"He speaks all his Words distinctly, half as loud again as the others."

{David Garrick as Hamlet}

In the weeks leading up to Hallowe'en, when I was writing daily about ghosts and spirits, I spent a few days on Shakespearean ghosts, including that of Hamlet's father. If only I'd read Tom Jones a couple of months earlier, I could have adduced a scene from it as evidence of just how scary Hamlet's father's ghost can be--for said ghost makes a memorable appearance in one of Tom Jones's most entertaining digressions, a trip to the theatre by Tom and his well-meaning buffoon of a servant, Partridge; that the scene also gives us a glimpse of David Garrick--whom Partridge refers to as "that little Man "--in action as Hamlet is an extra bonus:

As soon as the Play, which was Hamlet Prince of Denmark, began, Partridge was all Attention, nor did he break Silence till the Entrance of the Ghost; upon which he asked Jones, "What man that was in the strange Dress; something," said he," like what I have seen in a Picture. Sure it is not Armour, is it?" Jones answered, "That is the Ghost." To which Partridge replied, "Persuade me to that, Sir, if you can. Though I can't say I ever actually saw a Ghost in my life, yet I am certain I should know one, if I saw him, better than that comes to. No, no, Sir, Ghosts don't appear in such Dresses as that, neither."

Enter Garrick, and Partridge's doubts take wing, replaced by assailing fears that lead to knocking knees and trembling limbs:

"O la! Sir," said he, "I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not afraid of any Thing; for I know it is but a Play. And if it was really a Ghost, it could do one no Harm at such Distance, and in so much Company; any yet if I was frightened, I am not the only Person." "Why, who," cries Jones, "dost thou take to be such a Coward here besides thyself?" "Nay, you may call me Coward if you will; but if that little Man there upon the Stage is not frightned, I never saw any Man frightned in my Life. Ay, ay; go along with you!

Later, Partridge graces us with a close--if naive--analysis of Garrick's technique:

[D]id you not yourself observe afterwards, when he found out it was his own Father's Spirit, and how he was murdered in the Garden, how his Fear forsook him by Degrees, and he was struck dumb with Sorrow, as it were, just as I should have been, had it been my own Case.

Yet for all this, at the end of the play, when asked for his favorite player, Partridge forsakes Garrick, choosing instead the actor who had played Claudius, for which he is reproached by one of his companions:

"Indeed, Mr. Partridge," says Mrs. Miller, "you are not of the same Opinion with the Town, for they are all agreed, that Hamlet is acted by the best player who ever was on the Stage." "He the best Player!" cries Partridge, with a contemptuous Sneer. "Why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a Ghost, I should have looked in the very same Manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that Scene, as you called it, between him and his Mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me, any Man, that is, any good Man, that had such a Mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but indeed, Madam, though I was never at a Play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the Country; and the King for my Money; he speaks all his Words distinctly, half as loud again as the others.--Any Body may see he is an actor."

Gulled by Garrick's naturalism, the yokel prefers the overwrought. Though Partridge doesn't know that he is expected to prefer Garrick, the scene nevertheless reminds me distantly of Marcel's disappointment at first seeing La Berma on stage in In Search of Lost Time: expecting the spectacular, he fails to notice nuance.

If Samuel Johnson's account of Garrick's acting is accurate, Partridge would probably not have been the only novice theatre-goer to have been fuddled by Garrick's technique. In The Life of Johnson James Boswell reports Johnson saying:

Garrick . . . was no declaimer; there was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken To be, or not to be, better than he did; yet he was the only actor I ever saw whom I could call a master both in tragedy and comedy; though I liked him best in comedy. A true conception of character, and natural expression of it, were his distinguishing excellencies.

{Garrick as Richard III}

But there are limits to naturalism for Johnson, even in the case of Garrick:

Johnson, indeed, had thought more upon the subject of acting than might be generally supposed. Talking of it one day to Mr. Kemble, he said, "Are you, sir, one of those enthusiasts who believe yourself transformed into the very character you represent?" Upon Mr. Kemble's asnwering that he had never felt so strong a persuasion himself; "To be sure not, Sir, (said Johnson;) the thing is impossible. And if Garrick really believed himself to be that monster, Richard the Third, he deserved to be hanged every time he performed it.

With which sentiments I believe Dr. Johnson would have found Partridge in strong agreement.

Some laughs, or, "A dark, even-handed misanthropy"

To leaven yesterday's tales of robbery, killing, and general amorality, today let's have some humor!

I've really just got a few funny items for you, but I think that can be excused when this first one is, I venture, the funniest thing I've ever read. It is, not unexpectedly, by P. G. Wodehouse, and it opens the story "Buried Treasure," a tale of the Angler's Rest club that is collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937). The only additional introduction you need is the knowledge that in Angler's Rest stories Wodehouse identifies each speaker by the name of his drink. And now, to the joke:

The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.

"He'll have to let it grow or shave it off," said the Whisky and Splash. "He can't go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course."

Wodehouse's most impressive achievement in those paragraphs is to maintain complete surprise: even though you know a joke's coming, his opening lines get your thoughts running so completely in one particular track that the sudden jump to another, previously unconsidered track is hilarious.

Now let's shift from the verbal to the visual, and from the twentieth century to the eighteenth, where I've been spending so much of my reading time lately. One of the books that's been holding me in that period is Tom Jones (1749), and the designer of the Penguin Classics edition deserves plaudits for choosing the perfect cover image, James Gillray's print Fashionable Contrasts;--or--The Duchess's Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Feet (1792).



Created to celebrate and satirize the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York, the print's simplicity is stunning, especially when contrasted with the other works of Gillray and his contemporaries, which tended to be overloaded with characters and symbols. And what a title!

Gillray, whose work I've noted before, was a contemporary of Blake, Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank, an artistic descendant of Hogarth, and an influence on Goya. As Vic Gatrell tells us in his spectacularly entertaining City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006),

Gillray was an enigmatic fellow, and we're not going to like him. In appearance he seems to have been rather daunting, so it comes as no surprise to learn that, with his "slouching gait and careless habits," he was too taciturn to have intimate friends. As the artist-journalist W. H. Pyne remembered, he was "meanly mischievous" to other people and as lazy in his personal relationships as in his art, and "a stranger to the feelings of friendship." But although he was "a careless sort of cynic, one who neither loved, nor hated society," "his aberrations were more the results of low habits and the want of self-esteem, than from malignity, envy, or meanness."

And though, as Gatrell points out,

Artistic London was a small world, and he grew into his trade alongside significant others. . . . [and in] their tavern lives, these men mingled with literary and theatrical hacks as well as each other, acting out the fashionable cult of dissolute genius with growing conviction,

Gillray seems never quite to have been fully a member of that fraternity of artists, standing decidedly aloof.

Except for a few depictions of St James's characters from life, his works lack warmth or affection. . . . Many are moved by a dark, even-handed misanthropy--by something approaching hatred, mixed with sadism.

