Eric The Blue

Up in Michigan with Philip Roth

In Chapter 3 of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, Amy Bellette shows narrator Nathan Zuckerman an unpublished letter to the editor she once sent to The New York Times.  The occasion had been a Times piece of "cultural journalism" for which the reporter had travelled to Michigan to interview the real-life models for the characters in Ernest Hemingway's early stories. Here's an excerpt from her letter, which is to say, an excerpt from the novel:

Hemingway's early stories are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories.  Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway.  These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they're easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.  The integrity of the journalist's informant is never questioned--only the integrity of the writer.

And the letter goes on and on--Amy, its author, is in a state of high dudgeon, and one feels that the narrator, Zuckerman, who is Philip Roth's alter ego, agrees with every word.  What, then, should we make of the fact that Hemingway's early stories are not set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula?  Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb that abuts Chicago on the west, but the family kept a summer home on Walloon Lake, in Charlevoix and Emmet Counties, Michigan.  The above map shows the region.  It's not in the Upper Peninsula, but just to the southwest of the Lower Peninsula's northern tip.  Here is a map, from Wikipedia, showing the location of Walloon Lake within the state of Michigan:

On the map at the top of this post, Walloon Lake is the smaller and more eastward of the two big lakes shown.  It's clear that this is the area, known intimately by Hemingway on account of his boyhood summers spent there, in which his early stories are set.  For example, from the story called "Up In Michigan":

Hortons Bay, the town, was only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix. . . . A steep sandy road ran down the hill to the bay through the timber.  From Smith's back door you could look out across the woods that ran down to the lake and across the bay.  It was very beautiful in the spring and summer, the bay blue and bright and usually white caps on the lake out beyond the point from the breeze blowing from Charlevoix and Lake Michigan.  

The story called "The Battler" begins with Nick Adams being thrown from a car on a freight train he had jumped at Walton Junction, one of Michigan's "lost towns," which was just to the south of Fife Lake.  The train had passed through Kalkasca, and Nick surmises that "he must be nearly to Mancelona."  You can see, from the below map, that he's just to the south of the "Up In Michigan" setting, and headed north to his destination, where all these early Nick Adams stories are set.  Nick's girlfriend, Marge, figures in some of them.  She's from Charlevoix, the town on the narrow strip of land between the eastern shore of Lake Michigan and the northwestern end of Lake Charlevoix, the larger of the two lakes on the top map.  The story called "The End of Something" begins with the history of Hortons Bay:

In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town.  No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake.  Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber.  The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard.  All the piles of lumber were carried away.  The big mill building had all its machinery that was removeable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill.  The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake carrying the two great saws, the travelling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber.  Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town.

I don't really know what to make of this.  Did Philip Roth (and his editor), like Homer, nod?  If so, it's sort of rich, since it amounts to Amy's creator displaying that he is innocent of the geographic setting for the Hemingway stories--even as he has his character aggressively criticize the Times for ignoring Hemingway's fiction in order to write up some gossip that their "critic" is able to dredge up, discuss, and present to subscribers as "cultural criticism."  In other words, the Times is lectured for not caring about literature, and the lecture reveals that the lecturer hasn’t troubled himself about such a significant detail as where “up in Michigan” these fictions are set.  Imagine Roth on the subject of a pontificating reviewer who misplaced the Weequahic neighborhood within the city of Newark. The other possibility is that the mistake is deliberate, in which case Roth is injecting into the narrative something like an inside joke that tends to amplify Amy's point:  not even she knows what she's talking about (though at least she's ahead of the Times).

 

 

Stoner

For quite awhile I've been aware of this novel, Stoner, by John Williams, which is often said to have a "cult following."  I think it was the title and the associations of "cult following" that led me to believe the book had to do with drug culture, but then I learned by chance that the title is the last name of the main character, William Stoner, who is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri.  And not long after that I saw at a brick-and-mortar bookstore--plug: Magers & Quinn, in south Minneapolis, Hennepin Avenue a block south of Lake Street--a NYRB hardback, 50th anniversary edition (2015), for $8.  So it's mine now, and I started reading Stoner a few days ago.  I should be done by now, because it's only 288 pages and I've been enjoying it about as much as any book I've ever read, but because of my enjoyment I've been limiting myself to a chapter or two a day--there's 17 chapters to the 288 pages--so that there'll be more to savor tomorrow. 

The cultists like to discuss whether the book is a statement of despair or an uplifting tale of a good man.  I think I comprehend the opposing views.  Stoner qualifies as a loser, both at home, where he pays exorbitant fees for the ordinary crime of having foolishly married a psychological wreck, and at work, where the devious head of the English department out maneuvers him in a feud arising from Stoner's principled stand against a flashy but incompetent PhD candidate.  Thus Stoner, hated by his boss, remains forever at the assistant professor level, teaching not graduate seminars but endless sections of freshman composition, on different days, often one in the early morning and another late in the afternoon.  His reaction to the adversity is like that of his parents who, without complaint or possibility of success, farmed dusty Missouri land day after long day till one day first his dad and then his mom died.  Most of Stoner's students would have been too indifferent to know what a dedicated teacher he was, day after day, year after year, until it happened to him, too.  The family epitaph could be by Bob Dylan:

Life is sad
Life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do, and you do it well.

The story of how Stoner got from the family farm to the University is told in chapter 1.  A county agent has mentioned to his father that the public university at Columbia has a new school, the school of agriculture, and that his son should consider attending. It's discussed at the supper table one evening.  In his innocence, William asks whether it costs money.  The answer is that his mother has a cousin who lives on a farm just outside of the university town, and he could live there and "work his room and board." His next question, about whether his parents would be able to manage the farm without him, elicits perhaps the first of the book's many memorable passages:

"Your ma and me could manage.  I'd plant the upper twenty in wheat; that would cut down the hand work."

William looked at his mother.  "Ma?" he asked.

She said tonelessly, "You do what your pa says."

"You really want me to go?" he asked, as if he half hoped for a denial.  "You really want me to?"

His father shifted his weight on the chair.  He looked at his thick, callused fingers, into the cracks of which soil had penetrated so deeply that it could not be washed away.  He laced his fingers together and held them up, almost in an attitude of prayer.

"I never had no schooling to speak of," he said, looking at his hands.  "I started working a farm when I finished sixth grade.  Never held with schooling when I was a young 'un. But now I don't know.  Seems like the land gets drier and harder to work every year; it ain't rich like it was when I was a boy.  County agent says they got new ideas, ways of doing things they teach you at the University.  Maybe he's right.  Sometimes when I'm working the field I get to thinking."  He paused.  His fingers tightened upon themselves, and his clasped hands dropped to the table.  "I get to thinking--"  He scowled at his hands and shook his head.  "You go on to the University come fall.  Your ma and me will manage."

It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father make.  That fall he went to Columbia and enrolled in the University as a freshman in the College of Agriculture.

A few pages later:

The summer after his first year of college he returned to his father's farm and helped with the crops.  Once his father asked him how he liked school, and he replied that he liked it fine.  His father nodded and did not mention the matter again.

In his second year, Stoner took a class, "rather perfunctorily required of all University students," in English literature.  It was taught by a man like the one Stoner would become.  One day the topic was Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet, which Williams sets out in the text of the novel:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The instructor, employing the Socratic method, asks Stoner what the poem means--"what, across three centuries, Shakespeare is saying to you."  He is unable to answer, but, feeling some dread, because his loving parents were expecting a return on their investment back on the farm, he left off taking courses in the agriculture school and beginning with the next semester registered instead for courses in philosophy, literature, and classical languages.  The answer to the question about the poem is supplied by the novel itself, especially an episode concerning an affair Stoner has with a graduate student who is an exemplar of the heartbreaking ideal expressed by Shakespeare.

Last day of the season

The last day of baseball's regular season: an objective correlative for the elegiac mood.  Everything conspires to attain the strong effect, the season of fall, long shadows, the murmuring and half-empty stadium while the tvs in bars are turned to football games, a sudden cessation of quotidian days, one game after another, every day all spring and summer, endless games after hope for success is gone and then, all at once, a three-hour hole in every October day, a chilly wind and the promise of winter.  I'm not the only one who feels this way.  Here's a poem by Linda Pastan.  I came across it in a book someone once gave me as a gift, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball:

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.

She's not always so earnest.  Here's another:

American stories: Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" (and some predecessors)

 

With most writers, you begin to feel, once you've read enough of their output, that you know and recognize their world.  You even hear people say things like "the world according to Milton" or "the world according to Hemingway," and you have an idea what they're talking about.  In the latter, for example, there is a war going on, either in the foreground (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls) or in the background, which may be explicit ("Soldier's Home," "In Another Country") or unmentioned, "left out" but present ("Big Two-Hearted River," The Sun Also Rises).  I've been rooting around in my paperback edition of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and notice that, in a publisher's blurb, fellow writer Stanley Elkin illustrates the principle by enthusing, "I'm nuts about Raymond Carver's new stories.  They're real as discount stores, time clocks, the franchises in small towns, bad marriages."

The point can be amplified, with respect to Carver, by noting how certain kinds of situations recur.  Here's one.  It's the middle of the night.  Husband and wife are in bed. Wife has a lot of unspecified stuff rattling around her head and can't sleep.  Husband has no trouble sleeping and so is oblivious to wife's almost desperate state of mind, the symptoms of which, though not the underlying cause, are described in a succession of simple, declarative sentences. 

She looked in on the children.  She pulled the covers up over her son's shoulders.  She went back to the living room and sat down in the big chair.  She paged through a magazine and tried to read.  She gazed at the photographs and then she tried to read again.  Now and then a car went by on the street outside and she looked up.  As each car passed she waited, listening.  And then she looked down at the magazine again.  There was a stack of magazines in the rack by the big chair.  She paged through them all.

That's from "The Student's Wife."  At the end, she goes back into the bedroom, where her husband "looked desperate in his heavy sleep":

As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.

In "I Could See the Smallest Things," the sleepless wife hears her open gate outside.  She nudges her husband, who only groans.  Then:

I stayed still awhile longer until I decided it was no use.  I got up and got my slippers.  I went to the kitchen and made tea and sat with it at the kitchen table.  I smoked one of Cliff's unfiltereds.

It was late. I didn't want to look at the time.  I drank the tea and smoked another cigarette.  After awhile I decided I'd go out and fasten up the gate.

Outside, she sees her next door neighbor, in his pajamas, flashlight in one hand and bug poison in the other, crouching in the yard plantings, killing slugs.  They have a brief conversation that is evocative of happier past times on both sides.  He shows her a slug.  When she goes back inside to bed, she gives her husband "a little shake" and

He cleared his throat. He swallowed.  Something caught and dribbled in his chest. 

The story closes with her connecting husband to slugs in the yard next door. 

If Carver's career is divided into two phases--an early, "minimalist" one, in which the editor Gordon Lish figured prominently, and a late one that was cut short by his death, age 50, in 1988--then "The Student's Wife" and "I Could See the Smallest Things" both belong to the early phase.  So does "The Bath," in which a young mother goes to a bakery and orders, from a not very sympathetic-seeming baker, a cake for her son's eighth birthday.  Then, on the morning of the party, before the cake can be picked up, the boy is struck by a car while walking to school.  The parents keep a vigil at the hospital.  The boy slumbers in something like a coma, nothing happens, the reader along with the parents is subjected to the grim hospital world where tanned and well-dressed doctors speak evasively to frightened consumers of health care, and, finally, the mother goes home to take a bath.  Soon as she's fed the dog, the phone rings:

"Yes!" she said.  "Hello!" she said.

"Mrs Weiss," a man's voice said.

"Yes," she said.  "This is Mrs Weiss.  Is it about Scotty?" she said.

"Scotty," the voice said.  "It is about Scotty," the voice said.  "It has to do with Scotty, yes."

And that's the end of the story.  This dead-fall of an ending, the telephone call of the baker, has an awful and desolating force that may put one in mind of the gate-knocking scene in Macbeth.  (At dawn on the morning after the night of the murders, there is a knocking at the castle gate, which, considering what has just happened, should be the hand of God--but it turns out just to be some drunken revelers getting in late.  The king's corpse, and those of his slumbering body guards, haven't even been discovered yet.)  You don't perhaps realize the nightmare you've been sunk in till it collides with the mundane. 

Now that I've compared him to Shakespeare, it remains to be said that Carver wasn't altogether happy with the "minimalist" stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet Please and What We Talk About.  In this interview--full of interest--he answered the question, "How has your work changed?"

I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I'd be at a dead end—writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn't want to read myself, and that's the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called me a “minimalist” writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn't like it. There's something about “minimalist” that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don't like. But all of the stories in the new book, the one called Cathedral, were written within an eighteen-month period; and in every one of them I feel this difference.

One of the stories in Cathedral is "A Small, Good Thing," which is a reworking of "The Bath."  The new story is around three times longer, mostly because it continues forward in time.  The redone first part is very similar, though you notice, if you put the two texts side-by-side, that most of the changes have a softening effect. For example, the doctors, while still tanned and well dressed, have not been dealt a natural void in the human sympathy suit.  The boy, however, dies in the hospital.  The numbed parents go home and realize it's the baker who keeps calling on the phone.  He wants the money for his stale cake.  Enraged, they drive to the mall where the bakery is located.  It's in the wee hours of the night, everything is dark, and they are contemplating violence.  The baker lets them into his well-lighted work place and the angry exchange we're expecting begins.  But it comes out that the birthday boy has died and the baker's sullen demeanor falls away.

