Given that the world didn't, as predicted, end, let's celebrate its shopworn beauty.

{Photos by rocketlass.}

In April, I visited Hawaii for the first time, spending a wonderful week on Maui with my in-laws, and, for all the tourist-trap nonsense, what I found myself thinking about most was the lure of the port, and the wrack and ruin of sailors, adventurers, layabouts, rummies, and ne'er-do-wells that the sea has always attracted. Even I, a land-lubbing lover of routine, born as far from a coast as you can get, felt the draw; it was all too easy to imagine a life of beachfront days and barroom nights.

Which led me to Alvaro Mutis's stories of Maqroll el Gaviero, and their wonderful evocations of the shabby, bypassed ports of the world. I've written about Maqroll before, and, returning to him, I was pleased to find the same mixture of the exotic and the tedious, adventure and ennui, a portrait of a spavined world that, in these forgotten harbors, is slowly winding down. Maqroll doesn't so much have adventures and love affairs as that they have him; the reverse would require a bit too much active desire, too much engagement with this decrepit dinosaur of a world.

This passage, from early in The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call, is representative of Mutis's style and outlook:

The tramp steamer entered my field of vision as slowly as a wounded saurian. I could not believe my eyes. With the wondrous splendour of Saint Petersburg in the background, the poor ship intruded on the scene, its sides covered with dirty streaks of rust and refuse that reached all the way to the waterline. The captain's bridge, and the row of cabins on the deck for crew members and occasional passengers, had been painted white a long time before. Now a coat of grime, oil, and urine gave them an indefinite color, the color of misery, of irreparable decadence, of desperate, incessant use. The chimerical freighter slipped through the water to the agonized gasp of its machinery and the irregular rhythm of driving rods that threatened at any moment to fall silent forever. Now it occupied the foreground of the serene, dreamlike spectacle that had held all my attention, and my astonished wonder turned into something extremely difficult to define. This nomadic piece of sea trash bore a kind of witness to our destiny on earth, a pulvis eris that seemed truer and more eloquent in these polished metal waters with the gold and white vision of the capital of the last czars behind them. The sleek outline of the buildings and wharves on the Finnish coast rose at my side. At that moment I felt the stirrings of a warm solidarity for the tramp steamer, as if it were an unfortunate brother, a victim of human neglect and greed to which it responded with a stubborn determination to keep tracing the dreary wake of its miseries on all the world's seas.

I remember a particular recurring moment from childhood: the end of a day in which you've played and played and played, and now you're being called away to bed, but you have a feeling--as strong as any feeling about anything--that if you could just have another few minutes, you could really get something done, you could in some important sense finish what you're doing, make this day of play complete and even perfect. But the call, parental, is irresistible, and the chance is lost. I remember thinking that as an adult, I'd be able to take that extra time, that I'd be able to do what I wanted until it was done, finish things off properly.

But one of the lessons of adulthood, learned slowly, is that you never get it all done, that life--so seemingly manageable from a child's point of view--is simply too crowded and overflowing to ever be fully set in order and instead must be lived in some more or less tolerable state of half-completion. We make our peace with that, of course, to the point that we essentially forget the idea of an alternative. But reading Mutis, with his world of endlessly deferred maintenance and improvements, jury-rigged machines and dreamily static lives, its universe that could use a good paint job, brings the sensation back in all its childhood force.

"They are simply dull, solid, one-hundred percent Americans, who have never been in a night club in their lives," or, New York and "the Real America"

As preparation for a trip this week to New York, I decided to read a Robert Benchley piece from 1928, "The Typical New Yorker," collected in The Benchley Report. Benchley opens with a bit of throat-clearing that perhaps shouldn't have been surprising, but was:

One of the most persistent convictions reported by foreign commentators on the United States (a group which evidently embraces all unoccupied literates of England and the more meditative sections of the Continent) is that the real America is represented by the Middle West. Aside from the not entirely adventitious question of who is to decide what "the real America" is, there arises a fascinating speculation for breeders and students of climatic influence as to why a man living in Muncie, Indiana, should partake of a more essential integrity in being what he is than a man living in New York City. Why is the Middle Westerner the real American, and the New Yorker the product of some complicated inbreeding which renders him a sport (in the biological sense) and a man without a country?

