The Literature of Dread

A miserable memory. The year, I think, was 1970. I was six, maybe seven. My father was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Paris, and I attended a French primary school.

The French school system at the time was the same old-fashioned authoritarian institution that had inspired defiant works of art like The 400 Blows and Zero de Conduite. French schools were still rigidly centralized—it was said that the Minister of National Education could look at his watch at any hour of the school day and know what lesson was being taught in every classroom in the country. The system allowed corporal punishment even for trivial infractions.

Punishment in our school was administered in a sadistically protracted manner: the misbehaving pupil, rather than being disciplined right away by the teacher, was placed in the hall, just outside the doorway of the classroom. The principal made his rounds of the corridors several times an hour and spanked every child he found cowering in the doorways.

One day the teacher put me in the hall for doodling in my notebook instead of copying the lesson plan. The punishment was painful—four sharp blows on the bottom with a stiff open palm. Grimmer still was the humiliation of being returned to the classroom with a faceful of hot tears to endure the silent jeering of classmates and the teacher’s triumphant smugness. But worst of all was the anticipation. The school occupied a big, imposing old building, and if a lot of children misbehaved that period and you found yourself at the far end of the principal’s circuit, it could take him quite a while to reach you. The corridors were wide and curving, the floors were uncarpeted and the ceilings were high; you could hear the principal’s heavy footsteps long before you saw him. I remember trying to make myself invisible by flattening my body against the doorway and praying, though our family was not religious, to be spared.

This experience was my introduction to the psychology of dread, which I think of as not just as extreme, paralyzing fear, but fear of the imminent, of the inevitable. As when an animal is first caught in a trap, in the state of dread, the body and the mind are immobilized and wildly active at the same time.

The apprentice writer receives a great deal of instruction in the ways of suspense: he is taught to delay his climactic points, to put switchbacks, twists, and false bottoms in the plot; possibly, like Brian De Palma or Shirley Jackson, to save the greatest shock for the very end. Plotted on a graph, the well-made suspenseful work of fiction or film might look like a series of progressively higher peaks.

Suspense is a pleasurable emotion, dependent on convention. As Hitchcock put it:

Some people are talking about baseball—they don’t know it but there’s a bomb under the table. The conversation has suddenly become charged. The bomb must never go off…you’ve deprived the audience of release: a foot touches the bomb, out the window it goes, just in time.

Other artists break this convention and there is a large body count, but, almost always, someone is spared. And it is our nature that we always identify with living characters; just as in our dreams, we can never really die.

But dread negates suspense. There is no pleasurable uncertainty—no escape—because the outcome is foreknown. The work which is based not on suspense but on dread, if plotted on a graph would look like a steadily rising straight line ending in a preordained point. Or it might resemble something else—a piece of music like Ravel’s Bolero—a reiteration of the same melody but progressively louder, more intense, more emphatic.

The great imminent, inevitable experience in life is, of course, death. ‘Most things never happen; this one will,’ wrote Philip Larkin, the poet laureate of dread.

In fiction or dramatic art, dread often makes itself felt in the form of dramatic irony, where we know something the characters don’t. In Greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex, dramatic irony confirms, with heavy regret, that those who defy the gods are destined for a dire end. In fiction, comics, and movies based on fundamentalist religion, dramatic irony shows us that the characters who have not accepted fundamentalist tenets are hellfire bait, though they are of course unaware of it.

In Aharon Appelfeld’s novel, Badenheim 1939, dramatic irony becomes something more complex.

The title tells us that we are in a spa in the German-speaking world on the eve of the Second World War. Ten pages in, we know that this is a resort town for the Jewish middle class and that its occupants pay little attention to the approaching conflict. The faceless functionaries of the Sanitation Department mysteriously show up, register all persons of Jewish ancestry, and encourage them to emigrate to Poland. The residents of Badenheim, rather than making preparations to flee, marvel at the Sanitation Department’s efficiency and professionalism. In other words, within a few chapters, we know, as the book’s characters do not, that they are doomed.

The characters are, as most of us would be, too caught up in their own worries and status anxieties to notice the greater danger lurking. They resist moving to Poland not because it would mean extinction but because Poland is associated with low-status Ostjuden – Eastern European Jews.

Badenheim 1939 is, like almost all narratives written by Holocaust survivors, a deeply unconsoling work. Unlike, say, the film of Schindler’s List (about which one critic remarked that only Steven Spielberg could make a feel-good movie about the Holocaust), there is no redemptive moral, no triumph of the human spirit.

