More Dynamite

Essays 1990-2012

Craig Raine

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848872875
• eBook ISBN: 9781782392057
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

More Dynamite anthologizes a wealth of essays by a writer with one of the keenest critical eyes of his generation. Craig Raine - poet, critic, novelist, Oxford don and editor - turns his fearsome and unflinching gaze on subjects ranging from Kafka to Koons, Beckett to Babel. He waxes lyrical about Ron Mueck's hyperreal sculptures and reassesses the metafiction of David Foster Wallace. For Raine, no element of cultural output is insignificant, be it cinema, fiction, poetry or installation art. Finding solace in both literature and art alike, and finding moments of truth and beauty where others had stopped looking, More Dynamite will reinvigorate readers, challenge our perceptions of the classics and wonderfully affirm our love of good writing, new and old. This extensive collection of essays is a crash course in twentieth century artistic endeavour - nothing short of a master class in high culture from one of the most discerning minds in contemporary British letters.

Contents

Part One: Books – Reading the Fine Print

Isaac Babel (2002)

Derek Walcott’s Poetry (2000)

Raymond Carver (2009)

Elizabeth Bishop (2008)

William Golding (2009)

William Golding’s The Spire (2011)

Updike: Just Looking (1990)

Updike Tribute (2009)

Memory in Literature (2005)

Kipling and Racism (1999)

Just So Stories (2001)

Stoppard’s Trilogy (2002)

Stoppard: A Speech (2004)

Life Studies (2003)

Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (2004)

Lowell’s Letters (2005)

The Lowell–Bishop Letters (2008)

Double Exposures: Ted Hughes (2006)

Ted Hughes’s Letters (2007)

A. E. Housman’s Letters (2007)

Marianne Moore (2004)

V. S. Naipaul (2001)

J. M. Coetzee (2007)

Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Logue, Seamus Heaney (2005)

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (2010)

Kundera’s Italics (2006)

Kundera’s The Curtain (2007)

Christopher Logue (2007)

Counter-Intuitive Larkin (2008)

Rebecca Gilman: Dramatist (2004)

Joyce’s Exiles (2006)

Harold Pinter Remembered (2009)

Short Bit about Beckett (2006)

Don Paterson (2007)

Kafka: The Trial (2001)

Laughter in the Dark: Nabokov (1998)

Paul Valéry’s Notebooks (2000)

Auden’s Early Poetry (2005)

Auden’s Prose (2008)

Zbigniew Herbert (2008)

Not about Heroes (2006)

Opera as a Flawed Form (2004)

Influences (2004)

Poetry and Language (2004)

Short Introduction to T. S. Eliot (2008)

The Laureate (2005)

Consider the Hipster: How Good is David Foster Wallace? (2011)

Eliot’s Inferno: The Letters (2009)

Bryan Forbes (2010)

Alan Bennett: The Angst in the Axminster (2009)

Salinger: ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (2010)

Sex: Mrs Whitehouse and Mrs Eagleton (2010)

Part Two: Art – Reading the Detail

Seurat’s Courage (1997)

Old Friends in Venice (1995)

Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen (1999)

Masterpieces: Things in Particular (1997)

Frank Gehry (1998)

Ron Mueck (2000)

Mueck at Kanazawa (2008)

Mueck: Invitation au Voyage (2009)

Modigliani (2006)

Adam Elsheimer (2006)

Klimt (2008)

Richard van den Dool (2005)

Jeff Koons (2009)

Rodchenko (2008)

Sickert in Venice (2009)

Vorticists (2011)

Gerhard Richter (2011)

Hockney at the Royal Academy (2012)

Damien Hirst Retrospective (2012)

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Index

PART ONE

Books – Reading the Fine Print

Isaac Babel

(2002)

My wife, Ann Pasternak Slater, met Nadezhda Mandelstam in Moscow in 1971, shortly after the publication of Hope Against Hope. The sequel, Hope Abandoned, was finished and waiting in another room. The poet’s chain-smoking widow jerked her thumb over her shoulder: ‘More dynamite in there.’

