The Room and the Chair
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Katyn

I was up at 3:30 a.m. this morning. I couldn't fall back asleep. After 6:30 I gave up, fired up my computer and saw that the Polish political and military establishment had been effectively wiped out in a plane crash just hours earlier. The president, his wife, ministers, members of Parliament, generals--all gone. A total of 96 people, including the crew.

As everyone knows by now, they were on their way to Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Katyn. Here in the United States it's difficult to imagine the grievous wound to the Polish psyche that Katyn represents. It's origins are in the 1939 near simultaneous German and Soviet invasion of Poland. When I was in Poland this fall, there was a massive photographic exhibit of the dual invasion in the medieval square in Krakow where butchers used to sell and trade meat. The photographs were larger than New York City subway posters. Everyone, from small children to the oldest Krakow residents, were drawn to them.

The Soviets captured and imprisoned about 20,000 Polish military officers; in the Russian woods near the village of Katyn the following year they summarily executed nearly all of them. As Anne Applebaum writes in The New York Review of Books, Stalin's secret order destroyed Poland's most educated and prosperous reservists, young men who were not drafted as soldiers but merchants, doctors, lawyers, university lecturers and others that volunteered. In effect, Stalin massacred those who could have mounted a serious resistance to post-war Soviet dominion. Worse, as Applebaum writes, for years the Soviets said the Germans were the killers, a lie that was repeated at Nuremberg, and even by the British. For decades Katyn was a verboten topic inside Poland. "Katyn wasn't a single wartime event," Applebaum writes, "but a series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland's loss of sovereignty."   

My heart goes out to Poland. My great-grandfather migrated from Krakow, Poland shortly before WW I. He was a linen maker to the Russian czar, and an advocate of a free Poland. This fall, when I was in Krakow, I paused at the Katyn memorial off Krakow's main square. It was erected there in 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was the first time a memorial was allowed. Today, I would be placing my flowers below the cross if I could. 

A great film about Katyn is Andrzej Wajda's eponymous 2007 movie. You can buy it here. The film's official website is slow-loading but interesting. There's also a PBS documentary with actual footage from the time. Learn more here. Finally there's a great Zbigniew Herbert poem about Katyn you can read on Margaret Soltan's blog, University Diaries.

Various thoughts

In the Guardian Robert McCrum ponders Diana Athill, Hilary Mantel and Richard Holmes winning National Book Critics Circle awards and asks are the Brits ascendant. I've gotten into trouble whenever I try to make generalizations like McCrum does here. It seems to me that it's the excellence of an individual work that matters, not whether a body of literature from one country is superior to another country's. 

I finished reading Terry Castle's The Professor yesterday.  I was thrilled by her craziness. The core of the collection is the longest essay, "The Professor," which is a recounting of a disastrous affair with a college professor. The usual Castle strengths obtain: A++ cultural fluency, fearlessness, hysterical humor. Yet if you boil down the essay, you realize how nutty the story is. I understand that when getting dumped, you get hurt. But Castle was celibate for five years after her professor dumped her after an affair of what--five months. And now, thirty years later, she's still fascinated with it. Yet, yet, I LOVED that about her. The maniacal pain, the brave confrontation with her own absurdity. Also this: I could never manage to write about episodes in my life that were just as debilitating. Should I? Writers go some places easily and hang back from others relentlessly. 

The Personal Essay MFA

I'm at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, participating in the 30th anniversary celebration of their MFA program. Last night I spoke to a craft class of non-fiction and fiction writing students. The majority of the 15 or so students are working in non-fiction. I was somewhat surprised to learn that all of them are writing memoirs, and many of them are writing personal essays about their childhoods. The director of the program Beverly Lowry has written several novels and three non-fiction books--a biography of Harriet Tubman,  a book about pickaxe murderer Karla Faye Tucker and a biography of African American entrepreneur Sarah Breedlove. Lowry told me it's difficult to get her students to not write about themselves, even though many of them are only in their twenties. (Their discussion this seminar was about Dave Eggers.) It's even harder, she said, to get them to do reporting. I told them about David Carr's book The Night of the Gun, and how it was an example of a reported memoir. They seemed somewhat unconvinced that reporting out their childhood memories would be beneficial. They wanted to create the atmosphere of what their childhoods were like from their own perspective, not other people's. It also troubled me was that they were not willing to put together a book-length memoir.

