From Hanif Kureishi, 'Gabriel's Gift': Epigraphs 1.2 and 5.2 - Art, Imagination and Absence

Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) won international fame (and an Oscar nomination) as the author of the screenplay for the Stephen Frears film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), in which Londoners variously marginalized (by ethnicity, class, sexual orientation...) meet, clash, love and, for the most part, find mutual understanding--in Margaret Thatcher's England. I find the film as fresh and powerful (and funny) today as I did over 25 years ago.

Before Laundrette, Kureishi was already playwright-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, and his subsequent career has defied those who would pigeon-hole him as any one thing: novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenplay author or playwright. I drew two epigraphs for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me from his fourth novel, Gabriel's Gift (2001; UK Kindle edition here, US paperback edition here). Like Laundrette and Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, Gift is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of familial wrangling. Like Buddha, it features prominently a Bowie-like rock icon--in this fourth novel the father's former bandmate, who presents the 15-year-old Gabriel with a sketch that the boy, a budding artist, copies perfectly as the first step in a demonstration of the power of art to mend what's broken.

Accordingly, the two epigraphs we're talking about today resonate more optimistically in Gabriel's Gift itself than when they appear in the context (out of context) of A Kiss Before You Leave Me.

Epigraph 5.2: 'Art is what you do when other people leave the room' (from Gift, chapter 1). In Gabriel's Gift, this is the boy's recollection of a sentence heard on television the night before, now turned into a comforting accompaniment for the solitary creative process of an artist in the making. True, there have been traumatic departures from his household: his twin brother who died as a toddler, and his father, whom his mother has sent packing. But the emphasis in the sentence is on the rightness, the appropriateness of solitary artistic work, and in Kureishi's novel the power of art is, as we've said, fundamentally restorative.... In A Kiss Before You Leave Me, this epigraph introduces the section entitled 'Solo Show', which begins with an inventory of paintings done by Jack Emery in preparation for his first one-man show, but is also about departures affecting or involving him, dissolutions of ties, in both the past and the present, and, to some extent, about the reasons for those dissolutions: rightly or wrongly, art may seem to at least one character in A Kiss Before You Leave Me like what you can finally do when you've left the others behind.

Epigraph 1.2: '"What does an imagination do but see what isn't there?"' (from Gift, chapter 3). In Gabriel's Gift, rock icon Lester Jones is speaking to Gabriel, polymorphic icon to fledgeling artist, affirming the boy in his creative identity and reassuring him of the powerful value of his differentness. (It's a rare 'creative' who receives this message at the age of 15, but it's never too late to read this scene, in its entirety.) Where the question is inserted in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, however--as an epigraph to the first section, 'Seeing Someone'--the reader knows nothing of the 'art' plot and can associate the quotation only with the tortured power and play of the voyeuristic imagination as seen in the culmination of that section. (See the second half of my Sartre post of three days ago, and the earlier discussion of the lyrics of 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'.)

Absence, separation and negativity come to the fore at these moments in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. They may well not be the dominant notes in the novel as a whole--but at these moments in particular the novel feels very different from Gabriel's Gift, which most readers would call Kureishi's sunniest work to date. It's all in the context.

Language and Silence: September 11: A Public and Personal Anniversary

I'm probably not the only one this morning who'll be reaching for a little Wittgenstein. It sounds better to my ear in the original German: 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Abschnitt/Proposition 7: 'What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence').

If I hadn't vowed to blog every day this month, I would probably have passed over the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in silence. And the same is true, in consequence, for another anniversary that coincides with it: 11 September 2010 was the true date of first publication of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, making this a curiously personal-and-public day for me and a day of conflicting emotions, and conflicting inclinations to speak and to remain silent--not least because both the novel and this blog have represented to me heightened instances of 'breaking silence'.

But I don't want to go on embroidering on multiple meanings, exploiting accidental convergences, and such. I don't want to exploit anything or anyone. This is a day, simply, for me to say that the United States has been very good to me, and that you, all of you, have been very good to me. And that, whatever our passion for anniversaries, we are, also, 'all about' tomorrows.

