Eric The Blue

Ralph Ellison writes a sex scene

I read, basically over the course of July, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It’s 568 pages in the Vintage Book paperback I’ve owned, I don’t know why, for years: maybe I saw it in a book store one day not long after noticing that it’s #19 on the Modern Library list of hundred best 20th-century novels in English. 

Anyway, 568 pages in 30 days, so 19 per day. Could have made faster progress. Once, in a coffee shop, a first Tinder date was in progress at the next table, and the strained, cringey conversation overwhelmed my interest in the literary masterpiece. It might also have helped if I’d known from the start that a sex scene unfolds beginning around page 500.

Sex scenes in “serious novels” can be problematic, as evidenced by the fact that not even John Updike consistently  dazzles in this subgenre. The things people do with their bodies tend to connect them to the so-called lower animals and thus may undercut the aura of elevation the author has conjured. There is too the problem of which words to use. The ones in anatomy texts seem inappropriately clinical for describing the experience of the participants, but the unclinical ones have almost attained the status of cliches, so worked over are they in common parlance. The censor could actually be the author’s friend, since the construction of an opaque curtain requires less linguistic resourcefulness than is needed to narrate events happening on the other side of it.

In the first 500 pages of Invisible Man a narrator who bears a close resemblance to Ralph Ellison—Black, smart, from the South—has a succession of deflating and often absurd experiences: rich liberal white do-gooders, the administration of his Black college (Ellison attended Tuskegee), his bosses in the Communist Party after he moves to Harlem, others . . . they all disappoint. 

It’s the Communist Party that gets most of the attention in the novel’s second half. The narrator is at first a rising star, but then he begins to comprehend that he’s the object of jealousies and, probably, back-room machinations that are hidden from him. His rise stalls out as his portraits of his colleagues, smug spouters of Party jargon, grow progressively more superb. 

The principals in the sex scene are the narrator and the wife of one of the higher-ups in the Party. Only she’s there for the sex; he hopes she’ll be chatty and help him understand what the bosses are keeping from him. There isn’t much sign of Ellison worrying, circa 1950, about the perspective of a censor:

“Come on, beat me daddy—you—you big black bruiser. What’s taking you so long?” she said. “Hurry up, knock me down! Don’t you want me?”

I was annoyed enough to slap her. She lay aggressively receptive, flushed, her navel no goblet but a pit in an earth-quaking land, flexing taut and expansive.

I take it that she had an innie and part of the sex play involved him drinking liquor from it. You barely need to read between the lines to see that she has expectations arising from the race of her partner. Of course the word taut is deployed. I laughed through the pages-long scene and thought at first it was Ellison’s inability to overcome the aforementioned challenges that made it seem ridiculous. Only slowly did it occur to me that no one was laughing harder than Ellison. The narrator’s scheme is for a long while stymied by the steady flow of demands and complaints emanating from his loquacious partner but eventually:

“Sure,” I said, picking up some silken piece of clothing. “You brought out the best in me. I overpowered you, but what could I do?”

“And wasn’t I a good nymphomaniac?” she said, watching me closely. “Really and truly?”

“You have no idea,” I said. “George had better keep an eye on you.”

She twisted herself from side to side with irritation. “Oh, nuts! That ole Georgie porgie wouldn’t know a nymphomaniac if she got right into bed with him!”

“You’re wonderful,” I said. “Tell me about George. Tell me about that great master mind of social change.”

She steadied her gaze, frowning. “Who, Georgie?” she said, looking at me out of one bleary eye. “Georgie’s blind’sa mole in a hole’n doesn’t know a thing about it. ‘D you ever hear of such a thing, fifteen years! Say, what’re you laughing at, boo’ful?”

Himself. Her. The general situation. He slips her dress over her head, pulls it down over her hips, and laughs more when she tries to arrange their next meeting. 

Edmund Wilson's last decade

"Happily sunk in Balzac again," writes Edmund Wilson, in one of his last Journal entries before dying, age 77, on June 12, 1972, at Talcottville, New York. This is on page 881 of the Journal entitled The Sixties, which, to get him to his finish, slops over into the 1970s. There are also The Fifties, The Forties, The Thirties, and The Twenties. Though they aren't all of such daunting length, none is slim, and you can see how someone might aspire to approach their end happily sunk in Wilson again. A page in my edition of The Sixties bears the heading "Books by Edmund Wilson" and lists, besides the five Journals (five is about the number of decades of adult life we can hope for), 28 other titles, many of them door stops too. Hemingway's suicide early in The Sixties elicits the observation that it was a bad end for one who had advised other writers "to survive and get your work done." Wilson took the advice.

The Sixties makes for pleasant reading late at night since you don't have to worry about anything like losing the plot. I just perk up naturally when the occasion demands. Not interested in the decor of his hotel room in Montreal? Mixing up the identities of his neighbors in Talcottville? Just forge ahead, it's like listening to someone smart talk: never dull for long. Though sometimes I wonder if I missed something. A continuing theme is his troubles with the income tax, and unless I drowsed through it, he never explains the genesis. I know from another source that he simply failed to file a return for several years running. He would probably have agreed with the Saul Bellow character who can't forgive the government for compelling us all to be accountants. Wilson had other things to do, and it occurs to me that the tax code is likely not kind to someone like him, a freelance intellectual who labors away steadily for years, earning very little, and then the government taxes him like a rich man when one year he publishes a book that sells well. 

I'll tell you this, he could afford to buy liquor even in the lean years. Lots of drinking. He also liked the ladies and, for a guy short, fat, and sallow, enjoyed considerable success in this realm. It really seems to be the case that all you have to do is ask. At the beginning of The Sixties, he's 65, and encroaching senescence, as a theme, laps the tax trouble. The following poem, addressed to his fourth and last wife, Elena, gets dropped into the end of the Journal:

Is that a bird or a leaf?
Good grief!
My eyes are old and dim,
And I am getting deaf, my dear,
Your words are no more clear
And I can hardly swim.
I find this rather grim.

Of his flagging capacities, however, the following passage is a fairer representative of what he rued most:

Last year, alone here all summer, I felt, when I had an erection, what a pity it was that so splendid a thing should not have a chance to enjoy itself. This summer I have fewer erections and do not have such vivid feelings about them. I think that I have aged in the last year, but I hope that this does not mean that an abrupt drop has taken place. 

This perhaps calls for a gloss. He was alone at Talcottville, where he lived around half the time in what he called "the old stone house" that had been in the family for years. Elena hated it there and stayed away to the degree possible. It's remote: nearest town of any significance is Rome, and if Rome doesn't count then Utica. It's more than 150 miles to Rochester and around 60 more to Buffalo. Wilson knew families in the area from time spent there as a kid and seems to have enjoyed the contrast with his life among the literati of NYC and Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He engaged an immigrant drug store clerk to teach him Hungarian and studied the flora of the area with a biologist from Syracuse. To Elena, who could not be sustained by such interests, Talcottville could as well have been a Siberian prison camp. The nearest restaurant was at a town with the unprepossessing name of Boonville. To the troubles with the IRS and the problems of advancing age may be added, as a theme to Wilson's Journal, that old reliable, "domestic disputes." For things did not always improve markedly when Elena was on the scene:

After the Sharps left, I drank another glass of the horrible wine, and though I hadn't had much to drink, I set off a quarrel with Elena, telling her that she hadn't been to bed with me for weeks—which led to her ungraciousness about birthday gifts, etc. She hadn't shown me much affection or sympathy since she came to Talcottville, had told me to "snap out of it" and not "pity myself" when I had told her how depressed I was, and, when I said that I needed sympathy, had said, "Everybody needs sympathy." She thought Helen was at the store but then it turned out she was in her room and had, I suppose, been hearing it all through the radiator pipe in the living-room ceiling. This made the situation worse. The next thing I remember, I was sitting in my chair in the big downstairs room and threw at her an old copy of Scrutiny, which hit the wall just to the right of the doorway, outside of which she was standing. She went upstairs, but then came down again and said sadly and propitiatingly, "Good night." I should have met her on this, gone and kissed her; but I threw at her another magazine, a larger and thinner one, which flapped and fell on the floor. Upstairs she spat at me about Mary Pcolar and told me she didn't like my "spongy body"—which may well be true.

Helen is their daughter, a teenager. The physical characteristics of Mary Pcolar, the drugstore clerk and Hungarian tutor, have been previously described in the Journal. Poor Wilson mourning his lonely erections, then suffering even more when Elena came to Talcottville, reminds me that according to Oscar Wilde only two things ever go wrong in life: the first is not getting what you want, the second is getting what you want. 

Joan Acocella, 1945-2024

The New York Times's obituary for Joan Acocella, who died Sunday, highlights her work as a dance critic, but she also reviewed books and authors and wrote literary essays. To her, a ballet aficionado, I owe my first acquaintance with the fiction of Elmore Leonard, whose specialty was criminals and assorted other lowlifes. When Leonard died, in 2013, she wrote an appreciative obit/review for The New Yorker. I'm pretty sure it's behind a pay wall, but, on the occasion of her death, The New York Review of Books is granting free online access to several of her essays originally published in that journal, including one on Leonard, from 2015, when the Library of America first published a couple collections of his novels. The whole piece is entertaining and full of her unpretentious intelligence; I'm going to set down below a passage that probably sheds some light on why, having read her on Leonard, I picked up a novel of his to read, and have by now read through his entire body of work, not that it was a chore (if I live ten more years, I'll probably do it again). The preface to the quotation would be that Leonard is widely regarded as a master of dialogue, and everyone who writes about him takes a crack at explaining his "ear"; Acocella has the good sense to let a few examples speak for themselves, including:

Leonard's dialogue contains great tributes to the speech of Mexican-Americans and Cuban-Americans and old Jewish men named Maury who want to tell you how much better things were in Miami in the old days. But Leonard lived almost all his life in and around Detroit, a city where, in his time, more than half of the people, and well over half of the people involved with the criminal justice system, were African-American. Consequently, a lot of his best characters are black, and speak a language that many people, black and white, would agree is classic African-American, mid-twentieth-century, northern. Early in his Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) we encounter a situation commonly found in stories about crimes committed by people working in tandem: not all the collaborators know what the take was, and some of them suspect that they're not being given their fair share. In Unknown Man one bank robber asks another how much they got from the Wyandotte Savings Job:

"We didn't get nothing," Bobby said.

Virgil nodded, very slowly. "That's what I was afraid you were going to say. Nothing from the cashier windows?"

"Nothing," Bobby said. "No time."

"I heard seventeen big ones."

"You heard shit."

"Told to me by honest gentlemen work for the prosecuting attorney."

"Told to you by your mama it still shit."

Virgil then excuses himself to go to the bathroom, emerges with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and blows Bobby away.

Thanks for the tip, Joan. I don't doubt that you were just as good on the subject of Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Norwegians!

I got my Norwegian last name automatically and my parents, to exhibit their pride of heritage, had to give me a Norwegian first name as well. I don't share the pride, just the opposite, never think of myself as Norwegian or even Norwegian American, just American, and have abjured most of the Nordic trimmings: boiled potatoes, lutefisk, loud ugly sweaters, Edvard Grieg, skating, skiing, and those absurd delicate Christmas "cookies" that invariably get crushed in transport from your mom's house. Should've named me "Mike" like most of the people I play golf with. 

But now the prideful Norwegians who begat me are gone and I find myself taking some gingerly steps into their, I mean our, cultural past. For example, I'm reading Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. This is Ole Rolvaag, who went by O.E. Rolvaag, I presume because who would take Ole seriously as a novelist?— even if he was father to Karl, Minnesota's 31st governor. Giants in the Earth is one of the few books I was encouraged to read, because "it tells the story of your great grandparents' generation" homesteading, and I therefore declined. I assumed they encountered difficulties on the prairie that were overcome with the assistance of their Lutheran faith. Not interested. 

Boy, was I wrong, in pretty much the way anticipated by John Berryman, whose "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" includes the lines:

Pioneering is not feeling well,
not Indians, beasts.
Not all their riddling can forestall
one leaving. Sam, your uncle has had to
go from us to live with God. 'Then Aunt went too?'
Dear, she does wait still.
Stricken: 'Oh. Then he takes us one by one.'

The introduction to my paperback edition describes how Rolvaag had emigrated from an island off the west coast of Norway, a fishing village within a few kilometers of the Arctic Circle. He traded the empty vista of the cold sea (if it was the time of year when the sun came up) for a similar view across endless and uninhabited prairie. It's not a mystery why the government gave the land away. One thing I hadn't anticipated is an undercurrent of marital discord. The leading characters are husband and wife: the man, Per Hansa, is competent, gung-ho, up to every challenge but only dimly conscious of the desolation felt by his wife, Beret, who, instead of admiring his pioneering skills, feels obliged to suppress countless resentments. She hadn't asked for this life. The passages concerning her despair, brought on by empty prairieland, are through her eyes, not his. To celebrate small victories against manifold hardships, the men of the settlement gather in a barn and get smashed on cheap whiskey. Hadn't anticipated that, either. "The story of your great grandparents," lol. 

Speaking of literature in Norwegian, and getting smashed, the last book I read, the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, comes to a climax, so to speak, when the author's father dies of alcoholism. It seems he sold his house and moved in with his mother, the author's grandmother, who on account of dementia was in no shape to turn her son away, had she been so inclined. He then used the proceeds of the real estate sale, which he hadn't bothered to deposit in a bank, to buy liquor. When the supply ran low, he'd retrieve another bill and head for the store, the only times he went out. The author and his brother deduced this after discovering what was left of dad's stash, and putting the money pile together with the condition of the house, which they had fond memories of from visits in their youth. We are talking about serious levels of human degradation: for example, out of either incapacity or indifference, dad had stopped using the toilet, and the house had to be emptied of everything he'd touched, like beds and other furniture, there were piles of soiled clothes and empty liquor containers, spilled liquor and human waste everywhere, odor that made the author choke on entering, and his uncommunicative grandmother, bones showing through threadbare clothes, sitting silent and confused in a chair. 

The brothers, who had been living separate lives far apart from each other and their father, set about doing what needs to be done. They clean, and clean and clean, over many days, assisted briefly by an uncle who hauls stuff to a dump. Knausgaard's narration supplies every detail of the work, including tools used, the cleaning products used, his scrubbing techniques, what his brother was working on while he tackled the laundry room, the bath, steps, handrails, etc. It goes on and on and is oddly moving. The idea might be that, unlike in Great Works of Literature, life is made of menial work and trivial pursuits. That's just the way it is. Death means cleaning house, not philosophy—and, in this case, there's a lot of cleaning.  There is also a meeting with a funeral director that's notable for the mixture of crisp business and palpably memorized courtesies. It's not a part of Book 1, but I understand that in a subsequent volume of My Struggle, about the author's life as husband and father, he takes up such subjects as the troubles connected with leaving the house in cold weather with young children who cannot zip their coats or buckle their boots or find their mittens. 

T.S. Eliot says, "Merry Christmas."

A few weeks ago, when Kissinger died, someone related an anecdote that put me in mind, again, of maybe my favorite political quip ever. Bob Dole was at some event with a congressional colleague. As they headed to their seats, they passed by the dais on which were seated all the living former presidents—at the time, Ford, Carter, and Nixon. "Look," said Dole to his companion, "it's See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil." 

The writer Gore Vidal is the star of the Kissinger anecdote. He was with a friend in the Sistine Chapel, taking in the stupendous works of Renaissance religious painting, when the friend suddenly noticed Henry Kissinger thoughtfully contemplating the section of Michelangelo's Last Judgement that depicts the damned descending into Hell. The friend was stunned to see Kissinger and breathlessly pointed him out to Vidal, who said, "Yes, looks like he's apartment hunting." 

Wouldn't be surprised if both are apocryphal but, if so, I don't want to know. Neither is too Christmassy so here is a link to a Christmas poem, T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi." 

 

Calm down

To the over-reactors who live with me, I sometimes advise, "It's not the end of the world; in fact, only the end of the world is the end of the world." Does not qualify as "memorable speech," one straightforward definition of poetry. But on a similar note, though tilted toward grown-up over-reactors, I recently stumbled on this, by the poet William Stafford:

It's All Right

Someone you trusted has treated you bad.
Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.
Did you expect anything different?
Your work--better than some others'--has languished,
neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,
and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck
spoiled what you did. That grudge, held against you
for years after you patched up, has flared,
and you've lost a friend for a time. Things
at home aren't so good; on the job your spirits
have sunk. But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, "Hi!"
Slowly the sun creeps across the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.

John Prine, visibly scarred on the occasion by more than one cancer surgery, has a song I like on the same subject:

 

The lyric to the second stanza goes:

I was sitting in the bathtub counting my toes
When the radiator broke, the water all froze
I was stuck in the ice without my clothes
Naked as the eyes of a clown.
I was crying ice cubes, hoping I'd croak
When the sun come through the window, the ice all broke
I stood up and laughed, thought it was a joke
That's the way that the world goes 'round.

As has been pointed out, saying "Calm down" has had the desired effect never, for no one, but maybe these can help. 

KOK's spring creek

I'm around a hundred pages into the above immense work, Book 1 of six autobiographical novels by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. Around a decade ago, when first published, the phrase "literary sensation" usually accompanied reviews of the work, which sold in Norway, a country of around 5 million, 450,000 copies. I have to say that the cover is false advertising. My Struggle, Book 1, the first of six chronicles, and the opening 440 pages out of 3500. It must have been quite a struggle, and indeed the author pic makes it look as if he's been living in the forest with wolves for awhile. Nevertheless, the last big episode I passed concerned the 15-year-old Knausgaard maneuvering and dissembling in order to get to parties, without his parents knowing, where kids drank liquor. I see that a critic, James Wood, says that even when bored he was interested, and for now I feel similarly. I think there is a cinematic genre in which the film maker purports to make "art" just by running his camera in front of people who are living their lives. Writing words is different from following people around with a camera but you get the idea: the first 100 pages of My Struggle called to mind such a movie. Here is a poem, by William Matthews, on a similar theme, though it's somewhat more concise (title is "Sad Stories Told in Bars, the 'Reader's Digest' Version"):

First I was born and it was tough on Mom.
Dad felt left out. There's much I can't recall.
I seethed my way to speech and said a lot
of things that were deemed cute. I was so small
my likely chance was growth, and so I grew.
Long days in school I filled, like a spring creek,
with boredom. Sex I discovered soon
enough, I now think. Sweet misery!

