"Golden-skinned boys and girls playing roulette with highballs in every hand," or, Sunday morning coming down

Like the raucous seagulls circling Wrigley Field in the ninth inning of yesterday's game, preparing to scarf up the inevitable hot dog puke, Sunday morning waits patiently for the weekend reveler, knowing he will require its quiet for rest, regret, and recovery. For those readers who fall into that category, I offer this morning some dissipated selections from Edmund Wilson's journals of the 1920s.

I'll start with a scene, interpolated by Wilson years later as he re-read his notebooks, that is enough to strike horror into the heart of any man who can recall his first illicit visit to a certain carefully monitored drug store aisle:

I decided that I had now been innocent long enough and decided to buy a condom. I went to a drugstore on Greenwich Avenue and watched nervously from outside to be sure that there were no women there. I then went in and inquired. The clerk withdrew to the back counter and produced a condom of rubber, which he highly recommended, blowing it up like a balloon in order to show me how reliable it was. But the condom, thus distended, burst, and this turned out to be something of an omen. I soon got over my shyness with women, but I was a victim of many of the hazards of sex--from which I might have been saved by previous experience: abortions, gonorrhea, entanglements, a broken heart.

What I wonder is whether that druggist put on the same demonstration for every young man who asked for a condom, or if he sensed a particular susceptibility to embarrassment in Wilson? And, with that in mind: might it all have been a prank, the condom intentionally ruptured to throw a fright into the affected fop who'd had the temerity to inquire about it?

Along those lines, this account of Wilson's friend Ted Paramore, from 1921, is lively and ridiculous in its portrayal of uncertain young male sexuality:

The girl he got away from Donald Douglas. --"She wasn't very good. She wasn't very pretty but she had a good body." --She finally made him feel so ashamed, however, that he gave her up: "She said, 'You make me feel as if I were on a barren plain whipped by a bitter wind!' --And I ---!" --business of hanging his head in abasement. --But the first time he had been to see her, he was enormously set up the next morning--he came in to see me, beaming, and said it had restored his self-confidence. She had "made him breakfast and everything."

It strikes me that any woman who can come up with that image of the barren plain probably deserved better than the apparently feckless Paramore, who, elsewhere in the journal, is seen attending a ball as a "vulture,"

that is, he went as a stag and spent the evening trying to pass out old men and steal their young mistresses.

Now, in reverse of the way things usually progress, we'll move from sex to drink. Having expressed doubt about Ted Paramore, it seems only fair to let him offer a bit of irrefutable wisdom:

"At these parties they get absolutely soused, then they begin to get Ritzy, and at the same time they keep falling off the chairs. You can't try to high-hat everybody and fall off chairs at the same time."

Then, a brief look in on a 1921 party at the apartment of Cleon Throckmorton, a theatrical set designer:

I came in and found the room full of people whom I took at first to be the cast of Orpheus. I went over to Catherine Throckmorton and we sat down together--she was just drunk enough to be partly speechless and to have assumed, as she often does under those circumstances, a bogus foreign accent.

Finally, because a night of drinking with Edmund Wilson wouldn't be complete without Ring Lardner and Scott Fitzgerald, here's an early morning--following a late-night--scene at Lardner's house:

Zelda had gone to sleep in an armchair, and covered herself with a shawl. . . . Lardner read teh golf rules aloud. (This was a little book put out by the local golf club. Lardner read these rules at length with a cold and somber scor that was funny, yet really conveyed his disgust with his successful suburban life.) --Then we went back to the Fitzgeralds' Lardner and I started talkign abotu the oil scandal, and Fitz fell asleep in his chair. Lardner and I went on talking about baseball, Heywood Broun, Lardner's writing, the Americanized Carmen, the Rascoes, etc. Deep blue patches appeared at the windows. I couldn't at first think what they were--then I realized it was the dawn. The birds tuned up one at a time It grew light. It was seven o'clock. Scott asked what we had been talking about. Lardner said we had been talking about him. --"I suppose you analyzed me ruthlessly."

Am I wrong, when I picture the livers of that generation, in imagining something just sub-Lovecraftian in its inchoate horror?