Isaac Babel was another dynamitist – a writer whose explosive force derives from his terse transcriptions of first-hand experience. He wrote to his friend Paustovsky: ‘on my shield is inscribed the device “authenticity”.’ Some paragraphs of his prose are acts of deliberate terror. The simple shock-waves of the actual, the cruel, the irrefutable, are his speciality. His sudden, ruthless, marvellous gift leaves the reader trying – too late – to look away from what Babel is compelled to show us. There is no escape. The violence is calculated to injure the reader’s bourgeois sensibility, to destroy his good taste, to trap him in the epicentre of the blast – to terrorise him.

Dulgushov is fatally wounded: ‘He was sitting propped up against a tree. He lay with his legs splayed far apart, his boots pointing in opposite directions. Without lowering his eyes from me, he carefully lifted his shirt. His stomach was torn open, his intestines spilling to his knees, and we could see his heart beating’ (my italics). The narrator lacks the ‘courage’ to finish him off, as the wounded man asks.

‘Afonka Bida’ tells the story of a Cossack whose wounded horse has to be shot. First, he feels in the wound with his copper-coloured fingers, then a comrade shoots the horse: ‘Maslak walked over to the horse, treading daintily on his fat legs, slid his revolver into its ear, and fired’ (my italics). Deranged with grief, Afonka Bida goes on the rampage and returns with a replacement mount. It has cost him an eye: ‘he had combed his sweat-drenched forelock over his gouged-out eye.’

Afonka expresses his sorrow in a phrase – ‘Where’s one to find another horse like that?’ – which recalls another story in the collection, ‘Crossing the River Zbrucz’. The narrator is billeted on a family of Volhynian Jews in Novograd. He lies back on ‘the ripped eiderdown’ and dreams restlessly about battle. He is woken by a pregnant Jewish woman tapping him on his face. I quote the rest of the two-page story, about one quarter of the total:

‘Pan,’ she says to me, ‘you are shouting in your sleep, and tossing and turning. I’ll put your bed in another corner, because you are kicking my papa.’

She raises her thin legs and round belly from the floor and pulls the blanket off the sleeping man. An old man is lying there on his back, dead. His gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two, and dark blood is clinging to his beard like a lump of lead.

‘Pan,’ the Jewess says, shaking out the eiderdown, ‘the Poles were hacking him to death and he kept begging them, “Kill me in the backyard so my daughter won’t see me die!” But they wouldn’t inconvenience themselves. He died in this room, thinking of me ... And now I want you to tell me,’ the woman suddenly said with terrible force, ‘I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!’

That sudden ‘terrible force’ is Babel’s speciality, too. But it depends not just on the way the mundane nightmare is succeeded by the infinitely worse waking nightmare. It depends also on what follows the dark blood in the beard – shaking out the eiderdown. In those four alert words is all the shock, all the tragic incongruity, of ordinary life’s unbearable, bearable continuities.

This is ‘Berestechko’ and more Jews:

The old man was screeching, and tried to break free. Kudrya from the machine gun detachment grabbed his head and held it wedged under his arm. The Jew fell silent and spread his legs. Kudrya pulled out his dagger with his right hand and carefully slit the old man’s throat without spattering himself. He knocked on one of the closed windows.

‘If anyone’s interested,’ he said, ‘they can come get him. It’s no problem.’ (my italics)

You know it is true. No fiction writer would dare this black farce – the fastidiousness of the barbarian’s meticulous barbarity, the etiquette observed by the executioner knocking on the closed window. It is writing with the greatest possible specific gravity. It exerts an awful, irresistible pull on the reader. There are the ingredients for a sick joke here, the shape of perverse laughter – but Babel skirts the absurd and renders it as sober, almost off-hand, factual, unquestionable.

The casual cruelty and the laconic prose recall the italicised prefatory micro-bulletins above the stories in Hemingway’s In Our Time. Quoted like this, the Babel stories satisfy the imperatives set down in his diary: ‘short chapters saturated with content’; ‘very simple, a factual account, no superfluous description’; ‘rest. New men. Night in the field. The horses, I tie myself to the stirrup. – Night, corn on the cob, nurse. Dawn. Without a plot.’

