On the Moon's Tears at Trempeleau, Wisconsin

 

Trempeleau Mountain is a few miles to the south of Winona downstream on the Mississippi’s east bank.  The mountain is 450 feet high, ragged with green forest or winter-grey and snow-veined depending upon the season.  The big hill is so close to the river that from the Minnesota shore, the mountain looks like an island improbably rising from Mississippi itself.  Several tributary rivers meander across wetlands below the bluff’s south face.  Between bends in these streams, hummocks of prairie like grassy causeways extend toward the Mississippi’s main channel.  Steep bluffs, some of them showing palisades of crumbling grey cliff, ring the horizon.  The Mississippi, and the smaller rivers flowing through the inundated grasslands, pooling in marshes and lagoons, seem scarcely to move, but are immensely powerful in their repose, watery giants sprawled out across the land.  The Indians who once lived here called the bluff “the mountain that dips its toes in the water.”  

Trempeleau is old, timber houses with white walls and old wharf-side warehouses made of stacked pink-yellow limestone blocks, all above a railroad embankment that runs like a dike across a pool impounded by the right-of-way and a dam downstream.  Cafes on timber docks, bridges to nowhere, jut out over the ponds and marinas leak little white boats through canals to the Mississippi’s main channel along waterways bored through tongues of wooded isles along the river.  Viewed from overhead, the broad valley sits between uplands dissected into  narrow, forested valleys and the river-bottoms, here three or four miles wide, are all thatched with meadows and shards of golden prairie that seem to float on the river.  Old Victorian era houses are hunkered down among the trees lining the residential streets in the town.  An ancient inn served travelers at the time of the Civil War and, today, the trim, white-washed building hangs over an old boat-house like a grotto opening onto the riverbank.  Every alley and back yard runs up against steep hillside tangled with dense brush, poison ivy and wild parsnip tangled in sumac rising like a palisade wall over the semi-circular flats where the town is built.

Timothy Pauketat is a well-known archaeologist employed by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and, indeed, also holds the position of official State Archaeologist for the Land of Lincoln.  On the 18th of November, 2021, Dr. Pauketat delivered a lecture for the Archaeological Conservancy called “The Moon’s Tears Fell on Cahokia”.  I enjoy watching these lectures and, since I have visited Cahokia many times, looked forward to his speech.  Pauketat is the author of a monograph on Cahokia, written in a simple popular style, and the book was a modest best-seller a few years ago.  The scholar is a tall, gaunt-looking fellow with a beak nose, a cowlick of dishwater blonde hair over his glasses and the appearance of a friendly scarecrow.

Dr. Pauketat’s lecture was presented in the form of a Power Point.  One of his first slides is a map showing Meso-American influence on the land that is now the United States.  The map extends south to Mexico City and the Yucatan.  On the northwest borders of territory delimited by a dotted line, the place-name “Chaco” is inscribed, signifying that this ceremonial center or complex of pueblos or Great House palaces or whatever it was in New Mexico was a place influenced by the high civilizations to the South.  At the center of the map is Cahokia, the vast city that once occupied the flood plains a few miles to the east of what is now St. Louis.  But the really interesting aspect of this map, showing the geographical boundaries of Mexican civilization in North America is to the north.  A tongue of this region mapped on the slide, the land of the Caddo-speaking Mississippians who raised mound-pyramids from the Gulf of Mexico throughout today’s Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri, extends up the great river valley and ends with the words “Trempeleau”, Cahokia’s most northern outpost. It seems remarkable to me that Trempeleau, Wisconsin, five-hundred miles upriver from Cahokia, in the driftless bluff country around the Mississippi River Valley, a place in which the upper slopes of the hills are dotted with Hopewell Mounds raised two-thousand years ago, as well as Effigy Mounds outlining marching bears, turtle earthworks and birds with outstretched wings (900 to 1500 years before present) was the site of a Cahokian shrine.   

Pauketat’s thesis is that the Caddo-speaking Cahokians subscribed to a moon-cult and that many of their monuments attest to these beliefs.  In Meso-American pre-conquest cultures, rain is often referred to as the “tears of the moon.”  When the moon appears within a concentric circle, the atmosphere is congested with water and this phenomenon is a harbinger of rain.  A cultural preoccupation with rain would not seem likely in the relatively humid Midwest.  But, although Pauketat doesn’t make this completely clear in his lecture (he is covering lots of ground), crops and farming require rain and an understanding of wet and dry meteorological cycles.  Beginning around 900 AD, the Caddo and other similar tribes in the Mississippi basin began growing corn.  Throughout the Americas, the cultivation of corn is an immediate precursor to a village-based economy.  After 150 years of corn cultivation, the Indians were congregating in urban centers, most notably Cahokia, probably one of the largest cities in the world at that time, boasting over 100,000 residents,  The sustenance of a large urban population is dependent upon robust crops and surpluses.  And crops, of course, are water-dependant.  On this basis, the Cahokians looked to the skies and the moon for guarantees that there would be sufficient rain to support their villages and cities. 

Generally wet weather in the Mississippi basin occurred at a time when much of the Meso-American world was suffering drought.  It was dry at Chaco Canyon -- indeed the drought lasted for several hundred years, and, probably, forced migration of the ancestral Puebloans into more moist mountainous regions in the southwest.  Similarly, drought afflicted west Mexico and the Yucatan circa 1000 to 1200 AD.  It was during these times that the Huastecan Indians in northwest Mexico began to construct circular shrines, little round buildings with pointed thatch roofs.  Rounded buildings in Mexico symbolize the wind and, therefore, are sacred to forces imagined to blow rain clouds across the dry land.  This sort of building program seems to have been adopted by the medieval era Cahokians.  (Pauketat notes that there’s no direct evidence of trade suturing together the Mexican world and American Midwest – archaeologists have not found copper bells or obsidian or macaws in their excavations in Illinois and Wisconsin.  But Pauketat believes that priests or shamans traveled long distances to visit other tribal groups and, most likely, transmitted influences based upon what they had seen to members of their own cultural group.)   

Archaeologists first discovered evidence of a moon-cult at two outliers near Cahokia, the Pfeffer and the Emerald Acropolis sites about twenty miles west of the big urban center.  The Pfeffer site was threatened by agriculture and, so, salvage archaeology occurred at that place in 2000 and 2007.  The most noteworthy finding was a complex of houses supported by posts, generally rectangular structures with closely spaced vertical palisades supporting what must have been thatched roofs.  The curious feature was that the houses were rebuilt probably at about 20 year intervals with a changing central axis orientation.  In effect, the houses were built in iterations that predictably rotated through an arc of about 20 degrees.  In the center of these structures, surmised to be sweat-baths (saunas), the direction of the long axis was signified by a central groove packed full of yellow-black fill obviously exotic and imported to the site.  This “pointer,” as it were, was laid down in conditions of inundation – in other words, the exotic fill was packed into the central trench either during a naturally occurring rainstorm (with the structure’s roof removed) or with the builders pouring large amounts of water onto the clay to “laminate” the silt.  The periodic changes in the orientation of these buildings seemed correlated to the lunar “long cycle”, a 19.3 year periodicity defined by a north-south maximum and minimum moon rise.  Apparently, every 19 to 20 years, the axis of the sweat bath was changed to point in the direction of either the lunar maximum or lunar minimum.

(I’m always skeptical of archeo-astronomy, a view that Pauketat also espouses, noting that he had no interest in this subject until studying the findings at the Pfeffer site.  The sky is full of all sorts of moving objects and it would seem to me that an assiduous researcher could readily correlate points of the terrestrial surface with phenomenon in the sky.  But Pauketat seems to be a reasonable fellow and, therefore, I am willing to accept his conclusions on this subject at face-value, particularly since a number of separate Cahokian sites seem to share a common lunar orientation.)

The consensus opinion interpreting the Pfeffer excavation is that this work uncovered a complex of sweat baths, probably on the order of a pilgrimage site, all of them oriented toward astronomical landmarks in the lunar cycle and, indeed, rebuilt periodically to conform to the maximum and minimum moonrise.  Obviously, the shrine buildings were intensely involved with water – steam was produced in them and they were equipped with inundated clay floor markers produced by pouring water on yellow and black fill.  

These findings were confirmed by the discovery of similar structures at Trempeleau.  Immediately to the southwest of Trempeleau mountain’s main ridge, there is a hill called Little Bluff.  On top of Little Bluff, several mounds were known to exist, previously thought to be either Hopewell or Effigy Mound woodland culture sites.  Excavations beginning in 2009 and continuing through 2016, including some actually conducted in people’s lawns in the town, showed that the area was a Cahokian outlier.  Characteristically, Cahokian ceramics were found as well as gaming pieces known from the big urban site near St. Louis.  In fact, middens discovered in the middle of modern-day Trempeleau were full of Cahokian red potsherds.  

At the Wisconsin site, the Cahokian pilgrims had re-sculpted the entire top of Little Bluff, shaving off the domed profile of the hill to make a flat terrace.  On the terrace, a small central pyramidal-shaped mound supported a central shrine of some sort.  Embankment causeways ran from the central prism-shaped mound to circular mounds at the north and south edges of the bluff.  These mounds, also, supported rounded wind-water structures similar to the Huastecan model in western Mexico.  Pointer fill, a sort of mound dug down into the hilltop as an intaglio feature (as opposed to built up over the bluff terrace), aimed directly at the lunar minimum – that is, the moonrise as seen at its minimum point.  The clay floors of the structures showed signs of periodic inundation.  Accordingly, the site was similar in most respects with features found at Pfeffer.  Again, the structures were interpreted as sweat baths, probably regarded as salubrious and healing, suggesting that people who were ill may have been brought by dugout canoe to his location to be treated for their sicknesses in the tightly built saunas.  Pauketat interprets the general footprint of the site as suggesting the moon flanked by moon-dogs (paraselenae), a well-known phenomenon in very cold weather when the air is suffused with ice crystals.  The shrine at Trempeleau was probably occupied seasonally for about fifty years.

Beginning in 2011, Pauketat worked to excavate the so-called Emerald Acropolis, an Illinois site near Pfeffer.  This was also salvage archaeology necessitated by agricultural development encroaching on an isolated, densely wooded hill rising above the otherwise flat prairie.  Again, the dig resulted in the discovery of a number of circular buildings, sweat lodges, and, even, a large “council house” with a central axis mundi post probably projecting several feet above the center of the structure.  The complex structures were made from bent-poles and arbor-roofed.  Many of them had intaglio yellow-black clay features, oriented toward the minimum and maximum moon rise landmarks.  Periodically, the structures seem to have been literally washed away, possibly by human-induced flooding and, then, rebuilt.  In the council house, archaeological workers discovered a human sacrifice, an inhumation of a young boy or girl in the corner of the structure.  (Discovery of human remains like this can be catastrophic to a “dig” in that local tribes have to be consulted as to the meaning of these relics, skeletal artifacts may have to be carefully extracted for repatriation, and tribes claiming an affiliation with the culture once at the site have veto power over further excavations.  Here it was decided to not remove the skeletal remains and simply leave them in the excavation, as Pauketat is quick to note, well below the level that will be disturbed by future plowing.  Tribes claiming an interest in these artifacts are the Pawnee, Ho-Chunk, the Ohio Miami now living in Oklahoma and the modern-day Caddo.)

