Wodehouse's letters

In need of a quick post today, I find Jeeves coming, as usual, to the rescue. Well, not Jeeves so much as his creator: I can't believe I've not yet mentioned the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters.

For a proper review of the volume, you couldn't do better than my fellow Invisible Librarian Ed Park's for Bookforum (which I just amused myself by mistyping Bookfuror). One of Ed's most interesting observations concerns the disjunction between Wodehouse's meticulous plotting and an expressed desire for its opposite:

How interesting, then, to read what a younger Wodehouse wrote to a friend in 1914: “That is what I’ve always wanted to be able to do, to interest the reader for about five thousand words without having any real story. At present, I have to have an author-proof plot, or I’m no good.” Voice is subservient to narrative. Of course, an author as long-lived as Wodehouse will change his views on craft and ambition over the years. But in that contradiction between form and style—in a pinch, predestination and free will—lies a curious truth. Could it be that for us readers (after all, the most important part of this equation), Wodehouse in the end achieved his goal of dispensing with “any real story”? “It’s just a question of detail,” Wodehouse remarks about the composition, after the heavy lifting is done. Perhaps the aspects of his books that give us the most pleasure—the utter insouciance, the similes of fizzy genius (comparing, to pluck at random from the sacred oeuvre, a dour countenance to a “V-shaped depression off the coast of Iceland”)—could only be arrived at once the scaffolding was absolutely secure. Which is to say, a reader with much on his mind about the uncertainties of life might well have deeper reasons for immersing himself in a story called “There’s Always Golf.”

It's well worth clicking through to read the rest--there are few writers whose comedic sense I trust more than Ed's, and that comes through in his choice of lines to quote.

For my part, I'll share just two of the bits that have greatly amused me as I've flipped through the book. First comes from a letter to Wodehouse's daughter, Leonora, of July 3, 1921:

Love Among the Chickens is out in the cheap edition. I'll send you a copy. Townend told me it was on sale at the Charing Cross bookstall, so I rolled round and found they had sold out. Thence to Piccadilly Circus bookstall. Sold out again. Pretty good in the first two days. Both men offered to sell me "other Wodehouse books," but I smiled gently on them and legged it.

Just as Bertie would have done.

Then there's this account, sent to his friend William Townend in 1932, of a visit to H. G. Wells's house:

I like Wells, but the trouble with him is that you can never see him alone. He is accompanied wherever he goes by the woman he's living with. When they came to lunch, we were all set to listen to his brilliant table talk, and she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways, monopolizing the conversation while he sat looking like a crushed rabbit. I did manage to get him away in a corner after lunch long enough for him to tell me that he had an arrangement with her that when he went to London, he went by himself, and he added, his face lighting up, that he was going to London next week. Then she yelled for him, and he trotted off.

By the way, when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.

Her idea, I imagine. I can't believe Wells would have thought of that himself.

What makes that letter even more deliciously amusing is that--as editor Sophie Ratcliffe points out in a note, Wodehouse used that very image a mere six years later in The Code of the Woosters. Bertie explains that at the house of a newly married friend he'd seen, over the fireplace, "the legend 'Two Lovers Built This Nest,' and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it."

I would be falling down on one of my self-imposed Internet duties if I didn't close with some lines from Wodehouse's one letter to Anthony Powell, from 1967. A bookseller had sent him Powell's 1939 novel What's Become of Waring, and Wodehouse sent Powell a note of appreciation:

I have always admired your work so much, especially the Music of Time series. The early ones are all fine, but what I like, and what I suppose everyone likes, is the feeling that one is living with a group of characters and sharing their adventures, the whole thing lit up by the charm which is your secret. I hope the series is going on for ever. I should hate to feel that I should never meet Widmerpool again.

Which leads to two thoughts:

1 It's interesting that Wodehouse likes Dance, for Powell's sense of time couldn't be more different from Wodehouse's: the latter's characters are trapped in amber, living forever in a prelapsarian (or at least pre–World War I) wonderland, while Powell's are forever moving, paced by death and driven by various and sundry furies, acted upon by time in ways they could never have predicted.

2 I'm pleased that Wodehouse uses the word "charm." It's undeniably one of Dance's great qualities, yet it's not one I've ever properly identified by that name. But Wodehouse is right: there are few books whose wit and humanity are more delicately charming than Dance.

Charles Portis yet again

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Though I'll cop to being 'round the moon for the novels of Charles Portis, I've only been a fan for a couple of years. (Thanks, Ed Park!) So presumably I can be forgiven for not knowing this story of one of the many times in the past four decades that he's been rediscovered:

The earliest inclusion in my Portis file was a 1984 story from the New York Times. . . . The story told of two bookstore employees in New York who were so smitten with Portis's five-year-old out-of-print novel The Dog of the South that they bought all 183 remaning hardcover copies (it had never appeared in paperback) and set them up as the sole window display in the Madison Avenue Bookshop. The books sold fast, to the curious and to those collared by the hand-selling bookstore staff.

The story comes from Jay Jennings's introduction to the new collection of Portis miscellany that he edited, Escape Velocity. Portis, sadly, is such a strange writer--too funny to be taken up by those who require their great novels to announce themselves as such; too haphazardly regional to be our designated national jester; too earnest in his ironies to be slotted comfortably, well, anywhere--that it seems likely he'll need to be rediscovered in perpetuity, exhumed with the pickaxes of praise once a generation or so.

The very existence of Escape Velocity, then, is a reason for celebration, a sign that for now the Portisean moon is in the seventh house, tarpaper and shotgun though its accompanying adjectives may be. Portis fans don't need my encouragement to plunk down twenty-eight of their ill-gotten dollars for it, but just in case, I'll offer up a passage--selected, mind you, nearly at random--to make my case. It comes from a four-part series on quitting smoking that Portis wrote for the International Herald Tribune in 1962:

Another day of lethargy in this bee-loud glade, trying to kick the smoking habit. It appears every one will make it but me.

I did, however, beat a kid at ping-pong three straight games. He had little short arms and all I had to do was tip the ball over the net out of his reach. So much for his nicotine-free lungs.

To think: the subscribers of 1962 had not a whit of context in which to place those sentences! What on earth would one think, sitting down to his shimmer-weak percolator coffee (and, let's be honest, breakfast cigarette), shaking straight the page, and reading this man's bragging about beating a child? But we know: those paragraphs are pure Portis.

Buy Portis. Read Portis. You'll be the better for it.

Harry Mathews

If you've not yet checked out the new issue of the Quarterly Conversation, by all means do so. In addition to the usual spate of strong reviews (including one from the always-worthwhile Patrick Kurp), the issue features a symposium on one of the most interesting living American writers, Harry Mathews.

I've written about Mathews and his strange, funny, linguistically and structurally experimental fiction before. If you've not read those posts, you should at least go check out the one that draws on his Paris Review interview and features a perplexed Bennett Cerf saying, about Mathews's novel The Conversions, "Mr. Mathews, I don’t know what the hell you’re up to and I think you owe it to Random House readers to explain!"

