For the last 30 years, the literary reputation of the working-class London neighborhoods of Spitalfields and Whitechapel has revolved around two men: Nicholas Hawksmoor and Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper, I trust, needs no introduction, and in recent years the architect Hawksmoor’s reputation as a designer of churches has begun to rival that of his 18th century contemporary Sir Christopher Wren. But in pop culture both men have also become the focuses for a protean web of mysticism, conspiracy-mongering and alternative mythology.
The ur-texts for this addictive weirdness are “Lud Heat” (1975), a feverish book by the London poet and novelist Iain Sinclair, and an influential work of Ripperology with the lurid title “Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution” (1976), by Stephen Knight. Sinclair may be the closest thing in modern English letters to William Blake, and the delirious opening section of “Lud Heat” — “Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches” — is an intensely allusive, hallucinatory collage of poetry and prose, combining Egyptian mythology, Blake’s poetry, and eight of Hawksmoor’s churches into an occult map, complete with a diagram of the pentagram the churches form over central London.
Knight’s book, meanwhile, is the most comprehensive formulation of the theory that the Ripper murders were committed by Sir William Withey Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, as a Masonic plot to cover up an illegitimate child fathered by Victoria’s dissolute grandson, the Duke of Clarence. It’s a jerry-built, “Da Vinci Code”-style construction of might-have’s, what-if’s and why-not’s, mixing royal paranoia, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (as a putatively Masonic document, not a Jewish one), and the life of the painter Walter Sickert (who in some variations of the theory is himself the murderer).
From these two springs — occult architecture and murderous Masons — flow several engrossing novels, all centered largely around Spitalfields and Whitechapel. In Peter Ackroyd’s “Hawksmoor” (1985), which cites “Lud Heat” as a principal source — Ackroyd being Wordsworth to Sinclair’s Blake — the 18th century architect is reimagined as a Satanist named Nicholas Dyer, layering coded pagan messages into the design of his churches, especially Christ Church, Spitalfields. (The real Hawksmoor’s interest in paganism was limited to his architectural use of Egyptian pyramids and obelisks, Corinthian columns, and Persian post-and-lintel doorways.) Dyer’s first-person account, a bravura imitation of robust 18th century prose, alternates with a third-person account of a series of modern murders near Dyer’s churches, which are investigated by a detective named Hawksmoor. It’s more macabre than conclusive, but it’s a lot of fun to read.
Meanwhile the American Paul West’s Ripper novel, “The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper” (1991), based largely on Knight’s book, is told from the point of view of the victims and of Walter Sickert. Like all of West’s novels, it’s written in a dense, modernist-inflected prose, and it portrays Sickert as a weak-willed, unwilling participant in the murders. And like other recent fictions about the Ripper, it walks an uncomfortable line between feminism and sensationalism, evoking the wretched lives of Whitechapel whores with real compassion, but also showing their murders in such graphic detail it earned West the wrath of some reviewers. And there is also Sinclair’s own idiosyncratic rendering of Knight, “White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings” (1987), a gorgeously written “Hawksmoor”-style narrative about the Ripper murders, alternating present and past.
But the apotheosis of creepy Whitechapel lit is Alan Moore’s epic graphic novel “From Hell,” originally published serially over several years in the early ’90s, which combines the Hawksmoor and Ripper streams into a wild, rushing torrent, with stunningly detailed black-and-white illustrations by Eddie Campbell. I hate to overuse the word “idiosyncratic,” but let’s face it: Ian McEwan and Martin Amis aren’t going to touch this stuff. It takes an omnivorously encyclopedic, outsider sensibility like Moore’s (and Sinclair, Ackroyd and West’s) to venture into this territory, and Moore’s the most omnivorous of the lot, openly acknowledging his debt to Sinclair et al. in extensive notes, and dumping into the book all things London (circa 1888), including cameos by the Elephant Man, William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, Buffalo Bill and a young Aleister Crowley. The chapter in which Gull and his evil coachman Netley take the reader on a tour of Hawksmoor’s pentagram of pagan churches takes “Lud Heat’s” occult aria and turns it into a full-blown opera of classical paganism, Freemasonry and psychopathology.