That certainly seems the case when you look at some of Gillray's other works, such as this celebration of Nelson's victory on the Nile, Destruction of the French Collossus, which could with some adjustments have been slipped into the pages of an EC comic of the 1950s:



Given the horrors clearly available to Gillray's imagination, it may not surprise you to learn that he went insane in his later years. In his last days he thought George Cruikshank (later to be celebrated for his illustrations of Dickens) was Sir Joshua Reynolds and he himself was Rubens, while a suicide attempt in 1811 inadvertently recreated some of the grotesquely comic air of his prints:

He once tried to throw himself out of [his patron] Hannah Humphrey's upper window, and was saved because he jammed his head and was spotted from White's club across the street.

But now I've allowed my interest in Gillray to derail me from my initial intention to leaven your day with humor--can anything be further from the comedic than suicidal insanity? I'll try to make up for it with, first, another Gillray, this one with none of the elegance of Fashionable Contrasts--for as any Swift fan could tell you, when all else fails, one can always opt for scatology, which Gillray did in his 1793 take on the possibility of a French invasion, The French Invasion;--or--John Bull, Bombarding the Bum-Boats:



Gross, yes, but hard not to smile at, and presumably effective politically. The French, it seems, may find themselves needing the services of the Poopsmith.

Having descended into the gutter, I'll stay there and close with this pleasantly scurillous anecdote that Henry Fielding tosses off in Tom Jones regarding actress Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and good friend of I've Been Reading Lately favorite Lord Rochester:

On this subject, reader, I must stop a moment, to tell thee a story. "The famous Nell Gwynn, stepping one day, from a house where she had made a short visit, into her coach, saw a great mob assembled, and her footman all bloody and dirty; the fellow, being asked by his mistress the reason of his being in that condition, answered, `I have been fighting, madam, with an impudent rascal who called your ladyship a wh--re.' `You blockhead,' replied Mrs Gwynn, `at this rate you must fight every day of your life; why, you fool, all the world knows it.'

`Do they?' cries the fellow, in a muttering voice, after he had shut the coach-door, `they shan't call me a whore's footman for all that.'"

Finally, since it's a day of visuals, and I've already violated all bounds of good taste, I may as well add some nudity. Here's a 1672 engraving by Richard Thomson of a painting by Peter Cross depicting Nell Gwyn as Cupid:



Gwyn's sly smile and, um . . . perkiness . . . may be NSFW these days, but they must have been just fine in Samuel Pepys's day, for he reportedly kept a copy hanging over his desk at the Admiralty.

Punching the clock

{Lee Marvin in Point Blank (1967), based on Richard Stark's The Hunter (1962)}

I've written before about my wish that we had more good fiction about work. Like it or not, work is the focus of much, if not most, of our energy and time, yet with a handful of great exceptions-- such as the refusals of Bartleby, the farmers' camaraderie of Wendell Berry, and the occasional scene in Tolstoy--literature has tended to give short shrift to the working life.

That's just one of the many reasons I've enjoyed the five Richard Stark novels I've blazed through in the past two weeks in between sections of Tom Jones. In each of the novels, Stark (who is one of Donald Westlake's many identities) concerns himself with such seemingly mundane details as finding a good job, getting to know the other workers, and doing the work. He doesn't stint on detail, and he doesn't touch on much outside of the job.

Since, however, Stark's main character in these novels is a bank robber, Parker, a work day--or a novel--might begin in as dramatic a fashion as this, from Firebreak (2001):

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

That's, of course, where the novels draw their interest: they're carefully crafted crime novels, as thrilling as any in the genre. But I'm not joking when I say they're novels about work, as well. With the essentially amoral Parker as their focus, in a sense the books' only moral center is their acting out of the old saw that any job worth doing is worth doing well, and that care and attention to detail will be rewarded. Parker's attention to detail would be fanatical if it weren't so methodical, put solidly in service of his twin imperatives: do the job well and stay alive. One of his fellow heisters notes his tenacious attention in Breakout (2002):

Williams nodded, grinning. “There’s always another detail, huh?”

“Sooner or later,” Parker said,” you get to them all.”

So what we get from Stark is a picture of a professional at the top of his game, fully engaged with his craft, written by someone who is working with similar care; Stark's adherence to the working values that he shows us Parker living by is what lifts these books above the ordinary. In the second Parker novel, The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), Stark uses a throwaway line describing a mechanic to signal his appreciation of craft. Parker brings in a beater semi for some special repair work, and:

When the mechanic came in at seven o'clock, he looked at the truck in disgust. He got interested, though, being a professional, and worked on it till nine-thirty.

Parker is the epitome of the interested professional, and thus the best partner, the best planner, the one most likely to anticipate trouble, whether it comes from the known obstacles, such as police and alarms, or from the unexpected, such as the stupidity or cupidity of his colleagues. He's also, while quiet himself, a necessarily astute student of human nature; like the most skilled boss, he knows who and how to push those he's working with--yet he also knows when to hang back and let someone more skilled take over. This exchange between Parker and a cop, from Breakout (2002), presents in more explicit form than usual Parker's thoughtful perceptiveness, which Stark subtly never lets the reader forget:

Putting the microphone back on its hook, Turley said, “I'll look like a real idiot, once I finally do bring you in.”

Parker said, “I didn’t take your gun.”

Turley looked at him sideways, looked at the road ahead. “Meaning what?”

“I’m not out to make you feel bad about yourself,” Parker told him. “It’s just that it’s time for me to get to some other part of the world.”

“And you figure,” Turley said, “if I’m your chauffeur, but you don’t disarm me, I didn’t lose my weapon to you, that way I’ve still got my dignity.”

“Up to you,” Parker said.

“And I’ll be easier to control,” Turley said, “if I’ve still got my dignity.”

“Up to you."

Turley laughed, not as if he meant it, and said, “Here I was telling you all about game theory. We could have had some nice discussions, back in Stoneveldt [Prison].”

“I don’t think so,” Parker said.

Stark's insight into human nature isn't always limited to Parker's search for advantages; one of the most memorable moments in Breakout is when an adulterous businessman, on being woken by intruders, is momentarily but genuinely relieved to discover that they are not private detectives sent by his wife, but merely murderous bank robbers. It's a small moment, passed over quickly, but it's indicative of Stark's deep attunement to people and their thought processes.

Stark has said that he doesn't plan his novels in advance; instead, he puts Parker into a situation and watches how he gets out of it. That sense of initial contingency somehow suffuses the books despite Stark's multilayered, near-perfect plots. As we watch unexpected complications pile up, we quickly begin to understand, and appreciate, Parker's mania for control and detail. It is as much a general approach to life as it is to crime (or work): take care with what you can, which will in the long run free more of your attention to dealing with what you cannot. In fact, it is that determination to focus, that relentlessness, that makes Parker a compelling character. He will never stop looking for angles, never stop thinking about risk, never stop covering contingencies--because he knows that the minute he does that, he's inviting death into the heist.

