Evelyn Waugh

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Many literary careers are doomed to go on slightly longer than they should, and to outlive the author’s original engrossing talent. Waugh himself lived to lament the Second Vatican Council and to deplore the abolition of the Latin Mass - which means that he became not more Catholic than the Pope but more curmudgeonly than his own confessors and more conservative than the Church itself. This has the accidentally beautiful result of making Sword of Honour into a literary memorial not just for a lost world but for a lost faith.

In Catholic doctrine one is supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner. This can be a distinction without a difference if the “sin” is to be something (a Jew, a homosexual, even a divorcee) rather than to do something. Non-Christian charity requires, however, that one forgive Waugh precisely because it was his innate - as well as his adopted - vices that made him a king of comedy and of tragedy for almost three decades.

-- Christopher Hitchens, “Evelyn Waugh: the Permanent Adolescent” in Arguably

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Kafka

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Someone must have been telling lies about K., for the popular image of him as the great Gloomy Gus of 20th-century letters (close rivals: Beckett, Cioran, maybe Céline) does not bear very much scrutiny. Consider this incident, which took place as he was dying of tuberculosis, and knew it. One day, when he was walking in a Berlin park, Kafka saw a little girl crying. He asked her why she was sad and she told him that she had lost her doll. Oh no, Kafka said, her doll was not lost - the toy was simply off on an exciting adventure. Understandably sceptical, the girl asked for proof. So Kafka went home and wrote a long, detailed letter from the doll, and gave it to the little girl the following day. Then, every day for the next three weeks, he gave her an additional letter. It seems that the doll had met a boy doll, and become engaged, and then married. By the end of the three weeks, the doll was setting up her marital home and the little girl no longer missed her mute companion.

This is hardly the sort of thing you would expect of the fellow who wrote The Trial or The Castle or 'In the Penal Settlement' (one of the most horrific short texts ever to have sneaked its way into the literary canon), and it is poignant as well as charming, not least because in our own climate of nervy erotic suspicion a middle-aged male writer who attempted such kindliness would have the social services or police on him like a shot. But the story of Kafka and the Lost Doll is instructive as well as surprising.

It explains to the neophyte what an unusually kind and thoughtful man he could be, even when he was drawing his shallow breaths in sharp pain. Some of his fans think that - again like Beckett - he bordered on the saintly. But it also hints at Kafka's knowledge of the power that lies in stories, his own stories in particular. Stories can cure the sadness of small girls. They can also frighten, console, give courage. They can help even a sick and dying writer make some sense of what remains of his short life. Kafka seems often to have thought of writing as a curse or (to borrow a term from the literature of shamanism) a sickness vocation. And yet the thing that makes you ill may also, from time to time, make you powerful.

-- Kevin Jackson at Literary Review

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cats and weather

The cats and I are playing that game again: will it or won't it rain? And they are understandably upset with me. They could have spent the day outside. It is nicely overcast. But a small chance of rain last night actually materialized. It wasn't much of a rain, but I can be overly scrupulous that way, when I probably should be freer. Sammy yowled a good part of the night. I am impressed that Pop doesn't say anything. Though, it's not like I don't suffer in terms of broken sleep and tiredness and frustration. I will let then go this evening if it does not rain again. I still fail to understand why they should regard being inside the house as some sort of harsh punishment. They are wild things. Not truly pets. They are not dogs. I miss you, Bo. Now there was a dog who knew how to appreciate an air-conditioned home. It's only too bad that dogs don't have that neat litter-box treat.

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1940

Within 30 minutes of letting the cats out, the sky darkens and then the thunder and now the rain. At least Coco and Sammy came back in readily enough. But Ash remains stubborn.

Nina Zero

Nina Zero comes from a working-class family, and life is a little rough with an abusive father who is pretty good with his fists, especially on the womenfolk. For this excerpt, she is visiting her family for dinner. Ray is her brother, who lives and works in his father’s shadow.

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There was something about the way Pop and Ray were sitting that I wanted to hold in my hand and study. I went to get my camera bag. I know Pop would get angry if I brought out my camera, because he didn’t like me taking pictures.

He couldn’t understand it was an obsession for me. He thought a camera was something you took out when somebody had a birthday or came to visit. The idea I took photos to understand things about the world and myself made him suspicious, like maybe I was too stupid to understand that the world is a straightforward place where you have to work hard and support yourself and your family and then relax a little after, and art is for people who don’t have to work for a living and is unnecessary to guys like him, unless you consider television or motion pictures art.

-- “Shooting Elvis” by Robert M. Eversz

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95. Books

I began to scatter books and magnifying glasses around the house. I have wanted to open more lines of narratives to read. For instance, the first obvious book-post is the toilet. I set out de Sade’s “Philosophy of the Bedroom” on the toilet-tank along with a magnifying glass. When I am stuck on the toilet, I can read a page or two from that. I would also have a book for the kitchen, so that when I am busy preparing my meals and doing my evening chores, making ice and cleaning up, I can read a page or two from that book. I would have a book for each of the two beds I use, so when I am stirring awake in the early morning, I can read a page or two in those books. I have been flirting with this idea for some time, developing a manic hunger to have a lot of narratives going, aside from the three books that make up my daily reading and the book that I have for my bedtime reading.

However, this feverish urge quickly settled down, and now I only have one extra book going, and that is the one on the toilet. Though, it is not de Sade. I grew disenchanted with that book, and I now have Francis Wheen’s biography on Karl Marx in the bathroom. I had been itching to reread it, and it is a good biography that is still easy and breezy enough to read on the sly. And one finds that you can make fairly steady progress on a book while you are stuck on the toilet.

Daily Fun

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