Houellebecq, Sassoon, Coetzee, Limonov

Christ! who's your tailor?

Whatever, Michel Houellebecq

In this novel, Houellebecq's first, he lays out the view of modern society that he has continued to develop (or maybe just restate) in one novel after another. His now well-known thesis: 

Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as `the law of the market’... Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.

The book's French title is... Extension du Domaine de la Lutte. He’s stayed true to the above idea for the rest of his career. Serotonin, the most recent of his books that I’ve read, could have been called Extension du Domaine de la Lutte, Part 8. I've read most of his other books but had put off reading this first one because I heard it wasn't as good. This is true, it isn't as good. It reads like sketchy, prototype Houellebecq: it's a little slow, spins its wheels, and most of the action takes place in the hero's head. Still, it has some of that Houellebecq magic. What is that magic? He said in a Paris Review interview that he wasn't the world's greatest writer but that his books had some virtues, chief among them intensity. This intensity has something to do with simplicity. My French is bad, but I can read his books in the original almost without using a dictionary. Not just his prose but his whole world is simple. Houellebecq never qualifies his judgments, (including his misanthropy and racism), never hedges or complicates. What the characters want is very simple. Life is very simple. His writing isn't ideology or pornography, but it’s so enjoyable that sometimes you wonder if it might be.

I've always thought there was something telling and essential about the way any writer writes about sex. Most basically avoid it. Only a few do it well, and it's not necessarily who you'd expect. Readers of Stephen King will remember his sex scenes, which feature in almost all of his books and are sometimes creepy, sometimes not, but never formulaic. He's not the world's greatest writer either, but his books have intensity. You can always write about sex as farce, but if you don't want to do that, then the only way to do it is with total sincerity – with passion. The writers who screw it up (famously) are people like John Updike or Tom Wolfe, who try to maintain an ironic distance from the act. Philip Roth is another writer who writes about sex pretty well, without inhibition or unnecessary crudeness. But Houellebecq is a special case. In the world of his novels, there's really nothing worth doing except sex. His cynicism stops there. Sex, unlike everything else, is good. In a recent autobiographical essay, A Few Months in My Life, he writes, "Aside from sex, there are other pleasures in life, for example those related to gastronomy, to alcohol or to other drugs; if I wanted to compare their intensity to that offered by sexual pleasure, I’d have to divide by about fifty.” I think into that same category he would put hobbies, sports, art, and most of professional, social, and family life. From what I know of his work, the only one of life's pleasures he would value at a higher fraction than 1/50th of sex is reading. From Whatever:

“The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.”

There are other passages about reading like this in his books, equally poignant and self-pitying. I don’t know the source of Houellebecq’s magic, but maybe you could say that it has something to do with combining the seemingly unrelated pleasures of sex and reading.

*

Memoirs of an English Infantry Officer, by Siegfried Sassoon

I first encountered Siegfried Sassoon as a character in Pat Barker's Regeneration novels. A war hero known for his ferocious charges into German trenches, he has ended up in a mental asylum for shell shock. Going over his life with a psychiatrist there, he says,

"I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the ... the other side. that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn't seem able to ..?" He laced his fingers. "Knot them together."

In the real Sassoon's three-book memoir you mostly see this "other side": diffident, sensitive, literary. It seems a funny accident that this young man also excels at, in the first of the books, fox-hunting, and, in the second, killing Germans. I read this second one, I think, out of evergreen interest in the mystery of physical courage and the experience of war. The divided Sassoon, gay poet, unlikely warrior, seems like the kind of outsider who could say something unexpected about combat. Unfortunately in this book he doesn't say much about it at all. The memoir contains vivid descriptions of the discomforts of soldiering but not many about action, and these are so understated that it's hard to tell what's going on. I found myself flipping back a few pages to make sure I hadn't missed the part where he was actually in the battle. I suspect this understatement is conventional: probably it was not the thing in such works to include gruesome descriptions of combat, whatever your personal feelings about it may have been. Sassoon may have been divided, but when it comes to killing and dying, "one side" is not able to stand apart and report on what the other is doing. Where he does do this – and where the book is really interesting – is when reporting on social life, specifically class. Half an outsider (Sassoon's father came from a rich Iraqi Jewish family), he can identify the rules of his set where one who fully belonged would hardly notice them. He is aware of his ability to cut a good figure but never takes it for granted. Here he recalls how he first reports to his regiment in the company of another officer, a middle-class salesman:

