Books

Although the study of comparative mythology is certainly worthwhile — especially in terms of coming up with explanations for common themes like apocalyptic floods, fratricidal brothers, and virgin mothers, among others — scholars who engage in this field invariably run the risk of misinterpreting or misrepresenting the narrative traditions of cultures not their own. Bond and Christensen say this frequently happened to Campbell in his studies of Asian, African, and Native American folklore, which he either generalized until they fit into his philosophical framework or, in the case of his writing on the Sanskrit concept of ānanda, accidentally mistranslated.

As story consultant Steve Seager explains on his blog, the monomyth is only one type of ancient myth. While narratives like the story of Moses in the Book of Exodus and the battle between Marduk and Tiamat in Mesopotamian mythology can be summarized as hero’s journeys, many other tales of old — from tragedies like Oedipus Rex to folktales like Rumpelstiltskin, not to mention most creation myths — cannot.

Cultures from the ancient world not only had unique gods and monsters, but unique narrative traditions also. “Indian narrative forms are radically different from Western forms,” Seager writes. “Watch a Bollywood movie. One moment the film is a romance, then a thriller, then a musical, then a martial arts movie — confusing for a Western audience but totally natural for an Indian audience.” He defines these narrative forms as “eminently comfortable with complexity, non-linearity and the non-binary nature of being.” Where hero’s journeys deal in dualities, with the protagonist abandoning one worldview in favor of another, defeating the dragon or being defeated by it, Indian stories — shaped by Hinduism and Buddhism — do not typically present their conflicts in the framework of a choice.

In 1841, Poe wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” his groundbreaking detective story featuring Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth in Paris who unravels crimes through “ratiocination,” the application of deductive logic to the clues. Monsieur Dupin reads in the newspapers about the savage murders of two women. He explains to his sidekick that the police focus too narrowly on the rules of evidence. “This may be the practice in law, but it is not the usage of reason. My ultimate object is only the truth,” he insists. Dupin deduces that the killer was . . . an orangutan that’d escaped from a sailor’s possession. The story concludes with Poe’s defense of amateur crime-solving. “The Chief of police was not happy that the answer to the mystery of the killings had been found by someone who was not a policeman,” says his sidekick. Dupin replies that while the chief is a “good fellow” he often misses “something which is there before his eyes.”

Then a real murder captured Poe and the public’s imagination. On the sweltering morning of July 28, 1841, passersby spotted a woman’s corpse floating on the Hudson River. The victim was Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful, twenty-one-year-old “cigar girl” at John Anderson’s tobacco emporium. The Herald speculated that she was killed by a “gang of negroes.” The Post reported that an Irish gang lured Mary Rogers to the shore where she was, “after the accomplishment of their hellish purposes, brutally murdered.”

Dissatisfied, Poe did something audacious: he set out to publicly solve the Mary Rogers case while the investigation was ongoing.

This sprightly sounding young man, about to leave the shtetl and his mother behind, would die 26 years later, in 1939, as an impoverished alcoholic in Paris in 1939.

But in that period he also became one of the most prolific, insightful, and well-paid journalists in Europe, and wrote 17 novels and novellas along with at least four books of nonfiction (most of which he wrote while sitting in cafés and drinking). But despite these professional and artistic achievements, his personal life was one of catastrophe; aside from his oeuvre, he would leave behind nothing but debts and a schizophrenic wife locked away in Austria.

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Roth initially identified as a pacifist. Nevertheless, he enlisted in 1916 and worked as a military censor, served on the Galician front, and then returned in 1918 to civilian life in a war-weary and impoverished Vienna.

Here is where Roth’s lies, fabrications, and “mythomaniac” days (as David Bronson, his first biographer, called them) began. He would claim his father was a Polish count, that he was captured and served time in a Russian prison, and that he left the army as a lieutenant, none of which was true.

What was true is that the world Roth knew had shattered completely. In 1916, the old emperor—the doddering Kaiser Franz Joseph I—died during the war he had started. His successor, Karl I, held on to the empire for two years before it collapsed. Soon after that, the victorious allies gathered in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors to begin redrawing the map of Europe.

Roth began his journalism career in Vienna in 1919 and churned out a hundred articles before the newspaper he was working for folded. He met Friedl Reichler in 1919 and they married in the Leopoldstadt synagogue in Vienna in 1922. Friedl accompanied him to Berlin and Roth began to work for the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung.

Always short of money—his great translator, Michael Hofmann, called him “the most impractical man who ever lived”—Roth published his first novel, Flight Without End, in 1927. Zipper and His Father came out a year later and Right and Left a year after that. His first financially successful novel—Job: Story of a Simple Man, published in 1930—was certainly his most Jewish. Never again would a Jew hold such a central place in his writing, although Jews did appear in nearly every one of them and his descriptions in his novels of shtetls were surely based on Brody.