There is also no depiction of brutality, or even of the camps themselves. When this novel was published in 1980, renderings of the camps had reached a critical mass, and every writer who described them risked producing a kind of Holocaust pornography. So there are no camps, but there is also no afterwards from which we might draw perspective or consolation. There is only the increasingly airless and fantastical atmosphere in the mountain town, and the persistent denial and illusioned optimism of the residents. At the very end of the book, when they are on a train to the camps, one of characters remarks hopefully, “If the coaches are so dirty, it must mean we have not so far to go.”

By not giving us the worst, in other words, Appelfeld lets us imagine the worst.

Badenheim 1939 is in its tightly controlled way, a very angry work, but Appelfeld uses dramatic irony to an empathetic end: because we know the ultimate fate of Badenheim’s residents before they do, we keenly feel the dread –we suffer, as much as readers who are removed, safe and comfortable can be said to suffer–before the characters do.

I can think of no other work of art, even King Lear, in which the feeling of dread is so viscerally persistent. Reading Badenheim 1939 corresponds to Andrew Solomon’s evocation of the paralyzing anxiety of a major depression:


If you trip or slip, there is a moment, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself — a passing, fraction-of-a-second horror.[It’s like that] hour after hour.

Here, the fate of the residents of Badenheim is the earth rushing up at you hour after hour, the about-to-happen, that imminent terrible event.

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John Broening’s Column Note.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

Photo: A still from The 400 Blows.

Notes on James Salter’s LIGHT YEARS

Alas the glory of the prince! How the time has gone,
vanished under night’s helm, as if it never were!

From “The Wanderer,” 6th century English poem

He heard the clack of his dog’s old nails on the floor. Hadji sat at his feet, looking up, hungry like all the aged. His dog that had run in the breathless snow, strong legged, young, his ears back, his keen glances, his pure smell. A life that passed in an instant.

From Light Years (1975)

Some things that are plentiful in James Salter’s writing: wartime heroism, the valorization of the dead, striking or farfetched similes, fine things and physical beauty, descriptions of food and drink, sexual opportunism, an almost mystical attitude towards the acquisition of fame and money, accidents, lost youth, sadness at the passage of time.

Some things that are noticeable by their absence: sexual restraint and fidelity, long passages of background or expository prose, politics, humility, Middle America, justice, a sense of damnation or sin as opposed to a sense of time wasted.

In 1992, when he was in his sixties, Salter published an essay in Esquire celebrating the pairing of beautiful younger women with older, powerful men.  He made approving references to Abelard and Heloise, to Picasso’s romantic life, to the habits of the Continental nobility, even to sex tourism: “happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality, and one of the imperishable visions if it is of life among a burnished, graceful people not as advanced as we” (by ‘burnished,’ Salter of course means dark-skinned).

Salter is everywhere referred to as a ‘writer’s writer,’ or a ‘stylist.’

Le style c’est l’homme, Buffon wrote in the 18th century. Style is the man. Yet to call a writer a stylist in our day means to concentrate on the surface beauty of his prose and to ignore the man behind the style.

A stylist is often a euphemist of genius, a writer who gives elegant or poetic expression to man’s basest motives or actions. Like Hemingway, Salter is a writer driven not by religion or even ethics as much as by a code, or manners. The code Salter articulates–the code behind the style–is a pagan or aristocratic one, though Salter himself is no blue-blood (actual aristocrats are too complacent, incurious and suspicious of mere verbal glibness to ever expand upon the meaning of their beliefs). Like ‘grace under pressure,’ it is as much about looking good as doing the right thing.

Light Years, like Anna Karenina, is a marriage novel, though without a Kitty and a Levin; it is written from the perspective not of Tolstoy but of Vronsky, from the perspective of a man who values surfaces above all things, whose unhappiness is bone-deep, yet who is closed to alternatives.. The world of Viri and Nedra is the world of upper-middle class New York and Long Island from the late Fifties to the early Seventies. Viri is an architect; Nedra doesn’t work; they give dinner parties, have affairs; shop; divorce; they and their friends grow older and frailer; Nedra dies of cancer.

Nedra, like Rochester or Gatsby, is at the beginning of the novel a mysterious character whose mystery is described largely by her effect on other people. The source of the mystery, the reader realizes with a sinking heart, is something as ordinary as glamour––a numinous-seeming confidence that comes from the envied combination of beauty, money, leisure, and good taste.

Salter is a writer who has cut a figure in the world, been in the thick of battle, spent time in Hollywood, loved many women.  The terse Hemingway style is an obvious model for him–the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises in Salter’s early war novels, the Hemingway of sitting around in cafes and noticing the light on leaves in Salter’s later novels; but his prose has a compressed lushness all its own.

