Party-going

Comic novels often reach their heights in party scenes. It's the perfect situation, after all, bringing together drunkenness, awkward conversation, and shifting groups of characters. (And did I mention drunkenness?) To my mind, they're second only to hangover scenes as a chance for a comic novelist to really cut loose and have fun.

While Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong is sadly devoid of hangover scenes, it is rife with parties, all quite funny. The best is held by the protagonist, Treece, for some of the students he works with, and the funniest part of that party is built around the breach of social etiquette that opens it: Louis Bates, an awkward student, arrives far too early.

[Treece] was straightaway presented with a major social quandary: could one fairly ask the too-early guest to wander about the cold winter streets and return in an hour, when the sandwiches would be made and the preparations completed, the old pair of working trousers and the frilly apron replaced by a suit--or must one invite him in and perhaps even entertain him? Louis, on the other hand, had no such social doubts, and politely and firmly indicated what he considered appropriate:

"I'm afraid I'm a little early," he said, "but that's because I didn't want to be late. I have no sense of time."

"I think we said four o'clock, didn't we?" asked Treece, opening the door no wider. "It's now not quite three."

"I know," said Louis, and at that point it dawned on Treece that Louis actually intended to stay, for some abstruse purpose.

"None of your colleagues has arrived yet," Treece said.

The remark did not perturb Louis at all. "Apres moi, le deluge," he said.

Treece saw that he had no alternative and gave way, and Louis stepped confidently into the hall, unbuttoning his coat and looking with interest about him at the decoration. "I thought we might have a little chat about how I was getting on, you know," said Louis.

"I think we might try and preserve this as a social occasion," said Treece.

Leading Louis into the drawing room and helping him out of his huge overcoat, "which he had somehow contrived to wind about him like a shroud," Treece apologizes:

"You must excuse me if I leave you here, but I haven't finished getting things ready yet, and I have to change," said Treece. Louis appeared at first hurt, and then baffled, by this news. He was well awared that if he was left alone in an empty room he would quickly be nibbled by misfortune; he would pull over a bookcase while trying to take out a book, or be discovered by an unwarned housekeeper and accused of burglary. He knew himself and he knew his gods; he knew the rotation of his misfortunes. "This is a nice room," he said quick-wittedly.

Treece looked around, surprised; it had not changed, it was as it was, and that was patently the last thing that could be said of it. If he was the sort of person who liked nice rooms, he was damned if this was the sort of room he would be living in.

As Treece attempts to flee to the kitchen, it gets no better:

"Isn't there anything I can be doing?" [Louis] suggested. "I'm afraid there isn't," said Treece, nervous of Louis's desire to please. He made hastily for the door and Louis planned an even more desperate move. "Do you think I could have a bath?"

But Treece had gone. He had withdrawn to the kitchen and, up to his elbows in pastry (Mrs. Watson had taught him how to make cakes), was wondering what Louis was doing and what would have happened to the room when he got back. In fact, Louis passed through all the stages of privation in a strange house--he examined the ornaments on the mantel, looked at the pictures on the walls, noticed the books in the bookcase and read the spicier pages of the medical directory, peered at his teeth in the mirror, made sure his fly buttons were fastened--and he was cutting his hair at the back with a pair of scissors found in an open drawer of the bureau when Treece returned, nearly an hour later, to start the fire. "I ought to have done this before I came," said Louis Bates.

And all of the before anyone's had a drop to drink!

The modern novel

As I write this, it's late on a hot Fourth of July, and through our open windows we can hear the constant barrage of celebration. Illegal celebration, as Illinois doesn't allow fireworks--and all the more entertaining (at a distance) therefore.

But against that backdrop, do you really think I'm going to write a post titled "The modern novel"? Seems like too big a task on a night like tonight. So I'll turn the topic over to Malcolm Bradbury, from Eating People Is Wrong:

"You are not converting me," cried Treece furiously. "All the modern novel seems to have discovered since Lawrence is that there are some people in England who change their shirts every day. I knew that already. I don't need to read modern novels."

"But you should," said Viola.

"Why?" cried Treece. "I read this one because someone said I was in it. And I am. Do you realise that the story about the professor who left the script of one of his articles among some student essays, and another tutor gave it C minus, is about me? Someone must have told this man. Even down to the bit about, 'This is good lower second stuff.' It was B minus actually. That makes it worse."

"Poet's licence," said Viola.