The hill called the Emerald Acropolis contains a geological phenomenon known as a “perched aquifer”.  This means that the upper part of the knoll is comprised of permeable soils and rock allowing waters to seep down to what is called an acquitard or acquilard, that is, an impermeable barrier to the water’s further descent.  Where an impermeable layer of rock blocks seepage, the water table is “perched” above the adjacent land – this results in springs flowing from the side of the hill at the level of the acquitard with circumadjacent ponds or lagoons at the base of the knoll.  In Meso-America this geological structure, a “perched acquifer” is called a “water-mountain”, not coincidentally the Aztec and Mayan name for a city.  Clearly, the Cahokians regarded the Emerald Acropolis as a sacred location, a “water-mountain”, and built pilgrim houses around its base.  These places were not permanent dwellings, but periodically inhabited over several hundred years, presumably on the basis of religious festivals conducted there.

Pauketat observes that the area around Cahokia is rich with dramatic water features.  First, there are vast flood plains around the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri.  The high lands on both sides of these flood plains are karst formation, riddled with impressive Cenote-like sinkholes.  The marshy lowlands are full of oxbow lakes that attract an abundance of water fowl.  Knolls like the Emerald Acropolis provide evidence of perched aquifers with flowing springs.  Cahokia itself was a watery city, a sort of Venice filled with canals and lagoons.  Borrow pits near the big mounds fill with runoff even today and were probably semi-permanent water-features 900 years ago.  Raised causeways strike across the swampy land connecting platform mounds on which there were erected very large sweat baths, circular in form after the model of the Mayan and Huastecan structures.  For instance at the highest point in Cahokia, the summit of Monk’s Mound, modern archaeologists working with Pauketat have found a massive sweat lodge circular in shape and equipped with a huge vertical axis mundi central pole.  Again long-cycle lunar orientations govern the construction of many of the rectangular religious buildings.  

Apparently, a central component of the moon-cult at Cahokia was the consumption of something called “the Black Drink.”  The “Black Drink” is a tea comprised of Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria), a stimulant and, if consumed in sufficient quantity, an emetic as well.  Scholars discovered use of the “Black Drink” at these sites accidentally.  Cups elaborately decorated with spirals derived from the natural forms of the lightning whelk shell (a kind of nautilus cephalopod) were found to contain residues of some dark substance.  Initially, it was thought that these deposits were chocolate or cacao imported from Mexico.  But analysis showed not cacao, but fragmented tea leaves of the Ilex vomitoria.  This herb doesn’t grow in central Illinois or Missouri and was imported from the Gulf Coast along with great quantities of whelk shells that were somehow associated with the brewing of this tea, as witness ceramic cups bearing their patterns.  Clearly, the Cahokians were venturing to the south as far as the Gulf to acquire this “Black Drink” and, also, lightning welk shells found in abundance in their city.  A red-colored ceramic vessel shows a figure holding a cup imprinted with whelk-shaped patterns; on the other side of the figure, there is a urn with a cap, presumably a boiling pot of this powerful tea.  A Cahokian outlier in northern Mississippi further confirms this Drang nach Sueden (or the impulse toward the South) in Cahokia’s culture.  Near Clarksdale, there is a Cahokian pilgrimage site similar to the complex built in the north at Trempeleau.  The Carson site, as it is called, shows a number of round pilgrim-shrine sweat baths and other structures, many of them aligned to lunar minimum and maximum moonrises.  

On the night that Professor Pauketat presented this lecture,someone attending the program said that the moon was rising dramatically over a mesa outside of Albuquerque.  The lecture’s facilitator sent a note to participants encouraging them to look for the moon climbing into the skies over their own landscapes.  And, later, during the early morning hours, there was a partial eclipse, the face of the moon eroded by the earth’s shadow casting a pinkish-red light, that is, a so-called “Blood Moon.”

Crossing into Wisconsin on Highway 43, the bridge from Winona spans two lobes of dark water and, then, joins the river-road parallel to the Mississippi at a tee intersection.  At intervals, two-story taverns set back a couple hundred feet from the train tracks stand along the highway – presumably the owners of these places live above their bars open on the ground level.  Although it’s early on a Sunday morning in late November, each isolated pub has a couple of pickup trucks dutifully parked in the gravel ringing the place, hunters, perhaps, having an eye-opener before chasing deer in the cold, windy coulees or alcoholics driven out of town by Sunday closing laws.  The valley opens up south of Winona and Trempeleau Mountain stands entirely isolated, a single ridge of dark hills, mostly with rounded summits, but, also, spiked with a pointed horn of rock at one end of the little range.  Obviously, the mountain was once an island, surrounded on all sides by overflow from the Mississippi because these highlands are apart, separated by several miles, from the ring of bluffs lining the valley on all sides.  It’s an anomalous-looking landscape, flat lands now bearing row-crops, mostly corn, that lap up along the sides of the ridge pressed here against the river.  

At Trempeleau, the valley’s flood plain is seven or eight miles wide and, after passing a few unincorporated villages, the highway jogs four miles west across river flats golden with corn stalk stubble to slip into the town under the south flank of the island mountain.  The village feels closed-in, the mountain blocking passage to the north along the river except along a narrow terrace crowded with a two-lane blacktop and train tracks running along the levee.  Trempeleau is butted into the main channel of the Mississippi, here a lake-shaped reach of water where a tug-boat with a prow like a white church steeple is chugging along the embankment.  The Minnesota side of the river, beyond a couple football fields’ width of water is rugged, high hills heavy with trees crowded close to the channel, a tangled chaos of steep valleys and cliff-lined bluff tops that looks entirely primeval – there are no houses and no signs of any infrastructure on the other side of the river: the landscape seems like something that might have inspired and daunted the first pioneers here, steep ravines and wild wooded hills now and then flashing cliffs like bared teeth.  (This perception turns out to be wholly wrong.)

I don’t know where the trail head leads up to the Cahokia mound-site and so I take the winding way, north along the channel to the State Park gateway.  A typical Wisconsin supper-club, a bit like a barge improbably beached on the river bank stands just beyond the entrance to the Park.  This is Sullivan’s, a place where I have eaten a couple times, a pleasant place in mild weather with a redwood deck leaning out over the railroad tracks nearby and the heaped up waters of the river, impounded here by a Corps of Engineers lock and dam downstream.  On Trempeleau Mountain, the ridge rises to piles of stone like columnar crow’s nests high in the hills.  There’s no trail in this direction and so I drive back to the village, one mile downstream, a place where all the lanes are L-shaped and dipped down to dead-end along the river.  The wind is cold and blows a gale and the lake is shingled with bright-tipped waves.  A bronze horseman with dogs stands on a plinth on the levee – this is apparently Trempeleau himself.  The town was once a railroad hub and a river-boat harbor, full of bars and whorehouses no doubt, but it’s now a place for summer-people, modest bungalows to rent for a night or a week along the main street, and, down, closer to the water, some ancient brick buildings that have odd pointed pediments and turrets like witch’s hats.  The village has changed its vocation from swindling river-boat passengers and train crews to selling tourists coffee, bagels, and boat rides along this scenic stretch of the Mississippi.

The trail to the Cahokian shrine is on 35, where the highway enters the village, a block to the east of the post office.  Some rugged-looking rustic steps lead up the side of a ravine and, then, the trail climbs very steeply, hanging off the side of the coulee, to the top of Little Bluff.  A couple of lanes, more like jeep tracks, intersect at the edge of the bluff-top, and, then, a narrow road runs along the ridge skirting deep drop-offs on both sides.  The archaeological site occupies a tongue of hilltop running to the southwest and overlooking the village.  There’s almost nothing to see.  The mounds run in a procession away from a causeway between two deep and shadowy borrow pits, excavations from which the Indians scooped dirt and dumped it, basket upon basket, to make the prism-shaped high points on the hill.  In fact, the largest mound, which now looks like a natural feature, is a big flat-topped embankment where the City of Trempeleau built its grey vat of a concrete water tower.  The steep ramp-like roads climbing to this height presumably were for servicing this facility although it’s mostly long gone, torn down “about 1991", an odd locution suggesting that we know what happened here a thousand years ago, better then we understand events only thirty years before the present. 

Archaeologists in 2016 sunk a tee-shaped trench into the highest mound, still bearing a rough semi-circle of broken concrete foundations embedded in the old Cahokian mound like envious, broken molars.  Beneath a yard of dirt disturbed by the construction of the water tower, the scientists and their teams found layers of orange-yellow and black fill, very precisely set down in alternating strata.  The fill was polished with water poured across each layer and created a mound densely layered like an expensive chocolate and toffee cake.  The bright yellow clay came from the bottoms of the borrow pits, loess blown here from the great west.  The black dirt was pulled out of the bottoms of ravines where sometimes water flowed.  At the center of the mound, a pit was found calcined to a crimson-color, a place where fire had burned periodically for many years.  The diagrams of the mounds as originally constituted are confusing – it looks like the row of mounds rises toward the overlook over the village and river.  In fact, the narrow promontory of land was shaped to step down in four platforms toward the sheer edge of the bluff above the prairie below where the Indians built several council houses. The pier of prairie hanging over the ancient village (probably only occupied in the warm season) provided a theatrical stage for ceremonial rites.  Probably, only some of the people living below were allowed access to the bluff-top shrines.  But the place as configured so that rituals could be performed so as to be witnessed by the people along the side of the river below.  Things were done on these heights for the benefit of those below. 

Work on the hilltop shrine probably took twenty years and involved moving 1.8 million bushels of dirt.  Cahokian water shrines often had round walls to suggest that these structures had been rolled and pummeled and pounded by rain-bearing winds.  So it’s interesting to observe that on the temple mound at this water shrine, sacred to the Tears of the Moon, the city fathers in Trempeleau built for themselves a perfectly circular concrete reservoir to hold water and, in fact, planted this wind-abraded tower exactly where the ancient shrine was located.  

A man named Thomas Hayes Lewis, a professional surveyor, first mapped this site in 1884.  At the time, the shapes of the mounds crowning the hilltop were very clear.  Photographs taken by an antiquarian named Squiers in 1905 show the hilltop as naked with only a few trees, mostly lean-looking saplings, gathered around the edges of the rectangular mounds.  Another picture made by Squier from the valley below shows the flank of the bluff, numbered in ink painted on the photograph, marking the mounds along the ridge-line.  Surprisingly, the bluff top is almost completely treeless.  It seems that the forests that now grow densely all along the ridges and steep hillsides and that crown the bluff are modern.  Apparently, these steep hills overlooking the Mississippi were mostly barren 116 years ago.  

The director of the Milwaukee Museum of Natural History wrote a letter to Trempeleau’s mayor in April 1938 pleading that another location be found for the water tower.  The Milwaukee Museum director said that this hilltop complex was one of the most notable prehistoric sites in all of Wisconsin. But apparently the entreaties in the letter were ignored.  The water tower survives today as a hedge of ragged concrete half sunk in the weeds.  The mounds are hard to see, but they are still there.  

On 35 south of Trempeleau, a big catfish as long as a semi-trailer greets visitors to the village.  The catfish is green and white with a tangle of barbels like airplane cable.  Reputedly, it is the largest fiber-glass catfish in the world.  The highway crosses three flat, broad rivers wrapped in a grey fog of underbrush. It’s hunting season, four days before Thanksgiving, but the only deer I see are road-kill, brown barrel-shaped torsos lying in the gravel at the edge of the road.  

