Vernon Dahmer

After I raved about Taylor Branch's America in the King Years yesterday, I figured I ought to give you an example of why I'm praising it so highly. Here, from volume two, Pillar of Fire, is Branch giving a quick but detailed biographical sketch of Mississippi farmer Vernon Dahmer--and using that sketch to explore the underlying complexity of the very concept of race, especially as employed in the highly charged American South of the 1960s:

Staying on alone at the farm, [SNCC worker Hollis] Watkins gradually learned that the Dahmer family's Faulknerian bloodlines wandered across racial boundaries and taboos. Vernon Dahmer's mother, Ellen Kelly, had been one of four light-skinned mulatto daughters born during Reconstruction to a white plantation owner named Kelly, for whom their farm region north of Hattiesburg was named Kelly Settlement. Old man Kelly had no wife or other children, and he honored his mulatto family far beyond accepted custom. In the 1890s, Ellen Kelly caused something of a family crisis by entertaining a marriage proposal from George Dahmer, a most unusual white man--born illegitimately in 1871 to a transient German immigrant and a white woman who, during the chaos and destitution that followed the Civil War in Mississippi, had gone on to marry an ex-slave with whom she produced eight dark-skinned children raised as George Dahmer's younger siblings.

To the ex-Confederate planter Kelly, the problem with George Dahmer as a suitor for his daughter Ellen was not so much his bastard status or the racial confusion of a genetic white man living within Negro culture, but his lack of higher education. Kelly withheld consent until young George Dahmer completed courses at Jackson State, Mississippi's Reconstruction-built Negro college, but then he blessed the newlyweds with a full share of his estate: forty acres, a cow, two calves, and a feather bed. Although some of the surviving white cousins contested these gifts to Negroes as the folly of a lunatic bachelor, the bequest stood, and in time George and Ellen Dahmer gained possession of additional Kelly acreage.

In December of 1908, four months after Lyndon Johnson was born in the Texas Hill Country, Vernon Dahmer arrived as the eighth of twelve Dahmer children. He may have become the superior farmer of the lot in any case, but competition decreased significantly when three of his five brothers married "out of the race" into white society in the North, one as a church pastor. Not all family members on either side of the color line were aware of the secret. Among Vernon Dahmer's most delicate tasks as an adult was to maintain ties among the witting ones even while engineering an innocent extinction of bonds in the next generation. Life's passages--births, marriages, deaths--posed the most difficult decisions about which distant ones could be notified, and how to do so without risking the fateful curiosity of the unwitting. With time, the simplest family communications across the color barrier became trying and dangerous. On the Negro side, parents faced the crippling issue of whether to acknowledge the possibility that especially light-skinned children might cross over, and if so, whether it was mutually safe and emotionally tolerable to seek the counsel of those who had gone before.

Vernon Dahmer narrowed such dilemmas by choosing successively darker wives. After fathering three sons during the Depression who grew up to look like him and his father, George--that is, by all appearances as white as the governor of Mississippi--he married a darker woman who bore three discernibly Negro sons during the 1940s, and two years after the second wife died, he married Ellie Dahmer in 1952 and produced a son, Dennis, and a daughter, Bettie, his young tractor driver, also clearly of African descent. In public, Dahmer learned to expect different reactions according to which sets of children were in his company. Among strangers, he could pass with his eldest children as a white family so long as Ellie was not along, whereas with her and the younger children he functioned separately across the color line as an ambassador. On Southern highways, he easily picked up food from the first-class "white" side of segregated restaurants if his family remained hidden in the car. Less pleasantly, white strangers who encountered the entire family assumed sometimes that Dahmer was a white boss among servants. Some made collegial remarks to him about his niggers.

Dahmer was murdered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in January of 1966 for his work in support of voting rights. In 1998, more than thirty years later, the leader of the local Klan chapter, Samuel Bowers, was convicted, on the fifth try, of Dahmer's murder. Bowers died in prison last fall.

The complexities of race that Dahmer lived out, and the racism he fought against, are, of course, still with us. To take only one obvious example: Barack Obama, despite his multi-racial heritage, is almost exclusively identified as black, a point which will be hammered home over and over, with ever-less-subtle hints of racism, in the coming months. The lesson the GOP took from the 1960s was that they needed to make racism a prominent part of their playbook; should Obama's campaign continue to gather steam, we'll soon see them deploying the nastiest parts of it.

America in the King Years

As I wrote just last week, I'm not usually inclined to recommend books generally, to all readers, instead hedging my recommendations with caveats and explanations, rooting everything fully in my own sensibility. Part of what I enjoy about reading good critics--James Wood and Michael Dirda, for example--is learning, over time, what they like and dislike and where their tastes and mine overlap; learning their sensibilities means both that I gain some appreciation for books I might otherwise not have noticed or liked and that I learn when and how far to trust their recommendations.

I've also written on this blog about how personal reading decisions are, how people read for different reasons and in different ways. I don't really believe that people should be reading a certain type of book in a certain way or that reading those books will make you a better person. Will serious reading of Tolstoy make you think deeply about how people live their lives? Sure, but so, in a different way, will reading Watership Down. If I had a book-related motto, it would be read what you want to read; take those minutes or hours to simply be, separate from the world and concentrating deeply on something that requires your active participation, your collaboration, your bringing to bear your lifetime of thoughts and experience Do that, and I'll call it good.

So if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll realize how unusual it is that I'm saying the following: Every American who wants to understand this country should read Taylor Branch's America in the King Years. I read the first volume, Parting the Waters (1988) last January and it was so utterly involving that I had to take a break. I spent my Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday this year reading the second volume, Pillar of Fire (1997), and I'm going to have to take another break before I tackle the similarly acclaimed third volume, At Canaan's Edge (2006).

In the first two books, Branch performs the seemingly superhuman feat of covering every aspect of the civil rights movement from 1955-1963, with all its successes and failures, dramatic moments and dull meetings, charismatic leaders and brave followers--and making it spellbinding. The cast of characters is tremendous; King himself, at the center through the first volume, by the second volume is only the most important voice of many, disappearing from the narrative for pages at a time. Branch gives us real insight into countless figures, including the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Lyndon Johnson, Bayard Rustin, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, Adam Clayton Powell, James Bevel, John Doar, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Without ever sacrificing the tone of a serious historian, Branch makes moments of high drama such as James Meredith's integration of Ole Miss as gripping as any thriller, and he's equally good at explaining the intricate political maneuvering, both high- and low-level, that underlay every bit of forward progress. Somehow, he makes it easy to keep track of the movement's proliferation of acronym-named organizations and their leaders, as well as dozens of different protest actions in cities across the United States. There truly is never a dull moment.

Branch accomplishes both of what I see as the historian's highest goals, fully bringing the period and its people to life and making clear the very real possibility that these events, many of them completely familiar to us by now, could easily have happened in a different way, or not at all. The two goals are deeply interconnected: placing us so firmly in the time constantly (if indirectly) reminds us that progress is not inexorable and that history is the product of individual decisions, in this case often ones of jaw-dropping bravery at great personal cost. It's a stunning achievement, and it makes America in the King Years the best history writing I've ever read, hands down.

At the same time, by bringing to life the complexity underlying the simplistic national narrative of progress in civil rights, Branch points the way to an understanding of the following forty years of politics, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, from the crumbling of the Solid South to the continuing (but nearly finished) realignment of the Republicans and Democrats into Southern vs. Northern, Rural vs. Urban, lily-White vs. multi-racial parties. If I were to teach a class in contemporary politics (for which I'd be astonishingly unqualified), I'd start my syllabus with this trilogy, Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), and Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes (1970); from them alone, I think even a novice student of American history could gain a working understanding of how we've ended up where we are as a nation.

