Crime time!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Sorry, can't blog today. Too busy reading Gillian Flynn's Dark Places.

Oh, fine. How about a quick crime novel roundup, and then I'll go back to trying to figure out what wonderfully horrible twist Flynn's going to surprise me with next?

1 The new batch of Parker novels is out now from the University of Chicago Press: Flashfire (2000) and Firebreak (2001). They've got an introduction by Terry Teachout that's one of the best we've published. Teachout points out that despite his sociopathic tendencies, "Parker kills only when absolutely necessary, a clear sign that he isn't crazy"; does a nice job of drawing the distinction between Stark's Parker and Westlake's Dortmunder; and quotes my favorite Dortmunder line, which just might be my favorite Westlake line, period:

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.

Flashfire is one of the best in the series, featuring a lot of heists, a strong female character (who's a civilian, no less!), and some truly great exchanges between Parker and a Florida sheriff. It's easy to why Hollywood chose this one to launch the upcoming Parker movie series.

2 Over the weekend I continued my progress through the rest of Westlake's novels. I started with a darkly comic novel called Two Much (1975), in which one of Westlake's least honorable and least likable protagonists cons two rich twin sisters into thinking that he, too, is a twin--and a separate twin is sleeping with each sister. It's a great example of two Westlake strengths: his enjoyment of playing out the implications of a puzzle he sets for himself and his understanding, most clearly on display in the Parker novels, that our instinct as readers is to want the narrator to get away with what he's doing almost regardless of how awful it is or how amoral he is. Present us with a problem and we want to see it solved; Westlake knew that better than anyone I can think of.

3 The other Westlake I read this weekend was refreshingly light: Good Behavior (1985), which finds John Dortmunder and his gang trying to kidnap a nun . . . on behalf of her convent. It won't surprise you that the gang ends up dressed in habits:

Very strange. When nothing shows but your face, enclosed by the white oval of a wimple and the featureless black of a nun's costume, you wouldn't expect much by way of individual character to show through, but it did, it did. . . . Tiny, whose face mostly consisted of knuckles anyway, was barely plausible as the kind of false nun who, in the Middle Ages, poisoned and robbed unwary travelers. Stan Murch looked like a pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales, probably the one with ideas for alternate routes to Canterbury. . . . Kelp was surely someone whose sister was the pretty one, while Dortmunder looked mostly like a missionary nun who was already among the cannibals and headhunters before realizing she'd lost her faith.

It's all as ridiculous as it sounds, and it makes for one of the best of the Dortmunder series.

4 While Hard Case Crime will officially mark their welcome return next month with the publication of Lawrence Block's new book of smut and crime, Getting Off (which I'm looking forward to reading soon alongside Nicholson Baker's new book of smut and smut, House of Holes), they'll also be publishing a new book by Max Allan Collins, Quarry's Ex (2011). Collins is at his best when writing about Quarry, whose character is perfectly suited for Collins's tight mix of violence, quips, and social observation, and I've really enjoyed watching him flesh out the hitman's backstory these past couple of years. Quarry's Ex is a strong addition to that story. It should show up in stores in September; it's available for pre-order now.

5 I'll close by returning to Gillian Flynn, so that I can return to reading Gillian Flynn: last summer, at the start of the annual Stahl family vacation, I gave a copy of Flynn's first novel, Sharp Objects, to my sister. She blazed through it, then lent it to my brother. As he was nearing the end, my sister and I sat and watched him, waiting for him to get to that part, so we could see how he reacted. He kept looking up and laughing at us . . . and then he got to that part. He stopped laughing.

The Beauties of Powell--and no, this isn't a post about Pamela Flitton and Matilda Donners

When you re-read a favorite book as often as I re-read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, you find yourself focusing on different aspects each time through. This time around, as I've been reading the penultimate volume, Temporary Kings, the past couple of days, I've found myself reading it almost as if it's one of those collections from the days of lax copyright enforcement, a "Beauties of" collection, this one not The Beauties of Shakespeare or The Beauties of Sterne, but The Beauties of Powell.

I'm drawn to his frequently memorable turns of phrase, their aphoristic nature softened--even as their effect is heightened--by Powell's habit of putting them in the mouths of specific characters. Take this, for example, from Dr. Brightman, an academic Nick Jenkins meets at a conference in Venice:

Certain persons require a court. Others prefer a harem. That is not quite the same thing.

