Eric The Blue

Alumni notes

It's getting on toward the end of May, time not only for graduation ceremonies but also for college reunions, and therefore the mails--US Post and modern ethereal--are carrying those solicitations for information from one of the class's more earnest, officious members.  For those who fill them out, the rhetorical task is daunting: communicating your success without appearing to boast; making a favorable impression without appearing to try. 

This is the fiftieth reunion year for the class of 1962, which includes Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, who graduated that year from Harvard.  He evidently received his solicitation and filled it out.  For "occupation," he replied: "Prisoner."  Address?  "No. 04475-046, US Penitentiary--Max, P.O. Box 8500, Florence, CO."  In a section for "awards"--Harvard doesn't require its alums to cultivate an appearance of modesty--Kaczynski wrote, "Eight life sentences, issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, 1998."  He claims authorship of one publication, "Technological Slavery," published two years ago by Feral House, and indicates that he had lived in Eliot House while at Harvard.

It happens that Henry David Thoreau, a member of the Harvard class of 1837, who resembled Kaczynski in his predilection for solitary living, his distrust of technological advancement, and his contempt for received opinions, received his solicitation regarding his tenth class reunion while wintering on Walden Pond.  He did not reply till the following fall, when in response to the following questions--where and when were you born? where were you fitted for college? are you married? what is your profession or trade? what is your present employment? and what fact of general importance can you mention?--he wrote:

Dear Sir,

I confess that I have very little class spirit, and have almost forgotten that I ever spent four years at Cambridge.  That must have been in a former state of existence.  It is difficult to realize that the old routine is still kept up.  However, I will undertake at last to answer your questions as well as I can in spite of a poor memory and a defect of information.

1st then, I was born, they say, on the 12th of July 1817, on what is called the Virginia Road, in the east part of Concord.

2nd I was fitted, or rather made unfit, for College, at Concord Academy & elsewhere, mainly by myself, with the countenance of Phineas Allen, Preceptor.

3d I am not married.

4th I dont know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in every instance has been practised before being studied.  The mercantile part of it was begun here by myself alone.

--It is not one but legion.  I will give you some of the monster's heads.  I am a Schoolmaster--a Private Tutor, a Surveyor--a Gardener, a Farmer--a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glasspaper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.  If you will act the part of Iolas, and apply a hot iron to any of these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you.

5th My present employment is to answer such orders as may be expected from so general an advertisement as the above--that is, if I see fit, which is not always the case, for I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry attractive or otherwise.  Indeed my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.  For the last two or three years I have lived in Concord woods alone, something more than a mile from any neighbor, in a house built entirely by myself.

6th I cannot think of a single general fact of any importance before or since graduating. 

He then signed "Henry D Thoreau" before adding a postscript: I beg that the Class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of pecuniary assistance, and will make known their case to me, I will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money.

"Advice of more worth than money"--that would be what he thought he gave the world in Walden, one of the great books of American literature.  I'm embarrassed to think how many times I had read it before it occurred to me that the careful ledgers of his expenses, set down in such exacting detail in the chapter called "Economy," are, however accurate, intended as satire.  (I know what you're interested in: money.  So here you go, have a look.)

A dim view of humanity would be another quality shared by Thoreau and the Unabomber.  Something tending toward the messianic as well.  I don't think, however, that Kaczynski would be capable of my favorite nugget from Thoreau's letter--". . . a Painter, I mean a House Painter. . . ."

Richard Ford in The New Yorker

If you like the short fiction of Richard Ford--and I do--then check out, at The New Yorker Blog, Jon Michaud on "Richard Ford's Fathers and Sons."  His observation concerning the number of stories announcing, in their first sentences, "fractured families and tense father-son relationships" is so simple and so right that you feel a little mad about not having noticed it yourself--like why did it take Kittredge to set out how some of the Canterbury pilgrims, in the tales they tell, are jousting with one another regarding opposing views of marriage? 

In my post on "Rock Springs," I mentioned that you can read some of Ford's stories online, and I linked to "Leaving for Kenosha."   Michaud links to three more stories--the ones whose openings he quotes to marshal an argument--although by clicking them you will come face to face with The New Yorker's subscriber wall.  My advice is to take the advice of W. C. Fields, who said he had saved a lot of time by determining always to give in immediately to temptation.  Also, by subscribing you'll be able to read Lorrie Moore's review of Canada, Ford's new novel.  The New Yorker is easily the best "general interest magazine" published in the United States.  It took me about three hours to write this post, because in trying to relocate the Michaud post on Ford I was diverted by around thirty other interesting things to read.

Ann Romney's reading

In a post entitled "Woe is Mitt: Contraception, Tolstoy, and Taxes," John Cassidy takes up the kerfuffle surrounding Ann Romney having indicated, on the social media site Pinterest, that one of her favorite books is Anna Karenina.  Not wise, some say, since the plot concerns the marital straying of a generally sympathetic character who is married to a boring government official--a sort of 19th-century, Russian version of Mitt Romney.  Besides, it's a great novel, one of the best ever written, and therefore probably qualifies Mrs Romney as a "snob" and member of the "culural elite." 

Cassidy doesn't say so, but Tolstoy himself might have had some sympathy for Republicans who think his book was immoral.  He thought so himself.  In late midlife, the famous, wealthy, esteemed author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina fell into a depression, the principle source of which seems to have been an unusually acute consciousness of mortality.  He might have achieved more than almost anyone else, and been of enviable status, but what finally was the good of that if in the long run he was consigned to the same oblivion as everyone else?  The resulting reflection, self-examination, and study bred intense disgust with all that he had done up to that time, which of course included the compositon of two of the greatest works of fiction ever published.  He renounced his copyrights, stopped eating meat, moved into the servants' quarters, and adopted a brand of Christianity that caused him to be excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.  His wife was understandably perplexed. The fictions that he now wrote were explicitly didactic.  They included tales for children ("God Sees the Truth, but Waits"), the justly famous "Kreutzer Sonata" (evinces disgust with sexuality), "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (title character endures slowly advancing terminal illness and realizes at the end that his career and marriage and all other traditional pursuits were useless frauds), and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (title question answered by last sentence, wherein the main character, having dropped dead of cupidity, is buried by his servant: "Six feet from head to toe was all he needed").

I don't know how the total picture plays with Republicans.  Santorum's voters probably approve of the late Tolstoy, though they may think it's snobbish to know about him.  Mitt Romney's country-club set probably thinks the older Tolstoy could have organized the first OWS rally.  My own conclusion isn't overtly political.  It's an error to suppose that somewhere, among the rich and famous living in penthouse apartments or in gated communities filled with things advertised on television during golf tournaments, people are content.

Two poems about the sea

Here's the text of the Frost poem, "Once by the Pacific," that I recently called the best ever written about the Pacific Ocean as seen from the shore:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the light was spoken.

It's a traditional form, a sonnet, with the ostensible subject of "nature," and moreover rhymes chimingly, all characteristics that align it with a million other poems concerning how the mind of God is expressed in nature.  Yes, says Frost, but it's not the good news that you think.  I love the way in which, close to the end, a single sentence fills out a single line: "Somebody had better be prepared for rage."  It's a way of highlighting.  You have to know too that in the Book of Genesis all of history begins with God declaring, "Let there be light." 

And will end, according to this poem, with Him angry, disgusted, and admitting His act of creation was a mistake.  Put out the light.

Frost has this reputation for being a practical Yankee poet who espoused the virtues of work, patriotism, and faith.  Actually, his recurring subjects are madness, the distance (or silence, or absence) of God, the blank indifference (or malignity) of nature, and the end of the world.  Here's another of my favorites, a savage rebuke of the idea behind a lot of "creationist" bunk. 

As to poems about the sea, one of the few rivals to "Once by the Pacific" is by Housman:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.

Dickens at 200

Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago today.  I wrote about him most recently here; I am not one of those who loves Dickens unreservedly.  Adam Gopnik, writing recently about the scandal of America's prison system, had the occasion to quote Dickens on the subject of the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, which he (Dickens) visited in 1842:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

When Dickens was a kid, his father had been thrown into debtor's prison, the notorious Marshalsea.  The boy never got over it.  Wherever he went, he wanted to see the prison.  In his novels, they loom large, simultaneously metaphors and grotesque in their materiality.  You have to love the wounded, reforming Dickens. 

In 170 years we in America still have not "roused up to stay" the awful toll of our prisons.  We could begin by not incarcerating people for possession of marijuana.  I can't think of anything good that comes from that. 

Stingo and me

Stingo, the narrator in Styron's Sophie's Choice, says that the prospect of spending an hour alone with the Brooklyn white pages aroused in him a sense of anticipation almost erotic in its intensity, such was his attraction to words on paper.  I don't have it that bad but I have it bad enough to know what Stingo's talking about.  This morning, I was off from work so that spouse Amanda could keep a 9:30 gyno appointment without having to drag along three bundles of proof that all her parts were there and functioning as of nine, four, and one year ago.  The message I had published on our intranet attendance tracker said "in around noon."  When Amanda got home earlier than I'd expected, I put George Lyman Kittredge's Chaucer and His Poetry into my backpack and caught an express bus before 11.  Suddenly it was clear that I would have almost an hour alone with Kittredge and Chaucer in the corner of a skyway coffee shop between the morning and noon rushes.  Medical devices that measure the rate of various physiological processes would have testified to my excitement, could I have been hooked up during the bus ride.  And the actual event did not disappoint.  The skyways were mostly empty, the coffee shop vacant, and Kittredge coming up to where he discusses how, in what he calls "the marriage group," different Canterbuy pilgrims are by their tales responding to the views expressed by the Wife of Bath, "one of the most amazing characters that the brain of man has ever yet conceived." 

I know, I know, I am a dweeb, but permit me my enthusiasms because when have I ever knocked yours?Unless you are a Republican volunteer or a devotee of some other exotic creed, never.  We are all just trying to do what Dr Johnson called "filling the vacuities" of life.  Have mercy on us.

Chaucer and the fabliau

A fabliau, according to Merriam Webster's online dictionary, is "a short, usually comic, frankly coarse, and often cynical tale in verse popular especially in the 12th and 13th centuries."  Chaucer, whose life coincides pretty nearly with the second half of the 14th century, was a practitioner: of the Canterbury tales, the stories told by the miller, the reeve, the shipman, and the merchant all either qualify as fabliaux, or else exhibit the influence of the form.  Every aspect of the dictionary definition is present in these tales.  To illustrate, consider the plot of the tale of the shipman:

A merchant has a pretty wife who spends freely on the nice things she loves.  The merchant himself, however, is something of a miser, and is given to retiring to his counting house to tally up accounts.  His best friend is a young monk, who when visiting endears himself to the household help by tipping liberally.  On one of these visits, the wife confides to the monk that she is unhappy with her tight-fisted husband who, she suggests, does not satisfy her in bed, either.  She asks the monk for 100 francs to pay her debts.  The monk secures the 100 francs from the merchant and then, having turned it over to the wife, enjoys her sexual favors, their agreement being

That for thise hundred frankes he sholde all nyght
Have hire in his armes bolt upright.

When the merchant eventually asks for his money back, the monk says that he has returned it already--to the wife.  This man of God then hits the highway.  The merchant naturally asks his wife for the 100 francs.  She says that she's already spent it; also, that she had thought it was for the monk's long stay at their house, not repayment of an actual cash loan.  She will make it up to him in the bedroom:

For I wol paye yow wel and redily
Fro day to day, and if so be I faille,
I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille.

The pun--"taille" in the sense of "tally" or "ledger" and also "tale" or "ass"--neatly summarizes the theme of this story in which the price of sex, whether it be with your husband or his good friend the monk, is 100 francs.  F Scott Fitzgerald was not the first writer to investigate the financial foundations of the impulses to which all the finest citizens attach only the most exalted motives.  Everything in the story tends to impress upon us the brutal idea that money is at the root of everything.  The monk, besides duping both merchant and wife, purchases with coins the courtesy of the household help.  All of life is a confidence game.  Having been played herself by the monk, the wife cons the unknowing husband, and the tale ends with another double entendre:

Thus endeth my tale, and God us sende
Taillynge ynough unto our lyves ende.