In the TQC symposium, Dan Visel takes a crack at explaining the book that baffled Cerf. Jeremy Davies writes about Mathews's most conventional novel, the surprisingly moving Cigarettes, as does A. D. Jameson, who focuses on the novel's complicated plot. Laird Hunt writes about another of my favorite Mathews novels, the dryly funny and playful My Life in CIA, John Beer addresses the poetry, and Daniel Levin Becker writes about Mathews's book of fractured proverbs, Selected Declarations of Dependence. Sadly, no one attends to Matthews's Singular Pleasures, a goofy book of microfictions that are all about masturbation. I guess that one's less appropriate for group analysis than for solo study.

And on top of all that there's my favorite piece, a memoir of discovering Mathews by none other than my fellow Invisible Librarian, Ed Park. After reading a few of these essays, you'll have a pretty good idea, I suspect, whether Mathews is for you--and if so, you'll be incredibly grateful, for he's a truly singular writer, one whose work, despite an often rebarbative surface, stays with you for a long time after reading.

The very existence of this entry, I fear, suggests that I need a hobby (beyond, that is, this blogging thing).

{Photo by Flickr user penreyes, used under a Creative Commons license that reserves some rights.}

At a party a couple of weeks ago, my friend Joseph Clayton Mills and I got onto the topic of Chet Morton, friend of the Hardy Boys; brother of Joe Hardy's girlfriend, Iola; and inveterate hobbyist. I mentioned my favorite of Chet's one-per-book hobbies, taxidermy, and Joseph countered that he was always most impressed by Chet's brief passion for falconry.

"Falconry?" I asked. "Where in Bayport would Chet have encountered falconry, the sport of kings?"

Then, earlier this week, I stumbled upon what I thought might be the answer: perhaps Chet's interest in falconry began with a session of George Plimpton's Video Falconry on Biff Hooper's Colecovision?



This led Joseph to some quick research on the subject of Chet's hobbies. The list on Wikipedia, he reported, is "woefully inadequate," but the entry did deliver this remarkable bit of information:

Chet is one of the most popular characters in The Hardy Boys. In fact, by the mid-sixties, Chet had become so popular that in 1965 the Stratemeyer Syndicate was planning to develop a series about him and his hobbies.

It seems that the Stratemeyer Syndicate did a lot of work on this series (even some complete chapters were written), yet the Syndicate never began to publish it.

And that's not all:

A list of proposed titles in the Chet Morton series were found in the Stratemeyer Archives at the New York Public Library.
1. Chet Morton and the Funny Putty Caper
2. Chet Morton and the Talking Turkey
3. Chet Morton and the Mighty Muscle Builder
4. Chet Morton and the Stolen Flea Circus
5. Chet Morton and his Electronic Exam Passer
6. Chet Morton and his Bird-Brain Blimp
7. Chet Morton and the Monkey’s Uncle
8. Chet Morton and the Flying Fruitcake
9. Chet Morton and the Mystery at Tucks Cove
10 Chet Morton and the Mystery at the Friar Tuck House
11 Chet Morton and the Mystery of Ben's Bat

Those aren't quite Invisible Library titles, but I couldn't resist at least passing them on to my fellow invisible librarian, Ed Park, who replied, "Why do I feel like these could all be euphemisms in House of Holes??"

Surely someone's already working on the Chet Morton fanfiction, right?

On the pleasures of Dungeons and Dragons, a game I've never played

{Photos by rocketlass.}

When rocketlass and I were in New York last fall, Ed Park was kind enough to invite us over. We'd only been there a few minutes when I looked up from a conversation with Ed's elder son and saw Ed and rocketlass at the bookshelf, engrossed in Ed's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide. When I walked over, they were looking at--I'm not making this up--a table showing the amount of damage a character would take in a battle with tentacled creatures . . . and how that damage would increase with each additional tentacle. The mind boggled, pleasantly.

I would gladly have played D&D as a kid, but I wasn't living in that sort of town. Rocketlass still plays occasionally--I think she's a chaotic half-shark-alligator half-gully dwarf or something--and I knew that Ed had been fascinated by D&D and roleplaying games since childhood (as evidenced by this wonderful story for the Significant Objects series on a little-known game called The Mountains of Moralia.)

But even that knowledge didn't prepare me for the pleasure offered by Ed's piece about the Dungeon Master's Guide in the recent anthology Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Books. It's funny, loving, and self-questioning--all the things that a non-sappy essay on one's most cherished book should be--and on top of that, it's formally inventive. I'll share a few highlights, which, stripped from context, will seem a bit more fragmentary than they really are.



Here's one that gets at the charm of the obsessive specificity of the game's rulebook:

35. "Some of the words I've never encountered since. Psionics, which was this trippy other level of playing in which a character had all sorts of powerful mental abilities. It was distinct from magic--any character could choose to be a magic-user, but psionics was something you either had or didn't, and it was very unlikely you had it. I think there was a 1 in 100 chance you had psionic capability."

36. "I liked how so much space was devoted to a trait that so few characters would have. To a situation that might never come up. Just in case. Worlds within worlds."

And this:

42. "The Colors of Gemstones. Chances of Knowing the Answer to a Question."

43. "Intoxication Recovery Table."

44. "Cubic Volume of Rock Per 8 Hours Labor Per Miner."

That list represents the very organized quality that would have appealed to me as a pre-teen boy--the sense it gives that the world really is explicable if you are willing to apply yourself and, more important, be systematic. Lacking potential D&D partners, I met that need with Bill James's baseball writing, a gateway drug to nerddom of a different sort.

Then there's this, familiar from hours spent gawping in Waldenbooks:

70. "Look at this cover! It's totally insane. I'm amazed my parents allowed me to read this stuff at all. That they bought me this! Check it out. You've got this near-nude fire giant or demon or chaotic evil demigod, muscles bulging, looking rigid as a statue, with weird yellow flames dancing around his body and two horrible-looking horns coming out his forehead and a set of fangs and a nose like a fleur-de-lis and little inexpressive sunbursts where his eyes should be."

Which leads, inevitably, as it did in life, to this:

71. "Mom, it's not Satanic!"

If these excerpts have whetted your appetite, you should read the whole essay; on its own, it's worth the cost of the book, and that's before you get to Ray Bradbury's touching introduction about his Halloween-loving aunt and Edgar Allan Poe, or Karen Joy Fowler's piece on her youthful defense of The Once and Future King, one of my own favorites.

And if after reading Ed on the Dungeon Master's Guide, you find your taste for D&D isn't sated, I'd recommend Paul LaFarge's amazing 2006 interview with D&D inventor Gary Gygax for the Believer and this Grognardia post, to which D&D fans have appended their favorite examples of Gygaxian prose. Trust me: once you get sucked into that labyrinth, you'll wish you'd memorized the chart about the tentacles.

