on reading julie orringer's flight portfolio

Julie Orringer with Katherine Noel - taken at last nights event

In the middle of Julie Orringer's ambitious new novel The Flight Portfolio one of the characters recounts a German proverb. "It goes like this. Who's most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow? None of them.  The most important is the boy who carries the milk to the market.  One wrong step and the work of all the others is lost in an instant."

The proverb demonstrates the crucial role that Varian Fry played during Nazi occupied France. Fry is the protagonist of this historical novel, and in 1940 he spearheaded a rescue operation to get imperiled artists and writers out of France.  It involved first verifying who the importance artists were; then obtaining passports and visas, be they forged or legitimate.  In some cases the artists had to be hidden before they found safe passage to the United States.  The work was done without much cooperation from the United States government, with the exception of some heroic efforts on the part of Hiram Bingham, a vice consul who against State Department guidelines issued hundreds of visas.

You can imagine too, the moral questions besetting such a program. With a limited number of visas on hand, who was deemed worth the opportunity of escape?  In fact, who was worthy of survival?  And what about the question of potential?  There are so many difficult questions.

The novel runs about 550 pages. When you have other reading projects and obligations (which I do) there has to be something great about a book of this complexity and scope that keeps you coming back.  I was immediately drawn into the narrative with the opening sequence where Varian Fry visits the Chagalls.  He must impress upon Chagall the crucial importance of leaving France.  His life is at stake.  But Chagall believes his reputation will protect him. The scene plunges you immediately into the difficulty of Fry's mission.

Over the next several hundred pages we meet many artists and writers of the time, including a lot of surrealists.  There are wonderful scenes where surrealist games are played - all based on fact.  They took up residence at a gorgeous Marseille villa called Air Bel - where they were able briefly to live a different life and escape the horrors of war.  We meet such people as  Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Andre Breton and Andre Gide.  Other important figures of the time, like Peggy Guggenheim and Eleanor Roosevelt also make appearances in the book.

But this is historical fiction, and as such it imagines fictional characters too.  Among those is Elliott Grant, an imagined Harvard classmate of Varian Fry who shows up in Marseille with a special request:  to enable the passage out of France of a brilliant young physicist who is the son of a very close friend.  The inclusion of this fictional character lets Orringer open up further provocative questions about race, sexual preference and artistic accomplishment.  How have they influenced our assessments of who and what is deemed worth opportunity and survival.  And yes, as well as being the story of Varian Fry’s courageous rescue operation, this novel is also a love story.

Some critics have taken issue with this.  Writing in the New York Times Cynthia Ostik questions what she refers to as "a knot of intertwined characters, who together come to dominate, even to override, and finally to invade the historical Fry."  But last night at Politics and Prose where I was honored to introduce Julie Orringer's book talk, she explained her reasoning.  After poring over twenty something boxes of memos, letters, memoir drafts and diaries in the Varian Fry archive for ten years, she made sure all historical facts were accurately portrayed.  But at the same time, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind, after reading between the lines, that Varian Fry was gay.  

By the way, the flight portfolio which gives the novel its title, was a portfolio of donated lithographs by artists of the day,  collected with the intention of exhibiting them in the United States, in order to gain support for the cause and demonstrate what was at risk.

This novel is long, there's no question about it. Cynthia Ostik called it "movie tone make-believe" And to be honest in the middle you do get the sense that one more revision would have made the book that much better.  Perhaps it was a revision too far for an author who had been immersed in the complexities of this story for a decade.  So yes, some of the dialog begins to read like a film script, with a lot of exposition, and not so much inner life. Some scenes beg for actors to breathe life and heart into them.

Having said this, the final chapters brought it all together again.  Oh, the love lost.  And the lost lives - lives forfeited for no better reason than that others were spared instead. Also, the dreadful sense that in spite of the countless heroic rescue efforts accomplished, there might always be more that didn't happen.  Underlying this, is Varian's personal heartache from which you sense he may never recover. For me, this made Fry's nobility, Fry's actual person more vivid, rather than less so.  Very personal emotional struggles certainly lie behind great heroic public deeds. 

By the way, during the q&a portion of last night's event one audience member stood up to say that as a girl in Connecticut she was a play mate of Varian Fry's daughter.  When he died suddenly at 59, and everyone read his obituary, they were astonished at the life this man had led during the war.

