The war against forgetting: Salvador Allende

Patricio Guzmán has devoted much of his career to navigating the foggy history of his native Chile, particularly those few jubilant and turbulent years marked by the unprecedented non-violent ascension of its democratically elected socialist government and that long trail of dark years marked by terror, torture, order and oppression, by ostensible prosperity and cooperation with imperialist foreign powers, that followed. There’s this notion that Chile’s elder populace (those who didn’t, like Guzmán, go into exile), thinned out along its peculiar narrow stem of diverse topography, have constructed their national fog by way of a collective willful amnesia surrounding those aforementioned years. This amnesiac fog is invoked in the very title of Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). I wonder if the process inherent in journeying through this fog, unable to apprehend a view of what’s ahead or behind, hasn’t contributed to that special wandering, uncharted feeling that accompanies some of Guzmán’s finest, most personal films.

This feeling is certainly among the most compelling elements of Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light (2010), a masterpiece essay film that traverses the Atacama Desert in search of distant stars and bones of the disappeared. Yet this feeling can even be found in the more conventional documentary Salvador Allende (2004), now available on DVD from Icarus. After repeatedly encircling the Allende enigma, most famously in the three-part, Chris Marker-produced The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Guzmán took this project as an opportunity to take direct aim at Chile’s controversial fallen president, about whom there remains a conspicuous paucity of commentary. Yet there’s nothing especially direct about Salvador Allende. It finds its path as it proceeds.

Guzmán narrates Salvador Allende, emphasizing the first-person approach, while his soft voice can also frequently be heard off-camera posing questions. Guzmán was in his early 30s when Allende came into power (and passed 15 doubtlessly despairing days of detainment in the National Stadium following the coup) and is able to cull a healthy portion of Salvador Allende from his own archive of footage, shot between Allende’s 1970 inauguration and 1973, the year of that other September 11, when US-backed military forces ousted Allende’s government (a day Guzmán hauntingly evokes with repeated images of flames consuming the Palacio de la Moneda following the aerial bombing). Early in the film, Guzmán explains that he wants to get to know the Allende beneath the icon. He travels to Allende’s native Valparaiso, where the city’s former mayor persuasively insists that Allende (who received support from Cuba, but not from the USSR) was neither Marxist nor Leninist but libertarian, having received his first political education from an anarchist Italian shoemaker. But as the film goes along this effort to focus on Allende the man quietly dissipates, replaced by a more straightforward chronicle of Allende’s pre-presidential political career, conveying his charisma and popularity, highlighted by memorable images such as the one of gleeful rural children chasing his departing campaign train.

Later in Salvador Allende Guzmán details Allende’s difficult presidency, his agrarian reforms and nationalization of the mining industry, the hostilities directed at his policies, and his outspoken contempt for US interference and multinational corporations. A notable, revealing interview with former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirms Nixon’s explicit commands to get rid of Allende by any means necessary. Yet, appropriately for a film about a politician devoted to workers and the poor, Guzmán finds many of his strongest sequences by giving the floor to ordinary Chileans. He documents a lively debate between several former UP militants about whether or not Allende should have defended the government and properly armed the militia. This debate also pries open the thorny question of Allende’s suicide, undertaken just as the army was about to take him prisoner, an event which only compounds the mystery of his life. One could argue that Salvador Allende falls short of its ostensible goal in that Allende is virtually as enigmatic a figure by the film’s end as he was at its start. But the fortitude of this enigma is also, it seems to me, the film’s point. Allende, though revered by Guzmán as he is by millions around the world, is a truly singular, enduringly contentious figure—so singular that very few have made significant attempts to tell his story. The value of Guzmán’s film is that even in its limitations it makes an enormous contribution to a conversation about Allende that needs to be maintained. In Guzmán’s films the personal inevitably merges with the political, and the articulated memories of the filmmaker and his subjects continue to wage a non-violent war against the perils of forgetting.

Wrecked: lost, beaten, alone, oblivious

It opens bleary-eyed, gurgling itself into what may or may not be its protagonist’s waking state. He’s battered, trapped, at a complete loss as to where he is or how he got there. It was early enough in the wintry morning that I felt not entirely dissimilar as I settled in. I went into a press screening of Wrecked with my preferred amount of foreknowledge regarding its content, contributors, and genre: I didn’t know a damned thing about it. If you’re likewise ignorant of these factors and are still inclined to see the film anyway, by all means, stop reading. Having said that, the following comments shy away from excess synopsis. Wrecked, a US/Canada co-production, is assuredly simple, a modest yet promising double-debut from two resourceful Canadian filmmakers, director Michael Greenspan and writer Christopher Dodd. So I’ll try to keep this review simple too.