In the early books, Stark seems to be explicitly trying to render Parker unpleasant: he's more violent and brutal than he would later become, more likely to kill, and he has no real existence outside his work. Though the books are narrated more or less in a close third person from Parker's perspective, we are never privy to his emotional life; it's as if he is as much a decision-making matrix as a human, never looking beyond the immediate prospect. And in the section of each book where Stark shifts his narrative perspective to some of the peripheral characters, Parker becomes almost a void, so quiet and inscrutable as to be nearly invisible.

In the later novels, however, Parker has, if not softened--he's still unapologetically ready to kill to save his own life--then at least grown a bit. He's got a long-term girlfriend, for example, and even a home. In addition, though he would dispute the fact, he is clearly far more likely to leave people alive in his wake than strict risk accounting might demand; though plenty of people still die, there is no wanton killing, and no one who is killed could be classed an innocent.

Does it make sense that this taciturn, pitiless man might, having however improbably found happiness outside of his work, desire to limit the destruction within his work? Or is it a cop-out on Stark's part? Is he getting too fond of the character, and thus softening him--or, worse, making it easy on him, so we don't have to see him make ethically unacceptable decisions? After all, though most of us gave up looking for explicit moral lessons in fiction in childhood, we are still looking, in one form or another, for truth. It thus seems far more important that Parker--along with those around him--be perceptively, believably rendered than that he be ethically acceptable.

Is, then, the slightly softer Parker convincing? Is he true? On the basis of a couple of novels, I'd say so, but for a more definite judgment, I'll have to wait until I've read more. For now, I think I'll join with Elmore Leonard--who said, "Whatever Stark writes, I read"--and enjoy the ride.

That Dog Won't Hunt, or, Cigarette Shenanigans

{All photos by Maura.}

Paul Collins at Weekend Stubble has a fascinating post up today about a forthcoming article he's written for the New York Times Book Review [It's now up at the Times site.]
about the cigarette ads that were bound into the middle of a lot of American paperbacks in the 1970s. Though I've come across these when buying used books before, I'd forgotten all about them--and I certainly never knew how commmon they were. (Collins reveals that Lorillard alone ran ads in 540 million paperbacks in one three-year period.)



He links to a creepily nefarious 1986 memo from a Phillip Morris executive noting that he had commissioned a positive review of a book, Robert D. Tollison's Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and had been trying, unsuccessfully, to plant it in the San Francisco Chronicle.



I found a real treat buried in the memo: the reviewer, David Hunter (described by the exec as "a freelancer who wants to work for me") submitted the review under the pen name Leigh Hunt.



The English lit fans among you will recognize that name. (And don't you love his louche pose in that portrait?) Friend of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Hazlitt, among many others, Hunt was in his lifetime well known for his poetry, his political journalism (which he put in the service of liberal political reform), and his integrity. He spent time in jail for attacking the Prince Regent in print, and he remained within at least arm's length of financial ruin his whole life. As his Wikipedia entry puts it, Hunt should be remembered for

his unremitting literary industry under the most discouraging circumstances, and for his uncompromising independence as a journalist and an author.

Dickens called him

The very soul of truth and honour,

while Byron, in his journal, wrote that

Hunt is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times--much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive, aspect. If he goes on qualis ab incepto, I know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. . . . [H]e is a man worth knowing. . . . [W]ithal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring "the right to the expedient" might excuse.

So why did David Hunter use Hunt's name? I think there's no question that he was thumbing his nose at his boss at Philip Morris, whom he could be confident wouldn't know Hunt. Was he also just indicating his utter cynicism, as the taking of the assignment in the first place might suggest? Or could he possibly have secretly been attempting to sabotage the company's efforts--was he trying to set off alarm bells among the review editors to whom the piece would be submitted?

That last does, I grant you, seem unlikely. But people's relationships to cigarettes--and thus to cigarette companies--are often complicated. Take as an example this passage from Luc Sante's spectacular, nigh-erotic paean to cigarettes, "Our Friend the Cigarette," available in his recent collection, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 (2007):

Nowadays no one will really defend smoking, even the most unregenerate addicts being inclined now and then to sermonize against their filthy habit. Hardly anyone wishes to dignify the appalling cynicism of the tobacco cartels and their decades of suppressing facts and falsifying statistics. When you see a tract issued by a smokers' rights group, you can be sure that it originated either in the public-relations department of a cigarette manufacturer or else somewhere on the coldly literal-minded fringe of the libertarian movement.

And yet . . .

Maybe there are ex-smokers out there who feel uncomplicated relief at having quit. I doubt there are very many, though. Your cigarette was a friend--the sort of friend parents and teachers warned you against, who would lead you down dark alleys and leave you holding the bag when things went wrong--but a friend nevertheless. It's terribly sad that you can't enjoy a smoke now and again without tumbling into the whirlpool of perdition, the way you can take a glass of spirits on the weekend with no danger that by Monday you will end up filtering the shoe polish after exhausting the cooking sherry.

I wonder whether David Hunter was a smoker . . . in 1986, a man following the sometimes lonely, hand-to-mouth existence that is the life of a freelance writer, taking a distasteful job from a cigarette company to pay the bills? My bet's on the butts.

Step right up!

Do you sometimes worry that you've run out of new ways to misuse office resources? Do you already only call your trans-Atlantic sweetie from your work line? Do you already bring in your iPod, laptop, telephone, and digital camera to charge on the power strip under your desk? Do you already fedex yourself home every afternoon?

Well, don't despair! Instead, subscribe to The New-York Ghost, the Free Weekly Newsletter You Print Out at Work! Four or so pages, arriving in your e-mail box every Thursday, ready to be printed on your employer's dime!

Curated, proprieted, kiss-of-lifed, tuckpointed, and zookept by Ed from the Dizzies, the New-York Ghost (along with its hitherto reclusive editor) was profiled in the New-York Times over the Thanksgiving weekend, which surely led to an avalanche of subscription requests. You've thus missed your chance to get in on the ground floor, or even the mezzanine--in fact, were this a Ponzi scheme, I'd suggest you hold on to your wallet and keep moving, mister--but as there is no limit to the number of electrons that can be devoted to the New-York Ghost, there can still be a copy waiting for you if you want one!

By not subscribing before now, you have, however, missed the first installment of my Brief Lives of the Hip-Hop Stars (in the manner of, and with apologies to, my beloved John Aubrey), which appeared in the November 6th issue. But never fear! If you subscribe now, you'll surely be in time for installment two--and meanwhile, here is installment one, appearing for the first time on the Internets:

Levi Stahl's "Brief Lives of the Hip-Hop Stars"

Ol' Dirty Bastard

Though strictly speaking neither old, dirty, nor a bastard, young Russell Jones took that name when he began rapping with cousins and friends as part of the Wu-Tang Clan; his later change of moniker to Big Baby Jesus was similarly unrelated to facts of his size, age, or divinity. However suspect ODB's personal nomenclature, he was always sound on such disparate (and sadly little-bruit'd) topics as penguins and space aliens. He fathered thirteen children, and he once saved a little girl who was not one of them from being run over by a speeding car—an act of heroism for which he made sincere attempts to avoid being publicly lauded.