In recent years, the real Spitalfields and Whitechapel have lost much of their macabre aura to upscale development and the latest influx of immigrants from Bangladesh. Spitalfields, in fact, is now also known as Banglatown, and tourists taking Ripper walking tours are likely to end up in one of the curry restaurants along Brick Lane, the titular location of Spitalfield’s most recent literary representation, Monica Ali’s warmhearted domestic epic of immigrant life, “Brick Lane” (2003). But then, London being what it is, compacted and labyrinthine, you can still take a five-minute walk that encompasses all of Spitalfields, from the Ripper to Hawksmoor to Monica Ali. Start in Dorset Street, where Miller’s Court used to be, site of the most horrific Ripper murder, then walk east toward Hawksmoor’s brooding Christ Church, towering above Commercial Street. Then round the corner up Fournier Street, past the handsome row houses built by Huguenot weavers and up to Brick Lane, where a temple stands as a palimpsest of immigrant history — it’s been a Huguenot church, a Methodist chapel, a synagogue and, since the 1970s, a mosque. Here, even in the heart of Ali’s Banglatown, there’s a reminder of the occult London of Sinclair, Ackroyd, West and Moore: up under the pediment of the building a vertical sundial is built into the wall, with the Latin motto Umbra sumus — “We are shadows.”
The most serendipitous literary experience I have had was when I found myself, very many years ago, reading Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady” for the first time while on holiday in Florence where some of the most significant action of the book takes place — I use the word “action,” of course, in the special, Jamesian sense. It is often said that one may only come truly to know a foreign city by falling in love there — ah, San Francisco, mon amour — but as Logan Pearsall Smith said of life, I prefer reading.
The first thing the visitor must understand about Ireland is that there are two Irelands: There is Dublin, and then there is all that is not Dublin. I make the distinction not out of the city dweller’s usual prejudice against the provinces, or not entirely so, but sometimes it does seem that every Irish person aspires to the condition of Dubliner — the country has a population of some 4 and a half million, of whom a million and a quarter live in the capital, a great many of them “from the country,” as we say.
Before any guidebook, then, rough or smooth, the essential volume the first-time visitor must pack, whether in a Louis Vuitton valise or one of Mr. Kipling’s exceedingly fine knapsacks, is James Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Late in life Joyce was visited in Paris by an old and somewhat naive acquaintance from “dear, dirty Dumpling” who gave it as his opinion that the author’s first book was still his best, to which Joyce, after a moment’s rueful reflection, replied, “Do you know, I think you might be right.” True, the Dublin of the 1890s and early 1900s portrayed in the book seems very different from today’s tigerish metropolis, but a closer look will show us the old place persisting behind the new, like the silver roots under the artfully highlighted hairstyle of one of our contemporary captains of industry. For all the vastness of his mature achievement, Joyce was never again to write with such freshness and cold precision as in these stories of spiritual paralysis — Joyce’s own term — and quiet desperation in the life, and lives, of our capital city.
Difficult to find an equivalently quintessential portrait of provincial life. So much of Irish writing is in the pastoral mode, even when cast in an urban setting, that it is a task to set off the true countrymen against the rest. However, the three modern-day writers who best capture the meanness, the wry gaiety and the poetry of country living are Eugene McCabe, the late John McGahern and, of course, the much-loved William Trevor. McCabe’s 2004 story collection, the ambiguously titled “Heaven Lies About Us,” and McGahern’s and Trevor’s “Collected Stories,” are each in their own way superb. How to choose one? Don’t: Just take all three.
