The Occasional Review

Some happy developments

2012-01-21T12:01:00.005-05:00

Hello, dear neglected readers. It's been too long and I will post something soon; the world is still full of good books. But, in the meantime, several pieces of my writing have appeared around the Web.

First, Paul Kingsnorth, whose collection of poetry I reviewed a few months ago, discovered this blog and generously invited me to be part of the Dark Mountain project. They are re-publishing some of my old reviews -- starting with this one -- and then I'll be writing new essays for them as well.

Also, a surprise: Energy Bulletin reposted that article. I wasn't a regular reader of this website, but there's very often interesting things there, and I recommend the site to anyone who doesn't find my recent gloomy preoccupations entirely baffling.

Next, a friend at htmlgiant asked me to write a review for them. I saw Stanislaw Lem on the list, a writer I loved in college, and requested The Cyberiad. It was just as enjoyable as the other books of his I've read, and unlike many other science fiction writers, contained little outdated techno-messianism, just a deep feeling for the limits of human understanding as well as a rollicking sense of humor. Here is the review. Htmlgiant publishes its reviews anonymously, to facilitate honesty/nastiness, but I am quite happy to identify it as my own work.

Finally, I secure my livelihood partly through the generosity of the literary magazine Ploughshares, where I work to put together the issues and often write for the blog. So far, I've reviewed a recent Tolstoy biography, the poetry of A. S. J. Tessimond (who I discovered through the wonderful blog First Known When Lost), and the Japanese writer Kanoko Okamoto. I also contributed to or assembled our lists on books for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Winter.

That's all for now. Some good books that I've read recently, but probably won't write about, include Joe Bageant's two books, In Zanesville, by Jo Ann Beard, and the Blackmores' excellent translations of Victor Hugo's poetry.

The Somerville Poetry Project

2011-11-21T20:42:00.014-05:00

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, a little town next to Cambridge. My wife and I moved here mainly because the rents were low, but over the last several years we've developed a love for the place, from our plot in the community garden to the Chinese takeout place down the street. About a year ago, a friend told me that Somerville gave grants to writers. I don't normally try for such things, but I sent in a few pieces and several months later they told me I had gotten one. The Council's only requirement was that I complete a community benefit project. A meeting with some other grant recipients to work on a project together predictably didn't amount to anything, so I came up with an idea on my own. In case the concept is useful to anyone else, here it is.

For most of my life, I was indifferent to poetry. I liked words in pretty much every other form, but something terrible seemed to happen when you spaced them out. In ninth grade, I remember our English teacher gave us a poem -- I think it was by Robert Frost -- about (I thought) snakes slithering down a hill. The teacher asked what the poem was about; before I could chime in with my snake answer, someone said it was about the sun coming out and melting the snow.

This was apparently the correct answer. I read the poem again; it still seemed to be about snakes. I decided then that I was going to keep my mouth shut about poetry, because it was sneaky stuff with no purpose other than making the uninitiated demonstrate their stupidity.

I held to this opinion through most of school. One exception: I remember being shaken by "Dulce et Decorum Est," because we hadn't ever read it in class; the poem just appeared on a test. I read it twice, and remember sitting stunned and feeling the words work inside me, until eventually I roused myself and went about labeling the rhyme scheme and stresses. Completing the test defused my interest; I didn't seek out any other Wilfred Owen. The only pleasure I got from poetry in those years was the sense that I had extracted the meaning that the author had, for mysterious reasons, decided to hide.

Eventually, though, I discovered that the actual problem was that I had only been reading poems in school. Poems don't offer themselves to people approaching with weapons in hand; they leave a husk of dry meaning behind and then disappear down some burrow. It took several years out of school for me to approach poetry unarmed, with no papers to be written, when I made the attempt for new reasons: I wanted to feel cultured and to impress women. The muses considered these reasonably worthy motives and consented to brush against my hand.

A few years ago, when I was reading a lot of Milosz, I discovered his poetry anthology, A Book of Luminous Things. Certain poems in that book began to affect me in a profound way, and I finally understood why verse, until recently, had been acknowledged by almost all writers as the supreme literary art. Poets I had read in school with almost total incomprehension, like Hopkins, began to make a great deal of sense. And it seemed a shame that so many people who love to read never even consider sitting down with a book of poetry.

Some of this is simply taste, but some of it, I am convinced, is that the art form remains freighted with anxiety from school, where students are given extremely difficult work much too soon and then forced to decipher and analyze it.

So: I thought, why not present some great poems in a tension-free environment? My idea was to make booklets of some of my favorite poems in the public domain and leave them around Somerville. I typeset the poems, printed the pages, bound the booklets with waxed thread, and left them where people would find them: coffee shops, bus stops, libraries, and assorted park benches.

Inside each book are several blank pages, with a note encouraging the reader to write a few words in the space and leave the book elsewhere: a poem, or song lyrics, or any words that seem worth writing down to them. Frankly, I expect a few pages will be filled with obscenities, but that's fine. Hopefully, the books will make the rounds for a few months before wear and tear, weather, and carelessness remove most of them from circulation.

I'm not sure yet if it's been a success. All I know is that the booklets aren't where I left them anymore. A few local outlets were nice enough to write about the project. It was, in any case, a pleasure to spend some time re-reading favorite poets, and discovering a few new ones, and to think about what kinds of poems could communicate with a large group of people.

The arts have always felt threatened in America, and this is especially true in hard times. Poems don't feed anyone or help pay the rent. They do, however, tell us something about how hunger and poverty have been borne in the past, and borne with dignity. The dignity does not lie in the poet prescribing certain actions or responses -- equally great poems can call forth anger and calm, stoicism and despair. The dignity is in the language, the sense that the sorrow has been shaped and transformed.

There is comfort, too, in joining our individual fate with countless others. To quote Robinson Jeffers, "prose can discuss matters of the moment; poetry must deal with things that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by." In poems, I feel how little humanity has changed, and how much I can share with a Tamil woman in the twelfth century or a Chinese bureaucrat in the eighth. This sense of fellowship is both a steadying and enlarging influence, and an antidote to the sense of meaninglessness produced by too much throwaway culture.

I remember a passage in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, where the narrator describes the teaching of literature as trying to sell a real diamond on the street for a quarter. Almost everyone will pass it by, because who among the uninitiated could believe that the diamond was genuine, and that a mind and spirit could be enlivened for a lifetime because of a few old pages and some quiet attention?

Well, my thought is that you stop trying so hard to sell the diamond. Just leave it somewhere, and hope that a few people might pick it up and turn it around in their hands. If anyone would like a copy of the PDF, feel free to send an e-mail to somervillepoetry@gmail.com. I tried to have a mix of the famous and fairly obscure, so hopefully there's something for everyone.

Kidland and Other Poems, by Paul Kingsnorth

2011-10-06T18:14:00.027-04:00

A few months ago, I discovered the work of the Dark Mountain Project. It is a collective of artists/scientists/environmentalists with some shared premises: that our society is not actually serious about solving its environmental problems; that we are driving towards a wall of firm ecological limits; that, even with the parts falling off our industrial machine, we will fairly soon hit this wall with a greater or lesser degree of violence; and that any environmental vision that imagines our Western lifestyles continuing unchanged with a few solar panels and hybrid cars is an unworkable fantasy.

The sooner we abandon this fantasy, they argue, and acknowledge the coming cataclysms, the sooner we can start talking about—not solutions, but other visions of society and culture that might work in a world of severe and chaotic weather, depleted soil and oceans, and very little remaining oil.

There are statistics to defend these claims, but if you haven't felt, emotionally, the bankruptcy and destructiveness of the modern industrial project, I doubt they will convince you. For whatever reason, I am already at that place. When I read the Dark Mountain manifesto—and I am not usually the sort of person to read manifestos—I felt page after page the ring of absolute truth.

I still have to get copies of the Project's two anthologies, but I read some of Paul Kingsnorth's contributions—he is one of the Project's founders—and felt a deep affinity. His favorite poets are also mine—Edward Thomas, John Clare, Robinson Jeffers—and he has a belief, which I hope is not delusional, that the arts have something to contribute in changing the consciousness of people who are losing faith, with good reason, in industrial society and its promises.

Kingsnorth has mainly written journalism up to this point, but from his website he seems to see himself fundamentally as a poet. Kidland is his first book of verse. It may seem strange to see a cyclone on the horizon and emerge from your shelter to present the storm with some poems—but, well, the world needs poems along with guides on organic farming; they make life worthwhile whether disaster is a year or centuries away. And in any case disaster is always approaching.

The question remains, though: what kind of art does one make for a society that has no long-term future? If you believe this is a silly question, and aren't convinced about any of the premises I mentioned in the first paragraph, don't bother with Kingsnorth, because his work won't make sense to you. If any of them struck a chord, though, I think his poems will be worth your time.

I read Kidland with pleasure and with disappointment. It is an extremely uneven book: too eager to make points, heavy-handed, and now and then very beautiful. It reminded me of a Robert Musil quote that you can't feel profoundly out of step with your society without doing some damage to yourself. Rage and a sense of disconnectedness from one's potential audience—and from humanity as a whole—injure as much as they inspire. Declining civilizations often cripple their own genuine talents in this way; this is part of how the disease wards off the possibility of healing.

Let me give an example. Here is an excerpt from “Kidland,” the long narrative poem at the center of the book. It is about a man who has set up camp in a forest in Northern England—a “utopia of one,” in his words—because of disgust with the ecological destructiveness of his species. There is also a young city woman, Sarah, who stumbles upon his camp, and a farmer who is abandoning his land in the area. The quote below is from the man in the woods, who is speaking to Sarah:

Where is the urgency? he was saying. Can you not see
how things are? The great forests are burning, the great
forests
of the world. The breath of your lungs is taken from you
and what do you do? There are a million jewelled creatures
that you will never see, that the world
will never see again. There is poison in the water
and in the air and in every cell that you are made of.
Poison: our gift to the world. Do you ever wonder
What the place would be like without us? Free
I would say, to breathe again.

Every one of these thoughts can find a home in my mind, but when I read these lines they are just words. The music is missing—that something that carries the words into the deeper consciousness and makes them larger than the ideas they contain. “Talk / is cheap,” Sarah responds, a fitting response. This long, ambitious poem then goes on to feature a heavily allegorical rape and a sudden death. As with some of Jeffers' narrative poems with their extremes of emotion and violence, for anyone expecting realism the story can feel a bit ludicrous.

I think it is telling that Kingsnorth's most ambitious poems are, to my mind, the least successful, while the small lyrics are often wonderful. Here, for example, is the poem that follows “Kidland.”

and the trees

and the trees on the hill stand waiting to reclaim the field
and the field lies yellow and cut beneath the sky
and the sky hangs grey above the grassline
and the grasses quieten at the approach of night
and night comes and I rise and move towards the trees
I hope they will have their way soon
and I tell them so

Let that sit for a second. Try to read it slowly if you can; I know the monitor makes it difficult. The thought is the same—the sense of sympathy with the non-human world, the question of what it would be like if we were gone, or at least left things alone. Here, though, the lines sing. They are coming from a deeper place, as they do in another poem about trees, “A chaos of you,” which ends with this description: “They dream, rooted, of the hills beyond their kerbside / and in the autumn, unexpected but meant for the moment, / their dreams are carried away to be born.”

Robinson Jeffers wrote something interesting once in a letter to Mark Van Doren about Van Doren's now-forgotten poetry: “I have a criticism,” he wrote, “and no doubt from me it will surprise you. I think you are too (vulgar word) pessimistic...Civilization is bitter to the singer, it is bitter in that essential way to everyone, but I think we can remember that there was a time before it and will be a time after it, and can keep an important part of us timeless enough to be uncivilized.”

Jeffers knew that he was handling material that was difficult to make poetry out of—but he was rooted in the natural world and also in a historical sense of the ebb and flow of civilizations. He often seems to be flying at an enormous height where he calmly sees the wreck of our modern civilization just a few miles down from the ruins of Rome and Kahokia and Palenque, along with the mountains and rivers that have survived them all. The fact that his society was in decline did not strike him as an unprecedented calamity but part of a longstanding historical pattern.

Kingsnorth's best poems have some of this timelessness, but a great deal of his work is instead filled with an entirely understandable disgust, not just with the world modern man has created, but with humanity itself. There is almost a longing for apocalypse. In several poems, a character stands in for Man and Kingsnorth writes about fundamental flaws in his character: too much greed, too little foresight. Again, one can sympathize, but the attitude makes the poetry captive to a few ideas: “I give you what you ask for, / you ask for more. I leave you / alone in the place, you wreck it all,” says the creator figure in “Changeling.”

Disgust, I think, is hard to make poetry out of—you say temporary things when you are disgusted, and in such moods it is best not to try to make points about humanity. In one of my favorite poems, “Parable of the tares,” though, the disgust deepens into a kind of acceptance, and Kingsnorth captures the fury and distraction of the masses living within a disintegrating system—it is a worthy successor to “Rearmament,” the Jeffers poem that gave the Dark Mountain project its name.

Nothing is permanent, everything pulling apart, cascading
away from the highest peaks. Vibrate the strings of this
once green world
one final time, make merry, go with laughter
and with fury, almost-masters.

“Almost-masters”—there, I think, is the hand of a real poet. If there are only a few such moments in this book, that's more than most of us ever manage.

I wrote earlier that declining civilizations find ways to resist their own renewal, not only by how they treat artists but also by stunting and distracting the public that might encounter the ideas these thinkers produce. The machinery of distraction, though, requires resources, and eventually it comes apart along with everything else. As the official narrative frays, once marginal ideas begin to get a hearing. Many of these ideas will be crazy; the Dark Mountain Project and Kingsnorth are not. They strike me as some of the few people looking at our likely future with open eyes. As a poet, Kingsnorth is still finding his voice, but he is walking down a genuine path and has my gratitude.

Man and the Natural World, by Keith Thomas

2011-09-15T14:19:00.011-04:00

Most people in today's society are profoundly helpless. Try to imagine what you would do if the water stopped coming out of the faucets and filling up your toilet tank. As America and perhaps the global industrial system begin to come apart at the seams, one stops taking such services for granted. One also realizes that potable water comes out of faucets every so often in human history, but then also disappears, usually for centuries at a time.

I would give you some of the specifics, but unfortunately I have been realizing lately that I am a historical illiterate. Virtually everything I know about the human past has been picked up from historical novels, movies, or asides in books about other things. I haven't read a work of pure history in a long time, and it's only recently -- as I realized that modern industrial civilization is just as susceptible to collapse as the ones that have come before it -- that I began to feel the weight of my ignorance.

Which brings us to Man and the Natural World. I found it for a dollar at an outdoor book market and was attracted to the title. Thomas describes changing attitudes to the natural world in early modern Britain, a time period that he sets at approximately 1500-1800. A great many things happened in the relationship between Britons and their natural environment during this period: enclosures of common land, increasing urbanization, the birth of scientific taxonomy, early attempts at conservation, and many others. I read a few pages, saw that Thomas was an engaging writer, and decided to take a first step towards dispelling my massive ignorance of the human past.

Man and the Natural World, as a study of attitudes, contains references to an extraordinary variety of sources, everything from poetry to pamphlets to popular sermons to the log books of merchants and aristocrats. Thomas realizes that to convince people that a certain belief was actually widely held, he must accumulate a fair amount of evidence, and the book often consists of fascinating lists of information. Here is an example from the chapter on botanical nomenclature:

Anyone who wants evidence of the way in which polite sensibilities have changed with the centuries need only consider the briskly anatomical nature of this now suppressed terminology, for in the seventeenth-century countryside there grew black maidenhair, naked ladies, pissabed (or shitabed), mares fart and priest's ballocks. In the herb garden could be found horse pistle and prick madam; while in the orchard the open arse (or medlar) was a popular fruit. Even the black beetle was twitch-ballock and the long-tailed titmouse bum-towel. Many of today's more fanciful flower names—lords and ladies, for example—are deliberate inventions of the nineteenth century, designed to obliterate some unacceptable indecency of the past...

If this passage bores you, don't bother with Man and the Natural World. If you are delighted and a little sad that the pissabed is now called a dandelion, this book will give you endless pleasure. My favorite country-name for a plant was "welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk," now commonly known, apparently, as the houseleek, and still associated with virility in some quarters.

Man and the Natural World is more than a wonderful assemblage; Thomas's arguments slowly emerge out of these progressions of lists, and his points are complicated and sometimes disturbing. For example, one might simply long for earlier times when local people knew plants and their functions. As Thomas demonstrates, though, these names only existed for plants with some obvious human utility, and placed man's needs at the center of their world (pissabed describes the diuretic quality of the plant's roots, whereas the more modern word dandelion apparently comes from the "lion's tooth" shape of the leaves themselves.) Early naturalists who came to rural people to help identify plants soon reached the limits of their knowledge; rural curiosity did not extend to even common plants that had no known human function, so the naturalists had to go around naming and classifying these plants themselves.

"By eroding the old vocabulary, with its rich symbolic overtones," Thomas writes, "the naturalists had completed their onslaught on the long established notion that nature was responsive to human affairs." This may seem like a simple impoverishment, but it also led to the modern attitude, which I am certainly in sympathy with, that parts of the natural world deserve to be left alone whether people can get anything out of them or not.

Another fascinating chapter is on the human attitude towards animals. Thomas shows how urbanization and the keeping of pets led to a sentimental attitude towards animals (he has a list of animal names over time, showing how they got progressively closer to human ones) which then led, often, to the revulsion of city-dwellers towards country people who made a living off these animals. And the country people were, indeed, enormously cruel. Some of the old means of producing tastier meat, including nailing live ducks to a floor by their webs, are as brutal as anything one can find in a modern industrial plant, albeit on a smaller scale.

So which attitude is "correct" -- that of the practical countryman, or the city sentimentalist who refuses to give up the meat and services which these animals provide, but instead, like Gilbert White, simply plants a screen of trees to protect himself from the sight of the slaughterhouse? And to what extent is vegetarianism -- which is my personal choice -- even possible without the global supply lines that provide people in cold climates with a continuous supply of varied food?

These questions arise constantly while reading this book, because Thomas convincingly shows how most modern environmental attitudes actually arose out an increasing estrangement from nature, which then produced a longing for the world that was being destroyed, often without a concomitant willingness to give up the fruits of that destruction.

...by the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had come to find man's ascendancy over nature increasingly abhorrent to their moral and aesthetic sensibilities. This was the human dilemma: how to reconcile the physical requirements of civilization with the new feelings and values which that same civilization had generated...The growth of towns had led to a new longing for the countryside. The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature. The new-found security from wild animals had generated in increasing concern to protect birds and preserve wild creatures in their natural state. Economic independence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people lived.

Obviously, none of these contradictions have gone away. It is generally comfortable city-dwellers that call for environmental protection, are quite convinced about climate change, and then take flights across the country to enjoy the scenery of their favorite national park, all while depending on massive quantities of resources to maintain every aspect of their lifestyle.

And yet some of the attitudes that such people have developed, even tinged with hypocrisy and a lack of practical knowledge, seem to have enduring value: a respect for nature outside its utility to man, compassion for the lives and suffering of animals, and an aesthetic feeling for wild as well as managed nature. As D. H. Lawrence once wrote, the road that modern man has been struggling along has been filled with waste and mistakes, and we may end up going back to where we came from, but it has also been a real journey; there has been some development along with the destruction. When we begin to return to a pre-industrial pattern of life -- I am starting to suspect this will happen forcibly with the end of cheap oil, and probably entail a great deal of suffering -- hopefully there are some lessons that can be saved from the path that we have been on. We also have lots of things to re-learn from past societies, and books like Thomas's (his other classic work about the same early modern period is called Religion and the Decline of Magic) can help illuminate the road that led to the modern world, which we may soon be walking back down.

Brooke Allen and Paul Dry Books

2011-09-13T21:12:00.006-04:00

A review I wrote of a good book on Syria (before the revolution) called The Other Side of the Mirror was just published at Ploughshares, and is available online. My reviews are also sometimes published on the Ploughshares blog.

I picked up the book because I've read some of Brooke Allen's essays before at The New Criterion and have always enjoyed her work; here, as an example, is her fine piece on Henry Green.

I can also recommend the publisher: Paul Dry Books. A friend gave me one of their books many years ago, and I've enjoyed exploring their list: a combination of good new books, like Allen's, and worthy re-issues like Walter de la Mare and Sister Miriam Joseph and some fine young adult novels. I recommend poking around; there aren't many small publishers left with an eye for books like these, and they deserve your support.

Notes on Democracy, by H. L. Mencken

2011-08-20T20:39:00.037-04:00

I've never been more depressed about America or its prospects than I am right now. During the Bush years, I thought, perhaps stupidly, that everything would return to a tolerable state after he left. Obama's speeches on the campaign trail even made me hope for something better than a return to normalcy. Now it looks like the most aberrant and brutal policies of the Bush era are simply going to continue as part of a bipartisan consensus. And looking at the current field, there is no obvious hope of things getting better, only the very real possibility of them getting much worse.

So: what can a person do, assuming that you have the luxury to care about something beyond paying your bills and getting through the day?

1) You can get involved in fixing a broken system: lobbying for changes in the political process, supporting or creating a viable third party, maybe even running for something yourself.

2) Like Thoreau (before his John Brown days), you can try to reformulate your sense of idealism to function entirely outside the existing systems of power. Your program will then involve only yourself and maybe a few other people. Also, it'll probably require some surplus income or a wealthy friend. Individual civil disobedience falls somewhere between the first and second categories.

3) You can take a historical perspective, realize that things have never been all that much better or worse in America, and then have a good laugh at the endless procession of smooth-talking frauds and pious idiots that this country manages to produce.

Most people move up and down this list, but each has a natural resting place. If the third option has any appeal for you, and to a lesser extent the second, H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy might prove sympathetic. If the first, prepare to be quite brilliantly mocked:

...there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to virgins.

You have to be in a very particular mood to enjoy Mencken. The publisher kindly sent me this book several years ago, and it took increasing quantities of dismay to finally, a few weeks ago, arrive at it. Mencken is an entertaining writer but not, for me, an endearing one. Americans are naturally idealistic, which is part of the reason we are so easily fooled, and have such a hard time recognizing when we're working on ruining our own lives while actively destroying those of others.

When there is so little to be patriotic about, though, and you are both completely fed up and have no idea how to improve the situation, Mencken can provide a kind of desperate consolation. As he writes in the concluding section of the Notes, "I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology."

This book was published in 1926, when increasing concentration of wealth, virtually unregulated markets, and runaway war spending were preparing the way for a massive collapse. Manning the helm at the period were, among others, an inarticulate idiot, whose English was "so bad a kind of grandeur creeps into it," and a pseudo-idealist who reduced "all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones," and whose avowed principles were quickly compromised in the face of any resistance.

Notes on Democracy is not particularly cohesive; it is basically a series of witty political pamphlets with titles like "The Eternal Mob" and "The Occasional Exception." For some reason, it fell out of print for decades, and this useful re-issue features an excellent introduction by Marion Elizabeth Rogers, as well as extensive footnoting of Mencken's references to scandals of the day and America's political past. Most of these footnotes are useful; some are a little insulting—I wonder what Mencken would make of the fact that Bach and Freud as well as batches of fairly common foreign phrases, from Reich to vox populi, now apparently need to be identified.

Here are some of Mencken's arguments: most people are stupid and this is simply a genetic necessity. Forget education or any other system of improvement; these people are dumb because they have simply absorbed as much as they are constitutionally able to absorb. He expresses admiration for eugenicists like Francis Galton, and incredulity that anyone could think that folk music or folktales actually rose out of the common mass. He supports the theory that some great, now forgotten individual artists created this work, with the folk acting only as "referees, choosing which should survive," although he fails to explain why the idiotic folk would have such unerringly good taste.

(Note: I find this side of Mencken repellent, but there is enough that is worthwhile that I suggest simply getting past it. Most of this stuff is at the beginning of the book.)

Now, intelligent and honorable politicians, Mencken argues, when faced with this mob, either don't last long or quickly become frauds, consciously or unconsciously. Then the exploitation of the office begins. "The business of victimizing [this public]," Mencken writes, "is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has its masters and it has its quacks ... The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then, raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to it."

As you can see, there is both wit and insight here, both about why the bums do eventually get thrown out, and then inevitably thrown back in, with renewed hope. Again, Mencken suggests no solutions, but it is at least something to hear the truth spoken. Mencken once wrote, incidentally, that his only objective was only to make "life measurably more bearable for the civilized minority in America."

So what, you might ask, is Mencken's standard for "civilized"? He is not, it turns out, devoid of idealism; he simply believes—like Carlin, incidentally—that honor does not exist in groups, which inevitably work to destroy it, but only in isolated free individuals. In Europe, he says the aristocrats might once have filled this role; in America, their absence is filled, in the public mind at least, by the plutocracy. "[This plutocracy] is, of course, something quite different," he writes. "It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage—above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob only yesterday—and from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities."

He fails to identify the historical aristocracy that actually possessed these noble qualities, but he at least makes it clear what he admires. So, what should the few men and women in America that fit this description do for their country? Mencken's answer: leave it alone, and fight to make sure it does the same to you.

Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness.

It is partially Mencken's fault that this passage is all too easy to applaud. How else could someone who endlessly castigated America become such a celebrated figure in his time? Most people like to think of themselves as surrounded by inferiors, and this kind of writing lends itself to self-congratulation of the stupidest kind. But Mencken is constantly slipping out of such traps if you read him carefully; he has a complicated mind, and this is why his writing is still worth reading for more than turns of phrase. The capacity for doing without—there is a line that, say, Ayn Rand, would never have written. She would also never have mentioned public duty or any kind of obligation, to the state or otherwise. But Mencken's brilliant and racy style makes it very easy to read fast and miss the harder lessons, so the laughter his insults produce often settles into arrogant complacency.