But start with Taylor Branch. It will make you think in complicated ways about race, rights, American history, personal responsibility, bravery, non-violence, organization, power, and an uncountable host of other topics. In other words, I guarantee it will be worth your time.

Secret police

From Franz Kafka's The Trial (1914, English translation 1937)

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

From Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch (1983, English translation 1994)

The metaphysical meaning of the secret services lies in the words that designate them: "secret services" because they appropriate all secrecy. Their meaning lies in their loathsome and dizzying conquests, but even more in the fact that they have violently forced secrecy to become apparent, too visible, as blatant as an advertisement posted on every corner. All secret services share a mission that is far more important and far more effective than all their conflicts: the annihilation of secrecy.

From Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954-63 (1988)

Hoover had shifted the terms of debate. No longer was the Bureau expected to prove that the KGB or the American Communists were controlling [King aide] Stanley Levison, as King first demanded. Nor was it even required to show that Levison or [his employee Jack] O'Dell was conspiring with King to commit a criminal or subversive act. Those standards had vanished in concession to Hoover.
. . . .
The issue became one of associations rather than crimes or deeds, in a world of contamination of by word of mouth. Then the Jones wiretap picked up tantalizing hints of King's hidden sex life, enabling Hoover to suggest more strongly that the Administration was in league with a pack of guttersnipes. One character issue joined another, and the associations raised taboos that were chilling to most Americans, especially white ones, of Negro back alley and cutthroats and faceless subversives and hellish perversions. For the FBI, the true nature of King's movement reduced to the issue of whether he did or did not have contact with undesirables--an elementary question suited to the Bureau's skills and tastes. All it needed to prove or disprove these associations was comprehensive surveillance of King. For Robert Kennedy, the test soon became whether previous retreats before Hoover left any ground to defend.

From Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow: Volume 1, Fever and Spear (2002, English translation 2005)

Everything can be distorted, twisted, destroyed, erased, if, whether you know it or not, you've been sentenced already, and if you don't know, then you're utterly defenceless, lost. That's how it is with persecutions, purges, with the worst of intrigues and plots, you have no idea how frightening it is when someone with power and influence decides to deny you, or when many people band together in agreement, although agreement isn't always necessary, all that 's needed is a malicious deed or word that takes and spreads like wildfire, and convinces others, it's like an epidemic. You don't know how dangerous persuasive people can be, never pit yourself against such people unless you are prepared to become even more despicable than they are and unless you're sure that your imagination, no, your capacity for invention is even greater than theirs, and that your outbreak of cholera will spread faster and in the right direction.

From Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (1998, English translation 2001)

Happy the creators of pessimistic systems! Besides taking refuge in the fact of having made something, they can exult in their explanation of universal suffering, and include themselves in it.

The poet of loathing, part three

Part one of this post on Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels is here and part two is here.

The satire really is brilliant, St. Aubyn's words are chosen with Wodehousian care. I've written about his prose briefly before, and the sharpness continues throughout the four novels. Here's a character reflecting on a diplomat he sees at a party:

Diplomats, thought Nicholas, long made redundant by telephones, still preserved the mannerisms of men who were dealing with great matters of state. He had once seen Jacques d'Alantour fold his overcoat on a banister and declare with all the emphasis of a man refusing to compromise over the Spanish Succession, "I shall put my coat here." He had then placed his hat on a nearby chair and added with an air of infinite subtlety, "But my hat I shall put here. Otherwise it may fall!" as if he were hinting that on the other hand some arrangement could be reached over the exact terms of the marriage.

In yesterday's post I mentioned Martin Amis; here's a passage that strikes me as worthy of his father, Kingsley. Patrick, having just been treated to a lengthy disquisition by a tremendous blowhard, thinks:

The loop of his monstrous vanity was complete. He had been talking about a book in which he wrote about his photographs of the animals he had shot with guns from his own magnificent collection, a collection photographed (alas, not by him) in the second book.

The only place St. Aubyn's satire falls short is when his characters visit America in Mother's Milk. Even there, it's not unfunny, but most of his targets are familiar or too broad (obesity, guns, the Bush administration), whereas the best of his satire of upper-crust British culture is more carefully targeted. Yet sometimes his writing can redeem even a tired topic, as in this scene in a coffee shop:

"Have a great one!" said Pete, a heavy-jawed blonde beast in an apron, sliding the coffee across the counter.

Old enough to remember the arrival of "Have a nice day," Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of "Have a great one." Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? "You have a profound and meaningful day now," he simpered under his breath as he tottered across the room with his giant mug. "Have a blissful one," he snapped as he sat at a table. "You all make sure you have an all-body orgasm," he whispered in a Southern accent, "and make it last." Because you deserve it. Because you owe it to yourself. Because you're a unique and special person. In the end, there was only so much you could expect from a cup of coffee and an uneatable muffin. If only Pete had confined himself to realistic achievements. "Have a cold shower," or "Try not to crash your car."

"Heavy-jawed blonde beast." "Weimar of bullying cheerfulness." "Simpering." Those are the words and phrases of someone who has taken care with every sentence; they, far more than topics, are what separate great satire from pedestrian.

So should you read Some Hope and Mother's Milk? I laughed a lot, cringed a lot, felt dirty merely for being human, was aghast at cruelty and astonished at more simple meanness, and was totally wrung out by the end. If that sounds fine to you, read away.

The poet of loathing, part two

Part one of this piece on Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels is here.

Even as the narrative jumps ably from character to character, the sense of disdain remains, couched in lacerating descriptions, as in this introduction, from the point of view of a Melrose family friend, of an acquaintance:

His hair was blow-dried until it rose and stiffened like a black meringue on top of his skull. His clothes did nothing to compensate for those natural disadvantages. If Vijay's favorite flared green trousers were a mistake, it was a trivial one compared to his range of lightweight jackets in chaotic tartan patterns, with flapless pockets sewn onto the outside. Still, any clothes were preferable to the sight of him in a bathing suit. Anne remembered with horror his narrow shoulders and their white pustules struggling to break through a thick pelt of wiry black hair.

Had Vijay's character been more attractive his appearance might have elicited pity or even indifference, but spending just a few days with him convinced Anne that each hideous feature had been molded by internal malevolence.

Because loathing is an effective driving force of comedy, of course, the novels are funny—but they can also be drainingly unpleasant, like some of Martin Amis's darker novels. And there is where my reservations about recommending them enter. They're frequently as funny as Evelyn Waugh, who himself could be quite negative about humanity. But St. Aubyn's depictions of Patrick's father's cruelty are far more explicit than Waugh (whether because of his own temperaments or the limitations of the times) ever approached in his descriptions of depravity. Especially in the early books, St. Aubyn creates some awkward juxtapositions between truly disturbing scenes of abuse and more distanced dissections of essentially trivial human folly that are played for laughs. St. Aubyn might argue that both real suffering and the mock-horrors of a fancy dinner party share roots in a failure to conceive of the reality of other people and their pain, but that wouldn't make the mismatched tones any less jarring. It's a real problem, but ultimately it's one I'm willing to put up with for St. Aubyn's comedy and characters. I wouldn't, however, dismiss out of hand someone who wasn't.

There is a payoff, of sorts, for being willing to stomach the darkness of the first couple of novels, as in the most recent two we see Patrick—by no means free of his inherited demons—actively trying to become a better, more complete person, a person he would not instinctively loathe. Aside from the sharpness of the writing, that desire for self-understanding is the real reason to read these St. Aubyn novels. We get a sense, not just from Patrick but from other characters as well, of a real mind sifting through its impressions, feelings, and thoughts in a constant effort to understand itself, make its way forward, and both accept and rein in its worst impulses. That caliber of analysis of human consciousness and motivation is uncommon; to find it married to laugh-out-loud satire will make me forgive many a jarring shift in tone.