The traditional fabliau is just for laughs, a kind of coarse joke at the expense of some ridiculous character.  In Chaucer's hand, the joke remains, you laugh and laugh, but finally you may wonder what exactly is so funny. The emotional source of the story is something like disgust.  And the tale of the shipman is by no means the only one like this.  One critic, discussing the merchant's tale, offers the opinion that it's "one of the most savagely obscene, angrily embittered, pessimistic, and unsmiling tales in our language."  In several of these stories, the coarse joke of the fabliau describes the whole human scene.

Two Aprils

Chaucer is my new coffee-break companion--I've now finished the 850 or so lines of the "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, wherein the pilgrims are expertly limned.  My tentative plan is to read the tales of the miller, the reeve, the nun's priest, the wife of Bath, the merchant, the franklin, and the pardoner.  I don't think you want to read the whole thing:  according to Robert K. Root, author of The Poetry of Chaucer (1922), the parson's tale--actually a sermon--is "interminably long" and "interminably dull."  I can see that it's long and am going to trust him about the dullness.

It's not on account of being an advanced Chaucerian that I claim familiarity with the criticism of Dr Root.  Years ago, as a student at the University of Minnesota, I took "the Chaucer course" taught by Andrew Macleish, who had us buy Allan H. Maclaine's The Students Comprehensive Guide to the Canterbury Tales.  In less than 300 pages, this helpmate collects a significant portion of the scholarly commentary on The Canterbury Tales, including Root's stricture regarding the parson's sermon.  My copy is alternately pristine and marked with underlinings and marginalia, so I can tell which tales were and weren't assigned.  The ones I mean to read are the ones I read years ago. 

Here are just a few lines from the portrait of the miller in the Prologue:

Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A werte, and thereon stood a tuft of herys,
Reed as the bristles of a sowes erys;
His nosethirles blake were and wyde.

You would not say of The Canterbury Tales what Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost--that it lacks in human interest on account of the lack of human characters.  Chaucer is the first English poet whose name we know and, with the exception of Shakespeare, it's not clear that his achievement has been matched.  For those of us for whom the Middle English is opaque, it can be exhilirating how again and again initial perplexity gives way to bursts of enjoyment of the type often associated with a "modern" literary sensibility.  Chaucer's urbane realism.  His many-minded mastery of the whole human scene.  In Joyce's Ulysses, one of the characters sniffs his own toe jam, but that kind of thing was not invented by Joyce.  Chaucer casts a long shadow.  The Tales open:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flour. . . .

More than 600 years later, what is probably the most famous long poem in English of the 20th century, Eliot's Waste Land, begins:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. . . .

 

Keats toward the end

I'm working my way toward the end of Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats.  Such a short life, such a long book:  at 700+ pages, it works out to almost 30 pages per year.  I'd hate to have to read 30 pages about what I did between my most recent birthdays.

I'm far enough along so that Keats is now, by his own description, living a posthumous existence.  He's coughing up blood.  He's stopped writing  poetry.  Periods where he appears to grasp at hope alternate with those in which he knows he's dying and begins withdrawing from life.  He's broke and relies on friends for lodging.  A note of bitterness sometimes creeps into his letters, especially those to Fanny Brawne, his fiancee.  He does not know it but he will one day be regarded as one of the greatest English poets.  He's 24.

At the end of the last chapter I've finished, Bate describes an event that partakes of something almost like comedy.  Keats was living at the home of Leigh Hunt.  Fanny Brawne sent a letter, and when it arrived Mrs. Hunt, being busy with a child, asked the maid to bring it to Keats.  The maid, however, was discontented--among other things, she resented the extra burden imposed upon her by such a sick man living in the house.  She did not immediately deliver the letter, which fell into the hands of the Hunts' 10-year-old son, and, by the time Keats finally got it, the seal had been broken.  In health he might have relished a story concerning how the complaints of house servants exert their influence on the lives of "the great."  He was, however, sufficiently distraught by the broken seal to determine to move from the Hunts' house.  It was over a letter as prosaic as the events leading to the delayed delivery. 

I say the event partakes of something almost like comedy, but it also has the effect of highlighting the misery Keats endured at the end.  His life got off to a bad start--his father died when he was 8, his mother when he was 14--and the story of his last year makes difficult reading. 

A poem

I spent some time over the long weekend leafing around in Eighteenth Century English Literature, an anthology I had to buy in college.  It's interesting now partly because the marginalia reveals what made an impression upon me thirty years ago.  Maybe people don't change much.  The marked passages still seem to me the most notable ones. 

There is a section near the end that I looked at for the first time.  It's a miscellany of poems by unknown poets.  Naturally Dr Leyasmeyer hadn't assigned us to read any such obscure stuff.  But I kind of liked this one:

I have lost my mistress, horse, and wife,
And when I think on human life,
    Cry mercy 'twas no worse.
My mistress sickly, poor and old,
My wife damn'd ugly, and a scold,
    I am sorry for my horse.

The name of the author is lost to literary history.

Rock Springs: Richard Ford out west

Richard Ford is best known for the series of novels--The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006)--about Frank Bascombe, a resident of suburban New Jersey whose life has been blighted by domestic woe (death of a child, divorce) from which he has nevertheless emerged, sanity intact and capable of illuminating every scene with his intelligence and powers of observation.  These books, now available between two hard covers in an Everyman's Contemporary Classics edition a la Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels, deserve their high reputations.

But I like his short fiction even more--especially the stories collected in Rock Springs, which are set not in New Jersey but in the West, usually Montana, where the characters are not sportwriters or realtors but survivors, barely, of bad choices made in lives that hadn't started well, either.  (The sequence of bad choices stretches back in time.)  In the title story, a man named Earl is travelling with his girlfriend and young daughter from Montana to Florida in a cranberry Mercedes he stole off an ophthamologist's lot in Whitefish.  Here is the opening:

Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn't turn me in to the police.  I had managed to scrape with the law in Kalispell over several bad checks--which is a prison crime in Montana.  And I knew Edna was already looking at her cards and thinking about a move, since it wasn't the first time I'd been in law scrapes in my life.  She herself already had her own troubles, losing her kids and keeping her ex-husband, Danny, from breaking in her house and stealing her things while she was at work, which is really why I had moved in in the first place, that and needing to give my little daughter, Cheryl, a better shake in things.

This is not Bascombe-land.  The Mercedes breaks down in Wyoming and there is an interlude at a trailer home by a gold mine where Earl asks the sixtyish African-American woman who comes to the door if he can use the phone: much politeness and signs of trouble equal, approximately, to his own.  The Mercedes hid in the cottonwoods to the side of the road, tires sunk in soft sand, the trio get a cab to the Ramada Inn at the town of Rock Springs.  There is another interlude of food and love making, then Edna takes Earl up on his offer to buy her a bus ticket back to Kalispell.  So she's leaving in the morning.  When the girlfriend and the daughter are asleep, Earl goes outside to see about another car, and the story concludes:

I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags, one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it was riding.  I looked inside the driver's window.  There were maps and paperback books and sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans that hang on the window wells.  And in the back there were kids' toys and some pillows and a cat box with a cat sitting in it staring up at me like I was the face of the moon.  It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car.  Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different.  Though I had a funny sensation at that moment and turned and looked up at the windows along the back of the motel.  All were dark except two.  Mine and another one.  And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn?  Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared?  Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him?  Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him?  Would you think he had a daughter?  Would you think he was anybody like you?

I won't be able to give a rational account of the effect achieved by these words, at least upon me.  But I think it has a lot to do with the inventory of items in the car from Ohio, the way they suggest something different from the monochrome of distress and trouble that has preceded. "It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car." In my time hanging around Departments of English, I didn't notice that reading literature seemed to have made people more generous or humane, but this story by Ford, and others from the same volume about as good, seem like understated invitations to extend  sympathy's arc. 

You can read some of Ford's stories online.  Here is a recent one, "Leaving for Kenosha," published in The New Yorker of March 3, 2008.  Another gem. 

A review of my review of Johnson; or, Johnson & Quoheleth

Having come to the end of Bate's first-rate biography of Dr Johnson, it is natural to scan again my own brief review of Johnson's life, in my Authors category, and to contemplate possible corrective measures.  I think my nod at the end in the direction of his orthodox Christian faith was too easy.  He indeed was the author of the Prayers and Meditations I mentioned.  Bate however points out that theological subjects are hardly ever the immediate subject of his diverse work product; also, that he confessed to being, as a young man, "a lax talker against religion"; and that in the last days of his life he destroyed large portions of a journal in which he may have confided some measure of skepticism.  Whatever his faith was, it wasn't serene.  Bate I think would say that Johnson, perhaps because he knew his own mind, and put a premium on honesty, deliberately chose not to address himself to religious themes.  Philosophical themes, yes.  And the recurring motif here puts one in mind of the Book of Ecclesiastes rather more than anything written by Paul or one of the evangelists.  Quoheleth, the preacher of Ecclesiastes:

Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.  The wise man has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness; and yet I perceived that one fate comes to all of them. . . .  So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a man who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by a man who did not toil for it.  What has a man from all the toil and strain with which he toils beneath the sun?  For all his days are full of pain, and his work is a vexation; even in the night his mind does not rest.  This also is a vanity. 

Johnson:

Enlarge my Life with Multitude of Days,
In Health, in Sickness, thus the Suppliant prays;
Hides from Himself his State, and shuns to know,
That Life protracted is protracted Woe.

Quoheleth:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.  For man does not know his time.  Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds which are caught in a snare, so the sons of men are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.

Johnson:

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promise of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abissinia. . . .  Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

I first found out about Ecclesiastes in a college course on the Old Testament.  We had made our way through the Pentateuch, and the historical books, and the prophets, and coming now to Ecclesiastes, the instructor related an anecdote concerning how, in a previous year, a student had at this point in the term visited him in his office and said: "Finally, something I can believe in!"  It's hard to know how this slim masterpiece was admitted into the canon, and in a similar way the works of Johnson are bracing in comparison to the conversation of the confident Tory and Church of England stalwart immortalized by Boswell.

Bate's Johnson

I've started W. Jackson Bate's biography of Samuel Johnson and am reminded all over again of why I love Dr. Johnson.  Herewith an abbreviated miscellany gleaned either from Bate or my own prior enjoyable researches.

On his youthful reading: "What I read were not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly."

On marriage (from Rasselas): "Such is the common process of marriage.  A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another.  Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves unhappy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together.  They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed.  They wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty."

On second marriages: "The triumph of hope over experience."

From his Life of Milton, in Lives of the Poets: "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again.  No one ever wished it longer than it is."

From his review of a theological work wherein the argument is advanced that God, in his infinite mercy, shields the poor from misery by granting them immunity from life's small annoyances: "The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich.  They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh."

In the same review, regarding the author's fantasy that we might better bear our burdens by considering that, to "superior beings," human misery looks no worse than the plight of animals to us, Dr. Johnson, with unconcealed contempt, suggested that the argument could have been carried further: "He might have shown that the hunters whose game is man have many sports analogous to our own.  As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse themselves now and then with sinking a ship, and stand around the fields of Blenheim or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cock-pit.  As we shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or pleasure, and knock him down with an apoplexy.  Some of them, perhaps, are virtuosi, and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human philosopher in the effects of the air pump.  To swell a man with a tympany is as good a sport as to blow a frog.  Many a merry bout have these frolic beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all this he knows not why.  As they are wiser and more powerful than we, they have more exquisite diversions, for we have no way of procuring any sport so brisk and so lasting as the paroxysms of the gout and stone which undoubtedly must make high mirth, especially if the play be a little diversified with the blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf."

Responding to the complaints of the American colonists in his pamphlet, Taxation No Tyranny: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" 

Offering advice: "My good friend, clear your mind of cant.  You may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.'  You are not his most humble servant.  You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather and were so much wet.'  You don't care sixpence whether he is wet or dry.  You talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly."

