Three Dreams

The hosts of college radio programs often congratulate themselves on their eclectic musical tastes. A typical playlist might juxtapose Eric Dolphy, a Bulgarian women’s chorus, Hurricane Smith and Mercan Dede. The implication is that the host knows more about music than you do and is more welcoming of “diversity,” the cardinal virtue among cultural sophisticates. That the show will seem to most listeners at first briefly amusing, then irritatingly smug and turn quickly into unlistenable crap is proof to the host that he is hipper than thou.

Eclecticism is useful and interesting only when the similarities among the juxtaposed items are stronger and more interesting than the dissimilarities, and the items themselves are worthy of attention. In the summer issue of The Threepenny Review, Arthur Lubow’s brief essay, “Dream Books,” is based on the linkages among three books: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years; Volume I: 1933-41, Volume II: 1942-45, by Victor Klemperer; Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays, by Winsor McCay; and Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. Those titles, coupled with Lubow’s opening sentences, assured me I was in good hands:

“Lying in bed one morning, on the blurry border of sleep, I realized that the three books I was currently reading all conjured up the fantastic realism of a dream. In each, incidents were depicted with hyper-lifelike clarity, but the story lines flagrantly, even preposterously, violated the rules by which we live, the very assumptions which our next step.”

I have read the Klemperer and Calvino volumes (the latter, several times), and know McCay’s masterpieces of comic strip art from other sources, though not the new and pricey ($125) edition edited by Peter Maresca that Lubow cites. My instinctive reaction to his premise was that I would enjoy the company of anyone with those books stacked on his night table. I want to meet such a rich, expansive sensibility and stay up late talking with him. This is a man who will not waste my time, though I might worry that I was wasting his. Among a critic’s foremost gifts is the ability to perceive similarities regardless of medium, genre, time or space, and taken together Lubow’s books form a useful core sample of the human mind in the 20th century.

Klemperer was a Jewish humanities professor who survived in Dresden under the Third Reich. Calvino was the author of elegant postmodern fiction. McCay was the greatest artist ever to work in comic strips. Speaking of the three books and their dream-like atmospheres, Lubow writes:

“Sequentiality itself was overthrown, or at least undermined. The narratives advanced, as if towards a crisis or climax, yet they seemed suspended in an aspic of frozen time. Or such was my dreamy epiphany. To a wide-awake mind, the books appeared at first to have almost nothing in common.”

Fortunately, Lubow’s essay is available online, so I’ll give nothing more away. If you don’t already know The Threepenny Review, browse the online offerings or buy the magazine, one I have been reading regularly since shortly after Wendy Lesser started publishing it more than 25 years ago. I interviewed Lesser in 2000, at her office in Berkeley, for a newspaper story I was writing about literature and the Bay Area. She possesses an editor’s most important gift – the ability to attract good writers.

As an aside, if you enjoy Winsor McCay’s comics you might be interested in Stephen Millhauser’s novella “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne,” collected in Little Kingdoms (1993). Millhauser, a friend and former neighbor of mine, based the story roughly on McCay’s life and work.