Summer fades

From Edmund Wilson's notebooks of the 1920s:

The first cold blue of autumn and the melancholy of the shore provoking thoughts not only of the end of summer, but of the pressure of time, the wavering of ambition, the disappointments of love--the period of life that approaches its close like the period of the year.

August is usually a betwixt-and-between month for me: summery, yes, but often too hot, tainted by long-distant yet still potent memories of the too-early return of school. It's the month when you start to lament what you've not done in the summer, while still not having any of the consolations of autumn.

This year, however, August was an unexpected glory. It was hot enough here and there to clearly be summer, yet pleasant enough overall to reward porch-sitting and park-walking. It had five full weekends, and we were actually home for all but one of them. Baseball, well played for the dog days, was a soothing backbeat. Hummingbirds visited, the first time.

September's arrival, therefore, is less bittersweet than usual. Summer in Chicago is a fleeting, untrustworthy, regretful thing; this year, somehow, it escaped its own nature. I look to autumn now not with the melancholy of Wilson, but the joy of Thoreau, writing in his journal on October 14, 1857:

Another, the tenth of these memorable days. We have had some fog the last two or three nights, and this forenoon it was slow to disperse, but this afternoon it is warmer even than yesterday. I should like it better if it were not so warm. I am glad to reach the shade of Hubbard's Grove; the coolness is refreshing. It is indeed a golden autumn. These ten days are enough to make the reputation of any climate. A tradition of these days might be handed down to posterity. They deserve a notice in history, in the history of Concord.

May your autumn this year bring similar shimmering pleasure.

Youth's a stuff will not endure

Edmund Wilson, writing on Proust, said that the narrator of In Search of Lost Time

has proved the fatal impossibility of ever finding our happiness in another individual. A woman will not, and cannot, live in the world in which we would have her--that is, the world in which we live, which we ourselves imagine; and what we love in her is merely the product of our own imagination: we have supplied her with it ourself.

Proust's view is far gloomier than mine, but he does describe as well as anyone the sense of falling in love, not with a person, but with your projection of them. Young love is particularly susceptible to that mistake: we've simply not had the experience, in the years of our first, fumbling adulthood, to know better. In The Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly writes,

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

And in those years when we first take that wrong turning, we do so with such brash confidence, such certainty, that we wouldn't have consulted a map even if we'd had one.

That's what kept coming to mind as I read John Cotter's novel of misplaced love, vague artistic ambition, aimlessness, and drunken nonsense, Under the Small Lights (2010) in one long, absorbed sitting on Saturday. Jack, a twenty-year-old college student, spends a summer drinking and drugging with a pair of recently eloped friends, wasting away the warm days being tempted and teased by the wife of the couple. They skinny-dip in her parents' pool; they kiss in the kitchen when the party's in the den; she snuggles up to him in bed when her husband's away. He spends the summer convincing himself simultaneously that she wants to sleep with him as badly as he wants to sleep with her, that he's going to sleep with her, and that somehow they're also not going to do that because her husband is his best friend. Parties come and go; other girls offer alternatives; the relationship remains painful and impossible.

Cotter dresses the story in prose that matches the haze of drunken dreams with the precision of young memory. Listen to the consonance and assonance in this description of some ill-advised firing of bottle rockets:

I re-lit them and ran back, priding myself on how well my drunk legs hopped the trail. Back together, we saw them flare up then turn on us. Burning, they sent a blue streak straight our way. They hadn't been crooked wrong in the rock but the flare-up on take-off sent them looping, burning blue over gold. As we turned and streaked away I could hear Paul and Corinna panting in my ears. Then I was concentrating on my own running. By the time the flares went bang behind us, Corinna was ahead by twenty yards. I'd drifted off to the side of one of the warehouses. I knew all of our hearts must be pounding a fury but I could only feel my own.

The prose is particularly well-suited to what Cotter is trying to capture: that moment when youth teeters into adulthood, when the languorous pace and lifelong friendships of childhood begin to give way to the fast-flicker rush of adult life, with its consequences and regrets, and new, more subtle forms of monotony and change. The summer is one long deferral of responsibility and consequence, peopled with characters who are starting for the first time to see themselves plain, and really wonder whether who they are is who they want to be. Jack watches his friend Star:

Much of the Star I knew was composed of parts of Corinna she'd caught or memorized. Still, I felt at a loss to watch her change into someone more like Mara. I recognized her low threshold for imitation. Seeing how Bill paused a little before answering any question in a way that centered the action on his answer, I'd started doing it myself. Recently I'd noticed myself unconsciously copying the way Paul ran the tip of a cigarette around the inside rim of an ashtray, never tapping it. But to see Star taking on what I was convinced were Mara's tics (who else?)--the way she tossed her head to move the hair from her eyes, or wearing the same shirt three or four days in a row--made me feel unsteady.

None of this is new territory, of course--I found myself thinking of Edmund Wilson's portrait of dissolute, confused Bohemian New York, I Thought of Daisy, while a funny running scene of drunken artistic collaboration on the shores of Walden in winter called to mind Withnail and I--but Cotter makes it fresh and engaging, with characters whose mistakes make us ache.

Elsewhere in The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly writes,

Art is memory: memory is re-enacted desire.

Under the Small Lights convincingly takes us back to those years when all we were was an inchoate bundle of desire, and our every action was an attempt to figure out the forms we wanted it to take.

Against interpretation, against allegory, for Kafka

The problem with having a Tumbler annex to this blog is that occasionally when I'm wandering my bookshelves in search of some brief, interesting material to post, I get sucked into reading something I hadn't at all meant to spend my evening with.

That was the case last night, as, flipping through one of the Library of America's collections of Edmund Wilson's criticism, I started reading a piece from 1947, "A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka." It's ostensibly a review of a couple of volumes of Kafka odds and ends and criticism, A Franz Kafka Miscellany and The Kafka Problem; the latter in particular seems to have provoked Wilson. Its forty-one essays and memoirs of Kafka, Wilson writes, "finally give rise to the suspicion that Kafka is being wildly overdone." He continues:

One realizes that it is not merely a question of appreciating Kafka as a poet who gives expression for the intellectuals to their emotions of helplessness and self-contempt but of building him up as a theologian and saint who can somehow also justify for them--or help them to accept without justification--the ways of a banal, bureaucratic and incomprehensible God to sensitive and anxious men.

Leaving aside the swipe at the sensitivity of the critics, smacking as it does of some of the references to masculine toughness that occasionally mar Orwell's criticism, Wilson in that sentence reveals that his argument is more with the critics than with Kafka's work itself: other critics--"cultists," Wilson calls them elsewhere--have made of Kafka a minor deity and the The Trial and The Castle "something like sacred writings, finding in them religious implications that Wilson thinks are in reality "practically nil."

All of which is fair enough. Writers need to be rescued from their fans on occasion. But in condemning the too-grand claims made for Kafka, Wilson goes too far himself--"Kafka is impossible to take . . . as a major writer"--ending up trapped in the ways of thinking that he's deriding: he goes looking for explicit meaning in Kafka, and, not finding it--or not finding it in the way he's expecting--ends by dismissing the work:

If, however, one puts Kafka beside writers with whom he may properly be compared, he still seems rather unsatisfactory. Gogol and Poe were equally neurotic, in their destinies they were equally unhappy; and if it is true, as Mr. Savage says [in one of the essays in The Kafka Problem, that there is present in Kafka's world neither personality nor love, there is no love in either Gogol or Poe, and though there are plenty of personalities in Gogol, the actors of Poe, as a rule, are even less characterized than Kafka's. But, though the symbols that these writers generate are just as unpleasant as Kafka's, though, like his, they represent mostly the intense and painful realization of emotional culs-de-sac, yet they have both certain advantages over Kafka--for Gogol was nourished and fortified by his heroic conception or Russia, and Poe, for all his Tory view, is post-Revolutionary American in his challenging, defiant temper, his alert and curious mind. In their ways, they are both tonic. But the denationalized, discouraged, disaffected, disabled Kafka, though for the moment he may frighten or amuse us, can in the end only let us down. he is quite true to his time and place, but it is surely a time and place in which few of us will want to linger--whether as stunned and hypnotized helots of totalitarian states or as citizens of freer societies, who have relapsed into taking Kafka's stories as evidence that God's law and man's purpose are conceived in terms so different that we may as well give up hope of ever identifying the one with the other.