But such mind droppings are too much the method of Boswell.  Bate, I think, is especially strong on Johnson during his twenties and thirties, two decades during which, out of the eye of biography, he suffered extreme hardships, feared for his sanity, and may have contemplated suicide.  Beckett said that Johnson meant as much to him as any author, which will seem to you very strange if you know Beckett and only Boswell's Johnson.  Bate's Johnson is the one Beckett considered a kindred spirit: "the confident public man," as J.M. Coetzee has written, "who sees no point in living yet cannot face annihilation."

 

 

Our Mutual Friend: I come to the end

I've just finished Our Mutual Friend, the last novel Dickens completed.  The current critical consensus, one gleans from reading here and there, is that the early novels of "the jolly Dickens" were loved by his contemporaries, but that as he aged, and his vision darkened, he produced the works--Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend--on which his reputation as the greatest of the English novelists now rests.  My own eccentric impression is that his vision did not darken to the point that his fiction attained the  crepuscular quality of reality.  I have in mind, for example, the rather too obviously contrasting couples, the Lammles, who marry for money only to discover that he does not have as much as she thought and that she does not have as much as he thought, and the Harmons, who marry only after John proves to himself that Bella knows nothing of his incipient wealth.  She marries him anyway, of course, and gets her reward, while the cold, manipulative Lammles suffer unhappiness before being dismissed from the plot.  It would be pleasant if life were like that.

The scene in which Bella discovers that she has picked, not only a good man but also a rich one, is as we say "over the top" somewhat in the manner of an episode of "Extreme Makeover."  I am not one of those who love Dickens unreservedly. 

Looking back at Hemingway

Fifty years ago today, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.  The New Yorker has a collection of photographs of him here.  I don't want to make too much of it, but in my mind there are two Hemingways, and the photographs of him tend to fall easily into the one or the other class: there is the handsome young man, slim, disciplined, a friend to many other poor artists living in Paris in the 1920s; and then there is the over-sized, white-bearded celebrity author photographed beside some dead animals in Life.  He seems to have arrived at old age so quickly that the vigilant photographers failed to document the stages of middle-life.  Before Hemingway was 35 he had given us In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms.  If everything he wrote is of interest, that is mainly because he is the author of these five books, too.

On NPR this morning, Scott Simon described Hemingway as "a boxer, a boozer, a philanderer and a big-game hunter who wrote some of the most sublime prose of the English language:  short, sharp, piercing sentences that told stories about soldiers, lovers, hunters, bravery, fear and death."  One detects the two Hemingways in this one sentence, but I'm afraid that here, as elsewhere, the famous author overwhelms the artist.  Hemingway is one of our greatest writers but to speak of "short, sharp, piercing sentences" suggests one flight over from too high an altitude.  I don't know how exactly this distillation got going; George Will proved he's a subscriber by once comparing the "terse" style of George W Bush to Hemingway, thereby eliciting this contemptuous riposte from Norman Mailer.  Anyway, as a sample of Hemingway's "sublime prose," I offer here the opening to A Farewell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.  In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.  Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.  The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Read it aloud and see if you don't like the sound the words make.  The language is simultaneously poetic, charged, and simple--not one word of more than two syllables.  And the words are wedded to a theme, which is Hemingway's great theme (and that of the Book of Ecclesiastes).  In the first sentence, there are mountains; in the second, pebbles and boulders; in the third, dust; and, in the fourth, "dust" is repeated so as to achieve an almost choric effect: mountains, boulders, pebbles, dust, dust, dust.  The first mention of human activity is in the first sentence mentioning dust.

Some advice for Poor Angus from Robert Pinsky

Our eight-year-old and I have evolving bedtime rituals.  The current one involves Shel Silverstein.  She has his book of children's poems, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and we take turns reading aloud our "favorites," first her, then me, then her, then me, and so on, till I put an end to it.  Her favorites tend to be long ones, so as to extend her day.  I actually have only one favorite, "Poor Angus," which goes like this:

Oh what do you do, poor Angus,
When hunger makes you cry?
"I fix myself an omelet, sir,
Of fluffy clouds and sky."

Oh what do you wear, poor Angus,
When winds blow down the hills?
"I sew myself a warm cloak, sir,
Of hope and daffodils."

Oh who do you love, poor Angus,
When Catherine's left the moor?
"Ah, then, sir, then's the only time
I feel I'm really poor."

I think I like "Poor Angus" mainly because it reminds me of this poem, by Robert Pinsky, which I like quite a lot more:

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Here is Pinsky himself performing the poem in an elevator. 

 

Fittingly austere.  Poor Angus needs to learn to court his sleep. 

Bloomsday, 2011

Each June 16, as both my faithful readers know, I devote a post to James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses concerns a day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom.  The exact day is June 16, 1904, which had personal significance for Joyce, as he went out that evening with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, who permitted him considerable liberties.  So, June 16: Bloomsday (meaning: Bloom's Day), the closest thing we have to a literary holiday.

Elizabeth Minkel collects here a New York-centric menu of Bloomsday activities this weekend.  You can read Joyce no matter where you are, and, as Ulysses cannot be conquered in a day, I have always recommended the long story "The Dead," which brings Dubliners to a close.  If you don't like "The Dead," forget about Ulysses; if you do like it, read Dubliners through from start to finish.  Your reward at the end will be that you get to read "The Dead" again, and you can then proceed to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then Ulysses, then (if you're more ambitious than I) Finnegan's Wake. 

For the beginner, the main difficulty of Ulysses has to do with Joyce's method.  Previously, novels had always given a kind of artificial focus to human consciousness.  When characteres think, it's as if they are writing essays in the style of the author.  Joyce attempts to reproduce the fluidity of human consciousness-- the way in which walking down a street, for example, a store sign, or bit of overheard conversation, might set off a kind of reverie having to do with a sexual experience, or a memory from earliest youth, or an argument with one's spouse, which reverie, while in progress, might take another sudden turn when a work worry obtrudes as a businessman passes walking in the other direction.  You can guess how this might be challenging for a reader accustomed to friendly, omniscient narrators who responsibly provide commentary, notes, and smooth transitions.

The aspect of Ulysses that appeals most to me is the mock-heroic.  Bloom's "adventures" on his day parallel those of Ulysses making his way home from war in the Homeric epic, but Bloom is no Ulysses, and it is gradually revealed that his wife is no Penelope, either.  There is a literary anecdote about a young Columbia University English professor who, feeling intimidated when Lionel Trilling asked him why he thought Ulysses was such a great book, mumbled something having to do with the revolutionary technique, the stream-of-consciousness narrative, etc., etc.  When he came to the end, Trilling said he thought Ulysses was extraordinary mainly because it is the first novel in which the hero sniffs his toe jam.

Our Mutual Friend (on my Nook)

Have been happily sunk for more than a month now in Our Mutual Friend, the last novel Dickens completed before dying, age 58, in 1870.  If you are at all interested in Dickens, I recommend this podcast of Andrew Martin's conversation with Robert Gottlieb on the occasion of Gottlieb's essay, "Who Was Charles Dickens?", appearing in The New York Review of Books.  The podcast includes a link to the essay, which, happily, is available in its entirety and not hiding behind a subscriber wall.

Then begin reading Dickens.  Or, as Vladimir Nabokov said, in his lecture on Bleak House, which follows upon the one on Mansfield Park:

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens.  We are now ready to bask in Dickens.  In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room.  In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.

In my case, with my Nook.  Am not sure it is the best tool for this particular work, rather intricately plotted as it is and, according to its Wikipedia article, featuring nineteen "major characters."  When you are proceeding at the rate of one or two chapters per day, you sometimes feel the need to reacquaint yourself with someone who has been for awhile off the stage, and the Nook does not lend itself so well as an old-fashioned physical book to backward leafings.  So if you are me you just give it up and keep up the forward momentum, basking in all the richly detailed present moments, this one and then that one: several weeks' worth at the rate of my progression.  Here is a recent one:

Mr and Mrs Lammle's house in Sackville Street, Piccadilly, was but a temporary residence.  It has done well enough, they informed their friends, for Mr Lammle when a bachelor, but it would not do now.  So, they were always looking at palatial residences in the best situations, and always very nearly taking or buying one, but never quite concluding the bargain.  Hereby they made for themselves a shining little reputation apart.  People said, on seeing a vacant palatial residence, "The very thing for the Lammles!" and wrote to  the Lammles about it, and the Lammles always went to look at it, but unfortunately it never exactly answered.  In short, they suffered so many disappointments, that they began to think it would be necessary to build a palatial residence.  And hereby they made another shining reputation; many persons of their acquaintance becoming by anticipation dissatisfied with their own houses, and envious of the nonexistent Lammle structure.

It's the world of Eliot's wasteland only with Dickensian gusto substituted for the tired, sad voice.

Little Dorrit and Maria Beadnell

I've been reading Little Dorrit, one of the great dark novels from late in Dickens's career.  Yesterday's reading installment included Chapter 13, wherein Arthur Clennam, having returned to London after years in China, pays a visit to Christopher Casby and meets again his daughter, Flora, the great love of Clennam's youth.  He's still single, she a wealthy widow, and the meeting is for Clennam quite a disappointment:

Clennam's eyes no sooner fell upon the object of his old passion, than it shivered and broke to pieces. . . . Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath, but that was not much.  Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much.  Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly.  That was much.  Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now.  That was a fatal blow.

The interest of the scene derives in part from the fact that it is drawn from a small episode in Dickens's own life.  His first love, Maria Beadnell, who had broken with him in 1833, when Dickens was 21, had contacted him more than twenty years later, as Little Dorrit was forming in his mind.  Dickens, however, was about to leave for Paris, and there followed, instead of a meeting, an incubation period during which they exchanged shyly ardent letters.  By the time the meeting finally occurred Dickens, married and in his mid-40s, had worked himself up into quite a state of expectation.  But, surprise!--the Maria of his imagination, an idealized version of a woman twenty years younger, was in the flesh fat and foolish.  In his biography Peter Ackroyd reports that, after this meeting, "the passionate epistles are followed by letters of excuse or delay, in which he evokes the sacred name of his art in order to explain his inability to meet her."

The incident is akin to that experienced by a million attendees of school reunions.  But I for one am inclined to attribute to one of the great novelists of all time a degree of sophistication that should have made him immune to such a disappointment.  Dickens seems to have been quite affected, and his disappointment has an angry, aggressive flavor.  He put it right into Little Dorrit, where Maria might have recognized quite an unflattering portrait of herself.   

Car Talk and Puzzlers

On Saturdays, I like to lay about in the forenoon, drinking coffee, maybe roughhousing with the girls, and then, at 11:00, tuning into "Car Talk" on NPR.  Not that I care about cars.  I'm the kind of coffee-shop loitering, Obama-voting, public transportation-using urban liberal who, in my bachelor days, contemplated going car-less.  But then how would I get myself and my golf clubs to whatever course my friends were playing this weekend?  Plus, I had to travel forty miles each way on the big holidays.  So year in and year out I would drive 6000 miles, first in a Dodge Omni, then in another Dodge Omni, then in a Toyota Tercel that one of the regulars in our golf foursomes, the owner of a Suburban, nicknamed "Big Blue." 

I remember the first time I tuned into "Car Talk."  It was an accident.  I'd been listening to something else, and by the time this crazy car call-in show came on I was washing dishes and so didn't click off the radio.  The first caller was a woman with some car trouble, I can't remember what, that she described in considerable detail.  When she finally came to the end of the symptoms, one of the hosts asked: "What color is the car?"  I kept listening and soon was hooked.

