Vachel Lindsay

When Vachel Lindsay died in 1931, Sinclair Lewis called him "one of our great poets, a power and glory in the land." He had already earned the admiration of Yeats and performed for larger crowds than any American poet today could hope for. Edgar Lee Masters published a biography of him four years later. Sometime around this point (or possibly even earlier) his reputation seems to have gone into decline. The only biography that one can easily find in libraries today is by Eleanor Ruggles. It was published in 1959, and on the first page she already seems to have doubts about whether Lindsay's work would survive. He merits a single paragraph in Randall Jarrell's essay "Fifty Years of American Poetry," written in 1963, although it is an appreciative paragraph: "He had more sheer imagination, sheer objective command," Jarrell writes, "than most of his contemporaries, so that several of his poems are perfected as almost none of theirs are."

Sometime between then and now, Lindsay's Collected Poems went completely out of print. I made it through college without ever hearing his name, and there are plenty of practicing poets today - I have made inquiries - who have no idea who he is.

Somehow I got interested in him. I think I read something about how he had once gone wandering across the Midwest, trading his poems for food and shelter (I am vulnerable to the romance of such things). Eventually I stumbled across his Selected Poems in a used bookstore. The back cover said that his most important poem was "The Congo," so I flipped to it. There were instructions for chanting in the margin, things like "A rapidly piling climax of speed and racket," and the first section was called "Their Basic Savagery." Uh oh, I thought. And then I found passages like this:

"Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM."

Bingo bango bongo, I thought, I will not be purchasing this book. Months later I came across a copy of the Dover Thrift edition of "The Congo and Other Poems." It is the only book of Lindsay's poetry that is still in print, and the store was selling it for forty cents. I decided that this was worth my money. I skipped the poems with chanting instructions and went straight to the middle of the book.

There were a few silly poems, a few sentimental ones, and a whole host of great ones. They were indignant, fanciful, profound, strange, and funny - and not like anything I had come across in American poetry. The only real point of comparison for me was Blake's early stuff. Lindsay's poems do not strike as deep as Blake's best, and his visual art is not nearly of the same stature (his drawings are included in the Collected Poems), but there are interesting similarities: the obsession with Swedenborg, the horror of industrial civilization, the mystical, slightly nutty significance they both draw from all kinds of events.

But there is an important difference. Blake - as funny as he can be - does not deliver his prophecies as a joke; I get the sense that he believes every word. With Lindsay, I can sense a canny half-smile - it is the look of someone at a party who starts acting a little crazy because he is surrounded by incredibly boring people. He means most of what he says, but he is exaggerating a little to get people's attention, to try to shake them out of their lifelessness, and also just to entertain himself. Here is a quote from his Introduction to the Collected Poems, entitled "Adventures Preaching Hieroglyphic Sermons." I think you can hear what I'm talking about:

There is just one way to convince citizens of the United States that you are dead in earnest about an idea. It will do no good to be crucified for it, or burned at the stake for it. It will do no good to go to jail for it. But if you go broke for a hobby over and over again the genuine fructifying wrath and opposition is terrific. They will notice your idea at least. I flooded Springfield with free pamphlets incessantly. And so I began to relish home-town controversy on its absolute merits...

I remember a quote - I think it was said in relation to Frank Lloyd Wright - that our great American men are always to some degree charlatans. The quote isn't worth thinking too hard about, but it has an element of truth. Lindsay knows that he is performing, but he also has a sense of his own ridiculousness. Here, for example, is how he explains his rise to popularity: "And to this general interest in poetry I attribute the fact that I, a speaker to whom not six persons were ever known to listen with patience, became a conventionalized "reciter" of my own verses almost instantly, and have since that time recited to about one million people."

His poetry has some very serious things to say, but it also has an ease, a naturalness, and a sense of fun that is rare in American literature. I should mention here that I agree with Sinclair Lewis: I think Vachel Lindsay is a great poet, one of the real ones. Not of Whitman's stature or anything, but someone with important and delightful things to say that still deserves to be heard. I am not really sure why his work has disappeared. University neglect might have played a role. Schools tend to amplify the reputations of people who have supplied some sort of technical innovation, especially if this innovation requires extensive explication. People who broke imaginative ground without any obvious technical breakthroughs, or whose work usually found voice in traditional forms, tend to be out of luck. At least if they were not already established classics.

