courtesy of Houghton Mifflin.

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero
Mariner Books, 2012

Ardent followers of the late writer Jose Saramago, I’m sure have long noticed a gaping hole in their collections. Until recently his translated work available to his American readership — an oeuvre spanning decades — had yet to include his first novel ever written, first published in Portugal in 1977.

When first released in his native country, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, did not provoke a following or garner much attention — The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, for instance, sparked a row with the Catholic Church and was censored by the Portuguese government. Manual remained largely unnoticed, unlike the next phase of his writing career, which was filled with prestigious literary prizes, the Nobel Prize in Literature among them.

According to the back flap, a copywriter would have you believe it’s a “brilliant juxtaposition of a passionate love story and the crisis of a nation.” Peripherally speaking, those things happen, but what it really is about is the artist’s existential progression. It’s not so much about love, but of enduring fame; it’s not a protest against a fascist regime, but a meditation on fate. Manual is not a manual in the literal sense, but closer in kin to a journal, written by a sardonic portrait painter under the pen name H.

Diary-like in its construction, it also shares components of other literary genres. H explores writing autobiography, along with mini-profiles of other artists, and by including a letter from a scorned lover, even tries his hand at some minor scrapbooking. Though formally trained, H is mistrustful of his ability to paint a lifelike portrait of his subjects. He muses, “[I turn] to writing without knowing its secrets,” paradoxically, in the hope to unveil those very secrets that separate technically skilled painters from actual artists. Manual is in fact, the anti-instructional guide — the titular irony underscored by H’s fervent autodidactic approach to writing.

His clients’ likeliness isn’t the only thing that’s revealed in his portraits. H claims, “anyone who paints portraits portrays himself.” Like strolling into a carnival tent of funhouse mirrors, each portrait renders a caricature of a fraudulent painter at a philosophical fork in the road — provoking his increasing desire to create a “truthful” portrait — one that is a faithful representation of the sitter and the painter. He likens the experience to “asking a psychoanalyst to take interest in a patient just a little bit further, which could lead him to the edge of the precipice and his inevitable downfall.” His plunge into the abyss is his nearest hope towards attaining the form of salvation he’s looking for — letting go of learned techniques and embracing unfiltered intuition.

Manual leaves Saramago more exposed than what is characteristic of the writer. Biographical elements are deeply embedded within its pages. His experience in Lisbon under Salazar’s dictatorship mirrors H’s own. Both men came of age, and grew well into it, while grappling with livelihoods in constant danger of being easily extinguished by a tyrannical government at the sign of any infraction. During particular heady meditations their voices appear to coalesce into one, and I wonder if we are actually glimpsing the pages of Saramago’s journal, when passages like the particular following lament:

If the straits of Tagus are located where I hoped to find India, will I be obliged to relinquish the name Vasco and call myself Ferdinand? Heaven forbid that I should die en route, as always happens to the man who fails to find what he is searching for in life. The man who took the wrong route and chose the wrong name +

Strangely, H’s emphasis on biography appears to be his prescribed antidote for these ill-fated men, the tragic victims of fate. Though crude, through sheer cleverness, he more or less achieves what he champions as a “freedom to be won” by filling reams of paper with a “written” portrait, he’s created a work guided by faith alone. In essence, he’s put on a blindfold, climbed a chair, and has fallen backwards trusting someone will catch him, which is the most honest piece of art he’s authored. If a painter portrays himself painting, it can also be said, anyone who writes, writes himself. He’s casted people from his life as characters within his narrative while he remains the unadulterated protagonist.

H has picked the lock and freed himself of his own limitations as an artist by writing the skeleton key. By relinquishing his christened name in favor of his initial H, he proves he is neither Vasco nor Ferdinand, philosophizing:

To give…a name is to capture him at a given moment in his earthly journey, to immobilize him, perhaps off-balance, to present him disfigured. A simple initial leaves him indeterminate, but determining him self in movement +

Names denote limitations and impose boundaries, and this, is a story about grown and rebirth.

H self assesses, “What do I want? First, not to be defeated. Then, if possible, to succeed.” This also appears to be Saramago’s ideal for Manual. It may lack tidiness, emphasized especially by H’s pedantic ramblings, (“Careful! What have I just written? Paint the saint. I know exactly what I am about to do, but could anyone reading these three words know it?…But what does it mean to pain the saint?” gives you an idea) but Manualneither ends in defeat for either man. By the last page H’s papers reveal a portrait of an artist whose reflection is crisply and clearly defined than any portrait painted.

As far as first novels go, it’s an endearing snapshot of the author, not as a young man, for he wasn’t young when he began writing professionally, but as a young writer — exhibiting exuberant energy in his prose, yet lacking matured restraint only experience can teach to pull back when necessary. However, it’s this vulnerability that results in Manual being a far more intimate read than some of his later work. If you’re an admirer of the late writer, Saramago slightly undone makes it worth the read.

Joseph Epstein © Mike Fisher, via hmhbooks.com

Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit
by Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

In earlier books Joseph Epstein exposed the underbelly of snobbery, examined the self-reflexive nature of envy, and explored the disparate components of friendship. In some form or another, his published works are primarily concerned with the act of unveiling, revealing to his readers something about their own human nature they might have missed. Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, his latest, attempts to do the same. And what is gossip but a crude form of sleuthing?







