David Corbett

Last Thursday, Phillipa released the results of her poll on preferences for male and female authors and protagonists. In my comment, I sheepishly admitted that I’d not really recognized my favoritism toward male authors until obliged to fess up.

And yet I knew there were women writers I not only enjoyed but admired and read greedily. So in a fit of atonement (I’m so Catholic), I felt obliged to discuss one of them here. A woman who has me awestruck, frankly: Martha Gellhorn.

I came upon her by accident—that is, while doing research.

John Updike once remarked that he realized early in his career that he could either be a reader or a writer but not both. Hearing that, I felt welcomed, as it were, to one of the severest regrets of many a professional writer—the lack of time one has to pursue reading for pleasure. Deadlines, the demands of research—not to mention the fear of a sort of stylistic or tonal contamination many novelists experience when they read fiction while at work on a manuscript—bars many of us from reading as widely as we would like.

And so much research requires plodding through impenetrable tracts of dense lifeless data, culling for that one crackling detail that might bring a passage to life. The joy is compound, then, when a source not only provides the information sought, but does so with a fresh, commanding style.

That’s how it was when I encountered the work of Martha Gellhorn, war correspondent for nearly fifty years (as well as a novelist and short story writer), too often known merely for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway.

Her collection, The Face of War, drawn from her work covering combat zones from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to Central America in the 1980s, provided one of those rare frissons every reader craves—the discovery of a fresh voice that is so unique, so penetrating, so sure-handed and clear, that every page seems to shimmer or haunt.

Opening the book at random, I came across her descriptions of the Nuremburg defendants, and was spellbound:

Goering’s “terrible mouth . . . a smile that was not a smile, but only a habit his lips had taken.”

Sauckel with his “puzzled stupid butcher-boy face.”

Hess, with “dark dents for eyes,” who “jerked his foreshortened head on his long neck, weird, inquisitive and birdlike.”

Frank with his “small cheap face, pink-cheeked, with a little sharp nose and black sleek hair. He looked patient and composed, like a waiter when the restaurant is not busy.”

Streicher compulsively chewing gum, his face blank: “the face of an idiot, this one.”

The “dreadful, weak” face of Schirach, who from the side sometimes resembled a hypochondriacal woman, who all her life “blackened her family’s existence with complaints.”

But the principal reason I was drawn to her was because, late in her professional life, she ventured to El Salvador, where much of my most recent two novels, Blood of Paradise and Do They Know I’m Running?, take place. She notes that she went there “in stupefying ignorance,” but it was her motive for going that I found inspiring:

As citizens, I think we all have an exhaustive duty to know what our governments are up to, and it is cowardice or laziness to ask: what can I do about it anyway? Every squeak counts, if only in self-respect. Gloomily, because otherwise I would be ashamed of myself, I made the small effort of a detour to El Salvador.

Gellhorn helped me with my own ignorance, just as she corrected her own. She spoke of a young American journalist who checked into the San Salvador Sheraton, left the hotel and then was never seen again until his body was returned to his family a year and a half later. The reason for his murder? No one could tell. Suggesting it might have been a case of mistaken identity, Gellhorn reflects acidly, “When killing is so easy, general and never punished, there must often be casual errors.”

Despite having been in war-ravaged cities such as Madrid, London, Helsinki and Saigon, she found San Salvador to be the most frightening of all. The violence didn’t come loudly from outside, but stealthily from within. The police hunted day and night, and she feared for the people who spoke to her. “Those who should have hated me as an American were friendly and trusting. But I knew what they risked and was awed by their courage.”

She came to admire the country’s poor: “Learning to read is the peasants’ rebellion. Their primer is the Bible. They were called the People of the Word, and that made them subversives. Subversives are prey.”

She was also outraged by the state of the refugee camps, the worst she’d seen since Vietnam. “Without the Church, courageous in El Salvador, the refugees would starve.” And her conversations with the wealthy women of the capital revealed a mind-numbing oblivion to the true state of affairs in their country: Only a few agitators were causing the trouble; talk of murdered civilians was propaganda; if there were any refugees, they were fleeing the Communists.

Such bromides were echoed by President Reagan, for whom Gellhorn harbored a particularly fierce revulsion, describing him as “boyish,” with an “ultra sincere chocolate voice.” When he equated the Nicaraguan Contras with the Founding Fathers, she could barely contain her rage: “This is truly astonishing, since the Founding Fathers were not known to gouge out the eyes and mutilate the bodies of their enemies, or to commit other such unseemly acts.”

Gellhorn found many parallels between El Salvador and Vietnam, which she also covered as a journalist, and she remarked that it was not easy being a citizen of a superpower, nor was it getting easier. She would feel isolated in her shame, she said, if she didn’t belong to a perennial minority of Americans, the “obstinate bleeding hearts who will never agree that might makes right, and know that if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless.” She recalls with both fury and shame how Johnson and Nixon lied about their plans to escalate the conflict in Southeast Asia, cheating America of the leaders its citizens thought they had elected, only to blunder into atrocity:

Power corrupts, an old truism, but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power schemes become unstuck in time, at cruel cost to others; then the powerful put their stupid important heads together and invent the next similar schemes.

