Huckleberry Finn

After a decade or so, I picked up Huckleberry Finn again. I’m not sure if I was a slow child, but I don’t remember getting very much out of it in high school. I really wonder whether there is any point in giving children great books. Maybe we should just let them read whatever they want. Almost everything assigned was wasted on me, from Don Quixote to Donne’s poetry. I only noticed what I missed years later, reading on my own.

In this case, I bow to the consensus. This book is as beautiful as anything in English literature. When I re-read Gatsby, I started wondering whether the other American classics lived up to their reputations, but no revaluation is necessary here. Moby Dick is as great as people say; so is Leaves of Grass, so is Huckleberry Finn. They are wild, cobbled-together messes, but they are the genuine article. All books of travel, all with immense, swirling casts of characters, all somehow centerless, tied to no single place or community. America!

Well, I’m not sure what has happened to my country. We still produce the big wild books, but the vitality is somehow gone. The vitality is gone in more and more places every day. In Twain and Melville’s picaresques, I get a sense of immense freedom and space — in Pynchon and Barth, the capers seem frantic and somehow childish, a terror of boredom instead of a joy at possibilities.

Let me type a passage out for you. Read it and remember that there was a time when America held out a promise of freedom that was like nothing that had ever been offered before. There were slaves then and there are detainees now, but when I read certain books that this country has produced, I refuse to believe that this promise was ever entirely a lie. Maybe it will contain some truth again one of these days. Anyway, I have built it up too much, but here it is — Huck pushes off in his canoe at night, because his father is looking for him:

I didn’t lose no time. The next time I was a-spinning down stream soft but quick in the shade of the bank. I made two mile and a half, and then struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the middle of the river, because pretty soon I would be passing the ferry landing and people might see me and hail me. I got amongst the driftwood and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float. I laid there and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights! I heard people talking on the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too, every word of it. One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights, now. ‘Tother one said this warn’t one of the short ones, he reckoned – and then they laughed, and he said it over again and they laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn’t laugh; he ripped out something brisk and said let him alone. The first fellow said he ‘lowed to tell it to his old woman – she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn’t nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o’clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn’t wait more than a week longer. After that, the talk got further and further away, and I couldn’t make out the words any more, but I could hear the mumble; and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.

How lovely is that? Anyone but a genius trying to create this effect would have describing the rocking of the boat, or the stars, or the rush of the water; Twain does it entirely with a pointless, beautiful conversation. The book is so much better than Twain’s others because here, for once, he has no fear of stillness. Until the end, that is. Then he returns to caper mode. And I must say, I dreaded getting to it and hated it as much as I was afraid I would. What an utterly awful close to a great book.

The ending has been defended by some very smart men, including T.S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lionel Trilling (anytime people agree that something is either very bad or very good, a critic somewhere is writing an essay). I can see their points (sort of) and still think that nothing will ever convince me to like that ending. Hemingway told people that they should stop reading when Jim is recaptured, because "This is the real end. The rest is cheating."

I agree, but I have a small modification. Like Hemingway, people usually say that the book’s inspiration flags when Tom Sawyer appears. This is not true; the decline actually begins earlier, and I can pinpoint the exact spot. After the Duke and the Dauphin run the Royal Nonesuch, and Jim has his wonderful line ("But, Huck, dese kings o’ ourn is regular rapscallions; dat’s just what dey is; dey’s reglar rapscallions") it is obvious that they should be jettisoned from the novel. They are minor, comic characters and their performance is over.

Instead, they take center stage for an immense caper. The Twain restlessness, that dread of stillness, comes back and continues from here until the end. The episode is hilarious, but it is the sort of thing that one can only read once — it is not, like what has come before, art. Tom’s adventures, his pointless manhandling of Jim, are just continuations of this trend and contain roughly the same amount of inspiration; they only feel worse because they affect a character that we care about, whereas the Duke-Dauphin escapade is entirely irrelevant.

I noticed something else recently, too. All of the books I’ve mentioned, all of these American classics — every single one is told in first person. Why is this? The American canon is dominated by first person narratives like no other national literature. I could make some lame guesses, but I have no real theory. It seems interesting, though.

Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indridason

I saw a review of this novel in the New York Times and decided to read it purely out of curiosity about Iceland. This was the first Icelandic novel I had ever seen translated into English, and it received a good review, so I got it from the library. Apparently Indridason (there is an accent on the second d that I don't know how to reproduce) is a sensation in his home country; the back flap tells us that "he and J.K. Rowling are the only authors to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Icelandic bestseller list."

The mention of Harry Potter should have given me a foretaste of what I was going to get from this novel. For example, here are some of the things I discovered about Iceland from Silence of the Grave. Yellow police tape is used to surround crime scenes. During Christmas, they listen to Bing Crosby sing White Christmas (presumably in English, unless Bing really covered his bases). Their garages are filled with old bikes and barbeque grills. The lead detective is haunted by various mistakes he made in his Past. And when these harried cops are in a rush, they scarf down cheap hamburgers.

The passage of Halley's comet, which figures tangentially in the plot, is linked to ... yes, the death of Mark Twain! He is the only historical figure mentioned in the book. Also, investigations in Iceland seem to proceed much the same way they do in America. At least once during the course of the investigation, a strip club must be visited - also, they must stumble into a seedy bar where "a miserable country singer" performs bad love songs. (What exactly is "country music" in Iceland?) A fortune teller must appear in a crucial moment and make an eerily accurate prediction.

Fifty pages in, around the mention of the BBQ grill, I started to suspect that America had quietly taken over Iceland a few years ago and no one had made much of a fuss about it. Other than the names, the only signs that this was a novel from halfway around the world were the mention of a "traditional Icelandic sweater" and a plot development involving a military base built during WWII, full of British and American troops. Those of us in search of the exotic, it seems, will have to go farther afield than Iceland - or transfer to a genre less constrained by the demands of suspense.

What we are left with, then, is a reasonably well-constructed mystery novel. The book is fairly predictable, except for the fact that the murder took place more than sixty years ago (a body is found when a plot is being excavated for new housing). Such old crimes bring up interesting issues, since it is unlikely that the perpetrator can still be punished. What then is the point of the investigation? Is there such a thing as cosmic justice - does every murder deserve to have its mysteries unraveled, simply because of a strange human feeling that such events deserve explanations? Does truth have a value outside of possible temporal consequences?

These questions are unfortunately more interesting than the book itself, which switches between the investigation and scenes from an unidentified family with an abusive husband. Clearly, then, either the husband or the wife is in that grave. You read on to see exactly how it happened, and for no other reason. Not a lot of brilliant sleuthing is done - mostly red herrings are uncovered, and then someone is found who explains exactly what went down. I wasn't disappointed by the end, but there was none of the intellectual pleasure that comes out of, say, a sturdy P.D. James plot.

I didn't get much else out of this book, unfortunately. There are some hilariously terrible attempts to render slang, which I imagine are the translator's fault. Here is the detective's daughter teenage jive: "Mum threw a wobbler when I said I was coming to see you." (Perhaps in her anger she tossed a frisbee at her?) Also, the book is written in the broken-up "exciting" prose of thrillers. A sample: "He dithered. Caught unawares. Then invited her inside." And. So. On. I hate this kind of writing. It is the literary equivalent of the whipsnap editing and swooping camerawork of bad TV action shows: an attempt to fabricate a dynamism that the narrative is unable to produce on its own.

Anyway, I would never have read this novel if it was just another decent piece of American pulp, but I suppose I'm glad I did. The discovery of nothing is itself a discovery, no? I admit that it is a little depressing, though, that mediocrity appears to basically be the same the world over. Wouldn't it be more interesting if "this book is typical" meant something different in every country?