He looked at them, and then he shook his head slowly.  He pulled a chair out from under the card table that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a telephone directory.  "Please sit down," he said.  "Let me get you a chair," he said to Howard.  "Sit down now, please."  The baker went into the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs.  "Please sit down, you people."

And the story ends:

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf.  "It's a heavy bread, but rich."  They smelled it, then he had them taste it.  It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains.  They listened to him.  They ate what they could.  They swallowed the dark bread.  It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light.  They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

Probably this comes on too strong.  The way in which the accoutrements of the baker's financial interests--the receipts and the adding machine and the telephone directory he used to look up the numbers of delinquent customers--are swept to the side as he exercises himself to make the grieving parents comfortable: it's too obtrusive.  Similarly with the blunt evocation of the Eucharist that ends the story.  Yes, Raymond Carver, they are communing.

This ending, however, is another of the recurring situations, and in maybe Carver's finest story the effect is unspeakably powerful.  This is "Cathedral," the title story, which can be read online here.  It's about a visit--by a blind man to the home of the narrator and his wife.  The blind man and the wife are great friends.  They met when she worked briefly as his assistant, and on her last day, when they were parting, the blind man had asked whether he could touch her face with his hands.  She had let him, and he had run his hands all over her face and neck.  They hadn't "seen" each other since that day but had kept in touch through tapes sent back and forth in the mail.  She had been through a divorce and a suicide attempt before marrying the narrator and the blind man had heard about it all on tapes.  The narrator tells us he knows these things and he tells us how he knows them: she told him.  Now the blind man's mother has died, so he's traveling, and he's going to come to their house.  The narrator's wife is eagerly anticipating the visit, but he's not.

His wife drives to the train station to pick up the blind man.  When she returns, the narrator describes how he watches his wife get out of the car, walk around to help the blind man, gently guides him, smiling and laughing, to the front door.  You get the idea that the smiling and laughing is unusual, not something that happens a lot in this house.  There are bare suggestions of constrained lives, lots of drinking, dead-end jobs, no kids.  The wife, however, has prepared a nice meal.  The narrator watches as the blind man eats with gusto.  He does not turn down the offer of a drink, or of a refill.  The trio repair to the living room with dessert.  The narrator turns on the tv--not the usual entertainment of a blind man.  But the tv is going.  They smoke dope.  The narrator notices that this too does not appear to be the blind man's usual pastime, but he's trying to be a good guest.  The pot takes down the wife, who falls asleep on the couch.  Now it's just the two men and the tv.  The narrator feels uncomfortable.  The tv show is about European cathedrals--sounds like PBS.  He flips through the channels, but nothing seems better, and he lands back on the cathedral show.  It occurs to him that the blind man might have no concept of cathedrals.  He tries describing them in words but feels he fails.  The blind man asks him whether it's okay to ask if he's religious.  The narrator says he isn't religious.  The blind man allows that he in fact doesn't have any conception of cathedrals but has an idea.  What if the narrator helped him to draw one?  The narrator finds materials, and the story winds down, the two men touching as the sighted one guides the hand of the blind man over the construction paper, their joined hands leaping up again and again for the spires, the narrator closing his eyes--"I thought it was something I should do"--and saying: "It was like nothing else in my life up to now."

[Originally posted as "Carver's World" on April 8, 2017.]

More of USA

 

I've just finished 1919, the second installment in the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, whose unusual family story I described here.  The novels are long--the whole trilogy is printed in this Modern Library volume I picked up somewhere, and it comes in at 1,453 pages.  The work is divided into sections, like chapters, headed by the name of the main character whose story is featured in that segment.  Then you get to another section, a different character, the story seemingly unconnected to that of the preceding section.  And then another, and another.  In time, over the sprawl of the book, some of the stories get linked: characters meet, become involved in each others' lives for awhile, separate, may or may not be heard from again.  The reader thus has the occasional experience of observing someone known intimately from another section performing as an extra in a different character's story.  These longer sections of prose narrative are separated by pastiches of newspaper headlines and articles, under the heading of "Newsreel," as well as sections called "The Camera Eye" and mini biographies of famous Americans who lived during the period of time--first couple decades of the last century-- in which the action is set. The word "kaleidoscopic" inevitably recurs in descriptions of the effect, though if you are less favorably impressed you might incline toward, say, "disjointed."  In his later years Dos Passos turned to painting, and one senses that USA is to some considerable degree a novelistic version of certain then-recent developments in the visual arts, such as impressionism and cubism.  

To me, these intervening sections of newsreels, etc., are often annoying or even incomprehensible: The Camera Eye sections, for instance, are told in a stream-of consciousness flow that's either hard or impossible to comprehend--so eager have I been to press ahead in order to get to the "regular stories" that I couldn't render an opinion about what a more careful reader might discover about The Camera Eye.  Just the phrase itself, which suggests a rotating lens taking in impressions without any intelligent selection principle, indicates what the reader is up against.  I suspect the object is to deliver an indelible "impression" of the USA but the impression I often have is of an arch author showing off as he moves from the pummel horse to the rings to the high bar in the gymnasium of modernistic exercises.  Occasionally, however, as in a portion of Newsreel XLI from near the conclusion to 1919, his aim is realized:

his reply was an order to his followers to hang these two lads on the spot.  They were placed on chairs under trees, halters fastened on the boughs were placed around their necks, and then they were maltreated until they pushed the chair away from them with their feet in order to finish their torments.

 

How great is "The Great Gatsby"?

 

Here is a list of the hundred best novels, according to the Modern Library board.  Scanning it, I think it must actually be the hundred best English-language novels published since about 1900--no Tolstoy, no Russian, no Dickens, no Jane Austen, no Middlemarch, no Melville or Hawthorne or Mark Twain.

I was at the site because I googled "100 best novels" in order to see where The Great Gatsby would come in.  It's always near the top of these lists, and yep, there it is, at number 2, sandwiched at the pinnacle between two works by James Joyce.  Is it overrated?  Not as much as A Portrait of the Artist!  My theory is that these books are read and talked about mainly at colleges and universities, where there are often constraints of time and a desire to expose students to an array of "standard authors," so the brevity of The Great Gatsby gives it a boost. In Survey of American Literature, it's always assigned, along with a couple of stories by Hemingway, a story of Faulkner's (or maybe As I Lay Dying, which is also brief), some poems by Frost, and "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock."  I'm not being flip, these are all great works, but I'm not sure they're greater than other works of the period that make their entrance farther down this list of novels.  You're not going to assign such immense works as An American Tragedy, USA, or Studs Lonigan.  Any of them would consume the whole term, just to get the pages turned.  So, of American novels of the period between the two world wars--The Great Gatsby just has the most exposure.

But paging through my copy now I feel more inclined to defend its high reputation.  It's not long but not wispy, either.  I see that the passages I marked as a college student still have for me a strong appeal.  Of seasonal interest, because it just happened to me, is Daisy's question, in almost the first scene:

She looked at us all radiantly.  "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?  I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

Seems like an odd thing to "watch for" or be radiant about.  Her husband soon interrupts her languor:

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.  "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.  Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it.  The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.  It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

Vacancy--intellectual, moral--in society's upper crust: the theme of the book.  Gatsby shouldn't have wanted in.  I put an exclamation mark next to

[Gatsby] took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray.  While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue.  Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.  "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.

and another next to narrator Nick Carraway's final judgment:

I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.  It was all very careless and confused.  They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .

One of the qualities of the book is the way in which this sharp verdict is rendered within a dusky glow of disappointment and wistful longing for something genuine and better.  Of one of the anonymous and forgotten attendees of one of Gatsby's summer parties, Fitzgerald writes: "Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration  of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face."  

Bloomsday, 2018

June 16, Bloomsday, so-called because the action of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904.  One of the leading characters, Leopold Bloom, spends the day wandering the streets of his hometown in order to stay away from his house, where he knows his wife, Molly, has scheduled an assignation with Blazes Boylan, a concert manager.  The novel seems better each time one reads it, which is fortunate, since on first perusal most mortals are lost, lost.  Three Monkeys Online has collected the thoughts of fifty writers on Joyce, here.  I will highlight the following, from Salman Rushdie on Ulysses:

You never hear people say that there is so much humor in the book, that the characters are so lively or that the theme--Stephen Daedalus in search of his lost father and Bloom looking for his lost child--is so moving.  To me it was moving, in the first place.

It's possible to overlook, or to forget, though Rushdie seems not to have, that the Blooms lost a young son over ten years ago, and, while Leopold has never gotten over it, his sadness has elevated his character and in some substantial way made him more humane and tolerant.  No cuckold in literature is more resigned or beloved.  When he and Stephen finally meet up late in the evening at Bella Cohen's brothel, after which Bloom takes him to his house and makes him cocoa . . . Rushdie's right, it's very moving.  It's also the first novel I ever read in which the protagonist sniffs his toe jam and takes a dump, which reminds me of the following notable passage in the novel I'm reading now (Roth's Sabbath's Theater):

In the morning, after a leisurely bath in Debby's tub, he took a wonderful crap in her toilet--satisfying stools easily urged forth, density, real dimension, so unlike the sickbed stuff that, on an ordinary day, streamed intermittently out of him because of the agitating action of Voltaren.  He bequeathed onto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm.  The robust road again!  I have a mistress!  He felt as overcome and nonsensical as Emma Bovary out riding with Rodolphe.  In the masterpieces they're always killing themselves when they commit adultery.  He wanted to kill himself when he couldn't.

Joyce might have meant more to Roth than, say, Anna Karenina.  Happy Bloomsday.

Looking back at Philip Roth

Philip Roth's death, while I was chopping at the big water of his collected works, some thirty or more books, means that suddenly the opinions of others on this hurricane-force man of letters are plastered all over the place.  I especially like this New York Times piece wherein a bunch of novelists, critics, and assorted scholarly types are asked to say a few words about their favorite Roth book.  Judging by the number of mentions, it seems there might be a consensus for Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral being his two best books.  I'd have guessed that Portnoy's Complaint would earn more votes, just for notoriety and universal "name recognition," but perhaps among this learned group Sabbath's Theater, next on my list to read, has replaced it as the greatest achievement of "the transgressive Roth."  Of course there are many Roths.  I just finished Nemesis, the last novel he wrote.  I remember one scene in which the protagonist and his love interest have canoed out to an island from the lakeside summer camp where they work and, away from the kids, disrobe in a previously prepared bower before the curtain is demurely drawn--next we know, they're paddling back to camp, very happy with one another.  This isn't always how it works in Roth.  For example, the teen-aged Alexander Portnoy uses a hunk of liver from the icebox for an idiosyncratic purpose and then has to see it again later that day when it's served for supper.

Nemesis is named by one of the Times's experts.  Its main character, an earnest square of a playground director, may remind us of all the other squares whom Roth, creator of Alexander Portnoy and Mickey Sabbath, plainly esteems.  These fellows work hard for modest wages, often in a struggling family business, often in the role of the transgressive protagonist's father, and almost always in Newark, New Jersey, specifically the Weequahic section southwest of the main business district, where the Jews lived.  The autobiographical aspect is here apparent, which reminds me that Roth also wrote a memoir, Patrimony, about his father, and that it is at least twice-mentioned in the article.  Even Alexander Portnoy worked as a public-interest lawyer, and remember, too, the definition that is set out on the very first page:

Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. . .

Philip Roth in his fecund dotage

 

In the second half of the 1990s, when he was in the second half of his seventh decade of life, Philip Roth published three novels, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, that are sometimes referred to as "the American trilogy."  Each was widely acclaimed.  American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize, I Married a Communist was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award, and The Human Stain received the PEN/Faulkner Award.  All three are on a big canvas, of hefty length, and address themselves to large issues in American life, such as domestic terrorism and identity politics.  Since they were composed by a man who presumably had commenced receiving social security payments, the novels were often attributed to a late-life cataract of creativity.  Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, had won the National Book Award in 1960, so there is a 40-year span between it and The Human Stain.

I have for the past few weeks been sunk in the quartet of novels that Roth wrote after he finished the American trilogy.  They are Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis--a tetralogy handsomely collected in a Library of America volume under the title Nemeses.  I've read American Pastoral and The Human Stain, and for whatever reason they do not affect me like these four even later novels, written when Roth was well into his 70s.  In the Library of America volume, the four works come in at 446 pages.  I can't say much about Nemesis, which I'm only around twenty pages into, but in two of the other three (Everyman and The Humbling) the survey of American society is replaced by the crabbed ruminations of a near septuagenarian who faces declining health and a gray tedium of days that are leading, he knows, toward extinction.  The other two are death-infused as well, Indignation being set against the backdrop of the Korean War while Nemesis concerns a polio epidemic in Newark, New Jersey.  The protagonists are in a state of quiet desperation.  The consolations of religion are tartly dismissed, and, in the books with the older protagonists, the subject of suicide arises.  I said I was "sunk" in the books, not "happily sunk."  In The Humbling, the central character is an aging actor who suddenly can't act anymore, and, being very familiar with the world's dramatic literature, he calls to mind all the characters he knows who commit suicide: "Hedda in Hedda Gabler, Julie in Miss Julie, Phaedra in Hippolytus, Jocasta in Oedipus the King, almost everyone in Antigone, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Joe Keller in All My Sons, Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh, Simon Stimson in Our Town, Ophelia in Hamlet, Othello in Othello, Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, Goneril in King Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra, the grandfather in Awake and Sing!, Ivanov in Ivanov, Konstantin in The Seagull."  And these are only the plays in which Roth's protagonist has acted.  He adds a few more that he knows about--"Deirdre in Deirdre of the Sorrows, Hedvig in The Wild Duck, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Christine and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles' Ajax."  The conclusion of it is:

He should set himself the task of rereading these plays.  Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced.  Nobody should be able to say that he didn't think it through.