And so I read The Waste Land in three different classes, but not a single poem of Hardy's. Every work by Joyce, but not one story by Frank O'Connor. But whose books do I bother to open today? Lindsay's technical achievement - his contribution, I suppose, to the story of poetry - is his various chants, but anyone who looks only at those poems is not going to see why he is still worth reading. But look at everything else and - making allowances for lots of pleasant throwaways and some really bad, really silly stuff - I think you'll see what I mean: "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan," for example, or the three poems in "A Gospel of Beauty." And so many of the moon poems are wonderful too.

I managed to track down the Collected Poems in a used bookstore, but it is hard to find and often expensive. The Dover edition contains some good stuff and is well worth your $1.50. But it is high time that someone like the Library of America brought out Lindsay's Collected Poems again. We need a good dose of his strangeness in this country, along with a solid slap in the face.

Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox

I'm drawn to coterie obsessions: books brought back into print after years of neglect, waiting to finally be understood by the enlightened minority. Who doesn't want to be a member of an exclusive club of admirers? And Desperate Characters is definitely an exclusive sort of book. No one I know has ever heard of it, and it is swimming in praise from notable writers, all of whom consider it an unjustly ignored classic. In the introduction, Jonathan Franzen calls it "obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow.” Obviously superior! And David Foster Wallace says that it is “a sustained work of prose so lucid and fine that it seems less written than carved.”

Well, I love a good carved book, so I picked up Desperate Characters a few weeks ago, ready to encounter a masterpiece. The novel deals with Otto and Sophie Bentwood, a wealthy and childless Brooklyn couple in their early 40s. Sophie has had two miscarriages but this doesn’t seem like one of the couple's major sorrows (neither partner expresses any particular longing for a child). Otto is a lawyer; Sophie, despite her obviously extensive education, doesn’t feel like doing most of the translating jobs she is offered, so she is largely idle.

The novel skips over Otto's life at the office, so we never see the couple engage in any productive work. Instead, we see them at home, sniping at each other – "half-consciously amassing evidence against the other," in Fox’s memorable phrase – and occasionally attending parties where people have conversations like this. Here is Sophie with her friend Mike:

“I wish I were Jewish,” she said. “Then when I died, I’d die as a Jew.”
“You’ll die as a Protestant.”
“There aren’t many left.”
“Then as a Gentile. I asked you, what’s the matter? Are you working on anything?”
“I haven’t wanted to work; it seems futile. There are so many who do it better than I do. I was sent a novel to translate but I couldn’t understand it, even in French. It simply irritated me. And I don’t have to work.”
“Tell me a little Baudelaire,” he said.

Who the hell talks like this? (She immediately proceeds to quote some Baudelaire, by the way.) Jonathan Lethem describes the dialogue as “bristling” and “hilarious.” I found it tedious and annoying. I don’t know how to locate anything like an actual human being in this kind of talk, and there is a great deal of it in the book. This exchange is close to the beginning of the novel, so I soldiered on, figuring it isn't always easy to get into an exclusive club.

There are three main engines of tension in Desperate Characters. First, Otto’s long-time law partnership is dissolving, and his former partner Charlie has been escaping with their old clients by spreading innuendos about Otto’s health and competence.

Second, Sophie gets bitten on the hand by a cat, and keeps putting off going to the doctor – at the very end, we are still waiting to hear if the cat has rabies (the two Bentwoods manage to catch the animal and get it to the ASPCA). If the cat does have rabies, Sophie will probably require a number of painful shots in her stomach.

The third engine is that the world is going to shit. Not only do the Bentwoods have a particularly unpleasant marriage, black people – yes, black people! – are taking over their neighborhood. There are drunk black people throwing up on the stoop; black people banging on the door and asking to make phone calls, black people leaving trash everywhere and generally making a mess of things.

I suspect Fox’s depictions of this de-gentrification will make many readers uncomfortable, but at least she is courageous enough not to hide behind the usual pieties. In any case, the Bentwoods are not racist; all sorts of poor people make them uncomfortable, even white ones. Here, for example, is a description of the Haynes family. The father is a caretaker for the Bentwoods' summer cottage, which has been trashed by some unknown intruders, and husband and wife have gone over to complain about the break-in:

Sitting around the kitchen table like collapsed sacks of grain were Mrs. Haynes and the three Haynes children, two boys in their late teens, and a girl a few years younger. The girl was immensely fat. From beneath a tangle of burnt-looking fairish hair, she was staring down at a copy of Life magazine, her mouth open.