Here’s where we start: Adrien Brody finds himself trapped in a car that’s smashed into a tree in a dense forest. Corpses he doesn’t recognize slouch in the backseat. He’s got no food and little water and the radio assaults him with fuzzy, dated pop hits. (Tiny Tim eerily trills away twice in one weekend; Insidious also uses ‘Tip-toe Through the Tulips’ for retro-creep-out effect.) He seems to suffer from amnesia. He has no idea how to negotiate his survival in this place, wherever it is. The only words spoken during the first 15 minutes are largely torrents of expletives. In keeping with Brody’s desperate, frazzled state, Greenspan and Dodd deftly manage our degrees of orientation. The camera angles even make it difficult to discern up from down. It’s hard to know what’s even meant to be real: when you can barely remember a thing about your life it seems your dreams and hallucinations conform to your immediate circumstances.

Okay, okay, Brody does get out of the car. He makes friends with a dog that’s pretty easy to love. He starts crawling on his belly. Bleached-out flashbacks accumulate. Here’s more: there’s a radio broadcast regarding a bank robbery in Abbotsford. But how presumptuous should we be about the significance of this shard of clearly significant information? More interestingly, how presumptuous should Brody’s character be? Dodd wisely gives him little to say, resisting killing time with needless jabbering. Brody works fluently with what’s he’s got, sometimes using his nasal voice to simply aid his arduous forward movement. Sound design and music emerge as unusually dominant elements, and Michael Brook supplies both with equal parts evocation and ambiguity. I can assure you that it’s all going somewhere, but it’s uphill all the way, and looks pretty painful. Still, if you’re curious, you might just want to follow along.

Marwencol: a backyard theatre of war

Mark Hogancamp went into a coma for nine days after being beaten by four guys outside a bar. The movies have told us that something strange and possibly sinister transpires in that fathomless non-place where victims of accidents, crimes and war plunge for a time, but for Hogancamp, what was lost while comatose seems to have been a blessing. He awoke with severe amnesia, which meant he forgot he was a ruinous alcoholic. Bottles of booze stir nothing in him now. Their faded allure has freed him to make a new life, but of what sort? He had to learn to walk and talk all over, but couldn’t quite shake off a tremor. He can only handle working one shift a week making meatballs at a diner. In his abundant spare time he discovered he wasn’t just brain injured but deeply lonely. Medicare bought him little in the way of therapy, so he had to invent his own. In his Kingston, NY backyard he constructed a Belgian village in miniature, populating it with dolls refurbished as soldiers and women seeking refuge from the Second World War. Jeff Malmberg’s documentary about Hogancamp is named after Hogancamp’s creation: Marwencol.

It isn’t to dissuade you from seeing Marwencol when I say that everything great about it is derived from Hogancamp’s own charisma, vulnerability, and creativity. I don’t think Malmberg went as deep as he could have. There’s so often the feeling that Malmberg stopped digging as soon as he uncovered a sentimental sweet spot—which is easy enough since Hogancamp wears his heart on his sleeve, and his heart is so directly connected to his endearingly desperate horniness. All of Marwencol’s most striking images come directly from Hogancamp’s own lens, his painstakingly made photographs of tableaus depicting the elaborate dramas unfolding in Marwencol, tales of bravery, sadism, romance and betrayal. These inspired pseudo-film stills are what brought Hogancamp’s project to public attention, first in the pages of Esopus Magazine and later via his solo exhibition in a Manhattan gallery. But it’s enough that Malmberg invested such time in allowing his subject to reveal himself, fears, obsessions, and fetishes included. I don’t like to let documentary filmmakers off the hook just because they chose a great subject, especially from the veritable gold mine of the outsider art world, but I have to commend Malmberg for recognizing that Hogancamp had a lot to say and mostly staying out of his way as he tried to speak.

You might say that what Hogancamp’s inadvertently achieved is a modest version of what Philip Seymour Hoffman undertakes in Synecdoche, New York, but all on his own, and without a MacArthur Fellowship. Hogancamp’s dolls are surrogates for people he knows, neighbours, friends and workmates, and he uses these figures to negotiate between fantasy and reality, desire and disappointment. Unlike Charlie Kaufman’s epic of proliferate simulacra, Marwencol ends not with death but the possibility of rebirth. Hogancamp had the need for alcoholic oblivion beaten out of him. He constructed a place where his inner demons could wage war without hurting his loved ones, and he may have become an artist while mostly just trying to heal himself. Some day Hogancamp’s World War II will probably have to end, but his postwar universe will be glowing with nothing but potential.

