That's a long ballot.

Work and travel are conspiring to keep me from the computer, so blogging may be less than perfectly reliable over the next week or so. Tonight, I don't have time for the extended post on the first volume of Robert Caro's amazing biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power (1981) that I'd intended to write. But I do have time to share this amusing litany of novelty candidates who ran against Johnson in his failed attempt to capture one of Texas's Senate seats in 1941:

Because it was a special election rather than a party primary, any citizen could get on the ballot merely by paying a $100 fee, and twenty-seven candidates besides Johnson had taken advantage of that opportunity. One candidate was a radio peddler of various goat-gland concoctions designed to improve, among other things, virility. Another was a laxative manufacturer (Hal Collins of Crazy Water Crystals) who attracted big crowds at rallies by giving away a free mattress to the couple present who had the most children. A third, "Commodore" Muse Hatfield, felt that Roosevelt had not gone far enough; the Commodore favored the immediate creation of a five-ocean Navy, to be financed by a national lottery. The ballot also included "Cyclone" Davis, who lived under a Dallas viaduct and announced that he didn't have to campaign because "Providence will place me in the Senate"; a geologist who proposed a $50 monthly pension for everyone over sixty-five and a $5 pension for everyone else; a chiropractor; an ex-bootlegger; an admitted kidnapper; two bearded prophets; and two rocking-chair sages (including a wealthy self-styled "rump farmer" who said he was for "the masses"--by which he apparently meant his masses of impoverished tenant farmers). There were also two candidates whose qualifications rested on their kinship with famous Texans of the past. Joseph C. Bean was a cousin of a pair of legendary Texans: Judge Roy C. Bean, "The Law West of the Pecos," and Ellis P. Bean, a hero of Texas's war against Mexico who had gained fame by spending several years in a Mexican prison with a pet lizard named Bill. Edwin Waller III had only one famous ancestor, but that one, Edwin Waller I, had claimed the honor of having begun the Mexican War by committing the war's first "overt act" (which on closer inspection turned out to be an argument between Waller and some Mexicans over the use of a small boat.)

And that's to say nothing of the candidate who ended up entering the race late and throwing off all of Johnson's calculations, the state's sitting governor, W. Lee O'Daniel . . . a former radio flour pitchman who responded to (seemingly accurate) claims that he'd betrayed his working-class base by saying, "How can they say I'm against the working man when I buried my daddy in overalls?" More on him soon . . .

LBJ in the ring

Right before I left for a Hawaii vacation with my in-laws last week, America's greatest sportswriter, Joe Posnanski, was kind enough to mention Robert Caro's three-volume (and counting) biography of Lyndon B. Johnson in a great post about Manny Ramirez. Thus was solved my dilemma about what books to carry with me on the trip: I'd take Caro. (In addition, that is, to Dorothy Dunnett, Nicholson Baker, Sam Lipsyte, Trollope, and Laura Hillenbrand.)

And oh, the joys. All I have to do is flash the book at my coworker John to make him openly ache with envy because I'm getting to read this book for the first time. "I read the third volume twice," he said today, "and enjoyed it more the second time."

Based on 500 pages of volume one, The Path to Power, I see what he means. Caro is an astonishingly good biographer--something I knew from having read his 1,200-page book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, in a breathless rush on a beach vacation back in 2002--able to make you care, actually care, about such inconsequential things as a student government election at San Marcos State Teachers College in 1929. Or about the vote-by-vote details of LBJ's first race. And, almost unique among biographers, he is both unflinching in passing judgment on bad behavior and fully willing to acknowledge complexity; his LBJ is a monster of ambition and coarse power plays even as he's also a remarkably admirable hard worker and innovative political thinker, doing great things for the poor and underserved.

And then there are the passing scenes: Caro interviewed everyone, it seems, and that enables him to narrate moments that otherwise would be lost, inconsequential, to history. Like this one, which, however it may illuminate LBJ's character, makes me laugh just thinking about it:

He had made a great point of describing himself as a tough man in a fistfight--something believable, despite his awkwardness, because of his size. During a poker game, however, he began arguing with another student, and wouldn't stop shouting at him. The other boy jumped up and lunged at him. Johnson, without a single gesture of resistance, immediately fell back on a bed and, as his foe approached, began kicking his feet in the air with a frantic, windmilling motion. The other poker players all remember him lying there and kicking-"like a girl," Horace Richards says--and they remember him shouting: "If you hit me, I'll kick you! If you hit me, I'll kick you!" The other men were astonished.

LBJ, so menacing and tough in the well of the House, the Senate, lying on a bed like an eight-year-old, kicking and kicking, ineffectual. And it happens more than once!

Nicholson Baker on influences

One of the books I carried with me on vacation last week, and very much enjoyed, was U and I (1991), Nicholson Baker's attempt to plumb the extent of John Updike's influence on his reading, writing, and life.

Like so much of Baker's writing, U and I is eminently quotable--and bloggable, and discussable. There are sentences on nearly every page that you can't help but want to read to a friend and talk over, even if, like me, you've read barely a word of Updike: Baker's questions about influence and career and style, even as they're firmly rooted in his own neuroses, are broadly applicable.

Tonight I'll focus on the section in which Baker, after confessing to some anxiety about not having read Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence before embarking on this project, sets out a distinction between contingent and chronic influences:

A contingent influence springs to mind as you try to solve the problems suggested by a chosen subject and then it goes away.

He then notes the many contingent influences weighing on him as he works on this project, which include Bloom, Henry James's "A Figure in the Carpet," Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, and more. (Had Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage existed in 1991, it would surely have made the list.) This, he writes,

is the arrangement of bayonets and blowguns whose hostage I currently am and whose exact middle point, as far from any single peril of encroachment as possible, is what I'm trying to find as I write; and yet when I'm done, the particular threats will tiptoe off as quickly as they came and I will be surprised to remember,w hen I see the shape my essay finally take,s how uncomfortable and beset they all made me feel.

Chronic influences, on the other hand, stay with you:

Unlike contingent influences, who (or which) you are always hoping will turn out to be more different from you than you felt them to be at the time they made themselves known, permanent influences like Updike (and, to a lesser extent, Nabokov), make you very unhappy when they threaten to be more unlike you as human beings than you had thought. . . . Because you are matching yourself constantly against a permanent influence, any divergence between you and him assumes the proportions of a small crisis, any convergence is an occasion to nod as if it were all in the cards. . . . Normally if I read something I think is wrong, I forget it two days later . . . but with Updike, when I disagree with him, there is an element of pain, of emotional rupture, that makes me remember my difference, and as a result I keep returning unhappily to it over the years and checking to see whether the disaccord remains in effect--and because each time I check it I have to find grounds that will satisfy me for my continued refusal to be convinced by what he's said, I am able to refine my opinions in a way I could never do if I did find him universally agreeable.

On the one hand, Baker is expressing a view that I think even he, self-deprecating to the bone, would agree is essentially childish: we want to feel that we know our heroes, that they are like us, and, when young, we have a lot of trouble separating the doer from the deed, the creator from the creation. In adult life, we're supposed to be beyond that.

But with our very favorite writers, the ones whose words have molded ours beyond what we can even tell anymore, that separation remains hard to make--and in that last sentence, Baker comes close to justifying us in our failure to fully break free. It's true: it's not just that the flaw in the beloved makes the beauty stand out, but that the disagreement, worried over and maintained, forces us to look closely at the ground we're holding in opposition, and shore it up against all manner of assault that wouldn't have even threatened us had we not so much at stake.

Back into Dorothy Dunnett's clutches!