There are two points of interest in that paragraph. First, the obvious one: as Ecclesiastes told us ever so long ago, there is nothing new under the sun, and it's probably safe to assume that urbanites have been being drummed out of the "real American" category since the Articles of Confederation. The second interesting bit is the reference to Muncie: Benchley's article was published (in the Yale Review) in 1928, a year before Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture pinned Muncie down as the heart of the heart of the country; apparently it already had that reputation.

Benchley goes on to question the pervasive notion that country life is superior to city life:

I remember once a mother whose three children were being brought up in the country (and very disagreeable and dishonest children they were, too) saying, with infinite pity of the children of a city acquaintance, "Just think, those kiddies have probably never seen a cow!" Just what sanctity or earnest of nobility was supposed to attach itself to the presence of a cow in a child's life I never could figure out, but there was an answer which might have been made that her own kiddies had never seen the Woolworth Building or the East River bridges at night. Among the major inquiries that will one day have to be made is one into the foundation for this belief that intimacy with cows, horses, and hens or the contemplation, day in and day out, of great stretches of crops exerts a purifying influence on the souls of those lucky enough to be subjected to it. Perhaps when the answer is found, it may help solve another of the pressing social problems of the day--that of Rural Delinquency.

As a refugee from the rural, I heartily agree!

Benchley's actual point is to draw a distinction between the experience of the ordinary New Yorker, going from home to office back home on the same treadmill walked by everyone, even those vaunted Middle Westerners (who surely "have to attend to some sort of office work during the day aside from contemplating Nature in its more magnificent aspects"), and that of the visitor, for whom

New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. This is only natural, for outsiders come to New York for the sole purpose of having a good time, and it is for their New York hosts to provide it. The visiting Englishman, or the visiting Californian, is convinced that New York City is made up of millions of gay pixies, flitting about constantly in a sophisticated manner in search of a new thrill. "I don't see how you stand it," they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. "It's all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living." And under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it.

I'll be in town for work, so perhaps I can manage to occupy some middle ground--a mix of the treadmill and the ginmill, tiring my friends just enough that they won't object to seeing me when next I land?

Old Filth for your Friday

I'm currently reading Jane Gardam's Old FIlth (2004), with great pleasure. It's an impressive novel, ranging over the long life of a retired barrister and taking in Raj orphans, contemporary England, lifelong regrets, the difficulties of aging, and more, all assembled through deftly handled episodes, memories, and shifts of perspective--that last technique being used particularly well, as Gardam is continually giving us new tidbits of information about the secrets characters are keeping from one another, and the insights they have (or don't have) into one another's behavior and experience.

The book is also funny, subtly so for the most part, but Gardam does occasionally turn the comedy loose and let it edge toward the ridiculous. The following exchange is a good example. It come early in the life of Old Filth (a barrister who got his name because he supposedly coined the acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong"), when, having been rescued from his brutally inattentive caretakers, he's being bundled off to school for the first time:

A short man jumped out and came jollily to the foot of the garden steps. He was talking.

"--I dare say," he said. "Eddie Feathers, I dare say? Excellent to meet you. I am your new Headmaster and my name is Sir. Always SIr. Understood? The school is small. There are only twenty boys. They call each other by their surnames. I have one assistant, Mr. Smith. He is always called Mr. Smith, my assistant, whatever his real name. Different ones come and go. This Mr. Smith is something of a trial but very good at cricket, which I am not. And so, good morning, Eddie, and these are your sisters, I dare say?"

"C-cou-cousins," came out of Edward's mouth. He liked this man.