There's not enough room in a poem so curt
to get me out of adolescence, yet
I'm nearing fifty with a limp, and dread
the way the dead get stacked up like a cord
of wood. Not much of a story, is it?
The life that matter's not the one I've led.

I think the odd "matter's" in the last line is a kind of shorthand for the sense, "The life that matters isn't the one I've led," which has one too many syllables? Anyway, my favorite part is where the poem finally seems to be rising to the level of an English teacher's idea of "poetry" when the promising simile, "like a spring creek," gets immediately filled with . . . boredom. 

DeLillo's Underworld: the conclusion

In the last pages of Underworld, two nuns pay a visit to a gay man, Ismael, who lives among the poor in the Bronx. One of the nuns seems disappointed that, notwithstanding his sexual inclinations, Ismael appears cheerful and in good health. He shows them how he has jerry-rigged an electrical current sufficient to run a TV in the abandoned building in which some homeless orphans take shelter. It involves a generator and a kid pedaling a stationary bike. The channel that comes on is a cable business show; switching the channel requires a surge that the kid on the bike isn't able to muster. DeLillo writes:

On the screen an image flicks and jumps. It is a man's discoid head, a fellow in a white shirt with blue collar, or blue shirt with white collar—there is a fairly frequent color shift. He is talking about the big board composite while numbers and letters flow in two bands across the bottom of the screen, a blue band and a white band, and the crew sits watching and the kid on the bike is bent and pedaling, a furious pumping boy, and the names and prices flow in two different directions with active issues blinking.

[Snip]

Ismael appoints four members of the crew to go with the nuns and distribute food in the area. But the crew is rooted right now. They urge Juano to pedal faster because this is the only way to change channels and they want to watch cartoons or movies, something with visuals better than a head. 

They're saying, "Go, man, fasta, fasta."

The bicycle boy bends and pumps and the picture wavers briefly but then springs back to the round announcer's face and the moving lines of prices. Ismael stands there laughing. He loves the language of buying and selling and the sight of those clustered sets of letters that represent enormous corporate entities with their jets and stretches and tanker fleets. He starts pulling kids off the cushionless sofa and stone-slinging them toward the door while the other kids keep urging Juano on. 

They're saying, "Fasta, fasta, you the man."

The boy cranks and strains, bouncing on the seat, but the numbers keep flowing across the screen. Electronics slightly up, transports down, industrials more or less unchanged. 

Eight hundred pages earlier, when the novel opens, it had been around 40 years earlier, 1951, and some non-baseball fan, bored in the upper deck of the Polo Grounds during the game in which Bobby Thomson would hit his famous homer, is tearing pages out of a Life magazine and letting them flutter down into the lower deck, where the print advertisements for stuff for sale fall upon J Edgar Hoover, guest of Giants manager Leo Durocher and the director of the FBI. Hoover is thinking about nuclear war. It's natural to wonder about the author of this "material"—according to the Wikipedia article, he was raised in an Italian Catholic family in the Bronx, and attended Fordham University, a Jesuit school with its flagship campus in the Bronx. The first twenty-some years of his life are Catholicism and the Bronx. At the very end of Underworld, one of the forsaken kids, the beautiful and elusive Esmeralda, is raped and killed, her body tossed off the roof of a building. The nun who had studied Ismael for signs of God's judgment upon him is devastated:

She sees nothing for the rest of that day and the day after and the two or three weeks after that. She sees the human heart exposed like a pig's muscle on a slab. That's the only thing she sees. She believes she is falling into crisis, beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between. The serenity of immense design is missing from her life, authorship and moral form. . . .

That Life magazine issue had included, in an article about "the glories of the Prado," a reproduction of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death, painted in 1564. This glossy page too falls on Hoover, along with the advertisements, and makes a strong impression on him. The stricken nun has the unusual name Sister Edgar, which tends to link her to the gay director of the FBI whose ruminations on Soviet missiles during a baseball game are interrupted by The Triumph of Death. As Underworld closes, it's tempting to think DeLillo's object was to create a kind of 20th-century American analog to Bruegel's painting, which, when it alights on Hoover, is described as "a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin."  Hoover is at first annoyed, can't understand why there'd be such a picture in a magazine called Life, but he can't stop looking at it. 

Rereadings

I took off the shelf today a book I've owned for about 45 years, an anthology unambiguously entitled Eighteenth Century English Literature edited by Geoffrey Tillotson et al. Paging through it, and reading passages I had marked sometime around 1982, I see I haven't changed much: what seems to have most attracted my attention then still seems striking to me now. Can't remember now what bit I originally meant to track down but here are a few things I enjoyed again. From the opening to a poem of Swift's:

This maxim more than all the rest
Is thought too base for human Breast;
"In all distresses of our Friends
We first consult our private Ends. . . ."

If this perhaps your Patience move
Let reason and experience prove. . . .

Dear honest Ned is in the Gout,
Lies rackt with Pain, and you without:
How patiently you hear him groan!
How glad the case is not your own!

Dr. Johnson, in Rasselas, wrote:

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.

His review of a work of theodicy, in which a confident and blithe theologian explained away the troubles of the world by asserting, for example, that God in His mercy had made the yoke of poverty easier to bear by endowing the afflicted with the virtue of hope, included this pointed critique:

The milder degrees of poverty are sometimes supported by hope, but the more severe often sink down in motionless despondence. Life must be seen before it can be known. This author and [Alexander] Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be born. The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes imbitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyments 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. 

I had put two exclamation points in the margin beside that paragraph. What I especially like now is the way in which Johnson's brocaded style, which sometimes perhaps approaches the border of the ridiculous, has the effect of highlighting the epigrammatic, scornful, "Life must be seen before it can be known."

The anthology reprinted David Hume's essay "On Miracles," which perhaps as much as anything he wrote earned him the title of The Great Infidel. The argument Hume advances is that an auditor, in evaluating reports of miraculous events (such as are narrated in the Bible), should attempt to determine whether it's more likely that the miracle occurred or that there is something deficient in the report of it. And he always decides against the miracle and in favor of a problematic report; for example:

It is strange, a judicious Reader is apt to say, upon the Perusal of these wonderful Historians, that such prodigious Events never happen in our Days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that Men should lye in all Ages.

There is at the back of the Anthology a section called "A Miscellany of Poems" that's free of my notations except for a grinning face I drew in the margin next to the following anonymous contribution to the art of poetry:

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.

Don does Lenny: more on Underworld

I’ve made it about two-thirds of the way through Underworld—in other words, there are around 560 pages behind me and around 280 to go. On some heavy-lidded evenings, looking ahead to see if I’ll reach a natural stopping place before the world news comes on public radio at 1 a.m., I’ve thought of Dr. Johnson’s judgment on Paradise Lost: “No one ever wished it longer.” There are many strands to the narrative and, for those who’ve read it, the one concerning Klara Sax and her arty friends bores me. I hope her first husband Alfred, the retired science teacher, has a larger role in the remaining pages, but even if he doesn’t I’m confident there will be more in the way of enjoyable surprises, such as:

January 11, 1955

There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor, that can make its way across a county, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don’t know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fat, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

“If you’d been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you’d have visions too.”

There ensues an interview between Father Paulus and one of the main characters as a young Catholic school student in which my favorable impression of the priest suffers no diminishment. Twenty pages earlier, it had been a couple years later, October 8, 1957, to be exact, and

Erica did things with Jell-O that took people’s breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. The tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations through half a dozen flavors. She might put black raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatin chills and fully thickens she folds in a swathe of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.

It then develops that while she’s working in Jell-O her teenaged son, a math whiz who will grow up to work for the government in nuclear weapons development, is diligently applying himself to the hobby most closely associated, among characters in literature, with Alexander Portnoy.

I think there is a strong whiff of Lenny Bruce in the disquisition on Jell-O—“Lime Jell-o is goyish, lime soda is very goyish”—and he soon appears onstage as well. The occasion is a stand-up gig in West Hollywood on the same evening, October 22, 1962, that Kennedy had addressed the nation on Soviet missiles in Cuba. The president used the phrase “full retaliatory response.” DeLillo has Bruce walk out on the stage and, in front of the mic, pause for effect before beginning, very gravely, “Good evening, my fellow citizens”:

“I dig it on one level. Being on the brink. It’s a rush, man. You can talk all you want about living on the edge. Yeah I know, you smoke some grass on Saturday night. Making the scene. Plus you accidentally drove through Watts one night and can’t stop talking about it. . . .”

Wouldn’t wish Underworld too much shorter.

Don DeLillo does "what color is your parachute" &c

My enjoyment persists, more or less unabated, as I've been proceeding through DeLillo's Underworld. But I think my first notice, insofar as it highlighted a satiric undercurrent in Underworld, may have given a false impression. Such an "undercurrent" exists, yes. Yesterday my eyes passed over the following as one of the characters, Nick Shay, who works in waste management, aka garbage, attends a corporate conference in the American sun belt:

Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste. This was the name we gave our conference in the desert. The meeting was industry-wide but we were the firm that provided the motive force, we were the front-runners, the go-getters, the guys who were ready to understand the true dimensions of the subject.

I was in my early forties, hired away from a thin-blooded job as a corporate speech writer and public relations aide, and I was ready for something new, for a faith to embrace. . . .

Not that I completely disliked my previous job. I wrote speeches mostly for corporate chairmen, ruddy white-haired guys with big ravaged noses, patriarchs of this or that industry. They tended to be sportsmen who flew in company planes to remote lakes in Canada, where they fished the last unspoiled waters of the continent. . . .

I was the juniormost fellow with the fixed smile. There was a spirit of generous welcome, the spirit of one-of-us and how-many-kids and let's-have-lunch. I wanted to be bound to the company. I felt complicit with some unspoken function of the corporation. I stayed late and worked weekends. I corrected my foot-drag step. I heard my own voice and saw my smile and earned an office at the end of the hall, where I wore a crisp gray suit and grew stronger by the day.

But the novel, which is sometimes described as "post-modernist," includes a lot of old-fashioned pleasures, such as characters with whom one sympathizes, or even loves. I mentioned how it begins with the baseball game in which Bobby Thomson hit a 9th-inning, rally-capping, game-winning homer to secure the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants—the "shot heard 'round the world," in baseball lore. Running through the novel, and occupying the place of the grail in a medieval quest narrative, is the question of what happened to the ball Thomson hit after it landed in the left-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds: who got it in the scramble? who ended up with it later? what's the full story, the chain of custody? how to be sure a ball is that ball? And so it happens that one of Nick's colleagues (the one who's screwing his wife) finds himself one day in the basement of an elderly and dying widower, a collector of baseball memorabilia who lives in the greater New York City part of New Jersey. This basement is a museum and DeLillo exercises his considerable linguistic resourcefulness in describing the diverse exhibits. Why would anyone go to such lengths? My initial reaction was: one more grotesque and damaged American to add to the dramatis personae. Then the novel traces the widower's journey into the city one day to buy pastries at a particular bakery on the Lower East Side. He has to pass a lot of bakeries to get to this one, and one would think that crossing the Hudson, navigating in Manhattan, parking, getting from parking spot to bakery door and from there back to car and the return trip to Jersey, especially for a man of his age and failing health, would be a prohibitive hassle. It isn't at first apparent why he's doing it, but then it develops that he and his wife, when they lived in the city, had patronized this bakery, and loved its products. The bakery has been in continuous operation, and eating those same pastries now is a remaining connection to her, and then one is gradually made to understand that the compulsive researching and collecting has a similar explanation: having lost her, he's now trying to hold on to things that matter to him. 

There is also a retired public school science teacher, kind, intelligent, decent, an American Leopold Bloom.The description of his habits includes this:

He took his coffee black with a stab of rye in the morning, a nip, a pin drop, and with anisette in the afternoon or early evening, a shot, a jolt of the licorice sap, and maybe a beady tongue-taste of rye again before retiring, without coffee this time, medically forbidden of course but just a driblet, a measured snort, the briefest swig in the history of guilty drinking.

His wife left him to pursue her avant garde art, a whole other story. At least his marital status allows him to be his sister's caregiver and co-tenant. She's sunk in deepening dementia, and like a repeated contrapuntal theme in a musical work DeLillo repeats their absurd, identical conversations and gestures: she begs him to tell her when he's going out, else she doesn't know, he tells her he did, and will, removes her smudged eyeglasses, carefully cleans the lenses, gently replaces them on her face. 

On the first 60 pages of DeLillo's Underworld

I saw the same edition of the book I'm reading, pictured above, for $2 on a clearance shelf at Magers & Quinn this afternoon. It was Cormac McCarthy who died, not Don DeLillo. Two dollars must make Underworld less per pound than anything at the grocery store. It's 827 roughly 7 x 11 inch pages. Medium-sized print. I read recently that McCarthy's Blood Meridian, published in 1985, just attained best seller status for the first time.

Underworld begins at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan on October 3, 1951, the Wednesday the Giants won that season's National League pennant, in a playoff against Brooklyn, on a homer by Bobby Thomson in the bottom of the ninth inning. The play-by-play aspect of the chapter is historically accurate, as far as I can tell, but DeLillo pretty clearly has more than baseball on his mind. In his telling, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover are sitting in box seats with tickets they got from Giant manager Leo Durocher. During the game Hoover, the director of the FBI, is informed that the Russians just successfully tested an atomic bomb. Two shots heard 'round the world. If the question is what's Underworld "about," the best answer is probably America in the second half of the twentieth century.

Another DeLillo touch concerns a bored fan in the upper deck who tears pages out of a Life magazine and sends them fluttering down on the fans below:

The pages keep falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars, waffle irons and shampoos and blended whiskeys. Piping times, an optimistic bounty that carries into the news pages where the nation's farmers record a bumper crop. And the resplendent products, how the dazzle of a Packard car is repeated in the feature story about the art treasures of the Prado. It is all part of the same thing. Rubens and Titian and Playtex and Motorola. And here's a picture of Sinatra himself sitting in a nightclub in Nevada with Ava Gardner and would you check that cleavage. Frank didn't know he was in this week's Life until the page fell out of the sky. He has people who are supposed to tell him these things. He keeps the page and reaches for another to stuff in Gleason's face. Here's a Budweiser ad, pal. In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance. Johnson & Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and Bristol-Myers and General Motors. These are the venerated emblems of the burgeoning economy, easier to identify than the names of battlefields or dead presidents. Not that Jackie's in a mood to scan a magazine. He is sunk in deep inertia, a rancid sweat developing, his mouth filled with the foretaste of massive inner shiftings.

Yes, Jackie, not much of a fan, has overserved himself beer and ballpark fare, and he vomits on Sinatra's shoes, hosiery, and pants cuffs just before Thomson hits his homer. It later develops that one of the character's elderly mother is a huge fan of Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners. This character works in waste management and whenever he shops can't help but see the shining merchandise as future garbage. What besides ads for shining merchandise was falling from above in the Polo Grounds? The Life feature story was about the Prado art museum, and it included a reproduction of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. The torn facing pages of this image land on the breast of J. Edgar Hoover, who studies it and is repelled. 

Rereading Huck Finn

One thing about rereading books, you sometimes wonder whether you were sentient on previous perusals. Today, in Huck Finn, I came to the following description of a one-horse Arkansas town on the Mississippi River not long before the Civil War; somehow, it had never before penetrated the defenses I evidently raise while "reading":

All the stores was along one street. They had white-domestic awnings in front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There was empty dry-goods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella, but didn't wear no coats or waistcoats; they called one another Bill, and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and used considerable many cuss-words. There was as many as one loafer leaning up against every awning-post, and he most always had his hands in his britches pockets, except when he fetched them out to lend a chaw of tobacco or scratch. What a body was hearing amongst them, all the time was—

"Gimme a chaw 'v tobacker, Hank."

"Cain't—I hain't got but one chaw left. Ask Bill."

Pretty sure I'll be dead before ChatGPT can equal that. While I was typing it in, the word processing tool used by this blogging platform inserted considerable many underlinings to indicate the phrases  and constructions needing the attention of an editor.

Spoiler alert: in the immediately following pages, the residents of this town and the surrounding rural areas are cast in an unfavorable light, especially if compared to the narrator and his friend, Miss Watson's runaway slave Jim. 

Unscholarly notes on Madame Bovary

1. The title character is a "fallen woman," which is the one thing a lot of people (including me) know about Madame Bovary. When I began making my way through it, I kept waiting for the adultery to get started. But it takes awhile. Here's the first time:

The broadcloth of her habit clung to the velvet of his coat. She leaned back her head, her white throat swelled in a sigh, and, her resistance gone, weeping, hiding her face, with a long shudder she gave herself to him.

In my edition, this occurs on page 152 of 330. I could be wrong, but I feel like if you opened at random a paperback romance novel, the kind with a Fabio-looking guy on the cover with a swooning lady, and let your eye fall somewhere on the page, you might read a sentence a lot like this one. 

2. So what's going on for the first 150 pages? Well, the book begins, not with Emma Bovary, the title character, but with the man she ultimately marries, Charles Bovary, whose youth is described, and a fair amount too about his parents. Eventually we learn a fair amount about Emma as a girl and young adult. The author (Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880, pictured) is at pains to describe, for example, her reading habits. She consumes novels, some good, others not, and I wonder whether the point isn't to supply an explanation of sorts for what's coming. Her reading tempts her to expect a lot from life, like in the plots of books in which Big Things happen to the heroines. They have to in order to keep the reader's interest up. But Big Things will not happen in the life of a woman married to Charles Bovary. She's unhappy, bored, "unfulfilled." Thus the wandering eye.