Like I said, sometimes research isn’t a chore, it’s a joy, an inspiration. A call to arms. Reading Gellhorn reminded me that the battle against naked power never ends, and life is a daily choosing of sides—if only for self-respect.

* * * * *

Murderateros—who sits on the throne in your temple of revered writers, male or female?

Do you have a favorite war correspondent, or journalist, whose work anchors you once again in the world and reminds you of the stakes of being human, of being alive together at this time, in this place, on this planet?

What inspirational nudge, insight, or life lesson has your favorite writer bestowed?

* * * * *

Jukebox Hero of the Week: Boy, this one’s hard, because the post is so damn serious. But I’m going with Arlene Auger, one of my favorite sopranos, who died far too young (age 53) of a brain tumor in 1993. She was a late bloomer, so her career was sadly far too short, but her voice was the essence of simplicity and clarity.

This clip shows her singing “Morgen” (Morning) by Richard Strauss. I chose this piece because Strauss, though exonerated of being a Nazi sympathizer, was nonetheless one of the composers sanctioned by Hitler as fitting for the Third Reich, and Thomas Mann condemned him after the war for being “a Nazi composer.” Despite the messy background, the song is stunning, and reminds me that man is complicated, stitched together from light and dark, and even the wise and gifted routinely fall far short of their ideals (ask Joe Paterno):

David Corbett and Zoë Ferraris

Today on Wildcard Tuesday, David Corbett converses with author Zoë Ferraris about writing heroes outside the normal mold.

Zoë is the author of two novels, Finding Nouf  and City of Veils, with her third, Kingdom of Shadows, due out from Little Brown in June, 2012.

Zoë’s novels take place Saudi Arabia, and while providing a tense, smart, suspenseful read, they also explore the uniquely disturbing relationship between the sexes under the shadow of strict Islam. Laura Wilson, in her review of City of Veils  for The Guardian, wrote:

Ferraris’s second novel more than lives up to the promise of her magnificent debut …. The plot is thrilling, with plenty of twists and turns, and all the characters well drawn, but what makes this novel really extraordinary is Ferraris’s knowledgeable and sensitive depiction of a place where religion, used as a blunt instrument, has given rise to a stultifying, paranoid and sex-obsessed society, where women are forcibly infantilised and men are emotionally bonsaied. Highly recommended. 

David: When I first read Finding Nouf, I was bowled over by how insightful it was about what damage a culture premised on male superiority could inflict not just on women but on men.

But the other thing that made me take notice was the timing. The book came out in 2008, with America still in the throes of post-9/11 Muslim-bashing. Muslim men in particular were often viewed as terrorists until proven otherwise.

I thought you were incredibly brave, hoping readers would see as human someone so many Americans had already stigmatized, demonized or dismissed.

And yet I didn’t get any sense of a political agenda on your part, though I did sense a desire to lend a voice to one particular type of voiceless—or invisible—character. Am I correct in that?

Zoë: Thanks, David. And yes, I’ve been hanging around Muslims for twenty years. At some point I took stock of all the Arab men I knew and asked myself how many of them are similar to anything I’ve seen in the media—bearded fundamentalist, sleazy souq merchant, wife-beater, oil baron, or billionaire sheikh. The only one who fit any of the above categories was an American I knew who had converted to Islam. His idea of being Muslim was culled from old National Geographic photos; he became a fundamentalist and grew the craziest beard I’ve ever seen.

Same goes for Muslim women. Checklist: any belly dancers out there? Nope.

If you wear the same perfume three days in a row, you’ll stop smelling it. It’s this energy-saving device inside your brain that eliminates new perceptions of familiar things. I think most Americans don’t stigmatize Arabs so much as we’re presented with ideas that become odorless, invisible after a few encounters.

It’s easy to break a stereotype for a minute or two, much harder to set up a situation where you care enough about a character to follow him through a rich series of events. The key is getting a reader to care. And with all the attention on the Muslim world these days, I figured that shouldn’t be too hard.

Much harder, I imagine, to tackle the subject of immigrants in this country, especially Latinos, as you’re doing in Do They Know I’m Running? In many ways that hits closer to home, because it’s a matter of looking at one’s own community and how it deals with strangers.

David: Yes, most people have made up their minds on who and what an “illegal immigrant” is. But I’m not sure my task was harder than yours.

As you say, the problem is creating a character (or characters) people care about enough to follow through a series of crises, intimacies, betrayals, victories. But if the reader’s mind is already made up, your character remains as invisible as Ellison’s hero.

I think this remark of yours is illuminating: And with all the attention on the Muslim world these days, I figured that (getting a reader to care) shouldn’t be too hard.

I succumbed to the same impulse. But what I found was a kind of topical overload. When you’re bombarded with information 24/7 you get pounded into believing there’s nothing more to be contemplated on an issue.

