Memories of the Future

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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Siri Hustvedt

There are two memories of the future. I had, for a time, thought there was only one, but as I examined that memory I learned of the second. Or maybe that should be the first since it came earlier. So now I had to consider both, in case one remembered the other.

Both are urban memories. One is of Moscow in the 1920s, when it was a city of small, cramped apartments, when life was lived on the streets and the people you might encounter sitting beside you on a bench may be mad, shysters or visionaries. The other is of New York in the 1970s, when it was a city of small, cramped apartments, when life was lived on the streets and the people you might meet in any subway train may be mad, shysters or visionaries.

Ah, but is this an echo, or simply a consequence of the place and the time? Probably; isn’t that kind of city liable to be what it takes to inspire this kind of fiction?

Except that to say these two fictions are of a kind would be odd. One, after all, is a collection of stories or, to be more accurate, the title novella in a collection of stories: Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. The other is a novel: Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt. One, the Krzhizhanovsky, was written in the 1920s but not discovered until twenty-five years after the author’s death, and not published for a further fifteen years after that. The other, the Hustvedt, was written within the last couple of years and is set partly in the present and partly in the late 1970s when Hustvedt’s character, impenetrably named “S.H.”, first arrived in New York.

Each contains inventions that lodge in the mind. Krzhizhanovsky’s “Quadraturin” tells of a lotion that will increase the size of the central character’s dark and poky apartment. But there is a spill and the apartment continues to grow, until the light from the dim bulb in the ceiling is too weak to reach the walls, the small dirty window is so far away that it sheds no light, and the central character gets lost within the dark shadows of his own home.

Hustvedt has an aside: what if the hero in a novel is handed a key, the key opens a hidden door, and when he goes through the door he finds himself a minor character in a different novel. Oh that is an idea far far bigger than the couple of sentences in which it is expressed.

These are places, books, full of voices. Krzhizhanovsky has us meet people in the street who tells us about the Eiffel Tower uprooting itself and rampaging across Europe, or who sell logic to those prepared to queue for a syllogism. Hustvedt has us listen to voices through thin apartment walls, voices that talk indistinctly about murder and witches.

There are, of course, political undercurrents that run through both books, occasionally bursting to the surface. In Krzhizhanovsky it is the issue of the seemingly endless questionnaires that the Soviet regime requires everyone to complete: everyone lies, of course, but the questionnaires will determine their status in the new regime. And then there is the title story, in which the life of Schterer is reconstructed, from his time at university in Tsarist Russia when he first conceived the idea of a time machine, through his failed experiments, the interruption of the First World War, his post-war attempts to continue his experiments against official obstruction, and the final success which sees him journey a few years into the future only to find that nothing has changed, and when he returns no one is interested in the future.

Krzhizhanovsky gives us a series of separate stories that together paint a picture of a world in which the wildness of imagination provides the only hope for individual survival. Hustvedt also provides a wealth of story, but here interlinked and interwoven to form one novel. SH is a novelist in her mid-sixties who comes across the journal she kept when she first moved to New York in 1979; she is about to take up a place at Columbia, but is having a year out first in which to write her novel. We are given, therefore, SH now, SH then, and extracts from the novel she was trying to write but never finished. A novel in which the two central characters both imagine themselves as Sherlock Holmes (another SH) though in fact the mysteries they investigate are unresolved, and the characters bear the significant initials of IF, IS and ID. But the journal presents the greater mystery, also unresolved, in which voices through the wall carry indistinct tales of a child dead, perhaps accident, perhaps murder, and of other conflicts with unknown others. Then, at the exact mid-point of the book, SH is the victim of an attempted rape, only to be rescued at the last minute by the women from the next door apartment bursting in and chasing off the attacker. She is then drawn into their circle, and the novel takes on issues of female independence and empowerment without ever forgetting or solving the mystery surrounding her neighbour.