Some of the things Julie Orringer revealed in her talk last night added still new dimensions to this already complex tour de force of a book. A recording of the talk will be available on the Politics and Prose youtube channel in a few weeks time. I encourage you to listen - and of course to read this incredible book.

#julieorringer #flightportfolio #varianfry

man on the edge of a nervous breakdown - on reading Saul Bellow's Herzog

1st edition cover

Sometimes I begin to read book club selections like a recalcitrant student, plowing through dutifully, and without much enjoyment.  Why do I pick these books? If I hadn't been contracted to facilitate the book group discussion, I probably wouldn't finish some of these selections.

But perversely, that's why I pick them.  I pick them because something inside me knows that I can't just stick to what comes naturally, to what comforts and entertains.  I want to grow as a person and as a reader, so I must get out of my comfort zone.  Probably this is why lots of people participate in book clubs.  The added incentive of discussion at the end,  gets us through books we wouldn't read otherwise.

Nine times out of ten, I understand upon finishing such books - in this case, upon finishing Herzog, why it was important reading and why it's considered a masterpiece. My understanding of literature and of humankind has been broadened.  My capacity for empathy has enlarged,  as has my admiration for the author, and for what goes into writing something that will stand the test of time.

But when I started Herzog, I was thoroughly annoyed. Something about Saul Bellow has always annoyed me.  Maybe because he comes from a certain epoch where casual sexism and racism, a sense of white male entitlement and being at the top of your game is never for a moment questioned.  And although this novel was written in 1964, there's no nod to a contemporary sensibility about the culture. It is a man's world - an intellectual white man's world at that, and there's no inkling of any social or political unrest brewing, any shifting mores for women or people of color, nor any attempt to see things through their eyes.

This is underscored by the character of Moses Herzog (and Herzog is a roman a clef), recently divorced and in a fragile psychological state. He decides to write letters to all and sundry: ex wife,  dead family members, New York Times, childhood pals.  He's sorting through his life, airing grievances, ranting and looking for escape. He buys new clothes although he professes not to care about them, and takes up social invitations in the hopes of distracting himself. But since most of the action takes place inside his head - the letters pour forth as the ramblings and scrawlings of a disturbed but brilliant mind.

Here he is writing to the Times.  "Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in the Marxian sense. In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair and to read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse towards well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society...." etc.   Do you get why it's annoying?

Yet Herzog is perfectly justified to himself. He's no cuckold and no fool. Nor is he mad; he has intellectual range and taste. He appreciates women as sexual objects, especially Ramona who is "lovely, fragrant, sexual, good to the touch. " He also has a finely tuned sense of the injustice of his own personal history.  Maybe because his intellectual faculties are so finely tuned, as is his sense of his position in the world, I did not at first recognize that he's holding on to sanity by a thread.  He pays great attention to his physical care - to bathing,  shaving and dressing rituals with a self-satisfied vanity, and as he muses about his ex wife Madeleine, his friend and betrayer Valentine Gersbach, his childhood friend Asphalter, or lover Ramona,  we experience his whole life.

It isn't until the final third of the novel that all the pieces pull together.  He goes to Chicago to visit his daughter June and after a car accident visits a house he owns in the Berkshires.  The full force of his breakdown comes crashing down and the writing reaches a glorious crescendo.  Finally the notion of  "a man at the top of his game" is questioned and collapses.

Entering the house- the money pit Herzog invested in for Madeleine and June's sakes, he finds it in  terrible disrepair.  He enters the bedroom where "He found the young owls in the large light fixture over the bed where he and Madeleine had known so much misery and hatred. (some delight as well.) On the mattress much nest litter had fallen - straws, wool threads, down, bits of flesh (mouse ends) and streaks of excrement.  Unwilling to disturb these flat faced little creatures, Herzog pulled the mattress of his marriage bed into June's room.  He opened more windows, and the sun and country air at once entered. He was surprised to feels such contentment.... contentment?  Whom was he kidding, this was joy!"

And what joy I experienced reading these final chapters. The writing is so good that it almost disappears - and you are fully inside the experience. With the last lines of the novel, tears came into my eyes.   No, I never liked Moses Herzog. I actively disliked him. Were I to encounter a man like this in real life, I'd have neither patience nor sympathy.   So it's pretty wonderful to have spent several hours in his company and to have allowed his state, his story, to affect me like this.  The best kind of reading can be like that sometimes.

#herzog #saulbellow