I enjoy Poe, but any analysis that leads to you plumping for him over Kafka is inherently flawed. The problem is that very one of interpretation: Kafka, at his best, is meant to be experienced rather than analyzed. As the Bible would have it, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." A freshman lit class can ever-so-painfully drag theme after theme from a reading of The Trial, and in some sense it's obviously far from inappropriate to do so: part of what keeps that novel alive for people is the ways they can use it to illuminate the contemporary world. But we are not students. We don't have papers due, and reading the book that way, with readers' guide–style questions in mind, strips it of much of its power as a strange work of personal expression, a fever dream that has no applicability to ordinary life, no explanation, because it has left the ordinary world far behind, a dim memory. The very raggedness that Wilson marks in the debit column is a feature when the book--and, even more, its neighbors The Castle and Amerika--is read this way: this novel is unfinished because finishing it is impossible, would close off too many possibilities, would trade a pretense of perfection for the inherent raggedness of individual experience. Theseus's bad example aside, we don't usually escape from labyrinths in this life.

That resistance to interpretation is even more true of the shorter fiction, which is what really draws me back to Kafka again and again.Wilson acknowledges that

Some of his short stories are absolutely first-rate, comparable to Gogol's and Poe's. Like them, they are realistic nightmares that embody in concrete imagery the manias of neurotic states.

And those stories are, again, at their best when taken as strange wholes, comprehensible only on their own terms of reference. Here, perfection does have its place: as a marker of the independent, singular existence of each of these tales.

Take "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor," for instance, with the anxiety of its two jumping balls and the sulky, complicated assistants: read in a rush, it draws you inexorably into the claustrophobia of Blumfeld's world; interpreted, its power seeps out into banality (as is the case with its cousin "Bartleby the Scrivener"). Or the extreme case represented by the brevity of "Give it Up!":

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn't very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: "You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

Sure, you could make the policeman the representative of the indifferent modern bureaucratic state, and--but good god, aren't you falling asleep already? And how do you account for the awkwardness of that "sudden jerk," and the impression of solitary laughter? The same goes for "Before the Law," "The Imperial Message," "Fellowship," or any of a dozen other of Kafka's shortest writings. Like dreams, they wither under analysis; like dreams, they offer us hermetic brilliance if we choose to accept them on their own terms.

I realize that such an approach risks abdicating the role of the critic entirely, and I want to be clear that I'm not advocating this position for the vast majority of writers. Kafka, "major" or not, is for me a special case, leading a class of his own whose other members include, on the lighter side, Calvino and the best of Murakami, and on the darker side, say, the Bible and the most inscrutable Greek myths. Halldor Laxness reaches this pitch at times; Steven Millhauser can, too, on occasion, if a bit self-consciously. And surely there are others? (Zachary Mason, I've got my eye on you!)

I realize, too, that this post is far from an adequate or considered rebuttal of Wilson. I'm taking advantage of the mutability of a blog and responding to Kafka as a reader and a writer rather than a critic, spinning out one evening's thoughts rather than marshaling an argument. Wilson was presenting a viewpoint, a position, an entry in an ongoing conversation about a writer whose reputation was still being developed. I'm giving disjointed impressions spiked with passion. But hybridity and awkwardness seem right for Kafka, leading me to close with this, from "Description of a Struggle":

So we walked on in silence. Listening to the sound of our steps, I couldn't understand why I was incapable of keeping step with my acquaintance--especially since the air was clear and I could see his legs quite plainly. Here and there someone leaned out of a window and watched us.

And, the scene, framed by that window, of two men walking together, awkwardly out of step, conveys no clear meaning; yet the watchers, silent, never forget it.

“The quantity is naturally indefinite,” Or, Prohibition and its discontents

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Earlier this summer I read, all in a rush, Daniel Okrent’s wonderful history of Prohibition, Last Call, and ever since, I’ve been taking note of mentions of the ban in the books I read.

First, there’s John O’Hara, in The Girl on the Baggage Truck (1960), looking back on that period:

All this was thirty years ago, as remote-seeming to many people today as the Gay Nineties had seemed to me. New York now is as different from New York then as New York then was from London. The one pervasive factor in all our lives was Prohibition, which made lawbreakers of us all and gave a subtly conspiratorial, arcane touch to the simple act of dining out. Even that was phony, for there were only a few speakeasies which you could not talk your way into, where you had to be known.

Apparently it wasn’t so easy in upstate New York--at least if this scene from Edmund Wilson’s gin-soaked novel of bohemian life in 1920s New York, I Thought of Daisy (1929), is accurate:

“I’m sorry that I can’t offer you a drink--but the only things we can get around here are apple and alcohol, and both of them are vile. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s really more considerate to the guests not to offer them anything at all!”--“We hoped you might bring something with you,” said Daisy, looking up with her sweet candid smile. She was dealing out white plates around a table in the middle of the room. I apologized for not having thought of it. “We never think of it ourselves--if you can believe me,” Pete insisted. “It’s almost impossible to get any kind of decent liquor--in New York or anywhere else--and the kind of drinks that you can get just don’t interest me!” I agreed with him heartily and added that the trouble with New York was that everybody there drank far too much bad liquor. “That’s why we came to the country,” said Daisy. “We decided that it was that or the drunkard’s home!”

The British never quite understood the very American experiment that was Prohibition, and who better to flaut the law than Winston Churchill? William Manchester, in his biography of Churchill, The Last Lion (1983), quotes a diary entry from Winston’s son, Randolph, from a trip to America with his father in 1929:

We are now in the ship bound to Seattle, American soil and Prohibition. But we are well-equipped. My big flask is full of whisky and the little one contains brandy. I have reserves of both in medicine bottles. It is almost certain that we shall have no trouble. Still if we do, Papa pays the fine and I get the publicity.” Papa would have been hit by both; he had a case of brandy in stone hot-water bottles.

On a later trip, in 1932, an auto accident--Churchill was hit by a car as he crossed 79th Street at the edge of Central Park--provided the perfect pretext for his doctor to, as Manchester puts it, rescue him

from the hardship of Prohibition with a note on his stationery: “This is to certify that the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters [slightly over eight ounces].”

That white lie, and its malign effects, was the sort that John O’Hara had in mind when he launched into a fire sermon on the period in his novella Imagine Kissing Pete (1960):

We had come to our maturity and our knowledgeability during the long decade of cynicism that was usually dismissed as “a cynical disregard of the law of the land,” but that was something else, something deeper. The law had been passed with a “noble” but nevertheless cynical disregard of men’s right to drink. It was a law that had been imposed on some who took pleasure in drinking by some who did not. And when the law was an instant failure, it was not admitted to be a failure by those who had imposed it. They fought to retain the law in spite of its immediate failure and its proliferating corruption, and they fought as hard as they would have for a law that had been an immediate success. They gained no recruits to their own way; they had only deserters, who were not brave deserters but furtive ones; there was no honest mutiny but only grumbling and small disobediences. And we grew up listening to the grumbling, watching the small disobediences; laughing along when the grumbling was intentionally funny, imitating the small disobediences in other ways beside the customs of drinking. It was not only a cynical disregard for a law of the land; the law was eventually changed. Prohibition, the zealots’ attempt to force total abstinence on a temperate nation, made liars of a hundred million men and cheats of their children; the West Point cadets who cheated in examinations, the basketball players who connived with gamblers, the thousands of uncaught cheats in the high schools and colleges. We had grown up and away from our earlier esteem of God and country and valor, and had matured at a moment when riches were vanishing for reasons that we could not understand. We were the losing, not the lost, generation. . . . We knew everything, but we were incapable of recognizing the meaning of our complacency.

Given such an anomie--to say nothing of the booze that underlies it--it’s no surprise that O’Hara can be relied on in the matter of hangovers. In Appointment in Samarra (1935), he presents a memorable account:

He had felt physically worse many times, but this was a pretty good hangover. It is a pretty good hangover when you look at yourself in the mirror and can see nothing above the bridge of your nose. You do not see your eyes, nor the condition of your hair. You see your beard, almost hair by hair; and the hair on your chest and the bones that stick up at the base of your neck. You see your pajamas and the lines in your neck, and the stuff on your lower lip that looks as though it might be blood but never is. You first brush your teeth, which is an improvement but leaves something to be desired. Then you try Lavoris and then an Eno’s. By the time you get out of the bathroom you are ready for another cigarette and in urgent need of coffee or a drink, and you wish to God you could afford a valet to tie your shoes. You have a hard time getting your feet in your trousers, but you finally make it, having taken just any pair of trousers, the first your hands touched in the closet. But you consider a long, long time before selecting a tie. You stare at the ties; stare and stare at them, and you look down at your thighs to see what color suit you are going to be wearing. Dark gray. Practically any tie will go with a dark gray suit.