"I know nothing of girls," said Sir. "I know everything about boys. I am a very good teacher, Feathers, as your father may remember. By the time you leave my Outfit there is not a bird, butterfly or flower, not a fish or insect of the British Isles you will not recognise. You will also read Latin like a Roman and understand Euclid and Greek."

. . .

"Auntie May," said Auntie May to Sir. "I am Auntie May."

"Ah, the redoubtable Auntie May. You are seeing to the girls, I hear? This would be quite outside my territory. I teach only boys. My establishment is very expensive and very well-known. I am unmarried, as is Mr. Smith, but let me say, for all things good should be noised abroad, that here is absolutely nothing unpleasant going on in my school. We are perfectly clean. There is nothing like that."

"Well, that will be a change for him," said Auntie May. "There's been nothing pleasant here."

"So I understand. Or rather I do not understand for such events are beyond comprehension in a well-run Outfit. There is no corporal punishment in my school. And there is no emotional hysteria. One can only suppose that these things are the result of the mixture of the sexes. I never teach girls."

Perhaps it's simply because I have Charles Portis on the brain lately, but isn't there a hint of the Portisean (Portisian?) solipsistic mania in Sir?

A noir numbskull

The only good thing about Hard Case Crime's long break between books--a hiatus, caused by a search for a new distribution partner, that will end in September with a new Lawrence Block novel that features a just possibly NSFW cover--is that it's given me a chance to read some of the earlier books that had fallen by the wayside.

One of those was Honey in His Mouth, a novel that Doc Savage creator Lester Dent wrote in 1956 but never published. It's a fun, bleak little crime novel, but what's most interesting about it is what Dent does with the figure of the noir protagonist. Noir for me is most interesting when it focuses on a relatively ordinary guy who, through bad luck or cupidity finds himself falling through the floor of his ordinary life and into a darker, more dangerous world. Usually, however, a writer--even a very good writer--can't resist the urge to make that everyman just a tiny bit more resourceful, quick-thinking, and calm under pressure than, well, every man. It's understandable: if you're going to put a man under pressure in order to see what it does to him, he can't fold on the first page. But it distances us from the character, encouraging us to project our wishes on him rather than see our failings; it can be fun, but it slights the realism that is in some important sense noir's stock in trade.

Dent doesn't fall victim to that temptation. First, his main character, Walter Harsh, is no hero: he's an extremely small-time con man. More important, Harsh is dumb. Stone dumb. Even more, he doesn't realize it. Instead, like, presumably, all failing con men, he assumes at every juncture that he's in the middle of putting one over on everyone else. He gets picked up by a crew of South Americans who want to hire him to impersonate their soon-to-be deposed dictator, and he barely asks a question, assuming all along that he'll end up on top. Here, for example, he falls for nothing more than a wink:

But Mr. Hassam at once did a thing which set hi min solid with Harsh. What Mr. Hassam did was give the wall safe a knowing glance, then wink at Harsh. He did this so the others did not observe. It had the same effect on Harsh that an orator is striving for when he opens his speech with a gut-buster joke It warmed up the audience, got it interested. The little smoky guy might be an operator, Harsh thought.

Then in this scene, Harsh's stupidity takes a more physical form, an unearned confidence in his fighting ability:

Brother leaned toward him. Hit him in the belly, Harsh thought, but hand him a good one so it would settle things. He brought his right fist up towards Brother's middle, but Brother pushed the hand aside easily.

Just as easily, Harsh gets his eardrums boxed. And, physically or metaphorically, he gets them boxed again and again and again, never letting the lesson teach him his limitations.

A stupid protagonist--a walking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect--is tough to pull off without boring or irritating your readers, but Dent does it, keeping the supporting cast interesting enough and the plot brisk enough that Walter Harsh remains amusing. Most noir plots, if enacted in reality, would end quickly, hero dead; Dent gives us a realistically incompetent lead and still manages to string us along nicely, and keep our interest, for 250 pages. It's quite a feat.

On the bummery with Charles Portis and the Masters of Atlantis

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Last week I promised (threatened?) more selections from Charles Portis's wonderfully strange Masters of Atlantis, and today I deliver!

