Roll: What brought you to Kolkata in the first place, Fionn?

Reilly: A trip to India for me had to include Kolkata. The photographs of Raghubir Singh, the films of of Satyajit Ray, the specter of The Black Hole, its history, the reputation for being big and chaotic plus a conversation with a merchant banker from Bombay made it somewhere I had to discover.

When did you start seeing the possibility of a book of Kolkata photographs? What was it that enthralled you as a photographer?

As I started to develop my 30-odd rolls of film from my first trip, the excitement grew. I felt that I was on to something and my passion for the place increased. I had gone to Kolkata but by shooting in black and white my camera was revealing an older Calcutta. I knew I would be going back to get more pictures.

Did your idea of the book change over the period of your visits? Did Kolkata change?

No. I just felt that I wanted to see more and get better pictures. I still do. I would happily continue to do more of the same, maybe making a few more discoveries on the way. I would love to add some domestic interiors to the collection. In the space of four years I saw no change at all.

Being in Kolkata conjures up visits to Naples in the ‘60s, the same open-ness and welcome without its people clinging or demanding anything. How, for you, does Kolkata compare with other cities you’ve known?

Interesting comparison to Naples. I was only in Naples for a crazy Kolkata like taxi ride from train station to port. I cannot think of anywhere I have been with the streets teeming with so much human energy. Maybe Bucharest has a similar thing going on with a population going about its business seemingly oblivious to its backdrop of crumbling empire.

The stereotype of Calcutta, lepers and flea-ridden beggars, has helped to keep it off the tourist map. How amazed most Westerners who discover it must be to find the efficient Kolkata modern subway system that puts the MTA to shame. What are your thoughts in this regard? The reality of Kolkata versus the myth.

India is so paradoxical. Seems logical, in that respect, that the city of so much poverty and suffering IS the “City of Joy”. I have to say that I have seen plentiful scenes of human suffering in Kolkata, as I have in Delhi, but my feeling of Kolkata is that it is a city with a smile on its face. I love the subway. Air-conditioned, subterranean efficiency underneath the boiling chaos above. Each day I would take the metro, in a flash, to the top end of the city and spend all day walking back down town through a labyrinth of streets and back alleys.

My generation was raised with Satyajit Ray’s films — the Bengali Chekhov. I’m glad you mentioned him. I still find elements of Bengali artistic temperament — so different from the Bollywood style of the rest of India — everywhere I go in West Bengal. What about you?

The first time I went to India, it was as a journalist covering the Mumbai stock exchange. I remember asking a banker at dinner what he thought of Satyajit Ray. He said that Ray presented a “very negative side of India”. That conversation made me want to go to Kolkata even more. I can’t imagine films like Jalshagar (The Music Room) or Pather Panchali coming out of Mumbai.

Elements also of the long Communist rule over West Bengal: people fed and clothed at modest expense. Did you encounter remnants of this?

Big yes to that question. I had a 25-cent eye exam in a crumbing old palace. Another time I got sick and got treated for next to nothing by a doctor with a very plummy accent who told me his other practice was in London’s Gloucester Road. Every time I have been to Kolkata there have been marches and demonstrations. The spirit that booted the British out from Calcutta to Delhi remains.

What drew your camera, as you walked around Kolkata? What will we see in your photos? — particular aspects of the city, or all aspects?

My eye is drawn to the visual imprint of time. Time erodes things but that is a backdrop to the force of life going on in front of it. Here we are in the 21st century but In Kolkata life goes on in scenes more akin to Charles Dickens’ London. I love this quote by Rabrindranath Tagore: “In the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places.”

What was it that kept you coming back to Kolkata?

Something about it fits with what I dig about life. I fantasize about living there.

Will you go back again? Or have you exhausted your affair with the city?

I will go back again. I have been four times and I get a little emotional every time I leave. The book is printed and bound but I have not finished.

Roll: All great cities are inexhaustible, and Kolkata is one — perhaps one of the last, its overlapping folds of history as yet unreconstructed. It has been preserved for us from tourist hordes by its reputation, not for violence but for suffering. Yet I’ve found that anyone who knows the city loves it. It’s so nice to have somewhere like that, even if you can’t be there. A true north in the compass of the heart.

A New Kolkata is being built, out by the airport, full of Western hotels and boutiques. In order to say you’ve visited, it soon may not even be necessary to go into the old Kolkata. This might preserve the old city a little longer. Thank you, Fionn, for helping to memorialize that city, and thank you for talking to Roll Magazine.