On the novel The Sympathizer

 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is an American novel published in 2015 and widely acclaimed.  The book details the adventures of an unnamed Vietnamese Communist spy.  The spy has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army, working closely with a General in that hapless military force.  Educated in the United States, the spy, who narrates the novel, is a “double-minded man” (this is announced on the book’s first page), an amphibious being who navigates both the sunlit streets of Los Angeles and the murky, turbid corruption of Vietnam with equal aplomb. (The hero is also a self-described “bastard” – the son of Vietnamese girl and lecherous French priest.)  In diagram, the novel has the features of an adventure novel or thriller, although the reader immediately encounters obstacles to appreciating the book as a superior exercise in genre fiction.  The first-person voice narrating the story is the book’s principal complication, an exercise in high style that elevates the novel’s historical novel qua thriller apparatus into literary excellence.  The book’s texture is intricate and the narrative discourse is not merely, or, even, primarily descriptive – rather, the author is a little like Marcel Proust or Stendhal: the story-teller’s idiosyncrasies are the novel’s primary attraction and the spy thriller plot frequently digresses into miniature essays about American and Vietnamese culture, history, and, even, movies during the glory days of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.  The plot is crowded with characters, some of them quite vivid, but all recede into the shadows cast by the glaring, exorbitantly opinionated and comical musings of the narrator.  

In structure, the book divides into clearly delineated sequences, very much like the structure of a well-made Hollywood script – and, of course, a book this famous and with many bravura sequences of threat, suspense, and violence is fated (or should we say doomed) to appear on silver screen.  In its action and situations, the novel seems designed to be converted into a film.  But, of course, the peculiar vehemence of the narrator, the aspect of the book that provides the prose with its distinctive energy, is anti-narrative, a system of rhetorical effects that probably can’t be translated into a plausible movie.  It will be interested to see how the book is adapted to HBO – apparently, a mini-series is being plotted as I write. 

The novel begins with a literal sort of bang, a bravura passage involving the fall of Saigon.  This part of the book is hallucinatory and remarkable, prescient as to the chaos that attended upon the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan – the reader can readily imagine the action in the opening of the book because we saw it unfold on our TV screens in the precipitous pull-out from Kabul.  The hero (or anti-hero) escapes Saigon in the company of a friend Bon.  On the Saigon runway, Bon’s wife and child are killed.  Bon becomes a hollow man, vacant except for grief and rage and, later, depicted as a nihilistic killer.  In the book’s second act, the protagonist’s life as a refugee is Los Angeles is chronicled.  This part of the book develops into a thriller.  For reasons that aren’t clear to me, the General (now running a liquor store while is wife operates a squalid Chinese restaurant) deputizes the narrator to kill a man always referred to as the “crapulent Major.”  The killing is accomplished but, as in Macbeth, for instance, the protagonist suffers from pervasive feelings of guilt and hallucinates that the head of the Major is a centerpiece on a table at a wedding that he attends in the aftermath of the homicide.  In this assassination narrative, the book invokes Hitchcock and Graham Greene and the killing is described in a set-piece that should be readily adapted for screen.  Nguyen effectively depicts the Vietnamese refugee community, a group of schemers plotting to resurrect the War with the help of a gung-ho American congressman.  There is much witty by-play between the various factions of Vietnamese veterans and their children, a younger generation who seem rather remote from the passions of the bloody war fought in Southeast Asia.  Throughout this part of the book and following, our Commie “mole” narrator writes an account of his activities in invisible (rice-water) ink – this is sent to the protagonist’s Aunt in Paris, presumably for distribution to his handler or spy-master in the Vietnamese secret service.  (I was never entirely sure whether the Aunt in Paris is a real person in contact with the spy-master or simply a euphemism for the spy-master himself.)  

In the book’s third section, the protagonist finds himself recruited to serve as a consultant on a big-budget Hollywood film shot in the Philippines.  The name of the film is The Hamlet, but references in the book’s acknowledgments section make it clear that the inspiration for this part of the novel is Apocalypse Now.  (Although it seems that the movie being shot is really more like Oliver Stone’s Platoon).  The film’s director, referred to sardonically as the Auteur, heartily dislikes his Vietnamese consultant and the hero seems to increasingly occupy the role as the movie-maker’s bad conscience.  An accident on the set, probably triggered by the Auteur in an effort to kill the protagonist, results in the narrator being parboiled by an explosion.  He’s hospitalized, paid some damages for his injuries, and shipped back to the United States.  This part of the book exploits the familiar notion that Hollywood movies customarily get all factual and historical details right, but that this verisimilitude is in service of a story and characters that are utterly false and completely fraudulent.  (In one of his amusing mini-essays, the narrator points out that the director and his scenarist can’t even accurately reproduce the typical way that Vietnamese scream when they are tortured and killed.  The protagonist who has much experience with torture and killing knows all about this subject.)

In the fourth section in the book, the protagonist joins a quixotic raid, conducted through Thailand and Cambodia on the Communist regime in Vietnam.  The raid revives the dormant General and provides an occasion for some inspiring speeches about how the clandestine military action restores to its hapless refugee participants honor lost in their defeat in Vietnam. (Aspects of this section of the book harken back to the Bay of Pigs debacle.)  However, the narrator’s participation in this covert action comes at a high price.  To show his loyalty, the protagonist has to assassinate Sonny, a fellow Vietnamese Communist, also educated in Los Angeles and well-known for his opposition to the war in southeast Asia.  This murder arises from obviously impure motives: the narrator sympathizes with Sonny’s ideology and has reason to personally dislike his victim:  Sonny has appropriated Ms. Mori, the hero’s girlfriend while he was in the Philippines and they are rivals for the woman.  Further, there doesn’t seem any good reason to eliminate Sonny; he’s politically ineffective and no threat to anyone. The General, it seems, orders the murder to compromise the narrator, alarmed that the hero has been courting his daughter, a thoroughly assimilated young woman who sings in a rock band.  Once again, the murder is presented in a cinematically described set-piece.  After killing his former friend, the narrator adjourns to the apartment of the General’s daughter for a sexual encounter – there’s nothing like a good murder to stir the libido.  We next see the hero in Cambodia attempting a reconnaissance mission through Laos and across the Mekong River, the border with Vietnam.  The part of the book seems written under the influence of Joseph Conrad, full of sound and fury and ornamented with impressive descriptions of landscape – the narrator’s prose style is reminiscent of “The Heart of Darkness” or some scenes in Conrad’s masterpiece, Nostromo.  After a bloody firefight, the narrator is  taken prisoner and his plight in a Vietnamese re-education camp comprises the final, or fifth act, of the novel.

Up to this point, the novel seems to me fully realized and highly successful.  The last part of The Sympathizer, however, palls and, unfortunately, the book’s narrative climax is also its weakest link.  

 Here the narrator’s elaborate rhetoric takes over and Nguyen’s propensity for highly ornamented discourse overwhelms the story.  The hero is isolated in dank, suffocating cell, allowed access to fresh air and light for only an hour a day, and nourished, if inadequately, on wretched, verminous provisions.  (It’s detestable to be lectured at length by a moron and, even, more awful to have to endure those speeches on an empty stomach.)  The Commandant entrusted with re-educating the narrator is a tedious fool and Nguyen repeats his speeches berating our hero at length.  The general burden of the Commandant’s diatribe is that the narrator, despite his ostensible allegiance to the cause, is irretrievably damaged in, at least, two ways – first, the hero’s immersion in California culture specifically, and Western politics and literature, in general, taints him and must be purged from his system; in other words, the very flexibility that made the narrator an asset as a spy compromises him badly in the eyes of the dogmatic interrogator.  Second, the narrator’s status as a “bastard”, the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest makes him a mongrel, a half-breed who is, somehow, genetically predisposed to betray the glorious Revolution.  In support of these theses, the Commandant quotes gibberish by Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao and has required our hero to write a lengthy confession, several hundred handwritten pages composed in his putrid cell by the light of a tiny tallow candle.  The confession is supposed to be self-criticism, but is deemed unworthy and, even, subversive on the basis of our hero’s elaborate prose style: “The bad news (says the Commandant) is that your language betrays you.  It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple.  It is the language of the elite.”  At this point, it becomes evident to the reader that the Commandant is describing the very novel that we are reading.  The self-revelatory text presented to the dogmatic Commandant is the novel entitled The Sympathizer.  At one point, the hero observes that his smudged and stained confession consists of 307 pages.  Checking the margin, I see that the book numbers the pages up to this point in the story at 317.  Thus, one of the revelations in the novel’s denouement is the nature of the text we are reading.  

This development is pretty clever and motivates the florid prose style in which the book is written.  But the problem with the scenes with the hero’s doctrinaire and vicious interlocutors is that this stuff has all been done before and much better.  The immediate precursor to The Sympathizer’s interrogation scenes is the similar, and much better managed, material at the close of Orwell’s 1984.  The loquacious and terrifying torturer in the Orwell novel, O’Brien, the man who ultimately persuades Winston Smith that 2 + 2 = 5, is the spiritual predecessor the Commandant and the “faceless man”, the reeducation camp’s big boss whom the hero encounters at the end of The Sympathizer.  (Of course, the granddaddy of all of these torturers in Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov).  Nguyen’s Commandant and the napalm-burned “faceless man” don’t have much to add to their distinguished lineage and the dialogue sequences in the book’s last act are implausible and tedious.  There is a concept called “haranguing” in Marvel and DC comic books.  Before the villain delivers the coup de grace to his helpless victim, he unburdens himself of a lengthy harangue, a megalomaniacal monologue that usually gives the various caped crusaders a chance to rescue the target of the bad guy’s ire.  This is how the speechifying toward the end of The Sympathizer comes off.  As the Commie villains blather on and on, we expect a colorfully garbed super-hero to alight in the re-education camp and act as a deus ex machina that will levitate our narrator to safety. 

The inevitable problem of a book of this kind is that the hero’s wise-ass stance can’t be sustained in the face of the horrors presented.  (Nguyen makes a valiant attempt – there’s a good joke about the rock-hard products of the narrator’s defecation, a stony, petrified cube of shit formed by conditions of near-starvation forming “one of the bricks” in Communism’s heroic structure.)  As in Catch 22, deferred atrocities and horrors catch up with narrative and the witty steam, as it were, leaks out of the book under the pressure of its ghastly content.  We reach the serious parts of both Catch 22 and The Sympathizer with a sense of dread – the light touch has to be abandoned in favor of a gravely earnest tone that falsifies the earlier, better parts of the book. It’s easy to move and appall readers with descriptions of horrors; comedy is a lot more difficult to sustain.     