And with that, it’s time to toss back a chaser of water, with a toast to Aristotle, who I believe liked to say, as cocktail hour approached in ancient Athens, “All things in moderation, my friends--including all things in moderation.”

"Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility," or, D. H. goes to parties

Considering how important he was to the first years of my consciously literary reading--the first year or so of college, say--I've not written that much about D. H Lawrence in the nearly five years I've been writing this blog. That's largely because, as I've joked before, Lawrence, for all his actual virtues, is one of those authors one tend to grow out of: as one's experience widens, the overwrought quality of his depictions of relations between men and women becomes apparent, starts to look less like a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the inevitable struggle of primal forces and more like a self-aggrandizing depiction of willed difficulty. Life and love, for the sane, are just not quite that tough.* I'm reminded of a scene from Harold Nicolson's diaries, collected in John Gross's indispensable New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, telling of a meeting with Frieda Lawrence at a party:

She says that Lawrence said, "Frieda, if people really knew what you were like, they would strangle you." I say, "Did he say that angrily?" She said, "No--very quietly, after several minutes deep thought."

Anthony Powell--whose relatively catholic literary tastes can be trusted to overcome what one would be right to assume would be his social and political dislike of Lawrence--described him well in a review of Lawrence's literary criticism written for Punch in 1956:

Lawrence was in a way too gifted; at least too lacking in self-discipline to control his gifts to their best advantage. Leaning heavily towards the state of being primarily a poet, he was chiefly, as it turned out, concerned with writing novels. As a novelist, with all his force, he is never wholly at ease with his medium. He himself is the only character who ever truly emerges.

Nonetheless, Lawrence and his work remain of interest, so when my coworker Joseph Peterson lent me Edmund Wilson's The Twenties, one of the volumes of his journals that FSG published in the 1970s, I was greatly entertained by Wilson's account of a party given for Lawrence in August of 1923 that Wilson, then twenty-eight, attended:

Terrific argument betwen John Macy and Lawrence about extent to which reviewers were prostitutes. Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility. . . . I found Lawrence's appearance disconcerting. He was lean, but his head was disproportionately small. One saw that he belonged to an inferior caste--some bred-down unripening race of the collieries. Against this inferiority--fundamental and physical--he must have had to fight all his life: his passionate spirit had made up for it by exaggerated self-assertion. (I have never seen this physical aspect of Lawrence mentioned.) On this occasion, he suddenly became hysterical and burst out in childish rudeness and in a high-pitched screaming voice with something like: "I'm not enjoying this! Why are we sitting here having tea? I don't want tea! I don't want to be doing this!" The Seltzers [the hosts], rather stodgy in their bourgeois apartment, sat through it and made no reply, and nobody else took any notice of it. . . . The furious fit soon passed, and he presently came over and began to talk to me in a conventional British way. I don't remember what he said except to ask me a question or two about myself. I had earlier been rather antagonized by his denunciation of Dante as a writer who had tried to intellectualize love.

After which I find myself wanting to turn back to Powell, who, elsewhere in the Punch piece quoted above, wrote of Lawrence,

[H]is whole approach seems largely inappropriate to the world of literature. Lawrence was a frustrated politician or preacher. He wanted power: to force people to do his will. He was temperamentally unable to understand that different people by their nature may require to live different lives; and, accordingly, to find their expression in different forms of art.

All of which, oddly enough, makes me think it may be time--after nearly twenty years--to revisit The Rainbow.

"It was only during the age of candlelight that the race of ghosts really flourished," or, Edmund Wilson as uncanny anthologist

Since first discovering the giant Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural last fall, I've admired it as much for its timing as for its quality: it was published in early 1944, when the war, though going far better than it had been a few years before, was still a long way from being over. I love picturing editors Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise drawing up a list of stories, followed by the staff at Random House diligently securing permissions, then designing and printing the book--all with the aim of putting a bit of a supernatural scare into people who had plenty of entirely natural dangers to scare them.

But seemingly the editors knew what they were doing--or at least they weren't alone in the publishing world in thinking that readers might find eerie tales a welcome distraction: on turning to Edmund Wilson's review of the book in the May 25, 1944 issue of the New Yorker* (from which the current edition of the book takes his quote praising "a sudden revival of the appetite for tales of horror"), I discovered the review was occasioned by the publication of no fewer than six volumes of this sort that spring: The Pocket Mystery Reader, The Pocket Book of Mystery Stories, Tales of Terror (with an introduction by Boris Karloff), Creeps by Night (edited by Dashiell Hammett), Best Ghost Stories of M. R. James, and this "prodigous anthology," which Wilson rates as "the best of them" because it is so comprehensive and "not unintelligently edited." Wilson does, however, note that it suffers from

the fault of so many American omnibuses and anthologies of being too cumbersome to handle in bed, the only place where one is likely to read ghost stories.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, looking back, that the public displayed such a taste in the depths of the war. Wilson offers a straightforward explanation that remains convincing all these years later:

First, the longing for mystic experience, which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion, when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel that our own world has failed us, we try to find evidence for another world; second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic before the real terrors loose in the world--the Gestapo, the G. P. U., tank attacks, bombing from the air, and empty cities mined with booby traps--by injections of imaginary horror that soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to provide us with a mere dramatic amusement.

Beyond this general observation, Wilson barely bothers to treat the books under consideration in his review, except to say that, for all their merits,

I find it very hard to imagine that any of these particular could scare anybody over ten.

Instead, he uses the anthologies as a launching pad for an sketching out of his own anthology of unsettling tales:

These collections, of course, aim primarily at popular entertainment; they do not pretend to a literary standard. But I should like to suggest that an anthology of considerable interest and power could be compiled by assembling some horror stories by really first-rate modern writers, in which they have achieved their effects not merely by attempting to transpose into terms of contemporary life the old fairy tales of goblins and phantoms but by probing psychological caverns where the constraints of that life itself have engendered disquieting obsessions.

Had he lived long enough to read Stephen King, I expect Wilson would have hated his writing, but I think that as an anthologist he would have been alert to stories that define fear in the way that King did in his interview with the Paris Review in 2006:

I don't think there's anything that I'm not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, What are we afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We're afraid of change. We're afraid of disruption.**

The real fun comes, however, when Wilson starts putting names to the concepts:

I should start off with Hawthorne and Poe, who are represented in these collections, but I should include, also, Melville and Gogol, who are not. The first really great short stories of horror came in the early or middle nineteenth century, when the school of gothic romance had achieved some sophistication and was adopting the methods of realism. All four of these writers wrote stories that were at the same time tales of horror and psychological or moral fables. They were not interested in spooks for their own sake; they knew that their demons were symbols, and they knew what they were doing with these symbols. We read the tales of Poe in our childhood, when all that we are likely to get out of them is shudders, yet these stories are all poems that express the most intense emotions. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is not merely an ordinary ghost story; the house--see the opening paragraph--is an image for a human personality, and its fate--see the fissure that runs through the wall--is the fate of a disrupted mind. And as for Gogol, he probably remains the very greatest master in this genre. I should put in at least "Viy" and "The Nose"--the former, a vampire story, one of the most terrific things of its kind ever written, and the latter, though it purports to be comic, almost equally a tale of horror, for it is charged with the disguised, lurking meaning of a fear taking shape as a nightmare.

I'm a bit surprised that he rates Poe's lush, overheated prose so highly (though admittedly "Usher" is one of those rare Poe productions with which it's hard to find any fault), especially when he later damns Arthur Machen, arguing that his story "The Great God Pan"

seems to me to sum up in a fatal way everything that was most "ham" in the aesthetic satanism of the fin-de-siecle.

Still, it's hard to argue with Wilson's list thus far: Hawthorne's explorations of the dark underbelly of public rectitude are foundational for American strange tales, Poe's influence is inescapable, and Melville and Gogol are at their most memorable when they're at their most strange. Later, Wilson adds Conrad, Kipling, Henry James***, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Blackwood, and Walter de la Mare, before finally closing with Kafka, who writes

at the same time satires on the bourgeoisie and visioins of moral horror; narratives that are logical and compel our attention and fantasies that generate more shudders than the whole of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood combined. A master can make it seem more horrible to be pursued by two little balls than the spirit of a malignant Knight Templar, and more natural to turn into a cockroach than to be bitten by a diabolic spider.****

Wilson, in other words, does a fairly good job of setting the tone of his anthology, and even though none of his authors would come near qualifying as going out on a limb, the review nonetheless makes me wish he'd followed through on this idea; I would enjoy seeing how he'd flesh out the anthology.