Subscribe now! Ed here will tell you how:

For a free subscription or sample, write to newyorkghostATgmailDOTcom, with a non-spam-sounding subject line and your e-mail address in the body of the message as well.

No salesman will visit your home!

Consigned to the Flames II: Henry James

Following yesterday's dream evocation of the James brothers, a reminder that Henry James was quite an enthusiastic burner of letters, draft manuscripts, and personal papers. Philip Horne lays out the case in his introduction to Henry James: A Life in Letters (2001):

In the following letters, James mentions as friends or familiars a number of people he seems very likely to have corresponded with, people he knew well, or had business relations with, like his relations the Tweedys, J. M. Barrie, Charles Milnes Gaskell, Alice Bartlett (later Warren), Auguste Laugel, J. Comyns Carr and Charles Frohmann. Yet no letters to any of these have been traced, while in the letters that survive there are numerous references to further (still untraced) letters that James has written or means to write. It may be that some recipients acted on the instruction to "Burn this" (or some comic variation on that formula) that James attached to frankly gossiping letters--letters that are often of particular interest to later readers. Having delivered himself on the subject of the play Votes for Women (1907) by Elizabeth Robins, James commands his correspondent Lucy Clifford, "Only repeat me, quote me, betray me not--and burn my letter with fire or candle (if you have either! Otherwise wade out into the sea with it and soak the ink out of it.)" In 1910, moreover, after his health had begun to decline, James, who was deeply concerned with privacy, had a large bonfire in which he burned a great number of personal documents and manuscripts, doubtless including letters from him that he had retrieved from the effects of correspondents who had died (notably his sister Alice and his close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson.)

The final bonfires, in 1909 and 1910, were reportedly prompted by the shock James received from studying a batch of Byron's letters and papers. Though one assumes James's personal peccadilloes couldn't have held a candle to Byron's extensive transgressions, the fear of their exposure was enough to send him, match in hand, to the burning barrel. As James himself explained to an inquiry from his friend Annie Adams Fields about some letters from Sarah Orne Jewett,

I kept almost all letters for years--till my receptacles would no longer hold them, then I made a gigantic bonfire and have been easier in mind since--save as to a certain residuum which had to survive.

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.

"Your whisky has made you original."

Jenny Davidson's's great post a week or so ago at Light Reading on Lord Byron's letters about swimming (specifically, as you may have guessed, about swimming the Hellespont) led me to pick up, on her recommendation, the one-volume distillation of Harvard University Press's twelve volumes of Byron's correspondence, Selected Letters and Journals (1982).

On receiving the book, I turned to the index in search of some name that had recently been on my reading list; settling on James Hogg, I thumbed my way to a letter the twenty-six-year-old Byron wrote to the forty-four-year-old Hogg on March 24, 1814. After an introductory paragraph acquiescing to Hogg's request for some verse for a journal he was printing, Byron gets right down to the good stuff: strongly held opinions, exuberant scurrility, and wonderful bombast. I'm going to quote at more length than I usually do, simply because each paragraph contains at least a couple of lines so creative or ridiculous as to be well worth sharing.

You seem to be a plain spoken man, Mr. Hogg, and I really do not like you the worse for it. I can't write verses, and yet you want a bit of my poetry for your book. It is for you to reconcile yourself with yourself.--You shall have the verses

You are mistaken, my good fellow, in thinking that I (or, indeed, any living verse-writer--for we shall sink poets) can write as well as Milton. Milton's Paradise Lost is, as a whole, a heavy concern; but the two first books of it are the very finest poetry that has ever been produced in this world--at least since the flood--for I make little doubt Abel was a fine pastoral poet, and Cain a fine bloody poet, and so forth; but we, now-a-days, even we (you and I, i.e.) know no more of their poetry than the brutum vulgus--I beg pardon, the swinish multitude, do of Wordsworth and Pye. Poetry must always exist, like drink, where there is a demand for it. And Cain's may have been the brandy of the Antediluvians, and Abel's the small [?] still.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too hight and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots form old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn the plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all. Suppose any one to have the dramatic handling for the first time of such ready-made stories as Lear, Macbeth, &c. and he would be a sad fellow, indeed, if he did not make something very grand of them. [As] for his historical plays, properly historical, I mean, they were mere redressings of former plays on the same subjects, and in twenty cases out of twenty-one, the finest, the very finest things, are taken all but verbatim out of the old affairs. You think, no doubt, that A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! is Shakespeare's. Not a syllable of it. You will find it all in the old nameless dramatist. Could not one take up Tom Jones and improve it, without being a greater genius than Fielding? I, for my part, think Shakespeare's plays might be improved, and the public seem, and have seemed to think so too, for not one of his is or ever has been acted as he wrote it; and what the pit applauded three hundred years past, is five times out of ten not Shakespeare's, but Cibber's.

Stick you to Walter Scott, my good friend, and do not talk any more stuff about his not being willing to give you real advice, if you really will ask for real advice. You love Southey, forsooth--I am sure Southey loves nobody but himself, however. I hate these talkers one and all, body and soul. They are a set of the most despicable impostors--that is my opinion of them. They know nothing of the world and what is poetry, but the reflection of the world? What sympathy have this people with the spirit of this stirring age? They are no more able to understand the least of it, than your lass--nay, I beg her pardon, she may very probably have intense sympathy with both its spirit (I mean the whisky,) and its body (I mean the bard.) They are mere old wives. Look at their beastly vulgarity, when they wish to be homely, and their exquisite stuff, when they clap on sail, and aim at fancy. Coleridge is the best of the trio--but bad is the best. Southey should have been a parish-clerk, and Wordsworth a man-midwife--both in darkness. I doubt if either of them ever got drunk, and I am of the old creed of Homer the wine-bibber. Indeed I think you and Burns have derived a great advantage from this, that being poets, and drinkers of wine, you have had a new potation to rely upon. Your whisky has made you original. I have always thought it a fine liquor. I back you against beer at all events, gill to gallon.

By the bye, you are a fine hand to cut up the minor matters of verse-writing; you indeed think harmony the all-in-all. My dear sir, you may depend upon it, you never had name yet, without making it rhyme to theme. I overlook all that sort of thing, however, and so must you, in your turn, pass over my real or supposed ruggedness. The fact is, that I have a theory on the subject, but that I have not time at present for explaining it. The first time all the poets of the age meet--it must be in London, glorious London is the place, after all--we shall, if you please, have a small trial of skill. You shall write seventeen odes for me, anything from Miltonian blank down to Phillupian [sic] namby, and I a similar number for you, and let a jury of good men and true be the judges between us. I name Scott for foreman--Tom Campbell may be admitted, and Mrs. Baillie, (though it be not exactly a matron case.) You may name the other nine worthies yourself. We shall, at all events, have a dinner upon the occasion, and I stipulate for a small importation of the peat reek.

