If we were to limit checkouts to a single book . . . which Invisible title would you choose?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this week Laura Miller, author of an excellent book on growing up with (and to some extent growing out of) Narnia, The Magician's Book, and book columnist for Salon, wrote about invisible books--and the Invisible Library that Ed Park and I have been curating, with a certain appropriate vagueness of effort, since 2008. Fans of the Library should go read the whole article, but there are two bits that I think are well worth pointing out here.

First, there's this, which includes a fact that, as a committed Dickens fan, I can't believe I didn't know:

The pseudonymous Dr. Beachcomber would like to expand the Invisible Library to include fake books -- that is, titles that don't even exist in a fictional universe. They appear only on the spines of sham bookshelves used to disguise secret doors in exceptionally interesting houses. Charles Dickens had just such a door installed in his own study in London, with fake titles of his own devising, including "Socrates on Wedlock."

To which I can only reply: of course he did. If you look up "fecund" in the dictionary, alongside stipple pictures of soybeans germinating you'll find an image of Dickens stroking his beard in satisfaction.

In Tearing Haste, the recent volume of letters between Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Mitford included a list of that sort of book--unquestionably not truly Invisible Library titles, despite Dr. Beachcomber's stance--requested by Deborah for a door in her house. To a one they were, as Ed put it when I sent them to him, "horrible"--pun-riddled and silly, though at least acknowledged to be so. (And there was at least one clever and slightly sassy title: Bondage, by Anne Fleming, a play on an apparently poorly kept secret about the sexual proclivities of their friends Ian and Anne.)

Then there's this question, the crux, really, of Miller's article, and not a question that had yet occurred to me:

Which raises an intriguing question: If allowed to choose only one, which volume in the Invisible Library would you most want to read?

If you're the sort to dive into the scrum that is a comments section, what better invitation do you need? Hie thee to Salon and plump for your favorite!

No one who's read this blog for long can be in any doubt about my choice: any one of the novels or memoirs written by Nicholas Jenkins, narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. Like all fans of Dance, I suspect they'd be much like Anthony Powell's non-Dance novels; like nearly all fans of Dance, that would bring me great, great joy.

{Though if I were to get a second choice . . . who would turn down the chance to read Orbius Tertius?}

In honor of Independence Day

I may be a few days late, but love of country knoweth no season, abideth by no clock, is reck'd not by the sun nor the moon, surely?

So here, in honor of the 4th of July, which in my neighborhood didn't really end until at least 4 AM on the 5th--at least, that's when I remember hearing the last explosion--a brief passage from Adam Goodheart's wonderful look at the incidentals, interstices, and forgotten elements of the first year of America's Civil War, 1861: The Civil War Awakening:

Like later generations, the men of the 1850s and 1860s expressed their ideals of masculinity through their physical appearance. Most noticeable, and revealing, was the astonishing profusion of facial hair that sprouted forth during those years, including on the previously smooth faces of [James] Garfield and his friends. For a century and a half, American men (and most Europeans) had, nearly without exception, gone clean-shaven: it was a sign of gentility, civility, and restraint. (In the late eighteenth century, one Philadelphia woman considered it a matter of note that she had seen "an elephant and two bearded men" in the street that day.) This changed very suddenly. Most American historians, when they have considered the topic at all, have assumed it had to do with Civil War soldiers avoiding the inconvenience of shaving while in the field.

In fact, the phenomenon predated the war by a number of years--and was the subject of a great deal of contemporary comment and debate. As early as 1844, one physician began inveighing against "woman faced men" with their habit of "emasculating [the] face with a razor," even suggesting that shaving caused diseases of the throat. At the time, this was still an eccentric opinion. By the following decade, however, talk of a "beard movement" was sweeping the nation. In 1857, a conscientious journalist took a stroll through Boston's streets and conducted a statistical survey: of the 543 men he encountered, no fewer than 338 had full, bushy beards, "as God meant to have them," while nearly all the rest sported lesser facial hair of various sorts. Only four were "men of the old school, smooth shaven, with the exception of slight tufted promontories jutting down from either ear, as if designed as a compromise measure between the good old doctrine and modern radicalism."

Good to know that trend stories have been with us nearly as long as newspapers (though this one does seem a bit more grounded than today's "Let's go see what six hipsters in Brooklyn are doing!" variety).

No post on the history of American facial hair would be complete without a photo of Union general Ambrose Burnside, who, though no great shakes as a general, remains a familiar figure to even casual Civil War buffs for the twin redans of his facial hair.


Happy birthday, America!

A young Iris Murdoch

Caught by the pleasures (illicit?) of reading other people's mail, I went straight last week from the new book of William Maxwell and Eudora Welty's letters to the first selection of what I hope will be many volumes of Iris Murdoch's, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-1945. The letters are to two of her simultaneous paramours, the ill-fated Frank Thompson, who was to be executed in Bulgaria during the war, and David Hicks, to whom she was briefly engaged; it's hard to imagine any fan of Murdoch not falling for these letters, which are absolutely sizzling with youthful energy, passion, and intellectual archness. The exchange in which she confesses to Thompson that she's lost her virginity, and he responds, are a stunningly perfect example of the way that, when young, we want to seem sophisticated, imperturbable, and intellectual--even as we also more than anything else want to know how the other person feels, really feels, and how much we can influence that feeling by our actions. Both say exactly, in clinical terms, what they're thinking and feeling; neither one says anything of the truth about what they're thinking and feeling.