It's a line that could have come from any number of Nick's closest friends--Barnby, Moreland, and even Isobel come to mind--and its function here is not only make us smile with recognition, but to help us understand the affinity Nick feels, to his mild surprise, for Brightman.

Then there are Nick's own observations, which tend to be more extended and to carry a meditative, worried-over, even self-doubting quality. Here, he's reflecting on some stories provided by a potential biographer of X. Trapnel:

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

Then there's this, provoked by meeting a pair of acquaintances whom logic suggests would only be found together if sex is involved:

Ada's immediate assumption of the exaggeratedly welcoming manner of one caught in compromising circumstances was not very convincing either.

Or this, on an old boss re-encountered:

He gave minute instructions, forcibly bringing back the years when I had worked under him, something establishing a relationship which can never wholly fade.

Or his assessment of his father, whose finicky, martinet-by-way-of-habitual-grumpiness marked Nick's childhood:

My father had few friends. The cause of that was not, I think, his own ever smouldering irascibility: people put up surprisingly well with irascibility, some even finding in it a spice to life otherwise humdrum. There is little evidence that the irascible, as a class, are friendless, and my father's bursts of temper may, for certain acquaintances, have added to the excitement of knowing him. It was more a kind of diffidence, uncertainty of himself (to some extent inducing the irascibility) that also militated against intimacy.

Adding interest to this description is the fact that Nick, while alert to his father's faults, is himself diffident, more seen than heard, a quality that makes him the perfect narrative window.

Page after page of Dance offer similar pleasures, presenting the world seen, not, in Browning's sense, plain, but through a distinct sensibility, Nick's, informed by the experience (and gossip) of decades and generous enough to encompass, gratefully, the stories and opinions and judgments of the many other people who make up the weave of a life. There's a reason this is my favorite book in the world, folks; I'll be reading and re-reading it for a long, long time to come.

Temporary Kings

Finding myself last night in one of those rare moods when I couldn't settle into any one book--I tried fiction, criticism, poetry, history--I finally remembered the best rule for a situation like that: turn to an old favorite. For me, that was Anthony Powell, and the moment I opened A Dance to the Music of Time my restlessness was cured.

I picked up at the penultimate volume, Temporary Kings (1973), where I'd last left off in my perpetual re-reading. The final volumes of Dance are unquestionably the weakest. Some critics, including Christopher Hitchens, deem them (or at least the final one, Hearing Secret Harmonies) a failure,

no longer informed by experience and curiosity, well-recollected and hard-won and wrought over in reflection. Rather, it resembles the plaintive tone of a beached colonial retiree, convinced that all around him is going to the dogs.

Though I think Hitchens certainly goes too far (a specialty of his), and I've defended the final volumes before, I'll concede that the final two books, at least, don't have quite the verve or appeal as the earlier ones: many of the most interesting characters of the earlier volumes are dead, and even Trapnel, the series' final brilliantly living invention, is no longer around, leaving the narrative to be carried by second stringers (Ada Leintwardine, Polly Duport, Books Bagshaw) and new characters, some compelling (Gwinnett, Brightman), others flat or one-note (Jacky Bragadin, Louis Glober).

This leads to a slight, but palpable sense of disengagement--but one that is, if frustrating at times, nonetheless suitable. The greatest achievement of Dance is its tracking of the way that age changes a cohort, from Nick Jenkins, the narrator, on down. By Temporary Kings, Nick and friends are in their mid-fifties, and while a true aficionado and observer of human behavior will always find new wrinkles to fascinate him, by the time of Temporary Kings, Nick evinces an awareness that the stories most important to his life, the threads that have truly been woven in with his own, have been spun out, tied off, and that when most of the new threads he sees around him, spun out by people in a younger generation, are resolved, he won't be around to see them. The novel's title, taken from a reference Nick makes to The Golden Bough, is an acknowledgment of that fact: the world is slowly passing him, and his generation, by, as it always has and always will.

