The tremendous drenching power of the rain was brought home to us by the dripping coming and going of our father and of our visitors, but above all by the sight of the birds. The ludicrously pitiable appearance of the crows in the rainy season is so notorious that the phrase "bedraggled crow" has become a figurative synonym in the Bengali language for an untidy and disheveled person…
But one of the most attractive and engaging sights of the season was to be seen in the inner courtyard of our house, when there was a heavy downpour. The rain came down in what looked like closely packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground. At first the pencils only pitted the sandy soil, but as soon as some water had collected all around they began to bounce off the surface of water and pop up and down in the form of minuscule puppets. Every square inch of ground seemed to receive one of the little things, and our water-logged yard was broken up into a pattern which was not only mobile but dizzily in motion. As we sat on the veranda, myriads of tiny watery marionettes, each with an expanding circlet of water at its feet, gave us such a dancing display as we had never dreamt of seeing in actual life.
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
THIS is ONE of those important books that, after I'd read it, compelled me to go and see the place for myself. I visited Aliano (Levi calls it Gagliano) in Lucania, in southern Italy, when I was on my around-the-shore-of-the-Mediterranean trip. It was a detour from the coast, but a memorable one. I wrote about it in The Pillars of Hercules. "He wasn't Italian," an old man told me in the town, speaking in Italian. "He was a foreigner — a Russian." I questioned this. " "'Breo," the man said. At first I didn't understand, and then I guessed at the word, Ebreo, a Jew. So everything Levi experienced in 1935, and wrote about in 1943, was still true in 1995: these people were remote, mentally and geographically, off the map in every sense.
The book describes the oddity of this educated Florentine among the peasants of a remote village in the deep south of Italy — a forgotten people, hardly Christian. Christ didn't get to Aliano, they explain to him; Christ stopped miles away, at Eboli. "We're not Christians," they say. They are superstitious, violent, passionate, mercurial, secretive, with a greater belief in dragons than in any saint.
I was struck by the peasants' build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips; their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.
Among other things, this is one of the great studies of modern European peasant life, written by a highly intelligent and sympathetic alien, resident in a rural village. There is one toilet in the village, "and probably there was not another one within a radius of fifty miles." Werewolves lurk nearby, the villagers say. Unwritten but arcane laws govern the behavior of men and women. When Levi's sister visits, she is forbidden to live with him; no man can be left alone with a woman who is not his wife. Levi spends his time in the village painting, writing, and healing the sick.
Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason, nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks… No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.
Before he died in 1975, Levi gave instructions that he be buried in the cemetery of Aliano. And there he rests, in the dust among the pines.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
THERE ARE TWO Moveable Feasts— the first one published in 1964, heavily edited and cobbled together by his widow, and fourth wife, Mary; the second, edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway, published in 2009, is truer to Ernest Hemingway's surviving manuscript (some pages are reproduced) and subtitled "The Restored Edition." It was the last book that Hemingway wrote; he committed suicide not long after finishing it. Both editions are worth reading. The first seems better structured and more organized — though this organization was imposed. The restored edition is longer, more ruminative, but kinder to various of the characters — Scott Fitzgerald especially, but also Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, who comes off badly in the 1964 edition.
The subject is Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway knew the city well — he arrived with wife Hadley late in 1921 and lived there off and on until 1928, when he left to take up residence in Key West with his new wife, Pauline. The themes of this memoir of Paris are being hard-up and happy, the love that Hemingway has for Hadley and his son, and his passion for writing. Being poor, hungry much of the time, Hemingway constantly reverts to the subject of food — flavors, aromas, simple food, good wine; the pleasures of eating and drinking. It is a book about physical sensation, and the intensity of such physicality in Paris.
"Then there was the bad weather," the book begins. "It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe."
Streets are mentioned so often they become familiar, as do parks and churches and people's apartments. The book is filled with restaurants, bistros, and bars, and their specialties in food and drink. The result is that, reading A Moveable Feast, especially the fuller version, we are able to make a map of Paris in our imagination and to follow the comings and goings of Hemingway and the literary lions who stalk its pages — James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others. Its fault and its virtue is that it is dated: Paris is no longer as Hemingway describes it, but this is a vivid portrait of the city as it looked and smelled and tasted in the twenties.
At one point, Hemingway, a close observer of the life of the city, takes on travel writers:
Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work… I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a fewfritures home to their families.
With the fishermen and the lie on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great plain trees on the stone banks of the river, the elms and sometimes the poplars, I knew that I could never be lonely along the river.
The End of the Game by Peter Beard
ALMOST FIFTY YEARS ago, Peter Beard went to Africa and found himself in a violated Eden. Africa possessed him as it does anyone who has wondered who we once were, as humans at our most heroic, thriving as hunters. The Africa he saw was the Africa that transformed me a few years later — and transformed many others. "Before the Congo I was a mere animal," Joseph Conrad wrote. Beard's landmark account of his awakening, The End of the Game (1965), with its unforgettable images, gives fresh meaning to the word "prescience," and it remains one of the classics of unambiguous warning about humans and animals occupying the same dramatic space: "The tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains, and out of the bush and into the cities."