I guess I'm more of a novel reader and so was impressed by the body count of suicides in these plays.  I'm surveying the novels I know and Anna Karenina is the only suicide I can think of.  No, Hurstwood kills himself in Sister Carrie.  Oh, and Simon Axler in Philip Roth's The Humbling, and a widow who takes a painting class from the protagonist of Philip Roth's Everyman.  It's like he's trying to catch his genre up.

UPDATE: Yikes.  When I clicked over to Facebook to post this, I saw the following "trending headline": "Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and literary icon, dies at 85." 

On Chesil Beach

 

Having enjoyed Ian McEwan's The Children Act, I checked out of the library On Chesil Beach, which was published in 2007, seven years before The Children Act, and which I remember reading somewhere was in the hand of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he was seen traveling somewhere.  Here is the opening sentence of On Chesil Beach:

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.

The narrative interest aroused is along the line, then, of: What's going to happen when these two endeavor to consummate their marriage?  Fortunately, it's not like waiting around for the Great White Whale to arrive on the scene, for the work is barely 200 small pages, with considerable white space between the lines, and, notwithstanding the backwards-looking narration of two biographies and one courtship, the promised sexual failure occurs at just about the half way point.  One learns from Wikipedia that the book comes in at fewer than 40,000 words, and that controversy ensued when it was nominated for the Booker Prize, an award for novels, not novellas, though I'm not sure there are definitions of these terms.  I'm saying that if you want to find out what happens, or doesn't, on the wedding night, it's not a huge investment in time to find out.  But the power of the book, which I think is considerable, derives from the second 20,000 words.

Being an Ian McEwan beginner, it seems to me noteworthy that I've now read two of his books, and at the center of each is an undersexed woman who is the object of the (male) author's intense and very sympathetic scrutiny.  

 

Harris and Bellow

 

Continuing with the Mark Harris theme (begun the other day, here), novelist Saul Bellow was another of Professor Harris's scholarly interests. Indeed he was so interested in becoming Bellow's official biographer that he pursued, or perhaps the apt verb is stalked, his quarry, occasionally securing interviews, like in the writer's Chicago office or at Manhattan restaurants--Bellow was a city slicker--during which the Nobel laureate would check his watch while Harris made his pitch.  We know this is true because ultimately Harris, despairing of success, wrote a book anyway, a kind of memoir of the hunt called Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck.  It's an unusual and funny book, the humor often of the self-deprecating type: a contemporaneous review by James Wolcott is available here (though the meaty middle is behind a subscriber wall, you can at least get a taste from the free part).

The subtitle about the drumlin woodchuck is the first way in which the book about Bellow displays Harris's evident interests and preoccupations.  Remember how the epigraph to It Looked Like Forever was the Frost poem "Provide, Provide"?  Another of Frost's poems is "A Drumlin Woodchuck," which celebrates the alert self-interest of the title animal, especially the double exits of his underground home.  The identification of his "quarry" with the sly woodchuck is part of Harris's joke on himself, and also part of his view of Bellow's character.  

But for Bellow readers there is another connection to what we know about Harris, the Johnson-Boswell scholar.  For the words of Bellow's novels, like the words in the Life of Johnson, are preeminently, and most memorably, the record of smart people talking things over.  When I say "smart," I mean in every sense of the word, including book-smart and streetwise, as suggested by Samuel Monk's description of the Life:

The chief glory of the Life is the conversation, always dominated by Johnson but not at all a monologue.  It is the talk of a man, or rather of men, who have experienced broadly, read widely, observed and reflected on their observations, whose ideas are constantly brought to the test of experience, and whose experience is habitually transmuted into ideas.  The book is as large as life and as human as its central character.

If you like Bellow's novels, you might similarly commend them.  If you dislike them, you might complain of their "talkiness."  Though the books are crowded with incidents, there is not so much a conventional plot as there is people talking and reflecting on things that have happened.  You can see how this could be a problem.  I've just finished reading Herzog, and the little trick of that book--the method for letting Moses Herzog carry on like the mature Johnson and his friends at their club--is that he has just been divorced and, out of perturbation of spirit, has begun compulsively composing letters.  They are addressed to his shrink, his professor friends, his children, his former spouses, historical figures, many of them dead, others.  Plainly the letters aren't all meant to be mailed, but Herzog pours forth his thoughts in them.  The drama in the book is that of a strong mind working.  One's appreciation is assisted by a liberal arts education, and I find that in a couple memorable passages some sacred figures from religion class at St Olaf College, circa 1977, receive pretty rough treatment.  For example:

I'm sure you know the views of Buber.  It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object).  By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship.  God comes and goes in man's soul.  And men come and go in each other's souls.  Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.  You have dialogue with a man.  You have intercourse with his wife.

That letter, to his psychiatrist, is from relatively early in the novel, and the bitterness is informed by personal experience.  Much later, he writes to an academic colleague and rival, giving the man's new book a generally good review but with a large, heady, plainspoken caveat:

My dear Professor Mermelstein [there is in Bellow a Dickensian relish for names].  I want to congratulate you on a splendid book.  In some matters you scooped me, you know . . . .  But then I thought the treatment you gave Kierkegaard was fairly frivolous.  I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more.  I do not see this.  Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick.  We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines.  Things are grim enough without these shivery games.  People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise.  But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it.  You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.  With the religious, the love of suffering is a form of gratitude to experience or an opportunity to experience evil and change it into good.  They believe the spiritual cycle can and will be completed in a man's existence and he will somehow make use of his suffering, if only in the last moments of his life, when the mercy of God will reward him with a vision of the truth, and he will die transfigured.  But this is a special exercise.  More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating.

Not the kind of thing one is accustomed to reading in a novel, this also has the flavor, in its conclusion, of a  Johnsonian retort, terse, indignant, memorable.  Depend upon it, Sir.  Suffering is most frequently crushing and unilluminating.  Your comfortable theologizing cannot redeem it.  There's a lot of talk but Harris is  one who enjoys listening.  In the last sentence of his funny book, he says that Bellow's writings enriched him, amused him, informed him, raised him up.   

April is a busy month

April, according to my employer's Intranet page (which I have been known to stumble upon while trying to navigate to espn.com to monitor a Twins day game), is Alcohol Awareness Week.  On noticing this, I have the following thoughts, in order:

1. God, there is an effin' month for everything.
2. I am aware of running low on the freeway-aged wine I prefer.
3. I wonder whether my sneering condescension is a defense mechanism and that I should click on the hyperlink to take the recommended self-assessment.

So I click and soon am faced with such questions as: "In a typical week, on how many days do you consume alcohol?"  Well, at least I don't have to estimate.  "Have you, in the past month, suffered any negative consequences from alcohol consumption?"  Happily, they only seem interested in me, and could care less about my wife, who is generally unimpressed by my witticisms after glass #2.  "Do you ever consume alcohol to forget about things you'd rather not think about?"  I'm beginning to think the author of these questions thinks he's a better, braver man than I. 

April is also National Poetry Month.  The general population is probably as excited about that as I am about alcohol awareness, so here is a poem by a really great English poet, Philip Larkin, that might catch the attention of poetry haters:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

If you were determined to be perverse, you might take the view that the f-bombs are just a cheap trick, like a comic whose routine includes twenty thousand occurrences of "fuck" because it's easier than being funny.  But try to substitute something else into this particular poem.  It doesn't work.  They "mess" you up?  No.  The coarse bluntness goes with all the rest.  Maybe you can detect a bit of reaching in the second stanza, coinages to achieve the needed rhyme, and it's not clear to me that being "soppy-stern" and "at one another's throats" occupy different halves of any known spectrum.  Also, if you take the advice of the penultimate line, the advice of the final line is redundant.  So it's a little unsatisfying, logically.  But I quibble.  Even if you disagree with the dim view here expressed, you have to admit it's a memorable expression.  (W.H. Auden defined "poetry" as "memorable speech.")

I own the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which comes in at more than 1700 pages, and I'm fairly confident the only occurrences of "fuck," or any form thereof, are in this poem of Larkin's.  I just checked, and this one, by Ai, is free of "fuck," so I'm guessing all the others are, too:

Twenty-year Marriage

You keep me waiting in a truck

with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,   

while you piss against the south side of a tree.

Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.   

That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows   

and the seat, one fake leather thigh,   

pressed close to mine is cold.   

I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,   

but get inside me, start the engine;   

you’ll have the strength, the will to move.   

I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half.

Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.   

Pretend you don’t owe me a thing   

and maybe we’ll roll out of here,   

leaving the past stacked up behind us;

old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.

 

 

 

Dr Johnson on marriage

I have a Penguin Classic paperback edition of Samuel Johnson's Collected Essays that I've been forging through at the rate of one or two a day.  According to the blurb on the back cover, Johnson tackles "ethical questions such as the importance of self-knowledge, awareness of mortality, the role of the novel, and, in a lighter vein, marriage . . . ."

In a lighter vein, marriage?  I think I remember, almost exactly ten years ago, Judge Jack Nordby telling Amanda and me, before pronouncing the magic words, that marriage was not to be entered into lightly, and by now she has probably come around to that view herself.  Here is Dr Johnson in Rambler No. 39:

Melanthia came to town upon the death of her father, with a very large fortune, and with the reputation of a much larger; she was therefore followed and caressed by many men of rank, and by some of understanding; but having an insatiable desire of pleasure, she was not at leisure, from the park, the gardens, the theatres, visits, assemblies, and masquerades, to attend seriously to any proposal, but was still impatient for a new flatterer, and neglected marriage as always in her power; till in time her admirers fell away, wearied with expence, disgusted at her folly, or offended by her inconstancy; she heard of concerts to which she was not invited, and was more than once forced to sit still at an assembly, for want of a partner.  In this distress, chance threw in her way Philotryphus, a man vain, glittering, and thoughtless as herself, who had spent a small fortune in equipage and dress, and was shining in the last suit for which his taylor would give him credit.  He had been long endeavouring to retrieve his extravagance by marriage, and therefore soon paid his court to Melanthia, who after some weeks of insensibility saw him at a ball, and was wholly overcome by his performance in a minuet.  They married; but a man cannot always dance, and Philotryphus had no other method of pleasing . . . .

That was in 1750.  Johnson's wife, Tetty, died two years later, and when in 1759 his mother died, he defrayed the funeral expenses by hastily composing and rushing into print The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssnia, in which one of the characters, pretty clearly speaking for the author, declaims:

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 diversity 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.

The consistent outlook maintained in different circumstances raises questions about Dr Johnson's own marriage, the more so since it occurred when he was penniless and in his mid-20s, to a woman in her mid-40s who came with a dowry of £600.  Tetty was dead before Johnson met Boswell, so she figures in The Life of Johnson (if memory serves) only when, on the anniversaries of her death, her presence in his daily devotion is put forward as further proof of his moral excellence.  Tetty was however regarded with mirth by other of Johnson's friends, who remarked on her size (large) and debated whether her rosy complexion was best explained by her overuse of paint or spirits.  We now know, though not from Boswell, that Johnson's early years in London were marred by extreme privation, including probably homelessness, and it is unclear in what part of this Tetty shared: Johnson seems to have been living as a bachelor.  He never remarried, and is on record as having described second marriages as representing "the triumph of hope over experience." His long flirtation in old age with Mrs Thrale ended badly, though "flirtation" is probably not the word, since it seems she and he were practitioners of something that sounds a lot like S & M. 

The conclusion of the argument is that it's easier to write well than live well. 

 

War and Peace

I've been making unsteady progress through Tolstoy's War and Peace for a couple months now.  At the rate of ten pages per day, it would take around a hundred days to finish, and that is my approximate pace.  But I go days without reading a page.  Henry James called the novel and others like it "loose baggy monsters," a phrase suggesting uneven performance and slack organization that, with respect to War and Peace, seems to me apt.  The characters may go on a fox hunt that is described with thorough Tolstoyan relish, but which at the same time does not seem to advance the narrative, so that one forms the impression that perhaps Tolstoy himself had gone on a fox hunt while in the middle of the book, and next morning wrote it up and in it went.  Then there are the crushingly boring sections that read like the monograph of a PhD candidate in history.  I think I remember reading somewhere that Hemingway said War and Peace would be an even greater book if Tolstoy had cut the sections that he probably considered to be the very greatest.  Hemingway might have been right about that. 

Anyhow, I think it is the heterogeneous sprawl that accounts for my unsteady progress through the book.  I have an electronic edition loaded on my phone, so that I don't have to lug around the thousand pages, but at home I read a Norton critical edition that includes at the beginning of every chapter a little editorial header describing the contents of that chapter.  It's useful when you are trying to find something that would otherwise be like a particular pebble on the beach, but it tends to cause stalls when, shutting the book and turning off the lamp at night, you notice that the header for the next chapter is, say, "Senselessness of the battle of Borodino, and erroneousness of the historians' account of it."  Next day instead of reading in bed I'm apt to watch the Twins, and the always interesting "Twins Live" when the game is done.

On the other hand, I pass many evenings happily sunk in the endless effortless flow of words describing the lives of the Rostovs and Bolkonskys and Bezukhovs, the mesmerizing effect occasionally interrupted by something truly arresting, like the thoughts of Prince Andrew on the night before the Battle of Borodino as he contemplates, in the 24th chapter of Book X, his likely death the next day.