The poet of loathing

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I enjoy recommending books. It was fun when I was a bookseller, and I still enjoy it, only now the beneficiaries (brunt-bearers?) are my friends and family.

But I have a lot of respect for the fact that everyone reads differently and for a wide range of reasons. People look for different things from books, and their tastes differ accordingly. So my recommendations tend to be hedged about with caveats: A Dance to the Music of Time is my favorite novel, but if you get a couple of hundred pages into it and feel like it's a slog, it's probably not for you; if uncertainty bothers you, stay away from Murakami; and if you don't enjoy the Francis Bacon biography in Aubrey's Brief Lives, then Aubrey is not for you. My caution is also driven by my knowledge that your reading time is probably more precious to you than mine is to me. After all, this is what I do with most of my free time; you, on the other hand, probably have plenty to do and don't want to waste it gritting your teeth at something I've blithely recommended.

Which brings me to Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, the three brief books that make up his mid-90s Some Hope trilogy and 2005's Mother's Milk. Each of the novels takes up a discrete period in the life of Patrick Melrose, troubled scion of an extravagantly wealthy—though rapidly declining—English family. The first finds him as a boy of five, suffering the depredations of his astonishingly cruel father. The second, set in Patrick's twenties, is a grotesquely detailed narrative of a weekend in New York during which he tries, without openly forming the thought, to kill himself by overdosing on the heroin and cocaine to which he has become addicted. The third finds him, thirtyish and a bit wiser, attending a country house dinner party, while the fourth introduces him to the joys of parenthood while reacquainting him with the pains of being parented. We get just enough detail about the interstices of Patrick's life to get a sense of how it has unfolded when we haven't been looking, and the result is a surprisingly rounded portrait of a deeply unhappy young man trying desperately to come to some sort of acceptable terms with himself and the world.

And oh, that world. St. Aubyn has clearly made a lifelong study of loathing—self and other—and now he is both its poet and its comedian. The world as Patrick sees it is comprised of so much tawdriness, dishonesty, and just plain crap as to make a real engagement with it nearly impossible, unless modulated by drugs, sarcasm, or ironic distance; nothing can be taken on its merits, because under Patrick's unforgiving gaze, those merits will, surely, soon be discovered to be chimerical—if not sinister. And for Patrick, there are few kindred spirits, few who prefer to see the world's true, unvarnished bleakness:

Patrick took his drink over to a small book-lined alcove in the corner of the room. Scanning the shelves, his eye fell on a volume called The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and next to it a second volume called More Journals of a Disappointed Man, and finally, by the same author, a third volume entitled Enjoying Life. How could a man who had made such a promising start to his career have ended up writing a book called Enjoying Life? Patrick took the offending volume from the shelf and read the first sentence that he saw: "Verily, the flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes!"

"Verily," muttered Patrick.

More tomorrow.

Remembering to give credit where it's due

This blog, as you know, is about what I've been reading lately. As someone who despite having a small but functional local library less than a block away gives in a couple times a week to my near-pathological urge to buy books, a chronicle of my reading is also a chronicle of my buying--and of the physical books themselves. Today Stacey and I rearranged the books in our bookcases so that we would no longer have a hundred or so books resting, sideways and disorganized, atop all of our properly shelved books. It took a long time, but it was worth it, the temporarily ordered shelves satisfying the lingering remnants of the bookseller in me.

Which is all a roundabout way of getting to the fact that, right after I finished my post about Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters the other night, I realized that I should mention that it was, physically, a near-perfect book. The Penguin Press marketing department did its work, getting a great title and subtitle (Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death), and the design department created a flawless cover, making use of striking spirit photography and a great typeface for the title. The interior design was excellent as well, clear and readable. There's not much more you could ask for in a mid-level trade book; congratulations are in order.

And while I'm praising Penguin, I should say that I love the recent redesign of the Penguin classics. I'm not talking about the Deluxe Editions, which are wonderful but have gotten plenty of press, but of the regular old Classics line. The covers have been simplified, with an image on the top half and black on the bottom, and both the design and the image choices have been spot-on. Now, they're still printed on some of the worst paper in the world, so they feel ancient about forty minutes after you get them home. but baby steps are still progress . . .

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."

William James

I've been a casual fan of William James ever since discovering The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) about a dozen years ago. James is one of those philosophers whose writing and very thought give a concrete sense of the person behind them, the life force animating the thinking; his writing gives the feeling almost of being thought through as it's been presented to you--it's an active thought, alive with possibility. Take this, for example, from his lectures on pragmatism, as presented by Robert B. Richardson in his splendid new biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006):

Pragmatism, says James, accepts the possibility that the world is various, pluralistic, "made up of a lot of eaches." It accepts, too, the possibliity that all may not be at last right with the world. "I find myself," he says, "willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play' . . . I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers and no total preservation of all that is . . . When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is enough to accept."

Richardson's biography is first and foremost an intellectual biography of James, an exploration of the way that his ideas evolved in the context of late-nineteenth century scientific and philosophical thought. But he also delivers a detailed, compelling account of James's life as well, woven thickly with quotations from his writings, speeches, diaries, and letters; what emerges is a portrait of a man who, despite constant physical ailments, neurotic exhaustion, and various forms of depression, was vibrantly alive to new ideas and new experiences, always willing to consider new ways of looking at the world. Fighting against received ideas and philosophies that would limit the validity of human experience in favor of a concept of a purpose or an absolute, James continually returned to the primacy of individual experience and our efforts to make sense of it.

The story of William James also necessarily involves a biographer in the fascinating, complicated story of the entire James family. Of his brother, novelist Henry, William once said, "he is a native of the James family, and has no other country," and that could, it seems, be said of the entire family. His sister Alice is known to us now largely through her diary; she has been taken up in recent decades as a feminist icon, her physical and emotional problems seen as resulting from the strictures placed on women in those days. But none of the James children came through the hothouse childhood atmosphere created by their self-involved, independently wealthy father entirely intact. William and Henry suffered physical and emotional problems all their lives, while Wilky and Bob led difficult, seemingly unhappy lives, neither one ever quite finding his place in the world.

Despite that, the bond among the siblings remains strong and fascinating after all these years--especially the one tying William and Henry and Alice. William's letters to Henry, always full of interesting thoughts and opinions, become remarkably entertaining every time William reads one of Henry's novels: he invariably scolds Henry for not being clear enough, suggesting that he try, just once, writing a straightforward story. It's impossible for me to imagine the outcome had Henry, whose very instruments were occlusion and indirection, taken up his brother's challenge.

The desire that thought be expressed straightforwardly and openly also comes through in the letter William wrote to his sister when he learned she had terminal cancer. In closing, after a frank discussion of her impending death and the uncertain prospect of immortality, he closes with

It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but . . if one has things present to one's mind, and I know they are present enough to your mind, why not speak them out"

It's the frankness of a philosopher and of a brother who knows his sister and her mind--and respects both utterly.

Richardson delivers that level of detail and nuance throughout William James. It's a tad too long, and he backtracks a bit too much, occasionally repeating examples, but it's all in service of giving as complete a picture as possible of the man behind the thought. And while Richardson doesn't whitewash James's faults, ultimately he presents a James who is admirable and inspiring. I put down the book seeing James's intellectual energy and openness to new ideas as a real goal to strive for; that, it seems to me, is surely the mark of a good biography.