I spent a fair amount of time in this space last year raving about Dorothy Dunnett's historical novels about late medieval and early modern Europe. The five thousand-plus pages of her eight-book House of Niccolo series were easily the most transporting and memorable reading I did last year; five months after closing the final volume, I still find myself calling scenes and characters to mind with startling regularity.

Regular readers will know that I'm an enthusiastic recommender of books I like. Really, what other reason is there for having a blog? Dunnett, however, I always recommend with a grain of salt. Her books definitely aren't to every taste: not everyone likes (or trusts) historical fiction, let alone historical fiction whose primary narrative techniques are obliqueness and temporary confusion--and that expects from the reader a close attention and eye for detail more common to poetry . . . and that over thousands of pages. But if you do find her to your liking, oh, the rewards! Book after gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, exhilarating book!

I recently dove into Dunnett's other--her first, actually--big series, the Lymond Chronicles. I'd heard that the two series are different enough that readers tend to have a distinct favorite, and I can see after just one book that Niccolo won't be displaced in my heart. The Lymond books carry the familiarity of an old friend, but they are more deliberately allusive and complicated in their language even as their characters and psychology are less acutely presented. Still, the first book, The Game of Kings (1961), is a marvel. It kept me rapt, and I'm confident that the second one will allow me to effortlessly while away an upcoming plane ride.

The most gripping moment in The Game of Kings is a wonderful example of Dunnett's gift for descriptions of physical activity and danger: a swordfight between brothers that runs for eight densely spaced pages--and barely leaves the reader a chance to breathe. I won't share any of the details of the battle, because it's best encountered in place, but I will share the amusing folderol that precedes it, as the formalities of combat are observed:

Erskine proffered the book again. "Richard Crawford, third Baron Culter, laying your hand on the book a second time, you must swear that you stand no otherwise appointed than by me, with a rapier and a dagger; that you have not any other pointed instrument or engine, small or great; no stone nor herb of virtue, no charm, experiment, or other enchantment by whose power you believe you may the easier overcome your adversary who here shall oppose you in his defence; and that you trust not in anything more than in God, your body, and the merits of your quarrel, so God you help."

Given the choice between a rapier and a stone or herb of virtue, I'd take my chances with the edged weapon. (Though maybe I should at least take a course of stage combat first?)

Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned. In both senses of that apostrophe.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

An essay on F Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned in Geoff Dyer's new collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (and, let's be honest, the quiet persistence of the Fuck Yeah Fitzgerald tumblr) led me to that novel last week. I tend to think of myself as someone who is regularly reading Fitzgerald, but the encounter with this novel made me realize that I usually engage with only a small portion of his work: The Great Gatsby, perpetually re-read and never exhausted; and his lingering mess, The Crack-Up and the notebooks. Each is in its own way perfection: the only flaw in Gatsby is a slight overheatedness, for which the jeweled sentences and the gentle complicity of Nick Carraway more than make up, while the minor matters in The Crack-Up and the notebooks are perfect in their small compass of imperfection, full of striking fragments and unforgettable lines unmoored from unfinished stories.

To read The Beautiful and Damned is to re-encounter the imperfect Fitzgerald, the Fitzgerald who was learning his craft, his generation, and his own self all at the same time. Dyer puts it well:

For more than a hundred pages, The Beautiful and Damned does not represent any kind of advance on This Side of Paradise. Isolated moments of insight cannot disguise its stylistic and structural flimsiness. The reader's heart sinks when, after less than twenty pages, Fitzgerald abandons novelistic prose and inserts one of the little playlets that should have been edited out of his first novel.* . . . Unleashed as soon as Gloria sets foot in the book, Fitzgerald's tendency to effulgence is, at first, ironically refracted through Anthony's consciousness: "Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea." Shortly afterward it takes on the tone of Fitzgerald's own lyrical yearning. A cab "moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean"; Gloria "turned up her face to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage." Fitzgerald never entirely grew out of this kind of thing--he would have been a lesser writer if he had--but he did learn to control it, to ground the lushest imagery in the actual and immediate.

There's so much more purple prose from the early going that Dyer could have cited. Want more gossamer? Here:

There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.

Yet even as those sentences set the eyes rolling, others show signs of Fitgerald's mature lyricisim--and, as Dyer writes, a grounding in the immediate. Take this, from the page following the gossamer feather:

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Just when the prose starts to feel too puffed up, Fitzgerald brings on the newsboys to deflate it; then, almost unnoticed, he inverts our notions of night and day, dark and light, hot and cold, giving the power and the glory, fading out, to the night and leaving the day the hangover-wracked imposition that his characters feel it to be.

The novel does, as Dyer notes, pick up considerably a ways in, and its tale of the disintegration of, respectively, Anthony, Gloria, and their marriage, has all the brutality, but none of the didacticism, of a temperance tract like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Light party scenes--of the recognizably 1920s sort that Waugh and Powell treated comically and Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson treated seriously, ending up with a sort of Fitzgerald-lite--give way to scene after scene of unalloyed disssipation. The overriding impression is of people who have been entirely unfitted, by education, upbringing, and culture, for the daily round of life, and of the powerful lure of failure--and, as Dyer puts it, "the capacity of failure to generate some kind of hideous enlightenment." By the end of the novel, its imperfections are forgotten, and all that's left is the coppery taste of destruction, pain, and emptiness portrayed with brutal precision.

L. J. Davis, R. I. P. (relative peace, that is, with the occasional frustration and failure in order that caustic comedy may ensue)

{Photo by rocketlass.}

It was the odd parts of the obituaries that did it. Like this, from the New York Times:

L. J. Davis was known among friends and editors as affable and voluble, a man who arrived at every personal encounter equipped with a capacious store of unusual facts and anecdotes he was prepared to dispense at the slightest provocation.

There are more at the blog of the NYRB Classics, publishers of L. J. Davis's 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, which, on the strength--and strangeness--of the obituaries, I picked up Thursday on my way home from work.

I laughed like a lunatic several times during the L ride home, drawing stares. The novel announces its tone flawlessly in its opening paragraph:

Lowell Lake was a tall man, rather thin, with thin sandy hair and a distant, preoccupied though amiable disposition, as though the world did not reach him as it reaches other men and all the voices around him were pleasant but very faint. His attention was liable to wander off at any time and he was always asking people to repeat things. He gave the impression that people bored him, though not in a bad way: actually, they seemed to lull him. He was frequently discovered half-asleep at his desk, gazing vacantly out the nearest window.

I read that, and I found myself thinking of another, very different New Yorker, Donald E. Westlake, and of a very non-New Yorker, Charles Portis, and the ensuing pages bore me out: Davis shared with those two writers an eye for--and appreciation of--human oddity, a love of distinct and inexplicable patterns of speech and thought, and a refusal to shy away from the darker, weaker, and less defensible parts of our shared humanity.

And, like those two men, he's funny. Extravagantly so at times, but also subtly. Here's a good test:

"Something's the matter with you this morning," said his wife as they sat down to their instant coffee and frozen coffee cake. They were not great breakfast people.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit how hard I laughed at that simple second sentence. Its six words carry so much . . . hands-up resignation in the face of the myriad pointless yet unavoidable decisions life forces upon us every goddam day that it achieves brilliance. I laughed again just now as I typed it; I'm looped on that sentence.

Rest assured, though: there is much more overt comedy as well. Take this scene, in the church the day before Lowell's wedding:

"I'm not sure," said Lowell's future mother-in-law, planting herself squarely in front of the altar and standing there as though waiting for the crucified Christ to make a move for his gun. "I don't think I like it, but I'm still thinking it over. Tell me what you think, I'm open for suggestions.