All of which leads me to a question: where would you start if you were to compile an anthology of strange, uncanny, and/or supernatural tales? What authors would you have to include? Any you would exclude on principle?

For me, I think it would have to start with Ray Bradbury, whose unsettling mix of nostalgia and dark secrets has troubled me ever since childhood--and, I think, would have pleased Wilson (if he could get beyond Bradbury's occasionally overwrought prose); I'd probably try one of the stories from The Martian Chronicles, which I could assure Wilson--were he to pop up on the Ouija board some October night--are very much capable of frightening reasoning adults.

And for you?

A Jazz Age Friday fancy

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I know deep in my heart that wishing you were living in another era is a mug's game--and however attractive it might seem at times, it will always come up against my more natural, even borderline pathological, tendency towards contentment--but even so, doesn't reading this opening page of Edmund Wilson's novel I Thought of Daisy (1929) make you want to be, even if just for one night, one party, in the 1920s?

It was a low red-brick house with a white door, a brass knob and brass name-plates, and new green-and-white awnings and green window-boxes: the sort of place which, in those days, downtown, seemed particularly smart. We rang, and, after a moment, the electric clicking began--with its quick and ready profusion, plucking distinctly the string of excitement which could still be set vibrating for me at the prospect of meeting new people in Greenwich Village.

They were Hugo Bamman's friends: I had never met them. Rita Cavanagh, the poet, was to be there--and other persons reputed to possess genius or to whom I vaguely attributed romance. The stairs were soft-carpeted in green. The host, tall and smiling, in a dinner jacket, met us at the door. The rooms were very bright and well-kept: I saw lettuce-green cocktail glasses, a bruised-mulberry batik behind a divan and, on the wall, a set of framed designs for the costumes of some ballet, vividly tinselly golds, blues and purples. And there were girls, like the colored sketches, in the brightest make-ups and clothes, with red silk roses of Cuban shawls and silver turbans and red hair and black arching Russian eyebrows beautifully penciled on.

Ah, yes, it's Friday night and you're young, your escape from the provinces recent enough that glamorous New York's own admiration of its undeniable charms has yet to lose its appeal; you have new friends and they have money, to neither of which you've yet seen the downside; at a bar nearby the Millay sisters are probably pouring; the booze is illicit and surely lousy but oh, how freely it flows; September's settling in, the Village's street trees starting to turn, while the streetlights ensure that it's never quite night.

For one night, for one party . . .

"All are sick with some form of the ideal," or, It's time again for Proust

August is waning, and the air carries a feeling that, as Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence pointed out earlier this week, Tove Jansson described perfectly in The Summer Book:

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin.

The weather suits my annual August return to Proust, a tradition I copied from a poet friend, Carrie Olivia Adams; this year, I'm closing out my second time through the whole cycle, reading Finding Time Again in the 2002 translation by Ian Patterson.

In anticipation, I turned last week to Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1948), because I vaguely remembered Connolly expressing dissatisfaction with In Search of Lost Time. I was surprised at how close he comes to outright dismissal:

He exhibits, beyond all others, the defect of the Mandarin style; the failure of the writer's intellectual or emotional content to fill the elaborate frame which his talent plans for it. The honeycombs continue to develop, but fewer and fewer pollen-bags are emptied into them. There are many great passages where the complexity is worthy of the emotion expended on it, where very subtle and difficult truths are presented in language that could only express them if difficult and subtle.

Notwithstanding, now that the element of novelty and cult-snobbery has worn off, much of Proust, as of his master Ruskin, must stand condemned. He is often repetitive and feeble; the emotions of envy, jealousy, lust, and snobbishness around which his book is built, though they generate an enormous impetus, are incapable of sustaining it through twenty or thirty volumes; Swann's jealousy of Odette is enough without Proust's jealousy of Albertine, Saint-Loup's of Rachel and Charlus's of Morel and if the emotions repeat themselves, so also do the stories, the situations, the comments, parentheses, and cliches. Proust will remain a great writer, but his titles to fame my have to be reconsidered.

Few would argue that there are not parts of In Search of Lost Time that could be trimmed or tightened, but Connolly's critique is far, far too broad. In so coolly dismissing the repetitive patterns of the book, he reduces what is in reality recurrence, echo, and commentary to something akin to laziness or failure of imagination. More important, what he identifies as "envy, jealousy, lust, and snobbishness" might more productively be grouped together under the more general--and more important, for far more empathetic--concept of longing, an emotion with which one would assume the perpetually dissatisfied Connolly to be quite familiar.

Edmund Wilson is far more generous, and far closer to correct, in his treament of Proust in Axel's Castle (1931):

All [Proust's characters] alike are suffering from some form of unsatisfied longing or disappointed hope: all are sick with some form of the ideal. Legrandin wants to know the Guermantes; Vinteuil is wounded in his love for his daughter; Swann, associating the beauty of Odette with that of the women of Boticelli, ridiculously and tragically identifies his passion for her with his neglected aesthetic interests.

Connolly is much closer to the mark in his indictment of the slash-and-burn nature of Proust's satire:

He was modern enough to attack the values of this world but he had nothing to put in their place, for their values were his own, those of the narrator in the book who spends his life in going to parties and watching snobs behave but is never a snob himself. . . . [W]hat in fact he declares is that nothing changes except the small social set which he admired in his youth and which fell to pieces. . . . There was a new face with an old title in a box at the opera--but the title and the box are always there, coveted and prized by the ruling class of six or seven countries; there are no new ideas, no revolution in wisdom, no reversals of taste, nobody to declare that they never want to see an opera again.

This is a version of the common criticism of the satirist: that by destroying everything and offering nothing to replace what he's savaged, he leaves the reader feeling inclined, not to revolution or fundamental change, but to resignation. If it's all really that bad, why bother trying to change anything?

Here, too, Wilson provides a strong rebuttal. After describing some of the scenes of greatest cruelty in the novel--including the Guermantes's callous disregard of Swann's awkward confession of his impending death--Wilson first offers a more suitable and balanced assessment of the aims of Proust's satire:

Proust has destroyed, and destroyed with ferocity, the social hierarchy he has just been expounding. Its values, he tells us, are an imposture: pretending to honor and distinction, it accepts all that is vulgar and base; its pride is nothing nobler than the instinct which it shares with the woman who keeps the toilet and the elevator boy's sister, to spit upon the person whom we happen to have at a disadvantage. And whatever the social world may say to the contrary, it either ignores or seeks to kill those few impulses toward justice and beauty which make men admirable. It seems strange that so many critics should have found Proust's novel "unmoral"; the truth is that he was preoccupied with morality to the extent of tending to deal in melodrama. Proust was himself (on his mother's side) half-Jewish; and for all his Parisian sophistication, there remains in him much of the capacity for apocalyptic moral indignation of the classical Jewish prophet.

From there, he reminds us that, contrary to Connolly's assertion, Proust does offer us counter-examples:

[W]e begin to understand why Proust finds these realities so inacceptable, as we become aware of the standards by which he judges them. These standards are supplied, on the one hand, by such artists as Bergotte, the novelist, and Vinteuil, the composer; but on the other hand, by Swann and by the narrator's mother and grandmother. . . . The world is different from Combray, not merely because Combray is provincial, but because the world is the world and occupied with the things of the world. It is not really Combray itself, but the example of his mother and grandmother, with their kindness, their spiritual nobility, their rigid moral principles and their utter self-abnegation, from which Proust's narrator sets out on his ill-fated adventures among men.

Against the cynical and grasping world of society, Proust sets a conception of strength of character, of a kindness and dignity so fundamental that even when our longings make us ridiculous--as Swann's pursuit of Odette can't help but do--they can never make us cruel or small.

It is, as Wilson notes, a deeply moral vision, and while its backwards-looking, conservative vision may not be the first step towards the revolution for which Connolly seems to be asking, it unquestionably answers his charge that Proust offered no alternative to the values of the society he condemns.

And now to submit to Proust's obsessions and watch this late-summer Saturday slip away.

From the notebooks of Edmund Wilson, Anglophobe

Because I inadvertently posted on Friday the piece I had intended for today--damn my too-casual use of Blogger's auto-post function!--today all I have for you are some bits I encountered in Edmund Wilson's journal The Forties this afternoon.