This is finally, though, the reader's fault and not the writer's. And it is good to know that Mencken, in his own life, was capable of appreciating real artists and true statesmen, and seems to have been a man of both courage and (occasional) open-mindedness. I still find him, as I always have, a difficult writer to like. I admire people whose instinct, in the absence of definite evidence, is to believe before they disbelieve, who are willing to be fooled and disappointed repeatedly before they reject anything that might be worthwhile. Mencken's constant shoveling out of bullshit means he often loses his eye for gold. Notes from Democracy is filled, for example, with mockery of chiropractors and osteopaths, both of whom have long since proved—in the face of immense opposition—that they are not in fact quacks.

Something else bothers me too. Adjusting for comic exaggeration, many of the things Mencken says have the absolute ring of truth, but I feel like they should be said with sadness or rage instead of relish, because no one suffers more from the current arrangements in America than the masses on whom Mencken heaps so much contempt. It is also hard, today, to be satisfied with Mencken's vision of lonely and honorable individualism. Our most pressing problems, particularly the ecological ones, have demonstrated that we are an interconnected community whose private actions affect each other. Simply removing yourself from the contagion doesn't seem like a real solution.

But, well, maybe there is no solution, and that's that. This could be something, at long last, to consider, and Notes on Democracy makes the point too incisively to be ignored. If you have arrived at the mood I mentioned earlier, and need some desperate consolation, I recommend seeking it out.

Last Words, by George Carlin

2011-08-06T17:10:00.015-04:00

I was beginning to realize something: I had a powerful new tool for my tool kit, though I've only made sparing use of it since. Getting laughs all the time wasn't my only responsibility. My responsibility was to engage the audience's mind for ninety minutes. Get laughs, of course, dazzle them from time to time with form, craft, verbal fireworks, but above all engage their minds.
—George Carlin, Last Words

As I've written before, I think stand-up comedy is one of the few remaining vibrant art forms in this country. There are, as always, only two or three great talents, but there's a whole constellation of worthwhile secondary talents, a real sense of excitement about the medium, and a sizable and engaged audience.

Part of the energy comes from diversity: stand-up comedians are racially, economically, and philosophically much more varied than the usual creators of today's "fine" arts. Also, since good comedians work in many different registers—jumping, like Shakespeare, from farts and boners to reflections on death—they also attract a very mixed audience. Louis CK will riff at great length about masturbation, and then include a bit—maybe based on Peter Singer's ideas, maybe just his own thoughts—about how we make needless purchases when we know, on some level, that the same amount of money could probably save someone's life in another country. George Carlin could win over a crowd with an accomplished but fairly safe routine on airline jargon, and then hit them with a subtle and disturbing monologue on the fraudulence of most modern environmentalism (“The Planet Is Fine”).

While I was watching Carlin's routine on the American Dream, I remember thinking—Jesus, people are paying to hear this! These are some of the most honest and destructive reflections that anyone is going to hear on the state of this country, things a few wise writers have been saying for years (although maybe not so sharply) to a tiny and shrinking audience—and here this comedian has an auditorium of thousands, and millions on HBO and now on YouTube, willing to listen to him say them. And they're enjoying it! It's possible they ignored the disturbing parts and went home chuckling about something else, but the words still reached them. The seeds are in their head now.

I noticed, though, that some of Carlin's most profound routines, like the two I've mentioned, work better as transcripts. The ideas are coming too fast to digest in the monologue—they need the time and space that the page grants them. Nothing fundamental is lost when you read the words instead of hearing him deliver them. As Carlin notes in the quote above, which is from his "sortabiography" Last Words, it's not just about getting laughs anymore, it's about fully engaging the mind, and the page is usually a better way to do this than performance.

So I thought I would read one of his books. Last Words is the posthumous autobiography that Tony Hendra compiled from a hundred pages that Carlin wrote about his early life and many hours of interviews. I wish Carlin had lived to complete the writing, because the first third of the book about his childhood is by far the best part. A sample of his writing:

The highlights of my life were my trips to midtown with Bessie, listening to the radio, and thumb-sucking. I was a world-class thumb-sucker. My specialty at bedtime was to loosen part of the bottom sheet, wrap it around my thumb, and cram the whole thing into my mouth for extended, overnight sucking.

Imagine reading this out loud, delivering it like a comedian—I don't think it makes it better. This is written humor. And there's many more passages in the first third of the book that are just as charming. It's a wonderful picture of growing up in 50s New York, with all of the education and energy that a largely unsupervised street childhood can provide.

The book then goes into Carlin's time in the Air Force and the beginnings of his comedy career. And then Hendra must have had to step in, because the book features more transcripts of Carlin's routines, and the prose is less sharp, although it is animated with the same lively intelligence. Carlin's life becomes less interesting when he gets famous: the work takes over, along with predictable cycles of drugs and rehab, creative exhaustion and reinvention.

There are still thoughtful passages on the art of comedy, though, and the book is worth reading all the way through. In one section, Carlin discusses a line about abortion that he wanted to include in a routine, but that never seemed to work. “Audiences wouldn't follow me there,” he writes. “It was one step too far. They didn't enjoy the risk. I'm a realist. After a while, I dropped the line. And maybe they were right: maybe it was too complex an idea or the phrasing was too harsh. But it shows how the audience shapes the material. They are part of the process. I write, they edit.”

Now, a writer might say that this is selling out, the kind of compromise that makes stand-up comedy something less than a genuine art form. I'm not so sure. A few decades ago, Philip Larkin wrote about the two tensions from which art springs: “the tension between the artist and his material and between the artist and his audience.” In the previous century, he wrote, for most serious artists “the second of these has slackened or even perished.” And he saw this as a disaster for both the arts and the audience, as artists restrict themselves to ever smaller circles (and begin to say increasingly inconsequential things) and the mass audience falls back on purely commercial entertainment, never encountering anything that might wake them up a little.

Undeniably, most stand-up comedy falls into the category of commercial entertainment. It is slavish in its desire to please, exhausting in its endless facetiousness and refusal to say anything serious. (Go to a comedy club on a bad night and it is about as depressing an evening as you can pay for.) But when a comedian realizes, as Carlin did, that getting laughs is not his only responsibility—that something honest and challenging can take place in the space between the artist's personal vision and the audience's expectations—the night can become special.

Louis CK, who wrote a fine piece about Carlin when he died, is probably the best stand-up around right now, has been freeing himself more and more from the obligation to be continuously funny, especially on Louis, his TV show, and some of the episodes of that show are simply works of art (“The Bully” is my favorite of the ones I've seen). So are parts of Carlin's specials; and this book may have reached the same heights if Carlin had had time to complete it. It is interesting that he names more writers as inspirations than comedians: Noam Chomsky, Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal. It's a shame he died before finishing—I think he had another career ahead of him.

Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt

2011-07-04T17:36:00.009-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the shelves at Goodwill when a wave of sadness came off a familiar yellow spine. It was Tuck Everlasting, which I had read as a child, fairly soon after I came to America. It was the same edition, with the same misty watercolor on its cover. A student (the front cover identifies her as Tatjana) had been through the little novel already, circling vocabulary words and identifying similes and metaphors. Her resolution petered out around page fifty; I like to think that she started enjoying the book at this point.

The little I could remember from childhood: there was a family that drank from a spring in the woods and became immortal. I couldn't bring back anything else or place the source of that sadness. A glance at a few pages indicated, though, that the prose was worthy of adult respect. Here is a character sketch of the mysterious stranger that comes to town: "His tall body moved continuously; a foot tapped, a shoulder twitched. And it moved in angles, rather jerkily. But at the same time he had a kind of grace, like a well-handled marionette."

(SMILE, wrote Tatjana next to this passage, successfully identifying one of the few actual reasons to read, none of which -- teachers take note -- involve spotting similes.)

I wonder why we so rarely return to early favorites. Maybe the fear of unraveling the memory of enchantment. There is a beautiful passage in John Crowley's novel The Translator, about a woman coming across a box of childhood art that she had made with her brother Ben:

She was surprised years later to find that her mother had kept a lot of the writings they had done, the drawings and the models, the chronologies and the maps. Most of the work was Ben's, which was maybe why she had kept it. When Kit took it all from the cardboard box, she felt a strange vertigo: she recognized and remembered these things and at the same time saw them shrivel and shrink; what had once been big and vivid to her became small, and not only in size. He had done it all on little pieces of shoddy paper, in colored pencils; he had been just a child. It was like picking up the body of a bird, and being surprised to find it nearly weightless.

What a pleasure, then, to feel none of this vertigo in the first few chapters of Tuck Everlasting, but instead writing of enduring charm and beauty.

One of the wonderful things about childhood -- I remember very faintly -- is a sense that everything is alive and can be communicated with: animals and plants, houses and roads. And one can see this sense of the world in Tuck Everlasting, as well as most books that speak to children. In the first few pages of the novel, the grass is described as cut "painfully to the quick" (how many adults would consider the suffering of cut grass?); the house where our heroine Winnie lives "was so proud of itself that you wanted to make a lot of noise as you passed, and maybe even throw a rock or two"; and the wood where the spring is hidden "had a sleeping, otherworldly appearance that made you want to speak in whispers."

Winnie is a lonely ten-year-old. Most of the time, she only has a toad for company (the toad, as one would expect in such a book, seems to be able to understand much of what Winnie says). One day, Winnie decides to explore the wood, which her family owns, and she comes across a beautiful boy, Jesse Tuck, drinking from a spring by an oak tree. She wants a drink too, but he won't let her, and she becomes understandably curious about why.

When the rest of the Tucks come to meet their son, they realize that the little girl might be a problem for them, and they grab her and take her to their house. There, they try to explain their situation -- how they drank accidentally from the spring once almost a century ago and have been alive ever since, unable to age or even get hurt, moving from place to place to avoid scrutiny. Angus, the wise and gentle father, tries to convince Winnie that no one else should ever know about the spring. There is a lovely conversation about the continuous flow of water in the pond, and how the Tucks have somehow been removed from this cycle.

Soon after this point, though, an adult reader begins to feel that this is indeed a book for children. A stagy plot gets underway involving a man who wants to sell the spring water. The plot moves rapidly in three- to four-page chapters, with virtually no summary narration; it's one tiny scene after another, a kind of eternal present that felt thin and rushed. The whole action of the book, including an unexpected act of violence and a late-night jailbreak, takes place in about two days.

Here is "a kid's review" from Amazon: "I read 'Tuck Everlasting' in sixth grade, and while reading it, noticed that it lacked the basic elements of a good book. The first thing I noticed that the book seemed to be -if I may- condensed."

Indeed you may, junior reviewer and sophisticate-in-training! Thankfully I had no such complaints when I was young; my imagination filled in whatever might be missing and turned a pencil sketch into a painting. As an adult, though, I was beginning to feel the shrinking that Crowley describes. I couldn't believe anymore that so much would hinge on Winnie, or that people would consider her quite so important. I was still glad I read the book, but felt like it belonged to my past.

Then I came to the Epilogue. It takes place many years after the main action of the book, and involves a choice that was presented to Winnie as a child. The Epilogue is only six pages long, but it transforms everything that has come before. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of writing, not just for children but for anyone. Here, as I read, I understood the wave of sadness that came off the book when I first picked it off the shelf. The end was still thought-provoking, still powerful.

So, perhaps the bird is light in one's hand at times, but it does wake up and fly again. It was nice to discover that my reaction as a child was authentic and lasting, and more to be trusted than my taste as an adolescent (most of my high school favorites, like Catch-22, I've never been able to finish again). I think most adults, even ones who didn't love this book as a child, would find the novel worth reading by the end. It is a lovely fable, and its resonance only grows, I think, once one has become more closely acquainted with death.

Paul et Virginie, by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

2011-05-19T09:40:00.016-04:00

I became interested in this largely forgotten novel because of a passage in Edward Goldsmith's The Way, which I wrote about a few months ago. In response to arguments about the essential randomness of nature, Goldsmith quotes a passage from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Etudes de la Nature:

If snails, nay bugs, caterpillars and locusts ravage our plains, it is because we destroy the birds of our groves which live upon them; or because on transporting the trees of foreign countries into our own, such as the great chestnut of India, the ebony and others, we have transported with them the eggs of those insects which they nourish, without importing likewise the birds of the same climate which destroy them. Every country has those peculiar to itself, for the preservation of its plants.

This seemed like an unusually wise man, both for our own time and the late 18th century. My French is bad, so I decided not to take on the multi-volume Etudes, which were once famous. At the end of these volumes, though, Bernardin placed the small novel Paul et Virginie, which he considered a distillation of his ideas about the natural order.

The book must still be read in France, because I found several new editions in a foreign language bookstore, although the introduction indicates that it is regarded by French critics as an embarrassment, something like Uncle Tom's Cabin in American literature. Paul et Virginie was an enormous popular sensation in its day, and admired by everyone from Napoleon (it was apparently his favorite book) to Alexander von Humboldt, who had it virtually memorized.

A copy also made its way into the room of little Emma Rouault, who would grow up to become Madame Bovary. This paragraph is probably the only place where English-speakers regularly encounter the book. Saint-Pierre's novel is mentioned at the beginning of the famous fourth chapter -- which, incidentally, I have always found very unconvincing as psychology -- where we hear about the reading that gave rise to Emma's dreams of romance:

She had read Paul and Virginia, and had dreamed of the bamboo cabin, of the Negro Domingo and the dog Fidele; and especially she dreamed that she, too, had a sweet little brother for a devoted friend, and that he climbed trees as tall as church steeples to pluck her their crimson fruit, and came running barefoot over the sand to bring her a bird's nest.

The story is simple. Two women end up alone with young children on the Île de France, a colonial name for modern-day Mauritius: one's husband has died, and the other has been abandoned by her lover. The two decide to live near each other and raise their children together, along with their faithful slaves Marie and Domingue, who grow to love each other. The novel's attitude to slavery seems to be that it's fine as long as the masters are nice to them.

Their son and daughter are Paul and Virginie. They are beautiful little children, in touch with the natural world, free from the corrupting influence of civilization, healthy and vigorous. The earth provides everything they need, and they care for their little piece of land and make it blooming and beautiful. As they get older, possibly from lack of other options, they begin to fall in love with each other. Their mothers want them to marry one day, but Virginie's mother -- in one of those refreshing bits of openness often found in French novels -- is worried the girl will get pregnant too young. She is also concerned that the two will have no money when they grow up. So, when a rich aunt in Paris offers to make Virginie her heir if her mother will send her back to France, the girl is put on a boat. As you can imagine, things begin to go wrong when she leaves the island.

It is, in many ways, a silly novel. In addition to its offensive depiction of slavery, long conversations are devoted to dated social criticism, people burst into tears on virtually every page, and its depiction of natural morality is often ludicrous. Virginie, for example, is unwilling to be saved from a foundering ship because it would require that she strip off some of her clothes in front of a male sailor. And this modesty, which she apparently learned from wandering around the forests of a tropical island, is presented as quite noble and right; only a corrupt, civilized woman would expose herself so shamelessly to save her life.

And yet, as easy as it is to mock, the book, somehow, is not dead. Many parts, to my surprise, are still extraordinarily beautiful. For one, the descriptions. The forests are painted with wonderful felicity, heightened for me by the lovely feel of certain French words: "La rivière qui coule en bouillonnant sur un lit de roche..." ("The river which runs foaming over a bed of rock..." but how inadequate "foaming" or "bubbling" feels in the face of a word like "bouillonnant"!) I loved the image of the palms rising above the other trees, and looking from above like a second forest planted on the ground of the lower canopy.

So -- if you wipe away the lugubrious melodrama and all the criticism of civilization -- which none of Saint-Pierre's city readers, from Napoleon down, seem to have taken very seriously -- something genuine still remains, and that something is a sense of reverence for the tropical landscape. Virginie, for example, will never eat a fruit without making sure that she places its seeds in good soil. Her intuition, her natural sense of gratitude, tells her that this is somehow part of the arrangement. When she writes a letter to her family from France, she makes sure she includes some European seeds, which, despite Paul's attentions, don't flourish on the climate of the island.

As you can tell, Bernardin's sense of realism is much better with plants than people -- none of the characters in this little novel are particularly real, but the sense of integration between their lives and the world around them, the respect for the terms on which the gift of abundance is given -- all of these still feel genuine, and continue to give the myth of Paul et Virginie a certain power.

D. H. Lawrence mentioned Saint-Pierre in the chapter on Hector St. John de Crevecoeur from Studies in Classic American Literature. He names him in a list of all of the other back-to-nature writers. "I used to admire my head off," he writes, "before I tiptoed into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders ... Poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the wilderness, nine times out of ten.

"Hector St. John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to yourself ... Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St Pierre, Chateaubriand, exquisite Francois Le Vaillant, you lying little lot, with your Nature-Sweet-and-Pure!"

Lawrence, I must admit, is right. There is lying in this book, which is why every type of person from dictators to dreamy little provincial girls have found what they were looking for in its pages. But, as Lawrence continues, "Crevecoeur was an artist as well as a liar, otherwise we would not have bothered with him," and the same can be said of Bernardin. What remains true in this book is worth more, for me, than all of the dry ironies of Madame Bovary.

Randall Jarrell once wrote that "Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us." Well, it is worth blunting your sense of the ridiculous (temporarily), finding your inner Emma Rouault, and trying to rediscover some of what Paul et Virginie has to teach.

Enjoyment of Literature, by John Cowper Powys

2011-04-21T09:53:00.019-04:00

In one of Boston's last good used bookstores, there is a copy of Enjoyment of Literature in a glass cabinet. Powys has inscribed it to his brother and sister, dedicating the essay on Shakespeare to one and Proust to the other, and sketched Janus -- one of the many mythological figures he associated himself with -- on the title page. Somehow, the book passed through the hands of the Powys family to the poet Geoffrey Hill, whose name is also inside, before finally settling beneath the glass case.

I have only read one Powys novel, Wolf Solent, but felt a mysterious attraction to this volume, along with a completely unmysterious lack of $350, which is what it costs.

I might have been remembering Robertson Davies's introduction to Wolf Solent, where he describes Powys's twenty-five year career as an extension lecturer in America. I have always wondered, from Davies's description, what it would have been like to be in one of Powys's audiences.

As a lecturer he was what it is now fashionable to call charismatic; the tall, gaunt, eagle-like man, clad in his Cambridge gown, never spoke from notes; he thought in front of his audience, shouting, wooing, accusing and wowing 'em in a rhapsodic flow that might go on for an hour and a half, reaching to the highest shelves of his extraordinary literary range for allusions and examples from Homer, Dante, Rabelais, Dickens, Balzac and all the great of Western culture that would illumine his theme ... Powys was never the darling of the great American universities; they found him "un-scholarly" and did not care that Powys did what scholars rarely do; he brought a sense of the greatness and splendor of literature as an enrichment of life to people who wanted precisely that.

Powys, almost always broke, used his knowledge to dash off a few pamphlets like "One Hundred Greatest Books" for money, but Enjoyment of Literature (or The Pleasures of Literature, as it is called in England) is the mature fruit of all of those years of lecturing, composed only after he settled down to write seriously.

It is tough to write ordinary criticism -- to drape oneself over the edge of a sofa and declare "Oh how very fine" and then occasionally sigh, "Alas, that was not quite so fine" -- without feeling a little frivolous. Powys doesn't approach his task in this way. He treats books as ways to "support, deepen, and thicken out our profoundest life illusion," scattering exclamation points on every page and asserting that he cannot rest until he has connected "the most intimate peculiarities of a writer's style with the very centre of his soul's circumference and the widest parabola of its circling flight."

Is some of this too much? Undoubtedly, and there is plenty of hot air in this book, but no one can turn its pages and feel the same sense of dreary inconsequentiality that today's book review sections produce. Powys simply gets too much out of his reading -- he needs these books, he writes, in the "actual struggle of day-to-day life" -- and what he says about them is in a different world from the tedious grumbling of, say, Harold Bloom, whose enthusiasm for literature is far exceeded by his desire to scold and classify.

Powys writes about many of the authors you would expect -- Homer, Cervantes, Wordsworth, Dickens -- and a few that you would not -- like Rabelais and Matthew Arnold -- but he never pretends that his choice is somehow eternally objective. "Among books," he writes, "as among people and events, our character is our fate. We can extend the boundaries of ourselves, we can enrich our native roots; but it is a waste of time to struggle to enjoy what we are not destined to enjoy!"

He continues: "Thus the choice of books becomes, like the choice of a mate, or of a life-friend, a series of cross-roads of appalling significance." Isn't that last phrase wonderful? Floating on the occasional currents of fustian, there are touches like this that make even the weaker essays worthwhile.

Powys is not much of a critic if you haven't read the books already. He doesn't give plot summary or do much close analysis of passages. He is a critic of essences and -- I know this is unfashionable -- self-help. He acknowledges that these authors have been discussed to death, but what has often been ignored, he says, is what "in unsophisticated circles is called a writer's 'message.'" He knows that such a statement is calculated to give "a scholarly student no slight shock," and it certainly made me suspicious, but the message that Powys teases out is never reductive. In his best essays, he points out what most readers have dimly felt, and attempts to lift our intimations a little further into consciousness before they sink back beneath the waves. Here is a long passage, for example, from his essay on Homer (Powys only works in long sections):

"In all the greatest poems of the world as they tell us this tale of fate, this struggle and this acceptance, there come moments, often near the end of it all, that convey an indescribable sense of peace. At such moments there rises from the very simplicity of the words a magic and a healing that totally evades definition. Under the touch of this magic a great quiet descends upon our spirit and we grow ashamed of our turbulence, our hurry, our ignoble self-pity, our insatiable discontent. It is not -- as with the Christians -- that we turn from defeat in this world to triumph in another. It is rather as though we heard the voice of our personal wrongs and private miseries caught or sinking down into the orchestral utterance of all the generations, into the tune of the ancient sorrow of the earth herself."

Powys then gives a short quote from a prose translation of the Odyssey:

So he spoke ... and they poured libations to the blessed gods, who hold broad heaven, from where they sat. But goodly Odysseus arose and placed in the hand of Arete the two-handled cup, and spoke and addressed her with winged words:

"Fare thee well, O queen, throughout all the years, till old age and death come which are the lot of mortals. As for me, I go my way, but do thou in this house have joy of thy children and thy people and Alcinous the king."

So the goodly Odysseus spake and passed over the threshold.

"Now I am not unaware," Powys writes, "that to many among my readers these simple lines will convey no particular significance; but, as Plato might say in his tentative manner, 'does it not seem' as if a certain magical end-of-the-day evocation, full of tender assuagement and an almost religious solemnity, gathers upon us as we read, not so much like the rich, harsh, mystic note from some Gothic bell-tower, as like the very sound of the river of life itself, deep and full-brimming, infinitely sad and yet infinitely healing?"

Along with the "thoughtless cruelties" in these epics, Powys writes, there is also "a grand primeval natural democracy ... wherein to be a man under the sun, or a woman under the sun, is a thing in itself of magical awe and reverence."

This is not an original remark, many people have felt it, but it takes an enchanter to carry both the thought and the feeling along in the prose. It also takes a certain courage to be obvious (this is precisely the courage, by the way, that is missing in most second-rate writers.) Here is what Powys writes in his essay on Proust -- I think he is making a related point:

The pleasures of reading are not confined to the immediate excitement of reading. There are also after-thoughts; and when an exciting book leaves no after-thoughts we know well what has been wrong. The author has been afraid of being dull.

As anyone who has picked up one of Powys's doorstop novels knows, he is absolutely fearless in this respect. I read Wolf Solent many years ago -- it is, in fact, only occasionally dull, but it is quite frequently unfathomable: I often had no idea what Powys was driving at. But I am going to return to his novels now: Owen Glendower or A Glastonbury Romance next, and then maybe Porius. Certain books give you the confidence to tackle a difficult writer, and Enjoyment of Literature is one of them. I can't seem to finish The Rainbow, for example, but I'll keep trying, because Lawrence's essays make it clear that he has something important to say to me. William Gaddis's essays, meanwhile, along with Charles Olson's interviews, both come off as so incoherent that I wonder whether it's worth making the effort to navigate their labyrinths.

Enjoyment of Literature was published in 1938 and has never been reissued. Luckily, it is not too hard to find used on the Internet. Some courageous publisher -- maybe the Overlook Press, which publishes Powys's mature novels -- might want to bring it back in print. Since his novels are so immense, the essays are probably the best introduction to his work, and also the closest we will get to hearing his lecturing, which one friend describes as "an art on its own such as, one feels, the world will never see again."

Two fine blogs: First Known When Lost and The Lectern

2011-04-05T09:29:00.008-04:00

I was out looking for information about John Cowper Powys and came across two websites that I thought were worth sharing.

One of them, First Known When Lost, is a wonderful hybrid put together by Stephen Pentz, apparently a retired attorney. Each post contains a poem, either famous or obscure, along with a painting or a photograph, and finally a few of Pentz's thoughts.

The site has a casual, friendly feel, but there is an enormous amount of knowledge, lightly-worn, in each post, particularly about Larkin and the other English poets of the first half of the 20th century.

I can't imagine this sort of work existing without the Internet, so it's nice to see the medium starting to produce its own worthwhile forms. For the curious, this is the Powys post that I first came across. I didn't even know he wrote poetry before.

The next site is The Lectern, which contains an essay about The Brazen Head, one of Powys's little read (and apparently even weirder than usual) late novels. Whoever writes The Lectern is a Dostoevsky obsessive, so many of the posts relate to him, but the author also produces fine essays and appreciations of other writers along the way, while gathering together some fascinating quotes. Much worth reading.

The Sun: An Interview with Paul K Chappell

2011-04-03T08:39:00.009-04:00

I have been a subscriber to The Sun for a few years now. It's a good magazine, although there can be a certain sameness to the issues. The interviews are usually with mystics, practitioners of alternative medicine, unconventional political crusaders, and back-to-nature types. Even when I'm on board with them, as I usually am, their worldview can get a little predictable, as can the "life is tough but ain't it beautiful" note struck by many of the stories and poems.

There can also be an annoying air of middle-class complacency about the magazine's radicalism, as if a few more meditation retreats and book clubs would be a real first step towards solving the world's problems.

Nonetheless, I am always glad when a new issue arrives. I feel like the editors are always trying to reach people, and don't pawn off anything that they weren't genuinely affected by on their readers. As anyone who reads literary magazines can attest, this is actually quite rare. Many of the photographs are beautiful, the Readers Write section is always worth reading, and there are often discoveries to be made in the Interviews.