But the moments that really struck me--and perhaps it's just an early days of summer thing, the return, fifteen years too late, of the feeling that school ought to be out now--as embodying the things I remember about being young come in the diary portion of the book, which covers a tour Murdoch made of the West Country in 1939, when she was twenty, with a troupe of fellow actors from Oxford who visited towns and country manors to put on a musical revue, even as Europe was sliding into war. Seventy years later, the diary still carries the distinct air of youth, the fierce engagement with the immediate that sits side-by-side with ignorance, even dismissal, of the larger world. There are simple, self-consciously silly passages like this:

Am sharing room with Joan, which is excellent. We are luxurious compared to others, in that we have a private room, complete with dressing table, washstand, and Improving Textes. One bed is a Goosefeather Bed. My romantic spirit forthwith inclined me to sleep therein in spite of Joan's warnings--now I understand why the lady in the song preferred a cold open field. That was the hottest night of my life. That bed was as hot as flaming cinders on the flagstones of hell. I slept toward dawn--and then was wakened by cocks crowing. Realised this is the first time that I have lived on a genuine farm. Thought poetically about the Bird of Dawning--then 5 o/c struck & confirmed the cocks. (I never really believed it till now.) Then the cows passed under the window--giving tongue. Lay and laughed silently , hoping I wouldn't wake Joan. All sorts of strange birds sing. I sleep, & get up at 7:45 to accompaniment of more cows.

There's madcap adventure:

VIctor's car was an incredible sight. The hobby horses & banner stuck thro' the roof, placards bedecked the sides, & Hugh's haversack was strapped to the spare wheel, all but obscuring the number plate. In front were Victor & Tom--Tom as often as not opening the roof & standing up to view the countryside--while in the back were Charley & Joan & Hugh & me, woven in and out of each other like a half-inch twill, as Charley put it. Hugh & I sat in the middle, & the other two lay diagonally across us with their feet out of the windows. It was a splendid sight, & drew shouts of mirth & glee from all beholders. After an hour or so Hugh nobly got out & rode dangerously on the running board--at least it wouldn't have been so dangerous if he hadn't insisted on doing Cossack tricks all the way. Then it began to rain & we packed Hugh in again & I sat on his knee.

And there's what young actors always end up with, love:

After the show Hugh & I wandered down to the Cherwell which flows thro' meadows below the house, & sat & watched the moon rise. A group of white swans sailed silently past. It was a most magical evening. Hugh lay down beside me with his head touching my side, & I sat & looked across the river. Then gradually we gave expression to what had been tacit between us for several days. There is something incredibly tender & gentle about Hugh, for all his terrific strength & bluffness.

But the moment that most clearly brings back age twenty, with all its unrealized blindness and perpetual change, is this simple one, from relatively early in the trip:

I have revised my ideas of Cecil. Strange how quickly one can change estimations of character. He is not the lofty conceited & utterly snobbish young swine I thought he was at all. He is very keen on the drama, & he is humble enough to want to be liked. Ruth observed that "he didn't seem quite at home here," and I think she's right. I watched him & Hugh fencing with considerable interest. Hugh had it every time of course, but was kind to his opponent. Cecil eventually retired into a rather awkward silence. I thought of the last time I had seen him, at John Russell's sherry party, & wondered at the contrast.

That age when we're not sure yet who we are, much less who anyone else is--for 70 pages, Murdoch's diary brings it back in force, and the added knowledge that, because of the war, adulthood was about to demand brutal sacrifices of the members of the troupe makes the whole positively wrenching.

If ever a time machine deposits you at a literary luncheon in Paris in the 1890s . . .

. . . don't sit next to Henry James! Here, from Simon Nowell-Smith's The Legend of the Master (1948), a collection of memories of James by those who knew him that I learned about from the Maxwell-Welty letters, is the reason:

Henry James . . .would regale us with accounts of the various dilemmas into which his shyness had precipitated him. On one occasion, at a table d'hote on the Continent where he found himself in the centre of a long table, he felt very ill at ease until he had fortified himself with a bottle of claret. After a glass his spirits revived and he was just getting into his stride with the lady on his right and waving his hands about, as was his habit while talking, when to his horror he knocked over his bottle of wine which cascaded into the lady's lap. She was, however, most comforting and he ordered a second bottle. Gradually confidence returned and gesticulation sprang into abnormal activity. Suddenly a lady on the opposite side of the table, who had been practising her English on her neighbours, was heard to exclaim in a loud voice, "Luke, Luke, 'e 'ave done it again!" And sure enough the same lady received a second deluge of claret. This was too much for James, who immediately retired to his room and left the hotel early next morning.

I know that Dr. Johnson had decided thoughts on claret, as it related to manliness, port, and brandy, but what would he have settled on as the right spirit for spilling on a lady, I wonder?