This isn't stated. The novel, however, feels highly wrought: everything for a reason, details are connected in subterranean ways, and the reader has to do some of the work.

3. The reason you have to wait till page 152 for what you knew was coming: the first object of Emma's extracurricular affection, Leon, though highly interested, is too tame and conventional to force the moment to a crisis, and something similar could be said of Emma. After many longing and reciprocated looks, he limps out of town, which by the way is a small one far from Paris: when the locals go to a city, it's Rouen. The novel's subtitle is "Patterns of Provincial Life." The next candidate, Rodolphe, a local landowner, is slick, confident, unrestrained, and therefore it is the velvet of his coat to which Emma's habit clung as her white throat swelled and "she gave herself to him."

To fill in some details of the plot, Rodolphe in time cruelly jilts her on the eve of their planned escape, and, in a twist, she soon meets up again with Leon, who this time proves a satisfactory replacement. 

4. The title may have the effect of leading you astray from the main theme of the book, having to do with provincial life, the principal feature of which one might get at by asking: Who in the novel is admirable or likable? You can look high and low among the main characters. It's not like there are many villains, either. Emma's two lovers are different types of louts beneath their respectable surfaces. She herself, a shallow self-seeker, chooses them, though that's not precisely right: they are merely available. The small-town druggist, Homais, is a self-satisfied and self-described "man of science," a progressive skeptic and author of absurd articles of which he is way too proud. The village priest, another mediocrity, is a kind of foil to the druggist. After Emma has killed herself, and Charles is away with his grief, these two in mutual and charitable decency keep a vigil with the corpse, and there occurs maybe my favorite passage in the book:

Homais attacked confession. Bournisien defended it: he dilated on the acts of restitution it was constantly responsible for, told stories about thieves suddenly turning honest. Soldiers, approaching the tribunal of repentance, had felt the scales drop from their eyes. There was a minister at Fribourg . . .

His fellow watcher had fallen asleep. Bournisien found it somewhat hard to breathe, the air of the room was so heavy, and he opened a window. This woke the pharmacist.

"Here," the priest said. "Take a pinch of snuff. Do—it clears the head."

There was a continual barking somewhere in the distance.

"Do you hear a dog howling?" said the pharmacist.

"People say that they scent the dead," answered the priest. "It's like bees: they leave the hive when someone dies."

Homais didn't challenge those superstitions, for once again he had fallen asleep. 

Monsieur Bournisien, more resistant, continued for some time to move his lips in a murmur, then his chin sank gradually lower, his thick black book slipped from his hand, and he began to snore.

5. Christian moralists might be disappointed to learn that Emma's sexual sins aren't the proximate cause of her descent into despair. In her grasping desire, she lived well beyond the family's means—a path made possible by successive promissory notes she signed, without Charles's knowledge, in favor of the village loan shark, who in time of course demands payment. Now she's up against it, and seeks new sources of capital. One candidate indicates that he might be willing if only she will sleep with him, and she angrily rebuffs him. Later, more desperate, she arranges an interview with Rodolphe, and lets it be known that she'd like to recapture past magic. He's interested till she reveals her financial plight. When the transactional aspect of the proposal comes into view, he coolly dismisses her, and the narrator with equal equanimity observes that "of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling."

The book is sometimes funny; also, thoroughly grim and pitiless.

6. When she has failed to get money, and the Bovarys' household goods are about to be sold pursuant to a legal writ in order to raise funds for the creditor, Emma gets into the druggist's storeroom and eats arsenic. Flaubert writes:

Soon she was vomiting blood. Her lips pressed together more tightly.  Her limbs were contorted, her body was covered with brown blotches, her pulse quivered under the doctor's fingers like a taut thread, like a harpstring about to snap.

Then she began to scream, horribly . . . .

Not long thereafter, some villagers are gathered around her corpse, a few of them because they are preparing her for the funeral:

"Look at her," said the hotel-keeper, with a sigh. "How pretty she still is! You'd swear she'd be getting up any minute."

Then they bent over to put on her wreath.

They had to lift her head a little, and as they did so a black liquid poured out of her mouth like vomit. 

Just trying to reinforce the point about "grim and pitiless." Hard not to connect the brown splotches and black liquid with Emma's swollen white neck in the first love scene with Rodolphe. That sentence seems in retrospect an intended parody of the novels Emma liked to read. The real Flaubert describes the physical symptoms of poisoning and the scene in the room with the corpse, where a stupid, romantic sentiment is immediately exposed—not by an authorial comment but just as a necessary conclusion of the detached narration. 

7. The time has come to speak of Charles. His desperation while Emma is dying, and genuine heartbreak after her death, tend to elicit sympathy. But what an obtuse dolt! I'd almost go so far as to say Flaubert nodded, for in this supposed masterpiece of realism it seems unbelievable that Charles should never have suspected a thing. It's not as if Emma took elaborate pains to deceive him, or hesitated to answer a few questions with outlandish lies: such gestures would have indicated a measure of respect, and she had none for him. She didn't care what he felt or thought. After she's dead, he discovers among her things the saved letters of her lovers. Even then he is at first in denial. Also, he's impoverished, because his stuff has been sold to pay off the loan shark. Yet he grieves copiously? He respects himself about as much as she did, and takes his place among the novel's gallery of rather poor, though not villainous, human  specimens. 

8. Charles and Emma had a child together, a daughter. She makes no appearance for long stretches. When she is seen, she's often being carted away to a nurse so that her mother can pursue her interests. I cannot now remember what plan was made for her when Emma thought she was about to run off with Rodolphe. Maybe I'm a poor reader but it is no point of emphasis in the narration. The girl exists to be neglected. Had the Bovarys been childless, the novel would barely be different, but it would lack this little accent mark of sadness. Charles does not survive his wife by long: on the last page the little girl discovers him sitting oddly in a chair and, thinking he's playing, gives him a little push, and he falls over. Now she's officially an orphan, and the novel at its end. 

Talking myself off the ledge

Last night I was driving somewhere, Twins game on the radio—they're playing the Yankees, who have a win percentage so far of .714, the best in baseball—when a Twin hit a ball to right field. Don't know exactly what happened but whatever it was caused broadcaster Dan Gladden to exclaim, "Stanton cannot play outfield!" Before leaving to run errands, I'd been watching on TV when the Twins scored the first runs of the game after Stanton ran back on a deep fly, then decided to play it off the wall, which he did—after the ball had landed at the base of the fence. Gladden's declaration came after he subsequently turned another fly out into another double. Before I got back home, he made yet another bad play (according to Gladden).

My intention is not to pick on Stanton but just to point out to the anti-fans in my life that no team is without flaws. By "anti-fan" I mean people who, told that the Twins are doing "pretty good," or that Buxton had two more extra base hits yesterday, reply

When did they last win a playoff game?

or

He just came off an 0-for-30 streak, plus he's always injured.

Yes, I read about these issues in the Strib. But the Yankees, who are on pace to win more than 110 games, play a right fielder who might as well use a metal glove, and have you ever wondered when the Seattle Mariners last won a playoff game? Or consider the Los Angeles Angels. They have Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, probably the two best players in baseball. A couple years ago, they spent a sum of money that would be regarded as nontrivial by the main sponsor of the Saudi golf league in order to sign a 3rd baseman, Anthony Rendon, who is currently batting .242 (and not playing on account of a balky wrist). Trout got a hit the other day that ended an 0-for-26 drought. Their current record is 27-31. They've lost 13 games in a row and just fired their manager. Their last season with a winning record was 2015. 

I'm mainly trying to talk myself out of a tendency I know I have—dwelling obsessively on the Twins' weaknesses, about which I'm intimately familiar since I follow them every day, and unthinkingly thinking that life must be perfect for the fans of other teams. It's not even perfect for Yankee fans, and maybe there's a life lesson here hidden in plain sight. Everyone knows what they're up against, but it's not like the rest of human experience is accurately reflected on Instagram. For that, we have literature—John Cheever's fantastical, enormous radio, for example, and I like too this poem by Thomas Hardy.

Twins out west

I've loved Twins games on weekday nights on the west coast for around 55 years now. It's at least 54, because I know I was listening, transistor radio under the pillow, on Wednesday night, May 8, 1968, when the A's Catfish Hunter pitched a perfect game against the Twins in Oakland. The box score for that game is here. Back then, the standard starting time for night games was 8:00, and I see that the game was played in 2:28, so it would have been about half past midnight in the central time zone when Rich Reese, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, fanned for the last out. Reese worked the count full, 3-2, then fouled five consecutive pitches before whiffing on the eleventh pitch of the at-bat. You don't fall asleep five minutes after that, and I wonder whether next day I was noticeably groggy in Miss Sime's fourth grade class at Highland Elementary. 

Last night's game against the A's started at 8:40 local time. My kids didn't go to bed till the seventh inning. You know you're old when you think every change seems calculated to remove the charm from life. At least I was able to cut the grass between supper and the start of the game. Also, the Twins won, which is rare: in the last ten years, their record in road games against the A's is 6-23. They've done better everywhere else, including at Yankee Stadium. It can't be the rabid fans urging on the home team. The A's have been a bad draw forever. The attendance last night was 3138. Hunter's perfect game was witnessed by 6298. A lot of the same in the intervening 54 years. Games in their stadium have a weird feel, even on TV. Not enough people to make the low hum of a baseball crowd, and there is so much foul territory that the few who are there, invariably bundled up against the cold, could as well be watching on TV themselves. 

My older daughter is reading for school A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I read again myself in order to talk about it with her. Hot take: Shakespeare's comedies are skillful and amusing but they leave no imprint, and I can't fault an 8th-grader's cold response to fairies in the woods squeezing magic juice on the eyelids of the wrong sleeping lover, etc. Were I in charge of the curriculum and determined to make 8th graders read a Shakespeare play, it'd be Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Macbeth, brutal but brief. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that the plot of "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby," the play put on by the ridiculous rustics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, resembles closely that of Romeo and Juliet, which was also written in the mid-1590s. It's amusing to think of Shakespeare not taking himself that seriously, and imagining his tragedy played as a farce. 

As a reward for subjecting myself to A Midsummer Night's Dream, last night in bed after the ballgame I started reading Unknown Man No. 89, almost the only Elmore Leonard crime novel that had somehow escaped my attention. The main character is a Detroit process server who, according to the following Chapter 1 description, is a good fit for his occupation:

He decided he liked process serving because he was his own boss. He could work two hours a day or twenty-four; and because he liked it, he usually put in at least twelve. He didn't mind being in the car most of the day. He liked to drive around and listen to music or, about a hundred days a year, a Detroit Tigers baseball game. It didn't matter what place they were in. 

Someone called Leonard "the Dickens of Detroit" but—assuming there’s autobiography in this chacterization—to me he's just my doppelgänger. By the way, though it doesn't matter, the Twins are in first.

National Poetry Month: Eliot's April

John Berryman began an essay on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by observing that the second half of the title tends to undercut the first, since "J. Alfred Prufrock" doesn't sound like a singer of love songs: he'd be too buttoned up, "too well dressed." The effect of the title, however faint, is then bluntly reproduced in the first three lines:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The first two lines create an expectation—they sound "poetic," there is a nice rhyme, the scene is picturesque—and this expectation is then smashed by the third line, a fake and brutal simile. 

Berryman doesn't mention that Eliot's other famous poem, "The Waste Land," begins with the same kind of undercutting action. I'm pretty sure that April is National Poetry Month on account of the ebullient opening to The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work of English literature in the Middle Ages:

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al thee night with open yë—
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages—
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. . . .

I quote it at length the better to convey the dull thud with which "The Waste Land" opens:

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

Winter is like the etherized patient, unable to feel anything, a desirable state in the world according to TS Eliot since, unlike in The Canterbury Tales, you aren't apt to feel anything pleasing anyway. It's fun to think that Eliot, assuming he intended the sense of double take Berryman detected in the phrase "love song of J. Alfred Prufrock," may have been connecting himself to his antihero: WH Auden's first name was Wystan, and who wants to go by that, but Eliot's was Thomas. In an essay he described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion"—sounds like a right-winger dressed up in tweeds, not Tom Eliot who was born in St. Louis. My inclination to dislike him is mitigated almost entirely by the suspicion that he was capable of self-mockery and also because he loved Mark Twain and Adventures of Huck Finn, which I once noted, here. 

Tolstoy on the neck

I've been reading again some of Chekhov's stories. I'd forgotten, if I ever noticed, how many of them concern unhappy marriages and adultery. Chekhov's marital history does not account for this subject matter: he was born in 1860, did not marry until 1901, and died in 1904. The stories I'm thinking of—"The Grasshopper," "Anna on the Neck," "Lady with Lapdog"—were all written in the 1890s. I like to think that another aspect of his biography, that of his life as a reader, might shed some light on the question.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was published in book form in 1878, the year Chekhov turned 18. It's often regarded as the finest novel ever written, and it was immediately recognized as a great work. Chekhov certainly would have read it. From thirty thousand feet, what happens in Anna Karenina is that the title character cheats on her husband, which ruins her life, and she ends a suicide. Meanwhile, in a secondary plot, the upstanding characters, after many complications are resolved, marry, live happily, and prosper. The novel has an epigraph: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." 

The world according to Chekhov is about 300,000 versts from this. I doubt it's by chance that, in two of the three stories mentioned, the female strayer is named Anna. In one, the name makes it into the title, which is a double entendre: an award, the Order of St. Anna, worn around the neck, but in an undertone the sense too of "Anna is a burden" or, more colloquially, a real pain in the neck. The story is about the shifting power dynamics in a loveless marriage. Anna marries a middle-class flunky in order to elevate her poor family. Since he's the meal ticket, she's unassertive and miserable—until her good looks and personal charm make her a success in the new husband's social circle, including with those above him in the bureaucracy. She then treats him with impunity and forgets about her poor family. The story ends. It's not the upstanding people who prosper. Indeed there isn't an upstanding person in sight. When the hapless husband is seated in the train car that will carry him and Anna to their honeymoon, he receives the following physical description:

He was an official of medium height, rather stout and puffy, who looked exceedingly well nourished, with long whiskers and no moustache. His clean-shaven, round, sharply defined chin looked like the heel of a foot. The most characteristic point in his face was the absence of moustache, the bare, freshly shaven place, which gradually passed into the fat cheeks, quivering like jelly.

No one to cheer for, but not because they're both villains—to achieve that status, they'd have to be less ordinary.

The woman in "The Grasshopper" perhaps qualifies as a villain, but it's her long-suffering, decent husband who dies in the end. She then grieves hysterically, apparently to compensate for having treated him so shabbily, while his work colleagues make the necessary arrangements. "Lady with Lapdog" is one of Chekhov's late (1899) and most anthologized stories. Anna—the name again—and Gurov, vacationing in Yalta apart from their spouses, start an affair. Chekhov's education was scientific—he was a medical doctor—and the story, as much as any other, exemplifies the dispassionate intelligence, augmented by humane sympathy, that critics have compared to the bedside manner of a good physician. Here is something that happens in the world, let us observe and contemplate it rather than have any grand, moral conclusions—that, it seems, is something like what Chekhov thought.  The story ends in muted, un-Tolstoyan fashion, with a faint suggestion perhaps that the author is on the side of the lovers:

And it seemed to them that in only a few more minutes a solution would be found and a new, beautiful life would begin; but both of them knew very well that the end was still a long, long way away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

Maybe it's just me, but once you start thinking this way you see Tolstoy looming everywhere in Chekhov. One of Tolstoy's most famous long stories is "The Death of Ivan Ilych," about a man who, suffering a terminal illness, becomes persuaded that he had wasted his life in meaningless pursuits, like advancing in his career. He tries to think of how he could have lived differently. Just before finally dying, he has a mystical revelation inspired by the religious faith and cheerful service of a lowly servant who tends to him while he suffers the humiliating indignities of his last days. This is just the kind of thing that would irritate Chekhov, who three years after "Ilych" was published wrote a long story about a dying man, a professor of medicine, who having fallen ill did not become obsessed with philosophical or religious questions but carried on with his work, which had always interested him, and died without an epiphany. Chekhov gave it the title, "A Boring Story." 

The picture above is from when two of Russia's greatest writers met at Yalta in 1900. I remember reading somewhere that Chekhov, I think in a letter, said that he enjoyed their visit "because I only had to listen." 

Joan Didion, 1934-2021

From the New York Times's obituary of Joan Didion, the writer who died last week:

Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from "The White Album," she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

It read, in part: "In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure." This description, which Ms. Didion did not contest, could describe the archetypal heroine of her novels.

[Snip]

The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of "Miami" (1987), another extended foray into personal journalism, which some critics began to find wearying. Everywhere Ms. Didion went, it seemed, she found the identical set of circumstances: looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in cliched language indicated by quotation marks.

In an Introduction to a collection of Didion's nonfiction, John Leonard, who did not grow weary, nevertheless limns the same sensibility. He alludes to the critic (Randall Jarrell) who thought T. S. Eliot would have produced "The Wasteland" if assigned the task of composing a poem about the Garden of Eden. Similarly, indicates Leonard, with Didion. Elizabeth Hardwick's essay about Didion is called "In the Wasteland." No one "likes" the world according to Joan Didion, and few would agree that she's even describing the world they think they know, but she makes her case. The title of the aforementioned collection is We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. The phrase occurs in one of her essays and, out of context on the cover, has an air of vague uplift such as might have been approved by someone in marketing. But if you read through even a fraction of its 1100 pages you'd see that an apt gloss is more along the line of "we lie to ourselves in order to feel good." 

 

Hardwick on Nora in the doll's house

When I wrote, here, about Elizabeth Hardwick, I took note of the vivid openings to many of her essays, and I set a couple of them down. Now I have one to add. An essay on Ibsen's A Doll's House begins:

Ibsen could never be agreeable for very long. He seemed to have the fat of choler in his bloodstream, all of it collecting there from a youth as bitter, homely, and humiliating as a man could endure. Fate kept this large mind and angry ambition working as a druggist from the age of sixteen to twenty-two in the freezing cold of the little town of Grimstad. Well-named. He was sore at his family because they were worse than poor; they had gone from being well enough off to a great diminishment—the kind of reversal that stood out like a birthmark in the nosy, petty provincial world of Ibsen's life, and of his plays.