Now that we've reached the morning after, lest you harbor hopes that your gentleman's gentleman might sidle quietly into your room with a restorative, you first might want to be reminded that not all servants are as reliably comforting as Jeeves:

At dinner, Mrs Murphy sat mumbling about the butler-they always did manage to have such sinister servants, don't you now? "I really feel there's something wrong about him--I'm really afraid of him--even though his wife is such a good cook, I really think I'll have to discharge him!" "Well, Mother, I really don't think you're very good if you allow yourself to be intimidated by your own servants!" "Well, but you don't have to be in the house with him continually as I do--I really don't think it's safe to be in the house alone with him--I really think I'll have to let him go!"

Perhaps, like Wilson himself, you're fortunate enough to need little restorative aside from the Sunday itself:

That vague and charming feeling of coming to (no doubt a dose of aspirin contributed to these sensations) after having been drunk the night before, very late in the day--of going out and finding the warm May day, the people out on the Avenue in their Sunday clothes and riding on the top of the buses; of lying inside and hearing, from behind the lowered shades, where a bright sun comes in through a hole, the cries of children playing in the street and the sound of boat whistles. We leave the windows up during the day and the shades up at night: we don't need to shut ourselves up any longer.

And, if you can make it through the fog-headed morning,

At night, the park in a warm obscurity plaited with the bright pearls of lamps, the taxis moving on their errands--they seem more genial, more attractive now--the first soft mysteries of the city summer.

Swozzled or sober, enjoy this first real summer Sunday of the year, secure in the knowledge that there are plenty more to come--maybe not that endless string that stretched before us in childhood, but a sufficient number for the more modest ambitions of adulthood.

If only I'da known!

One of the advantages the internets have over print media is the ease with which they allow for the addition of postscripts after publication--which is good, because one of the consequences of spending a lot of time reading and a lot of time writing about that reading is that the two don't always match up just right: frequently I learn something new and interesting about a topic long after I've hit the Publish Post button.

But whereas print media would leave me with little recourse, with a blog all I have to do is spend a few minutes typing and tagging my new discoveries, and presto!--my account, however incomplete or questionable it may remain, is instantly more rich and expansive.

Here, for example, are three things I came across today alone that I wish I'd known a while back.

1 If, last night when I was writing about Steven Millhauser, I had already begun reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1930), I would have used this passage to help explain Millhauser's work:

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had always lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequence of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

Not, mind you, that I think Musil and Millhauser are necessarily all that congenial--I imagine Musil would casually dismiss Millhauser as far too playful--but the passage nevertheless serves well as a description of Millhauser's method.

2 If, two weeks ago when I was writing about the joy of reading collections of letters, I had remembered this scene from Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1937), I would have surely have used it to open my post:

"People do like to read letters," said Marcus, "especially those that are written to someone else."

"They do that sometimes when they are not supposed to," said Tamasin. "They must like it very much."

3 Finally, if, when I wrote about Ring Lardner back in the fall, I had already read Elizabeth Hardwick's brief essay about him, I would have drawn on it for this:

Out of a daily struggle to make a living by literary work of various kinds, Lardner produced many short stories and some longer works of great originality. These stories were also immensely popular and nothing touches us more than this rare happening. In a country like ours where there will necessarily be so much journalism, so much support of the popular, the successful, we are complacently grateful when we find the genuine among the acceptable.

And I probably wouldn't have been able to resist including this as well:

Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner's stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. Lies are at the core of nearly every character he produces for us. The only fear is being caught out, exposed to the truth. love cannot exist because the moment it runs into trouble the people lie about their former feelings. Because of the habit of lying, it is a world without common sense. The tortured characters are not always victims. They may be ruined and made fun of, but they have the last word. They bite the leg that kicks them.

And what, tomorrow, will I wish I had known today? Well, that's one of the reasons we keep reading, isn't it?

"I have supressed the worst of my aberrations."

Oh, these are going to be fun: the Library of America has just issued two volumes of Edmund Wilson's literary essays and reviews. Just flipping through the first volume, I find, appropos of my realization yesterday that I needed to read more Edith Wharton, from the March 1923 issue of Vanity Fair:

Has Mrs. Wharton ever been given her rightful place as the foremost of living American novelists and one of the foremost living novelists of the world?

I don't know whether she reached that point during her lifetime, but her critical standing seems pretty solid now. Then, as if Wilson knows exactly what to write to get me to clap my hat on my head and light out for the bookshop, he continues,

Has Thomas Hardy ever done anything better than Ethan Frome?