This month's interview is with Paul K Chappell, an Iraq veteran who is now a peace activist. He gives some very thoughtful responses to many of the difficult questions that face pacifists, and also provides an interesting window into the training of officers in the army. I was surprised, for example, to discover the extent to which West Point encourages its students to face opposing viewpoints: apparently they invited Noam Chomsky to give a speech on the legality of the Iraq War, and many of Chappell's friends were already reading Chomsky, along with people like Howard Zinn, to decide what they thought of the war they would soon be joining.

One particularly interesting section was Chappell's distinction between violence and play (Leslee Goodman is the interviewer).

Goodman: As a parent of sons, I heard that if I didn't let my boys play with toy guns, they would just make guns out of sticks. Is this not an indication that violence is in our genes?

Chappell: We need to look at the difference between violence and play. In play as soon as someone gets hurt, the game stops. When two puppies are biting each other, and one puppy yelps in pain, the play stops. If two boys are playing swords with sticks and one boy gets hurt, the play stops. The intention of violence is to inflict pain: you want to hurt people. The intention of play is to have fun, practice hand-eye coordination, test your strength against your peers, bond socially, and so on. Play is crucial, not just for humans but for all mammals. Nearly all young mammals like to wrestle. It builds muscular strength and the connections in your brain that govern motor control and balance. But it has nothing to do with violence.

I remember reading an article in the Boston Globe recently about the illegal traffic in finches to be used in cage fighting matches. Male saffron finches are "naturally aggressive" -- they fight over mates -- but the interesting detail for me is that these confrontations are rarely fatal in the wild, because the finches have room to retreat. The fight stops as soon as one bird feels himself overmatched. It leads to death or serious injury only when the birds are primed to fight and then forcibly confined. I think there are definite analogies to be drawn.

An Interview with Ron Sexsmith: Long Player, Late Bloomer

2011-03-21T20:27:00.024-04:00

I wrote about Ron Sexsmith a few years ago and how consistently great his albums have been for the past fifteen years. It turns out that his last one, Exit Strategy of the Soul, which I thought was fantastic, didn't sell very well, and neither did the one before. Ron apparently got pretty depressed about what felt like his disappearing career and even considered giving up music for a while.

Some of this mood is cataloged in Love Shines, a new documentary about the making of Sexsmith's most recent album, Long Player, Late Bloomer. Ron's management was nice enough to send me the DVD, which isn't available yet, because I was interviewing him over the phone for Time Out Boston.

The interview has just been posted, and you can read it here. He is one of my heroes, so it was an honor to speak to him.

About the album, Long Player, Late Bloomer is another wonderful collection of songs, and a fine place to start if you're not already a fan. During the first few listens, I'll admit I was put off by the production. Sexsmith apparently wanted a more commercial sound on this album and brought on a bigtime producer, Bob Rock, to gloss things up a bit. A lot of the songs, as a result, feel less intimate, vaguely smoothed over. One track, "No Help At all," has a slinky synthesized riff played on a keyboard that sounds like it has been set to "Disco Flute."

Pretty soon, though, the lyrics and the melodies start to shine through the saran wrap. I even began to appreciate some of Rock's touches, especially on songs like "Believe It When I See It" and "Love Shines," where his production gives the songs an anthemic energy that is something new in Sexsmith's music.

Long Player, Late Bloomer also feels cohesive in a way that most of Ron's albums do not, because there is an emotional arc that connects the songs to each other, involving, I think, the descent into depression and the slow climb back out. The album begins with a song about purely personal gripes ("Get In Line") and then moves from confusion about the purpose behind things ("The Reason Why") to a kind of a cosmic despair ("Believe It When I See It"), which is probably the most pessimistic song Sexsmith has ever written.

After a glimmer of light on "Miracles," we get "No Help At All" (the disco flute track) which begins to view the depression from outside, with some tongue-in-cheek humor, a signal that the darkness is clearing. And the album then moves from guarded hopefulness to, finally, a kind of radiant acceptance.

Not every song fits with this concept -- even Willie Nelson can't hold an entire concept album together -- but the odd-man-out tracks from the second half of the album (which is a bit weaker) still capture a branching out, a growing interest in the world, that fits with the idea of moving from inward gloom to something larger than the self.

For a while, I've been giving people Sexsmith mix CDs, and when they don't quite get my enthusiasm -- and many of them don't -- I end up stammering something about melodic complexity or sincerity or about how well the lyrics are put together. I have a hard time explaining why this music is so important to me, why it keeps on giving me sustenance when so many other works of art that I like, from movies to books, seem to exhaust themselves after a few encounters.

All I can say -- and this is just another kind of stammering -- is that I can hear the same divine spark in Sexsmith that Beethoven heard in Schubert, and that anyone who listens to Winterreise or the last piano sonata or dozens of Ron's songs can feel as well. That this spark can be communicated, and is offered to us for the price of a little attention, is something of a miracle -- one of the miracles that, as Ron sings, keep appearing in broad daylight. Pick up this album or any of his others: I hope the spark comes across.

Orley Farm, by Anthony Trollope

2011-02-12T19:56:00.023-05:00

I was once having an imaginary conversation with a real friend, a political scientist, and trying to defend the value of novels, poetry, and plays. A sentence came into my mind -- I was pleased with it for a second. "Literature," I said, comparing it in my mind to various other disciplines, "doesn't pretend to have answers that it does not actually have."

I checked myself, though, thinking of all the great works that would contradict this statement. It might not have been the most airtight aphorism, but while I was reading Orley Farm, it struck me as a good description of the appeal of Anthony Trollope's novels.

"He confounds me with his mastery," Tolstoy once wrote of Trollope. It is a hard word to associate with Trollope's baggy, seemingly improvised books, with their repetitions and occasionally paint-by-numbers romances, but mastery it is to have to written so much and lied so little. In scene after scene of his novels, you think, "yes, that's the way it would go." And Trollope's people -- unlike, say, Dickens's -- always feel like they could have existed in the real world, rather than being brilliantly designed to produce an effect.

It is a commonplace to say that, to make a piece of writing seem effortless and natural, you have to work quite hard at it. Trollope, somehow, sat down every morning at five and, keeping an eye on the clock, produced at least 250 words every fifteen minutes and spooled off dozens of immense novels that are probably the most lifelike books I have ever read. Nathaniel Hawthorne gave one of the best descriptions of the atmosphere of these books:

[Trollope's novels] precisely suit my taste, -- solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.

In Orley Farm, one feels that one is getting close to the actual lives of city lawyers in their chambers and commercial travelers selling their cheap iron furniture from door to door. Trollope, as he hews his lump out of Victorian society, can move between classes with no sense of strain, and also little sense of animus. When he does feel anger, as in the satirical chapters of The Way We Live Now, it tends to throw the book off track.

He is a hard writer to point to when defending the dignity of literature. He has no social agenda and doesn't seem to care much for art as a form of spiritual transcendence. But he has another quality which is unusual in a novelist and seems to me to be rather noble: he respects the privacy of his characters. He refuses to wander through the private rooms of their minds, tracking down every last thought. Even writing from an omniscient standpoint, one of Trollope's characteristic moves is to stop at a certain threshhold and declare that beyond this point he isn't sure what the character is thinking.

"What the lady's intentions were I will not pretend to say..." he writes, in some form or another, every few chapters. It is a bizarre thing to say about a person that you have made up, whose thoughts, on other occasions, you have been quite willing to detail. Even when he writes "she thought," he is often prone to add a qualifier like "we must presume," as if there is a limit beyond which his knowledge does not go. Another of his strategies is to detail several possible states of mind, and then declare that the truth is some unknown admixture of all of them. Basically (and this is rare for writers) he has manners, and won't extract more knowledge from his characters than they want to give. Another way to say this is that he respects the central mystery of each person, and in this sense -- and probably only in this sense -- he strikes me as a spiritual writer.

In Orley Farm, for example, which centers around the question of whether a will was forged by the widow of a dead landowner, he withholds a certain corner of a character's mind in a way that would be aggravating if he didn't also grant a similar margin to other characters: the attorneys on either side of the case, one in love with a judge's daughter, another infatuated with one of his clients; servants at various houses; a couple of witnesses -- one easily cowed by the crafty barristers, another not -- and a handful of gentry and commercial people who take sides with the various parties in the case.

It is an enormous canvas; several characters are quite needlessly introduced, and then sketched in detail only to disappear. It is not, like Dickens, a beautiful pattern, but somehow I never complained while reading. Encountering the people is itself a pleasure, and you never know when Trollope will have them become part of the story again -- it often seems that he doesn't know himself, and simply calls them back on stage when he starts to miss them.

One of the marks of his respect for characters is that he treats them like they are all living a life apart from the book they happen to be in. Even though he tends to write from a fairly fixed moral position, and is willing to declare that someone has acted badly, he never presumes (one of his favorite words) to make a final judgment on anyone. In short, he doesn't pretend to have answers that he doesn't actually have.

This is one of the reasons that, unlike the other novels of his era, Trollope's retain their interest to the last page. Normally, when the main action has been settled, it is a bit of a slog to get through the chapters of family happiness and the sorting-out of fates. Trollope refuses to sort people out in this way; it would be akin to passing judgment on the rest of a character's life. People go on; even if their characters may incline them in certain directions, who knows what might happen to them next.

Here, for example, is one of my favorite passages in the book, involving Lady Mason, the widow at the center of the trial, after her affairs have been decided:

Of her future life I will not venture to say anything. But no lesson is truer than that which teaches us to believe that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb. To how many has it not seemed, at some one period of their lives, that all was over for them, and that to them in their afflictions there was nothing left but to die ... For Lady Mason let us hope that the day will come in which she also may once again trick her beams in some modest, unassuming way, and that for her the morning may even yet be sweet with a glad warmth. For us, here in these pages, it must be sufficient to say this last kindly farewell.

Let us hope. This is the broad-minded note that Trollope's novels tend to strike, even with their villains. They are wonderful, generous books. Orley Farm was apparently one of Trollope's personal favorites, and along with The Way We Live Now is probably the best of his free-standing novels. I still have several of the Barchester and Pallister novels ahead of me, and am perfectly content that Trollope woke up religiously every morning and kept his pen moving.

Another blog

2011-02-05T09:09:00.005-05:00

Occasionally my office calls on me to contribute to our website blog. It's a publishing company, so most of our posts are book related; the best of my contributions is probably The Value of a Good Bookstore. Every Friday I also usually contribute a paragraph to a "What We're Reading" post.

The Way: An Ecological World-View, by Edward Goldsmith

2011-01-19T22:52:00.013-05:00

Edward Goldsmith, who passed away a few years ago, was quite famous in England, where he founded The Ecologist in 1970 and was instrumental in the creation of the Green Party. The Way: An Ecological World-View is his grand summation; it took him twenty years to write, and with appendix and bibliography is 500 pages long.

It is not well-known in America, where the University of Georgia Press publishes it. I first saw the book mentioned in The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock. Lovelock was listing plans to combat catastrophic climate change, including spraying particulate matter in the atmosphere and building a sunshade in space. After several increasingly terrifying proposals, Lovelock took a step back and said that, since we couldn't possibly predict the consequences of such massive bioengineering projects, it might be better if we returned to the kind of modest, responsible lives our ancestors once lived, as his friend Edward Goldsmith recommended in The Way. I decided immediately to go out and read it, since this seemed like a saner strategy than blocking out the sun.

The Way is a book for determined readers. First of all, to get past the first few chapters, you pretty much need to already be convinced of several things: that we are on the brink of an ecological collapse; that the past two hundreds years of industrial development have been a doubtful blessing for humans and the environment; and that we need to learn a great deal from certain pre-industrial societies and their relationship with the planet if we want any chance at decent survival.

Even if you are convinced of these things, and I am, Goldsmith does not make your work easy. You have to push through a mass of neologisms – heterotelic, chreods, homeorhetic – which only gradually sink in and then begin to seem useful. The early chapters are filled with cross-references – one page in chapter two, for example, refers a reader to five other chapters as well as the appendix for further development of ideas. It can seem like a maddening tangle.

This tangle, even if it might not be the best way to attract an audience, does end up serving a function. I think The Way is trying to be non-linear, associative, and extensively inter-linked as a mirror of the ecological worldview it is trying to describe. Each chapter is named after a certain principle – for example, “Natural systems are homeostatic” – that is less a link in an argument than a point in a constellation (most chapters are only a few pages long). Goldsmith wants to show how everything is connected – from the move away from early Earth-based religions to the breakdown of modern urban communities – and he jumps continually from one subject to another. The connections between these areas are not usually defended with statistics; they simply exist together in space, and the lines form between them (if they do) through a kind of intuition.

I eventually accepted that Goldsmith's goal was not to convince skeptics or suggest a definite course of action. As with Thoreau, the goal is not intellectual coherence but the communication of a certain spirit - a way of approaching the natural world - that can embrace a variety of responses. It is closer to religious conversion than argumentation. To his credit, Goldsmith realizes this:

Science (he writes) has not banished faith. It has substituted faith in modern science for faith in conventional religion. Ecology, with which we must replace it, is also a faith. It is a faith in the wisdom of those forces that created the natural world and the cosmos of which it is part; it is a faith in the latter's ability to provide us with extraordinary benefits — those required to satisfy our fundamental needs. It is a faith in our capacity to develop cultural patterns that can enable us to maintain its integrity and stability.

Unfortunately, Goldsmith forgets that certain citadels do not fall easily to the weapons of faith. He opens the book by trying to take down what he sees as the reductionistic assumptions of modern science. It is an attempt filled with logical holes that even a sympathetic reader can't fail to notice. Goldsmith begins by bringing up various mathematical models used in ecology, and points out that they cannot capture all aspects of reality (no one expects models to do this). In criticizing the Markovian mathematical formula used to predict ecological succession towards climax, he doesn't bother to indicate just what crucial aspect of reality is being left out. He attacks the neo-Darwinian explanation of evolution brought about through random mutations, but can't explain by what other mechanism it might take place.

Look at the word that I used, though, quite unconsciously: “mechanism.” These are the only kinds of explanations that most people accept as sound: cause-and-effect, the domino hitting the next in the line. But most natural processes do not work in this way. Goldsmith provides fascinating examples, like the relationship between salmon and mosquito larvae, and lays out the staggering array of complicated feedbacks and influences on what would seem to be a simple correlation.

His explanation is not intellectually satisfying; it is, in fact, not an explanation at all, but a gesture towards a mystery. A part of my mind – and most modern minds, I suspect – reflexively struggles against such mysteries and wants to do with away with them. When I encounter Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, or Goldsmith's argument that an ecosystem carefully coordinates its own development, or a description of Cairnsian mutations, where bacteria seem to produce certain beneficial genetic changes in a non-random manner, I am constantly sputtering, “But how can these things happen? Who's in control of it?”

Goldsmith cannot supply the kind of evidence that would satisfy this part of my brain. A similar sense of intellectual dissatisfaction occurs when theologians argue with atheistic philosophers, or intelligent design advocates with Darwinists. The former simply look stupid: they do not have an explanation to duel with the other one, only a sense that something crucial is being left out of the other's world-view - and while I might still crave such explanations, I'm not so sure that they're wrong.

So an ecologist won't be able to say exactly what a new chemical will do to our bodies and to the natural world over the next hundred years. Instead, she might counsel a spirit of caution before we introduce substances with no precedent into our ecosystem. And she will inevitably seem muddleheaded in comparison to a scientist who has run laboratory tests that find no evidence of harm, until twenty years later people find that all of the earthworms are dying – or the bees – or the swallows – and that this is having unexpected and cascading consequences for the biosphere. It is only when the network begins to collapse that we can see how we have disturbed it. And then, maybe, we begin to learn a little humility.

As Tim Parks said in our old interview, people aren't convinced by reasons; they become convinced when the bad news starts to pile up. As the modern belief in endless progress and constant development through technology yields increasingly useless marvels to go along with mounting environmental catastrophes, people, little by little, are beginning to consider other visions of being. Goldsmith's instinct is to look back to what he calls “vernacular societies” – from the ancient Greeks to Vedic Indians to African tribesmen – and draw inspiration from their ways of life. He doesn't spend time considering the possibility of limitless green energy through various as-yet-uninvented technologies. He writes, quite reasonably, that it is presumptuous "to postulate an ideal society for which there is no precedent in the human experience on this planet and whose biological, social and ecological viability has never been demonstrated."

Instead, the book provides examples of how philosophy and ritual helped keep these small human communities, both hunter-gatherer and agrarian, in balance with their environment for thousands of years. These models are not likely to suggest any practical steps to the modern reader – the divergence between the societies he describes and ours is simply too huge – but I'm glad that Goldsmith insisted on following his ideas to their natural conclusions. It gives the book a certain purity of spirit. Few people could hope to live up to this spirit (and certainly not a man typing away at night on a laptop) but it remains a true ideal, one that we can keep striving to make manifest in our various impure ways.

When I finished this book, and what began as confusion had turned to admiration, I remembered a passage from Chuang Tzu, when he describes Hui Tzu's objections to his ideas:

“I have a big tree called a shu. Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line to, its branches too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square. You could stand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice. Your words, too, are big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them.”

Remember, though, that animals love the hollows of a tree – a gnarled trunk will always be more full of life than a smooth one. The Way is stuffed with a lifetime's reading, crankiness, and ideas both deeply felt and poorly defended. I finished it a month ago, and have found myself continually flipping back to odd spots and finding more and more to explore. If the world created by the carpenters and their measuring lines doesn't strike you as a satisfactory place anymore, it is worth your time.

"Not Man Apart": George Dennison and Edwin Muir

2010-11-11T23:44:00.024-05:00

Robinson Jeffers, a disagreeable poet but unquestionably a great one, spent much of his life hectoring a dwindling audience that human beings need to stop being concerned so exclusively with their own affairs, and turn their attention instead to "the wholeness of life and things" -- the natural world of sea and rocks and animals that Jeffers described so beautifully. Love that, he wrote, not man apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

I have read two books recently that show, in very different ways, what this sense of wholeness might look like. One is the autobiography of Edwin Muir, a Scottish poet and translator (you may have seen his name on early editions of Kafka); the other is George Dennison's novella Shawno about his life in rural Maine with his family, his neighbors, and his dog Shawno.

The first hundred pages of Muir's biography describe his childhood on the Orkney Islands in a largely self-sufficient farming community. The narrative drifts through early memories: family songs and first scraps of text, walking through the legs of the cows in the field, the butchering of a pig, and the boats that went from one little island to another.

Eventually, when rents go up, the Muirs have to leave for Glasgow, a move that brings about the collapse of their family. As the Orkney section of the book comes to a close, Muir reflects for the first time on the value of the life they had to abandon:

I cannot say how much my idea of a good life was influenced by my early upbringing, but it seems to me that the life of the little island of Wyre was a good one, and that its sins were sins of the flesh, which are excusable, and not sins of the spirit. The farmers did not know ambition and the petty torments of ambition; they did not realize what competition was, though they lived at the end of Queen Victoria's reign; they helped one another with their work when help was required, following the old usage; they had a culture made up of legend, folk-song, and the poetry and prose of the Bible; they had customs which sanctioned their instinctive feelings for the earth; their life was an order, and a good order.

I wouldn't trust a statement like this if it was not preceded by a hundred pages that describe, with great specificity, the elements of this order, from sowing seeds to salting pork. The writing is often beautiful, but its most impressive quality is a sense of truthfulness. As T.S Eliot wrote in his introduction to Muir's poems, "Utter honesty with oneself and with the world is no more common among men of letters than among men of other occupations. I stress this unmistakable integrity, because I came to recognise it in Edwin Muir's work as well as in the man himself."

Dennison's work, to me, gives off a similar feeling of honesty. Even though Shawno is technically fiction, very little of it feels invented, and it hews pretty close to the facts of Dennison's life. After many years in New York, he moved with his family to the little town of Temple in the Maine countryside, and his later works all take place in this setting. Today, he is best known (if at all) for The Lives of Children, a wonderful book about teaching in a free school in New York for poor children. Dennison devoted the rest of his life to fiction, and produced much good work before his early death from cancer.

Unlike Muir's Orcadian childhood, which could just as easily have taken place centuries ago instead of the early 20th century, Shawno is firmly set in the modern world. The family drives to the grocery store to get food and occasionally watches TV at night. But there is, throughout, a sense of community that seems to belong to an older world. This community includes not just the people of Temple but all of the animals, tamed and wild, that share the town with them. Everyone who grows food keeps a dog or, as Dennison writes, "the woodchucks take it all," and these animals, including all of Temple's deer and finches and porcupine, keep crossing paths with each other and the town's human residents.

The book has a meandering quality, moving from descriptions of the creek to the general store to a flashback describing Shawno's days in New York. It is only at the end that a reader realizes how skilfully Dennison has gone about providing the knowledge needed to understand the story's conclusion.

One of the wonderful things about the human characters in Shawno (mostly Dennison's country neighbors, as well as a few other dislocated artists) is the feeling of competence that comes off of them. Today, when all most of us possess is an ephemeral competence involving the manipulation of gadgetry and the navigation of arbitrary man-made procedures, the characters in Shawno can drive posts for a cabin, hunt, replace shingles on a roof, and sugar the maples on their land. Their knowledge grows out of a life lived close to natural cycles, and increases their sense of connectedness with the world rather than drawing them further into themselves. They can also fiddle and draw and sing, the sort of skills that come from generating art and entertainment for yourself instead of always having them supplied to you.

Dennison describes all of this work and play with care and respect. One character sketch, of the man who runs the town's general store, contains a line that I think helps locate the achievement of both of these writers.

Of the men in the village he was certainly the least rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish, play poker, drink whiskey, and swap yarns. But he had gone away to college, and then to business school, and had worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous, lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he couldn't make a go of things in the city but because he loved the countryside and sorely missed the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs. When I met him his three children were away at college. We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his forbearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed by his wit, and by his kindliness, as when he would allow certain impoverished children to cluster for long, long minutes before the candy rack, blocking his narrow aisle; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still alert and lively. He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work.

"A bedrock of contentment" -- like Muir, Dennison is always searching for this sense of rightness, and the vision of a good life that underlies both of these books goes beyond the narrow circle of human concerns to include our relationship with the natural world, and some sense of our proper place in the "good order" that Muir found in the Orkneys.

As you can probably tell, neither writer has much sense of humor, and Dennison's writing in particular is sometimes stiff and high-toned (I usually prefer my "impoverished children" to be old-fashioned poor kids). There are parts of his other books -- Luisa Domic, for example, about a Chilean refugee from the Pinochet takeover -- where I find him sort of insufferable. There is, though, a seriousness and dignity in these two writers that is a much more valuable quality than irony, which is easy enough to find elsewhere. Muir is simply a great artist, and everything I have read by him, from essays to poetry, has been illuminating. I think Shawno is the best fiction that Dennison ever wrote, and along with Jimenez's Platero y yo is probably the best book I have read about a man's relationship with an animal.

It is depressing but in some ways unsurprising that both of these books, along with Muir's poetry, are entirely out of print. As a society, I think we are a little scared of what they have to tell us. Search them out, though. If we want to understand why our civilization keeps absorbing more and more resources while generating less and less human satisfaction, these are the visions we will have to confront, and learn from.

Spooky brew for Halloween

2010-11-01T20:22:00.004-04:00

As a break from gloomy thoughts (or a reflection of them), here is a ghost that drifted its way across my beer recently.

The People Take Death Seriously and Do Not Travel Far

2010-09-23T20:42:00.018-04:00

I saw a commercial recently that made me so angry that I had to step back for a second to ask why it was affecting me so strongly. It features a polar bear who leaves the melting Arctic for somewhere in America, passing trains and huge trucks and then wandering the streets of a huge city. It seemed, at first, like an indictment of our entire way of life. But then the polar bear finds a man outside of his pleasant suburban home about to get into a Nissan Leaf, an electric car. And the bear gives the man a hug out of sheer gratitude.

It took me a while to figure out why I was so disgusted. I'm glad there's finally an electric car; if you have to drive, it's certainly better than the alternative. And you'd think I would be pleased that an environmental crisis was at least being acknowledged.

But this ad somehow made me angrier than the "clean coal" nonsense you occasionally see in magazines. What bothered me was the commercial's implication that small private steps, from buying lightbulbs to a new car, which entail no real sacrifice on anyone's part, will solve the problems that we're facing.

This is continually what we're told: try to shut off lights, compost, ride a bike once in a while, recycle, make green consumer choices. All tiny, simple decisions that don't affect your life in any fundamental way. And I manage to stay satisfied with myself most of the time doing just these things.

Even a little thought, though, should tell us that this model of transformation simply isn't adequate to our situation anymore. These measures -- which, yes, are better than nothing -- are basically self-pacification devices. It's insane to think that lightbulbs and cars are anything more than a vague gesture in the right direction. The flaw runs much deeper in our way of life.

A simple example: flying is probably one of the most environmentally destructive private acts that any of us can commit. Yet I don't know a single person, including myself, who has ever given up a flight for this reason, even as we turn up our noses at thoughtless people with their huge SUVs.

Giving up flying, for me at least, would mean rarely or never seeing most of my family and friends. How many people are willing to do this? Not many, I suspect. Every modern society is built around cheap energy, and we're now living in a world that would require complete restructuring before normal, unheroic people could be even moderately responsible. And any system is in trouble if it requires heroism to sustain itself.

There's an apocalyptic feeling in the air, isn't there? I don't think it's just me, or a passing mood. It comes with the recognition that almost none of us are actually serious about addressing these problems. We're simply going to throw a party until the water comes through the door. The road we've been traveling for the past several hundred years doesn't seem like it can be gently redirected to a sensible place, so we're just waiting. Large-scale institutional solutions are not forthcoming, at least not until a cataclysm occurs, and everyone knows that the private acts we are willing to perform are drops in the bucket.

There's a poem from the Tao Te Ching that I've always found a little terrifying. It's one of the last verses, from the version by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times
faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
They food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple,
their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.

What always scared me about this poem was how low the bar was set, how close the ideal was to vegetable life, how much of what I value would be eliminated. The sense of peace that it carried was too huge, too much like death. It's hard not to rebel against it. Shouldn't life be more than this? Isn't it better that most people aren't satisfied to stay on this level?