From the Norton Anthology of Tweets

Sitting here watching the Twins.  Commercial for Cialis every six outs.  I know I'm old, thoughts encumbered by a teenager, because I find myself thinking, "Actually, it would be a pretty good thing if 'when the time is right' everyone took a minute to swallow a sugar tablet and maybe have a clear thought."

One of my funny friends says he's thankful for decreased sexual desire but wishes he could sleep through the night without having to piss. 

Dick Bremer is just now singing the praises of technology because he posed a question on-air and within minutes had the answer coming across his Twitter feed.  (Yes, Bert Blyleven did give up a homer to Ken Griffey Jr.)  It's always encouraging to hear a guy about my age not sounding like a curmudgeon and a Luddite.  I was earlier today scrolling through someone's Twitter feed when I came to this little gem:

The world changes.
The earth spins.
We grieve our losses.
We eke out wins.
Gnight.

 

Justin Kaplan (1925-2014)

I've been reading Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan. 

Curious about the author, I googled him and was soon reading this New York Times obituary.  I didn't know it, but besides his book on Whitman, Kaplan wrote two other biographies, of Mark Twain and Lincoln Steffens, and it seems that the Twain one, especially, is very highly esteemed: after its publication, in 1966, it won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.  It starts when Twain is 31, never discusses his birth, and dispenses with the boring genealogical details that one might have thought were required of biographers by worldwide statute.  The Whitman biography starts even farther ahead in the subject's life:

In the spring of 1884 the poet Walt Whitman bought a house in the unlovely city of Camden, New Jersey, and at the age of sixty-five slept under his own roof for the first time in his life.

In his later life, Kaplan edited a new Bartlett's Quotations (1992), a task that, according to the obituary, "entailed vast learning and wide reading, both of which he had, as well as an immense circle of associates willing to scare up quotations, which he also had."  He cut thousands of quotations on the ground that he "didn't care for withered flowers of poesy" and wouldn't suffer "platitudes, empty pieties, self-evident propositions, commencement oratory, or anything that sounds as though it might have come from the insides of a fortune cookie."  These were replaced by the witticisms of such figures as Woody Allen, Jimi Hendrix, and Erica Jong.  Conservatives complained, more particularly on the ground that Ronald Reagan, with just a few quotations, was under represented-- to which Kaplan, a self-described liberal, retorted that he'd given Reagan more than his due.

Well, he seems like my kind of fellow, and having a bit of a feel for his life I'm looking forward to the rest of his Whitman.

Bloomsday, 2015

The action of James Joyce's Ulysses occurs on June 16, 1904, which is marked by Joyceans as "Bloomsday" in honor of the main character, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad canvasser who spends the day walking around Dublin, plying his trade and attending a funeral and eventually just avoiding going home, where he knows his wife, Molly, has a late-afternoon assignation with her newest lover, Blazes Boylan.  Though according to many arbiters (such as the Modern Library's Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century, which it sits atop) Ulysses is one of the last century's greatest artistic achievements, it could at first not find a reputable publisher.  The alleged problem was obscenity.  It's amusing to speculate on the disappointment that must have been suffered by those who, taking notice of an intriguing indictment, got hold of a copy and discovered--it's hard to say exactly what, but surely not anything that tends to arouse prurient interest. 

And relying on that definition of obscenity--that it arouses prurient interest--Judge John Woolsey ruled, in December of 1933, eleven years after its first publication in Europe (in an edition of 1000, by the bookstore owner Sylvia Beach), that Ulysses was not obscene and therefore could be published in the United States of America.  In a way, it seems an odd definition.  Supposing you set out to arouse a reader's prurient interest.  In that case, whether your work product would be deemed obscene or not would depend upon your skill: if you were any good, you'd be a pornographer, while  less able toilers in the vineyard would at least not be guilty of any crime.  The former would not be able to find a publisher.  The latter would not be able to find readers.

Judge Woolsey's opinion, which serves as a preface to my Modern Library edition of the novel, is in a couple of places simultaneously astute and humorous.  He says he read the book through without detecting obscenity.  Nevertheless, doubting his qualifications, he asked a couple "friends," men whose opinions he respected, what they thought, and:

I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading Ulysses in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.

So, on the lookout for obscenity, these men found only a "very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women."  How disappointing!  Happy Bloomsday!

The Albigensian heresy

Writing to a friend, Flannery O'Connor said, of the short fiction of J.F. Powers:

[His] stories can be divided into two kinds--those that deal with the Catholic clergy and those that don't.  Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody; those that don't are not so good.

I think I've read enough of them now to concur, but the ones not about the clergy are still a good advertisement for Powers the man.  You can see, for example, that he was a baseball fan, and no complete son of a bitch ever loved baseball.  In his first collection, The Prince of Darkness, three (of eleven) stories are on the subject of race, and Powers's condemnation of bigotry sometimes is so strong that you feel he is losing artistic control.  We should remember that this book was published in 1947, the same year that Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line.  Powers wasn't the type who chose a side only after counting up the company he'd have.

It is, however, the stories about priests that are indeed of the greatest interest.  I think my favorite is called "The Forks."  Here is the swift, vivid opening:

That summer when Father Eudex got back from saying Mass at the orphanage in the morning, he would park Monsignor's car, which was long and black and new like a politician's, and sit down in the cool of the porch to read his office.  If Monsignor was not already standing in the door, he would immediately appear there, seeing that his car had safely returned, and inquire:

"Did you have any trouble with her?"

So, two characters, Monsignor and his assistant, Eudex.  Monsignor has a car, Eudex does not.  The car is the subject of three adjectives ("long," "black," "new") and a simile ("like a politician's").  Eudex borrows the car to drive out to the orphanage to say Mass.  While he's away, Monsignor is back at the rectory, idle unless you count worrying about the possibility that something ill will befall his automobile.   But I'm the one who just said what Monsignor is doing and worrying.  Powers doesn't quite say it.  He just makes you see it's true.  Maybe that is what keeps the sharp criticism from seeming shrill or pious.

Eudex can't stand Monsignor, and he's right to feel that way, for Monsignor is a conservative, pompous ass.  Of course, he is also Eudex's boss, so in their conversations the younger man does not give full voice to his opinions.  For that, he dislikes himself, and his ability to experience this form of dissatisfaction is another difference between them.  Monsignor blandly advances his opinions and in a pinch falls back on Latin and polysyllables.  Has Eudex never heard of the Albigensian heresy?  Near the end, Monsignor is resting upstairs when a parishioner comes to seek counsel.  She's a business owner and wants to know what to do with her money.  Eudex advises that she give to the poor, which causes her to recoil. 

"'Well!'" she says.  "'You are a funny one!'"  Eudex realizes that she had been expecting to receive a stock tip.  He advises her to come back in the evening and "speak to the pastor."  When she's left, Eudex, returning to his room, hears Monsignor calling to him from upstairs, asking who had been there.  He replies, "A woman seeking good counsel, " and waits for the follow-up questions, but "there came only a sigh and a shifting of weight that told Father Eudex he was simply turning over in bed."

That someone should call on a priest and expect to receive a stock tip is not regarded as odd.  Come back later, when Monsignor is up from his nap.  You can then avoid altogether having to speak with "the funny one."

 

A few notes on the novels of J.F. Powers

Having enjoyed Morte D'Urban, I've moved on to Wheat the Springeth Green, J.F. Powers's second and last novel.  It was published in 1988, the year he turned 71, which was also 25 years after Morte D'Urban won the National Book Award.  For his fans, Powers's small output is kind of disappointing, though, on the other side, it makes it relatively easy to hold in the brain for fondling his widely spaced offerings.  The publishing history is a book a decade for five decades--one collection of stories (Prince of Darkness) in the 1940s, another (The Presence of Grace) in the 1950s, Morte D'Urban in the 1960s, a third story collection (Look How the Fish Live) in the 1970s, and then Wheat that Springeth Green in the 1980s.

I don't know how Powers worked or how long it took him to write Wheat that Springeth Green.  It seems axiomatic that most writers, having won the National Book Award for their first novel, would get a second one into print before a quarter of a century had elapsed.  According to his New York Times obituary, Powers was disappointed by the sales of Morte D'Urban, which reminds me of Thoreau's rueful comment after he acquired from his publisher 706 unsold copies of his first book from the original run of 1000: "I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, more than 700 of which I wrote myself." 

Possibly the short story was more natural to Powers, for Wheat that Springeth Green sometimes seems less like a continuous narrative than a series of stories from various stages in the life of Father Joe Hackett.  I see that the page containing the publication information in my Washington Square Press paperback says, "Portions of this work were originally published in The New Yorker," and I can imagine that subscribers didn't suspect that they had just read one chapter of a work in progress.  Anyway, I'm not criticizing: Wheat that Springeth Green is approximately as enjoyable as its predecessor.

In both these novels, Roman Catholic clergy are simultaneously the object of satire and of the author's evident profound sympathy.  If that sounds impossible, I can only say try reading them, because how Powers manages to pull it off is a mystery to me and probably an aspect of artistic genius.  At least for me, it's hard not to think of current events while reading these books, which may in a way possess a kind of explanatory power--the human flaws, the mediocrity coexisting with self-satisfaction and a sense of entitlement: a combustible mix. But the weaknesses of Powers's priests are balanced perfectly with their humanity.  He taught English literature at St John's University, at Collegeville, Minnesota, for years, and one feels for his priests something like what one feels for Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims: it's easier to say that you love them than that you approve of them.

For Minnesotans, there is once again a local angle to appreciate.  Like Father Urban, Father Hackett is a sports fan serving a parish in Minnesota, and watching Twins games on TV, or listening to them on the radio, is a favorite pastime.  Sometimes a rained out ballgame is the occasion for Father Hackett to prosecute a priestly duty, such as pouring himself a stiff one before getting out a catalog to shop for some new office furniture.  The baseball details are as perfect as all the others.  At one point, Father Hackett thinks to himself, while the Twins are losing another one, that it's surprising that this is pretty much the same team that won the pennant just three years earlier.  The astute reader will then know that current time for this section of the novel is the summer of 1968, since the Twins won the pennant in 1965 (and finished the 1968 season in seventh place, with a sub-.500 record,  24 games behind the Tigers).  Here's another passage:

[Joe] returned to the study and poured half of the beer--more than half--into Father Felix's glass.  "Hey.  How'd that man get on second?"

Father Felix observed the television screen closely and nodded, as if to say yes, Joe was right, there was a man on second. 

"The official scorer has ruled it a single and an error, not a double," said the announcer.

"Who made the error?" Joe said, more to the announcer than to Father Felix. 

"According to our records, that's the first error Tony's made this season," said the announcer.

"What's so wonderful about that?" Joe said to the announcer.  "He's an outfielder."

This detail concerning "Tony" who made the error is like an overheard and forgotten whisper dropped by chance into the narrative, but longtime Twins' fans will know that it refers to Tony Oliva, the team's all-star right fielder in the late 60s. 

 

Morte d'Urban

Long ago someone, observing a man with his nose in a book laughing uproariously, said that the fellow was either crazy or reading Don Quixote. By that standard, I'm crazy, because today while reading Morte d'Urban, J.F. Powers's novel starring Father Urban, a dashing and able priest assigned to a backwater parish in central Minnesota, I laughed aloud when Urban meets by chance the lapsed daughter of a parishioner, whereupon one thing leads to another, a fair amount of Scotch is consumed, and he tries to rescue the moment by making of it a pastoral call before being outmaneuvered by the woman who, having no interest in discussing her apostasy, instead makes a pass at him:

And she got up, but then she changed her mind, and in a matter of moments, she was standing before him, before the fire, back to him, wearing nothing but her shoes.  They were high-heeled shoes.  Calf.  Golden calf.  Lovely woman.  No doubt of it.

"All right," she said, turning around.  "Try and stop me." 

"You've got me covered," he said, and took his eyes off her, and kept them off, commending himself.  It was like tearing up telephone directories, the hard part was getting started.

There's more than one thing funny about this but I think it is mainly the wildly incongruous simile blandly offered in a situation that does not usually elicit either blandness or similes.  He noticed her calf, was persuaded of her loveliness, then looked away, and that he was able to continue not looking called to mind the man who can perform the stupendous feat of tearing a phone book in half once he "gets a start."  The whole book is very funny, though the humor is not its only merit.  I read it years ago and for reasons that now mystify me didn't love it. 

Dubliners: "The Dead"

Joyce first conceived of the fiction that became Ulysses as another story for Dubliners.  That's the way "The Dead" began, too.  Of course "The Dead" did become the final story in Dubliners, and it may seem that it is unlike all the others in a way that any pared down version of Ulysses also would have to have been.  If it weren't for "The Dead," the greatness of Ulysses would have come as something like a bolt out of the blue.  I've read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the work published between Dubliners and Ulysses, a couple of times, and can't warm to it.  Maybe I'm missing something.  The technical innovation of Ulysses, and the challenge it lays upon the reader, has obscured somewhat the way in which that novel transcends ordinary boundaries and achieves the status of a kind of secular scripture, a reservoir of everything that can be usefully represented about what is sometimes called "the human condition." 