Nonetheless, there’s three-quarters (or, even, 4/5ths) of a very fine novel here. The Sympathizer’s plot is entertaining and full of exciting incidents.  But, the book’s chief appeal rests with its narrator.  The protagonist is an accomplished rhetorician and adept at devising remarkable figures of speech.  His discourse is showy, an excuse for all sorts of literary pyrotechnics.  In modern literature, the narrator seems most closely akin to Yossarian in Catch 22, a book that The Sympathizer resembles with respect to its dizzying shifts in tone – like Catch 22, The Sympathizer oscillates wildly between absurdist comedy, complete with pratfalls and one-liner gags (C-rations look the same entering the body as leaving it), and bleakly horrible violence.  Some critics have claimed that the book’s central consciousness is like the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man – this is an inept comparison.  The speaker in The Invisible Man is far more rancorous, obsessive, and bitter than the hero of The Sympathizer who seems a resourceful fellow, rather avuncular, and (until the end) with an excellent sense of humor.  (The Invisible Man is largely a series of allegories strung together into a first-person narrative that can’t hang together because the narrator’s personality is fractured by the racism that he experiences; The Sympathizer’s narrator is far less anguished and, despite the horrors around him, quite cheerful – nothing touches him deeply because he isn’t actually real in the first place: the hero is an artifact of a historical moment of divided consciousness, a poster-boy, as it were, for the contradictions that Marx thought doomed Capitalism and its military-industrial complex but that are equally applicable to modern Communist societies.)  As I read the book, the narrator seemed to me cousin to the witty, resourceful picaros who inhabit late 18th century literature – the protagonist seems like a figure from a novel by Henry Fielding, someone like Tom Jones or the narrator of novel by Laurence Sterne such as A Sentimental Journey or a character in a grotesque comedy like Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollet.

Nguyen’s unique prose style is well-illustrated by an episode at the beginning of Chapter 13.  The self-described “subversive” protagonist has returned to Los Angeles after his ill-fated foray into Hollywood film production.  Before departing for the Philippines, the narrator was enjoying a rather casual, if mutually satisfying, sexual relationship with Ms. Mori, a secretary for the professor at the University where the hero works as a graduate associate in the department of East Asian studies.  Ms. Mori’s parents are Nisei Japanese. Hoping to revive his affair with Ms. Mori, the narrator goes to her apartment and finds that she is entertaining another Vietnamese man, Sonny.  Sonny is a Communist himself and the hero accuses him of lacking commitment to the cause – instead of returning to Vietnam, Sonny remained in southern California, espousing Revolution but doing nothing to further his ostensible political objectives.  I am concerned, however, with demonstrating Nguyen’s flamboyant metaphors that are characteristic of the diction and tone throughout the novel.  

When he casts his eye on Ms. Mori’s books, the narrator sees “bookshelves bowed as the backs of coolies with the weight of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Angela Davis and other women who had wrestled with the Woman Question.”  The metaphor, which would be considered offensive if perpetrated by a non-Asian writer, suggests both Ms. Mori’s oriental heritage, the south Asian background of the narrator, and implies that the “Woman Question” is a luxury item borne on the backs of the wretched of the Earth.  The presence of the hero’s rival in Ms. Mori’s apartment induces “an anaphylactic reaction to his presence.”  The cork of an open bottle is “wine-bloodied”, another image that implies the potentially murderous hostility between the men.  The narrator poetically imbues mute objects with voices – a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka “maintain(s) a stoic Russian demeanor...”  And the narrator assures us that “every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it.”  This is trope foreshadows later words spoken in anger in the chapter under the influence of booze.  The characters sit in “the frigid waters of embarrassment” except for Ms. Mori’s “grace” in defusing the situation.  Ms. Mori’s cat yawns in “regal contempt” and climbing onto the lap of her current lover, Sonny, “sneers” at the hero, before falling “asleep out of boredom.”  Thoughts take on the form of “fleeting, evanescent material shape” and a “ghostly version” of the hero hovers over his rival’s head.  The hero perceives himself as an “unwilling partner in this complicated menage a trois.”  Ms. Mori’s “gaze (is) loaded with with pity, which was ever only served lukewarm.”  As the characters get drunk, the language becomes extravagantly fluid: “(l)onging flood(s) the basement of (the narrator’s) heart.”  The vodka is “pungent and wonderful... the paint thinner I needed to strip down the stained, flaking walls of my interior.”  This latter image of the vodka as a solvent abrading basement walls apparently ruined by previously adumbrated “floods” of longing is compact, vivid, and wholly baroque, a metaphysical conceit after the manner of John Donne.  

I have selected this passage to provide readers with a sense of the highly mannered, almost rococo style with which this book is written, an array of fireworks bursting on every page that has the effect of congesting and impeding the narrative, indeed, even establishing a counter-motion to the flow of events described in the book.  The various tropes listed in the preceding paragraph occur in the scope of four pages in the novel – and I have left out a number of less showy conceits.  

Nguyen’s rather fragrant and luxurious literary style is central to the book’s conception.  In Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert, after a particularly exuberant literary flourish, makes the self-deprecating remark that you can “rely on” a murderer to have a florid, ornamental style of writing.  (This is thematic to Lolita – the narrator’s exorbitant style masks and distances the sordid events that the story depicts: that is, the rape and destruction of a child.)  Similarly, Nguyen’s elaborately ornamented style keeps us at a distance from the violent and, even, horrific content comprising the story.  These stylistic devices are a means by which the narrator expresses his “double-mindedness” – terrible things are narrated in an elaborately rhetorical and humorous way.  Indeed, the book proposes that the role of spy is an equivalent to the author’s stance in writing an ironic novel of this sort.  The spy reports on what he sees.  Similarly, a novelist writes about things that he knows.  The novelist is making a confidential report to the reader (in the form of a confession to the Commandant).  Like the spy, the novelist is both inside the events that he chronicles as well as dispassionate, even scientifically abstracted, from those events.  The stance of reporting from a perspective both inside and outside of a society – that is, pretending to be a member of a polity while simultaneously undermining that polity – is integral to the book’s conception. 

The novel’s stylistic felicities and the narrator’s witty, engaging perspective implode in The Sympathizer’s final pages.  Detached and mordant observations give way to the Sturm und Drang of extended tortures scenes that unpleasant to read and oddly disconnected from the rest of the book.  Several technical problems arise.  First, physical pain (like music) can’t be plausibly described in the first person.  Pain is an isolating experience that is all inside.  But good writing is outside – that is, the writer extracts a feeling, impression, or idea from within his or her mind and, then, casts that as an exterior, that is a structure of words and syntax within the common parlance, to expose that subject to the reader.  Sex, described from first person point of view, poses similar problems and is a shoal on which many prose narratives have foundered – but most people have some experience of sex and can apply the writer’s approximations to that experience; thankfully, few modern people have the experience of being tortured. 

Furthermore, Nguyen’s symbolism implies that the hero’s torture is, somehow, beneficial to him.  Arguably, the reader may dislike the narrator to the point that he or she might uncharitably desire to see the protagonist get his proper comeuppance; but this isn’t the effect for which the writer seems to be striving.  Nguyen takes seriously the premise that the narrator must be “reeducated”, that his perceptions and cultural pretensions are askew and need to be forcibly corrected.  But this is a strange stance for the author to impose on his readers – it’s as if Orwell were asking us to be pleased over the fact that O’Brien’s torture has made Winston Smith “love Big Brother.”  The imagery of The Sympathizer’s torture scene involves brilliant lights, sensory deprivation, and electric shocks to prevent the hero from falling asleep – indeed, the hero’s worst affliction seems to be the Vietnamese torturers depriving him of sleep, surely an awful thing.  But the descriptions of this torture emphasizes that the narrator comes to certain realizations – that is, becomes educated – by the misery that he endures.  The constant brilliant light pouring down on the hero actually comes to signify something like enlightenment.  Sensory deprivation compels semi-monastic self-reflection.  And the fact that the hero is brutally kept from sleeping suggests the metaphor of becoming fully awakened.  Lest this interpretation seem extravagant, Nguyen emphasizes how the experience of torture restores to the hero memories and feelings that he has apparently repressed.

First, the hero regains a vivid memory of his participation in the rape of a female VC agent.  The narrator’s horror as to this event, seemingly repressed, is supposed to humanize our protagonist even as the first-person speaker dwells on conspicuously salacious and awful details involving the assault.  In addition to restoration of this repressed memory, the hero experiences restoration (or revelation) of a repressed emotion – namely, that he has always hated his French father. 

I am generally suspicious of plot developments that involve the recovery of suppressed feelings and memories.  This narrative tactic can yield revelations on cue supposed to deepen psychological elements in the story.  But the notion that one can repress a powerful, even life-altering, memory seems specious to me at best – a revenant from Freudian models of the mind probably best laid to rest.  The rape scene is sufficiently vivid that it seems highly unlikely that the hero would need torture to bring this recollection to light.  And, throughout the book, the narrator’s references to his father have all been disparaging – therefore, it comes as no surprise that the hero dislikes or, even, hates the French priest who begot him.  The only surprise is that the narrator himself is surprised that this emotion surges into prominence during his torture.  

The protagonist’s sleep-deprived meditations on these freshly unearthed memories and feelings yield a Heraclitean system of oppositions.  Everything is divided: father from son, north from south Vietnam, Europe opposes Asia, the Commandant is a dialectal opposite to the Commissar, Communism opposing Capitalism, mind is separated from body (the narrator imagines himself floating over his torture as a spectator), cells, themselves, divide and divide again in reproduction creating life from division.  What does this all mean? “Nothing,” the narrator proclaims.  At the bottom of all systems, there is merely nothingness.  These are fancy thoughts, but can’t be logically deduced from anything that we’ve seen in the novel.  Indeed, the novel is maximalist, multiplying scenes and situations (the hero commits not one murder but two), filling up the interstices in the plot with vividly described minor characters and the story is replete with love scenes, violence, and comedy.  To assert, in the penultimate chapter, that this all amounts to “nothing” falsifies the book’s narrative.  

The Sympathizer comes equipped with a coda or postlude in its final chapter.  Events in this chapter imprint an allegorical aspect on the novel’s already densely packed content.  The protagonist realizes that he is just another refugee cast adrift by the calamity in Southeast Asia.  He expresses solidarity with others like him – no longer a “double-minded” man he announces his identity with the collective.  Antinomies are overcome; the hero’s divisions are healed.  From a narcissistic “I”, the first-person narrator has become part of a “we” – the word “we” figures prominently in the slogan that ends the book.  All of this is summarized in the narrator’s response to a riddle repeated to him during his torture: “What is more precious than freedom and independence?”  The answer engraved into the hero’s psyche by his torture is simple enough, but syntactically ambiguous: “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence”  – in English, this sentence can mean either that “freedom and independence” are the highest of all values bar none, or that “nothing” itself is more precious than “freedom and independence”, a Buddhist recognition that all forms, including the self, are empty.  (Presumably, the narrator’s interrogation is conducted in Vietnamese and I doubt that this ambiguity exists in that language – but if the reader has not suspended disbelief by this point in the book, he or she is no longer reading it.)  From the liberating perception, that “nothingness” precedes “something” and that all forms are empty, the narrator forges his new consciousness.  I would like to believe that the metaphysics in the last few chapters are ironic, but find no trace of that attitude at the end of the book.

The Sympathizer is an impressive and exceptionally ambitious novel.  The fact that I am comparing it with similarly flawed classics like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 demonstrates the book’s formidable brilliance.  The fact that I don’t like the book’s conclusion may be idiosyncratic with this writer.  Perhaps, there are many others who find the ending of the book plausible and just.  In any event, the novel casts a fascinating perspective on the end of the war in Vietnam, a subject that is relevant today in the light of the way that the conflict in Afghanistan ended.  No doubt there will be thousands of “double-minded” refugees from that conflict and their destinies will be inextricably entwined with ours.  In America, we are always blithely starting wars and heedlessly ending them as well and so many of the truths expressed in Nguyen’s book will remain to perplex us for the foreseeable future. 