Tomorrow, more on William James--but this time on James and spiritualism. That's right: ghost stories coming up.

Smack in the biscuit, or, We don't need no hanky-panky

Between the holidays and my computer problems, I've fallen behind in telling you about the crime novels I've been reading lately. So here's a quick roundup.

1) Wade Miller's Branded Woman (1952) and John Lange's Grave Descend (1971), a couple of Hard Case Crime novels that I read back-to-back, made a good pair. Branded Woman, set in Mazatlan, stars a tough woman, a jewelry smuggler who is searching for the mysterious man known as The Trader, who years ago branded her on the forehead as a warning to stay out of his way. Of course, the scar has the opposite effect, making Branded Woman a fine revenge tale as the woman wends her way through a fairly large cast of shady characters, double agents, and red herrings on the trail of The Trader. The rarity (for noir) of a tough female protagonist is enough to make Branded Woman worthwhile; that the mystery is sufficiently convoluted to keep me guessing was a bonus.

Grave Descend is also set on the water, this time Jamaica, and it stars McGregor, a diver and salvage man who gets hired—at a surprisingly high price—to investigate a sunken yacht. It won't surprise you that nearly everything about the set-up, from the guy hiring him to the story of the yacht's sinking, strikes McGregor as suspicious. But, like so many noir heroes . . .

"Hanky-panky," said [his co-diver] Yeoman solemnly. It was his word to indicate a wide variety of derangements and interesting activity.

"Looks that way," McGregor said.

"They setting you up for something?"

McGregor nodded.

"Better get out now," Yeoman said. "We don't need no hanky-panky."

"well, no," McGregor said, and ordered a beer. "But . . . "

"You're curious," Yeoman said.

"Something like that."

"The curious fish," Yeoman said, "gets the hook."

The set-up of Grave Descend is fantastic, an extremely complicated scenario involving insurance fraud and murder and art theft, but the payoff is a bit disappointing. The story devolves a bit into chases and fistfights—all very good in their place, but not quite as exciting as I'd hoped, considering how many balls Lange had tossed into the air earlier. But it was still a fun read, worth the time if for no other reason than McGregor's escape from the depths of a swamp, during which he has to fight a crocodile. He should have listened to Yeoman, but you already knew that.

[Bonus for those of you who don't click the links: Miller is a pseudonym for a pair of writers who, among other things, wrote the book on which Touch of Evil was based, and John Lange is the pseudonym of—wait for it—Michael Crichton, under which he wrote in medical school. The Wikipedia rules.]

2) I also checked in with Spenser and his entourage, reading Robert Parker's most recent account of his adventures, Cold Service (2006). It's been several years since a Spenser novel has done much for me, but they're worth the occasional Saturday afternoon. I think of them kind of like the soaps: you check in once in a while to see what the people you've been watching for years have been up to lately. Not much ever changes, but even that very continuity is somewhat soothing. Cold Service opens just after Spenser's best friend, Hawk the hit man, has been shot, near fatally. During his recovery, Spenser explains to Hawk's soon-to-be-ex girlfriend that the reason Hawk is almost never wrong is that he tries never to speak about anything he doesn't know. It was as succinct an explanation of Hawk as Parker has ever come up with, well worth the trouble of checking in.

3) It took my local bookstore a month or so to get it, but I finally got to read Allan Guthrie's first novel, Two-Way Split (2004). It's set in the same seedy Edinburgh milieu as his second novel, Kiss Her Goodbye (2005), and it even peripherally features Kiss Her Goodbye's two most important characters, leg-breaker Joe Hope and his boss, Cooper. This novel, however, is about a set of novice criminals who disastrously botch a bank job. Along the way, a couple of outsiders, find out about the job, and, for very different reasons, close in on the thieves. Disaster and violence—painfully well-described—ensue.

Guthrie loads Two-Way Split with effective details, carefully drawing the grubbiness that pervades his characters' lives. Take this passage, for example, wherein Pearce, a recent ex-con who has reluctantly taken some enforcement work to pay off a debt, enters a block of council flats looking for a man named Cant:

Cant's handwritten name was taped on top of the garish pink paintwork of his front door. The letter a had been scored out and replaced with a u. Pearce felt the corners of his mouth twitch. He slipped a fingernail under a burst paint blister, which peeled off like boiled skin.

Pearce's greatest asset is his formidable strength, and from the moment he's introduced he carries the threat of violence:

Winter in Scotland was far too cold to walk around bare-chested. That's why Pearce wore a t-shirt. His fists clenched, relaxed, and clenched again. His forearm muscles writhed under his goose-pimpled skin. He smacked his hands together.

His challenge throughout the book is to overcome violence, get past those urges despite extreme provocation—and to accept an unexpected offer of what, against all odds, appears to be some sort of real future.

All the characters in Two-Way Split are damaged, one of them far, far more than is immediately clear (though as I look back through the book, I find that Guthrie drops hints from the very start); his fragility leads the novel into completely unexpected territory. But Guthrie pulls it off; right to the end he kept me guessing as to what decisions his characters would make—and, more importantly, caring about those choices.

When I read Kiss Her Goodbye this summer, I thought it wasn't entirely successful, the violence seeming disproportionate to the story and the characters. I think that if I'd read Two-Way Split first, I would have been more receptive to Kiss Her Goodbye—Two-Way Split seems a clearer exposition of Guthrie's themes. Or it's possible that it's just a matter of settling into his world, and either novel, read first, would have been tougher. Regardless, I'm now definitely ready for his next novel, Hard Man, which comes out next spring.

4) And, finally, over the holiday I read another Hard Case Crime novel, Richard S. Prather's The Peddler (1952), which tells the story of the meteoric rise of a small-time San Francisco hood named Tony to the high reaches of the syndicate that runs the city's brothels. It's a dark book, almost an inverse morality tale, where the protagonist becomes more and more successful while getting less and less human. Because Tony is the focus of the book, I kept ignoring the warnings his friends and associates—and his behavior—gave as to his utter amorality and self-centeredness, thinking that he'd eventually redeem himself. But as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Prather isn't pushing Tony to an epiphany. Tony is nowhere near trusting enough to learn any lessons; the only one on offer, therefore, is for us, and it's the old lesson that working in a dirty business will make you dirty.

I don't mean to make The Peddler sound like a drag—it's a completely gripping read. Early on, I found myself rooting for Tony despite myself; later I kept wondering, tensely, how his come-uppance would be delivered. And, oh, Prather has a way with slang:

Then Frame was saying, "He just went off his nut, see? We were plain' poker and the guy was drinkin' heavy. All of a sudden he goes off his rocker and yells at Sharkey, 'Get away from me—don't let him get me.' Then he yanks out the barker and bangs him. Smack in the biscuit. Then Romero flopped down on the floor, cold. I guess the sight of poor Sharkey's think-pot flying through the air like that put him under a strain." Frame grinned wolfishly, his stained, pitted teeth jutting under his pulled back lip.

I like a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. I can get along with just about anybody. But if you don't appreciate that crazy run of slang, I don't know if I can be your friend.

So few posts!

The sad death of our laptop has severely curtailed my ability to post this week. I hope to have a new one by next week, so the blogging should return more or less to normal soon.

