Copyright 1990 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

September 20, 1990

LENGTH: 971 words

HEADLINE: Books: One thinks, therefore one drinks - Paperbacks

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

Septuagenarian Stew: Stories And Poems, by Charles Bukowski (Black Sparrow Press/Airlift Distributors, Pounds 12.95)

The Legend Of The Holy Drinker, by Joseph Roth (Picador Classics, Pounds 3.99)

Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography Of John Reed, by Robert A. Rosenstone (Harvard, Pounds 9.95)

Arabesques, by Anton Shammas (Penguin, Pounds 5.99)

HE WAS never a very good suicide. 'I gave it a go now and then but something always used to go wrong.' As we stand on the brink of war and global recession, what better than to trash the poll tax demand, order a hat trick of tequilas and settle down with an uplifting collection from Bukowski? These poems and prose are so clean and sparse one almost wants to rummage through Bukowski's bin for all the adjectives and adverbs. They are cut-throat tales of the back alleys of America, ergo the West, of a world more dire than that of Ivan Denisovich.

Of course, Bukowski always has a companion, wherever he walks there is always another, wrapped in brown mantle, beside him. But it's only a chemical. It produces a kind of gin-soaked doggerel that is surely the perfect form to describe sleeping on park benches, working the assembly lines, and pensioners with a dollar to their name who pull triggers to alleviate terminal disease. Tragic humour is strewn liberally. In one poem, the Barfly who thanks to Mickey Rourke now drives a BMW, muses on suffering for art as he fingers his Gold Card. He writes of how the critics prefer the poems about him freezing and starving on cheap wine.

With his easy transition into post-Hollywood prosperity he has shown himself to be not just another angry young man although his 'difficulties with women' as the press release puts it, show him to be no less misogynistic. But luckily, the years of body-abuse have not affected the clarity of his vision. It is of a people for whom the word 'change' means distraction, for whom thinking is painful. They move in circles of hopelessness. This sometimes infects his words with the sour, if inevitable, tang of decadence. But then, as he himself demonstrates in his poem Nowhere, most English-language authors are writing dross. With so little competition, he can only soar.

The Legend Of The Holy Drinker, Ermano Olmi's film of which won a Palme D'Or in Venice two years ago, was Joseph Roth's final work. He died, a chronic alcoholic, down on his luck at 44, just as the second world war began. A Jew, who was buried a Catholic, he turned from republican radical into an inebriate waver of the Habsburg flag. Michael Hoffman, who after a somewhat pedantic first paragraph translates the work elegantly, says that Roth advanced a sophisticated argument that while drink shortened his life in the medium term, it kept him alive in the short term. Roth spent his last year in an attic room so tiny he could fall out of bed straight into the corridor and roll downstairs to the bar.

The 50-page novella describes a miraculous time in the life of Andreas Kartak, a man who has led a precarious existence sleeping under the bridges of the Seine. Innocent and saintly, in the manner of Peter Sellers in Being There, he finds himself on the receiving end of money, drink, love and friendship. It's a moving miniature ode to dipsomania rather than Bacchus. Take away the miracles and you'll hear it being sung on London's Embankment.

While Roth's work may not qualify him for the legendary status of his great contemporaries, Mann and Musil, his life surely would. The same goes for Jack Reed, who despite the film Reds is not to be consfused with Warren Beatty.

The last full biography of Reed was published in 1967. The Lost Revolutionary was a Cold War attempt at character assassination. Apart from a psychoanalytical epilogue that dismisses his subject as naive, Rosenstone's account is remarkably fair. Reed, brought up in Babbit-style Oregon, was educated at Harvard and at 26 left Greenwich Village's burgeoning bohemia to cover the Mexican Revolution. His political awakening came just before he left for the land of Villa and Zapata, while covering a story on the Paterson silk strike. 'In Paterson,' writes the American biographer, 'Jack had smelled, tasted and felt the spirit of radicalism, and found it good.'

After Mexico and reporting from the Western Front, came romance in the shape of Louise Bryant the sole justification for the title of the book. All this time Reed was writing articles, plays and stories, but for all his worldly experience, they were mediocre against the work of contemporaries such as O'Neil, Yeats and Pound. Reed's greatness would be established by reportage published only a year before his burial at the foot of the Kremlin. Ten Days That Shook The World not only illuminates the trials of revolution, but also shows up the caprice of the winds of change.

Coping with sudden change is the subject of the Palestinian-Israeli writer, Anton Shammas, in his beautiful, labyrinthine debut, Arabesques, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. He begins with Sub-Marquezian tales, sometimes veering close to the exotic, that describe the little Arab village of Fassuta, one that chose not to resist the Zionist annexation of 1948. In describing different generations of his family, he moves between time and place at high speed, interweaving history and autobiography through chains of subordinate clauses, but still achieving clarity. The book becomes progressively more complicated as the focus turns to Paris and America, where the narrative line turns precarious. It is an important novel in that Shammas's pointillist Palestinian history is today intertwined with the present world crisis. Its outcome will partly be measured by how we in the West grasp that the plight of the Palestinians is our plight too.