Dear sir, believe me sincerely yours,
BYRON

There's so much fun stuff there I don't even know where to begin. I've noted before Byron's slagging of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in Don Juan:

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey.

It's amusing to note that in the poem he dismisses Coleridge for being drunk, while in the letter he dismisses Southey and Wordsworth for not being drunk. And what great phrases Byron casually tosses off throughout! Homer the wine-bibber; gill to gallon; when they clap on sail, and aim at fancy; the brandy of the Antediluvians; the peat reek-- by which I assume (correctly?) he means whiskey.

This letter alone has made the purchase of the whole volume worthwhile. I'm sure I'll share more in the coming months, but a more extensive reading will have to wait, as I'm hip-deep in Tom Jones. Until then, I'll leave you with this line from a letter Byron sent his publisher, John Murray (whom I like to imagine receiving letters of a very different sort from one of his other authors, Jane Austen), on October 15, 1816:

[B]ut poetry is--I fear--incurable--God help me--if I proceed in this scribbling--I shall have frittered away my mind before I am thirty,--but it is at times a real relief to me.

Elementary, my dear Vladimir

When Stacey and I travel by car, we read Sherlock Holmes aloud during the drive. One story on the way there, and one on the way back. When packing, I sometimes wonder whether it's worth lugging the large hardcover of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes rather than a more manageable paperback. It's the same stories, after all, and since you can't really enjoy the illustrations while driving, all you gain are the notes, written from a Sherlockian perspective--the Sherlockians being the branch of fans that treats the Holmes stories as history rather than fiction. Today I was reminded why it's always worth the extra weight.

The reminder took the form of an editorial note near the end of "The Speckled Band." (If you've not read the story and would like to avoid learning about its solution, you should immediately go somewhere else--perhaps here--instead of continuing to read). One of the most popular Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Speckled Band" is also one that has over the years generated some questions among Sherlockians about its solution, in no small part because of some minor questions about the details of the case. (How could the adder live in the safe if there were not ventilation holes? Why would the Doctor whistle to recall the snake when it hadn't had time to perform its murderous duty? etc.) The note rounding up all these alternative theories--note #44 for this story--convinced me that this edition is worth lugging to the ends of the earth; even if you're not a Holmes fan, you might find it worth your time to read through to the end.

44There are some revisionist theories respecting "The Speckled Band." Several argue that Helen Stoner murdered Julius and Dr. Roylott, and probably her mother as well. Vivian Darkbloom, in the self-described "somewhat revisionist" essay "Holmes Is Where the Heart Is, or Tooth-Tooth, Tooties," suggests that Holmes murdered Dr. Roylott, to clear the way for an illicit liaison with Helen Stoner. Roylott's behaviour, the essay contends, was not that of a murderer, but of a man attempting to scare off a suitor. The essay appeared in the December 1976 issue of the Sherlockian journal Baker Street Miscellanea, and the editors reported that "the anagramatically pseudonymous Vivian Darkbloom has not seen fit to furnish us with any personal data, and consdering the scandalously icononclastic thrust of her principal thesis, we are not surprised. The author appears to be California-based, also engaged in medical studies, and a student of the works of Vladimir Nabokov as well as John H. Watson's . . . " A character named "Vivian Darkbloom" appeared in Stanley Kubrick's 1961 film adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita, for which Vladimir Nabokov wrote the screenplay, and in "Vladimir Nabokov: In Tribute to Sherlock Holmes," Andrew Page analyses references and images in Nabokov's Lolita,The Defense, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, and Pale Fire that demonstrate the author's familiarity with and affection for the Canon.

Now, perhaps more serious fans of Nabokov than I already knew about this revisionist theory--and, granted, it's not even certain that the article is by Nabokov--but I didn't know about it, and it made my day. Of course Nabokov is a Holmes fan, and of course he would have enjoyed sitting around thinking up alternate solutions to Holmes's cases!



His solution to this particular case is, you'll note, insane.

[Correction, 11/28/07, 12:10 AM: Ed at the Dizzies notes, quite sensibly,

I don't think it's VN's handiwork—I don't think he'd be so obvious as to offer that "Vivian Darkbloom"—an anagram he's dropped into several of his novels—was a fan of Nabokov...i.e., of himself!

That seems likely. Even the title of the article seems a bit too blunt an instrument for Nabokov. I think my critical sense was overwhelmed by my joy at immediately recognizing the Vivian Darkbloom anagram--that, and my fervent desire to imagine Nabokov scribbling out articles for Sherlockian publications under pseudonyms! A Holmes fan can dream, can he not?]

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.

Checking the Police Blotter

Given that I've just returned from a trip, and I know better than to travel without a Hard Case Crime novel or two, it's time for a Crime Novel Roundup!

A couple of months ago, I mentioned how much I was enjoying the early pages of Robert Terrall's Kill Now, Pay Later (1960), which is rife with exchanges like this one:

"A very nice-looking dish was waiting for him. Dark hair, glasses. She had a raincoat on that was too big for her, and she kept it on."

"No wonder," I said. "It was my raincoat, and all she had on underneath was one of my drip-dry shirts."

"Now you tell me."

I quoted a bunch of other favorite bits in my earlier post. Though it was a lot of fun--I laughed out loud several times--Kill Now, Pay Later was ultimately a bit disappointing--I kept waiting for the pile of deaths and very bad things to matter to someone, but they never really do. The whole remains extremely light, reminding me a bit of Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai books, where the crime seems to exist only to enable the drinking and the wry commentary. But maybe I'm being unfair: I came to Kill Now, Pay Later straight from a couple of Lawrence Block novels, where consequence and culpability are never far from the foreground; had I brought to the book a different set of expectations, maybe I would have been able to fully settle in and enjoy it.

The other crime novels I read that same weekend, Cornell Woolrich's Fright (1950) and Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938), both hinge on unexpected turning points in otherwise ordinary lives--but that's where the similarities end. Woolrich's novel is about a man who accidentally kills a woman who attempts to blackmail him on the eve of his wedding. In the ensuing years, while remaining in some ways completely sane, the man's ever-deepening paranoia drives him to commit hideous acts. Fright is a straightforward crime novel, a study of a weak character deformed by circumstance, and while it lags at times, Woolrich's chilling accounts of his protagonist's coldly violent attempts to cover his tracks pretty much compensate for any longueurs.

Simenon, on the other hand, plunges the reader right into insanity, as his protagonist, Kees Popinga, after discovering that the company he's worked for all his life is bankrupt, throws up his middle-class life completely. He kills a woman, then another, and he's soon on the run from the police, yawing between arguing with himself that all he needs to do is find a sympathetic person to listen to his story and positing himself as a near-Nietzschean superman, beyond all petty social strictures. Simenon's study of curdled normality is unsettling, yet at the same time often grotesquely funny: Popinga is an incompetent, intolerable megalomaniac, and as he sinks further and further into paranoia, his plight becomes cartoonishly ridiculous; what began as a character study ends as a bizarre social comedy.