Maxwell and Welty

I feel I could write post after post after post about What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell; instead, pressed by that demon Time, I'll simply say that if you like either writer, if you like dailyness and the pleasures of the commonplace, if you like Virginia Woolf or Thomas Hardy and would gladly talk about them and their lives endlessly, if you are more amused by the world than angered by it, if you are more saddened by the world than angered by it, if you could use a couple of examples of writers who made their art within the context of full and reasonably contented lives rather than having it deform them, well, buy the book, read it, and keep it near for the coming years. Its genius is born in the quotidian, in the way that, for most of us, if we're lucky, books and culture are part of a larger, fuller, sometimes much more trivial life, and the interplay between the daily and the lasting only heightens the pleasures of both. Such are the virtues, side by side and sentence by sentence, of these letters.

The overriding theme, however, is friendship. It's friendship within limits--you get the sense that, as in a lot of friendships that are no less real or lasting for this, certain topics are silently unremarked upon--but it's nonetheless a friendship of deep love and caring. There are many moments, on both sides, that demonstrate this, but the most memorable one comes during a rough patch in Welty's life. Maxwell's letter to her of January 24, 1967 is a marvel of care and circumspection, of careful management of topic and tone. He begins quietly enough, responding to queries about a recent illness and lamenting the drain that editing the work of other writers can be; he talks of reading Far from the Madding Crowd, calling Hardy "a magician." And then he turns serious--but he begins gently, almost imperceptibly, by, without preamble, launching into a story:

Your feeling about 1966, and fear for 1967, brought back the lowest period of my life, at the end of my sophomore year in college, when for about four or five months I really thought that the reason one thing after another turned out badly was that anything having to do with me necessarily would. So I decided on one last try, and if that didn't work, I would not try any more, ever. I had nobody to room with in my junior year and I had been introduced to somebody in a revolving door who seemed like a nice enough boy, so I got his address and wrote and asked if he'd like to room with me, and he wrote back he would, and in the fall, when we met in the dormitory, it was not the boy I had met in the revolving door--I must have got his name wrong--but a boy whom I had never laid eyes on, who had had polio, and had a withered leg, so he always dressed and undressed in his clothes closet, and he was a perfectly marvelous room-mate and from that time on everything worked out beautifully, for years and years.

What I am trying to say is there is no pattern in years, no constancy of good or bad luck. Who knows what the day after tomorrow will bring--the very thing we most wanted and haven't allowed our hearts to hope.

If what I heard in your voice persists, will you drop everything and come to New York and settle down in the back room and let us hang garlands of love around your neck, day after day, until you are feeling yourself again?

As an outsider, by the time you reach the end of the letter, and Maxwell's heart-wrenching plea to his friend--in whom he must have sensed real despair when last he talked with her--you realize that the whole letter was written with that final paragraph in mind, its studied casualness an example of nerves held tightly under control, in order that Maxwell's own fear not unduly frighten the friend he hoped to comfort. Would that we all have friends like that, could be friends like that.

This only happens to Nabokov

I was planning to write today about the letters of William Maxwell and Eudora Welty, but I was unexpectedly waylaid by another set of letters, ones that arrived as a completely unexpected and unheralded treat in the June 13-20 issue of the New Yorker: five letters sent by Vladimir Nabookov to Vera in the autumn of 1942 as he traveled the United States on a lecture tour.

The letters are a joy, loving and slightly absurd and polished and precise like all of Nabokov's prose. The first letter, which finds him having difficulty convincing several different South Carolinians who are waiting to meet a visiting Russian professor that he is that man, reads like a deleted scene from Pnin, all gentle misunderstanding and comedy. But the most wonderfully Nabokovian letter, the one that really makes it hard not to conclude that he somehow lived in a slightly different, stranger dimension and just sent back dispatches, is one mailed from Springfield, Illinois on November 7, 1942:

At the station in Springfield I was met . . . by the club secretary, a creepily silent melancholic of somewhat clerical cast with a small stock of automatic questions, which he quickly exhausted. He is an elderly bachelor, and his profession consists of doing secretarial work for several Springfield clubs. He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time--got awfully nervous, having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one. It turned out that his hobby--or, rather, the passion of his life--is flagpoles. He sighed with relief when a watchman gave him the exact information--seventy feet--because the pole in his own garden is still ten feet taller.

The occasional treat like this would be enough on its own to make a New Yorker subscription worthwhile; as far as I'm concerned, everything good the magazine publishes for the rest of the year now is gravy.

Hemingway, Stevens, and literary letters

In the midst of my current run of reading writers' letters, I received the e-mail below from my friend Joseph G. Peterson, novelist and poet, and it was too much fun, too full of the pleasures offered by literary letters and biographical anecdotes, not to share. So with Joe's permission, here it is:

Last night, I was browsing over the beautiful Borzoi edition of Wallace Stevens's, "Selected Poems". I was reading the biographical timeline in the back of the book when I encountered this fascinating biographical detail:

1936: In February in Key West, a somewhat intoxicated Stevens insulted Ernest Hemingway and a fistfight ensued; Stevens broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw, but the two made amends and concealed the cause of the injury (Stevens claimed he fell down some stairs). In October; Knopf published a trade edition of "Ideas of Order".

It's interesting to note that Stevens was 20 years Hemingway's senior and two years earlier, in 1934, Stevens had been promoted to vice president of Hartford Accident at a salary that in 2008 would have been $280,000.

