Eric The Blue

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

Righteous Victims: a progress report

Slowly, slowly.  I'm in the middle of chapter 10, "The Israeli-Egyptian Peace, 1977-79."  Overall, I think the work suffers from a failure to create vivid characters out of the historical actors, but this particular section, especially the narrative of the Camp David talks between Carter, Sadat, and Begin in September of 1978, is an exception.  Fewer facts and figures, more on the personalities--I hope this trend perists as Morris comes up to present time.  The enjoyment is sometimes that of fly-on-the-wall revelations:

The Egyptians and Israelis were asked not to discuss the proceedings with journalists and to channel everything through Carter's press secretary.  "It was imperative that there be a minimum of posturing," Carter explained.  He rejected Brzezinski's suggestion that the guest quarters be bugged to give the Americans an intelligence edge.

Sadat arrived with a hard-line document and separate "modifications" that amounted to fall-back positions.  Carter knew the main document was a non-starter.  Morris writes,

Just before the three men met, Carter asked to see Begin privately and warned him that Sadat's position paper would be "aggressive."  Begin was cautioned not to "over-react."  At the tripartite meeting, Sadat spent ninety minutes reading out his "Framework."  Begin listened patiently.  At the end Carter suggested that if Begin would just sign, it would save everybody a lot of time.  There were "gales of genuine laughter" and the meeting ended in good cheer.

It didn't last.  When the tripartite talks reached an impasse, the Americans undertook the drafting of documents, which they then discussed separately with the Israelis and Egyptians.  It's clear that the Americans, and Carter in particular, regarded Begin as the greater obstacle:

Presenting the American draft to the Israelis, Carter said he believed Sadat would accept the essentials.  Begin argued over almost every word, particularly a passage relating to the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force.  Carter: "Do you reject UN Resolution 242?"  Begin declined to commit himself explicitly on 242 but then asked to delete all reference to that resolution from the document. . . .  "If you don't espouse 242, it is a terrible blow to peace," the president said.  "If I were an Arab, I would prefer the present Israeli occupation to this proposal of yours," he added.  The president later apparently described Begin as a "psycho."

And again:

In a private meeting with Carter, Begin urged that Resolution 242 be left out of the agreement and implied that there could be no territorial compromise regarding the West Bank.  He could not go against the will of the Israeli people, he argued.  Carter responded that most Israelis were willing to give up the Sinai settlements for peace and were willing to withdraw from "substantial portions" of the West Bank as well.  In stating this position, Carter argued, he represented the Israeli people more accurately than Begin.  The two men then chewed over and over the same points, and Carter accused Begin of being willing to forgo peace "just to keep a few illegal settlers on Egyptian land"--in a "heated. . . unpleasant" discussion.

To my surprise, Ariel Sharon, at the time Israel's Agriculture Minister, was in Morris's view instrumental in persuading Begin to relent:

[B]oth Weizman and Agriculture Minister Sharon, the latter calling Begin from Jerusalem, argued that if peace with Egypt depended on uprooting the settlements, then the price had to be paid.

But the biggest hero is President Carter.  When negotiations were at the point of breaking down, he "was indefatigable, putting in twenty-hour days, exhibiting 'bulldoglike persistence' as well as a mastery of every problem and argument, however minor."  And, after agreement was reached, Morris writes:

For Carter, their chief engineer, the Camp David accords represented a personal triumph.  All who attended agreed subsequently that without his authority, mastery of detail, ready grasp of the issues, empathy, persuasive charm, and occasionally firmness, no agreement would have been possible.

Mr. Mom

Amanda is in Mexico with her mother and I am home from work with the kids.  While the older one was at kindergarten and the younger one napped, I reworked yesterday's post into a "letter to the editor." 

