We've been waiting for this one for something like half a century. Was it worth the wait?  Well, yes and no. These days, however important, it's only one more brick in the Robert Johnson wall, now a cottage industry all its own. Johnson's been mythologised by everyone from Samuel Charters and John Hammond Sr to Bob Dylan and John Hammond Jr. as well as demythologised by Elijah Wald. Through it all one sometimes forgets that  that real people have been, and still are, part of Robert Johnson's legacy. Perhaps McCormick's book, after all these years of waiting, was always going to be anti-climatic, all the more compounded by the author's personal problems. Yet I was enthralled by the book, even if there were times that I began to wonder about its veracity. Still, given McCormick's work in general, I was more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Biography of a Phantom could easily qualify as a crime novel. Not only is it an investigation, but Mack’s style and approach to Robert Johnson, is obviously based on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the tropes of hardboiled narratives.  Okay, the book is flawed, as was, of course, McCormick's approach. His mistreatment of Johnson's relatives, such as Carrie Thompson, cannot be dismissed. Which is why I think it's important to quote the book's editor, John W. Troutman,  when he writes in the book's Afterwards:  

“This book...ultimately is less about the life of Robert Johnson than it is about the human hellhounds and psychological phantoms that affected everyone involved. Their impact and reverberations seem interconnected and boundless, beginning with the lynchings and other racially motivated violence that terrorized and jeopardized Johnson’s family as well as Black communities throughout Mississippi during the early 1900s. They extend to the ineffable consequences of entombing Johnson’s humanity in a mythology that ascribed his musical brilliance literally to the doings of the devil, rather than to recognizing the labor of his craft, and the allusions and allegory in the poetic wellspring of Black songwriters that Johnson was drawing from and replenishing. They manifest in the historical plunder and exploitation of Black music and musicians by the record industry, and the toll weighed on Johnson’s family members as they endured decades of litigation over Johnson’s recordings and likeness. They manifest in the condition that both fueled McCormick’s manic research production and vast assembly of knowledge, and that also relentlessly tormented him, constraining his ability to make good choices, and then expanding the suffering of all those around him when his choices were bad. It is a story of tragedy, suffered by all, where mental health plays a role, but so does racism, greed, and the instruments of white supremacy in the legal system and corporate structure, in which the concerns of Carrie Thompson were so easily and consistently dismissed."

My Favourite Music of 2023

 

Hasan Ibn Ali, Reaching For the Stars

Jesse Mae Hemphill, She Wolf

Qasim Naqvi, Wadada Leo Smith, Andrew Cyrille

Jeff Parker, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

Favourite Books of 2023

     

 

In no particular order:

-Cruz by Nicolas Ferraro (Soho Crime). 

-Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper (Faber) 

-Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill (Knopf) 

-Biography of a Phantom by Mack McCormic

-Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (Fitzcarraldo Editions) 

- Death Watch by Stona Fitch (Arrow Editions)

-The Last Songbird by Daniel Weizmann (Melville House)

-Revolution- An Intellectual History by Enzo Traverso (Verso)

-Writers & Missionaries by Adam Shatz (Verso)

-The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

-Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy by Steven Powell (Bloomsbury)                                

-The Crystal Text by Clark Coolidge (City Lights)

-Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette (NYRB)

-The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright (Library of America)

-Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger (Faber)

Writing On Dangerous Ground: From the Poetry of Film Noir to Film Noir Poetry

What Is Noir?

Is more than darkness. Is

Corruption of the heart. Is

behind closed doors, board-

room or street. Is fucked

Whether you do, don’t sing, 

Moan, sniff or shoot. Is a

ticket to all we have, never

enough. Is greed, lust, a fatal

kiss, the banker, cop, criminal, or

any other poor sucker who

screams for mercy. Is a

dream of autonomy, femme

fatality causality, breathing,

“Hey, baby, let’s take it all.”

Is a corpse, a handful of dust

and ultimately who cares, if 

the only punishment is death.