Which is not to say, by any means, that a reader of Dance won't find pleasures in the characters in this volume, nor that they shouldn't look forward to some of its truly dramatic and revealing scenes featuring older favorites. The first time around, there will be plenty to engage and surprise in Temporary Kings. But on what must I think be my fifth time through, I found myself taking pleasure in and attending less to the specifics of character or plot than to the simple pleasure of being in company with Nick Jenkins and his approach to thought and observation, modeled, one feels comfortable assuming, on Powell's own.

Take the opening scene, which finds Nick, in Venice for an academic conference, watching an aged singer of Neapolitan songs perform. As usual with Nick, art occasions reflection, offering new ways of thinking of, classifying, and understanding friends, family, and experience, seeing how each holds up against or is refracted by similar or dissimilar portrayals in various art forms. In this case, a memory of a youthful visit to Venice (during which he saw a singer who looked remarkably similar to this one) leads to comparisons of the singer to an old acquaintance:

The stylized movements of the hands were reminiscent of Dicky Umfraville at one of his impersonations. He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves, perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at bay the melancholy--all but chronic Frederica and his stepchildren complained--now that Umfraville had retired from work as agent at Thrubworth.

Which eventually returns Nick to the singer himself:

The aged singer looked as if thoughts of death, melancholy in any form, were unknown to him. He could be conceived as suffering from rage, desire, misery, anguish, despair; not melancholy. That was clear; additionally so after the round of applause following his number. The clapping was reasonably hearty considering the heat, almost as oppressive as throughout the day just passed. Dr Emily Brightman and I joined in. Acknowledgment of his talent delighted the performer. He bowed again and again, repeatedly baring blackened sporadic stumps, while he mopped away streams of sweat that coursed down channels of dry loose skin ridging either side of his mouth. Longevity had brought not the smallest sense of repletion where public recognition was in question. That was on the whole sympathetic. One found oneself taking more interest than formerly in the habits and lineaments of old age.

What I appreciate about these passages is less the specifics of Nick's reflections, though I definitely enjoy those, than the fact of them: this, I realize as I read them, is how we experience art, one part of our brain engaging, sometimes deeply, with it, while another part meditates, zooms off on tangents, weaves it into the larger fabric of life and our attempts to understand it. Reading Dance reminds me of how frustratingly short shrift art (and especially books) gets within fiction; a reader's life, mental and emotional, is always wrapped up in the books he's reading, but how often do you encounter a fictional character who manifests that relationship to any kind of art?

I'll have more to say about Temporary Kings in Friday's post. For now, I'm just pleased to be back in Powell's world, one where art is as much a part of life as friends, gossip, love, and loss.

"The beginning is not a beginning at all," or, Maybe it's time to read Tristram Shandy again?

I pulled Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, and Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Indexes (2007), a book as precious yet as satisfying as its title, off my shelf over the weekend because I remembered that Thirlwell wrote well on the topic of Tristram Shandy. And I wasn't disappointed. Here, for example, is as good a distillation of Shandy as I could imagine being crammed into five sentences:

The essence of Sterne's novel is the way, deadpan, he makes Tristram a character who is stricken by a mania for comprehensiveness. To describe this type of mania, Sterne came up with the word hobbyhorse. Sterne's style is predicated on the hobbyhorse. All his destabilising of beginnings and endings (and everything in between) are part of his way of describing character: a construction helplessly at its own mercy, in thrall of compulsions of its own making. And Tristram's mania for comprehensiveness creates havoc with the book.

Writing a novel, you can try to get it all in; you can leave it all out; you can strike a middle ground and pretend that you've covered it all. Brutally: David Foster Wallace; Chekhov; Trollope. Sterne decided to make a game of pretending to care most about trying to get it all in; we've been playing in his playground ever since.

But Thirwell's next paragraph is even better, because it can so easily be turned on us, readers racing through our piles of unread books:

Tristram takes his life so seriously that his Life becomes impossible. For Tristram discovers that no beginning is ever a beginning. Every description of a beginning requires another description of the beginning's beginning, and so on. Therefore, although Tristram's Life, in its final state, take up around 600 pages, he has still not managed to get past the first few months of his life.

We read, in part, to illuminate and understand our experience, but what is the balance? When, instead, should we put down the book and go out?

All of this reminded me of a line from an early review of the novel in the Royal Female Magazine of February 1760, collected in the Norton Critical Edition of Tristram Shandy, which makes up for its ugliness as a book with this section of contemporary reviews:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy . . . affects (and not unsuccessfully) to please, by a contempt of all the rules observed in other writings, and therefore cannot justly have its merit measured by them.