The Ibsen family had to move from town to a miserable little farm on the outskirts. Father Ibsen had the inclination to bankruptcy and shadiness Ibsen used over and over in his work, and along with it the sardonic wit of a small-town failure who drank too much. . . .

And she's off! There is no "great diminishment" as she proceeds, maybe just an imperceptible modulation from panache to acute intelligence as she delves into the details of the subject at hand. Maybe it sounds slavish or unduly worshipful, but I've read certain books mainly just to find out what Hardwick had to say about them. Scan the Table of Contents. "Ibsen's Women"? Okay, I'm reading A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm. One knows, dimly, that Nora, in A Doll's House, is regarded as a feminist hero for leaving her family in order to find herself, or whatever, and it's a relief to feel one's own discomfort endorsed at the end of Hardwick's essay:

Nora's children—this is a hedge of thorns. Abandon Helmer, all right, but bundle up the children and take them with you, arranging for his weekend and vacation visits. Even in Ibsen's day one actress refused the part saying, "I could never abandon my children."

[Snip]

When Helmer says that she cannot leave her children, she might have said, "Millions of men have done so," and in that been perfectly consistent with current behavior. Nora seems to be saying that she cannot raise her own children in the old way and that she needs time to discover a new one.

Nevertheless, the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora.

Whew! Would have hated to disagree with Elizabeth Hardwick!

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky

Came to the end this morning of Crime and Punishment. Since Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are regarded as among the world's best novelists, and were alive and writing in Russia at the same time (middle of the 19th-century), it's become customary to think of them together and to profess a preference for one over the other. Tolstoy gets my vote, on the ground that I'm more interested in normal psychology than abnormal psychology. Also, I think they share a weakness that is comparatively obscure or hidden in Tolstoy: both are sentimental, or pious, about people who are below them on some kind of human status meter. 

Tolstoy came from one of the richest families in Russia. His characters are from the aristocracy, but the scope is so wide, his ambition so high, that ultimately just about everything in the world attracts his attention. (Someone facetiously criticized War and Peace for not having included a single boat race.)  Peasants therefore make their appearance, and, when they do, everything that's wonderful about everything else dissipates into worshipful stupidity. Their lives are simple and beautiful. They are guided by religious faith and folk wisdom. They are sturdy and morally upright. One speculates that very occasionally one of them might have too much to drink, or cheat for profit, or be cruel to a spouse, but one does not learn about this from Tolstoy. He never even tries to develop one as a character; the peasantry exists only as a monochromatic class of humanity. Thankfully, he doesn't dwell on them. Back to Levin and Kitty and Anna and Vronsky, et al. 

With Dostoevsky, it's different but kind of the same. He wasn't rich. His novels are so long partly because he was chronically short of funds and therefore always racing toward publication and a payday. He didn't have time for editing, and besides, was sometimes paid by the page. His novels are filled with people who are brilliant and tortured, like him. But then there are these other characters, the Sonyas and Alyoshas, saints who are idealized well beyond the point of being believable as people. These are the characters who to me seem to be in the place of Tolstoy's peasants, but, unlike Tolstoy's peasants, someone like Sonya is close to the center of Crime and Punishment. Her simple and unquestioning faith is what's recommended, and the extolling of her  virtues, which begins before she appears on stage, never relents. It's wearisome.

Mania! Madness! Dostoevsky!

I came to the chapter in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov, having broken relations with his family, walks directly to Sonia's apartment and interrogates her about her beliefs before asking her to read aloud for him the story of the raising of Lazarus from the Gospel of John. (He only knows about the story and can't find it in her New Testament; she's the one who knows it's in the Fourth Gospel.) In case the reader had forgotten, the narrator pointedly observes that it's a prostitute and a murderer who are contemplating the gospel text in Sonia's bare, destitute room. It doesn't seem like anything that might happen in The Real World, though I can imagine the scene as the subject of a painting—probably a sentimental one. The details of the interview could not be conveyed in a painting, however. Sonia is the eldest child in one of literature's most dysfunctional families. Her father has recently been killed in an accident and his wife, her stepmother, is dying of tuberculosis.  She's resorted to prostitution in order to raise desperately needed funds for the three younger children. Raskolnikov presses her on what she thinks is going to happen to these kids once they are orphans. She seems to be in denial about the hopelessness of the situation and, for example, begs him not to say aloud that their mother will soon be dead. Raskolnikov responds by setting before her the picture of her stepmother's beggarly appeals being interrupted by her coughing fits. Sonia says God would not allow the worst to become the children. Raskolnikov asks whether she has  noticed what God allows to become of some other people's children. Why does she suppose her siblings are special? He thinks she's a "religious maniac." She thinks he's a "madman." The sane reader probably thinks both are correct. In a twist, it comes out that her usual partner for Bible study had been Lizaveta, the pawnbroker's mentally challenged sister whom Raskolnikov a few days earlier had bludgeoned to death with an axe. 

Dostoevsky is sometimes said to rank among the great 19th-century literary realists, which perhaps is defensible if we allow in the sights and bad smells of the faithfully described streets and byways of St Petersburg. If you want, you can on Google Maps follow Raskolnikov on his walks around town: the streets haven't changed names, and it's true that if you turn left on this one from that one you will come to a bridge that crosses a canal, etc. But the events that are described, the elements of the plot, what every reader will remember, are fantastical and exhibit what I'd call an overheated religious sensibility. His novels are long, exceedingly long, but the same kinds of things happen again and again. The scene with Raskolnikov in Sonia's room resembles the more famous one in The Brothers Karamazov, where the brilliant intellectual Ivan lays out for his saintly younger brother the case for atheism by describing the suffering of children.

There is another way in which Dostoevsky may qualify as a "great 19th-century realist." It relates mainly to minor characters who aren't in the path of the fireball. The chapter before the one in Sonia's room begins with this description of Luzhin in the immediate aftermath of having been rejected by his fiancée and her formerly hopeful mother:

The point was that up to the very last minute he had not in the least expected such a break. He had blustered and bullied, never imagining even the possibility that two poor and unprotected women could escape his power. His confidence was greatly strengthened by vanity and that degree of self-reliance which might best be called self-infatuation. Peter Petrovich, who had struggled up from nothing, was full of almost morbid admiration for himself, set a high value by his own brain and capabilities and sometimes, when he was alone, even admired his own face in the mirror. But more than anything in the world he loved and prized his money, got together laboriously and by every means in his power; it raised him to the level of everything that had been superior to him.

It is to this point my favorite paragraph in the book, especially that last sentence. The novel is psychologically acute concerning characters who aren't vessels for all the religious and philosophic freight. 

The moral status of some literary dandies

About half through Crime and Punishment and feeling like I'm getting the hang of The Dostoevsky Code. For example, if a character, appearing on stage for the first time, is described as "fashionably dressed," or "well pomaded," or "with an elaborate toilet," or "carefully coifed," you can be sure that in time it will be revealed that she (or he) is in addition an asshole and a reprobate.

The general topic puts me in mind of Kent's spectacular takedown of the contemptible Oswald in King Lear:

A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition . . . .

Draw, you rogue, for though it be night, yet the moon shines. I'll make a sop o' th' moonshine of you. You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!

A cullion is a base or ignoble fellow and, etymologically, is from the Latin word for scrotum ("coleus"). And "barbermonger"! Always going to the barber and therefore continuous with a glass-gazing finical rogue. 

A hundred pages more of Crime and Punishment

I have been progressing through Crime and Punishment and can answer some of the questions concerning "what's gonna happen" that I mentioned here. Raskolnikov, for example, does murder the old pawnbroker. Of course, right? It would be a type of novel that hadn't yet been invented if he only thought about it for around 460 pages. What I hadn't guessed is that the old lady's mentally "slow" sister, with whom she lived, would return to the apartment before the expected time, with the result that she (the sister) is incontinently murdered too. In for a dime, in for a dollar. To buttress my claim that the novel is pulpy, I'll set down the passage in which the first murder occurs. Dostoevsky does not cheat the reader's voyeuristic curiosity:

The old woman was, as usual, bare-headed. Her thin fair hair, just turning grey, and thick with grease, was plaited into a rat's tail and fastened into a knot above the nape with a fragment of horn comb. Because she was so short the axe struck her full on the crown of the head. She cried out, but very feebly, and sank in a heap on the floor, still with enough strength left to raise both hands to her head. One of them still held the 'pledge' [the pawned object with which Raskolnikov had gained admission]. Then he struck her again and yet again, with all his strength, always with the blunt side of the axe, and always on the crown of the head. Blood poured out as if from an overturned glass and the body toppled over on its back. He stepped away as it fell, and then stopped to see the face: she was dead. Her wide-open eyes looked ready to start out of their sockets, her forehead was wrinkled and her whole face convulsively distorted. 

So that happens on page 66 of 465. The sister comes home on page 68 and is similarly bludgeoned to death, though her pathetic incomprehension makes the details even harder to bear. Part One then comes to its end on page 74. At the beginning of Part Two, on page 78, Raskolnikov receives a summons to report to the local police office. Things seem to be moving too fast to last another 400 pages, but it soon develops that the cops want to talk to him about a landlord-tenant issue: his poverty has been well established, he thought he had an arrangement with his landlady, but she apparently had tired of not getting her rent and had complained to the police. Acutely conscious of his guilt for terrible crimes, he finds himself explaining to the cops about a misunderstanding with his landlady. The cops are casual and bored. 

Pulp fiction

I began reading Crime and Punishment a few days ago. It's sometimes fun to speculate about how one's reaction to a book might be colored by the author's reputation—in this case, a large one. With, say, Ulysses, I'm pretty confident I'd ditch it in a minute, or five pages, if not for knowing beforehand that it's one of the most esteemed works of the twentieth century. So you persist, if you persist, partly to try and discover what other people, but not you so far, have discerned. That's the opposite of how I feel about Crime and Punishment! It seems like a pot-boiler, pulpy, overdrawn, fantastical, a melodrama. I'd never guess that it's regarded as a masterpiece of the world's literature, but I'd tear through it just to find out what happens. Will Raskolnikov kill the wretched old pawnbroker? If he does, will he be found out? Will the mass of forward pages unfurl like a police procedural, 19th-century St Petersburg, Russia style? What about his sister, Dunya—will her impending marriage to Luzhin occur? will he turn out to be a self-seeking prig and bully, as foreseen by Raskolnikov? 

To give one small example of what I mean by such adjectives as "overdrawn" and "fantastical": you could not say that Dostoevsky makes use of the trope about the "prostitute with a heart of gold" because, in his work, she's a saint, a Christian, a suffering servant. He one-ups sentimental rubbish. He'd be easy to lampoon but I can't set him down. 

Dostoevsky: a guilty pleasure. 

Of course, I do know something about the author and his reputation, so I can see, too, that the book is going to be a vehicle for exploring various philosophical/religious ideas, such as: Should the goal of life be to achieve a surplus of pleasure over pain and become, in a term not yet invented, self-actualized? The answer to that is going to be a thundering No, but, to tell the truth, I hardly care: I just want to know what's going to happen. One senses that the book was written in a kind of fever—because, while reading, you feel like you've caught it. 

Tolerable and its antonyms

 

I was out driving somewhere yesterday, radio tuned to an NPR news show, when the host said the current situation was "intolerable," whereupon the interviewee asserted it was worse than that: "The situation has been intolerable for the last 20 years," she said. I wonder for how long the intolerable can persist before it arrives at one of Jane Austen's favorite adjectives, "tolerable," as in:

The suitor had a tolerable income. 

Thirty years? Samuel Beckett, Jane's colleague on the Humanities syllabus, would probably say 70 or 80, to coincide with life expectancy.

ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.

VLADIMIR: That's what you think.

 

More on Samuel Beckett

I'm still sunk in the works of Samuel Beckett. Well, actually, I'm taking a bit of a break and reading instead the Beckett biography by Deirdre Bair, which, unlike Beckett's fiction, tells a story (more than 600 pages) with a beginning, middle, and end, what is sometimes called "plot."  There isn't a lot of that in Beckett's fiction. I recently finished the first volume, Molloy, in what is often called The Beckett Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—which commences:

I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind.

Does this sound promising? My thought, having just typed the above words, is that the first sentence sounds a lot like:

I am in my mother's womb

and that this may indicate the narrator's deepest wish. Much more pleasant back then, in there. There are two sections to Molloy, both journeys. In the first, Molloy travels to his mother's "room" and has some adventures, or non-adventures, anti-adventures, along the way. The only way you know he got there is this beginning. In the second section, a private investigator is dispatched by his shadowy bosses to travel to Molloy. The preparations for departure are elaborate and he too has some non-adventures, complications, along his way. The narrative interest, though that is a strong phrase for what most readers probably experience, centers on the question of what is going to happen when he encounters Molloy. But then he is recalled, and the novel ends, before this can occur. At least in Moby Dick, Ahab does in the end meet the Whale. 

The second installment, Malone Dies, which suggests that the name of the title character in Molloy was a mistake, a misheard shout (or whisper), begins:

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist's Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption. But I do not think so, I do not think I am wrong in saying that these rejoicings will take place in my absence, this year.

Absent from the rejoicing: this year, next year, last year, and the year before that. From the first chapter of Bair's biography, concerning her subject's religious upbringing:

The late Beatrice Orpen, who was a prominent painter in Dublin, sat with her family in the pew opposite the Becketts at Tullow Church, and remembered Sam frowning at her week after week during services. Years later she discovered that "his dissatisfaction was nothing personal—it was toward the whole cosmos rather than with me in particular."

Two excerpts from two plays by Samuel Beckett

I've been reading plays by Samuel Beckett—the two most famous ones, Waiting for Godot and Endgame. They are meant for the theatre, not the study: lots of stage directions, the most common being 

[Pause.]

When you're reading along, at least when I'm reading along, the tendency is to hurdle past to the words the characters speak, and one then misses the effect of haltingness, perplexity, befuddlement that is created in the theater. A mime act would be nothing but stage directions, and Beckett was moving in that direction: Godot premiered in 1953, Endgame in 1957, the same year as the aptly entitled "Act Without Words, A Mime for One Player." For some reason, pathos and futility lend themselves to wordless gestures. If things get bad enough, you quit talking, there's nothing to say, and the movements you make—sagging shoulders—tell the tale. But in Godot and Endgame the characters are still talking. It's often sort of funny. I imagine the audience often laughing, though a little uneasily. A professor maybe wouldn't approve but Beckett makes me think of Laurel and Hardy taking on Big Topics. For example, in Waiting for Godot, the scene is described tersely as

A country road. A tree. Evening.

and, before long, the two main characters discuss whether to hang themselves from the tree:

Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Vladimir: From a bough? [They go towards the tree.] I wouldn't trust it.

Estragon: We can always try.

Vladimir: Go ahead.

Estragon: After you.

Vladimir: No no, you first.

Estragon: Why me?

Vladimir: You're lighter than I am.

Estragon: Just so!

Vladimir: I don't understand.

Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you?

[Vladimir uses his intelligence.]

Vladimir: [finally]. I remain in the dark.

Estragon: This is how it is. [He reflects.] The bough . . . the bough . . . [Angrily.] Use your head, can't you?

Vladimir: You're my only hope.

Estragon: [with effort]. Gogo light—bough not break—Gogo dead. Didi heavy—bough break—Didi alone. Whereas—

Vladimir: I hadn't thought of that.

They decide to do nothing drastic till Godot arrives. They wait and talk the whole play long and of course Godot never comes. At the end, they agree to give up and leave. The play then ends with the last stage direction: [They do not move.]

The landscape of Endgame is similarly desolate. There are four characters. The two older ones are in trashcans out of which, soiled, they occasionally rise to speak before sinking back down in the filth. One of the younger characters at one point tells the following "joke":

[Raconteur's voice.}

An Englishman, needing a pair of striped trousers in a hurry for the New Year festivities, goes to his tailor who takes his measurements. 

[Tailor's voice.]

"That's the lot, come back in four days, I'll have it ready."

Good. Four days later.

[Tailor's voice.]

"So sorry, come back in a week, I've made a mess of the seat." 

Good, that's all right, a neat seat can be very ticklish. A week later.

[Tailor's voice.]

"Frightfully sorry, come back in ten days, I've made a hash of the crotch."

Good, can't be helped, a snug crotch is always a teaser. Ten days later.

[Tailor's voice.]

"Dreadfully sorry, come back in a fortnight, I've made a balls of the fly."

Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiff proposition. 

[Pause. Normal voice.]

I never told it worse. 

[Pause. Gloomy.]

I tell this story worse and worse.

[Pause. Raconteur's voice.]

Well, to make it short, the bluebells are blowing and he ballockses the buttonholes. 

[Customer's voice.]

"God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it's indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!"

[Tailor's voice, scandalized.]

"But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look—

[disdainful gesture, disgustedly]

—at the world—

[pause]

and look—

[loving gesture, proudly]

—at my TROUSERS!

The world he gestures at with disdain and disgust is mostly barren but with trashcans—the world according to Samuel Beckett. 

Bloomsday, 2021

Yesterday, to mark the anniversary of Bloomsday—Thursday, June 16, 1904, the day the action of James Joyce's Ulysses, starring Dubliner Leopold Bloom, is set—I read the introductory note to the section on Joyce in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. It was written by David Daiches and gets off to a fast start:

James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the previous.

A paragraph later, concerning the son as a young artist, a couple ways in which the apple fell near the tree come into view:

Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits of sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy person to get on with, yet he never lacked friends and throughout his 36 years on the Continent was always the center of a literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus who came out from Dublin to act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His financial position was much improved by the patronage of . . . .