To the editor:

Pat Anderson, author of "The utter folly of 'taxing the rich'" (February 23), shows she has studied the "Tax" section of the Republican platform.  Her lines might seem less palpably memorized had she taken any account of some rather obvious things that could be said on the other side of the argument.  Like the fact that President Clinton's economic program, which included a tax hike on high earners, did not prove to be a jobs killer.  Like the fact that the tax-cutting policies of the Bushies did not slide us along a rainbow arc landing in a pool of milk and honey.
 
It's not just in religion that the Republicans are fundamentalist.  They saw only black and white when the bright world sped past them.

--Eric Jorgenson

The utter folly of Pat Anderson

Today, in the Star Tribune newspaper, our former state auditor, Pat Anderson, argues that "[t]axes on the 'wealthy,' like so many progressive policies, actually work against the stated objectives."

As George Will would say, when he isn't lying about global warming, "Well." 

Anderson has nothing to say that hasn't been said ten million times by Republicans with prose styles even more wooden than hers.  "Punishing job creators," she lectures, "so that we can expand nonsustainable government programs makes no economic sense."  As if President Clinton's economic program, which raised taxes on the highest earners, proved to be a jobs-killer. As if the tax-cutting Bushies have dropped us along a rainbow slide into the land of milk and honey. 

I have a different idea of what's "nonsustainable."

Their lines are so palpably learned.  To believe them you'd have to think it was your duty.  They are fundamentalist in religion and fundamentalist in economics.  The world goes too fast for them.  Events have proven them wrong but they haven't the wit to change their tune.

Anderson is now "president" of something called "the Minnesota Free Market Institute."  I just visited their website and it is just as you'd expect. 

Date night

Amanda and I saw The Reader in a theatre the other night.  Being parents of young children and Netflix customers, we don't "go to the movies" very often--the movies come to us--so I am not accustomed to marking the reaction of the crowd when the credits begin to roll.  Silence and immobility, in this case. 

Well, the holocaust is a big topic, and it may appear a sign of coarseness just to grab your coat and stroll out of there--like maybe, given means and opportunity, you could have been one of the perpetrators, such is your nonchalance regarding Grave Matters.  Hannah, played by Kate Winslet, is a perpetrator.  Not at the top, or anywhere near it, but a small cog in the machinery of death, one of the ordinary Germans guilty of great crimes.  Uneducated, she needed a job, the SS was hiring, & etc.  It's not only because her name is Hannah that the phrase, "banality of evil," comes to mind.

The Reader, unlike 2002's The Pianist and other "holocaust films" I've seen, does not rely for its wallop on depicting scenes of horror, degradation, and inhumanity.  Though the present time of the movie spans close to 40 years, we are shown nothing that happened before 1958, when Hannah, then 36, has an affair with a 15-year-old, Michael Berg, played by David Kross.  Eight years later Michael is stunned when, attending a trial as part of a law school seminar, he hears Hannah's name announced as a defendant in a mass-murder case from the Nazi period.  If she could do it, what about him?  And, we may think as we sit there, what about us?

Director Stephen Daldry wants us to consider the psychology of the grown-up Michael Berg, played by Ralph Fiennes, considering the psychology of Hannah, who at her trial deliberately suppresses evidence favorable to her cause by failing to disclose that, being illiterate, she could not have written an incriminating report that is entered into evidence.  It seems she is less humiliated by her murders than by her inability to read or write.  Michael debates with himself whether to approach the court with this mitigating evidence, in the end keeps it to himself, and then, perhaps because Fiennes is good at it, mopes around in a state of numb moral bewilderment for the next thirty years. It's at least arguably annoying that you have to guess at what he's thinking as he stares with wistful blankness across rooms and through windows, but Winslet may finally win an Oscar, and the movie is somewhat above average.

By the way, what is the point of adopting a German accent when portraying, in English, Germans speaking German?  Would Iowa English offend against verisimilitude in a way that accented English does not? 