"We don't have to have it in church," said Lowell. "We could have it anywhere. We could have it in your church. . . . I mean . . . "

"When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it," she snapped, without taking her eyes off the altar. "You can just keep out of this. I wasn't talking about that, so shut up." Then she burst into tears.

"Excuse me," said Leo. "My wife is crying."

Lowell wasn't exactly sure what was going on, but his future mother-in-law was carrying on pretty loudly, and he looked hopelessly about the church, alternately hoping that no one would see him and that someone would come and help him.

"It's okay," said Leo to his wife, standing beside her with fumbling, incompetent gestures, patting her like a city boy trying to make friends with a cow. "Look, if it doesn't work out, she can divorce him in a couple of years, it's not like it's forever or anything. Who knows, maybe it will work out. Personally, I think it will work out."

Lowell's future mother-in-law made a kind of strangled noise and struck out at her husband. "All right," she said. "All right. After all, what do I know? Who am I, after all? Only a mother. Who listens to a mother? Just remember, my blood is on your hands."

Lowell couldn't tell whether this incredible threat was directed at himself, Leo, Christ, or some combination of the three of them, but evidently it meant that they were free to go. Moving as though balancing a plate on her head, his future mother-in-law turned and marched up the aisle without so much as a backward glance.

"I don't know if I told you," Leo remarked as they followed her out of the church, "but I'm a cutter."

Lowell wondered if it was an occupation or a pathology. Nothing could surprise him anymore, not even if Leo were suddenly to strip off his shirt in the middle of the quad to show him his collection of self-inflicted wounds.

In-law comedy is about as old as anything--I picture Adam and Eve each silently cringing as God wandered by in the altogether on one of his evening constitutionals through the Garden right in front of their spouse!--but Davis redeems it with the oddity of his imagery (the petted cow) and his impeccable timing. "I don't know if I told you," says Leo, just when Lowell (and we) have temporarily, and gratefully, let our defenses down.

Keep an eye on my Annex over the next few days for more bits from the novel. And if I've whetted your appetite, you should go read the piece on Davis that Evan Hughes published in the Awl today: along with an interesting account of Davis's career in general, he does a good job of addressing the sometimes uncomfortable racial angle that emerges when Lowell and his wife join the first wave of Brooklyn gentrifiers. Hughes argues that it's a reflection of the novel's close tracking of Lowell's point of view, and writes:

If you’ve ever felt uneasy about the fact that in your once-diverse neighborhood you are helping to make the streets safe for Corcoran and quinoa, Davis exploits that feeling to the extreme. If you’ve been priced out of that neighborhood and you’re bitter about it, the same goes for you. It’s all a bit cruel, really.

Those sections are actually hard to read at times, but there's no denying that they're drawing on the same brutal, flat-footed honesty of perspective that also makes Lowell's misanthropic confusion and irritation with everyone so effective and lacerating--to say nothing of the unflinching intensity of Lowell's own self-loathing. Cruelty, comedy, discomfort, reminders of our failings--if you're a fan of Sam Lipsyte, Martin Amis, or Joe Matt, to take just three, I suspect this novel is for you.

The pleasures of youthful friendship

Scenes from two very different novels echoed each other in my reading this week and seemed worth sharing. First, from a fantasy novel rocketlass liked very much but that I ultimately decided wasn't for me, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind:

Thus it was that three students made their slightly erratic way back to the University. See them as they go, weaving only slightly. It is quiet, and when the belling tower strikes the late hour, it doesn't break the silence so much as it underpins it. The crickets, too, respect the silence. Their calls are like careful stitches in its fabric, almost too small to be seen.

The night is like warm velvet around them. The stars, burning diamonds in the cloudless sky, turn the road beneath their feet a silver grey. The University and Imre are the heats of understanding and art, the strongest of the four corners of civilization. Here on the road between the two there is nothing but old trees and long grass bending to the wind. The night is perfect in a wild way, almost terrifyingly beautiful.

The three boys, one dark, one light, and one--for lack of a better word--fiery, do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.

And then, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned:

Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was at home.

His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury--who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his favorite chair.

The settled life of adulthood brings compensations that would have been barely comprehensible to our younger selves, but it's undeniable that something is lost along the way.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

The new issue of Bookforum features a very sharp review by Ed Park of Jonathan Coe's new novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. I read it right after I read the novel, and it crystallized something I'd been thinking about vaguely throughout my reading: Maxwell Sim is a novel that absolutely shouldn't work, but does because of Coe's inventiveness, wit, interest in structure, and keen--if pessimistic--understanding of human isolation.

The difficulties Coe faces are rooted in his choice of a protagonist, a depressed, middle-aged Englishman whom Ed correctly describes as "to all appearances, the soul of dullness." There are shades here of the undistinguished middle-aged male protagonist of Charles Chadwick's It's All Right Now, a man who seems to have very little story to tell, and very little facility for telling it. Sim wanders the globe, from a dinner in Sydney with his father to the north of Scotland on a publicity stunt for a maker of eco-friendly toothbrushes, meeting up along the way with acquaintances old and new, and ruminating on the ways that ever-more pervasive communications technologies are changing our lives, our relationships, and our very sense of self.

Sounds banal, doesn't it? And it is--Maxwell Sim doesn't have any ideas about Facebook and cellphones that your chain-e-mail-forwarding uncle hasn't had. But that's part of the point: Coe puts us in the head of a character whose thoughts remain on a very basic level, a character who actively shies away from depth and analysis. (Which is the opposite of Jonathan Franzen in Freedom, whose countless banal observations about contemporary life inexplicably were meant to be taken--and were taken!--as some sort of key to our culture.)

But then Coe's intricate, unusual structure comes into play: throughout his journey, Sim encounters four texts, reproduced in the novel, written by different people, all of which do attempt to look more deeply at human life. Those texts (an account of an English sailor who went mad while pretending to sail around the world; a short story written by Sim's estranged wife about a disturbing incident from their past; an essay about an invasion of privacy by a childhood friend; and his father's account of an intense, life-changing friendship) bit by bit force Sim out of his complacent floating, even as they introduce the larger themes that lie beneath the surface ruminations about Facebook: the pressure to become what people expect us to become; the difference between real events and pseudo-events; the way that real actions and moments of life are turned into performances or rituals; the yawning gap between our interior selves, our public selves, and other people; the ease with which we misunderstand other people--and deceive ourselves. None of these texts results in anything like an epiphany for Sim--I'm reminded of a line from The Beautiful and the Damned, "it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away"--but the questions they force accumulate, and they eventually drive Sim to a breakdown.

It's after that breakdown that Coe unexpectedly transforms The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim from a good, diverting book, into a an amazing one, making a decision so daring, yet so effective, that I still can't quite believe it. (Should you want more detail, Ed's review covers it.) Coe's ability to use complicated structure and narrative game-playing not to show off but to flesh out his thematic concerns is one of his his greatest gifts (see The Winshaw Legacy)--but it is also his riskiest habit as an author. His best novel, The Rotters Club, draws much of its power from the many ambiguities, of both incident and character, that it refuses to resolve; The Closed Circle, its aptly titled sequel, was an absolutely maddening book, answering questions and closing arcs that were more interesting and powerful when left trailing. In this new novel, the risk Coe takes is even more striking, and, while I expect there will be a lot of disagreement about this, I think it works, brilliantly.

If you've not tried Coe, whose relative obscurity over here provides Ed n his review with a literary party anecdote that could have come from Waugh, start with The Rotters Club. But do eventually find your way to Maxwell Sim, if for no other reason than that it's daring, and wholly distinct from its front-table brethren--and surely daring and distinction should be rewarded?