The joke itself is fun, of course, but what I love most about this passage is the earnestness of Treece's complaint about the modern novel. He really is an Edwardian at his core, and an early Edwardian at that--he's no Victorian, no prude, he wants to be a liberal intellectual, with all the doubting and questing that that entails, but the new and the now simply do not appeal. Usually, he can hide his distaste under the openness and relativism of his creed, but once in a while . . . it emerges in a cry straight from the heart.

"A Rupert Brooke without a Gallipoli"

Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong is full of great comic moments--from the level of observations (the lobby's "huge leather armchairs that looked like cows; you wouldn't have thought it odd if someone had come along to milk them") to extended scenes and exchanges of dialogue. The book is so good that I feel I should put all my (admittedly limited) resources to nudging it out of the long shadow of Lucky Jim, so I'll be sharing bits from it through the next few posts.

Today, I'll share a description that I admire not merely for how it captures a type of person that we can still picture now, long after the reference points Bradbury uses have ceased to be alive in our world, but also for how, not content to simply come up with a funny comparison, Bradbury gives them one further nudge, developing them until he's wrung every last bit of humor out of each. Here you go:

Merrick, if he was anything, was a gentleman. He was, it always seemed to Treece, a typical Cambridge product gone to seed; he was the bright young man of fifty, handsome, fair-haired, bursting with romantic idealism, the sort that nice girls always loved, the sort that had gone off in droves to fight the First World War. There was something passe and Edwardian about Merrick. He was conceited, cocksure, a public school and Cambridge Adonis fascinated by what he called "the classical way of life." Treece privately described him as a Rupert Brooke without a Gallipoli, and this was really almost fair; he seemed as if he had outstayed his lease on the earth, and now his romanticism was turning into a kind of Housman-like light cynicism, his open and frank assurance curdling, his Grecian-god looks becoming almost grotesque with wrinkles. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and took out a gold cigarette case: "Gasper?" he said. He would, naturally, wear a waistcoat; cigarettes he would call, of course, "gaspers." He smiled brilliantly at Emma and put his cigarette case before here; you felt that, like Bulldog Drummond, he would say, "Turkish on this side; Virginias on that."

You can see him, no? Pocket watch as well, I trust, and possibly a very narrow mustache? Or even a monocle?

Blimey! It's slang time!

A couple of novels I've read recently have thrown up some slang terms that seemed worth a bit of a look into, so, to deploy a new gleaning from the Urban Dictionary, I won't ramp with you--I'll get right to it:

1 That word--"ramp"--is actually the first one, though not, it seems, used with any of the meanings offered by the Urban Dictionary. I encountered it in Malcolm Bradbury's wonderfully funny campus comedy Eating People Is Wrong (1959). A faculty member is irritated that coffee in the faculty lounge must be paid for by departmentally issued tickets, and she says, "Isn't it a ramp?" A colleague then reflects,

Treece admired Viola's indignations. She was always full of protest about ramps, and over charging, and overcrowding in houses, and lack of toilet facilities at the bus station: her principles were always directed against tangible objects, whereas Treece's, these days, could fix on nothing save unresolvable complexities.

So a "ramp" is a scam, perhaps? An irritation? A bureaucratic irritation? English readers--is this a familiar term and I've just never encountered it?

2 The second term was in Matthew Specktor's new novel of Hollywood, American Dream Machine, one of the best books I've read this year. (It's like a more realistic, less distanced cousin to Steve Erickson's Zeroville--whereas Erickson deliberately offered up a naive cipher as his protagonist, and let Hollywood roil around him almost like a fever dream, Specktor gives us a number of fully realized, convincing characters and shows what happens when dreams become business, rebellion gets rich, and every human relationship takes a backseat to questions of success and fear of failure. It's perceptive, smart, funny, and beautifully written, with an emotional honesty and intensity that makes the prose sing.)

At two points in the book, younger characters address each other as "holmes," as in, "Hey, holmes." Now, the word itself isn't new--I'm not hip, but I'm not that not hip. My surprise came from the spelling: I'd always assumed it was "homes," from "homeboy."

And according to the Urban Dictionary it is. "Holmes," however, is also correct--and here's where the Urban Dictionary shows its weakness: a real dictionary would explain which was the preferred, or more common usage. Instead, we're left on our own. Me, I'll stick with "homes." The other version just makes me feel like Watson.