James Wood and the comic novel

This week’s issue of the New Yorker features one of James Wood’s most interesting reviews in a while, a dismissal of Howard Jacobson’s Booker-winning novel, The Finkler Question. The novel is one I wouldn’t have been likely to pick up anyway; rather, what’s interesting about the review is how Wood uses it to characterize a particular type of bad comic writing--and thereby define a different, better version as well.

After explaining that The Finkler Question “is always shouting at the reader,” as if it needs to make sure we’re getting the joke, Wood states his broader case:

The problem might be put like this. There is comedy, and then there is something called the Comic Novel, and these are related to each other rather as the year is related to a pocket diary--the latter a meaner, tidier, simpler version of the former. Comedy is the angle at which most of us see the world, the way that our very light is filtered. The novel is, by and large, a secular, comic form: one can be suspicious of any novelist who seems entirely immune to the comic. But the Comic Novel flattens comedy into the bar code of “the joke”--a strip of easy-to-swipe predictability. The Comic Novel might imagine itself descended from Cervantes and Fielding, but it is really the stunted offspring of Waugh and Wodehouse, lacking the magic of either. In the work of English comic writers like David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, and Tom Sharpe, there is, too often, a tiresome need to be always seen to be funny. The novel’s prose may be calm enough, but the novel’s form will seem exaggerated, because it is monochromatically devoted to funniness, as a fever is devoted to heat.

I think the phrase he's looking for here is "flop sweat."

Wood is at his best when he’s writing on the comic; though his book on comedy, The Irresponsible Self, is just a collection of review essays, it is more consistently interesting--and convincing--than his other two books. And he makes an important, useful distinction here: most novels worth reading are comic; not all of them are comic novels. Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is unquestionably comic, though you would be hard-pressed to find anything that could be called a joke in it. There is comedy in Iris Murdoch (though it’s overwhelmed by romance), in Barbara Pym, in Trollope, and in Halldor Laxness--to pick just four writers off my shelves. Those four are wildly disparate, but all in their own ways are practicing a form of psychological realism, and all realize that such an approach to the world requires them also to acknowledge their characters' occasional absurdities, smallnesses, and failures. Even such grim writers as Hilary Mantel or Roberto Bolano find room for comedy--hell, Richard Stark, in his Parker novels, some of the hardest-edged books I know, can’t help but allow glimmers of comedy to peek through, simply because he’s attending closely to the ways of people.

None of those writers (with the exception of Powell) are as funny as J. F. Powers, another of my favorites--nor did they set out to be--but a description of Powers’s writing from Wood’s essay about him in The Irresponsible Self would seem to apply to them as well, if in lesser form:

Powers is at his most comic when catching, as if by luck, this brackish overflow of people’s souls. . . . Powers shows again what comic realism can do: how it attends to the human exception, how it scathes our pretensions and blesses our weaknesses.

Wood’s other category is also clear--and, not unsurprisingly, it overlaps quite a bit with his other bete noir, the bustling, capacious, cosmopolitan genre he calls “Hysterical Realism.” It is the “cartoonish and inauthentic reality” he has complained of in Rushdie, the “pursuit of vitality at all costs” that he notes in Pynchon and others; you could take this description of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and apply it, nearly unchanged, to Wood’s demolition of The Finkler Question:

As realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic.

By pointing out the overlap between the two, I don’t intend to criticize, or even seem to be making a particularly revelatory point: I appreciate that Wood is consistent, and I expect that, pejorative labels aside, Howard Jacobson wouldn’t balk at a categorization scheme that placed The Finkler Question with White Teeth. To a large extent, I share Wood’s point of view: I prefer the quiet comedy of the former category to the manic madcap of the latter; I prefer classic psychological realism, because what I’m most interested in in fiction is the age-old question of how we are to live in this world.

Yet I feel that Wood’s division leaves something out--that for someone who truly values comedy, who loves Fielding and Wodehouse and Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and Kingsley Amis and others, who enjoys bursting into laughter on the subway (which I can’t quite imagine Wood ever doing), there are other novels that don’t quite fit the dichotomy of good/bad, gentle/madcap, natural/trying too hard that Wood sets up. They’re novels whose comedy--or perhaps satire--is not incidental, but the point, yet at the same time they neither use Wodehouse’s trick of unmooring us from all reality nor do they fall into the pit Wood identifies of rendering reality unintentionally unbelievable (and therefore unfunny).

Two recent examples give a clue as to how such a book can succeed: Personal Days, by my friend Ed Park, and The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. Of the two, Personal Days is by far the more sucesssful; The Ask, like Lipsyte’s previous book, Homeland, eventually collapses under the weight of its awkward plot. But along the way Lipsyte wraps the reader up in language so carefully polished that the jokes--and yes, there are jokes, a few of them awful--for the most part don’t feel like impositions, or demands for laughter, but instead feel more like the hidden sting in the sentence’s curved tail. And sting is the right term, for the rest of the genius of The Ask lies in its self-loathing, whose acid can dissolve any pretense; as you read it, you alternate between laughing and cringing. Laugh:

Bernie and Aiden slipped from their respective parental grips and commenced conversation about an action hero, something not quite human that maybe transformed or transmogrified but in any event could easily exsanguinate any mother or father or adult guardian, which was the crucial part, the takeaway, as TV commentators put it. It would have been hard to tell, witnessing the boys together now, that one had recently tried to bite off the other's penis. The flipside to the fickleness of children was their ability to transcend grudge, adjust to new conditions. Innocence, cruelty, rubbery limbs, amnesia, successful nations were erected on these qualities.

Cringe:

We knew the price of Christine’s criminally low price [for daycare], namely that under her supervision, or lack thereof, Bernie was becoming a criminal. Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for. . . . A few seasons in Christine’s cement yard with Queens County’s puniest toughs and Bernie had the strut of an old-time dockside hustler. It was hard to imagine the boy completing kindergarten; remarkably easy to picture him in a tangle of fish knives and sailor cock under some rot-soft pier.

The satire of Personal Days is much gentler, but no less on point, and it's given strength by the formal inventiveness of the novel, which allows for a sneaking accretion of emotion that unexpectedly explodes in the novel's rushing final section. Along the way, there's some truly wonderful comedy. Here, for example, is a passage that distills the frustrations of modern office life into a few short lines:

Lizzie drags an icon out of a cluttered corner of her screen but lets go too soon. It falls into the document she's working on, which happens to be her resume. The icon bounces back to its starting place with a boinggg noise she's never heard before. She learns that Word cannot insert a file into itself.

Word can seriously go fuck itself, she mutters. She's been talking to herself a lot lately but maybe we all have.

Later she's trying to put a chart into a different document but gets scolded: That is not a valid action for footnotes.

This is funny--the quick response, the finger-wagging strictness--but it also creeps her out. She calls up Pru except she accidentally dials her own extension and the little screen says, You cannot call yourself.

Our machines know more than we do, Pru thinks. Even their deficiencies and failures are instructive. They are trying to tell us something about the limits of the human, the nature of the possible. Or something like that, says Pru, who has been reading a novel about cyborgs set in the year 2012.

