The Big Sort: All Fiction Can Be Organized In Four Categories
Tim Parks: “All of narrative fiction, I’ve suggested, can be sorted into four grand categories. Each presents a rich world of feeling in which any number of stories can be told and positions established, but always in relation to, or rather, driven by, a distinct cluster of values and consequent emotions. My claim is that it really is worth being aware which of these worlds we are being drawn into. We read better. We know where we are. And what the dangers are.” – New York Review of Books
Tim Parks: “All of narrative fiction, I’ve suggested, can be sorted into four grand categories. Each presents a rich world of feeling in which any number of stories can be told and positions established, but always in relation to, or rather, driven by, a distinct cluster of values and consequent emotions. My claim is that it really is worth being aware which of these worlds we are being drawn into. We read better. We know where we are. And what the dangers are.” – New York Review of Books
‘Until It’s Glorified in Rhyme'
I have just read Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad (New York Review Books, 2019), which leads me to the poetry of Boris Slutsky (1919-1986). Here is the co-translator (with his wife Elizabeth) of Grossman’s novel, Robert Chandler, in his introduction to the Slutsky selection in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry(Penguin Books, 2015):
“What nearly all his poems have in common is a focus on the specific and a wariness of dogma. Slutsky is a careful, modest explorer of human experience, closer to Chekhov or Vasily Grossman than to Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn. Slutsky did, in fact, know Grossman. During the late 1950s, when both were living in the same building, Slutsky regularly read his new poems aloud to Grossman or left him copies of poems he had recently typed out.”
To call Stalingrad a war novel is misleading. Yes, the Nazis advance on the city and the Soviet military and civilians defend it, but much space is devoted to domestic and work life – parents, spouses, children, lovers, coworkers, neighbors. Family is the heart of the novel. No one is unimportant to Grossman. Don’t pigeonhole his novel with The Naked and the Dead. Similarly, Slutsky writes no hymns to hydroelectric projects. His themes are preeminently human and close to home. Chandler writes in his introduction:
“Slutsky wrote about the war, about the Shoah, about various aspects of his Jewish heritage, about Stalin, about returnees from the camps, about other writers, about almost every aspect of everyday life.”
In “All Rules Are Incorrect” (early 1960s, trans. Stephen Capus) Slutsky is at once defiant and traditional:
“All rules are incorrect,
all laws remain perverse,
until they’re firmly set
in well-wrought lines of verse.
“An age or era will
be merely a stretch of time
without a meaning until
it’s glorified in rhyme.
“Until the poet’s ‘Yes!’,
entrusted by his pen
to print, awards success
to this or that – till then
“the jury will be out,
the verdict still in doubt.”
Killing Turned Out to Be Supremely Easy'
From Zbigniew Herbert’s “Albigensians, Inquisitors and Troubadours” in The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985):
“They are barefooted, armed with clubs and knives, dressed only in shirts and trousers, but their thirst for blood is inexhaustible. They manage to break into the town following the members of the careless expedition. Once inside, they spread terror; the assault on the walls takes only a few hours. A crowd of survivors gathers in Saint-Nazaire Cathedral, and in the churches of La Madeleine and Sainte-Jude. The soldiery break down the doors and slaughter everyone: the new-born, women, cripples, elders, and priests celebrating mass. Bells toll for the dead. Extermination is total.”
On this date, July 22, in 1209, the people of Béziers, in the Languedoc region of southern France, were slaughtered in the first major engagement of the Albigensian Crusade. Earlier in the month, Pope Innocent III had called for a crusade against the Catharist heresy, also called Albigensianism after the city of Albi where the movement started. The army of soldiers and mercenaries was led by the Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud Amalric, who said, probably apocryphally, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. This came in reply to being told there were faithful Catholics among the inhabitants of Béziers: “Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.” The town was pillaged and burned.
'Almost as Though One Were Inventing Them'
“[I]t's such a pleasure to write down splendid words--almost as though one were inventing them.”
A reader complains that I quote others too often and, sometimes, at too great a length. I consider quotation an act of courtesy, the least I can do. Great writers have said many things better and more memorably than I. It would be rude to elbow them aside and start bloviating on my own. Besides, the lineage of blogging, in my understanding, traces straight back to the commonplace book.
The line quoted above, for instance, was written by George Lyttleton (1883-1962), a longtime housemaster and English teacher at Eton. His correspondent is Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-1999), a publisher and editor best remembered for editing The Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). Hart-Davis had been Lyttleton’s student at Eton in 1925-26. They met again at a dinner party in 1955 and started a regular exchange of letters that continued until Lyttleton’s death in 1962. The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letterswas published in six volumes between 1978 and 1984. I read them about eight years ago.