John Charles Fremont, the Pathfinder at war

One of my favorite parts of Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword is his account of the failed military career of General John Charles Fremont, who was assigned command of the troubled border state of Missouri and nearly lost it to the Confederacy through a combination of bullheadedness, inexperience, and straight-up blundering. Catton’s portrait of Fremont is pithy and memorable, and it demonstrates what I find one of Catton’s most refreshing characteristics, an ability to render crisp judgment while remaining humane about weakness:

John Charles Fremont brought to Missouri a great reputation, a brand-new commission as major general, and a formidable set of abilities which did not quite meet the demands that Missouri was about to make. He entered the Civil War at the precise place where it wore its most baffling aspect, and although he presently saw with tolerable clarity what needed to be done he knew hardly anything about the way to go about doing it. He was famous as The Pathfinder, the man who had charted trails across the untracked West; he had been the first presidential candidate of the new Republican party in 1856, helping to make another sort of trail into an even more trackless wilderness; and now he was in Missouri, a bewildering jungle where a trail could be blazed only by a man gifted with a profound understanding of the American character, the talents of a canny politician, and enormous skill as an administrator. Of these gifts General Fremont had hardly a trace.

Missouri at this point was more or less in open rebellion on its western half, with the Union army flailing to get it under control while not alienating the touchy but loyal block of citizenry nearer the Mississippi that was holding the state in the Union. Fremont was not good at juggling these responsibilities, and his self-regard and grandiloquent style (both of which he shared with that other ever-vexed Union general, McClellan), didn’t help:

It was the grand monarch atmosphere that hurt. Fremont had managed to surround himself with a gang that made western America fear the worst, and the posturing of his aides and guards apparently affected his own judgment. A European army officer, visiting St. Louis early in September, felt that he was seeing something common enough in Europe but extraordinary in America. The glittering display suggested “both a commander-in-chief and a proconsul,” and Fremont displayed “an ardent, ambitious personality” which “obviously is inclined to dictatorship.” The place hardly seemed American. Fremont was “French, but revolutionary French,” he disliked not only the Democrats but “all governmental parties,” and all West Pointers to boot, and the European summed him up in words that would have interested Abraham Lincoln: “He is one of those men who serve a government, not according to official instructions but rather with an understanding of its hidden intentions, men who understand in half-words what is expected of them.”

That was the real trouble. All the men suddenly raised to high place in 1861 were supposed to understand hidden intentions, to know how to act on half-words, to see far below the surface and to learn what the times required of them before the requirement was actually stated. This called for both vision and balance, and Fremont had only the vision. The balance was gone, distorted by the pro-consul’s trappings and the immeasurable ambition, by the sense of isolation from Washington, by the unending pressures of administrative chaos, probably also by the feeling that the Missouri situation was slipping out of control. Swollen with the need to perform a drastic act that would set everything straight, Fremont moved on to an act of immense folly—an act which his government would quickly disavow, but which nevertheless had at its haunted center something that must eventually be attended to.

That something was freeing the slaves, which Fremont did in all the contested areas of Missouri, via an order declaring all rebel property contraband and slaves explicitly free. Needless to say, he was overstepping his bounds and giving yet another indication of his unfitness for command; nevertheless the war, and Lincoln, would eventually catch up to him.

The methodical mind of Lincoln

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which begins next week with the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, has sent me back once again to that inexhaustibly fascinating conflict. This time, I'm reading Bruce Catton's three-volume history that was published on the war's centennial, which I'd recommend to any general reader. James M. McPherson's one-volume Battle Cry of Freedom may be a better introduction to the subject--his descriptions and explanations of battles are as good as any I've encountered, offering just as much detail and assistance as a nonspecialist needs--but Catton bests him in prose style and, more important, in analysis of character.

This passage, from near the end of the second volume, Terrible Swift Sword (1963), just after Lincoln has made the Emancipation Proclamation public, combines both qualities:

[T]he President had committed himself to an idea rather than to a specific program. The war would be a revolution from now on, and if revolutionary means were needed to win it they would be used. This, to be sure, had been inherent in the situation from the beginning. The overshadowing fact now was that when he issued his proclamation Mr. Lincoln did in his field exactly what General Lee did in his when he struck the Army of the Potomac at Mechanicsville: he took the initiative, and he would never give it up. All of the Americans who followed this hard road of war would sooner or later have to keep step with him: both those who went with him and those who went against him.

Which is fitting, because, for me at least, it all comes back to Lincoln. I don't think I'll ever tire of trying to fathom his mind, so agile and complicated and, for the most part, admirable.

The months leading up to the above passage from Terrible Swift Sword offer the clearest, most straightforward example I know of just what I find so fascinating about Lincoln as a thinker, politician, and leader. In the summer of 1862, having just written the Emancipation Proclamation he called a meeting of his cabinet and said, in the words of Treasury Secretary Samuel P. Chase, from a postwar letter,

I have considered every thing that has been said to me about the expediency of Emancipation & have made up my mind to issue THIS PROCLAMATION: and I have invited you together to discuss not what is to be done; but to have you hear what I have written & to get your suggestions about form & style. . . . I have thought it all over & have made a promise that this thing shall be done--to myself & to God.

The Cabinet took him at his word, but ultimately they urged him to table the proclamation until the Union Army should win a victory, lest it seem like an act of desperation rather than a call to freedom. Lincoln took their advice, and the proclamation went into a drawer.

A month later, Horace Greeley took to the pages of his New York Tribune to lambaste Lincoln for having neither direction nor resolve in his prosecution of the war or his handling of the issue of slavery. Lincoln replied:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours,
A. Lincoln.

There, displayed, is the mind that I find so fascinating: methodical, even mathematical in its laying out of an argument, fitting every piece into its place while making sure that no permutation of the argument is left to be assumed or ignored. Lincoln, as always seemed to be the case, knew exactly what his foremost goal was--and, unlike many involved in the war, never deluded himself about what it might take to get there. At the same time, even as he's deadly serious, I see a glimmer of his trademark gentle sarcasm there, too, as if the very act of being so elaborately explicit is a way of saying, "Good god, Horace, haven't you listened to a word I've said this past year?"

Looking back, it's hard not to be uncomfortable about Lincoln's willingness to countenance the continuation of slavery should that be necessary. The abolitionists, for all their frequent impracticality, unquestionably had honor (and justice) on their side. But at the same time, Lincoln knew better than anyone the constrictions under which he labored--and the earthshaking change he was about to introduce. Eric Foner, in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) argues that we shouldn't read that last line about Lincoln's "personal wish that all men everywhere could be free" as weasely or self-protecting, or even as a statement of his long-standing position that the personal and the official should be distinct. Rather, we should read the whole letter

as a way of preparing Northern public opinion for a change in policy on which he had already decided. Certainly, it suggested that freeing all the slaves was now a real option, something that had not been the case a year or even six months earlier. But perhaps the most telling comment came from the Springfield Republican. The editors praised Lincoln's position but pointed out that the very notion of "saving" the Union required rethinking: the prewar Union was gone forever.

No one knew that better than Lincoln; even as he methodically protested otherwise, he was leading the way to the new Union--and, as Catton put it, everyone was going to have to keep step.

Harry Mathews and the productive pleasures of constraints

Last week I urged you to go read the interview with Harry Mathews that the Paris Review published in 2007. A week later, I find I'm still carrying it around in my shoulder bag, flipping through it and thinking about it--especially about this exchange:

INTERVIEWER

Did Ashbery introduce you to any writers whose work you did read?