When it comes to choosing between the poets, that is where it gets hard. Among the living there are Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, the four M’s — Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, John Montague and Paul Muldoon — and a squadron of younger aspirants, especially female, notably Vona Groarke. However, if it is the spirit of the indomitable Irishry that the traveler has come in search of, then Yeats is still our chief of poets. Of course, almost all the Yeatsian yodeling about us being “no petty people” and the rest of it — in fact, in that instance he was speaking of the Anglo-Irish minority — is simply that — rhetoric — but what rhetoric it is. What one hears in these poems, especially those contained in “The Tower” (1928), surely the greatest single volume of poetry ever published, is the true, harsh voice of the Irish, not the wair-brushed brogue of the tourist-board advertisements or the mendicant wheedling at Brussels budget summits, but the voice of tragic acceptance in the face of life’s terrors and passing triumphs.
We do laugh a lot, even if our laughter is often bitterness disguised as gaiety. Flann O’Brien was both bitter and gay, like Yeats’ Chinese sages in the great poem “Lapis Lazuli.” While the celebrated “The Third Policeman” is probably the finer work artistically, “At Swim-Two-Birds” is funnier. O’Brien, real name Brian O’Nolan — which, paradoxically, sounds, to an Irish ear, entirely made up — was one of the oddest birds in the Irish aviary of literary oddities, a self-loathing product of an ultra-nationalist family whose humor was as black and twisted as a blackthorn stick. “At Swim-Two-Birds” — that hilarious postmodernist-before-its-time fantasia, with Mad Sweeney in the trees and Wild West cowboys galloping through the streets of Dublin — sank like a stone when it came out on the eve of war in 1939, and even lifelines from the likes of Graham Greene could not rescue it, but it remains a comic masterpiece, as galling as a bad draught of Guinness, and as Irish as rain.
On an island full of storytellers, most year-rounders will tell you nobody’s ever written a novel about the real Martha’s Vineyard. Elements of the Vineyard’s fame — the Kennedy clan, Bill Clinton, filmmakers, rock stars, newsmen, celebrities, intellectuals and literary giants who summer here — are not actually central to real Vineyard life. It’s fun to watch the likes of Judy Blume (“Summer Sisters”) and Anne Rivers Siddon (“Up Island”) try to capture the essence of the island, but most locals will leaf through those attempts and say, “Nice story, but it’s not really like that here.” Even residents who write Vineyard-themed fiction tend toward murder mysteries catering to tourists’ fantasies of romantically salty island life. “You gotta actually live here, year-round, to even begin to understand it,” say 100 percent of the casually interviewed.
Perhaps that’s why personal narratives abound in Vineyard literature. The memoir and its ilk represent the best the island has to offer. The most extraordinary sampling, a tribute to a passing generation of indomitable Yankees, can be found in the two-volume “Vineyard Voices,” by Linsey Lee. Here — along with dozens of gorgeous photographic portraits — are oral histories taken in recent years of largely working-class fisherman, seafarers, farmers, lighthouse keepers, civic leaders, Wampanoag tribal members, and a peppery island legend named Craig Kingsbury whose entry is dubiously titled “I Didn’t Bring Any Skunks to the Island.” (His supposed guilt on this topic generated more speculative gossip over the years than did Ted Kennedy’s driving skills.)
From the same generation is I.A.R. Wylie, whose novel “Ho, the Fair Wind” is one of the rare exceptions that captures the island both faithfully and fictionally. It’s a sweet 1945 romance featuring the most complicated island town: Oak Bluffs, which began as a Methodist revival meeting ground, and went on to become the locus of the Vineyard’s nightlife. Wylie’s heroine is a girl who comes from off-island to attend church camp, and falls in love with a first-generation Azorean fisherman. An unlikely combination? Not on this island, where scores of families have just that lineage.