Like other fans of the show I remember favorite calls.  One day Senator Tom Harkin called in with a car question.  I like the genre of calls involving women seeking an impartial adjudication of a car argument they've been having with the husband or boyfriend.  It's pretty clear to me that men, since they feel obliged to have an opinion on a car question, are more apt to be wrong than women, who are free to have no opinion and therefore only express one when they have an actual reason for believing as they do.  My favorite call of all time was probably the one in which the fellow's dog had gotten car sick and ralphed onto the dash, so that the puke seeped into the heat register, with the result that every time he ran the heater the car smelled of dog vomit.  They had a lot fun with that one, and finally advised the caller to sell the car--in the summertime.  They have a lot of fun with almost everyone before finally dispensing what I assume is consistently good advice.

I also like "the puzzler," a regular feature that is as often mathematical as auto-related.  (An ongoing good-natured joke concerns the utility of math and science over and against "the humanities"; whenever someone calls in and says they are a student, inquiries concerning their field of study are sure to follow, and an answer like "art history" or "comparative literature" elicits loud groans.  Of course they have  no clue what to do about their problematic vehicles!)  Since I haven't placed a post in my "Math" category for awhile, let me give an example of a recent Car Talk Puzzler.

There are three scraps of paper, each with a different number written on it.  You have to pick the one that has the biggest number.  If you want, you can look at one and then decide whether or not to choose it.  If you decide not to choose it, that one is out: you have to choose one of the other two.  If you look at one of the remaining ones, you must either choose it or the last one.  The question is: What's the best strategy?  It's obvious that just guessing at the start of the game gives you a one-third chance of winning.  Can you do better than that?

Yes, you can.  The best strategy, it turns out, is to look at one paper but never choose it.  Then, if the second paper has a higher number than the first, keep it; but if it has a lower number reject it also and make the third your choice.  Here is the way to analyse it.  There are only six orders in which the three papers may be chosen.  Let us denote the papers 1, 2, and 3, where 1 stands for the paper with the smallest number and 3 for the one with the biggest.  The six possibilities are:

i. 1, 2, 3
ii. 1, 3, 2
iii. 2, 1, 3
iv. 2, 3, 1
v. 3, 1, 2
vi. 3, 2, 1

Each sequence is as likely as another to represent the order in which you choose them.  In (i.) you lose, because you end up with (2), not (3).  In (ii.), you win.  Scenarios (v.) and (vi.) are both losers but (iii.) and (iv.) are both winners.  That's three out of six winners, which is a fifty percent improvement over just guessing at the start of the game.  (Uncovering first one and then another but always settling on number three is the same as just guessing that three is the highest without turning any over.)

An archive of "Car Talk" puzzlers is here.  The one I've described was for February 12 of this year.

Some early and late bloomers

In connection with yesterday's federal holiday, New Yorker bloggers Amy Davidson and Hendrik Hertzberg direct our attention to how young Martin Luther King Jr. was on April 4, 1968, the day of his death: 39.  We are accustomed to thinking of President Kennedy as "youthful" and as having been gunned down "in the prime of life."  Hertzberg points out that had Kennedy, who died at age 46, survived only to King's age, he would be unknown to all Americans except scholars of congressional minutiae and the vice-presidential politics of 1956.  And a third victim of assassination, Mohandas Gandhi, wouldn't even be on the radar screen of Jeopardy contestants had he died before reaching 40. 

King turned 27 while leading the Montgomery bus boycott.  We should all be grateful that he was not a late bloomer. 

Switching to another realm of human endeavor, consider the case of John Keats, who, despite dying at age 25, qualifies as one of the six greatest English authors (according to Edmund Wilson*). Shakespeare turned 25 in 1589, which is likely the year that his earliest extant play, I King Henry VI, was composed.  John Berryman has an essay in which he imagines Shakespeare taking stock of his career on the morning of his thirtieth birthday: virtually everything he is known for was yet to be done.  From the editor's headnote to the section on Keats in The Norton Anthology of English Literature:

No one can read Keats's poems and letters without an undersense of the immense waste of so extraordinary an intellect and genius cut off so early.  What he might have accomplished is beyond conjecture; what we do know is that his achievement, when he stopped writing at the age of 24, greatly exceeds that at the corresponding age of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton.

Poems and letters?  Yes, and a subject for another post.

*The other five being Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Austen, and Dickens.  Wilson stipulates, in hazarding this opinion in a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, that he is excepting Joyce, an Irishman.  See page xxi of John Updike's Introduction to Letters on Literature at the preceding link.

 

More on Dreiser

Having finished Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, I've started in on An American Tragedy, the 800-plus page novel usually considered Dreiser's masterpiece.  The afterword to my Signet classic paperback edition was written by Irving Howe in 1964 and begins: "Do I exaggerate in saying that Theodore Dreiser has dropped out of the awareness of cultivated Americans?"  He concludes that he is not exaggerating, and, as I indicated here, it seems to me that Dreiser's stock has fallen even farther in the last half century.  An American Tragedy was published in 1925, the same year as Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and the year before Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, two slim and highly wrought novels in which no one ever looks for work or worries about money.  If you are aware of Dreiser, however dimly, you probably do not think of him as being a contemporary of these current cornerstones of the American literature curriculum.

Dreiser is widely condemned for his ponderous style.  Here is a specimen, from early on in An American Tragedy, when the central character, Clyde Griffiths, accompanied by friends, is on his way to a Kansas City brothel for his first sexual experience:

Even as they talked, they had reached a certain house in a dark and rather wide street, the curbs of which for a block or more on either side were sprinkled with cabs and cars.  And at the corner, only a little distance away, were some young men standing and talking.  And over the way, more men.  And not a half block farther on, they passed two policemen, idling and conversing.  And although there was no light visible in any window, nor over any transom, still, curiously, there was a sense of vivid, radiant life.  One could feel it in this dark street.  Taxis spun and honked and two old-time closed carriages still in use rolled here and there, their curtains drawn.  And doors slammed or opened and closed.  And now and then a segment of bright inward light pierced the outward gloom and then disappeared again.  Overhead on this night were many stars.

Around half the sentences in An American Tragedy seem to begin, "And."  And then this and then that and yet another thing and also this too.  There is to it a sort of artless rush that not everyone, certainly not literature professors or instructors of creative writing, deems worthy of attention.  If however you're on Dreiser's side it is as if his head and heart are so full that the prose just gushes out, unconsidered, and that the result of the long flow is a complete and satisfying representation of American urban life at the beginning of the twentieth century.  A genteel tradition is thus overthrown.  How much that happens in the world is on account of people trying to get money and sex?  This rather large topic had not been a subject of American fiction before Dreiser. 

A quick note about Jennie Gerhardt, the novel Dreiser wrote after Sister Carrie.  The situation is that the title character, who is from an impoverished background, becomes the "kept woman" of an able man whose father had founded an extremely successful business.  There is a great deal of genuine affection between the two, but the man's family objects to Jennie, and he is himself conflicted in his feeling for her.  She asks for nothing, and he is sufficiently unconventional to live openly with her for many years.  Eventually the father dies.  The will leaves to him the sum of ten thousand dollars per year for three years.  If at the end of that time he persists in living with Jennie, he receives nothing more--unless he marries her, in which case the ten thousand per year continues till his death.  If he leaves her, he comes into his full inheritance, a very large fortune: the ten thousand per year is generated by dividends on just one large holding.

In the end, he leaves Jennie.  She thinks this is the right thing for him to do, but when he finally does it, she realizes that she wishes he would keep her instead of his fortune. His own feelings are similarly jumbled and he comes to regret his action.  For a lot of readers the question will arise: Just how much money was ten thousand dollars in around 1900, the approximate date of the father's death?  The answer, near as I can tell, is about a quarter of a million dollars.    

 

Reading Dreiser

My dim sense of things is that the novels of Theodore Dreiser, which I reread once in awhile (like lately) just for the pleasure they give me, are not highly esteemed today by those who decide, for example, what college students ought to read.  I think of a fork in the road, one path going to Dreiser and the other to Henry James, and James's stock is very high. 

"It has not escaped attention," writes poet and critic John Berryman, "that Dreiser writes like a hippopotamus."  Yes, that is true, but, as Berryman also recognizes, something about the awkwardness can be expressive and moving.  I think it's true of all the arts.  Would van Gogh's painting of the "Potato Eaters" be a masterpiece if it more clearly exhibited the effects of formal training?  Dreiser's artless maundering somehow conveys his own tenderness and wonder.

But patches of even his best books are really awful.  I think Dreiser exhibits the famous dictum concerning how authors should go back over their drafts and get rid of everything they are most proud of.  One imagines, for instance, that Dreiser thought the opening to the penultimate chapter of Jennie Gerhardt quite the thing:

The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore years and ten.  It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by mouth-to-mouth utterance that it seems the profoundest of truths.  As a matter of fact, man, even under his mortal illusion, is organically built to live five times the period of his maturity, and would do so if he but knew that it is spirit which endures, that age is an illusion, and that there is no death.  Yet the race-thought, gained from what dream of materialism we know not, persists, and the death of man under the mathematical formula so fearfully accepted is daily registered.

What is he talking about?  Chapters often begin with these philosophical asides and as a reader I regret every one.  When his reading shows through, instead of his experience of life, one proceeds with a grimace.  The world of science, especially medical science, seems a special weakness.  From Sister Carrie:

Not trained to reason or introspect himself, he could not analyze the change that was taking place in his mind, and hence his body, but he felt the depression of it.  Constant comparisons between his old state and his new showed a balance for the worse, which produced a constant state of gloom or, at least, depression.  Now, it has been shown experimentally that a constantly subdued frame of mind produces certain poisons in the blood, called katastates, just as virtuous feelings of pleasure and delight produce helpful chemicals called anastates.  The poisons generated by remorse inveigh against the system, and eventually produce marked physical deterioration.  To these Hurstwood was subject.

Do you not get the feeling that Dreiser thought we were to be grateful that he, unlike Hurstwood, had the gift "to introspect"?  Notice the sentence beginning with the condescending "Now" followed by several recurrences of the drab "produce."  It's the kind of verb you are obliged to deploy when you really do not understand how something works.  Few great novelists are capable of such clunking nonsense. 

More on Lydia Davis

I've finished The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I first wrote about a couple weeks ago, here, when I was maybe half-way through it. There are 198 "stories" in all, and, as the book has 733 pages, you can see that most are very short.  Like this one, titled "Index Entry":

Christian, I'm not a

There are several others that aren't much longer.  I'm not sure what I'd make of any one of these if I came upon it, individually, in a magazine.  But in this volume, intermixed with longer ones like "Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality," the cumulative effect is--here comes a paradox--overwhelming in an understated sort of way.  Perhaps nothing is more impressive than the portraits of old age, the depredations endured by those who live long enough to experience them and the responses of their children.  It's pretty clearly a subject close to Davis's own experience.  One can make out a sequence on the topic that concludes with this shattering prose poem, called "Head, Heart":

Heart weeps.

Head tries to help heart.

Head tells heart how it is, again.

You will lose the ones you love.  They will all go.  But even the earth will go, someday.

Heart feels better, then.

But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.

Heart is so new to this.

I want them back, says heart.

Head is all heart has.

Help, head.  Help heart.

Many in our neighborhood are mourning the death, last Saturday, of Dr Suzanne Grant.  The claims made in the obituary for her excellent personal characteristics are as true as the date of her birth, the names of her relatives, and the number of years she practiced medicine.  She was a great favorite of our 7-year-old and you can't trick people of that age.  Whenever she spotted me gardening, she'd hobble over and begin quizzing me about this plant or that one.  Finally one day I told her to stop wasting her breath:  "If there's something you don't know about these flowers, Dr Grant, it's a sure thing I won't know either."  One thing the obituary doesn't mention: hers was a death freely chosen.  She had a perforated ulcer, which might have been repaired by a surgery, but she declined, and now her many friends are hosting the head-heart colloquy.

Lydia Davis, Glenn Gould & Mary Tyler Moore

Having finished Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, my haphazard reading habits have caused me to pick up The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which more than caffeine has aroused my nervous system during midmorning, work-day coffee breaks.  Davis's "fictions" have been called crosses between stories, prose poems, and philosophic aphorisms.  In an interview, she has said that she likes Beckett for   "the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language."  These are characteristics that one recognizes in Davis's work, too.  And another one that she did not mention, the bleak outlook. 