Until then, I'll leave you with a passage from the wonderful new William James biography by Robert D. Richardson, about which more later:

Benjamin Paul Blood was a writer of letters to newspapers. Ten years older than James, he was a nonacademic, a philosopher, a mystic, and, it would turn out, a pluralist to boot. . . . Blood was, delightfully, much more than am etaphysiciain. Interested in machinery, he had patented a "swathing reaper." He had been a gambler, making and losing, he told James, "bar'ls" of money. He had been a "fancy gymnast" and had fought "some heavy fights--notably one of forty minutes with Ed. Mullett, whom I left senseless." "I have worn out many styles, " he wrote James years later, and am cosmopolitan, liberal to others, and contenteed with myself. If Blood sounded like Whitman, he lookd like a cross between Ppoe and Nietzsche. He sent James a photo of himself at age twenty-eight, taken when he had just "lifted by a chain on my right shoulder and around my right arm 1160 lbs." "I never could value things at others' rates," Blood wrote James, "never was respectable or conforming. . . . The chaff blows off, the rain remains and I could borrow the city treasury if I wanted the money."

Richardson calls Blood "this Paul Bunyan of Amsterdam, New York," in one of the many fine turns of phrase that litter this fascinating, idea-filled biography.

Norwegian Wood

While reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood (1987) a few weeks ago, I wrote:

For all that Murakami's books get discussed as weird pageants of contemporary life, icons of postmodernism, the ones I've read have all featured narrators driven by loss, alienated from their past or from the world by people they can't have back, decisions they can't unmake, times they can't recapture. There is a similarity in tone between Murakami and Berry, or Murakami and Anthony Powell, or Proust, that I would never have guessed when I first opened him.

Having finished the novel and spent a few weeks idly thinking about it, I still agree with what I wrote, but I think it gives an inappropriate sense of the book, making it sound melancholy rather than wistful. Instead, I think it's probably more important to focus on the loving attention to the material stuff of the world (and, thus, of memory) that lies at Norwegian Wood's core—and that fundamentally ties it to Murakami's other works, however different they may seem at first glance.

Take this description, for example:

Sunday morning I got up at nine, shaved, did my laundry, and hung the clothes on the roof. It was a beautiful day. The first smell of autumn was in the air. Red dragonflies were flitting around the quadrangle, chased by neighborhood kids swinging nets. With no wind, the Rising Sun hung limp on its pole. I put on a freshly ironed shirt and walked from the dorm to the streetcar stop. A student neighborhood on a Sunday morning: the streets were dead, virtually empty, most stores closed. What few sounds there were echoed with special clarity. A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at at a line of empty cans. A flower store was open, so I went in and bought some daffodils. Daffodils in the autumn: that was strange. But I had always liked that particular flower.

It's simple, straightforward writing, relating an inconsequential morning in the young narrator's life. But the concrete details of this scene, joined to the host of other elements of everyday, non-noteworthy life that accrue throughout Norwegian Wood, form a backdrop of consequence, a sense of a real, lived life moving forward day by day, laundry load by laundry load. The elements of everyday life may not seem worthy of notice, but Murakami's attention to them reminds us that they're all we have—that in a very real sense, our attention to the world around us is us. By taking notice of the seemingly inconsequential, we both sharpen our ability to attend to what is truly consequential—human lives and emotions—and we simultaneously invest the everyday, material world with consequence. We thus impregnate the world with a numinous quality that, in its best moments, reflects back to us with increased weight and potency. The following passage, in which the older narrator recalls the powerful emotions evoked by a friend's ill-treated girlfriend, demonstrates some of what I'm talking about:

It finally hit me some dozen or so years later. I had come to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlor, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red—my hand, the plate, the table, the world—as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything. In the midst of this overwhelming sunset, the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained—and would forever remain—unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, all-but-seared-in longing: forgotten for years to remember that such feelings had ever existed inside me. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears. She had been an absolutely special woman. Someone should have done something—anything—to save her.

The physical and inconsequential stores, amplifies, and reflects the emotional and consequential, either directly, as when Proust tells of the madeleine, or obliquely, as when Murakami's narrator is overcome by the sunset. Attention to the world, however minor its manifestations, is repaid with moments of knowledge, clarity, beauty, insight, transcendence. That sense of the importance—the necessity, even—of the everyday is, for me, the strongest connection between the straightforward love story of Norwegian Wood and the superficially very different Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In those novels, the details are, in their strangeness, more immediately arresting. But the care that Murakami lavishes on the physical things of this world is similar and so is its effect, both grounding and arguing for the importance of even the most mundane events of the novel.

I wrote back in July about the near-mythological ordeals that the narrators of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle endure. There's no comparable ordeal in Norwegian Wood, but I think the novel nevertheless mounts a strong argument for the value of simply carrying on. Norwegian Wood is crowded with suicides, nearly all by teenagers. [When we were discussing this book the other day, by the way, Stacey reminded me of the historical place of suicide in Japanese culture and how very different it is from our conception of the act. I'm choosing to avoid that complexity by arguing that the aggressively Western and modern orientation of Murakami's fiction limits the role of traditional interpretations—but I know I might be on shaky ground in doing so.] Some of the kids have fairly clear reasons, while others are essentially inexplicable, but the overall sense is that , faced with the quotidian difficulties of life, they decided they were unable to continue. In the face of so much death, there is a real sense of hard-won victory, of tangible achievement in the simple fact that the narrator is still alive twenty years later, able to vividly recall and tell us this story of his youth. His life has included great loss, disappointment, and sorrow, but he has kept going. Like the narrator in Hard-Boiled Wonderland swimming across the subterranean lake in the dark, he has chosen to muddle along despite having no idea of what's to come:

I looked back over my shoulder as I swam. I saw the Professor's light retreating into the distance, but my hand had yet to touch solid rock. How could it be so far? Decent of him to keep us guessing.

There are hints of the grudging optimism of Beckett in this vision of life: "I can't go on, I'll go on." We keep going, dealing with things as they come up, be they as straightforward as a fragile-souled lover or as complicated as unseen subterranean flesh-eaters. Effort itself is success, and it's decent of the future to keep us guessing. A reasonable note, it seems to me, on which to enter, blind as usual, a new year.

Book to book to book

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably have a sense of the oblique routes I take from one book or subject to another. Today’s post is a brief glimpse into that process.

Last week, I read Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) because in Julian MacLaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties, which I read earlier this month, he describes meeting Greene to discuss the possibility of MacLaren-Ross’s adapting the novel for the BBC. It turned out to be the right time of year to read the book, because I always like to read some Christmas book or other in December, and the events of A Gun for Sale take place right around the holiday. It’s a Graham Greene Christmas, however, so (even though this was before his Catholic novels) it’s a Christmas that serves mostly as a shabby attempt to tart up a fallen, grubby world. Raven, an utterly amoral professional gunman, finds himself hunted by the police in the town of Nottwich, and he soon discovers that, rare as aid and comfort are, goodness itself is even less common, in the upper classes or the lower. Raven is an outsider in a world of outsiders, which renders a holiday like Christmas mostly a cruel joke and life a painful struggle to the death:

Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

A Gun for Sale reminded me of the existence of James Jones’s The Pistol (1958), a tightly written novella about Richard Mast, a U.S. Army private in Hawaii who takes advantage of the confusion immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor to hold onto a pistol that he had been temporarily issued. Over the next few weeks, as the Army fortifies the beaches and roads of Hawaii in anticipation of a Japanese amphibious invasion, the pistol becomes a talisman, the tangible form of his hope for survival. With the pistol, he half-reasons, half-feels, he’ll have just enough advantage, just enough edge to make it through what’s ahead.

Word of his illicit firearm makes its way rapidly through the company, and Mast’s fellow soldiers fixate on taking it for themselves, by force if necessary. Most of them deliver variations on the same argument: “I need the pistol more than you because . . .” The repeated arguments and the symbolic role of the pistol could easily push the novella too far into allegory, but Jones pays such close attention to the details of life and work that the story doesn't ever come unmoored from reality. It’s a quick read and, if you’ve been interested in Jones but unwilling to commit the time to From Here to Eternity or The Thin Red Line, it would be a good starting point, giving a glimpse of his understanding of human motivations and of how men behave under pressure.