Can you imagine: 1) a similarly ensconced 55-year-old insurance executive at the high-point of his poetic career going mano a mano with a 35-year-old self-styled pugilist who just three years earlier wrote "Death in the Afternoon"? It seems too unreal to believe.

This raises the question, Levi, what parts of that fist fight are memorialized in Stevens's greatest poem? Can you see Wallace Stevens fresh from his battle with Hemingway, hand wounded, heart still beating furiously, warrior-like (no longer the insurance man) and saying to himself:

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

How crazy to think that two of the most influential writers of the twentieth century should have come to blows in Key West. It makes me think too, that Stevens fled the wreck of that visit and memorialized it in that wonderful stanza from"Farewell to Florida,"

I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees like bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once . . . Farewell. Go on, high ship.

Typing this stanza down, by the way, reminds me of just how closely Stevens entwined his poetic language with that of both Eliot's poetry "Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones, The trees like bones" and of Yeats's poetry, "And that she will not follow in any word, Or look, nor ever again in thought, except / That I loved her once . . . Farewell. Go on, high ship".

But these are just "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season" written on a rainy Chicago morning.

Joe later informed me that his speculation was wrong, that the timing was all off, the poems written before the punch was thrown. But I told him that simply recasts Stevens as a prophet, a seer who knew--as surely many did--that one day Hemingway would need to be punched, and that he might just be the one called on to do the deed.

Letters

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Having spent the past week devouring What There is to Say We Have Said, the new collection of the correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, and thereby being reminded of just how much I love to read writers’ letters, I pawed through my books Sunday afternoon to see just how many collections I have. The results:

The Selected Letters of Lord Byron

The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov

The Letters of Lord Chesterfield

The Letters of Noel Coward

The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert

The Lyttleton-Hart-Davis Letters, Volume I

Selected Letters of Julian Maclaren-Ross

The Letters of Herman Melville

In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire (Mitford) and Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Letters of Jessica Mitford

The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-73

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-1945 (more, please!)

A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography [of Barbara Pym] in Diaries and Letters

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991

Tolstoy's Letters, Volumes I and II

The Letters of E. B. White

Which leads me to the question: what am I missing? Knowing my taste, as so many of you do, are there collections I should seek out while I wait for a volume by Anthony Powell and further volumes from Iris Murdoch?

Westlake on Westlake, sorta

In my continuing mission to read all of Donald Westlake's novels, this week found me reading The Hook (2000), a non-series, non-comic novel that Ethan Iverson calls "a companion to The Ax which is almsot as good." If there's anyone to trust on the subject of Westlake, it's Ethan, but I think he's overstating the case here a bit: The Ax, as I've written before, is a flat-out masterpiece, a truly harrowing book whose hopelessness is so intense that reading it is almost painful. The Hook, on the other hand, while dealing with some of the same themes--a man turns to murder because his legitimate skills are no longer in demand--is, well, odd, and distinctly lesser.

The Hook tels the story of Wayne, a writer of thrillers who has seen his career destroyed by a slight, but steady, decline in sales--and by the way that those sales, recorded by the book chains' computers, set him on a path of downwardly spiraling expectations, advances, and sales. By chance, he meets an old friend, Bryce, who's a very successful writer but is blocked, unable to write because he's wrapped up in a terrible divorce. Bryce offers Wayne a deal: let Bryce publish Wayne's latest manuscript under his name, with no public acknowledgment, and he'll split the advance. Oh, and also Wayne has to kill Bryce's ex-wife.

It's a great set-up, worthy of Westlake at his best. But the resulting novel is a little too long, a little awkward, and a little slow. It's got neither Westlake's comedy nor the claustrophobic, trapped feeling that his serious novels burn with at their best. At the same time, however, it's interesting simply for the fact that, for all its failings, it feels so much like a Westlake novel: from the Invisible Library titles it contains (Double in Diamonds, The Shadowed Other, The Pollux Perspective, The Second Woman, Two Faces) to the unpredictably meandering nature of the plot, you can feel Westlake the playful magician at work, having fun working out every last inevitable detail of the plot he's set in motion.

What's perhaps of more interest to long-time Westlake fans, however, is a sketch of a novel idea that Bryce offers late in the book, when it's clear that he's lost his ability to come up with thriller plots. It comes right after Wayne criticizes an earlier idea as lacking action:

"It's all interior," Bryce said. "It's all inside him."

"Joe would want some action, I think," Wayne said. "And readers, too, they expect something else from you."

Bryce's next idea is even more interior:

"And what happens is, the book opens, he's coming to in the hospital. At first, he doesn't even know who he is."

"Uh huh," Wayne said.

"What happened was," Bryce said, "somebody beat him up, almost killed him, they got him into the hospital just in the nick of time."

"Uh huh," Wayne said.

"His memory comes back," Bryce said, "except for that. The beating. He doesn't remember anything about that."

"Uh huh," Wayne said.

"That's common, you know," Bryce said. "A traumatic experience, and people block it from their memory."

"Yeah, I know," Wayne said.

"So he doesn't know who did it, and he doesn't know why," Bryce said, "and he doesn't know if they're waiting out there to finish the job."

"Uh huh," Wayne said.

"So when he gets out of the hospital," Bryce said, "he starts searching back, trying to get to that moment of the beating, understand it."

"Uh huh," Wayne said.