This is why most writers who really know the Vineyard opt for nonfiction: The truth is so compelling, why bother making stuff up? Here is the only community in North America that never suffered armed conflict between indigenous people and white settlers — yet it has bragging rights over one of the first skirmishes of the American Revolution. Its a place where, a century ago, an entire county knew sign language to accommodate a genetic deaf community. It’s got some of the oldest commercial fishing ports in America and also the still-thriving native tribe of “Moby-Dick’s” harpooner. It’s one of the only communities in America that has successfully repelled McDonald’s; a place the New York Times described in 1981 as “Yankee Bohemian” when neither term was fashionable; a place that was one of the poorest counties in Massachusetts when some of the richest people in America began to summer here. It inspired and hosted the filming of one of the biggest blockbusters of all times — and was forever changed from that experience, as you can read in Edith Blake’s intimate, photo-filled “On Location….. On Martha’s Vineyard (The Making of the Movie Jaws).” Written after production wrapped but before the movie was a hit, this is a breezy, behind-the-scenes depiction by one of the many islanders who worked on the film.
And, of course, the Vineyard has one of the most pristine and diverse shorelines on the East Coast; the 100-square-mile island boasts a range of beaches from sandy dunes to salt marshes to rocky cliffs to deeply sheltered harbors. Nobody can describe it like Paul Schneider. In “The Enduring Shore” (2000) he weaves an ingenious narrative of human and natural history from a most original vantage point: a kayak, with which he circumnavigated not only Martha’s Vineyard, but neighboring Nantucket and Cape Cod.
“It was too good to be true,” begins the first chapter. “But there he was, back among his friends and family on Chappaquidick. Back in Edgartown Harbor. Back on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the indescribably exquisite month of July, with the rest of his life stretched out before him.” This passage and the paragraphs that follow, after lulling the reader into a sense of benign familiarity, turn out to be an enthralling description of an enslaved Wampanoag’s escape to freedom in 1614. Schneider then goes on to weave a narrative tapestry stretching from pre-history to the present day. All the while he manages to be at once personal and objective, concise and yet dramatic.
Read this book while sunbathing on the Vineyard’s famous beaches (perhaps the clothing-optional Gay Head Beach, in Aquinnah, beneath the much-photographed clay cliffs) or while you’re celebrity-spotting on Circuit Avenue. Youll find yourself more amazed by the island itself than by any of its glittering visitors.
Togo is the Zembla of West Africa: If it did not exist, it would have been invented by the author of an absurdist experimental novel, prompting generations of unwary readers to leaf through their atlases in search of the place. Indeed, some of Togo’s own residents may occasionally be tempted to leaf through their atlases, to assure themselves of their own existence. How is one to account for this finger of a country tucked in between Ghana and Benin, its population of 5 million people speaking 40-odd different languages? A country that owes its existence to the off chance of having been the tiniest of Germany’s short-lived African colonies, inherited by France after World War I, which absentmindedly failed to consolidate it into its other colonies? Where, until February of 2005, a general who had first seized power in 1967 still reigned, Mobutu-like, over a tribalized kleptocracy, propped up by French money and military advisors, referred to by his countrymen in hushed whispers as “le vieux.” Is this place for real?
In fact, Togo does exist; but that didnt stop the great Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma from inventing it. Kouroumas brilliant 1998 roman à clef, “Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals,” is a folk-absurdist chronicle of the life of Koyaga, a champion wrestler from a northern hill tribe (as Togo’s longtime dictator Eyadéma was) who is recruited into the French army, fights in Vietnam (as Kourouma did), and winds up commanding a clique of disgruntled ex-officers in his country’s first coup. He then gradually descends into the familiar dictatorial narrative of gold-plated extravagance and familial intrigue. Koyaga is tutored in the fine arts of torture, repression and opulent state dinners by a panoply of African greats, including Ivory Coast’s Houphouët-Boigny, Guineas Sékou Touré, Congo’s Mobutu, and the Central African Republic’s Bokassa. (They appear in clever guises: “The Man whose Totem is the Crocodile,” “The Man whose Totem is the Leopard,” and so on.)