Under the influence of a reckless moment: The Headless Woman

It begins with an accident on a country road. The driver, the sole occupant of the vehicle, stops the car, but keeps her eyes forward. Her name is Verónica, or Vero, for short. She does not examine what it is she’s run over, and this moment of decision or neglect or shock and confusion extends like a prolonged exhalation—or better yet, like a scream trapped in one’s throat. The moment is maddeningly still, chilling, and transfixing. Vero composes herself and drives on.

Things start to get strange. Vero goes to a hospital to be examined. She goes to a hotel instead of going home, even though home doesn’t seem that far away. She sleeps with a man who is not her husband, whether out of habit or in a sudden fit of desire is uncertain. She takes a shower with her clothes on. Of course, we don’t know yet where her home is. We don’t know yet who her husband is. We don’t know yet that she even has a husband. Exposition has been forsaken in lieu of something tantalizingly ambiguous. We’re asked to collect clues on our own, to stay a little more alert than most movies ask us to be. If you treasure the experience of entering a mystery blind you might want to consider just watching The Headless Woman (2008) and reading the rest of this later.

Vero’s behaviour is as compelling as her motives are nearly inscrutable, to the degree that certain sequences become comical, such the one that finds Vero sitting calmly in the waiting room of a dental clinic, as though she’s a patient and not one of the resident dentists. Vero banged her head in the collision—does she suffer from amnesia? There are more than enough noir flourishes in The Headless Woman to suggest such a movie-movie conceit. There’s something sufficiently elliptical in this slowly unraveling tale to suggest that all that follows may be the depiction of some extended fugue state. We’re immersed in subjectivity. We’ve perhaps entered a dream, but if so it isn’t a dream of mist and echoes but one of precise and vivid realist detail. One from which one doesn’t ever entirely wake.

This is the third film from the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, who had something of an art house hit with The Holy Girl (04), which is warmer than this latest film and actually a sort of comedy. Martel’s uncompromising sense of open-endedness and refusal to orient audiences either narratively or morally is tempered by her humour, her singular eye for fascinatingly peculiar bits of human interaction, and her immaculate, almost classical craftsmanship—a combination that’s allowed her to make her last two films under the auspices of the Almodóvar brothers, who are credited as co-producers. Although it played in very few theatres in Canada and the US, The Headless Woman is now available on DVD from Stand Releasing, which means that we can watch and re-watch it and piece together the shards of Vero’s posttraumatic daze. Once you do it’s surprising how coherent Martel’s narrative actually is—there isn’t a minute of this movie that’s not integral of the whole.

Yet the film’s brilliance, what makes you want to bother to seek out this coherence in the first place, is that no matter how much plot you glean certain shadows linger, expanding beyond the immediate story until it spreads into the sociological. Vero’s world is one where race and class-based inequities are less discreet than ours, and the meaning of her crime in this context can hardly be missed. When Vero gradually begins to recall or accept what’s transpired and attempts to resolve the situation however she can, the film’s creepier implications are revealed. She needn’t worry about her hit and run being discovered because there are others of her same social standing who, like friendly little elves, are cleaning up her mess while she recovers.

As remarkable as Martel’s writing and direction is, The Headless Woman would still be only half a movie were it not for the central performance of María Onetto. With her bottle-blonde hair—which she eventually changes, like a guilty heroine from Hitchcock—her heavy lidded eyes, and her sedate smile that could speak to some inner mischief as easily as serenity, Onetto reminds me most of some tranquilized version of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (74). Neither ingratiating nor alienating, Onetto doesn’t judge Vero but instead fully embodies her to the point where, against all odds, we identify with her. As with many a noir protagonist, we know she’s done something at least a little awful, even if we’re unsure of the gravity of the consequences of her actions—yet we can’t take our eyes off of her. And neither can Martel, who frames Onetto in ways that are endlessly curious, paying special attention to her neck and ears. Martel and Onetto insist on our intimacy if we’re to stick with the film, until by the end we too feel a little headless, totally intrigued, entertained, creeped out, and probably wondering what these women will do next.

You must remember this: Gregory Peck wrestles with his cagey brain (again) in Mirage, now on DVD

When the lights suddenly go out in New York City, David Stillwell (Gregory Peck) begins groping in the dark for answers. The blackout becomes something almost supernatural, a catalytic event, afflicting David with some sort of amnesia. He meets a beautiful raven-haired stranger (Diane Baker) in a stairwell who says she knows him and then flees when he doesn’t reciprocate. He descends into subterranean floors that later vanish inexplicably. His apartment is weirdly empty and is rearranged in his absence. He sees flashes of things—a man falling to his death, shadowy figures whispering below a tree—that don’t add up. A rabid wrestling fan attempts to abduct him, claiming David possesses some item of great value to an unnamed party. David goes to the cops, to a shrink, to a private dick (Walter Matthau), but almost no one seems able to help him, and everyone cracks wise. His life is in danger and he can’t remember why, and that strange woman reappears, more beautiful and glowing with doom that before, and offers cold comfort: it’s precisely his forgetting that’s keeping him alive.