My Mortal Enemy, by Willa Cather

I've read three of Willa Cather's books - My Ántonia in middle school, and again recently; A Lost Lady in college; and The Professor's House a few months ago - and liked all of them. They were all basically written at a stretch, it turns out, between 1918 and 1925. I will need to verify this further, but after reading My Mortal Enemy, I suspect that after this period she was lost to art; the shift that takes place is the sort that writers do not recover from.

My Mortal Enemy was written in 1926, a year after The Professor's House, and a few of the elements that appear briefly in that book - a fascination with Catholicism, for example - become the focus of this one. There is also something that I can only call a massive grudge against life as it is actually lived. In The Professor's House, this grudge seemed somehow legitimate - it was a dramatization of the compromises that very few people can avoid without dying young. When I finished the book, I thought of an Empson quote from Some Versions of Pastoral: "the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."

Alongside this sense of loss, though, there was a deeply unforgiving strain that I felt entered Cather's work for the first time. I wrote down a long passage from the section narrated by Tom Outland, the book's unspoiled ideal of life as it ought to be lived. He remains pure to the end because he gets killed in WWI (don't worry, I am giving nothing away) before he has to muddy his hands with marriage and moneymaking and other such messy realities.

When he is walking around Washington, D.C. (my former home) he rents a room from a low-level bureaucrat and his wife. Here are some representative passages: "How it did use to depress me," he writes, "to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big building at sunset! Their lives seemed to me so petty, so slavish." And later: "Thousands of them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery, who ought to be free..."

Now, these passages struck rather deep, because I have been one of that mob and felt, as who does not, what a poor sort of life it is. But I also wanted to protest, because there was more to my life than Tom is willing to grant - and more to the lives of pretty much everyone else I knew who succumbed to that routine. Outland portrays the couple he lived with as concerned only with money and maintaining their wretched social status. How does this boy - depicted elsewhere as so generous - decide that these other clerks are "all more or less like" them? This thought clearly belonged to Cather more than Tom, and it is an unfair one.

A realistic novelist, I think, has to at least make an attempt to see people as they see themselves, and none was made here. Part of these passages' power comes, I suppose, from their unwillingness to see the entire truth - it is the rare novel that is fair to everyone that walks through its pages. In any case, Cather wisely understands that she has no real interest in these people, and focuses on the ones whose virtues she can see; the clerks take up only a few pages. Which is why The Professor's House is still a great book. In My Mortal Enemy, on the other hand, this bitter side of Cather's worldview has taken over, and instead of the simple, heroic human virtues that she once wrote about, there is only a vague longing for the spiritual communion found in the Catholic church.

The book is a portrait of a long marriage - one something like the couple that she depicted in the Outland story - with every drop of joy taken out of it. The husband works all his life to support his wife, Myra, and she gives up her inheritance and her rich uncle to marry him - and for reasons that are never clear she later wishes that she had not done so. They are never truly happy, and at the end of the book she says that her husband has been, in a way, her mortal enemy.

Why? I don't know. Maybe because when Myra left everything behind for her husband she started to expect more than he could ever give her. But Myra also seems to have voluntarily and inexplicably poisoned her marriage with unfounded jealousy and needless hate. Cather seems to believe that this is somehow the hidden truth of all marriages. At the end, the narrator says that whenever she sees "the bright beginning of a love story" or "a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination" (the emphasis is mine) she remembers Myra's words about her husband.

God help someone that feels this when they see a young couple in love. Maybe our philosopher is right to be suspicious of such emotions, but I would recommend that she stop writing novels. The real problem is not that this observation is useless or necessarily false - I suppose I could see a poisonous but still honest novel built around it - but Cather has failed to produce anything like a flesh-and-blood marriage to dramatize her observation. The book is still as well-written as the books of hers that I love, and as well put together, but it is all in the service of an inhuman - anti-human - argument.

When I finished the book, I started to wonder: what is it about an attraction to Catholicism that brings out such a bitter view of human nature? You would think that the religion would foster kindness and forgiveness, and it seems to actually produce the opposite - at least in prose writers like Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene. (Who else? Burgess, maybe?) Maybe people who already have an intensely pessimistic outlook are drawn to religion, since only a god could redeem a world that looked so horrible. In any case, I can admire the craft shown in Greene and O'Connor's books (and in this one as well) and still feel a profound revulsion for them. They strike me somehow as the products of diseased imaginations.

The B Side

I was doing a search for Solomon Burke, whose new albumI am enjoying a great deal, and I stumbled upon this wonderful website. Its creator appears to own rooms full of old singles, and each post centers around an underappreciated B-side (which you can listen to, static and all) along with incredibly detailed biographies of the artist, someone associated with the creation of the music, or a summary of the state of the genre when the single was recorded.

His loves are primarily 60s soul, old school hip hop, and early funk (I wholeheartedly share the first) but it's never easy to say where one genre ends and another begins. He also has less extensive sites devoted to A sides, old gospel, and extremely obscure soul. God bless obsessives! Each post overflows with enthusiasm for its subject and is filled with information that I at least find fascinating (Bobby Byrd's contribution to the James Brown sound! The origin of the term R&B!) It is also one of the few personal sites on the Web in which vanity appears to play a negligible role. Good for him. I would love to know this much about anything.

Pan's Labyrinth

A few days ago I went to see Pan's Labyrinth. It has garnered near universal praise, and even claims of permanence from critics not usually given to hyperbole. I saw it and could see the reasons for the praise while being unimpressed and largely unmoved. It is a beautifully executed film, clearly the work of a single creator with a very particular vision, but one without much moral seriousness.

It is the story of a young, imaginative girl named Ofelia, travelling with her mother to a military camp in the woods. This is towards the end of the Spanish civil war. Her father is dead, and her mother is remarrying one of Franco's officers, who is devoted to wiping out the last of the Communist resistance. It is also established early that he is a sadist, eager to inflict pain for its own sake. The movie alternates between Ofelia's elaborate fantasies and increasingly brutal scenes of violence and torture.

Pan's Labyrinth clearly wants to be a parable that explores the nature of evil: both where it might come from and how to prevent it from corrupting you. But it never attempts to grapple with either of these questions. Instead it presents, repeatedly and as if they were revelatory, two answers: Don't obey blindly and don't hurt innocent people. I wholeheartedly agree, but I think the 20th century has shown that it is both just this simple and much more complicated. A movie that presents only the simplicity is grappling with a straw man.


I've been reading Primo Levi's memoirs recently, and they are such honest attempts to understand the nature of evil (and occasionally, forthrightly declare incomprehension) that this movie seems a little cheap in comparison. One of the reasons that Levi's books give off such a feeling of radiant decency is that he refuses to turn any person into a symbol. No one is allowed to represent goodness or innocence or corruption; there are only Henri and Jean and Cesare. They may represent characteristics that are widespread, but he always insists on dealing with them as individuals. I quickly got the sense that Del Toro had no such feeling for Ofelia. Early in the movie, Ofelia's mother asks her to tell her brother (in utero) a story to calm him down, and she tells one about a flower that grows at the top of mountain of thorns and provides immortality.

Something was wrong with this story. I remember feeling a line grate - I think it was about how all men fear death. The language was false; it was not a story that a child would tell. It existed to reinforce Del Toro's ideas, but it also meant that Ofelia was no longer convincing as a human being - she was now a symbol instead of a real little girl. And she remains a symbol throughout the movie - of innocence, of humanity, of spirited and decent disobedience: but one can only feel so much concern for the fate of symbols, unless they are of unusually deep resonance.