"The Dead" is the only thing Joyce wrote that suggests he might be capable of such an achievement.  The main character, Gabriel Conroy, is consistent with Joyce's other Dubliners in the respect that he might seem a fit object for the author's contempt.  What someone has said about J. Alfred Prufrock, that he sounds too plump and well-dressed to sing a love song, applies to Gabriel, too--not his name but his actual self.  When he first arrives at the party, he stamps the snow off his galoshes, and his wife soon jokes about how he thinks it very important that she wear galoshes, too.  Very late that evening, as he leaves the party, he sees his wife transfixed by piano music drifting into the foyer by the exit.  Her mood sends him into a swoon of sexual desire, but she later reveals to him, when they are alone in their hotel room, that she had been thinking of a delicate boy who died a few days after singing to her that same song in the cold air on the night before she moved away from him.  Gabriel, the wearer of galoshes, then "saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable, fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror." 

The whole long first portion of the story functions largely to confirm the justness of Gabriel's epiphany--it's a law that you must deploy "epiphany" when discussing Joyce--concerning himself.  But note a couple of things.  First, the effect of Gabriel coming to this conclusion is quite a different thing from the narrator making the same judgment.  And second, the adjectives, which include "well-meaning" and "pitiable."  In many of the other stories in Dubliners, we are aware of the narrator's artful sneer, but the volume ends with a scene suffused with sympathy.  Gabriel's interior monologue as he gazes on his sleeping wife, the object of the passionate dead boy's love, includes this:

Poor Aunt Julia!  She, too, would soon be a shade. . . .  He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal.  Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees.  The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died.  He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones.  Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

This is followed by the glimmering last paragraph, in which it is reported that "the snow was general over all of Ireland," and we are meant to infer, I think, that the problems of Gabriel and the other citizens of Dublin are universal and not really admitting of solutions.

Dubliners: "Grace"

There are fifteen stories in Dubliners.  To me, the first eleven make one set, the next three make a second, and the fifteenth, "The Dead," one of the very best things in the world's literature, stands alone and apart.  In the first eleven, there is a central character who keeps getting older:  the first stories feature young children, we come eventually to stories about young adults, and then onward to the work-a-day world of the middle-aged, their troubled marriages and unsensational frustrations.  These first eleven are incidents from private life that nonetheless show pretty plainly Joyce's view of his native city, circa 1900.  The next three stories address themselves to public life in Dublin, its politics ("Ivy Day in the Committe Room"), its cultural life ("A Mother"), and, in "Grace," its religion, which of course is Roman Catholicism.

There are three parts to "Grace" and they may be called "In the Saloon," "In the Sick Room," and "In Church"--or, as has been pointed out by more than one critic, the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of The Divine Comedy.  In the great effort that Joyce was about to embark on, the composition of Ulysses,  the wanderings of the main character are modeled, mock heroically, on The Odyssey.  But the long section in the sick room will remind most readers, I think, not of Homer or Dante but of Joyce's own "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," wherein the slack conversation of men not above the average is carefully recorded.  Here is a sample of the theologizing in "Grace":

Mr Kernan seemed to be troubled in mind.  He made an effort to recall the Protestant theology on some thorny points and in the end addressed Mr Cunningham. 

--Tell me, Martin, he said.  Weren't some of the popes--of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old popes--not exactly . . . you know . . . up to the knocker?

There was a silence.  Mr Cunningham said:

--O, of course, there were some bad lots . . . But the astonishing thing is this.  Not one of them, not the biggest drunkard, not the most . . . out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine.  Now isn't that an astonishing thing?

--That is, said Mr Kernan. 

--Yes, because when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, Mr Fogarty explained, he is infallible.

--Yes, said Mr Cunningham.

--O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope.  I remember I was younger then . . . Or was it that--?

Mr Fogarty interrupted.  He took up the bottle and helped the others to a little more.  Mr M'Coy, seeing that there was not enough to go around, pleaded that he had not finished his first measure.  The others accepted under protest.  The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

The story ends, in the brief Paradise section, with a sermon by a Father Purdon.  It seems to be his point that the businessmen in attendance at the retreat need fear no judgment from Christ, who "was not a hard taskmaster."  Mr Kernan had dreaded coming but begins to feel comfortable.  He's a relatively minor character in Ulysses, and still a drinker.  In Dublin circa 1900, Purdon was the name of a street known for its whorehouses.  There was much about Dublin of which Joyce disapproved and the Catholic Church headed the list. 

 

 

Dubliners: "A Mother"

In honor of Bloomsday, I'm going to take another step in my formerly steady march through Dubliners, Joyce's collection of fifteen short stories that first brought him to the attention of the literary world (and of censors).  I left off by giving a poor notice to "Ivy Day in the Committee Room."  (Just had to show that I'm not intimidated by Joyce's reputation.)  Next up, then, would be the thirteenth story, "A Mother," which is open to a similar charge: there is a fight, and both sides are right about what ails the other.  Another sneer.

I have remarked before about how Joyce's language in these stories seems calculated to augment  the effect of the drab  Dublin he describes.  But then there will be a sentence that stands out from the gray, and in "A Mother" I think it is one describing a "journalist," Mr O'Madden Burke, who has come to cover the concert and finds "by instinct" the room where the liquor is kept.  "His magniloquent western name," Joyce writes, "was the moral umbrella upon which he balanced the fine problem of his finances."  He gets the last word, too.  When the confrontation is over, and the reader may be trying to decide whose side to take, Mr O'Madden Burke, "poised upon his umbrella in approval," assures Mr Holohan that he (Holohan) did the right thing, and the story ends.

"A Mother" is usually thought of as Joyce's take on the Irish Revival.  Along this line, it's worth noting another detail relating to O'Madden Burke.  He had shown up with a colleague who could not, however, stay for the concert of Irish national music on account of having to "report the lecture which an American priest was giving in the Mansion House."  But he will of course make sure that O'Madden Burke's favorable notice gets into the paper. 

Views of the 18th president

I see that my current coffee-break companion, The Education of Henry Adams, heads the Modern Library Board's list of the top hundred works of nonfiction.  But the real eye-opener is "the reader's list," which, being largely an Ayn Rand tribute, shares few data points with that of the board.  For "readers," the counterpart to Adams's Education is Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. Two books not by Rand but about her also make it into the readers' top ten, along with Economics in One Lesson (#8) and More Guns, Less Crime (#10).  Perhaps the wing-nuts are too busy voting in online polls to have time for more than one economics lesson.

I just finished the chapter on President Grant in Adams's Education.  Grant is also the subject of a chapter in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War.  The divergent views of our eighteenth president displayed in these two books would make for a predictable compare-and-contrast essay question for a college course on, say, American Literature: 1860-1920.  The only problem is that the task has already been admirably performed by Wilson himself.  His thesis is that Grant's life was made of alternating periods of dissipation and intense concentration.  After graduating from West Point, he served in the Mexican War, of which he disapproved, and then drank himself out of the army after it had ended.  In the 1850s he failed at selling real estate, at working in a custom house, and in a run for county engineer.  When the Civil War began, he immediately volunteered for service.  It's not real surprising that he should have done so as he was at the time working as a clerk in a leather goods store in Galena, Illinois.  The store was run by two of his younger brothers.  The history of his performance in the war and his steady rise to the top command of the Union Army is well known and also the reason that, in 1868, the former unsuccessful candidate for county engineer was elected to the Presidency.  His two terms in office are widely regarded as a failure--it seems that being president at the start of the first Gilded Age did not qualify as a crisis of sufficient magnitude to activate his concentration.  "Let us have peace," he said, to the derision of Henry Adams.  By 1884, he was broke, the victim of one of the financial swindles that had plagued his Administrations. Also, he was suffering from throat cancer.  To raise funds for his family, he undertook the composition of his Personal Memoirs, which he completed in eleven months.  A week later, he died.  The memoirs, which were praised for their literary qualities by Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain (and by Edmund Wilson too), sold 300,000 copies in the first two years after publication and earned for Grant's family close to a half million dollars. 

Given these protracted slumps punctuated by high achievement, estimations of Grant can swing wildly to and fro, depending  upon how the estimator knew him.  Henry Adams spent the years of the Civil War in London helping his father, Lincoln's minister to the British government, keep England from recognizing the Confederacy.  Having  returned home after the war, he was cruelly disappointed when President Grant showed himself to be unfit for the challenges of the 1870s.  His brother, however, had served under Grant in the war, and revered him.  Wilson quotes the almost humorously opposite assessments of the two brothers.  The difference, of course, was that Henry knew Grant best during one of his slumps, whereas his brother observed him at the helm of the Union Army, succeeding brilliantly in a role that several predecessors with better resumes could not manage.

Here is a portion of Arnold's review of Grant's Personal Memoirs:

. . . .  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. . . .  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.

One of Wilson's points is that the characteristics of Grant the writer are the selfsame ones cited by those, such as Henry's brother, who lauded the leadership qualities of General Grant.  Arnold in his review seems to have caught both strains.

During World War I, Wilson, feeling he could not participate in the killing, volunteered for a medical unit, and spent much of 1918 first dressing wounds near the front, then patrolling the halls of a military hospital, where his tasks included keeping crazed, wounded soldiers from jumping out of windows or otherwise harming themselves.  I mention this because his praise of Grant's Personal Memoirs is tempered by the criticism that the book excluded too much of the human cost, the unspeakable suffering, of the "campaigns."  It had never occurred to me before I typed it above, but the title and the subtitle of his book on the literature of the Civil War rhyme, and the rhyming words are:  gore-war.

Sweet Misery

Here's a poem I like by a poet, William Matthews (pictured), who I think deserves a bigger audience.  Generally speaking, poets deserve bigger audiences, but I digress.  The title is "A Story Often 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: some 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.

An alternate title might be "Song of Myself in Fourteen Lines."  Yes, it's a bit of a downer, but our exclamatory times require an antidote.  The "curt" poem does include an exclamation point--behind the near cliche "Sweet misery!"  It's applied to sex but it occurs to me that it applies, too, to a consequence of sex: child-rearing, with all its tedium and joy, is a sweet misery.  Maybe Matthews would say that all of life qualifies.  Sweet misery!

W.H. Auden, meanderingly

Here's something about the taxonomy of twentieth-century poetry that I don't get.  Why does T.S. Eliot, who was born in St Louis and educated at Harvard before spending most of his adult years working for a London publishing house, earn a spot in anthologies of both English and American literature, while W.H. Auden, who grew up in the English Midlands and attended Oxford before emigrating to New York and taking American citizenship in his 30s, is considered a strictly English poet?

And is there something about poets that makes them ashamed of the names their parents gave them?  I have to say that going by your initials must surely reinforce a prejudice that many people have against poets and poetry.  You know what I mean.  It's like what John Berryman said about "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," that there is something reductive in the very title since the name of the person singing the "love song" takes away something from our conception of a love song: he sounds too well dressed.

Auden is the subject of this essay in the current New York Review.  If you love reading and books, it's natural to be interested in the lives of authors, and often a disappointment to discover the familiar blots.  I kind of regret how little we know about Shakespeare the man and also that the things we do know include the fact that on a couple of occasions he used the courts to enforce the payment of relatively small debts owed to him.  Joyce seems to have been under the impression that, being a genius, everyone he knew should pitch in to support him.  Taking up this general topic, the critic Malcolm Cowley could think of no better defense than to claim, "No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good English sentence."  I think I agree with that, though it is arguably just a disguised cliche. ("It's possible," say mothers, "to find something good to say about anyone.")

Anyway, it is gratifying to learn that Auden was a real prince of a man. Though it may embarrass some of the big-thinking wingnuts of his adopted land, he was an uncloseted homosexual and a Christian gentleman (and left-wing in his politics).  It is striking how many--Auden was one--of the leading lights of twentieth-century Christian practice have been all keen on Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr.  Maybe I should read them, but I think I will put it off till diagnosed with something dreadful. 

My favorite among Auden's poems that are taught in college courses is "Musee des Beaux Arts," and my favorite among those that aren't goes like this:

The Marquis de Sade and Genet
Are most highly thought of to-day;
        But torture and treachery
        Are not my sort of lechery,
So I've given my copies away.

But doesn't the penultimate line have one too many syllables--a flaw, if it is a flaw, that could easily have been corrected with the contraction "Aren't," which is to be preferred anyway on account of an informality that fits the context? 

I am sure I know better than Auden what recommends a limerick.

Cal and Lizzie

Sometimes I imagine the private conversations of the poet Robert Lowell and the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, who were married to each other for over twenty years. 

Elizabeth: Should we have chicken or beef tonight?

Robert: Don't care. 

Elizabeth: There's also leftover Chinese.

Robert: In the white box?

Elizabeth: You are a refrigerator sleuth.

Robert: Harriet is having trouble with word problems in algebra.  How old is the Chinese?  You think it's okay?

Elizabeth: Can't remember.   What are you doing over there, anyway?

Robert: An exercise. Can you bring me a whiskey?

Elizabeth: An "exercise"?

Robert: Yeah.  I'm trying to write an mproved version of "Lycidas."  But I could really use a whiskey.

Elizabeth: You're crazy as a voter in Kentucky. 

And so on.  Actually, I've rarely wondered about the table talk of these two, but yesterday, dipping into John Updike's More Matter, I stumbled upon his review of the Writers at Work interviews, in which he quotes Hardwick replying to a question about her being "fortunate":

As I have grown older I see myself as fortunate in many ways. It is fortunate to have had all my life this passion for studying and enjoying literature and for trying to add a bit to it as interestingly as I can. This passion has given me much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given me employment, escape from boredom, everything. The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

And I thought what an elevated life she led.  Maybe.  It must usually be a mistake to imagine that somewhere the fit and fair have found each other and are living in a way that would arouse the envy of all.