And there follows a roll call of the benefactors who kept Joyce afloat in an age before fellowships, arts grants, writing colonies, and so on. But what's really great about Daiches's note is the way in which he describes why many of us adore Joyce, notwithstanding some of his unattractive personal traits:

Joyce's almost life-long exile from his native Ireland has something paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin, its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of his writing in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin, however, so that they became microcosms, small-scale models, of all human life, of all history and all geography. Indeed that was his life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing about all human experience. .  .  .

Ulysses is an account of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904: it is thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm of all human experience. The events are therefore not told on a single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity of Man in the World. . . .

The climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom, worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive Stephen home and gives him a meal. . . .

The more one reads Ulysses the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to probe into the symbolic meaning in order to relish both its literary artistry and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one point of view a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in which he moves, from another a champion of kindness and justice whose humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and gives the book its positive human foundation. 

Perhaps one senses a few ounces of special pleading, a bit of a soft sell of the challenge connected with making sense of Ulysses: what Daiches calls "literary artistry," for example, sometimes seems to me like a pianist playing a discordant but difficult piece mainly just to exhibit his skill. But my own experience as a reader would cause me to write that, the more you read Ulysses, the more you love Leopold Bloom, and the better you feel about being a member of his species. Happy Bloomsday, a day late!

Hamlet and Hamnet

I was planning on watching basketball games this afternoon as I had no idea that today was reserved for the so-called play-in games, the marquee one being Michigan State v. UCLA late tonight. It took me awhile to adjust to the existence of these play-in games. Now I think there's more of them, and the NCAA and the TV networks are evidently trying to elevate their status by scheduling them on what used to be the first day of the actual 64-team tournament. Ka-ching! Maybe just a matter of time till the field expands to 128. Any team that doesn't make it must fire the coach. He'll then be hired by one of the other universities that had to fire its coach. The unsuccessful coaches will just circulate among the unsuccessful programs. The salaries are all into 7 figures so it's not a bad gig, even if you have to move a lot. 

Anyway, since the afternoon is open, more about Shakespeare, whose Hamlet I recently reread after reading this review of Hamnet, one of the New York Times's ten best books of 2020. Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died at age 11. We know that the boy was buried at Stratford-on-Avon, where he lived with his mother, on August 11, 1596. By that time his father, 32, had been working in London's theater biz as an actor and playwright for five or more years. Stratford-on-Avon is about 100 miles northwest of London, and 100 miles in 1600 was a lot farther than it is today. The theatre guy, then, lived apart from his family. Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, is a novel based at least loosely on what is known, or surmised, about Shakespeare's family, his likely problematic marriage, grief, and its possible impact on the playwright's work.

A source for Hamlet is a previously existing work with a boy hero named Hamlet, a circumstance that tends to refute the notion that Shakespeare, thinking of his son, chose a name that differed by a consonant. Nor is it the case that after his son's death Shakespeare, in his grief, immediately turned to the composition of Hamlet, for the play was almost certainly composed in the year 1600, about three years after the boy died. But, as there is little known about Shakespeare's emotional life, it is a kind of pastime to try to infer one from his work, and Hamlet seems the most personal work. There is, for example, the title character's obvious interest in the theatrical arts. He'd been moping around the castle, soliloquizing about suicide, but when the traveling theater troupe arrives he's suddenly animated and alive—full of questions, advice, and suggestions for the players, who it seems might have had reason to be put off by the presumption: they're the professionals, right? But Hamlet will not shut up. The scene goes on and on—too long, some may think, all the details not really necessary in order to advance the plot. It's said that Shakespeare's self-education had left him so well versed in the tricks of so many trades that carpenters think he must have been at least a carpenter's apprentice, sailors that he must have shipped out to sea, etc., etc., but the title character in Hamlet is like his creator sunk in the fine points of the theatre professions. 

It's also intriguing that Hamlet appears to represent a break with Shakespeare's artistic past, which, some have felt, is suggestive of a rupture in his private life. Hamlet is about half again as long as any of the 20 or so plays that preceded it. Scholars have determined that Shakespeare deployed in Hamlet more than 600 words that don't occur in any of the plays or poems he'd already written.  The technique is different, too. To praise Hamlet, you would not say that it's "tightly plotted" or "well paced." Elements of the plot don't make a ton of sense. The hero’s first despondent ruminations—

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon against self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

—occur before his interview with the Ghost causes him to suspect foul play. Once he knows his father was murdered, the audience wonders whether he'll take revenge, but he wonders whether he should commit suicide:

To be, or not to be, &c

The tight plot and paced action are gone and replaced by this brooding figure, dissatisfied with life and disgusted with the corruption around him. The length of the thing, and the new vocabulary, are like a piling on—an analog of the famous "double plot" in King Lear, about which someone observed it's apparently not enough that one old man should roam the earth in despair: there must be two. Between Hamlet (1600) and Lear (1605) Shakespeare created Iago, and Macbeth belongs to 1606. Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet is fiction, her surmises just surmises, but it's hard to dispute that Shakespeare discovered something new within himself in 1599 or 1600. 

Google it

I recently mentioned, regarding Charles Dickens, that I'd like to know the ratio of published words to days of adult life lived. Being not fully adjusted to the modern world, I sometimes forget that you don't have to wonder about these things. According to normblog, by way of the Twitter account @DickensDaily, Dickens's fifteen novels (including Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished at his death) have a total of 3,859,231 words. Since this  leaves out A Christmas Carol and Sketches by Boz, let's put the word count at the nice round figure of 4 million. Dickens died at age 57, so, keeping numbers round, let's say his career as an author of fiction lasted 35 years. I'm just trying to get an idea here.

Thirty-five years times 365 days per year makes 12,775 days. Four million words divided by 12,775 days makes 313 words per day. I'm surprised it's that low! About a page a day, every day, for 35 years. Of course, the work of composing a novel involves more than just producing words—there is the architecture of the thing to work out, assuming you don't just write down the first sentence and then "feel your way forward" for a few hundred pages. And writing novels isn't all Dickens did. He had ten children. He went to the theatre. He toured the world, including America twice, giving lectures and setting down his reactions in documents that don't count toward the 4 million word count. Ditto for the journalism he churned out as a very young man. Still, the calculations suggest that the cumulative effect of steady application may exceed expectations.

Let's see, if I watch sports on TV, an average of an hour per day every day for fifty years. . . .

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and arts ambassador who died last week at the age of 101, could not be accused of having been born on third base and then acting like he hit a triple.* The circumstances of his very early life were so calamitous that certain facts of his nativity were unknown to him into his maturity—he knew his birthday was March 24, for example, but only that the year of his birth was either 1919 or 1920 (it was 1919). His father, an auctioneer in the suburbs of New York City, died right around the time Lawrence was born—the biographical sketch in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry says the elder Ferlinghetti died "while the boy was still small" but his New York Times obituary says the death occurred "before Lawrence was born." His mother was then admitted to a state mental hospital before Lawrence, the youngest of five boys, turned 2. Nothing that I have seen takes up the question of what became of the four older boys. Lawrence was taken in by a woman he called "Aunt Emily," though she seems to have been a more distant relative of his mother. Her full name was Emily Monsanto and she took Lawrence to France, where they lived from 1920 to 1924. She then returned to the New York area with 5-year-old Lawrence. At some point, either before Emily took him to France or after they had returned and she was looking for work, Lawrence lived in an orphanage. She eventually found work as a governess for an affluent family in Bronxville—the Anthology and the obit provide different names for this family. The next awful thing to happen is that Emily went insane. By this time, however, the Bronxville family had taken to young Lawrence and he remained with them, reading through the extensive home library and eventually enrolling, presumably on their dime, at the University of North Carolina, a choice inspired by his devotion to native North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. He graduated with a BA in journalism just as the US was entering World War II. Ferlinghetti served in the navy and, after the war, attended graduate school at Columbia, for a master's degree, and the Sorbonne, in Paris, from which he received a doctorate in comparative literature. That's the first 31 years of a life that would last almost 71 more.

Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco in 1951 and opened City Lights Books two years later. His book store soon became something like a salon for the Beat movement in literature, and its small press published poetry, that of Ferlinghetti and others, including Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1955. No more obscurities in the biographical record from this point forward, but the preexisting ones persist. One of Ferlinghetti's longer poems is called "Autobiography" but its self-mockery would seem to make it an unreliable guide to biographical fact. It's made largely of two- and three-line units, the last line an undercutting blow:

I thought I was Tom Sawyer
catching crayfish in the Bronx River. . . .

I looked homeward
and saw no angel.
I got caught stealing pencils
from the Five and Ten Cent store
the same month I made Eagle Scout. . . .

I landed in Normandy
in a rowboat that turned over. . . .

I hear America singing
in the Yellow Pages.

The text of the whole poem is here. Ferlinghetti himself (I think) reads the poem, here, as a photographic montage of images whirs by, with musical interludes. 

 

*Don't know whether it was original with him, but I'm familiar with this line because Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa, applied it to President Geo. W. Bush: "He was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple." 

Re Marlowe and his contemporary

I've been reading up on Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan dramatist I referred to the other day (because a line from one of his plays gave Hemingway the title for "In Another Country"), and I see that a correction is in order: I said that Marlowe was murdered when he was 30, but actually he was 29. I think he gets the silver medal in English literature's "What Might He Have Achieved" competition, the gold going to the poet John Keats, who died, of tuberculosis, in 1821 at the age of 25. 

The circumstances around Marlowe's death are a topic of intrigue. According to Hallett Smith, author of the headnote to the section on Marlowe in The Norton Anthology, the dramatist was killed on May 30, 1593, at a London tavern, over a dispute about the bill. The method was stabbing with a dagger. It's possible for a Law and Order fan to imagine a jaded 16th-century London homicide detective debating with himself whether there might be more to the story. On the one hand, your work experience has impressed on you the sorry drab circumstances that can end in homicide. A person might very well be murdered over a dispute about a bar tab, especially considering the effects of alcohol on inhibition and judgment. But Marlowe was a notorious figure whose sudden death in a bar fight might attract suspicion—and it has attracted suspicion. Smith's headnote includes the following information:

From the time of his first great success, when he was 23 [Smith refers to the first production of the play Tamburlaine], Marlowe had only six years to live. They were not calm years. In 1589 he was involved in a brawl with one William Bradley, in which the poet Thomas Watson intervened and killed Bradley. Both poets were jailed, but Watson got off on a plea of self-defense and Marlowe was released. In 1591 Marlowe was living in London with the playwright Thomas Kyd, who later gave information to the Privy Council accusing Marlowe of atheism and treason.

In an essay called "Marlowe's Damnations," the poet and critic John Berryman energetically amplifies:

Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist's life and his work, which interest an increasing number of readers in this century, and the existence of which is denied only by very young persons or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux ["so much the worse for them"—French phrases, British spellings: you'd never guess Berryman was born in Oklahoma]. Marlowe was a professional secret agent, a notorious unbeliever, a manifest homosexual, cruel, quarrelsome, and perhaps murderous, his habitual associates scoundrels and traitors. . . .

Let us take both the atheism and the homosexuality seriously, because Marlowe did: he was missionary about both and he could have been burned for either. As William Empson has remarked, he was lucky to be murdered before he was burned.

Thus a cottage industry of criminal theories. He was murdered by the Church. He was murdered by a double-crossed spy. He was murdered by a double-crossed gay lover. He was murdered by the Privy Council, which was Queen Elizabeth's version of the FBI. It's wild that all these are defensible, though only one could be true, and it's also possible that a barroom fight was just a barroom fight. In his dramatic works, Marlowe's theme of themes is the transgressive pursuit of forbidden things. It's not surprising, for example, that one of his plays is a version of the Faust legend and that, in his hand, the tale is a parable of intellectual history: the medieval view that the purpose of human life is to work out one's religious salvation is contrasted with the desire—the lust—to find things out, to get knowledge. 

He had been born at Canterbury in February, 1564, and was therefore older than Shakespeare by two months, a circumstance that has resulted in Marlowe being often compared to the GOAT. This hasn't necessarily worked to Marlowe's disadvantage. For example, in one of Shakespeare's best known sonnets, the 29th, the speaker acknowledges having "desir[ed] this man's art and that man's scope," which has caused some to speculate that Shakespeare envied Marlowe's art and scope. (Because who else could possibly have aroused his jealousy?) Smith states that Shakespeare would "scarcely be known today" had he died at the same age as Marlowe. Investigating this claim, I discover that, by the best estimate of scholarship, only four of Shakespeare's extant plays clearly belong to 1593, the year he turned 29, or before. These are the first, second, and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III—a linked series of English history plays about strife between the Houses of York and Lancaster. The comedies Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and Love's Labour's Lost all belong to his 30th year, give or take a year. From what we can tell, Shakespeare's 20s were devoted to acquiring practical work experience in the London theatre world. At first, the principal vehicle was acting, and he was in his late 20s before writing plays supplanted acting in them as a career path. He would have known Marlowe, or at least been familiar with his work, and you don't have to think the man two months his senior is lurking in the 29th sonnet to have fun wondering what he thought about him. The two were in many ways opposites. Shakespeare seems to have possessed an essentially conservative temperament, and, though it's easy to see that he had knowledge of drink, drunks, and alcoholic dissipation, he was himself a poor candidate for getting stabbed in a tavern—and, indeed, he did not.  He was also one of the world's preeminent autodidacts, whereas Marlowe spent six years on scholarship at Cambridge. Berryman points out that Marlowe's plays are full of his classical education, and I identified what I take to be his "theme of themes." Such notions suggest the limits of his art and scope. It's possible to detect his obsessions in his work. Shakespeare's output is too variegated for that. No one speaks of Shakespeare's obsessions.

Wisdom of Wiggen

Ring Lardner, about whom I wrote a couple days ago, was once criticized by F. Scott Fitzgerald for squandering his gifts writing about baseball, "a boy's game." To which the poet and critic John Berryman, rising for the defense, responded:

Yogi Berra is a boy? Lardner wrote about big leaguers largely: not boys, men, in danger every second of demotion to the minors or focuses of national attention. They were nowhere, and they will be nowhere. Here they are in continuous crisis, dramatized in the key plays Lardner describes so well.

I'm on Berryman's side of the argument, but it's a little weird that he begins with Yogi Berra and, in the next sentence, slides into big leaguers who are "in danger every second of demotion to the minors," which was not Berra's problem. It's the stars who are the focuses of national attention. The struggles of a borderline player to make it to the majors, or stay in the majors, are the focus of only his own attention. Though not in the spotlight, it's easy to imagine that the struggle can be a desperate one. In the minors, you are riding buses between mid-sized cities and, assuming no 7-figure signing bonus in the recent past, probably hustling for extra dollars in the off season. The minimum major league salary currently stands at $563,500, and getting vested in the players' pension plan is a pass to spend the rest of your life watching Law & Order reruns, if that's what you want. Which world you're in, as Crash Davis explains in Bull Durham, depends on whether over a week's worth of Triple-AAA games you go 7-for-25 or 8-for-25. It shouldn't be a mystery why, scanning lists of players busted for steroid use, there are perhaps 40 unfamiliar names for every established big leaguer. 

The Henry Wiggen books of Mark Harris that I've enjoyed so much may be said to cover this territory. The first, The Southpaw (1953), is in some respects a kid's daydream of being a big league star: in his rookie season, the narrator-hero Henry Wiggen wins the Player of the Year Award while pitching his team, the New York Mammoths, to the World Series championship. The final volume, It Looked Like Forever (1979), begins with the Mammoths unceremoniously releasing Wiggen. This isn't altogether unexpected, as he is 39 and now wholly dependent upon guile, which will not take you as far as a good fast ball, but Wiggen had expected to be the Mammoths' next manager and then that doesn't happen either. So a double disappointment leaves him suddenly adrift after a long and successful career—19 years, to be exact, after his fairy tale rookie season. The novel's epigraph is the Robert Frost poem that has the lines:

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard.
Or keeps the end from being hard.

In the rest of the novel Wiggen has many adventures while, as the self-actualizers among us might say, "reinventing himself," though he doesn't talk that way and would probably make fun of people who do. It's my favorite of the four Wiggen books.

Between these bookends stand Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957). The former was made into a Hollywood movie starring Robert DeNiro and is probably the best known of the Wiggen books. It concerns the last season of Bruce Pearson, the Mammoths' third-string catcher who is diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease before it begins. Lack of star power is not the only thing that distinguishes Pearson from Lou Gehrig. He does not have a dedicated day at the home stadium in New York in which he declares himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," but he does become a slightly better ballplayer in the short time before his progressing disease sidelines him—because, facing his end, he pays more attention, starts noticing how pitchers retire him so easily, and where the fielders are positioned when he bats, and is able for a short time to mount a kind of rearguard action against habitual failure. You can see how this might be a little hokey, and sometimes maybe it is, but it also could be a lot worse. Pearson dies in the off season and of his teammates only his road roommate Wiggen, who is a pallbearer, attends the funeral. This is partly because several of the Mammoths are black and Pearson was a racial bigot. Bang the Drum is an adult book, not Pride of the Mammoths. 

A Ticket for a Seamstitch is the briefest of the Wiggen novels and was published the year after Bang the Drum, circumstances that have made me wonder whether at least the skeleton of it might have been cut from the earlier novel. In Ticket, the sense of abundant, bounding life that characterizes the other Wiggen books subsides and what one notices instead is a carefully constructed narrative, the two strands of which converge for a July 4, 1956, doubleheader between Washington and the home team Mammoths in New York. That is the day that Wiggen, pitching the nightcap, tries to win his sixteenth consecutive decision, which, had he succeeded, would have tied Carl Hubbell's record. It's also the day that the seamstitch of the title, having completed a transcontinental odyssey, realizes her ambition of seeing a big-league game featuring the Mammoths and, more particularly, her favorite player, Henry Wiggen. I think the climax would have been more satisfying if the separate but converging strands had been more fully rendered. Regarding the seamstitch, one gets the idea that the events of her journey are meant to establish her as the picaresque heroine of an American road novel. But we don't see enough of her. She has too few adventures and never becomes a vivid character. The situation is similar with the Mammoths and Wiggen's mounting win streak.