Bryce looked at him. He didn't say anything.

Wayne said, "And?"

"That's all," Bryce said. "I mean, that's all I have so far."

At the time The Hook was published, there was no reason a Westlake fan would take any real note of that description--but then last year Hard Case Crime published Memory, a novel Westlake wrote in the 1960s but couldn't get published, largely because, as Charles Ardai explained, it's not a crime novel but

serious, ambitious, philosophical literary fiction. . . . that grapples with the themes of existentialism.

The plot? A man gets beaten up on the first page, loses his memory, and spends the entire book trying to reconstruct--and hold on to--the very concept of a continuing self. In other words, too interior--if all you're looking for is a crime novel. But if you're willing to shift your expectations, it's a fascinating book, with moments as tense and freighted with anxiety as any crime novel, and finding its trace unexpectedly in The Hook, along with an acknowledgment of its fate, was quite a surprise.

Watership Down

Of all the many, many books that were important to me as a child, and that have remained closely with me over the years--Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, The Phantom Tollbooth, Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone, The Hobbit--I'm not sure any occupies as high a place as Richard Adams's Watership Down. I read it in third grade, and had a nosebleed all over my father's copy. I read it again in fourth grade, and a couple more times in middle school and high school. Adams's great achievement--presenting characters who are believably complicated, interesting, and human-like, while at the same time never letting us forget that they're rabbits--is one that remains impressive even on adult reacquaintance with the book. If anything, it's a more astonishing novel, because the anthropomorphizing that is so much a part of childhood is farther away, our tolerance significantly lessened, yet Adams holds our interest, and convinces us, nonetheless.

At heart, it's a book about different ways of organizing a society, and as the rabbits encounter a number of warrens, each built around a different idea of what constitutes security, the book takes on a moral force akin to that found in The Once and Future King. Lest that make the novel sound crudely allegorical, I should say that it's nothing of the sort: the rabbits are rabbits, their society is their society, not ours, and while we can draw lessons from what they experience, within the novel it never feels as if they're experiencing it for our sake.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post: if you're a Chicagoan and you love Watership Down, or loved it as a kid, you should go see the Lifeline Theatre's production of it that runs through this weekend. Rocketlass and I went Saturday, our confidence in Lifeline just barely balancing the inevitable doubts: How on earth can you put on aplay about bunnies without everyone on stage looking ridiculous? How, with the scrim of the mind's eye removed, would they be able to convince us that these actors, obviously people, were actually rabbits?

Well, they did it. The actors don't dress like rabbits, but they move with a deliberate, practiced strangeness that is taken from, and calls to mind, the twitchy fearfulness of rabbits. And within minutes of the curtain rising, rocketlass and I--and, it seems, the entire audience--bought it. By the time the first act drew to a close, coming out of the story was a lot like emerging from a dream.

The adaptation isn't perfect, if only because a long novel has been squeezed into a play of ordinary length. Each of the groups of other rabbits that the bunch meets is dealt with more glancingly in the play than in the novel, which causes the casual brutality of the first warren and the uncanny horrors of a later one to be muted. The complicated relationships among Fiver, Bigwig, and Hazel are sketched rather than fully enacted, and while the play tries admirably, it can't ever quite convey as well as Adams the way that being thrust into leadership works on Hazel. Adams manages to perpetually locate him in the moment of decision, with no sense of authorial or readerly knowledge of what's to come, lets us see Hazel forced to learn, adapt, and be decisive, and the admiration those qualities elicit in his companions; the play does a good job of addressing the topic, but again, time constraints limit it.

Yet even having acknowledged those limitations, I'm amazed. For two and a half hours, I felt like we were watching, and caring about, rabbits, in the same way that Adams makes you feel like you're reading about rabbits. Their vulnerability makes you ache: they're forever in danger; like Cain, the whole world sets its hand against them. Watching, you feel what it is to be prey. It's an amazing achievement, and it brings to mind the terror of powerlessness that Philip Larkin captures in his poem about a disease that was deliberately introduced to control rabbit populations, "Myxomatosis":

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

But unlike Larkin, Adams and the Lifeline crew, bring the rabbits out of it. Their enemies will never be fully vanquished, of course, but the rabbits are at least vouchsafed a bit of hard-earned peace. If you're a Watership Down fan, go see this play. If you've not read Watership Down, seek it out--then give a copy to your kids, your nieces and nephews.

"If I keep on reading Hardy, it will come."

I've spent the past week head over heels in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, which is looking likely to become the only letters collection I've ever read straight through. I've been, and will continue to be, drawing on it in my Twitter feed and over at the Annex; few writers are as dear to my heart as Maxwell, and the correspondence seems likely to turn me into a Welty fan, too.

There are many reasons to love these letters, and I'll get into a number of them in the coming weeks, but one of the chief reasons is the way the pair share their reading--and the fact that they're both perpetually reading a couple of my favorite authors. They talk continuously of Virginia Woolf, voraciously reading every new book about her and her coterie that appears; they're gone on Forster, whom I suspect it's time for me to revisit; and they both revel in the high tragedy of Thomas Hardy.