And are they? The most striking parts of the movie are its scenes of fantasy. They involve a faun that Ofelia meets who tells that her that she is the long lost daughter of the king of the underworld, but that she must perform three tasks to prove that she has not been too long among the mortals and lost her original nature. These sequences are the main reason for the praise this movie has received. Each of them, upon closer reflection, connects back to the Franco narrative. The first parable involves a huge frog that lives inside a tree, eating its food and slowly sapping the tree of its strength. In much the same way, the Fascists are eating sumptuous feasts while handing out miniscule bread rations to the peasants.

The rapacity and blind brutality of the regime is represented in a later sequence by a monster with eyes on its grasping hands. There are diagrams of it eating children. It consists only of appetite. Once roused, it is intent on consuming anything it can grasp; it has no real drive beyond its hunger.

Both of these are striking and indelible sequences. But this does not necessarily indicate that they are, in a deeper sense, meaningful. I think in many movies of this fantastical variety indelibility is somehow seen as an end in itself, as a sign that the director's imagination has succeeded. But it is not particularly difficult, with the resources available to a modern filmmaker, to create an indelible image. Imagine a giraffe with three heads. A man whose hair consists of thousands of moving antennae, with eyes on the end, like snails. I would be initially impressed if I saw those creatures alive and on film and then, if they did not have a real connection to the rest of the story, bored - as I was in Big Fish, and plenty of other movies that people call magical and then never want to see again.

In Pan's Labyrinth, the connections do exist, but they quickly exhaust their implications because none of them actually help to elucidate the phenomenon that they refer to. The frog in the tree may be a striking image, but it does not tell me anything that was not already obvious about a bunch of people having a feast while handing out bread rations. I remember thinking, when teachers pointed out connection after connection in Mann or Joyce, that the fact that these connections exist is not necessarily evidence of depth. Such breadcrumbs are relatively easy to scatter. I never understood why I should be impressed solely because a man's name is an allusion to Dante, and the apple that he eats as a snack connects to two other apples placed strategically around the book, leading to obvious connections to the Fall, as well as the golden apples and the Garden of the Hesperides, and look, aren't those the letters E V E hidden right there in his name, etc. etc.

This method of artistic creation strikes me as something like building a cathedral out of wicker. There are no blocks any more, just tiny tendrils connecting everything to everything else. And this mesh is, perhaps, stable, but give it a little push - by pointing out, for example, that millions of thematic connections exist between these people but no human ones - and the wind will take it away.

Pan's Labyrinth is not this sort of film, but it shares this artistic philosophy and duplicates some of its flaws. I felt again the lack of humanity that comes from an excessive love of symbols and connections. There is no such thing as tragedy in a world like this. It is both indelible and completely impermanent.

Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

I walked through a museum a few years ago and noticing that a lot of the older paintings were, as far as I could tell, pretty bad. Even taking changes in styles and conventions into account, I got the definite impression that these were painters of minor skill. And I wondered whether a painting that managed to survive for enough years would eventually end up in a museum, even with nothing else to recommend it. I figured that it probably would, and that there was nothing much wrong with this. Museums don't attempt to present only mankind’s highest achievements; they have a responsibility to catalogue as well as celebrate. And a mediocre painting is probably much more indicative of the style of an era than a brilliant one.

Literature, as far as I can tell, recognizes no similar obligations. A so-so novel from 1759 gathers no additional luster because of its age, except maybe for a social historian. Which is why, frankly, I am extraordinarily puzzled by the survival and continued acclaim accorded to Beowulf. Children everywhere are forced to read it — many more, I suspect, than the Iliad or the Odyssey. I see the Heaney translation on bookshelves everywhere. I picked it up recently, and other than a phrase here and there (usually a striking description of something) I found nothing that seemed to me like real poetry.

It was also impossible to enjoy as an adventure story. I could never get a handle on what anything looked like and, rather often, couldn't figure out what was actually going on. Has anyone read the fight scenes? Grendel’s size kept varying in my mind from roughly the size of a large man to thirty feet tall. I had an enormously hard time figuring out the choreography: when arms were ripped off, how blows were dealt. It was frustrating in the same way as the incompetently edited fight scenes in most Hollywood action movies. Everything is described but nothing seems to make sense together. You don’t encounter confusion like this in Homer. Every once in a while you wonder why something is being said at all, and it’s clear that there are conventions that you might not understand, but it is always clear what happens — on the battlefield, in conversation; everything is fully and concretely imaged.

In Beowulf, I felt like I was dealing with the infancy of storytelling, in a civilization that had only the barest interest in human nature. I wondered continually why I was reading it at all. Then I would flip to the back of the book and read the effusive praise about Heaney’s translation, with various notables saying that he had made it work, at last, as an English-language poem.

Now, I don’t know old English, so let me just judge what I’m capable of understanding. Here is a quote:

The bloody swathe that Swedes and Geats cut through each other was everywhere.

Does this seem like nit-picking? A swathe cannot be everywhere. It is a wide belt-like line (as in one cut by scythe, the dictionary tells me) -- a swathe that is everywhere is no longer a swathe. Is this line in the original? I feel like it must be; it has the same imprecision and nebulousness as the fight scenes. These are people that do not know how to tell a story yet, and if Heaney occasionally stumbles I would say that it is largely because Beowulf is not worth lavishing much care on.

There was a single passage, lasting a few pages, that was almost up to the standard of the Homeric epics -- it was, unsurprisingly, about power, and how once people achieve it they tend to get lazy and overconfident, and let it slip away. Managing power appears to be one of the few things this society was interested in, besides drinking mead and chopping each other up, and they thankfully got a few lines of lasting verse out of it.

How this book sold so well is an immense puzzle to me. Who would ever want to re-read it? If you wish to bother with it, I recommend getting it from the library once, filling in this gap in your historical knowledge, and leaving it at that.

Reading for Character

Among the various reasons I stopped subscribing to The Atlantic—the continuous inclusion of Christopher Hitchens’s articles, that interminable travelogue by Bernard Henri-Lévy—was a little feature called “The Close Read.” Its subtitle was What Makes Good Writing Good. It could also have been called Unremarkable Samples from Books that No One Will Remember in Two Months, Including Me; or—and this is just an ungenerous hunch of mine—Passages from Books by People I Know.

Various people wrote it, and I don’t much blame them for failing to turn this misbegotten idea into a success. I can’t imagine what I would have done with it. When I copy down passages from fiction, they are usually essayistic, and contain ideas I want to remember, not (necessarily) great writing. And the bits that seem strangely beautiful almost always lose their magic when they’re taken out of context; I read them later and have no idea why I copied them down.

I recently got an idea, though, for a similar feature that I could actually write; it would be called Reading for Character, or maybe Reading for an Author’s Mood. Most people can get a sense of what a writer is like from reading a few pages of creative work, but it’s usually impossible to pinpoint what passages created this impression. They’re rarely the most memorable sections, or the ones worth copying down; a writer has his guard up at these points, or (if we’re lucky) inspiration has struck and he’s picking up a transmission from somewhere else.

Where you can get this sense is from sentences written with partial attention: narrative connective tissue, transitions, things that could as easily be written one way as another. Decisions made here are of so little importance to the quality of the final work that they are only attributable to character. I read a passage recently that provides a good example. It’s from a perfectly okay movie review by Stephen Holden in the New York Times of a documentary about Ingmar Bergman.

This intimate, compelling film, which opens today at the Film Forum in Manhattan, confirms what any astute viewer of his films has probably guessed: that they are intensely autobiographical.