A poetic response to what constitutes noir, whether on the page or on the screen, isn’t as unusual as one might think. There have been, after all, any number of poets who’ve been attracted to noir fiction, and, by extension, film noir. And any number of noir writers who began as poets, stretching back to Raymond Chandler, who, even before his stories began to appear in Black Mask, was publishing poetry, admittedly doggrel, in The Westminster Gazette. To make sense out of the relationship between poetry and noir fiction and film, one need only recall the legendary French crime publisher Marcel Duhamel’s advice to Chester Himes in the late 1940s regarding the house rules for Serie Noire crime fiction: “Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like motion pictures…No streams of consciousness at all. We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what- only what they’re doing. Always doing something. From one scene to another. Don’t worry about it making sense.” A statement that isn’t far removed from William Carlos Williams’s imagist declaration, “No ideas but in things.” Like modern lyric poetry, noir, whether on page or screen, favours minimalism, a quality one sees in the films of Jules Dassin, Joseph Lewis, Anthony Mann, Robert Siodmak, and early Kubrick, as well as in the writing of Dashiell Hammett and, to an even higher degree, in Paul Cain. A technique whose precise imagery sharpens one’s focus on details and the overall narrative contour. 

Despite the attraction, poets, depending on how serious they took to their task, have had varying degrees of success in the genre. Some like Dorothy B. Hughes, Kenneth Fearing, Alfred Hayes, Charles Willeford and Stephen Dobyns, would find a home in noir fiction, and produce successful novels, while others, such Richard Hugo and Jack Spicer were destined to be dabblers, producing work of limited interest. Then there are those, like John Harvey and the late Jim Nisbet who have been able to move between the two types of writing. Some, as dissimilar as Henri Coulette, Robert Polito, Michael Gizzi and Alice Notley (Negativity's Kiss) have been heavily influenced by noir film and fiction.  Not to mention those whose poetry contains noirish elements, from Weldon Kees and Charles Reznikoff to John Wieners, and Charles Bukowski, from Lynda Hull to Summer Brenner and Frank Stanford, or, like the Irish poet Martina Evans (“As Mitchum said- Crossfire (1947)- the snakes were loose.” And “If you tell your dream, you don’t have to dream it/anymore, says Alan Ladd, Crossfire (1942) simply include elements of film noir.

It stands to reason that a poetic genre like film noir should, in turn, engender poetic responses. Nevertheless, I can’t off-hand think of another book of poetry that takes the same approach as On Dangerous Ground. Of course, there have been critics, such as Manny Farber, James Naremore, Nicholas Christopher, Robert Polito, Geoffrey O’Brien and Sarah Imogen Smith who have written about the genre of film noir in a poetic manner. A less eccentric path to follow, their writing- at least three of them, O’Brien (Arabian Nights), Christopher (Desperate Characters) and Polito (Hollywood & God), are, in fact, film-noir influenced poets- derives from a passion for film and an ability to communicate their perceptions in an intelligent, concise and perceptive manner. Yet such writing is substantially different from someone writing poems about film noir, much less with the hope of challenging the usual passive nature of viewing such films. 

My intention: to take 50 classic examples of film noir, and create a poem surrounding each of them. And, in doing so, investigate not only the  films but the world in which they were made and viewed, then and now. The poems themselves derived from whatever happened to attract my attention: a piece of dialogue, camerawork, lighting, a particular scene, a plot, an individual performance, sartorial style, the director, or simply the film’s ambiance, and its nexus in space and time. In many cases, I ended up writing about those films in terms of their politics, not quite free associating, but more like what poet the late poet Robert Duncan used to call “tone leading.” In other words, not a thought-out process but more akin to after-thoughts, resulting at times in nothing more than rants and raves about the world as it was and is. Such is the fractured nature of the world and  the poems themselves. In the end, the poems in On Dangerous Ground could be thought as distortions, often humorous, of the films under consideration, like scrambled film reviews that exist at a particular moment, distilled through time, whose shelf life will last until the next viewing, by which time another set of linguistic prompts or images might attract my attention.  