The poem seems wiser now than it did before, though, and more of a genuine ideal than all of our clean energy fantasies, which again promise solutions for everyone with absolutely no sacrifices required. A long look at the abyss, I think, might be a better idea. At least it's a real starting point.

News & Publications

2010-09-04T17:06:00.013-04:00

Some good news:

* First, Ensouling Language, which I wrote about here, is finally available.I'm already in the mood to read it again, which doesn't happen very often. If you have any interest in writing, it's worth your time and your $24.95.

* A story I wrote several years ago called The Gates, based on a long trip I took to Madagascar, has just appeared in Crazyhorse. I didn't know this when I submitted the story, but it turns out that Crazyhorse was founded by Thomas McGrath, a poet I like a lot. So I'm doubly glad to be part of it. Hopefully worth your $9 (I did my best).

* Also, Powell's picked up the Avvaiyar review published in Cerise Press for their Review-a-Day, which makes me happy. I hope it sells some copies of the book.

I've been reading some wonderful stuff lately that deserves to be better known, so I'll post something soon,

Akshay

Stephen King's Misery and the Uses of Horror

2010-08-04T11:05:00.007-04:00

Stephen King has been lobbying for respectability for a while, and the literary world seems to be coming around to him. Unlike most of the celebrated novels from the last thirty years, people are still reading King’s old work, and some of it seems likely to survive. I haven't read his other novels, but just going off the movie adaptations, there seem to be a wealth of narrative ideas in King's books. He isn’t, like most successful pulp novelists, simply writing to formula.

Misery, published in 1987, feels like a particularly personal book. It’s hero, Paul Sheldon, is a writer of historical romances who wants to be thought of as a serious writer, and even with all of his success has been hurt by the dismissiveness of critics. One day, drunk, having finally written what he thinks is a great book, he crashes his car in a Colorado snowstorm. When he comes to, his legs are shattered, and a large, strange woman named Annie Wilkes is taking care of him in her house. This care includes dosing him with powerful pain medication, on which Sheldon soon realizes he has become entirely dependent. Wilkes, an ex-nurse, is a huge fan of Sheldon’s work. She recognized him when she pulled him out of the car and hasn’t told anyone he is up in her house in the mountains.

Little by little, Sheldon realizes that his caretaker is deeply deranged. Annie becomes furious when she reads his latest romance, because Sheldon has killed off the series' main character, Misery Chastain, whom he desperately wanted to be rid of. Annie also forces Paul to burn his latest stab at literary respectability, Fast Cars, which she doesn’t think is worthy of his talent (too much profanity). Finally, trapped in his room, Paul is forced to write another novel that brings Misery back to life, while continually dealing with Annie’s rages and his own humiliating dependence.

This is certainly a gripping idea, and King develops it with great skill. It met, for me, the simplest test of a good novel: except for some pages from Sheldon’s ongoing captive manuscript, I never skimmed or even had the urge to skim. I was as interested in how things happened as what happened.

King also respects the tradition that he’s working in and has clearly read an enormous amount. Both Dumas and Fowles, past masters of the captivity narrative, come up in the novel, along with a number of other good writers. The book’s psychology is convincing, and the push and pull of power between Annie and Paul is ingeniously handled. King also has a fine sense of what needs to be left out to maintain his claustrophobic atmosphere – we get almost no backstory about Paul, and certain questions, like what became of Annie’s brief marriage, are pointedly left unanswered. There is a great deal of artistry in the book, and I think King deserves, in some ways, the respect he is looking for.

There are, however, several things about it that bother me – and they bother me not only about King but about all of his much less talented imitators working in pulp and television. Misery is about as good as the modern Gothic novel gets, so I think it is worth exploring how it works on a reader.

First, to quote one of Annie’s objections to Paul’s first draft, King cheats a little. He never cheats on plot; he knows all about how locks can be picked and how drug dependencies are created. But there are certain aspects of reality that he simply refuses to explore, and at a certain point this becomes an evasion instead of a narrative choice. For example, Sheldon can’t get out of bed for much of the book, and there is no bathroom where Annie has locked him up. A bedpan is mentioned near the end, but this obvious and intimate element of their relationship – with Paul probably wearing an open gown, and having to be bathed and cleaned and wiped everyday if he isn’t to smell – is never mentioned (their relationship would feel very different, I think, if it was). This aspect of Sheldon's plight is probably much more horrifying than anything else King describes – it is also something that everyone, at some point, is probably going to have to experience or watch someone else experience – but it is entirely outside of the realm of King’s interests.

The obvious objection is that King’s primary concern in Misery is not the body’s breakdown, but the nature of evil. Because Annie turns out to be not just a slightly addled fan but an actual psychopath. Paul is not her first victim; she has been killing people ever since she was an adolescent, and then repeatedly, quietly, and pointlessly ever since she became a nurse, until she was finally dismissed from her post. There is a long tradition of remorseless characters in literature, from Iago to Rigaud in Little Dorrit to Kate in East of Eden, whose motiveless malignity is, I suppose, meant to personify the same force that causes the tumor to metastasize, the stair to be not quite where we thought it was.

King is clearly trying to recreate this same sense of an implacable and unreasonable force bearing down on each of us. The Goddess never dies, Paul thinks, even when he is finally free of Annie, because she has become more than a human being for him; she is, like Iago, a demon.

Demons, though, to retain their power, must exist outside of psychology. And this is where Annie fails as a character, and in a profound way. Like so many modern villains, her actions are explained using the latest research from the abnormal psych people. We learn about Annie’s depressive states, her sense of paranoia, her inability to feel anything for all the infants and terminally ill patients she has killed as a nurse. When Annie suddenly feels bad about buying Paul a terrible typewriter than has hurt his hands – she actually cries – Paul, for the first time, considers why his captor might be this way:

Paul thought that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong.

This is not real empathy, and it also manages to kill the demon. The line about Annie's upbringing is disingenuous, because we never find out anything, good or bad, about her upbringing, and, like Kate from East of Eden, she began killing when she was still a child. All we have left as an explanation, then, is her glands. Annie is a typewriter with a piece broken; there is no hope for her, no possibility of an understanding than is more than mechanical. And there is absolutely no grandeur to her evil.

Such a person doesn’t produce the dread of a great villain like Iago, or the true sympathy that one can feel for, say, Mr. Falkland in Caleb Williams – instead, Annie just makes people scared. During the week I read this novel, I remember sitting in a bathroom stall in a library and being convinced that a man who walked in was going to burst through the doors and kill me. I even waited a second to buzz up a friendly census taker because I thought he was part of some murderous scheme.

There’s something unhealthy about this. A great book should make you feel more at home in the world, not less – the truth always does this, even if it’s unpleasant. But books like this, and the thousands by King’s much less talented followers, ignore genuine and universal anxieties – like Sheldon’s inability to clean himself or go to the bathroom – to create fresh and stupid ones. They succeed largely based on manufacturing false unease – a world filled with terrors that are, at best, immensely rare.

To some extent, this obsession with psychopaths reflects a natural interest both in the macabre and the extremes of human experience. People have always wanted to hear about murderers. There’s a difference today, though. Our fictional killers, like Annie, are less and less driven to crime by money or passion or revenge, and more often are actually wired wrong. They kill and torture simply out of some error of the brain. I suspect that anyone who watches even a little bit of TV could put together a psychological profile of one of these killers, representing the latest state of criminological science (I am tempted to put quotation marks around that last part).

Brain chemistry, glands: these are the explanations that the times demand. Some of the reasons are obvious: people who are simply, fundamentally, wrong, are the only ones who could possibly justify our fiercely punitive system of justice. We have to believe that such people not only exist but are quite common: the incorrigible, the unreachable. Not many people consider, though, what follows if we consider someone beyond hope. Tolstoy talked about this in The Kingdom of God is Within You. He discusses John Chrysostom’s arguments that some men are fundamentally bad, and must be restrained by force if the world is not to come to ruin:

This is ill grounded, Tolstoy writes, because if we allow ourselves to regard any men as intrinsically wicked men, then in the first place we annul, by so doing, the whole idea of the Christian teaching, according to which we are all equals and brothers, as sons of one Father in heaven.

Tolstoy also points out that there is no “perfect and unfailing distinction by which one could positively know the wicked from the good,” but he didn’t think then of the false certainty provided by brain chemistry and psychology, with which modern juries and modern readers are easily convinced that the death of a certain person is an unmixed blessing.

I am not a Christian, and I am not sure if there is such a thing as a soul, but I know that, if we are truly convinced that there is even a single person who, from birth, is completely impervious to love and incapable of empathy, we have to throw out even the possibility of one, because by what mechanism would some people receive a soul and others be denied one?

I’ve never meet one of these supposedly soulless individuals, though, so I’m not willing to do this, and I think there is something profoundly unhealthy about narratives like Misery and all of its screen siblings that present such people to us again and again. Faulkner talked about the modern author who writes “not of the heart but of the glands” – those same funny little glands that control Annie’s behavior – and saw it accurately as an assault on the dignity of man. This has to be a consideration when we try to measure the value of a book. King has an abundant imagination and a fine sense of craft – he is also, quite probably, a perfectly humane and intelligent person – but his books encourage an ugly and easy view of the world that I find inconsistent with real writing. Certain tasks, even done well, are better not done at all.

Poems of Avvaiyar

2010-07-05T10:38:00.005-04:00

A review I wrote of the ancient Tamil poet Avvaiyar has been published in the Cerise Press.

I'm proud of this one - not because of my own writing, but because I think these are great poems and pretty much no one outside the Tamil-speaking world knows about them (I don't speak Tamil and had never heard of Avvaiyar before). I found the book on a review shelf and picked it up out of curiosity over what Indian writers were doing for the many centuries between the great epics and colonization. Producing beautiful work, apparently; these things were here and just the translator wanting.

It's a slim book and a tiny press, but worth your attention and support. All possible praise to Pruiksma, the translator, and Red Hen Press for giving it to the English-speaking world.

Two More Publications

2010-06-25T15:32:00.005-04:00

Sorry for the long time between posts. I've read and seen some good things but haven't had anything very interesting to say about them.

A few recommendations: Sugar is a really wonderful and surprising movie about a Dominican baseball prospect who goes to Iowa to play Single A ball. And Niels Lyhne, by Jens Peter Jacobsen (a largely forgotten Danish writer who was one of Rilke's favorites) has some beautiful passages in Tina Nunnally's translation. Jacobsen also had an astounding mustache.

I also had two pieces published recently: a review of The Geometry of God, by Uzma Aslam Khan, in the Spring issue of Ploughshares, and a profile of the jazz musician Vijay Iyer for a new Indian magazine called The Caravan. Both were contract work, so I had to work a little to produce enthusiasm. The Khan book was accomplished but never made a profound impression - I ended up liking Iyer's music a lot, though.

Hope the pieces are worth reading - I'll post something more substantial soon.

Ensouling Language, by Stephen Harrod Buhner

2010-05-07T14:25:00.019-04:00

Among Gandhi’s thousands of articles and pamphlets, written in English and Gujurati, are several on sanitation. “A small spade is the means of salvation from a great nuisance,” Gandhi writes in one article. “In his book on rural hygiene, Dr. Poore says that excreta should be buried in earth no deeper than nine to twelve inches. The author contends that the superficial earth is charged with minute life, which, together with light and air which easily penetrate it, turn the excreta into good soft sweet-smelling soil within a week. Any villager can test this for himself.”

I felt a strange charge when reading these passages. This is how to write, I thought - this is how to approach life. Gandhi doesn’t bully people with rhetoric or his own authority. He does his research, he checks everything for himself. I would bet my life he dug his own nine-to-twelve inch latrines. Notice the use of “good” and “sweet-smelling,” too, which no scientist would write. There is always an emotional and moral element to Gandhi’s writing, and an underlying vision of a society where people respect each other and live responsibly on the earth.

To leave your waste is “a sin against God and humanity,” he writes. Even in this tiny pamphlet, he is trying to bring about “the restoration of the holy to everyday life,” using a subject that most of us have no inclination to think about.

The last quote – “the restoration of the holy” – is from Stephen Harrod Buhner’s wonderful book on writing, which arrived unsolicited on my doorstep a few months ago. When I started reading it, I remembered Gandhi’s piece, and my old thought that no good piece of writing is ever just about its nominal topic. Buhner’s book argues that any subject can be a doorway to the larger truths of existence, as long as the writer has developed a real emotional connection with his material - although some subjects, of course, are more likely to produce such a connection than others.

Buhner begins with the observation that the majority of books sold today are non-fiction, and not memoirs and histories and other such “serious” books, but genre nonfiction: books on gardening, trail guides, identifying birds, losing weight, etc. To a large extent, this is what people actually read. “There is no reason,” Buhner says, “that the art of writing should neglect the largest segment of the nonfiction field. Well, no reputable reason.”

He then quotes from how-to books like James Krenov’s The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking, and shows how the writer is creating “something that is more than the sum of the parts, something that touches on the depths of the human and the human relationship to the universe around her” – the same thing that I felt in those lines from Gandhi. This is an experience traditionally only associated with belletristic writing – poetry, novels, plays – and not even seen as a goal in more information-oriented work.

Buhner’s book describes how any writer, even one writing about, say, adobe walls, can achieve the sense of expansion - of traveling into larger worlds - that has always marked the best art. And although the subject is nonfiction, what Buhner has to say applies to serious writing of any kind.

Buhner, who is an herbalist as well as a writer, expressed his guiding principle in an earlier book, The Lost Language of Plants: “I do not believe we can solve the environmental problems facing us,” he wrote, “unless we develop our capacity for feeling and our empathy for other life-forms to the same degree that we have developed our facility for thought.”

Although it never struck me as important before, I noticed once that many of my favorite writers had a sense that consciousness was not limited to human beings. Reading their books, you felt life coming from everywhere. Edward Thomas’s winds whistle their joy or pain through cracks in the wall. Transtromer never doubts that plants have thoughts, and the oak tree that speaks to Prince Andrei in War and Peace is as important as any human character. Nicholson Baker, one of the few modern writers I follow with interest, can feel life coming up through old paper straws and other products of industrial civilization.

This experience is commonly known as the pathetic fallacy. Although ordinary people continue, stubbornly, to experience the world in this way, our culture’s intellectual and artistic leaders often see it, at best, as a useful delusion for poets. To argue that we can experience genuine communication with the non-human world without generating the message ourselves, one has to go against the entire current of our society and, by extension, our language. Modern artists who have felt the reality of such messages have often had to invent or procure their own words for it. Hopkins talked about inscape and instress, Lorca about duende. Buhner has to go back to the Greeks.

It is this exact exchange [between the human and non-human] they called aisthesis. For the ancient Greeks, the organ of aisthesis, that is, the part of us that is capable of accessing this experience, is the human heart — aisthesis comes directly out of our capacity to feel. The ancient Greeks insisted this experience could be shared with any part of the world, even the world itself, insisted there could be an invisible, sensorial touching between the human and nonhuman in such moments. And during those moments, understandings, perceptions, and insights that can be obtained no other way flow into us.

Buhner has several writing exercises – some of the very few I have ever found useful – to help get into a state of mind where such a stream of understanding might pass between you and some part of the world. The first step is getting a sense of what might have deep resonance for you: locating your loves and hates, your heroes, and the words and books that have already put down roots in your spirit.

Bertram Dobell, in his introduction to Thomas Traherne’s Centuries, wrote that “utter sincerity of thought, though it is not indeed the only requisite for a great writer, is yet, I think, the one indispensable quality without which all others are useless.” Buhner’s book, as well as being a clear example of this sincerity, is a forceful reminder that anything we produce without this core of conviction is probably going to be worthless. After all, most pieces of writing today – all the millions of articles and blog posts and novels – are not failed shots at greatness but successful attempts to achieve petty objectives.

But surely, one might say, not every piece of writing needs to be so important. Sometimes you need your guilty pleasures, your brainless time; there has to be something that fulfills that function. I don’t think Buhner would agree, and I don’t either. If you can find beauty anywhere, you also can’t forgive ugliness and thoughtlessness in any form. I am simply never in the mood to be lied to. From bad movies to the design of office buildings, the belief that large areas of our culture are inconsequential will, I'm convinced, eventually degrade our ability to find the truth even in the things that we do value.

Beyond the obvious crap, of course, there are the well-intentioned attempts to communicate information and ideas, provide intelligent diversion. Buhner has little tolerance for writing of this sort, motivated by no emotional charge. There is an obvious objection to this, but I will let it be made by a smarter man. Here is James Agee in his review of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard:

On the charge of lifelessness [he writes] I can only say that in my opinion there are two main kinds of life in art, not just one. The warmer, richer kind comes, invariably, from the kind of artist who works from far inside himself and his creatures. For the other kind, we can thank the good observer. Brackett and Wilder apparently have little if any gift from working from inside, but they are first rate observers, and their films are full of that kind of life. It is true, I think, that they fail to make much of the powerful tragic possibilities which are inherent in their story; they don’t even explore much of the deep anguish and pathos which are still more richly inherent, though they often reveal it, quickly and brilliantly. But this does not seem to me a shameful kind of failure, if indeed it is proper to call it a failure at all: they are simply not the men for such a job, nor was this the kind of job they were trying to do. But they are beautifully equipped to do the cold, exact, adroit, sardonic job they have done; and artists who, consciously or unconsciously, learn to be true to their limitations as well as to their gifts, deserve a kind of gratitude and respect they much too seldom get.

There is a whole world of Wilder’s kind of art that Buhner has no time for, and would probably not consider art at all (Roth, for example, whom I respect, is dismissed with a line). But I think this book is a necessary corrective, because today the kind of observational art that Agee describes gets far too much rather than too little respect. It is what goes into most television, even the best stuff, where wit and ingenuity are pretty much the entirety of what’s on display. It is also the same kind of “intelligence” that goes into our value-free mainstream political analysis.

So if Buhner dismisses too much – and takes too many potshots at MFA programs and the NY literary scene – I forgive him. Many of his concepts are taken, openly, from other thinkers – Stafford, Bly, and Gardner, mostly – but the synthesis is impressive, the writing is consistently excellent, and the depth and variety and seriousness of his reading are an inspiration (the book would be worth reading for the quotes alone). Buhner's book also meets its own criterion; by going deep enough into its subject, it gives us glimpses of the whole world and man's relationship to it, and a measure of greatness is achieved simply by telling our society what it most urgently needs to hear right now.

You might raise an eyebrow at the title (the publisher’s decision – Buhner’s preferred title is Inhabiting the Word) and by the author’s involvement with something called the Institute of Gaian Studies. I had those reactions at first, and they are entirely to my discredit. Remember that only time has given people like Blake and Tolstoy their veneer of respectability, and that kneejerk skepticism often keeps us from precisely the people who have something new to teach us. Renewal, if it comes for our society, is going to come from the margins. We just need to go seek it out.

Robert Altman: An Oral Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff

2010-02-06T12:37:00.004-05:00

I’ve sat through more bad Robert Altman movies than any other director’s – and not the sort of bad movie where you shrug and say, “Well, about what I expected,” but the kind where you’re baffled by what the person in charge might have been thinking. Most directors develop a style and a basic vein to exploit, and even their uninspired efforts provoke a shrug, because an audience has felt out their limits and is content with them.

With Altman, no matter how many movies have left me scratching my head, or simply dissatisfied – The Company, The Gingerbread Man, 3 Women, California Split, to name a few – I’ve never reached that place where I knew that he had nothing more to show me. For example, I’d seen a little of Tanner ‘88, which I liked okay, and a few months ago I picked up the sequel, Tanner on Tanner. By the end of an hour I was so bored I stopped. But just before I did, there was a moment – Tanner’s daughter (Cynthia Nixon) and her crew were singing “Exercise Your Right to Vote” in a van headed to one of the political conventions; the camera moves around the van, and she looks at it and smiles.

And immediately that image burned itself into my head; I’m not sure why. Maybe because it captured how much fun a road trip can be. And I thought – no one else gets stuff like this on film. That whole project is a narrative disaster, and I was completely bored, but the amazing thing is that I’m willing to give that movie another shot – I would rent it again, in the right mood, because there’s always something else to notice in Altman’s movies. That’s why I’d rather devote time to re-watching an Altman disaster than another Eastwood or Scorsese or Coen Brothers “success.”

Michael Tolkin, the author of the book and the screenplay for The Player (which Altman, of course, completely changed), says this well: “He has a few really great movies and a lot of films that are of great interest and are worth watching and watching again, but don’t fully work on the terms on which they could have worked because of his disdain for story.” Tolkin doesn’t specify which ones he thinks are great – I’ve never been as taken with Nashville as other people; I think McCabe & Mrs. Miller is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been in the mood to see Gosford Park for a third time.

The Tolkin quote is from Mitchell Zuckoff’s new book, Robert Altman: An Oral Biography. The book is mostly excerpts from hundreds of interviews - with Altman himself, members of his flight crew in WWII, his family, ex-wives and actors and producers – all arranged to tell the story of his life, with a little help from newspaper articles and reviews (this would be an interesting way to narrate a novel, by the way). I picked up the book because I’d heard a little about Altman’s creative method – how much freedom he gave actors to create their own parts, write their own songs and monologues, change the plot and course of a scene (much to the annoyance of the screenwriter) – and was curious how it worked.

Here’s Anne Rapp, an author and screenwriter that Altman met near the end of his career:

Bob has a reputation as being difficult on writers. You won’t hear that from me. I would show him something, and if I did nine things horrible and there was one little seed, one little character, one line that worked, his eyes would light up and he’d say, “That’s it, you hit the nail right there! Not take that and go write that.”

I would walk out of his office and feel like I kicked ass. Any other Hollywood meeting I was in, they’d rake you over the coals about those nine things you did wrong. Bob had that ability to make you walk out of his office and feel like running back to your computer. He had an amazing way of dealing with artists in vulnerable positions.

“I felt like a good writer for the three years I was with Bob,” Rapp says. “I have had nothing but doubts since.”

Much of the first half of the book is devoted to enfant terrible behavior, long past the acceptable age – drinking and cheating on wives and punching people into pools. Altman focused most of his anger on people on the business end of things: producers and publicists and executives (not that this is any excuse). Actors, however, were treated with nothing but consideration, and the book is filled with testimonies of the subtle advice he could give – or, sometimes, refuse to give – and how open he was to input from absolutely anyone on the set.

The stunning end of California Split was George Segal’s idea, for example, and Altman agreed to his suggestion, which Columbia said “cost them ten million dollars” (the screenwriter still seems upset about it). I don’t know if it’s a good ending, but I’ve never forgotten it or stopped thinking about what it might mean. And the girl whose nose gets smashed in The Long Goodbye – probably the most disturbing scene in any of his movies – was just a waitress that Altman met while they were filming, and then decided to insert the sequence into the film.

Altman has a gift, like Dylan, for suggestive incoherence (they’re also both capable of garden variety incoherence) and it’s often hard to get a handle on Altman’s people because he continually plays against the grain of the material. The film gives you a mess of information, and you simply have to work this character out in your head. An artist who tries this method had better be able to pull off coherence as well, though – Dylan certainly could, and Altman was a fine television director before he made any of his movies.

Zuckoff tries the same thing in this book: contradictory versions of stories nestle up against each other, with no attempt to sort them out, and different facets of Altman’s personality are described by the people that forgive him and those who don’t. “He was different,” Alan Rudolph says, “and it’ll take your book to try and define it, and it will be elusive and you’ll never get to the center of it because you shouldn’t be able to.”

The book is full of wonderful material, and Zuckoff deserves credit for his sense of how to organize it. He groups quotes that play off each other, and sets up separate chapters for material that needs its own space: on Altman’s relationships with his children, for example, and his slightly poisonous collaboration with a woman named Scotty Bushnell. I gobbled up the book in three days, and it’s one of the few biographies I might want to pick up again.

I had an idea while I was reading it – one that's occurred to me before when thinking about how Shakespeare operated – that certain art forms thrive on a level of carelessness. Altman never took a project he didn’t care about, and once he got something down to his satisfaction he absolutely refused to change it – but he also didn’t agonize. He worked with concentration but very quickly, got stuff in a couple of takes, make huge changes based on a gut feeling or a suggestion, and then moved on to the next project.

I’ve been on one set before, and was slightly horrified at the speed and borderline heedlessness with which things move – but I realize now that this is a healthy part of a medium which I enjoy but can’t get totally comfortable with. If a novelist or a poet spends years and years on a book, there’s a reasonable chance that the time has been well spent. But when a musician, say, is about to release an album that he's spent a decade agonizing over, you can pretty much guarantee that it’ll be bad. Additional time doesn’t ripen certain kinds of art, but encourages spoilage. So make a virtue out of accidents, embrace imperfection, and then move on – at least if you’re making movies.

Altman said this beautifully in the speech he gave at the Oscars for his Lifetime Achievement Award, which Zuckoff includes in the biography:

I’ve always said that making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there and you say – you build this beautiful structure, several of you, and then you sit back and you watch the tide come in, have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away. And that sand castle remains in your mind. Now, I've built about forty of them and I never tire of it. No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have. I'm very fortunate in my career. I've never had to direct a film that I didn't choose or develop. I love filmmaking. It has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition. And for that, I'm forever grateful.

Two Publications

2010-01-18T12:37:00.007-05:00

Hello readers!

A few of my pieces have appeared outside of this blog. First, a very short story I wrote called Attention has been published in Barrelhouse. Also, a poem appeared a few months ago in The Baltimore Review. Unfortunately, you can't find it online, and the magazine is rather difficult to find in bookstores. So, here it is, for those who might not order the issue. I'm fond of both of these pieces, so I hope you enjoy them.

Love Poem for a Boring Woman

You tell me about your job, your old dog,
your boss who is freaking out for nothing.
I watch the swirl of your hands, the movements
of your eyes – lively, dancing – as you talk
about your neighbor always making noise,
the roommate you had once who was crazy.

Listen! They are playing a song you love,
a song you could listen to forever.
It makes you think of winter, middle school,
the sad city where you grew up …

You stop.
“God,” you say, looking away, “I’m talking
your head off.” No, I think but don’t say –
You’re talking my heart full. Don’t ever stop
talking, there’s nothing I don’t want to hear.