The message that kills us is the one that pops up on the rare occasions when we remember to shut everything down for the weekend, just before we turn the computer off.

Are you sure you want to quit?

Then there's this description of the enigmatic boss, Maxine, which absolutely revels in the pleasures of language, its shifting rhythms and registers:

Maxine's new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved fur. Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end. . . . Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with xs for eyes.

With her female competition out of the way, Maxine leveled her extremely hot gaze right at Grime, who stood his ground. He swayed in place, gently rocking on one heel. Maxine was saying something about Wednesday, but it wasn't clear whether she meant tomorrow or last Wednesday.

Grime's not-flinching was making Maxine flinch. It looked like a nod but it was actually a flinch. Lizzie and Pru saw it all unfold. They're filing away the subtleties for Jack II and his blog. Maxine lost the thread of what she was saying, eyes gleaming in panic. She could have been talking about the general concept of Wednesday, its status as a hump day, its complicated spelling. No one had seen her quiver like this before. It was like she'd been set in italics.

There was a historical vibe to the scene.

Though the two books are, themselves, wildly different--it would be hard to convey just how much less corrosive Pesonal Days is than The Ask, while being no less insightful--at the same time they're more like each other than they are like either of Wood's categories. They are neither hysterical realism nor comedy that is trying too hard: instead, they're well-grounded satire written in language of almost Nabokovian polish--and they put that language in service of a story about recognizably human characters. I wonder what Wood would think of them. Would he see that they're different from the books he's writing about--or is there, as I suspect, a limit to his sense of the comic?

All I know is that I want more novels like these, books that manage to dedicate themselves simultaneously--and almost equally--to comedy, carefully wrought prose, and the basic problems of being human. What more can a reader ask for?

"It's your notion then that Jesus was a bootlegger?," or, Riding along with Charles Portis

{Photoz by rocketlass.}

At the urging of Ed Park, about ten days ago I read Charles Portis's The Dog of the South (1979). And . . . wow. Imagine an absurd blending of the Kafka who used to double his friends up with laughter when he read his stories; those nightmares wherein there's something you desperately need to do but are forever being drawn away from--only recast in the tone of a silent fim comedy; and the showmanship, shadiness, and hucksterism of Melville's The Confidence-Man.

The result is unlike anything else I've ever read, crammed from start to finish with oddballs, dropouts, and failures, all of whom cling to this world all the more intensely for the fact that they can't quite figure out what to do with it. Ray Midge, the energetically sad-sack copy editor who is the novel's protagonist, seems to regard all the world's facts as equally important; though paring them down or assigning importance might reveal hints of a pattern, it's as if he feels an obligation not to discriminate, as if each and every detail deserves his full care--as if the world is a manuscript, and his job is to check it out. It's as admirable as it is crazy, and when he sets out on a road trip to Latin America to retrieve his runaway wife, the reader can't help but harbor some hope that, when he finds her, she'll see his awkward strangeness that way, too.

I realize that's not the most articulate account; in some sense I feel like I'm still recovering from the book. For a more considered--but just as enthusiastic--take on this book and Portis in general, you should check out Ed's article from the March 2003 issue of the Believer. Meanwhile, I'll just pass on a scene that gives a sense of Portis's off-kilter humor. Midge has just washed up in Belize in the company of Dr. Reo Symes, confidence man, scam artist, and owner of a nonworking bus named The Dog of the South. Symes has fallen ill and is to be delivered to his mother and her friend Melba, who

ate heartily for a crone, sighing and cooing between bites and jiggling one leg up and down, making the floor shake. She ate fast and her eyes bulged from inner pressure and delight. This remarkable lady had psychic gifts and she had not slept for three years, or so they told me. She sat up in a chair every night in the dark drinking coffee.

Mrs. Symes quickly starts in on Midge with a barrage of pointed, staccato personal questions:

"Why kind of Christian do you call yourself?"

"I attend church when I can."

"Cards on the table, Mr. Midge."

"Well, I think I have a religious nature. I sometimes find it hard to determine God's will."

"Inconvenient, you mean."

"That too, yes."

"What does it take to keep you from attending church?"

"I go when I can."

"A light rain?"

"I go when I can."

"This 'religious nature' business reminds me of Reo, your man of science. He'll try to tell you that god is out there in the trees an grass somewhere. Some kind of force. That's pretty thin stuff if you ask me. And Father Jackie is not much better. He says God is a perfect sphere. A ball, if you will."

"There are many different opinions on the subject."

"Did you suppose I didn't know that?"

Then, holding firm to her attitude of skepticism towards her son and all his friends, Mrs. Symes begins to ask about Reo:

"Is that woman Sybill still living with him?"

"I just don't know about that. He was by himself when I met him in Mexico."

"Good riddance then. He brought an old hussy named Sybil with him the last time. She had great big bushy eyebrows like a man. She and Reo were trying to open up a restaurant somewhere in California and they wanted me to put up the money for it. As if I had any money. Reo tells everybody I have money."

Melba said, "No, it was a singing school. Reo wanted to open a singing school."

"The singing school was an entirely different thing, Melba. This was a restaurant they were talking about. Little Bit of Austria. Sybil was going to sing some kind of foreign songs to the customers while they were eating. She said she was a night-club singer, and a dancer too. She planned to dance all around people's tables while they were trying to eat. I thought these night clubs had beautiful young girls to do that kind of thing but Sybil was almost as old as Reo."

"Older," said Melba. "Don't you remember her arms?"

"They left in the middle of the night. I remember that. Just picked up and left without a word."

"Sybil didn't know one end of a piano keyboard from the other."

"She wore shiny boots and backless dresses."

"But she didn't wear a girdle."

"She wore hardly anything when she was sunning herself back there in the yard."

"Her shameful parts were covered."

"That goes without saying, Melba. It wasn't necessary for you to say that and make us all think about it."

How can you not want to spend more time with these people?

To ease your re-entry . . .

After the pleasant languors of the one holiday weekend in which we are directly instructed not to labor, what better way to ease our return to the working world than reading a brief, perceptive, sad, and moving account of what office life was like a scant decade ago, before the Internet changed our deskbound days? If that sounds good to you, go read Ed Park's piece in L Magazine on the subject, and remind yourself of what the Internet hasn't changed, namely the assumptions and omissions and conventions that keep us from ever truly getting to know most of our colleagues. Longtime readers will not be surprised--though I hope they'll be pleased--to discover that A Dance to the Music of Time plays a part as well . . .

{I really should have linked to Ed's piece in Thursday's post that touched on the pleasures of sharing stories and discoveries with friends, for Ed is both a master sharer and a wonderful recipient; the list of good novels he's put me on to is long and, despite my efforts to keep up, pleasantly ever-growing.}

"What I like about books within books is that they never can prick my conscience. It is extraordinarily comfortable that they don't exist."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Today was yet a great day in my ongoing love affair with the Internet, one of those days that, in a real-life love affair, you mark with sappy little stars and hearts (or some impenetrable code, if you're that sort) in your daily planner, the better to remember it years later when age and familiarity have dulled the power of that moment's passion.