3 I'll close with a locution that's not slang, but seems to fit today's theme nonetheless: "tailor style," used to describe cross-legged sitting, with the lower legs toward the body and crossed low on the ankle. It's one of Donald Westlake's favorite descriptive terms--if I remember right, a murder victim in Plunder Squad is even impaled on a sword while sitting tailor style. Aside from Westlake, however, I've only ever encountered it in the work of Lawrence Block--who, as a friend of Westlake, I thought might have picked it up from him (or vice versa).

Wikipedia, however, assures me that it's a common term. The entry for "Sitting"--good glorious god, there's an entry for "Sitting"--says it is found in several European languages (though the link to the Wiktionary entry does come up empty).

So now you have an assignment: Come up with a sentence that uses all three terms, and leave it in the comments. Don't let me down, homes.

"So I just had him deal with those cops, you know?"

One of the pleasures of working on my forthcoming collection of Donald Westlake's nonfiction, The Getaway Car, has been reading a lot of interviews across many years. Westlake was something of a performer in interviews--he had a number of essentially stock answers and anecdotes that he broke out at appropriate times, but 1) they're good ones, and 2) there's enough variation in questions and focus among the interviews that you're able to pick up something new from pretty much all of them.

The best I've found yet, and one that I'm planning to include, is an interview by William DeAndrea for Armchair Detective's Fall 1988 issue. It's a long interview, touching on pretty much every question any Westlake fan would want to ask, and it also offers new details from or angles on familiar stories. Like this one, about the origins of Parker:

WESTLAKE: Of course, the first book wasn't going to be part of a series. Nothing happened the way I anticipated it was going to happen with that book. I was doing one a year in hardcover from Random House, and I thought, okay, time to have another name, and I'd been reading all these Gold Medal books--which is where Peter Rabe came from--so I wrote this novel to be a Gold Medal paperback original novel. Certainly not a series. In fact, Parker got caught at the end. The editor at Gold Medal turned it down, and I was confused. Then it was sent to Pocket Books. There was an editor at Pocket Books named Bucklyn Moon. Buck Moon.

DEANDREA: Great name.

WESTLAKE: Yeah. He was an interesting guy. He was a white guy whose three great interests were mystery[en-dash]private eye-[en-dash]crime novels, poetry, and black writing. He edited anthologies of black poets, for instance; he was the American champion of Chester Himes--Gravedidgger Jones, Coffin Ed Johnson. These things all came together in him. At that time, I was represented by Scott Meredith, God help me. Buck called Scott, and then he called me, and said, "Is there any way for you to let Parker get away at the end of the book, and give me three a year?" I said, "I think so."

DEANDREA: "And you're gonna pay me for them, and everything?"

WESTLAKE: In 1961, the two companies that paid the top were Gold Medal and Pocket Books, and Gold Medal was a little better, because they paid on copies printed. Which is rather a wonderful thing. When I eventually did get published by them, when they would do another printing, they'd just send you a check for the number of books they'd printed.

DEANDREA: They work that way in Germany.

WESTLAKE: Well, Otto used to work that way with Mysterious Press. Until he became a serious publisher. (Laughter) But, at that time, a $3,000 advance was very good. So in '61, being told that for my second name I would do three books a year, which would be no problem, that would be $9,000 already. On the first of January, I know I'm going to make at least $9,000 this year--that's terrific. And I'd really had to distort the book to have the guy caught in the end anyway, so I just had him deal with those cops, you know? Parker unchained.

In order:

1. I knew of Bucklyn (elsewhere spelled Bucklin) Moon from this story, but I had never heard about his interest in African American literature.

2. Gold Medal paid on copies printed? Holy hell, that's amazing. Should I, a publishing professional, have already known that that's how a mass market paperback publisher once worked? Because I certainly didn't. Wow. 3. I have read many accounts from Westlake of rewriting the ending of The Hunter, but this is the only one I've come across where he explains that it was hard to have Parker get caught, convincingly, in the first place--and what fun is in that line "So I just had him deal with those cops, you know?" We know. Oh, do we know.

Trust me, folks: this book is going to be a lot of fun.

Back in the Saddle Again, or, Gene Autry never mentioned the sores!