Okay: I’m fine with the girl being fat, even immensely fat, and I’m fine with her reading Life magazine, but does her goddamn mouth have to be hanging open? Is this really necessary? I’m offended on artistic grounds, not moral ones, because this description is so entirely predictable. There is no longer any way that the Haynes family is going to surprise me: they have been summed up, and the rest of the pages in which they appear are entirely dead, because the author is only capable of hitting the same "white trash" button.

Luckily there is not a great deal of this; we spend most of our time with rich white people who read their Baudelaire with mouths firmly shut. Sophie visits a few more friends, they discuss Freud and eat potage fontange; all the while, her hand keeps swelling from the cat bite, and she puts off going to the doctor, convincing herself that it’s too small a matter to bother with. Otto is more and more stressed at work, and Charlie, his partner, stops by one night to talk with him and instead ends up taking a walk with Sophie, who doesn’t want to wake up her husband. In a scene that is utterly unconvincing, she confesses to Charlie that she had an affair recently and then hastily takes it back.

Two chapters later, we get the story of the affair, and it is the only part of the book that justified some of the extravagant praise. Francis Early, the other man, is genuinely fascinating, and there is real emotional intensity in this section instead of the haze of inexplicable nastiness that hangs over the rest of the novel. But this chapter soon ends, and we return to more pages of bitter spats, visits to friends, and anxiety about the breakdown of society. Along the way, we are treated to many passages of fine writing. Here is Sophie finally going to the hospital:

At the hospital information desk, a powdery old clerk told them to go back to the street and walk around to the emergency-room entrance a block away. There was no access from here, she said. She had the spurious helpfulness of an airline stewardess. Her smile did not conceal from Sophie her judgment: emergency cases belonged to a low social order in the hierarchy of disease. They left the reception room quickly, both of them unpleasantly aware of the special claustrophobic warmth that seems to be the natural climate of illness.

For a passage like this to be impressive, it has to be read very quickly, without thinking about whether any of what it contains is actually true. These are cocktail party aperçus; they only sound intelligent for a moment. Why exactly is the helpfulness of airline stewardesses spurious? And since when are emergency cases low on the hierarchy of disease? As for prose that Wallace says can be carved somewhere, just look at how many words are either confusing ("powdery"?) or entirely unnecessary. What does the word "special" add to "claustrophobic warmth"? Is "did not conceal from Sophie" all that different from the single word "revealed"?

This quote is entirely representative. For a book that is only 150 pages long, and has been described by several reviewers as perfect, the prose is continuously padded with needless distinctions. Thinking about a man she was drawn to, Sophie remembers "the way he'd nudge things with the unself-conscious and sober curiosity of a child or an especially alert animal." Such details should build to something, but there is never any sense of accretion in this book because its specificity is not actually useful. What is lost if it's just a run-of-the-mill alert animal, for example? Are we really getting closer to the truth by designating only the most alert of animals? And there are hundreds of sentences like this - it's like an aesthete swirling a mouthful of wine and trying to discover more and more obscure flavors. A substantial intelligence is deployed, but by an author that wants us to admire her penetration more than the content of her thought, which is consistently trivial and not nearly as subtle as it pretends to be.

I am honestly puzzled by the acclaim this book has received. What exactly is the insight that all of these writers are getting from Desperate Characters? There is certainly little pleasure to be had. Anyway, I will happily bow out of membership in this particular club. I don't have the money, in any case.

New Grub Street, by George Gissing

It is hard to say why certain novels built around now defunct social conventions maintain their power, while others start to seem ridiculous. I've never been bothered by the fact that modern divorce laws would make Anna Karenina very different, and Tess remains moving even though we no longer place any great value on virginity. Sometimes, though, things have changed a little too much. Here, for example, is a description of one of George Gissing's novels, as describing by Orwell in an admiring essay:

In A Life's Morning an honest and gifted man meets with ruin and death because it is impossible to walk about a big town with no hat on. His hat is blown out of the window when he is traveling in the train, and as he has not enough money to buy another, he misappropriates some money belonging to his employed, which sets going a series of disasters.

What makes this novel different than Tess and Anna Karenina? Although the conventions in those books may be gone, the impulses that once animated them are entirely alive. People still associate purity in women with limited sexual experience, and although infidelity might not exile a person from her entire social circle, ending a marriage is still a deeply isolating experience. But what is the article of expensive clothing, today, whose absence would so isolate us from every hope of advancement in life? It is a convention that is too silly to be taken seriously, and I cannot imagine reading that novel for anything but its historical value (incidentally, Orwell vouches for the fact that, even in the early 20th century, "bareheaded men were booed at in the street.")