Milton's granddaughter

Frank Kermode, writing in The New York Review, reminds us, I mean informs us, that we missed the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth last year.  His casually learned overview of Milton's career quotes liberally from Dr. Johnson's LIfe of Milton, and I was delighted to learn that Anna Williams, Johnson's friend who has a substantial part in Boswell's LIfe, is Milton's granddaughter.  It is she who is recorded as having wondered, prosaically, why a man should make of himself a beast with drink, causing Johnson to reply that "he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Two Georges

In the Minneapolis newspaper today, Chuck Prentice, of Edina, writes in a letter to the editor:

George Will's Feb. 15 commentary, "Climate fears seem to run hot and cold," exposes him as someone who, in the face of overwhelming consensus to the contrary among true experts, cherry picks and distorts information to fit his bias on the issue.

He cited information from the University of Illinois in his article.  However, the University of Illinois Polar Research Group posted this on its website Monday:  "In an opinion piece . . . George Will states, 'According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.'  We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice level was 16.79 million sq km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq km.  Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 milion sq km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.  This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined."

The website Mr. Prentice refers to is here.  The statement of the researchers continues, "It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."  Nate Silver elaborates in "George F. Will Takes on Science, Loses Credibility" and "Will Omitted Key Context in Ice Age Quote."  Silver's conclusion echoes the scientists' complaint: "Why is it that claims that would never have been tolerated by a competent fact-checker on the news page are okay on the editorial page? The Washington Post owes its readers an explanation -- and an apology."

Meanwhile, George Packer, in the excellent Feb. 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker, writes of the Florida real estate market and the economic slump in an article called "The Ponzi State," which resides, alack, behind a subscriber wall.  This is the same issue that remembers and celebrates the achievement of John Updike, and Packer's journalism, I think, sometimes attains effects generally reserved for literature.  He met a woman named Lee Gaither "smoking and talking on the phone" in her garage.  Turns out she was on the phone with Verizon, trying to persuade them not to shut off her Internet.  She worried about her son having no other kids to play with in their subdivision of foreclosed homes, and was hoping herself to stave off ruin by selling on eBay the items in her cluttered garage, which Packer catalogs with Updikean vigor before concluding, "Gaither was trying to sell possessions of no value to anyone but herself."

Florida's economy, according to Packer, has little behind it other than building homes for the people who keep moving there.  People are no longer moving there.

More from Netflix

Oliver Stone's "W."  Heavy on the Oedipal angle.  Who knows?  Poppy didn't go to Bahgdad so I'll finish the job for which he was not enough of a man.  "You have 48 hours to leave."  "Bring it on!"

Presumably there is a real reason for the invasion, and the family drama is a better candidate than WMD.

The movie is a cartoon, which doesn't mean it's unfair to W.  Colin Powell is probably jealous of all the face time Jeffrey Wright, who plays him in the movie, gets with Josh Brolin's Bush.  Plus, in the movie he gets to say "Fuck you" to Cheney.

Notable lacunae include Rumsfeld's prancing performances in the Pentagon briefing room and Bush, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, mocking condemned killer Karla Faye Tucker's plea for clemency.  Thandie Newton, as Condoleezza Rice, doesn't have much to say, which seems about right.  I'm not sure whether the young Laura Welch, on the occasion of meeting her future husband at a Texas barbecue, expressed a preference for the Democratic party while fondling an unlit cigarette.

Amanda reads in bed

Amanda, curled up in bed with David Lodge's Thinks, makes a gaspy little laughing sound and, when I ask the cause, reads to me from the first conversation between the two main characters, Ralph Messenger, a cheerful, confident atheist and professor of cognitive science at an English university, and Helen Reed, a novelist and creative writing tutor who, after the sudden death of her young husband, has begun occasionally to attend church services again.  Ralph naturally does not approve.  The part of their conversation Amanda read concludes:

'So you think that when we die we just cease to exist?' she says, when the waitress has gone.

'Not in an absolute sense.  The atoms of my body are indestructible.'

'But your self, your spirit, your soul . . . ?'

