DISCOVERIES

MISERABLE MIRACLE

By Henri Michaux

New York Review Books:

180 pp., $13.95 paper

“Perhaps Michaux has never tried to express anything,” the late Octavio Paz wrote of the poet in an essay reprinted as the introduction to this volume. “All his efforts have been directed at reaching that zone, by definition indescribable and incommunicable, in which meanings disappear. A center at once completely empty and completely full.”

Between 1956 and 1959, Henri Michaux wrote three books describing his experiences with mescaline. The text, written during each experience, is accompanied by line drawings that are alarming in their immediacy. They provide another language for Michaux to convey his terror, pleasure and sheer enervation. In the text, he wrestles with language: “I turn the pages: Nothing. I shake the volume trying to make the loose pages fall out,” he writes, after hallucinating colorful pictures in a book with no illustrations. He is astonished by “the phenomenon of ideas gravitating like planets ... An idea arrives, quickly ceases to exist. When it returns a few minutes later it seems absolutely new.”

While he is tripping, there is an overwhelming sense of connection with the universe and its geologic beginnings: of fire, of the trembling Earth, of ocean torrents and whistling wind. But a reader has the raw feeling that Michaux is being chased by language, that the words come just a few minutes later than the experience, and by then they are a little stale. The drawings, however, come from the epicenter. They resemble at first electrocardiograms, then eerie indecipherable kanji and, finally, word landscapes, letters melting into horizons and dripping down mountainsides.

With the epiphanies come some God-time-infinite-being psychobabble, ideas that are either unformed or inaccessible, but there is always the possibility that he speaks in the tongue of angels, and for that possibility, it is worth diving headlong into his experience.

*

MANHATTAN MONOLOGUES

Stories

By Louis Auchincloss

Houghton Mifflin: 226 pp., $25

The high society that Louis Auchincloss writes about is Chekhovian, tainted with desperation, distraught over the gradual loss of its entitlements. His characters are utterly unlikable down to the last heiress; they are bitter and disenfranchised and cynical; marriage is an arrangement, children are pawns and blue blood runs like ice water in constricted veins.

Besides unlikable characters, there are just too many adjectives; the dialogue is dense with chit-chat that swamps potentially interesting ideas. Take, for example, war as a test of manliness in the story “All That May Become a Man.” In the last paragraph, the narrator says to the reader, “I could never compete in a woman’s eyes with a hero,” a thought that might have carried the story had it not been quite so deeply buried.

Here is an example of the kind of obfuscation that Auchincloss indulges in: “The shock to me was such as to throw me into a kind of nervous breakdown, which may have necessitated my going for a time to a sanitorium, had not a stern talk with my mother formed the beginning of what looked to be a cure, or at least an alleviation.” Writing like this will doom a writer to mid-list. Characters, Auchincloss’ only hope in his world, get eaten in the machine of the mystique, which is, in all fairness, what happens in real life. But we expect more from fiction.

*

THE SUMMER OF MY GREEK TAVERNA

A Memoir

By Tom Stone

Simon & Schuster: 245 pp., $24

It has been too long since our last good food-and-life books. I think of John Lanchester’s “The Debt to Pleasure” or “Pass the Polenta” by Theresa Lust, not to mention the writings of M.F.K. Fisher or Elizabeth David. Now and then it is good to have these elegant reminders of slow meals and adventurous appetites.

“The Summer of My Greek Taverna” is also an expatriate’s tale, the story of a writer and a painter and their two young children trying to live in a place that inspires them. Tom Stone adds something to his chosen genre: graphic descriptions of his own querulous doubt at each new decision. It is too easy to forget, in the Peter Mayle world, that these lives require a great deal of risk. There is never enough money, never enough security, and always one is forced to run on instinct: to trust strangers selling houses and, in Stone’s case, Greeks bearing gifts. To stick to the dream.

I have come to believe that these memoirs, well and honestly written like Stone’s, are extremely important; for some of us, a map of the road not taken.