In a story called "Glenn Gould," the narrator, a stay-at-home mother, makes a point of watching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" whenever possible.  It seems odd that one of my favorite TV shows plays a part in the last two books I've read.  Franzen's teen-aged Patty Emerson, watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, is by way of this show introduced to my hometown of Minneapolis, and to escape her affluent but damaged family of origin she accepts an athletic scholarship to the University of Minnesota.  Davis's character, describing the attractions of the show, says: "I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited."

One feels that the language, here and almost everywhere in Davis's work, is charged and allusive.  The "other place," "that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited," is not really or just Minneapolis, Minnesota.  It's where sane, grounded, decent, intelligent, mostly contented Mary Richards, the character played by Mary Tyler Moore, makes her home.  That's the place the narrator hasn't been.  She gives the impression that she regards "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" as a guilty pleasure and is therefore pleased to learn, in a letter from her friend Mitch, that Glenn Gould, the great pianist she admires, is also a fan.  In the course of the brief story (though, at nine pages, it's one of Davis's longer ones), some of the pianist's characteristics are mentioned, and the movement is from the elevated ("intelligent," "high standards," "articulate") to the ominous ("hypochondriac," "excessively careful of his hands," "was fond of a certain rather ugly female pop singer").  Also, there is this:

Glenn Gould did not have children.  He was not married.

The narrator is married and has a child.  There is nothing in the story to indicate that either is a source of much satisfaction.  The husband is barely in the story.  When they eat dinner, they sometimes have little to talk about, so she will tell him about something funny from the last episode.  Then, "I can see that he is ready to laugh even before I tell it, though so often, in the case of other subjects, he is not terribly interested in what I say to him, especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic."

The sentence proceeds, clause by clause, to that final one: especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic.  That is all there is about the husband.  Her friend who tells her that Glenn Gould watches "Mary Tyler Moore" is Mitch but the husband is not named.  One of the things the narrator mentions about Glenn Gould is that he "was able to be selfish without hurting anyone."  To the narrator, it seems like a trait worth mentioning.

More Freedom

In Freedom, I've advanced to the section, about half-way through the novel, concerning Joey Berglund's freshman year at the University of Virginia.  I hope it doesn't seem perverse if I persist in my quirky attention to the novel's chronology and the fact-checking of small details, such as whether it is indeed possible that Joey's mother's college basketball games were played before the alternate possession rule eliminated almost all jump balls.

On page 251, Joey and his roommate are watching a World Series game on television.  We know that it is a few weeks past the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which occurred just as Joey was starting college.  The game, we are told, is between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees--check, those two teams were indeed the 2001 contestants.  The Diamondbacks, behind Randy Johnson's pitching, win the game 4-0--check, that was indeed the final score of Game 2, played on Sunday, October 28, in Phoenix, with Johnson the winning pitcher.  At the bottom of the  page, our omniscient narrator reports that "On Jonathan's TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over"--check, that is how  the game ended, according to the batter-by-batter summary supplied at the above "Game 2" link. 

Even Homer nodded but it's hard to catch Franzen.  Maybe the characterization of Patty Berglund,  nee Emerson, is not all of a piece.  Here she is speaking with Joey on the telephone, Thanksgiving 2001:

"But you don't have any religion."

"Exactly my point.  That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts.  That religion is stoopid.  Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished."

"Which sister?"

"Your aunt Abigail.  She's apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are.  How do I know this, you ask?  Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah.  I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey."

"I don't even know what the Kabbalah is," Joey said.

"Oh, I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her.  It's very Important and Mystical--I think Madonna's into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there."

"Madonna's Jewish?"

"Yah, Joey, hence her name."  His mother laughed at him.

All very enjoyable, like so much else in this long book, but, by this point in the narrative, the reader has gotten to know Patty pretty well, her flattened affect, for example, and how she is supposedly the stupidest person in her eccentric, flawed family of origin, and it therefore seems that some of the intelligence and wit displayed in the above conversation is on loan from Jonathan Franzen himself. 

Carping complaint, not even really a complaint, just something that occurred to me while I was reading along with great pleasure.  There are two Pattys.  One can't figure out that her drug-addled college friend does not really have leukemia and the other is the sophisticated author of the "autobiography," written at the suggestion of her therapist, which is included in the novel and displays throughout Franzen's own effortlessly elegant, but still conversational, prose style.

Freedom, Mary Tyler Moore, and jump balls

I have been reading with gusto Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom.  For me there is a kind of built- in "thrill of recognition," since the first 100 pages or so--that's how far into the 560-page work I am--are set in St. Paul and on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota.  The latter, especially, is my old stomping grounds.  The main character, Patty, plays for the Golden Gophers women's basketball team, and her husband-to-be, Walter, a first-year law student from The Range, goes to the games.  So did I!  During my years, from 1981 to 1984, you could display your student ID at the gate and watch a Big Ten women's basketball game for $1.  It appears I missed Patty by just a couple of seasons, for her career-ending injury occurs in the winter preceding Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister of Great Britain, which was in May of 1979.  I have tried, and so far failed, to catch Franzen nodding with respect to his chronology.  When Patty is 17, she is interruped while watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," which at the time "comprised the entirety of [her] knowledge of Minnesota."  The show ended its seven-year run in 1977, so that fits.  I thought I had him for sure when he has Patty resent the way in which back-up center Abbie Smith loses possessions by getting tied up, again and again, and then losing the ensuing jump ball.  The alternate possession rule had to have been adopted by then, right?  Nope, that didn't happen till 1981, so all the games Patty played in could well have been pockmarked by jump balls. 

I suppose no spoiler alert is needed before I let drop that Jonathan Franzen's Minnesota scene diverges somewhat from Garrison Keillor's. 

Chekhov v. Tolstoy

Have I mentioned that I love Chekhov?  Yes, I have--here, for instance.  In the last couple of weeks I've read Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard, and most of the stories collected in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, which is edited by Richard Ford, meaning that he decided which ones are "essential."  The choices are half-eccentric: Ford includes several stories that are familiar to anyone with any interest in Chekhov, or even just the short story ("The Kiss," "Gooseberries," "About Love," "The Darling," "On Official Duty," and, of course, "The Lady with the Dog"), a couple of others that are great but less known on account of being too long for inclusion in anthologies and such collections as The Portable Chekhov ("Ward No. 6" and "An Anonymous Story"), and others still that are not very well known at all--these are mostly by the younger, less grave Chekhov, about whom Ford thinks the world is under-informed. 

Personally, I think the wide world is under-informed, in a general sort of way, about Chekhov, who, besides being a major figure in world literature, was an exemplary human being.  Now that I've said that, some Ph.D. candidate will probably reveal that he (Chekhov) pursued a sexual interest in marsupials--in which case I think I shall take a second look at the kangaroo.

So you see that Chekhov strikes a chord in me.  I think it is largely the thoroughgoing rejection of the heroic mode.  In the post linked to above, I noted how the story "Anna on the Neck" invites comparison with another Russian Anna who steps out on her husband.  The biblical epigraphs are missing in Chekhov, and tragic consequences fail to develop.  It sometimes seems to me that Chekhov had read all of Tolstoy and made notes on every false enthusiasm.  You know how Tolstoy sometimes idealizes the Russian peasants, whose simple purity is a rebuke to the dissipated aristocrats?  The Chekhov story "Peasants," which I read a few days ago in Ford's collection, will have none of that sentimental nonsense.  From the opening:

In his memories of childhood he had pictured his home as bright, snug, comfortable.  Now, going into the hut, he was positively frightened; it was so dark, so crowded, so unclean.  His wife Olga and his daughter Sasha, who had come with him, kept looking in bewilderment at the big untidy stove, which filled up almost half the hut and was black with soot and flies.  What lots of flies!  The stove was on one side, the beams lay slanting on the walls, and it looked as though the hut were just going to fall to pieces.  In the corner, facing the door, under the holy images, bottle labels and newspaper cuttings were stuck on the walls instead of pictures.  The poverty, the poverty!  Of the grown-up people there were none at home; all were at work at the harvest.  On the stove was sitting a white-haired girl of eight, unwashed and apathetic; she did not even glance at them as they came in.  On the floor a white cat was rubbing itself against the oven fork.

"Puss, puss!" Sasha called to her.  "Puss!"

"She can't hear," said the little girl; "she has gone deaf."

"How is that?"

"Oh, she was beaten."

By the way, Ford includes "Kashtanka," told from the perspective of a lost dog who is taken in, then trained, by a circus clown whose act includes performing animals.  Chekhov was plainly fond of animals.  Showing someone mistreating a dog or a horse is in his fiction a kind of shorthand for "a-hole."

Writers read

The New Yorker is publishing this summer stories by twenty authors under age 40.  The anointed ones were asked, in interviews, a series of questions, including: "Who are your favorite authors over forty?"  As their answers indicate, the question is a little ambiguous.  Does Homer count or not?  Karen Russellseems to  have thought that maybe he doesn't, as her list ended with "whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones."  Nevertheless, Homer was named by two others.  By my count, the twenty young writers named 112 different "older" writers as "favorites."  Here, for your perusal, with links to the Wikipedia articles, are the ones named more than once, with the number of "votes" in parenthesis.

Marilynne Robinson (6)
Mary Gaitskill (5)
Edward P. Jones (5)
Toni Morrison (4)
Lydia Davis (4)
Deborah Eisenberg (4)
Philip Roth (3)
J.M. Coetzee (3)
Lorrie Moore (3)
Denis Johnson (3)
Jonathan Franzen (3)
Padgett Powell (2)
Roberto Bolano (2)
Jeffrey Eugenides (2)
Joy Williams (2)
Stuart Dybek (2)
Alice Munro (2)
Don DeLillo (2)
Jim Shepard (2)
Homer (2)
Bruno Schulz (2)
Peter Carey (2)
Kazuo Ishiguro (2)
V.S. Naipaul (2)
Colm Toibin (2)
George Saunders (2)
Saul Bellow (2)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2).

Readers write

A fan letter, by Nicholson Baker, to John Updike.  I have to say, it seems sort of churlish of The New York Review to block complete access, because I'm pretty sure the "teaser" you can see for nothing is more than half the whole.  For sure it includes the part I like best:

I thought what an amazing thing that Mr. Updike has been writing all the years that I have been growing up, and how I have come to depend on the idea that he is writing away as a soothing idea, and then I was reminded of Trollope, and how nice it must have been for writers back then to go about their lives knowing that Mr. Trollope was going to have a new book coming out soon, that it would be good; and they might not read all of the things he wrote, but they would read some, and they would know that what they didn’t read they were missing, but were comforted also that they knew what kind of man he was because they had already read a lot of what he wrote; and the idea they had of the man who gradually had written all these books was a powerful, happy thing in their lives.

I was trying to say something similar here. And when I wrote, here:

It's a comfort to think that, for those of us who did not know him personally, access to Updike is no less than before.  Being sustained by him, it's  a further comfort to contemplate how much his reading seems to have sustained him.  His love of books and learning is palpable on the written page.  Sometimes it breaks out with a little yell.  His introduction to Hugging the Shore concludes,

. . . I live again in a big white house with a view of saltwater.  I keep looking out the window.  The clean horizon beckons.  All sorts of silvery shadows streak the surface of the sea.  Sailboats dot it, some far out.  It looks like literature.  What a beautiful sight!

Bloomsday, 2010

The hordes of avid followers of this blog know that on each June 16, in honor of Bloomsday, I devote a post to James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904.  That's the day Joyce went on his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.  She seems to have permitted him considerable liberties and it meant enough to him to be commemorated in what some consider the finest novel written in the English language. 