Why the title?  For one thing, Nicholas Ray’s 1951 film, On Dangerous Ground, with a screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides, has always been one of my favourite films, and one that has stood the test of time. But the title also relates to film noir as a genre, as well as to the position of anyone who attempts to explicate such films places, whatever their agenda. Not to mention how the title describes Ray’s film: a sadistic urban cop confronts and falls under the spell of a blind woman, although up to that point he has no conception of how vulnerable people can be, including himself, so blind to any subtleties. His own rough justice turned inside out as the various narratives reflect and refract one another. All that the snow not so much a symbol of purity as a condition of life. It’s all dangerous ground- the city, the place from which the boy-killer falls, the relationship between the cop and the blind woman. It’s a world, however modified for general consumption, in which everyone is vulnerable- cop, blind woman, child. All the product, so typical of film noir, of a cross-section of cultures, under the influence of European emigres and Popular Front leftists: Wisconsinite Ray, of German-Norwegian parentage, Greek-Armenian A.I. Bezzerides, filmed by a New Yorker, George Diskant, whose roots can most likely be traced back to Russia, and Ida Lupino, a Londoner, who not only starred in the film but directed various parts when Ray was too ill to continue.

Basing a book of poems on films might be unusual, but it didn’t take a great leap of the imagination to come up with the idea. After all, these films which I’ve long been obsessed by have always been prime fodder for interpretation, and ideal for riffing off of. Moreover, these days they are all within easy reach.  On the other hand, any subject might have served a similar function. That is, had I been a different person. All that’s required in a subject is that can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, and used as a means of investigating the culture. In my case, the poems, written off and on over some ten years, were at times no more than an excuse to watch and think about the films. But as I watched them, and proceeded to write about them, it made me view the films in a different way, as artifacts to be acted upon rather than packaged and left on the shelf. So it was a two-way process, the poems activated the films, but the films clearly activated the poems, allowing me to go anywhere I liked with them, from glossing the surface of a given film to scouring its depths, while, at the same time, addressing subjects like crime, guilt, innocence, bourgeois values, late capitalism, and gendered space. Which made the films timeless, this even though they are so much of a period. Not that anyone could deny that, in the end, they are just movies- Ju-Ju beans for the eyes. Put them under the slightest scrutiny and they reveal themselves not only as documents of the culture, but something like a series of dreams about failed utopias. Half a century on, these films- spanning the years 1941 to 1976- can still captivate, and capable of affecting us on a personal as well as political level. Film noir poetry? “Give it a name,” as they say line in Scott Rosenberg’s 1995 Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead. A title deriving from a Warren Zevon song in which that aficionado of noir film and fiction goes on to sing, “You won't need a cab to find a priest/Maybe you should find a place to stay/Some place where they never change the sheets/And you just roll around Denver all day.”  Which goes to show that the relationship between poetry and noir, whether on page or screen, can take surprising forms. Hopefully the poems that constitute On Dangerous Ground will, if nothing else,  lead to further investigations, no matter that form they might take.

Ten Films and Their Opening Lines

The Big Heat: “Shocking, only if suburbia can/be paradise.”

Dark Passage: “It’s never easy, clocking the world, driving/the back roads and waterfront.”

Fallen Angel: “That was then, when Otto could still/see in the dark, and anti-fascism was a/thing” Human Desire: “How many/doors to make a room to make/an exit.”

In a Lonely Place: “A shattered world, future so bleak/it’s hardly worth the effort.”

The Killers: “Night time the proverbial/for irritable hoodlums…”

Kiss Me Deadly: “It’s the American Way, atomic/L.A. devolving into the future.”

Nightmare Alley: “Forget the reprobates, crawling parasites and/fallen angels…”

On Dangerous Ground: “With darkness bleeding into/domesticity…”

Sweet Smell of Success: A nostalgia of jazz, location shots, and barely/palatable venom.

Where the Sidewalk Ends: “A cop is basically a criminal,”/with an instinct for…legalised/violence”

(An earlier version of this entry appeared in Crime Time.)

On Dangerous Ground is available from Amazon and through Close to the Bone Press. 

Tumbling Full Throttle Into Oblivion: The Last Songbird by Daniel Weizmann

 “This hard-boiled stuff — it’s a menace.”