For more about this inspiring book visit
https://www.kolkatabook.com/

Carey Harrison-photo by Dion Ogust

Carey Harrison recently completed The Heart Beneath, a quartet of novels he began 49 years ago and which he regards as his life’s chief endeavor. (A separate series of novels, the Justice quintet, was fitted in, over the years, as were three more unconnected novels.) The Heart Beneath was published by Dr. Cicero Books in a revised edition in September 2016. That month, Harrison began a year as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, who awarded him the Fellowship in honor of his lifetime’s output of fiction. He continues to write and teach at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

]]> http://www.rollmagazine.com/a-true-north-in-the-compass-of-the-heart/feed/ 0 http://www.rollmagazine.com/try-calcutta/ http://www.rollmagazine.com/try-calcutta/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2018 04:56:33 +0000 Carey Harrison http://www.rollmagazine.com/?p=15311 Continue reading →]]> I fell in love with Calcutta at first sight, as one falls in love with a woman. (I raise my hat respectfully to all those who know how to fall in love gradually. This is not my way.) Had I expected to fall in love with, of all places, Calcutta? Certainly not. Of course not – what, fall for a place that I had first encountered as a history student in the vile form of the Black Hole of Calcutta; Calcutta that everyone connects to Mother Teresa, picking her brave way past flyblown beggars, the half-dead and the diseased; Calcutta the archetypical home of swarming India, of desperate impoverished millions?

None of this put me off. I have had a high tolerance for squalor ever since a childhood that made me familiar with the back streets, the tenements and the peasant farms of postwar Italy. France, in my teenage years, was little better. No one relishes sewer smells, but if you couldn’t stand them, continental Europe was not for you. India I knew somewhat, South India in particular, and I had lived in Sri Lanka. I’d never been to West Bengal, Calcutta’s home state, home to some of the third largest sociolinguistic group in the world: the Bengalis. Here I’d had a hint of what was to come: when I was 18 I’d been introduced to Bengali culture by the wonderful films of Satyajit Ray, movies with no connection to Bollywood, movies that Chekhov might have made had he been born a Bengali and become a film-maker.

Leaning out of the cab heading for South Calcutta from the airport, I was instantly drunk on the aroma of spices and humanity (not stale or sour or unwashed humanity – I have never known a folk who wash as joyfully and as often as the men and women of the sub-continent). I loved the little ragged shops, crammed as only Indian stores are crammed. I loved the automotive museum of its streets, the boxy little Ambassador cabs, toy car relics of another age. A compulsive novelist, I scribbled a first paragraph, as we drove. It’s hard to say – for me, anyway – what it is in a city that induces rapture. It’s not glorious architecture, much as I love to stroll through, say, Paris streets, it’s not a profusion of remarkable buildings, monuments, museums, great restaurants, or any of the things that I understand draw people to cities. It’s a sense that life is on the streets, already visible in all its aspects, present to sight and smell: Naples was the first city I fell in love with, Naples the famously transparent city, where as you climbed the steps of a sloping neighborhood, the houses around you offered a multi-story diorama of life in all its aspects: on each floor, open to the street in the heat of the night, priests knelt at deathbeds, babies screamed out their first breath, couples embraced, and the laundry clotheslines that all but blocked out the sky celebrated this panoply, this living soap opera, like Tibetan flags waving their blessing. At any rate it was so when I was young; I hope it still is; anyone who was there in those fearless postwar decades will tell you that my account is no exaggeration.

In Calcutta I found my Naples again, in a form one might never expect: everything – food, joy, camaraderie, on the street, but: no beggars. That’s right. No beggars. Nor have they been rounded up and made scarce, as in Giuliana-era New York City. West Bengal has been a Communist state for almost all its history, and its government made sure that food was so cheap that no one would go hungry, and clothing so cheap that no one need live in rags. And they don’t. Bengalis! Beautiful Bengalis, the handsomest race I know, display themselves, the women especially of course, like Berbers with all their finery always on show. And food — remember that all the Western alarm about street food in exotic places is exactly the reverse of where the danger lies: it lies in restaurant food, prepared out of sight, with who-knows-what going into it. In the street – all along the street, in the district of Tollygunge where I found myself – you see your food being cooked before your eyes, at a temperature that ensures your safety. Day after day I ate the most glorious stir-fry dishes, in particular a vegetable chow mein, watching the herbs and spices and chopped-up veg dance in the olive oil of a sizzling wok, before the noodles are thrown in – dear God, my mouth is watering as I write this! – to writhe like a huge, ecstatic bundle of tiny snakes, fit for a rajah, a day’s worth for 40 cents.

Poverty there is, of course; it isn’t drastic but it’s there. Tapwater there is, not to be drunk. (And for me as a vegan, no danger of toxic dairy or meat.) Bottles of water are everywhere, a hundred of them on every block. Noise there is too, of course, plenty of it; the East is never quiet by choice. When I lived there first I was amazed to find even the jungle perforated by vans driving to and fro along the lanes, blasting out music and advertising, all day.