The following exchange is from a grilling that Gnomon society aide-de-camp Austin Popper endures before the Texas State Legislature, which is worried about the recent arrival in the state of a handful of Gnomons, whom they fear are insurrectionists, malcontents, Communists, etc. I'm going to quote at greater length than I ordinarily would, simply because a lot of the comedy in this scene comes from the twists and turns of the questioning, which are as emphatic as they are ridiculous:

"But you did not always travel in such style, did you? With attendants and a briefcase. I'm thinking now of your years on the road as a bum."

"I was a tramp, yes, sir. I was down and out. I've never tried to conceal that."

"A drunken bum?"

"Yes, sir."

"Calling yourself Wally Wilson?"

"I believe I did use that name at one time."

"Sleeping in haystacks? Stealing laundry off clotheslines and hot pies from the windowsills of isolated farmhouses? Leaving cryptic hobo marks scrawled on fence posts and the trunks of trees?"

"No, sir, I was very much an urban tramp. No haystacks or barns for me. Mostly I walked the city streets wearing cast-off clothes, with overcoat sleeves hanging down to my knuckles. I did live in a box once for about a week. I went from a Temple to a box, so steep was my fall."

"A big crate? A packing case of some kind?"

"A pasteboard box."

"Under a viaduct in the warehouse district of Chicago?"

"No, sir, it was in a downtown park in one of our eastern cities."

"A long box you could stretch out in?"

"A short one. Mr. Moaler lives in what I would call a long box. Mine was very compact. When it snowed I had to squat in it all night with my head between my knees like a yogi or a magician's assistant. Then when morning came I had to hail a policeman or some other early riser to help get my numb legs straightened out again. "

"More a stiff garment than a house?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hunkered down there in your box, slapping at imaginary insects on your body. Your only comfort a bottle of cheap wine in a paper sack. Supporting yourself with petty thievery, always on the run, with Dobermans snapping at your buttocks. Not a pretty picture."

"It was cheap rum."

"The clear kind?"

"The dark kind."

"As an urban bum, Mr. Popper, did you often stagger into the middle of busy intersections with your gummy eyes and make comical, drunken attempts to direct traffic?"

"No, sir. In my worst delirium I never interfered with the flow of traffic. I never drank any hair tonic either."

Now, I know I'm unusually susceptible to this sort of thing--a friend's son once arrived at the ballpark armed with questions about hobos he'd been saving up until he saw me again--but is it possible to read that exchange without laughing? Without wanting to read the whole book? And--here I know I'm edging ever farther onto that limb--without wishing that this were the way the whole world was all the time?

"I love nothing better than to laugh but my life it is not a joke. Or it is a joke if you like but not a good one."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Almost exactly a year ago, I read my first Charles Portis novel, The Dog of the South, and I wrote that it was

crammed from start to finish with oddballs, dropouts, and failures, all of whom cling to this world all the more intensely for the fact that they can't quite figure out what to do with it.

I followed that with True Grit, which is also a wonderful book, if a bit less unhinged: whereas True Grit locates the reader so squarely in Mattie's point of view that we feel as if her own off-kilter worldview colors everything she sees (and, in the case of the book's strange cadences and vocabulary, everything she hears), in The Dog of the South, the crazy is general, manifest in everyone and everything found in our too-busy, too-atomistic, too-stimulated world. Being a fan of oddity, I preferred (and laughed more at) the latter.

Well, The Dog of the South has nothing on Masters of Atlantis (1985). Technically about the members of a secret society and the tribulations they face in trying to gain esoteric knowledge, recruit new members, and keep the organization afloat through most of the twentieth century, what it really is is a long succession of one oddball after another offering his own cracked interpretation of the world, nearly all of them incompatible with nearly all the others. In my description of The Dog of the South, I wrote that one character

seems to regard all the world's facts as equally important; though paring them down or assigning importance might reveal hints of a pattern, it's as if he feels an obligation not to discriminate, as if each and every detail deserves his full care

In Masters of Atlantis, it's as if every character is that character, and Portis has taken all the world's facts (and most of its non-facts), spun them around in one of those old wire baskets that were used to select bingo numbers,and drawn them out one by one.