— Dashiell Hammett, 1950

 

At the center of Daniel Weizmann’s new wave noir novel, The Last Songbird, is Adam “Addy” Zantz, a nebbish-like Lyft driver and would-be songwriter who, at moments opportune or not, can’t stop semi-composed lyrics from popping into his head. As he drives through L.A.’s streets, mean as well as meaningless, he obsesses about what might have been. He’s unable to come to terms with his ex- and former songwriting partner, having left him for a more professional songwriter-boyfriend. Nor can he relinquish his attachment to Annie Linden, a 73-year old former celebrity singer-songwriter (think Stevie Nicks crossed with Joni Mitchell), still worshipped by her fans, whom Adam drives to and from her Malibu home no matter the time of day. When her body is washed ashore in Hermosa Beach, the wrong person is arrested, and Adam feels he owes it to Annie to find the actual killer, as well as honour a request she made that he find something — Adam doesn’t yet know what — from her past. What keeps him on this two-fold case is not only his connection to a woman he regards as a kindred, if self-centered, spirit, but because she was, on the basis of a demo he once played for her in his car, the only person ever to express an appreciation for his potential as a songwriter.

Something of a Harold and Maude type of relationship, perhaps, but as any all-night cab driver can attest, unlikely fly-by-night friendships and adventures are commonplace in that line of work. Driving the graveyard shift in San Francisco in the late 1960s, every night, for me felt like an adventure, stopping only just short of what Zantz experiences. Maybe it was the drugs, at the time de rigueur for driving into the early morning light, enhancing everything, not least the paranoia that insisted on riding shotgun, on the lookout for the Zodiac or some other encrazed individual with a grudge against cabbies.  Although more fleeting than Zantz’s obsession with Annie, I remember falling for an older French woman — probably no more than in her early 30’s — straight out of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop — who read palms in Fisherman’s Wharf to pay for her and her daughter’s return to Paris. Fresh out of San Francisco State, I willingly contributed to her traveling expenses. Driving a cab is like that, the sort of job, whether permanent or precarious, that attracts a certain type, the sort who’d otherwise be writing poetry or a novel, or, as in Adam’s case, songs, and who can’t help but view their taxi as their personal theater, sometimes of the absurd, at other times of cruelty, depending on their fare, and on the way the cultural winds happen to be blowing on that particular day. It’s also the perfect job for someone investigating the culture. After all, in that line of work, as Weizmann demonstrates, contact with the world in all its sleazy glory is unavoidable, thrusting its presence on you whether you seek it out or not.

All of which is to say, what might seem far-fetched in the light of day can be ghostly real once the sun goes down, and you’re at the mercy of the laws of chance. Because once all those upstanding citizens go home from their jobs or entertainments of choice, and the streets fill up with the denizens of the night, anything can happen. It simply goes with the territory. And this is what Weizmann so ably captures, placing Addy in a world just a step outside his comfort zone and comprehension, subject, for better or worse, to the winds of fate. Consequently, The Last Songbird can be added to that swathe of crime novels, now a sub-genre all its own, that focus on taxi cab drivers, such as Lee Durkee’s The Last Taxi Driver, Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel, Fuminor Nakamura’s The Boy In the Earth, and others. Not to mention a film like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. And who can forget the anarcho-syndicalist taxi cab driver, played by Elijah Cook Jr. in Wim Wenders’ film Hammett, with a screenplay written by, amongst others, noirists Joe Gores and Ross Thomas.

But it seems like it takes more than one sub-genre to venture into the depths of present day Los Angeles. Certainly Weizmann’s first-person narrative could also be categorised as Jewish-noir. Born in Israel during the 1967 Six Day War and the Summer of Love, then arriving in Hollywood as an infant, Weizmann litters his novel with Jewish characters and vernacular. No so much in the vein of  Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Sidel novels, but more like those loosely knit narratives from the 1970s that wore their secular Jewishness lightly, such as Andrew Bergman’s Hollywood and Levine or Roger Simon’s The Big Fix. All of them highly readable and seemingly innocent regarding the harder edges of the genre, as if they’d only recently discovered the likes of Hammett or Chandler. Not really pastiche but using the genre’s tropes to explain this great big ball of confusion called the modern world. Without over-committing itself, The Last Songbird plays on those same tropes, but without the fake cynicism or wise-guy attitude, resulting in a narrative that takes the chaos of the city and the era as given.