Then there's a piece on Ring Lardner from the July 1924 issue of the Dial. Wilson takes Lardner, whom he, along with Fitzgerald, counted as a friend, to task for "being timid about coming forward in the role of serious writer." Comparing Lardner to Sinclair Lewis, he writes,

[W]hen Lardner comes closest to Lewis, as in the story called The Golden Honeymoon, he is less likely than Lewis to caricature, and hence to falsify, because he is primarily interested in studying a kind of person rather than in drawing up an indictment

--which seems to perfectly describe both Lardner's sympathetic openness and Lewis's brutally accurate satire, so vicious it's draining. But Wilson goes even farther, first leveling some more pointed criticism before taking what even eighty years later seems a breathtaking leap:

For all his saturnine tone, his apparent scorn of vulgar values, he seems committed to popular journalism. He does not even care to admit that he has tried to do work on a higher level. . . . Yet he would seem to come closer than anyone else among living American writers to possessing the combination of qualities that made Huckleberry Finn a masterpiece.

The whole essay reads as what it surely was meant to be: a direct, public challenge to a talented writer who was not, in Wilson's opinion, measuring up.

Sadly, we already know the answer to the question Wilson asks later,

Will Ring Lardner, then, go on to his Huckleberry Finn or has he already told all he knows?

For what Wilson wonders about in prospect in 1924, Fitzgerald would wonder about his friend in retrospect less than a decade later, in the obituary appreciation of Lardner that I wrote about recently. "So one is haunted," Fitzgerald wrote, "not only by a sense of personal loss but by a conviction that Ring got less percentage of himself down on paper than any other American of the first flight."

In my earlier post on that obituary, I pointed out that as Fitzgerald was writing about Lardner, surely he also was thinking about his own frittering away of his talent. And in fact, two years before challenging Lardner, Wilson had publicly challenged his friend Fitzgerald, too, who had just published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922):

[H]e has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.

That's candidness to the point of brutality, and I wonder how Fitzgerald took it. (A task for my next library visit!) But even as he calls This Side of Paradise (1920) "a preposterous farrago," slashes Fitzgerald for his slack language, and even mixes in some personal criticism--"Conversations about politics or general ideas have a way of snapping back to Fitzgerald"--Wilson is clearly aiming to urge his friend to push past what is easy or comfortable. To that end, he mixes in serious, though measured praise. This Side of Paradise is "exciting" and "animated with life," and

[I]t would be quite unfair to subject Scott Fitzgerald, who is still in his twenties and has presumably most of his work before him, to a rigorous overhauling. His restless imagination may yet produce something durable.

He saves his strongest praise for the conclusion, where, though still couched in doubts, it obviously points a possible way for his friend to better understand--and thus deploy--his own talent:

But, in any case, even the work that Fitzgerald has done up to date has a certain moral importance. In his very expression of the anarchy by which he finds himself bewildered, of his revolt which cannot fix on an object, he is typical of the war generation--the generation so memorably described on the last page of This Side of Paradise as "grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken."

It's interesting to come across this pair of essays a week after
I lamented the news that V. S. Naipaul dismisses the work of his longtime friend Anthony Powell in his most recent collection; while both writers are harshly criticizing friends, their differences in moral standing in doing so seem stark.

Powell, after all, is dead; nothing Naipaul says will make him a better writer. And while it is not incumbent on everyone to avoid speaking ill of the dead, a friend should surely hold fire in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Though I've not yet read Naipaul's piece on Powell, his striking lack of generosity--especially when set in contrast to Fitzgerald's honest yet appreciative assessment of Lardner--will render it extremely difficult to approach without distaste, and even doubt.

Wilson's words, on the other hand, though surely hurtful at the time (possibly even unnecessarily so, as there's a sense in both essays of the brash overconfidence of youth, of words running away with him) are far easier to justify, aimed as they were at the stimulation of talents that he clearly admired--and delivered while the men were still around to take issue with them or even prove him wrong. It's easy to imagine both Fitzgerald and Lardner cursing Wilson, maybe even to his face, but it's hard to imagine them dismissing his critique out of hand.

"Ring made no enemies, because he was kind."