Quite a build-up, no? Well, see what you think . . .

It started with a Tweet yesterday from Chicago blogger (and Robert Walser booster) Sam Golden Rule Jones:

One thing I learned from [Derwent] May['s history of the TLS]: Max Beerbohm wrote an article on imaginary books (like Ed Park's recent NYT piece) in 1914.

Those of you regular readers who are familiar with Ed's and my Invisible Library project will instantly see why I perked up: Ed remembered coming across the term "Invisible Library" several years ago in the wonderful OuLiPo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews, and soon after we launched our library we learned of some earlier attempts, but if Beerbohm was already on the case back before World War I, that would dramatically extend the pedigree of Invisible Librarianship!

Alas, neither Sam nor I had access to the TLS archives, so it appeared a trip to the library was in order--and then the library came to me, in the form of a kindly e-mail from Dave Lull, Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian, who had found Beerbohm's article, "Books within Books," originally published in the 12 March 1914 issue.

And oh, the pleasures to be found therein! Beerbohm, always a pleasant stylist, has great fun with the concept:

They must, I suppose, be classed among biblia abiblia. Ignored in the catalogue of any library, not one of them lurking in any uttermost cavern under the reading-room of the British Museum, none of them ever printed even for private circulation, these books written by this and that character in fiction are books only by courtesy and good will.

After bringing in Charles Lamb for some pointed commentary about books that actually do get published, regardless of their deficiency of merit, Beerbohm admits that,

I am shy of masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers expected me to find.

No, even the recommendation of "a few highly literary friends" can be more problematic than helpful:

But so soon as I am told that I "must" read this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I become strangely loth to do anything of the sort.

The appeal of books within books, as the quote I've taken for the headline of this post indicates, lies partly in their not being there looming over us, unread, on our shelves. They can never, however inadvertently, make us feel inadequate or ill-informed . . .

And yet--for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet longings--how eagerly would I devour these books within books!

So true: what I would give to read J. G. Quiggins's Unburnt Boats or Nick Jenkins's Fellow Member?

Beerbohm goes on to run through an extensive gathering of invisible books, taking the simultaneously frustrating and admirable approach of rarely noting the real-world books in which they appear. Any fan of the Invisible Library will find the whole essay worth reading; it's convinced me to order a used copy of the Beerbohm collection in which it appeared, And Even Now (1921).

Now back to my opening contention: though I've met Ed Park, our friendship came about primarily because of the Internet (with an assist from a shared appreciation of John Crowley); Sam Golden Rule Jones I know only through his online writing; Dave Lull I know only through the traces he leaves--of intelligence, wide reading, discriminating taste, and unstinting generosity--throughout the Internet. Could even the most technophobic deny that this is a red letter day for this greatest of communications media?

ITEMS!, or, just barely managing to keep Donald Westlake Week going!

Only time for a couple of quick notes today. Maybe if I dress them up with snazzy ITEM! tags, they'll seem more substantial?

ITEM! Almost Darwyn Cooke's blog, which has been soliciting readers' visual interpretations of Parker to celebrate the release of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter, has gathered all the submissions in a gallery. If you're a Parker fan, you should definitely go check it out; there are a lot of great ones to choose from, but my favorite is this re-imagining of the original pulp paperback of The Hunter.

ITEM! I wrote a post about Westlake for the blog of my employer, the University of Chicago Press, on Friday. There's not much there I haven't covered here in recent days--though I do call Dortmunder a schlimazel--but if you want to see me in straight-up shilling mode, or if you're a Levi Stahl completist {which even rocketlass knows better than to be}, head on over there and check it out.

ITEM! At the risk of derailing Donald Westlake Week, I have to point out Ed Park's essay from this Sunday's New York Times Book Review on the Invisble Library. The strictures imposed by the Times prevented him from mentioning our actual Invisible Library or the recent exhibit by INK Collective in London, but that didn't keep him from writing a great essay. He also talked about the concept on the NYTBR's podcast this week.

Oh, and Westlake is in the collections of the Invisible Library, thanks to Charles Ardai, who included a ghost-written Westlake novel in his Fifty-to-One. So there, we're right back on track!

Right--that'll be one chimerical cocktail, one make-believe mixed drink, and one illusory libation, coming right up.

{Photos by rocketlass.}

As Ed and I have, admittedly, been hard pressed to find ways to spend the oceans of grant money that have been flowing into the vaults of the Invisible Library--let alone our allotted portion of the $700 billion invisible bailout approved by Congress last week--I was glad to hit upon an idea while I was reading P. G. Wodehouse's Meet Mr. Mulliner (1927) yesterday afternoon.

In "The Story of William," Mr. Mulliner's Uncle William, having lost his best girl to a bounder in 1906 San Francisco, drags the empty shell of himself into Mike's Place in search of a specific for treating the rent heart:

The gentlemanly bar-tender pondered for some moments.

"Well," he replied at length, "I advance it, you understand, as a purely personal opinion, and I shall not be in the least offended if you decide not to act upon it; but my suggestion--for what it is worth--is that you try a Dynamite Dew-Drop."

One of the crowd that had gathered sympathetically round shook his head. He was a charming man with a black eye, who had shaved on the preceding Thursday.

"Much better give him a Dreamland Special."

A second man, in a sweater and a cloth cap, had yet another theory.

"You can't beat an Undertaker's Joy."

The imaginary cocktail! That's what the Invisible Library needs: a lavishly appointed, dimly lit lounge where our weary, word-drunk patrons can obtain purely notional cocktails, poured--alongside invisible viands and nonexistent noshes--by a dour-faced bartender who looks to have been pickled (rather carelessly) early in the Taft administration. As soon as I'm done with this post, I'll start drawing up the plans and thinking of apposite additions to the cocktail menu. The Menard's Malady? The Byronic Conscience? The Rough Magic? The Odo's Lament? The Third Murderer? The Lincoln's Dream?

As for Uncle William, well, he took the advice of the room to heart:

They were all so perfectly delighted and appeared to have his interests so unselfishly at heart that William could not bring himself to choose between them. He solved the problem in diplomatic fashion by playing no favourites and ordering all three of the beverages recommended.

The effect was instantaneous and gratifying. As he drained the first glass, it seemed to him that a torchlight procession, of whose existence he had hitherto not been aware, had begun to march down his throat and explore the recesses of his stomach. The second glass, though slightly too heavily charged with molten lava, was extremely palatable. It helped the torchlight procession along by adding to it a brass band of sinular power and sweetness of tone. And with the third someobody began to touch off fireworks inside his head.

William felt better--not only spiritually but physically.

Now that's the effect we want our invisible restoratives to have on our frequently melancholy patrons--making them keen of mind, strong of heart, firm of constitution! Perhaps we could name the bar The Circulation Desk?