Equally, one could claim that The Last Songbird belongs in still another sub-genre, that which investigates and revolves around the music industry. These run the gamut from Day Keene’s Payola, Arthur Lyons’ Three With a Bullet and Bill Moody’s Death of a Tenor Man to Elaine Jesmer’s Number One With a Bullet, Laurence Gonzales’s Jambeaux and, dare I say it, my own Cry For a Nickel, Die For a Dime. Do all these sub-genres thrown together simply indicate the lack of substance or commitment on the part of the author? Not necessarily. After all, unlike novels by the likes of Jim Thompson, David Goodis or Chester Himes, not every noir novel requires its author to put him or herself on the line, or to dig down so deep that it is difficult to understand how resurfacing can be possible. While Addy faces his own particular meltdown, there’s no reason to suspect that Weizmann might be undergoing a similar crisis; rather, one gets the impression that he is simply putting his considerable skills into constructing a good story while saying something that might resonate with the reader.

Noir-light it might be, but The Last Songbird has a lot going for it as it moves across Los Angeles, hitting various psycho-geographical points. And in going along for the ride, one moves from strip malls and strip joints to freeways and backstreets, from suburban McMansions to sleazy inner city apartments, from the Pacific Coast Highway to beach towns and criss-crossing freeways. At times it seems as though the novel’s various characters — “Every person a song in disguise” — are creatures of these various geographical points. There’s Addy’s semi-estranged suburban sister (actually his cousin), a relatively successful lawyer who is both jealous of Addy and looks down on him; the crazy dead mother, whom Addy recalls spending her final alcoholic years living with him out of her car; Annie’s ex-husband, a misogynistic creep who “In another life would have made dynamite extra in Fiddler On the Roof,” lives in Venice where he plots his takeover of the post-Annie pie; Addy’s friend, Ephraim, aka “Double Fry,” an orthodox Jewish photographer who lives on a boat at the beach, monitors police calls and dishes out words of Jewish wisdom; Bix, a fall-guy employed by Annie and allowed to live on her premises; Annie’s feminist ex-lover who lives near San Luis Obispo; and a machine shop owner, a black guy who, way back when, taught Annie to play guitar, and lives in “the last semi-industrial section of West Adams.” Add to that the assortment of young tearaways, women haters, sauna salesmen, memorabilia collectors, new age reprobates and, of course, pushy cops. Characters that seem to shape shift as the narrative progresses, none more so than Annie, both before and after her death.

In fact, The Last Songbird is the kind of novel that sneaks up on you. Before you know it, what began as an ordinary run-out written in a pedestrian style soon starts to show flashes of street-level lyricism and incisiveness. Perhaps it’s conscious on Weizmann’s part. Or maybe it just seems that way, as the novel quickly gathers steam until you feel you’re trapped in a narrative that might have been concocted by Raymond Chandler had the latter not had an elite private education and petit-bourgeois inclinations. But in the end, when it comes to a clear writing style along with the politics to back it up, Weizmann has more in common with Hammett, perhaps accompanied by the ingestion of some kind of Pynchon-pill of the Inherent Vice variety, whose effect  makes things all the more dizzying and unpredictable, until L.A. turns into his own personal Poisonville:

“Bottrell returned with a cardboard file box and dropped into his lavender chair, which had shrunk into children’s furniture under his large frame. His reappearance gear-shifted the mood to even worse- I had been badly mistaken when I read him breezy. Now, he radiated the seething noblesse oblige of the Burdened Frontiersman. With Nguyen at least, you knew where you stood: Indochinese testosterone and shit to prove. There was geopolitical turbulence in her snicker as she took the box from Bottrell and drew some ancient forms from a folder — handwritten. My handwriting.”