'As far as I'm concerned those are just ways of talking about certain kinds of brain activity.  When the brain ceases to function, they necessarily cease too.'

'And that doesn't fill you with despair?'

'No,' he says cheerfully, twisting creamy ribbons of tagliatelle on his fork.  'Why should it?'  He thrusts the steaming pasta into his mouth and munches vigorously.'

'Well, it seems pointless to spend years and years acquiring knowledge, accumulating experience, trying to be good, struggling to make something of yourself, as the saying goes, if nothing of that self survives death.  It's like building a beautiful sandcastle below the tideline.'

'That's the only part of the beach you can build a sandcastle,' Ralph says.

Having spent some time recently reading up on John Updike, I connect this conversation with something he said on the occasion of winning the Campion Award, for "a distinguished Christian person of letters":

Is not Christian fiction, insofar as it exists, a description of the bewilderment and panic, the sense of hollowness and futility, which afflicts those whose search for God is not successful? And are we not all, within the churches and temples or not, more searcher than finder in this regard?

Which itself reminds me of something Flannery O'Connor wrote in a letter:

I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.  It's hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now.  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.

To me it seems that these thinkers of big thoughts all agree that the claims of the Christian religion are implausible.  Some, however, for reasons having to do probably with their own psychology, are quite discouraged to discover the implausibility and so determine to believe it anyway. 

The bud o' the brier, the nard in the fire

With Valentine's Day on the horizon, I thought of trying to write Amanda a poem, and, unable to conceive a plan, or compose in my head a first line, my roving mind turned to what I know of English literature, where I hoped to find a model, and then to these lines of Ben Jonson, which I was compelled to memorize years ago in "The Literature of Renaissance English":

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Ha' you marked but the fall o' the snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Ha' you felt the wool o' the beaver?
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag o' the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!

For some reason, the professor, a very nice man named Richard Fehner, was extravagantly fond of these lines.  It may have been in the same course that I was first introduced to Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, in which it seems to me he is making fun of "O so white" & etc.:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

 

Eric the Blue reviews a movie

Amanda and I, like half the population, are members of Netflix.  We are at the membership level that allows you to have one in your house at the same time you have one in the mail.  It works pretty well for people who like movies but can't get out much.  Actually, it should work pretty well for almost anyone, as you are not limited to the usually terrible choices "currently showing." 

Anyway, last night it was "Out of Africa."  Thought it would never end.  When the camera isn't lingering lovingly on the African plain, trying to seduce the reviewer into observing that "Africa is like a character in this film," Meryl Streep is being surprised by the sudden reappearance of one of the men partly in her life.  Once, when her wandering husband, played by Klaus Maria Brandmuer, shows up and discovers that the Robert Redford character is now living in his house, he says, passing Redford on his way out, "You should have asked."  Redford replies, "I did.  She said Yes."  Since it is Africa, there are also a couple of scenes involving lions, but, at more than 2.5 hours, the movie is about 2.5 hours too long.  Sydney Pollack directs.

Saying good-bye to John Updike

I've been peering at obituaries and reminiscences, reading old stories and essays, listening to radio interviews recorded years ago, and cannot repress the thought that, while Updike's death is a great loss, those of us who care for literature can, perhaps for a week or two, take an interest in a higher than usual percentage of items in the daily cultural bombardment.  Here follow some Updike bits that I've stumbled across in the past few days.

1.  In John Updike, 1932-2009, I quoted from Elizabeth Hardwick's "Citizen Updike," one of the essays collected in Sight-Readings.  Now I've re-read the whole thing and find it all first-rate.  Of Tarbox, the name of the fictional town in which Couples is set, she writes: "Tar, an odorous viscous liquid, and box--well, guess." 

2.  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!