Siri Hustvedt’s previous novel, The Blazing World, acknowledged and drew on the influence of Margaret Cavendish. I don’t think, in this new novel, that Hustvedt either drew on or even knew of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s identically titled collection. And yet there are resonances that seem to link them, as if the similarities between the cities in which they are set themselves generated similarities that fed into the fictions. Hustvedt’s book is wonderful, the opening passage, a long bravura account of her arrival in New York and of the impression the city made upon her, is one of the most glorious pieces of writing I’ve encountered for a long time. But I am particularly grateful that Hustvedt’s novel also led me to discover the extraordinary stories of Krzhizhanovsky.

Siri Hustvedt

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Iain Banks, Margaret Cavendish, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Virginia Woolf

The Kent Literature Festival, which started lo these many years ago (though after most of the country’s other literary festivals) has gone through a fair number of name and location changes over the years. It now seems to be settled as the Folkestone Book Festival. One thing has been consistent over all this time: it has been something of a tail-end Charlie of book festivals, coming late in the year and drawing on a number of participants already familiar and tired from a year on the circuit. There have, from time to time, been somewhat misplaced attempts to live the thing up. I remember one notorious occasion when they had Iain Banks, and the organiser therefore decided it would be a Scottish Evening with himself and all the staff in tartans.

The more recent incarnation of the festival does seem rather more adventurous, however. This year, the cast included Siri Hustvedt, which felt like a real coup to me, though I did wonder if anyone else in Folkestone would have even heard of Siri Hustvedt (it didn’t help that they misspelled her name in the programme). I am inveterately early for things like this, and for a while my worries about how popular she might be seemed to have borne out: I was sitting outside the auditorium for over 20 minutes before anyone else turned up. Still, in the end there were around 40 of us in the audience, though I hadn’t taken on board that she seems to have become something of a feminist idol, and the only other few men in the audience were accompanying more intense wives.

Initially, I confess, I was disappointed. It turned out that we were not having an audience with Siri Hustvedt, we were having a Skype chat with her: she was sitting in a sunny room in her home in Brooklyn, we were in a dark theatre in Folkestone. It is, admittedly, a creative way to broaden the range of writers we might get to see at our tired little late-year book festival, but at the same time, bang goes my hope of getting her to sign The Blazing World. And I was a little annoyed that this wasn’t made clear in the programme: the Siri Hustvedt talk was under a heading “Words from a Wider World”, and if you worked your way patiently through the programme book you would find, several pages away, a note about this thread that, mid-paragraph, included a passing reference to “live link-up”, but that wasn’t at all clear.

On the plus side, her head filled a six-foot screen, which meant we had a wonderful view of how animated she is. Her eyes were particularly expressive, opening wide, rolling, glancing away to left or right. Her face was never still, and she laughed a lot; maybe, being in her own home, she was more relaxed that she might have been on stage. When we came to questions from the audience, someone asked inevitably about what conversations were like over the Siri Hustvedt/Paul Auster dining table. I saw Auster once at a reading, and I suddenly had an image of the light and lively Hustvedt against the dark and static Auster, and nearly burst out laughing.

The real problem was the interviewer. She wasn’t a writer or a critic, or even a psychiatrist (Hustvedt is a lecturer in psychiatry, so that might have been an interesting dynamic); she was an artist interested in “text and image”, the sort of bland phrase that means nothing. I’m not sure she’d had much experience interviewing, because her questions were rambling statements to which she somehow managed to append a question mark. And she had a habit of still hesitating and qualifying her question long after Hustvedt had started trying to answer it, which for me is a capital offence among interviewers.

But Hustvedt was gold: full of perceptions and ideas that moved effortlessly and revealingly from the structure of writing to the history of science to the character of memory to the role of women to the fluidity of gender. Everything was grist to her mill, everything interweaved with the way she wanted to write her novels. It was fascinating.

From the audience, after the usual fluffy questions from people who don’t really know how to talk to writers (the Hustvedt/Auster dining table, can you tell me something about that picture on the wall behind you) I managed to ask how she came to Margaret Cavendish. She immediately started on an excited five-minute talk about researching 17th century science and how the name Cavendish kept coming up and how she knew it from Virginia Woolf’s dismissive comments and how she therefore hadn’t read any Cavendish (because, well, Woolf), but then she did and how the scientific ideas still resonate with ideas we’re asking about today. When she finally wound down, she added: “And thank you for asking that question.”