But you do. You go silent. You tell me
later you’re sorry – you actually
apologize, my god, for not being
more interesting. I protest (weakly)
but I don’t tell you my secret. I haven’t
told anyone before: I’m boring too.
I’m tired of telling jokes, watching people’s
faces, pretending to be fascinating.
It’s too much work earning attention, and
there’s so much to say with no one to care.

Listen: I had a cat once, a brown one,
and I tried so hard to grow tomatoes
but they all died. That’s it. End of story.
There will be no punch line, nothing to make
you care other than the fact that it’s me
and I love you …
But it’s too soon for that.
My hand moves closer to yours and I hope
you understand. “Your boss sounds like a jerk,”
I say, and you tell me all about it.

Some Lines from Herzen's Memoirs

2009-11-29T22:24:00.004-05:00

Several years ago, I found a copy of the first volume of Alexander Herzen’s memoirs, translated by J.C. Duff. I’d picked it up because Isaiah Berlin – a brilliant man and a very reliable critic – had written that My Past & Thoughts, Herzen’s title for the six volumes of his memoirs, was one of the great monuments of Russian prose, along with War and Peace and a few other better known classics.

I finally picked up the first volume, called Childhood, Youth, and Exile, a few weeks ago, maybe because Herzen has been in the air (he’s a character in a recent Stoppard play that I haven’t seen). The memoirs are something of a mess and it’s easy to see why they’ve never become particularly popular, but so far I’m very glad to be reading them (I’ve been hunting for the remaining volumes).

The book was written in fits and starts, with brilliant and charming sections of obvious interest, like the section describing Napoleon’s burning of Moscow, giving way to private anecdotes related in far too much detail – various university shenanigans, for example, which even Herzen apologies for narrating at such length – until the narrative revives with an incisive observation or a moving character sketch (this happens repeatedly).

Here, for example, is a tossed-off observation about Herzen’s mother: “An exceedingly kind-hearted woman, but not strong-willed, she was utterly crushed by my father; and, as often happens with weak characters, she was apt to carry on a desperate opposition in matters of no importance.” Herzen’s opinions are rarely startling, but he has a gift for communicating the essence of an idea in a few sentences – a person’s character, or the atmosphere of a depressing provincial town. "The relative conventionality of his psychology makes it all the simpler and truer," D. S. Mirsky writes, but it is an earned conventionality. Herzen seems to have thought everything out for himself, accepting in the process a great deal of everyday wisdom as accurate. And so he moves in and out of the commonplace, and it is only later that you realize – Berlin points this out too – how original he is capable of being under his genial, conversational manner.

There was one passage in particular that I kept thinking about. It is about how Herzen found out he was an illegitimate child. Herzen’s father never married his mother according to the Russian rites, and gave his son an invented last name because he said that he was the child of his heart (Herz in German). Quite calmly, Herzen narrates this discovery

Children in general find out more than people think. They are easily put off, and forget for a time, but they persist in returning to the subject, especially if it is mysterious or alarming; and by their questions they get at the truth with surprising perseverance and ingenuity.

Once my curiosity was aroused, I soon learned all the details of my parents’ marriage – how my mother made up her mind to elope, how she was concealed in the Russian embassy at Cassel by uncle’s connivance, and then crossed the frontier disguised as a boy; and all this I found out without asking a single question.

Why did I find this passage so impressive? It was the second sentence, mainly, that was affecting me – “They are easily put off, and forget for a time, but they persist in returning to the subject...” There is Herzen’s insight into how children figure things out, but most of the passage’s originality is produced by the interval of time separating Herzen’s era of storytelling from ours.

I tried to imagine myself writing a story about a child in this situation and realized I would never have written that second sentence, which covers so many years and casual attempts to figure out the truth. I would instead have thought of the crucial scene, the moment when the pieces fell into place for the child, and I would probably have succumbed to the cliché of the inquisitive child and had the boy ask lots of questions.

Modern writers almost always build their stories around such spots of time; very few would think of having a passage like Herzen’s, where a child is "easily put off" and then takes in vital knowledge in a mysterious, gradual way that doesn't lend itself to condensation into a scene or two.

Herzen’s method isn’t dramatically satisfying – it isn’t “good” storytelling – but I think it's much closer to how life is actually experienced. Looking back on my own childhood – or my adult life, for that matter - it’s rare for me to be able to pinpoint a moment where something profound was learned. Such lessons, for most of us, are simply absorbed, and it’s only after we’ve already made them part of our way of looking at the world that we realize that anything at all has changed. This is just the sort of experience Herzen describes, and yet modern storytellers relentlessly drive their characters towards epiphanies, something I’m quite certain I’ve never had in my life.

Film and television, I think, are partially responsible. We have been raised on a storytelling medium that cannot comfortably depict gradual change: a second on screen in a second in life, and to give an audience the transformation that makes a story satisfying and consequential, artists often have to fabricate a “moment” that communicates this change.

Then again, the same is often true of Dickens, so perhaps the real culprit is the impulse to entertain – to create vividness on the page for a mass audience – which overwhelms the desire to tell the truth.

This is not a small matter, because storytelling is how most of us learn to look at our lives and create a sense of significance – we’re always writing a narrative that leads somewhere. And if we’re unable to stitch together these moments into a coherent story that has, for us, the ring of truth, life can seem pointless, or worth living only for isolated moments which form no narrative. There are always ready-made stories, of course, but most people have to do some work to fit their lives comfortably into them.

Guy Davenport has said this beautifully: "We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself."

Davenport is writing about Plutarch and Montaigne, and part of his point is that words, if we retain a sense of how to use them, are by far the best tools for this introspection. As even that ordinary passage from Herzen shows, we haven’t come up with anything better to describe the texture and flow of our thoughts and spirit, and our obsession with giving our narratives immediacy encourages a falsification of reality that I think damages our ability to be truthful about our lives.

As Davenport says, no one teaches this skill anymore, but there are still books – Herzen’s is one of them – that show us how it might be done. He survived personal agonies that would destroy most people, and lived through an era when revolutionary fervor was often accompanied by the sacrifice of every ordinary human value. But he never stopped being generous and thoughtful; he knew how to meditate on his experience, find words for it, and put himself at least somewhat at peace.

He didn't end up writing anything like a cohesive work of art, I suppose. Characters take center stage and then disappear, again and again, and one doesn't get a sense of how it all fits together, except for the consciousness through which the events are presented. But, as with Gandhi's memoirs, I prefer this book for its lack of self-conscious artistry. Neither man was too concerned with literary perfection, just telling people how he saw things. If you've lived and thought well enough, it turns out, that's plenty.

Back, by Henry Green

2009-10-19T20:08:00.011-04:00

I’ve only read a few books in my life with awe: Anna Karenina was one, when I was 19, and Party Going was another, a few years later, read at a single sitting in a dark corner of the college library. I’d discovered an ugly paperback in a used bookstore a few days earlier containing three of Henry Green’s novels: Loving, Living, and Party Going. The cover was filled with praise – extravagant praise, not the polite bookjacket variety – from people like W.H. Auden and Rebecca West, and I bought the book because I was curious why I’d never heard anything about the author.

Within three pages of Party Going I couldn’t stop. Not because of plot, because there was almost none, and not because of fine writing, because Green’s sentences were often baffling, and certainly not because I liked the characters, because they were virtually interchangeable, not particularly bright, and had few apparent concerns other than sleeping with each other. But I knew almost immediately that this was one of the great reading experiences of my life. Like Tolstoy – and this is the only similarity – ordinary life seemed to be taking on an intensity and strangeness that it had never possessed before on a page.

In Anna Karenina, though, I had some sense of how Tolstoy was doing it. There were insights to admire, huge passages where you could see how the spell was being cast phrase by phrase. With Green I had no idea, and still don’t. I’ve never even recommended Party Going to anyone because I’m at a loss to explain why I think it’s such a great book, and I’m not sure who else it would appeal to.

Over the years, Green has accumulated an odd coterie of admirers – Updike, Eudora Welty, Tim Parks, Terry Southern – and, as far as I can tell, very few readers. Each admirer also tends to connect with a different set of Green’s books because they are extraordinarily dissimilar. Despite some obvious stylistic similarities – the preponderance of dialogue, the occasional dropping of articles, strange word orders – each novel takes on a different method of storytelling and an entirely new set of narrative problems. And unlike, say, D.H. Lawrence, Green doesn’t have a stable set of moral concerns, and occasionally appears to have no concerns at all: his books don’t seem to be making points or pushing any view of the world on the reader. At first, it’s hard to see what drove Green to write them, and indeed Green wasn’t too sure himself. He had plenty of money and a job available to him running his family’s factory, and he apparently wrote novels because he couldn’t help it. He once said that he was no more proud of producing his books than growing fingernails.

Green's books are the work of a genuine savant. He never seems to have struggled through a derivative phrase, and his earlier books (the first was published when he was 19) are just as singular, in different ways, as his later ones. All of his novels, plus one extraordinary memoir, seem to casually shrug off the entire history of the art form – every familiar narrative device, every piece of emotional shorthand that we’ve come to expect as readers – and cut closer to the truth of lived experience than any writer I’ve come across.

Which is not to say that everything he wrote is a masterpiece. None of the four other Green novels I’ve read has given me the same sense of finished perfection as Party Going, but each has its wonders. Loving is probably the most charming of Green’s books, the most filled with characterization and plot and the sort of satisfactions one expects from novels, but it’s also a little sentimental, too broadly comic, the tiniest bit predictable.

It’s still a great book, though, and so are the others. Slowly, people are bringing them back into print (the Penguin edition with the three novels, and a fantastic introduction from Updike, was the only one available for a long time). Dalkey Archive Press has just re-issued Back, one of Green’s least-known novels, with the ugliest, most dashed-off cover I’ve ever seen on a modern book. Oh well. What’s inside is wonderful. I picked it up after reading Philip Hensher’s review of Jeremy Treglown’s dull biography of Green, which I slogged through several years ago (Hensher’s review is also a fine appreciation of Green’s work).

Back is about Charley Summers, a veteran returning from a German prison camp, and now using a wooden leg. The war is almost over and the streets are still filled with bombed out ruins. The woman Charley loved – who married someone else before he even left – died while he was in the camp, but not before having a child that Charley thinks might be his. Then Charley runs across a woman who looks exactly like his dead lover, a resemblance which is eventually explained, and he begins to lose his already disordered grasp on reality.

Already, this is like no other Green novel I’ve read: the focus on a single protagonist, the exploration of irregular mental states, and also the huge amount of plot covered in the first fifty pages. The book gets a little bogged down in the beginning, because Green dislikes narrative summary, and has to provide all of this information through conversations and little wisps of thought and suggestion. So there are some rickety scenes that seem to exist only to give us plot cues. But one survives on the touches. Here is a fairly ordinary passage, early in the book when Charley goes to visit his lover’s graveyard:

His felt thoughts began to wander. Of course he was lucky to have a job, his seat kept warm. There were plenty still over on the other side would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes. And they would get on with it if they were here, not spend as he was doing a deal of money on travelling to old places.

Start reading any of Green’s books and some long dormant faculty in the brain becomes alert. The words are simple enough but the phrases never seem to slide into their usual slots, to be skimmed and forgotten – you have to read slowly, but it feels like an engrossing conversation rather than work. Why is “as he was doing” tucked into the middle of that sentence, comma free? And what in the world does he mean by “felt thoughts”? (I’m still not sure about the latter.) In this heightened state of attention, awake but slightly disoriented, strange bits of poetry come floating to us down the sentences – “would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes.” Not showy lyricism, but ordinary speech at its most expressive.

Those words aren’t Charley’s, but society’s voice echoing in his head – “the cool moon,” a folk phrase – telling him how lucky he is to be back from the camps with a job to support him. Even when Green’s characters are alone, they are always talking to each other, as we all do, imagining what some person or group will think of us. This is why, despite the small casts of Green’s novels, their slim length, and the virtual absence of historical detail, they feel as dense and comprehensive as the great Victorian triple-deckers; society is still present in these books, talking to and through the characters.

Back, in particular, strikes me as having the literary sensibility of an earlier time. What other writer of Green’s era would feel comfortable taking a step back from a character and saying, simply, “She was a good-hearted girl”? And in the conversations that make up the majority of Green’s later novels, a narrative presence will suddenly leap up after a “he said” to mention that the previous remark was a lie. Green cannot entirely abandon the prerogatives of the 19th century novelist, and he hovers over his books and gestures now and then towards a world of stable truth that most other modernist writers became uncomfortable with and finally abandoned.

The book, for a time, shifts back in tone further even than the Victorians. Green introduces a long extract from an 18th century French court memoir, a parallel narrative about a woman becoming obsessed with a man who looks like a long dead lover. This interpolation, only thinly integrated into the narrative, wrecks the world of the book a little, but it is interesting enough for me to forgive its presence, especially since it sets up the second half of the novel, which is masterful.

Green has gotten the plot setup out of the way, and what follows is one of the most moving and strangely convincing love stories I’ve ever read, alive with pain and sex and a little dementia. The two people don’t come to gradually appreciate each other's fine qualities in the usual manner; the process is much more mysterious and true to life, with feints and turns and sudden irrational changes in mood and then the final coming to terms – and through it all the charge of sexual energy that drives all of Green’s best work.

Here is another passage. Charley’s secretary at the office, Miss Pitter, has been invited to a house in the country. She is sure Charley will come visit her at night, and she is waiting in bed, listening for him:

So they came back to the house with her, and she’d slipped upstairs, got into a smashing pyjama suit bought specially the day before, put out the light and, quaking with wonder, she’d lain there. She could hear them talk in the kitchen. And how they’d talked. Then they came up. And she’d wondered some more. Her own worst enemy would not have laughed at her that half hour. Even if it wasn’t the first time, of course. But nothing. She was all ready, pretending to be asleep, spread out like butter on bread. But nothing. She knew it was Charley when he went to the bathroom. For just that minute it was delicious to wait. But what all this added up to, she felt at the time, was that these repatriated men came back very queer from those camps. So in the end she’d gone to sleep alone, unvisited.

This is all done effortlessly, but so many voices have swooped in and out, taking us inside the character’s mind in her own words ("smashing pyjama suit") and the narrator's ("quaking with wonder"), and then moving us into the world of larger truth – where we learn that Miss Pitter has done this before – and then that marvelous phrase, “spread out like butter on bread,” where we get her thought, the warmth of the bed, and sexual anticipation all at once. And look at how the rhythms of her heartbeat have been embedded in the prose.

Then there is the oddest line of all: “Her own worst enemy would not have laughed at her that half hour.” I think much of Green’s spirit, his generosity, is in that line. He is deeply truthful writer, often a dark one, but he never enjoys inflicting disaster on his characters and makes allowances for every human weakness. His dialogue is filled with such affection for people and their peculiarities - "We're not talking of me, this instant minute, thanks" - as well as the peculiarities of class and region and profession, all of which may blur but will never disappear.

I'm not sure why Green stopped writing. He died in the early 70s, without publishing a word after 1952. Apparently he spent much of that time drunk. I don't want to pretend that I have any explanation for this, but I wonder if part of his dryness came from the loss of the vernacular culture from which he drew so much of his inspiration. Synge wrote that "All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children." In Pack My Bag, Green has wonderful samples of working class British talk: "When they describe," he writes, "as everyone knows, they are literally unsurpassed in the spoken word." And one can imagine him listening to maids and workers and the office typing pool, all of their words mixing with his imagination and becoming art.

Much of that world was already going after the war, and maybe Green was himself withdrawing from what was left of it. In any case, it survives in the books - nine novels and a memoir - and it is among the great fictional universes left by any writer this century, a happy age of literature all by itself. The Penguin volume is probably the place to start, but this is another great one for those that fall under the spell.

Some Thoughts on Vegetarianism

2009-08-30T10:20:00.015-04:00

I’ve come across many arguments for vegetarianism recently, and they’ve started to connect with thoughts I’ve had, since I wrote my article on torture, about the consequences of intellectual versus moral justifications for our actions. And I’ve become convinced that making intellectual arguments against certain issues is pointless, and is often a subtle way for the society that accepts them as legitimate to avoid changing its behavior, just as the politicians who talked about America’s “national character” during the detainee debates were so easily satisfied with symbolic remedies instead of real ones.

I should define my terms, since I might be using them in a peculiar way. I think there are two ways to determine the desirability of an action: one of them is to determine its consequences for the actor and society at large. These are intellectual reasons, because they demand a chain of reasoning which necessarily moves the thinker away from the act itself. Moral reasons stem from direct encounters – such as a look at these interrogation documents – and are based on instinctual revulsion that does not need any additional justification. Such responses can only be rebutted by looking at the acts and saying, “I honestly do not feel what you feel when I see this.”

Since such reasons are subjective, they are rarely used in serious arguments and are often seen as a form of sentimental muddle-headedness when they are. So it makes sense that, for years, the primary arguments for vegetarianism have been intellectual: the low nutritional value of the food produced by factory farming, for example, or the environmental consequences of eating meat, which involves the expenditure of vast quantities of water and land to produce a comparatively small amount of flesh, compared with plant-based food.

As with most intellectual arguments, these can be responded to with at least some logic, as Sandor Ellix Katz does in his bookon America’s underground food movements. I picked it up because I enjoyed his book on fermentation,which was full of interesting knowledge.

Katz has a chapter on meat where he responds to the arguments mentioned above: by spending a little extra money and time, it is fairly simple to find free range meat. And he points out that there is plenty of non-arable land that can be used to sustain small scale ranching. Clearly he's right. I spent some time on the coast of Madagascar and found a herd of very sprightly goats living off the meager vegetation that grew a few hundred yards from the ocean. Clearly, this land is more productive - for humans, of course - when creating meat and milk instead of growing wild.

So for many years, I could respond intellectually to such arguments and kept eating whatever I wanted. During that same stay in Africa, though, a different sort of encounter was forced on me. Our neighbors in Antananarivo were slaughtering two goats and I happened to be around to see them do it, because I heard the screaming of the second goat – which sounds, by the way, disturbingly human – as he watched what was happening to the first goat. The throat of each animal was cut, and blood pumped out of the body for a minute or so while the goat thrashed. Then it died, was skinned and butchered, and we were given some of the meat as a gift.

A few hours later, I ate the meat happily with everyone else – it was delicious, as you can expect – but it occurred to me that I would never have been able to kill the goat myself, even if I had the skills to do it properly. Killing a tame and immobilized animal seemed, and seems, completely repellent to me. I wondered if it was just squeamishness, so I conducted a thought experiment: I imagined standing behind a glass wall and pushing a button to kill the same goat, as neatly and humanely as possible, and realized that I still wouldn’t be able to do it. The act was morally repulsive, not merely unpleasant or gross.

These realizations took some time to filter through my consciousness, because habit is powerful, but eventually they did. I cut down on meat for a while – there were cravings, and occasionally still are – but for a few years I’ve eaten almost none, because I’ve never been able to shake the thought that it’s quite obviously wrong to ask other people (or machines) to do things that you are morally unwilling to do yourself.

The odd thing is that I’m certain that my reaction is common enough: only a fraction of people in the Western world would be able to cut that goat’s throat – or a cow or pig or chicken’s – especially many dozens of times a year, but almost all of them are comfortable letting someone else do it. I don’t think there’s any other area of modern life with such an immense disconnect between moral capacity and actual behavior – and the reason, as with torture, is the dominance of intellectual arguments even among thoughtful people.

Such arguments, by their very nature, are focused on human outcomes. For example, anytime I hear that someone is deciding to try vegetarianism because of their health – they’ve read some horrific story about how the unnatural diet of industrial cattle makes their meat nutritionally barren, or whatever – I know that their resolution won’t last long. Eventually, they will find meat that promises to be naturally raised and this will be enough. Then, once the question has entered the realm of consumer choice, something strange happens: the distinctions stop feeling important. You buy humane meat when you can, but you don’t protest when it isn’t available.

The same thing happens to me with Fair Trade products, the intellectual reasons for which I entirely appreciate. I get them on the rare occasions when I’m feeling adequately flush with cash to buy a little righteousness, but not otherwise. As with organic produce, the issue hasn’t put down any moral roots yet.

An intellectual commitment with a shallow moral basis will always be satisfied with words. My Costco dish soap says “Environmentally Friendly” and contains virtually no other information, and I swear I still felt good buying it. The words were enough; they gave me a little moral back rub, and that’s all I needed. I’m not bragging about my insensitivity - these things have real consequences. Listen to what happens to language, for example, when you don’t actually care what you’re doing. Here is Katz, who is usually intelligent and thoughtful, on humane slaughter:

The other major distinguishing factor for humane meat is how the animals are killed. Animals can be slaughtered with trauma, violence, and anonymity or calmly and quickly, with gratitude, tenderness, and even love. Intent and spirit can be as important as technique.

Words are being used here like odd colors daubed on an impressionistic painting – to create a kind of glow. But what possible meaning can they possess in this context? These animals are not terminally ill or in pain: how can they be killed with love? Do they experience it as gratitude, tenderness, or love when the blade cuts into them, or something very much like the opposite? Such words are flexible, but they do mean something, and they are being further debased to make normally compassionate people like Katz justify a purely selfish act, which should be acknowledged openly as what it is. "Made with love; raised with gratitude": Against the grain of his own beliefs, what Katz is using here is the language of modern commerce, which is eager to make us feel not just good but comprehensively good about every one of our indulgences.

There is one final consequence of having arguments on an intellectual plane – and it is a fixture of our political discourse, and perhaps of interest to the few people still reading this post. In the absence of any fixed scale of values, the only virtue becomes consistency. One group attacks the other for supposed hypocrisy, which is then used as an excuse for the former to make absolutely no moral demands on itself. Katz, for example, mentions that our breath kills millions of micro-organisms in the air, and Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle argues that vegetarians are hypocritical because they ignore the deaths of field animals that are involved in the machine harvesting of many crops, which is something like saying that living in a building where a construction worker died is morally equivalent to throwing someone off the roof.

But anyone looking for contradictions will not have to look hard to find them. My apartment is filled with products that I’m sure required the death of animals. There’s a line from Tennyson that plays in my mind when I think about the repercussions of my most ordinary decisions and purchases: “And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.” Our civilization is built on complicity, and we participate in a hundred appalling acts with every decision we make, every cent of tax that goes to our government. You just have to do the best you can – absence of hypocrisy is simply not a useful standard.

But looking at acts done for your benefit and deciding if you find them repulsive is a reasonable one, and is the only basis on which a fixed system of values could conceivably be determined in the absence of religious faith. Such moral encounters (with animals, with detainees, with civilians in countries we invade) are carefully hidden from us for a reason, but we need to seek them out, and trouble our beautiful minds with them, because we are so directly involved in what’s happening to them.

Some people will look at the same acts and not feel the way I feel, which is fine – I have no objective standard – but everyone should make the attempt to find out what they can live with. I'm not asking people to stare at gruesome videos: just spend some time around some of the animals we eat (they can be surprisingly hard to find, considering how many we consume) and think seriously about what it means to end one of their lives, and whether this strikes you as a necessary sacrifice.

I can’t make a moral connection with an oyster yet, for example, so I've eaten them occasionally (I'm less disturbed by the fishing and hunting of wild creatures in general). But I could relate to that goat, as well as other meat animals living in non-brutalized circumstances. I knew that I didn’t want the meat nearly as badly as the animal wanted to live.

With predatory creatures or traditional societies with limited food sources, there is a reasonable equivalence of desires, since not eating that meat would result in starvation or severe malnutrition. In Western societies, however, with our immense surpluses, we’ve gotten used to having our most casual desires trump the fundamental needs of other living creatures. We’re killing something, as David Foster Wallace put it in Consider the Lobster, merely because we like the feeling of a certain protein against our teeth.

In that same essay, Wallace also trots out a mainstay of vegetarian propaganda, which always assures the reader that vegetarians have a variety of equally delicious and healthy options: you can still get all the nutrients and flavors you need and deserve – hooray, no sacrifices required! This is disastrous intellectual ground on which to argue, because gourmandism is implicitly acknowledged to be a genuine counterweight to the moral argument. I think it’s quite plausible that vegetarianism is marginally less healthy and significantly less thrilling gastronomically than intelligently-pursued omnivorism. So what? Aren’t there any values that are worth defending to our own slight detriment?

Vegetarianism might well have some health costs, although I'm certain they are not severe, whereas eating decently-raised meat has, as far as I can see, only one human cost of any kind. In Kingsolver’s book, where her family raised and ate only local food for a year, her nine-year-old daughter knows not to name some of her chickens, so she “can face killing and selling them.”

There is a profound loss implied here. The desire to name these animals is close to instinctual. I doubt if there is a traditional culture in the world that does not individually identify the animals that it lives with closely, including some wild ones. These animals don’t always respond or care about these names, and there is often no practical reason to do it. The practice merely acknowledges what is obvious to anyone who has spent time, outside of a meat factory, with the land animals that we have tamed: that they are simple to differentiate, and have distinct personalities that one doesn't have to be a saint or a scientist to notice and appreciate. We view them as products only by stopping up certain springs of sympathy that are both natural and pleasant to us. And this is their loss and, less brutally, ours, because this sense of connection – along with the realization which accompanies it, that man is not a particularly lonely creature – is a source of contentment that we have increasingly abandoned. Vegetarianism does not produce this feeling, but it at least renders it an uncomplicated possibility. Which is a definite human cost, if that’s all we’re willing to care about.

John Clare: A Biography, by Jonathan Bate

2009-07-23T23:42:00.015-04:00

I've gobbled up dozens of literary biographies since college without ever encountering anything that seemed like a great book. The genre seems to attract writers who, despite their intelligence and doggedness and appreciation for the subject, are usually just too ordinary to have much insight into extraordinary talent. (Richard Holmes is a semi-exception.) But I keep reading them, and lately I’ve come to appreciate them more as anthologies: selections of illuminating excerpts by great authors and the people who knew them, with passages of relevant context.