But Weizmann has the sense to shy away from the mock Chandlerisms one has come to expect from so many neo-noir novels, opting instead for zingers that almost always hit their target, albeit in an off-centered way. Like morphing the overused Larkin family lines, which in Weizmann’s hands become “It takes a whole family to go insane.” Or playing off those same psycho-geographical cliches regarding what it’s like to live in a manufactured paradise: “Wherever you were, you were equidistant to the middle of nowhere. I tried to approximate the act of walking with an agonizing herky-jerky limp. The ape crawled up a staircase.” Okay, it’s true, Weizmann’s syntax can sometimes be a bit eccentric, defying grammar but rarely logic. At least to my ears, but then, no longer in L.A.’s linguistic loop, that could just be what passes for common usage in the southland these days. Because Weizmann never comes across as embittered or cynical, he can, suddenly shift attention away from the other to his hapless narrator:

“His organized yard, his bony shoulders and lazy hands and gold LCD watch, all gave the impression of a clam, clear mind, a sober tinkerer. But really he was buzzed on booze and propane and voltage — and he was hiding permanently in this metal pile-up. Hiding, just like the old man in Public Storage. How many of these hiders did any American city contain? I’m guessing tens of thousands. Including me.”

Having said all of that, I don’t really know how good — whatever “good” might mean — The Last Songbird actually is. All I can say is that it’s been one of the most entertaining crime novels I’ve read for some time. Full of surprises, Weizmann kept me guessing right to the end, unusual for such books these days. Nor am I sure how all the disparate parts of the novel come together. But somehow they do. This even though Weizmann takes the reader from one extreme to the other, but while doing so, never vacating the political terrain regarding gender politics, power relationships, family life, friendship, or celebrity culture. Weizmann, whose checkered past includes the anthology Drinking With Bukowski and the charming A History of Rock — A Grade-Schoolers Vision of Rock Music 1977-1980, as well as pages of new wave journalism, often filed under the name Shredder, for Flipside and The L.A. Weekly, accomplishes all of this with a light touch. More importantly, he fulfils one of the genre’s main requirements: that a fictional investigator, at the very least, investigate himself as much as the world around him. Although others have walked this way before, and some have ventured into more dangerous territory, Weizmann, with a nod towards Addy’s investigative future, can be congratulated on providing sufficient hard-boiled menace without tumbling full throttle into oblivion.

 

[Published by Melville House on May 23, 2023, 336 pages, $17.99 paperback]

The above originally appeared in On the Sea Wall.

An Outsider on the Inside: Writers & Missionaries- Essays on the Radical Imagination by Adam Shatz

"Legend has it that, in 1956, when Soviet tanks overthrew the council government in Budapest, an officer asked Georg Lukács to hand over his weapon and the latter gave him his pen."

                              (Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History)

For some time now, Adam Shatz has been producing informative and well-considered  essays, reportage and interviews in publications like the  London Review of Books, New York Review of Books and The Nation. In addition, he also hosts Myself With Others, a podcast in which he converses  with an assortment of writers, musicians and public intellectuals, most of whom it turns out seem to be  his friends. But what first brought his work to my attention were his articles on jazz,  deep and lengthy pieces, the kind one doesn't come across very often, on the likes of  Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, Frank Kimbrough, etc.. Perhaps the latter will constitute a future volume, because it's a  subject that's noticeably absent in Shatz's excellent Writers & Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination. Instead, what Shatz has put together here is a  series of essays- most of which have appeared in one form or another in the above periodicals- focusing on writers and intellectuals and how they have been able to articulate their politics given the factions, circumstances and hardline positions that exist, whether today or in the recent past.  Related to that is the degree to which such writers manage to accomplish this without sacrificing their humanity or perspective. It's a situation that the New York-based Shatz also addresses when it comes to his own writing. In other words, faced with present day inequities, how does someone in his profession negotiate the tightrope that separates journalism from activism, reportage from propaganda.     

To this end, Writers & Missionaries kicks-off with a series of essays on a number of Middle East writers. These include Fouad Ajami, and his  winding road  from Lebanese intellectual to neocon favourite; the Algerian writer and politically liberal Kamel Daoud; the life and death of the Israeli-Palestinian director of the Freedom Theatre Juliano Mer-Khamis; and the Palestinian nationalism of the renown Edward Said. All of them nuanced in their perspective, even if none, with the exception of Said, are exactly household names. But that only makes these chapters  all the more informative, interesting and important. 