In introducing my Ring Lardner imitation the other day, though I apologized to Lardner's fans, I forgot to apologize to his ghost. But if F. Scott Fitzgerald is right about Lardner, with whom he was close friends for many years, I shouldn't be worried:

It is hard to understand but I don't think he really gave a damn about anything except his personal relations with a few people. A case in point was his attitude to those imitators who lifted everything except the shirt off his back--only Hemingway has been more thoroughly frisked--it worried the imitators more than it worried Ring. His attitude was that if they got stuck in the process he'd help them over any tough place.

I took those lines from Fitzgerald's obituary remembrance of Lardner, who died in 1933 at the age of forty-eight, which is included in The Crack-Up (1945), the Edmund Wilson-edited book of Fitzgerald odds and ends. The whole obituary is worth reading. Fitzgerald appraises his friend with a clear-eyed honesty that would seem cruel were it not rooted in a deep appreciation of Lardner's underlying talent:

So one is haunted not only by a sense of personal loss but by a conviction that Ring got less percentage of himself down on paper than any other American of the first flight.

Fitzgerald attributes Lardner's failure to his early years covering baseball:

A writer can spin on about his adventures after thirty, after forty, after fifty, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of twenty-five. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance's diamond. . . . It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer.

That attribution seems to reflect Fitzgerald's own preoccupation with youth--he already saw his best years fading behind him though he was only thirty-seven--at least as much as they reflect the reality of the difficulties facing Lardner. In fact, the whole obituary, with its lament of lost promise, of a genius fallen silent at a young age, is impossible to read without thinking that Fitzgerald is writing about himself, too, and maybe even realizes it.

He kept on recording but he no longer projected, and this accumulation, which he has taken with him to the grave, crippled his spirit in the latter years. . . . He had agreed with himself to speak only with a small portion of his mind.

Another writer whom that description brings to mind is J. D. Salinger--who names Lardner as one of Holden Caulfield's favorite writers in A Catcher in the Rye.

Despite the wasted talent, despite the sadness and frustration that Fitzgerald identifies, the impression one is left with after his words is of a man who was, as the lines I used for this post's headline indicate, kind and attentive, loyal to his friends if not to his talent:

The woes of many people haunted him--for example, the doctor's death sentence pronounced upon Tad, the cartoonist (who, in fact, nearly outlived Ring)--it was as if he believed he could and ought to do something about such things. . . . So he was inclined to turn his cosmic sense of responsibility into the channel of solving other people's problems--finding someone an introduction to a theatrical manager, placing a friend in a job, maneuvering a man into a golf club. The effort made was often out of proportion to the situation.

As for Lardner's wit, which survived his loss of faith in his writing, Fitzgerald demonstrates it nicely by reproducing a refreshingly odd telegram Lardner to sent him and Zelda:

WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK AND WHY PLEASE ANSWER

Ultimately, though, Fitzgerald concludes in sadness--not so much because of the art Lardner might have written and didn't, but because he felt inadequate in his friendship:

At no time did I feel that I had known him enough, or that anyone knew him--it was not the feeling that there was more stuff in him and that it should come out, it was rather a qualitative difference, it was rather as though, due to some inadequacy in one's self, one had not penetrated to something unsolved, new and unsaid. That is why one wishes that Ring had written down a larger proportion of what was in his mind and heart. It would have saved him longer for us, and that in itself would be something. But I would like to know what it was, and now I will go on wishing--what did Ring want, how did he want things to be, how did he think things were?

From our perspective, nearly seventy-five years later, we can acknowledge Fitzgerald's personal lament while being a bit more forgiving about the work itself. People are still reading and enjoying You Know Me Al--as they're still reading The Great Gatsby--and that seems like an achievement to be proud of, regardless of what might have been.

{P.S. I was put in the mind to go back to Fitzgerald today by a nice post at Light Reading about the joys of flawed books. It's well worth checking out.}

Ring Lardner shows up at Brewers game

With all the necessary apologies to Ring Lardner fans: I couldn't help myself after reading this story about last night's Brewers-Reds game.

Friend Al,
Don't it always seem like when you make a mistake the manager is right there to bawl you out, but when he makes a mistake your the one out there on the field catching the boos? Well you wont believe it but last night thats what happened, only I didnt catch the boos, but only cause we were in Cincinati. But even if wed been home I think the rotten boobirds woulda been so confused they wouldnt know what to think. And it happened in the first inning, and all the other innings was worse, and I got to think its cause of that rotten Ned Yost's mistake; we just kinda give up.