"We entered the orderly room. The Adjutant was sitting at a table strewn with document. We saluted clumsily, but he did not look up for a minute or two. When he deigned to do so his eyes alighted on Mansfield. During a prolonged scrutiny he adjusted an eyeglass. Finally he leant back in his chair and exclaimed, with unreproducable hauteur, "Christ! who's your tailor?"... My own reception was in accordance with the cut of my clothes and my credentials from Captain Huxtable."

Sassoon sees himself as unself-confident and out of step. But to an American reader 100 years later, he seems delightfully like the genuine article. On leave, he goes shopping before being redeployed:

"The automatic pistol...was only a plaything, but I was weary of my Colt revolver, with which I knew I couldn't hit anything, although I had blazed it off a few times in the dark when I was pretending to be important in no-man's-land. The only object I could be sure of hitting was myself, and I decided (in the Army and Navy Stores) that I might conceivably find it necessary to put myself out of my misery, if the worst came to the worst...To blow one's brains out with that clumsy Colt was unthinkable. The automatic pistol, on the other hand, was quite a charming little weapon."

The book itself is charming but lacks a certain stopping power. There is a mood of melancholy, wistfulness and regret, and the writing is very good. But it's not obvious why it was written. The hesitancy and diffidence never really go away. We get all "one side" and none of the other: whatever it was that made Sassoon charge those German trenches with a bag full of grenades is not discussed or in any way evoked in the book. For me the memoir ended up inspiring a feeling that was probably very different from the one the author intended: nostalgia for old Britain, of which Sassoon appears to have been, despite his doubts, a pure product.

*

Slow Man and Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee

It's hard to know what to say about a writer so good, books so good. You feel like you might end up talking about them all day. Elizabeth Costello, especially, merits actual study. But what I felt when I read them was, "Fiction is possible." Not autofiction or creative nonfiction or some other kind of post-fiction, but the novel. These might seem like strange stories to inspire this faith. Their protagonists, like all Coetzee's heroes, are cold, cerebral, and disagreeable. There is much philosophizing; in fact, Elizabeth Costello is structured as a series of lectures. Nevertheless I was taken in naively: I read wanting to know what would happen next. What does happen? In Slow Man, not much, in Elizabeth Costello, even less. His difficult, intelligent, rather unlikable characters go to their fates, arguing the whole way, refusing to negotiate. Both protagonists are old, and this is the the most important thing about them, but the books aren't so much about mortality as about a certain harshness of life that old age lays bare. A vision of the world as basically no country for old men, not so different from Houellebecq's, although without Houellebecq's romanticism. An atmosphere of gloom, the feeling of having to proceed despite the penetrating cold. So why read it? Oddly enough, for pleasure. These books, without cheer or plot, remind you of the basic enjoyment of reading fiction. Simply the pleasure of being in that other place. That word, being "gripped" by a novel. You are gripped by it but the feeling is of gripping: the energy you have ready to use on your own behalf, in your own life, that you would use to have an argument or prepare for a meeting, you invest in the story instead. Escapism. I honestly would have preferred space aliens and tough-talking detectives, but the authors of these books just don't write as well. Adults develop a tolerance to the drug of reading and need the strongest batch – actual literature – to get their fix. Coetzee is remote and unfriendly, he doesn't give discounts or make conversation, but he sells the good stuff.  

*

It's Me, Eddie, by Eduard Limonov

I read this book in French, which as I’ve mentioned I don’t really speak, so I can't really comment on the prose. Perceived through the mist of a foreign language, though, it seems well-written: energetic, direct, always ready to be funny. I am really seeing through two glasses darkly because Limonov writes in Russian. I don't think the translation or my lack of fluency make much difference, though. Here is a more or less random extract of Limonov's writing, from one of his newspaper columns in the 90s:

"I am the best Russian writer, but I am forced to confess that I hate Russian language. Russian words are painfully long, they remind me of naked slimy worms. You know, those pink awful creatures that you can see on some hot summer night on path you walk. Worms get out of soil to copulate under the moonlight. Russian words are copulating on my table every day and night. I am looking at them with hate and I am screaming. I am gnashing my teeth. Why should put “icheskaya” to the end of “social” in “Social Republic?” Seven letters I am adding for what fuck?"