Yet the book gives pleasure. It's theme is congenial, at least to me, and certainly not what you'd expect from a baseball novel. Though the seamstitch's original fan letter had been directed to the married Wiggen, his new roommate, Piney Woods, replies, begins a correspondence, eventually recommends the trip, and eagerly awaits her arrival on July 3. The narrative interest generated by Ticket isn't much more than: What does the seamstitch look like, and what will happen when Piney meets her in the flesh?

Turns out she looks nothing like Woods had imagined, and he therefore deserts, leaving her alone with Wiggen, who spends the evening before his big game showing her around Manhattan and conducting himself like a charming gentleman. Here he is as narrator, indulging himself in a rhetorical flourish on the subject of the seamstitch and her half of humanity:

She has nice skin. You might as well say that for her, and decent hair and eyes and nose, average, nothing below average and nothing too much above, just exactly the average kind of girl you bump into everywhere you turn, waitresses and photo retouchers and switchboard girls, girls on trains and girls on planes, girls in depots and restaurants and nightclubs, girls in banks and insurance offices and tax offices, girls in the newspaper business and girls in the book business, girls selling tickets to the movies and girls tearing them in 1/2 at the door, girls in Queen City and all the towns of the 4-State Mountain League, and girls in New York and Chicago, girls, girls, girls, everywhere I go. I guess I ought to know. I keep an eye peeled. There was nothing wrong with the girl for God's sake.

A brief backwards glance. In Bang the Drum Wiggen, on his way to Pearson's hospital room in Rochester, Minnesota, meets up with an attractive airline employee who plainly signals her availability. Tempted, he nevertheless gives her the slip, and then congratulates himself on not "chasing after every pair of big white teeth" whose path crosses his. There are other incidents more or less like this in the Wiggen chronicle. He is interested, observant, "keeps an eye peeled," but, in the end, never asserts himself in the modest way necessary. His woman is his wife, Holly. When in a phone conversation he mentions to her the seamstitch, she replies:

"Maybe she will do your income tax for you, and nurse your baby through her cold, and write your letters to your fans, and keep on top of insurance matters, and polish up the grammar in your books, and live alone all summer." 

Wiggen asks what else is new. "Well," she said, "today I been repairing the furnace."

The novel thus places bleared scenes of matrimonial realism opposite the hot imaginings of Piney Woods and suggests that the wise man be happy with the former while abjuring the latter. Actually, more than "suggests": a moment before Woods bursts through a door with the seamstitch, one of the Mammoths, Red Traphagen, who is often in these novels the voice of wisdom, says, "Finally what Piney will find out is there is no place on earth like earth, and he will find a woman less than perfect, and if he loves her all he can, and she loves him, and their children, too, that will be the nearest he can expect to the moon."

Traphagen had to state the theme, as you wouldn't want to hear it from a 25-year-old who had won two World Series and twice been named Most Valuable Player.  

Sports books

According to my parents, when I was first old enough to express wishes at Christmas or as my birthday approached, I always asked for "a book and a ball," which shows I guess that at least some people don't change much after they're three years old. Naturally, I got a lot of sports books as gifts, and I have to say that most of them were a disappointment. The fiction was corny and unrealistic; the biographies were worshipful; the histories as sanitary as the bios. Babe Ruth keeps his promise to hit a home run for a sick boy in the hospital! I read them all anyway, repeatedly. When I got older, I found my way to grittier fare, like Instant Replay, Ball Four, and Foul (about the basketball player, Connie Hawkins). I think I liked them mainly because they seemed like great snags of phlegm in an apparently bottomless can of whitewash. 

The disappointments persisted, however. I read and loved a novel by Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, and so was really eager to consume his "baseball novel" called The Natural, which turned out to be a colossal bore. I suppose mainly it just wasn't what I expected, since I was interested in baseball as baseball, the game itself, whereas in the novel it's just a kind of vehicle for the delivery of an American Arthurian legend—this probably isn't fair, the only thing I remember for sure is being bored. The movie starring Robert Redford is also dull and it's possible that one, the movie or the book, is more oppressive than the other and that I'm conflating the two. 

Ring Lardner is who I should have loved. I reacted against the phony elevation of sports and sports stars and no one more savagely knocked down the pedestal erected for them than Lardner. To give a taste, here are a few sentences from a 5-page essay on Lardner by Elizabeth Hardwick, a sure guide to any topic she ever took up:

[H]is subjects are dishonesty, social climbing, boastfulness, and waste. . . .  Lardner's characters have every mean fault, but they lack the patience to do much with their meanness. The busher is boastful and stingy, and yet quite unable, for all his surface shrewdness, to discover his real place in the scheme of things. He is always being dropped by the women he had boasted about and all his stinginess cannot help to manage his affairs. Lardner's stories are filled with greedy, grasping people who nevertheless go bankrupt. . . .  Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner's stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. . . .  "Haircut" is one of the cruelest pieces of American fiction. Even Lardner seems to have felt some need for relief from the relentless evil of the smalltown joker and so he has him killed in the end. This cruel story is just about the only one that has the contrast of decent people preyed upon by a maniac. . . . [Lardner] wrapped his dreadful events in a comic language, as you would put insecticide in a bright can.

I say I should have loved him, but if, as Hardwick suggests, the author himself could not bear the "relentless evil" of his fictions, why shouldn't I have the same desire to escape? (I have that desire.) Just because there's a lot of sentimental rubbish about doesn't mean the whole world and everyone in it is sogged in sewage water. At first Lardner thrills you, you laugh at the jokes, which as they accrue are more plainly bitter ones, an aspect of the cold blank stare at depravity made trivial by its small objects, like "getting ahead," and finally making one's way through The Ring Lardner Reader is a suffocating slog. I think I persisted through 650 pages only on account of the puritanical notion that what's begun ought to be finished. Maybe one month I'll do it again since I'm also subject to the belief that unpleasantness is good for you. The jokes, or gags, might be funny if it were possible to divorce them from the underlying bitterness, which is unrelenting. From "A Caddy's Diary":

Mr. Thomas is one of the kind of players that when it has took him more than 6 shots to get on the green he will turn to you and say how many have I had caddy and you are suppose to pretend like you were thinking a minute and then say 4, then he will say to the man he is playing with well I did not know if I had shot 4 or 5 but the caddy says it is 4. You see in this way it is not him that is cheating but the caddy but he makes it up to the caddy afterwards with a $1.00 tip. 

Enjoyable by the half pint but not the tanker load.

Lardner, however, has a successor, Mark Harris, who puts to gentler use some of Lardner's subjects, techniques, and stratagems. I'm thinking of Harris's series of four novels narrated by baseball pitcher Henry Wiggen of the New York Mammoths. I've written about these books before, here and here; they are the closest thing I know to exceptions to the rule I've been describing about sports fictions being generally disappointing. Whereas Lardner's athletes get kicked off the pedestal to join a democratic parade of human depravity, Harris makes them participants in a human comedy. Lardner's world of depravity is in Harris transmuted into something more like mere folly and the folly is ameliorated by humor, high spirits, and an admixture of visible decency percolating occasionally to the surface. There are neither saints nor villains. My own heterodox opinion is that the first in the series, The Southpaw (1953), is the weakest, and that successive installments keep getting better and better, concluding with the last and best, It Looked Like Forever (1979)—though I'll admit that the third book in the series, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), is by far the briefest and seems less ambitious than the others. Before the Thanksgiving weekend is over I'll write something more about the Wiggen books, with an eye perhaps toward explaining my fondness for the one about the seamstitch. I feel lucky—thankful—to enjoy solitary pursuits like reading that aren't precluded by public health considerations, especially since I also like restaurants and bars. At the neighborhood joint, I used to nurse beers through an entire ball game, plus a burger or small pizza at halftime or during the middle innings, but those days are gone for now. It's probably good for my liver that I'm bookish.

Stay safe! Happy Thanksgiving!

David Copperfield: the social and legislative background, very condensed

Reading David Copperfield, it seems natural to wonder about child labor laws in 19th-century England. David is 10 when he goes to work at the counting-house. I have a 10-year-old, or will in a few weeks. She's in the fourth grade and learning her "math facts" (I call them "multiplication tables"). That someone her age should go off by himself to work for wages seems incredible. But it wouldn't have to the people who first read David Copperfield, which was published serially over the period May 1849 to November 1850. When you type into Google "child labor laws England" and click on the first thing that looks promising, you soon read:

The campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation—the Factory Act (1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10.

A colliery is a coal mine. Just want to call attention to the verb in that first sentence, culminated, as if outlawing the employment of 9-year-olds in factories was the crown jewel of progressive legislation. Imagine the "moderates" during the debate in the House of Commons: "Well, I can live with the prohibition against 9-year-olds, but, once you're 10, big government should not be telling you or your employer how many hours you can work." 

The hateful Mr Murdstone wasn't breaking any laws by sending David away to the counting-house.

Between the passage of the Mines Act and the first installment of David Copperfield, Marx's literary partner Friedrich Engels had published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Of course we all know his criticisms went too far. Quite an unfavorable portrait of the capitalists! Not really sure why Marx and Engels are blackguards and Dickens is loved. 

Sunday evening coming down

Sitting here watching the seventh game of the NLCS on TV. Wasn't expecting to care who wins but find myself now rooting for the Dodgers. Is that the Senior Circuit equivalent of being a Yankees fan? Well, I remember in my youth trying, but failing, to dislike the Yankee teams featuring Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, the leftfielder from Japan . . . who am I missing? All the starting pitchers, but you get the idea: workaday professionals doing their job, every game, every season for years, excellence. 

I don't know the Dodgers but I've always liked Justin Turner, their third baseman. Part of it is that he's a dumpy looking stump of a guy. In a track & field meet, what would be his event? Nothing. But he can play ball. In that crazy play, fourth inning, runners at second and third, nobody out, batter hits him a sharp grounder, he throws home starting a rundown that ends with him diving to tag the runner out, then he immediately twists around and, from his butt, throws out the guy from second trying to advance to third. Double play. Thinking about it now, I have no idea why the Atlanta guy waited so long before breaking for third base. If the runner on third is going right away, the guy on second has to go too: not soon, now. Turner can't run fast but I'm pretty sure that's the kind of baserunning sin he'd never commit. 

Maybe the World Series, which begins Tuesday, will keep me from obsessing over the election. Here's the kind of thing that is for me like a heaping plate of french fries while high:

There is a suburban GOP-held House seat that Romney won by 15%+ and Trump won by 10%+. Today, at least two private surveys I've seen have Trump *down* 10%+ there.

In the past few weeks, I've heard the word "bloodbath" uttered in multiple convos w/ GOP pollsters/ad makers.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 18, 2020

I’ve also started reading David Copperfield: 826 pages, which should distract me till the votes are all counted. I'm about 80 in. David's mother has remarried, he's bitten his stepfather, been sent away to school. Details of David's first-person narration make it evident that his mother abandons him to pursue her own love life and that he, idealizing her, can't admit this to himself. The situation has a parallel in Dickens's own life. When he was 12, his father was incarcerated in a debtor's prison, and he was removed from school to work in a factory. A few months later, his paternal grandmother died and the family inherited £450. This got his father out of prison but his mother did not want to recall young Charles from the factory. He never forgave her. 

Dodgers win, 4-3. Braves probably ran themselves out of the World Series in the top of the fourth inning. 

F.O. Matthiessen

 

F.O. Matthiessen taught American literature for two decades, 1930-50, at Harvard, which by itself would probably not warrant a Wikipedia article. He was also, however, the author of a book, American Renaissance, about the "standard" American authors of the mid-19th century—Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson—that is the source of his fame in literary circles. I've never read it, but my impression of the general consensus about the book is that Matthiessen, by discussing these authors in their historical and cultural context—that of America a decade or so before the start of the Civil War—practically invented the field known as "American Studies," now often its own department within a university. 

I wonder whether Matthiessen has any answers for a question that has sometimes occurred to me. If you sign up for a course in American literature, any period before 1850, the assigned readings are not likely to be the poems, novels, and plays that we usually think of as literature. Instead you'd read diaries and journals of colonial Americans, slave narratives, Puritan sermons, political documents relating to the founding (preeminently The Federalist Papers), some dull poetry (like by Edward Taylor and William Cullen Bryant), maybe Ben Franklin's Autobiography and "Rip Van Winkle." A hundred years and more of that and then suddenly, without warning: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby Dick (1851), Walden (1854), the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). 

Matthiessen's title indicates there was a reawakening, but to me it seems more like a first flowering, and from thin soil.

Anyhow, the Wikipedia article: I hit upon it the other day for no specific reason, and oh my! A suicide at 48, Matthiessen wrote, besides American Renaissance, about a half dozen books I wasn't aware of and was also an active left-wing socialist and a homosexual who lived with his partner, Russell Cheney, for 20 years ending with Cheney's death in 1945. Reading between the lines just a little, there comes into view a strange world in which Matthiessen seems to have been necessarily closeted though in an open-secret sort of way. It's affecting to think that his status as a scholar and Harvard professor is probably what made it possible for him to live half above ground (but half below). His progressive politics had nothing to do with this fundamental fact of his own life—gay rights had not yet been invented, or imagined. He was pro-labor, a union man, and but for his early death would likely have come to the attention of Joe McCarthy. There has evidently been speculation that the developing Red Scare contributed to his mental distress. The Life magazine of April 4, 1949, included an article, "Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts," accompanied by a rogues' gallery of Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, Matthiessen, and 45 others. Of course, Matthiessen had lost Cheney at around this same time. On April 1, 1950, he jumped to his death from the twelfth floor of a Boston hotel. 

Edmund Wilson's Civil War

Back in 2012, when the biopic Lincoln was in theaters, it received an unfavorable notice on the editorial page of the Star Tribune newspaper from Edmund Santurri, a religion professor at St. Olaf College. Dr. Santurri's complaint was essentially that the movie did not do justice to Lincoln's deep religious sensibility. I gave an unfavorable notice to Dr. Santurri's unfavorable notice, here, where I argued briefly that his editorial overstated the case, that Lincoln had as a younger but mature adult been skeptical on religious questions (as Santurri allows in the editorial), and that the religious language and allusions of his subsequent presidential oratory do not establish that his views changed. 

Well, a couple weeks ago I got a nice message from Dr. Santurri. It seems he'd been googling himself and came across my 8-year-old post. I hadn't persuaded him, nor do I recant my opposing view, but he seems as temperate and decent as you'd expect a professor of religion to be. 

Dr. Santurri's note set me to thinking again about Lincoln, and how it might have happened that I developed a heterodox view of probably the most famous and loved figure in American history. I think it has a lot to do with the chapter on Lincoln in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Though it's a door stop, coming in at around 800 pages, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in American culture, American literature, American history, our Civil War, or Lincoln, who is the subject of one of its chapters. I wanted to reread that chapter but discovered that I no longer own the book—I vaguely remember that my copy was in poor shape, the combination of its 800-page mass and many perusals having defeated the binding, and I probably discarded it before my most recent move. So I made an online order, which arrived a few days ago, and I've been happily communing with Edmund Wilson till about 2 in the morning for the last several nights. Kinky!

Here is a Wilsonian sentence that, reading it again, I remember being smitten by the first time around:

There has undoubtedly been written about [Lincoln] more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe; and there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

The reference is to Sandburg's six-volume Lincoln biography, The Prairie Years (2 volumes) and The War Years (4 volumes). It's an immense work of hagiography and, even if you've never dipped into it, so influential as to account for your view of Lincoln, assuming you've mainly just accepted what you heard from school teachers. This is the Lincoln who was born poor, the son of a saintly mother who died young, whose stepmother believed in him, who always had an improving book in his pocket for when he took a break from splitting rails, the honest store clerk and spinner of humorous yarns that, on closer inspection, were infused with unassuming profundity, the homespun genius who was rebuffed by Ann Rutledge, the love of his life, and whose lofty principles caused him to lose elections, a source of dejection until, in 1860, a desperate country turned to him, and he led it through the Civil War, freed the slaves, composed an American scripture for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote kindly letters of condolence to war widows, and, the great struggle finally won, was martyred on Good Friday, 1865. What Wilson, in about 30 pages, erects against this "sentimental rubbish" is a Lincoln who was embarrassed by his impoverished background, determined to make his way in the world, cold, calculating, supremely intelligent, possibly even more ambitious than he was smart, and persuaded of his superiority to other men. Wilson's authority for this quite different portrait is Lincoln's own papers, including speeches he gave in his 20s at the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, and, perhaps more decisive, the testimony of people he knew before he was famous, in particular his Springfield law partner William Herndon. Herndon's own life is interesting—his alcoholism delayed progress on the biography of his former law partner, and in the end he needed the assistance of an editor and co-author, Jesse Weik, to get to the finish line. But Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life was published in 1889, and the negative reviews may be attributed, if your view of the question is Wilson's, to the way in which it undercut the flourishing industry of Lincoln worship. Wikipedia:

The book received wildly mixed reviews due to the inclusion of such unvarnished elements as Lincoln's mother's illegitimacy (and even the rumors of Lincoln's own), its sometimes viciously negative portrayal of Herndon's longtime enemy Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's suicidal depression, and other decidedly less than hagiographic accounts of the martyred president who was quickly becoming the most venerated and romanticized figure in American history . . . .

Particularly damning was the denunciation of the book by Robert Todd Lincoln, whose grudge against Herndon stemmed largely from Herndon's accounting of Ann Rutledge as the only romantic love of his father's life. Weik felt that Herndon's portrayal of Robert's mother and the Lincolns' domestic life was especially hurtful.