First up is this anecdote, which seems almost too good to be true, from Wilson's time reporting from Italy in 1946. Passing on a story from fellow journalist Philip Hamburger, Wilson writes,

Lieutenant colonel who arrived in a staff car in Venice and asked a soldier to show him how to go: "Sir, you've had it: from here on the city is built entirely on water."

It sounds like something that could easily have come out of the mouth of one of Anthony Powell's imagined officers, no?

This, too, is acute, once you discount a tad for Wilson's marked Anglophobia:

English devices: They set out quietly to put over something so outrageous that you can't imagine any decent person would have the gall to attempt it, then, if you seem to be taking alarm, they try to make you feel that, if you objected, you would be behaving badly.

The Oxford brush-off: getting rid of importunate and troublesome questions by laughing gently about some aspect of the country or class or person which is totally irrelevant to the question in hand, and creating the impression that one had discredited it or him, that it is not to be taken seriously.

Later on that page, Wilson is reminded of this exchange, which surely both parties appreciated:

I left a party in London with Evelyn Waugh and some lady related to the Churchills, and we took a taxi together. He said in his well-tuned way--a lovely voice redeems his ugliness: "The Americans are politer than anyone else." I said, "Only than the British."

Which jibes with Randall Jarrell's aside, in Pictures from an Institution, that "to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all."

Better reading than your 401(k) statement . . .

{Photo by wallyg. Used under a Creative Commons license.}

If you're in search of some historical context for Great Depression II and you've already re-read Studs Terkel's Hard Times, I'd recommend you turn to Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake: A Chronicle of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Dawn of the New Deal (1958). A substantial collection of Wilson's non-literary work from the 1920s and '30s, it includes occasional writings, journalistic pieces, profiles, and even a few short fiction sketches. Flip through it for a couple of hours and you'll come away with a clear sense of the moment that the ebbing roar of the '20s gave way to the hard realities of the '30s; like Terkel's book, it's well-suited to address the problem that Wilson noted in his 1958 preface, how hard it is

for persons who were born too late to have memories of the depression to believe that it really occurred, that between 1929 and 1933 the whole structure of American society seemd actually to be going to pieces.

Wilson never seems more like Cyril Connolly than in these pieces; for once he seems entirely of his historical moment, to which he brings his ironic yet sympathetic appreciation of oddity, his eye for telling detail, and his light but elegant prose.

To chronicle the last days of the twenties, he brings us descriptions like this one, from a note about the faltering Ziegfeld Follies:

Yet the Ziegfeld show itself remains the best thing of its kind in New York: Edna Leedom, the Amazonian but amiable 100 per cent American blond grinding out the wisecracks of her songs from between a wide set of white teeth, which have the same expensive glitter as her diamonds; James Barton, with his fixed ginny stare and his partially paralyzed fingers, passing through the grisly stages of his disquieting drunken act; the sumptuous Greta Nissen, in a preposterous oriental pantomime, in the course of which, as a female Bluebeard, with a complacent Scandinavian smile, she slowly decapitates her lovers and shoves their heads out the door with her foot.

He even, unexpectedly, ranges far from New York--his profile from a piece about attendees at a Hopi snake dance in New Mexico serves as a reminder of how much the American West has changed since the 1930s:

Bill Peck is a well-meaning fellow. He started to go to Yale, but was always having awful hangovers and not showing up at his classes, and on trains he would get into card games with people who won all his money. So his father, a wealthy drug manufacturer, sent him out West to a ranch. At the ranch, Bill read books about lost gold mines and the buried treasures of the Spanish; his allowance had by that time been cut down, and he decided to go out and search for them. He wears a pistol slung under his arm and an old hat slouched over his eyes, and he goes for long walks in the woods with a pickaxe over his shoulder. One day he came back all excited and said that he had got into a cave which was all frozen full of ice and that in the ice were two American soldiers in a perfect state of preservation. But when people went out with him to look for the cave, he couldn't find the way again, and he never succeeded in getting back there.

Meanwhile, the despair of the depths of the Depression comes through powerfully in "A Bad Day in Brooklyn," which recounts, in determinedly flat language, three failed suicide attempts made on one day in 1933, all driven by the dire employment situation.

A strange contrast, however, is offered by Wilson's visits to four campaign headquarters on Election Night of 1930: the forlorn offices of the Republicans and the Socialists, the jubilant home of the Democrats--presided over by the "forcible-feeble gentlemanly face" of FDR, and the office of Dan O'Brien, the Rexobo, or King of the Hoboes. The hoboes have not won anything that night, but neither have they lost anything; O'Brien,

like other political leaders, is perhaps a little vague as to how his aims are to be accomplished

--but overall he strikes a relatively optimistic note, unusual for the period:

So far as Dan is concerned, New York is not a bad place to live: it is the cultural center of the country and that makes it interesting. He knows that for many people it must be a lunatic asylum, but a hobo doesn't worry about that--you never heard of a hobo jumping out the window: they are the most optimistic people in the world.

For our present predicament, however, perhaps no piece in the book is more appropriate than "Sunshine Charley," a profile of the former president of the National City Bank, "who did not even consider it necessary to go through the barest formailities of covering up his frauds," and now finds himself on trial. See if any of this sounds disturbingly familiar:

He was the banker of bankers, the salesman of salesmen, the genius of the New Economic era. He was the man who had taken the National City Company, that subsidiary of the National City Bank--established, according to the practice of the New Economic Era, as an institution legally distinct but actually identical with the bank, for the purpose of marketing securities which the bank was prohibited from selling--and had transformed it in six years' time from a room with a stenographer, a boy and a clerk into an organization with a staff of fourteen hundred and branch offices all over the country, which sold a billion and a half dollars' worth of securities a year--the largest corporation in the country.

Elsewhere Wilson writes that

There are people who have never recovered from the fantastic ambition and imaginings engendered by the boom of the twenties.

--the sort of line that sends chills through me, seeming instantly applicable to so many people in business and government in our time.

The pessimist in me comes away from The American Earthquake fretting about the many lessons of the 1930s that we've obviously willfully forgotten; the optimist in me looks to the lasting institutions our grandparents built from the catastrophe--Social Security, unemployment, and Keynesian economics among them--and hopes that they'll help us get through this mess more quickly than we did the first time around.

Until then, we've always got Wilson's Lexicon of Prohibition {item four at that link} by which to finely delineate our successive degrees of alcohol-aided distraction. Take your Depression how you will; I choose to take mine while burning with a low blue flame.

"Munday after Christmas was in danger to be spoiled by my horse," or, More Aubreyan Adventures!

In a post last week about the grave illnesses from which John Aubrey suffered as a child, I mentioned that the sketchy autobiographical notes that were appended to the 1696 edition of Aubrey's Miscellaneous Notes Upon Various Subjects tell of the many non-medical travails he endured in succeeding years. General bad fortune--mostly related to the chronic indebtedness caused by the labyrinthine restrictions and complicated debts encumbering his inherited property--alternates with threats of violent death, the reasons for which are often unclear.

Here, as promised, is a bit more detail:

1643. April and May, the Small Pox at Oxon; after left that ingenious place for three years led a sad life in the Country.

1656. Sept. 1655 or rather I think 1656 I began my chargeable tedious lawe Suite on the Entaile in Brcknockshire and Monmouthshire. This yeare and the last was a strange yeare to me. Several love and lawe suites.

1666. This yeare all my business and affairs ran kim kam, nothing tooke effect, as if I had been under an ill tongue. Treacheries in abundance against me.

1669 and 1670 I sold all my Estate in Wilts. From 1670 to this very day (I thank God) I have enjoyed a happy delitescency.

1671. Danger of Arrests.

1677. Latter end of June an impostume brake in my head. Mdm. St John's night 1673 in danger of being run through with a sword by a young templer at M. Burges' chamber in the M. Temple.

I was in danger of being killed by William Earl of Pembroke then Lord Herbert at the election of Sir William Salkeld for New Sarum. I have been in danger of being drowned twice.

Aubrey's equating of lawsuits and love suits in the entry for 1656 prompts a smile every time--especially given the often vexed outcomes of both activities. Another of the great joys of this selection are the disused seventeenth-century words he offers. Delitescence, or secluded retirement, is nice; but nothing can quite compare to kim kam, which the Oxford English Dictionary, drawing on Aubrey's usage and three others from the same period, defines as "Crooked, awkward, perverse, contrary." I see no reason that we all shouldn't try to return kim kam to circulation, posthaste.