The streets of Calcutta are not clean. But here I have to be honest with you. I dislike clean. I have never wanted to go to Scandinavia. It looks clean, to me. I don’t like bugs or stink or manifest foulness, although I’ve put up with it, as a guest in houses in the Rif mountains of Morocco where we all slept around the edges of a room that contained a hole in the center of the room, a hole to be used for unmistakable purposes, a hole that gave directly onto the town sewer, only a foot or so below the floor. This took some getting used to. But cities should be cities, places where calm is barely tolerated, where people drive like predators and howl like prey, where fires are lit on crumbling sidewalks to heat up food acquired at all-night resto-cafes.

It must be clear to you by now, dear readers, if you’re still reading: I’m not a tourist. I’m a traveler. Guide books are the killing jars of surprise, the thing for which a traveler lives. Guide books are the manufacturers of disappointment. If you’re a traveler, your memory and heart will be full, as mine is, of astonishment: the day, cycling through France, I came over a hill and saw a castle larger, grander, than any dream could have pictured, a castle without peer in the world – Carcassonne. I had no idea it existed. The morning after an all-night train journey with my head against an iron bar, when I staggered unawares into the largest square in the world, the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakesh, the Djemaa as it was in the old days, when the blue men came from the desert and told their stories and fought, bare-knuckled, not as a show for tourists.

The ultimate surprise? It’s this: Calcutta has a subway system of surpassing beauty and efficiency, its platforms and trains wide and accommodating, its digital schedules bright and reliable beside screens that offer filmed previews of current Calcutta theater shows, in an underground that puts not only the MTA (recently voted the worst subway system in the world) to shame, but rivals the best anywhere.

This is all stage décor, of course. What makes Calcutta so truly remarkable is the sheer sweetness of the inhabitants, its faces that breathe kindness, its people that supply it when (and not before) you need it, with a love in their eyes I’ve never known to be so consistent elsewhere. Of course it helps if you have a long white beard. (I’ll lend you mine.) Young men and women jump to their feet on the subway and seat you where they themselves had found a seat. And what’s absent in Calcutta is not only begging but offering to guide. Respect is unfailing. No one stares at you as though you were a Martian or an opportunity. I have never felt so at home in a place.

So what happened to the stereotype of Calcutta? The seething mass of frantic importunacy? What sustained this lying myth, of course, wasn’t only Mother Teresa. It was Communism. Who in our world, wanted to hear about a happy, thriving, loving Communist state? Protected by a false vision of their city, Calcuttans have survived in comparative innocence, saved from the tourist hordes. Who ever even heard of Communist West Bengal, when Communism comes up in conversation? For my part I had the advantage of growing up in an Italian town with a Communist mayor; Prospero Velo was his wonderful name; I had the advantage of spending time in Bologna, a Communist-run city that, like Calcutta, breathed (and maybe still breathes) the joy of sharing.

So where, you will wonder, are my travel photos to bear out the vision I’ve painted for you? Tourists take photos. Travelers just remember and move on, as nomads always have, leaving the soil of their brief dwelling to retain no lasting mark. Leaving it to the wind.

Carey Harrison recently completed The Heart Beneath, a quartet of novels he began 49 years ago and which he regards as his life’s chief endeavor. (A separate series of novels, the Justice quintet, was fitted in, over the years, as were three more unconnected novels.) The Heart Beneath was published by Dr. Cicero Books in a revised edition in September 2016. That month, Harrison began a year as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, who awarded him the Fellowship in honor of his lifetime’s output of fiction. He continues to write and teach at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

Just this past autumn an astonishing discovery was made, consisting of work hidden away in a crammed desk belonging to the writer Otis Kidwell Burger, mother of the writer and artist Katherine Burger, a Woodstock resident, former longtime director of the Artist’s Residency Program at Byrdcliffe, and currently House Manager at the Maverick concert hall. Katherine’s mother, Otis, is a lifelong writer and artist, as her daughter is. Otis’ longtime home on Manhattan’s Bethune Street was once a writers’ gathering place, frequented by such luminaries as Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, who set part of a novel there, in Otis’ house. The recent discovery is of the sole surviving copy of some of Otis’ work, poetry lost for 60 years: entitled Love is a Season, it’s a sonnet cycle, 47 poems long. Otis, now 94 years old, wrote them in 1957 and, unable to rouse any interest in them at the time, put them away in a drawer.