MATHEWS

Yes, thanks to John I began reading Raymond Roussel. Roussel had methodical approaches to writing fiction that completely excluded psychology. In the American novel, what else is there? If you don’t have psychology, people don’t see the words on the page. What was really holding me up was this idea that you had to have character development, relationships, and that this was the substance of the novel. Indeed, it is the substance of many novels, including extraordinary ones. But I had tried writing works involving psychology and characters and all that, and the results were terrible. In Roussel I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

INTERVIEWER

Which of Roussel's methods interested you?

MATHEWS

One method he used for short stories involved making the first and last sentence identical except for one letter. Each word has one meaning in the first sentence and a different one in the last. A word like train might be a choo-choo to start with and a trailing skirt-end afterward. In the longer works, he would take fragments of nursery rhymes and parrot them phonetically and then use the new words to construct a story. For instance, the song "J'ai du bon tabac" becomes "Jade tube onde aubade."

INTERVIEWER

What is the point of such a method? What does it achieve?

MATHEWS

It's very liberating. It allows you to make up something that you never would have if you didn't have this nasty problem to solve. For example, in Selected Declarations of Dependence I gave myself the task of writing a story using the one hundred and eight-five words that were found in forty-six proverbs. This is a forbiddingly small vocabulary. It was hard to know what to do with them. Then I started putting words together and a few words would lead to a sentence and then eventually it became this sweet love story. It was as though you were wandering through a jungle and suddenly you came into a clearing that is a beautifully composed garden. It's extraordinary, the feeling it gives you.

I happened to read that passage at what seemed to be the perfect moment: for the first time since grade school,* I was trying to write a song. I've been taking piano lessons lately, the most recent step in a process of re-learning that began eighteen months ago after twenty-five years away from the instrument. I can read music, and I can handle the keyboard tolerably well, but I've never really understood how music works, why I'm playing the notes I'm playing. So that's what I'm asking of my teacher: to simultaneously help me improve my technique and my understanding of music itself.

Which led him, two weeks ago, to give me the assignment of writing a new melody to the chords of "Amazing Grace." I spent hours on it . . . hours of sheer joy. And, to bring this back to Mathews, what it reminded me of most was attempting to write poetry back in my undergraduate days. The presiding spirit of the poetry program, Mary Kinzie, was a formalist at heart, and her approach to teaching poetry was to combine extensive reading with boot-camp-style immersion in formal structures. Whitman was verboten; Shakespeare's sonnets were to be gnawed to the marrow.

And it was effective. Form, for a beginning poet, forces attention, innovation, and persistence--and that's what I felt as I was struggling with my nascent melody: I had, essentially, a steeplechase course of chords through which I had to run it, and while my instincts would have led me to simpler formulations, to a quick resolution of the tension inherent in the first couple of chord changes, being forced to hew to the number of changes and measures I'd been given was oddly liberating. Mathews is startlingly right: when I discovered a way to handle it, it was like nothing so much as coming unexpectedly into a beautiful clearing.

Which makes me understand Mathews's desire to impose structure and limitations on the novel. Good god, why doesn't everyone want to do that? To deal with the illimitable, wholly protean form that we call the novel . . . how can anyone do that and not go insane?

{If you want to hear my song, I think this link should allow you to download a poor performance of it. I make no claims for it other than that it was a lot of fun to work on--and that I find myself whistling it sometimes.}

Donald Westlake, Brian Garfield, and Lawrence Block

Work and baseball and the piano--a trifecta sure to lead eventually to crime and the gutter--are preventing me from putting up a proper post today. But you're in luck: over at the blog of my employer, the University of Chicago Press, we've just posted an interview I conducted with Brian Garfield (author of, among other novels, Death Wish) about his long friendship with Donald Westlake, their many collaborations, and his aborted screenplay for Butcher's Moon.

Even better: Garfield was kind enough to send us some photos of Westlake and the crew at the fabled Mysterious Bookshop poker game, circa 1972. The sight of Westlake's giant goatee alone is worth clicking over for.



Oh, and Butcher's Moon is available now, along with the first two post-hiatus Parker novels, Comeback and Backflash. Westlake's friend (and fellow Mysterious Bookshop poker player) Lawrence Block has written three different dynamite forewords for this batch. I recommend you go get 'em on your lunch hour, then close the door to your office and read away the afternoon.

Venturing into Brasyl

My first foray into the sci-fi recommendations I collected last week has to be counted a success. I read Ian McDonald's Brasyl (2007), and it was perhaps the perfect entry point: set in Brazil, it's a novel that combines the near future (2032) with the distant past (1732) and the mostly ordinary present--but a present that's amped up by a few sci-fi intrusions from both ends of the timescale--all tied together by ideas from quantum mechanics. The scenes in the present, rendered realistically though with a bit of satire (the reality TV being aired in Rio is intense), help anchor McDonald's conception of what the next twenty-five years could bring, while the Brazilian setting means that the language and the slang, even when deliberately obscure, always feels rooted in an actual culture, never tripping my skeptic's sensors by feeling wholly invented or fake-futuristic.

McDonald's future Sao Paulo is a remarkable place, a logical extension of several of our world's current trajectories, including the growing class divide; the spread of unregulatable, makeshift slums in developing megacities; and our ever-more-pervasive communications technologies. And he renders that future with an attention to detail that makes the whole believable, so that passages like the one below, about a slumland megamarket built on a giant trash heap, feel as much like elegant reportage as they do fiction:

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's not that the drivers won't go inside--and they won't no matter how high you tip them--it's that they can't. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com towers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, moto-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuces and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past sweet steam of cachaca stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the vegetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the special ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

I quoted at length so you could get a sense of McDonald's attention to prose; the book has a voice, and it's one that fits the crowded, attention-addled world it depicts. Add a well-made plot that smoothly connects all three of McDonald's eras, and some fun riffing on the brain-bending ideas of quantum physics, and you've got a solid sci-fi novel that's successfully launched me on my quest. I don't yet feel anywhere near as at home in this galaxy as I do in, say, the universe of Ballard, who kicked off this whole project--his concerns and his prose style both are still naturally a bit closer to my heart-- but I'm enjoying the first steps of this spacewalk nonetheless.

My first foray into the sci-fi recommendations I collected last week has to be counted a success. I read Ian McDonald's Brasyl (2007), and it was perhaps the perfect entry point: set in Brazil, it's a novel that combines the near future (2032) with the distant past (1732) and the mostly ordinary present--but a present that's amped up by a few sci-fi intrusions from both ends of the timescale--all tied together by ideas from quantum mechanics. The scenes in the present, rendered realistically though with a bit of satire (the reality TV being aired in Rio is intense), help anchor McDonald's conception of what the next twenty-five years could bring, while the Brazilian setting means that the language and the slang, even when deliberately obscure, always feels rooted in an actual culture, never tripping my skeptic's sensors by feeling wholly invented or fake-futuristic.

McDonald's future Sao Paulo is a remarkable place, a logical extension of several of our world's current trajectories, including the growing class divide; the spread of unregulatable, makeshift slums in developing megacities; and our ever-more-pervasive communications technologies. And he renders that future with an attention to detail that makes the whole believable, so that passages like the one below, about a slumland megamarket built on a giant trash heap, feel as much like elegant reportage as they do fiction:

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's not that the drivers won't go inside--and they won't no matter how high you tip them--it's that they can't. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com towers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, moto-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuces and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past sweet steam of cachaca stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the vegetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the special ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

I quoted at length so you could get a sense of McDonald's attention to prose; the book has a voice, and it's one that fits the crowded, attention-addled world it depicts. Add a well-made plot that smoothly connects all three of McDonald's eras, and some fun riffing on the brain-bending ideas of quantum physics, and you've got a solid sci-fi novel that's successfully launched me on my quest. I don't yet feel anywhere near as at home in this galaxy as I do in, say, the universe of Ballard, who kicked off this whole project--his concerns and his prose style both are still naturally a bit closer to my heart-- but I'm enjoying the first steps of this spacewalk nonetheless.