Like a good anthology, I think a real biography should be long. Slimmer, supposedly "readable" biographies seem to be coming into fashion, but there is nothing less interesting than the bare details of a writer’s life; the best stuff will always be on paper, and if someone is worth writing about at all, she will have hundreds of interesting pages tucked away – letters, journals, stray articles, juvenilia, bits of table talk preserved by other people. So why not overstuff? The best literary biography – which, full disclosure, I have never finished – is by general consensus The Life of Johnson because Boswell put in everything he could find (and perhaps went a little overboard).

Note: I do not mean overstuffed with the sort of minutiae that fills bad doorstop biographies, like the dates on which an author visited various people and what they ate and wore; I mean overstuffed with a writer’s words and conversation.

Jonathan Bate’s 600-page biography of Clare is, luckily, stuffed in the right way. Even when there is little solid information about a period of Clare's life, like his childhood, Bate quotes his poems and journal entries to create the necessary background (Clare loved cataloging village rituals and lore, and wrote some of his loveliest poems about his childhood games and wanderings). And when, in his 20s, Clare finally sets out to collect subscribers to publish his first little volume of poems, the book begins to soar, because Bate now has a wealth of writing to work with. We get more of Clare's verse, and selections from his wonderful letters and prose pieces, written in the headlong, unpunctuated, but beautifully precise manner he used throughout his life.

For those who have not had the pleasure, here is a sample of one of Clare's autobiographical pieces about his early attempts at writing:

I became fond of scribbling from down right pleasure in giving vent to my feelings and long and pleasing and painful were my struggles to acquire a sufficient knowledge of the written english before I could put down my ideas on paper even so as to understand myself but I mastered it in time sufficiently to be understood by others and then I became an author by accident and felt astonished when the critics became my friends that they should have noticed me at all — and no less supprised at the mistakes they uttered — that one should imagine I had read the old poets when such were as far from my access as earth from heaven and that others should imagine I had coined words which were as common around me as the grass under my feet — and all these were burning encouragements that made me work on — as to profits — the greatest profits most congenial to my feelings were the friends it brought me and the names that it rendered familiar to my fireside — scraps of whose melodys I had heard and read in my corner — but had I only imagined for a moment that I should hold communion with such hereafter that would have then been to me ‘as music in mourning’ — but I wrote because it pleased me in sorrow—and when I am happy it makes me more happy and so I go on.

Forgive me for quoting at such length, but isn’t it difficult not to love this man? His voice comes across so clearly in his writing, so free of affectation and full of warmth, that one feels an immense affection for him that it's hard to feel for, say, Shelley. And throughout Clare’s life, people that met him felt the same way; even if they were patronizing or snobbish, they liked him and wanted to help him. A real intellectual collaboration developed between him and his early publishers, and Bate shows how important this literary society was for his artistic growth. And unlike the other great Romantics, Clare was greeted kindly by reviewers throughout his career, even if it was sometimes more for his up-from-nothing life story than his work.

After his first collection of poetry was published, Clare was the talk of the town for a few years, and Bate quotes extensively from his incisive pen portraits of the great figures of the age — Hazlitt, Lamb, de Quincey — whom he met during a handful of stays in London. Then comes the awful decline: money troubles, diminished sales, frequent drunkenness and womanizing, feelings of estrangement from his family, and growing mental instability, almost always dotted, however, with poems and prose sketches of extraordinary beauty and increasing mastery.

Bate is judicious: he isn’t so enamored with Clare that he overlooks his cruelty to his wife, his frequent irresponsibility, or the mess of barely legible manuscripts that he made his publishers wade through to cull individual volumes. Unfortunately, it is also around this point in the book that Bate feels the need to discuss the possible causes for Clare’s madness. Here is a sample of his reasoning:

Doctors often say that they can predict from an early age which of a group of children will have mental health problems later in life. It is usually the one who feels different: the misfit, the loner. Clare’s autobiographical writings reveal that he fell into this category. The hostility aroused by such a character in a small close-knit community led to village gossip that marked him out as too clever by half and likely to prove a lunatic. The sense of being a marked man made him feel more of an outsider and an oddity: the village prophecy that he would one day go mad contributed to its own fulfillment.

Isn’t there a whiff of the commonplace around this passage? Does Bate really think that such explanations — that he felt different from other people! — bring us any closer to understanding what happened to Clare? And this atmosphere — of reasonable intelligence coupled with a lack of imagination, of genuine love for the subject mixed with an inability to make any truly inspired acts of identification — hangs over even the best biographies I’ve read. These books are good at compiling and scene-sketching, but that deeper stab into the secret of an artist’s gift never seems to come; instead, we keep butting up against the biographer’s mundane attempts to "explain" the artist's personality.

Eventually, though, Bate has the good sense to give up on explanations. He simply quotes from the writing Clare did over his two decades in asylums: his poetry, his increasingly disordered journals, including some bizarre letters written in cipher, as well as visitors’ accounts of his behavior. Some of it is fascinating, since Clare was still capable of long periods of lucidity and inspiration, but as he becomes increasingly estranged from the things that once gave him joy – poetry, nature, his home, his family – it is mainly just heartbreaking.

Even with its desolate conclusion, though, Clare's life ends up feeling heroic instead of depressing. Few poets have done more with the talent given to them, and in the face of such obstacles. Robert Graves, who Bate quotes near the end of the book, comes closest to describing my feelings about Clare's work: "I find myself repeating whole poems of [his]," he wrote, "without having made a conscious effort to memorize them. And though it was taken as a symptom of madness that he one day confided in a visitor: ‘I know Gray — I know him well," I shall risk saying here, with equal affection: ‘I know Clare; I know him well.’" When you read his work, he always seems to be walking next to you, pointing out hundreds of things that you'd never noticed before or realized were beautiful; and while other poets shout and sing, conscious of their audience, and some seem to be whispering entirely to themselves, Clare is one of the rare ones who speaks to you in his ordinary voice, naturally, as one friend to another.

The best volume of his I have found is the Oxford Major Works, which contains poems along with prose sketches and a few letters. If you end up loving his work as much as I do, you’ll want to read Bate’s book, which does the things that a biography can manage to do, and does them well enough for me to be grateful.

Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker

2009-07-08T22:39:00.004-04:00

Nothing makes people angrier than to have an author take away one certainty without replacing it with another. This is only explanation I can think of for the brutality of some of the reviews of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, his pointillist account of the beginning of World War II. I picked the book up from the remaindered table knowing nothing about it, although I enjoyed The Mezzanine a great deal when I read it years ago. And I was curious about the blurbs on the back of Human Smoke, one of which described it as possibly "the most compelling argument for peace ever assembled."

"Assembled" is right (although "argument" is a tougher issue) -- the book consists of vignettes, usually no more than half a page long and often drawn from newspapers as well as famous and not-so-famous memoirs. Each vignette contains an account of some event -- Albert Speer taking his father on a tour of some insane proposed Nazi architectural projects, or the trials of conscientious objectors from various countries -- along with a line stating the date on which the event occurred. Authorial comment is virtually absent, and Baker insisted in an interview with Charlie Rose, somewhat disingenuously, that his opinions are nowhere in the book.

I suspect that most people will react to Human Smoke the way I did. In the beginning, maybe the first 50 pages, it was thrilling, compulsive reading; points of detail appeared one after another, each marking off a little area of the world around the time of the war, a net closing in around a huge school of fish. But deeper into the book, I started getting a little bored; the holes in the net were too huge to catch anything at all, and the pointillist method started to seem like an easy way to avoid making a coherent argument.

And Baker clearly does have some arguments, which he makes largely by juxtaposition. He shows how the people who were most aggressive and militaristic in their attitude to Nazi Germany -- Churchill, for example -- were also the least generous towards the Jews trying to get out and all of the other people who were clearly going to suffer the most because of the war, while the pacifists -- who are usually characterized as cowardly or entirely blind to the amorality of the Nazi regime -- were much more active in trying to help the people that needed it.

Second, he illustrates that the Allies -- and, again, Churchill in particular -- had a large role in escalating the brutality and aimlessness of the slaughter by beginning civilian bombing campaigns and making mass starvation part of their war strategy. And, in what is certainly the most controversial implication of the book, he indicates that these decisions may well have led the Nazis to escalate the program of extermination which they had always planned, but only as one of several possible options for ridding their territory of Jews and other undesirables.

I should say at this point that I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the era to judge any of these claims, and certainly not the last one. One of the reasons this book can be frustrating is that Baker doesn't lay out the facts in a comprehensive way, where you can either be positively convinced under the weight of evidence or angrily accuse him of an obvious omission. So it's hard to finish Human Smoke feeling like it was a real contribution to the history of the war.

But it does, I think, hammer a couple of useful chinks in the wall of moral certainty that surrounds WWII more than any other war. And eventually, after I recognized that the book's narrative method would prevent it from fulfilling certain desires, I began to appreciate the disorienting buzz that it captured, the sense of being a normal person living through these events, looking in the papers every day and wondering what in the world might happen next. Because Baker can see that this confusion is in some ways closer to the truth than the false clarity that comes with hindsight.

As a responsible writer, Baker even throws sand in the face of what are clearly some of his own moral convictions: he has a vignette where someone points out the absurdity of a pacifist response to the Nazis. And he has several conflicting accounts of the Nazis plans for the Jews -- deportation to Madagascar is one of them -- without providing any guidance on which ones were seriously considered. He acknowledges that the facts are simply a mess, that any comprehensive explanation requires that too much be left out.

In the end, you simply don't know how the war could have been best fought (although clearly everyone should have been more generous to the refugees). Uncertainty is obviously one of Baker's goals, the one that I'm guessing has made several reviewers so angry, partially because it makes their job harder. Many of them have decided that Baker is making a simple case for pacifism, or arguing that the Allies were partially responsible for the Holocaust, neither of which he is actually doing. But these straw men are simple ways to dismiss the book, or at least to deal with it quickly.

In any case, although I wasn't hugely impressed, I'm glad I read it. If nothing else, there are dozens of fascinating details, and you make the acquaintance of several intelligent and inspiring men -- Mihail Sebastian, for example, and Victor Klemperer, whose diaries I both want to read now. And it makes the point, which somehow never stops needing to be made, that one should be suspicious of the humanitarian impulses of leaders who are willing to drop bombs on other people's cities and kill whoever happens to be around.

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, by Joan Acocella

2009-07-01T00:25:00.011-04:00

Willa Cather is an easy writer to undervalue. I’ve noticed, over the years, that many of the people who express admiration for her books (which I recommend often) are the sort of people who don’t usually read “serious” novels. Even in 7th grade, when I first read My Àntonia, I remember thinking, excellent, she doesn’t make you work too hard – and hard work and confusion, I assumed, for quite a long time, were the signs of a really great book. Cather, though, tends to make it clear enough what effect she’s aiming for: her symbols are monumental and apparently obvious, and when she has an idea, she doesn’t try to conceal it in some elaborate way; she tells you as clearly and gracefully as she can. Her books often feel artlessly constructed: one scene after another, and stories that seem inserted wherever the author felt like it.

But when I finished My Àntonia, all those years ago, and began the usual, unconscious process of assimilating the novel into my way of looking at the world, it stopped seeming so simple. There was something dark there that wouldn’t spread itself thin in my imagination and disappear. So I read the book again, several years later, and never felt like I was covering old ground, the simplest test of a classic. And as I read Cather’s other great books – A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, her short stories and essays – the outlines of a disturbing vision became apparent. Most of them are stories of disappointment, where everything good has already happened – and where hope for anything but a deeper appreciation of the past seems destined for failure.

Joan Acocella, in her wonderful little book on Cather and her critics, identifies this vision more precisely than I’d ever been able to manage myself: “Each of the four novels [from My Àntonia to Death Comes for the Archbishop],” she writes, “makes the same point: to desire something is to have as much of it as you will probably ever have.” Proust, Acocella points out, on the other side of the ocean, had a similar insight, and spent many more pages – wonderful pages – laying it out.

It is an insight, though, that it is difficult not to eventually rebel against, especially when an author insists too much: insists, for example, that mature romantic love is largely a lie, that most of our deepest feelings for other people are fantasies spun out by the imagination – and are, in fact, somehow more beautiful for being self-created, since this means we might actually be able to hold on to them. There can be something sickly and self-defeating about this outlook, and I got annoyed about halfway through Cather’s bitter, accomplished novella, My Mortal Enemy, which I wrote about a few years ago.

In Cather’s greatest books, however, the vision is bracing and honest – there is a convincing world on the page that gives the philosophy life. Each of these books is, in Cather’s own wonderful description of Norris’s McTeague, as “disagreeable as only a great piece of work can be.” Disagreeable in its deeper implications, I mean, but still filled with beauties, because Cather’s outlook is entirely compatible with humor and an appreciation of the world – especially the natural world – and its gifts.

As Acocella discusses, Cather has been ill-served by critics since the beginning. She never dealt explicitly with the concerns – political, economic, feminist, and now sexual – that serious, committed people, in various eras, wanted her to deal with. And so she was patronized, given faint praise, and occasionally condemned. In recent years, critics have started taking her very seriously indeed, but only because it has been decided (admittedly, with some evidence) that she was a lesbian, and so everything she wrote – as an outpouring of subconscious, repressed desires – has become relevant in the right ways.

Acocella makes these academics look pretty silly, but that isn’t too hard to do – all you have to do is quote, after all – and I became a little impatient with this part of the book, because I just don’t believe that these professors make much of a difference to ordinary readers. The majority of the book, luckily (minus a short, interesting biography), is simply an appreciation of Cather’s work, the best I have ever read. We have so little decent criticism in America that it’s easy to forget how useful and even stirring a real reading of great work can be.

Acocella looks closely at individual passages and shows how tightly knit they are, despite the illusion of artlessness - and manages to convey a sense of joy at getting closer to the source of their power. And she doesn’t treat the books as closed systems – networks of imagery and language that refer only to themselves – but as arguments for a way of looking at the world. She teases the author’s changing vision and its contradictions out of the books, and looks at it seriously for its value as a philosophy of life. You get the sense that she believes that how you read a book is a matter of genuine consequence. Her criticism – even her dance criticism, which I’ve read despite my complete lack of interest in dance – is consistently excellent, and her recently published collection of essaysis entirely worth reading.

As for Cather, I think she’s one of America's best writers – up there with Melville and Twain as a writer of imaginative prose. Until recently, I’d never realized just how much great writing she produced. Apparently she only allowed one of her stories, “Paul’s Case,” to be anthologized, but there are dozens of others, virtually unknown, that are just as great, and her essays in Not Under Forty, along with many of her reviews – which, by the way, show sparks of genius even when Cather was in her mid-20s – are all worth owning. The good people at the Library of America have put out a volume called Stories, Poems, and Other Writings,which has been a real education for me. I recommend it to everyone, along with Acocella’s book.

Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy

2009-05-18T17:34:00.006-04:00

Most serious modern novelists, having committed themselves to a marginal medium, feel the need to defend the virtues of prose against the film camera. So they tend to write books that show off what words can accomplish - with labyrinthine plots that could never be put on screen, for example, or long essayistic passages; baroque prose, language games, individualized 1st person voices - all ensuring that no one ever accuses them of writing glorified screenplays.

Which is fine and understandable, and some great work has been done – but there is also a self-consciousness about this attitude that robs readers of one of the primary pleasures of stories: escapism, immersion. Immersion itself seems, for many writers, something to be wary of, since it is one of the things that film can accomplish so easily, a lazy and dangerous pleasure.

So it’s good to remember sometimes that prose doesn’t need too hysterical a defense; its virtues can be apparent even in ordinary storytelling by a good writer. Here is a paragraph about a third of the way through Maile Meloy’s wonderful first novel, Liars and Saints. It is about a crumbling marriage. The husband, Henry, has run for a position in the California state legislature, won, and moved to the state capital. His wife Clarissa has been stuck in the house with their baby, Abby.

When Henry came home, with drafts of bills to read, she said that if they were going to make this marriage work, they couldn’t live apart. He was too busy and too tired to argue very long, so she went with him to Sacramento, and moved into the tiny apartment he kept there. She took Abby to watch the debates, and made friends with Henry’s colleagues, and met lobbyists in the halls. Henry accused her of flirting with them, but she was only talking about the bills – and if the lobbyists liked her, so what? It could be useful. They said she had good ideas. She thought about becoming a lobbyist, too; she might be good at the research and the persuasion. But on three different afternoons she wanted to listen to important hearings, so she left Abby playing on the lobby carpet, just outside the chambers, perfectly safe. And each time, someone found Abby crying in a marble hallway somewhere else, with a full cloth diaper, and took her to Henry in committee, and Henry came out of his committee to find Clarissa. The first time it happened he smiled and said, “I have a job, Clar, and it’s to stay in that meeting.” The second time he just said, “Diaper.” The third time he handed Abby over silently, with a dark look, and that was the end of Clarissa’s lobbying career. She moved back to Sebastopol, less happy than ever.

This is the story of several months in a paragraph. Films have tried jumps like this – think of Kane and his wife at the breakfast table, the marriage dissolving in three cuts – but these scenes inevitably come off as a sort of glib shorthand; we never really understand what happened.

Here, along with the three filmable scenes, we get Henry’s mood and the texture of Clarissa’s mind – “perfectly safe,” she thinks about the baby left in the hallway – along with some of Clarissa’s naiveté, written in just the words she would use herself: “she might be good at the research and the persuasion.” Still, obviously, a kind of shorthand – that’s what art is, after all – but for me much more satisfying. The marriage is inhabited, and the story is told with a naturalness that makes it clear that this is the only medium in which to tell it.

Much of Liars and Saints moves at this same pace, and with the same sense of ease. The novel manages to cover three generations and more than fifty years in 260 pages; I can't imagine it being successfully filmed, even with its tight and involved plot. But I was lost in it; I read the book in great gulps over three days, anxious to find out what happened, and only stopped occasionally to let out little shouts of admiration. (How did Meloy write something this good this young?) The book is the story of the Santerre family: Teddy and Yvette, the father and mother, their two daughters Margot and Clarissa, and their marriages and children. Over the course of the story, which treats the points of view of various characters in short chapters, Meloy writes convincingly as a WWII pilot (Teddy), an old French-Canadian woman (Lenore, Yvette’s mother), and a fidgety adolescent boy, along with several others.

The story moves at a breakneck pace – with pregnancies and incest and deaths – and covers so much time that the events don’t feel as unlikely and melodramatic as they otherwise might: wait long enough, after all, and something huge will happen to you. The book doesn’t feel formless or arbitrary, either – there is a sense that the writer has discovered the shape of the narrative while writing; certain connections suggested themselves and pushed the book where it needed to go.

The story's disturbing implications only become apparent slowly; Meloy rarely steps in and spells anything out. As things go increasingly haywire for all of the characters, one gets the sense that – for all of the decisions these people get to make – the actual control that they have over their lives is pretty minimal. Genetic inheritance, family decisions, the historical moment, their own compulsions, bequeathed to them from God knows where – one starts to feel the truth of just how compelled most actions are.

Even the simple fact that Yvette passes on her beauty to her two daughters – as Clarissa, in turn, passes it on to hers – entirely changes the course of all of their lives: they are constantly in the path of other people’s desires, and so many of the events in the book would not take place if someone’s face happened to be differently proportioned.

That’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it? And this sort of determinism tends to make for dark and not entirely satisfying books; people expect (quite reasonably) change and personal agency from characters. And Meloy gives us some near the end, and it doesn’t feel wholly implausible – after all, I hope some sort of growth is possible over the course of a long life.

But still, something feels off about the later parts of the book, although the galloping plot certainly maintains interest. Meloy introduces the rather annoying voice of a child struggling with religious concerns (the whole family is Catholic, which is significant throughout) and can no longer hold back the urge to lay some ideas on us: evil is inextricably tied to good in life, etc. There is also a confrontation between two characters that has been waiting to happen for half the novel and comes off as completely false. The whole last chapter is a bit of a life-goes-on shrug.

But enough complaints. It's been a long time since I read a new first novel that was this good. Everyone should go out and read it and feel happy that such good stories are still being written.

A last note: Meloy wrote a sort of sequel to this novel called A Family Daughter, where one of this book's characters, from a similar but not identical family, turns out to have written Liars and Saints. The novel is not quite a disaster – she is too good a writer for that – but it is a real step down in inspiration. I gave up about halfway through. I felt like Meloy was blowing on embers that had already burned themselves out quite brilliantly in this novel. And A Family Daughter ends up scrambling the world that Liars and Saints creates so memorably.

The book, along with her collection of stories, also showed how Meloy's interest in the ramifications of beauty - so well-handled in Liars and Saints - can become limiting. Throughout her work, she seems to be almost exclusively interested in lovely people and their various entanglements. She likes things to happen quickly and it's easier with good looking people, I suppose. Meloy's primary obsession as a writer is sexual desire and the mess it can make of things - a worthy theme, certainly - but I'll admit that, as I've read more of her work, I've gotten slightly jealous and then occasionally bored with how monotonously desirable all of her people are. Even her older characters were invariably once beautiful, so the only loneliness in her books is the kind people feel when they've done everything and haven't found what they were looking for - and this is certainly not the most common variety.

Anyway, I'm hoping the sequel was an aberration, because if Liars and Saints is representative of her talent - and if Meloy can broaden her interests to include some different sorts of people - I think she will be one of the great writers of this generation. I’m looking forward to her new book of stories, which is coming out in a month or so.

An Interview with Tim Parks

2009-04-08T00:26:00.002-04:00

An interview I did with Tim Parks for the literary magazine Redivider is online here. As I've written earlier, I think Parks is one of the really great living writers. (Judge Savage is my current favorite among his novels, and the Adultery collection is probably my favorite modern collection of essays.)

Anyway, it was an immense and slightly mortifying honor to get to correspond with him. The interview takes a little while to get going - mostly because of my stammering attempts to impress him with my questions - but eventually gets interesting. I hope everyone enjoys it. Here is a favorite exchange:

AA: You mentioned earlier that some of these inflated literary reputations might have to do with America’s economic power. How do you see these two things affecting each other?

TP: Akshay, you hardly need me to clarify that for you… Do you? It isn’t obvious?

AA: Not entirely. I can see how America’s economic power might help spread the English language, but why would it compel praise for so-so art from people in other countries?

TP: This is rather extraordinary to me. It seems such an obvious equation. The world, certainly my part of the world, looks to America and the Anglo-Saxon culture in general as a model of the future, a motor of new fashion, the new thing. This despite all the hostility to American foreign policy. Books that are best sellers or much admired in the US are more or less automatically translated in Europe and other countries, because offering insight into the culture that drives the world. A best seller in Serbia, or Norway, or Kenya simply does not draw this attention. A brilliant writer in Croatia might easily be completely ignored, unless some political aspect of his work intersects with international interest. And reputation travels. Nobody needs to “compel praise”. It takes an extremely independent mind to read an author who comes on a tidal wave of hype and assess the material for what it is. Most people really do accept celebrity for quality. They do not question it. Add to this that very few countries have a tradition of independent criticism and the picture is complete. In Italy education does not train kids to imagine the majority might be wrong. It’s bad taste to scorn something universally admired. It’s unpleasant. Newspapers and publishers are owned by the same companies and work together and a journalist simply doesn’t set about taking to pieces a book that has been highly praised elsewhere and for which a great deal of money has been paid. At most they might choose not to talk about them.

Note, it is not a question of spreading the English language. Hardly anyone is reading Delillo or Franzen in English here. They are simply automatic exports the way our cinemas are automatically filled with the top ten Hollywood film, dubbed. But this was ever the way with the dominant power in the world. The Roman empire at its height was not admiring works coming out of Carthage or Londinium, nor was the British empire at its height paying much attention to anything from elsewhere, while all the world was reading Byron… To imagine that the success of books really depends on a large number of independent critical minds arriving at a positive judgment is simply not to pay attention to what’s going on. Obviously, certain qualities are required, but once the tidal wave of received opinion has begun to roll, success is guaranteed.

The Beggar Maid, by Alice Munro

2009-03-09T23:58:00.010-04:00

There is a widespread consensus in North America that Alice Munro is among the best living writers in English. Jonathan Franzen’s impassioned and silly defense of her work came after Munro's last collection had already been on the bestseller list, and long after most readers I know had felt compelled to read at least some of her work.

I have read maybe twenty of her stories – most from the big Selected volume and the Hateship collection – and have consistently felt something strange. It is not dissatisfaction, exactly. I have always been very impressed and then, with one exception, have never felt the need to read any of the stories again. "That was good," I would think, and know that I was done with it. It’s been years since I cracked open the Selected Stories. There must be more good things in there, but I’m never in the mood.

The exception I mentioned is a story called The Beggar Maid. As soon as I finished it, I knew that one of these days I would need to read it again. I found out it was part of a collection of linked stories and decided to make an effort to read Munro seriously through an entire collection.

The collection is called The Beggar Maid in America, with the subtitle Stories of Flo and Rose; the Canadian edition, which appeared first, has a better and less misleading title, Who Do You Think You Are? I say misleading because the whole book is really about Rose. Her step-mother, Flo, is a minor character who disappears for most of the middle of the book, and none of the stories, in any case, really focus on her.

The plot is an old one, and its broad outlines are revealed early, since Munro loves skipping ahead. Rose is an imaginative and intelligent child growing up in a poor town with her father and step-mother, Flo. She manages to go to high school and then college on a scholarship. In the process, she rids herself of all the things that might mark her as a bumpkin – her accent, her habits of dress. She learns how to tell the ugly stories of growing up poor in a way that will amuse her middle-class friends.

In college she marries unwisely with the son of a rich family. After a number of rocky years, marked by infidelity and depression and fights, they divorce. The woman slowly finds her way and achieves a measure of fame as an actress. Her step-mother, old and alone now, eventually has to be put in an old age home. The Beggar Maid, which disturbed and impressed me so much, is the story of Rose and her husband’s courtship, and an encounter they have many years after they divorce.

In some ways, I wish I had just re-read that story. Its blank spots and mysteries were more interesting when left unfilled. The rest of this book only gave me the same feeling I’ve had with so much of Munro's other work – how intelligent, how perceptive – and then, again, the sensation that these stories had nothing left to tell me.