Otis at her 94th birthday party — photo by Charley Ryan

This re-discovery would have compelling charm, in and of itself. What makes it so much more is that Love is a Season provides us with some of the most moving and surprising love sonnets written since Shakespeare. Those who have known Otis Kidwell Burger’s poetry and other writing, composed during a long life never very far from the typewriter, and published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, will not be surprised that the poetry is excellent. What has taken aback every reader, and the audience at formal and informal readings from the sonnet cycle, is the bold ​originality​ of the collection, which recruits the natural world to validate the poet’s feelings. Heaven itself, she confesses, might condemn her. Neither the poet nor her beloved are free of other entanglements. Love obeys no rules; very well, but where then, does the lover find his or her patent, Love’s writ? In the landscape and its creatures, Otis’ poems tell us, invoking light and landscape, field and forest, and deploying compulsive attention to beasts, birds and insects. This is her cast; these are her judges, and her exemplars. The entire drama, presented with masterly formal control, gives us the birth of passion, and its waning with the winter light: the sequence spans a year.

Otis’ daughter is quick to confess the surprise of this brimming surrender to erotic obsession. It’s as if I’m meeting a whole new side of my mother, Katherine admits.

I hear you like the blood in my own body,
Otis writes,
or like the wind that winds about the house;
Invisible, you spin a thread nobody
But I can follow; secret as a mouse
Beneath its pathways in the meadow grass

The 47 sonnets are Shakespearean in form. There are two, composed during the dismemberment of the passionate ‘season’ charted by the poet, that are loose – as if distraught — in construction. The rest are as faithfully in thrall to metre and rhyme as if they too are the blood in the poet’s own body. And the subject matter, not only love but love’s court of endorsement – a kind of trial of her love — leaps out at the reader in poem after poem, insisting on the interpenetration of human passion and its animal origins. The poet has, she says,
…taken counsel with the breathless fish,
With bird who drink and swim in the air of sky,
And footed beasts between…

Creatures confirm, as nothing else in the world around her can, the overwhelmingly natural ferocity of her feelings.

I am both ass and owl, both snake and dove;
The fearful Name by which men summon love.
…
From all created forms, unreason springs
Cross all the careful roads of history,
All fierce as claws, as scales, as airy wings,
As lung to air, as gill to darkling sea…
These know my reasons, and my reckless love
Will find its pardon there, if not above.

She is a driven soul at the mercy of elves’ gold:

As if the tree of night had showered down
A host of jewels from its shaken leaves,
Opals and rubles from its towering crown,
So is my room ablaze with golden greaves
Of flashing beetle, and pallid moths which fold
As slim as silken pencils; lace-winged flies;
Gay striped bugs with knobby horns, and bold
Big moths, beneath whose dull grey lies.
A tiger-lily underwing; and red
As blood spots, tiny moths; and here and there
Black velvet moths, jet-furred about the head.
And fluttering scalloped browns that beat the air
Like driven souls. A fortune, in light’s thrall.
But, like elves’ gold, with daylight, vanished all.

Finding Otis’ poems has been a little like finding a hidden, undiscovered Elizabethan play — the work carries the same stunning surprise conveyed by something that should have belonged to all of us, should have been part of our national treasury and the mental lexicon of all poetry-lovers. Soon they will form part of our heritage, as they always should have done – just as countless other jewels have been lost forever; but not this one.

Otis at the period when she wrote the poems

Her book belongs to the New York countryside in which it was written; to the species it invokes; to love itself and to its permanence in the very language that announces love’s impermanence. And at the last it is the landscape – the wide impossibility of skies – that she thanks.

Lord Lord, preserve for me this end of dream;
This lucid respite from the personal
When love’s no longer flesh, but hill and stream
And summer light, and every interval
In human plans and passions; let me see
Back-lit with love’s uncanny brightness, all
Mankind and earth as part of time and me
And I of them; enchanted, in the thrall
Or forces far too large to put aside,
Which joined us two by two, that we might bear
Earth, life, Love, flesh, and all the wide
Impossibilities of skies. Oh, wear
Me lightly, time; who once have known
Your puzzle and your promise in my bone.

Love is a Season, by Otis Kidwell Burger, with artwork by Katherine Burger, will be published on March 31st by Dr. Cicero Books, and available shortly thereafter on Amazon.com

Program Includes Sneak-Peek Preview of Starz’s forthcoming American Gods Television Series and Conversation with Executive Producer Bryan Fuller.