Epstein’s discerning eye for tantalizing details could have earned him a lucrative career as a gossip columnist in another life, but Gossip thrives on meatier substances. Epstein is methodic in his undertaking, and for a subject so sprawling, the end result is neatly delivered. However, a book about gossip naturally indulges in plenty of it. Despite Epstein’s best efforts it can be overwhelming to digest; as anecdotes pile upon anecdotes, gossipy tidbits lose their crispness, and a reader’s interest is in danger of flagging. 


 



For this reason, Gossip is a book best read in energetic spurts, to be put down and resumed later. It’s freshness should be preserved, because after all it is curiously refreshing to read Epstein doling out scuttlebutt. He describes his taste as “[running] to the antediluvian, but it tends also to run to the highbrow,” and he has a certain penchant for gossip starring long dead French literati. He leans conservative — he’s held in high esteem by commentators like David Brooks and the late William F. Buckley Jr. — and has been called in print a “fuddy-duddy” at least once. Finally, how he packages and delivers gossip couldn’t be more dissimilar to popular gossip blogs, where most gossip junkies are likely to get their daily fix. 




But Epstein is not hiding behind any pretension that what he’s doing is a more noble form of gossiping, but rather a more sophisticated one. His traditionalist backstory can make the septuagenarian come across old-fashioned as he laments the good old days, when a less sleazy form of gossip — one not so concerned with uncovering disreputable details about reputable personages — was not yet the rule publicly. 





But these pronouncements are exactly what propel Gossip from a superficial read to a treatise on the subject. He shies away from claiming that what he has written is a history of gossip. In the preface he sketches a rough chronology of gossip’s evolution: It began as “a personal act most often carried on between two persons; then, with the advent of the printing press, it soon became public, with men and women earning their living discovering and purveying gossip to a mass audience.” Though what Epstein offers is not a complete history, it’s an impressively extensive one, chronicling gossip’s infiltration of the media during the last century. He profiles big names in journalism, using their careers to display exactly how low standards have fallen. What reads like mini-biographies can also be read as cautionary tales of gossip’s erosion of social mores.


He is particularly unkind to Barbara Walters, whom he credits as being in her appearances no more than “a yenta, a female blabbermouth and busy body.” She was nevertheless an ingenious businesswoman; Walters’s form of journalism, namely her propensity to conduct emotional interviews (Epstein coins them “the weepies”) garnered higher ratings than those enjoyed by any female journalist before her. But it’s her inclination towards the vulgar tendencies of gossip that irks Epstein. He compiles a list of some of the many indiscreet questions Walters has posed in the past: 







[Of] Fidel Castro if he is secretly married, and Prince Philip if his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, would soon be likely to leave the throne so that her son could become King. She queries Barbara Bush on her depression, asks Boris Yeltsin if he drinks too much, Vladimir Putin if he has ever killed anyone, Muammar Qaddafi if he is insane, and drills Martha Stewart with ‘Why do so many people hate you?’

Epstein is a social critic by trade, his eyes naturally trained to look outward. But Gossip explores hidden motive, whether it’s intentionally concealed or not. It’s often hard to discern our own reasons for imparting information that may be more wisely left unsaid. When Epstein’s critical eye swivels inwards he extracts philosophical meditations, writing, “If I report on the hypocrisy of another writer, writing one way and living another … am I not suggesting that my own life shows no such divide?” In another instance he derides himself for revealing a secret his mother kept until her death, asking his readers, “what do you call a man who gossips about his own mother?”





Epstein’s line of rhetorical questioning shapes Gossip into a self-conscious read. To quote Epstein quoting George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, gossip is “a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.” That is to say that our preference in gossip reveals more about ourselves than is revealed by the secrets we loose. Perhaps, no one has explored the nature of gossip quite the way authors have — authors of all kinds. Epstein devotes chapters to novelists and he quotes them abundantly. If he uses journalism to make a case for gossip’s role in the decline of society’s standards, he evinces novels are the product of its refined capabilities, as they are made up of the very “constituent parts of gossip.” According to Epstein, the novel subsists on “speculation on character, curiosity about other worlds, an interest in social status, the unveiling of secrets, nice discriminations, revelations of secret motivations, moral judgments,” in order to propel plotlines. Gossip wants to expose truth, or at least give the impression that it is doing so, and literature is often where gossip and truth intersect. Whether it’s “gutter journalism” or one of Jane Austen’s novels, Epstein readily acknowledges, “Gossip is indisputably a form of knowledge,” the question being, “how reliable a form of knowledge is it?”


Though he is ultimately unable to produce an answer, the question remains a peripheral one. It doesn’t distract from the rest of the book, since Epstein’s natural knack of storytelling makes up for loose ends. Gossip is punctuated with revelations in the guise of diary entries, and I am certain that in no other place can one find gossip about Lionel Trilling’s depression and Diana Trilling’s neurosis, or Orson Wells sticking a restaurant bill of a “stratospheric sum” to an unsuspecting journalist. It’s with pieces of original reporting like these that Epstein demonstrates to the reader that “if ever there was a mixed bag, gossip provides it.”

For the time invested—although Gossip runs a modest 256 pages — Epstein ends on a rather obvious note: Gossip should be consumed in moderation. Isaac Bashevis Singer used to say about a certain Jewish delicacy, “You can have too much … even of kreplach.” An overabundance of gossip may be bad for the digestive track, and Gossip provides more than your daily allowance. But if Epstein convinces his readers of nothing else, gossip when rendered at its best reads like Pages from the Goncourt Journals; at its worst it’s the National Enquirer, a fine writer being often the producer of fine gossip.