Though ostensibly riddled with Cold War paranoia, Mirage (1965), directed by Edward Dmytryk, is too slight and warmly lit to be as noir as the set-up promises, but it is terrific fun, particularly while the ambiguity holds and we know as little about what the hell is going on as David does. This is a movie about a man who can’t come to terms with the very recent past and turns to others to coax him slowly into it. And you’ve got to wonder what it is about Peck’s handsomely furrowed brow that makes him such a perfect, sympathetic embodiment of repressed memory. He was rendered so helpless by amnesia in Spellbound (45) that Ingrid Bergman fell in love with him even when he proved to be a potentially murderous imposter. There was some profound darkness in Peck that cut through the outer decency he so often exuded, and beautiful women always seemed willing to shine a light into that darkness and root around.

The music, by Quincy Jones, is irritating, and the bursts of violence are silly, which is probably why Dmytryk cuts to the TV to watch wrestling for a bit while David is supposed to be disarming and knocking out a gun-wielding heavy. The movie’s too long, and the dispatching of clues too piecemeal for a resolution that’s inevitably less exciting than what leads to it. But Peter Stone’s dialogue crackles, Peck and Matthau are a highly enjoyably matched team of would-be sleuths in over their heads, Baker is sexy and mysterious enough in her array of hats, and Dmtryk’s unusual use of silent flashbacks is nicely creepy, foreshadowing stylistic efforts soon to come from the likes of Nicolas Roeg. Overall, Mirage is much like the spooky little girl that offers David temporary refuge and a cup of invisible coffee: there’s not much substance there, but the presentation is enticing.

The Moviegoer: Walker Percy's great novel blurs, complicates and poeticizes the American dream life

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, first published in 1961 and set in New Orleans, begins with protagonist Binx Bolling visiting his aunt. She gives him some bad news, and his internal response to this is conveyed to us, unencumbered by what would seem to be required exposition, through his first-person narration:

“She squeezed me tighter than ever. ‘Scotty is dead. Now it’s up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.’ This was true. I could easily act like a solider. Was that all I had to do?

“It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain…”

No information about who Scotty even is gets in the way of this, and the description of the experience of going to the movie near Lake Pontchartrain is much longer and more evocative—more important—than Binx’s grave meeting with the family member to which he’s closest. The unnamed movie is about an amnesiac who loses his whole life as it once was, but then starts a new one which actually seems pretty good. But Binx is just as interested in recalling his conversation with the proprietor of the cinema afterwards, because Binx, avid moviegoer that he is, cannot even enter a theatre until he knows something about the theatre itself or the people who operate it. Like a guy who can’t eat in a restaurant until he’s shook hands with the cooks, his experience of the movies is obsessively holistic, not a plunge into the fictive world on screen but a sought-after sense of awareness that can only be summoned up by taking in both the movie and his place within it as viewer:

“…it was here in Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra. It was during a rerelease of Red River a couple of years ago that I became aware of the first faint stirrings of curiosity about the particular seat I sat in, the lady in the ticket booth… As Montgomery Clift was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail. Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now?”

There’s another fascinating moment where Binx describes going to a screening of Panic in the Streets, which was filmed on location in New Orleans, and recognizing the very street outside the theatre on screen. This experience grants Binx’s home place a sense of “certification.” By seeing a movie which shows his neighbourhood, it becomes possible “to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

I’d first heard of The Moviegoer while reading The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully associative book about photography published just a few years ago. Dyer proposes that Binx sees the world, specifically its objects, as though through William Eggleston’s camera, citing a moment in The Moviegoer where Binx is getting dressed one morning and is arrested by a sudden awareness of the objects he’s placing in his pockets. As a Southerner approaching his 30th birthday, a man whose sole talent, by his own admittance, is making money—or as he puts it, “selling mutual funds to widows and dagos”—a man who even when speaking to the reader in this private, interior voice, describes himself, rather hilariously, as someone deeply pleased by acts of perfect conformity, Binx’s sole access to his soul’s true yearnings arises only from such moments as the ones in the theatre in Tivoli or when he fills his pockets with items, moments during which some hidden light is cast upon the mundane, filling it with some glowing presence. These moments, he tells us, remind him of something he calls “the search,” something that first struck him when he was injured years ago somewhere in “the Orient,” something which “anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” An everydayness Binx, in his schizophrenic manner, is carefully cultivating.