Having already rambled a long time here, I'll give you just the briefest of samples today; expect more later in the week (that can serve as a warning to those whose taste for weirdness is easily sated). Here's Lamar Jimmerson, leader of the Gnomon Society, reflecting on a woman who has recently moved into the temple in the role of housekeeper/landlady, with the aim of bringing in boarders:

All this, with the best yet to come, the roomers. Soon there would be a pack of coughing drifters bumping around upstairs, alcoholic house painters and clarinet painters, tramping to the bathroom at all hours of the night. Still, to give the woman her due, she had been very decent in offering to mend his clothes and in putting her tiny car at his disposal. She had brought no cats along with her and no miniature dogs. She did not whinny or titter and had not, so far, tried to embrace him.

Portis has a particular genius for allowing trains of thought to thunder along to their eventual destinations, however side-shunted and off-topic those may be. In their extravagance and detail, the pointless ruminations of his characters bring to mind the elongated, distracting quality of Homeric similes, image that get so caught up in their own terms and concerns that their point of origin is quickly lost.

The next passage is a perfect demonstration. Jimmerson, in addition to leading the Gnomon Society, is in the middle of a quixotic run for the governorship of Indiana:

What could he, Governor Lamar Jimmerson, Master of Gnomons, do for his fellow citizens? One service came immediately to mind. As his first official act he would order the Parks Department to install a guardrail all around the base of Rainbow Falls, with plenty of warning signs. Such an inviting place and yet so treacherous. At this very moment white-haired judges and rumpled old family attorneys were down there losing their footing and crying out as they fell and bruised their buttocks on those cruel green rocks, first slick and now hard. But then downstream a bit, below the cascade, all violence spent, wouldn't there be a limpid pool where older men in prickly blue wool bathing briefs could paddle about unobserved with swim bladders under their arms?

I suspect that many of you are now making an expression like the one rocketlass presented when I read her a passage, something my constant laughter left me barely able to do: an eyebrow cocked at an angle perfectly calibrated to express skepticism, bewilderment, and doubts about my sanity in equal measure. And I do understand: I have trouble believing these novels were ever published, let alone that they're still in print; they're just so weird. But for the initiates (and here I am beginning to sound a bit like a Master of Atlantis myself), the pleasures offered by Portis are countless.

Partying in midcentury Chicago

{Photos by rocketlass.}

In my day job, one of the books I've been handling publicity for is Bachelors and Bunnies, a new book by Carrie Pitzulo that argues that Playboy magazine and the Playboy corporation have had a significantly more pro-feminist history and outlook throughout their history than their reputation would suggest.

So it's probably not surprising that, when the protagonist of Frederick Exley's unclassifiable masterpiece A Fan's Notes described his years living in Chicago in the mid-1950s, I found myself seeing my city as the swinging, no-hang-ups party town long ago portrayed by Hef:

There I lived in that section called the Near North Side, a paradise for the young men and women--airline hostesses with airline hostesses, rising executives with rising executives, Junior Leaguers with Junior Leaguers, voyeurs with voyeurs--who overflowed its modern town houses and converted Victorian mansions, men and women who reigned, or were, in youth's obliviousness, sure they reigned supreme there. The section had an absurd though touching notion of itself as the Greenwich Village of the Plains; but the young men I knew there seemed blatantly and refreshingly unburdened with things of the mind, and the fine, corn-bred, yellow-haired girls as succulently wholesome as cream of chicken soup.