Sue Grant, Michel de Montaigne, Roger Angell

I can always remember when our neighbor Dr. Sue Grant died, because when Amanda was pregnant with our youngest, she (Dr Grant) told us that one thing she regretted was that she probably wouldn't last long enough to "meet" the new baby.  And she was right: our Claire was born three days after her memorial service. I remember that Lydia was just starting to have some bathroom successes and we took along her portable potty to the church.  It was a snowy Saturday morning in Minneapolis, and during the service I had to take her out to use it.  In all the hurry and excitement, I left the back door of the minivan wide open after she'd done her business.  So when the funeral was over we had to sweep snow off the floor and seats before strapping her in again.  Claire was born the following Tuesday.

Anyway, I've been thinking of Dr Grant, because at her estate sale I bought for about a dollar a hardback selection of Montaigne's essays that I've been reading in bed at night and on my morning coffeebreaks.  There's no marginalia or markings of any kind.  I doubt she ever read it--the "science and nature" section of the bookstore would have been by far her favorite.  My own drowsy enjoyment of the book is punctuated by moments of stabbing pleasure, as when it comes to light that Montaigne evidently shared one of my secret pastimes--namely, imagining great and powerful personages on the toilet, raising themselves up on one haunch to clean, just the same way as everyone does it.  Montaigne:

If I had been able to see Erasmus in other days, it would have been hard for me not to take for adages and maxims everything he said to his valet and his hostess.  We imagine much more appropriately an artisan on the toilet seat or on his wife than a great president, venerable by his demeanor and his ability.  It seems to us that they do not stoop from their lofty thrones even to live.

That was written about 450 years ago.  I'd forgotten, till I looked it up again now, that "or on his wife."  How could I forget that?  One of the theologians responsible for getting these essays placed on the Index argued that Montaigne was insufficiently ashamed of his vices. 

Nevertheless, his work is widely regarded as the fountainhead of the modern "personal essay."  One of the more enjoyable rivulets I've lately come across is here, behind a subscriber wall: the reflections of the 93-year-old Roger Angell,  longtime New Yorker editor and baseball aficionado, on old age.  He's pictured above lounging somewhat jauntily in Central Park earlier this year.  Maybe Angell would say that it's easier to appear "jaunty" when your cane looks momentarily more like a fashion accessory than a third leg used to aid walking.  Without sugar-coating the geriatric complaints, which include besides physical symptoms a lot of funeral-going, almost predictably for a nonagenarian those of a wife and of a daughter, Angell is not without hope and considerable humor.  I laughed out loud at the Starbucks I was in when I read:

I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

TEACHER: Good morning, class.  This is the first day of school and we're going to introduce ourselves.  I'll call on you, one by one, and you can tell us your name and maybe what your dad or your mom does for a living.  You please, over at this end.

SMALL BOY: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.

TEACHER: A mechanic!  Thank you, Irving,  Next?

SMALL GIRL: My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer. 

TEACHER:  How nice for you, Emma!  Next?

SECOND SMALL BOY: My name is Luke and my dad is dead.

TEACHER: Oh, Luke, how sad for you.  We're all very sorry about that, aren't we class?  Luke, do you think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?

LUKE (seizes his throat):  He went "Ngungghhh!"

In another passage, Angell reads the thought balloon above the heads of acquaintances who, happening upon him, inquire about his "secret" and rave, "You're looking great!":  "Holy shit--he's still vertical."

Increasing your word power: Susan Sontag and Eric the Blue

Who would have guessed that the hyper-smart Susan Sontag, whom John Updike once described as our camp follower of the French avant garde, kept journals in which she set down unfamiliar words she came across in her reading?--"persiflage," for one, and "integument." The author of an in-progress biography of her reveals this detail here.  I'd love to know what other words she was unsure of.  It would be a tremendous resource for teens preparing for the SAT.

I just walked over to the book shelf and took down a battered Modern Library paperback of William Faulkner's Light in August.  Sure enough, the inside of the back cover and the blank page facing it are filled with the definitions of words I came across while reading the novel for a college class in the 1970s.  I couldn't make much of the book, but I was too dutiful a student not to turn the pages, so had decided, what the hell, I will at least make my vocabulary more Faulknerian.  Here are the words, together with their definitions--only thing I know about the source for them is that it was not an online dictionary.

avatar: one regarded as the incarnation or embodiment of some known model

irascible: prone to outbursts of temper

immanent: existing within; inherent

augur: a seer or prophet; soothsayer

mendacity: the quality or state of being a liar

meretricious: pertaining to or resembling a prostitute

importunate: stubbornly or unreasonably persistent

veracity: habitual adherence to truth

redolent: having or emitting fragrance

ratiocination: to reason logically and methodically

soporific: tending to induce sleep

purlieu: an outlying or neighboring area

incipient: just beginning to exist or appear

spurious: lacking validity; false; counterfeit

visceral: intensely emotional

perspicuous: easy to understand; lucid

putrefaction: the decomposition of organic matter

inscrutable: not able to be fathomed or understood

apotheosis: deification

catafalque: what a coffin sits on

abrogate: to abolish; annul by authority

lassitude: a state of exhaustion; torpor; lethargy

paramour: a lover, esp adulterous lover

If you know nothing of Light in August, I bet you wouldn't guess from the above that it's about poor whites in Mississippi.

 

Funereal

Today I was as usual thinking about death and a funny story a friend once told me flew into my head. 

I used to play softball for a team sponsored by a funeral home. Consequently, I got to know several funeral directors--the ones who liked to play ball.  I had never thought about it before, but sometimes people die in their houses, and they don't just beam themselves over to the embalming room.   Someone from the funeral home goes and gets them.  The story concerns one time when the family member placing the call had warned that the decedent was "a big fellow."  So they sent out not one but two funeral directors, a couple of strong, able-bodied guys from the softball team.  Arriving at the residence, they discovered some complicating factors.  For one thing, it was an old house, and the "big fellow" was in an upstairs bedroom.  For another, he weighed over 400 pounds.  To get to the bedroom, you climbed about ten stairs to a landing, then turned 180 degrees and went up about five more steps.  I'm not going to resist making the obvious joke about how the descent  was toilsome due to 400 pounds of "dead" weight.  The turn: very awkward, especially considering that making it brought them into sight of the family members seated in the living room at the bottom of the steps.  My friends tried to disguise the fact that they were using the bannister to slide the corpse along.  Nothing helped, however.  They bumped and thumped their way down, adjusting their grips a few times and not even pretending to be gentle. 

If you take up mortuary science in school, do you know what the first course you take is called--a prerequisite for all the more advanced ones?  Freshman Decomposition. 

For some reason, this "discussion" puts me in mind of a poem by Robert Frost.  Ants are a curious race.

Joyce's Dubliners: "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"

There was a golden past, when giants trod the earth, and current times represent a precipitous, lamentable decline.  That's the idea of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." If it's more memorable in Joyce's telling than grandma's, that may be an instance of damning with faint praise. 

Here are a few of the characters, together with their physical descriptions.  Old Jack "had an old man's face, very bony and hairy."  Mat O'Connor is "a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many blotches and pimples."  Mr Henchy's entrance is accompanied by more than one reference to his "snuffling" nose.  Mr Crofton "was a very fat man, whose blue serge clothes seemed to be in danger of falling from his sloping figure."  Father Keon's "face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of damp yellow cheese save where two rosy spots indicated the cheekbones."

There is in Joyce a tendency to sneer, and it's in his least successful fictions that one's attention is singularly drawn to his expressions of contempt. 

 

The Switch and the pleasures of hating

I remember observing, recently and approvingly, that, with the possible exception of one character, no one in the immense sprawl of Middlemarch qualifies as a villain.  I get a lot of pleasure from that book but the pleasure of hating isn't one of them.

Not so with Elmore Leonard.  I've just finished The Switch, which features one of the great a-holes in recent American fiction.  If you've read it you will probably know that I'm not talking about either of the two ex-cons, somewhat likable practitioners of grand theft auto who now are trying their hand at kidnapping and extortion.    And I'm certainly not talking about their dim-witted, right-wing accomplice: he's too pathetic to hate.

I'm talking, of course, about Frank Dawson, the target of the extortion plot.  Let's tally up some of the reasons for hating him.

1.  In college, he majored in Business, and was a member of the Young Republicans.  It doesn't help that he was on the golf team, either.

2.  Is he a worse husband or father?  There is much to be said on both sides, but I'd say he's a worse husband, since he regards his wife's kidnapping as an opportunity to be done with her.  His son he only neglects.

3.  He's stupid.  He thinks that since he's rich he isn't, but he is.

4.  The facts underlying his marriage are damning.  His wife is hot, sure, but for him the more important trait is her pliability.  In other words, she's perfect because most really attractive women have options and therefore can't be dominated. 

5.  For purposes of demographic checklists, he's a Catholic.

6.  His real religion is the Deep Run Country Club.  It's the center of his social life.  He's also the club golf champion.

7.  He has his car--a white Lincoln Continental, Mark V--washed daily. 

8.  His wealth can be explained by the interactions of several factors: his privileged background; the importance he places upon financial success; a willingness to round corners, cheat, break the law; the marshalling of America's professional services industry--law, accounting--to make up for his defects in the intelligence compartment.

9.  He uses others to place himself at a distance from the riskier aspects of his business enterprises.  The profitability is connected with illegality but his front men are more exposed than he. 

10.  He's a bit of a fop. 

11.  When drinking, which is most of the time, he's even messier and meaner.

Read the book and add to the list.  At the library, it may be in the Mystery section, but I'd shelve it with the "contemporary classics."  Leonard is among other things a great American satirist, and the chief pleasure to be derived from satire is the highly satisfying sensation that accompanies someone despicable getting what they deserve.

More Elmore Leonard: LaBrava

A few droppings from Elmore Leonard's LaBrava, which I finished over the weekend.

He's a master of the dialogue technique that, in plays, is called stichomythia.  For example:

LaBrava said, "All the money you got, why don't you buy a new car?"

Maurice said, "You know what you're talking about?  This car's a classic, collector's model."

"Then you oughta get a tune."

Maurice said, "What do you mean, all the money I got?" 

"You told me you were a millionaire one time."

"Used to be," Maurice said.  "I spent most of my dough on booze, broads and  boats and the rest I wasted."

This is the kind of thing he's famous for and that comes through in the film versions (Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, which is based on Rum Punch) of his novels.  His descriptive powers deserve more attention.  A desolate urban landscape:

They got out and Cundo led the way through an open gate in the fence, in close darkness through rubble--just like buildings he had seen in Cuba in the revolution--through overgrown bushes and weeds choking the walk that had once led through a garden along the side of the hotel.  There were rusted beer cans and maybe rats.  As they reached the open ground behind the hotel, Cundo watched the headlights on the MacArthur Causeway off to the left, not far, the cars coming out of darkness from the distant Miami skyline.  The old man was missing it.  His head was bent back to look up at all those dark windows--hotel this big and not one light showing.  He should go inside and see the destruction, like it was in a war.

A room inside the Miami Beach Police Department's Detective Bureau:

The squad room inside was like all the squad rooms he had ever seen in older police buildings: different types of desks and tables bunched in rows to conserve space, a few men at desks who might have been athletes at one time, solidly built, or had the look of career noncoms in civilian clothes.  No one wore a shoulder holster anymore; they packed Smiths on their hipbones, short-barreled mags with big grips.  In a corner of the room was a holding cell--and this was different from all the others he had ever seen--made of wrought-iron bars, the kind of ornamental grillwork you might find on a Spanish patio.

The details, tossed off so unassumingly--the headlights on the freeway and the contrast with the abandoned hotel, the ornamental grillwork on the holding cell, like something on a Spanish patio, only it's a jail cell in the cop station--are better even than the dialogue. 

 

Sunk in Elmore Leonard

I found the obituaries and tributes that followed upon the recent death of Elmore Leonard, especially this one by Joan Acocella and this one by Anthony Lane, so interesting that I picked up at the library a paperback 52 Pickup.  I've now read Mr Majestyk and Stick, too.  Next up: LaBrava.  I read them in the order that I find them checked-in at the library.  If Leonard is a bad habit, like drinking booze, I'm in trouble, having dived into the bottle and pulled the cap down over my head.

But Leonard isn't a bad habit.  Put aside the garish, mass-market covers and the arguably lowbrow genre, "crime fiction."  Consider intead all the glittering moments unconnected to the shady dealings of the characters.  After all, you may find something of interest in Moby-Dick even if whaling tales aren't your normal fare.  Who is better than Leonard on the subject of the homes of the American rich?

Stick turned into the drive, 100 Bali Way, followed the blacktop through a patch of jungle and came in view of the house, white with a whiter roof; it reminded Stick of a mausoleum, neat and simple.  Barry said, "Around back."  They came to a turnaround area of cobblestones, four garage doors, a covered walk leading to the house and Stick couldn't believe the seze and sprawl of the place.  Like an assortment of low modules stuck together, open sides and walls of glass set at angles, the grounds dropping away from the house in gradual tiers, with wide steps that might front a museum leading down to the terraced patio and on to the swimming pool.  A sweep of manicured lawn extended to a boat dock and a southwest view of Biscayne Bay, downtown Miami standing in rows of highrises beyond. . . .

[Snip]

It seemed more like a museum than a place where people lived: all marble and glass or wide open, full of hanging plants and flower arrangements, potted palm trees.  Looking across some of the rooms or down a hall it was hard to tell what was outside and what was in. 