I honor all of you. I wish all of you strength and tenderness. And I will see you tomorrow.

Finding Constance Garnett

I logged several decades as a book-lover before I expanded my horizon to include ebooks close to four years ago. And all book-lovers (with or without an e- up front) spend a certain amount of time in quest of specific books. Ebibliophile may be a neologism the world can live without, but we exist, we are real, and we have our passions. We go to lengths that we do not always disclose, just to be able to download the elusive title in readable form. Some day I may do a more general (very much in the sense of 'general confession') detailing of my quests for individual ebooks. Today, let's talk about just one that's finally available in the U.S. and Canada.

When I was growing up, there was one canonical English translator for 19th-century Russian fiction: Constance Garnett (1861-1946).

True, from the 1950s onward there emerged in Penguin Classics a number of contemporary translators with significant readerships: Rosemary Edmonds, David Magarshack, David McDuff, Ronald Wilks. I've relied on them more than on any other contemporary translators. I'd like to salute them here but leave them out of today's discussion.

Constance Garnett saw almost 40 years of Queen Victoria's reign, then lived on past the end of World War II. But when her detractors refer to her as a 'Victorian' they are not thinking primarily of the fact that her life overlapped with that of many of her authors. As a translator, she sometimes downplayed sexual content, especially in the case of Anna Karenina. Still, for multiple generations of English-speaking readers hers was, and for many still is, the voice of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov: a beautiful, compelling and (especially in her day) a surprisingly immediate voice. (If it wouldn't open a can of worms, I'd say that her translations were almost comparable in stature to the King James Version of the Bible.) Perhaps the power of her English owes something to the master novelists of the era into which she was born: Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, Henry James, Conrad....

In recent decades, she's been found wanting by some (but not all) critics who have compared her translations with those of the new kids on the block, the prolific team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In addition to all their other strengths as translators, Pevear and Volokhonsky have the advantage that she is a native speaker of Russian and he of American English. They are arguably the world's most famous and most decorated living literary translators into English. Their translations are current, precise and authoritative. Some are even bestsellers; their Anna Karenina was a selection of Oprah's Book Club.

My passions in this area, however, remain permanently focussed on Garnett. (Perhaps I'm just one of those birds who mate for life.) And my greatest ebibliophilic quest has been for Garnett's 1904 translation of Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece War and Peace.

Largely because Gutenberg.org chose to digitize the (later) Maude translation, there has been until now no digital access to Garnett's. (Some databases indicate the contrary, but they mistake the Maude for the Garnett.) I've campaigned online for a Garnett War and Peace ebook for years--and suddenly it's here before us. It's so new that even Google as of this writing is unaware of it. (That will change quickly: Google tracks this blog admirably.)

Surprisingly enough, the new ebook is a Barnes & Noble Classics edition (published in print in 2006; with an introduction by Joseph Frank and extensive notes by Lena Lencek) available as of this writing only at the U.S. and Canadian iBooks stores. (This, too, will change, I predict: even if there is no Kindle edition [other books in the series have so far been offered only in EPUB format--the format for most ebook readers except the Kindle], I expect it to crop up as an offering on Barnes & Noble's nook soon. When that happens, I'll post a link.) [UPDATE: nook and Kindle editions of the Garnett translation are now available, as of 9 December 2012, but the price for this Modern Library ebook is more than three times that of the iBooks edition and in what I call the 'gouge zone'; as a rule, I don't provide links to such editions on this blog.]

Here are the iBooks links: for the U.S. and for Canada. Not an iBooks user yet? Well, whenever you're ready, iBooks--and Garnett--will be there. For me, at least, the wait has been worth it.