On Storm's Brackets

 

On Halloween afternoon, the small town symphony played its first concert of the 2021-22 season.  The day was cold crystal, brightly lit by the sun’s brief flare.  Bare trees cast hooked shadows, although some foliage still hung on isolated branches making gobbets of red and yellow color above the brown planes and edges of the landscape.  The sun’s sharp angle built rectilinear boxes within boxes: square houses inside square blocks within the square town at the center of the square county, all of these containers casting hard, right-edged shadows.  

I pulled up to the curb on the north side of the High School.  The wind swept fallen leaves across the street.  One of our town’s most famous widows parked her SUV behind me.  I greeted her on the sidewalk as we hurried through the chilly wind to the door into the school.  The widow was accompanied by her sister-in-law, a robust older woman with a quick stride.  

As we rounded the corner of the High School building, the widow asked me if I was still writing.  I’ve found that the best way to respond to this question is with a self-deprecating jibe.  The question seems oddly impertinent to me: “still writing?” You might as well ask me if I am still breathing.  

The rampart of the long High School facade frowned down at us.  Across the desert of wilted lawn in front of the School, I could see the large white house, a pale villa on the edge of downtown, where the widow had lived before her husband died.  (A prominent local physician, he was killed in a freak accident on a mountain bike trail that he had built in the small woods at the outskirts of our town.)

“It’s the old neighborhood,” the widow’s sister-in-law said, gesturing toward the white house on the short block stubbed up against the High School grounds.

Masks were mandatory in the auditorium where the symphony orchestra members, clad in black, were seated on the stage, musicians arrayed against a colorful geometric backdrop.  (If the backdrop were slid to the side, the audience in the concert hall would find itself looking into the big, dark void of the basketball court on the far side of the stage.)  Strings were tuning; a flute and oboe competed in playing arpeggios and brass expelled truncated fanfares.  Alternate aisles were taped-off to maintain “social distancing”.  I took a seat near the front, but alone far to the right of orchestra.  

Because of Covid, the symphony had not played a concert for 613 days.  I was a little early and so I took a book from my breast pocket, a little Reclam edition of Theodor Storm’s novella, “The Doppelgaenger”.  I read a few pages in German and, then, the chairman of the Symphony Board appeared and spoke some introductory words.  He told us that the artists had used their isolation during the pandemic to practice and, therefore, improve their skills.  There was a joke: “This is the first Halloween concert that we’ve played in which the entire audience came in masks.”

I suppose these days of “racial reckoning” are golden for Black soloists.  The concert featured an excellent African-American bassoonist who appeared beneath the conductor’s podium wearing a tinsel-colored vest.  The first half of the concert had, as its main work, a bassoon concerto by Rossini, a wonderful piece with which I was completely unfamiliar.  A woman nearby whispered to her husband: “I just love the bassoon.  It’s such a fun sounding instrument.”

At the intermission, I didn’t leave my seat, instead reading another page or so of the novella.  The second half of the concert concluded with Dvorak’s 8th Symphony.  I closed my eyes to listen to the music, but found that although I could concentrate on the melody and texture of the symphony in the moment, I wasn’t able to patch together a mosaic of memories to build a coherent picture of the piece as a whole.  The music’s immediacy obliterated, it seemed, what had come before and, similarly, provided little access to what would follow.  I had a sense of being immersed in the symphony, drowning in a succession of instants.

Then, my mind wandered: I thought of the little mutilated book in my pocket.  I had acquired a stack of Reclam Verlag editions of German classics from a college girlfriend.  At first, I couldn’t recall why the books had come into my possession, but, then, memories returned to me and, at least, I thought I remembered how this had happened. 

When I attended college and took German language classes, the instructors generally assigned readings in Deutsch classic literature in Reclam Verlag editions.  This was before the Internet made all books in all languages more or less instantly available.  In those days, books imported from Germany were expensive with the exception of the very cheaply produced, if serviceable, Reclam volumes.  To spare students unnecessary cost, most German language courses in literature used these books.  

Reclam Verlag books are immediately recognizable by their brilliant yellow covers.  The books are all the same shape, about three by five inches, easily carried in your breast pocket if you are so inclined.  (That was where I had stashed the Storm novella when I attended the symphony.)  Philip Reclam, the founder of the imprint was a German radical who transformed his father’s staid “Museum of Literary Culture” into political pamphlets, small so that they could be readily smuggled as Samizdat literature.  Reclam was imprisoned for distributing Thomas Payne’s The Age of Reason in German translation.  After the failure of the German revolutions of 1848-1849, Reclam abandoned political tracts for German classics.  Copyright law in Austria propelled creative works into the public domain after a lapse of thirty years from first publication.  So Reclam reinvented his business to re-publish classic German literature such as Goethe’s Faust, Part I, the best-selling of all of his imprint’s books even today.  After issuing books by Schiller and Goethe, Reclam began providing students with volumes of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies.  The business flourished.  By 1908, Reclam had book vending machines in all of the major train stations in the German-speaking world.  During both World Wars, the edition’s small format made them standard issue to German soldiers.  The volumes could be easily carried into combat.  

During my college years, I had acquired about eight or nine of the little yellow books.  They were fragile, printed on very cheap paper that rapidly yellowed itself, the interiors of the books becoming the color of faded papyrus under the violent sunburst of the front and back covers.  With use, the covers sometimes detached.  But, despite these flaws, the little books are redolent to me of my college days and, so, I regard them with nostalgic pleasure.  

As it happened, I had a stack of Reclam Verlag editions on a shelf near a small brass bowl, a Tibetan artifact, in which I was accustomed to keep my Austin Symphony Orchestra tickets.  About a month before the Halloween concert, I was uncertain whether I had purchased tickets for the upcoming season and made my donation to the orchestra – each year I give the enterprise some money.  One afternoon, I looked in the Tibetan bowl, found tickets left over from the last concert season in 2019, but didn’t find anything for the 2021-22 programs.  In the course of that search, I came upon another Reclam Verlag volume, really just a brittle pamphlet, containing Theodor Storm’s 1886 “The Doppelgaenger”.  I had just finished reading a long novel, Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, and was between German books.  I recalled enjoying Storm’s impressive novella Der Schimmelreiter (“The Pale Horseman”) many years earlier in college and, so, I thought I would try “The Doppelgaenger”.  The little volume had lost it’s cover many years before and there were brownish stains on the front page of the text on which the title was printed as well as the date of publication.  In a round, looping hand, my former girlfriend had written her name in print on the top of the page. 

It’s difficult for me to write objectively about KS.  Most of this difficulty arises from the fact that my feelings about her were muddled in 1977 and haven’t really acquired any clarity since that time.  In fact, as I describe her as “my former girlfriend”, I recognize that this term isn’t exact either – I’m not sure if she was ever a “girlfriend” as that term is conventionally applied.  She was certainly a friend and, on a few occasions, I had intimate relations with her – but I didn’t know what these encounters meant to me exactly and, certainly, I have no idea how she viewed the situation.

I met KS in an airless seminar room in Folwell Hall at the University of Minnesota, a graduate level class in German lyric poetry.  People were allowed to smoke in classes, at least at the graduate level, some amount of nicotine in the bloodstream deemed salubrious, I suppose, and conducing to free and frank discussion and, a class about German lyric poetry, a melancholy and ecstatic subject, required nothing, if not, free and frank discussion.  Inevitably, this sort of poetry is revelatory, although it tends to reveal concealed things not about the verse, but about those interpreting the verse – people made all sorts of declarations in this class: people confessed homosexuality, various sorts of crimes, deep-seated hatreds and fears and the details of intimate encounters.  The professor, a swarthy middle-aged man from a part of Prussia that no longer exists, a realm that was, then, suffocating under the burden of Soviet occupation, smoked huge malodorous cigars and the air in that warm room behind a door shut on a warm corridor high in the building, was tinted blue – the color of romanticism and roiling cigar smoke.

KS wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she had a desperate, brooding aura about her that made men (and women as well – she was bisexual) frantic to rescue her from whatever obscure malaise she was suffering.  She had enormous eyes in which you could drown or swim laps doing the Australian crawl depending upon your inclination.  Her nose was broad and a little coarse, but she had sensual full lips and a trim, compact frame and her voice was ideal for slowly reading aloud the sorrowful poems composed by mostly doomed Germans that we were discussing.  She made every lyric that she read resound as if accompanied by a languorous melody by Schubert.  

A friend of mine was interested in her and, probably, had slept with her as well, but he had concluded that relations with her came with consequences that were too burdensome.  So he suggested that I explore an encounter with her. She was from a rural part of the State and had suffered terrible grief when growing up (a sister had died in a car crash).  Her family was humble, the sort of people that quit high school to have babies or work for the County, but her surviving sisters were all ambitious and attractive, strivers and connivers.  She lived in modest rented home with several other women and they were all casually promiscuous although that phrase is unjust – it was merely the temper of the times.  In those days, women would have sex with you as readily as they might shake your hand, usually I think from a sense of curiosity – no one, it seemed, had much to lose.  The idea was to put the sexual experience first and, then, sort things out later.  At least, this was the custom in KS’ circle.  In her case, KS’ charms were accompanied by a sweet, if slightly fetid, aroma of depravity.  She had traveled widely in Europe and availed herself of the local lads as well as fellow wayfarers.  For a time, she had lived with some casual pick-up in the humid cellar of Peggy Guggenheim’s Venice villa and there had been a participant in all sorts of orgies, elaborate group sex encounters and, it was in that exotic setting, that she had acquired a taste for women as well as men.  (After sleeping with a female mutual acquaintance, KS announced to me that she liked “big boobs, a tiny waist, and a big ass as much as the next guy.”) One had the sense that she was willing to try anything and, of course, this notion made her wonderfully appealing, if, also, perhaps a little too readily discarded after testing her limits.  

I’m conscious that this description isn’t chivalrous and, even, may be a big ignoble.  And it’s also unfair and misleading in a way.  KS was highly intelligent, cultured, and witty.  Her outer attributes revolved, it seemed, about a profound well of implacable sorrow.  She was never vulgar and, even, rather decorous when she mentioned sex – if she said something explicit, she always sighed and bracketed her words with the tremolo of a silvery laugh, signifying, it seemed, that you shouldn’t take anything that she revealed too seriously.  When she described sexual partners, she said that she “rather fancied him (or her)”  She was fundamentally discrete, perhaps, due to her small-town background, and she wore the whiff of scandal about her as a sort of veil.  By the time, I went to Austin to practice law, she had slept with everyone that I knew.  Nonetheless, she prized her independence.  When things took on a sizzle that she found unacceptably restrictive to her freedoms, she simply bought a plane ticket and lit out to Europe or Africa or Central America.  I never knew how KS supported herself – she was what the Jews call “a Luftmensch,” someone that lives on air alone.  Once, she took me to see her maiden aunt, an old woman who lived alongside a snarling traffic artery connecting Minneapolis to St. Paul.  The old woman had white hair and lived in a small clapboard house, improbably situated on a tiny lawn with a single droopy cottonwood tree, her dwelling between two huge industrial facilities – there was a massive grain elevator towering over her place to the left and some sort of foundry that vomited fire at all hours of the day on her right.  The house was swathed in a perpetual mist of smoke and malt fumes.  The old woman was courteous, soft-spoken, and her house was full of souvenirs of travels all around the world and, speaking with her, I had the sense that I was seeing my girlfriend (if that’s what she was) as she would appear fifty years in the future.  