This tension between perfecting conformity and feeling the grip of “the search” reminded me not of a movie but of another book… about movies. James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties, a somewhat loghorrretic but in many ways deeply satisfying study of precisely what the title implies, draws us into the psychology of the postwar American dream life, where the props of reality took on more cinematic qualities. He describes military training in the 50s this way:
“…the traditional sort of ‘war games’ they put us through in basic training, with gas masks and bayonets and live ammo going off just above our heads, felt like some historical re-enactment, as unreal as playing cowboys and Indians again…”

Harvey zeroes in on the strange dialogue between the faux-optimism of postwar ideology and the movies, American movies, the ostensible propagandic vehicles of this ideology.

Binx, presumably, given this un-articulated experience in “the Orient,” has actually been a solider, yet it’s revealing that he reassures us that for his aunt he can “act like a soldier.” Did the movies teach him how? I finally got around to reading The Moviegoer this past week because I thought it would be a good thing to read while in the thick of the Toronto International Film Festival, where I annually immerse myself in what is surely an unhealthy deluge of movies. It’s interesting, then, to find Percy’s book, so exacting in its invoking of sense of place—far ahead of the academic study of the phenomena—is very much about the way that movies are not just escapism, nor, obviously, just a source of knowledge and understanding of self and the world, but are somehow both at once. There are moments in the novel when Binx makes it sound like he goes to the movies to idle away the hours between work, dating his secretaries or socializing pleasantly with his family. Yet it seems that the movies in their subliminal way are cumulatively conspiring against such pacification—they are thrusting him back into “the search.” And for this reason, The Moviegoer may just be required reading for all of us addicted to the hovering rectangle of light.

Guy down in front next to the lady, he's our man in Panama: a comic chronicle of heartache, humiliation and pathology in Key West, circa 1978

I have never been to Key West, Florida. At least not, you know, in the conventional sense. But I have written about it, several times in fact, and what’s more I even wrote about Key West for the people of Key West. My pal Paul moved down there and got me a gig with a local magazine, interviewing Key Westers or, in any case, people somehow associated with the place, however incredibly tangentially. I’d talk to them and then write about our conversation in such a way that made it seem like I personally had something profound to say about Key West, even pretending it was a place I could in some way call home. The ruse was encouraged by my superiors. It was weirdly fun.

Most of what I do know about Key West I learned the same highly dubious way I learn most things: from reading fiction. Key West’s literary history is of course formidable, with its Hemingways and Tennessees and Elizabeth Bishops, though the period that really got me interested occured after their time, a period that previous to this gig I knew absolutely zilch about. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about Key West seemed to talk about what the place was like in the 70s, the time before colossal gentrification, the time of locally sanctioned madness, cheap real estate, too many guns, too many drugs, rampant corruption and literary outlaws. And I don’t know that any one figure seemed to sum up that time better than Thomas McGuane, a.k.a. Captain Berserko. Dude was so crazy he even married Margot Kidder. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t live there anymore.

The McGuane novel that everyone considers to be the his defining Key West work is Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), which he himself eventually made into an amiably off the wall movie with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and Kidder (enough said). But the one that strikes me as the genuine article, the one that comes closest to mapping out the particular pathology of that era/place/generation is in fact the novel McGuane took his biggest critical whipping for, largely on account of its disquieting degree of autobiographical content delivered in the treacherous wake of McGuane’s time spent courting Hollywood and seducing starlets. Literary types tend to find it distasteful when ostensibly serious writers overstep the boundaries of literary celebrity, and Panama (78), dragged McGuane’s private hysteria and public fumbles out into the open. You ask me, it’s a hell of a book, that much better—not to mention funnier—than its predecessor for laying its heart so crudely bare—though like Ninety-two, the mercurial comic prose is in high gear.

Panama’s protagonist is one Chester Pomeroy, returning to Key West to lick his wounds following some sort of debacle, or a perhaps series of them. The back cover blub explains that Chester’s a washed-up rock star, though you’d never glean that from anything described in the meat of the novel. He mentions being on tour, seems to like music, and at one point recalls having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard, but the way he conveys his past vocational adventures tends to be willfully oblique and/or surreally embellished: “I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.”