This is a caveman translation, significantly worse than Google. I wonder if in fact it's Limonov's own bad English. But it's hard to believe it loses anything compared to the original, and it may even read better with a strong accent. This is Limonov’s style: funny, abrasive, self-confident bordering on megalomania.

It's Me, Eddie, his first of many books, is about his life in New York City in the 70s. He and his beautiful young wife moved to New York from Moscow in 1976. At that time, you were allowed to leave the Soviet Union but not come back. That was alright with them. He was a poet, she was a model, and they were going to make it in the West. This took longer than they expected. Elena did better than her husband, though, and soon enough started having affairs, and then left him. Eddie is Limonov’s memoir of the year and a half after this event, his personal nadir.

Limonov is contradictory, like Sassoon. A boastful, macho, even violent man, he reacts unexpectedly to the catastrophe of abandonment. Does he stalk his ex-wife? Sleep with as many women as he can? No. He tells his friend, "Sexually I'm totally freaked out, women don't arouse me, my dick is faint with incomprehension, it just dangles be­cause it doesn't know what to want and its master is sick."

He feels he's dying of loneliness. "What I need now," he says, "is someone to service me — caress, kiss, want me — rather than wanting and being ingratiating myself. Only from men can I get all this."

Limonov is a man of action, and when he decides to become homosexual, he follows through. He has sex with petty thugs and vagrants, all of them black, in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, episodes recounted in the book in romanticized scenes that are only partly believable. Nevertheless you believe him in a general way, and admire him. He brags, not in the mealy-mouthed and conventional way we're used to people bragging in memoirs, but openly, with real pride.

"I was happy and pleased with myself when I woke up the next morning," he says, after his first liaison. "I lay there smiling and thought how I must be the only Russian poet who had ever been smart enough to fuck a black man in a New York vacant lot."

Limonov is famous for having many lives, from Parisian man of letters to Balkan soldier (on the wrong side) to Russian politician. What ties these lives together is his conception of himself as a hero. In this book, this grandiose impulse, which can often be sheer arrogance, expresses itself as a kind of big-heartedness. Just as he doesn't hesitate to have sex with men, he also declines to hold a grudge against his faithless ex-wife. The book made its splash because of his gay adventures (the French edition has the shameless title, "Le poète Russe prefere les grands negres") but the most moving parts have to do with Elena. She treated him cruelly, leaving him without a word of regret for someone richer and better connected, and the reader, assuming he can stand Limonov, naturally takes his side and wants to see him get over his ex-wife, or at least avoid her completely. Instead he makes a fool of himself for this woman, keeps pursuing her, keeps seeing her, keeps buying things for her and helping her. And since he is a writer, he never stops reflecting on all this while he's doing it. These reflections reach a kind of climax when he finds himself thinking about Elena's romantic career: how she first married a much older man at 17, left him for Limonov, then left Limonov for someone else and has already left him.

"Suddenly it dawned on me: Good Lord, she doesn't know what she's supposed to do with us all, with men, with the Victors, the Eddies, the Jeans… Use us in sex, get our money, have us take her to a restaurant. That's all she can do with us. She's innocent as a baby, for she doesn't know how else she can use us... She doesn't know about love... No one has told her about love, God's gift to man."

The book, like all Limonov's books, is about Limonov – his brave exploits, his battle with the world, his unique and brilliant observations – but it’s also about love. What separates Limonov from history's other colorful sociopaths isn't just his literary ability but his ability to love. Indeed, his whole checkered life he seems to have been strangely faithful to the women he was with. He's proud of this, just as he's basically proud of everything he's done. A rare quality, and even moreso for a writer. His descriptions of his casual affairs with other women during this time can be extremely unpleasant, and in fact in his life Limonov was basically a shit, but I admire him in this book. He tries to live without pettiness, and more or less succeeds.