So, a good evening. But I still don’t have my copy of The Blazing World signed.

Hustvedt and Tiptree

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James Tiptree Jr, Julie Phillips, Robert Silverberg, Siri Hustvedt, Ursula K. Le Guin

I put Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World down late last year. I was enjoying it, but I was overloaded with other things I had to do and reading for pleasure came rather low on the pecking order. This morning I picked it up again; still too much else to do, but what the hell. And practically the first thing I read is a passage about James Tiptree.

She outlines the basic story we all know: how no-one met Tiptree, how Silverberg said the work was ineluctably masculine, the appearance of Raccoona Sheldon, etc. Then we come to this bit:

What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: ‘Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.’

Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. ‘When you take on a male persona, something happens.’

When I asked what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled, ‘You get to be the father.’

… She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man — not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her — and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

Two things struck me about this passage.

First, although this analysis of Tiptree’s suicide doesn’t conform to the story in Julie Phillips’s biography, doesn’t take into account the husband’s illness or her own, or mention that this was all a decade after her identity was revealed, yet there is something that rings true about it. Le Guin was right that there was something in Tiptree’s writing that Raccoona Sheldon’s lacked, and after Tiptree’s identity was revealed, Tiptree’s writing lacked it also. To my mind, ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’, ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’ and Raccoona Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’, which came out around the time of the revelation, were the last really significant things she wrote. The stories that came later, and all of the novels, were distinctly minor affairs when compared to the work that appeared when Tiptree was safely behind her mask.

The Encyclopedia says that the revelation killed Tiptree. That’s not strictly true, it didn’t even stop her writing; but it stopped her being Tiptree, and that took something out of the writing. And for that, Hustvedt’s point about getting to ‘be the father’, works as well as any. It may not be that she couldn’t live without the man inside her, though she certainly went into decline without him; but it is surely the case that she couldn’t write to that high and wonderful standard without him.

The second thing is that Hustvedt’s novel tells of a woman artist who calls herself Harry, and whose work is exhibited as by a succession of male front men. All the time I was reading this far I was asking myself: does she know about Tiptree. It seems to me that there is a lot of James Tiptree in Harry.

Well, now it seems I have my answer.

Oracle Night

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Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt

Something traumatic must have happened to Paul Auster and his wife, Siri Hustvedt, in the last year or so. I say this simply because they have both written the same story, or part of a story, not as the main thrust of their novel but as a violent intrusion into the world of the novel late in the course of the book. Those of you who read my piece on Hustvedt’s What I Loved a little while ago might recall that I lamented the melodrama when the son of a friend of the main character turns into a drug addict and thief tied up with a vicious crowd. Now, towards the end of Auster’s new novel, Oracle Night (Faber, 2004), the son of a friend of the main character is a drug addict and thief who commits a sudden act of outrageous violence against the narrator’s wife. Both Auster and Hustvedt transpose the event into the past, but because the two stories are so uncannily alike it feels recent. Auster’s handling of it is the more visceral, but less melodramatic; and I wonder if it is significant that the father of the criminal is the inevitable Auster-surrogate in the novel, here called Trause?