In a special evening program, Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman and Executive Producer Bryan Fuller discuss moving from page to screen for the forthcoming Starz television series, “American Gods,” adapted from Gaiman’s best selling novel. The event takes place on Saturday, April 15 at 7:30 p.m., and includes an exclusive preview of the first episode of the new television series ahead of its premiere on the Starz network, which will take place on April 30 at 9 p.m. Episode one of the “American Gods” program will be screened in the Sosnoff Theater at 7:30 p.m., followed by a brief intermission at 8:30 p.m., after which Gaiman and Fuller will discuss their collaboration and take questions from the audience. Tickets are $25, free to the Bard community, and may be purchased or reserved by calling the box office at 845–758-7900, or by visiting the website:

About Starz’s American Gods Series

American Gods posits a different kind of war brewing—one between Old Gods and New. The traditional Old Gods, with mythological roots from around the world, fear irrelevance as their believers die off or are seduced by the money, technology, and celebrity offered by the New Gods. Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is an ex-con who, left adrift by the recent death of his wife, becomes bodyguard and traveling partner to conman Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane). But in truth, Mr. Wednesday is a powerful old deity, on a cross-country mission to build an army and reclaim his lost glory.

Adapted from the award-winning novel, American Gods stars Ricky Whittle (The 100, Austenland) as Shadow Moon; Ian McShane (Deadwood, Ray Donovan) as Mr. Wednesday; Emily Browning (Sucker Punch, Legend) as Laura Moon and Pablo Schreiber (Orange is the New Black) as Mad Sweeney. Other cast members include Yetide Badaki (Aquarius, Masters of Sex) as Bilquis, Bruce Langley (Deadly Waters) as Technical Boy, Crispin Glover (Back to the Future) as Mr. World and Orlando Jones (Madiba, Sleepy Hollow) as Mr. Nancy.

Additional cast include Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, The Fall) as Media; Kristin Chenoweth (Pushing Daisies, Wicked) as Easter; Jonathan Tucker (Kingdom) as Low Key Lyesmith; Cloris Leachman (Malcom in The Middle, Raising Hope) as Zorya Vechernyaya; Peter Stormare (Fargo, Prison Break) as Czernobog; Chris Obi (Snow White and the Huntsman, The Counselor) as Anubis; Demore Barnes (12 Monkeys) as Mr. Ibis, Corbin Bernsen (L.A. Law) as Vulcan and Mousa Kraish (Superbad, Fast & Furious) as The Jinn.

American Gods is produced by FremantleMedia North America. Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Heroes) and Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049, Alien: Covenant, Murder on the Orient Express, Kings, Heroes) are writers and showrunners. David Slade (Hannibal, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) is directing the pilot and additional episodes. FMNA’s Craig Cegielski and Stefanie Berk are executive producers along with Fuller, Green, Slade, Adam Kane and Neil Gaiman. Senior Vice Presidents of Original Programming Marta Fernandez and Ken Segna are the Starz executives in charge of American Gods.

Neil Gaiman, photo by Kyle Kennedy

Neil Gaiman, professor in the arts at Bard College, is a New York Times best– selling author of novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, comics, journalism, and screenplays, who is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living postmodern writers. Works include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Novels for younger readers include Fortunately, the Milk; Coraline, also an Academy Award–nominated film; and The Graveyard Book, winner of the Newbery (U.S.) and Carnegie (U.K.) Medals. He has written and directed for film and television, including a 2011 episode of Doctor Who that won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by graphic artist Chip Kidd. www.neilgaiman.com

Bryan Fuller, photo courtesy of the artist

Bryan Fuller serves as executive producer and co-showrunner on Starz’s American Gods, based on Neil Gaiman’s classic novel. Fuller got his start writing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, followed by Star Trek: Voyager, where he worked his way up from freelance writer to staff writer to co-producer. He charted a new path during his last year on Star Trek: Voyager, writing a spec pilot called “Dead Girl,” which became Showtime’s Dead Like Me. Fuller then went on to create the critically acclaimed series Wonderfalls for Fox and wrote and executive produced the animated movie The Amazing Screw-On Head with Mike Mignola for the Sci-Fi Channel. He also served as writer and co-executive producer on the first season of NBC’s Heroes before leaving to create the Emmy Award– winning Pushing Daisies for ABC. He wrote and executive produced Mockingbird Lane, a reimagining of the classic sit-com The Munsters as a modern family dramedy, which aired on NBC as a Halloween special, and served as executive producer on the television film High Moon for Syfy. Bryan then developed and executive produced the critically– acclaimed series Hannibal, which ran for three seasons on NBC. Fuller was the recipient of the Dan Curtis Legacy Award at the 40th Annual Saturn Awards, as well as the 3rd Annual Award for Comic-Con All Access Game Changer from Spike TV.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College — Photo by Peter Aaron/Esto

Named for the late Richard B. Fisher, former chair of Bard’s Board of Trustees, the Fisher Center has become an influential force in performing arts programming, earning critical acclaim for innovative productions of opera, orchestral, chamber, dance, and theater programs. The Center was designed by legendary architect Frank Gehry and distinguished acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, and has received international praise for its breathtaking architecture and superb sound.