The old saw is that as long as an author gives the characters and their world a sense of solidity, as Jane Austen does, we will believe in the conventions along with them. But I can only follow this so far, and I admit getting annoyed even at Austen's immensely solid characters when they are shocked at trifling breaches in etiquette. I understand that it all makes sense in context, but I have no great desire (most of the time) to read about people contorting themselves in a bizarre, corseted world.

Which is, finally, a good way to describe much but not all of New Grub Street. Most of the book deals with people writing to support themselves in a society that makes almost no sense to me. Imagine a world where, purely through force of convention, literature is no longer a supremely impractical way to make a living - as I assumed it always had been - but the only possible labor for a man of education in a city without a fortune to support himself. A clerkship or any other sort of work would, it seems, be completely humiliating, so even people with no great love for literature churn out mountains of stories and articles and novels at incredible speed merely to pay the bills.

Apparently this was an actual state of affairs in late 19th century London. Gissing himself wrote this novel in two months (it is 500 pages long) and much of it is taken, with small variations, from his own life. The main plot involves a struggling writer, Edwin Reardon, and his wife Amy. Reardon has written a few books that have done okay, but under the pressure of paying the rent and supporting a young child, he has gone completely dry. His wife doesn't understand why he can't just sit down and fill up the pages, and the tension over money and his productivity starts to put a strain on their relationship.

I kept thinking, as I was reading, "Jesus, just get a regular job," but apparently even Reardon's wife regards such a step as utter degradation. She refuses to be married to any sort of common laborer, and the two separate when Reardon suggests that he give up on literature and go back to clerking.

Gissing does make the setting and era entirely convincing - in Virginia Woolf's description, it is "a world of fog and fourwheelers, of slatternly landladies, of struggling men of letters, of gnawing domestic misery, of gloomy back streets, and ignoble yellow chapels" - but, as you can see, this is not much of an inducement to read a book. What has kept it alive, I think, is its other major plot, involving the relationship between Jasper Milvain, an up-and-coming writer, and Marian Yule, a lower-middle-class young woman who helps her father with his own literary work.

For Marian, as with many of the people in this book, writing is little better than slave labor, done entirely out of necessity or compulsion. She is an intelligent and good-hearted woman whose circumstances have denied her any hope of escaping this routine unless she happens to come into some money. Milvain, too, has to make his own fortune, but he has more options. He studies the market, and is clever enough to learn to write in a light, racy style that he can tell is what people will pay to read. Throughout the novel, he maintains that unless one is a genius, there is absolutely no point in trying to follow some fastidious personal vision - just see what people want and then supply it. (His foil in this respect, and one of my favorite characters in the book, is a man named Mr. Biffen, who is assiduously working to polish a grim realist tale, sure to be a failure, called Mr. Bailey, Grocer.)

We are meant to dislike Jasper, but I suspect that he got away from Gissing a little, because by the end of the novel he becomes an incredibly lifelike, almost emblematic figure. There is some strange, disturbing modern quality about him, something that I would call pure "above-averageness" -- he is a man who is entirely incapable of both heroism and treachery. He helps his friends when he can and produces pleasant and intelligent work. He is witty, genial, sensible, and clearly on the road to success. We recognize him as suited for the world, and as the sort of man that most of us would like to be (and perhaps, in many ways, already are); but there is also something repulsive about his sensibleness, about the complete lack of inspiration and grandeur in all that he aims for.

But Jasper's is the time that is to come. Even with all of the focus on vanished convention - the obsession with marrying well and refusing positions beneath one's station - I think one can witness the birth of the modern literary world in this fat grim novel. From the success of a little paper called Chit-Chat, which is sold for pennies to people riding the streetcars, and caters to the so-called "quarter educated" (the paper has only tiny half-column articles with short paragraphs) to Reardon's failed attempts at writing a popular novel, we can see the mass audience beginning to take over the world of words. It is a world on the edge of a cliff, with many of the vices of the modern world and few of the virtues of the old one - and I've never quite come across its like in a novel before. Which is praise of a certain kind.

So, although I doubt many people will thank me for the recommendation, I think New Grub Street is worth reading. It has numerous flaws only partially attributable to the speed at which it was written: Gissing is not quite large enough as an artist to see past the world that he is writing about, and there are many sections where he seems to both attack and entirely accept the conventions of his time. But there is something about New Grub Street that is, finally, difficult to shake - and that is a rare quality even in books that I liked much more than this one.

Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters

I was reading a handful of books at the same time as the Spoon River Anthology, and it succeeded in winning my time away from its competitors and being finished first, which is definitely a sign of a certain kind of literary merit, and an especially impressive achievement for a book of verse. The Anthology is one of the few books of poetry that I would confidently recommend to people who don't normally read poetry. It is rare among classics of American poetry in actually having enjoyed, immediately, the popularity it deserved, and it even seems to have been a success in translation. Not many people talk about it today, but I don't think it has lost any of its appeal over the years.

The book consists of a series of short monologues by the inhabitants of a graveyard in a small Illinois town, all written in free verse. The dead know what has happened in the town since their deaths - "Do you remember, passer-by," one man says, "the path I wore across the lot where now stands the opera house" - and about the other townspeople who have joined them under the hill. Death has brought a certain insight for a few of them but most continue to strike the attitudes they adopted in life: they nurse grievances, blame their tormentors, and justify their actions to each other and to us. It is often the plainest monologues that are the most haunting:

Dow Kritt

Samuel is forever talking of his elm--
But I did not need to die to learn about roots:
I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River.
Look at my elm!
Sprung from as good a seed as his,
Sown at the same time,
It is dying at the top:
Not from lack of life, nor fungus,
Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks.
Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock,
And can no further spread.
And all the while the top of the tree
Is tiring itself out, and dying,
Trying to grow.

Samuel, the gardener, has his monologue on the facing page. "Now I," he writes, "an under-tenant of the earth, can see / That the branches of a tree / Spread no wider than its roots. / And how shall the soul of a man / Be larger than the life he has lived?" Masters, as you can see from the quotes, does not write realistically in the voices of his characters. Except for his intellectuals and poets (and these strike me as some of the weaker poems in the collection) death has lent everyone the same, simple eloquence.

There are 244 separate monologues in the book dating back to the Revolutionary War, and they proceed up to the early part of the 20th century (the book was published in 1915). Some of the characters are entirely isolated - one person happened to die on a train passing through Spoon River - but most connect to at least one other person in the book: there are lovers, spouses, children, friends, victims and abusers scattered throughout the collection, and part of the fun of reading the book is flipping back to the index and establishing this web of connections. The characters intersect across a number of plotlines - a failed bank, an arson, a few political campaigns, and any number of illicit romances - that lend the book a certain coherence even as it doesn't really progress towards anything.

Sometimes these connections prove to be less illuminating than the individual poems. Masters has a weakness for somewhat mechanical ironies: the temperance crusader is secretly a drunk, the upstanding citizen is an adulterer, the town's priest is proud of saving a marriage that the wife believes poisoned the lives of the entire family, and so on. Masters also tends to re-use the same effects to achieve intensity (at one point I counted six poems in a row that ended with an exclamation mark) which lends a certain sameness to the weaker poems.

A larger flaw is his habit of forcing his own judgments into the mouths of his characters. Here is a judge, for example, that Masters clearly dislikes: "I reached the highest place in Spoon River / But through what bitterness of spirit!" Or another powerful man - named, with something less that subtlety, John M. Church - who declares that he "pulled the wires with judge and jury, / And the upper courts, to beat the claims / Of the crippled, the widow and orphan, / And made a fortune thereat." When Church's monologue ends with "But the rats devoured my heart / And a snake made a nest in my skull!" it seems less like an artistic statement about what waits for everyone and more a piece of bitter wish-fulfillment from the author (after all, no one's heart will end up in very good shape at the end). And apparently it is this pamphleteering instinct that marred the other narrative poems that Masters produced over the remainder of his life - May Swenson, in her introduction to this book, describes them as "dogmatic novels in verse," and I can easily imagine what she means from the weaker poems in the collection.

But the Spoon River Anthology is largely unmarred by such faults. It is one of the greatest ideas for a long poem in all of English literature and Masters rises to the challenge much of the time. The Anthology also makes a demand of the reader that very few good books make directly nowadays: think on your life. What are you doing, and why, in the time that you have left? Not the most original questions, obviously, but real ones - and a book that forces them on us could do much worse.