After several brief sexual encounters, undoubtedly very disappointing for her, she began to betray me with everyone I knew.  The word “betray” is too strong, but I was inexperienced and, so, I perceived her conduct ungenerously and in those terms.  After cutting a swath through my close friends, she began to explore more remote acquaintances.  One of these men, Harry (I will call him), proved to be her undoing.  

Harry was the son of a famous Twin Cities physician and had been raised in a large house on a large magnificently wooded lot on the highest hill in the West Suburbs.  His charismatic father was one generation from the boats that had brought his Irish and Italian forebears to Ellis Island.  But Harry’s mother was, I think, Mediterranean in extraction and, so, the young man was wonderfully handsome.  He had a satyr’s curly hair, luxuriant blonde locks coiling over his pale face with the idealized features of a Hellenist statue, the face and chest and arms of a much-beloved favorite of a Byzantine emperor.  Harry was easy-going, nonchalant, and talented.  He could play guitar and knew hundreds of old songs that he sang for his admirers in a clear, vibrant tenor.  No one ever saw him inconvenienced or embarrassed or out of sorts.  He was equal to all occasions.  Women were afraid of him because he didn’t seem to be much interested in them, always catnip for the fair sex.  It wasn’t that he was Gay or asexual – rather, he was a sort of Stoic of the classical kind: although much was pleasing to him, nothing was necessary and he seemed the suave master of his desires.  Unlike the rest of us who were pathetically needy and supplicant, Harry could take it or leave it.  He was fearless and utterly self-confident and nothing fazed him.  

Harry, like KS, was independent.  On a whim, he might leave town for a week to paddle a canoe alone in the Boundary Waters just under the liquid ledge of wilderness Ontario.  He could build a fire in wet weather and make it burn, caught fish, cleaned them expertly, and fried them in savory batter, and he had wonderfully trained hunting hounds and was an expert shot with both rifle and scatter-gun.  I don’t know what he was studying.  It didn’t really matter.  Education was meaningless.  He seemed to be pretty much perfect and there was nothing one could add to him to enhance his appeal.  At a campfire down by the pale moonlit froth of the Falls of St. Anthony, Harry told me that he was the complete master of his body: he said: “when I have sex I can just go on exactly as long as I wish.  I don’t feel any urgency.  It’s just very, very mellow for me.”  I had no sense that he was boasting.  In fact, he told me these things in a completely matter of fact way – he couldn’t understand why others made such a big deal about sexual intercourse.  To him, it was a natural function just like eating or defecating.  

Of course, KS ultimately made her way to Harry and, of course, she immediately tilted the relationship into intimacy.  KS knew that men also found Harry immensely attractive and, I think, she hoped that he would invite some of his buddies into trysts with her.  In any event, she told me that she was impressed with Harry in every way and that he possessed “a perfect penis”, quite a compliment because she had seen and employed a number of these things.  

Love affairs, particularly among the young, often involve disastrous imbalances of power.  In every case before Harry, KS was the aggressor, knew exactly what she wanted, and assiduously steered her lovers in that direction, both emotionally and physically.  Generally, she wanted to avoid emotional engagement beyond the level of people “fancying” one another – that is, she avoided intimacy that went much beyond simple mutual enjoyment.  For this reason, her abandoned lovers all felt that she was cold and somewhat vacant in their relationships with her.  But this was a projection of their disappointment, in fact, she was fully present and vibrantly responsive but only on a transient basis.  The simple fact was that, until she slept with Harry, KS was in control of these encounters; the power was all invested in her.

But, unfortunately for her, KS had met her match in the beautiful and indifferent Harry.  He was happy to sleep with her, but didn’t show an ounce of commitment.  Suddenly, KS found herself at the mercy of someone else and this sensation, apparently, appalled her.  She doubled and redoubled her efforts to make Harry admit that he desired, or, even, loved her.  But he was disengaged – instead of devoting all of his time to her, he spent weekends canoeing local rivers or hunting for deer and pheasants with his cronies in the lake country up north.  He went to bars with his friends, didn’t bother to invite her, and sat all night listening to jazz, a single drink to purchase “cover” on the table in front of him.  (Others guzzled beer and whiskey and ended up drunk.  Not Harry.  He had the very best marijuana in town, but I never saw him acting as if he were stoned.)  KS tried every wile that she possessed, and she had formidable armory of sexual and emotional tricks, but Harry remained resolutely independent.  He gave her the impression that she was merely one of a number of pleasures that he enjoyed, always in moderation, and that there was nothing special about her.

Of course, there is nothing special about any of us.  Dear Reader, this is true of you and me and everyone else.  But when you are young, you want to be loved for your special characteristics -- not despite, but because of, your eccentricities.  And this what KS wanted.  She could no longer be cavalier with Harry.  Instead, she wanted to be his “number one”, his particular vice, his downfall if at all possible.  But, unlike all the rest of us whom she had enjoyed, she couldn’t make a dent in his nonchalance and suave indifference.  KS had fallen in love with him.  But, although he liked having sex with her, Harry wasn’t really willing to cross the street for her.  And this seemed to madden KS.

KS decided that if she couldn’t have Harry (probably so she could have the pleasure of dumping him), she would simply leave the country.  KS had finished her college education and was at loose ends and so she explored the possibility of joining the Peace Corps.  I think she had an altruistic streak – she was a very kind person, despite, perhaps, the impression I might have given of her in these words, and, in fact, she was a staunch enemy of injustice and politically progressive.  If she couldn’t seduce Harry into falling in love with her, KS decided that she would abandon our city and cast herself into a kind of nunnery – that is, the Peace Corps.  She attended some preliminary orientation meetings and made it known throughout our circle of friends that the only thing that would deter her from this course of desperate action would be Harry announcing that he needed her.  She knew that I saw Harry about once every two weeks, usually in a club where he went with other friends to listen to music.  One day, KS summoned me to her apartment and announced that she was about to leave the country and, therefore, had to distribute her belongings among her friends.  I was her only friend interested in reading the Reclam Verlag books that she had acquired for her German classes at the University.  And, so, with the sorrowful mien of someone making her last Will and Testament, she bequeathed to me her Deutsch books, handing them over to me ceremoniously.  Then, she asked me if Harry ever spoke about her.  I told her that he had nothing but good things to say about her.  This was true.  Harry was too noble to ever say anything bad about anyone.  She mentioned a date when she planned to fly to Morocco where she was engaged to teach English at some remote desert village in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains.  She told me the time that her airplane was departing, on a weekend mid-afternoon if remember correctly, and even gave me the flight number.  KS said that she would miss me and hoped I would write and she gave me her address.  But, of course, it was conspicuous to me that she expected (indeed, even was commanding) that I tell this all to Harry and explain to her that she was deadly serious about her plan to leave the United States for several years in the Peace Corps and that, in fact, he should come to the airport and stop her from leaving.  She told me, in fact, that she didn’t really expect to go to Morocco and that Harry, who disapproved of the whole thing, would stop her from embarking on this mission.

Storm’s Ein Doppelgaenger makes use of what the German’s call a Rahmengeschichte – that is, a framing narrative that encloses the principal story.  Often, I think the “frame” story is better than the material that it surrounds.  This is my impression of Storm’s novella.     

A middle-aged lawyer from a provincial city in north Germany travels to Jena.  It is “high summer” and the attorney spends the day touring the town, visiting its attractions including the famous medieval Fuchsturm (or “Fox Tower”), a battlement overlooking the city in its deep, beautiful vale.  (There is a famous and melancholy poem about Jena by Gottfried Benn that begins with the words “Jena, in its lovely valley...”) Exhausted by his exertions, the lawyer returns to the Inn where he is staying at the Sign of the Bear, an ancient place famous for a visit from Martin Luther about four-hundred years earlier.  After consuming a bottle of the local wine, a refreshing Ingelheimer, the first-person narrator falls asleep in his chair behind the “cold” oven in the Inn’s Bierkeller.  A little later, the narrator awakes and sees an older man berating a youth about the boy’s propensity to write poetry instead of pursuing his studies.  When the young man, evidently the older fellow’s son, departs, the narrator strikes up a conversation with him.  The men discuss the fact that poetry is a vice of the young and the narrator says that he was once much addicted to verse when he was a student and, in fact, memorized half of the works of Ludwig Uhland (a lyric poet).  The men enjoy another bottle of wine.  The lawyer has identified the other man as an Oberfoerster, that is, a forester or, perhaps, better identified as a “Head Game Warden.”  (The man, who is said to be about 50, is colorfully dressed in hunting garb.)  In the course of their conversation, the men become friends and the Game Warden invites the lawyer to his home, a rustic estate in the forest about an hour distant from Jena.  The Game Warden says that he is certain that his wife will enjoy meeting the narrator.  “After all,” the Game Warden observes, “the two of your grew up in the same town.”  The narrator remarks that there is something familiar about the Oberfoerster and asks him how he has discovered that the lawyer is from his wife’s native city.  “It’s in the Inn’s registry,” the Game Warden says.  This statement explains why the long expository sentence commencing the novella includes the detail that the narrator has written in the Fremdenbuch (Guest Registry) not only his name and profession but also his address.  Apparently, north Germans are a convivial group and the Guest Registry is available for inspection, presumably to foster friendships among the patrons.  The narrator is pleased to spend a couple days with the Game Warden – apparently, he’s on vacation – and he agrees to visit his new friend’s forest retreat.  The Forester whistles for his hunting dog, an animal that has been inconspicuously sleeping in a corner of the Bierkeller and departs.

The next day, the lawyer travels to the Forester’s lodge, a picturesque retreat in the woods.  Dogs come out to greet him and the lawyer is introduced to the Game Warden’s attractive wife.  She also seems familiar to the narrator, but he can’t identify her lineage in his hometown and her accent is slightly uncouth.  The narrator watches the woman feed birds with crumbs of bread.  Then, he walks with the Game Warden through the velvety green forest.  The men encounter a stag with sixteen point antlers and some does.  Storm describes the woods with lyric intensity.  After their stroll, the narrator again takes a nap.  There is something dream-like about this part of the tale, the lawyer’s peregrinations in a strange place interrupted by long periods of sleep.  

When the narrator awakens, it is early evening.  The Game Warden has vanished into the woods on some official business.  The lawyer encounters Christine, the Oberfoerster’s wife, and they also walk in the woods.  Christine mentions that her husband has been gone for quite awhile and, then, blushes.  (There is a tiny implication that the novella might develop into a love story involving the lawyer and Oberfoerster’s wife, but this is a misdirection.)  While they are walking, the lawyer presumes to violate the stillness of the woods by asking Christine about her life in the small city where he was raised and now resides.  Christine says that she is the daughter of a man named John Hansen.  When the woman is asked about her father, she responds with a strange contradictory description: her father had large kind and lovely eyes and was very gentle, but was, simultaneously, a brute who beat her and her mother.  The lawyer is unable to understand how Christine can recall her father both with warmth and horror.  (It is John Hansen’s double aspect that imparts the name Ein Doppelgaenger to the novella.)  