The difficulty of portraying a community’s view of the strangers in its midst is really one of intimacy. And yes, the intimacy ironically works against you. The closer to home the invisible hero is, the more likely he will slip under the radar of preconception and arouse feelings not just of sympathy but guilt.

Zoë: I can see how you ran into topical overload. A novel’s relationship to current events is one of those things that relies on the slot machine of destiny. And I’m sorry, but you and me are competing with vampires, which sometimes makes me think that people are suffering topical overload on everything and the best thing that fiction can do right now is nourish fantasy.

You said that if a reader’s mind is already made up then your characters remain invisible, but I think even the most absolutely rigid minds can be flexed by good fiction. One of the most awesome things a writer can do is take someone completely vile and make you fall in love with him—even if you’re not prepared to admit it. May I call the jury’s attention to Exhibits Hannibal Lecter and Tony Soprano? Dear cannibalistic serial killer, how did you get so charismatic? Ditto you, plump little sleazebag from Jersey? Why do I like you? That’s just shamelessly good writing.

I like your point about intimacy making it more difficult for a reader to accept an invisible hero, especially if anger and guilt are involved. But I just keep believing that when you write about topical things, you’re working with an advantage. And if Thomas Harris can make me like a sociopathic serial killer, then shoot, anything can happen.

David: I’d like to spin the intimacy angle a little, or take it in a new direction. John Hawkes wrote in a short story called “A Little Bit of the Old Slap and Tickle” that to be loved is to be seen. We all want to be seen honestly—and ultimately accepted—if only by one person. And that’s particularly true in a culture where sex roles are so regimented.

And yet, if women are veiled, how are they actually, truly seen? Removing the veil could go deliciously well or disastrously wrong, is my guess.

Zoë: This reminds me of something people usually ask at my readings: What do Saudi women wear under their burqas? It’s a strange, yet totally natural question. And yes, a friend of mine in Saudi often says that women just want to be seen, and she blames this on the burqa.

The first time I encountered a super-devout Muslim face to face, he came to my front door. He was looking for my husband, and when I answered the door (without a veil or head scarf, naturally—this was in Daly City), he turned aside so fast that he nearly got whiplash. He spoke very tenderly and politely to me, but he refused to look at me, and at age nineteen, I was tortured by that. Not only was it awkward watching him have a conversation with the side of my house, I felt like my own presence on my doorstep was dirty, or I was breaking some mysterious Muslim protocol. My husband later said that, in the mind of the visitor, he was showing great respect for me. He was, by not looking at me, loving me in his way—by giving me the freedom to be exposed and not stared at. But I persist in feeling that when someone pointedly avoids looking at my face while they’re talking to me, it’s insulting and disturbing.

David: Wow, that really beats my greeting-the-Jehovah’s-Witnesses-in-nothing-but-my-Batman-cape story.

Circling back to a point we addressed at the start, in a certain sense, we both, in our choice of heroes, honored the age-old challenge of giving a voice to the voiceless—or, a face to the invisible. But is this wise with one’s protagonist—especially in the crime genre?

James Lee Burke famously dedicates himself to standing up for the marginalized, but his heroes David Robicheux and Billy Bob Holland fit perfectly the mold of the chisel-chinned (if heavy-hearted) plains gunman. Lee Child’s Reacher and Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch epitomize the type, which accounts for much of their series’ vast appeal. I’m sure there are those who might argue that, by having heroes who for most readers seem to be outsiders, we’ve violated a cardinal rule of crime writing.

Did we fail to get the memo—or worse, ignore it?

Zoë: Nah, we read the memo, we just didn’t like it.

I think we’re showing respect for the genre by hitting it with a gene gun. Ye Olde Chisel-Chinned Plains Gunman was born a long time ago, and he’s still the main comfort food when it comes to digesting the ugly parts of our country’s history. But you and me, we’re not just doing all this to be nice, giving those poor voiceless their say. We’re evolving something. We’re part of a whole new menu of crime fiction that encompasses the world. (Check out the Independent’s “Around the World in 80 Sleuths”.)

We’ve defined an invisible hero as someone who’s been “stigmatized, demonized or dismissed.” That fits with the tradition that almost every successful crime hero is tortured in some way. (I believe that was the….other memo.)

Genre loves its antiheroes! And so do we. We may drag new people into that mix—the devout Muslim, the illegal immigrant—but what are they beyond that? How are they tortured?

I think we’re re-seeding the genre, so let’s make a date and see what’s grown up in thirty years.

* * * * *

So Murderateros—do you know of any other invisible heroes? Do you think that the marginalized are best employed as secondary characters? Or is the outsider in fact the archetypal protagonist?

And is topicality a blessing, a cure, or an irrelevance?

* * * * *

Jukebox Hero of the Week: It seemed fitting to find an artist with both Latin and Arab roots, which points directly at Shakira, whose lineage is both Colombian and Lebanese. This song, “Ojos Así,” more than any other captures that dual heritage. It’s based in the Phrygian dominant scale, contains interludes of Arabic, and Shakira herself sings in Arabic in the album version, single version, and various remixes of the song. (In this video, she also, yes, belly dances—sorry, Zoë.)