Aubrey's autobiographical notes somewhat resemble his brief lives, though they're far more fragmentary; so much is left out that someone unfamiliar with Aubrey's less-than-methodical, drink-fueled work habits might naturally assume that he was being deliberately suggestive, writing with a sly wink. More likely is that, just as with his Lives, Aubrey always meant to put together something more detailed, but his habitual disorganization and dissipation got the better of him.

Perhaps that knowledge is what leads me to detect in these minimal notes some tiny hints of that strain of self-excoriation, of frustrated acknowledgment of failures of character or resolve, that I find so inexplicably charming in other favorite writers such as Cyril Connolly, Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, and even, in his diaries, Samuel Johnson. Edmund Wilson, in his introduction to the 1962 edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives, notes that at the points when Aubrey's Lives most clearly reveal the haziness of his memories of late-night conversations, the original manuscripts are often dotted with the frustrated exclamation, "Sot that I am!"

But fan that I am of the fragment, the incomplete, the hopelessly heterogenous, I find the Miscellanies endless fun; I'll be dipping into it for years. Like when I need a cure for toothache--

Take a new nail, and make the gum bleed with it, and then drive it into an oak. This did cure William Neal's son, a very stout gentleman, when he was almost mad with the pain, and had a mind to have pistolled himself.

--or when my horses have been bewitched--

Mr. Sp. told me that his horse which was bewitched, would break bridles and strong halters, like a Samson. They filled a bottle of the horse's urine, stopped it with a cork and bound it fast in, and then buried it underground: and the party suspected to be the witch, felt ill, that he could not make water, of which he died. When they took up. the bottle, the urine was almost gone; so, that they did believe, that if the fellow could have lived a little longer, he had recovered.

--or, perhaps most important, when I need to save myself from the horror of sour beer on a stormy summer night:

In Herefordshire, and other parts, they do put a cold iron bar upon their barrels, to preserve their beer from being soured by thunder. This is a common practice in Kent.

Sot that Aubrey was, I'll enjoy this messy volume and be grateful.

Roger Ackroyd is dead. At least we can agree on that, right?

When I was in middle school, I went through a period where I read little but Agatha Christie novels. (For those of you keeping score at home, that period followed the one wherein I read little but Doc Savage novels and preceded the one wherein I read little but Star Trek novels.) They offered exactly what I was looking for in a mystery: a setting vaguely exotic, both in its Englishness and its era; minimal violence, occurring offscreen and with virtually no gore; and, most important, a battle of wits--one which, because Christie always played straight with her readers, I was invited to join. I blazed through book after book, preferring Poirot to Marple but ultimately willing to read whatever my local library held.

For nearly twenty years after that, however, I didn't read a single Christie novel. I had moved on: I preferred straight novels, in general, and when I did read mysteries, I was much more interested in the brooding and violence of noir than Christie's decorum. But then a couple of months ago circumstances, like criminals, began to conspire . . .

First, Spinster Aunt supplied a very convincing post about reading Murder on the Orient Express, in the midst of which she pointed out that "You can read Christie's books, drunk, in a day," and that, "They're very good around Christmas time, when [one does] virtually everything in a pleasant alcoholic haze." Marketers take note: those are undeniable selling points!

Then Michael Dirda weighed in. In his Classics for Pleasure (2007), after acknowledging that Christie is not a good writer "if we look to her for the more obvious literary qualities [such as] distinctive prose style, rich characterization, a picture of society and contemporary life," he succinctly explained--thus making me remember--just what is so much fun about her:

Where Christie excels is in her plotting, that most essential of the elements of fiction. (As E. M. Forster emphatically insisted, "Oh yes, the novel tells a story.") Like a poet who writes only sonnets or a composer working out a set of variations, Christie accepts the conventions of the mystery and then seeks to surprise us with her originality. A creative-writing student could usefully study her novels just to learn the art of narrative construction.

In that sense, Christie stands as the anti-Chandler: her characterizations and atmosphere are nil, but her plots are fiendishly clever, her red herrings sprinkled with well-camouflaged abandon, and her mastery of manipulation and misdirection are second to none. No less a mind than Edmund Wilson wrote, after reading Death Comes at the End, that

I confess that I have been had by Mrs. Christie. I did not guess who the murderer was, I was incited to keep on and find out, and when I did finally find out, I was surprised.

--though fairness dictates that I point out that he continued by writing, "I did not care for Agatha Christie, and I hope never to read another of her books."

When I discovered that, despite Christie's reputation as a seamless plotter, Pierre Bayard had, in his book Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery (1998), had the gall to argue that Hercule Poirot had gotten the answer to the question posed by his title wrong, it was obvious: the fates (as represented by my Google Reader and my library) were conspiring to tell me that it was time to give Dame Agatha another try.

Fortunately, I'd somehow never read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), despite its having been the book that made Christie's name, so I was in the fortunate position of being able to read it and Bayard's refutation back to back. And it turns out that . . . everyone was right! Spinster Aunt's recommendation of a drink or two to ease the reading was much appreciated, Dirda's assessment of Christie's characters--

[S]he uses the same stock company in book after book--the retired colonel, the village gossip, the local doctor, the independent young woman, the shrewd governess. They, and the victim, are no more real to us than the characters in a game of Clue.

--was dead on, and Christie's plot was ingenious--yet at the same time Bayard homed in on so many surprisingly weak points as to make a reader wonder if she, too, might have been in on the deception. Reading the two books back to back is a treat I'd recommend to any mystery fan.

Bayard's book consists of two roughly even parts: a section of general reflections on the conditions and rules of the mystery genre, and a section specifically deconstructing Christie's explanation of Roger Ackroyd's untimely demise. Much of the fun of the book rests on Bayard's utter seriousness: though he doesn't make the Sherlockian move of pretending that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is anything more than a novel, within the context of the novel itself he treats every fact presented as a true description of the characters and events of the book--and he insists on devising an alternate solution that fits those facts. "Our first concern, then, is with rigor," he writes early in the book, and he does not waver; I think not even Christie herself could argue for long against his solution. It is, like Christie's, ingenious and satisfying--the more so because it teases out a possibility that, before Bayard's work, the novel itself had foreclosed. The very act of reopening the question serves to animate and enliven The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in a way that surely hasn't obtained since soon after its first publication.

I can't be the only person who, on reading Bayard's book, wished Borges had been alive to enjoy it, can I? Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? is almost like a bizarre refraction of a story like Pierre Menard, an enactment of the idea that every text is perpetually alive and available for rewriting, for injecting with a new meaning. Bayard has, in a sense, modernized this eighty-year-old story, by giving us that most post-modern of things: a choice. We now have two answers, two interpretations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, which give rise, between them, to a third choice: we can decide for ourselves which of the proposed murderers killed Roger Ackroyd--or we can decide to revel in ambiguity itself, enjoying the pleasures of close reading and the stimulation of uncertainty.

And if that's what we choose, we can wholeheartedly look forward to Bayard's next book, on . . . get ready for it . . . The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Edmund Wilson on Abraham Lincoln

Having indirectly slagged Edmund Wilson the other night when writing about Viktor Shklovsky, I think it's only fair to point out how good Wilson is in his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) when writing about another regular preoccupation of this blog, Abraham Lincoln.

Wilson doesn't really break new ground in his study of Lincoln, and he gets Reconstruction wrong (which I suppose can partially be excused by the fact that Wilson was writing before historians in the 1960s and after began arguing for Reconstruction's value--and its eventual, necessary continuation in the Civil Rights movement). But as usual, when Wilson pays close attention to texts--in this case Lincoln's writings and speeches--his responses are insightful and compelling.

He's also good on Lincoln's dreams and visions, one of my favorite aspects of Lincoln history and folklore, which, he notes,

add an element of imagery and tragic foreshadowing that one finds sometimes in the lives of poets--Dante's visions or Byron's last poem--but that one does not expect to encounter in the career of a political figure.

Later, in tying Lincoln's fatalism with his sense of his public role as the suffering but stalwart face of the nation--and therefore of democracy--Wilson writes,

The night before Lincoln was murdered, he dreamed again of the ship approaching its dark destination. He had foreseen and accepted his doom; he knew it was part of the drama. He had in some sense imagined this drama himself--had even prefigured Booth and the aspect he would wear for Booth when the latter would leap down from the Presidential box crying, "Sic semper tyrannis!" Had he not once told Herndon that Brutus was created to murder Caesar and Caesar to be murdered by Brutus?

So far as I remember, Borges never wrote about Lincoln, but that last line makes me think he would have found a rich subject in Abe's morbid fatalism.

But the most fun in Wilson's essay is found early on, when he's doing the work that all writers on Lincoln seem to have to do before setting sail: clearing the deck of a century of accumulated nonsense.