Salter’s prose invites us, through a kind of intensified seeing, to make a grail of laughter of an empty ashcan, in Hart Crane’s words. This promise to transform the workaday world into a kind of magic play land is the promise of the great stylists—Nabokov, Proust, Nicholson Baker.

It is also the promise of advertising. Salter, aristocratic hedonist that he is, celebrates a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure: dinner parties, tailored clothes, lazy alcohol-drenched summers at the beach, gallery-hopping, adultery. But Light Years is no brightly colored advertisement for joie de vivre, no Renoir painting or New Yorker cover: the truth-teller within the novelist, the truth teller that squats within any worthwhile artist, can’t help but describe the heavy pagan sadness that dogs the pursuit of pleasure’s every step; yet the stylist within the artist can’t help glamorizing not just the pleasure but the sadness.

The result is, surprisingly, not an incoherent work of fiction but a tensely satisfying one, one of those rare novels that, in a process like seduction, moves the reader almost against his will.

Why is this book, which elevates the meretricious, the snobbish, the narrowly bourgeois, so moving?

In the pagan consciousness, one of the feelings that approximate religious awe is a sense of the majesty of time’s passing. In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of Britain, a work in which the pagan overlaps the Christian worldview, a speaker compares our life on earth to the flight of a sparrow through a banquet hall. In Light Years, time is, to use a Salteresque simile, like the ancient stone floor beneath a throw rug.

(What is the true nature of time? Nabokov compared our trying to figure it out—us, sentient creatures living in time—to a harried driver keeping an eye on the road and one hand on the steering wheel, while with the other hand fumbling through the contents of the glove compartment.)

Time, we see, has a dual nature: it is both motion and accumulation; current and sediment. Salter records the movement of the light throughout the day; the changing of the light through the seasons. He records the passage of the years and their cumulative effect, which is to induce a kind of vertigo in man, a wonderment:

There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green.

[…]

It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.

The heavy sense of the dual nature of time in Light Years makes time itself the agent of drama and gives this mostly eventless and drama-free novel its narrative pull.  Salter describes a minor character, a failed painter, as seen through the eyes of his daughter:

He had spent a lot of time with her when she was a child. She remembered some of it. She had lived in waves of color he had chosen, irradiated by them as by the sun. She had seen his torn sketchbooks on the floor with footprints across their pages, she had found him sprawled drunk in her room, his face on the thick spruce boards. She could never betray him: it was unthinkable, He asked nothing of her. All these years he had been beaten, as if in a street fight, before her eyes.

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John Broening’s Column Note.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

The Violent Muse

“I say, violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.” – H. Rap Brown

Violence is the muse of the American imagination.

More than any other human impulse, more than wonder at the beauty of nature, love of God, fellow-feeling, nationalism, or romantic love, violence has inspired Americans to create new artistic genres, modes, styles: the Western. The Mobster Epic. Outlaw Country. Slam Dancing. Superhero Comics. Pulp Fiction. Gangsta Rap.

Look at our movies. It’s impossible to talk about American movies without examining the central role of violence in their development. The first feature-length movie produced in this country was a shoot-em-up Western called The Great Train Robbery. What’s characteristic about this movie is not its violent subject, but its most famous shot. It’s described by the Edison Film Company, which released the film in 1903, as “A life size picture of Barnes, leader of the outlaw band, taking aim and firing point blank at each individual in the audience. The resulting excitement is great. This section of the scene can be used either to begin the subject or to end it, as the operator may choose.”

Already, at the birth of the movies, cinematic violence was something detachable, free-floating, an end in itself. Scorsese pays tribute to this famous shot at the end of The Departed when Mark Walberg’s cop character fires at the camera. Coppola unconsciously echoed it in the theatrical print of Apocalypse Now, which begins and ends with the napalming of the Vietnamese jungle, an eerily beautiful conflagration only tenuously related to the narrative.

Since the release of The Great Train Robbery, American directors have done violence better than any other directors. Ford, the master of death on horseback.  Peckinpah, with his slow-motion lethal ballets. Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a new era of heightened movie violence. Scorsese. Tarantino, who in Kill Bill uses arterial spray the way Jackson Pollock used paint.