The reviewer does, however, go on to complain of the "wantonness of the author's wit" and to wish that a note of delicacy could have been introduced. The very idea of a delicate, inoffensive Sterne boggles the mind (a topic that came up a couple of years ago in connection with Thirlwell and one of those oh-so-eighteenth-century volumes, The Beauties of Sterne).

Then there's the first review of the novel, by William Kentrick in the December 1759 issue of the Monthly Review, which notes what is still a valid objection, and its, if not refutation, then at least its leavening factor:

There prevails, indeed, a certain quaintness, and something like an affectation of being immoderately witty, throughout the whole work. But this is perhaps the Author's manner. Be that, however, as it will, it is generally attended with spirit and humour enough to render it entertaining.

Which, if my memory of sixteen years ago is true, remains the case these 250 years later. There is, in Tristram Shandy, some flop sweat, but it's more than made up for by the true humor, inventiveness, surprise, and even genius on offer elsewhere in the book. Yet sixteen years is a long time to be away from a book one professes to love: perhaps it's time to revisit Tristram and Uncle Toby and the rest? Any thoughts, readers?

A Friday night story

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I suspect that Friday night is the best time to read the title story of Harvey Swados's Nights in the Gardens of Brookyln. An adult Friday night, that is, spent in, not out; at home, perhaps alone, or, if with your spouse, quietly. For it is about remembering, with nostalgia but realism, the city of one's youth, half real and half the product of your hopes of the time. The opening sets the scene:

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter. I was young, the war (the one that ended in 1945, the only one that will ever be "the war" for people my age) was just over, and I was free.

It's about being young and in love--with a city and with a person--and having friends who are in the same situation, and of feeling like the city is a stage for your explorations and adventures. Even those of us who are homebodies by nature remember those days.

But it's also about how a city is a perpetual reminder than you can't stop change: you can't hold a city still or make it be or stay what you want any more than you can do that with your friends. So that even a scene like this, of recalled mornings of pleasure, contains the implied sting of loss:

It started with late breakfast at our place on Remsen Street; then around noon we'd meander over the little Penny Bridge at the foot of Montague Street and on through the broken-down bars and vague-eyed derelicts of Myrtle Avenue and Sands Street (all gone now, replaced by handsome characterless courthouses and office buildings), on to the great bridge. So there are pictures of Barney and me cavorting, of Deelie and Pauline strolling like models on the promenade, of us all lined up before the struts with the marvelous skyline and the springtime sun behind us, our faces half in shadow but leaning forward to the camera's eye in hope and expectation.

In "hope and expectation": what Swados does in just forty pages is remind us of what that felt like and map out the difference between those who, as the years pile up, trade expectation, profitably, for contentment, and those who keep looking, sometimes to their detriment. In its ability to distinguish emotionally between youth and age it's as good as anything I can think of outside of a favorite passage from William Maxwell's Ancestors, which I quoted in this post a couple of years ago.

Are the compromises worth it? Should we lament the passing of youthful expectations? The beauty of Swados's story is that he shows us their allure without luring us, shows us their poisons without preaching, and leaves us--as we sit at home on this Friday night with our piano, the ballgame on quietly in the background--for tonight, at least feeling as if the trade-off was a good one.

Short, round, tall, short, or, "Now that was a silly business."

1 Charles Portis's wonderfully cracked Norwood (1966) has provided me another citation for my running file of comparisons to Sydney Greenstreet!

The man with the funny voice was a midget of inestimable age. He was sitting on the end of the bowling machine runway with his legs crossed. On his face there was a Sydney Greenstreet look of weary petulance.

Weary petulance--that's the best way to describe Greenstreet's best, and most typical, look. The only other look I can imagine competing with it would be his look of rapidly eroding patience.

I'll take this occasion to repeat my plea: all you novelists out there, I want more Sydney Greenstreet comparisons! Even after Donald Westlake's honorable efforts, the field remains relatively unploughed, ready for your best efforts! In an earlier post on this topic, I even wrote some that you're welcome to use to get started:

"The next morning the sun announcing my hangover was like Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca: huge, round, smug, and disasteful."