Reading this collection helped me locate what I think is unsatisfying about Munro's work. Her writing feels almost entirely like a product of her conscious knowledge. It is too figured out, too completely fathomed – the writer spells out every implication and leaves nothing for the reader’s imagination. I am sure Munro follows random paths and has bursts of inspiration while writing, but before she is done she mercilessly tracks down every plot development, every stray bit of emotion, and pins it wriggling to the page with a fine phrase. And when I finish the stories most of them feel so dead.

Here is a representative quote. This is after Rose has already become famous:

It was part of her job to go on local television chatting about these productions, trying to drum up interest, telling amusing stories about things that had happened during the tour. There was nothing shameful about any of this, but sometimes Rose was deeply, unaccountably ashamed. She did not let her confusion show. When she was talking in public she was frank and charming; she had a puzzled, diffident way of leading into her anecdotes, as if she were just now remembering, had not told them a hundred times already.

This is good writing. Munro has noticed something and gotten it just right. And in passage after passage she gets such things right. But I realized something after admiring so many bits of observation: I was never surprised by them. I never had to struggle to figure out what she was getting at. I immediately knew what she meant, because these are things that everyone has felt and noticed, although few of us can express them quite so well. Who hasn't told the same story a few too many times and felt a little fake? It is near universal; and Munro consistently expends her powers on capturing such universal experiences and emotions. Her main characters rarely feel like individuals living independent existences; they are vessels for identification, and gain their aliveness from the extent to which they are like us.

So you think yes, that’s just what it’s like to be spanked by your parents, or to wait for a lover’s phone call – or “Ah, well put!” – but this sense of recognition is, for me, one of the secondary pleasures of literature. What I look for - vaguely, because it is a large and nebulous thing - is the sense of a writer struggling to get at something that's just beyond the capacity of words, trying to dramatize some internal conflict that won't quite be soothed into manageable shape. With Munro everything feels shaped and managed; I have little freedom to look at the story in a way other than the one she has laid out for me. There are plenty of unresolved spots, but even these seem determined.

For example, there is a carefully placed ambiguity at the end of Simon’s Luck, where Rose finds out, years later, that a lover she had thought abandoned her had been sick and died of pancreatic cancer. Had Simon meant to see her again? Was he already dying when he knew her? Here is how Munro handles the moment. Rose is acting in a soap opera, and compares the moment she learned about Simon's death to what the viewers of the soap expect in a plotline:

People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery.

Simon’s dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement. It was preposterous, it was unfair, that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power.

This is a skillful ending and it unites a lot of the story’s concerns (the last phrase echoes an earlier line). But notice how Munro is not willing to simply leave the mystery in the air; she needs to sum it up, to point out that life is often like this. And yes, it is. We find out things later that seem to throw whole periods of our life out of focus. Again, I know just what I'm supposed to think about what has happened.

To clarify, I am not looking for pointless mystification. This story would not be better if Munro left out the concluding passage. It wouldn't make sense without it; what she has already written demands such a passage, and the story wouldn’t generate implications simply because its obvious and quite satisfying conclusion has been left out. In her later stories, in fact, such passages are often omitted, but the stories never open out because of it, because Munro is fundamentally a clinical writer. She uses scenes to diagnose people, and her characters rarely have much life outside of the implied diagnosis. There is no tale to trust outside of the teller.

One of the marks of this style of writing is that the big scenes in a story rarely happen between people. They happen when the main character is isolated in some way, realizing things. The confrontations, the unpredictable conversations, the general messiness of interaction between fully engaged people - these are consistently skipped over or quickly summarized. So there is never enough reality pushing up against the explanations. In this book, for example, we miss the details of Rose's divorce, her rise to fame, and most other things that might set her apart as an individual; what is left is the beautifully realized passages of common experience.

There is a passage from Milosz's The Captive Mind that I remembered while I was reading this book: "It is sometimes better to stammer from an excess of emotion than to speak in well-turned phrases. The inner voice that stops us when we might say too much is wise." This stammer is missing from Munro. She knows a great deal, and she knows it too well to be a really interesting writer for me, although she is certainly a good one.

The only place where I have heard this stammer from her – this reaching after some complicated and unmanageable truth – is in the title story from this collection. It is still the closest thing to a great story that I have read by her, and it contains all the hard scenes that I feel like she tends to skip. You can find it in her Selected Stories too, and I think everyone should read it. Her prose is much less smooth in The Beggar Maid; the narrative voice seems to keep correcting itself, wiping out its own assertions. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel and I don’t think the writer does either. It has the undertow of confusion that is one of the things that keeps a story alive. I wish Munro would allow herself to feel it a little more often.

The Little Virtues, by Natalia Ginzburg

2009-01-11T21:39:00.011-05:00

Virginia Woolf said something interesting once about marriage. I can’t track down the quote, unfortunately, but approximately it was that the ordinary days of any long relationship were like plain beads being put on a string, one after another, and then – at a moment when we’re beginning to get impatient, or perhaps after we’ve been impatient for some time – something magical is slipped on the thread, some invaluable, unexpected stone that would be much less beautiful if it were not set off by the beads that came before and the ones that will follow.

This idea is pleasing, but I don’t think it sits comfortably with most people today. Intensity is a more easily celebrated goal: feeling things as strongly as possible for as much of one’s life as possible, diamond after diamond on the string. We could easily be falling in love today – or visiting another country, fighting our old limits, and then sinking ourselves in some strange and exquisite pleasure. Or all at once! - the more intense the better.

I’m not sure which one I believe – neither, entirely – but I know that very few modern writers apply Woolf's advice to their books. The goal is to dazzle, line by line and page by page, because otherwise the reader – the extraordinarily beautiful creature who has agreed, for some reason, to go on a blind date with us – will get bored and leave. It is the rare writer who considers that the reader’s boredom might actually be a valuable tool in her arsenal. Not cranky and impatient boredom, of course, which we experience when a person’s forced liveliness fails to enchant, but the gentle, lazy variety. This kind of receptive boredom is a valuable state for a writer, because the most profound and surprising truths can be slipped under the table of the reader’s fully engaged consciousness.

One of the marks of Natalia Ginzburg's originality, I think, is her use of the constructive possibilities of boredom. In several of her best essays, I wondered in the middle why I was bothering to read this stuff at all, and only continued because Ginzburg's plain, conversational style kept pulling me through sentence after sentence, until, usually near the end of the piece, she would slip on that magical stone that transformed everything that came before.

The essay that first captured me was He and I, included in Philip Lopate’s wonderful anthology of the personal essay. It is about Ginzburg’s long marriage. Here are the first few paragraphs:

He always feels hot, I always feel cold. In the summer when it is really hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on the evening.

He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well. He manages – in his own way – to speak even the languages that he doesn’t know.

This is already getting a little annoying. I skipped this essay in the anthology several times because it felt like one of those narcissistic relationship features in the lifestyle section of the newspaper. But as the essay continues, it becomes apparent that Ginzburg is writing out of a belief not in her extraordinariness but her complete ordinariness - the opposite of narcissism. She feels quite sincerely that she is much like other people (several of her essays are written in the first person plural) and is comfortable using her own life to get at some general truths. And so the essay continues, alternating between her husband’s attributes and her own:

There are certain restaurants in England where the waiter goes through a little ritual: he pours some wine into a glass so that the customer can test whether he likes it or not. He used to hate this ritual and always prevented the waiter from carrying it out by taking the bottle from him. I used to argue with him about this and say that you should let people carry out their prescribed tasks.

This is mildly interesting and it makes you think about how different people are, but it isn't exactly scintillating. I kept reading with half-focus, a little bored, and when I had to do something else, I marked the page and set the anthology aside. I could easily have never picked up the essay again. Which shows what a dangerous strategy this exploitation of ordinariness can be for a writer. Good filmmakers – who have always known how to use boredom, just think of Tarkovsky or Ray or Ozu – only need us to stay in our chairs and keep our eyes open. But writers can't rely on inertia. Luckily, Ginzburg’s pieces are short; I saw the book a few days later and decided that I might as well finish the essay.

He and I continues in list form, with all the accumulated knowledge and schisms of a long relationship: the couple’s different approaches to cleanliness, and shopping, and how they fight. And then, near the end, Ginzburg mentions the first time they met and walked along the Via Nazionale, many years before they were together as a couple. Then there are a few more details about how her husband dressed differently then than when she came across him again. And the essay ends with this paragraph:

If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale; two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.

This was magical for me when I read it – "so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever" – and I knew that it could not have had the same effect if not for all of those mundane details that I had half-sleepwalked through earlier in the essay. And then, in those last few lines, a rush of illumination, achieved in a way that would have been impossible through more direct means.

Illumination about what, exactly? It’ll sound hackneyed as soon as it’s written out – the great mystery, the strangeness of life! – which is why writers have to find other ways to get at it.

Impressed, I picked up The Little Virtues, a collection of Ginzburg’s essays translated from the Italian, including He and I. It's a slim collection, just over a hundred pages. When I began, I was convinced that I’d found a new favorite writer. Winter in the Abruzzi is a masterpiece; like He and I, it is a simple narrative of family life, entirely transformed by its last few paragraphs. And I really liked Portrait of a Friend, about Cesare Pavese.

And then my enthusiasm started to tail off. There are three essays about life in England with a few extraordinary passages, but full of untenable, abstract generalizations – about the obscure sadness of England, its tasteless cuisine, and various other gripes that sound like the laments of an Italian in an unfamiliar country and not the unassailable truths that Ginzburg seems to think they are.

This trend continues in the essays about life in Italy after the Second World War. At a certain point, I stopped being able to follow what Ginzburg was talking about. Here, for example, is a quote from Silence, which she considers a vice that “poisons our epoch”:

We have been advised to defend ourselves from despair with egotism. But egotism has never solved despair. And we are too used to calling our soul’s vices illnesses, to putting up with them and to letting them rule our lives, or to soothing them with sweet syrups in order to cure them as if they were illnesses. Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. It is not given to us to choose whether we are happy or unhappy. But we must choose not to be demonically unhappy.

This is simply too vague to be satisfying for me. And the less I understand an author, the more the use of “we” feels like an imposition. Maybe the audience of Ginzburg’s time knew exactly what she was talking about – in another essay, she directly addresses the survivors of Fascism in Italy – but I think a writer needs to be less insular to survive her age.

Ginzburg is at her best when she has a concrete subject to work with – her own life, or her friend’s life – instead of abstract ideas. But she is too good and careful a writer not to have at least one interesting thing to say in any piece she bothered to write and publish. The Little Virtues, for example, the title essay, is a wonderfully wise and thought-provoking set of maxims on how to raise children, going very much against the modern grain. And even though Ginzburg only duplicated, for me, the beauty of He and I in a single essay, I still think the book is entirely worth reading. Even a weaker essay like Human Relationships can contain a passage like this one, worth remembering for a long time (Ginzburg is talking about the moment when we know we are truly adults):

In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, the words for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. And so it is that now as we turn to that secret moment we look at others to see whether they have lived through an identical moment, or whether they are still far away from it; it is this that we have to know. It is the highest moment in the life of a human being, and it is necessary that we stand with others whose eyes are fixed on the highest moment of their destiny.

On Wings of Song, by Thomas Disch

2008-11-21T09:55:00.008-05:00

I was an occasional reader of Thomas Disch's blog, Endzone. Most of the posts were just ordinary musings, but there were also some brilliant bits of verse and an obviously immense intelligence on display. When I was looking at John Crowley's website a few weeks ago, I found out that Disch had committed suicide in his apartment.

Something about following a person's life online and then hearing this was really disturbing, maybe even more than when I heard about David Foster Wallace. Which was also tremendously sad.

This is the best of the tributes to Disch that I've read online. The story of his last days is pretty awful. I'm sure that money wasn't the only problem, but it's depressing to think that such a great writer might have been even partially compelled to end things because of a lack of resources.

Because he was, it turns out, a great writer. I picked up one of Disch's old novels, On Wings of Song, after I found out what had happened to him, as an ineffectual form of tribute. The book is out of print and I had to request it from library storage.

It is a brilliant novel, one of the weirdest and most imaginative I've ever read. Any description of the plot is going to sound a little silly, and I was resistant at first, I'll admit. I was never a big reader of science fiction growing up, and I'm still much more susceptible to silliness when it's wearing some armor and swinging a sword. But this book won me over quickly and entirely.

On Wings of Song is set in the near future. Most of the book takes place in Iowa, which has become a severely repressive place, both by law and convention. There is a faction known colloquially as the "undergodders" dictating most social policy, such as the availability of certain newspapers and radio stations. (Realistically, however, most of these media do end up getting into the state through surrounding, more progressive areas like Minnesota.) The undergodders save their most virulent hatred for the practice of flying -- I guess you could call it a "wedge issue" in this world -- which is the process by which people, using music, can escape their physical bodies and become creatures called fairies.

These fairies cannot actually be detected, although there are devices to trap them using sound and other stimuli. Fairies can, however, re-enter their bodies after flying and give accounts of their experience, but the experience of flight is often so intoxicating that many people abandon their bodies and leave them to die -- in a corporeal sense, at least, since fairies appear to be immortal.

I know, I know, it sounds silly! But trust me, give this book about forty pages and you'll be completely hooked. Its protagonist is Daniel Weinreb, the fairly ordinary son of a dentist who ends up, through a venial crime, in one of the state's prison camps.

After hearing a man sing in the camp, Daniel becomes obsessed with flying, which is actually quite difficult and requires both musical skill and something like depth of soul -- it takes complete involvement in a song that one is singing (along with, sometimes, the help of various devices) to achieve the escape velocity required to leave the body.

Along the way, Disch throws off some brilliant and terrifying details of this particular future. What makes his world so endlessly interesting is that it isn't monopolar. Unlike a fair amount of science fiction, everything in his world doesn't follow from one central conceit, with the rest of the author's energy going towards tracing obvious consequences and inventing bits of technological embroidery. Disch's world is actually alive and random and in flux; policies change and become more or less repressive, and there are economic and technological and social changes that don't all cut in a single direction.

I'll leave the disturbingly plausible P-W lozenge for readers to discover themselves, but here is an example of what I'm talking about. This is a description of part of Daniel's job at the prison camp, which involves:

.. the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite that was used as a supplement in various extended meat and cheese products. The bugs bred at Station 78 in all their billions, were almost as economical a source of protein as soybeans, since they could be grown in the labyrinthine underground bunkers to quite remarkable sizes with no other food source than a black sludge-like paste produced for next to nothing by various urban sanitation departments. The termites' ordinary life-cycle had been simplified and adapted to assembly-line techniques, which were automated so that, unless there was a breakdown, workers weren't obliged to go into the actual tunnels.

This horrific passage might not even be forward-thinking anymore; the book was written in 1978, and for all I know this is already happening in some form, at least for animal feed. But the primary appeal of this book -- for me, at least -- is not in futurological details, as impressive as they might be. And it isn't even the passages of extraordinary psychological perceptiveness scattered throughout the book. For example: "Grandison Whiting listened to the exposé [Daniel is talking about the abuses in the prison camp] with a glistening attentiveness behind which Daniel could sense not indignation but the meshing of various cogs and gears of a logical rebuttal."

With so many phrases in the book -- "glistening attentiveness" -- I thought yes, yes that's exactly right. (I also loved the line, "She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks.")

So what is wonderful about this book? I'm not sure I know. Maybe its unpredictability, its ability to expand in the mind. Flying -- which Daniel keeps unsuccessfully trying to do as the plot winds its way through several twists and changes in perspective and location -- is obviously a metaphor for transcendence: artistic, athletic, religious, whatever. And even though the book stays true to its reality and doesn't seem like an exercise in connecting allegorical dots, the idea of flying becomes, by the end, incredibly charged and resonant.

It might especially connect with people (I am one) who are more moved by music than any other art, and enjoy singing and playing instruments, but have never quite been able to get good enough -- in technical terms and in terms of complete internal commitment -- to lose themselves in the process of creating music.

There is something, it is true, that is a little juvenile in this obsession with losing inhibitions. And, in a wonderful interview, Disch acknowledged that "science fiction, in our culture, is basically intended for children, or young adults, as they say, and a certain amount of science fiction has to fulfill the emotional and intellectual needs of 13, 14, 15-year olds."

He obviously wasn't trying to describe his own work, but there were parts of On Wings of Song where I felt like this was still true. There is a character named Barbara, for example, in the prison camp, who chides Daniel for not running away from Iowa at fifteen like his friend did: "In any case, Daniel," she says, "age has nothing to do with anything. It's the excuse people use till they're old enough to acquire better excuses--a wife, or children, or a job. There are always going to be excuses if you look for them."

Deep inside, I heard a little cheer from myself at 15, who is still in there somewhere. Because the emotional and intellectual needs of young adults don't actually go away; they just get wrapped in layers of complexity and compromise and tolerance (and wisdom?) But they can still be reached -- and should be, every once in a while, because they are legitimate needs and we muffle them at our own peril.

There are some things, though, that I do feel I've outgrown. I'm more bored than thrilled by sacrilege at this point, and the book's satire of fundamentalism didn't do much for me. Also, it doesn't end that well. In a scene near the end, when Daniel is singing a song about honeybunnies on stage after dyeing his skin to look like a black man (I think he might have been in a bunny costume, too) the old spectre of silliness finally re-emerged. Part 3 of the book in general, where this scene takes place, didn't click for me except in parts, and the conclusion is surprising but not really satisfying.

But On Wings of Song is at least two-thirds of a masterpiece, which is more than enough for me. It should really be back in print. I'm going to read Camp Concentration and 334 next, and maybe some of Disch's essays and poetry. I'm sorry I didn't find them sooner.

Great American Hypocrites, by Glenn Greenwald

2008-10-22T22:54:00.005-04:00

I generally don't bother with political blogs but I've been making an exception lately for Glenn Greenwald. He's a good writer, and a more serious thinker than the hundreds of people around the Internet who lavish their intelligence on the daily minutiae of poll movements and stray gaffes. Over the few years his blog has been online, Greenwald has brought several issues to people's attention simply by taking the time to read the documents that the government releases, and this is while professional reporters have regurgitated the administration's press releases or reproduced quotes from opposite camps, assuming that the truth would somehow determine itself.

Greenwald also writes at length. He doesn't have the addictive but finally enervating habit of posting link-plus-half-a-paragraph entries each hour, and he doesn't jump on the story of the day to give you his "take." He isn't part of the echo chamber, at least not usually. Greenwald focuses, instead, on a set of his own central concerns. On a weekly basis, he discusses torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless surveillance (he was and possibly still is a practicing lawyer). Most media outlets covered these stories for roughly a week, almost nothing changed, and then the news cycle marched on to something else.

So if Greenwald is occasionally indignant and repetitive, I'm glad: Americans need to have these things shoved down their throats on a daily basis. All of these prisoners are still there, and some of them have been locked up for almost a decade without any opportunity to prove their innocence in a court of law. And the administration is either unwilling or unable to prove their guilt; considering the scant evidence that it has actually put forward, the latter seems much more likely. Yet people who were once paranoid about the encroachment of the federal government on fundamental rights have barely made a sound. I'm not sure what conservatism means anymore if it doesn't include some respect for the founding documents of this country and what were once the basic tenets of our system of law: habeas corpus, the necessity of warrants, every human being's right to humane treatment.

I wrote several years ago about McCain's finally pointless "stand" on torture. After I wrote that article, McCain had a chance to vote for legislation that explicitly banned waterboarding in February 2008. He chose not to, opting instead to leave in place the hazy set of regulations in the Military Commissions Acts from 2006, which McCain knew gave the president the right to determine the legality of any interrogation practice himself. Mccain had already lost my vote at this point, but he succeeded in also losing my respect.

Greenwald lays out the case against McCain in the last chapter of Great American Hypocrites. Like most of the book, the chapter seems hastily written and temporary in the way of most such political screeds. I wish I could recommend the book more highly because I really do admire his blog.

Greenwald's central points are at least interesting. Basically, he argues that the Republican Party has won most of its recent elections by engineering a narrative of traditional masculinity versus elitist effeminacy; or, if their opponent is a woman, by painting her as an excessively masculine, gender-confused weirdo.

The media has run with this strategy because it is extremely easy to understand -- the real man versus the professorial loser -- and also entertaining for viewers, since it makes the private lives of politicians increasingly "relevant" to the election. Even columnists that are supposedly liberal traffic in the same basic dichotomies because they lend themselves so effortlessly to readable satire (Maureen Dowd is an obvious example). And the narrative also plays to the insecurities of people who are increasingly stuck in stores and offices, and aren't sure how their lives fit into the old archetypal American narratives of personal courage and heroism.

This insecurity, Greenwald argues, is a driving force behind the bellicosity of the Republican Party. The neo-conservatives who pushed for war, to a rather extraordinary degree, are people that avoided service in wars they vociferously supported, while demonizing anyone that urged caution, including many who had actual military experience. Greenwald sees the standard-bearer of this mentality in John Wayne, who managed to get numerous suspect deferments in WWII and then spent the rest of his life cheering on other wars, while denouncing people who disagreed with him as anti-American. Naturally, Wayne is now an icon, especially with conservatives, for playacting the sort of heroic life that people long for. And today's heroism-by-proxy -- sending other people to fight and showing "courage" by keeping them there -- is essentially the same thing as playacting.

Unfortunately, Greenwald lays out these points in maddeningly repetitive fashion. Whole paragraphs of text are repeated verbatim, and certain phrases come up numerous times without alteration. Also, it is hard to analyze a frivolous phenomenon without occasionally seeming frivolous yourself. Gleenwald catalogues the spread of media chatter on a handful of largely forgotten stories, and it is as exhausting to read as it was to watch. The book's exposure of hypocrisy also includes dozens of prominent conservatives who defended traditional values while living lives that were either highly untraditional or genuinely debauched. So a section of the book is basically a long list, often of obscure figures and their salacious scandals, and it ends up feeling as pointless and gossipy, again, as the non-stories on TV. This kind of stuff, at best, belongs in an appendix as a form of highly anecdotal evidence, but Great American Hypocrites has no endmatter and no references, which seems strange for a lawyer.

I'm only bothering to write this review first to recommend the blog, and second because there is a little discussed quote from McCain near the end of Great American Hypocrites that I wanted to put online as my small contribution to election discourse. It's quite extraordinary (the bold is in the original). Greenwald begins by quoting the New York Observer's Jason Horowitz:

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city's wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point. "One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardia, an invitee, and two other guests.

That's the thoughtful, insightful view of the highly experienced, profoundly serious maverick for whom foreign policy a mastered discipline. Apparently, all Iraq needed for the last five years was some profanity-laced commands issued by the American President to the frightened sectarian simpletons, and harmony would have reigned.

Stop the bullshit, indeed. I would dismiss this as a stray remark if it didn't seem so typical of the attitude that has governed America for the last eight years. Conservatives complain about the nanny state, but when in power they don't actually work towards a lean, sensible government that sticks to a few basic responsibilities; their actual dream, as evidenced in this quote, is the daddy state, where resources that were once used to help people (deserving or not) are now used to punish those that step out of line. The daddy state doesn't tolerate excuses or bother thinking about root causes; it has no respect for privacy or sense of limited authority. Anything it does is automatically within its rights. And if the children complain, or don't step into line, the daddy state simply tells them to cut it out, and then delivers spankings when, mysteriously, they don't. It's a disastrous, patronizing, and profoundly stupid way to look at the world.

It's hard to get too enthusiastic about most American politicians, but I'll at least be thrilled to get rid of such people for a little while.

Ask the Dust, by John Fante

2008-10-12T10:17:00.007-04:00

I was on a plane when I came across Robert Towne's film of Ask the Dust, with Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek. I remembered the movie getting bad reviews and was surprised to find that the portion I managed to see -- roughly the middle half -- was actually good. Or at least it exercised a certain fascination. This fascination was mainly born of the fact that something about the relationship between the two main characters -- Arturo Bandini, a struggling Italian writer in Los Angeles, and Camilla Lopez, a local Mexican waitress -- simply didn't make sense. Since most movies make entirely too much sense, this cloud of irrationality that hung over the two of them was weirdly alluring.

Here's what I mean. Arturo is obviously attracted to Camilla, and she essentially offers herself to him on several occasions, but what could have been glorious or at least reasonably satisfying sexual encounters dissolve into fury and abuse and violence, for no reason that I could make out.

Several months later, I picked up the novel -- it is widely acknowledged as a California classic -- and it quickly became clear that there is an explanation for this strangeness. The novel, unlike the movie, is not mainly about writerly ambition or racial self-loathing: it is about Catholic sexual guilt.

The strange thing is that Bandini is a nonbeliever -- a fairly virulent one, at times -- but he simply can't escape the habits of his upbringing. He is constantly thinking about mortal sins in which he does not actually believe. He is desperate for sex but so estranged from his desire that he can only experience arousal when alone. He goes to a prostitute and then runs away in terror, after throwing all of his money at her just so she'll leave him alone.

Bandini is finally only capable of being with a woman when he is pretending that she is Camilla. And this other woman -- his only sexual partner in the book -- is grotesquely scarred around the loins, so can barely bring himself to look at her.

Eventually, despite being unable to touch Camilla except in rage, Bandini declares that he is in love with her, and as far as I can tell he is sincere. He sends Camilla some conventional, mostly plagiarized woman-on-a-pedestal poetry. She is understandably amused and then annoyed by Bandini’s courtship, which alternates between declarations of love and racist insults.

Camilla, in any case, is already in love with someone else at the restaurant, a bartender named Sammy who has no particular respect for her and is occasionally abusive (he gets more and more hateful towards her as the book goes on). There is a telling passage when Arturo finally gets why Camilla wants to be with Sammy:

I understood it. She did not hate Arturo Bandini, not really. She hated the fact that he did not meet her standard. She wanted to love him, but she couldn't. She wanted him like Sammy: quiet, taciturn, grim, a good shot with a rifle, a good bartender who accepted her as a waitress and nothing else. I got out of the car, grinning, because I knew that would hurt her.

"Accepted her as a waitress" -- that's one of the key lines in this book. Arturo cannot honestly be with any woman, because he refuses to accept people as they wish to be accepted. The prostitute, for example, has no interest in talking, but Bandini (before he flees) insists on conversation to assuage his guilt over his own desire. All Camilla wants is a night or two of companionship, but this prospect is intolerable to him, and he ends up hating her for even making the offer.