Film critics, like Pauline Kael, who employ phrases like ‘violent lyricism’ to describe what these directors do, are on the money. Like a lyric poem, violence in movies stops narrative time. The notorious scene in Scorsese’ Raging Bull, in which Jake La Motta destroys the face of a boxer fancied by Motta’s wife, is so gruesome that it annihilates everything that comes before and after. And like most violent scenes in Scorsese (think of the death of Joe Pesci’s character in Casino, for which Scorsese has gone to the trouble of getting the sound of aluminum baseball bats on bone just right), it’s executed with such loving care–slowed down, enhanced by the use of extreme close up–that we can only conclude that the director considers violence a subject of inexhaustible beauty and fascination, as the Hakuru poets viewed the cherry blossom.

There are many critics, especially European ones like Umberto Eco, who believe that genre fiction is our most significant contribution to world literature: the crime thriller, the mystery novel, the police procedural, the serial killer novel: each of these has violence at its core.

Periodically, a writer of genius will reinvent one of these genres, or slice and dice a few of them. James Ellroy took Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled prose, mid-century scandal rag boilerplate, hipster jive, and a deeply cinematic compression, and turned this hybrid style upon the secret history of the American Century. In American Tabloid, he describes the botched Bay of Pigs invasion from the viewpoint of a participant in a low-flying plane:

They saw a supply ship snagged on a reef. They saw dead men flopping out of a hole in the hull. They saw sharks bobbing at body parts twenty yards offshore.
They saw beached landing craft. They saw live men crawling over dead men. They saw a hundred-yard stretch of bodies in bright-red shallow water.
The invaders kept coming, Flamethrowers nailed them the second they hit the wave break. They got flash-fried and boiled alive.

There is a whole school of writers who have thought of themselves as pugilists.  Hemingway, who, with Poe, must be at the center of any discussion of violence in American literature, celebrated in Spain’s bullfighting the expression of a deeply American belief, the belief in the redemptive power of ritualized violence. He famously remarked, “I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.” Norman Mailer with his cocktail party dustups, friendship with Ali, and advocacy of the therapeutic power of violence. Pete Dexter, who writes about death in the ring and poses for his book jacket photo with his broken nose, a speed bag hanging in the background.

James Wright, probably our best postwar poet, saw our belief in redemptive violence with far more ambivalence; in his heartbreaking ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio’ he described the tragic way this belief is acted out on our high school football fields:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

And there are less obvious examples from other arts. Jackson Pollock, whom Life magazine called ‘Jack the Dripper,’ and who enacted on canvas the violent rituals of his life. Miles Davis, who aspired to ‘play like [Sugar Ray] Robinson boxed.”  And Davis could play like a boxer: percussively, alternating long periods of stalking silence with short explosive riffs, setting up a counter rhythm to frustrate his opponent’s expectations (more than any artist, Miles saw the audience as the antagonist). Large swaths of hip hop mash up a series of American archetypes: Gunslinger, mobster, juvenile delinquent, urban revolutionary–the gangsta rapper is a little bit of all of these.

Where does this obsession with violence in country originate? In his All God’s Children, Fox Butterfield, like most historians of violence, mentions the persistence of the frontier mentality in our national consciousness. But others trace our fascination back to our Puritan roots. In an interview, Rikki Ducornet, whose novel, The Fanmaker’s Inquisition, is a fantasia on the Marquis de Sade, was asked why our culture, with its obsession with  ritualized torture, sexual violence, and brilliant serial killers like Hannibal Lecter, was so Sadean, she replied: “The obsession with the body, which is really a hatred of the body, is a legacy of our Puritan ancestors…the belief in man’s innate badness is always a problem in Christian cultures.”

Rap Brown, who as Jamil Al-Amin, was sentenced several years ago to life in prison for the murder of one deputy and the attempted murder of another, is best remembered as a political figure. As an agitprop sloganeer, he popularized the catchphrase ‘Burn, baby, burn” that punctuated the inner-city riots of the 60s, and coined the phrase that began this essay.  It is often misquoted as “Violence is American as apple pie.” This misses the uncomfortably sexual connotation of his phrase. ‘Cherry pie’ was, and is, a sexualized term, especially for a young, available woman. So, Brown’s insinuation that violence is as American as cherry pie has a double meaning, one that hints at a disturbing impulse that is at the heart of this country’s history.

As James Ellroy, writes in the preface to American Tabloid: “America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets.”

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John Broening’s Column Note.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

Two Descriptions of John Berger

Editor’s Note: John Broening is a regular contributor. His column note:

I’m a lapsed member of the Church of Theory. I don’t believe in Theory anymore, but I do believe in criticism.