The living room was like an art gallery: two steps down to a gray marble floor and a sectional piece in the middle, pure white, where about a dozen people could sit among the pillows and look at the paintings and pieces of sculpture that didn't make any sense at all.  The room was pale gray and pink and white except for a black marble cocktail table.  There were white flowers on it--no ashtrays--and several copies of a magazine, fanned out, called Saavy.

Part of what I love about this is that it only pretends to be a just-the-facts description.  The details register and sum to a judgment.  Museum, mausoleum.  Speaking of Moby-Dick, the whiteness of the place is like that of the whale.  The fanned magazines were never meant to be read.  The art objects don't make any sense but an ashtray would.   The plot to this novel was kick-started when Stick, the protagonist, got dragged to the similarly gaudy residence of a criminal and, wandering around, was accosted by the tough-talking owner.  Who are ya?  An appraiser?  See anything ya like?  Stick lets his eyes drift around the place, then fixes them back on the owner and says, after a brief pause, "No, I guess I don't." 

Joyce's Dubliners: "Clay" and "A Painful Case"

In "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts," men find no cheer in marriage.  The next two stories in Dubliners are "Clay" and "A Painful Case."  The main characters in these stories aren't married but the color of their lives is gray, too.

Maria, in "Clay," works at a Protestant home for fallen women.  Her physical description is that of a witch--"a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin."  She's prim, like the interior decoration that repels Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud."  The people in these stories by Joyce tend to be small and what some people call "fussy."

In the story, she has the evening off and is travelling to a party at a home where she formerly worked, caring for children who are now grown.  She has some very minor adventures--or misadventures--along the way: maybe it is not too much to regard "Clay" as a very, very small mock odyssey.  What one notices, in the rather drab narration of Maria's preparations and travel, is her heightened response to suggestions of sexuality or matrimony. While dressing, she studies her body in a mirror, and judges it, despite the years, "a nice tidy little body."  She stops along the way to buy cake for the party and blushes when the girl at the counter asks whether it's wedding cake she wants.  Back on the tram with the cake, she makes small talk with a man who has had a few drinks.  Her reaction to this ordinary encounter is such that she forgets the cake on the tram.  At the party, she plays a blindfold game that had earlier been alluded to back at her work: when someone predicted she'd pick the ring, a symbol of marriage, she had laughed nervously and denied she wanted a man.  In the event, she picks a saucer on which some mischievous girls have put something soft and wet--clay, a symbol of mortality.  The girls are scolded and Maria takes another turn.  This time she chooses a prayer book. 

As the story comes to a close, Maria is asked to sing a song, "one of the old songs" called "I Dreamt that I Dwelt."  Blushing, she sings the first verse, in which the speaker celebrates a mutually fulfilling love affair, and, having finished this verse, by mistake sings it again in "a tiny quavering voice."  Her mistake is overlooked by the host, who has had too much to drink, and the story ends.

"A Painful Case" features a man who is single by choice.  He has orderly habits, works in a bank, has liberal political views but dislikes the people whose cause has his intellectual support.  He doesn't like anyone, actually.  He has a brief dalliance with a married woman but breaks it off when it becomes evident that she is emotionally starved and wants from him more than a dalliance.   Her neediness repels him and his life falls back into the same pattern.  After some years pass, he is one evening eating dinner in a restaurant and sees in his newspaper a story headlined "A Painful Case" concerning a woman's suicide.  It's the woman with whom he had had the small affair.  His food congeals as he reads the threadbare account of the "accident" at the train tracks.  His default reaction is to feel disgusted with her again, and confirmed in his decision to leave her.  But as he ponders his thoughts turn and he feels that he is "outcast from life's feast."  That striking phrase recurs in his sad nearly swooning revery, and the reader understands to whom the newspaper headline, and title of this great story, applies.  

Joyce's Dubliners: "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts"

After "The Boarding House," the next two stories in Dubliners are "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts."  They have a similar structure, for in both a man comes home in the evening somewhat the worse for having had a few--"where there are four Irishmen," my wife's Irish grandmother says, "there's usually a fifth"--and faces a discouraging domestic situation.  We have noted how the age of the main character keeps getting older as we progress through these stories, from schoolboys in the first few to the late-teen Eveline and now to thirtyish men in "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts."  They're married with children and things are not going well.  When the "hero" of "Counterparts" arrives home near the end of the story, he enters the kitchen and, finding it dark and empty, bawls out his wife's name.  There then follows this terse summary of their life together:

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.  They had five children.  A little boy came running down the stairs. 

The story ends when the man beats this boy who is guilty of being present. It's an ugly scene but we are prevented from condemning him, perhaps, by the manner in which the objective, humanly convincing narrative of the man's suffocating work-a-day life has been rendered in the portion of the story I've skipped over.

The main character of "A Little Cloud" would be too timid to beat anyone.  When he gets home, his wife berates him before handing off the baby so she can shop for tea before the store closes.  When she gets back, the baby is crying and she berates him again.  In between, he has been studying their flat, especially a picture of his wife and the "prim" furniture that reminds him of her.  The theme of all these stories is entrapment.

Middlemarch

Finished Middlemarch yesterday.  According to Wikipedia, its author, Marian Evans, used the pen name George Eliot "to ensure her books would be taken seriously."  Having spent a couple of months sunk in Middlemarch, I have my own amateur's theory.  The book is so full of learning and intelligence that, had it sprung from the mind of a female (which, of course, it did), the critical reception might have been marred somewhat by the jealousy of male writers.  Besides the apt and ranging chapter epigraphs drawn from world literature, there is the evident mastery of diverse subjects, from contemporary politics and business to the practice of medicine to an unsentimental but sympathetic grasp of human psychology.  And it's all executed with such leisurely assurance.  If the best novel in the English language was not written by James Joyce, then it's probably Middlemarch.

I have one bit of amateurish psychology regarding Eliot.  She doesn't go in much for villains. I think she might have assented to the maxim that one who understood all would forgive all, and in that case she herself would be obliged to forgive a lot, for there doesn't seem to be anything she doesn't comprehend.  But is she not hard on Rosamond Vincy?  And isn't beautiful, spoiled Rosamond, who marries the admirable Dr Lydgate and then almost destroys him with her bitchy egocentrism, just the sort of woman that a homely genius like Marian Evans might especially despise? About the only thing to be said against Lydgate is that he was fool enough to marry Rosamond. I wonder whether Eliot wasn't in her fiction working out some bitterness--exercising her prerogative to take authorly revenge.

Virginia Woolf's famous dictum concerning Middlemarch is that it is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."  Less well known is the opinion of another woman, from the other side of the Atlantic.  In a letter to a relative, Emily Dickinson asked, "What do I think of Middlemarch?"--and began her reply with another question: "What do I think of glory?"

 

Flannery O'Connor and her prayers

The current New Yorker includes a selection of prayers (behind a subscriber wall) by Flannery O'Connor, best known as the author of A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, two story collections that she completed before dying, at age 39, on August 3, 1964.  After graduating college, she spent a year at the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, where she kept a ruled notebook in which she addressed handwritten entries to God. 

They're sort of crazy.  Her stories have a hard kick--someone said, I think aptly, that you laugh and laugh and then finally may wonder what it is that you are laughing at.  But these prayers, or diary letters to God, aren't funny at all.   She's relieved to have the peace that comes from having banished sexual desire, but then it comes calling again, and she's full of self-reproach.  She's serious about heaven and hell.  She disparages science.  Regarding her fiction, she analogously credits God for whatever is meritorious in it: God is to her as she is to typewriter.  Perhaps you, as I, think this might all be more interesting if you knew more about abnormal psychology.  Predictably, abnormal psychology is another subject for which she has nothing but disdain.  Ha, ha!

When I was in college, I had a short story course for which we were required to buy The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  It came in at around 1500 pages and included 109 stories by 87 authors.  O'Connor was represented by three stories.  In one, a family is going on a car trip.  The grandma is chatty, full of what barely qualifies as conventional wisdom.  She keeps up a running commentary, part of which involves current events--a notorious criminal known as the Misfit is on the loose.  Then there is car trouble.  Sure enough, the Misfit and his men come upon the scene. The whole family is murdered.  One of the Misfit's men makes a joke while sliding down a ditch with a body, and the story ends when the Misfit rebukes him: 

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," the Misfit said.  "It's no real pleasure in life."

In another, the main character decides to have a likeness of Christ tattooed on his back.  The tattoo artist gives him a book of Christian art to look through for possible models.  He flips past the familiar ones--"The Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus, Jesus the Physician's Friend."  Finally he chooses, to have tattooed on his back, "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."

Hers is an unusual sensibility.  She's really popular at Catholic universities but I wonder what she'd think of her most enthusiastic admirers.  Probably more than she thinks of us Sunday morning sippers of Bloody Marys.  There's enough of her disdain to go around.  Regarding the savage grotesqueries in her stories, she commented: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures."

 

Dickens or Eliot

Having been happily sunk in Middlemarch for several weeks now, I finally got around to googling the author, Mary Ann Evans (pen name: George Eliot), and was amused to read, in the description accompanying the second return, that she was "one of the leading female English novelists of the 19th century."  This seems a lot like calling Tiger Woods one of the best mixed-race golfers on the PGA tour. It's a BBC History site, and if you click the link you discover that the article itself avoids being ridiculous by leaving off "female":  "one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century." 

The principal competition would be Dickens and I have to say that I like Middlemarch better than any of his books I've read.  But it's like Tolstoy or Dostoevski.  There's  no accounting for taste.  With Dostoevski and Dickens you have wounded geniuses working it out with pen and paper.  Tolstoy and Eliot seem more like naturals to me.  No wound necessary.  They were born to be omniscient narrators. 

 

Joyce's Dubliners: "The Boarding House"

The trial of the neighborhood-watch champion of Florida has begun, the New England Patriots' tight end has been charged with an execution-style homicide, President Obama has ended his silence about climate change, and the Supreme Court has ruled on voting rights, the Defense of Marriage Act, and California's Prop 8.  Where to begin?  How about with "The Boarding House," the seventh story in Joyce's Dubliners and one of my favorites.

Roaming hither and thither in the critical literature, one forms the idea that "The Boarding House" has been read as another installment in the sequence of "paralysis" stories.  Doran, a tenant in Mrs Mooney's boarding house, takes up with his landlady's 19-year-old daughter.  Mrs Mooney is alert to every new development in her house, but she does not squash the affair until it has reached a point where she calculates that Doran can be confronted and forced to marry the girl.  And she calculates correctly.  Doran feels trapped and wants to fly away, but he fears exposure, publicity,, and the loss of his job in the office of a Catholic wine merchant--a position, we are told, he has held for thirteen years.  So, just as Eveline could not bring herself to leave Ireland for a new and freer life, Doran makes a marriage that is not his but Mrs Mooney's idea, and faces a narrowing, Dublin future.

The main problem with this is that it makes Doran the star of the show.  It also makes Mrs Mooney, who executed the trap that Doran won't escape, a candidate for villainhood.  But here is how the story starts:

Mrs Mooney was a butcher's daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman.  She had  married her father's foreman and opened a butcher's shop near Spring Gardens.  But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil.  He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt.  It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after.  By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business.  One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour's house.

After that they lived apart.  She went to the priest and got a separation from him with care of the children. . . .  Mrs Mooney, who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business and set up a boarding-house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing woman.

She's not a villain.  She's a woman who's been kocked about some and learned how to take care of herself. There's a detail that, on first reading, is easy to glide past:

Mrs Mooney sat in the straw arm-chair and watched the servant Mary remove the breakfast things.  She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help make Tuesday's bread pudding.

She's a close calculator and she may not have miscalculated since she married her father's foreman.  I feel about her the way I feel about those weeds that grow up in the cracks of your sidewalk.  You don't like them but your dislike is mitigated by something like admiration. 

Bloomsday

Another Bloomsday, this one coinciding with Father's Day--which seems poignantly fitting, for Mr Bloom lost a son in infancy and has never fully recovered: it's the main source of his tender, loitering sorrow.  If you've ever thought of diving into Ulysses, generally regarded as the best novel ever written in the English language--and possibly the second most demanding, behind only Joyce's next and last offering, Finnegan's Wake--read this appreciation (especially section 3) from  Michael Chabon to boost  you into the morning hours of Mr Bloom's adventures on the sixteenth of June, 1904, in Dublin. 

Meanwhile, I've been devoting a post to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners, Joyce's first  and most accessible work.  But in this post I'm going to skip lightly over the fifth and sixth, which are "After the Race" and "Two Gallants."  They aren't my favorites.  The young Joyce despised Dublin, and these are the stories in which his disdain is most thinly veiled.  Moreover the stories bear a weight of symbolic representation that to me seems labored: their three gallants are meant to stand for all Ireland, but they are just three sorry samplings of humanity such as one might meet up with anywhere.  Still: it's only in comparison to the others  that these seem weak.  Here is the interior monologue of one "gallant" as he sits in a cheap restaurant refreshing himself toward the end of his despiciable little adventure:

He would be thrity-one in November.  Would he never get a good job?  Would he never have a home of his own?  He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to.  He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls.  He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too.  Experience had embittered his heart against the world.  But all hope had not left him.  He felt better after having eaten than he had felt before, less weary of his life, less vanquished in spirit.  He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready. 

I've indicated that the stories display too crudely Joyce's disdain but you could not fairly say that he sneers.  This sponge's loftiest goal is to make a mercenary marriage and he is at least dimly aware that it would require a simple-minded girl to realize it.  That is all true.  To hate the man, however, you have to be simple-minded yourself. 

