A neo-Jamesian folkmeos

{Ford Madox Brown, The Dream of Sardanapalus, 1871}

When I started this blog a bit more than two years ago, I didn't specify that I would only write about reading I did while awake . . . so today you get a post about a dream. There was actual reading in the dream, and it included some figures who've figured prominently in this blog already, so it seems relatively justifiable, but I still feel as if I should apologize to the large percentage of the population that has the good sense not to share its dreams.

The origin of the dream is simple: before bed, I spent an hour or so engrossed in Richard Stark's The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), the second of his many novels starring Parker the bank robber. The Parker novels are essentially novels about work, wrapped up in mundane detail--but because most of us readers work office jobs, we enjoy watching Parker go through all the planning and overplanning that underlies a successful heist.

Because I tend to take the tone and language of whatever I'm reading before bed straight into my dreamlife, soon after turning off the light I found myself in the midst of planning a heist. I was working with Parker, who was his usual hyper-professional self, and we were ticking off all the set-up elements that were incidental--yet crucial--to our heist. We had created false names, rented cars, stolen license plates, bought unregistered guns, timed police shifts and guard routes. More unusual, though, was that for this heist to work we'd had to create and produce an issue of a highbrow literary magazine.

Parker's every action in Stark's novels demonstrates that he knows what any conscientious worker learns at some point: that one cuts corners, however seemingly minor, at one's own risk. Rushed or incomplete efforts have a way of coming back to bite you--and in the case of a bank robbery, those unpleasant surprises are likely to lead to prison or death. It should therefore be no surprise that under Parker's direction our heist team produced a first-rate literary magazine. No faking here. It was well-planned, well-edited, well-designed, and full of interesting articles.

Which was good, because our heist went sour in the planning stages, and we called it off. Dejected, I sat in what ought to have been the getaway car, and my only consolation for the wasted money and time was the thought that I could at least read our magazine. So I opened it to the lead article, a double interview in which Anne Carson and a male contemporary American novelist (whose name I knew during the dream, but whose identity was lost to me on waking) walked through a forest and talked. Though I remember flipping through the magazine hoping to find a photo of the notoriously camera-shy Carson--to no avail--I recall nothing about the article except for the following passage, which I reproduce more or less as I read it in my dream, editorial notes as they were in the dream magazine:

CARSON: So in what way would you say you're most nineteenth-century?

MALE NOVELIST: [Chuckles sheepishly] Well, to be honest, it's probably my belief in a neo-Jameseian folkmeos. [A neo-Jamesian folkmeos is a belief that a male artist's domestic concerns naturally ought to be addressed by the women of a household. One can surely assume that the Alice Jameses, especially were they alive today, would have had some sharp comments about that belief.--Eds.] And how about you? How are you most nineteenth-century?

CARSON: Oh, goodness--I never even quite make it to the end of the eighteenth century!

"Folkmeos" appears to be a wholly made-up word--what it has to do, really, with William or Henry James I have no idea. More interesting is that despite the fact that I concentrated very hard on remembering all the details of the dream--and in particular that word--and even described the whole dream to my coworker Carrie, highlighting "folkmeos," by early afternoon I couldn't recall the word without Carrie's assitance. The mind really does want--and, presumably, need--us to forget our dreams.

I don't know that there's any other lesson here, other than to be careful what you read in bed. I do, however, promise not to turn dream reading into a regular feature of this blog.

The Touchstone

It was lines like this--

Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn form the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his purposeless person to the window

--that had me asking, less than two pages into Edith Wharton's novella The Touchstone (1900), why I'd not read more of her books. Until I picked up this one at the Melville House booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the only Wharton I had read had been a pleasantly creepy volume of her ghost stories. I'm going to have to rectify that, and soon.

The Touchstone is brief, but full of interesting thoughts about honor, honesty, and intimate relationships, all related in well-honed prose. Take this description of a wealthy book collector, which leaves us in no doubt as to the sort of man he is:

Some people are judged by their actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield.