What is criticism? Criticism is a kind of trenchant social commentary, credo, and witty, freewheeling philosophizing exercise whose starting point is the individual work of art. This has been the m.o. of the great critics: Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, Clive James (Hell, let’s even throw Benjamin in there!).

What criticism means to most people, alas, and certainly to those who write on the Internet is a kind of consumer guide. Ever since the age of Reagan, the consumer guide—thumbs-up, thumbs-down, 4 out of 5 stars, cheers/jeers—is what most of the audience for art expects. Pace Eagleton, this isn’t commodifying the individual, but it is commodifying the work of art.

I’m conscious of not tailoring my style to this medium, of writing an archaic, overcomplicated literary prose for a medium that depends on a language whose meaning can be grasped instantaneously. But I have a problem with the language—with the sloppy, snarky, write-before-you-think dialect that has become the Internet’s lingua franca.

Here, among other things, I’ll explore my weakness for forgotten works of literature; even if they are barely worth revisiting, they often remind us of what we have lost in our culture.”

Two descriptions of John Berger. The first is from Kingsley Amis: Amis recalls seeing a violently animated Berger having a heated exchange with a Maitre d’ at a restaurant, his hands resembling ‘two airplanes in mid-dogfight.’ Amis tells us that he thought a scuffle was about to break out, but it turned out Berger was merely confirming a reservation.

We have every reason to mistrust Amis’s account, to believe he would go out of his way to make Berger look ridiculous: Berger—politically radical, artistically experimental, Anglophobe—represented everything the Blimpish Amis detested about intellectuals.

The second description comes from Berger himself, from the 1988 afterword to his first and best novel, A Painter of Our Time. Surprisingly, it goes a long way towards confirming the essential truth of Amis’s observation. In his afterword, Berger, an Englishman, writes about himself at the time Painter was published in 1958, and his adoption of the more open, emotive, and, one imagines, more gesticulatory manner of the Eastern European refugee painters who were the model for his engage hero, Janos Lavin:


There was a predilection on both sides, theirs and mine, a certain complicity..It was based upon our experience of the English and the English refusal of pain…Our complicity, our opposition, grew from the assumption that pain is at the source of human imagination, This didn’t make us solemn, but it did make us embrace, put our arms around one another, to the embarrassment of any watching Englishman….

There is the faintest acknowledgment, isn’t there, that the writer is not merely following his heart but also performing for an audience, and that what he is performing is a rejection as well as an impersonation.

The impersonation didn’t stop with Berger’s outward personal style: Berger’s Marxism is itself a continental style, and his writing can be viewed as a rejection of the English Establishment style and an embracing of the pan-European. For example, Berger’s art criticism: at the time Berger started publishing in the mid-Fifties, the typical English art critic was a connoisseur—so, Berger resolved to expose the capitalist roots of connoisseurship. The typical English critic wrote in an elevated, vaporizing style; Berger was concrete and dwelt on the specific materials and the specific challenges within the artist’s studio. The typical English critic spoke to an audience of his own class and background (as Denis Donoghue once observed about the prose of a certain English literary critic, there is an unspoken ‘of course’ at the end of each sentence); Berger hopefully addressed his art writings to the enlightened working class.

Seen from the outside, Berger’s life has been a series of public rejections: as a young conscript in WWII, he refused the officer’s commission that was his due in favor of life as an enlisted man; when he won the Booker Prize in 1972, he resolved in his notorious acceptance speech to ‘turn the prize against itself’ and fight the Booker-McConnell’s history of economic exploitation of the Caribbean by giving half his prize money to the London chapter of the Black Panthers; shortly afterwards, he rejected London and its cultural life for a farm in the French Alps (as is the case for every literary type from Tolstoy onward, being able to leave the farm six months out of the year is a precondition to finding truth and meaning in rural life).

What I’m describing is a kind of symbiotic relationship, one that benefits both the rebel and the Establishment (to borrow a term that was coined around the time Berger started appearing in print): the rebel uses the Establishment to negatively define himself—whatever it is, he is not. He uses the Establishment’s crimes and abuses of power to arouse the anger he needs in order to create, and he uses the Establishment’s inevitable retaliation as a way to both generate sympathy for his causes and to make a name for himself.

The Establishment, for its part, uses the rebel’s more extreme charges—that it is as fascistic and repressive as Nazi Germany, for example—to nullify less extreme charges that might have more truth to them; the Establishment uses the rebel’s attacks as a way to unify itself; and the Establishment points to the fact that it allows the rebel to publicly attack it as a sign that it actually supports the free society that it claims to believe in.

This dynamic can be seen in the careers of D.H. Lawrence, of Allen Ginsberg, and more recently, of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill.