I didn’t remember this sentence at all after I read the review, but at the end I got the impression that Stephen Holden was not someone I liked—that he was, at least when he wrote this review, a bit of an ass. I went back to read it again to figure out why I felt this way, since he didn’t say anything that actually offended me. And I settled on this sentence. Why would you write “any astute viewer”? That sentence could easily have been written “what viewers of his films have probably guessed” – or “what most viewers of his film have guessed.” Either would have been a much more generous sentiment, and probably more accurate.

I like the “probably” on top of it, too, because that implies that even some astute viewers have missed what Stephen Holden sees as elementary. He probably never meant to imply any of these things; he wrote the sentence without thinking, and he happened to be in a pompous mood, which may or may not be a permanent condition with him. Incidentally, I was reading some old work e-mails of mine and realized that I sounded like (and actually was) a jerk. Once I said that I “had no idea” what someone’s e-mail address was; it would have been just as simple, and more sensible, to say that I didn’t know what it was.

Why did I write that? It implied that my boss was being stupid for expecting me to know what this person’s e-mail address was, which I suppose was what I thought, completely unfairly, because I hated my job on that day and it crept into my language. Work e-mails are usually forgotten in an hour, and seen as utilitarian and characterless, but I bet you can trace someone’s outlook on life more easily and accurately there than in, for lack of a better word, expressive communications, which tend to put on more layers of artifice.

The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz

I wonder how many books got sold or thrown out the year after the Soviet Union collapsed. My friend told me that his public library had shelves and shelves of books for sale written by political scientists during the Cold War, all trying to puzzle out what the Soviets were thinking. Most of them are temporary in the way that all such books are temporary, but I’m sure there is a great deal of intelligence there that is perhaps never going to see the light of day again, except by the occasional historian.

Among the books that have already started to gather dust are the most distinguished works related to communism. I doubt many people will read Koestler in another fifty years. I don’t know a single person that’s read John Reed, or Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky (unless you count Tony Blair; it’s apparently one of his favorites). All those novels about nuclear anxiety will probably soon be forgotten too: On the Beach, etc. Even Faulkner’s famous Nobel lecture seems so dated. None of my friends who studied philosophy care much about Karl Popper or Alexander Herzen.

The obvious exception is 1984, which survives even as Animal Farm, deservedly, disappears along with the memory of its historical originals. Another book that deserves to survive, and I fear will not, is Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind. I am a little embarrassed about why I picked it up. The book is a study of the capitulation of artists to the demands of Communism, and I was looking for some insight into the bad state of political affairs in this country—the fact that so many people who seem bright enough are willing to accept what they must know are lies for the sake of their political affiliation.

The book’s epigram appeared to prepare me for getting what I wanted; it is a quote from “an old Jew of Galicia”:

When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever say he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

Hooray, I thought! Take that, Dubya! Because what I wanted out of this book was to be told things I already knew, with a dash of wit, from someone with some moral authority. Basically, I was looking for another one of the political cheerleading books that work their way, within a year, from the central display case to the $1 section at the back of the store. I was a symptom of the bad situation I was describing.

In any case, as I started reading, I realized I wasn’t going to get what I was looking for. Milosz describes the attractions of Communism; the hard questions that any all-embracing philosophy spares a person from answering for herself; and the strange sort of dissembling life produced in a society of informants. There were oblique analogies here to American life, but nothing direct. Everything was beautifully written, and clearly the product of an incisive mind, but it felt like a book that no one would much care to read fifty years from now.

And then, a few chapters in, Milosz starts writing a different sort of book. He produces four character sketches of artists known to him who, in some form of another, decided to bend their art to the demands of the state. He doesn’t name any of these people, but each can be said to conform to a certain artistic type; the names of the chapters are Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, the Disappointed Lover, and so on. Each one is enthralling. It is one of the most beautiful acts of identification I have ever come across. Novelists are continually writing about artists – painters, musicians, other writers – but I have never come across another book that I felt had such insight into the different varieties of the artistic temperament.

Milosz does not attempt any generalizations; the sketches, in addition to being a history of life in Poland during the Nazi years, are attempts to see what made these specific writers decide to alter their art to the dictates of socialist realism. Milosz describes their life and temperament, he reads everything they have written; and slowly, he brings out some element of their outlook that keeps emerging through their life and work, something that makes them willing to settle, in the end, for untruth.

Most Western artists no longer have to worry about the demands of the state, but the traits that make a person susceptible to one capitulation will always leave him open to others, and modern society has no end of compromises that it encourages artists to make. Forget modern society—life encourages compromises. It is always easier to take your cues from convention, give up before something is quite right—or, for that matter, just leave the damn page blank and go to bed.

There are a few books that I feel like I need to read every few years to steady myself somehow. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is one; I think this will become another. I encourage everyone to read it.

A Revaluation (The Great Gatsby)

I read The Great Gatsby in high school and don’t remember thinking anything in particular about it. I went to Fitzgerald’s grave around then (it was just across from my high school); the book’s lovely last sentence is carved on his tombstone, and I’ve never forgotten it. During college, I would occasionally come across passages from Gatsby quoted in other books to make various points about America and the American dream; the scene with Daisy and the shirts was quoted in a book about consumerism. The green light and the ash heap showed up in various essays.

Eventually, the consensus about the profundity of this book – along with, I’m sure, an attraction to Fitzgerald’s life – started to make me think that I must have missed something in high school (god knows I missed plenty) and just needed to pick the book up again. A professor of mine recommended Babylon Revisited, which was supposed to be Fitzgerald’s best short story. I finished it and remember thinking, a little puzzled, Wow, this is bad.

Well, no matter, I thought: his masterpiece is Gatsby, and his almost-masterpiece (as everyone knows) is Tender is the Night. The latter was assigned for another class college, and I was a little shocked to find myself thinking, after the first twenty pages or so, Wow, this is actually awful. Then it got a little better, and ended so beautifully that I forgot about how lame so much of it was. It might not even have been the entire ending; I remember being extraordinarily moved by just the last paragraph. I don’t much remember the rest.

So now, after all these years, I decided it was time to take up Gatsby again. The only serious candidate for the great American novel other than Moby Dick, right? Glorious prose? Trenchant insights into America, money, love, and how they are all wrapped up together? I was excited. Pretty soon – I would say again within twenty pages – I started to get worried. The book begins well enough, but as soon as the first chapter ends, there is a huge, dry stretch: predictable, toothless satire; stilted dialogue based purely on one or two catch phrases; and characters that are basically patched together from one personality trait and a physical feature.

Even the famous passages that would show up now and then – Daisy’s voice that sounds like money, the shirts on the bed – seemed false and unconvincing in context. The premise of the novel is a great one, but the actual plot is so full of ludicrous coincidences and melodrama that it’s hard to remember how moving the central situation is. Again, the book ends well, but the rest was so mediocre that it didn’t change my basic disappointment.

Fitzgerald’s limitations as a writer are never clearer than the section when he assumes the voice of Jordan Baker, the young “cool, insolent” lady golfer. Here’s a piece of his attempt, as she narrates a story to Nick: “I was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.”

“Bit into the soft ground.” A better writer would have passed on that phrase if he had any interest in plausibility -- which is closely related to respect for a character. But Fitzgerald is incapable of capturing another person’s voice; when he tries, the person sounds exactly like him. So he has to give people little tics to animate them somehow: Gatsby with his “old sport,” Meyer Rothstein with his inability to pronounced the letter x. He describes a person’s personality instead of capturing it on the page; he has no knack for creating interesting people, so his usual method is just to insist that they are very special indeed. Occasionally it works. Here’s my favorite passage in the book, about Gatsby’s smile:

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

The book never gets this good again. In addition to the things I mentioned above, the actual prose takes a nosedive too. For someone known for the quality of his sentences, it is astonishing how unedited most of the book seems. Fitzgerald is continually using words whose meaning he appears to only half-understand. His sentences are full of redundancies (“clever, shrewd men”) and he is a master of the ill-considered adverb (“he found her excitingly desirable”). Edmund Wilson wrote an essay about him where he pretty much took his measure. Wilson is writing about This Side of Paradise, which Fitzgerald is supposed to have transcended completely in writing Gatsby, but I think this passage could easily apply to every work of his I’ve read:

The story itself, furthermore, is very immaturely imaged: it is always just verging on the ludicrous. And, finally, This Side of Paradise is one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published (a fault which the publisher’s proofreader seems to have made no effort to remedy.) Not only is it ornamented with bogus ideas and faked literary references, but it is full of literary words tossed about with the most reckless inaccuracy.