Are you an Anglophile? Take this simple quiz and find out!

Reading John Wyndham's creepy and well-conceived The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was later filmed as The Village of the Damned, brought me several unexpected pleasures.

1 I smiled at this sentence describing the sleepy hamlet of Midwich:

And before that it hit the headlines--well, anyway, the broadsheets--when Black Ned, a second-class highwayman, was shot on the steps of The Scythe and Stone Inn by Sweet Polly Parker, and although this gesture of reproof appears to have been of a more personal than social nature, she was, nevertheless, much lauded for it in the ballads of 1768.

Then I stopped, for it occurred to me that here was a perfect test of whether a reader is amenable to English literature: this droll, historically inclined sentence, which draws its arch-eyebrowed humor largely from its balanced, careful organization, seems characteristic of the dominant strain of the nation's literary output. A reader who pauses to enjoy this sentence might as well move on to Dickens, Thackeray, Waugh, Powell, Fitzgerald, and others. One who doesn't should probably plump for Dostoevsky or Melville instead.

2 As I was reading the book I realized that Ed's and my recent creation of the Invisible Library has unexpectedly added a new layer of drama to my reading. Early in the novel, the narrator refers to Midwich resident Gordon Zellaby's work of philosophy While We Last; soon after, Zellaby himself mentions that the manuscript for his next book, The British Twilight, is overdue.

I snapped to attention: would he--given the distractions posed by an infestation of possibly alien children--deliver the manuscript? Would The British Twilight ever be published--and thus available for stocking at the Invisible Library?

Sadly, John Wyndham seems to have been far less concerned about the fate of The British Twilight than I am, for the novel ends without a definite answer. Given, however, that nine years pass between the initial mention of the book and the conclusion of The Midwich Cuckoos, I decided, in my role as Invisible Librarian, that Zellaby--a professional philosopher--would surely have found the time to finish The British Twilight at some point. Thus a copy now resides on the "Z" shelf.

Did I make the right decision? Only Wyndham would know for sure, and he left this world nearly forty years ago; should his spirit visit the Library, I'll let you know.

3 Because I've had the Invisible Library on the brain this week, I also perked up at the following line spoken by a character:

What's going on here is the burning of books before they have been written.

The character is using books as a metaphor to describe the short-sightedness of the government's failure to study the alien children, but it also seems like a phrase one might find decorating one of the more cobwebby carrels in the Invisible Library.

It seems like it would go nicely that area of special collections that would house lost books like Profiles in String, the greatest work of X. Trapnel, the only manuscript of which was chucked into a Venetian canal by Pamela Widmerpool, because "it wasn't worthy of X."

Now any reader in possession of an Invisible Library card can see for himself whether Pamela was right . . . or whether perhaps the book was brilliant, and that was why it haunted her . . . if that was why, after Trapnel's death she admitted with a shiver, "I see that manuscript of his floating away on every canal."

Stocking the shelves of the Invisible Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this summer, inspired by book-filled novels by Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, I hit upon the idea of using the Internet to start a catalog of books that exist only within other books--a Borgesian invisible library.

Now, through the inventiveness and industry of Ed Park--no mean begetter of imaginary books himself--the Invisible Library has a home! So far Ed and I have catalogued a mere handful of titles--leaning heavily on our old favorite, Anthony Powell--but the library is designed to be infinitely expandable, and we'll continually add more as we come across them.

Come by for a visit: whether you find your fancy piqued by Odo Stevens's wartime memoir Sad Majors or Fellowes Kraft's Joseph-Campbellesque mythic exploration Time's Body or Sebastian Knight's little-understood first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, we promise you'll leave empty-handed.

"We both are rather comic people," or, Letters Week, Part II!

It seems right to follow the high seriousness of Tolstoy's letters with the more down-to-earth concerns of Barbara Pym. She offers a nice contrast, too in that, for all that Tolstoy took himself too seriously, Pym, at least in her letters, often presented herself too lightly; like the sharper characters in her novels, she tended to try to put the best face on bad news, offering up everything with a leaven of wry, self-deprecating humor.

In this letter to Henry Harvey, a longtime object of failed love interest, for example, her attempts at levity can't hide the emotional strain of a collapsed affair:

I can't exactly remember what I did tell you in my last letter. Did I tell you that I was in love and that it was all hopeless? I expect so--well if I did you may be interested (and relieved?) to hear that we parted at Christmas and haven't seen or written to each other since then--a real Victorian renunciation--the sort of thing I adore in novels, but find extremely painful in real life. Of course we may come together again in the future--time alone will tell (sorry!) but in the meantime he thought it better I should try to find somebody else who can marry me, which he wouldn't be able to do for at least a year. . . . Luckily we both are rather comic people so it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Or take this letter to her friend Bob Smith, from April 22, 1954, about her recurring struggles with the publishing industry:

I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don't and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and "declined" (that seems to be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs!

But late on this Tuesday night, something more truly cheerful seems in order--and what's more reliably entertaining than descriptions of Cyril Connolly? This one is from another letter to Henry Harvey, dated February 20, 1946:

If you haven't read Cyril Connolly's book The Unquiet Grave, you will wonder what I am talking about and say [angst] is just one of my silly German words, but as I expect you have read it you will see that I am keeping up to date with all our clever young men. Not that he is young exactly--he is approaching forty, indeed, probably is forty now, is fat and given to self-pity and nostalgia. But he is clever and puts his finger on what it is we suffer from now--though maybe you don't in the bracing air of Sweden. He is "soaked in French Literature"--not my expression, but the kind of thing one would like to be!

And this passage from a letter to her friend Richard Campbell Roberts, from January 5, 1965, seems a good way to close for today:

It says on this Airmail pad that 12 sheets and an envelope weighs less than half an nounce, but I doubt if I can go on at that length. Also I am writing this in the office in the morning, which seems frightfully sinful.

If simply writing a letter in the office of a morning makes her feel sinful, I think she needs a copy of Personal Days! Ed, how's your time machine working?

The dangers of drink!

{Photo of the lovely Le Tigre bar in Madison, Wisconsin by rocketlass.}

At least somewhat under the influence of gin and champagne at a wedding last weekend, I . . .

1 Discussed, with rocketlass and another guest who happened to be an Anthony Powell fan, which of two attendees was most likely to be Pamela Widmerpool. The vote, as I suppose it usually would regarding this question, broke down on gender lines.

2 Urged said Powell fan to watch the BBC television adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time. I would likely never have been willing to try it without Ed Park's recommendation, but on watching it this spring rocketlass and I were pleasantly surprised at how much of Powell's sensibility it conveyed. And oh, the casting is good! I'm not sure that it would hold any interest for a non-Dance fan, aside from its splendidly rendered period settings and costumes (How well upper-class men dressed in the first half of the twentieth century!), but for a Powell fan the initial appearance of nearly every character is a moment of sheer pleasure.