"She was built like Sydney Greenstreet, and even had his laugh, but you couldn't take your eyes off her--which, come to think of it, made her even more like Greenstreet."

"Give it up, man--you couldn't keep a lid on this story if you put it in a steamer trunk and plopped Sydney Greenstreet on the top."

Get to it, writers of America!

2 Since I started with a classic fat man, it seems right to turn to one of the strangest bits of information in Robert K. Massie's Peter the Great (1980), which I also read last week: his account of Frederick William I of Prussia's obsession with giants:

The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of them, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, were almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive--one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds--and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the giants lent to Frederick William and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)

As I typed that passage, I kept thinking that it was getting too long and I should cut it off. But where could I have stopped? Would you have wanted to continue in life not knowing about Peter's annual fifty-giant gift? Or Frederick's despondence when he took some back? Each sentence piles on yet another amazing detail. The past is a foreign country indeed--they do things insanely differently there.

3 Or maybe not so much, depending on whether you're hanging out in the American South in a Charles Portis novel. Back to Norwood, and a conversation with the earlier "midget of inestimable age," who introduces himself to Norwood as Edmund B. Ratner, the world's smallest perfect man:

"My father sold me when I was just a pup."

"Sold you?"

"Yes."

"I don't believe that."

"It's true, yes. He sold me to a man named Curly Hill. Those were dreadful times! My father, Solomon Ratner, was not an uneducated man but he was only a junior railway clerk and there were so many mouths to feed. And imagine, a midget in the house! Well, Curly came to town with his animal show--he toured all the fairs. He saw me at the station and asked me how I would like to wear a cowboy suit and ride an Irish wolfhound. He had a chimp named Bob doing it at the time. I directed him to my father and they came to terms. I never learned the price though I expect it was around twenty pounds, perhaps more. Now understand, I don't brood on it. Curly was like a second father to me, a very decent, humorous man. He came from good people. His mother was the oldest practical nurse in the United Kingdom. I saw her once, she looked like a mummy, poor thing. The pound was worth five dollars at that time."

"Are you with a circus here?"

"No, no, I thought I told you, I left circus work. Now that was a silly business. I let my appetite run away with me. I can't account for it, it came and it went. Pizzas, thick pastramis, chili dogs--nothing was too gross and I simply could not get enough. Some gland acting up. I grew four inches and gained almost two stone. Well, the upshot was, they took away my billing as the World's Smallest Perfect Man and gave it to a little goon who calls himself Bumblebee Billy. I ask you! Bumblebee Billy! All his fingers are like toes. Needless to say, I was furious and I said some regrettable little things to the boss. The long and short is, I was sacked altogether. "

"Them are regular little hands you got."

"Of course they are."

"If you were out somewhere without anything else around, like a desert, and I was to start walking toward you I would walk right into you because I would think you were further off than what you were."

"I've never heard it put quite that way."

Doesn't that make you want to, first, thank the gods that the world has someone as strange as Charles Portis in it, and, second, run out and buy, not a midget or giant, for that would be wrong, but the first Portis novel you find?

In Search of Lost Nuance, or, Twitter and Proust

I quoted the following line from Francisco Goldman's moving, awkwardly intimate memoir Say Her Name (2011) on my Twitter feed today:

Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.

Stephen Mitchelmore, a blogger and critic I enjoy reading both for his perceptiveness and for his well defined taste and point of view, replied

What do you mean? Proust is as much about forgetting as remembering; habit and the sudden ending of habit.

Realizing I'd been quoting, he wrote that he presumed Goldman hadn't read In Search of Lost Time. I explained that I'd quoted the line because I liked the idea of an author who was as identified with forgetting as Proust is with remembering, but Mitchelmore wasn't convinced, writing:

I think it's awful; it's based on what's at best a misrepresentation, at worst a philistine refusal to understand.

It's nothing new to point out that Twitter's 140-character limit can kill nuance, but I do think this question deserves a bit more delving. First off, Mitchelmore is unquestionably right; in fact, what most surprised me about reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time fourteen years ago was that it was at least as much about losing the past, losing those things and people that we for so long in our lives take for granted as perpetual, as it was about retention. The famous memory-laden madeleine, which for the general literary public has essentially become a synecdoche for the whole sprawling novel, is itself as much a token of forgetting and neglect as it is of memory: it brings the past to life precisely because the mind has let it languish, unthought of. As Proust explains later in the second volume, Within a Budding Grove,

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we have forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside of us, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourself in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words . . . been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unattainable.