Even her more descriptive passages often reveal character; here her protagonist, Glennard, with a lost love on his mind, returns home:

In his sitting room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory silver frame, just where memory officiously reminded him, Margaret Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead.

Glennard is trying not to think about the late Margaret Aubyn because she used to love him and he has a cache of her letters to him--a cache that, because she was a famous writer, could be sold to a publisher, solving his money problems and making possible his marriage to the woman whose photo has displaced hers. Knowing that he is betraying a trust, he sells the letters, and what follows is an unshakable, obsessive guilt that comes close to destroying the very marriage that his betrayal enabled.

Wharton describes Glennard's states of mind, and in particular the emotions and deceptions that fuel his discussions with his wife,with a penetrating acuity similar to that of Henry James--but without the sense one gets from James of an extended worrying about a point before landing on it, like a dog turning circles before lying down. Instead, Wharton's sentences are balanced and precise, and her metaphors, while striking, are clear and insightful. Here, for example, in the midst of an argument with his wife, Glennard realizes he has been too harsh, angering her:

He felt her close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed the hand on the trigger.

And later, when Glennard finds himself on the verge of confessing his guilt to his wife, their conversation tiptoes up to the revelation, and

something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind speech.

Other novelists of dialogue as combat, such as Barbara Pym or Ivy Compton-Burnett, leave the emotional ground underlying conversation up to the reader to infer; Wharton instead draws out every shift in that terrain with a marriage counselor's focus on nuance and intention.

So Melville House's Art of the Novella series is now two for two, and it's set me on the Wharton trail. But where next--The Age of Innocence or Ethan Frome?

The Thin Place, part one

I wanted to like Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place (2006). The reviews it received when it came out made it sound like something truly original and strange; in Harper's, John Leonard, whom I always appreciate even when I disagree with him, compared her to Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Thoreau. The book's title, too, made it sound promising, a thin place being, in myth and religion, a place where the walls between the physical and spiritual worlds are unusually thin, to the point of being permeable. And the book opens with reasonable promise:

There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake. One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall. This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do. The dead souls no longer wore gowns. They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.

There's no doubt that this is the sort of paragraph that will make a person keep reading: the fairytale description of the girls sets a tone, and while the lines about the unspeakable might not hold up to close scrutiny, they're at least unexpected, a statement right up front that this book will be governed by a strongly expressed sensibility.

But there is also, already in that first paragraph and getting worse as the book progresses, a forced combination of weightiness and casualness to the prose, driven by a pretense of bouncing quickly from thought to thought, unconcerned, as minds are, with underlying structure. But this forces Davis's sentences into an oddly mannered slackness, where clarity (along with, at times, grammatical structure) is sacrificed. Meaning becomes unclear, odd constructions trip up the reader, and the flow of the telling is disrupted. Take this paragraph, for example, which follows a page or so written from the perspective of a pet dog, then a paragraph that seems to be in the voice of the omniscient narrator:

Poor beavers. So shiny and sleek--no wonder women wanted to put that fur on their bodies. Of course they didn't love the fur the way they loved the beloved--they didn't want to slip into the beaver's fur the way they wanted to slip into the beloved's coat or vest. They didn't want to be thought of as beavers. They just wanted to be admired. Also they wanted to stay warm.

It's unclear to me whether these are the narrator's thoughts--in which case, "beloved" could mean the men in the women's lives, and the women really do want to slip into those men's coats--or the dog's thoughts, perhaps--which, though less likely, would make the odd note of the word "beloved," and the idea of nuzzling into a vest, make more sense. The final sentence, meanwhile, seems to be so affected as to be in a sort of limbo, neither a tossed-off joke nor an actual observation.

I understand that passages like the above may not really be a serious problem; they may only grate on me with particular force because I do a lot of editing and therefore spend a lot of time thinking about structure and clarity. It's possible that most readers could pass over them without trouble. And the passages that tripped me up are intermingled with sharply written lines like these:

"It was only seven-thirty, and the study was like an oven, his hair like an animal sitting on his head."
and
"Outside in the parking lot, the air was hot and humid and as swarming with bugs as a brain is with ideas."
and
"'Time's up,' Piet said, trying to tip [the cat] Gigi off the pillow, like a ball or shoe, something without claws."