My first foray into the sci-fi recommendations I collected last week has to be counted a success. I read Ian McDonald's Brasyl (2007), and it was perhaps the perfect entry point: set in Brazil, it's a novel that combines the near future (2032) with the distant past (1732) and the mostly ordinary present--but a present that's amped up by a few sci-fi intrusions from both ends of the timescale--all tied together by ideas from quantum mechanics. The scenes in the present, rendered realistically though with a bit of satire (the reality TV being aired in Rio is intense), help anchor McDonald's conception of what the next twenty-five years could bring, while the Brazilian setting means that the language and the slang, even when deliberately obscure, always feels rooted in an actual culture, never tripping my skeptic's sensors by feeling wholly invented or fake-futuristic.

McDonald's future Sao Paulo is a remarkable place, a logical extension of several of our world's current trajectories, including the growing class divide; the spread of unregulatable, makeshift slums in developing megacities; and our ever-more-pervasive communications technologies. And he renders that future with an attention to detail that makes the whole believable, so that passages like the one below, about a slumland megamarket built on a giant trash heap, feel as much like elegant reportage as they do fiction:

The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's not that the drivers won't go inside--and they won't no matter how high you tip them--it's that they can't. Todos os Santos, like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends: the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and manufactories, the pylons and com towers and transmission lines. The outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, moto-taxis, private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns. Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of lettuces and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past sweet steam of cachaca stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos is the vegetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays, cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto the special ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light; and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that, stolen electricity.

I quoted at length so you could get a sense of McDonald's attention to prose; the book has a voice, and it's one that fits the crowded, attention-addled world it depicts. Add a well-made plot that smoothly connects all three of McDonald's eras, and some fun riffing on the brain-bending ideas of quantum physics, and you've got a solid sci-fi novel that's successfully launched me on my quest. I don't yet feel anywhere near as at home in this galaxy as I do in, say, the universe of Ballard, who kicked off this whole project--his concerns and his prose style both are still naturally a bit closer to my heart-- but I'm enjoying the first steps of this spacewalk nonetheless.

More Harry Mathews (fewer numbers this time, I promise)

I’m not the only one with Harry Mathews on the brain lately: Chris Kieran of Dreamers Rise put up a post over the weekend about his years of reading Mathews—and he pointed out a great line from the cover copy for an old omnibus paperback of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Tlooth, and The Conversions:

For several years Harry Mathews has enjoyed a growing following among college students, artists, other poets and writers, and fans of the obscure who have never been able to buy his books.

As Chris points out, that is a pretty good description of Mathews’s small but devoted fanbase.

In addition, Chris pointed to an interview with Mathews that Susannah Hunnewell (a Mathewsian name if I’ve ever read one) conducted for the Paris Review in 2007. The interview is so full of interesting material that I could quote from it on this blog for weeks. Instead, I’ll share some pieces and urge you to go read it in full. As I mentioned last week, the one time I met him, Mathews was a remarkably good performer, charismatic and natural-seeming even as he told what were surely polished anecdotes; the interview has the same feel, of a few hours spent with a great conversationalist.

Here’s Mathews’s response to the question of whether he has an audience in mind when he’s writing:

I’ve always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.

Which is fun, and, in its way, not wholly unserious—but Mathews follows it up with a more direct answer:

I suppose I must have had dreams of greater recognition, but I’ve always had the audience I wanted, and that was the audience that reads poetry. What I want is enthusiasm among friends and their friends, people who I know are serious readers.

Much of the early part of the interview deals with Mathews’s relationship to his parents, and how that played into the way he took his first steps as a writer. His parents, as parents will do, had wanted him to establish himself in an ordinary, stable career and an ordinary, stable (if upper-class) social life, but Mathews had other plans:

Then I got a depressing letter from my father. I had written him at great length explaining why I’d switched from music to writing, and his response was, You’ve gone from bad to worse. When I think of him reading my first novel, The Conversions . . . . Fortunately there were some reviews—in America, two that I saw. One was in Time magazine, if you can imagine such a thing, and the other was an exuberant article by Terry Southern in The Nation. But the English edition was reviewed glowingly in almost every major paper. And because my father was a snobbish Anglophile, he said, If the English like it, it must be good. At that point, he relaxed. I hadn’t totally screwed up my life.

I tell myself again and again that the book reviewing world was different back then . . . but Harry Mathews got reviewed in Time!

His father wasn’t the only person who found The Conversions perplexing:

Kenneth Koch had put the manuscript in Jason Epstein’s hands at Random House, and his reaction was, Well, I can’t not publish it. But when it came out, except for a handful of readers, nobody could see what was there. They kept trying to read through the text rather than just reading it. When Dwight Macdonald saw me, he said, I didn’t imagine you looked like that. I think he was expecting a gnome. I had a surprising encounter with Bennett Cerf, who was head of Random House at the time. This was the man who published Ulysses. One day I was called in to his office. He said, Mr. Mathews, I don’t know what the hell you’re up to and I think you owe it to Random House readers to explain!

That story is even better if you’re familiar with Cerf’s cultured New York accent and slight air of fuddlement from in his many appearances on What’s My Line?

From there, the interview gets into some really interesting questions about the Oulipo, restrictive or programmatic writing, and favorite writers—with Mathews revealing himself to be an unexpected fan of a book I particularly like, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. It’s all well worth your time—and, might I suggest, a place in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume V?

Surprises, pleasant

One of the books I've enjoyed most this year* is Jamie Iredell's The Book of Freaks. I knew of Iredell from his first book, Prose. Poems. A Novel, which Andrew Wessels, in the review he wrote for me for the Quarterly Conversation, praised as "A singular, American story. A singular, American poem." The title alone--bet-hedging as all get-out--would seem to make that book worth opening, but ultimately I didn't think Prose. Poems. A Novel. was for me, for reasons Andrew noted:

Friends, alcohol, and locations are all described and interacted with but fade in and out without leaving a mark on the narrator. He is not upset that the Summit Saloon closes. That’s just the way it is. He is not upset that he has only felt a part of something a few times in his life. That’s just the way it is. The poems are not an attempt to create meaning, which would just be a lie. They are recognitions of the reality of the narrator’s life and situation. And the reality of being American is movement and change.

It would actually be hard to more perfectly describe the opposite of my experience: I've lived in the same house for more than a decade, with my wife, while working for the same employer the whole time. Change and drama (to say nothing of drugs) are not for me.

Andrew's appreciation of that book, however, was enough to make me open The Book of Freaks, and I'm so glad I did. I've drawn on the book over in my Tumblr annex in recent days, and as I've done so, I've found that the hard part isn't finding bits to quote-it's keeping myself from quoting the whole book. Arranged alphabetically, like a dictionary or handbook, The Book of Freaks reminds me of nothing so much as a cracked, contemporary Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon--only, one written by a Sei Shonagon who, rather than being a bit petty and superficial (yet brilliant) is instead cranky, crazy, and ironic, and who almost certainly counts himself as one of the freaks of his title.

His entry for "Hangnail, A" is a good example of his wandering, goofily associative technique:

When you find this loose piece of skin on your fingertips, rip it back, the skin trickle rippling the forearm. A blood globe reflects irises, blue, and with the surrounding eye whites, think of July 4th: the fog-dappled Marina beach sand that wound its way up the shorts and ground the thigh skin to tenderized red. That fucking surfer asshole with teeth for a head said, "You walk like you've got a stick up your ass." Knives slipped into pants and stones hefted at Ford pickups zipping past the walked route homeward from the school bus stop. That sleeveless jean jacket cocksucker's hair dripping mullet grease popped a zit when the blade flicked his wrist and the slice welled red. The stickiness congealing like a hangnail. the wife says, lotion-up, Vaseline that shit. Think of Steinbeck's Lenny, Lenny breaking Curly's hand in his own crumpling fist. Lenny was a big ill-witted boy who liked to pet soft things and usually killed them. That's what kind of retard to be. That's a retard.