Chester’s two central concerns upon his return, the poles of some Oedipal wish-fulfillment, are: a reunion with Catherine, a woman he apparently married years ago in Panama, though neither can remember the ceremony, a woman he publicly insulted at some point in his blurry past but whom he still loves with an aching force, so much so that he stalks her in super markets and actually nails his left hand to her door while super-loaded on Bolivian cocaine; and to continue denying that his father is still alive, wealthy and boring, rather than a store detective who died of smoke inhalation in a Boston subway fire years ago. This is just one example of our hero’s selective or severely damaged recall skills. Chester’s memory issues are offered some degree of remedy when Catherine hires a private detective to follow him around so as to report back later on his actions. Yet in Chester’s first-person narration there’s never anything less than a rich sense of someone less than obsessed with coming to terms with his own identity. In an especially memorable moment, that sense of self-actualization is specifically concerned with how his relationship to place: “I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death.”

In a certain sense Panama is a novel of redemption, though the shape or value of this redemption is hardly clearly defined or entirely resolved. It is a sort of staggering celebration of self-implosion and fiery bullshit, and a treatise on the limitations of willing oneself toward insanity. And it’s thick with a palpable, desperate heartache that refuses to surrender to the notion of a polite, quiet laying down of arms in romantic battle. What’s important too is that it speaks so specifically of a geography and a people as an entry point into persona and story. Whether or not the Key West of Panama really existed matters less than the fact that only Key West, that crazed, slightly suicidal Key West of the 70s, could have helped give birth to this heartfelt, daring, extraordinary goof of a novel.

On fiction, formats and forgotten gems: Millipede Press revives The Deadly Percheron, The Tenant

When we talk about vintage pulp fiction, we talk about how it’s presented. We actually refer to it by its published format. There are purists who scoff at the re-packaging of pulp fiction in prestige editions, the idea being that you’re not getting the full experience if you read Rendezvous in Black or The Postman Always Rings Twice or Dark Passage on acid-free paper bound in leather. The argument is simultaneously compelling and degrading. There is indeed something appealing about consuming material deemed lowbrow or excessively sanguine by the elite in the same cheap, disposable paperbacks as their original consumers. But those original paperbacks now sell for luxury prices. Ironically, they are now valuable antiques. Furthermore, if this material is worth revisiting, if it may even be great literature, then why shouldn’t it be reprinted in formats designed to endure? Why let these books perish in the literary ghetto?

I discovered the great hard-boiled pulps I’ve grown to adore in the gaudy but sturdily bound Black Lizard trade paperbacks of the 1980s and 90s—editions that have now also become collector’s items. I still regularly scour used bookstores trying to hunt down some new-to-me title in this noble imprint, only to balk at the price. In the end, all I really care about is being able to actually read these books, to have the opportunity to find forgotten gems and keep the established masterpieces available to all. So I was very happy to recently discover Millipede Press, a publisher out of Lakewood, Colorado, who’ve been resurrecting some superb crime fiction in editions that run the gamut from limited edition deluxe boxed hardcovers to trades that’ll only put you out about $13.

I’d never heard of The Deadly Percheron, not of its author John Franklin Bardin. It was Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the new introduction to Millipede’s reprint, and that got me intrigued. The Deadly Percheron, originally published in 1946, is a masterwork of amnesia fiction, a genre Lethem coined and defined in The Vintage Book of Amnesia, his anthology featuring the likes of Nabokov, Murakami and, of course, Lethem's beloved Philip K. Dick. Lethem wanted to include The Deadly Percheron in the anthology in its entirety, but for obvious reasons this proved impractical. Thanks to Millipede however, it has a new life.

A psychiatrist interviews a new patient who tells him of leprechauns who pay him to perform strange antics. The psychiatrist accompanies the patient to a bar to meet one of his employers, who turns out to be, apparently, nothing more than a fanciful midget. But that very night an actress is murdered and the patient becomes a suspect. The psychiatrist tries to help, but soon finds himself led into the New York subway and knocked unconscious. Next thing he knows he’s in a mental hospital, badly scarred, and taken for a tramp. Months have passed. The man he used to be is reportedly dead, his widow moved away. Gradually the one-time shrink comes to accept his new identity and lives an exceedingly humble life as a soda jerk working the graveyard shift in some Coney Island joint. He’s oddly content. Until his past catches up with him…

The finale is a little too wrapped up, disappointing in the way the finales of a lot of great film noirs are disappointing—but the getting-there is more than worth it. I can recall very few stories where the labyrinth of amnesia is more fraught with strange detours of multiple meaning. The scene in which the hero feels he’s being chased down a dark street: is he being chased by his past self? The rumpled nighthawk with whom this once respectable professional takes up with: is she really just another factor in his transient life or in fact the embodiment of a repressed desire to flee his “real” life? The Deadly Percheron feels less like conventional crime fiction than a precursor to the films of David Lynch.