Wilson goes on to say that Fitzgerald does not commit the unpardonable sin for a novelist; that is, his book does not fail to live. And it’s true, several scenes from Gatsby do stay alive in the mind, and appear to have worked their way into the American literary consciousness. However, as “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” proves, simply being memorable is not necessary a sign of any deeper merit. In any case, something bothers me more than everything I’ve mentioned so far, and that is that there is something very phony about a lot of Fitzgerald’s writing. Even in his most beautiful passages, there is some element of false bombast -— some disastrous faux-poetic choice, usually -- that continually makes me think: He’s lying.

Let me give you an example. This passage ends the chapter when Gatsby tells Nick about kissing Daisy. “Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

Something important has apparently happened here; Nick has grazed the edge of a profound mystery. And I don’t believe it; I don’t believe that a man feeling anything deeply is going to write something like “wisp of startled air.” Because that is nonsense.

I always feel like Fitzgerald is wrapping his phrases around unfelt emotions. Even that famous last passage—read the sentence before it, the one everyone forgets: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” There it is again in “orgastic future,” a little voice that says (to me at least) “bullshit.”

Compare the end of My Àntonia to The Great Gatsby. The two books are written just a few years apart; both end on the same word—“past”—both have the same elegiac tone. But there is nothing false about Cather’s last passage. Every word is written with sincerity and authority. It is the work of an artist. Fitzgerald’s is the work of a good writer who has struck upon a pretty phrase.

I suppose Fitzgerald’s life has something to do with this book’s popularity, along with the fact that it deals with the big American themes, and is therefore suitable for classroom discussion and scholarly analysis. But it also isn’t that great, and it’s odd that America – which has produced so many genuine works of genius – has decided to hold it up as one of the premier achievements of its culture.

Textbook diversity

I recently stumbled across a website that provides stock images for textbook publishers and other media outlets. Unlike Reuters and similar services, however, this organization has a slightly narrower focus. Take a look at it, and make sure you move your cursor up to the scrolling bar of images at the top of the screen.

At first, I thought this service was hilarious just because it was such a tiny, bizarre niche. But part of the humor lies in the fact that the website is blatant about something which is usually handled quietly.

A related story that got me thinking about this question of creating images of a cheerful diversity that doesn't actually exist: Houghton Mifflin got in trouble recently for using healthy children from a modeling agency and having them sit in wheelchairs when shooting their textbook images. Apparently they did this so often that they had to start keeping careful track to make sure that someone who was handicapped in Chapter 2 was not jumping around in Chapter 5. (Incidentally, insisting on a vision of the world where children in wheelchairs are stuck there forever, in addition to being rather hopeless, is clearly discriminatory, since it disregards the claims of the large community of American faithhealers.) Naturally, there is something a little seedy about this sort of thing, and the author of the article where I read about these various practices, says that truth is being sacrificed to political correctness.

He makes some legitimate points. It is offensive for the CEO of PhotoEdit (and Hollywood, for that matter) to indicate that some races can be passed off as others, and clearly we can't pretend that the high points of American history and literature are more diverse than they actually are. And if a school can’t actually find a legitimate picture of black and white kids together, then perhaps something is going wrong at their university.

Some of his other points, however, indicate that he has a very particular version of the truth that he wants presented. He rails against the publisher for not wanting to use a picture of a barefoot African villager, indicating this ignores the grinding poverty that is the norm in Africa. Who exactly decides what is representative? And even if determining this were possible, why exactly are we required to depict the median? Shouldn't the pictures in certain types of books be of the world as we wish it to be, instead of the world as it is?

I'm sure that somewhere out there in an African village is a kid with shoes. In a French textbook introducing a student to francophone Africa, I don’t see why the picture can’t be of a healthy smiling kid, instead of someone dying of cholera. A complete education will inform a student what the actual proportion is, but indicating that the former image is somehow a lie is ridiculous.

I foresee an objection that the world as we want it to be would, perhaps, not contain anyone handicapped. But this would be a world in which no one ever had an accident, and medicine had reached a stage that it appears unlikely ever to reach. A world where kids in African villages have shoes, however, and different sorts of people enjoy hanging out with each other might require a little more generosity than we appear to currently possess, but it can at least be imagined.

Obviously, an image in a textbook doesn’t go very far towards creating this reality. But even if someone laughs at how unrepresentative a collection of images is, acknowledging the gap between reality and fantasy is at least the beginning of progress. I read a good essay recently by John Crowley that said that perhaps creating an awareness of this gap is one of the functions of art.

The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino

I read this book largely on train rides and one long flight, and it was a wonderful companion. It's been a while since since I've read something that made me this happy. The story starts in the 1760s, with a twelve year old Italian Baron climbing up into a tree to defy an order from his father. The family assumes that after he is through sulking, he'll come down, but the Baron decides that he is never going to return to land; and like Robinson Crusoe, there is some pleasure to be had just from seeing how he manages to stays up there. The book is, in some ways, an elegy for feudal Italian society, since the Enlightenment happens while the Baron is up in trees (incredibly, he finds a way to take part); and after his death, the thick groves of trees that allowed him to travel over such an immense distance are gradually cut down.

The book is narrated as a memoir written by the Baron's younger brother, and a great deal of the book's beauty comes from Calvino's creation of this sad, wise voice. Calvino clearly understands the danger of a fanciful premise, and makes sure that there is nothing fanciful about the prose or narrative style. It reads something like an exceptionally well-written journalistic account, with attempts at corroboration and alternate versions of the same story.

A little over halfway through, thoroughly delighted, I thought about how lovely it would be to read this story to a child. And then the book began dealing with the adult Baron's love affairs and, to my mind, started to unravel a little -- or at least become less purely delightful. At first I thought it was just because the fairytale world of the first part of the book had been spoiled with adult concerns, but now I think it's something else. The memoir is clearly being written for the public by a nobleman in the early 19th century, and there's something jarring about this man mentioning a woman opening her blouse to bare her rosy nipples. There is something far too modern and unreticent about his treatment of the Baron's affairs, and it breaks apart the reality of the book.

Calvino could still have dealt with them, but it would have to be done in a different way. (At the end of the book, the brother indicates he is just writing in a notebook for his own private pleasure, but I suspect that this is Calvino realizing that something has gone wrong, because this is certainly not how the first part of the book reads.) After the Baron's affair with his one great love, the book never feels quite as pure as did in the beginning; it's hard to forget, now, that you're reading a whimsical story. Characters from other books start to show up (well, at least one, from War and Peace); events strain credulity; and one catches the author trying to be funny, instead of letting the story produce its own humor. But, for a long stretch, this is a brilliant, delightful book. And strangely sad, somehow. I've read if on a winter's night and Invisible Cities, and it's astonishing how wide-ranging Calvino's talents are, how many voices he can assume with integrity and ease. I may have to go back and read those books again, but right now this is the only one I really love.

