Literature

Introducing: SJ Fowler

Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.

SJ Fowler has been exploring the boundaries of European poetry in his Maintenant series, a project that takes its name from pugilist, poet, hoaxer and nephew of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Cravan. It’s an astonishing project, one that has profiled the work of almost 100 contemporary poets, placing the likes of Frédéric Forte, Tadeusz Różewicz and George Szirtes alongside Ann Cotten, Luna Miguel, Holly Pester and Ragnhildur Jóhanns. Says Fowler,

“For years I was completely isolated in my reading too…and as such I was in a bubble, didn’t have the chance to develop any sense of prejudice against poetry in translation, or avant garde work, as somehow otherly. That’s perhaps why I read this kind of work alongside poetry that might be better known in this country in equal measure.”

A lost soul

Arthur Cravan writes to Mina Loy from Mexico City, December 10, 1917:

Since leaving I have become tremendously pure, and if I manage to survive I’m thinking of becoming a saint. But I don’t think I will survive. If you don’t get any more letters you’ll know that I’m dead or else that I’ve gone mad. If you can’t console me I’d rather disappear from the world of the senses or at least of the intelligence. I can no longer see a star or read a book without being filled with horror. I have almost no strength left for writing to you. and if I knew I was doing it in vain, I would kill myself in five minutes. All I do is think about suicide. As you have probably never been in this state, you can’t understand. If you had suffered half as much as I do, you would fly to my side. Listen, Mona, I would almost ask you to lie. The idea of death fills me with horror, so even if you couldn’t come, could you give me the sweet illusion that I will see you again? I could never bear the truth. Madness terrifies me more than death. My brain can’t manage to repair the losses, and the only thing I really grasp is that I am lost. Wire me for God’s sake. This is the Christmas of a lost soul. It will be the New Year of a man who is condemned to death…. Mina, I can’t believe, I don’t dare believe, that you will abandon me. If you come, I swear to you on my eternal soul that I will never cause you pain and that your life will be sweeter than that of any other woman. Forget the past. I was full of lies, but now I only want to live for the truth.

From the New Yorker.

Dos Passos’ America

Will Augerot on the magnificent U.S.A. trilogy.

I’m not sure that any writer today is writing fiction as contemporary in substance as that which John Dos Passos was writing in the 1920’s and 30’s. Precarious, exploited youth; economic catastrophes; senseless warmongering; cynical self-promoters; feckless media beholden to entrepreneurial myths: the U.S.A. trilogy has it all. Dos Passos died in 1970, but behind his prose a reader can sense the presence of an intelligence that somehow, anachronistically, understands our maddening yet hopeful times. Unfortunately, U.S.A. has suffered its share of high-profile detractors, and the reputation of the novelist that Jean-Paul Sartre called “the greatest writer of our time” isn’t what it once was.

The reality of the street

The revolutionary act of urban walking.

There was a whole band of urban ramblers exploring the insalubrious and unheralded districts of London during the interwar years. In books such as Gordon S Maxwell’s The Fringe of London, Thomas Burke’s The Outer Circle and James Bone’s The London Perambulator, the previously overlooked suburban hinterland of the city was treated with the same reverence as more conventional heritage sites. The workaday city was celebrated as a land rich in legend and wonder. In the same period, George Orwell was undertaking his politicised tramps around London and into the Kent countryside to experience the hardships endured by the homeless and destitute; then he walked his way from Coventry to Wigan Pier, chronicling the “distressed areas” of the north.

Yet it was a bunch of Parisian gadabouts who turned this damp-tweed form of subversive schlepping into a codified art. For members of the Situationist International (SI), such drifts were fact-finding missions for the transformation of urban living and society in general. The walks were recast as dérives and the findings formed the new pseudo-social science of psychogeography. The intent was overtly revolutionary. Radicalism was not cloaked in the guise of a walking guide; the SI’s ambulatory studies of the Paris suburbs were “reconnaissance missions” for the revolution that was to come – and it very nearly did in May 1968.

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Encounter at the crossroads of Europe

Will Stone, translator of Stefan Zweig‘s Nietzsche [a gorse read of 2013], on Zweig and Emile Verhaeren.

In Berlin, apart from his studies and bohemian indulgences, Zweig sought a more expansive freedom in literary terms, and caught the bug of translation. He began to explore further afield, even translating poets such as Keats and Yeats and producing with other translators a collection of Verlaine’s poetry to which he added a critically acclaimed introduction. But all the time he was moving closer to Belgium, drawn by the rich crop of its home grown artists and writers who seemed to integrate their works in fresh and creatively productive ways. So in the summer break of 1902, long anticipating a visit to the ‘little land between the languages’, Zweig made his move.

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The vital importance of Zweig’s meeting with Verhaeren in relation to his ensuing career as a writer, emissary of humanism and key proponent for the higher ideal of a Europe of cultural unity, cannot be underestimated. The contrast between Verhaeren’s openness, curiosity, vitality, not to mention the explicit visionary credentials he held, and the self conscious dandified Viennese poetry circles Zweig had moved within was extreme. It was if Zweig himself had suddenly been released from a reserve of pampered elites into the rawness and unpredictability of the wild and could finally breathe real air, taste real food and appreciate the creative potential of risk and unpredictability. In Verhaeren’s verses he saw bold new vistas opening up which seemed to strike a necessary chord with the rapidly transforming epoch, as the fabled ‘golden age of security’, guarded by the Hapsburg realm unceremoniously gave way to something far more restless, ominous and uncertain.