Though I make no promises, tonight marks an attempt to get back to blogging more reliably following my Getaway Car–induced slowdown. (I've turned in the manuscript, and while there are still many hurdles still to leap, things are moving along nicely--and best of all, I really like the book as it's come together. In the course of assembling it, re-arranging it, and typing large parts of it, I've read the whole thing probably three times now, and I find myself enjoying Donald Westlake's company just as much every time--a good sign.) There's a better than reasonable chance that upcoming travels and work stress will keep me from returning to a regular schedule until autumn, well, to quote Sampson Starkweather, "It's true, people cannot be trusted / but do it anyway. It's great! Trust me."

As with any pursuit you let lie fallow for a while, it takes a bit of stretching and plodding to get back into it. Neglected muscles grumble; skills, disregarded, refuse to answer the call. (You should--or, more properly, shouldn't--hear me at the piano after a week on the road. Good god.)

So for tonight, I'll merely praise Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong (1959), a book that, as a mid-fifties campus comedy, molders unfairly in the shadow of Lucky Jim. Oh, there's no doubt that Lucky Jim is the better, funnier book, but more than a half-century on from the publication of the two, I think there's room enough for both. As I ease back into all this nonsense, I'll likely share a number of passages from it that made me laugh out loud. For now, however, I'll simply share two invocations of Shakespeare, both of which get at the genius at the book's heart--the attempt to portray the ultimate dilemma facing the liberal intellectual: once we admit that all can (and should) be doubted, where can we find firm footing, and how can we ever hope to move beyond self-criticism (and self-analysis to support that criticism) to grapple with the world as such? (The title sums it up brilliantly: Yes, eating people is clearly wrong, but when one considers . . . )

Herewith, passage one:

There are people to whom life seems so simple, and so pleasantly simple, that when you look at them you wonder, "Well, look, perhaps I just haven't through this through far enough--I, and Shakespeare, and the rest of us."

It would be a good line, a funny line, if its only joke was the so-English diffidence of "Well, look, perhaps." But the late, and, one assumes, reluctant, invocation of Shakespeare raises it to genius.

Then there's this:

Of course, in a way Hamlet was a man of action--look how he was always killing people.

I know that this isn't necessarily the aspiration of all comic writing, but is there any higher praise than this: that line could have been delivered by Bertie Wooster.

When there's no hare in the race, a turtle can have his day in the sun, or, A Winner!

Readers, you have outdone yourselves! I asked for your turtle stories, in celebration of the publication of Russell Hoban's wonderful and odd novel Turtle Diary, and you came through brilliantly!

Fifteen of you posted stories--you can read them all in the comments to this post, and I urge you to do so--and so many of them are good that picking just one to win the promised copy of Turtle Diary has proved to be very difficult.

It's probably no surprise that the most beautifully written, calling up a summer night in all its humid verdancy, comes from Patrick Kurp, discerning shopkeeper over at Anecdotal Evidence:

In the late summer, the fields and marshes along Riverview Road are dense green jungles dotted with the gaudy magenta of purple loosestrife. The road follows the southernmost edge of Saratoga County, N.Y., paralleling the Mohawk River and stretches of the old Barge Canal.

The rest of the story lives up to its opening, bringing together youth and age, wisdom and inexperience, and uniting them through simple care for an animal that most likely is incapable of understanding it.

The simplest, on the other hand, is Lisa Peet's account of dreaming of owning a turtle named Quonset, while the saddest is undoubtedly Bentham Hurtado, Jr.'s lament for his late turtle friend, Cabbage.

Alas, there can only be one winner, and that is Thomas, who shares this story:

In 1997, in Athens Greece, a cousin of mine had an extended house-sitting arrangement with an elderly woman who had gone to London for some kind of therapy. It was a one-floor house in Kypseli, an area of Athens that had once been both a popular middle-class neighbourhood as well as home to all kinds of writers, musicians and arts, but had now become overpopulated, even slummy in parts. The living room had French windows that opened to a shabby, dusty garden surrounded on all sides by apartment buildings. The old woman had rescued two turtles in the early 1980s and given them a home in this garden. They were still alive when my cousin was staying there and one of her duties was to make sure they had food and water.

One day she was sitting in the living room when she heard a thudding noise on the French windows. She tried to ignore it, but it kept occurring. Finally she got up. Through the window she saw one of the turtles knocking at the base of the door with its head. When she opened, it turned around and started walking away. After a few steps, it stopped and looked back at her. It took a few more steps and again looked back. To my cousin's amazement, the turtle was trying to lead her to the end of the garden.