3 Succumbed, following years of resistance, to my friend Erin Hogan's entreaties to read her favorite novel, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. My capitulation came about in large part because said Powell fan, who happens to be her best friend, explained that, on reading Dance, he e-mailed Erin to say, "The Jest has fallen to second place." Worse, I promised to read it this week, which, as I try to be a man who honors his word, I've begun to do.

From reading literature, I'm given to understand that people have, through the years, here and there been known to commit more grievous errors when under the influence of drink. At times, there are unquestionable benefits to being a book nerd.

Opening the Box

{Photo by rocketlass of a box by rocketlass.}

A couple of years after first my first, admittedly desultory attempt to read Harry Stephen Keeler, I've dived right into one of his biggest and strangest books, The Box from Japan (1932), a volume that even committed Keelerite Ed Park describes as "WEIRD." He's right, but through at least the first fifty pages, The Box from Japan's weirdness is charming, consisting mostly of exuberance, exclamation points, and unusual descriptions that resemble nothing so much as particularly enthusiastic advertising copy.

Like many (or all?) of Keeler's novels, The Box from Japan is set in his native Chicago, "that London of the West"--though in 1942, an eventful ten years into the future. The most striking thing so far about Keeler's past-future Chicago is not its robotic policemen or skyscraper landing strips for airplanes . . . no, sadly, it's this:

His little two-block jump, it is true, cost him a red 25-cent coupon out of his perforated book of taxi-meter "pay" tickets, but saved him perhaps some ten minutes of elbowing his way along a thoroughfare which now, in Chicago, connecting as it did the busiest stations of the venerable old State Street subway and the new Clark Street subway, was hopelessly crowded at this hour of the morning.

Oh, if only Chicago really had a Clark Street subway--hell, if only we had any serious expansion of the coverage of our subway system, or if only we weren't relying on technology nearly as old as Keeler's book. Our terrible transit system is not helping kill my current crush on New York.

But it seems wrong to leave you with a lament. Instead, I'll share the most striking non-Chicago-related line in the first fifty pages of The Box from Japan. To set it up I have to transcribe a description that precedes it. The scene is the office of the American Projectiscope Company, Inc.:

Near the door, however--and Carr Halsey smiled in spite of himself--was a movable polished wooden railing as venerable as those others like it which adorned all offices when he had been but small boy, and he knew at least that he was in the right place, for this was but one of the many relics which his uncle lovingly transported from office to office as the American Projectiscope Company every few years changed its quarters.

Keeler then describes the sentry of the inner office door:

And guarding the one opening in the antique wooden railing, moreover, sat Babson, more venerable appendage of the American Projectiscope Company than any single piece of office furniture it might own! Elderly, with rapidly thinning gray hair, he was, beyond all doubt, even more like that wooden railing than the railing itself!

"Even more like that wooden railing than the railing itself"? I know what Keeler means, but what he's actually written makes no sense! And is impossible to forget once you've read it!

I think I'm going to start using that method of comparison in my daily life. For example: in his use of exclamation points, Ed Park frequently is even more like Harry Stephen Keeler than Harry Stephen Keeler himself!

Cataloging the Imaginary Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) is a novel purporting to be a biography of a recently dead writer, penned by his half-brother. As such, it's full of the titles of books that don't exist outside the world of the novel. Like other prolific fake-titlers, such as Anthony Powell (J. G. Quiggin's Unburnt Boats, St. John Clarke's Fields of Amaranth, etc.), Nabokov seems to have greatly enjoyed the task of naming these phantom books, which at their best reside comfortably at the mysterious juncture of plausibility, originality, and amusement.

When, the day after reading Sebastian Knight, I encountered yet more fake titles in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark (1938), then even more--though tipped more towards verisimilitude--last night in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), I began to think . . . what better, more Borgesian use could there be for the infinite capacity of the Internet than to assemble a catalog of the world's Fictional Library?

Thus was born a new feature! If I end up sticking with this over the months and building a ridiculously long list, I'll probably at some point figure out a different place to put them and a different way to organize them. For now, however, those of you who enjoy the art of fake titling as much as I do can simply enjoy this first batch:

From Graham Greene's The End of the Affair

For Ever Fido (1912), author unknown
The Ambitious Host, by Maurice Bendrix
The Crowned Image, by Maurice Bendrix
The Grave on the Water-Front, by Maurice Bendrix

From Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark

Memoirs of a Forgetful Man, by Udo Conrad
History of Art: Volumes One through Ten, by Nonnenmacher

From Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Laws of Literary Imagination, author unknown
The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, by Mr. Goodman
Fall of Man, by Godfrey Goodman
Recollections of a Lifetime, by Samuel Goodrich
The Doubtful Asphodel, by Sebastian Knight
The Funny Mountain, by Sebastian Knight
Lost Property, by Sebastian Knight
The Prismatic Bezel, by Sebastian Knight
Success, by Sebastian Knight

Finally, I can't resist sharing some of the titles of go-getting business books featured in Ed Park's great new novel Personal Days (2008):

Every Worker's War Chest, by Fred Glass
Office Politics 101, by Randall Slurry
Climbing the Seven-Rung Ladder: The Business of Business, by Chad Ravioli and Khader Adipose
The Business Warrior's 30-Day Mental Fitness Plan (Revised Edition), by Cody Waxing
Yes, I Drank the Kool-Aid--and I Went Back for Seconds, by M. Halsey Patterson
Mine for the Taking: or, Some (INCREDIBLY!) Irreverent Notes on the Business of Wealth, by Parker Edwards
Letters to a Young Tycoon, by Percy Ampersand, edited by Percy Ampersand IV

Because part of the fun of that section of Ed's book is coming across these and other titles, I won't share nearly all of them--but maybe Ed will offer more at his reading at Chicago's lovely Book Cellar in Lincoln Square tomorrow night. Come out and see for yourself! Thursday, June 5th at 7 o'clock, 4736 N. Lincoln Avenue!

Criss-cross!

In what I think will be the last post linking Ed Park's Personal Days to Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, we turn to the place of unusual appearance in business dealings.

First Ed tells us about the office's tarty bombshell, Maxine, whose faith in the powers of an outfit that can be described only with the aid of italics is, unexpectedly, proved to be misplaced:

Maxine's new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved fur. Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end. . . . Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with xs for eyes.

With her female competition out of the way, Maxine leveled her extremely hot gaze right at Grime, who stood his ground. He swayed in place, gently rocking on one heel. Maxine was saying something about Wednesday, but it wasn't clear whether she meant tomorrow or last Wednesday.

Grime's not-flinching was making Maxine flinch. It looked like a nod but it was actually a flinch. Lizzie and Pru saw it all unfold. They're filing away the subtleties for Jack II and his blog. Maxine lost the thread of what she was saying, eyes gleaming in panic. She could have been talking about the general concept of Wednesday, its status as a hump day, its complicated spelling. No one had seen her quiver like this before. It was like she'd been set in italics.

There was a historical vibe to the scene.