Logic would have led me from The Pistol to Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear (1940), which was sitting on my table and would have kept up some of the tone and subject of the Greene and the Jones, concerning as it does an English armaments engineer who finds himself caught up in World War II intrigue. But that will have to wait, because Christmas intervened, and for Christmas Stacey got me Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map (2006). It tells the story of the London cholera epidemic of 1854 and Dr. John Snow’s discovery that cholera is transmitted through contaminated water. In recent weeks I'd discussed the book with friends who, like me, knew some of the story from Edward Tufte’s discussion in Visual Explanation of the map of mortality that Snow drew up as part of his evidence. But whereas Tufte was primarily interested in the successful information design of Snow’s map, Johnson tells, in gripping fashion, the larger story of the epidemic and what Snow’s discovery reveals about history, innovation, science, intuition, and human thought in general.

Johnson presents Snow (and the mostly forgotten Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose work, both independently and with Snow, contributed greatly to the ultimate vindication of Snow’s theory) as a consilient thinker, someone who, by being interested in all fields and—more important—willing to apply insights from one field of study to a problem in another—was able to see connections and draw conclusions that other scientists and medical professionals of the era, blinded by received wisdom, were simply unable to see. As Johnson presents the evidence, it is extremely hard to understand how anyone could fail to accept Snow’s conclusions. Yet many extremely smart and educated people refused to surrender their adherence to the longstanding theory that disease was caused by “miasma” emanating from the slums.

As Johnson explores that blindness, the book becomes more than just good popular history. Johnson is fascinated by the question of how ideas come together and how various factors, from individual temperaments to religion to social thought to urban planning (or lack thereof) aid or hinder the furthering of knowledge and the acceptance of ideas. As he explains,

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

By the conclusion of the book, a Jane Jacobs-driven paean to urban living, The Ghost Map has become as much a book about ideas and knowledge in general as about the 1854 cholera epidemic itself. It's a success in both regards.

And, finally, where will The Ghost Map lead me? Well, one reason I had been discussing it earlier in the month with my friend Maggie is that she was reading Robinson Crusoe, which led to us talking about Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which led to The Ghost Map. And I've never read A Journal of the Plague Year. . .

And now you understand why I’ll never get everything on my shelves read.

Scary

For a brief moment last night, purely by accident, the following three books were stacked on the bed at my house:

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
Ghost Hunters, by Deborah Blum
The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connolly

The only one of the three having anything, really, to do with ghosts or spirits is Ghost Hunters, whose subtitle, "William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death" tells you all you need to know. Johnson's The Ghost Map, which was a pleasantly surprising Christmas gift from Stacey, is about London's 1854 cholera epidemic, while The Unquiet Grave, is a sort of commonplace book or journal that, if it's about anything, is about how Cyril Connolly can't form this mess of thoughts into a book.

But if I stack those in the window—maybe with The Oxford Book of Death on top and The Oxford Book of the Supernatural on the bottom—they would probably serve as a reasonably effective burglar-deterrent.

However, as Stacey pointed out last night when I broached the idea, we just might return from work one night to find our house lousy with ghosts and spirits of every stripe. They'd probably even have figured out how to work the buzzer and let all the vampires in, too.

Influences

From the Introduction to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes (2006), translated by Anne Carson

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He'll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim's head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother's funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drover away.

From Edward St. Aubyn's Bad News (1994), collected in Some Hope

Patrick looked down the avenue. It was like the opening shot of a documentary on overpopulation. He walked down the street, imagining the severed heads of passers-by rolling into the gutter in his wake.

If I find myself lopping off anyone's head (going all Judith on someone? all Highlander?) in the next few days, there's my alibi: look at what I was reading! It's nearly as bad as those video games Congress is always warning me about.

On the importance of a good prose style

A good dinner, a martini, a quiet hotel room with a wireless connection, a good book, and a Blogger account. What more could I want after a long week in New York of work and visiting friends?

So, as I've said before on this blog, I'm unlikely to enjoy a novel if I don't approve of the author's prose. The sentence, after all, is the first evidence I have by which to judge an author, and a writer who can't figure out the difference between a good sentence and a bad one is necessarily suspect. There are exceptions (see Jones, James), but usually what I want to know about a writer is, first of all, can he or she write?

The prose I like most straddles a fine line between careful observation and too much aestheticism, describing the world the way it is with near-perfect precision while not drawing attention to itself at the expense of the described. It's a product of continued, careful attention to the details that make up life and the language available to us for describing those details. At its best, such prose serves simultaneously to provide the background in which characters are placed for our contemplation and to convey a sense of those characters themselves. The following description of Dr. David Melrose, from the first page of Edward St. Aubyn's Never Mind (1992, collected in Some Hope), is a good example:

In his blue dressing gown, and already wearing dark glasses although it was still too early for the September sun to have risen above the limestone mountain, he directed a heavy stream of water from the hose he held in his left hand onto the column of ants moving busily through the gravel at his feet. His technique was well-established: he would let the survivors struggle over the wet stones, and regain their dignity for a while, before bringing the thundering water down on them again. With his free hand he removed a cigar from his mouth, its smoke drifting up through the brown and gray curls that covered the jutting bones of his forehead. He then arrowed the jet of water with his thumb to batter more efficiently an ant on whose death he was wholly bent.

Now, any half-competent high school English student could explain what St. Aubyn is conveying about the man--a doctor--in this paragraph, but that makes the achievement, concise and pointed, no less impressive. St. Aubyn has chosen the right details and the precise words in which to convey them. And it's not a matter of picking particularly unusual or erudite words, but of using words in a way that, in a sense, allows them to realize their full potential. Technique, struggle, thundering, arrowed, batter, wholly bent: these are not unusual words, but they are unusually well-chosen, creating an indelible picture of intense, almost finicky cruelty. Again, it's a matter of attentive observation of the world--or, in this case, of careful imagination of a character and how he would manifest himself in the world--followed by equal care applied to the words in which those observations are presented.

That sort of precision is the basis for the odd melding of minds of which the best reading consists, that sense of a real encounter with a previously unknown person who, through their prose, is showing you how they see the world. Encountering such clear evidence of care and intelligence in the first pages of a novel creates the trust that allows me to lend essential credence to the author's ideas about life and human relationships; I want to know what the author thinks because his prose has convinced me that those thoughts will repay the time I invest in them.

Further, in satire of this sort that trust, in turn, allows the author . . .

And yet, to Eleanor, David had seemed so different from the tribe of English snobs and distant cousins who hung around, ready for an emergency, or a weekend, full of memories that were not even their own, memories of the way their grandfathers had lived, which was not in fact how their grandfathers had lived. When she had met David, she thought that he was the first person who really understood her. Now he was the last person she would go to for understanding. It was hard to explain this change and she tried to resist the temptation of thinking that he had been waiting all along for her money to subsidize his fantasies of how he deserved to live. Perhaps, on the contrary, it was her money that had cheapened him. He had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

. . . to sink the stiletto with absolutely bloodless, surgical precision.

St. Aubyn seems to have the asperity, the cruel, unblinking honesty, of Waugh or Saki or Dawn Powell. Oh, I think I've found an author I'm going to really like.

It's a helluva town.