Maybe it is, but of the works of Joyce known to me the most enjoyable is "The Dead," the long story that brings his collection Dubliners to a close.  There is a party on a winter evening to honor two elderly ladies, the maiden aunts of one Gabriel Conroy.  The guests and the food and talk are described with Dickensian thoroughness, page after page, and finally the guests, including Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, head home in the dark.  We've gotten to know something about Gabriel.  He's educated, conservative, nearly middle-aged, a decent man but timid and conventional.  Gretta, whose beauty has begun to fade, was once courted by a sickly man who caught his death serenading her on an inclement night.  That is one thing we learn.  Another thing we learn is that Gabriel thinks it very important to wear galoshes in wet weather.  Alone with his wife after the party, he watches out the window as the snow falls and has a kind of muted vision of mediocrity and insignificance--within and without.  The end.

I've done the story the same justice as the teaser, "Danish prince returns home on school vacation and finds his father murdered and his mother already remarried to his uncle."  If you are at all inclined, read "The Dead."  If you like it, read all of Dubliners straight through: it's a great book, and your prize will be that at the end you'll get to read "The Dead" again.

Encore

Seven days, says my dashboard, since I delivered myself of the definitive deconstruction of the political commentary of Michael Gerson.  What can I do for an encore?  That is the question reverberating in cyberspace.  Here on First Avenue South, in Minneapolis, however, the question has been: when the hell are you going to plant flowers in the boulevard?  And the answer has been: on some day when I am not at work for nine hours and the Twins aren't playing the Yankees on tv.  What a full life.  Reminds me of a cartoon in The New Yorker.  It's a graveyard, full of stones, and the only one you can read says, "Here lies So-and-So.  He watched a lot of sports on television."

The Twins, after disappointing Bronx losses on Friday and Saturday, salvaged game three yesterday by scoring five runs in the eighth inning, all batted in against Mariano Rivera, who walked Thome with the bases loaded and then yielded a grand slam to Kubel.  As for gardening, I can say that, while not an Olympic sport, you use muscles that apparently hibernate in the winter.  I lay in bed, weary and feeling hot on the tops of my ears, with the Modern Library's Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen.  We're going to see "Dollhouse," Rebecca Gilman's "droll and deliciously caustic" update of Ibsen's "A Doll's House," at the Guthrie on May 26, so naturally, like the A-student I wasn't, I'm reading up in preparation for the big night out. 

Being a hundred per cent Norwegian, I feel obliged to approve of every dropping from the pen of Norway's greatest gift to literature, though I have to admit that some of those earlier plays--the only ones I've read so far--may strike a Swede as melodramatic and cheap.  I'm thinking mainly now of Pillars of Society.  You think all is well at the house of the town's finest citizen?  Well, it's not, and some of the trouble concerns forbidden sex.  Oh, my!

As Rochefoucault his Maxims drew. . .

I've put aside my Johnson and taken up The Portable Swift, half of which consists of Gulliver.  In college, or somewhere, I read "A Modest Proposal" and "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," and that is nearly all I know of Swift.  I think I might have gotten sidetracked when, reading "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," I wondered about this fellow La Rochefoucauld who appears in the first line.  I found his maxims and never got back to Swift.  Here is a sampling of said maxims.  He really ought to be better known.

We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

For most of mankind, love of justice is nothing more than the fear of suffering injustice.

The old love to give good advice, to console themselves for no longer being in a condition to give bad examples.

We would scarcely ever enjoy ourselves, if we never flattered ourselves.

To refuse praise means that you want to be praised twice.

No matter how many nice things they say about us, we never learn anything new.

Our enemies come closer in their judgments about us than we ever do about ourselves.

In the misfortunes of our friends, we always find something not displeasing.

A short biography, with a small collection of other of his maxims, is here.  If Swift is a kindred spirit I am going to be enjoying my coffee breaks.

Sex tips for 18th-century travelling men

James Boswell (1740-1795) has sometimes been criticized for being a kind of lackey, and for making a cartoon figure of Dr. Johnson.  There is some truth to the charge, which, with the emphasis on some, is a way of saying that there is a line of defense open to those inclined in Boswell's favor.  He is after all the author of one of the most enjoyable books ever written: The Life of Johnson, whatever its faults, has been a well of pleasure to readers for now more than 200 years.  Then there are his voluminous journals.  Where to start?  The expurgated pages, of course!

Boswell was in his mid-20s and travelling on the Continent when word reached him that his mother had died back in Edinburgh.  He returned home in the company of Therese Le Vasseur, Rousseau's lifetime companion.  His entries for the eleven days of the journey from Paris to London are missing from the journal, though a literary executor inserted a slip of paper marked "Reprehensible Passage" at the place where the approximately twelve manuscript pages should have been.  Before they were destroyed these pages were read by Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, whose notes are the principal source for the following Editorial Note in Boswell on the Grand Tour, edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle:

It does not appear that before leaving Paris Boswell had formed any scheme of seducing Therese, and the day of his departure found him tense and harassed by difficulties in getting started, and deeply unhappy over his mother's death.  But the intimacy of travel and the proximity in which the pair found themselves at inns at night precipitated an intrigue almost immediately.  On the second night out they shared the same bed; Boswell's first attempt, as often with him, was a fiasco.  He was deeply humiliated, the grief he was trying to repress came back upon him, and he wept.  Therese, with a Frenchwoman's tenderness and sympathy, put her arm around him to console him and laid his hand on her shoulder.  His grief and embarrassment waned; as he recorded on another occasion, his powers were excited and he felt himself vigorous.  Next day he was very proud of himself, and in the coach he congratulated Therese (who was almost twenty years his senior) on her good fortune in having at last experienced the ardours of a Scotch lover.  Therese stunned him by denying that she had great cause for gratitude:  "I allow," she said, "that you are a hardy and vigorous lover, but you have no art."  Then, with quick perception seeing him cast down, she went on, "I did not mean to hurt you.  You are young, you can learn.  I myself will give you your first lesson in the art of love."

[Snip.]

He gave some details of her instruction.  He must be gentle though ardent; he must not hurry.  She asked him, as a man who had travelled much, if he had noticed how many things were achieved by men's hands.  He made good technical progress, though he was not wholly persuaded of her right to set up for a teacher; he said she rode him "agitated, like a bad rider galloping downhill."  After awhile her lectures bored him, and he brought up the subject of Rousseau, hoping at least to gather a few dicta philosophi for his journal.  Therese in her turn found that dull.  It was a mistake, he finally reflected, to get involved with an old man's mistress.

The first entry following the excised pages commences: "Wednesday 12 February [1766; Dover].  Yesterday morning had gone to bed very early, and had done it once: thirteen in all."  Years later, speaking of himself in the third person in his Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell wrote: "He had all Dr. Johnson's principles, with some degree of relaxation."

At home

Fortified with Christmas cookies, I've been shoveling snow for lo these many days.  Since it has now stopped accumulating, the plowing of side streets has begun, and this morning I chopped up and cleared away the heavy crusty mass deposited in the night at the end of our driveway by a public employee getting time-and-a-half.  Before he did his work, our driveway was passable but the street was not.  After he plowed, the street was passable but we couldn't get our car to it. With the holiday now past, and our reliance on the automobile no longer mocked by circumstances, the world seems to have returned to normal.

If it hadn't been for all that snow I might have had more of a chance to do what I do every Christmas:  tenderly peruse the tables of contents and indexes, and selected random pages, of the books I get as gifts, which this year were Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor, from my sister, and the Library of America edition of Henry Adams's History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, from Amanda.  The latter now sits next to its previously purchased mate, concerning the history of our country during the administrations of Madison, on a shelf filling up with these handsome editions--I have L of A volumes given over to the works of Thoreau, Clemons, Nabokov, Henry James, Howells, and Wilson, besides the Adams pair.

Speaking of books, over at the New Yorker site diverse writers and editors of that estimable magazine tell what they read in 2009.  Lauren Collins provides a list, because she'd written them down in a notebook.  As best I can in a listless moment remember, my own would look like this:

1. The Triple Thinkers, by Edmund Wilson
2. The Wound and the Bow (Wilson)
3. Classics and Commercials (Wilson)
4. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
5. Six Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman; and
6. assorted writings of Samuel Johnson, culled from one source and another, mainly Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and William Wimsatt.

Looking it over there is a kind of personal logic to the succession.  Dickens is the subject of the long opening essay in The Wound and the Bow, and, having only ever read Hard Times, I determined to take a longer drink from that deep river.  When I came up, a couple of months later, I was in the mood for something very different--a slim science paperback with the word "easy" in the title.  Well, it's not that easy.  Meanwhile, this being the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth, I had stumbled across some notices pertaining to him, especially this from Wolcott, and next thing I knew was plundering the PR3522 area of the public library.  Predictably, I am now submerged in Boswell's Life, though I have the good sense to limit myself to an abridged version--the one in The Portable Johnson Boswell, which includes a value-added introduction by Louis Kronenberger.  I sometimes find myself laughing aloud:

One night, when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them in a ramble.  They rapped violently at the door of his chambers in the Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt, with his little black wig on the top of his head, instead of a night-cap, and a poker in his hand, imagining, probably, that some ruffians were coming to attack him.  When he discovdered who they were, and was told their errand, he smiled, and with great good humour agreed to their proposal: "What, is it you, you dogs!  I'll have a frisk with you."  He was soon drest, and they sallied forth together into Covent-Garden, where the greengrocers and fruiterers were beginning to arrange their hampers, just come in from the country.  Johnson made some attempts to help them; but the honest gardeners stared so at his figure and manner, and odd interference, that he soon saw his services were not relished.  They then repaired to one of the neighbouring taverns, and made a bowl of that liquor called Bishop, which Johnson had always liked; while in joyous contempt of sleep, from which he had been roused, he repeated the festive lines,

Short, O short then be thy reign,
And give us to the world again!

They did not stay long, but walked down to the Thames, took a boat, and rowed to Billingsgate.  Beauclerk and Johnson were so well pleased with their amusement, that they resoved to persevere in dissipation for the rest of the day: but Langton deserted them, being engaged to breakfast with some young Ladies.  Johnson scolded him for "leaving his social friends to go and sit with a set of wretched un-idea'd girls."  Garrick being told of this ramble, said to him smartly, "I heard of your frolick t'other night.  You'll be in the Chronicle."  Upon which Johnson afterwards observed, "He durst not do such a thing.  His wife would not let him!" 

There is much to enjoy in this little episode, and it is only one of very many in the whole, but the figure of Dr. Johnson in the role of macho taunter of the hen-pecked married man, who can't go out carousing with his friends, lodges in the mind.  Kronenberger, in an astute remark in the Introduction, suggests that Johnson, conscious of his oddness, took inordinate delight in things he thought "normal." 

In one post: Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson & a Tiger joke

Of this speech in the third act of King Lear--

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

--A.C. Bradley, one of the best Shakespearean critics, suggests that criticism must stand mute, and declares only, "This is one of those passages which make one worship Shakespeare."  Indent, new paragraph, nothing more to say about that.

The accumulation of such passages, in diverse situations across approximately 36 dramas, all compelling the conclusion that nothing remains to be said, is responsible for Shakespeare's status as the author of "humanistic scriptures, the tested residue of pragmatic wisdom, a general collection of quotable texts and usable examples" (as Harry Levin, in his General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare, puts it).  This raises the question: who's in second place? 

Since I have recently quoted Dr. Johnson to shed light upon the troubles of Tiger Woods, it should not surprise my hordes of loyal readers to learn that, today, I vote for him (Johnson, not Woods).  I've been reading Johnson's LIfe of Savage and, on a coffee break from work trouble on Friday, came upon this passage:

Examples need not be sought at any great distance to prove that superiority of fortune has a natural tendency to kindle pride, and that pride seldom fails to exert itself in contempt and insult; and if this is often the effect of hereditary wealth and of honors enjoyed only to the merit of others, it is some extenuation of any indecent triumphs to which this unhappy man [Savage] may have been betrayed that his prosperity was heightened by the force of novelty and made more intoxicating by a sense of the misery in which he had so long languished and perhaps of the insults which he had formerly borne, and which he might now think himself entitled to revenge.  It is too common for those who have unjustly suffered pain to inflict it likewise in their turn with the same injustice, and to imagine that they have a right to treat others as they have themselves been treated. . . .