This warped view of people is, I think, a problem for the book. Since Arturo narrates, there is not a single character besides him that feels real. And the author doesn’t give us enough in the dialogue to see through the cracks in Arturo’s perspective. The crucial relationship in the book is Sammy and Camilla: why does she keep going back to him? Why is her attachment to him so deep? But Camilla is given no chance to explain herself and Sammy is barely present, so we never understand the crisis that drives the last third of the novel.

What we have left, then, is Bandini and his obsessions. The sexual stuff is frankly not that interesting to me. In this particular way I think the world has gotten saner for most people. Bandini’s other focus –- his desperation to make it as a writer –- is a more durable and entertaining set of neuroses. The alternation between messianic arrogance and deep self-loathing that dominates the first part of the book is pretty hilarious. Bandini distributes copies of his single published story all around the motel where he lives, even putting them on chairs so people will have to pick them up to sit down. No one touches them. “It was disheartening,” he writes. “A big woman in one of the deep chairs had even seated herself upon a copy, not bothering to remove it.” And Fante makes (for me) more interesting use of Bandini’s religious preoccupations in relation to his writing:

My plight drove me to the typewriter. I sat before it, overwhelmed with grief for Arturo Bandini. Sometimes an idea floated harmless through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

What could be the matter with me? When I was a boy I had prayed to St. Teresa for a new fountain pen. My prayer was answered. Anyway, I did get a new fountain pen. Now I prayed to St. Teresa again. Please, sweet and lovely saint, gimme an idea.

The prose throughout the novel is filled with the same nervy energy, which seems easier to write than it actually is. There are several great passages and a lot to admire, but by the end I felt like something had gone badly wrong with the book. Around the middle of Ask the Dust there’s an earthquake, one character disappears from the narrative, and from this point on everything starts to feel increasingly arbitrary. Events happen faster and more chaotically, and there's an apocalyptic conclusion that has a certain power but finally feels artificial to me.

What is it about Los Angeles that seems to demand such endings? The L.A. novels I've read usually contain a small group of isolated characters, all from somewhere else, all without family. There isn’t a society behind them that represents any kind of continuity, so when the slim connections between these characters break, the entire world of the novel falls apart, and the author needs increasingly heightened and histrionic consequences –- deaths, madness, natural disasters -– to give these broken ties a sense of significance (or he needs to be indifferent to the actual idea of significance). It often makes for a great deal of vitality without anything approaching tragedy. I liked this book but it pretty much disappeared from my consciousness the second I finished it. It's definitely worth the day or two it takes to read, though.

Exit Strategy of the Soul, by Ron Sexsmith

2008-09-12T07:45:00.012-04:00

I haven't written any music reviews for this website, because I'm not sure how you manage to convince someone of musical value through words. I used to devour music reviews in college until I realized that there was virtually no connection between how intelligent the reviewers seemed and whether their judgments ended up lining up with mine. So I stopped reading them. Now I look at the occasional interview with a musician I already like, or wait for recommendations from friends.

So I want to apologize for subjecting you to a music review. Because I'm going to attempt to convince you that Ron Sexsmith is a great artist, knowing in advance that there's no way I can do this with words. I only bother because it seems like very few people know about him. Sexsmith has released ten albums over the last decade and a half and keeps getting bounced from one label to another. Several of his old albums are no longer available, although you can usually find them used.

On first listen, his music does not seem like a particularly specialized taste, one that needs to be defended against philistines. It sounds, quite frequently, like soft rock, suitable for waiting rooms and supermarkets. His melodies are rarely immediately catchy, and he also avoids jarring dissonances, both in his singing and his instrumentation. His tempos are generally loping, with drumming that stays very much in the background. Very rarely will you find yourself tapping a toe.

In short, Sexsmith never insists that you pay attention to him. His music only opens up on repeated listens, where the listener is actually focusing – on the lyrics, the melody, the structure of a song. Unfortunately, the segment of the population that tends to be serious about popular music is likely to be put off both by the "unchallenging" surface pleasantness of Sexsmith's music and the content of his lyrics, which are often both coherent and hopeful.

Sexsmith tells stories, he relates morals, and even occasionally declares his faith. He has a song called "God Loves Everyone," and the lyrics, unashamedly and without irony, say just that. And although I don't believe this and I'm pretty sure it's not true, I believe the song. I'm willing to follow it past what I can reasonably defend. The point of music – or at least one of them – is to take us beyond the realm of the intellectually defensible, a realm that most people find exhausting now and then. So we sent up prayers and trouble deaf heaven with our cries – and the more beautiful we can make these cries, the higher up they get before they disappear. Which in my experience they eventually do.

I'm only willing to follow them up, of course, when I'm convinced that a musician isn't insincere or simply muddleheaded. But Sexsmith's lyrics are exceptionally smart and always leavened by doubt. His version of God in the afore-mentioned song, in any case, is a strange and abstract entity, clearly worked out in his mind independent of any organized religion. "The heart runs on faith / the mind on proof," he sings in "Poor Helpless Dreams," and Sexsmith never completely loses himself in one or the other. His love songs always acknowledge the possibility of disaster, even with the best of wills; and his songs of faith and affirmation make it clear that these are simply prayers, and do not reflect the world as it generally stands.

The only source of happiness that Sexsmith reliably returns to is the lost paradise of childhood. And if he occasionally gets sentimental, which he does, I am also moved by his music in a way that I'm not by even the best modern songwriters. Songs like "Seem to Recall" reach down into a place that few pieces of music have ever accessed for me.

An example: the song "Traveling Alone" starts with an image of a man getting on a train, and uses the words of the Christian marriage ceremony to signify our union not with another person, but with private obsessions: "From the dreams at hand there's no divorce / In sickness and in health / It's a fever that must run its course / Before you are well." And the song ends with a simple but beautiful metaphor for fundamental human isolation.

It's one on one, you and your soul
And nobody else
Just look around this train is full
Of folks who keep to themselves
These faces in windows
Heading out for places unknown
Though lives intermingle
Our thoughts are left to roam
All traveling alone

Is this great poetry? Maybe not, but it is a great set of song lyrics, and their impact on me partly depends on the melody that I hear as I write them out. I sat down once with my guitar to figure out how to play "One Less Shadow" - another great Ron song - and after a fair amount of time I got it mostly right and realized how strange and inspired Sexsmith's progressions are. By way of contrast, when I sit down at the keyboard to goof around, it is easy for me to plonk my way into discovering something that sounds okay, like it "could be a song." The hands finds their way to ordinary chords and try out variations on old tunes.

I'm fairly certain that most songs, and even some great ones, are written this way - composed at the piano or the guitar basically using trial and error. But when I play an inspired melody like "Here, There, and Everywhere," the chords don't run in the usual grooves; they're twisted and idiosyncratic, even while the tune seems as inevitable as C to F. The artist has clearly worked out the song and cast it into shape in his imagination. I'm sure there's plenty of tweaking left to do, but the heart of the song is coming from inspiration and not from someone's fingers chancing on a tune. I always feel this deeper inspiration with Sexsmith's best songs; they are simply beyond accident, beyond the range of musical dabblers like me.

There are a few caveats. Sexsmith doesn't seem particularly devoted to the production part of his music; once he gets the song right, he leaves the ornamentation and basic sound to other people who don't always serve him well. So there are some production disasters on his albums: the backing singers on "These Days," the bizarre tuba breakdown on "At Different Times," and any number of schmaltzy arrangements (no one seems to be able to entirely wreck the songs, though, and Sexsmith's versions are always the best). Also, while every one of his albums is worth owning, I don't think a single one is flawless; at least a handful of songs usually don't connect with me.

The current one, though, Exit Strategy of the Soul, is very good, and well-produced. Like his other albums, on first listen I regretted buying it; three or four listens later I realized my mistake. The album contributes another five or six great songs to the dozens Sexsmith has written over the last decade and a half, a period of productivity that is astonishing considering how quickly most great musical talents fizzle out.

I once had a stack of his CDs on my office desk, and a colleague assumed – because of Sexsmith's last name and the pictures of the slightly chubby man on all the covers – that this was music of the most extraordinary depravity. (I can't imagine what would have happened if I'd had some Bruce Cockburn albums mixed in.) But one of the amazing things about Sexsmith is that he is writing healthy, wise, inventive songs in times that don't seem to deserve them. Musical talent, as far as I can tell, is handed out at random, and most of the time it's given to people with almost nothing to say. So we should pay attention when it happens to be granted to someone with intelligence and insight, because it is a rare gift.

Update: I managed to see Sexsmith in Cambridge with about twenty other people. In his words, it was a "small but mighty audience." Almost everything promised a bad night. Sexsmith's drummer had bailed on them earlier in the tour, so it was just him and a bassist. Some of the crowd had come for one of the earlier, local acts, so they were milling around by the bar without really listening. And there was another band playing in the basement whose bass would vibrate through the floor in the middle of Sexsmith's songs, which was extremely annoying.

I was starting to feel bad until Ron got a few songs into his set, and then, during "All in Good Time," everyone in front of the stage started singing along. The dozen or so of us knew all the lyrics, and not just to that song. Looking around, it was obvious that there was profound devotion in this little group, which I hope was worth something to him. He seems to be pretty satisfied with what he's doing, in any case.

As for the show, Sexsmith was really good. The songs sounded a lot like they do on the records, although with some creative and unobtrusively brilliant guitar work to fill in for the missing instruments. I really recommend picking up one of his albums (his latest is very good) -- I can't think of another artist working today that engages me intensely in so many different ways.

Swami and Friends, by R.K. Narayan

2008-09-02T10:42:00.009-04:00

I have so far read five of R.K. Narayan's fourteen novels. Every one contained beautiful moments, but in almost every book, at some point or another, I had an unpleasant sense of arbitrariness. Why is this happening, I thought, instead of something else? Plot developments seemed to fall from the sky, and the books meandered their way to conclusions that felt almost random. It was like the characters were being moved around by some inscrutable fate, and not by either the intelligence of the author or the dictates of their own characters. Many of Narayan's books strike me as reflecting a deep belief that no one is really in control of their lives. Of the books I have read, only The Painter of Signs has a certain sense of inevitability – the heroine has a very narrowly defined personality, and she follows it to the end – but it is also one of the dullest of Narayan's novels.

The one book of Narayan's that I am sure is a masterpiece is Swami and Friends. It is definitely the best book about childhood I have ever read. The feeling of arbitrariness that bothers me in Narayan's other novels now seems like it simply reflects the texture of pre-adolescence, where life hasn't developed a coherent narrative yet, only a series of mini-narratives: what happened on a certain weekend, a certain day in school. The world of childhood also frees Narayan from writing about sexual desire, a subject that he cautiously approaches in some of his other books with consistently unconvincing results.

Swami and Friends is Narayan's first book, the one that he struggled so much to get published in India until it made its way, through friends in England, to Graham Greene, who immediately recognized its value. The novel bears the marks of an early effort; the beginning is a little shaky (it gets better and better as it goes on) and the inspiration comes in fits and starts. There are little stories in chapters of five of six pages, and although elements sometimes carry over from one chapter to another, there is no real plot. A ten-year-old boy named Swaminathan (Swami for short) is going to school in the 1930s during the early days of the Indian independence movement, in a sleepy medium-sized city somewhere in Tamil Nadu. There is nothing extraordinary about him; he is not particularly bright or stupid, dull or spirited. He gets in trouble occasionally. He makes friends but is basically a follower of other stronger and more assertive children.

Narayan's conviction of randomness, of life simply happening to people, seems absolutely right for the world of children. One day, for whatever reason, father is angry, so Swami avoids him (the anger is never explained). A boy who was once a close friend moves away. The boy sends a card telling everyone in the class not to forget him and to write, but forgets to put down his address on the letter. In a few pages he is entirely forgotten. The book is so funny that the melancholy only seems to catch up with it at the very end, and it is easy to overlook the amount of insight and intelligence that go into even the simplest paragraphs. Here is an example:

Father was standing in the small courtyard, wearing a dhoti and a banian, the dress which, for its very homeliness, Swaminathan detested to see him in; it indicated that he did not intend going out in the near future.
"Where are you going?"
"Nowhere."
"Where were you yesterday at this time?"
"Here."
"You are lying. You were not here yesterday. And you are not going out right now."
"That is right," Mother added, just appearing from somewhere, "there is no limit to his loafing in the sun. He will die of sunstroke if he keeps on like this."

I think the heart of Narayan's gift is in that little phrase "just appearing from somewhere." I didn't even notice it until I read the book the second time, but it so perfectly describes the feeling of being yelled at by your parents. One parent starts, and then the other person just seems to show up - from where? who knew they were even involved? - and begins to heap on more complaints that are not quite the same as the first set of complaints, making it difficult to find any way to respond. There are beautiful moments like this scattered throughout the book. And although the comedy can sometimes be excessively genial for my taste, Narayan is too honest a writer to ignore the cruelty of children to each other. Near the end of the novel, there is a moment of callousness that is all the more chilling for being small and unremarkable. And the book concludes with one of my favorite scenes in all of literature.

Greene said something about Narayan that I have always found pretty silly - "Without him," Greene wrote, "I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." Ignoring the question of whether being Indian is a single thing that can be figured out - let alone through reading! - Narayan's books strike me as a very odd sort of guide to India. I have spent a great deal of time in the part of India that (approximately) Narayan wrote about, and it is not a place that I recognize in his pages. Other than the little details of food and clothing, one would have a completely different vision of what life is like for most people in India from these novels. The sheer crowdedness is largely gone, and the hunger and desperate poverty seem to have completely disappeared. Now, the last thing I am interested in is pages of useless hand-wringing, but it seems odd that something that is so much a part of the texture of daily life - the beggars, the people living everywhere on almost nothing - merits almost no mention in Narayan's novels.

The only book where this doesn't seem odd is Swami and Friends. Because children are the one group that absolutely accepts life as it is, no matter how bad it might be for other people or for themselves. I was in New Delhi until I was eight; I'm sure there were people all around the city living in plastic tents or sleeping on the street, and I don't remember them being a source of any reflection for me. They were just another part of the world, like the air and the heat. My rather hazy memories mainly concern good and bad days at school, mean teachers, and games of cricket, which are exactly what fill up the pages of Swami and Friends. It is a shame that the book is no longer independently in print in the U.S., but you can find it in this collection. It is a great little book, one that I don't think I will ever get tired of re-reading.

Vachel Lindsay

2008-07-02T21:25:00.011-04:00

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 (although it is stupid to keep making such hierarchies) 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

2008-05-19T20:38:00.014-04:00

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

2008-04-17T10:29:00.008-04:00

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

2008-03-10T14:39:00.013-04:00

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

2007-12-04T11:36:00.005-05:00

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

2007-11-18T17:08:00.003-05:00

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

2007-10-03T19:54:00.003-04:00

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.

Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño

2007-09-09T15:50:00.003-04:00

When I picked up my first Bolaño books, I admit I was drawn as much to the story of his life as anything that seemed to be in his books. The legend of Bolaño -- being arrested by Pinochet, the years of penniless wandering, publishing now prominent works for peanuts with minor provincial houses -- usually took up a fair quantity of his first reviews, and why not? A romantic life is worthy of attention nowadays -- few writers seem to have them.

I first picked up By Night in Chile, which had been designated his masterpiece by various bigwigs (Susan Sontag, James Wood), and was a little disappointed. It was very readable, but I felt like it existed to make rather obvious points about political complicity -- it featured a Chilean priest on his deathbed describing various encounters with the Pinochet regime -- and also, despite its streaming prose style (there were no paragraph breaks) it didn't feel fluidly constructed; I got the impression of several short stories squeezed together.

There was one short story, however, set in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire (it is narrated to the priest) that felt like a great one. And one of the things that impresses me most about Bolaño is his extraordinary flexibility, his apparent comfort in different eras, different countries -- a quality he shares with Borges, who he greatly admired (ahem, according to my research on Wikipedia). Last Evenings on Earth features stories about Americans in the Midwest, poets in occupied France, Portuguese, Spaniards, and all variety of South Americans. And each one is told in the same completely unaffected style; there is not a sentence in the book that seems to have been labored over to create the impression of beauty. Like Tolstoy, directness of communication seems to be the only goal, and every line feels like it could be naturally spoken. It is unsurprising that his big novels are all sequences of monologues.

Despite the variety of settings, there is also a certain sameness to the stories in the book. Most of them feature a man, almost always a writer, living a fairly solitary existence in one city or another; often some person crosses his path, something happens between them -- a small incident, usually, like an insult at a party -- and then after a few more encounters the person leaves the main character's life. Perhaps years later something is heard of him. There are no revelations of any variety, or even any indication that this is necessarily a significant encounter for anyone involved.

Each story is told in a flat summary narration that isn't, however, "deadpan" -- it is both completely natural and deeply strange, strange because it is used to describe lives that have no narrative arc, where one thing follows another with nothing in particular learned, no goal in mind. To me this voice felt like new in literature; the coldness came not from any lack of humanity in either the characters or the writer, but a hard look at the shape of most lives and an unwillingness to accept the sense of artificiality that comes with the epiphanies at the end of so much modern fiction. The one story that seems to contain a life-changing encounter, probably the most traditional in the book -- Mauricio ("The Eye") Silva -- also seemed the most stilted and unnatural to me.

There is one story in the book that I think is a masterpiece, and that is "Anne Moore's Life." It simply narrates the life of a young woman, moving from partner to partner, city to city, with some good experiences and many bad ones, with almost no narrative shape, no attempt to make any one event stand out more than another. It is almost an anti-narrative, with every event flattened out so you can somehow see an entire life in front of you in what appears to be its utter terrifying pointlessness.

I read the story with growing dread, a feeling of being lost in some awful place, but even as I knew that this was not the sort of feeling I read for, that the sense of aimlessness that pervades so much modern life requires no further duplication in books, I couldn't help feeling that the story was an honest one. It was telling the truth about so much many lives -- maybe all lives, at some point or another -- and its effects were not achieved by accident or through sloppiness. Only a real artist, I think, could have brushed away so many thousand years of narrative convention to produce something like this, a narrative whose significance exists in its being completely drained of significance. Well, that's not exactly true; the significance is just displaced -- instead of being found in particular moments, it is spread out to the patterns, obvious and mysterious, that rise out of an entire life.

I think I've made Bolaño seem like a drearier writer than he is, because the ease of his style also makes for incredibly addictive reading, and he can also be tremendously funny, although it is often hard to figure out where the humor is coming from. There is a passage from the Anne Moore story that seems to get at it:

A fair few of Girona's junkies used to gather outside that bar, and the local toughs were often to be seen cruising around, but Anne would reminisce about the toughs of San Francisco, who were seriously tough, and I would reminisce about the toughs of Mexico City, and we'd laugh and laugh, although now, to be honest, I can't remember what what so funny, perhaps just the fact that we were alive.

I will pick up The Savage Detectives soon and read it, and his final novel (2066) is apparently coming out next year in English. So far, it has been hard to love Bolaño books, but there is also something immensely compelling and somehow liberating about them.

Ron Carlson

2007-09-05T08:48:00.001-04:00

Another one of my reviews was just posted on Bookslut. It isn't a particularly enthusiastic review, and I hope I was fair. I had a feeling that I wouldn't like the the book even when I requested it, but I do like Ron Carlson's stories and wanted to see if something interesting could be done in the "craft of writing" genre. It was also something of a nostalgic excursion, because I used to gobble up such books in college and hadn't opened one since.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what people think. It's strange: whenever I go back and read these Bookslut reviews after some time has passed, I get the feeling that some stodgy old man has written them. They usually only say things that I agree with, but the liveliness is sort of gone. And it's usually there when I re-read old parts of this blog. Well, you do the best you can.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

2007-08-27T21:53:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago, I googled Anatole Broyard. I remember reading that he was the basis for Coleman Silk in The Human Stain -- a book I liked a lot -- and was curious about his life. I happened to come across a lengthy piece about him by Henry Louis Gates. I was enthralled, and a few days later I checked Gates's book of essays out of the library.

The collection consists of eight biographical sketches of different black men, written mainly for The New Yorker: James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Bill Jones (a dancer and choreographer), Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, and Broyard. There is also a piece on the O.J. Simpson trial. Why the "thirteen" in the title? I certainly didn't spot thirteen different ways of looking enumerated in the book, so I suppose Gates just wanted to allude to the Wallace Stevens poem.

Well, mission accomplished, I suppose. Your allusion has been spotted, Mr. Gates. It is a very professorial title, and Gates is a much worse writer when that side of him comes out. After reading the Broyard piece, which addressed a massively complicated subject with such wonderful clarity and immediacy, it was rather disappointing to flip to the introduction and come across a passage like this (I am choosing at random):

I distrust the rhetoric of crisis. It's at once too gloomy and too hopeful: the Hippocratic trope of "crisis" invokes a turning point, beyond which lies recovery or death, and neither one seems in the cards for us. I have my doubts, too, about the way the ostensible subject of the crisis, the black male, has been conceptualized. It's a conversation that still bears traces (though fading ones) of a rivalry over victim status: the sort of Oppression Sweepstakes that ran through so much harebrained attitudinizing of the seventies and eighties.

This is not bad writing, exactly, it is just completely dead. It is Professor Writing. I recognize it from a thousand mediocre lectures and pieces of mandatory reading. Gates is capable of much better, but he needs a subject to keep him from being blandly smart and nothing more. He can even be a fine communicator of ideas as long as he has some reality to tie them to. Compare this passage from the essay on Harry Belafonte to the one above:

Politics, it sometimes seems, is what Belafonte did instead of the more wholesome, more normal preoccupations of the American superstar--namely, drugs, debauchery, and dissipation. On some level, surely, we want our idols to engage in the sins of the flesh--on our behalf, as it were--and, being obliging souls, they usually do. By contrast, the celebrity who makes heavy weather of his political convictions strikes us (when they are not our convictions) as recklessly indulgent: what's violated is the intricate, unwritten covenant between celebrities and their fans. We elevate them to godlike status, but heaven forbid they should think they're better than us.

The professor is still very much in evidence here, but this is real writing. Gates duplicates some of the virtues and flaws of Edmund Wilson, one of my favorite writers of biographical sketches: the stately prose, the ability to disappear at some points into the material, and also the tendency to go off the rails when left alone with ideas (see for example Wilson's terrible introduction to Patriotic Gore, his great book on the Civil War).

Gates, luckily, also has the mark of a great journalist: he knows when to let people keep talking -- in person and on the page. Many of the best pieces -- the Colin Powell one, for example -- lay out a few facts and then just feature one quote after another about what various people think of the subject. And Gates does seem to have had access to an incredible range of people. He also has the knack for getting people to shed their public persona and speak with unusual candor (or, in Powell's case, get up and dance -- Gates somehow managed to get him to do the Camel Walk). Here is a passage that jumped out at me from the Harry Belafonte piece:

Sidney Poitier, who is Belafonte's best friend and nearly exact contemporary, says that the childhood years they spent in the West Indies gave them a psychological advantage: colonialism aside, growing up in a black-majority country meant that most of the doctors, nurses, lawyers, and policemen you encountered were black. "I firmly believe," Poitier said, "that we both had the opportunity to arrive at the formation of a sense of ourselves without have it fucked with by racism as it existed in the United States."

Sidney Poitier curses! Who knew? Anyway, I could quote and quote. Thirteen Ways is not flawless, but it is has given me more to think about than most other books I have read recently. And also more to discover: I have a whole list of titles that Gates has made me want to read (Baldwin's essays in particular). I was going to write some commonplace about how this book transcends issues of race, but this seemed like a weirdly belittling compliment; race is still a massive enough issue in American life to be quite worthy of everyone's attention with no transcending required. I recommend at least taking a look at the Broyard, Belafonte, and Powell pieces -- they are very worth your time.

Louis CK

2007-08-08T17:45:00.004-04:00

I was thinking recently that it was unlikely that any work of art from the past couple of decades was going to rival the best seasons of the Simpsons. What books (in English at least) are definitely going to survive from the same time period? And I remembered something that Borges wrote about artists working in media that are not given literary respect. He was writing specifically about Shakespeare and why none of his contemporaries seem to have taken any notice of the magnitude of what he was producing: "Every era believes that there is a literary genre that has a kind of primacy. Today, for example, any writer who has not written a novel is asked when he is going to write one." And in Shakespeare's day the prestige genre was the epic poem - drama was throwaway popular entertainment.

And he goes on to mention that so much of the best art is produced, to some extent, under the artistic radar of its times. In his own era, he mentions how people were finally coming to see film as an art, but utterly ignoring the screenwriter. "Ben Hecht had to a die a few days ago," he writes, "in order for me to remember that he was the author of the screenplays of these films that I have so often watched and praised." The same is still true of all the people who wrote those Simpsons episodes: it is now common enough to praise that show to the skies, but how many people know who those writers are, search out more of their work, or rank them with the great artists of our time?

After reading this Borges essay (it is "The Enigma of Shakespeare," if anyone is interested, from the Selected Non-Fictions collection - a book that is absolutely wonderful) I started to think about what other works of art might now be hiding in popular but low prestige areas. Television writers, certainly, still get very little credit. Comic books and graphic novels as well, although I have been less impressed with some of the apparent classics of those genres (the only one that struck me as having the same merit as a great novel is Ghost World, although I admit I've only read about a dozen graphic novels).

There is another genre that reminded of what Borges said about drama in Shakespeare's time -- that it was considered primarily a performer's showcase instead of a literary art -- and that is stand-up comedy. People praise certain comics, but I don't think it has ever been really appreciated as literary art form, despite the fact that good comics seem just as hardworking and concerned with craft as the most diligent writer of fiction or poetry. I recently read a wonderful interview in the AV Club with Louis CK, and I started looking up some of his material on YouTube. And it's seriously brilliant. I do like the absurdist one-liner comics, but the ones that really stick with me are the storytellers - Cosby and Pryor and CK - that make you forget the obvious artifice behind a guy standing up and telling jokes. Anyway, here are some of my favorite clips, but there are plenty more - uneven of course but the good parts are really inspired.