Other than that, Oracle Night is, for much of its length, one of the better of Auster’s novels, as good as Mr Vertigo or Leviathan (both of which I rate up there with his best), though in the end it is a book of trailing, unfinished stories, which means the book itself has an unfinished feel. It is narrated by a novelist, Stanley Orr, who lives, inevitably, in Brooklyn. Having suffered some sort of seizure bad enough that the doctors assumed he would not live, he has now finally come out of hospital. On one of his hesitant, recuperative walks around the neighbourhood he happens upon a new stationer’s shop, where he buys a blue notebook. Back home, he finds a new story coming to him which he writes in the notebook (so intensely is he engaged by this new story that when his wife, Grace, returns home he seems to have disappeared, one of several vaguely magical touches in the novel that are not developed). The story is of a man who walks away from his life and ends up in Kansas City, working with a retired taxi driver who collects telephone books as some sort of memorial for the victims of the concentration camps (this makes more sense in the novel than it does in any synopsis). The man was a publisher, and with him he carries the manuscript of a newly discovered novel by a noted author from between the wars; this novel, which is only very briefly synopsised, is called Oracle Night. When Orr manages to get his hero locked in the underground bunker where the collection of telephone books is stored, he finds himself unable to continue with the story. Curiously, his wife reports a dream which has almost the same plot as this abandoned novel. Next he writes a movie treatment for The Time Machine. Orr (and presumably Auster) does not rate The Time Machine highly: ‘a bad, awkwardly written piece of work, social criticism disguising itself as adventure yarn and heavy-handed on both counts’, so he rewrites it into a tale of two time travellers, one from the past and one from the future, who meet in Dallas in November 1963. The treatment is, not surprisingly, rejected.

All this while Orr is finding his wife acting strangely. Around the middle of the novel she informs him that she is pregnant, but seems disturbed by the prospect. Eventually, Orr uses the notebook to write a story which explains his wife’s behaviour: he imagines (and we are given no reason to doubt that this fiction is true, since the whole novel is about fiction turning into reality) that she had an affair with another writer, Trause, who had known her since she was a child and who is now Orr’s best friend. Having written the story, he tears up the notebook as if by so doing he is destroying the fiction’s chance of affecting reality. But in the moment of that destruction Trause dies as a result of deep vein thrombosis, and not long after Trause’s addict son attacks Grace causing her to lose the child.

And there it ends, and despite the fact that I think this is a wonderful novel (and I get more out of it the more I think about it) it still feels somehow unresolved…

First published at Livejournal, 25 February 2004.

What I Loved

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Siri Hustvedt

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre, 2003) is the first of her novels that I have read. It is not exactly what I was expecting – I suppose I rather thought that Mrs Paul Auster might write something as coolly detached as her husband (a silly, sexist, knee-jerk response, but one fostered by reviews of her earlier two novels). I certainly did not expect a determinedly realist novel that is as crowded with emotion as this book. It is a wrench to read simply because of the potency of the emotional blows she submits her characters to. I don’t think I have read any novel which deals so powerfully and convincingly with the effect of the death of a child.

At the core of the novel are two smart New York couples. Leo, the narrator, lectures in art history and is an acclaimed art critic, his wife, Erica, lectures in literature and is an expert in the novels of Henry James. Leo’s best friend is the artist Bill Weschler, and Bill’s second wife, Violet, writes a series of books on the cultural phenomenon of psychological disorder. Leo first seeks out Bill when he buys one of Bill’s early paintings, a portrait of Violet. They become close, Bill and Violet move in to the flat above Leo and Erica, their sons are born within weeks of each other, the two families take holidays together at a house in Vermont. The account of the friendships between these four people is beautifully handled in the early part of the book (and refreshingly does not descend into the conventional tale of adultery that you half expect it to).

Then Matt, Leo and Erica’s son, is killed at the age of 11, and the novel suddenly takes an unexpected turn. Grief and loss become the central figures, rather than the joy and friendship that has gone before. Grief, Hustvedt tells us, does not draw people together but rather pushes them apart. In their attempts to come to terms with the scale of their loss, Leo and Erica end up pushing each other away, and separate. Left on his own, Leo has to depend ever more on Bill and Violet, until Bill too dies; but that draws him further into the problems they have with their own son, Mark. Mark is a congenital liar and thief who, by his mid-teens, is running around with a charming but amoral young artist. This is where Hustvedt’s control of the book faulters, because the whole story of Mark and Teddy Giles descends too readily into melodrama that seems even more overblown set against the subtleties of the rest of the novel.

Nevertheless, apart from this problem with plot that surfaces about two thirds of the way through and runs as a garish thread through the whole of the rest of the book, this is an extraordinary novel.

First published at Livejournal, 23 January 2004.