From Sartre's 'Kean': Epigraph 1.3 - Seeing Someone, or Not

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about The Collector, let's talk some more about the amorous observer's inability to see.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean (a very free adaptation, first staged in 1953, of an 1836 play by Dumas père) is best known as a bravura star vehicle for actors as different as Anthony Hopkins and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It turns the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean (1789-1833) into a specimen of existentialist bad faith: even 'actor', 'man', 'lover' are for Sartre's Kean just so many roles in his repertoire. As the play continues, he will be called upon to step aside and yield Elena, the woman he loves (or 'loves'), to the advances of the Prince of Wales--in exchange for money to pay off his creditors. In an earlier scene (II, 2, 1), however, he explains why he must use his time before she joins him in his dressing room, to think about Elena:

'It's only when I'm alone that I can meditate on the charm of the woman I love.... When she's with me, I won't have a moment to see her: I'll be too busy watching her.'

Watching her, noting her responses, trying to catch her out, stealing glances at her, spying on her--but not for a moment seeing her....

The first section of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me (the section introduced by the epigraph from Kean) is entitled 'Seeing Someone'. It extends from the first gleam in a matchmaker's eye (roughly speaking) to the culmination of the first date of the pair she's brought together. The reader's attention by this time is not on the matchmaker at all, and not primarily on the new pair (Miranda and Jack), but on an observer who's secretly followed them back to Miranda's place, lingered outside in the dark--watching, spying and all the rest--and who sees, or believes he can see, even in the darkness, through walls, then from blocks away. The section ends:

A part of [him] recoils, but he cannot look away, he stares, through the blackness, the streets, the walls that separate them, that close him in and out but cannot save the three of them from this: he sees.

Or not. The watcher in the shadows can imagine well enough what the other two are doing--can't 'avert his gaze', can't stop imagining, can't not 'know', can't escape that knowledge--but these are all negations relating to a figure who is herself absent. His view of the 'real' Miranda may be even more compromised than Kean's of the 'present' Elena....

From John Fowles, 'The Collector': Epigraph 6.1 - In the Name of Miranda

One of the shortest epigraphs in A Kiss Before You Leave Me may appear at first quite innocent: '...Her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda.' That innocence doesn't last for long, but here I'll pretend to preserve it a bit longer by talking first about my secondary reason for using the quotation and only after that, and cryptically, about my primary reason.

Miranda is of course the name of the apparent protagonist of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, whose beauty animates the so-called 'Miranda paintings' for which she poses. In using the epigraph from John Fowles, I wanted the reader to think, if only for a moment, about the name Miranda (as well as the recurrent subject of 'my' Miranda's beauty).

Miranda is such a popular name today that we may forget that it seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. (He used it, of course, for Prospero's daughter in The Tempest, the source of another epigraph [4.1].) The form 'Miranda' is a Latin gerundive--'a 'verbal adjective' formed from the present participle of a verb, always passive in force; e.g., agenda (neuter plural), literally, '[things that are] to be done'; 'referendum'; 'propaganda'; 'Amanda', '[she who deserves] to be loved'. The meaning of the name Miranda is sometimes given simply as '[she who is] to be admired', but the verb mirari means not only 'admire' but also 'look at', 'marvel at'. I propose that we gloss 'Miranda' as 'she who is to be gazed upon in amazement'. Miranda Kincaid is admirable in every way... and beautiful, yes, astonishingly, wondrously so--but not necessarily to be emulated--especially in her moments of 'passivity'.

Miranda's beauty is a huge topic. Among other things, when other characters find her appealing, her beauty is often all they can see, or at least all they can name. We wonder at times how deeply others understand her, especially those who are attracted to her. Moreover, as the novel goes on, her beauty becomes a commodity of sorts, subjected to commercial exploitation. Some readers may discover a recurring theme of the connection between (a) certain loves' failures to see deeply or to understand and (b) the monetization of beauty or of love itself.

But my primary reason for including the epigraph from John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector was to remind readers already familiar with it that Miranda is the name of the young woman in that novel. I don't want to say much here about the plot of The Collector, because that might imply a closer parallel between situations in the two books than is actually there. But the least I can say is that my brief reference to Fowles's novel suggests that what presents itself as a passionate love of beauty, a love or 'love' that understands itself as collecting, preserving and protecting the exquisitely beautiful, can also be the enemy of what it admires.