Megalomania serves as a good transition to Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Slide (2007), as it's the defining trait of Slide's best character. A follow-up to their great Bust (2006), Slide follows the two survivors from that book's band of incompetents, Irish-American slut Angela Petrakos and nasty, murderous, pathologically self-regarding businessman Max Fisher. In Bust, Bruen and Starr achieved something rare and impressive: they set a half-dozen or so distinct characters loose in pursuit of various ends, and succeeded--without undercutting any individual characters' motivations--in bringing them all together in a spectacularly complicated, satisfying, and funny plot. Bust was nasty and violent and deeply misanthropic, and it was one of the best crime novels I've read in recent years.

Slide, though a lot of fun, reads like a slighter sibling: aside from Max Fisher--who, having become a crack-addicted drug dealer, has renamed himself The M.A.X.--the other characters are less vibrant than those of the first novel, and their desires less intricately intertwined. The M.A.X., however, is so funny that he almost singlehandedly redeems the book: his mixture of arrogance, incompetence, and brutality are hideously hilarious. An example, taken nearly at random:

He put the Glock down the waistband of his trousers, in the small of his back, and went, "Ouch." Jesus, it was cold. Did he have time to warm it up? Could you microwave a gun? And it pressed against his bum sacroiliac, shit. He took the piece out, got his black suede jacket. It had that expensive cut, you saw it, you whistled, it said taste and platinum card. Yeah, after today, it was platinum or bust baby.

I'll close with the best crime novel I've read in recent months: David Goodis's The Wounded and the Slain (1955). A thumbnail description sounds formulaic to the point of offensiveness: trying to salvage their failing marriage, a couple vacations in Jamaica--but the husband drunkenly kills a man in the Kingston slums, and the repercussions force the pair to re-evaluate themselves and their relationship. Yet the book works. The man's struggles with alcoholism, guilt, and failure are believable and compelling, while his wife--despite some strikingly dated references to frigidity--by the novel's end has been presented as an independent actor, more than the equal of her husband in decisiveness and action. It's a nice reminder that while noir features more than its share of misogyny, it also is the source of some female characters who are far stronger than the men who surround them--and not all of them are femme fatales.

Anyone else putting The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps on their Christmas list?

Consigned to the Flames I: Emperor Shi Huang Ti

Under my belt for the long weekend trip to my grandparents from which I've just returned:

1,618 miles, 276 pages of Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task, 222 pages of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Slide, 215 pages of Mickey Spillane's Dead Street, 140 pages of Tom Jones, and much pleasant time with my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncle, cousins, great-aunt, and great-uncle.

Thus I have no time for a proper post tonight.

Instead, I'll inaugurate a New Feature! (Oh, for blinking, scrolling, multi-colored, music-playing text there! Oh, World Wide Web of the early aughts, how I miss thee! Oh, Henry Fielding, how you infect and deform my prose!)

This feature will recur every time I come across an account of an author burning any sort of written work: unfinished novels, letters, diaries, notebooks, etc. Though other forms of destruction--particularly, say, by tiger--may be in themselves interesting, I will only include destructive acts that involved fire. If a form of destruction is unspecified, I will assume fire to have been employed, fire being, the evidence of paper-rock-scissors aside, the natural enemy of paper.

Because the Internets are by their nature totalizing, I will set no other boundaries and anticipate no other limits to this series: I will instead pretend that the series will one day encompass every instance of authorial immolation. Limits can therefore be set only by authors themselves deciding to disregard their fears of a potentially prurient posterity and eschew the temptations of the torch.

I'll begin by already stretching the minimal boundaries I've just now set out; you'll please simply disregard those for today. Think of this as an establishing shot. Zippos to the ready.



From "The Wall and the Books," by Jorge Luis Borges, collected in Selected Non-fictions (1999), Eliot Weinberger, editor:

I read, a few days ago, that the man who ordered the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall was that first Emperor, Shi Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning of all the books that had been written before his time. That these two vast undertakings--the five or six hundred leagues of stone against the barbarians, and the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past--were the work of the same person and were, in a sense, his attributes, inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me. . . . Perhaps hi Huang Ti walled his empire because he knew that it was fragile, and destroyed the books because he knew that they were sacred books, books that teach what the whole universe teaches or the conscience of every man. Perhaps the burning of the libraries and the building of the wall are acts that in some secret way erase each other.

Boswell the Spy

{James Boswell, engraving by E. Finden after a sketch by George Langton.}

I wrote briefly yesterday about James Boswell's genius for self-promotion. The following passage in Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task will give you a good idea of his skill--and shamelessness--in that arena. Following legal studies in Utrecht, Boswell set out on a European tour, in the course of which he befriended Rousseau and Voltaire, and which closed with a visit to Corsica, an island whose recent overthrow of its Genoese rulers, followed by its annexation by France, had caught the English imagination. While on the island, Boswell met and befriended the deposed Corsican ruler, General Pasquale Paoli--who initially though Boswell was a spy because of his note-taking. That suspicion must have planted an idea, for

As [Boswell] made his way back through Europe, he sent a series of unsigned letters to an English newspaper. These anonymous letters, a skilful blend of fact and fantasy purporting to come from a correspondent with insider intelligence, suggested that Boswell's visit to Corsica might have profound consequences. Corsica was described as being of strategic importance to Great Britain; Boswell, they hinted, was more than a tourist; he was in fact on a secret mission. The letters alluded to clandestine negotiations, concealed papers, and diplomatic intrigues. The Genoese were said to be seriously alarmed by Boswell's activities. One letter even suggested that he had gone to the island to explore the romantic possibility of establishing the Stuart line on the throne of Corsica (a rumour which rendered [Boswell's father] Lord Auchinleck apoplectic.) This was all nonsense, of course, but it was effective in whipping up public sympathy for the cause of Corsican independence. It also served to publicize the book about his travels which Boswell planned to write. Boswell was pleased to portray himself as a man of both mystery and importance.

Boswell's subterfuge worked: his Account of Corsica (1768) sold out three printings and was translated into four other languages, while Boswell himself became a celebrity, accosted by strangers wanting to meet "Corsican Boswell."

While Boswell's actions in sending the letters, though brazen, are understandable (and really not that different from contemporary viral marketing), another component of his Corsican adventures, described well by Sisman, provides a better example of the combination of self-importance, vainglory, and absurdity that make Boswell such an irresistible figure:

Boswell decided he should share his Corsican expertise. He sought an interview with [former Prime Minister William] Pitt, still an influential figure in Parliament though he had been out of office since 1761. Pitt replied to Boswell's request by suggesting that a meeting with the current Secretary of State might be more effective. But Boswell would not be denied: the opportunity to appeal personally to the Friend of Liberty was irresistible. He was ushered into the statesman's presence dressed as a native Corsican chief, armed with stiletto and Paoli's pistols in his belt, and wearing a cap complete with a tuft of cock's feathers. It was a ludicrous display--though perhaps no more ludicrous than Byron dressing in Greek costume half a century later. Pitt received Boswell politely enough. Later Boswell appeared at Garrick's spectacular Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon wearing the same outfit.