The effectiveness of such compact, clear images goes a long way towards mitigating my irritation with Davis's cloudier efforts.

Part two tomorrow.

William James and ghosts

Yesterday's book on William James was a serious intellectual biography, tracing his ideas and his life through dense--but fascinating--paragraphs woven thickly with quotations from his writings, letters, and diaries. Today's James book, Ghost Hunters: WIlliam James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (2006) on the other hand, has a much smaller scope and, written by a journalist, Deborah Blum, it's a comparatively much easier, quicker read.

The late nineteenth century witnessed the birth of the spiritualist movement, as mediums, sensitives, and hauntings of all sorts made news (and lots of money) throughout the United States and Europe. James--who, as I wrote yesterday, was never one to close off the possibility of finding truth in unexpected places--was an early champion of scientific exploration into the possibility of spirit communication, and Deborah Blum ably details his efforts with allies of various levels of scientific integrity and credulousness to establish proof of paranormal phenomena.

From the vantage point of this more skeptical age, it's hard to believe just how worked up the public and the scientific community got over the work of mediums who almost all seem to have been utter fakes--and not very good ones at that. Yet Blum makes clear that James and company were risking their reputations with every foray into the spirit world, however carefully controlled and documented; the very fact that they deigned to investigate these disreputable performers was enough to raise significant ire on the part of many of their fellow scientists. James, however, with his characteristic openness, believed that it was just as unscientific to declare there is no chance of spirit communication as it would have been to blindly accept the word of any believer off the street.

So he and his colleagues devised experiments, some truly rigorous and others fairly suspect, and tested medium after medium. And, to no contemporary reader's surprise, they caught nearly all of them cheating: lifting tables with their feet, calling forth gauzy ghosts from curtains with hidden strings, steaming open envelopes, sneaking hands free in order to rap the table. Some of the researchers were gladdened by these results, because they were at heart debunkers. But many of them essentially wanted to believe--they only wanted some proof, both to back up that belief and to convince others--so Blum's book is, for the most part, a litany of disappointment.

But then there's Leonora Piper, a medium who once made, said William's brother Henry

an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me--not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law, and an allusion so pertinent and initiated and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me.

And Henry wasn't the only one; despite never being caught employing any sort of detective tricks, Piper is recorded as having delivered intimate messages to a wide variety of investigators and ordinary sitters. Here's the account of another investigator:

The professor had brought a single circle of gold, one that once belonged to his dead mother. The ring had been one of two, a set that he and his mother had exchanged on Christmas.

Each ring had been engraved with the first word of the recipient's favorite proverb. Long ago, he'd lost the one she'd given him. But the previous year, when his mother died, the ring he'd given to her had been returned to him.

The professor was holding that ring in his hand during the sitting, hiding the word as he inquired, "What was written in Mamma's ring."

"I had hardly got the words from my mouth till she slapped down the word on the other ring--the one Mamma had given me, and which had been lost years ago.

"As the word was a peculiar one, doubtfully ever written in any ring before, an as she wrote it in such a flash, it was surely curious."

How much credence to lend to these accounts after more than a century is, of course, difficult to know--after all, science's ability to test and measure has advanced tremendously, and we still have no data suggesting that paranormal phenomena are real. But Leonora Piper's readings were enough, at the time, for William James to begin to believe that there might be spirit communication. As he put it, "To upset the conclusion that all crows are black, there is no need to seek demonstration that no crow is black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow; a single one is sufficient." Miss Piper was his white crow, and even now, reading Blum's account of her sittings can bring chills.