There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe.

Before I let Wilson go any farther: I doubt anyone's surpassed Lincoln since 1962, but surely someone's surpassed Poe? Ernest Hemingway, maybe? Jack Kerouac? Okay, back to it:

[T]here are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg. Yet Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, insufferable though it sometimes is, is by no means the worst of these tributes. It is useless if one tries to consult it for the source of some reported incident, but it does have its unselective value as an album of Lincoln clippings. It would, however, be more easily acceptable as a repository of Lincoln folk-lore if the compiler had not gone so far in contributing to this folk-lore himself. Here is Sandburg's intimate account of the behavior of Lincoln's mother, about whom almost nothing is known: "She could croon in the moist evening twilight to the shining face in the sweet bundle, 'Hush thee, hush thee, thy father's a gentleman!' She could toss the bundle into the air against a far, hazy line of blue mountains, catch it in her two hands as it came down, let it snuggle close to her breast and feed, while she asked, 'Here we come--where from?' And after they had both sunken in the depths of forgetful sleep, in the early dark and past midnight, the tug of a mouth at her nipples in the grey dawn matched in its freshness the first warblings of birds and the morning stars leaving the earth to the sun and dew."

Lincoln's mother's nipples! Sandburg imagined Lincoln's mother's nipples! And he compared baby Abe's chewing on them to the singing of birds! I can picture a writer--especially one who is a folksy poet at heart--getting caught up in a rush of words and penning that line. But how on earth does he read it over later without deciding to put the whole manuscript to the match?

It's fun to contrast that silly romantic picture with one of the few things we actually do know about the real Mrs. Lincoln: that she may have been the source of her son's youthful prowess as a wrestler. In Honor's Voice, Douglas L. Wilson quotes testimony from Usher Linder, a neighbor of the Lincolns in Indiana:

His mother, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, was said to be a very strong-minded woman, and one of the most athletic women in Kentucky. In a fair wrestle, she could throw most of the men who ever put her powers to the test. A reliable gentleman told me he heard the late Jack Thomas, clerk of the Grayson Court, say he had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back.

Occasionally I enjoy suspending my disbelief in an afterlife long enough that I can picture unlikely meetings between the dead. Tonight, I'm picturing that day in 1967 when Carl Sandburg joined the heavenly host:

Greeted just inside the gates by Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sandburg was surprised to quickly find himself being seized by the wings and wrestled to the ground. Confused, he accepted the victorious Mrs. Lincoln's offer of a hand getting up, and as she pulled him to his feet, she introduced herself in her Hoosier drawl and said, "You shouldn't ought to have written that about my nipples."

Dusting off the speechless Sandburg's robes, Mrs. Lincoln smiled and continued, "But you did like my boy, and I have to admit I did enjoy that whole 'hog butcher of the world' bit, so maybe we can be friends after all."

Elementary, my dear Wilson

To follow yesterday's post about crime novels that are all far more about the people involved in the crime than about the solution to the mystery, I'll turn to a pair of pieces about standard detective stories. First, there's interwar puzzle novelist Anthony Berkeley musing on the popularity--and future--of the genre in "Why Do I Write Detective Stories?", collected in The Avenging Chance:

The reason why detective stories are so popular is simple enough. They are, after all, only a glorified puzzle; and everyone enjoys a puzzle. To read a detective story as it should be read is really a test of intelligence; in fact one might say that whereas the ordinary novel appeals only to the emotions, the detective story appeals to the intellect, which surely should be the more important. . . . How long can the detective story expect to maintain its present popularity? Always, I think, provided that it moves with the times. This is, so long as those who write them will recognize that the convention of yesterday will not suit the requirements of tomorrow. In other words, the days of pure puzzle story, without living characters, an interesting setting, or some kind of resemblance to real life are over. Already, without sacrificing the puzzle element, authors are paying more attention to character and atmosphere. Already the detective story is becoming altogether more sophisticated.

Berkeley's clockwork puzzle stories would seem exactly the sort that would irk Edmund Wilson, who in a late 1944 article called "Why Do People Read Detective Novels?" argued--with reference specifically to Agatha Christie--that

You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, for they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader's suspicion.

The dozens of dissenting letters he received about that article led to the wonderfully titled follow-up "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Wilson gave no ground to the mystery lovers in that piece, saving the sharpest sting for near the end:

[M]y final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.

Ah, but maybe Wilson was not so immune as he thought. Mere weeks later, he was admitting that,

I have myself become addicted, in spells, to reading myself to sleep with Sherlock Holmes.

Though he tries to argue that Conan Doyle's stories are different from typical detective stories, closer to fairy tales than puzzles, that seems like nothing more than an ex post facto justification for the pleasure he derives from the Holmes tales. It's that sort of half-admission of enthusiastic fallibility, turning up occasionally in Wilson's writings, that humanizes him for me, transforming him from a distant statue of expansive critical acumen into an actual person, experiencing and thinking about literature as he encounters it.

Wilson will thus be a silent passenger later today in the car, as Stacey and I continue our traveling tradition of reading Sherlock Holmes aloud. I believe that "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" is up next. May your Thanksgiving contain at least as much satisfyingly solvable mystery as that.

Ignorance and Impudent Puppies, or, A Postscript to Edmund Wilson Week

Though I'll continue reading away at the new Library of America volumes here and there for a good long while, I'll close Edmund Wilson Week with two entries from James Laughlin's wonderful autobiography in scrapbook form, The Way It Wasn't (2006):

WILSON, EDMUND

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up went through about five printings and we keep it in print. But it got me in Dutch with Edmund Wilson because the papers came from him and I didn't show him proofs until it was too late. He had systematically crossed out the name of every friend they'd had at Princeton, though the book said nothing bad about them. And I put the names back in, John Peal Bishop and this one and that one. Edmund wrote to me on one of his cards, "You are an impudent puppy."

Which isn't as bad as the assessment of Wilson himself that one of Laughlin's authors delivered:

DAHLBERG

DREADFUL EDWARD

I should have spotted from something he said when I first took him out to lunch that Edward Dahlberg was going to be a problem. Over a BLT on 4th Street (no New Directions author has ever been lunched at the Four Seasons) Edward told me, quite seriously, that Edmund Wilson was "a very ignorant man."

"Vaudeville has alway been an American specialty," or, Edmund Wilson Week concludes

Earlier this week I gave Edmund Wilson the edge in moral standing over V. S. Naipaul, because Wilson's pointed critiques of the work of his friends Ring Lardner and Scott Fitzgerald were delivered when the men were alive and could respond--either with anger or, what was surely Wilson's hope, better writing--while Naipaul's dismissal of his friend Anthony Powell's work appeared only after Powell was safely dead. To be fair, therefore, I should write about another piece in the first Library of American volume of Wilson's critical work, "The All-Star Literary Vaudeville," which he published anonymously in a multi-authored collection called American Criticism (1926). In it, Wilson runs through seemingly every working writer of the period, totting up their many faults and their relatively few successes. His opening disclaimer, that

he feels a certain human sympathy with all [the American literary movement's] manifestations, even with those of which, artistically, he disapproves

and that he has,

for his own satisfaction, for the appeasement of his own conscience, made an attempt to draw up a balance-sheet of his opinions in regard to his contemporaries, not merely in disparagement of those whom he considers rather overrated but in justice to those he admires,

falls a little flat when cloaked in anonymity. Say what you will about the reviewing approach of Dale Peck, but he at least signs his name to his bloodbaths.

Wilson further compromises himself with the closing sentence of that initial paragraph:

If he succeeds in disturbing one editor or reviewer, in an atmosphere where now for some time politeness and complacency have reigned, he will feel that he has not written in vain.

That stated desire to provoke seems even more to require that Wilson be up-front about his identity; if he felt, as he apparently did, that the world of reviewing had grown too comfortable, then he ought to have been willing to accept some of that discomfort as the price of honesty. That he wasn't is understandable, but at this distance of years it's difficult to excuse, both on his part and on the part of his editor. (Alongside of all this is the question of just who Wilson would have fooled. I may have to pick up a biography to see how quickly he was outed--the piece certainly reads like Wilson's usual work.)

It's easy to see why the essay, properly attributed, would have made for uncomfortable cocktail parties. In a note to The Shores of Light, the collection in which it was reprinted in 1952, Wilson mentions that Maxwell Bodenheim described him as "a fatuous policeman, menacingly swinging his club," and it's hard to disagree--even though Wilson also notes that he "qualified or softened" some of his initial judgments for the reissue. To take a few:

Dos Passos is ridden by adolescent resentments and seems given to documenting life from the outside rather than knowing it by intimate experience.