Roland Topor’s The Tenant, originally published in 1964, a book I’ve wanted to read ever since I first saw Roman Polanski’s wickedly disturbing film version, has also received the Millipede treatment in an edition featuring the author’s enigmatic illustrations, some long out-of-print short stories, and an introduction by Thomas Ligotti. It it’s way, The Tenant is also a sort of amnesia tale, its protagonist gradually losing his sense of identity until it becomes fully fused with that of the suicidal woman who’d previously inhabited his two-room Paris apartment. Written with cool detachment, the narrative trajectory recalls Paul Bowles’ ‘A Distant Episode,’ with the considerable difference that the true culprits behind the protagonist’s psychological breakdown remain entirely ambiguous to the very end.

Our protagonist initially seems exceedingly normal, only slowly revealing Kafkaesque tendencies toward self-appointed guilt and sexual anxiety. The imagery surrounding his sense of being persecuted is uniformly vaginal: the oval bathroom window he watches from his apartment; the single eye visible on the face of the heavily bandaged previous tenant, and her screaming mouth; holes hidden in walls and doors with doors; everywhere cavities await and threaten. Topor’s narrative feels at once inevitable and lined with shock, a chilling exploration of mental corrosion and how we come to terms with what constitutes self. In an inspired choice, Millipede’s edition features a Topor illustration of a figure without a face.

"You'd laugh like it was the end of the world": Daniil Kharms

If we’re to take his testaments at face value, it would seem that the rather strange Russian writer known as Daniil Kharms was born twice. Actually, make that three times. Mmm… okay, maybe four. He emerged from the womb four months ahead of schedule. His father, very concerned that the child should be born precisely on New Year’s Day, was so enraged with this premature arrival that he pushed the boy back in the womb. When next little Daniil entered the world he was immediately placed in an incubator. Was his eventual emergence from the incubator his final, proper birth? Or was it many years later, when, drawing upon with the English words “charms” and “harms,” the adult Daniil adopted the surname by which we refer to him?

The entire notion of face value is questioned tirelessly throughout the work of Daniil Kharms. A literary artist and fixture of the salons aligned with a number of radical movements, he was a devout terrorist in the battle against causality and common sense. In his writings, not even the sequence of prime numbers is to be taken for granted. By the time you’ve read just a handful of his mostly very short, spare, often cruel and poetic texts, his words have so effectively cleansed the imagination’s palate that each new phrase seems to invent the world one object at a time, giving birth to it piece by piece like some baffled, amnesiac God trying to familiarize Himself with each and every tool in his workshop.

Kharms sought not ambiguity but a certain aesthetic “correctness” that could only be achieved through the destructive mastering of language, along with the consistent insertion of some sort of error to set his proposed truths in stark relief. Nevertheless, certainty is indeed a rare thing in Kharms’ worldview. And he did indeed live in particularly uncertain times. The one thing we do know for sure is that Daniil Kharms –or at least the man born as Daniil Yuvachev– starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad having only ever seen his children’s prose published in his lifetime. He was 36. And apparently, he hated children.

Frequently, if quite misleadingly, linked to the Absurdists and their ilk, Kharms is very much the sort of writer I should have discovered in my teens, when my appetite for forthright nonsense and heroic madness was probably at its all-time peak. Fortunately, coming to it now, Kharms’ work strikes me as possessing a richness that would have likely gone underappreciated by my younger self. In any case I’m only now aware of him thanks to the recent publication of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Duckworth, $35), a superb introduction to Kharms’ work edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich.

Chains of destruction proliferate. In ‘Events’ a man dies from gluttony, another from bad news, a woman perishes after falling from a cupboard, children drown in a pond, an old woman takes to drinking and wanders the highways. “All good people,” Kharms laments, “But they don’t know how to hold their ground.” In another piece old women tumble from windows one after the other, until the author tires of witness them. In ‘Lynch Law’ our collective desire for blood is coolly surveyed. In other pieces people disappear into woods or even one body part at a time. Reading these works as having been written in defiance of Stalinist purges is tempting, interesting in its own right, but also limiting. Kharms’ imaginings are too wild and resonant to be contained purely within their political context.

The darkly compelling, very funny, and altogether remarkable story ‘The Old Woman,’ one of the only pieces in Today I Wrote Nothing that exceeds a few pages in length, conveys a strong sense of the diverse forms of dream logic Kharms employs. An old woman –a archetype always to be feared in Kharms– enters the house of the protagonist and dies, or rather seems to die, upsetting his plans to write, to pursue a budding romance, to simply relax in his home. He fears that her death, thought owing nothing to any action of his, will be blamed on him, perhaps because he loathes her so. In this and other works, Kharms shares something with Kafka in his chilling distribution of guilt.