Joyce's Dubliners: "Eveline"

Harry Levin once observed that, likely as a consequence of having lived his life in near blindness, Joyce's fiction is of "low visibility."  The other senses predominate, and "Eveline," the fourth story in Dubliners, is suffused with the smell of dusty cretonne and the sound of a street organ.  We may surmise that the cretonne is the material of the draperies in Eveline's Dublin home.  And we're told that when her mother was lying on her death bed in that house, her father had been angered when the sound of a street organ had wafted into the sick room, so that the sound of one now reminds Eveline of her promise to her dying mother to hold the family together as best she could.  But it's a narrow, hard life.  Her father is cruel and drinks too much.  One brother (her favorite) is dead.  Another brother has moved away.  Eveline, who is 19, is responsible for two younger siblings and housework.  She also supplies much of the household income by working at an unrewarding shop job.  The one bright spot is her boyfried, Frank, a sailor.  He has proposed to her and she is weighing an elopement--to Buenos Aires.  Should she stay or should she go?

She has written her letters, and she leaves for the ship.  But then she can't do it.  Probably she should have.  It's not a good sign that the cretonne in the house smells of dust.  She had promised her mother, however.  And this narrow life of unsensational sacrifice is not the worst one to be imagined. 

The central figures in the three earlier stories had been even younger than Eveline.  Joyce did not conceive of these stories as separate but as successive chapters concerning the citizens of Dublin.  In this regard, we might recall that the first one opened with a priest having suffered a stroke, and his young friend wondering at hearing the grown-up word paralysis.  In that first story, the word referred to a physical condition.  As a generalized spiritual malaise, it's the theme of the book, which will end with Gabriel Conroy swooning as he watches the snow, "general all over Ireland," faintly falling and covering everything, "all the living and the dead." 

Joyce's Dubliners: "Araby"

The third story in Dubliners is "Araby."  I wrote very briefly about it here.  It's the one you are most likely to have read, for it is frequently anthologized and assigned in literature courses on the short story.  In its favor are its brevity, the youth of the main character, and a theme that one might expect to appeal to college-aged readers.  Updike's "A&P" is popular for the same reasons.  Indeed, "A&P" seems like an updated, American version of "Araby." You can predict the "compare and contrast" essay question on the midterm.

By the time you've finished the first three stories, you have an idea of what Joyce is about in Dubliners.  Things are not stated but suggested.  Hardly anything of note seems to happen.  There is nothing showy about the prose.  All seems calculated to create an aura of gray drabness.  The characters in the stories feel it but can't escape.  What's suggested but not stated in "Araby"?  The narrator's high hopes, the holy feeling he has when thinking of Mangan's sister and of giving her a gift.  O, love!  But when he finally gets to the bazaar, it's late.  The sellers are closing up, counting money.  He overhears bits of coarse conversation.  At a stall, he can barely get the attention of the sales girl, who resents the interruption of her conversation with two boys.  Then the conclusion:

I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real.  Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar.  I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket.  I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out.  The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

The end.  The last sentence calls attention to itself: the mutedness is dropped in favor of a rare statement of strong emotion.  I like the sentence before that one.  The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.  The verbal associations, including how the narrator walks down the center of the bazaar, evoke a religious service in a church.  But it's a market.  Everyone is on the make.  The boy longs for something sacred and is swamped by the profane. 

 

Joyce's Dubliners: "An Encounter"

The title refers to "an encounter" that two Dublin boys have while skipping out of their Catholic school one late spring day.  An older man approaches them in a field, talks aimlessly with them of this and that, then walks away and--well, here, I'll just set down the passage everyone talks about:

After a long while his monologue paused.  He stood up slowly, saying he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field.  We remained silent when he had gone.  After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

--I say! Look what he's doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:

--I say . . .  He's a queer old josser!

When the man returns to the boys, the one named Mahony runs off, leaving the narrator alone to listen to talk that now seems more menacing.  Boys must not have sweethearts.  They must be whipped if they do, especially if they lie about it.  The narrator stands up and leaves during a pause in the odd monologue.  He joins Mahony and the story ends.

The story had begun with descriptions of the Catholic school routine and the games the boys played when school was out.  The narrator allows to drop his dissatisfaction with his life:

The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself.  But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The game of hooky thus acquires the aspect of an initial striking out for the territory, but the boys meet up only with ordinary scenes of Dublin life, to which the adjective "squalid" is at one point applied, before the encounter with the old josser.  The story is not an advertisement for Dublin, though the boys' route through the city is carefully, almost lovingly, chronicled, with reference to the actual street names--North Strand Road, Wharf Road (a popular name for East Wall Road)--so that assisted by Google maps one can today trace their steps.

Joyce's Dubliners: "The Sisters"

No one has ever been able to figure out why the first story is called "The Sisters," for it is about the troubled priest, who dies in the course of the very short story, and the boy narrator he has befriended.  The boy lives with his aunt and uncle, so it may not be the first time his life has been affected by death, but it quite likely is the first time he is conscious of his own reaction.  He walks up to the house where the priest lived with his two sisters and thinks of entering to pay his respects.  Then:

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock.  I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went.  I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.

Later, accompanied by his aunt, he does visit the mourning house.  When the boy first learned that the priest had died, a friend of his uncle's had hinted broadly that there was something the matter with the priest and his relationship with the boy, and the reader therefore strains, during the visit that closes the story, to discover what that might all be about.  One of the sisters tells a story suggesting that the priest suffered from mental illness, but it's hard to grasp exactly what the truth is, and the story ends. 

This was not the method of O. Henry.  While I have no evidence that it's true, it pleases me to think that the title is a literary tip of the hat to a writer whose method may be detected in Dubliners.

Children's stories

What's going on, Louis Menand once asked, in The Cat in the Hat?  Two young children, home alone on a rainy day, the door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish.  What was their mother thinking?  Where had she gone?  These questions are the invisible mass of the iceberg moving beneath the water. 

I thought of Menand this evening while reading Curious George.  The man in the yellow hat--do I worry too much, or are we supposed to worry about him?  He travels to Africa, captures George, hauls him across the ocean, and, after some implausible adventures, including the monkey enjoying a nap and "a good pipe," deposits him in the zoo.  What a wonderful place for George to live!  That is how it  ends, but I don't believe it.  Or approve it.  If I was the chooser, instead of just the reader, I would opt for Al Perkins's version of King Midas and the Golden Touch, at least on nights the Twins aren't on TV (it's sort of long).  It's never too early to learn to distrust your wishes, and this version makes the king's palpable.  Gold!  Gold!  Gold!  He's down in the palace cellar where it's stored, admiring the heaps of it, his enjoyment practically erotic in its intensity, when the temptation scene occurs.  It wouldn't be a children's story if he didn't get a second wish to cancel the first.

Reading and forgetting

I got a kick out of this, from Ian Crouch at The New Yorker Blog.  I recognized myself, having come to the bottom of the last page--". . . and yes I said yes I will Yes" (I just looked it up; all I really remembered is that the last word is "Yes")--of Joyce's Ulysses as Crouch concludes:

Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as a conquest.  As we polish off some classic text, we may pause for a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast.  Another monster bagged.

Joyce, it should be noted, said, on being asked what kind of readers he hoped for: "The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works."  The interviewer, Max Eastman, allowed that Joyce smiled as he said this--"smiled, and then repeated it."  So he expected  more than I had given him while mentally flexing over the carcass of his great work.  I don't remember much of it now.  I remember reading that Lionel Trilling said it was a great novel partly because it was the first time in the history of literature that the "hero" had sniffed his own toe jam but I do not remember reading that scene in the book.

One aspect of the case Crouch does not delve into concerns the fact that hardly anyone reads good books anymore except when assigned to by literature professors, and there is a conspiracy among them to make thoughtlessness mandatory.  I remember taking a course called "Philosophical Ideas in Literature" during the interim term--basically, the month of January--while a college student.  The reading list consisted of Moby-Dick, Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, Brand, Peer Gynt, Time Must Have a Stop, The Stranger, and The Wasteland.  In a month!  I'm probably forgetting part of the syllabus, too.  If you slept six hours per night and went to the movies on Saturday, you'd be challenged just to turn all the pages in one month, let alone permit your eye to pass over the words. 

On the general question of what to read, my only advice has already been offered by (I think) Simone Weil:  "Read only what you hunger for, because then you don't read: you eat." And remember.

Maybe everyone is already taking her advice.  It would explain why no one reads good books.

UPDATE: I've remembered now that the syllabus for "Philosophical Ideas in Literature" included also Darkness at Noon and Brave New World.  I remembered the titles but the books themselves are forgotten.  I probably "read" them, as I was a fairly dutiful average student, but they are lost to me now.  Two works by Aldous Huxley!  He must have been a particular favorite of the professor, the renowned Kierkegaard scholar and translator Howard Hong.  Huxley was known, I learn now from Wikipedia, for his interest in paranormal phenomena and experimentation with psychedelic drugs.  Doesn't sound very Kierkegaardean.

Jane

I'm not a Janeite, but I enjoy Jane Austen's novels, and over the spare quarter hours of the past week have been happily sunk in Persuasion.  It's the last of her finished  novels, and the only one of the six that I haven't read before.  I'm about half way through.  My one criticism would be that Anne's strong feeling for Captain Wentworth seems to arise from excellencies of character that she (Jane Austen) forgot to get into the book.  And what of the propensity for giving to her families three daughters even though she's only ever interested in two?  In Persuasion, it's the eldest, Elizabeth, who's forgotten.  I'll see if future developments render this observation inapt (and inept). 

I don't deny her greatness.  No author I know of has portrayed so vividly the decent mediocrities who make up the largest portion of humankind.  For example, from Persuasion:

Charles Musgrove was civil and agreeable; in sense and temper he was undoubtedly superior to his wife; but not of powers, or conversation, or grace, to make the past, as they were connected together, at all a dangerous contemplation; though, at the same time, Anne could believe, with Lady Russell, that a more equal match might have greatly improved him; and that a woman of real understanding might have given more consequence to his character, and more usefulness, rationality, and elegance to his habits and pursuits.  As it was, he did nothing with much zeal, but sport; and his time was otherwise trifled away, without benefit from books, or any thing else.  He had very good spirits, which never seemed much affected by his wife's occasional lowness; bore with her unreasonableness sometimes to Anne's admiration; and, upon the whole, though there was very often a little disagreement, they might pass for a happy couple.

The passage is ostensibly about Charles, though perhaps more is revealed about his wife, Mary--and perhaps more yet about marriage.  My edition, from the Everyman Library, includes a Select Bibliography that recommends Norman Page's The Language of Jane Austen, "a unique and compelling study based on statistical analyses of the most common words in Austen."  I'm guessing "tolerable" earns a mention.  It seems to be almost her favorite adjective, and its connotations seem a fair summary of what her clear-eyed gaze discovered. 

Sickness: the upsides

One prescription for longevity, according to someone (Lewis Thomas?), is to contract a chronic disease and then take good care of it. The idea is that the ill are less apt to smoke, or drink and drive, or drive fast without seat belts, or have unprotected sex with lots of partners, and are as a result likely to live, with an assist from modern medicine, all the days that their one piece of bad luck allows.  There are other upsides to illness.  For example, it is conducive to indoor pursuits.  I'd been making my way through Mansfield Park at the rate of two chapters per day, but, admitted to the hospital for a night and two days, I was through the last hundred pages in a single, sick-aided bound. 

I have to report that the novel does not work on me in the way I imagine Jane Austen intended.  I am not able to regard amateur theatricals as a gateway to depravity, or the high-spirited Crawford siblings as blackguards, or the adulterous affair of a family member as an occasion for personal humiliation and self-lacerating woe.  But what the hell?  Part of "the experience of literature" must be the broadening exposure to different outlooks.  Tolstoy was hysterical on the same general topics and he is probably one of the handful of people in the history of the world who was an even greater novelist than she.

Austen, Frost: two anniversaries

The New Yorker's Page Turner blog calls attention to a couple literary anniversaries of this past week--the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frost's death (Wednesday) and the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Tuesday). 

Joshua Rothman, in his commemorative post, takes up the issue of the divide between Frost's ruddy public personality and the rather desperate view of things expressed in his best poems.  In this essay, from The New York Review of February 1, 1963, Robert Lowell took up the same issue and summed up the poetry side of the question in this paragraph:

Randall Jarrell has a fine phrase about Frost’s “matter-of-fact magnificence.” He writes that the poems’ subjects are isolation, extinction, and the learning of human limitation. These three themes combine, I think, in a single main theme, that of a man moving through the formless, the lawless and the free, of moving into snow, air, ocean, waste, despair, death, and madness. When the limits are reached, and sometimes almost passed, the man returns.

While you're perusing Lowell on Frost, check out the Table of Contents for that issue of The New York Review.  Articles by Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Elizabeth Hardwick, W.H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Adrienne Rich, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, a poetry page that included three of Berryman's Dream Songs. . . .  I see now that it was Volume One, Number One, and I think they succeeded in making a fabulous first impression.

Two posts on Jane Austen have caused me to plunge again into her novels.  I'm starting on Sense and Sensibility, which I've passed by before, and find, on one of the first pages, the following description of Elinor Dashwood:

Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence.  She had an excellent heart,--her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong, but she knew how to govern them. . . .

I don't know much about Jane Austen, but I've read three of her novels--Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey--and Elinor sounds to me like the kind of person who could have written them.