The novel follows Koyaga’s history through the Cold War years of Western-sponsored corruption, and into the ’90s, when the old wrestler finds himself lost in a new world of IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs and exiles returning from Europe demanding transparency and decentralization. But its real genius is stylistic: The narrator, Bingo, is Koyaga’s griot, a praise-singing storyteller who recites the leader’s history over the course of a six-day, five-night banquet. The language, thick with African idiom and oral tradition, throws the postcolonial political narrative into high relief, like Woody Guthrie reciting the life and times of Richard Nixon.
For a more realistic introduction to Togo, there’s the book beloved of every Peace Corps volunteer: “The Village of Waiting” (1988), by George Packer. Packer is best known today for his superb reporting on the Iraq war for the New Yorker, which culminated in the 2005 book “The Assassins’ Gate.” He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo in 1982-83. Stationed as an English teacher in a sluggish village of the Ewe ethnicity called Laviéma (whose name, according to legend, meant “wait a little longer”), Packer found his modest optimism deteriorating into a profound alienation and cynicism over the course of 18 months. His intense friendships with his host family, with the village chief, and with his students were laced with mistrust and incomprehension. Confronted by their poverty, he felt responsible; confronted by their manipulation and dishonesty, he felt simultaneously abused and sympathetic. Ultimately, wracked by hypochondria and anxiety, he quit before his two-year Peace Corps term was up. “The Village of Waiting” is one of the most wrenchingly honest books ever written by a white person about Africa, a bracing antidote to romantic authenticity myths and exotic horror stories alike. Isak Dinesen, Packer notes, wrote of waking in the Kenyan highlands and thinking, “Here I am, where I ought to be.” He himself woke up sweating, hungry, “mildly at ease, or mildly anxious. But never where I ought to be.”
Tété-Michel Kpomassie didn’t feel Togo was where he ought to be, either, though he grew up in a typical family of the Mina ethnicity in the 1940s and ’50s, herding goats and picking coconuts on a coastal plantation. When a priestess of the local python god demanded that he be apprenticed to her, he fled the country, setting out for a far land he had become obsessed with since discovering a book about it in a missionary bookshop: Greenland. It took him eight years to work his way up through West Africa and Europe, but he made it, and spent two years living among the Inuit, driving a dog sled and hunting seal in a kayak. “An African in Greenland,” his 1981 account of those years, is one of the more original volumes of amateur anthropology ever written, as well as a ripping good travel yarn. And it’s a curious meditation on Africa, Europe, the Arctic, and the tenuous and arbitrary ways in which different cultures regard each other as “savage.”
No bibliography of Togo would be complete without a guide to some aspect of vodun, the animist religion that thrives from southeastern Ghana to southern Benin, and the ancestor of Haitian voodoo. Judy Rosenthal’s 1998 “Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo” focuses on two of the more colorful and fast-growing sects, gorovodun and Tchamba vodun, both of which are tied up in fascinating ways with cultural exchange between Togo’s Christian/vodun south and its Muslim north, and with the history of slavery. Rosenthal lived for long stretches in an impoverished fishing village called Dogbeda, and intimately shared the lives of the vodun priestesses, or “horses.” She recounts their jealous rivalries, their ever-changing family arrangements, and the splendidly chaotic festivals at which they are possessed and transformed by spirits of varying personalities and sexes. Imagine the early-’90s voguing documentary “Paris Is Burning” recast in a dirt-poor African fishing community, with a certain amount of animal sacrifice thrown in. If that sounds appealing, you will enjoy your time in Togo.
A salty friend who sails the strait twice a year from Key West to the Marina Hemingway had these words before my trip to Havana: “You don’t need anything down there but greenbacks, your liver and your cock.” From long-legged rumba with tall, black jineteras on the rooftop of the Hotel Inglaterra, to giggling over daiquiris with bronzed mulattas on the warm sands of the Playas del Este, to rum-soaked stumbles along the Malecon with a girl on each arm and the Gulf crashing against that historic stone promenade with what seemed like the full force of American antipathy hurled south from Miami, I found this to be true.