Then there's Goncharov's account of Oblomov's landlord, who is, perhaps intentionally, awkward and a bit grotesque:

The brother tip-toed into the room and responded to Oblomov's greeting with a triple bow. His tunic was tightly buttoned from top to bottom so that it was impossible to tell whether he was wearing any linen underneath. His tie was knotted with a single knot and the ends were tucked inside the tunic. He was about forty with a tuft of hair sticking straight up from his brown and with two identical tufts sprouting, wild and untended, from each temple, resembling nothing so much as the ears of an average-sized dog. His gray eyes never settled on their target directly, but only after some stealthy reconnoitering in its vicinity.

It seemed as if he were ashamed of his hands and whenever he spoke to someone he did his best to keeping them out of sight, either placing both hands behind his back or keeping one tucked inside his coat and holding the other behind his back. When handing a document requiring some explanation to a supervisor he would keep one hand behind his back and, with the middle finger of his other hand, making sure to keep the nail pointing downwards, he would point to the line or word in question. Then, at the earliest possible moment he would tuck the hand out of sight, maybe because his fingers were on the thick side, reddish and trembling slightly, and he felt, not unreasonably, that it was somehow too indelicate to expose them too frequently to public scrutiny.

Despite that seeming insecurity, the landlord manages to successfully dun the relatively hapless Oblomov for 1,354 roubles and twenty-eight kopecks for a two-week rental.

Were we able to jumble these scenes, I think that Oblomov might successfully deploy his congenital mix of apathy and vagueness to hold out against Grime's unflappability, whereas I have no question that Maxine's wardrobe (mal)function would cut the landlord's bill at least in half.

As Patricia Highsmith might have put it, criss-cross! Inter-novelistic loans, that's what we need!

Reading the signs

Reading Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859) and Ed Park's Personal Days (2008) at the same time continues to offer unexpected (and unexpectedly rewarding) affinities. Take, for example, this bit of contemporary folklore offered up by one of Ed's charactes:

Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone's Googling you. We take to this bit of instant folklore immediately.

I wonder whether a Yahoo search triggers the same response? Or an Alta Vista search?

If Goncharov were alive today, he'd surely know the answer, if the following conversation between Oblomov's parents is any indication:

Suddenly Ilya Ivanovich stopped in the middle of the room, and, with a look of alarm, touched the tip of his nose. "Oh, no, this is terrible," he said, "look, the tip of my nose is itching, there's going to be a death."

"There you go again!" his wife exclaimed, clasping her hands, "it's not the tip of your nose itching that means there's going to be a death, it's the bridge of your nose! Really, what a scatterbrain you are! What if you were to say something like that when we were visiting people or when we had guests--it would be so embarrassing!"

"Well, what does it mean then when the tip of your nose itches?" said Ilya Ivanovich, discountenanced.

"A death! Really, what can you be thinking of?"

"I'm always mixing things up," said Ilya Ivanovich. "How can a personal be expected to know what it means when you itch in all these different places, the side of your nose, the tip, the eyebrows. . . ?"

Pelegaya Ivanovna was quick to supply the information. "The side means news, between the eyebrows means tears, the forehead means meeting someone, on the right a man, on the left a woman, the ears means rain, the lips, kissing, the whiskers, eating sweets, the elbow, sleeping in a new place, the soles of the feet, a journey."

"Well done, Pelageya Ivanovna!" said Ilya Ivanovich.

For maximum enjoyment, I recommend reading Pelegaya Ivanovna's litany out loud at top speed.

"Consequently, the initial prospect of spending the major part of his life going to work was painfully depressing."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Those of you who've served time in an office will surely recognize this guy:

At work he has no clearly defined tasks because his colleagues and supervisors have never been able to detect in him any particular skills or competence. Whatever task he is given he performs in such a way that his supervisor is always hard put to it to say whether he has performed it well or badly. No matter how closely he looks or how carefully he reads, the best he can come up with is: "Leave it for now, I'll take a look at it later . . yes, well it seems more or less alright."

Apparently some aspects of office life never change: the above is not from Ed Park's brand-new, critically acclaimed novel of office life, Personal Days, but from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, which was published in 1859. As I was traveling when Ed's book was published this week and therefore couldn't pick up the copy I'd pre-ordered at 57th Street Books, I was pleasantly surprised to discover some office comedy in Oblomov.

The titular gentleman of the novel is primarily known for spending most of his life in bed, alternately daydreaming and dozing--but as a young man he worked in Russia's senselessly bureaucratic civil service. Like many a person entering on his first job, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov brought some misconceptions to the workplace:

He imagined that office colleagues were just one close, happy family constantly putting themselves out for each other's comfort and pleasure and that attendance at the office could not possibly be a kind of compulsory custom that you simply had to observe every single day and that slush, heat, or mere disinclination would be adequate and legitimate grounds for non-attendance.

Imagine his dismay on realizing that nothing short of an earthquake could excuse a healthy civil servant's absence from his place of work and that, in any case, St. Petersburg never had the good fortune to have earthquakes. No doubt a flood would also be acceptable grounds, but floods hardly ever happened there either.

Worse was his misunderstanding of the role of the boss:

At home, he had heard that a boss or a supervisor was a father to his subordinates and had formed an image of such a personage, an image as beaming and benign and indulgent as a member of his own family. He saw him as a kind of second father who lived and breathed only to reward his subordinates and to cater, unceasingly and unremittingly, regardless of their merits, not only to their needs but even to their pleasures. Ilya Ilyich thought that a superior was so intimately bound up in the welfare of his subordinates that he would inquire anxiously whether he had had a good night's sleep, why his eyes were a little cloudy and whether he might not have a little headache.

His first day on the job was thus a rude awakening. The moment the supervisor appeared, everyone started hustling and bustling and bumping into each other from sheer agitation, some even nervously fingering their clothing in case he might deem them not sufficiently presentable. The reason for this, as Oblomov subsequently became aware, was that in the person of a subordinate scared out of his wits and rushing to pay his respects, a certain type of boss saw not only proper respect for his person, but a mark of zealousness and indeed at times even of competence.

And all that frantic kowtowing occurs despite Oblomov's department having a relatively good supervisor:

He was never heard to utter a harsh word or even to raise his voice; he never demanded but always asked. If he wanted you to do something, he asked; if he invited you to his house, he asked; if he had you arrested, he asked.

Between the rush of duties ("It doesn't leave a moment for living!" Oblomov laments) and his fear of his supervisor ("[T]he moment the boss addressed him, he would find that his natural voice had been replaced by something nauseatingly insipid."), poor Oblomov quickly becomes a wreck . . . so he forges a doctor's note diagnosing himself with hepatitis and an enlarged heart, both blamed on the office, which he then forsakes forever in favor of his bed.

Those of us without substantial private incomes from large country estates, however, will inevitably be back on the train Monday--but with Personal Days under one arm, Oblomov under the other, we'll have an extra spring in our step and a glint in our eye, our quiet laughter a sufficient defense against our fellow commuters' confused contempt.