Wikipedia doesn't say so, but, according to Wilson, Herndon is also the principal source for information about Lincoln's religious skepticism. When he first knew Lincoln, the future president was already familiar with the views of Voltaire, Volney, and Thomas Paine. Herndon loaned him works by Darwin, Spencer, and Feuerbach. He also flatly states that Lincoln did not believe "that Jesus was . . . the son of God" or that "the Bible was the special divine revelation of God as the Christian world contends." I mentioned before that, in the handbill Lincoln produced to respond in 1846 to a political opponent who charged him with "infidelity," he gave no explanation for not being a member of any church, "a current fact." But it was more than a current fact. Lincoln was never a member of any church. On Good Friday, 1865, he went to the theater. In presidential "fact sheets" such as are distributed to kids in social studies class, the space for "religion" is most commonly filled with "Methodist," "Episcopalian," and "Presbyterian." For Lincoln, the usefully tactful phrase is "no formal affiliation" (ditto for Thomas Jefferson). 

The subtitle of Patriotic Gore is Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. It's an idiosyncratic work in the respect that authors you'd expect to hear about—Melville, Whitman—are not featured, but we learn a lot about such figures as Frederick Olmsted, Sidney Lanier, and John W. De Forest. One of the chapters I like most is devoted to Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy.  In other chapters Wilson discusses William T. Sherman, the Union general who burned a swatch across the South from Atlanta to the sea, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: I don't think these men, however well known, are usually thought of as having made contributions to American literature.

You'd be excused, from what I've said so far, for concluding that the book is aggressive and revisionist. The title (from the state song of Maryland) is reductive—patriotism engenders "gore"—and the effect of the chapter on Lincoln is to depict a human, not a saint. The pervading ambience, however, is of learnedness worn lightly and expressed in a style at once elegant and conversational. The chapter on Grant is the opposite of reductive. Mark Twain had tried to persuade the former general and president to write a memoir, but Grant, pleading that he had no literary gift and anyway didn't need the money, declined. Three years later he had been swindled out of all his money and diagnosed with incurable throat cancer. He now undertook the composition of his memoirs in order to leave something to his family, and, as Wilson explains, it turns out that he did have a literary gift, even if his sensibility was sometimes clouded by the cocaine he used to ward off pain. He dictated the first part and then, when he could no longer speak, wrote out longhand the remainder. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant was completed eleven months after he'd begun and a week before he died. It was an immediate best seller and earned for Grant's family about $450,000. Wilson quotes, approvingly, from the contemporary review of Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, a man about as unlike Grant as can be imagined:

. . . . I found a man of sterling good-sense as well as of the firmest resolution; a man, withal, humane, simple, modest; from all restless self-consciousness and desire for display perfectly free; never boastful where he himself was concerned . . . . I found a language straightforward, nervous, firm, possessing in general the high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.

Wilson's narrative of Lee's surrender to Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse does, however, have a revisionist thrust—and it turns out that the truth is more interesting than the more familiar melodrama. Grant was as one with Lincoln in his inclination, or determination, to offer the South generous terms, but The Personal Memoirs also make clear that he did not by a long stretch revere Lee and had never subscribed to the theory of the Confederate general's nearly mystical powers. This probably accounts in large degree for his success. Whereas the former Union generals had minced around, Grant had a clear-eyed view of his side's advantages, and he pursued the Confederate army implacably, engaged it steadily in a vicious war of attrition that the out manned and out supplied Confederates could never win, and by the early spring of 1865 had reduced the opposing army to a ragtag collection of starvelings. "There is nothing for me to do but go and see General Grant," said Lee, adding, "and I would rather die a thousand deaths." Wilson observes, "He would hardly have spoken thus of McClellan."

Two lesser splendors of Evelyn Waugh

When I last wrote, here, of Evelyn Waugh, I cribbed my title, "Splendors of Evelyn Waugh," from an essay by Edmund Wilson called "Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh." I'd only read the novel called A Handful of Dust, and loved it, so there had been no misery. I've now read two more, The Loved One and Men at Arms—still no misery, though for me neither one is quite up to the level of the one I happened to read first. The Loved One is a satire on the funeral industry in southern California. It's very brief, quite funny, and maybe a bit of a confection, like a movie you enjoy and never think of again. Waugh, an Englishman, spent some time writing for the studios in Hollywood, an experience that must account for the American setting. The author's gimlet eye traveled well.

Men at Arms, the first installment in a World War II trilogy called Sword of Honor, is longer and more ambitious. Reading around hither and thither, one gathers that the novels of this trilogy—the second and third installments are Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender (published in the U.S. as The End of the Battle)—are often regarded as Waugh's finest. I doubt it's an opinion to which I'd subscribe, for Men at Arms bores me intermittently. The hero, if that's the right word, is Guy Crouchback. Like the main character in A Handful of Dust (and like Waugh himself), he is shocked to be abandoned and divorced by his wife, and, in the case of Crouchback, sees military service in a just cause as a way to rally himself. But he's in his mid-30s. The title might appear to promise scenes of battle, but nine-tenths or more of the book concerns Crouchback's efforts to enlist, and, once he's in, the long days and weeks and months of nothing as his somewhat eccentric unit trains and awaits orders. You can see perhaps why it might be subject to dullness—the dullness seems to be the point. Think you know about soldiering in time of war? No, Waugh is saying, it's not like that.

Some part of the narrative interest must arise from the reader wondering what will happen when Crouchback and his colleagues finally "see action." When this happens, toward the very end, the details are farcical. The short chapter describing their expedition across enemy ground ends, "The brigade resumed its old duty of standing by for orders." The next sentence, the first one of the following chapter, is: "Three weeks later the Brigade was still standing by for orders." Crouchback's final fate is determined not by enemy fire or any battlefield event but, rather, by a gift of whiskey for a hospitalized colleague. The hospitalization is not the result of a wound incurred in battle. The patient, however, dies. 

I say I was intermittently bored. The book is often very amusing in a way that elicits from critics and reviewers the compound adjective, seriocomic. In one of my favorite episodes, Crouchback, a Catholic, listens as a somewhat absurd fellow communicant relates a story about a divorced Catholic who had a one-night stand with his ex that resulted in a pregnancy and thus the perpetuation of an English Catholic family through a male heir who, but for the tryst, would never have been conceived. Crouchback's friend discerns God's providence. Crouchback is more taken by the suggestion that the divorced Catholic had not really screwed another man's wife, since by canon law she was still married to him. He turns the question over in his mind and, having satisfied himself that the man was indeed sinless, at the next opportunity boards a train for London, where he knows his ex, the inaptly named Virginia, resides. She's no longer married to the man for whom she left Crouchback, and her history apparently raises his expectation of success, but the seduction does not go well:

"I was wrong in thinking the army had changed you for the better. Whatever your faults in the old days you weren't a cad. You're worse than Augustus now."

"You forget I don't know Augustus."

"Well, take it from me he was a monumental cad." 

A tiny light gleamed in their darkness, a pin-point in each easy tear which swelled in her eyes and fell.

"Admit I'm not as bad as Augustus."

"Very little to choose. But he was fatter. I'll admit that."

She might be loose but she's not dumb:

"You used to be so strict and pious. I rather liked it in you. What's happened to all that?"

"It's still there. More than ever. I told you so when we first met again."

"Well, what would your priests say about your goings-on to-night; picking up a notorious divorcée in an hotel?"

"They wouldn't mind. You're my wife."

"Oh, rot." 

"Well, you asked what the priests would say. They'd say: 'Go ahead.'"

The light that had shone and waxed in their blackness suddenly snapped out as though at the order of an air-raid warden.

"But this is horrible," said Virginia.

Guy was taken by surprise this time. 

"What's horrible?" he said.

"It's absolutely disgusting. It's worse than anything Augustus or Mr. Troy could ever dream of. Can't you see, you pig, you?"

"No," said Guy in deep, innocent sincerity. "No, I don't see."

"I'd far rather be taken for a tart. I'd rather have been offered five pounds to do something ridiculous in high heels or drive you round the room in toy harness or any of the things they write about in books." Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. "I thought you'd taken a fancy for me again and wanted a bit of fun for the sake of old times. I thought you'd chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless lunatic pig." 

This is notable partly because in the novel Guy Crouchback often seems to speak for the author, whose Catholic faith and generally conservative views the character shares. But there isn't a question about who appears in a better light here, right?  At least to me, an outsider, Crouchback and his Church, as well as his friend who told the story about how the male heir got his start, appear ridiculous. The light in a hotel room illuminates something wet and smug that might go undetected in the reading room of a theological library. 

Born on this date, Raymond Chandler

Megan Abbott, marking the birthday of Raymond Chandler on this date in 1888, directs attention to the following paragraph from The Long Goodbye:

"I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful."

A man who likes it that much probably should have left after just one. The Wikipedia article on Chandler includes this bit of biography:

Cissy Chandler [his wife] died in 1954, after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

Nothing gold can stay.

Splendors of Evelyn Waugh

Just finished reading, with considerable pleasure, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust. If all his books are this good, I have a baseball season's worth of indulgent gratification to look forward to, because he wrote seventeen novels. The best known of them is Brideshead Revisited. In reading around about Waugh, I gather that his career is often thought of as falling into two phases, an early one, audacious and hilarious, characterized by satire tending toward farce, and then a later one, more serious and conventional, on which his reputation as a leading "Catholic novelist" rests. Brideshead Revisited (1945) belongs to Phase Two. In retrospect, A Handful of Dust, which was published in 1934, four years after Waugh's conversion to Roman Catholicism, seems transitional. It's farcical and funny, but you'd have to be comatose not to detect a serious undercurrent that seems consistent with what a conservative and observant Catholic would likely think about the crazy events that are described, poker-faced, without any moralizing commentary. You laugh and laugh but by the end you may think that the book is more disturbing than funny.

The main character is Tony Last, the proprietor of a country house at Hetton, a small town in the northeast of England nearer to Scotland than it is to London. His wife, Brenda, starts an affair with one of their visitors, John Beaver (the names are Dickensian), a Londoner even more shallow than her undiscerning husband, whose suspicions are not even aroused when she rents a small apartment in London and starts staying there almost all the time. The reason for the affair would appear to be nothing  more  than that she needs something to do. She explains to Tony that she is auditing an economics course, the absurdity of which betrays her indifference about whether he is deceived. Nevertheless he is deceived. Their young son, who as a practical matter has been abandoned by his mother, is then killed in an accident, whereupon Brenda delivers to Tony a second grievous blow. Believe me, it's funnier than it sounds. The conversations they have with their respective barristers (English for lawyers)! Back then, there could be no divorce without "cause," the most common being abandonment and adultery. One service provided by Tony's firm is detectives who will accompany the client on a vacation with a lover, either actual or a plausible actor, so that "evidence" can be gathered for divorce court. So Tony goes off on one of these trips with a strumpet he has recruited from a bar usually too seedy for him to patronize. Against his instructions, she brings along on the trip her daughter: nothing else to do with the girl. Comedy ensues, the effect amplified somewhat by the fact, never mentioned, that this farce is executed for the purpose of working up "evidence" even though Brenda is actually guilty of both adultery and abandonment. 

Tony soon leaves England on a cruise, his apparent idea being that a change of scenery will change something else. But wherever you go, there you are. In the end, he comes to grief in the Amazonian interior of Brazil. I won't go into the details, except to say that I take the novel's geographic diversity to be an aspect of Waugh's religious—Christian, Catholic—sensibility. There is nothing anywhere in this world for the pilgrim. If you're at Hetton, you might yearn for the attractions of London, home to bounders like John Beaver who are screwing your wife when not worrying about what men's club they might be of sufficient status to join. You escape to Brazil. Maybe the natives there will reveal that the true savages are in England. No, the Brazilian ones disappoint, too. In one of Waugh's many brilliant strokes, a scene from Brazil is at one point juxtaposed against one concerning the world Tony has left behind. To travel into Brazil's interior, it is necessary to hire natives who can transport provisions and function as guides in the jungle. But Tony and his partner—there's a story behind how they made common cause!—arrive in the village when the men are all away on a drunk and so the two white men end up negotiating with a woman, Rosa, whose guile is exercised entirely in the service of obtaining . . . cigarettes. Meanwhile, back in London, an ancillary character, an acquaintance of Tony's who is a member of Parliament representing a rural district, has his finest moment. He's another frequenter of the club scene and, by the way, the fellow who accompanies Tony to the bar where he finds the woman to go off with him for the purpose of manufacturing and collecting evidence. This fellow, Jock by name, spends his time enjoying himself in the capital and being occasionally puzzled by the mail he receives from his constituents, who have questions and problems relating, for example, to their pigs. The following is what's placed opposite the negotiation with Rosa. It's also representative of Waugh's prose.

Ten o'clock on the river Waurupang was question time at Westminster. For a long time now Jock had had a question which his constituents wanted him to ask. It came up that afternoon. 

"I should like to ask the Minister of Agriculture whether in view of the dumping in this country of Japanese pork pies, the right honourable member is prepared to consider a modification of the eight and a half score basic pig from two and a half inches of thickness around the belly as originally specified, to two inches."

Replying for the Minister, the under-secretary said: "The matter is receiving the closest attention. As the honourable member is no doubt aware the question of the importation of pork pies is a matter for the Board of Trade, not for the Board of Agriculture. With regard to the specifications of the basic pig, I must remind the honourable member that, as he is doubtless aware, the eight and a half score pig is modelled on the requirements of the bacon curers and has no direct relation to pig meat for sale in pies. That is being dealt with by a separate committee who have not yet made their report."

"Would the honourable member consider an increase of the specified maximum of fatness on the shoulders?"

"I must have notice of that question."

Jock left the House that afternoon with the comfortable feeling that he had at last done something tangible in the interest of his constituents.

This statesman ends up with Brenda after Beaver leaves for America.

Bloomsday, 2020

Feeling lazy, but I want to keep up the tradition of saying something about Joyce each year on June 16, Bloomsday, so-called because the action of his novel Ulysses, featuring Dubliner Leopold Bloom, occurred on June 16, 1904. Here are some earlier installments.

And, for this year's installment, here is a hand off to Jonathan deBurca Butler, author of the essay "James Joyce in Rome." Condensed version: he hated it! He wrote his brother, "Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse." Butler thinks Rome made him almost fond of his hometown and that his poverty while living there—one Christmas, the Joyces, nearly homeless, dined only on pasta—may account for the "The Dead," which he conceived of in Rome, opening with a Dublin feast. 

Pivot

Last week, I kept forgetting to bring a face mask along when I was going someplace. It's hard to remember that old problem when you're getting earnest messages encouraging you to hide your trash bin and hook up your garden hose. The federal government seems to have forgotten about it, too. Every day, about a thousand more dead, but the administration is said to have "pivoted." I guess that explains the tweet about the 75-year-old Catholic fellow in Buffalo who, according to the first official police statement, "tripped and fell." But, unfortunately, once again, someone standing around with a cell phone, and it now develops that he's actually a bad actor who fell harder than he was pushed and, moreover, is probably an Antifa provocateur. 

Better pivot again. 

I watched a little of the Floyd funeral in Houston yesterday and, on account of all the swaying and clapping, was reminded of some lines of poetry:

The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows,
Only their children feel the holy ghost.

I was about to say I don't know why these lines are in my head, or who wrote them, but then I remembered it's 2020 and I typed into Google "The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows"—voila! Copyright 1978, when I was in college, and I wonder . . . yup, the author, Marilyn Nelson (pictured), taught English at St. Olaf College when I was a student there in the late 70s. Never had her, but that must account for my familiarity with the opening of one of her poems. It must also account for her familiarity with Lutherans. African-Americans who grew up on military bases generally aren't acquainted with the insides of Lutheran churches, but at St. Olaf it would have required an effort to maintain her innocence. 

Reading over the whole poem ("Churchgoing"), I think it must be intended as an answer to one of the same title by Philip Larkin. Larkin was a thoroughgoing atheist, but Nelson's poem concludes:

We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.

I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.

Meanwhile protesters are cleared away so that our president, fingering a Bible as if it were an item for sale on a cable-tv shopping channel, could assume his position between a church and some photographers. I think George Will's column advancing the thesis that with Trump there is no bottom was published the day before that debacle.

Miscellany

In case like me you are wondering when there will be a vaccine for the coronavirus, it seems the answer is "in 12 to 18 months." The date you ask has no bearing on the answer, which is ever and always "in 12 to 18 months."

I see, however, that the final American death toll is variable. A while ago Trump said it would be 55, maybe 60k. A couple days after we roared past 60k, he told Fox News that was too low. You don't get rich without being good with numbers! Now he says it's going to be 75, 80, maybe 100k. No wait, that was yesterday. Today, his Administration's favorite model says 134,000. The number goes up on account of relaxed restrictions, which his Administration favors, except when it doesn't. And Trump's authority is "total," except that he's deferring to the governors, whom he then criticizes for following his Administration's guidelines (in the case of the governors of Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia) and for violating those guidelines (in the case of the governor of Georgia). Meanwhile, the governors of Florida and Texas, who are also relaxing restrictions before Trump Administration guidelines say they should, are "doing a great job." Needless to say, so is he.

I'm still collecting Faulkner anecdotes. Flannery O'Connor's letters are collected in a book called The Habit of Being. I looked up "Faulkner, William" in the index yesterday and came across this gem, from a letter she wrote to Elizabeth Bishop on 2 August 1959:

Yesterday I sold a pair of [peacocks], the first time I have sold any. These people showed up in a long white car, the woman in short shorts. They obviously had plenty of money that they weren't used to. She flew a Piper Cub, kept two coons, and what she called a "Weimeraw" dog. He was going to start in on pheasants, peafowl and bullfrogs. They came in and admired the house and she said, "We was in Macon looking for some French Provincial furniture. I want me a love seat." The man was a structural engineer. He said he had a friend in Mississippi who was a writer and I said who was that. He said, "His name is Bill Faulkner. I don't know if he's any good or not but he's a mighty nice fellow." I told him he was right good. 

In another letter, she tells John Hawkes that, regarding Faulkner, "Probably the real reason I don't read him is because he makes me feel that with my one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens altogether." In yet another, she tells someone else, "I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won't get swamped." 