Lyman King

You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Around which you may walk by the use of foresight
And wisdom.
Thus you believe, viewing the lives of other men,
As one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill,
Seeing how their difficulties could be avoided.
But pass on into life:
In time you shall see Fate approach you
In the shape of your own image in the mirror;
Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth,
And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest,
And you shall know that guest,
And read the authentic message of his eyes.

Starting Out in the Evening, by Brian Morton

I discovered this book through A.O. Scott's review of the movie in The New York Times, in which he describes the novel as near perfect. It is about an aging novelist, Leonard Schiller; his books, though once well-regarded, are now out of print and almost entirely forgotten. He still maintains his routine, continues to work on a last novel that has occupied him for over a decade, and spends most of the day in his tiny apartment reading and writing except for occasional outings with old friends - many of whom are sick and dying - and visits from his now middle-aged daughter.

There was one line from Scott's review that stuck with me for days. He compares the novelist to the main character in The Leopard (Visconti's film, not the novel) - and writes that "both movies concern an old man who has outlived the social order in which his life made sense." Schiller's social order is much smaller than Lampedusa's - as far as I can tell, it is the literary culture that existed for a few decades among a select group of intellectuals in Manhattan. They were a group of very serious men (there were probably a few women in the mix too) who believed that a perfectly adventurous life could be lived around words and ideas, that to read and write carefully was a valiant act that had real consequences for the world. They were willing to forgo certain types of intensity so they could have the stability that they needed to do their work and hopefully create something useful and beautiful for society. (Henry James comes up a lot in this book, as you might imagine.) I'm not sure they would have described this as a sacrifice - after all, they were all doing exactly what they wanted to do - but I think they did subscribe to a certain ascetic notion of the artist as a person who had to give up certain conventional satisfactions to perform his service to the world.

Were they right? Did their sacrifice result in the beauty that they hoped for, or did they rob their own work of the vitality it might have had by celebrating a vision of the writer's life that was too monkish and withdrawn? The latter position (and one that I came into this book supporting) is represented by Heather, a young Master's student who discovered Schiller's first two novels as an adolescent. She sees them as stories encouraging people to break out of conventional bonds and embrace freedom and passionate experience. She is an admirer of D.H. Lawrence (so am I) and loves Schiller's books for celebrating the same intensity that she sees in Lawrence. Heather wants to write her thesis about Schiller and then hopefully complete a book that will revive his reputation.

Unsurprisingly, she is shocked to find this fat, quiet old man living in his tiny apartment - he is not much of a representative for the sort of passion that she found in his books. She also is less than impressed with Schiller's last two novels and can't help but think that the rut that Schiller has fallen into - this quiet plodding away at reading and writing - is an escape from life that has drained his novels of their energy. Part of the reason this might have happened is that Schiller lost the wife to whom he was passionately devoted after those first two books. (The description of their early married life and desire for each other are some of the most beautiful sections in the book.) It is an open question whether Schiller is still writing with his entire spirit, or whether his routine is less devotion than weakness at this point - just something to keep him sane and going from day to day.

As Heather conducts her interviews and does her research, a strange romance develops between the two of them. It is less a physical relationship and more of a conversation between visions of life. Schiller's middle-aged daughter, Ariel, is another partner in this conversation. She was once a dancer and is now, not too unhappily, an aerobics instructor. Morton does a lovely job describing the physical immediacy with which she experiences the world, and sets it next to the other characters, who are all trying to get a fix on the world through words.

I hope I haven't made the book seem too schematic, with each character standing in for a certain idea, because they are also large enough to contain multiple positions. All of them can see the value in how other people approach the world for their own life. Here is one of my favorite passages in the novel, with Schiller thinking about his life in light of Heather's (he is sick and has almost collapsed walking up some museum steps): "He didn't want to make a scene. The thought crossed his mind that if greatness had eluded him as a writer, perhaps this was why: because he'd never wanted to make a scene. Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone."

The last major character - and for me the most unsatisfactory - is Casey, Ariel's old boyfriend who re-enters her life. She is nearing 40 and wants a child (yes, that old plot) and he does not. Casey is black and Morton pulls out the usual bits of sociological research on what it is like to be a black man: people cross the street to avoid you, police stop you for no particular reason. Etc. There is nothing that is less than well-written but I felt a real drop in the novel's creative energy whenever Casey stepped into the book. Plus him and Ariel have various conversations that just rehash the novel's other themes; they go see 35-Up and talk about how it seems like the middle-aged people in that documentary have given up on their dreams, lost their energy and zest as they get older. Again, etc.