My favorite passage about Hardy thus far is this, from a letter sent by Maxwell on March 7, 1967:

I am so glad you are working. Able to. I think about working. This idea and that. But don't take off my hat and sit down to it, for some reason. I almost had an idea in France last summer, but it faded away like the Cheshire cat's smile. But I tell myself if I keep on reading Hardy, it will come. I have just finished Tess of the D-- ---. When Angel Clare found her in that seaside resort, living with Alec D'Urbeville, and she said, "Don't come near me," and "Too late, too late," and he went away, and she went upstairs to her bedroom and [threw] herself on the floor with her head on that chair, and said "O,O,O" and then "I can't bear it," it was she and I that couldn't bear it. I will never be the same. But what do you think they talked about for those five days, in that empty house that didn't belong to them? Brazil?

This hints at a crucial aspect of Hardy: either you vibrate to the tones he works in, are willing to go with what Anthony Powell calls his "at times clumsily expressed" account of life's grotesqueries and tragedies, or you see it all as overblown and ridiculously operatic. If you're in the former camp, Hardy's novels--Tess especially--can wrench you like little else, you can't bear it; if you're in the latter, your response is likely to take the form of, "Really? Really?"

Having taken great pleasure in reading and re-reading Hardy over the years, I am glad to be in the former camp, and, now, to know that I have such distinguished company as Maxwell and Welty.

"I'll never see anything like it again, nor will anyone." R. I. P., Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

The NYRB Classics Tumblr has alerted me to the news that Patrick Leigh Fermor has died. The death of a ninety-six-year-old tends to bring more appreciation than sadness, at least to those of us who knew the man only through his words. I've written about Fermor here quite a bit before; his travel writings are among the best of the genre, and for an unapologetic Anglophile like myself, Fermor epitomized a certain attractive strand of English upper-class intrepidity, a more benignly globetrotting twentieth-century version of the Victorian imperialist adventurer. If you've not read him, now's the time: as I wrote over at the Annex: Start with A Time of Gifts, the first leg of his lifelong journey, or In Tearing Haste, the collection of his correspondence with Deborah Mitford. And then don’t stop. When you’re done with it all, you can read W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight, an account of the time the author and Fermor kidnapped a German general.

A Fermor fan site is gathering links to obituaries, which will be plentiful and full of incident. For my remembrance, I'll turn to an unforgettable party scene that Fermor, a splendid raconteur and light-hearted enjoyer of good company, described in a letter of thanks to the host, his good friend Deborah Mitford, in a letter of July 26, 1990, collected in In Tearing Haste:

It was a marvelous and grand arrival there--the expanse of empty black-and-white check flor, then the great swoop of scarlet stairs, with your solitary triumvirate welcomingly halted half way up. . . . It was as if the whole house had transformed into a different element, half familiar and half unknown, like a fair, or an aquarium full of resplendent creatures and any number of friendly faces, starting with Henry's. The tented acreage--those steps and the normally outdoors reclining statue and dog being indoors gave a real through-the-looking-glass feeling. The whole thing, that array of people looking after us, everything being marvellous and on time, as though being painlessly managed with a magic wand--there were so many openings for things being held up, or going wrong. None did and, for me, the whole thing dissolved into one of those golden Turner radiances. . . . The great thing was that you and Andrew spread such a feeling of enjoyment and warmth and fun, that it seemed to affect everything else. It was only later that it occurred to me that I had told my entire life story to Madame de Vogue last time, the only one, I'd sat next to her, but it didn't seem to matter. Part of the previously golden Turneresque mist was that I lost touch with all nearest and dearest--couldn't find you or Robert, sat and had long chats with Coote and Billa. What was strange was that it seemed simultaneously to last for ever and to be over almost at once. Like Wellington's battle comparison. It all looked fantastic, driving away, looking back on bridge and river, the big tent, the full moon high up, a few decorative alabaster clouds floating discreetly, some people strolling under oak trees, and dawn beginning to break. It was still total glory. I'll never see anything like it again, nor will anyone, and many many thanks to you and Andrew.

And tons of love from
Paddy

If there's an afterlife, I hope that a Turneresque mist and some alabaster clouds, plentiful fine drinks and good company, and perhaps a little-noted footpath disappearing off into the woods, are what greet Fermor tonight. Rest in peace.

Summer is here!

And so is the Summer issue of the Quarterly Conversation!

My review this time is of a new translation of Ovid's Amores and Heroides from Harvard (from which I've quoted extensively over at the Annex already). Other highlights include Patrick Kurp on Adam Zagajewski, Andy Frazee on Alberto Mobilio's new book, and Erica Mena on the monster FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry.

Oh, and a collection of takes on the question "Who was David Foster Wallace?", the answers to which range through all of his published works, from his masterpiece, Infinite Jest, to his story collections to the new, unfinished The Pale King. It's an impressive lineup of writers, and the results vary interestingly in their tone and approach to the question.

Let your work slide, folks--there's reading to do!

Dorothy Whipple

Browsing Three Lives & Company bookstore on a recent trip to New York, I was seduced yet again by an elegant book from Persephone Press, Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance (1953). It's a straightforward tale of the destruction of a seemingly stable marriage by the introduction of a French adventuress who, in her amorality and biting disdain is nearly as memorable as Thackeray's Becky Sharp. She loves Madame Bovary, for all the wrong reasons. It's the sort of novel that Persephone does so well: minor and forgotten, yet well worth reading if you're into quietly domestic twentieth-century British fiction.