It also describes some aspects of Berger’s career. But, to his credit, Berger has rebelled against his own rebellion. Now, I’m not implying for a second that Berger, as he has grown older, has succumbed to the inevitable rightward drift that marks the careers of so many former Lefties, writers like John Osborne, Christopher Hitchens and, yes, Kingsley Amis. Berger in recent years has been, if anything, more intransigently Hard Left in his politics.

Berger, though, has looked for another path through Marxism: as he said in a recent interview: “The problem with Marxism is there is no real space for ethics. Okay, there is plenty of space in it for the struggle of justice against injustice, but the notion that an act is good or bad in itself — there is no space for that. There is no space for that which is outside time or, if you wish, for the eternal…”

Berger has passionately argued against a kind of reductionist utilitarianism in Marxist writing (a tendency which Dylan Thomas memorably parodied in How to Be a Poet: “spring gay/ as the workers’ procession/to the newly opened gymnasium/look! the full employment of the blossoms!”). Much of his best work makes room for what is outside time, for the eternal. Very few writers have written in such a clear-eyed and moving way about what he calls ‘the shared subjectivity of sex’ or about the struggle to find something eternal in a love that is secular and time-bound:

The flower’s ovules
will be seeding still
When Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain

Berger has been compared to Shelley and Lawrence, for his very English combination of rebelliousness and mysticism, but his real peer is probably Ruskin. Like Ruskin, Berger has put his remarkable eye and prose at the service of a tragically unrealizable moral vision. Berger has dreamed that his writings would help bring about a plebeian industrial democracy—Ruskin imagined an art world that returned to preindustrial values. And Berger resembles Ruskin in the sad nature of his legacy: Ruskin directly inspired two of the ugliest art movements in history: the pre-Raphaelite and the Neo Gothic. Berger’s dream of a ‘radical art history,’ as one his best critics, Geoff Dyer, has pointed out, “was no sooner realized than betrayed’ in “numerous cultural studies departments…where second–rate Eagletons discoursed away in the confident belief that no one was paying attention.”

But we don’t judge a writer by his legacy: what we continue to value in a writer is that which is inimitably his own. No other writer could find hidden affinities between Francis Bacon’s paintings and Walt Disney’s cartoons, or could explain why Rodin’s insatiable need to dominate women fatally weakened his sculpture, or could show how Turner’s lifelong preoccupations in paint originated in the blood and water of his father’s barber shop, or could use a auto mechanic’s testimony to refute the unquestioned assumptions of a Surrealist painter, or, finally, could write so movingly about how the rise and fall of political hopes makes us see the same painting in such a different way.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

On James Merrill’s The Seraglio & the literary ‘frisson’


Reading is a physical process, and the body of every avid reader retains the faintest traces of the physical effects left upon it by the books he’s read. I’m not talking about eyestrain, or backache or even a stiff neck. And I don’t mean just laughter and tears—although these are both rare and welcome by-products of our reading. Nor do I refer to the force that impels us to fling a book across the room because of its sheer fatuousness or the unearned demands it makes on our time or attention.

I mean a physical reaction, a deposit of complex pleasure, that’s unique to art: what the French call the frisson. The word ‘frisson’ means both shudder or shiver, and thrill: in other words, the frisson is, equally, a reaction of fear and pleasure. It is an art-emotion that Rilke captured so well in those famous lines from the first of the Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us.

No writer more assiduously analyzed or nourished this art-shudder than Nabokov: he described it variously as a “thrill,” “aesthetic bliss” and “the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.” In his lecture on Dickens, he rhapsodizes, “although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite the highest emotion humanity has evolved.”

Every serious reader cultivates the art-shudder and will happily list the works that have given him this singular thrill. For many readers it begins in youth with horror fiction; I would start my list with books that are on most lists: at eight, the end of Johnny Tremain, and Johnny running through the streets of Revolutionary War Boston and yelling ‘Rab’s dead!’ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, read at thirteen. The final thunderous pages of The Great Gatsby, read my senior year in high school; in my twenties, Larkin’s poetry ; in my thirties Walter Raleigh’s What is our life? with its clinching line “but we die in earnest, that’s no jest.”

One favorite work that is probably on few lists is James Merrill’s first novel The Seraglio (1957). The Seraglio hardly what you’d think of as a poet’s novel. Merrill’s second novel, The (Diblos) Notebook, which is plotless, experimental and preoccupied with language, especially the aesthetics of literary revision, is more what you’d expect from a poet.