Thinking about it today I realized I had been too quick to judge. Right now, for example, I'm reading Terry Castle's brainy, beautiful book, The Professor. It's basically essays about her life--her quasi-friendship with Susan Sontag, a trip to Santa Fe with her mother, and a great longer essay about her college relationship with a professor. Next on my bookstand is Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read. Though as Sam Anderson pointed out in New York magazine, these are "both examples of what you might call the personal-academic essay—a hybrid that cross-breeds two oft-critiqued genres: memoir (engaging but shallow) and literary criticism (deep but dull)." I think it's got to be engaging and deep for me to fall for it.

Journalism and the Novel

Friends over the years have said I'm one of the few journalists who was able to "make the transition" from journalism to fiction. I've always disagreed. Just take literature written in English alone. There's Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, William Thackery, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Willa Cather, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, George Orwell, E.M. Forster, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe. In Spanish, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an obvious example. But I'm sure there are more. Please add any you know of in the comments section. In the meantime there's an interesting book from Cambridge University Press on the subject by Doug Underwood. You can check it out here. 

 

Nowruz

Nowruz, or "New Day" in Persian, is the Iranian New Year's Day. But for them, it doesn't occur on January 1st, it occurs on the vernal equinox. The West calls it the first day of Spring. Today, March 21st, is that day.  It's a huge holiday in Iran, with presents for children, family dinners, visits to relatives, and, for most people, two weeks vacation. Nowruz is also celebrated in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikstan, and among the Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Georgia and Turkey. The holiday predates the arrival of Islam in Persia.

Yesterday Obama wished Iran a Happy Nowruz. The Ayatollah Khamenei replied with something along the lines of Death to Obama. The picture with the soldiers above shows the celebrations in Kabul. More, here. The other picture shows shopping in preparation for Nowruz in Tehran. 

Reconsidering Memoir

In 2002 I wrote an essay for The Washington Monthly called "Almost Famous." It's my anti-memoir manifesto. In particular, it decries something I dubbed the "Nobody Memoir,"  which I defined as an autobiography written by those "who are neither generals, statesmen, celebrities or their kin." Since then, I've met people who have written memoirs and have had to slide around my disagreeable attitude. I felt embarrassed by it at times, but never, even after having read a few memoirs every so often, did I feel the need to recant. (And I've become increasingly suspicious of non-fiction, though I've never organized my thinking enough to come out and say anything in an essay.)

I'm convinced the novel is a form most likely to make a fierce revival in the coming years. (More about that later.) What i'm really mad for, today, is a nobody memoir by a British book editor, who, at the time of writing it, was 89-years-old. Diana Athill has written other memoirs, all of which I've missed. (I intend to find and read all of them.) Towards the End breaks several rules I have. Rule 1. Brits who are self-effacing are a terrific bore. Rule 2. My ex-husband was British so anyone who is British must prove themselves to be unlike my ex-husband 3. Book editors can't write worth a darn. 

I'm here to tell you that Athill is self-effacing to a fault, but she's also utterly engrossing. She's an awful lot like my ex-husband, but since I don't have to live with her or have her children, I find her dangerously delightful. I have no idea how she edited the colossal narcissism of Roth or Naipaul, but I'd much rather read her than either of them.

And I suppose I should also mention that if she hadn't won the National Book Critics Circle prize for autobiography last week, I wouldn't have read the book. So, prizes, yes, yes, yes, do serve a legitimate and important purpose. 

Book Covers

The Millions is doing a great look at American versus British book covers for the novels in their annual tournament. What makes a cover you just can't help but love? The Room and the Chair went through so many iterations. Here are just a few of them.