The Radetzky March, a family epic about the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, came out in 1932 and is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. At 369 pages, it is Roth’s longest, though that isn’t all that long for an epoch-defining piece of literature. But Roth’s other novels, often written in haste, tended to be around half that.

On Jan. 30, 1933, the day President Hindenburg installed Adolf Hitler as chancellor, Roth took a train to Paris. He would never return to Germany and, as Hofmann tells us, Radetzky March was published “nicely in time to be fed to the flames by enthusiastic National Socialist students in Berlin on 10 May, 1933.”

In all likelihood, it was this odd yet hilarious combination of characters, along with Toole’s Southern heritage, that led to the book’s posthumous release. Even in the early ‘60s, the novel offended the progressive sensibilities of publishers based in New York. It took a fellow writer from Louisiana, Walker Percy, to agree to read the manuscript and advocate for the book’s publication nearly a decade after Toole committed suicide. As if to satisfy the demands of divine justice, the book went on to become a bestseller and win the Pulitzer Prize for that year.

However, what really makes A Confederacy of Dunces a classic worthy of being read today is how closely and how well it predicts the future—our present. Even if Ignatius was a complete anomaly in his own time, there’s a whole generation of Ignatiuses today: vain, overeducated young adults who can’t hold a job, live healthily, own any property, or maintain a friendship or romantic partnership, and yet often feel proud of themselves. Like Ignatius, they feel qualified to deliver their opinion on a whole range of issues they have no clue about. Without a doubt, if Ignatius existed today, he would likely be an online influencer hosting a popular YouTube channel or podcast that spoke to disaffected men like himself.

Accidents do happen, though. As luck would have it, I came across a relatively tiny database with a large number of Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Herald Examiner issues. A perfunctory search yielded no results at all. I remembered that Bukowski’s father was mad at him for signing his piece as “Henry Bukowski” in a 1940 Los Angeles Collegian issue, his first known publication ever. I tried several variations of the Bukowski name and, lo and behold, there they were, three letters by a “Henry C. Bukowski, Jr.” I clicked on them and sure enough those were the elusive letters Bukowski had mentioned in interviews and poems, lying dormant for God knows how long in that small database no one had ever heard of.

Funnily enough, when I took a close look at the front cover of those three issues, I couldn’t help but notice they were not Los Angeles Examiner nor Los Angeles Herald Examiner, even though I was positive that’s how they were called in the database. I retraced my steps and clicked again on those Los Angeles Examiner issues, only to be taken to yet another newspaper called Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express. But of course! A classic tagging mistake! All the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express issues had been mislabeled Los Angeles Examiner. The only way to find those letters was by accident. Blame it on the Digital Humanities’ race to digitize all books known to mankind in the blink of an eye. That, and sketchy OCR at best were the main culprits of many unproductive hours in front of the computer. And how naïve of me to think that Bukowski would have submitted his letters to Los Angeles Examiner, which was the morning edition of the paper. He tried the evening edition, when he was sober enough to read it. Funny how these things make perfect sense in retrospect only.

It all had been worth the effort. Those controversial letters were no longer some sort of mythical creature mockingly teasing me in the distance, putting my patience to the test. They were right there up for grabs, waiting to be scrutinized, analyzed, and dissected. Oh, the joys ahead!

But first things first. Although claims about those Nazi sympathies had been made by Sounes in 1998, Miles in 2005, and, above all, Ben Pleasants in his Visceral Bukowski in 2004 — all of them when Bukowski was long gone — the hard truth is that the first person to happily spread the gospel was none other than Bukowski himself. In interviews, poems, stories, and novels, Bukowski didn’t shy away from talking about what he called the “Nazi trip,” especially in the infamous Pleasants tapes — I say infamous because when Pleasants was attacked for proclaiming Bukowski was a Nazi at core, he always maintained that everything he said was sourced from the tapes he recorded in the mid-to-late 1970s, when he was working on a Bukowski biography that never came to fruition. For years, it was thought that Pleasants had made that up and that those tapes were pure fabrication, but after Pleasants passed away in 2013, I was able to track them down and, indeed, I could hear Bukowski droning on and on about his Nazi persona.

What Pleasants failed to mention was that it was all said in jest. In the tapes, Bukowski is very clear about that. His Nazi trip was a giant put-on, as simple as that. Perhaps, in a perverse sort of way, it was just another instance of his self-deprecating humor. Pleasants, who had been researching into Bukowski’s work as early as 1970, was fully aware of Bukowski’s public statements. And yet, what Bukowski remembered half-jokingly in those tapes and elsewhere, Pleasants turned into radical, deeply-rooted Nazi beliefs. Striking, to say the least. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if it was just his personal vendetta over the canceled biography. It didn’t help matters that Bukowski wrote a short-story in 1978 where he made fun of Pleasants’ overbearing, self-centered demeanour.