He started at "hangnail"!

That's the pleasure of this book: following Iredell's skewed leaps of logic and attention, dancing along his unexpected connections, each leading sort of inexorably to the next, but at the same time taking such an odd angle that the point of origin is instantly lost, like Hansel in a bird-filled forest. The connections don't always work--an inherent risk when an author gives his childlike, semi-conscious imagination its head--but they do often enough to give the book a sense of abundance, of joy amid confusion, that's unlike anything else I've read recently. Read this entry on San Francisco, for example, and try not to enjoy the way it plays with cliches and outside impressions:

San Franciscans are most noted for their dreadlocks. In fact, when seen by astronauts hovering in the glow of the thermosphere, San Francisco proves to be one enormous dreadlock. All of Earth's patchouli--a substance cultivated primarily in regions known for their human rights violations--is exported to San Francicso. Thus, the air surrounding San Francisco, extending into the stratosphere, has had its trace elements replaced by patchouli and molecules of Dungeness crab. San Franciscans are fond of tacos and flat landscapes. Summers, one finds San Franciscans huddled around the hulking burning body of a wooden man, a wooden man in the shape of an inverse taco, placed in a distant desert, a desert flatter--even--than San Francisco.

It makes me wish he'd come up with an entry for Chicago.

I don't recommend that you live by the precepts of The Book of Freaks--unless you're the man with a shoe for a head found in its pages--but you could do far worse than tucking it in a pocket as a distraction for the year's sure-to-come moments of unalphabetized uncertainty.

An Oulipo question

Since this has inadvertently become “Ask the Readers Questions Week,” I’ve got one more to wrap up with—but it’s on a completely different topic.

Back when I was a bookseller, my store held an event to celebrate the release of The Oulipo Compendium, a compilation of and reference work to the members of the Oulipo and their many creations. The volume’s editor, Harry Mathews, came to the store and gave a talk about the book and the Oulipo in general, and he was wonderful—funny, polished, abstracted, an intellectual showman (and good company at dinner, to boot). It was by far the best bookstore event I’ve ever been involved in: we had great attendance and even sold a lot of books.

I’ve had the Oulipo on my mind lately, because Scott Esposito is leading a group read of Georges Perec’s Life A Users Manual (which you’re welcome to join). If you’re a fan of the Oulipo, the Compendium is indispensable, chock full of sublime and ridiculous ideas for new ways to approach literary creation. And it’s one of those ideas that leads to my question for you today: the N+7 constraint.

N+7 is simple. You replace every non-proper noun in a piece of text with the noun found seven nouns after it in the dictionary. So the first line of Mathews’s pleasantly odd book My Life in CIA,

That she was the natural child of an Orsini could not be proved or disproved; but those dark flashing eyes, that dusky complexion betrayed the Italian blood in her veins.

--when run through Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1977), becomes:

That shearwater was the natural childishness of an Orsini could not be proved or disproved; but those dark flashing eye-catchers, that dusky complicacy betrayed the Italian bloodfin in her veldt.

As the Compendium points out, this exercise is more entertaining the weaker the dictionary you use: smaller dictionaries allow you to travel much farther from your root word—no “eyes” to “eye-catchers” if you deploy a pocket phrasebook—but you get the idea. (And of course, there are those people who don’t think this sounds like fun at all. I disagree, but I understand. Those people should probably stop reading now; we’ll return to normal business on Monday.)

Anyway, way back when the Compendium was published, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about N+7, and then one day it occurred to me that it had another, unremarked quality that seems perfectly designed to appeal to Oulipians: It's an Ouroboros! If you perform this operation enough times on the same sentence with the same dictionary—each time moving seven nouns down from the most recent result—you’ll eventually get back to your starting point!

Think about it: if your dictionary has a number of nouns that’s evenly divisible by seven, you’ll get back to your starting points after one trip through. If it’s not divisible by seven, when you get to the end of the dictionary you just carry over your remainder: the dictionary ends four nouns short of the seven you need, so you start your new trip through on the third noun. If my math is correct, you get back home, no matter the dictionary . . . on your seventh time through.

But when I mentioned that to Harry Mathews all those years ago, he replied that he thought I was wrong. So I turn to you, readers: who’s right, me or Mathews?

My newly assembled sci-fi reading list!

On Monday, I asked readers for recommendations of science fiction writers I should try, and wow, have you folks come through! If this is a topic that interests you, I recommend you go read the comments to the post, because many people were kind enough to offer a bit of detail along with their recommendations, but I figure it's worth my posting a tally or summary of sorts here.

Here are the names offered up thus far, with vote totals in parenthesis and a bit of commentary here and there as seems warranted.

• Gregory Benford
• Alfred Bester (3): Clearly I'm going to have to try Bester. (Side note: longtime Chicagoans will remember when there was a sci-fi bookstore on Belmont named after his best-known novel, The Stars Our Destination.)
• James Blish: Atticus warns me to stay away from Blish's Star Trek books, not realizing that the one area of sci-fi in which I've read deeply (aside from Asimov) . . . is Star Trek novels. I read probably seventy-five of them in middle school and high school. Such is youth?
• Octavia Butler: I've actually read one Butler, Fledgling (2005). Though it suffered a bit from being the first of a planned series, which Butler's accidental death prevented from continuing, it was definitely interesting enough to make me want to read more.
• John Crowley: Oh, have I read Crowley. But I've not read Engine Summer, the closest thing to straight sci-fi he's written.
• Thomas Disch (4): Disch was the winner in this unscientific poll. I've not read him at all, though David Auerbach's essay on his work at the Millions last year nearly convinced me. Should I start with On Wings of Song, as marco suggests?
• R. A. Lafferty (3): Anonymous wrote that Lafferty "is not afraid of extravagant language." "Be ye not afraid of extravagant language" would make a nice motto; I think I'll be checking Lafferty out.
• China Mieville: I tried The City and the City, and while the concept was fascinating, I felt like the characters weren't very substantial, and I couldn't keep going.
• Ursula K. LeGuin
• Ian McDonald: This suggestion, from Thomas, a bookseller friend from 57th Street Books, is the only one I've already acted on. I'm about 40% of the way through McDonald's Brasyl and am really impressed so far. (And this can serve as a reminder: if you don't have a local bookstore that you haunt often enough that the booksellers hand you things they think you'll like, you're really missing out on one of life's great pleasures.)
• Dan Simmons
• John Sladek (2): Atticus describes him as "very funny," which is always a plus in my book.
• The Strugatsky Brothers
• Michael Swanwick
• James Tiptree, Jr.: Ed Park seconded this one via e-mail.
• Jack Vance

I'll definitely be giving a lot of these authors a try; thanks to everyone who took the time to make suggestions. In gratitude, I'll pass on one of my own, courtesy of Ed Park: back in February he used his Astral Weeks column in the Los Angeles Times to recommend a one-a-week, year-long sci-fi diet consisting of the fifty-two stories in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed wrote,

his big book is both a thrilling entertainment and a convincing argument for the way SF can refresh the mind, play boldly with form and reflect its era creatively — in other words, what all good literature should do.

Now that I've got sci-fi on the brain, I think I'll start on the Wesleyan diet this weekend.