Were I as self-dramatizing as Boswell, I'd explain now that I'll be away from the blog for a few days on a secret mission; since I'm not, however, I'll admit that it's just a visit to my grandparents. I'll leave you with a recommendation, a question, and a note of thanks.

The Recommendation
Check out Jenny D's recent post at Light Reading that features entertaining excerpts from Lord Byron's letters.

The Question
Boswell wasn't really a spy, but there have been quite a few English writers through the years who were. Kit Marlowe (maybe), Graham Greene, and Ian Fleming come immediately to mind. But who else?

The Note of Thanks
Saturday marks the end of the second year of I've Been Reading Lately. Three hundred-forty-five posts and I'm still enjoying it. I hope you are, too. Thanks for reading.

Norman Mailer and Boswell fistfight in heaven

{Norman Mailer, by Carl Van Vechten, 1948.}

From "A Review of My Contemporaries," by Neal Pollack, collected in The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (2000)

"Bring it, Mailer," I said. "Give me your best shot."

He launched himself at me like a jackal that had skipped breakfast. He grabbed my shoulders. I slipped in a pool of blood and saliva, momentarily dazed by the swirl of lights and smoke and laughter.

Mailer threw punches and kicked at my groin. I struggled, feeling, for the first time in my literary career, pure terror. My arms were leaden, my legs unhelpful.

"Die forever in hell!" said my eternal adversary.

"Four hundred dollars on Mailer!" I heard from the crowd.

Though I think of Neal Pollack as pretty much a one-joke writer, I do enjoy the above piece, wherein he engages in a rough-and-tumble fistfight with the literary giants of Mailer's generation, finishing by besting Mailer himself. It's the one time when Pollack's faux arrogance seems appropriately deployed, reducing the whole question of literary greatness to a goofy gladiatorial bout, fueled by the same mix of self-promotion and pugnacity that defined Mailer nearly as much as his writing. The obituaries for Mailer this week have been full of similarly ridiculous stories of fistfights and rages; my favorite is this one from the Telegraph in which his fists prevail, but he is defeated nevertheless:

Seven years later, at a party, he threw a glass at [Gore Vidal] and, by some accounts, including Vidal's ("I saw this tiny fist coming at me"), punched him. Still on the floor, Vidal announced: "Words fail Norman Mailer. Yet again."

Aside from a bewildered high school reading of Tough Guys Don't Dance (the only Mailer our local library owned), I've actually read very little of Mailer's writing. Every time I think I might want to read him, what stops me is thinking of this exchange from Murray Kempton's account of the 1968 Democratic Convention in his "The Decline and Fall of the Democratic Party." Mailer is arguing that they must force Mayor Daley's hand, make him to take an action that will register with everyone as inexcusable:

"Why is it," [Mailer] said to me, "that I have never hit you? it is because you represent the face of decency." I thought, first, that he might have chosen a better example, second, that such distinctions among faces cannot have inhibited Norman at every moment in his prior experience, and, last, that I must explain to my son that the recognition that you are in the presence of a truly large personage is not hampered but completed when you understand that you can laugh at him a little. I said none of these things and went on listening. We must raise the ante, Norman continued, we must make him hit the face of decency.

Kempton goes on to get at exactly why I find Mailer's public persona uncongenial, despite all the undeniable intermingled good qualities:

Norman said that if I would go alone, I had more guts than he did. And I wondered again, as I often did, how insubstantialities like guts can worry men so much more intelligent than I. I remember the war and its few patrols, and that acceptance of death that occasional soldiers know just once or twice and real soldiers know many times before it kills them. I remember coming out of the hills in that state of peace possible only to a man when he has known the enemy, and assured that I would never again fear gunfire. Then I was asleep in my tent, and some lonely Japanese Betty came over and began firing those silly white tracers and I, with nothing to fear, ran panting, almost gibbering, from tree to tree. The one thing that guts is not is a quality that can be depended on. That is why it is useless continually to test it, because there is always a time when it fails almost anyone. Bravery is irrelevant; unless you have the dangerous good fortune of not knowing you are in danger, the trick is to anticipate; as often as not, you will act badly any time you are surprised. Dignity, not courage, is all anyone can hope to keep; how odd that Mailer should so little understand his life as not to see that one of its more significant achievements has not come from its tests of his bravery but from its continual salvage of dignity intact.

Though I don't have the personal experience with danger that Kempton uses to back up his position, I am with him in being confused by those worries about toughness. The more that I associate Mailer with such questions, the less interested I am in reading him; whether that's secretly fueling my dislike of his prose style as well is an open question. But I am willing to be told that I'm mistaken, and I've not given up on the idea of finding something of real value in his work. My friend Erin swears by The Executioner's Song, which she's read many times (maybe even many times in succession back in high school?), so I have it on my shelves awaiting the right day.

Tonight as I was reading about Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptious Task: The Making of "The Life of Dr. Johnson" (2000), I was reminded of one of the most notorious episodes of Mailer's life, his championing of convicted killer Jack Abbott. Abbott's letters to Mailer had convinced the writer of his repentance; Mailer helped him publish a prison memoir, then he advocated for Abbott's release. Six weeks after being paroled, Abbott murdered a man. Mailer later described the incident as "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."

The Abbott case came to mind while I was reading about James Boswell's legal career. Having grudgingly acceded to his father's wishes and begun to practice law in Edinburgh, Boswell quickly

acquired a reputation for defending the hopeless and the helpless: drunken soldiers, forgers, horse-thieves, and sheep-stealers, rioters, brawlers, arsonists, the poor and the needy, clients that other, more prudent advocates avoided.

To his great credit, Boswell vigorously defended his clients, in the process sabotaging (perhaps intentionally?) his long-term career prospects. He grew particularly attached to his first criminal client, John Reid, who stood accused of the capital crime of stealing sheep. He succeeded in getting Reid acquitted, but eight years later Reid faced a similar charge and

Despite Boswell's advocacy being conducted "in a very masterly and pathetic manner"--so much so that he was applauded by several members of the jury when they convened at a tavern afterwards--Reid was this time found guilty.

Overwrought, and presumably feeling the sentence of death a grave injustice, Boswell huddled with Reid in his cell for hours, then walked with him to the gallows:

Desperate to save Reid's life, he planned to have the body cut down, carried into a stable, and there resuscitated with the aid of a surgeon. But when the moment came, Reid was beyond recall. This failure, and the pity Boswell felt for his hapless client, affected him deeply--though it must be admitted that he relished the drama of the occasion.