It's far from my vision of paradise; my Chicago is much more homebound and quiet, my circle of friends almost lacking rising executives (let alone airline hostesses). But Exley does manage to imbue the Chicago of that era--not yet surpassed in size by Los Angeles, or in cool by San Francisco; still to face the slog of the '70s and the super-slick spruce-up of Daley's '90s; before Rush Street became the Viagra Triangle--with some of the hedonistic magic that was Hef's stock in trade:

If the section was not the Village, it was precisely named: the Near North Side was near to everything. In the morning we descended into the subways and were in a matter of minutes conveyed to the Loop where, after cursorily putting in our days at the altar of commerce, we fled back to Babylon. The bars--The Singapore, Larry's Lounge, Mister Kelley's, Gus' Pub--along Rush Street (Chicago's "White Way") were within five minutes' walking distance from anywhere in the area; in those saloons those genial young men, corn-bred girls, and I nightly got quite happily, quite absurdly, drunk. In the summer we sat around gallon thermoses of vodka and tonic, as tribesmen around the beneficent fire, taking the sun on the most exhilarating city lake front in the world. (I have never sen any other, so I suffer from no competing claims). Behind us rose the dizzying turrets of Chicago's skyline, pale and iridescent facades rising into the azure heavens, buildings all constructed, it seemed, for nothing save the pleasure of our eyes. At evening we wandered from one apartment to another, as from one room in a house to another, as if the entire Near North Side were but a single mansion to which we had a standing invitation.

Now, I realize that it's but a small step from those standing, drunken invitations to the alcoholic wrecks and disintegrations portrayed by, say, the Johns O'Hara and Cheever--and that's even before we say anything about the troubles of gender inequity in the perpetual party Exley portrays--but even so, those glimmers of a lost era are seductive, like the spinning of the Capitol dome as you lay the needle on a new Sinatra record. Pick up your martinis, folks, and let's start dancing.

A tiny little joke

{Dollhouse-scale baloney sandwich photo by Flickr user Miss Millificent. Some rights reserved by the photographer; reproduced under a Creative Commons license.}

Over the weekend I read What's So Funny? (2007) the next-to-last Dortmunder novel. And there was a line in it that made me laugh, not because it was funny, which it only barely was, but because its sheer pointless superfluity--and the fecundity of the comic imagination that such a frothy overflow of jokes suggests--seemed in its way to sum up Westlake's angle on the world: almost everything is funny, if you just pay attention.

And now you want to hear the joke, right? Remember, I warned you that it's not, strictly speaking, that funny. Okay: a group of lawyers, security personnel, and claimants to a disputed inheritance are meeting to discuss plans for moving some of the goods in question, and

The more senior of the NYPD men present, whose name was Chief Inspector Mologna (pronounced Maloney), now spoke.

Well, at least half of you probably now think I'm a lunatic. But that other half: can't you sense the joy--the crooked smile that must have lit up Westlake's face when he typed that? You read a joke like that--pointless, stupid, groan-inducing, included just because it came to mind and a master craftsman makes use of all the tools at hand--and you're reminded of why this guy's one of your favorite writers no matter what mode or genre he's working in.

You other folks should rest assured that the novel does contain a lot of actual comedy, as well as an entertaining heist. The baloney joke's on page 234 of the cloth edition, second paragraph, so you can skip it when you get there if that'll make you happier.

Pithy thoughts on what Ovid called "that rumpy-pumpy stuff."

Alain de Botton came up with a nicely phrased thought this week in his Twitter feed:

So many affairs would be prevented if people could more easily reveal that they would ideally like to sleep with one another--but won't.

In its pithy incisiveness, it sounds like something that ought to have been said by an Anthony Powell character, perhaps Moreland (whose affair with Priscilla Tolland might have been headed off by such a conversation).

That thought sent me back to Powell's Writer's Notebook, a volume whose only flaw is its slimness. I sought out this old favorite:

All love affairs are special cases, and yet at the same time each is the same case.

And this:

It is always a mistake to assume that other people have lower standards than oneself.

Then I encountered this gruesome idea of service:

A is having an affair with B's wife, and tries to teach her habits of punctuality, so that B too shall profit in some way from the situation.