Ballard, Wolfe, and a Sci-Fi question

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Finding my thoughts a bit scattered today, I turn to numbers in hopes of giving them a pretense of order. But since I'm writing about science fiction, let's make it a countdown!

3 For the past year and a half, I've been ever-so-slowly making my way through the 1,200 or so pages of J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories. I'm only about 350 pages in--up to 1962--and the thought that keeps returning to my mind (and that I can't be the first to dsicover) is that Ballard is clearly writing in the tradition of Joseph Conrad: Ballard's scientists, marooned on far-flung outposts throughout the galaxy, are merely Conrad's company agents and traders thrown into the future.

Like Conrad's characters, Ballard's have been nominally put in charge of places that are only barely understood back home--and whose history, culture, traditions, and dangers are almost entirely a secret. Their knowledge is limited where it isn't totally useless; their true dominion extends no farther than the walls of their base camp; and the culture they represent is utterly unwanted, even insignificant when set against against the inescapable age of the universe around them.

Look at the opening of "The Waiting Grounds," for example:

Whether Henry Tallis, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can't say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me--a job which could easily have been done in three days--were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven't yet faced up to.

Sounds self-consciously Conradian, no? That passage also signals the other key similarity between the writers: their characters, symbols of power without its substance, ultimately have only their honor to fall back on, and even, eventually, to hold them together.

If you're a Conrad fan who hasn't tried Ballard, you've got a treat in store (and vice-versa).



2 I've also been reading The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Short Fiction, which offers different charms. If Ballard's stories are of a space colonialism, about Western civilization's endless attempts to extend its domain into areas where it's not necessarily wanted or needed, Wolfe's are often about our attempts to exert that sort of control over our own selves and beings here at home. His stories are full of mad doctors operating on humans, psychological experiments that kill, houses of human horrors. Wolfe's world is one of knowledge perverted: it's not surprising that he has a story called "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories." (Though it is surprising that he also has stories called "The Doctor of Death Island" and "Death of the Island Doctor"--both written to answer a dare from Isaac Asimov.)

They make a good pair for reading in alternation, Ballard and Wolfe, the antiseptic, plainspoken loneliness of space set against the gothic nightmares we can produce here at home.



1 Which leads me to a question for you all: what good sci-fi writers am I missing? Ballard and Wolfe I enjoy, Bradbury--for all his occasional sentimentalism--is a long-standing favorite, Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem are as well. I tried Iain M. Banks last year, and he decidedly was not for me; I felt the same about Samuel R. Delaney's Nova, though in his case I'm not sure that I ought to give up on his whole ouevre.

Any suggestions?

Arthur Koestler's Dialogue with Death

Usually when I recommend that my employer, the University of Chicago Press, take a look at an out-of-print book for possible reprinting, it’s a book I’ve already fallen for; that was the case with Richard Stark’s Parker novels, Anthony Powell’s The Fisher King, and Francois Sagan’s A Certain Smile (coming this fall!).

But this spring Chicago published a book at my suggestion that I hadn’t even read: Arthur Koestler’s Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War (1946). All I knew about it when I recommended it was what Louis Menand had written in a New Yorker article on Koestler:

One of Koestler’s finest books, for example, is the account of his Spanish imprisonment, Dialogue with Death published in England in 1942. The book is not really about politics. Koestler despised the Fascists, but he saw little to respect in the Republicans, either. The book is about what it is like to face one’s imminent execution—it was admired by Sartre, among others, as a lucid statement of the existentialist situation—and, in this respect, it is a stranger and stronger book than Darkness at Noon.

Koestler’s Spanish experiences obviously informed Darkness at Noon, but the novel has more to do with the fatal self-deceptions of Communist dialectics than it does with the sheer apprehension of death. And Darkness at Noon is a roman a these, in which every character is a type—the disillusioned old revolutionary, the soulless apparatchik, the doomed idealist. Dialogue with Death is just a report on a series of mostly horrible events, and the author is under no obligation to organize them, or even to make sense of them.

Now that the book has arrived (with a new introduction by Menand), I’m pleased to see that it’s every bit as good as he said. I started it last night and read until late, unable to convince myself to put the book down.

Koestler’s writing is direct and clear, reminiscent at times of Orwell’s famous writing on the same war; yet at the same time, because this is a book about one man’s experience more than it’s a book about the war, it’s shot through with self-reflection and attention to the internal processes triggered by danger and imprisonment. Here, for example, is Koestler’s account of the day that followed the decision to kill himself that evening with a shard of glass he’d discovered in his cell:

The fact that I had made a decision which I regarded as final filled me with utter contentment. I became really cheerful, and the barometer rose at an astonishing rate. I called to memory, just by way of a test, the scene when the bear [a fellow prisoner] was led away, and the scenes in the police station. They now left me completely cold. I thought of friends and relatives, and found that I was not in the least bit moved. I was very proud of this Olympian frame of mind, and, true to the penny novelette, thought: nothing has power to move him who has done with life.

It was not until much later, in Seville, when I and a fellow prisoner, also condemned to death, were discussing the various forms of fear, that I understood the secret of this magic metamorphosis: namely, that by coming to a sham decision to take my life I had simply snatched for myself twelve untroubled hours. My state of Olympian calm was not, as I thought, the result of the decision itself, but of my having set a time limit of twelve hours. Up till now I had counted hourly on hearing the oily voice [of the executioner] calling out my name; now, by a wishful inference, I took it for granted that the twelve hours’ respite which I had given myself would be respected by the outside world. This was why I was so cheerful.

The penny novelettes make an appearance elsewhere as well:

I had a feeling that my knees were nothing but flabby jelly. “The condemned man walked with an uncertain gait.” All condemned men walk with an uncertain gait. Damn those penny novelettes.

Yet another time when Koestler thinks death is imminent, his fears are allayed by the fact that the guards handcuff him—handcuffs being in such short supply, and so difficult to remove from the dead, that only string is used to bind the condemned. These are the small lessons taught by prison life, and Koestler conveys them, one painful one after another.

His account of the days before his capture, when he waiting in Malaga for the Nationalist troops to take the city, is just as striking as the prison journal. Here he writes of the entry of conquering troops into the surrendered city:

As they pass by the house they salute us, and the household staff, who only yesterday assiduously raised their clenched fists, now with equal Spanish effusiveness, raise their arms in the Fascist salute. They seem perfectly at ease, but since they look upon us foreigners as half imbecile, the gardener advises Sir Peter and me to change our demeanour, too, “because we have a new Government now.”

Then there’s this, from the pitiful pretense of defense mounted by the city, a scene whose telling calls to mind the resignation found in Kafka:

There, up above on the Devil’s Rock, squats Captain Pizarro, gazing down at the road below to see if the rebels are coming. Beside him are a telephone and a steel wire. When the rebels come Pizarro is to telephone down to the post below. But as he is convinced that the telephone will fail to function at the critical moment, he has provided himself with the wire, which runs eight hundred yards to headquarters below; when he gives it a tug, a bell rings. Sometimes a bird comes and pecks at the wire, and then the alarm is sounded below.

Dialogue with Death makes a perfect companion to Homage to Catalonia: whereas the overriding impression given by Orwell’s book is one of futility—part of it brought on by the ridiculous infighting of the Spanish Left, part by the cruel absurdity of war itself—Koestler’s book captures, without varnishing the story, some of the drama and intensity of the war, and even of very basic personal peril, so that we can begin to understand just what it was that drew so many idealistic young people to want to go to Spain to fight and die. The books work well together because we shouldn't be seduced by such visions, but we should never forget that people throughout history have been, and probably will continue to be.

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

{Photos by rocketlass.}

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

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

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



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

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

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

And this:

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

43. "Intoxication Recovery Table."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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