Hunger

All through the book, we wait for the big moment: when the narrator finally makes it as a writer, when the money comes in -- a hundred kroner, say -- that lifts him up out of poverty and obscurity and allows him a decent place to live and a steady diet -- and a modicum of respect, to boot. It doesn't have to be a fortune, even: just enough to get by, to get his waistcoat out of hock, enough for him to claim with accuracy that he makes a living by his pen.

Of course, the moment never comes -- not in the pages of this book, at least. The writer in question, the quasi-autobiographical narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, gives the perfect picture of the motive to write, but the means are at a loss. We have to extrapolate from the novel's conclusion: when the unnamed speaker takes to the seas, a habitat hostile to the craft (but, apparently, if Melville is to be considered, not hostile to the formation of the proper temperament). It is then and only then -- in the last page and a half of the novel -- that we figure out how the narrator got out of the mess he was in -- starvation-grade poverty -- and made it to the point at which he could actually pull together the wits required to tell his own tale. It isn't so much the sea, though, that catalyzes this writer's pursuance of his craft; rather, in keeping with the point of the book, it's the fact that he finally has the benefit of a steady diet. Forget five hundred dollars and a room of your own -- it's daily bread that a writer needs above all.

And without that daily bread, how good a writer can this character be? We know better than to assume that the masterpieces he believes himself to be crafting in the midst of his poverty are genuine. It's clear from his inane ramblings -- and the sympathetic but sensible rejections he repeatedly receives -- that whatever he is trying to write in the midst of maintaining his unwonted hunger diet is not material on par with the final product -- the novel we are reading, written in the style of a memoir. It's only after the fact, with the benefit of looking back from a very different vantage point, that the narrator can present this kind of experience with any kind of clarity or artfulness. The narrator himself is not so much unreliable as much as he is reliably capturing an unreliable state that he inhabited in the past; alternating between complete arrogance and a supreme self-loathing, he himself realizes as much when he is in the latter mode. The voice of this novel has a perfect immediacy, but at the same time we can recognize a certain distinct distance. The experience has passed, but it has remained with him.

Hunger reads like a leaner, more taught Crime and Punishment, only there is no murder -- no galvanizing, irrevocable act -- to force the young would-be man of consequence into the crucible of his fate. The narrator of Hunger does, however, give Raskolnikov a run for his money when it comes to alienation. The alternating currents of self-doubt (a hazardous and even self-destructive sense of pride) and delusions of grandeur are common to both. Both are crazed and alienated by the dire poverty of their situations. Both are prompted equally by impulses of dire cruelty and seemingly random impulses toward utter kindness; if impulses toward kindness could be said to reach a hysterical pitch, they do so with both of these fellows. Both of them reside within the very midst and broil of the city yet are separated from everyone around them. Both talk to themselves aloud, oblivious as they wander the streets. Yet Raskolnikov commits his irrevocable act based on logic -- to prove a theory, to put thoughts into action. Hamsun's narrator, by contrast, doesn't seem capable of sticking with a particular train of thought long enough to see it through to the name of action; he is too sicklied over with a cast of thought that is not only pale but fractured as well. Laughing at himself, jumping on his hat, weeping his way through the streets, throwing what little money he has to near-perfect strangers, selling off his near-worthless possessions one by one to pawnbrokers ... In that sense, Hamsun's narrator matches Raskolnikov almost deed for deed. But the case could still be made: without any ability to hold a thought together long enough to act upon it, Hamsun delivers in a certain unmistakable way the crazier of the two. This we recognize as a kind of modern paralysis, bearing with it the sting of a psychological acuity that is Freudian in nature. The voice of the novel is the crucial element here, what allows this insanity to be rendered with such relentless precision.

Given the limitations of the mental state of the narrator at the time of the events he recounts, it's a bold move to use first-person here. But the use of first-person is also exactly what makes Hunger work. What it sacrifices in terms of clarity, though, it makes up for in expressiveness. The real feature that separates Hunger from Crime and Punishment -- what, in fact, makes it not only a leaner novel but a more realistic and more modern novel -- is Hamsun's trenchant use of voice, the psychological depth that is conveyed not only by the story but by the language of the story. Hunger reaches beyond the psychological depravity of Poe, for instance, because it deals with a more realistic and less sensational fringe. The voice carries this book. It is, one might argue, the most modern of 19th century novels, one that is full thirty years ahead of its time, and in addition it deserves to be lauded for not doing what we might expect it to do: to give us the story of how and why a writer became a writer. In that sense, Hunger keeps good company: neither The Bell Jar nor This Boy's Life tells us directly how the person speaking came to be the person writing; we have to extrapolate from the data provided. John Fante's Ask the Dust runs most nearly parallel to Hunger. We can see the drive, the examples that prove, over and over, the capacity for verbal fluency and the will to pursue the writer's life. What goes into the formation of a writer, though, is perhaps ultimately something very hard to know, even for the writers themselves. What Hunger proves, though, is that the writer's life begins with hunger and only reaches fruition when there is food to be had.