James Schuyler's letters

Much to my surprise, Bookslut published (a month later) the other review I had submitted to them - and this time with my name. Here it is. I hope you enjoy it. I actually got rather interested in the subject of when people first got the idea of publishing private correspondence -- thinking that this might be a real psychological turning point of some sort -- but was never able to figure it out. Granted, my efforts consisted of sending off an e-mail to an old professor of mine (no response, sadly) but I wasn't sure how else to pursue the subject. I don't mean the oldest collection of letters that's even been published, but the year in which someone first thought that a collection of posthumous letters would, on its own, find an audience. Any help is appreciated.

Pennies from Heaven

There is a local library near our house that has very few books, and appears to be used primarily as a place to rent videos for free. In any case, it is full of completely forgotten movies on videocassette that no one rents, which my girlfriend occasionally picks up on a whim. Anyway, she picked up, as a joke, what appeared to be a kitschy musical called Pennies from Heaven, with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. The only indication that it was anything unusual or special was a bit of praise on the back from Pauline Kael.

In any case, we watched it, and it is extraordinary. It is one of the darkest movies I have ever seen - it's the kind of musical I could imagine Nathanael West writing. The movie deals with a song salesman in the great depression who dreams of opening up a record store. He is a stock figure from old movies: the big dreamer. His wife is frigid; he's sexually voracious. He falls in love (or appears to) with another woman, has an affair, gets her pregnant.

In most movies, the big dreamer's dreams are actually worthwhile, and his love is actually sincere. But everything about this person is incredibly second-rate. And his completely lack of consistency and sincerity ruins life for everyone around him. The songs, for the most part, instead of expressing any sort of exuberant emotion, just express the character's delusions. Throughout the movie -- which I can't say, incidentally, that I actually enjoyed -- there is this feeling of something like cognitive dissonance. You have no idea how to react to anything: a love song is sung with semi-obscene sexual gestures; sometimes songs run directly counter to what is actually happening, and occasionally express what the character is feeling.

Occasionally, I got the sense that this was because the filmmakers themselves didn't know what they were going for. The movie actually works a lot better when the songs work unironically -- as they do, for the most part, in the second half of the movie -- and just express what the character is feeling. Even then, the dissonance comes -- as in West's books -- with wondering how much sympathy we are supposed to give the characters, how seriously we are supposed to take their plight. Like that awful letter in Miss Lonelyhearts from the girl who was born without a nose. Her voice is captured too perfectly to not feel connected with her, but there's always this feeling that all of it might be a joke to the writer, who is just playing around with the conventions of what captures our sympathy.

I felt the same way here sometimes -- but too many of the scenes played too honestly, with too much compassion, to not have the hand of some sort of artist behind them. I read the biography of the writer at allmovie, and apparently he's a legend in Britain, where this was originally a seven-hour miniseries. Anyway, at first I recoiled a little bit with the usual line about movies like this -- why would anyone spend time and money on a movie just to get depressed? -- but it stayed with me for too long. It's worth seeing.

(Incidentally, I realize that DVDs are a superior technology, but in four or five years all of those discs in the library will be too scratched up to play at all, and get thrown away; old videocassettes may go fuzzy in places, but they will at least play - if our library is any indication - for about twenty years. It also struck me that, despite the greater cultural importance of movies, a pre-DVD/VHS movie that didn't immediately find an audience -- and isn't made by someone later acknowledged as a master -- is much more deeply lost and unlikely to be rediscovered than a book. Anyway, it turns out this movie has been released on DVD, so see it if you have the chance.)

M31: A Family Romance, by Stephen Wright

I wrote this to get the reviewer spot at Bookslut. I thought I'd post it before it was completely forgotten. It's all right - the voice is a little bland, and I sound a little bit like a bored professional, but I don't think I say anything too stupid. The only lie in it is that I made myself sound more enthusiastic about the book than I actually was.

Here the truth: the book is very good and still probably not worth reading. It's scary: Wright's clearly an imaginative writer, far above the usual run, but it took very little time for me to feel like I'd reached the borders of his talent, at least as expressed in this book. I could tell that M31 was good and I still got bored. If it was a movie of similar quality, I would have been perfectly content and entertained and recommended it to my friends. But for some reason as soon as I pick up a book and it doesn't stack up to Tolstoy and Proust I wonder why the hell I'm wasting my time.

There's this scary line I read once from Simone Weil about how the only function a second-rate writer serves is to help create an atmosphere out of which a man or woman of genius can emerge. It's an awful thing to consider for someone with literary aspirations, but when I read fiction I feel like I agree. Maybe this is why so many writers nowadays cram their books with information. Beauty is a roll of the dice, but people will always appreciate facts. Anyway, here's the review:

Since at least the 1950s, when city dwellers started escaping to the suburbs instead of out to the countryside, American novels and movies have capitalized on something that can be identified as rural dread. From Shirley Jackson to Deliverance, these works have always played to the suspicion that moving among all these placid, friendly farmers and small town folk were murderers, sodomites, and the insane. Ever motel had an owner with a knife behind his back, every basement a deformed child produced by incest and too much power line radiation. An urbanite driving across these vast flat spaces in the middle of the country might well feel that anyone could go crazy out here. Couldn’t looking out at miles and miles of corn be like staring at wallpaper? Eventually shapes would start moving around in there, and if you kept looking long enough they would probably become real.

Aliens, Elvis, the Virgin Mary: why are they never spotted in New York? Stephen Wright never answers this question directly, but he gives us enough information to figure it out for ourselves. M31: A Family Romance features a family that the locals call the “saucer people.” They live in what was once a church; a satellite dish next to the old steeple scans the sky for signals. They are surrounded by acres of corn, with the nearest neighbor visible only with binoculars. A single road goes by the house, and one day it brings a couple – one of them is a woman named Gwen who is sure she was contacted by aliens. They are here to see Dash and Dot, the patriarch and matriarch of the family, and celebrities on the UFO contactee circuit with multiple books under their belt explaining the ways of the Etherians to humans.

Alone in the house while the couple goes to the conferences are their five children: Maryse has a baby of her own whom she only feeds weight loss smoothies, which is all she drinks; Dallas, their teenage son, prefers beer; Edsel, their younger son, is convinced that he is adopted, for no apparent reason; and Zoe, the youngest, screams constantly and has seizures that her parents interpret as communications with the Occupants, the aliens. Trinity, the teenage daughter who seems like the sanest of the bunch, apologizes to their guests: “This family should be driven around in a van and displayed at pro-abortion rallies.”

For the first third of the book, however, the family appears to be no stranger than most: a lot of pointless sullenness and hostility, wisecracks, constant complaining, and showing off one’s wit in front of the guests. (The book features one of the most hilarious family dinners ever depicted in print.) The only sign that there is anything at all odd is the metallic spaceship, known only as The Object, that family members go in and out of when the mood strikes them; they are waiting for a sign from The Occupants to put it into use.

The family seems no more messed up than any other, but the undercurrent of dread remains. Gwen, the visitor, feels that something is wrong, and wants desperately to leave. A gun disappears. Dallas, the oldest son, seems to hover on the edge of violence out of sheer boredom. Something is strange about the way Dash acts around Gwen and his own daughters. And there is always the corn, stretching out for miles, with, as Dallas explains, American nuclear warheads buried just beneath them, pointed at the Soviet Union. And there is the immense sky, unpolluted by city lights, which the family looks up at with binoculars. They are searching for M31, the galaxy in Andromeda that Dash identifies as our home, where the informed will go when the Etherians come. Wright has done his research; UFO chaser jargon is scattered throughout the book. (The fascinated, the skeptical, and the crazy are welcome to find out about “deros” – or detrimental robots – at the Wikipedia entry for Robert Shaver.)