Funes the Memorious aside, it simply isn't possible to retain everything--much less to retain everything with its full emotional valence. Proust recognized that, and he explained and even dramatized it, along with the concomitant bursts of overwhelming recall that such selective memory enables, better than anyone.

Yet Proust is known as the writer of retention, of holding tight to memory. That's his public, madeleine-soaked image. Mitchelmore is right that such a thumbnail description is a misapprehension or misrepresentation, but I don't think those of us who have read, and loved, Proust have any chance of actually changing that perception now. The madeleine is Proust is the madeleine is Proust. Maybe Mitchelmore would disagree, or say that it's our duty to try nonetheless, but I tend to think, rather, that all we can do is encourage people to actually read Proust, engage with his prose and his mind, and be surprised by what they find.

And that's why I like Goldman's line, wrong as it is: given that we aren't likely to make the public acknowledge a more nuanced Proust, I like imagining a writer whose public persona, wanted or unwanted, is as closely tied to forgetting as Proust's is to remembering. What pleasures such a writer could offer! What nuances of the relationship between remembering and forgetting could he or she explore--informed, we would hope, by Proust's--and what mixed melancholy and joy such a writer could evoke!

Old favorites

In Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, the narrator, on picking up a book of philosophy he'd written years before and then essentially banished from his mind, thinks,

It's always a strange experience to read one's own writings again after an interval. They so rarely fail to impress.

I certainly wouldn't say that's true of my own writing--cringing is surely my response at least as often--but when you've written more than 1,000 blog posts, you're bound to occasionally come across something you'd forgotten writing and are glad to rediscover.

Such was the case with this post from 2007 about, among other things, Sei Shonagon, Iris Murdoch, and Achilles, which ended with a topic I thought was well worth revisiting today: prompted by Murdoch's nomination of Achilles as one of her two favorite characters, I put together an off-the-top-of-my-head list of my favorites. Here's how I described my thinking then:

Unlike her, I think if I put together a list it won't consist of characters with whom I particularly identify; rather--like Odysseus--they'd be characters who I can't stop thinking about, who seem forever capable of revealing new surprises.

And, after Odysseus, here's who I came up with:

Bjartur from Independent People

Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles

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

Bartleby the Scrivener

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

King David

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

First Sergeant Milt Warden from From Here to Eternity

Lyra from the His Dark Materials trilogy

Sir Lancelot

Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky from Anna Karenina

Huckleberry Finn

Philip Marlowe

Mrs. Aubrey from Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows

Rose Ryder from John Crowley's Aegypt series

Nearly four years on, who would I add? Again, off the top of my head:

Niccolo, Dr. Tobie, and Katelijne Sersanders from Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer

Roberto Bolano's Arturo Belano

David Gately from Infinite Jest

Trollope's Madame Max Goesler

And you?

{An administrative note to close: Work and travel have finally caught me out, and I'm taking next week off from blogging, which I don't think I've done in . . . three years? The annex will still be active, though, and you can follow that either through Tumblr itself or through your Google Reader. See you all in a week.}

On the road

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I've spent the past few days on the road--in fiction, that is. And they couldn't have been two more different American roads: the contemporary Southern blacktops traveled by the ex-con Sailor Ripley and his love, Lula Pace Fortune, in Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart (1991), a celebration of all that is broke-down, displaced, casual, passionate, dead-end, and makeshift in American culture; and the still largely virgin motorways, all potholes and cow crossings, of the wide-open American West of the early automobile era, in Sinclair Lewis's Free Air (1919).

I'll have more to say about Sailor and Lula's road, and Gifford's word-drunk, hyper-charged vernacular depiction of it, sometime later. Right now I'm hampered by the fact that the 600-page Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels is the sort of book that as you read it you know you absolutely have to lend to a friend--and, if that someone is another writer for whom you know you've found a crucial book . . . well, sometimes you have to lend it when you've still got 400 pages to go.