She followed it to where some empty ceramic pots were kept, and among them she found the other turtle, which had somehow managed to fall over and was stuck on its back. She turned it over again, and the two turtles went off to another corner of the garden together.

I'm a sucker for a good Lassie story, especially when the Lassie character wears a shell. Thomas, if you'll drop me an e-mail with your address, I'll get the book out to you.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. As William G. might put it, it's been nice to think turtle thoughts with you.

In youth

I'm as deep into working on The Getaway Car, my forthcoming Donald Westlake collection, as I've been yet--the hope is to turn in a draft manuscript next week--so all I'll steal time away for today is to share a paragraph from Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies:

As a child Christina had been very much disliked by other children. She had never suffered particularly because of this, having led, even at a very early age, an active inner life that curtailed her observation of whatever went on around her, to such a degree that she never picked up the mannerisms then in vogue, and at the age of ten was called old-fashioned by other little girls. Even then she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being.

I picked up Two Serious Ladies entirely on the strength of a single line quoted by a friend on Facebook:

It is against my entire code, but then, I have never begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.

You folks are now in the fortunate position of having a whole paragraph more than I did--plus my assurance that it was a good decision. To the bookstore, I say!

From turtles to water-beetles

While I'm busy collecting turtle stories--go leave yours in the comments to Wednesday's post!--I'll share another passage from Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary. This one is from Neara's diary, written after a session of watching her pet water-beetle:

It was past three in the morning and I was staring into the green murk of Madame Beetle's tank. The plants are all shrouded in long green webs of algae, there are white and ghostly bits of old meat hanging about blooming with mould, the sides of the tank are very dim. It's like the setting for a tiny horror film but Madame Beetle doesn't seem to mind. I can't think now how it could have occurred to me that I might write a story about her. Who am I to use the mystery of her that way? Her swimming is better than my writing and she doesn't expect to get paid for it. If someone were to buy me, have me shipped in a tin with air-holes, what would I be a specimen of?

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that, as her eventual partner in well-meaning crime, William G., points out, she would be the source of Neara soup.

You can never have too many turtles, but maybe you can have too many Turtle Diaries? Or, a contest!

For several years now, Ed Park has been urging me to read Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary. So it's fitting that in his introduction to the new NYRB Classics edition what he does is, essentially, urge you--and you, and you over there--to read it. "I'm going to make you need this story," he writes, and elsewhere,

My own shelves are crammed with books I mean to get around to sometime. Yours probably are, too. What if I told you that this novel, of two loners on a mission to liberate the sea turtles from the London Zoo, is like a lot of things you already like, while being so much its own stupendous thing that it's become one of my literary yardsticks?

And what if I told you that my shelves, too, are crammed, with books Ed has convinced me to read (while his, I suspect, groan under a similar weight in return), and that those I've followed through on (Charles Portis! Charles Portis! Charles Portis!) have taken their place among my favorites? When Ed Park tells you to read something, trust him.

He's right about Turtle Diary, too. Told through dual (not quite dueling) diaries, it comes to life through the voices of its twin narrators, William G. and Neera, and the wild (and often hilarious) peregrinations of their strange, solitary thoughts. On the first page alone, William dreams of an octopus, then looks up a picture of one in the bookstore where he works:

Their eyes are dreadful to look at. I shouldn't like to be looked at by an octopus no matter how small and harmless it might be. To be stared at by those eyes would be altogether too much for me, would leave me nothing whatever to be.

From that unexpectedly bleak thought, within sentences he's on to this:

They're related to the chambered nautilus which I'd always thought of only as a shell with nothing in it. But there it was in the book full of tentacles and swimming inscrutably.

"Swimming inscrutably." Perfect, and perfectly strange. A later entry opens:

Briefcases. Businessmen, barristers carry briefs. When I was in advertising we always talked about what our brief was. Brief means letter in German. Brief is short. Life is a brief case. Brief candle, out, out. In the tube there was a very small, very poor-looking man in a threadbare suit and a not very clean shirt, spectacles. He made a roll-up, lit it, then took from his briefcase a great glossy brochure with glorious colour photographs of motorcycles. Many unshaven men carry briefcases. I've seen briefcases carried by men who looked as if they slept rough. Women tramps usually have carrier bags, plastic ones often. I carry one of those expanding files with a flap. Paper in it for taking notes, a book sometimes, sandwich and an apple for lunch. The apple bulges, can't be helped.