From here, things begin to happen – strange violent things – and revelation follows revelation, but none of them seem to clear anything up; this is one of the few books where things make less sense the more you find out. At the end, you are unsure about what happened, let alone why people acted the way they did. This appears to be the point; the characters are mysterious even to each other. The novel’s approach to its people can be summarized by how Dash looks at his wife: “He stood there until her eyes met his and in them were neither questions nor answers but sharp facets of light glimpsed for the first time, the deeps of a stranger.”

What holds the book together is Wright’s prose: his sure sense of metaphor; his precise, serpentine sentences; and his ability to capture strange floating states of being: “White veins of lightning stood up stark as winter trees on the far sky where he half expected to spot a grim finger or two reaching through the low racing clouds.” (Occasionally, my reaction was more “Wait, what?” but the passages can usually be deciphered.) By the end of the book, Wright is unable to keep the family together, and the book drives itself into the sort of hallucinatory tinfoil-wearing madness that I was glad it had avoided until then, since crazy people are never all that interesting. The ending strikes me as a failure, because the heart of the book was the family, not the obsession with aliens. The conclusion succeeds, however, even as it spins out of control, in evoking a combination of the various forms of dread that have filled the rest of this strange, beautiful novel: rural, domestic, cosmic, American.

Caleb Williams by William Godwin

I've finally found a book that I think could be enjoyed by every single person I know. And it was written in 1794! I've tried reading a few things that are identified as "page turners," and have usually found them so thinly conceived that the solution is either fairly obvious by the middle of the book, or so arbitrary as to be of no interest. Most modern mysteries annoy me for the latter reason. The only mystery writer I find consistently delightful is Chesterton, and this may partially be because they're short stories and consist almost entirely of problem and solution.

Anyway, it's been a long time since I've read a book this quickly just to find out what happens. I was unwilling to take out less than a hundred page chunk every day. The book is a sort of murder mystery, but the murderer is revealed about a third of the way into the novel; and the rest of it is just a cat and mouse game. But the relationship between the two men is so strange and interesting that I never got bored. There isn't a huge amount of subtlety in the novel, and most of the characters are painted in primary colors -- but the central situation is so genuinely fascinating that it carries the entire book.

I think I have a vivid image of pretty much every scene -- and, what is rarer, a completely clear idea of causality and chronology -- while also not remembering a single memorable sentence or interesting turn of phrase. In fact, the only places I noticed style was when a section was getting unusually melodramatic. Godwin doesn't bother describing much of anything beyond what is absolutely necessary, and has no real feeling for rhythm or music in words -- but I haven't come across another book that demonstrates how largely irrelevant this is to whether or not a novel is successful, as long as the author is not actually vague or imprecise. But the praise that you seem to see most commonly on the back of literary fiction, at least in my experience, relates to prose style.

This is, in fact, the thing that I tend to look for first in books -- college training, perhaps, or because it takes less time to make this judgement -- and I have occasionally maintained that I can tell whether a book's any good from the first page. (In my defense, this is almost always because of a pretentious style, not an undistinguished one.) And Godwin's prose was so blunt that in the beginning of the novel I was really wondering why this book was worth reading, but I couldn't have cared less when the plot started to move.

Anyway, a wonderful book. Everyone go out and read it and tell me what you think. There are, incredibly, four editions of it in print. If you have any sort of a long trip coming, pick it up. It is certainly the most rewarding and engrossing potboiler I've ever read. I was even thinking of turning it into a screenplay, set in some sort of semi-feudal landowner type society. Maybe the post-Reconstruction American South. But there a few time change difficulties that I haven't figured out how to get around.

A Musil review

A review I wrote of a collection of Robert Musil odds and ends is here. My name is nowhere to be found on the page, so you will have to take it on faith that I wrote it.

Garrison Keillor

There have been a flurry of articles about Garrison Keillor recently, but this one -- mentioned in Bookslut -- caught my attention for its unusually bitter tone. Everyone should read it, because it is a good example of the dangerous appeal of a vicious review.

First, I have not read Good Poems, nor do I have any particular attachment to Garrison Keillor, but it was still obvious to me that Kleinzahler never really scored any honest points. The only legitimate criticism of a book like this one is that the selection is lousy, but Kleinzahler never identifies a single poem that he wishes wasn't here; he appears to dislike Billy Collins, but doesn't give an example of how an included Collins poem is bad. He maintains that the poetry read on Keillor's shows "as a rule, isn't poetry at all but prose arbitrarily broken into lines masquerading as poetry" -- and doesn't provide a single example. A usual sample is "more often than not a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside — watching the geese head south, getting lost in the woods, this sort of thing." I would bet a fair amount that there is not a single poem in the collection that could be identified by this description. It is a lot easier to be funny than accurate.

The only poets Kleinzahler does mention are Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Burns, along with Whitman and a few other modern poets that he likes; but all in all, on the basis of no evidence, he wants us to accept that this is a "rotten collection." When he does actually quote something, he identifies himself as a reader of extraordinary insensitivity. He quotes William Carlos Williams's "To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (the relevant line is this one: "It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there" ) and then lays out this paragraph:

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else. Nor will their lives be diminished by not standing in front of a Cézanne at the art museum or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.

This is an incompetent reading of the Williams poem, which is a great deal more subtle than Kleinzahler can apparently handle. First of all, since he has decided to get news from this poem, it is worth pointing out that Williams does not specify a percentage of men who die miserably, so all those Americans at the ballpark are beside the point.

More importantly, there is a calculated ambiguity in the use of the word "miserably." The first meaning is that every day people die unhappy for lack of something that poetry can provide. But, in a sense that Kleinzahler misses completely, it can also mean that these deaths are miserable because of what they have missed, that these people's lives have been somehow wretched, pitiable, lacking in fulfillment, because they lived them with no sense of beauty or imagination. Their deaths are sad for the poet, not for the people themselves, who perhaps -- as Kleinzahler points out -- never knew or cared what they were missing. From his reading of this poem, though, I suspect Kleinzahler is missing quite a bit himself. Miserable bastard. If only he got as much out of poetry as I do.

Let me just point out one more incoherent paragraph in this thoroughly incoherent review.

Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the arts are not for everyone, and that bad art is worse than no art at all; and that good or bad, art's exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply entertain. And in this, Moby Dick or Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" are not different than the movie Cat in the Hat or Britney Spears wiggling her behind on stage; the former being more complexly entertaining and satisfying, but only for those who can appreciate the difference, and they are the minority.

I was thinking for a while about this phrase: "bad art is worse than no art at all." Is this really a choice that we get to make? Has there ever been a society where exclusively good art has been produced? Our only real options as a culture are a mixture of good and bad art, purely bad art, or no art at all, and the latter two scenarios are mainly created by totalitarian governments. And how in the world is reading a bad poem worse for someone than not reading one at all? They might be equivalent, but worse?

Kleinzahler is forced to make this clearly indefensible assertion because otherwise there would be no reason to get this pissed off about a collection of poems that he happens not to like, for reasons that he himself doesn't seem to be clear about -- especially when he also argues that art is merely entertainment that some people get and other people don't. It's true that for people of a certain sensitivity bad art really is offensive, but you can't defend unleashing that anger in print unless you think that it's honestly damaging people somehow. And that's the problem if you simultaneously argue that, objectively, it isn't all that important, while generating feelings of a strength that indicate that it might just be the most important thing in the world to you. Kleinzahler realizes this contradiction, I think, but to truly face it would require throwing out most of his review, so he slips out of the knot with a bad joke...