And finally, we get to just one of the many bad outcomes that could result from all this sneaking around and double-dealing, presented here with the sort of admirable matter-of-factness that would, one assumes, go over well at the sort of parties to which one, being dull, is not generally invited:

I must go off now and see a man who is blackmailing me.

Quite.

Robert Caro on W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel

One of the ways that Robert Caro justifies the incredible length--768 pages--of The Path to Power, the first volume of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, is by incorporating a handful of fascinating miniature biographical and descriptive accounts of side characters who played important parts in LBJ's rise. Caro's portrait of LBJ's father, a failed alcoholic whose integrity cost him his state congressional seat, is moving, while his depiction of Sam Rayburn, the powerful Texan who was Speaker of the House during World War II, spends nearly thirty pages in giving a rounded picture of Rayburn's toughness, integrity, and essential loneliness.

The most surprising mini-portrait, at least for a non-Texan, is the final one: that of W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, who in 1939 was elected governor of Texas--and in 1941 US Senator--despite never having previously been a candidate for office, never having worked on a campaign, and in fact never having voted.



Caro spins out the story with obvious relish for its absurdities. In 1927 O'Daniel was a sales manager for Light Crust Flour, which sponsored a radio program featuring a country and western band named the Light Crust Doughboys. When the regular announcer fell sick one day, O'Daniel stepped in, and he stayed.

He began whistling along with the band. He began composing tunes, and writing lyrics. Then he began writing little poems that he recited himself.

I know we live in a less sentimental age, but see if you can wade through the sap in this next paragraph without drowning:

After a while not all songs were about flour. They were tributes to Texas ("Beautiful, Beautiful Texas," "Sons of the Alamo") and to cowboys ("The Lay of the Lonely Longhorn"). There were hymns to an old horse and to "The Orphan Newsboy." Many were about motherhood: "The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother's Hair" was a particular favorite, as was another which began: "Mother, you fashioned me / Bore me and rationed me. . . . " The songs were about current events: when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, the Light Crust Doughboys sang (to the tune of "My Bonny"), "Please Bring Back My Baby to Me"; when Will Rogers was killed, O'Daniel wrote: "Someone in heaven is thinking of you; someone who always was loyal and true; someone who used to be close to your side, laughed when you laughed and cried when you cried." More and more, the songs and poems were about religion--old-time, Fundamentalist, evangelical religion; "It was good for Lee O'Daniel, and it's good enough for me," the Doughboys sang.

As you might expect, the cognoscenti, such as they were, had doubts about O'Daniel's sincerity; one visitor to the studio claimed that, as the band played "That Old Rugged Cross," "O'Daniel leaned over . . . and whispered, 'That's what really brings 'em in!'"

And then, seemingly out of the blue, in 1938 he asked his listeners if he should run for governor:

A blind man had asked him to do so, he said, and he wished they would write and tell him whether or not he should. He received, he said, 54,449 replies. All but three told him to run; those three said he shouldn't--because, they said, he was too good for the job.

His campaign was, if anything, even more ridiculous: he toured in a red circus wagon with the Light Crust Doughboys playing behind him, promising a state pension plan but entirely ducking the question of how he would quintuple the state's funds to pay for it, falling back instead on yet another song to the tune of "My Bonny":

We have builded our beautiful highways
With taxes from city and farm,
But you can't pyramid those taxes,
Without doing our Texas great harm.

Oh, and like many a charlatan before and since, he claimed to be running in order to get the "professional politicians" out of governmment. And he won. Easily . . . at which point he turned out to be less interested in the pension plan than in doing the bidding of the big business interests that had secretly been backing him.

Caro's account of O'Daniel's rise runs for eight pages, and he pops up intermittently through the thirty-five that follow, as he runs against (and eventually defeats) LBJ in the senatorial race. Believe me: there's plenty more eye-popping strangeness in those pages. I won't say they're worth reading the whole book for, but they are an indication of the pleasures in store if you do tackle it.

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.