Each summer the Fisher Center presents the Bard SummerScape festival, seven weeks of performing arts programs reflecting the life and times of the featured composer of the esteemed Bard Music Festival, now celebrating its 28th year. Fall and spring seasons include original productions, special one-night-only concerts, and touring artists from around the globe.

The Fisher Center is home to the Bard College Theater & Performance and Dance Programs, providing students access to exceptional theater facilities and opportunities to work with professional directors and dramaturges on publicly attended productions throughout the year. The Bard College Conservatory of Music and Bard College Music Program stage regular orchestral and chamber concerts. Fishercenter.bard.edu

Featured Image: Ian McShane, (Mr. Wednesday) and Ricky Whittle, (Shadow Moon) From forthcoming Starz television series, American Gods. Photo courtesy of Starz

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman published several reviews, anonymously, of Leaves of Grass, in which he described the book as “transcendent and new.” It must have been difficult for him to accept anonymity, and not be able to take credit for the reviews as well. He also printed a copy of a private letter from Emerson—on the back cover of Leaves of Grass—extolling the virtues of the book. The transcendentalist from Concord, by the way, was none too pleased about becoming American publishing’s first blurbist.

When one can’t write one’s own reviews, there’s always bribery. Faulkner paid Alexander Woolcott five hundred bucks to praise Sanctuary on his radio program (and you thought Allen Freed had invented payola).

Oscar Wilde

An over-developed ego is one of the characteristics that make it possible for a writer to keep slogging through the inevitable years of rejection. After being asked to choose the best hundred books ever written, Oscar Wilde once demurred, “I fear that would be impossible, I have only written five.” Gertrude Stein once asked—in all seriousness—“Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?” The ego of James Joyce could be easily satisfied: “The only demand I make of my reader is that he devote his whole life to reading my works.”

Franz Kafka

Struggling back from that digression… it is important for writers to develop a network of other literary types upon whom they rely for a supply of blurbs and favorable reviews. Having friends write the reviews, repaid with gushing raves about their works, is always a good plan. Entering literary contests sponsored by one’s publisher, and judged by the very friends with whom one has been exchanging public praise, is another profitable technique. Kafka successfully parlayed all these tricks to promote The Metamorphosis. Anthony Burgess went even further: he wrote a rave review of Inside Mr. Enderby, a book he himself had written under the pseudonym “Joseph Kell.”

Occasionally writers have been able to promote their work through other forms of chicanery. Writing, like politics, is near the top of the list of mendacious occupations.

Washington Irving created a demand for Knickerbocker’s History of New York with fake news stories. On 26 October 1809, he placed a missing persons notice in the Evening Post about an old man named Knickerbocker. On 6 November, another notice—this time with an alleged sighting near Albany—appeared in the paper. Ten days later, a notice from Knickerbocker’s landlord, Seth Handaside, announced his discovery of a manuscript in the old man’s room. On the 28th, a printer, Inskeep & Bradford, announced the publication of “A History of New-York, in two volumes, duodecimo. Price three dollars.” The notice explained, “This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrick Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind.” Irving’s book came out on December 6th, to great acclaim—and no one seemed to mind at all that they had been victims of a hoax, let alone America’s first great publicity stunt.

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw used a tactic similar to Washington Irving’s—but not to promote a particular book. He used false newspaper reports to promote himself. He wrote, under pseudonym, a series of articles by a truly obnoxious reporter who interviewed an unknown author named George Bernard Shaw. Shaw—never the model of modesty—once boasted, “People must not be forced to adopt me as their favorite author—even for their own good.”

Upton Sinclair

Before Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, made him a household name, he was just another hack writer trying to get by. When he finished writing the novel Journal of Arthur Stirling, he placed a fake obituary for the title character in The New York Times: “By suicide in the Hudson River, poet and man of genius, in the 22nd year of age, the only son of Richard T. and Grace Stirling, deceased, of Chicago.” That brief notice, and the later discovery of the hoax, only boosted sales of the now-forgotten novel.

While I have no qualms about becoming as self-servingly venal as the writers listed above, I don’t think I’ll actually review Sausage: A Global History. I do like the book, but that doesn’t tell you much does it?

No, I think I’ll just share some of the things that didn’t make it into the final book. It’s a small book, part of a series of similar small books, so I had to trim away half of the original text. Also, after the book was written, edited, and in production, I learned that one of my former students—now a chef in Maryland—has started producing jerked sausage. Mark Henry was born in Jamaica, studied at the CIA, and now has a company called Island Bwoy Cuisine: website: His combining of flavors and techniques from multiple cultures is a perfect example of the way sausages have evolved throughout history—and would have fit beautifully into the book’s text (had I known about it in time). His site includes recipes, and one is curiously similar to this simple one we’ve been making for years—but is not in the book:

Sausage with Reduced Cream

Enough sauce for a half-pound of pasta—preferably shaped pasta, something that can carry lots of the unctuous sauce.