Though the cases are, to be honest, not all that similar--it's hard to view Boswell's actions in a very bad light--the commitment and determination of both Boswell and Mailer are undeniable. And though I'm not sure I'd have made the connection had I not just been reading Mailer obits, the men resemble each other in other ways, too: their genius for unrelenting self-promotion, their vanity (that presumably hid self-doubt), and their seemingly insatiable hunger for the spotlight.

What would they have made of each other? How likely is it that, like Vidal and Mailer, Jimmy Breslin and Mailer, the world and Mailer, they would have come to blows?

Tangentially Connected Things (with apologies to Sei Shonagon)

1 Maybe Sei Shonagon's ghost was flitting around the Internets this weekend, because I wasn't the only one writing about her. While I used her words primarily as window dressing for a post about Iris Murdoch, selfdivider actually wrote well about her and her Pillow Book. The opening of his post is irresistible:

I have no doubt that Walter Benjamin, in his previous incarnation, was a Japanese woman named Sei Shonagon, born in 966 AD, serving in the court of Empress Teishi.

2 If you've not read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, I can recommend it wholeheartedly. It's a real treat, the occasional diary-like entry about her life at the Imperial court mixing with more general appreciations of the details (and frustrations) of everyday life. Her greatest form--and what causes selfdivider to link her with Benjamin--is the list. On Saturday I mentioned in passing her list of "Pleasing Things," but that list is so ordinary as to be unrepresentative. She's often far more unexpected in her choice of categories--as in this one, for example:

Squalid Things

The back of a piece of embroidery.

The inside of a cat's ear.

A swarm of mice, who still have no fur, when they come wriggling out of their nest.

The seams of a fur robe that has not yet been lined.

Darkness in a place that does not give the impression of being very clean.

A rather unattractive woman who looks after a large brood of children.

A woman who falls ill and remains unwell for a long time. In the mind of her lover, who is not particularly devoted to her, she must appear rather squalid.

Or this one:

Things That Should Be Short

A piece of thread when one wants to sew something in a hurry.

A lamp stand.

The hair of a woman of the lower classes should be neat and short.

The speech of a young girl.

There's an intimacy to Sei Shonagon's self-presentation in The Pillow Book that's stunning, born not from the revelation of private details but from the single strong sensibility that informs every entry. As with Hazlitt or, to a lesser degree, Montaigne, I close the book feeling as if I've met a person; to read it is, in a way that is astonishing considering that more than a millennium separates her from us, to feel that one knows its writer.

3 Speaking of selfdivider, I meant to link to his blog months ago when he posted a translation of an interview with Haruki Murakami that he found in a Korean magazine. If you're a Murakami fan--and especially if, like me, you find yourself responding to his cryptic clarity with an effort to divine larger authorial statements--it's well worth your time.

4 In my post Saturday about Iris Murdoch, I mentioned how much I like her first novel, Under the Net, largely because of its energy and the love of London that comes through in Murdoch's detailed descriptions. In one of the interviews collected in the book that prompted that post, From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, Murdoch talks with her husband, critic John Bayley, and others at a 1986 symposium on her work, Murdoch explains that she would like to think that she's been getting better at her craft over the years, then says,

Someone told me this morning that they thought Under the Net was the best one, which I found very distressing!

In response, John Bayley points out one of the best aspects of that novel, the sense it gives throughout of being utterly contingent, of the possibility that the ultimate resolution of the plot could take any of a number of forms:

BAYLEY: Curiously I think Under the Net is the only one of your novels where you can feel that the novelist doesn't know how it's going to end, if you see what I mean. Actually, this is an important criterion about novels, historically speaking, that a great many novelists did write quite genuinely not knowing how to end the thing; when novels came out in installments, of course, it was quite common. I may be quite wrong about Under the Net; you probably did know how it was going to end, but it has a kind of freshness that is very mysterious, and that we strangely associate with something that is not planned.

MURDOCH: Well, yes, I did know how Under the Net was going to end. But I think this is a matter of style. It is quite an interesting point, isn't it, that some novels can seem like that, and it may be better if you have that feeling. I mean there can be a sense of too much presence of the author, a feeling that the author is going to bring the thing through to the end, come what may, in a particular way.

How could I--a partisan of the baggy and organic, a lover of the carefully arranged formlessness of Penelope Fitzgerald's best novels, a raving fan of Moby-Dick--do anything but agree? (And yet I love form, too, whether it's the jeweled perfection of The Great Gatsby or the interpenetrating circles of John Crowley's Aegypt cycle. At least I've never pretended to be consistent.)

5 Since Iris Murdoch and Jane Austen wrestled for my reading attention this weekend, it seems right to take note of something Murdoch told Simon Price in 1984:

I think my two favorite characters in literature are Achilles and Mr. Knightley in Emma. Perhaps that represents two sides of one's character, or something, but I find that I identify with both of them.

Knightley is easy to understand: he's a strong, interesting, good character. (Side note: though I know I long ago offered evidence that I was never a teenage girl, the fact that I find him far more compelling than Darcy surely provides more, right?) The choice of Achilles on the other hand--rage personified,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses

--surprises, even perplexes me. What did Murdoch see there to identify with? His rage? His ambition, which caused him to willingly choose an early death rather than forego the only eternal life he could imagine, that of lasting fame for his exploits?

As an even-tempered, unambitious sort, I've always had a bit of trouble with Achilles; for me Achilles--and the values he represents--serves as a reminder of how distant Homer's world was from ours. His values, his cares, are almost as far from mine as is possible to imagine. Yet at the same time, I've always felt an affinity with Odysseus. Sure, he's possibly the least trustworthy person in literature, but nearly every subterfuge is entered into with the same goal: keeping him alive another day. While I'd like to think I'm more scrupulous, it would require an inappropriate level of self-regard to think that I wouldn't appreciate some of Odysseus's tactics were I to find myself in similar situations.

6 All of which leads me to a larger question: just who are my favorite characters in literature? Oddly enough, I hadn't thought about that question, really, until I read about Murdoch's choices. Unlike her, I think if I put together a list it won't consist of characters with whom I particularly identify; rather--like Odysseus--they'd be characters who I can't stop thinking about, who seem forever capable of revealing new surprises. So to add to Odysseus, here's a list that came more or less off the top of my head during tonight's run:

Bjartur from Independent People

Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Lieutenant Amanda Turck from James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor

Bartleby the Scrivener

Jayber Crow, from Wendell Berry's books about the Port William Membership

King David

Barnby, Uncle Giles, and Tuffy Weedon from A Dance to the Music of Time

First Sergeant Milt Warden from From Here to Eternity

Lyra from the His Dark Materials trilogy

Sir Lancelot

Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky from Anna Karenina

Huckleberry Finn

Philip Marlowe

Mrs. Aubrey from Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows

Rose Ryder from John Crowley's Aegypt series

And who are yours?