So I'll stick to Lewis, which, coincidentally, was put into my hands by a friend, and also shares with Gifford an infectious joy in unusual language and over-the-top slang. The book, which tells of a young woman's cross-country drive and the freedom from social mustiness she finds there, is full of everything from Minnesota pidgin German to slang phrases that snap like (and make as little sense as) Damon Runyon or Ring Lardner. The language reaches its apotheosis in this bit of venting by Bill, a Minnesota country boy surprised at the high-class company an old friend is keeping in his new home in Seattle:

Aw, how d'you get that way? Rats, you don't want to go tagging after them Willy boys. Damn dirty snobs. And the girls are worse. I tell you, Milt, these hoop-te-doodle society Janes may look all right to hicks like us, but on the side they raise more hell than any milliner's trimmer from Chi that ever vamped a rube burg.

That linguistic verve carries through the whole scene, which turns into the novel's most comic:

He wandered for an hour and came back to find that, in a "dry" city which he had never seen before, the crafty Bill had obtained a quart of bourbon, and was in a state of unsteady beatitude. He wanted, he announced, to dance.

Milt got him into the community bathtub, and soused him under, but Bill's wet body was slippery, and Bill's merry soul was all for frolicsome gamboling, and he slid out of Milt's grasp, he sloshed around in the tub, he sprinkled Milt's sacred good suit with soapy water, and escaped, and in the costume of Adam he danced orientally in Milt's room, till he was seized with sleepiness and cosmic grief, and retired to Milt's bed in tears and nothing else.

Is there a word in that passage that's not perfectly chosen? Nearly all seem to do treble duty: they describe the scene, they cast its events in terms just outsized and unexpected enough to render it grand (if not Biblical), and they mesh sonically so that we trip merrily along, laughing all the way. Even the simplest line, "He wanted, he announced, to dance," conveys exactly the right rhythm for its pronouncement: we can see Bill's face, flattened carefully into drunken seriousness, as he raises a solemn finger and takes his first step to a beat that only he can hear.

And that's ultimately what pleased me most about Free Air: it's a fun book more than anything else. Lewis is always a satirist, but here the satire is gentle, humane, even loving--there's none of the scorched-earth bleakness that makes the laughs in Babbitt, great though they are, so damned hopeless. It's a bon-bon of a book, perfect for summer; take it on the road in your flivver.

Under the Net

Spending time with the young Iris Murdoch last week--in the form of her letters--sent me back to her first novel, long a favorite, Under the Net (1954). It had been years since I'd read the book, and I remembered it as having a freshness, a fundamental lightness of spirit that, for all the comedy that her later books would retain, she never came close to replicating.

What I discovered on reacquaintance is that, if anything, I underestimated Under the Net's lightness. Its protagonist, Jake Donaghue, a translator and would-be writer who is primarily a layabout and sponge, is like nothing so much as a penniless Bertie Wooster, and his feckless, solipsistic bobbing through postwar London gives the whole novel a Wodehousian verve. There's a ridiculous dog-napping (temporarily interrupted for a spot of whiskey), a socialist riot on a film set of ancient Rome, and a drunken revel to rival any of Bertie and Catsmeat's Race Night escapades. That particular incident ends with a drunken swim in the Thames:

A moment later we were climbing the wall.

"Watch out for police," said Lefty. "They'll think we're going to rob a warehouse. If you see one, pretend to be drunk,"

This was rather superfluous advice.

I also really enjoyed this silly rumination, which gives a good sense of the not-always sensible way that Donaghue's mind works:

There are some parts of London which are necessary and some parts which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earl's Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason.

What I find particularly interesting about that passage is that Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, talking with her in an interview I've cited before, specifically praised its air of contingency:

Curiously I think Under the Net is the only one of your novels where you can feel that the novelist doesn't know how it's going to end, if you see what I mean. . . . I may be quite wrong about Under the Net; you probably did know how it was going to end, but it has a kind of freshness that is very mysterious, and that we strangely associate with something that is not planned.

If anything, Under the Net goes too far in that direction; at time it verges on being a picaresque. But its comic joy and its gentle handling of themes (responsibility, self-deception, illusion, and the transformative magic of erotic and romantic love) that would obsess Murdoch for the next forty-plus years, make it a remarkable, charming novel, and a great way for a reader new to Murdoch to make her acquaintance.

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.