The book is primarily carried by Whipple's keen insight into the compromises and self-deceptions of marriage, as well as the destructiveness of unacknowledged selfishness, but it's also full of well-drawn minor characters and moments of shining wit. The dry tone of the following made me smile:

The art of letter-writing, as taught at the Pension Ste Colombe, had not included an example of a letter one could write to one's lover's wife to ask her to send the clothes he had left behind when he deserted her, and Louise spent a considerable time in wondering how to word it. It was, she admitted to herself, a difficult sort of letter.

And then there's this peek inside the cloudy head of the weak husband himself:

"I think we'll all have a glass of sherry," he said.

He almost worked on that axiom. When in doubt, have a glass of sherry. It tided him over. It put things off, and after a glass of sherry, problems mostly solved themselves.

That's nearly enough to indict him on its own: anyone who would fall back on sherry as a problem solver is not to be trusted. Sherry, after all, is at best a pointed stick compared to the Swiss army knife that is gin.

Nicholson Baker works blue once again

I feel I should begin this post with an apology, and perhaps a warning: as they say in the comedy business, I am, however temporarily, working blue here.

It's because of Nicholson Baker. Late this summer, Baker will publish a new novel, which would be a reason for joy no matter its content; Baker's novels, each sui generis, yet each affording what feels convincingly like communion with Baker's odd, hyperspace mind, are a sheer joy.

But this time, the anticipation is even greater, because of the book's title. Are you ready? (Have you made sure your boss isn't looking over your shoulder?) House of Holes: A Book of Raunch. Ahem.

Anyone who's read The Fermata, that magically ridiculous piece of porn masquerading as literature, knows that Baker can definitely work blue--and that he can do it without surrendering the Nabokovian sheen of his prose. The new book apparently offers more evidence of that skill: a couple of weeks ago Sam Anderson, on his Times blog The 6th Floor, selected two sentences from House of Holes among his five favorite sentences of that week . . . and then redacted them, calling them "too scatological for the 6th Floor blog."

Which brings me to another of Baker's best qualities: his utter shamelessness--and even more, the evident glee he takes in being shameless. There is no topic that is beneath him, no indignity to which he will not admit if it furthers the argument he's making or the story he's telling. Most of us, were we to come up with the idea of a man who's able to temporarily stop time, would quickly bury it once some of the more sordid possibilities began to emerge; Baker dove in and wrote a whole novel. Most of us, if we thought our psoriasis was an indicator of some essential affinity with John Updike, would pretend even to ourselves that we didn't actually believe it. Baker not only writes about it at length in U and I, he takes it one ridiculous, unnecessary step further:

When my psoriasis began to get bad, on the other hand, I welcomed its spread at first--I'd been worried that because the disease had shown up late in me (phase I involved only the scalp and penis) . . .

And, surprised anew, we laugh. Elsewhere in U and I is what is, to me at least, a much more startling confession:

I myself have never successfully masturbated to Updike's writing, though I have to certain remembered scenes in Iris Murdoch.

To which my response--and, I'm willing to proclaim, any sane response--is:

1. Eewww.
2. Really? Iris Murdoch? "Sex comes to most of us with a twist," indeed.
3. That "succesfully" in there. That's the brilliant bit, a little landmine of glee masquerading as straightforward explanation. If you wanted to shoot Baker's genius into space on the tiniest of rockets in order to give alien civilizations something a bit more down to earth to chew on than the high-culture bombast carried by Viking II, that one little word might almost suffice.

All of which makes me await House of Holes with bated breath. Which is better, I suppose, than heavy breathing.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, anatomized

Melyvn Bragg's "In Our Time" program on the BBC's Radio 4 is almost always worth attending to: Bragg assembles three or four experts on a topic, anything from logic to Cleopatra to the neutrino, and he somehow manages to keep them all on point and speaking clearly at a smart layman's level for an hour of fascinating discussion and explanation.

Recently, "In Our Time" covered one of my favorite books for perpetual consultation, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. You can listen to the program at the BBC's site, though I believe they only keep them up for a limited time; it's possible that if it's disappeared from that link you can find it for free in the iTunes store.

One of the pleasures of the digital age is being able to consult Burton on specific topics merely through a keyword search. A search for "broadcast," which seemed unlikely (Yes, I find: Merriam-Webster's dates it to 1767), led me to a search for "news," which was more productive, turning up this bit of advice about letting go of one's regrets and not dwelling on one's past--for everyone else will soon be distracted by other topics:

Be content; 'tis but a nine dayes wonder; and as one sorrow drives out another, one passion another, one cloud another, one rumour is expelled by another; every day almost, come new news unto our ears, as how the sun was eclipsed, meteors seen i'th' aire, monsters born, prodigies, how the Turks were overthrown in Persia, an earth-quake in Helvetia, Calabria, Japan, or China, an inundation in Holland, a great plague in Constantinople, a fire at Prage, a dearth in Germany, such a man is made a lord, a bishop, another hanged, deposed, prest to death, for some murder, treason, rape, theft, oppression; all which we do hear at first with a kind of admiration, detestation, consternation; but by and by they are buried in silence: thy father's dead, thy brother rob'd, wife runs mad, neighbour hath kild himselfe; 'tis heavy, gastly, fearful newes at first, in every mans mouth, table talk; but, after a while, who speaks or thinks of it? It will be so with thee and thine offence: it will be forgotten in an instant, be it theft, rape, sodomy, murder, incest, treason, &c. thou art not the first offender, nor shalt thou be the last; 'tis no wonder; every houre such malefactors are called in question: nothing so common,