Of course, there are moments of more insidious vividness – a prostitute squinting to squeeze a pimple on her shoulder, a Jew on his way to synagogue (‘he fastened the three bone buttons of his green coat. He dusted himself with the cockerel feathers’), ‘a moaning hurrah, shredded by the wind’. Babel knows the ‘round shoulders’ of plump women. He is as expert on backs as a chiropractor: ‘scars shimmered on her powdered back’; passion means that ‘blotches flared up on her arms and shoulders’; ‘her back, dazzling and sad, moved in front of me.’ Or there is the mistress of Division Commander Savitsky, ‘combing her hair in the coolness under the awning’, smilingly chiding her lover as she buttons up his shirt for him. Not unbuttoning, but the far greater intimacy of buttoning up.

This is an utterly authentic vignette of a landscape transformed by battle:

Cossacks went from yard to yard collecting rags and eating unripe plums. The moment we arrived, Akinfiev curled up on the hay and fell asleep, and I took a blanket from his cart and went to look for some shade to lie down in. But the fields on both sides of the road were covered with excrement. A bearded muzhik in copper-rimmed spectacles and a Tyrolean hat was sitting by the wayside reading a newspaper.

The fatigue we might have guessed – and even the excrement – but it took Babel’s being there to assure us so confidently of those unripe plums and that implausible yet irrefutable Tyrolean hat. Equally, Babel’s first-hand knowledge can assure us that cooking pots are stirred with a twig, or that sleeping cavalry tie their horses to their legs. Or consider the narrative hypnosis that holds us while a Cossack, Prishchepa, executes a bloody revenge to restore the looted furniture to his family hut. He arranges it as he remembers from childhood, drinks vodka for two days, sings, cries – and finally sets fire to the hut. Before he vanishes, he throws ‘a lock of his hair into the flames’. A remarkable, inexplicable, unforgettable final touch.

Elsewhere, Vytagaichenko, the regiment commander, is woken by a Polish attack. ‘He mounted his horse and rode over to the lead squadron. His face was creased with red stripes from his uncomfortable sleep, and his pockets were filled with plums.’ The creases are good, but they are to be expected. The plums are the surprise – the authenticating detail, the guarantee of genuineness, by this alert connoisseur, this calm Berenson of the battlefield. Both Lionel Trilling and Henry Gifford are exercised by the perceived conflict between the timorous intellectual and the warriors he fought alongside. (See Trilling’s introduction to Collected Stories (Methuen, 1957) and Gifford’s shrewd and learned essay in Grand Street (Autumn, 1989).) In a revisionist spirit, Gifford offers the testimony of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist, who knew one of Babel’s comradesin-arms: ‘They liked Babel very much in the army. He had a calm fearlessness of which he was quite unconscious.’ The internal evidence of the stories suggests how closely this was related to an almost scholarly impulse. Those plums are recorded twice in the unflinching spirit of thoroughness – the pedantry of genius.

But selective quotation is distorting. It ignores the aesthetic pleasure of form and shapeliness. The stories are wholes. Who can tell from fragmentary quotation whether that verbal parallel lamenting the loss of a father and the loss of a horse is intentional and ironic, or inadvertent repetition? (There are unintentional repetitions in Babel, but here I think he is covertly ironising horse-centred Cossack morality.) A weak, early, overwritten, knowingly improbable story like ‘Shabos-Nakhamu’ can look intriguing if you quote only the last paragraph: ‘The innkeeper, naked beneath the rays of the rising sun, stood waiting for her huddled against the tree. He felt cold. He was shifting from one foot to another.’ And, up to now, most of my quotation has been sensationalist and Babel’s subtler registers under-represented. For example, ‘Dolgushov’s Death’ is more than its core – the slow cascade of intestines and flexing heart of Dolgushov, who is eventually put out of his misery by Afonka Bida. He shoots the dying man in the mouth. Bida despises the bespectacled, ineffectual narrator, whose fastidious tenderness is actually a form of cruelty – and he threatens to shoot him, too. The story ends like this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents