Finished The Underground City, by H.L. "Doc" Humes (published in the 50s). This book is what they call a "sleeper". Probably soon to be re-published, in tandem with documentary film coming out about Humes, produced by his daughter Immy.

A huge book, over 700 pp. Set in wartime & postwar France. Big panorama of Resistance fighters, Communists, US Embassy & military people, etc. Probably one of the deepest & most knowledgeable, subtle evocations of the French Resistance written (at least in English). The style has Gallic clarity and simplicity. But it's a strange, melancholy book. The protagonist, "John Stone", an American officer working with the underground who gets caught up in postwar scapegoating and political machinations, is a curiously affectless, absent personality. Maybe related to the literary atmosphere of the time (Camus, Sartre, Existentialism...). He's also in shock during & after his wartime experiences. Furthermore it's clear Humes is grappling with questions of American direction in the shadow of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Striking foresight in the way he focuses on the relation between "security" and civil liberties. Humes brings his characters & their situation to life with tremendous, vivid realism. Questions of loyalty & betrayal are at the core of this novel steeped in war and soldierly values.

Still trying to figure out what I'm doing. Sincerely sorry for all the comings & goings of this blog. I love this medium but I'm in a creative miasma-turmoil-block. Will continue to try to be quiet...

Annoyed with both Jim Harrison & William Logan pieces in NYTBR last weekend. Logan tries to knock Crane off his always-shaky pedestal. Harrison the successful bon-vivant novelist makes fun of academic poets. They are fair game (I've done it myself occasionally), but when he writes "Vallejo... a grander poet than any now living on this bruised earth"... fooey. Excuse me, Jim, but how would you know?? Stick with hunting quail, buddy. Poetry's out of your league.

Reading H.L. Humes, The Underground City. He's better than Pynchon, John (speaking as one who hasn't read Pynchon).

Here's a new chapter from untitled fresco-in-progress.

1

 
Like the famous rose out of the dried-up swimming pool
the thought of you comes to me with the approach
of your birthday.  The planet spins just out of reach
of the sun (path of a dizzy potter's wheel)

 
still warming with evening light the flaking fresco
(framed by gilded oak) in the old Town Hall
where the phantom image of a pax municipal
is captured in a ring of dancing girls... come & go,

 
come & go with me they sing, in their clear soprano
silence of pastel.  And so I would indeed...
out of my fated rounds (Providence, decreed
in faded characters - Dante Street, Hope, Gano...)

 
and across the squared improbable city
harbored in every heart - toward you
(my dancing absence, skipping beat, blue
J).  From shallow deeps and minor bays to blazing C.