Shatz then sets his sights on  Paris with a series of finely modulated entries on three African American writers: Chester Himes, Richard Wright and William Gardner Smith. With all three having self-exiled  in Paris at roughly the same time, Shatz examines how this group of writers were able to deal with the relationship between their politics and their displacement, as well as the dynamics surrounding the racism they were escaping from and the racism inherent in their adoptive country, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Algerians and the French state, which, as exotic exiles, they did or did not notice, much less act upon. Shatz remains in France for the next section, in which he tackles a handful of  French writers and intellectuals: Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Houllebecq, as well as film-makers Claude Lanzman and Jean-Pierre Melville. The latter two constitute an interesting comparison: the former an  ultra-Zionist who directed Shoah, and the latter a WW2 maquis activist, whose participation would influence his future films, whether those with a war time or film noir setting. Shatz concludes this section with another interesting comparison: that of Jean-Paul Sartre and the leftist Egyptian writer Arwa Salih, and their respective positions  regarding the Algerian war of independence, Israel and the plight of the Palestinians.    

Even if one is familiar with some of the writers discussed, Shatz’s perspective will invariably be enlightening. For instance, his reading of Michel Houllebecq might surprise those who harbour, as I do, an instinctive dislike for this racaille of contemporary French fiction. Enough, at any rate, to make any hardened Houllebecq critic consider having another look at his writing. Though perhaps the same can't be said about Alain Robbe-Grillet. After reading that particular chapter, it would be difficult for many to read this most renown of nouveau roman novelists without taking into account his sadomasochistic tendencies, turning that famous camera-eye style into something that has less to do with the cinema or hardboiled fiction than with the cold stare of pornography. It's a flirtation that, in turn, might also cause some  to feel a pang of guilt for being advocates of that particular writer, along with his proclamations regarding the future direction of the novel.  

   

Shatz ends Writers & Missionaries with two extended essays in which he looks at his own life: the first, from which the book's title is taken, concerns his relationship to the Middle East, and, as a non-Zionist Jew, his identification with, and commitment to, those who live there, albeit as an outsider; and, lastly, an extended essay on his teenage years as an obsessive but creative  high-end chef, which, like the previous essay, reads as a stand-in for Shatz's own political evolution as a leftist with an internationalist perspective.   

It's no stretch of the imagination to think of Shatz as one of  those cosmopolitan intellectuals that  Enzo Traverso describes in his book Revolution: An Intellectual History  (Traverso being one of Shatz’s “rabbis,” and subject of a fascinating  interview on an LRB podcast), though, if rootless, Shatz is no doubt more so in spirit than  in fact.  An intellectual in an age of informationals, Shatz certainly remains on the missionary end of the spectrum, minus the colonial baggage and dogmatism normally associated with the term. Negotiating that slippery slope, Shatz digs deep into the circumstances of his subjects, allowing them- the oppressed, the exiled, the outsider- to speak, whenever possible, for themselves. In the end, he reminds us that, though a vanishing breed, public intellectuals who double as cross-cultural ambassadors play a vital role in the function and drift of what is possible. This as opposed to the critique du siécle about which Shatz also ponders, namely, why write at a time when  the meaning of authorship is being questioned? This dialectic could be taken as the sub-structure of  Shatz's book, one  he alludes to on more than one occasion. Addressing that conundrum, Shatz holds fast to his progressive politics,  observing, explaining and interpreting, particularly when it comes to Middle East resistance movements, while zeroing in on particular activists. All the while knowing that no matter how much he might identify with such movements and activists, he, whether by profession, disposition, politics or culture, will invariably remain something of an outsider. But t’s that  self-assumed role that informs his writing and which makes it so accessible. Reading Shatz,  one inevitably discovers currents and thinkers that, considering the sharp shocks of today's instantaneous culture, one might otherwise have never known about. Speaking personally, if not for Shatz, I would never  have known about several of the Middle Eastern writers included in this volume, nor, to go further afield, would I have comes across the likes of Traverso as well as  the incredible anti-fascist forger Adolfo Kaminsky (A Forger's Life), the former a subject of a Shatz interview, and the latter the focus of an LRB article. Whether as  interrogator, journalist, public critic, Shatz remains an important contributor in a world that can be as boundary-defying as it is parochial.