The Seraglio is in many ways a period piece: Freudian and antiquarian like many cultural products of the Fifties. It even features that favored character of Fifties culture, the sinister, self-hating homosexual, with the perfect sissy name of Francis.

Merrill’s work resembles a brittle novel of manners, with its precisely observed social milieu—the artsy old money set in and around Boston and New York—and its carefully doled-out apercus.

The Seraglio tells the story of Francis Tanning, the homosexual scion of an old, ailing but still potent financial tycoon, Benjamin Tanning. Around the elder Tanning, at The Cottage, his summer house, is the seraglio, the harem of available women: fiancées, ex-wives, the wives of penniless colleagues, bohemian artists. Francis himself, so sensitive as a boy that a recipe for apple pie causes him to burst into tears, drifts around Europe, has a few disastrous entanglements with women, tries in vain to please his father.

Then, halfway through the novel, Francis takes a straight razor and cuts off his own penis. The scene is realistically rendered—“The blade was very sharp; something began easily to separate then to resist, tougher than a thong of leather”—one shudders to imagine the research involved in bringing it to life.

The novelist has artfully prepared us for this shock: a portrait is mutilated on the opening page, and in the novel’s metaphorical language and ornamental detail, there are decapitations and disfigurements everywhere we look. Francis has already tried to rid of himself of his manhood once by attempting to give away his inheritance.

A lesser novelist would have ended with the self-castration. For Merrill, the act initiates a psychic journey that is ultimately unknowable. Francis proclaims his own freedom from rules and entanglements, dabbles in the occult (here is the beginning of Merrill’s unfortunate lifelong infatuation with the Ouija board), drives too fast, quotes Lady Macbeth’s line about unsexing herself, and displays a genius for making everyone around him uncomfortable.

The father, Benjamin, who in some ways resembles a more benign version of the rapacious tycoon from Chinatown, loves his son in his own way.

Towards the end of the novel the elder Tanning remarries, but that hardly puts an end to his kind of seigneurialism. Sex is at the center of this novel in ways that it can never be in James’s work. Creepily, Francis eyes another prospect for his father, and awakens his father’s interest in her. It is as this point that we realize the significance of the title: aha! We say, every harem needs its eunuch!

But the real surprise is in the final pages of the novel.

I read the last pages of the novel on a summer day very much like the one the novel’s ending describes. It would be a cliché, and untrue, to say that I was transported, or suddenly lost awareness of my surroundings; if anything I was more aware of the fat mosquitoes that I slapped on my shins, the huge elm tree above my head, the stagnant, lichen-rimmed inlet below the house, the handful of pleasure boats out on the bay.

And here was the art-thrill again, in the last few pages of the novel; in the walled garden of the summer house, Francis is drawn into a game of Hide-and-Seek with his nephews and nieces:


Lily…rehearsed the rules he obeyed at her age, in the same walled garden.

“Uncle Francis is It,” she announced proudly at last. “If he wants to play he has to be It.”

Francis shuts his eyes and counts to a hundred:

“Ready or not!” he shouted…With exaggerated stealth and flashing stern glances into the greenery he started across the lawn…Where were they? No sound of smothered laughter came to ease his confusion.

But only after coming upon the children building castles at the sea’s edge, oblivious to him, did Francis stare over the lulled water and understand. He was It. He tentatively said so the first time, then once more with an exquisite tremor of conviction: “I am It.”

The words carried with them wondrous notions of selflessness, of permanence. His father coughed behind him in the house. The children trembled against the sea. He knew the expression on his own face. The entire world was real.

Up to this point, The Seraglio has been threaded with images of insubstantiality, of theater, of the unreal. Read as a self-enclosed set piece, the ending of The Seraglio is as finely shaped and cadenced as a short story; the ending could be that of a Hesse novel, in which the protagonist, after stumbling through a forest of spiritual confusion, finally comes upon a clearing, and enlightenment.

Read as a set piece, the ending describes what Zen Buddhism calls satori, the sudden flash of enlightenment in which the true nature of the universe is revealed, or what Hinduism calls Samadhi, in which all ego boundaries dissolve, and the watcher realizes that he is all things. The ending is the capital ‘E’ epiphany, that moment of enlightenment that, as Charles Baxter warned us, our modern fiction tirelessly manufactures.

But of course we can’t read it without knowledge of what’s gone on before. Francis is also ‘It’ in the way the character in the horror movie, who has been observing the strange goings-on in the small town from the periphery and suddenly finds that the townspeople have turned their malevolent predators ‘gazes in his direction, is ‘It.’