Kafka, and even more so Gogol –who he proudly points to as a major influence– are perhaps the writers most readily comparable to Kharms. Though, in terms of his troubling equations of cause and effect, of things appearing and disappearing, of things living and dying –see ‘Father and Daughter’ for a haunting example– one could argue he outdoes both of them. He reveals both the humour and the wonder in things that fail to fully materialize, in events that disrupt order only to pass by and be shrugged off. There is always this fear of proceeding, of ambition itself –the world is so dangerous, after all. It’s a terrifying perspective that feels more real the more it screws with our agreed upon reality. It’s like what Kharms himself promises at the end of one of the pieces included here: “You’d laugh like it was the end of the world.”

Slaves to the Rhythm: Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

Though I’ve spent my life largely involved with other forms, I’ve always subscribed to the Romantic notion that all art should aspire to the conditions of music. Music seems to possess a unique power, penetrating our interior world of dreams, memories and desires with inexplicable immediacy, yet simultaneously able to provoke flights of solidarity between individuals who might otherwise never feel united. If I have a single overriding bias when assessing the books or films I write about, it’s most certainly my attraction to anything that has some shape, rhythm or tone that works like music. 

Much as I love music however, I find myself becoming increasingly curmudgeonly in my attitude toward our easy access to and/or abundance of music in every aspect of daily public life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera has a character lament one’s inability to sit down for a meal in a restaurant without being bombarded with music. Luis Buñuel, in his contemporaneous memoir My Last Sigh, lamented how difficult it was for him to find a bar where music was not always being played. He liked to devise his films in bars, and found that incessant background music interfered with his ability to daydream freely. 20 years and several leaps in technology later and the protests made in these books now seems quaint: the thoughtless battery of music has virtually conquered modern life. Like anything of beauty, when the presence of music becomes total it becomes taken for granted: it plays and plays, but no one hears it.

I’m getting too gloomy. The point of this column is in fact to call attention to a new book that I think functions as a welcome antidote to this musical malaise, one that celebrates the enduring bond between our species and the infinite varieties of music that haunt us. Oliver Sacks is among the world’s most successful popular science writers for a good reason. He conveys the study of neurological science through narratives that seize upon struggles with the business of living that anyone can relate to. In a voice that’s always as compassionate as it is curious, he reveals our vulnerability to the dictates of biochemistry, yet as he does so, the science to which he surrenders so much enthusiasm suddenly begins to expand life’s possibilities rather than shrink them.

Musicophilia (Knopf, $34.95) is Sacks’ latest, and in some ways –though I’m not even sure if Sacks himself is aware of it– it feels like a summation of his previous books. It frequently draws upon case studies from those books to help flesh out his concentrated exploration of our strange contract with music, a force that alone seems to break though countless barriers raised by defects of our brains. Sacks explains how the brains of talented musicians are physically distinctive from those of non-musicians, yet he spends more time marveling at the musical abilities of people whose brains might seem to promise no special talents whatsoever.

Sacks tells of 42-year-old man with no previous special interest in music who after being struck by lightning became obsessed to the point of throwing everything away for a career as a concert pianist. He tells of a man fully gripped by Alzheimer’s who remembers the baritone part of every song he ever sang in his 40 years with an a cappella group. He tells of a man with the worst case of amnesia on record, a man who doesn’t recognize the wife who’s cared for him daily since his debilitating brain infection 20 years ago, yet who can sit down at a piano and play a Bach Prelude with grace. He may not remember who Bach is, but once the notation is placed before him, he “remembers” how to play and for that time and only that time does he truly have a present.

But Sacks also relays fascinating anecdotes about those for whom music has been a sort of curse: victims of musical hallucinations, overwhelming musical sensitivity, or, perhaps most disturbing of all, a complete lack of affect toward music. (He counts William and Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Freud among those famed artists and intellectuals seemingly uninterested or even hostile toward music.) As already evidenced in Awakenings, Sacks’ famous book on his experiences with encephalitis sufferers, music has often been a tremendous therapeutic tool for treating numerous severe neurological disorders, yet it can also be the bane of some, such as the 19th century music critic Nikonov, who eventually became so painfully afflicted by musical antipathy that any music, however soft, would send him into convulsions. (Nikonov authored a pamphlet entitled Fear of Music, a title eventually appropriated by Talking Heads for one of their very best records.)

Sacks strings together his tales and observations by theme, leading to no sweeping thesis aside from the sum of his book’s parts, which seem to me to work just fine, since it’s the very mystery of music that makes these readings so compelling. The final scene described in Musicophilia features several individuals, each of them confined largely to the island constructed from their own severe dementia, suddenly brought together by music which they had no idea was coming, nor will they recall after it disappears. And it’s such moments that remind us eloquently of music’s special ephemeral quality, one so seductive and so heartbreaking.