[Savage] was then able to discern that if misery be the effect of virtue it ought to be reverenced; if of ill fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.  And the humanity of that man can deserve no panegyric who is capable of reproaching a criminal in the hands of the executioner.

Maybe this does not deserve the epithet "quotable," but it's overflowing of wisdom and humanity, and is one of those passages that make me worship Dr. Johnson. On a lower note:

Q: What is the difference between a Cadillac Escalade and a golf ball?

A: Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball 300 yards.

Bedtime reading

Just came down the stairs after reading, with our 6-year-old at her bedtime, The Cat in the Hat.  Is it just me or is there something kind of alarming and sinister roiling beneath the surface of the rhyming anapests?  Where has the mother gone, anyway?  It is not right to leave young children alone at home, apparently with the doors unlocked.  At the very end, she arrives back home and speaks, but she is never shown--a figure of mystery, which is a poor trait in a mother.  In her absence, the children sit and stare out the window at the bleak day until the Cat arrives on the scene.  He is no substitute for a decent mother and the children do not appear to be entertained by his "tricks."  There is no one to cheer for.  The fish?  No.  He is right, in a way, but he is also an unimaginative scold, and his repeated appeals to what the absent mother would say are morally repellent.  The children you just feel sorry for.  Until near the end, when the boy, who is the narrator, captures with his net the two Things, they appear flummoxed and passive.  I tell Rianna that of her books it is my favorite, and that is true, but I don't blame her for not liking it.  The story is sad and upsetting.  When on the last page the narrator asks the individual reader whether she would tell her mother what had happened, he comes close to making the same mistake as the fish.  I would not tell that mother a thing.  She is not to be trusted.

Dr Johnson & the problems of life

Still happily swimming in Dr. Johnson's orotundities.  Here he is, in Rasselas, on an old problem:

Such is the common process of marriage.  A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another.  Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together.  They marry, and discover what nothing  but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

When Johnson speaks of marriage, it is tempting to make biographical applications.  His wife, who was his senior by about 25 years, is a somewhat shadowy character in The Life of Johnson.  Perhaps Boswell didn't know too much about her, perhaps details would not serve a quasi-hagiographic purpose.  Perhaps both.  What I know of the record suggests that Johnson at first adored her, then neglected her, and finally, after her death, suffered terribly from remorse over his behavior toward her.  In Rambler No. 45 he advances the argument that people only think that marriage makes them miserable.  They recall their youth, when they were vigorous and full of hope, also as yet unmarried, then look across the room (I'm paraphrasing) and attribute to the first thing the eye settles on their current unhappiness.  But the real problem is that they are no longer young and vigorous and full of hope.  I shall cease paraphrasing: "It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that whether married or unmarried we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn."

By the way, if the SAT is in the future of your offspring, you may want to push on them Johnson's Ramblers and Idlers.  Hell, he wrote the Dictionary, and it shows. 

The fact of second marriages is adduced to show that matrimony, though complained about, is most probably not an inferior state.  There is wisdom in crowds.  Johnson, however, did not himself remarry, and lived a widower for his last 32 years.  Despite his many good traits it is hard to doubt that he would have been a trying domestic companion.  Better to read him, even if you've already taken the SAT.  Clear thinking, forceful expressions, a scorn for cant and sentimentality--recommended for all.  His great theme is wishful thinking, a ruinous folly that, on the topic at hand, wears the aspect of self-serving convictions.  Why do spouses resent one another?  "We are always willing to fancy ourselves within a little of happiness and when, with repeated efforts, we cannot reach it, persuade ourselves that it is intercepted by an ill-paired mate, since if we could find any other obstacle it would be our own fault that it was not removed." 

Compensations of flu

I've been laid low with flu, garden-variety.  It's almost pleasant to be sick enough to stay home from work, conscience free, but not so sick as to be unable to enjoy sedentary pursuits--the divisional race in the American League Central, for example, and Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets.  Last night the Twins beat the Royals while the Pale Hose topped the Tigers, thereby lifting the Twins to within a game of first place and freeing me, once the telecasts were concluded, to forge ahead in Johnson's account of the life and work of John Milton. 

Though it may not have seemed so to Milton, his life was divided in three parts: (1) youthful apprenticeship; (2) pamphleteer; and (3) epic poet.  Johnson, a self-made man dogged for years by the need to make a living, probably regarded the details of (1) with a mixture of asperity and longing.  There is no need to speculate about what he, a strong Tory, thought of the details of (2).  Almost against his will he could not deny Milton's achievement in (3).  One can often sense the opposing forces contending in his inimitable prose style.  Having reached the point, on the cusp between (1) and (2), at which Milton returns home to contentious England from his tour of the continent, Johnson writes:

Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school.  This is the period of his life from which all his biographers seem inclined to shrink.

His contempt for Milton's politics is joined to a coldly ferocious attack on his character:

It has been observed that they who most clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it.  What we know of Milton's character in domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary.  His family consisted of women, and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate and inferior beings.  That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education.  He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.

The temperature here seems sufficiently high to make one wonder what his veneration of Milton would preclude.  His offhanded dismissal of "Lycidas" is famous (and wrong), and he works into his generally admiring review of Paradise Lost the remark that "none ever wished it longer."  (I think he was right about that.)  One does nevertheless often detect a kind of grudging veneration, in small things as well as great:

Of his zeal for learning in all its parts, he gave a proof by publishing the next year (1661) Accidence commenced Grammar, a little book which has nothing remarkable but that its author, who had been lately defending the supreme powers of his country and was then writing Paradise Lost, could descend from his elevation to rescue children from the perplexity of grammatical confusion, and the trouble of lessons unnecessarily repeated.

Delmon Young, batting with two out and the bases loaded in the sixth inning of a pitchers' duel, has just delivered a bases-clearing double.  It appears the Twins have a good chance of playing a meaningful game on the very last day of the regular season.  As a compensation for the flu, all this is first-rate.

Wilson on Dickens

Having finished Bleak House, I am re-reading Edmund Wison's essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow.  It is called "Dickens: The Two Scrooges."  After relating the story of his father's incarceration in Marshalsea Prison and Charles's employment for six months, when he was 12, in a blacking warehouse, Wilson writes at the beginning of the long essay's third section:

For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel.  Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to play the roles of both, and to continue up to his death to put into them all that was most passionate in his feeling.

I know that my eyes have passed over these words before and am surprised now to think they made no impression on me.  Wilson seems exactly right but his Dickens, the brooding and subversive survivor of a childhood wound, is not the kindly lover of Christmas many think they know.  When Wilson tries to place Dickens in some kind of literary context the author whose name recurs is no Englishman.  It's Dostoevski.

Family vacation to the poor man's ocean

We've just returned from the first ever Jorgenson-McFarlane family vacation, a two-day and one-night trip to the twin ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin.  The exalted phrase, "family vacation," is really part of a successful advertising campaign undertaken by the elder Jorgensons, who wanted to persuade McFarlane, 6, that this short trip is a great treat.  We saw the zoo and the aquarium in Duluth and went on a cruise of the harbor that shoved out from Barker's Island in Superior.  All fine, but for me the whole reason for going is just to see the lake, the way the water and sky merge in a vast blank of gray.  Everyone who reads Moby Dick must wonder what is going to happen when finally Ahab meets the great white whale--and feel bored, probably, wading through the several hundred pages of Melvillean prose that precede this showdown.  My favorite moment, however, occurs before the Pequod has even gone out to sea.  Ishmael boards in port for a job interview, and is asked by Peleg why he wants to go a-whaling. 

"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is," he answers.  "I want to see the world."  Peleg tells him to have a look out over the ship's weather bow.  Ishmael complies, and 

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"

"Not much," I replied - "nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."

"Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?" 

No.  Had to go to Duluth. 

More enjoyable activities

What is new with Eric?  Well, the Torrens Twins, my entry in the Fantasy Baseball League of Hennepin County, are trying to be more than an also-ran, but an injury to Ian Kinsler and the prolonged slump of Jason Bay, now also hobbled, are holding them back.  What to do?  I thought I had made a shrewd move by picking up Jarod Washburn just before the division-leading Tigers acquired him in a trade, but I see that tonight he got beat up by the Orioles. 

On coffee breaks and in bed I read Bleak House and am now almost to the end.  At Caribou this afternoon Mr. Jarndyce stepped back so that Woodcourt could step forward, thereby clearing the way for Esther's bliss.  Such is the goodness and purity of Jarndyce that I have to suspect that the thirty or so pages in the 900s of my Penguin Classic paperback will relate yet more of his magnanimous acts.   But what was going on between him and Esther, all that "little woman" and "my Guardian" between people engaged to be married?  Even allowing for different courtship customs this one seems odd.  I see now, turning to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, that his discussion of Bleak House includes a section headed "John Jarndyce's Curious Courtship" wherein he advances the theory that Jarndyce, who is perhaps 30 years older than Esther, proposes that their marriage be platonic--that is what he means by repeatedly insisting that "nothing can change" and stressing that on this "one point" she must be "quite certain."  In this light it seems possible to criticize old kindly Jarndyce, since under the terms of his proposal Esther, who is really not in a position to turn him down, will be denied children as well as any lover.  The whole thing is very strange and makes you wonder just how badly disfigured Esther had been by the smallpox, another topic on which Dickens seems to equivocate.  

In her column today Miss Manners alludes to Bleak House--to Mrs. Jellyby, in particular, in whose honor she names the Jellyby Syndrome, a condition in which "those who work on behalf of other people in general feel free to annoy the particular people with whom they come into contact."  I have elsewhere published my admiration for Miss Manners.

Regarding Suicide Alexander's bank book, etc.

It's the last season for the local nine in the Metrodome, and a local sportswriter, Tom Powers, has an enjoyable column about the most eccentric Twins ever to play under the fluttery roof.  Perhaps Luis Castillo, the current Mets 2nd baseman who is sporting a batting average north of .300, has the highest profile of the honorees.  According to Powers, Castillo once sent a clubhouse attendant to an ATM to withdraw some cash for him.  The fellow returned with the money and a statement showing a remaining balance well into seven figures. 

This reminds me of Suicide Alexander's World Series bank book.  Alexander figures prominently in Mark Harris's It Looked Like Forever, the last installment of the Henry Wiggen tetralogy.  After his team won the World Series in 1950, Alexander deposited $500,000 in what we then called a passbook savings account.  He never touched the money and enjoyed displaying the book to friends and acquaintances.  After the initial deposit, the only entries were for interest accruals.  By 1971, the present time of the novel, his balance stood at $1,095,561.60.  I think those who are good at math will tell you that over those twenty years he was getting about a 3.5% return.

It is not just ballplayers, fictional and otherwise, who exhibit odd financial habits.  In Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever reveals that her father John barely eked out a living during the years that he was publishing in The New Yorker some of the best short fiction ever written by an American.  Then, in the mid-1960s, he had a windfall.  Back then, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insured deposits in a single bank up to $10,000.  According to his daughter, Cheever had about $9500 in every bank in Westchester County.

By the way, if you are interested in Cheever, Home Before Dark is an interesting book that can be read in perhaps two long coffee-shop sessions.  And It Looked Like Forever is less familiar than it ought to be.  I think it is the most enjoyable novel in the Wiggen tetralogy, though of course The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly are more well known. In the first chapter, at a funeral, Wiggen observes a ballplayer paying a lot of attention to a wealthy older woman, and

it occurred to me now and again that she might of took him to bed with her.  Why not?  He was only 30 years younger than her, and the older I grew the more I become aware of things that would of formerly surprised me. 

It's only one of many enjoyable moments.  The education of Henry Wiggen is over and now he's teaching us.  Harris was a Boswell scholar, and I've always thought of the mature Wiggen as a kind of subliterate Dr. Johnson, a genius of common sense. 

Happily sunk in Bleak House

I've progressed in Bleak House to the episode in which Allan Woodcourt, back in England after his trip with the navy to India, ministers to Jo, the homeless steet-sweeper. 