Lately I've been admiring Alice Thomas Ellis's ear for the quiet, often punishing asides we deliver, sotto voce or even silently, in the interstices of difficult conversations--and her ability to render their often unsettlingly oblique quality. Hoban has a similar skill with what we say truly to ourselves, the altogether more benign jokes and tangents that pepper our thoughts throughout the day, and that in quantity and importance often outweigh the words we speak aloud.

(My favorite of those? This one, which I have found myself thinking about pretty much every day in the month since I first read it:

Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: "The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup . . . " I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

How can you resist that?)

The voices, and the underlying sensibility, are what draw you in, but Hoban doesn't rely solely on that--he instead sets his two seemingly inertia-ridden characters in motion and works them through a plot, and even a romance. If the plot is a bit fractured, if, as Ed puts it, "the dramatic mainstays of love and death . . . are not necessarily in the places you expect," well, that's what happens when you set out with oddballs. The book starts off funny, and, while never losing its charm, winds up being moving, earning its place as "one of the great novels of middle age," as Ed puts it:

It's a book that can help you, even if you don't think you need help. (If you've read this far, you do.) It offers solace to anyone who has ever looked at her situation in life and wondered, as one of Hoban's characters does, "Am I doomed?" (Answer: No.)

Now that I've filled your mind with turtle thoughts ("Funny, two minds full of turtle thoughts"; "Now here we are, both of us alone and thinking turtle thoughts."), let's put them to good use! I've ended up with an extra copy of Turtle Diary, and rather than let it moulder on my shelf, I thought I'd give it to someone: I'll send the book to the person who leaves the best turtle story in the comments by June 20.

I'll start. A few years back, I was walking out of Central Park up the 77th Street ramp, when a young man on a bicycle came barreling down the ramp, swept around the curve, and headed north, towards Belvedere Castle and Turtle Pond. How did I know that's where he was headed? In his right hand, held out away from his body, was a turtle, legs swimming in air. As he flew past, the man was saying to the turtle, "Don't fret! Don't fret!"

And your turtle story?

Penelope Fitzgerald on Barbara Pym

Before I leave Barbara Pym for a while, here's one last, quick post in honor of her centennial. In a review of Pym's A Few Green Leaves, Penelope Fitzgerald--who, though nearly Pym's contemporary, didn't truly get established in her writing career until much later, and who clearly felt Pym's influence--offers a description of the mostly hidden stakes that quietly underlie conversations in Pym's works:

In her nine novels Barbara Pym stuck serenely to the [world] she knew best: quiet suburbs, obscure office departments, villages where the neighbours could be observed through the curtains, and, above all, Anglican parishes. . . . This meant that the necessary confrontations must take place at cold Sunday suppers, little gatherings, visits, funerals, and so on, which Barbara Pym, supremely observant in her own territory, was able to convert into a battleground. Here, even without intending it, a given character is either advancing or retreating: you have, for instance, an unfair advantage if your mother is dead, "just a silver-framed photograph," over someone whose mother lives in Putney. And in the course of the struggle strange fragments of conversation float to the surface, lyrical moments dear to Barbara Pym.

"An anthropologist," declared Miss Doggett in an authoritative tone. "He does some kind of scientific work, I believe."

"I thought it meant a cannibal--someone who ate human flesh," said Jane in wonder.

"Well, science has made such strides," said Miss Doggett doubtfully.

Or:

"Well, he is a Roman Catholic priest, and it is not usual for them to marry, is it?"

"No, of course they are forbidden to," Miss Foresight agreed.

"Still, Miss Lydgate is much taller than he is," she added.

In such exchanges the victory is doubtful: indeed, Miss Doggett and Miss Foresight are, in their way, invincible.

Pym's conversational battles, like her humor, are so subtle that an inattentive or unsympathetic reader could easily miss them entirely. Unlike Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose characters fight with words like naked blades and in not a few cases are ready to back up their thrusts with actual violence, Pym's characters leave the social surface unruffled; in fact, a fear of troubling the waters is at the root of many a silent retreat. Pym's dialogue, and what it represents, is part of a lineage that stretches back to Austen--but surely Penelope Fitzgerald was not its last practitioner? Anyone have nominations for the Pym of today, in that regard?