Sinclair Lewis, with a vigorous satiric humor, has brought against certain aspects of American civilization an indictment that has its local importance, but, when one has been through Main Street and Babbitt, amusing though they certainly are, one is not left with any appetite to reader further novels by Lewis: they have beauty neither of style nor of form and they tell us nothing new about life.

To follow the moral disintegration of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie is to suffer all the agonies of being out of work without being rewarded by the aesthetic pleasure which art is supposed to supply.

Vachel Lindsay's best poems . . . are spoiled by the incurable cheapness and looseness which are rampant in the rest of his work.

[Eugene] O'Neill is hysterically embittered.

Robert Frost has a thin but authentic vein of poetic sensibility; but I find him excessively dull, and he certainly writes very poor verse.

H.D., like Carl Sandburg, writes well, but, like Sandburg, there is not much in her.

Even H. L. Mencken, whom Wilson claims is "underrated as a writer of English prose" and whom he calls "perhaps a prophet rather than a critic," comes under fire for his ideas, which are "neither many nor subtle."

Yet once we get over the shock of Wilson's baldly brutal phrases, his opinions hold up pretty well eighty years later. As an Illinoisan, I'm supposed to leap to the defense of Dreiser, Sandburg, and Lindsay, but the only one of the three I've ever found congenial is Sandburg, and even there I have to agree with Wilson, who locates Sandburg's appeal in his skill with language, while lamenting that "his ideas seem rather obvious, his emotions rather meager." I can't speak to his assessments of H. D. or Dos Passos, not having read them, but his take on Sinclair Lewis is dead-on, succinctly marking the difference between the satire of Lewis and the richer, more pointed, and better-written work of Evelyn Waugh. Moreover, two of the writers whom Wilson chooses to single out for unmitigated praise, Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane, have only seen their reputations grow since the '20s.

Wilson does make some mistakes, of course. Frost he misjudges--I could see how one might deem some of Frost's story-like poems as "poor verse," but I don't understand how he could be viewed as dull. Wilson undervalues Marianne Moore, seeming not to get her organic strangeness, while Edna St. Vincent Millay (with whom he'd conducted a disastrously passionate affair) he overrates slightly, calling her "perhaps one of the most important of our poets." Edward Arlington Robinson, meanwhile, whom he heralds as "one of the poets of our time most likely to survive as an American classic," has survived, but feels remarkably dated; in fact, it's hard to see how he wouldn't have already seemed a bit musty in the late '20s.

What I find most surprising in "The All-Star Literary Vaudeville," however, is just how many of the poets and writers of the period have survived. Very few of the artists Wilson notes are entirely unfamiliar, and the majority of them would be recognized by even a relatively casual fan of American literature. Wilson's individual assessments--correct or not--aren't as interesting in themselves as they are as a whole, the record of a period of impressive creative flowering as it appeared, in the moment, to a particularly astute reader whose general interests and tastes we already know. Quibble with Wilson as I will over his failure of nerve, I'm glad to have this record. And his dazzling closing paragraph, a perfect example of his way with brief, effective descriptions, is so good as to almost make me forgive him his anonymity:

When time shall have weeded out our less important writers, it is probably that those who remain will give the impression of a literary vaudeville: H. L. Mencken hoarse with preaching in his act making fun of preachers; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the soloist, a contralto with deep notes of pathos; Sherwood Anderson holding his audience with naive but disquieting bedtime stories; Theodore Dreiser with his newspaper narrative of commonplace scandals and crimes and obituaries of millionaire, in which the reporter astonishes the readers by being rash enough to try to tell the truth; T. S. Eliot patching from many cultures a dazzled and variegated disguise for the shrinking and scrupulous soul of a hero out of Henry James.

And if those writers are the vaudeville acts, Wilson places himself in the role of their emcee, or possibly their clown. I can't help but imagine him typing that last period, then wiping his brow and taking a tiny little bow.

"These luminosities are too low-burning and evanescent," or, Edmund Wilson Week Continues!

A the end of the week, I'm in the same spot where I began it: still reading through the first of the two new Library of America volumes of Edmund Wilson's literary essays. I'm enjoying reading Wilson as much for his style as for his insight. He writes long sentences that perpetually shift and redirect themselves, subordinate clause leading to subordinate clause—perhaps interrupted by an interjection—leading to another clause until, at the end, the reader emerges from the thicket of thought to see, just ahead, clear and shining and difficult to dispute, Wilson's point.

Here, for example, is his somewhat arch take on Hart Crane, from the May 11, 1927 issue of the New Republic:

Mr. Crane has a most remarkable style, a style that is strikingly original--almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was, not merely not applied to a great subject, but not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all.

Not to appear to claim too much for myself, but if you've read much of this blog, I think you'll see why I find Wilson's prose congenial. It might even seem that I've used him as a model, but much as I enjoy his writing, I discovered it long after I'd discovered (and begun to abuse) the comma, semicolon, and all the glorious constructions they enable.

However, just as Wilson is sometimes wrong in his judgments, he is also sometimes guilty of an offense with which Stacey frequently charges me: he writes sentences that, however clear, are just too damned long. Take this monstrosity, from earlier in the piece quoted above:

Mr. E .A. Robinson's Tristram has been extravagantly admired in some quarters; but, though it is undoubtedly more easily readable than his other Arthurian poems, though it contains a better story more energetically told and though it is by no means poor in those flashes of moral vision that make the weaker poems of Robinson more interesting than the strongest of many of his contemporaries, it seems to me that these luminosities are too low-burning and evanescent to justify the whole of a long narrative that reads at its worst like a movie scenario and at its best like a novel of adultery of the nineties, full of long well-bred conversations of which the metaphysical archness sounds peculiarly incongruous in the moths of the heroes of medieval legend.

There really ought to be a break for cocktails in there somewhere around "moral vision"; otherwise, it seems cruel to ask anyone to endure the forced march that follows "low-burning and evanescent."

Those overstuffed nightmares are relatively rare, however, and more than made up for by lines like these further comments on Hart Crane, which benefit from Wilson’s habit of delaying the payoff:

His poetry is a disponible, as they say about French troops. We are eagerly waiting to see to which part of the front he will move it: just at present it is killing time in the cafes behind the lines.

None of this would matter, however, if Wilson weren’t an interesting and acute reader of literature. The conclusion of his “Poe at Home and Abroad,” for example, both situates Edgar Allan Poe and notes the sources of his power:

It was Poe who sent out the bridge from the romanticism of the early nineteenth century to the symbolism of the later; and symbolism, as M. Seylaz points out, though scarcely any of its original exponents survive, now permeates literature. We must not, however, expect that Poe should be admired or understood in his capacity of suspension across this chasm by critics who are hardly aware that either of its banks exist.

Earlier in that piece, which is from the December 8, 1926 issue of the New Republic, Wilson writes:

[T]he real significance of Poe’s short stories does not lie in what they purport to relate. Many are confessedly dreams; and, as with dreams, though they seem absurd, their effect on our emotions is serious. And even those that pretend to the logic and the exactitude of actual narratives are, nevertheless, also dreams.

Who knew that Wilson could write like Borges?

As interesting and thoughtful as Wilson’s piece on Poe is, it’s still not as pithy or unforgettable as this dual description of Poe and Twain by V. S. Pritchett, who these days may be my favorite critic:

Everything really American, really non-English, comes out of that pair of spiritual derelicts, those two scarecrow figures with their half-lynched minds.

Though "spiritual derelicts" is satisfyingly apt, I will admit to being a bit vague about what Pritchett means by “half-lynched minds.” But the phrase does possess a certain emotional power and rightness not unlike that achieved by the best of the aforementioned Symbolists, who, as Wilson explains:

contrive[d] to communicate emotions by images whose connection with the subject and whose relevance to one another we may not always understand.

Pritchett’s description stands in the shadow of Hemingway’s mannered, six-words-too-long assessment of Twain’s greatest book:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Hemingway's line is such a commonplace now as to have lost any force it might once have had, but Pritchett’s, eerie and sidelong, retains its power. With one sentence, he changed forever how I will approach both Twain and Poe. In my reading so far, Wilson hasn't delivered any judgment quite so stiletto-sharp, but he's opened up new ways for me to think about writers I enjoy. To a critic who can do that, I'll gladly raise my glass; it's what all of us who write about books aim for, and any day in which we succeed can surely be counted a good one.