And that brings me to the real reason I picked up this book, after I'd just read more than 500 pages about William James: the ghost stories. Ghost Hunters is chock-full of them, from a series of spell-binding accounts of death-visitations to psychic detection to some truly spine-tingling accounts of seances. Blum tells them well, allowing them space to be themselves, true in the telling, and only after they're finished allowing scientists and reality to begin to intrude. What more can you ask than a book that marries the spooky pleasures of ghost stories and the excitement of scientific discovery?

On that note, just for fun, I'll end with one of the accounts of a death-visitation collected by researchers for the Society for Psychical Research (of whose U.S. branch William James was head) and published in a book called Phantasms of the Living. You might check under the bed before you begin reading:

A British clergyman was taking a summer evening walk over the downs near Marlcombe Hill. He was composing in his head a congratulatory letter to a good friend whose birthday would be two days later, on August 20, 1874.

He had barely begun when a voice spoke sharply in his ear: "What, write to a dead man; write to a dead man?"

The clergyman turned hastily around, expecting to see someone behind him. There was only the fading light lazing the grasses with gold. "Treating the matter as an illusion, I went on with my composition." the same voice spoke again, this time louder and with some impatience: "What, write to a dead man; write to a dead man?"

Again, he turned around. Again, there was no one there. But now he was afraid that it wasn't an illusion.

After hurrying home, he wrote the letter and sent it anyway. "In reply [I] received from Mrs. W. the sad, but to me not unexpected, intelligence that her husband was dead."

Lovecraft and other scares

My worries about October's demands on my time have so far been borne out: between the last days of my marathon training and the first days of baseball playoffs, my writing has suffered. I'm such a creature of habit that, were I to continue writing this blog for the next forty years, October would probably always be a light month for those reasons.

My reading continues, though, if for no other reason than that my commute continues. And today I have for you a bit from Luc Sante's excellent article on H. P. Lovecraft in the October 19th New York Review of Books. Luc Sante is one of my favorite writers; Lovecraft, on the other hand, I find fascinating but can read only in very small doses. Sante has come to the rescue, though, and his article is a splendid example of the joys of letting another, better reader tell me about a writer I don't know well. That article alone is worth the price of the issue.

I’ll excerpt one passage for you. Relying on the Library of America edition of Lovecraft's stories and Michel Houellebecq's recent biography, Sante tells of Lovecraft's fears:

It is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list.

If you’re looking for something scary to read, since it’s that time of year, New York Review of Books Classics has a couple of good collections, one of which, The Colour out of Space, takes its title from a very good Lovecraft story. They also publish Edward Gorey's anthology of his favorite ghost stories, The Haunted Looking Glass. No Lovecraft in there, but it does close with a very scary M. R. James story.

Oxford's collection of M. R. James's ghost stories, Casting the Runes, is also very good, full of stories of cursed artifacts and dangerous scholarship (and the hardcover is great because it's so teeny, with a trim size of only about four by five, a true pocket book).

If you're more interested in repression than the horrors of antiquity, The Ghost Stories of Henry James will do; it's surprisingly creepy and effective. Edith Wharton's ghost stories are a bit staid--more so, even, than James's, but at least a few are extremely gripping.

John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights, which includes several stories that formed the basis for episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents relies for its chills less on the supernatural than on the all-too-natural: plain old human cruelty and evil. It's also published by the NYRB.

If you're just looking for variety and value, it's hard to do better than One Hundred Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, from Sterling Publishing. Not every story is a winner, but at approximately $.13 per story, it's hard to go wrong. And if you sit up all night reading those, you're in luck: Sterling also has volumes of Wicked Little Witch stories and Hair-Raising Little Horror stories.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Tartarus Press, a small publisher from the UK specializing in reprints of books by old masters of horror and the macabre. Stacey reads their journal, Wormwood, and while I have yet to buy any of their apparently beautifully produced volumes, now that October has returned I'm trolling their list once again. When we were last in London, we were told by a friend of a friend that there's a particular little bookshop that stocks a lot of Tartarus books. We didn't find it--and until we do, I'm going to assume that it's one of those stores that you might easily enter . . . but never be able to leave.

So what--other than Bush--is keeping you up at night?