Someone took to social media to suggest that the coronavirus quarantine might be a good time to learn a poem by heart, "to get a different rhythm and new voice in your head." So I've been looking around for one I think I can memorize and finally found:

A mob of the MAGA persuasion
Conducted a statehouse invasion.
Though heavily armed,
Not one was harmed:
Whaddya know? They were all Caucasion!

National Poetry Month

 

Larry David has a message for us.

Also, April is National Poetry Month, so here is John Milton (1608-1674) with a similar message:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

Or, updated and secularized: we also advance the cause by staying in and binge watching our favorite shows, a "mild yoke" considering what is happening, and is going to happen, in ICUs across our country. TV watching is the kind of heroism I'm cut out for.

Milton isn't widely loved—Dr Johnson said of his greatest work, the epic poem Paradise Lost, "no one ever wished it longer"—but the above sonnet is of biographical interest and makes me like Milton. The situation is that he's going blind. He was ambitious and had always intended to write a long poem on a Christian topic; he thought of it as a debt that he, a supremely gifted person, owed to God. But he hasn't done it, and now, with the onset of blindness, it looks as if he never will. And the poem then makes the point that God doesn't need anything from him, or anyone. The end of the story is that Paradise Lost is out of the mind of a blind man who dictated the whole thing—more than ten thousand lines of iambic pentameter—to assorted secretaries. 

Since it's National Poetry Month, here's another, this one by Maggie Smith, a contemporary American living in Ohio: "Good Bones" was a social media hit in 2016.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Misc.

That's the Chiefs' quarterback, a Super Bowl champ and MVP now, in the picture. Didn't know till about a week ago that his dad is former Twin Pat Mahomes, who pitched for my favorite team in the 90s. Patrick, the quarterback, was born in September of 1995, at the end of his dad's last full season with the Twins. He managed to eke out an 11-year major league career, finishing up with the Pirates in 2003 but then persisting in the minors till 2009. 

Today's date, 02/02/2020, is a palindrome—the same forwards and back. Hope you are enjoying it as the next one isn't till December 12, 2121. You are fortunate to be experiencing a palindromic date, however: last one before today was November 11, 1111.

You know those wintry "puddles" that form during thaws, a thin layer of ice on top that is just strong enough so that, stepping on them, your foot doesn't break through but you can see and feel the water squishing below? If I ever tire of walking on them please have an NRA member put me out of my misery with a single shot to the temple.

The pictures below are from the Harvard College yearbook showing some members of the senior class for 1950—Henry Kissinger (bottom) and the poet Robert Bly. Both are well into their 90s now but still alive. I believe Bly resides in rural west central Minnesota, where he grew up, near Madison in Lac qui Parle County. He went to St. Olaf for one year before transferring to Harvard—my alma mater not good enough for him, apparently. I get a kick out of how the yearbook bios name the school where the student "prepared." I suppose in 1950 it hadn't been very long since everyone who went to Harvard had attended a "prep" school. Bly, however, prepared at Madison High School. The US Navy helped, too. But his military experience did not cause him to support all our military adventures, for in the 1960s his fierce poems against the Vietnam War got the attention of people who otherwise probably did not read poetry. I'm a little surprised that he doesn't get more attention in these parts as he is one of the leading American poets of the second half of the 20th-century and his Minnesota background figures in many of the poems—for example, "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings":

We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
To new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters, the boy
Tortured with the telephone generator,
"I felt sorry for him,
And blew his head off with a shotgun."
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and in your cup you will look down
And see
Black starfighters.
We were the ones we intended to bomb!
Therefore we will have
To go far away
To atone
For the sufferings of the stringy-chested
And the small rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.

I'm trying to imagine Bly's classmate Henry Kissinger reacting to a poem like this one. The two probably don't have much in common besides Harvard and longevity.

I googled "W Garwood Kleinhen," Kissinger's page-mate in the yearbook. He went on to get an MBA in 1952, also from Harvard, and served as president of the Harvard Club of Southern California from 1983 to 1985. 

 

 

LA woman

I have a book, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, that I pulled off the shelf recently when I espied it while looking for something else. It's how I came to know about a poem, by Linda Pastan—

Baseball

When you tried to tell me
baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season—
I didn't believe you.

It's just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that's it.
Yes.

—that I've mentioned before, here and here. This time I reread an essay, "Dodger Stadium," by Eve Babitz, who is identified in the Contributor Notes section only as "a novelist and short story writer who hails from Los Angeles." Were the essay to arouse your curiosity about the author, a distinct possibility, you would soon find, having googled "Eve Babitz," the above photograph of her, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. Wikipedia describes the photograph, by Julian Wasser, as "her first brush with notoriety" and explains that the occasion for the "iconic" image was a retrospective of Duchamp's work, at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps, "with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time." Very LA: girls from my hometown might have been a little reckless at the age of 20—nothing beats fun for a good time—but few of them played chess or had their pictures taken, in any state of dress, with artists of the French avant garde. 

To say that Babitz "hails from Los Angeles" feels like a different kind of statement than, say, "Bob Dylan hails from Hibbing." She was born in Hollywood and went to Hollywood High. Her mother was an artist and her father a violinist under contract with 20th Century Fox. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky, a family friend. Before she became a writer, she was, like her mother, a visual artist: she worked in the music industry designing album covers, including for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Besides the aforementioned Hopps, boyfriends included Jim Morrison—yes, that Jim Morrison—Harrison Ford, and Steve Martin. As a writer, almost her only subject is Los Angeles: it's predictable that one might be introduced to her by happening upon an essay called "Dodger Stadium," which is ostensibly "about" how a quiet evening at home, scrambled eggs for supper, was interrupted by a phone call from an occasional beau, some kind of entertainment industry exec who split his time between coasts. He's seeking relief from excruciating studio meetings. Would she go with him to the Dodger game tonight? Yes, she would. You can tell it's not her usual pastime by the way she, for example, calls a "run" a "point," but she's enthusiastic about her companion:

I remember the first time I saw him. It was at a reception for a nouveau-wave actress in a bungalow behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, and everyone was making faded, jaded little French remarks at each other and being tiresome because the toast for the caviar wasn't buttered enough—when in he came, dressed like Johnny Carson and asking for Scotch.

I pounced on him and lured him off to the sidelines.

Satire aimed at a certain kind of life achieves a heightened effect when delivered by someone sunk in the life. I put "about" in quotes above because I think Babitz's real subject in "Dodger Stadium" is the gulf, never stated explicitly but implied by almost every detail, between the baseball game and the LA milieu with which she's familiar. Well, she comes close to an explicit statement:

We got our tickets and strolled inside the gates where music was playing and hawkers hawking, and he bought himself a scorecard and became downright cheerful. The blissfully festive smell of mustard cut through the air dissolving any residual anger, and zillions of little kids with pennants and blue plastic Dodger caps raced through the young couples as we all gave ourselves up to the setting sun. The tempo of the organ music inflicted the reality so that everything belonged inside of these Vatican Stadium walls, and the studios, and phones, and death, and rented cars belonged outside if they wanted any claims on time or space.

Just want to call attention to the smell of mustard (which a reader might connect to the caviar that's the subject of "faded, jaded" complaints at the Beverly Hills bungalow party) and the way in which the terminal emphasis of the last sentence's list falls not on "death" but "rented cars." The essay is about half over before Babitz drops the detail that her date has a wife back in New York. After the game, which the Dodgers win 3-2, they drive in his rented car to "a hidden little French restaurant," where, despite the hiddenness, he's recognized by an agent who joins them for "movie-deal talk" while, under the table, in the essay's last sentence, she felt a hand "come to rest some place just above my knee."

More about Eve Babitz here.

Samuel Sewall in his Diary

Chasing after some scrap of information the other day, I ended up leafing through a book I bought once for a college course—an anthology, America in Literature, volume 1, covering the colonial period up to the Civil War, edited by David Levin and Theodore Gross. I don't think the editor's selections are at all idiosyncratic and one thing their anthology makes you realize is that, before 1850, America had contributed virtually nothing to the world's literature. Quick, name a great work written by an American within a normal lifetime of our Declaration. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography? I've read it more than once, and enjoy it, but I'm not sure it qualifies, and anyway, supposing it's allowed, name another. This anthology is filled with diaries, personal narratives, sermons, pamphlets, and poetry in imitation of European models. The interest is largely historical. What was it like to be a pioneer, a Puritan in 17th-century America, a slave? Our early "literature" can shed light on such questions, but when Jane Austen and William Wordsworth were at work there was no American of genius similarly employed. And then, suddenly, without warning or barely a sense that the field had been ploughed: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby Dick (1851), Walden (1854), the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), and, though it wasn't published till later, the poetry of Emily Dickinson composed mostly during the Civil War years. It's almost as if a civilization, like a teenager, has to attain the age of majority before you can expect anything of it.

Paging through that book: what a bleak landscape—I'd rather watch Fox News's coverage of the impeachment hearings than read again the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, or Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, or any of the ghoulish theologizing of the Puritans. The professor, Edward Griffin, assigned the Journal of John Woolman, a Quaker who lived from 1720 to 1772, and I was an earnest enough student to force my eyes to pass over all the words, but, seeing it again in this anthology, all I could remember of it was trying to whip up artificial interest by tracking how much time elapsed between the author's nocturnal emissions, which he duly and self-laceratingly recorded in his journal. 

There is one glorious exception, and that is the Diary of Samuel Sewall. Sewall, who lived from 1652 to 1730, was one of New England's leading citizens. If he hadn't kept a diary through almost his entire life, he'd be known, if he was known, only as one of the judges at the Salem witch trials. To his credit, he was in later life ashamed of the part he'd played, though a cynic might say that both his legal judgments and subsequent renunciation were in line with current public opinion. But he kept this diary, too. He makes no visible effort to be eloquent, just notes things that happened, lots of weather reports, lots of church-going, and, most notably, lots of death, including in his own family, children, not an excess of emotion in these parts or any other, just the facts, and you get the idea that it wasn't that he was at all stone-hearted: death was just more common then, it happened all the time and was normal. Finally, when he's in his mid-60s, his wife dies, and, a couple years later, he undertakes the courtship of a widow whom he identifies as Madam Winthrop. In Boston in 1720 you did not "date"; you paid visits and talked, then, after awhile, you'd pop the question—that part was the same. The reader of the diary can deduce, though Sewall never spells it out himself, that notwithstanding his prominence he is much more interested in her than she is in him. For example, she always seems to be away when he calls on her—suspicious, since when taking his leave he'd usually mention when he expected to call again, or  would send a note a few days in advance (which she would not answer). Consequently, he spent a lot of time sitting around with her maid and her kids, waiting for her to show up, and you can again deduce, from his very spare prose, that they know the score and feel a little sorry for him: there's a fair amount of, "Well, she should be back soon" or "You might want to call on her at So-and-So's." He sends her gifts (always noting in his diary how much the gift cost) and then notes later, after seeing her, that she failed to thank him for it. He persists with the courtship, and persists too in recording, Dragnet-style, the many small indignities he suffers. It's hard, but intriguing, and somewhat humorous, to imagine him returning home from these defeats and recording them in his diary. At first, she had been polite but expert in parrying his gallantries. As time passes and he doesn't give up, she adopts more aggressive strategies. For example, she tells him she's noticed that he doesn't travel in a horse-drawn carriage. Niceties soon give way altogether and the "courtship" takes on a purely mercenary aspect: he tells her, directly, what she could expect to receive if they were to marry and he then die first. She's not impressed. His next-to-last visit took place on Friday, November 4, 1720:

Went again about 7. a-clock; found there Mr. John Walley and his wife: sat discoursing pleasantly. I showed them Isaac Moses's writing. Madam W. served comfits to us. After awhile a table was set. I urged Mr. Walley to crave a blessing; but he put it upon me. About 9. they went away. I asked Madam what fashioned necklace I should present her with, she said None at all. I asked her whereabout we left off last time; mentioned what I had offered to give her; asked her what she would give me; she said she could not change her condition: she had said so from the beginning; could not be so far from her children, the Lecture. Quoted the Apostle Paul affirming that a single life was better than a married. I answered that was for the present distress. She said she had not pleasure in things of that nature as formerly: I said, you are the fitter to make me a wife.

Paul, especially in his first letter to the Corinthians, does take a dim view of matrimonial love, asserting famously that he thought it best for people to remain single, like him, though allowing that "it's better to marry than burn." This is the biblical text Madam Winthrop refers to, not (one suspects) because she esteems it but because she hopes to encourage Sam Sewall to leave (and not return). The sophisticated judge and lay biblical scholar replies that Paul's instruction was guidance for another time, when it was thought the world would soon end. Just in case you missed it, she then plays what she must have hoped would be the ace of trumps—she's no longer interested in sex—to which he replies (in effect), "Great, neither am I!" The "courtship" arrived at this point on November 4 after having begun with Sam's first mention of Madam Winthrop on October 11. There'd be one more visit, on November 7, when Sam, before a dying fire (symbolism!), announces his intention to call no more, eliciting from Madam Winthrop some kind words in which one might detect more relief than kindness. A question raised by this remarkable document is just how much of what the reader detects was first detected by Sam Sewall. He might seem obtuse, but it's his words that reveal the truth of the situation, all of it modestly conveyed, in few words, a possible small masterpiece of precision, humor, and humanity.

Sewall was also the author of "The Selling of Joseph," one of the first anti-slavery tracts published in North America.

Sex in Middlemarch

Since Middlemarch, George Eliot's best novel, was published in 1871-72, its 800-page bulk owes nothing to sex scenes. I trust, however, that I am not the only reader who wonders about the sex life of Dorothea Brooke and her husband, Edward Casaubon. Though the novel is panoramic, many-peopled, and multi-themed, with diverse interlocking plots, Dorothea qualifies as "the central character." As the novel opens, she is 20, not yet a legal adult, and, as her parents are both deceased, she lives with a paternal uncle who is also her guardian. Almost the first thing we learn from the omniscient narrator is that Dorothea was "open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring." She has a sister, Celia, who is somewhat more conventional: the first chapter reveals that Celia is very much more interested than her sister in what becomes of the jewelry that had belonged to their mother. Sir James Chettam, a neighbor of the same social status as their uncle, is a frequent visitor. It's obvious that he's paying court to Dorothea, who is so revulsed by him as to be in a state of denial about his intentions. The revulsion seems to be mainly physical. When, for example, they are sitting at table, Chettam directing idle but flattering small talk in Dorothea's direction, she notices "his dimpled hands" and finds them "quite disagreeable." On page 37 of my edition, Celia takes Dorothea aside and spells out to her that Chettam wants to marry her, will soon propose, expects to be accepted, and that she'll have to answer. Then:

The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea's mind that the tears welled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were embittered, and she thought with disgust of Sir James's conceiving that she recogonized him as her lover.

This statement is about as close to a frankly sexual passage as you will find in Middlemarch. The phrase "her lover" makes possibly its only appearance in order to register the heroine's aversion to Sir James Chettam, who is soon engaged—to Celia.

Chettam, however, has an acquaintance:

This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history. . . .

Dorothea looks forward to his visit with "venerating expectation," for she knows what he's noted for in the county, and she reveres the life of the mind—the more so when applied to religious topics. When he appears in the Brooke household Celia, in a detail probably meant to be considered alongside Chettam's dimpled hands, absents herself: she "did not like the company of Mr Casaubon's moles and sallowness." Dorothea, however, is favorably impressed by the scholar. To each her own! You can see where this is headed. Casaubon proposes in a letter containing such sentences as

I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life has arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you

and

In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might cause you bitterness or shame

Well, you shall know them by their prose styles, and you can't blame a fellow for taking care with the phrasing in an epistolary proposal. I believe that Casaubon, who's in his mid-40s, is saying in that last specimen that he's a virgin. A perfect match for an "ardent" 20-year-old! But, as the narrator coolly informs, "Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life and its best objects." Her uncle tries to dissuade her, but she believes she'll be a partner, a helpmate, in the achievement of her brilliant husband's great work, to be entitled enticingly Key to All Mythologies.

Are you wondering about the reaction of Sir James Chettam upon hearing the news that Dorothea has accepted a marriage proposal from Casaubon?

"Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!" (The point of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.)

Despite her parenthetic instruction, the omniscient narrator drops more than enough details to confirm the justness of Chettam's spontaneous exclamation. We have for example the entire text of the marriage proposal, and she periodically imports a character, Mrs Cadwallader, whose name I suspect is supposed to make you think "caterwauler," to shout observations the narrator is too tactful to make directly, including:

"He has got no red blood in his body," said Sir James.

"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader.

At about this point, the story of an unusual match is interrupted by a long stretch concerning another of this immense book's plot lines, the one concerning the Vincy and Farebrother families, and we next see Dorothea on her Roman honeymoon looking pensive in a museum and, later the same day, alone in her hotel room, weeping. The explanation is supplied in one of those passages of acute commentary that make you love the author:

Nor can I suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

The life Dorothea had imagined recedes farther as it slowly dawns on her that her new husband, who has brought her to Rome so that he can collect material for Key to All Mythologies, is just gathering and shuffling notes. The book will never be written. He isn't up to it. (His young relative, Ladislaw, lets drop that one circumstance inhibiting Casaubon's researches is that he can't read German—kind of a fun detail considering that Eliot had taught herself German in order to pursue her theological interests, and that her first book was a translation of Das Leben Jesu, The Life of Jesus, a groundbreaking work of biblical scholarship by the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss.) And so Dorothea allows herself to be led uselessly through museums while her husband toils uselessly in libraries, their mutual disenchantment swelling on their honeymoon. The novel is many things and one of them is a desolating portrait of a bad marriage. 

Meanwhile, back in Warwickshire, Celia and Sir James Chettam are new parents within a year of their marriage. By such plot developments, together with mention of repellent moles and dimples, and wedding journeys infused with disappointment, did George Eliot signal readers regarding the sex lives of Middlemarchers.