I'm in New York this week for work, so my reading is on the subway instead of the L. Some New York notes:

1) I started my trip, on the plane, with the least New York book I had handy, Wendell Berry's new novella, Andy Catlett (2006). Berry is a man of the country and the farm, unimpressed by cities, though he has lived in them at times, and Andy Catlett is in part a lament of everything that I can hear right now through my hotel window, the sounds of post-War America--fueled by petroleum, always on the go, mind always split between here and there, now and the future. It's an elegiac book, despite being written about a nine-year-old boy, and in picking it to bring, I guessed right: its slow cadences put me in the right mood for entering the city.

2) But once I got to my hotel, the Hudson, I had no choice but to leap with both feet into the future that to Berry is of such uncertain value, for the Hudson resembles nothing so much as a vision of tomorrow dreamed up by Wong Kar Wei and Haruki Murakami, with the addition of at least a dollop of Eurotrash. So back to Murakami I went, this time to Norwegian Wood (1987, translated into English in 2000).

And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Norwegian Wood is haunted by a similar sense of loss to that which pervades Andy Catlett. A thirty-seven-year-old man looks back, from 1987, on a love of his 1960s youth:

Each time [that memory] appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. . . . Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

For all that Murakami's books get discussed as weird pageants of contemporary life, icons of postmodernism, the ones I've read have all featured narrators driven by loss, alienated from their past or from the world by people they can't have back, decisions they can't unmake, times they can't recapture. There is a similarity in tone between Murakami and Berry, or Murakami and Anthony Powell, or Proust, that I never expected when I first opened his novels.

3) For weeks, I've been trying to remember the name of a contemporary British author, whose multi-volume family saga has been reviewed favorably, and whose prose style seemed like one I would appreciate. Take this exchange, for example:

"Imagine wanting to talk to someone on the phone," said Eleanor. "I dread it."

"Youth," said Nicholas tolerantly.

"I dreaded it even more in my youth, if that's possible."

Wanting to read this unknown author's collected novels, and knowing what its spine looked like, I'd even gone so far as to quickly look over all the fiction shelves at 57th Street Books in an attempt to circumvent my faulty memory, but to no avail. Then last night, while waiting to meet some friends, I wandered into Three Lives and Company on 10th Street and there it was, stacked high on the front table of staff favorites: Edward St. Aubyn's Some Hope (2003).

When fate gives you such clear instructions to buy a book, you are required to do so, fidelity to your local bookstore and lack of space in your luggage be damned.

4) As a longtime Joseph Mitchell fan, I talked the aforementioned friends into visiting McSorley's Old Ale House last night, and I was pleased that it was all I could have hoped for, abjuring modernity while somehow avoiding the deadly taints of kitsch or irony. The urinals alone--deep, tall, and majestic--made me feel young and insignificant, part of a lesser, fallen generation. We can't even pee like they used to pee.

Then we proceeded to irk our waiter with our frequent indecision in the face of his queries. It was hard to fault him: after all, one's only choices are light or dark, have another round or don't. And again I felt a failure. Joseph Mitchell would have had no trouble deciding. William Maxwell would have had no trouble deciding. Hell, had they allowed women back then, Dorothy Parker would have had no trouble deciding.

A couple of times, our waiter simply decided for us, always in the affirmative, always for the dark, and he was right, of course. We drank what was put in front of us and talked, of, among other topics, baseball, on which subject we were not the only patrons dwelling on this mid-December night. Imagining people talking of Ruth and DiMaggio in their day, just as we talked of Pettite and Giambi, made me feel a bit better about our efforts as patrons.

But my confidence received its largest boost when, as we made our thanks and headed for the door, the waiter chucked me on the elbow and said, "That's a nice suit."

Had I had my proper hat, I would have tipped it to Joseph Mitchell as I left.

Caesar and the Romans

Reading the excellent new Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006), by Adrian Goldsworthy, I was reminded of Cato the Elder, who ended each speech in the Roman Senate, no matter its topic, with "Moreover I advise that Carthage must be destroyed." Some days I feel that I should end every post, no matter its topic, with "Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now."

Goldsworthy is best known as a military historian, and his accounts of Caesar's campaigns and feats of generalship are detailed, clear, and always interesting. Caesar's confidence, inventiveness, and willingness to try unusual tactics put me in the mind of Ulysses Grant (though without Grant's crucial willingness to invest trusted subordinates with great freedom and power (and yes, I realize I'm drawing the line of influence in the wrong direction)). Caesar himself remains, necessarily, something of a cipher: he is, as expected, smart, canny, and ferociously ambitious, and he inspires great loyalty in his soldiers, but he is also at various times brutal, merciful, egalitarian, authoritarian, friendly, and cold. The gaps in historical knowledge, along with the uncertain motivations of those of his near-contemporaries whose writings have reached us, force those contradictions to remain unresolved and Caesar, thus, to remain a complicated figure.

Throughout the book, Goldsworthy draws on Cicero, to whose copious writings we trace so much of our knowledge of the period, and who is one of the most perpetually interesting Romans. Brilliant and ambitious, and with a deep understanding of human nature and the uses of power, he is forever building and maintaining alliances, like a man who lives in the shadow of an enormous dike and knows the dangers of inattention. But his principles are only as strong as his backers, and in his craven willingness to blow with the prevailing winds, to change in whatever way is needed to preserve himself, his power, and his image as a statesman, he reminded me of no one so much as Joe Lieberman. Cicero at least lived in a time in which to fail to make self-preservation a priority might mean one's life; all Lieberman gets out of the deal is an occasional kiss from the Derelict in Chief and a ready chair on the Sunday morning blowhard shows.

Goldsworthy also does well with what is, for me, the most important job of the Roman historian: relating the detailed anecdotes that make the individual Roman leaders, and their ridiculously dramatic lives and deaths. For example, here's how he tells of the gruesome end of Cato the Younger, who, defeated by Caesar in the Civil War, found himself with the choice to flee, surrender, or commit suicide. Retiring to his room,

He complained when he noticed that his son and servants had removed his sword, and insisted that they return it, but then went back to his reading. His choice of work was significant, Plato's Phaedo, a discussion on the immortality of the soul, but throughout his life he had pursued the study of philosophy. Finally, without warning, he stopped reading, took up his sword and stabbed himself in the stomach. Teh wound was bad, but not immediately mortal, and once they heard the commotion his son and slaves rushed to him. A doctor was brought and Cato's wound cleansed and bound up. However, he had never lacked determination or courage, and once they had gone the forty-eight-year-old tore open the stitches and began ripping out his own entrails. he was dead before they could restrain him. When Casear heard the news he said that he bitterly begrudged the opportunity of pardoning his most determined opponent, but to a great extent Cato had acted out of a desire to avoid his enemy's mercy.

Of such detail, a remarkable amount of which has come down to us through the millennia, are the attractions of Roman history woven. Its mix of personalities and events makes it inexhaustible; the more I read about the classical world, the more easily I understand early curricula that focused on it to the exclusion of all else. At the very least, you'd never be bored.

Graham Greene

A busy week of work and the death of our laptop's monitor conspired to make last week a light blogging week. So this week might be a bit disjointed, like a whole week of notes rather than separate entries.

And tonight's topic is Graham Greene. It seems like anywhere Greene the man turns up, he's interesting or entertaining. Julian MacLaren-Ross, in Memoirs of the Forties (1965), tells of meeting Greene for the first time at Greene's apartment. Late in the evening, they are taken into the nursery by Vivien Greene to say goodnight to the children. On returning to the parlor:

"Lovely children," I said, "charming," in the hearty voice used by my father when he'd survived a social ordeal, and I was further relieved to see Greene had a brandy bottle in his hand.

He said: "Who was it complained that not enough children get murdered in detective stories?"