We was in Cinncinati, and I come up to hit with one out and the bases empty. Arroyo's pitching for the Reds, that skinny longhaired goofball who kicks up that foot like he's gonna ballerina the ball in there instead of throwin the dam thing. He tries me out with one of them slowwww pitches he's got, probably calls it a curveball but it aint got no more curve than my tits. I dont even look at it, just step back out the box and wiggle the bat, loose up my shoulders while Blue stands there behind the plate and dont say nothing. Next pitch, he tries the same blamed thing--and the umps gotta be wondering the same thing I am: does he think I'm dumb? That from the ballerina-toe-kick guy. Well now Ive kinda got him where I want him, cause he has to throw me something, maybe that fastball of his that aint no faster bout than the ball used to come bouncing back off the barn door when you and me'd take turns throwin when we was kids. An thats what he goes and throws me, a grade-A meatball, and next thing you know that big lummox of a left fielder's out there waving his arms around like hes drowning and I'm dusting myself off at second base.

Now it aint no secret that we been having some hard times lately, and I'm standing there at second thinking maybe things is starting to turn around, this the first inning an all. Ryan Brauns up next, and after him the big guy, so somebody's gonna chase me around them bases, right?

So the first pitch he throws to Braun's the same blamed pitch he tossed me that I dented that left field wall with. Ryan pops bout four buttons off'n his jersey and durn near turns hisself crosseyed but all he does is bust it foul. I try to wave to him tell him to calm down--hes only twenty-four, don't hardly have to shave yet, and he aint got the veteran cool I got. But the second pitch he does the same thing, only this time that dope Arroyo's got smart, and its up around his eyes. Aint nobody ever hit that pitch and aint nobody ever will, cepting maybe Vlad. But Ryan aint one to play wait and see, and maybe he's right--next pitch is another meatball, pretty for hittin as any you'll ever see. But all the kid can do is knock it right back to the screen, and I'm still standing down there at second base, starting to get tuckered out from jumpin every which way every time.

And heres where it gets weird and where that cussed manager of our started in to losing us the game. You know me, Al: I aint no baserunner. I know what order to run 'em in, and I do a mean jog around 'em when I park one but I don't do much else'n that. So when I'm on second and looking down at Leyva down there in the coaching box, I mostly just look make sure he's there. He aint gonna give me no sign that matters none.

But this time I look over and I tell you, what I saw made my eyes hurt. Leyva's a-slapping and swiping and tugging at his cap, and I aint no baserunner but I know the sign for a steal when I see it and thats what hes giving me. The goon is tellin me to steal third! I got three steals all year, Al--I aint no base stealer. I aint gonna make third if they let me start out in the third baseman's pocket. So I look over at coach with a kinda hunkered-down look, squint my eyes at him make sure he knows I know what hes doin. And I'll be darned if he don't go through that whole slap swipe tug thing again. Even as I get my lead I know its the dumbest idea in the world, but there it is. Im stealin third.

Like I said, that Arroyo's got a ballerina leg kick, but he dont use that when there's guys on, so I got to watch his feet more close, and when he starts to moving I scoot for third base, hoping and prayin that Braun's gonna park this one so what I know's going happen aint going happen. I didn't see where the pitch was--I was too busy watching that damned Encarnacion waiting for me like the ol' Grim Reaper down third base--but I hear tell it was about a mile outside, and Ryan bout threw his bat into the crowd trying to get it, 'cause he seen me streaking down there like a moron, but he cant get it and the next thing I know I'm as out as out can be and thats the third out.

I get back to the dugout and Leyva and Yost are there jawing at each other. Yost is asking Leyva why he sent me, Leyva's asking Yost why he told him to send me, and I'm standing there cussing and slapping at the dirt on my uniform. Yost says he wasnt telling Leyva to send me--and here's where I almost just bout give up and went home, cause this team's snakebit--he was just scratching away at a mosquito bite, that's all, didn't mean nothing by it.

Just scratching away at a mosquito bite, didn't mean nothing by it. Oh, did I do some cussing then. That blamed mosquito sent me to my certain doom, and I think that's kinda what finished us of for that game. We went out there an right quick gave up about a hundred runs or so and we were done for the day.

Like I said, Al, I think this teams snakebit. Or mosquito bit. All I knows I'm killing every one of those rotten things I can find in that dugout tomorrow.

Yours truly,
Gabe