"It surely is a strange fact," [Allan] considers, "that in the heart of a civilized world this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog."

You would not call Dickens a master of realism.  Most of the leading characters in Bleak House are either perfectly good (John Jarndyce, Esther, Allan) or perfectly wicked (Tulkinghorn, Vholes, the Smallweeds).  Lady Dedlock and Richard Carstone are exceptions but they do not seem to me particularly memorable.  The novel is memorable despite seeming finally remote from the experience of most of us.  The scene with Allan and Jo is memorable in a way that may put you in mind of Edgar's ministrations to his father in the fourth act of King Lear--touching, tender, pitiable, and unlike anything I've come across in my life. 

Two poems

Our six-year-old has been enjoying, at her bedtime, the poems in Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends.  And not only she.  Here is my favorite, of the ones we've come to so far:

Poor Angus

Oh what do you do, poor Angus,
When hunger makes you cry?
"I fix myself an omelet, sir,
Of fluffy clouds and sky."

Oh what do you wear, poor Angus,
When winds blow down the hills?
"I sew myself a warm cloak, sir,
Of hope and daffodils."

Oh who do you love, poor Angus,
When Catherine's left the moor?
"Ah, then, sir, then's the only time
I feel I'm really poor."

It reminds me of this one, by Robert Pinsky, who I suppose was not thinking of children when he wrote

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Chekhov

I know I said that upon finishing Righteous Victims I meant to turn my attention to Dickens, but I've been spending my last few coffee breaks with the Norton critical edition of Chekhov's stories.  The short story seems to fit my life, which does not permit long stretches of uninterrupted reading, and you can't really do better than Chekhov.  I highly recommend the Wikipedia article.  Do you find that sometimes, when reading in Wikipedia about something you know about, the article seems very poor?  The  Hemingway entry was like that last time I looked at it.  But the Chekhov article is long, detailed, informative, well written and a pleasure to read.

Yesterday morning I finished "The Lady with the Dog" and Wednesday I'd read "Anna on the Neck."  The former is justly famous.  Nabokov, who was not a Chekhov enthusiast, called it one of the very greatest of short stories, and he'll not be contradicted by me.  The latter reminds me that Flannery O'Connor once wrote a story ("Good Country People") about a character with a wooden leg, which an American really should not do unless she wants readers to think of Captain Ahab.  In the same way, the author of "Anna on the Neck" might have given the young wife another name had he not wanted to remind the reader of another Russian Anna who tortured her husband.  But in Chekhov of course the marital straying is not accompanied by biblical epigraphs, hysteria, and suicide.  If Anna Karenina is streaked with iridescent shades of purplish red, Chekhov is all earth brown and gray.

The rather flat prose of the stories goes with what Mirsky called an "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values."  Nevertheless a sentence sometimes gleams.  Of the husband in "Anna on the Neck," a rich official who has won a young bride who must marry for money, he writes: "His clean-shaven, round, sharply defined chin looked like the heel of a foot."  Of Gurov's past conquests he writes, in "The Lady with the Dog":

He could remember carefree, good-natured women who were exhilirated by love-making and grateful to him for the happiness he gave them, however short-lived; and there had been others--his wife among them--whose caresses were insincere, affected, hysterical, mixed up with a great deal of quite unnecessary talk, and whose expressions seemed to say that all this was not just lovemaking or passion, but something much more significant; then there had been two or three beautiful, cold women, over whose features flitted a predatory expression, betraying a determination to wring from life more than it could give, women no longer in their first youth, capricious, irrational, despotic, brainless, and when Gurov had cooled to these, their beauty aroused in him nothing but revulsion, and the lace trimming on their underclothes reminded him of fish-scales.

One feels that the official's chin looked like the heel of a foot to his wife, who was repulsed by the thought of being touched by him.  And in the sentence from "The Lady with the Dog," one of Chekhov's longest, this sense of revulsion is strong enough to require the actual word.

"Any idiot can face a crisis," Chekhov once wrote.  "It's this day-to-day living that wears you out."

La Rochefoucauld explains

Today I shall not paraphrase La Rochefoucauld (as here) but, discounting the difficulties involved in translating an aphorist, quote him exactly: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it." 

If good writing expresses memorably large truths in few words then not many of all the sentences ever written are better than that one.  Thoreau, in Walden, wrote that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"--a contender for the same title and, in subject matter and acuity of vision, an obvious cousin. 

Who is not afflicted?  Reading Coetzee on Beckett in The New York Review, an unlikely victim swings into view:

One of the more unexpected of [Beckett's] literary enthusiams is for Samuel Johnson.  Struck by the "mad terrified face" in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale into a stage play.  It is not the great pontificator of Boswell's Life who engages him, as [his] letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression.  In Beckett's version of events, Johnson takes up residence with the much younger Hester and her husband at a time when he is already impotent and therefore doomed to be a "Platonic gigolo"  in the menage a trois.  He suffers first the despair of "the lover with nothing to love with," then heartbreak when the husband dies and Hester goes off with another man.

[Snip]

In the confident public man who privately struggles against listlessness and depression, who sees no point in living yet cannot face annihilation, Beckett clearly detects a kindred spirit.

Flannery O'Connor

Joyce Carol Oates reviews the recently published Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch, and, as is the custom with reviews in The New York Review, has as much or more to say about Gooch's subject as she does about Gooch's book.  You can't argue with much of what she says.  A fierce and devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor's stories are melodramatic cartoons written in the 1950s and 1960s, when the usual models were the carefully wrought and understated short fictions of Chekhov and Joyce.  "To the hard of hearing you shout," O'Connor explained, "and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." 

It is the sanguine unbelievers, and their similarly comfortable lukewarm Christian communicants, who require these large and startling figures.  Sometimes it would be more accurate to dispense with "large" and "startling" in favor of "terrible" and "grim."  You laugh and laugh and then wonder what you are laughing at.  "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," maybe her most frequently reprinted story, begins with an overly chatty grandma complaining that the car trip she's embarking on with her son's family should take a different route, the better to avoid the haunts of a notorious criminal who's been terrorizing the region.  They go anyway, she keeps up a steady stream of inane commentary, for example agreeing with the proprietor of a roadside restaurant who says that these days a good man is hard to find, then there is an accident and--surprise!--the notorious criminal, known as The Misfit, arrives on the scene and kills them all, including the baby, who is in the story only so that it can be murdered.  People hate it so when bad things happen to babies.

Oates directs attention to the conclusion of this story without mentioning the last word, which, though I once made a systematic reading of her slim collected works for a school project, is the one thing I will never forget from O'Connor's world.  All the members of the family have been shot dead.  The Misfit directs his helper, one Bobby Lee, to retrieve the old lady's corpse from the ditch and toss it with the others.  He descends into the ditch "with a yodel" before declaring, "Some fun!"  The story ends with the Misfit's retort:  "'Shut up, Bobby Lee,' the Misfit said.  'It's no real pleasure in life.'"

So there for your consideration is one of the large and startling figures. Once, in a letter, O'Connor wrote:

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

That seems to shed some light on what is going on in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and, more generally, in the world according to Flannery O'Connor.

Oates takes up the question of whether "the art of caricature [is] a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety."  She doesn't offer a final answer, but her catalog of the evidence, in a footnote, for O'Connor's rising stock on the Literary Reputation Index--the proliferation of book-length studies of her work, the Ph.D. dissertations, the way in which sales of the Library of America edition of her work surpass those of her fellow southerner Faulkner--suggest that academic toilers now esteem her startling figures more than, say, Faulkner's rich, complicated, comprehensive chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County.  There is a certain irony here.  O'Connor saw herself as an outsider, even as a kind of prophet to the comfortable and unconverted masses, but the source of her outsider critique is now what has made her a campus favorite.  Think of all the Catholic universities and other Christian institutions of what is called higher education, their English faculties drowning in tenure-track earnestness.  Catholics have tried to claim James Joyce, a passionate atheist, as a lost son of the Church.  Imagine the enthusiasm generated by an actual orthodox believer.

One of the pleasures of literature involves what has been called "the thrill of recognition."  O'Connor's large and startling figures do not provide it.  Her fiction to me is news from another world, one inhabited not by human beings but by the unusual sensibility of Flannery O'Connor.  I guess my vote is for what Oates calls an art of complexity or subtlety, not this harrowing tunnel always narrowing in on a medieval portrait of Christ.  But you can't deny the kick. 

Native Son

Native Son is probably the the most exotic specimen on my list of Ten Favorite American Novels.  Remember, you can't really argue with me, or with Mailer, whose list moved me to make my own,  because admission is based only on how much I, or he, like the book.  But I know that to a lot of people Native Son will look out of place on a list that includes such standards as Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby.  So I have an explanation.

I first read Native Son when I was about 15.  I had always been interested in sports, and when quite young read a lot of books with titles like Babe Ruth, Boy Slugger.  As I got older, my interests didn't really change, but I progressed to I Never Had It Made (Jackie Robinson) and Go Up For Glory (Bill Russell).  These contributions to publishing history served up what you'd expect, including a measure of racial animus that, to a boy in an all-white suburb, was an exciting new topic.  I moved off the sports shelves and, for some reason I can no longer remember, chose The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Native Son followed, along with Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, and then many of the essays, stories, and novels of James Baldwin.  This was to me all news from another world. 

Years later, in college, I was enrolled in a seminar, "American Literature of the 1930s."  We were all assigned to choose a book from a list, read it, and report on it to the other participants.  Someone else took Native Son, a woman who, it developed when she delivered her report, hated it.  Mainly she couldn't stand the way it was written--"indulgent," "wordy," "sloppy." Since it was one of the books that made me a reader, I felt that my personal taste was under assault.  She didn't understand.  It was an angry book, the author was angry, and that was the way angry people talked.  They used a lot of adjectives.  The woman had mentioned that she was also in a "lyric poetry workshop," something like that, and so maybe she didn't comprehend that those conventions did not necessarily apply to novels.  Clumsiness, if that is what it was, can be expressive.  Bob Dylan's voice is fine for the songs he sings.  I worked up this defense after it was too late to air it in the seminar.  But I was on Richard Wright's side.

The woman in the seminar, by the way, was named Sarah Lindsay.  She is now quite a well known poet.  I can see how everything she said against Native Son was, from a certain perspective, true.  She might have mentioned, too, the melodrama and stock characters. Doesn't matter to me.  Irrelevant.  Native Son is the first grown-up American novel I loved.

Ten favorite American novels

The New York Review has been publishing, in installments, selections from Norman Mailer's letters on writing.  The last installment includes a letter in which Mailer, responding to a query, lists his ten favorite American novels.  Here's his list.  (I'm not sure whether the order in which he set them down was meant to signify anything, but I'm preserving it.)

U.S.A. John Dos Passos
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell
Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe
The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara
The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain
Moby-Dick Herman Melville

"They're all selections from the mainstream of American novels," wrote Mailer, "not a surprise on the list, which separates me, I suspect, from my colleagues." 

Ahem.  Not a surprise on the list?  The letter is dated January 16, 1988, so one of the surprises is that he did not name any of his own books.  Naturally one begins making emendations.  Mailer mentioned that, excepting Huckleberry Finn, he read all the novels on his list as a freshman at Harvard, a year made "luminous because of these books."  I find that my own "surprise entries," too, probably are explained by biographical details, especially the impressionable age at which I first read some of them.  Here goes.  My rule is that no author gets more than one book.  The order is significant only in that those shared with Mailer come first.  The six others are in the order in which they were first published.

Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Moby-Dick Herman Melville
An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
Native Son Richard Wright
The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow
The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
Rabbit is Rich John Updike
The Sportswriter Richard Ford

Suppose that I could not duplicate any of Mailer's choices--titles or authors.  Then I'd add these four.

Babbitt Sinclair Lewis
Miss Lonelyhearts Nathanael West
It Looked Like For Ever Mark Harris
Everyman Philip Roth