Ingredients

1 Tbsp. mild-tasting olive oil
½ lb. salsiccia, sweet Italian sausage, crumbled
2 Tbsp. sherry (not cooking sherry—it’s too salty)
½ pint heavy cream
½ cup parmigiano reggiano, finely grated
pinch. nutmeg, freshly grated
salt and pepper to taste

Method

1.While the pasta is cooking, sauté the crumbled sausage in oil, in a large skillet—breaking up the pieces as much as possible. It should be well-browned.

2.Pour off the excess fat, and deglaze the pan with sherry. (these first two steps can be done ahead of time)

3.When the sherry has evaporated, stir in cream, nutmeg, and cheese. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until thickened.

4.Drain cooked pasta—reserving some of the cooking water—and add to the skillet. Toss to coat. If the pasta seems too dry, add a little of the reserved cooking water.

5.Serve with a green salad; a tangy vinaigrette will complement the rich sauce.

Should you wish to make your own salsiccia, the recipe is on page 120 of Sausage: A Global History. Just because I’m not actually reviewing my own book doesn’t mean you get to escape without encountering one last plug.

Gary Allen’s most recent book is Can It!: The Pleasures and Perils of Preserving Foods, his third book from Reaktion. You can find more of his speculations about things he has been known to (but really shouldn’t) put in his mouth — his own foot being a prime example of the latter — on his website:  onthetable​.us 

At this point — and perhaps for a year or two to come — I am simply researching the worlds of the different novels, and focusing variously on the 21st century American Midwest, on Ancient Rome and its provinces under the Emperor Tiberius, on Elizabethan London, and on deep space travel, far in the future. (The 5th book is set in post-Second World War Europe and South America, where I am a little more at home.)

How will all of this work when it’s put together? Firstly, what form will it take, exactly? Imagine that the five books are a, b, c, d and e. Book ‘a’, whose title is Where Every Stranger (is a ghost), which is also the title of the entire book, is set in the contemporary midwest; ‘b’ (entitled Et In Arcadia Ego ) is Ancient Rome; ‘c’ (Richard’s Fate) is postwar Europe; ‘d’ (A Green Girl in London) is Elizabethan London; ‘e’ (The Museum of Violence) is deep space.

The order of the chapters, each roughly 30 pages, with ten chapters to each separate novel of what is consequently a 1500-page book, is as follows:

Abab cdcd abab cdcd ee abab cdcd abab cdcd ee abab cdcd eeeeee

The reason for this order is in part a matter of the best way to keep the reader abreast of five separate narratives, and in part dictated by the nature of the 5 books and their interactions — how they bounce off each other. As the book moves to a climax, the interaction of the separate books, hitherto only thematic, changes: books ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, and ‘d’ start to bleed into each other across the centuries and continents, in a futuristic setting which belongs to book ‘e’: deep space. The result is that the book as a unified whole starts to emerge as the novels morph, during the final 180 pages (the 6 final, consecutive book-‘e’ chapters), into a common territory.

This much became quickly clear in my head, purely as a result of the formal properties of keeping 5 full-length books going at once: the solution requires strong, clear underpinnings (against all my long-held convictions about how to let a novel find itself according to its own evolving logic), even a reduction to a mathematical form, or to a musical form,​ ​since the abab cdcd structure outlined above is in effect ​a ​rondo, in the view of my friend and neighbor, the virtuoso guitarist and composer Fred Hand, to whom I described my plan.

The intended order of chapters, along with the geographical and temporal settings of all five books and their leading characters, came to me on May 24 2014 (the 100th anniversary of my mother’s birth, surely a good omen) while riding through rain and hail from Asheville, North Carolina, across the Mississippi to Raccoon Mountain campsite outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, as part of a 10,000-mile motorbike journey around the United States in the company of my brother-in-law, both of us Harley Davidson​-borne​. The hailstorm was my first aboard a motorbike, after 50 years of biking — but not the last of our 10,000-mile journey. Hailstones banging off the steaming metal of the bike, and off my helmeted head, made me feel at the mercy of a celestial drummer, and may have beaten some rhythmic sense into my brain as I planned the book. The chapter pattern, if you imagine it as a poetic rhyme scheme, is not original: the central 30 chapters turns out to imitate the ababcdcdee decastich rhyme scheme of the Ercil form introduced by James Gray in honor of fellow-poet Ercil Brown; and that of the Ravenfly, a form created by Amanda J. Norton, with the same rhyme scheme.