Poetry not only isn't good for you, bad poetry has been shown to cause lymphomas and, in extreme instances, pancreatic cancer, in laboratory experiments. (I'll have to dig around in my notes to find exactly what study that was....)

The only sense in which bad art can actually be bad for you, I think, is when it generates too many reviews like this, which I honestly believe stimulate malice and are bad for the character.

Haditha and Christopher Hitchens

Anytime you're looking for someone to say something either extremely obvious or thoroughly incoherent about the situation in Iraq, but with great vehemence, Christopher Hitchens is your man. He is at it again in Slate, arguing that Haditha is not like My Lai.

I hadn't heard much of this talk, so I was curious who was actually making this claim. Hitchens has his sources. He says there's been a lot of "glib talk about My Lai." This, in the style of Internet journalism, hyperlinks somewhere. And where does it hyperlink? Yes, to another Hitchens article about why Iraq isn't like Vietnam. Is Hitchens accusing himself of glib talk?

Well, no: My Lai is never mentioned in his article. Is it mentioned in the New York Times article that he links to, which compares Vietnam and Iraq? No: that article was written long before Haditha, and mentions no massacres. Anyway, before I analyze the rest of this argument, I would just like to make something absolutely clear about this: Christopher Hitchens is a liar. If you link to something that is supposed to corrobate your argument, and it leads here, then you are either being dishonest or are just an incompetent journalist. Why do people keep publishing this guy?

Here are some of Hitchens main points: My Lai took all day; more people were killed. The army now warns people not to do such things again. Indeed, all of this is true. I waited to see where this was headed, but then he switches gears, which I must say is one of his characteristic moves:

The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us.

Indeed, one ought not need add this, Mr. Hitchens; I will throughly concede that these massacres took place in two different countries. Two different enemies were involved. They even took place, yes, more than thirty years apart. Why has no one else thought to point this out?

Then he marches forward with his apparent argument: the Vietcong were a people's army and he won't have them compared -- simply won't -- to Zarqawi and the other monsters we are now fighting. What? But we were talking about the massacre of one group of women and children, and comparing it with the (alleged) massacre of another group of women and children. What in the world does this have to do with the nobility or savagery of the enemy we are fighting? Is it better to shoot down a village full of civilians in a just war or an unjust war? Hitchens doesn't care; he wants to get indignant about yet another straw man. (He wisely decides to link nowhere to prove this point; I have not heard anyone praising Zarqawi's methods or congratulating him as a freedom fighter.)

Then Hitchens goes forth to take a bold position. Apparently, some insurgent elements are actually trying to make American soldiers jittery about the civilian population by sending suicide bombers. So what does this mean? "As with the foul policy above, the awful thing about this charming policy is that it works. Which leads us to one very important conclusion: Any coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by definition doing Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his orders. If anything justifies a court-martial, then surely that does."

So here is the grand finale. A soldier who shoots a civilian should be court martialed, because it's bad for America's status in Iraq. Well said, Mr. Hitchens. I too believe that a soldier - no matter how rattled his nerves might be - who walks through a village and shoots women and children, and then proceeds to cover it up by filing a false report, should be punished. And I also think that My Lai and Haditha are two different things, and that both are awful. Can I get published in Slate for saying it, or in The Atlantic, which also continually publishes this guy's useless articles? I sure hope so, because I could use the money. Here's an idea for my first article: Iraq is in the Middle East. Now all I need is a suitably vehement first sentence, preferably a little orotund: "All across the media, you can see people arguing about the position of Iraq on the globe, first saying that it is located in South America, and others arguing that it is in fact in Asia. But this is absurdly false..."

A Hypothesis About Dreams

I read an interesting article in The Sun about dreams; unfortunately the less interesting first half is all that's online. In any case, I was annoyed that I remember so few of my dreams, since apparently they are the ticket to psychological health; more dreams might also mean less money spent on movies.

My genuinely hallucinatory sequences -- the sort of things stereotypically associated with deep sleep -- happen in daydreams, or when I've just started to go to sleep, the periods during which I still have some level of control over what happens, and for whatever reason am no longer thinking about sex. So why do I remember nothing happening when my mind is left to its own devices? Am I completely lacking in imagination? To avoid reaching this conclusion, I've come up with a hypothesis to explain my sad dream life, as well as those of most people I know.

From reading old books, I have a real sense that, a century ago and farther back, people dreamed more - or rather, they remembered more; and that these memories had greater density and were therefore taken more seriously as a part of everyday life. So why do so many people today say they rarely remember dreams? Here's my theory: alarm clocks. The few dreams I do remember almost always come when I'm about to come out of sleep: when the sun is starting to shine on my face, when my bladder is just starting to make demands in the middle of the night; that is, at the stage when the conscious mind is just starting to rouse, and with it our capacity to remember what is going on. The slow wake is essential to remembering dreams.

And what completely destroys the slow wake? Yes, the alarm clock! Nothing is more destructive to the in-between stage between sleep and consciousness than the braying of the alarm; it immediately displaces whatever might have been going on in your head with its insistent reality of beeps or songs or people talking.

So why don't people always dream on weekends, you ask? Well, it's quite possible to internalize an alarm clock, and live by the habits it instills; even without the alarm going off, your conscious brain may lose the facility of gradually waking and sneaking up on those vaporous dream transmissions. Another possible explanation: more comfortable beds. I remember dreaming a great deal when camping, because the rocks poking into my back kept me continually floating in the in-between state, but I was tired enough from hiking to stay asleep instead of just tossing.

Nostalgia

Slate has an feature with various authors recommending their favorite beach reading. You get to watch a bunch of authors do a little dance as they try to avoid seeming pretentious without losing their credibility as literary intellectuals. The really sad display comes from the people that try to be funny (cf. George Saunders, whose early storiesI really love; he should have known better.)

Anyway, one author who contributed to this list was David Amsden, who has inspired violent hatred in me and a couple of my friends purely because he went to our high school and published a novelat the age of 21. I have no idea if it's any good. Publisher's Weekly called it "solid but unremarkable" - which sounds like something one might tell a gastroenterologist about recent bowel movements. (Seriously, could any review be more quietly vicious? I would rather be punched in the face than have someone call me "solid but unremarkable.") Here, in any case, is Amsden's entry:

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. My gut tells me that Amis would disapprove of being labeled a beach read, but I read this book at the beach when I (much like the protagonist Charles Highway) was a pretentious 19-year-old neophyte obsessed with a girl who didn't know I existed. I've reread this whenever I feel like recapturing that ignorance, which is exactly the point of beach reading: to zone out, to simultaneously forget and remember, to be misguidedly nostalgic about moments that didn't actually happen. Plus, the novel was made into a perfectly terrible film starring Ione Skye and Dexter Fletcher—the ultimate post-beach rental.

Nothing about this struck me as terribly bad other than its self-involvement and rather pretentious explanation of "the point of beach reading" (also, you have to be a neophyte in something; Amsden seems to just mean it as "a young man") -- but my friend dug through the passage and found something to hate. What, he asked me, could this possibly mean? "To be misguidedly nostalgic about moments that didn't actually happen."

This initially felt fine to me: lame writing, but nothing actually nonsensical. But something did seem off. I didn't think you could be nostalgic about things that didn't happen; you could only feel regret for them, mixed perhaps with nostalgia for a time when they might have happened. (Ah, college.) Even if your memories are somehow false, you still have to believe in them on some level for this emotion to exist at all.

I looked nostalgia up to confirm my suspicion, and here is the definition: "A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past" - perhaps a false past that exists only in your imagination, but definitely nothing that you know not to have happened. Apparently the word comes from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algia (pain). The pain of returning home. Isn't that lovely? I think I remember reading somewhere that Nabokov thought it was the most beautiful word in English.