The Crow Census

Common American Crow by John James Audubon

Certainly, they are common enough, these birds that so often when we look up are there, bracketing the sky with their uneven wingbeats. If we consider the crow as a punctuation mark, it's an ambiguously rendered one, one that means whatever you want it to mean. I was surprised to find out that people in some cultures consider the crow a symbol of harmony, but I can certainly see it. The meaning of the crow depends on context, mood. Like Walt Whitman, your average crow contains multitudes.

Of course, many people consider the crow a nuisance; you don't need a license to kill a crow, and there's no bag limit in the United States between August and March. And many people consider it an omen, like its slightly bigger, rougher, more scraggly cousin, the raven, and just about any other black bird, for that matter. Anything that eats carrion and trash tends to get a bad rap, but undeservedly so, I would say. Such scavengers merely take out the trash we ourselves don't want to deal with.

Regardless, the crow is a survivor. It has been around for a long, long time, and it can adapt to just about any climate. The crow is universal, world-wide. Crows are smart birds; they can be taught to speak. Legends abound about their intelligence. Aesop was rather fond of them. Crows are raucous, noisy, selfish, social, gregarious. But to see a congress of them -- what's called, in a somewhat unjustifiable maligning, a "murder" -- is to become aware of something crucial about the world we inhabit, and that is that they are much more at home in this place than we are. It belongs to them as much as or more than it belongs to anyone or anything else. When we clear out of here, I have a suspicion that they will still be around.

The etymology of "crow" is somewhat telling. Suddenly one day I was struck when it occurred to me that the Scottish word "corbie" and the Latin word "corvus" and the English word "crow" are all related. This suggests that there has been a lot of talk about crows for many years: the words that span multiple languages are often the words that have been around for a while.

Crows can supposedly recognize distinct features among human beings, but we are unable to recognize any defining differences between one crow and the next. I wonder: can a crow really tell himself apart from any other crow? Where does one crow end and the next one begin?

Each time I visit the Rocky Mountains, the crows there -- in much stronger numbers than anywhere else I have been -- remind me that they are the dominant feature of the landscape: more so than than the pines, even, which merely sway in the wind while the crows circle about them. Their cries call all through the wind as though the birds were themselves putting it into motion themselves with their calls, their breaths, their wingbeats.

I don't know that anyone would ever be able to perform a census. The king of crows himself couldn't pull it off. Maybe that's what they're up to, though, what they're attempting -- all that cawing and cakling about in the trees, on fence posts, atop dumpsters -- they're taking their own count, sounding off, checking names to see who's there. But every time they start to finalize the roster, confusion sets in: they can't tell who has been counted and who hasn't, and by that time there are that many more of them and they lose count. They scatter, break and combine, they multiply -- and the count starts again.

Catalpa

With their big, broad, rubbery leaves and their seed pods that hang down all ragged and stringy, catalpa trees seem to me as though they belong in a swamp, in the South, somewhere very humid. They seem to have been designed precisely to fit into a William Faulkner novel. The trunk of a well-grown catalpa is massy and round, but then the branches droop and tangle themselves all around, tending to dip back down toward the ground. What makes this tree my favorite, though, is the flower. I found this image on the Oklahoma University website:



You don't expect a catalpa to have such a pretty flower, and you can't quite believe it until you actually look at it up close. The catalpa flower has an orchid-like quality to it, a long tongue and a fine spray of purple coming out of the bell, the yellow splotches on either side, the ruffled white skirts. I don't know enough about botany to know what any of it is for except that it is all essential to the process of making more catalpa trees. The flower seems like it ought to be delicate, but there are thousands of these things all over a tree that seems otherwise to be quite sturdy. If I were a bee, I would spend time here. The fragrance of the flowers is sweet and drowsy, not as powerful as honeysuckle but still maintaining a definite presense when you are in proximity of the tree. The fact that these trees grow around here -- that they flourish, even -- never ceases to surprise me. I'm glad for that.