The narrator probes Christine’s memories and she recalls a freezing Winter night, when the stove in their little cottage was cold and dark.  Her father carried Christine through the icy streets and she saw the stars above them.  When a tear from her father’s eyes fell on her face, John Hansen said that God was weeping over them.  But, then, Christine says that she has horrific memories about the man and recoils from them.  The narrator inquires as to whether perhaps these bad memories are fantasies of some sort.  Christine seems unclear.  She stoops to gather wild flowers that she twists into a wreath.  As he watches her “skillful” hands knitting the wreathe, the narrator wonders if the death of her parents hasn’t perhaps colored her memories and made them unreliable.  Christine recalls that her mother died first and, then, her father, John Hansen.  She was raised, she tells the lawyer, by the kindly parents of her husband who saved the orphan from begging on the streets of the little city.  Christine is grateful that she was treated so kindly and isn’t certain herself about the details of her early childhood.

At this point, the Forester appears.  He admits that he has been eavesdropping on their conversation.  When Christine goes into a nearby clearing to pick some more wildflowers, the Game Warden suggests that the lawyer’s discussion with his wife has inadvertently troubled her and that, perhaps, the conversation should not continue.  The narrator says that he doesn’t recall any one named John Hansen and that, therefore, he can’t place Christine’s family in his memories of his home town.  The Game Warden says that it’s best to leave the past in peace and not talk about it.  Christine was literally saved from the dust on the side of the road and, undoubtedly, experienced terrible things as a child and that it’s preferable not to speak of such things.

At the game lodge, the men eat and drink and the Forester regales the narrator with exciting hunting stories.  Christine goes to bed.  When the lawyer withdraws to his bed-chamber, he stands next to the windowsill looking into the dim, lustrous, and enchanted-looking forest.  His mind ranges back to his own youth and he recalls once chasing butterflies at the outskirts of town.  During that foray, he came to a place where there were the ruins of a knacker’s yard, that is, a place where decrepit horses were slaughtered and their hides salvaged for leather.  The place was overgrown.  Nearby, the narrator recalls a noisome well, the deep shaft covered with rotting boards.  An indefinable sense of despair and horror afflicts the lawyer – it seems that there is some part of this childhood memory that he can’t exactly access. (In this way, the narrator is like Christine – there are things in his childhood that he can’t recall and interpret.) Across a field from the knacker’s yard, a small house stood, a straw-thatched roof falling into the interior of the “liliputian” cottage.  The narrator recalls that the tiny hut was a place of ill-repute.  He recalls hearing a man roaring with rage inside the cottage, a woman screaming and a child whimpering.  Then, the narrator realizes that John Hansen is another name for a man, now long vanished, that he knew as John Glueckstadt (or John from Glueckstadt – the German word designates a town in Schleswig-Holstein, but, also, means “Lucky City,” an ironic appellation as we will see.)  Identifying John Hansen as John Glueckstadt triggers a swarm of memories in the narrator.  These memories comprise the so-called Binnenerzaehlung (or “inner story” bracketed by the frame narrative).

John Hansen was a spirited, powerfully built young man who served with distinction in the army.   There’s an ominous note sounded at the outset – it was only the intervention of a comrade that kept Hansen from striking down a commanding officer who had insulted him.  Returning to his home town, the young man fell in with bad company, a scoundrel named Wenzel.  One day while drinking on the dike protecting the city, Wenzel encourages Hansen to join him in a burglary.  (During this encounter, the John is shown pulling up clods of earth and grass to pitch them at some nearby swallows – for Storm, a dweller among villages retrieved from the fierce North Sea and sheltered by dikes, anything that threatens these levees signifies catastrophe.  Indeed, the failure of dikes in Storm’s masterpiece Der Schimmelreiter (“The Pale Rider”), written around the same time as Ein Doppelgaenger, is a central element in the calamitous flood that climaxes that tale.)  Needless to say, Hansen’s sortie into crime is disastrous.  He’s apprehended and sent to prison for six years in Glueckstadt.  

Emerging from prison, Hansen, now nicknamed “John Glueckstadt” returns to his hometown.  Although he’s disgraced, the locals seem inclined to give him some opportunities for gainful employment.  John manages a crew of women harvesting chicory in the swampy fields near the town.  (Chicory is an herb that can be used as a substitute for coffee – it’s a sort of poor man’s java.)  Although the townsfolk don’t trust John and consider him “dangerous-looking,” he seems the ideal choice to serve as foreman supervising the gang of women gathering the herb – it’s thought that his intimidating demeanor will keep the large gang in line; he supervises 60 women.

Among these women is a 16-year old girl, Hanna.  (Storm defers naming her – at the outset, she’s just one of slatterns grubbing in the swamp.)  The narrator has seen Hanna before, as a beautiful, if filthy, child begging near the stairwell of the middle class home where the lawyer was raised.  He recalls her pale skin and tiny hands and may have touched her once when he doled out some pennies to her.  Again, there is a trace of an erotic impulse directed at Hanna by the courtly and repressed lawyer, at least as he recalls events from his own youth.  The lawyer recalls the women in chicory gang as Dirne –literally “whores”, but here used in a more mild and less derogatory sense: the term is midway between “slut” or “bitch” and “broads”.  (If I were translating the story, I would use the general word “gals” or “girls” for Storm’s locution.)  One afternoon, three women on the crew begin taunting Hanna.  They accuse her of “making eyes” at John.  A fight ensues and Hanna flees into the nearby field, running in the direction of the derelict tannery and its dangerous well.  Hanna threatens to throw herself into the deep cistern.  John seizes her, taking Hanna in his arms.  The inevitable ensues and Hanna becomes John’s common-law wife.  

John and Hanna live in a tiny cottage with a thatched roof at the edge of town.  This little hut is where Hanna dwells with her elderly and ailing mother.  At a town dance, Hanna waltzes with John and everyone admits that they make a lovely couple.  However, the censorious folks in the city, including the hypocritical mayor and his wife, denigrate the couple – they seem to envy them their pure, unmitigated happiness.  “He won’t be able to regain his lost honor,” the Mayor remarks to his wife.

Hanna’s mother is sickly and, soon enough, the couple are quarreling.  But Hanna becomes pregnant.  She has a difficult labor and, when John summons the midwife, the woman contemptuously says that she has other, more profitable, business and Hanna will do fine without any assistance.  This enrages John and stirs in him dangerous emotions of revenge.  When the midwife finally makes her belated appearance, she says that the child is a Dirne and will have a difficult life because she’s a “convict’s daughter.”  

After the birth of the child, the couple is happy for a time.  But John has become increasingly paranoid – with some reason, he believes the townsfolk are scheming to destroy him.  One night, the baby is crying.  Hanna is too exhausted to rock the child to sleep and her mother is unable to help her because of an attack of gout.  Hanna tells John that they need a cradle that he can rock to soothe the baby.  But they can’t afford any wood from which to fashion a cradle.  John says that he could saw off the legs of some furniture and rebuild the baby’s little bed into a cradle.  The narrator says that the cradle is merely an occasion that Hanna exploits to mock her husband as weak and ineffectual.  This leads to a bitter quarrel and John strikes Hanna with his fists.  Hanna shrieks: “Woe to you!  With that blow you’ve smashed to pieces all of your luck!”  John is appalled by what he has done and falls on his knees next to the baby’s crib.  “As he involuntarily approached the baby, she flung her hands and head backward, and the child’s shrill cries seemed to announce an unbearable misfortune.”  (Here Storm is using the word “Glueck” – that is “good fortune” – and “Unglueck”, “misfortune” in the context of John Hansen’s nickname as John Glueckstadt.)  Hanna runs out of the house.  John is afraid that she is going to fling herself into the abandoned well.  He finds her on the brink of the cistern, again takes her in his arms, and there is brief reconciliation.  Storm’s narrator says: “And, so, good fortune quietly returned to his side; he hadn’t yet driven it away.”  

But respite is short.  Hanna and John begin fighting again.  Hanna melodramatically presents John with a knife and urges him to stab her to death.  She cries out that she has been the cause of his misery.  But again there is a reconciliation.  An old beggar frequents the edge of town and, sometimes, takes care of the little girl.  This man is also a convict, who’s present employment is hauling wheelbarrows of sand from the heath into the city.  (It seems possible that John knows the fellow from the penitentiary).  The old man makes wooden shoes for the little girl.  Then, he is out of the story – it seems that Storm uses the figure of the kindly convict as a balance to the wicked Wenzel who will make a reappearance later in the novella.)

Hanna’s mother dies.  John has cut down a big ash tree that shades one side of the cottage, planning to sell the wood to support the increasingly impoverished family.  (The chicory gang rebels when John begins his relationship with Hanna and the ex-con loses that job.)  John engages a kindly carpenter who lives in nearby cottage to make a coffin for Hanna’s mother from the ash tree’s wood.  Throughout the novella, Storm repeatedly devises episodes involving wood – at this lowest strata of society, apparently, access to a source of wood is necessary for life.  And, indeed, the denouement of the novella involves an instance of (mis)appropriation of timber.  The ash tree’s wood won’t yield a profit if it is buried with a corpse and, so, the family sinks into desperate poverty after Hanna’s mother dies.  Hanna, who was raised as a beggar, proclaims that she will go downtown and gather some money in that way.  Hanna has a sharp-tongue and says: “You knew full well that you liberated a beggar-whore when you took up with me.”  The implication seems to be that Hanna may be inclined to do a little bit more than begging in order to support the family.  This enrages John and there is another domestic battle.  In the course of the struggle, John knocks Hanna down and, as she falls, Hanna’s head is impaled on a screw protruding from the oven in the corner of the room.  (The reader will recall the narrator’s location behind the “cold oven” at the Sign of the Bear in Jena.)  Hanna dies and John stammers: “I’ve – I’ve murdered her.”  Looking up, he sees the carpenter in the doorway.  The carpenter drily remarks:   “I guess I’ll have to make another coffin,” adding for a good measure “you didn’t deserve her anyway.”  Nonetheless, the carpenter reasonably concludes that no good will come from John going to prison again.  So the two men agree to conceal the death.  The carpenter constructs another casket, Hanna is swiftly and unceremoniously buried and, upon returning to the cottage, John contemplates suicide.  But his little daughter, now three years old, stretches her tiny hands toward her father and he decides to live.

An old beggar woman joins the household.  This lady is an accomplished beggar, well-known to all the best families in town and she can sometimes acquire enough food to feed the little family.  The old woman drags herself about town on a crude crutch and, through her efforts supports John and the child.  The transaction is simply described: the old woman has lost her dwelling under someone’s stairs and needs a place to keep out of the rain and snow.  In exchange for this abode, she sometimes brings home soup and scraps of meat to share with the family.  Despite this arrangement, the three inhabitants of the little cottage are dangerously near starvation.  Reduced to eating roasted potatoes, the family ekes out a living.  They are too poor to afford butter with their potatoes and have to content themselves with a pinch of salt.  John, however, tells the child that the potatoes are a fine delicacy and, when the little girl complains of hunger, he assuages her pangs by telling her stories about fantastic castles and princesses.  

Two years pass and the old beggar woman teaches Christine (the child’s name as we now know) to read.  Christine has dreams of a kind woman bringing food to her.  She asks her father if this woman is her mother.  John describes Hanna as the “most beautiful woman in the world” as far as he was concerned and says that the child was only three years old when she died.  Hanna confesses that she has no clear memory of what her mother looked like.  John says the family had no money to have a picture taken of Hanna.  John tells Christine that Hanna is a kind of guardian angel protecting her.  This alarms the old beggar woman who says that spirits of the night are deadly and that they carry small children away.  John thinks that Christine is probably doomed.  He recites a little poem to himself: Better an early grave / If from starvation you are saved.