“Three Trapped Tigers,” G. Cabrera Infante’s 1958 masterpiece, captures Havana as it was, a place of Santeria and frantic drinking, of mystical black women and handsome young men in their best outfits with not much to do under the oppressive shadow of politics. Half a century later, not much has changed. The things the thugs in power on both sides of the strait can’t control continue to be the starry Havana nights, the hectic energy of the Habaneras, the rum, and the brassy music that sets everything off once the sun goes down. Infante, who at first embraced the Revolution, but later died in exile, knew that love is possible at every turn in Havana, especially if it’s only for one night. This novel, the best the city has ever produced, is an anatomy of the fecund Havana we dream of finding, and if we possess the bravery to go there in these times, we still do.
But of course Habaneros are more than just their parties. Race and struggle define the Cuban soul. Ada Ferrer’s “Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898″ details the essence of the Cuban Revolution from 60 years before it happened. Soon after “discovery” in 1492, Columbus’ ruthless enslavement of the indigenous Taíno set the stage for the sugar cane factory that chewed up imported African slaves like a juicing machine, which Cuba quickly became. There’s a reason why Castro’s Revolution, which at one point was only himself, and as he famously quotes, “one other guy,” hiding in the Sierra Maestra, went on to defeat the U.S.-trained and -equipped forces of Batista. Ferrer reveals the secret: Cuba has always been a minority white privileged class and a majority of disenfranchised blacks. Ever wonder why the angry exiles in Miami who influence so much of American policy are all white? Ferrer explains it.
Castro is no hero either, though it’s hard to find a Habanera who will admit this in public (just as it’s nearly impossible to find a Habanera who won’t say that José Martí, Cuba’s national poet, is really just a jingoist). Reinaldo Arenas, though, had the bravery to, and he paid the price with decades of police harassment, and a constant ban on his works. The gay boys who look for love in the shadows of Plaza Don Quixote all know his name, and his novel “Farewell to the Sea” tells us why. On display here is a human heart, tender and longing, trapped by a political system that won’t let it be what it is, and the strained marriage it forces that heart into. Arenas’ own tragic demise reflects the one his narrator can’t escape in this poetic requiem.
The folk, however, need their pastimes, and in Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria’s “The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball,” we get at once a detailed and colorful timeline of Havana’s preferred sport, as well as a fine description of why the Habanero heart yearns north. Cuba and America desire each other in the schizophrenic way that France and England do. In Havana, the U.S. national sport is played with poetic skill and, more important, followed by old men in wicker hats with a familiar earnestness, pointing to how much the embargo has stolen from all of us. Not to be missed in this vein is Jim Shepard’s masterly short story “Batting Against Castro,” which is found in his collection of the same title, and uses the cover of béisbol to reveal how the headstrong people of the city can seduce even a hardened gringo.
As the days pass and the initial romance of Havana fades into hangover, worry and repetition, one comes to know Cuba in a deeper way, the way that provokes one to ask, “Why do all these girls give it up for money? Who do they really give their hearts to?” It also helps if one of them steals your wallet. Only the most determined foreigner doesn’t begin to see that Cuba isn’t a party for everyone. The 31 stories in “The Voice of the Turtle” admit this. This is the broad and definitive collection of modern Habanera voices, and G. Cabrera Infante’s title story, of a cagauma turtle on its back that’s abused by two dimwitted young men, is a metaphor of a troubled country to rival any story of its kind in the world. Featured here are Octavio Armand, Carlos Montenegro, Lourdes Casal and Lydia Cabrera. The quiet frustration of Alfonso Hernández Catá’s “I Sent Quinine” is a particular treat.
Ultimately, the great literary art of modern Havana hides in the alleys of that decayed city like the most fearful of dissenters. Contemporary Habanera writers have no safe outlet and their cautious work reflects that. The exiles have long since lost their claim. What we are left with are the echoes, the memories of those humid and wondrous Havana nights, of the women we met and loved, whom we paid and wrote to, and who of course never wrote back.