More interesting, I think, are the minor characters who are part of the modern New York literary scene that Heather steps into. They are all leading much more externally interesting lives than Schiller, traveling and going to concerts and parties; they are interested in art and writing but only as long as it's fun for them. They write for magazines and papers with no illusions that the work will last. The writing is meant to serve to create an interesting lifestyle - to meet interesting people and go to new places - and no one thinks it makes any sense to sacrifice any part of the life for the art. And Heather, while basically agreeing with them, can't help seeing a little more nobility in Schiller's life than in theirs.

But what does this nobility really add up to? Schiller's books are not much more likely to last than all of those articles. But who has had a better life, who is worthier of serving as a model? Obviously these questions are not answerable (and are therefore fine material for a novel). I'm not sure this book is near-perfect - I felt my interest dropping off a little near the end - but it is deeply enjoyable (and surprisingly funny, by the way) and asks certain questions in just the right way. Anyone who thinks these questions are important - I'm sure there are a few such people left! - should definitely pick it up.

Nothing Like the Sun, by Anthony Burgess

On the back of this book is some of the most hilariously faint praise I've ever read: "Of all the books about Shakespeare that 1964 will bring forth, none is likely to make livelier reading than Anthony Burgess's historical novel, Nothing Like the Sun." Well said, Country Life magazine - I might even go farther and assert that of all the books about Shakespeare that I have read this year, this is the best. I included it on a list of my favorite historical novels, if anyone is curious.

I should begin by saying that I know very little about Shakespeare or Elizabethan England, so Burgess could have gotten away with almost anything - but, to the extent that one can sense historical rightness, this book felt right. It begins with WS (as he is called throughout) in his adolescence, delivering gloves for his father as his family deals with declining fortunes. He is seduced by a much older woman, gets her pregnant, and is forced to marry.

All of this is beautifully told in a mixture of Elizabethan and modern English. The dialogue in particular is wonderfully handled. None of the people quite came alive for me as complete people - Anne Hathaway and WS's family were vivid but generally creatures of a single characteristic - but Burgess's recreation of the physical and linguistic life of the era was a real delight. The bulk of the book occurs in London after WS has left. He writes his first so-so plays (Titus, The Comedy of Errors) and meets Henry Wriothesley, a spoiled but charming aristocrat, who becomes his patron and occasional lover.

The plot from this point on largely concerns the triangle sketched out in the Sonnets: the pure love with the young man (which WS realizes is not so pure at all) and the degraded lust he feels for the Dark Lady. The Dark Lady is probably the book's biggest problem - she doesn't feel at all real, although there are some beautiful pieces of writing about the texture and look of her skin. Aside from lust and a desire to sleep her way into the aristocracy, she has no real personality. Burgess imagines her as a transplant from the East Indies, a Muslim with a Christian name - Lucy/Fatimah - but aside from giving her a speech pattern (she has a hard time pronouncing certain letter combinations) he makes little effort at deeper characterization.

But the center of this novel is not really a particular person - not even Shakespeare's consciousness felt very alive for me, although what artist would be capable of capturing it? - but the chaotic vibrant world that could give birth to his art. Here is a passage describing WS leaving London as the plague descends:

He left behind a manner of a necropolis. The city baked in its corruption; flies crawled over the sleeping lips of a child; the rats twitched their whiskers at an old dead woman (shrunk to five stone) that lay among lice in a heap of rancid rags; the bells tolled all day for the plague-stricken; cold ale tasted as warm as a posset; the flesher shooed flies off with both hands before chopping his stinking beef; heaps of shit festered and heaved in the heat; tattered villains broke into houses where man, woman, child lay panting and calling feebly for water and, mocking their distress, stole what they had a mind to; the city grew a head, glowing over limbs of towers and houses in the rat-scurrying night, and its face was drawn, its eyes sunken, it vomited foul living matter down to ooze over the cobbles, in its delirium it cried Jesus Jesus.

Riots of apprentices, publics executions, the heads on spikes lining the bridges -- all are just as vividly rendered. I think the book is at its best when it takes detours away from the love triangle; its weakest section is actually in first person and deals with the beginning of the romance with the Dark Lady. I admire the audacity of trying to write as Shakespeare, but it leads to passages that are basically just pedestrian retreads of the material in the sonnets: "For love is one word but many things; love is a unity only in the word. With her I can find the beast's heaven which is the angel's hell; with him, the body's hunger now able to be set aside, there is that most desirable of sorts of love, that which Plato did hymn."