And he is ‘It’ in the way someone with no sex, a man who has hacked off his own genitals, is no longer a he or a she but an ‘It.’ We are also reminded that if a loss of ego boundaries is the sign of enlightenment, it also a sign of madness.

Both readings are formidably present: the beauty and the terror, the chill in our bodies, the stamp of great literature that is like a muscle memory.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

Images courtesy of bluffton.edu & wustl.edu

I have two professions: I am a chef and a writer.

I have two professions: I am a chef and a writer.

One of these professions is doing very well; wages are rising; young people—educated , bright, energetic young people who might otherwise go to law school or med school are clamoring to join it; it has caught the popular imagination; it has its own cable network; it is, as they say, blowing up. When I attended its most celebrated festival last year, I saw something I never thought I’d see: colleagues of mine with their own entourages, like movie stars or prizefighters.

As a well-regarded but hardly famous practitioner of this profession in what is considered a third-tier town I’ve not only been interviewed and reviewed and profiled and asked to speak on panels but even caricatured by local cartoonists and offered money to endorse products. And at a time when people in occupations once thought to be iron-clad guarantors of prosperity are downsizing their expectations and girding their loins for the worst, I, a natural pessimist, am sunny about the future of this profession.

The other profession—well, it’s not going so great. One of its practitioners, in a famous article in Salon announcing his retirement, bemoaned that he was being paid the same rate that he had received when he started out 30 years ago, the same rate—not adjusted for inflation—that he had received in 1978.

Many of its oldest and most venerated outlets are closing their doors. Hardly a week goes by without the announcement of massive layoffs in this industry; even the most established practitioners worry about their own obsolescence; shortly before his death, its most famous American practitioner woefully compared his craft to the trade of a coach maker at the dawn of the automobile age.
Even though I produce something for this profession every week, I earn little from it—less per hour, I can’t help but notice, than the cheerful acid casualty who cuts my grass.

Yet, if I were to ask myself where my heart is, where, as Auden would say, I put the money of my feelings, it would be on this other profession, this sinking profession.

There comes a time in the life of most writers when they realize the truth: they will never be famous; forget posterity: their works will be largely unknown even to the present day; the two or three stories or poems in the little magazines (whose readership consists of, let’s face it, not the appreciative common reader Virginia Woolf wrote for, but resentful fellow practitioners); the book that sold 1,500 copies and then sunk without a trace–that’s as good as it’s ever going to get.

(But what about the Internet, you say. Well, —to continue the culinary/ literary metaphor—don’t you feel , when you log on, then log off a short time later, like someone who has been slouched over a refrigerator door for ten minutes, who then ruefully closes it, telling himself he was never all that hungry anyway?)

It didn’t start out that way—this bleak outlook we writers have; from the moment when our third grade teacher read to the class our earnest, block-lettered essay about the death of our pet hamster and our faces burned with happy embarrassment, we’ve been hooked on—we’ve been conditioned to expect—ever-larger doses of recognition.

But there comes a time in the life of most writers when they realize the truth: the need to write runs deeper than the ego; deeper than the need for praise or fame or riches or even some obscure desire for revenge.

Why do we write—why do I write? I confess that every time I ask myself this question and come back with an honest answer it never fails to put a smile on my face: We write because we have to write.

Why do we have to write? It may be for a reason as eloquent as Richard Wilbur’s, who said: “It is by words and the defeat of words/down sudden vistas of the vain attempt/that for a flying moment one may see/by what cross purposes the world is dreamt.” Or it may be for a reason as homely as the matron’s in E.M. Forster’s essay who proclaims, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

But we embrace this truth out of desperate necessity because—

Because, haven’t you heard? It is the chefs who are now the artists, with their own school of explicators who analyze their creative birth pangs in works with fatuous titles like The Soul of a Chef. We even have our own avant-garde, complete with its own manifestos, space-age techniques, food that doesn’t even look like food, and forward-looking eagerness to elevate something as intrinsically pleasurable as eating to new levels of tedium. And perhaps somewhere, slouching towards San Sebastian waiting to be born is the chef ready to destroy the bourgeois illusion that food is supposed to taste good.

Perhaps, I think to myself in moments of grandiose self pity, now is the time for the writer in me to embrace the anonymity of the craftsman, with the painstaking vigor of the stonecutter, who carved in the obscure corners of cathedrals, the elaborate foliation of which he knew would be visible only to the eye of God.

But maybe you’ve had enough negative affirmations for one evening.

If not, here’s another, final one, from Ted Hughes:

To hatch a crow
a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
         over emptiness
But flying

-John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun,the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.