Evelyn Waugh tells a good story in a letter to Nancy Mitford, dated October 4, 1948 and collected in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996):

So my friend Graham Greene whose books you won't read was sitting in a New York hotel feeling quite well when he felt very wet & sticking in the lap & hurried to the lavatory & found that his penis was pouring with blood. So he fainted & and was taken to a hospital and the doctors said "It may be caused by five diseases two of which are not immediately fatal, the others are." Then they chloroformed him & he woke up two days later & they said: "Well, we can't find anything wrong at all. What have you been up to? Too much womanizing?" "No, not for weeks since I left my home in England." "Ah" they said "That's it." What a terrible warning. No wonder his books are sad.

And from a October 19, 1954 letter:

Graham Green prefers spirits to wine and was not happy. As we started [a trip to Reims] he saw the name [Alan] Pryce-Jones (a harmless gentle Welsh journalist) on the list and said: "I can't go. I won't meet Pryce-Jones. He's too negative." Well, he came. That evening we all went to bed at about midnight--Lord Long haranguing the night porter--"Don't tell me all brothels are closed. I'll wake them up"--Next morning we met again at ten Graham looking ghastly. "I didn't get to bed until after four." "What were you doing?" "Drinking marc." "Who with?" "Pryce-Jones."

Then there's this, from Anthony Powell, who got along well enough with Greene but didn't like his books. In his journal (available in Journals: 1990-1992 (1997)), Powell wrote, on April 3, 1991, the day of Greene's death:

There was always an element of deviousness, indeed humbug, about all Graham's public utterances and behaviour. I think he was completely cynical, really only liking sex and money and his own particular form of publicity. I always go on pretty well with him, chiefly just before the war. We had the only colossal row after the war when he was my publisher. He would go white with rage on such occasions, admitting that he had to have rows from time to time for his health.

The occasion for the white-with-rage row was that Greene, who was at the time the managing director of Eyre & Spottiswode, was delaying the publication of Powell's book on John Aubrey, during which argument he let slip that he found the book "bloody boring."

Then there's Barbara Pym, in a letter to Philip Larkin of July 14, 1974, taking inspiration from Greene:

The sun is coming out again and I will turn to my novel. They say Graham Greene writes only 250 words a day, so I should be able to manage that!

I don't think those 250 words included the writing he did in his two journals, one real and one false, of which I learned from reviews of Norman Sherry's enormous, three-volume biography. That fact alone may force me to read the whole biography someday after all.

Peter Pavia

On the plane back from a Thanksgiving visit to the in-laws in San Jose, I read a Hard Case Crime novel, Peter Pavia’s Dutch Uncle (2005), which got me thinking about George Pelecanos. Not that Pavia writes much like Pelecanos; his much more obvious (and clearly credited) forebear is Elmore “Dutch” Leonard. Rather, my thoughts ran in that direction because over the years Pelecanos has garnered tremendous critical praise, his novels able to escape the crime/mystery ghetto and be reviewed more or less as straight-up novels—and Pavia, at least on the evidence of Dutch Uncle, is better.

Now, I’ve only read four of Pelecanos’s novels, the ones featuring private eye Derek Strange, which I understand are not as highly regarded as his earlier quartet featuring Nick Stefano, Dimitri Karras, and Marcus Clay (let alone his reportedly stellar work on The Wire). And I’ve enjoyed all four: together they present an wide-ranging and detailed picture of contemporary Washington, D.C., legal and illegal, and unshadowed by the Capitol or the White House and what happens there. In Strange, Pelecanos has created an interesting central character who grows with each story, and he’s surrounded him with a supporting cast that looks like it’ll prove worth his continued attention. He’s aiming high, trying to both relate a good crime story and tell us something about the way our cities work now, especially at the margins.

Pelecanos clearly works very hard to portray different perspectives, from that of a redneck Virginia gun dealer to the drug peddler who kills with what the rednecks sells him. More than any other contemporary author I can think of, he refuses to be limited by racial boundaries, feeling as entitled to present the perspective of a black teenager as of the Greek restaurateur who is much closer to his own background. It’s admirable. But somewhere along the line, the seams start showing. Reading Pelecanos, at times I can feel the effort, can guess at all that’s involved in trying to portray life from these varied points of view—I can see what ought to be transparent. Part of that comes from Pelecanos’s attempts to put readers deep into the thought processes of secondary characters through a third-person omniscient narration so close as to be essentially first-person—near stream-of-consciousness at times—which tends to by its very nature draw attention to itself. I find that at those points I’m thinking about Pelecanos’s word choices and thought processes rather than sinking willingly into the characters themselves. Those very efforts at authenticity backfire; they remind me that the characters are ultimately under Pelecanos’s thumb, subject to his will and the needs of his story.

None of this is intended to denigrate George Pelecanos: he’s writing good books, and ambitious books, which I’ll keep reading and for which it woulf be unfair to punish him. Instead, it’s an attempt to tell you how good I think Peter Pavia’s Dutch Uncle is. Whereas Pelecanos has, in my view, failed to fully bring his secondary characters to life; Pavia populates his novel with more than a dozen fully realized characters, without striking a wrong note. To make the comparison with Pelecanos fair, I should point out that we only see from the perspective of three characters, all white men, in Dutch Uncle—but the overall impression of a group of real people living their lives and happening to intersect is so strong that the perspective doesn’t seem the slightest bit limited.

The novel tells the story of Harry Healy, a small-time hood who gets in over his head and is suspected of murdering a drug dealer. The plot is pretty skeletal, but like most good crime novels, Dutch Uncle has a strong sense of place, depicting all the squalor of mid-90s Miami, along with other unsavory Florida locales, and it’s got a full cast, including worn-down cops, vapid models, a hillbilly drug dealer, a rust-fund cokehead, bar bouncers, and a variety of good people in bad situations. What separates it from a lot of novels—not just crime novels—is that the characters, even the most minor, seem completely alive and independent: they’re ends in themselves rather than means, who they are rather than what they are—or what Pavia needs them to be and do. Oh, they further the plot (after all, in a crime novel, how could they not?), and they advance Pavia’s themes, but those considerations always take a back seat to the characters’ own existences as fully imagined people.

Pavia has somehow, for one novel at least, found his way to the right side of that near-mystical line that separates the ordinary fictional characters, created out of whole cloth from masses of detail, from those who, like Tolstoy’s characters, surmount their details and seem alive, rounded, and breathing. Lord knows, I’m not saying Pavia’s as good as Tolstoy—he doesn't, for one thing, project quite the same god-like sympathy for everyone that Tolstoy did in his novels—but his characters cohere in the same manner, their histories, thoughts, and actions forming a seemingly organic whole, from the hapless young Alex Fernandez, a washed-up college baseball star now caught up with criminals, to the quietly drunk house painter whose work ethic Healy learns to appreciate.

I’d be a far better critic if I could identify that animating spark, the difference between this detail and that—between Pavia’s gay Miami playboy drug dealer’s too-short silk bathrobe that reveals his sagging balls and Pelecanos’s teenaged drug dealer’s unspoken love of his pit bull—but in the absence of science, I’m forced to go with feel, and Pavia’s characters feel right. And their actions and choices, because somehow Pavia makes them seem to be wholly their own—surprising at times, but always believable—carry a real weight, a sense of long-term consequence that lends a palpable tension to every moment of decision. That in itself is a measure of Pavia’s achievement: there does seem to be a long term that those actions could screw up; these characters have an existence after the book is closed.

From what I can tell, Dutch Uncle is Pavia’s debut novel. It’s the best I’ve read from Hard Case Crime yet, and I can’t wait for his next.