There is, of course, the alternative approach, taken by Charlie Sheen, of reveling in one's bad acts and noising them about oneself. I don't know how Burton would have addressed such a tack, but this passage might suffice:

for his intemperance he hath aches, crudities, gowts, and, as fruits of his idleness and fulness, lust, surfeiting and drunkenness, all manner of diseases: pecuniis augetur improbitas: the wealthier, the more dishonest. He is exposed to hatred, envy, peril and treason, fear of death of degradation, &c. 'tis lubrica statio et proxima prxcipitio; and the higher he climbs, the greater is his fall.

Memorial Day

From a letter sent by Abraham Lincoln on May 25, 1861, to the parents of Elmer Ellsworth, a friend of Lincoln and the first Union officer killed in the war:

My dear sir and Madam, In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surprisingly great. This power, combined with fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as it seemed to me, the best natural talent, I ever knew.

I found this passage in a post at the LIbrary of America' Reader's Almanac blog that draws on their new volume The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It and Adam Goodheart's acclaimed new book 1861: The Civil War Awakening to tell the story of Ellsworth, a man who found unusual fame even before he became a symbol of the sacrifices that the war would call for, The post is well worth clicking over to and reading, as, I suspect, are both books.

Ellsworth was but the first of those to give, as Lincoln would later put it, "the last full measure of devotion" to their country. The death toll of the Civil War is staggering even when considered against the current population of America; when considered as part of the much smaller nation of the time, it's almost incomprehensible. On this Memorial Day, 150 years later, I'm grateful that, for all our continuing follies as humans, we are no long quite so blithe about sending soldiers to certain death by the tens of thousands. True civilization, by its nature, may forever elude us, always demanding some further refinement of our nature, but in this respect at least we are a bit farther down the road.

Matthew Scudder is back

I wrote last week about how impressed I was by Lester Dent's achievement in Honey in His Mouth of writing a good crime novel built around a fencepost-dumb protagonist. Today, I'm marveling at an even more impressive achievement, this one by Lawrence Block: his new Matthew Scudder book, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, is a crime novel that derives nearly all of its suspense, not from the crime under investigation, but from its protagonist's day-by-day, minute-by-minute struggle to keep from drinking. And it works: the book is completely gripping, as through page after page you alternate between dread and relief, pulled on by the palpable force of Scudder's will even as you (and he) worry that it may not be enough.

Ed Park's review of the book for Time is a good place to go for more; he does a nice job of setting the novel in context of the rest of Block's Scudder books, in which alcohol--and, in the past several novels, recovery--has always played a large part. I think it was from Scudder, rather than from any afterschool special, that I got my first sense of how powerful addiction could be, and how the struggle to overcome it could never quite be definitively won. But none of the novels until this one have focused so relentlessly on that struggle, and it's a testament to Block's writing, and more to his narrative voice as Scudder, that he makes it so compelling. Scudder sits with a Coke as informants drink, and he catches a whiff of whiskey; he walks to fill time he would once have spent drinking; he calls his sponsor at all hours and gets the sort of advice that is familiar to us from Bubbles's struggles on The Wire or David Foster Wallace's brilliant analysis in Infinite Jest, advice that is so simple, so basic, so no-nonsense that it ought not to work--and yet somehow does.

All that should make for a novel that is relentlessly grim, but that's not the case; in fact, A Drop of the Hard Stuff is also a lot of fun--even in extremis Scudder is a gentle ironist at heart, and the book full of the usual Block touches, the humor and observations and asides that make it obvious how he and Donald Westlake could be great friends. My favorite is this playful exchange between Scudder and an informant:

He was frowning in concentration. "Jack, Jack, Jack. Did he have a sobriquet?"

"A what?"

"A nickname, for Christ's sake. And don't tell me you didn't know the word."

"I knew it," I said. "I've come across it in print, but I'm not sure I ever heard anyone say it before. I certainly never heard anyone say it in Poogan's"

"It's a perfectly fine word. And it's not exactly the same as a nickname. Take Charles Lindbergh. His nickname was Lindy--"

"As in hop," I suggested.

"--and his sobriquet was the Lone Eagle. George Herman Ruth, nickname was Babe, sobriquet was the Sultan of Swat. Al Capone--"

"I get the idea."

"I just wanted to keep on saying it, Matthew. Sobriquet. I know it from reading, and I don't think I ever heard it before, and I know for certain I never said it before. I wonder if I'm pronouncing it correctly."

"I'm the wrong person to ask."

"I'll look it up," he said, and he picked up his glass and put it down without drinking. "Hi-Low Jack," he said. "Wasn't that his fucking sobriquet? Isn't that what they called him?"

And just like that, digression is folded back into plot, and Scudder is off on his quest.

Block is a treasure, and the fact that he's still turning out good novels--novels that show that he remains engaged and interested in his craft--is something to celebrate. It's good to have Matt Scudder back.

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.