Orley Farm, by Anthony Trollope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.