Something about 1st person also restricts Burgess's imagination, I think; he starts making scholarly points and ticking off developments like any dreary biopic: "So I started a play on Troilus and Cressida in disgust that man should be born in baseness and nastiness and my sickness found me a new language for its expression - jerking harsh words, a delirium of coinages and grotesque fusions." Um, indeed WS. (I had a brief flashback to Ray: "Ray, what you've created here is a completely innovative fusion of gospel and blues!") But there is, thankfully, very little of this.

The book ends rather suddenly - an almost mystical passage heralding the flowering of the genius that allowed Shakespeare to write his greatest plays - and then a last scene on his deathbed. I'm not sure it entirely works, but Burgess writes so well that he can pull off almost anything he wants. This book doesn't quite hold together, but just entering its world and reading its sentences was enough to me. A wonderful companion, especially for someone reading the plays.

Stoner, by John Williams

A great deal has been written about this book recently. Steve Almond wrote an admiring review in Tin House, and Morris Dickstein wrote an appreciation recently in The New York Times. There was a huge list of holds at the library and it took months for me to get a copy. I wish I had just bought it, because I definitely want to own it now. It is a wonderful book.

The plot is easy enough to summarize. We first meet William Stoner at 19, on a farm in Missouri with his parents. He goes to agricultural college and discovers, accidentally, a passion for literature. He continues studying and becomes a professor, makes a marriage that proves to be a painful failure, has a child, writes a little-noticed book while continuing to be a devoted teacher, has a few conflicts in the English department and one beautiful experience that I will not give away - and then ages and dies. Most people would describe the book as grim; and its prose style and atmosphere it reminded me somewhat of Revolutionary Road, the Richard Yates novel.

Revolutionary Road, however, is a book that I am almost scared to re-read, because its vision leaves no room for joy of any kind. There is also a horrific inevitability to everything that happens in that book; one never for an instant thinks that these people might break out of their destructive patterns, because the author's mark of death is on them from the moment they appear. Whenever a character in that novel insisted that it was time for a change, I felt like the author was playing with me, because it was clear that happiness was not a possibility in the author's vision of the world.

Stoner has very little of this feeling of inevitability, and it has immense power partially because we realize that this is a world where joy is entirely possible. If most hopes fail, finally, to materialize, it is not because the author feels that this is simply the truth of life; they are dashed simply because certain human beings happen to act in certain ways. I approached the end of Revolutionary Road only with a sort of dull horror, but I finished Stoner with a real sense of tragedy.

The very few parts of the novel I felt were flawed were places where I felt a grim destiny was being forced on characters unnecessarily - Stoner's daughter, for example. It is also immensely difficult to sustain a sense of character while narrating an entire life. Most people, I think, feel like their younger selves were almost different people; when you stretch a life out to several decades, it can't help feel like there are multiple people involved. And the old Stoner does end up feeling like a different person in his old age. The secondary characters in the book actually hold up better, because they are basically nuanced grotesques who can strike only a few poses.

As for the prose, it is immensely refreshing to find an author who has too much respect for the reader and his story to attempt to wrestle anyone for their attention. The book's style, like its subject, is quiet and plain. It celebrates a deep internal vitality - the quiet joys of scholarship and study - that makes no show of itself. The only moments of semi-extravagance come in dialogue. There is also another quality that Stoner shares with many of my favorite works of art: as I finished the book, I had very little sense of what the author might be like. The world the writer created had entirely overwhelmed whatever his personality and attitudes might have been. There are some hints here and there, as there always are, but there was no person rattling a cage behind every sentence - or any sentence, for that matter. I think it takes immense humility to achieve this.

I took a break after reading Stoner - I wanted to think about it for a little while - and didn't pick up any other books for a few days. I had Washington Square lying around, so I started reading it on the subway. And there was old Henry James, smirking out of every paragraph and patting himself on the back for every cleverly turned phrase. I felt an immense sense of revulsion (the book was actually slammed shut) and gave it up after five pages. James's gifts as a writer are so immense - in terms of the actual construction and pacing of a story I can't think of anyone better - but the little I read felt so phony, so far from real human life, that I couldn't keep going. And it struck me that not possessing a great deal of ingenuity can be a real blessing for a writer - "set down with as much modesty as cunning," Hamlet tells the players. (I might even have changed it to "more modesty than cunning.") Williams only wrote three novels in his life but I will definitely seek them all out; I can't imagine any of them being less than extremely good after this book.