​The idea for the novel as a whole had been gestating for a while, though in a totally different form. ​Some years earlier, I had given vent to my sense of having many more stories to tell (coiled, unformed as yet, but ready to be unleashed) than the world wanted to hear from me, by imagining taking a year off from teaching to write 50 1-hour radio plays, one a week​, with no planning, starting from scratch — what in French is called partir à zé ro — each week​. ​I felt pregnant with countless untold tales (as indeed we all are) and wanted to give birth to as many as possible, even though ​I had already ​been ​what a local magazine called “uber-​prolific​” for years​, producing ​more than 200 scripts, novels, ​stage and radio plays. This would be different. I proposed to my radio producer, Georg Bühren of SüdWestFunk in Köln, Germany, that he assemble a team of six radio directors who would in turn, over a period of 50 weeks​,receive my weekly play, cast it and record it. If nothing else i​t would be a newsworthy feat. Georg smiled patiently. It had taken all his charm, he reminded me, to persuade his radio station to broadcast one of my plays each year, never mind fifty. ​I knew this. I brooded. ​Between the early 1970s and the turn of the century I had written radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation; this was a noble horse — serious radio drama, for what was mostly a very small audience​ — that had died under me; the World Service Drama unit, my final stable, closed; Germany, which had translated and broadcast many of my plays, became my sole outlet, my last ride.

It then occurred to me that I had a radio station near ​my home in upstate New York, a station whose owner had allowed me to host a weekly interview show for the very magazine in which you are reading this, the brainchild (this magazine and the radio show) of my beloved friend, editor Tom Grasso. Simple, then: I would write the 50 plays, and each ​one​ — to make the project even more challenging, and enable the material to survive beyond the broadcast​ — would also be a chapter of a novel, an extremely long novel, since each chapter/one-hour play would be at least 30 pages long. ​A 1500-page novel. Well, why not? But how did the 50 plays, which I had originally pictured as entirely disparate stories thought up week by week, cohere as a novel, or, as it turned out ​ when my ride through rain and hail prompted me​, a stellium of novels? I was grateful when the hyper-awareness and concentrated focus of motorbiking allowed the dreaming mind to wander off and come back with the very large posy of wildflowers that was Where Every Stranger (is a ghost).

The chief site of pilgrimage on my bike journey (others were William Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, and the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio) was the cemetery at Wounded Knee. I had recently met the great historian of the West, Bobby Bridger, whose understanding of American history as an epic of denial — denial of genocide carried out on the continent’s native tribes — gave my motorbike journey meaning. Through ​Bobby’s words​ I understood ​afresh ​the place I was in, the place I was seeing. Th​anks to​ ​this,​ my newborn work took shape. Starting in ghost-ridden contemporary America, the narrative threads would include ancient Rome, Elizabethan London, post-World-War-II Europe and South America, and deep space in the distant future, where all the threads would pull together and mingle in one weave, one variegated meditation ​- the ancient one, the same one that has preoccupied writers and thinkers since Aeschylus on the challenge posed by man’s hereditary inhumanity to man.​

All well and good. But the last thing The Maker in the Head ever wants is to shuttle back and forth between dream-materials. Writing more than one book, script or story at once is anathema to The Maker. I’m praying that The Maker will make an exception for these 5 novels, because of their thematic unity: they sh​are nothing, except theme — and yet that theme is all. It is the problem of how to transform the long and all-essential heritage of human violence, all-essential because each of us is descended from a successfully violent primate forebear (otherwise we and our line would be extinct) — how to transform this inheritance into a life still fruitful and rich, and not a neutered paradise. What would life be without danger? And danger is itself the threat of violence, which must be real if there is to be real danger.

I shall report on whether the Maker’s mercy is upon me — when I have ingested enough (but not too much!) research to start letting go of it all and responding to nothing but the passion kindled by the overall story, and by its subsidiaries. Maker willing, my chariot will then be hitched to five snorting horses trying to pull the reins out of my fist, and I’ll be off on the wildest literary ride of my life.

Author Harrison

My new novel, Dog’s Mercury, is available now from Amazon.com, and from the publishers, Dr. Cicero Books, at drcicerobooks.com. It is a meditative, comic tale of a history teacher who abandons his career and his family to become a hobo, only to come across a murder and be drawn into the murderer’s life, and so back again into the world. The photo (below) shows me en route to the book launch, book in hand, and with a supporting cast of portraits painted by my masterful artist wife, Claire Lambe, and until recently exhibited at Oriole 9 in Woodstock.

Till next time, dear reader!

​