Winter is harsh and cold.  Birds fall frozen from the sky.  The family has no fuel – they’ve been burning scraps of peat in the oven -- and they huddle together in bed, hungry and cold.  Christine is freezing to death.  John has to rub her hands and feet to keep them from becoming frost-bitten.  The old beggar woman tells the two of them to waltz around the cottage so that they don’t succumb to the cold.  “Dancing will warm you up.”  Then, the beggar woman goes to a wealthy patron and comes back with a little food and a pot of cold coffee.  It’s Christmas Eve.  Desperation drives John into the snowy fields.  In the darkness, he creeps up to the dangerous well in the decaying tannery yard.  He tears up the rotting boards covering the well and brings them home for firewood.  This act is described obliquely – in the deadly cold, people hear the crack of an axe cutting wood and, then, a cheerful fire sizzles in old oven in the cottage.  John has a premonition that doom is at his heels, but, for the time being, the family is saved.  

In early Spring, the wicked Wenzel appears and insinuates that he and John should commit a few crimes together.  John staunchly refuses this invitation to larceny, but he is seen talking with the jailbird.  The Mayor summons John to his chambers and tells him that he has been observed consorting with this well-known criminal and that people now suspect him of plotting with the man.  The rumor spreads through town that John has returned to his felonious ways.  No one will hire him as a day-laborer and, again, he and his daughter are faced with starvation.  

Christine says that she will support them by begging.  This is unacceptable to John.  He tells her that they will just have to tighten their belts and eat a little less.  Christine insists that she can beg so that they can eat.  Hallucinating with hunger, John sees an apparition of Hanna and tells her that it would be better if he had died as well.  During his efforts to find work, John has walked by a field next to the Knacker’s Yard and noticed a few potatoes remaining in the furrows.  This is near the well where he committed “robbery” by cutting up the lathe covering the opening to the deep cistern and burning it for fuel.  John decides that in the middle of the night, he will go to the field and snatch the remaining potatoes left in the field.  Whispering to himself that he’ll find work on the morrow, John waits for nightfall.

“He sat for a long time, several hours, until the moon had set and everyone, as he thought, was asleep.  Then, he stepped out of the room and the cottage.  The air was sultry – just a breath of breeze and darkness lay impenetrable over the earth.  But John knew the way well and, finally, he perceived by the weeds around his ankles that he had reached the potato field.  He didn’t stop there, because he feared that he had been seen and, instead, went further, squatted, and hid himself under some bushes, twitching with fear as something brushed against him.  But it was only creatures stirring there: a centipede and a toad had crept over his hand.  His little sack was half full of potatoes that he had taken from the field.  He stood and weighed the sack in his hands: it would be enough —“

“John stood and listened, as if a voice was calling to him from above in the night; then, he gripped the sack and he ran, farther, always farther; he scarcely noticed that he was now running through the grain fields and the ears of wheat, with their raw heads brushed against his face; no star showed him the way; he ran back and forth and couldn’t find his way out of the wheat.  It occurred to him that he had passed this way before, a decade earlier – it couldn’t be far from where he had taken the 16 year old girl in his arms.  With a sickly-sweet shudder, he forged ahead: the wheat rustled against his face and a bird cawed at him, either a partridge stirred up underfoot or a black bird.  He scarcely heard it, running farther and farther as if he could never stop running...”

“A weak glimmer twitched on the horizon; a thunderstorm was approaching.  For a moment, he stopped and considered his situation: he had seen dark clouds earlier in the evening.  So he suddenly grasped where east and west were.  So, he turned and hastened his steps; he wanted to get back home to his daughter.  But there was something under his feet, he felt himself stumble, and, before he could take another step, there was nothing underfoot at all – a shrill scream echoed through the darkness.  Then, it was as if the earth had swallowed him.”      

“A couple birds screeched in the air and, then, everything was still: no human footfalls sounded in the grain field.  The ears of wheat whispered and a million insects, scarcely audible, gnawed at the roots and shafts of the crop, until the heavy, humid air erupted in storm with echoing thunder and unloading torrents of rain so that no other sounds could be heard.”

“In the cottage at the end of the northernmost street, a small child was aroused from her sleep.  She had dreamed that she had come upon a loaf of bread.  But when she bit into it, the bread turned into a stone. The little girl reached out in the bed for her father’s hand.  But her fingers only encountered the edge of the pillow but, then, she was sleeping peacefully again.”

John is never seen again.  The locals gossip that he may have fled to America.  Others think that he went back on the dike to plot deviltry with Wenzel, fell into a sluice with weir gate, drowned and was washed out to sea.

The Mayor pronounces the moral of the piece: “After John served his debt so society, he was, as is customary in these cases, persecuted to death by our dear fellow citizens.  They hounded him to death because our society is without mercy.  If you want my opinion, he should rest in peace – now he belongs in the court of another Judge.”  

The Mayor’s interlocutor says: “Really?  You have some peculiar opinions about our John Glueckstadt.”

“His name was John Hansen,” the Mayor says.

The narrator who has told this story has been lost in reverie.  He returns to consciousness, looking from the window of the Game Warden’s lodge.  The moon is shining over the dark forest.

The lawyer recalls that when he was a boy, he went into the wheat field near town to catch butterflies.  The ground was still wet from a great thunderstorm that had passed over the city the night before.  The boy sees a death’s head moth fluttering through the wheat, some of it knocked over by the gale.  As he pursues the moth, the boy senses that someone is calling out.  He hears the word “Christian” coming from under the earth and is frightened.  Returning to his family, the boy (who is our narrator as a youth) says that he heard a ghost crying out from underground.  No one pays any attention to him.

A season later, the boy returns to the wheat field and sees a carrion bird flying up out of the open mouth of the well that is no longer covered with boards.  There’s a bad smell.

The next morning, the narrator recognizes that the voice crying out from underground was saying “Christine”.  After breakfast, he looks at the pictures on the wall of the Oberfoerster’s chalet.  There’s an image of the deposition of Christ by Rubens and a portrait of Martin Luther.  Near those pictures, there is an old photograph showing a handsome young man in a soldier’s uniform.  

The lawyer returns home.  He sends a letter to the Oberfoerster.  The Game Warden writes back to him and says that his wife wept when receiving the attorney’s message, but, later, she was glad that her father had been restored to her, not as a legend, but as a man in full.  The Game Warden says that a wreath of roses now encircles the old photograph of the courageous-looking and high-spirited soldier.

The Game Warden invites the lawyer for another visit.  He says that his errant son, the young man infatuated with poetry, has successfully completed his exams.  “My wife looks closely at his face and says that she can see the features of her father in the boy.”

“Our joy would be complete if you would come for another visit,” the Game Warden writes.

“– certainly,” the lawyer responds: “if God’s sunshine wakes me tomorrow, I will come.”

Storm didn’t have long to live.  He died two years later.  The novella was made into a movie in 1974.  It has what might be considered a happy ending.  John doesn’t die in the well.  He’s rescued and, with Hanna, departs for America, perhaps, Minnesota.

KS told me that she waited for Harry at the airport until final boarding call.  She was the last person to walk down the jet-way to the waiting airplane.  Of course, Harry didn’t appear.

She ended up in Morocco in a dusty village somewhere to the west of the ruins of Carthage.  Roads were bad and it took hours to reach the capital.  I don’t know if Harry wrote to her.  However, I corresponded with KS and, even, I think sent her some books, all novels if I remember correctly.  KS wrote to me on occasion.  She had many adventures in north Africa and, even, ran afoul of the regime.  I think she was briefly jailed for infractions against the government, retaliation for some misbegotten intimacy with a scion of the royal family.

The Peace Corps rescued KS.  She had more adventures and, later, became the mistress of a very famous artist.  For a time, KS used her beautiful voice as an announcer for a rhythm, blues and soul show on a college radio station.  Then, she moved back to her home town in rural Minnesota where she lives today.

Harry lived with a woman with whom he smoked marijuana.  It wasn’t clear that the relationship involved much sex.  It was more a matter of convenience.  About five years later, Harry drove a hundred miles to see me in Austin.  We went to eat at the McDonald’s about two blocks from my law offices.

Harry took a napkin and diagramed the world of my wishes and dreams.  This space was sketched as a circle about the size of a silver dollar.  Then, he made a tiny dot on the page – this mark represented my means, that is, my ability to achieve my hopes and aspirations.  I expected that some sort of profound philosophical utterance would follow, perhaps, something about reducing my wishes to match my means or a stoic declaration that one should really have no aspirations at all.  Instead, Harry drew a much larger circle around the round silver-dollar-sized mark.  

“I think your wishes and dreams are less than your means.  What if you had the ability to expand your means to encompass what you desire?”

“That would be very good,” I said.

He told me that this was possible but that, in order to accomplish this feat, I would have to agree to become an AMWAY distributor, that is, a purveyor of soaps and other household disinfectants as part of a pyramid scheme.  I told Harry that I would have to think about this proposal, finished my hamburger and that was the last time I ever saw him.  A friend, later, told me that the woman with whom he was living became terribly ill and that Harry tenderly nursed her and that, perhaps, she recovered, although this was uncertain.  

The symphony by Dvorak ended and the audience rose for a standing ovation.  Such responses are obligatory in the small town where I live.  I thought of Antonin Dvorak spending high-summer in Spillville, Iowa, a hamlet with a little square in the center of town where there was an ancient lathe and shingle bandstand, not a bandshell but more of a wooden gazebo.  An enormous Bohemian-Catholic church named after St. Wenceslaus stood a block uphill from the square that was lined by small taverns and little cafes serving Czech food.  The cemetery was full of grave-markers in the shape of crosses made from cast-iron.  The crosses were hard to keep vertical; they tilted left and right like the harpoons stuck in back of the great white whale. 

I felt a little disoriented after the symphony.  I listen to classical music with my eyes shut and the auditorium with its red plush seats, too narrowly spaced for obese modern buttocks, seemed strange to me, a disorienting venue full of people wearing masks tightly fastened around their lower jaws.     

I didn’t see the doctor’s widow or her sister-in-law as I stepped out onto the sidewalk and found my SUV, now drowned in a long casket-shaped shadow cast by the facade of the High School.  It was Halloween and a chill wind was blowing down the avenue, scattering leaves as the breeze ran through alleys and lawns.  

Later, there would be ghosts and the walking dead, vampires and tramps and little mermaids, all traipsing along the cold sidewalks.  

I thought that I would write a book report on Storm’s tale, Ein Doppelgaenger.  Otherwise what would be the point of having laboriously deciphered the book from the German. I transform everything in my life into literature except that I have it on good authority that this is not literature at all but a self-indulgent botch of things.

The next morning would be the Day of the Dead, Dios la Muertos.  In Oaxaca, people would decorate graves.  When relatives cease to decorate a grave, the deceased suffers a kind of second death – he or she is forgotten.  The dead person makes the trip from Heaven or elsewhere to the bright meadows of the living.  But there is no one to greet to traveler.  The world of the living is colder even than death to the disappointed spirit and the ghost sadly departs this life never to return.

November 11, 2021