3.  Speaking of his criticism, I'm gratified to notice how rarely it is excluded from the register of his diverse achievements.  The collections--Picked-Up Pieces, Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, Due Considerations--are doorstops, and the experience of reading them is like hanging out for hours with someone really smart.  How fun is that?  Stupidity surrounds us but there are avenues of escape.

4.  Speaking of stupidity, check this out. 

5.  Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness contains a section, "On Not Being a Dove,"about the peace movement inspired by our country's adventure in Vietnam.  His view seems to have been that, while a mistake, it was our mistake, and that once there stolid patriotism would have been more appropriate than the embarrassing antics of protestors obsessed with their own virtue.  You can tell that Hardwick, for one, does not agree--the adjectives "tangled" and "dubious" creep into her discussion of this aspect of her subject's memoir.  Anyway, Updike was a reliable Democratic voter, and I enjoyed this excerpt from one of his last interviews, wherein it is apparent which presidential candidate got his last vote:

It's very worrisome: I think if this country doesn't elect Obama, it will have blown an opportunity that will never come along again. I just think he's so much the superior candidate. Everything about him. But maybe I'm speaking like a teenage crush. Being the child of Depression Democrats, I've never had a great love for Republicans, although some of my best friends, etc., are Republicans. I've lived my adult life mostly under Republican administrations, mostly after LBJ — there was just Clinton and Carter. And this deification of Reagan, you mention Reagan, somehow the waves will part! I remember when people thought it was incredible that he'd be elected — as incredible as it is for Sarah Palin to become V.P., it was incredible for him to become president. He was charming, though, in a way. And he sort of convinced you — my mother once asked, how does he convince everyone that they're rich? 

6.  Here's a poem that will be published, posthumously now, in a volume called Endpoint and Other Poems:

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

Avishai Margalit on suicide bombers

In January, 2003, Avishai Margalit, a philosopher and George Kennan Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study, published in The New York Review an essay, "The Suicide Bombers," that at the time seemed to me an antidote to the 9-11 Manichaeism served up by the Bush administration and seems to me now an antidote to the tired refrain, following predictably upon Israel's recent attack on Gaza, concerning Israel's "right to defend itself."  The essay, available here, is a sober and dispassionate assessment of the suicide bombers who were then, at the height of the second intifada, inflicting death, despair, and panic upon Israeli civilians living inside their country's pre-1967 borders.   Without excusing, Margalit attempts to understand, and the exercise has the effect of drawing away a veil raised by shouts of "terrorist" and "evil-doer."  A couple paragraphs from his concluding section are representative:

Israel claims it is fighting a war against the "infrastructure of terrorism," but in fact it is destroying the infrastructure of the entire Palestinian society, not only its security forces and civil administration but much else as well. Many of the Israeli countermeasures are not only cruel but also irrational. As Ian Buruma recently reported in these pages, at the height of the olive-picking season, Israeli settlers have prevented Palestinian villagers from tending their own olive trees, fully aware that producing olive oil is one of the major activities of the Palestinian economy, the main source of income for many Palestinian villagers, and a source of pride as well.  To make matters worse, settlers have not only been preventing the Palestinians from picking their olives but have been stealing them for themselves. This is simply one small example of a policy that is not just bad but also irrational.  

Still, even when it is clear that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians are evil and irrational, it is far from clear how to confront the suicide bombers in ways that are rational and effective, as well as morally justified. This is why the moderate left is in trouble in Israel. The public is scared and in despair, and has no use for moralizing comments. It wants strategic solutions for stopping the suicide terror.

Instead of the familiar mantra regarding Israel's "right to defend itself," how about assessing the ethics and utility of what it does to defend itself?  That seems to me a reasonable activity, and when it is pursued, sixty years of failed policy come into focus.  Israel's response to its own failures has been to ratchet up the violence, and when that has failed to ratchet it up further, until now, in the immediate aftermath of its latest offensive, an Israeli academic and former soldier in its army confesses that the Gaza action "seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash."  It isn't working, hasn't for sixty years.  Should not that be taken into account?