Falling in love (with a writer--specifically Barbara Pym)

Is there any moment more important to us when we're young--more obsessed-over, more fraught--than that of falling in love? The energy and emotion that we, at sixteen or eighteen or twenty, bring to bear on trying to pinpoint the instant when appreciation and amusement and desire and friendship and intrigue crystallize into love . . . well, if it does nothing else it reminds us, ineluctably, that we're ultimately all the centers of our own Copernican scheme.

But when does it happen with a writer? There's no question that sometimes it's instant. For me, that's Borges, or Steven Millhauser: reading both the first time felt uncannily like welcoming old friends into the house--there was surprise and mystery there, certainly, but also a comfort, as if Borges's Library of Babel had already alerted me to the existence of these brilliant permutations of letters. Other times, it's gradual. I didn't really fall for Anthony Powell until well into the second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, and I didn't--to stay with and extend the metaphor--marry him until my second time through the sequence.

It's probably no surprise, given the ups and downs of her reputation over the decades, that the process was gradual with Barbara Pym. Penelope Fitzgerald's praise led me to Less Than Angels, and I was impressed with her delicacy and humor, but it took time for head and heels to swap. I read another, then another. Then I read the diaries and letters, and used a whole pad of post-it flags. Then I found myself spotting Barbara Pym characters and situations in everyday life. I was caught.

There really is no one quite like her. Oh, Jane Austen is her model, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Anthony Powell impinge on her Venn diagram, but no one else provides her exact cocktail of insight, aphoristic asperity, wit, perceptiveness, and at times painful honesty--mixed, crucially, with love and comfort. Her centennial has sent me back to her books, as it should, and that has only confirmed my love.

I'll close with an anecdote that makes me smile, shared by Pym's sister, Hilary Pym Walton, which opens her brief foreword to "All This Reading": The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003):

I am reminded of an incident from the distant past when someone, on meeting Barbara and me with our mother, asked, "And which is the clever one?" I am afraid that she was referring to me, as I had drawn a picture of a horse at an early age and had received some sort of certificate.

Which leads me back to Pym's inexhaustible diaries, to an entry from July 10, 1943, when she was in an army training camp:

I went with Peggy Wall, a quiet dark girl who seems to be about the best of our lot--she used to be secretary to a literary agent. She said as soon as she saw me she thought--I bet she's going to write a novel about it. Well--who knows.

If you share my tastes at all--there's nearly eight years of blog posts here to help you determine that--and you've not read Pym, do. It will make your summer.

Good birthday wishes for Thomas Hardy and Barbara Pym!

In a diary entry for May 20, 1977, Barbara Pym noted,

Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol pump I thought a Hardy heroine of today might well follow such an occupation. Tess for instance.

She mentions reading Hardy a couple of times in her diaries and letters, once accurately describing the right atmosphere for taking comfort from his poetry--

The weather is dull but not unpleasant--rather calming and saddening and I'm glad i have brought Hardy's poems with me.

--and later trying (and failing) to imagine him driving.

If she knew they shared a birthday, she didn't mention it. Yesterday, June 2, would have been Pym's hundredth birthday, Hardy's 173rd. They overlapped for fifteen years, long enough for us to imagine a young Pym, having fallen for Tess, saddened at hearing of Hardy's death. They're not similar writers at all, but in a talk written for the BBC in the spring of 1978, "Finding a Voice," Pym did reveal some passages from Hardy's notebooks that, while she doesn't explicitly make this point, feel like part of the Pym universe:

Let me quote this entry for Sunday, February 1st 1874: "To Trinity Church, Dorchester. The rector in his sermon delivered himself of mean images in a sublime voice, and the effect is that of a glowing landscape in which clothes are hung up to dry." Or another entry, for October 25th 1867, more likely to have inspired a poem: "Martha R --, an old maid whose lover died, has his love letters to her bound, and keeps them on the parlour table."

The latter has the self-aware wistfulness of Pym's characters, the former a hint of her judgment and humor--though if we encountered it in the context of Hardy's work the judgment would predominate.

Which leads to the unanswerable question: Would Hardy have liked Pym's work? It seems wildly unlikely, doesn't it? Hardy bridges the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but for all their ventures into psychology his novels remain nearly as full of incident as their predecessors, whereas Barbara Pym's books turn on such modest changes of heart and fortune that a reader more accustomed to the violence and passion of Hardy could miss them entirely. In fact, the developments in Pym's plots so often don't exist, involving as they do the raising and surrendering of unexpressed dreams--whereas dreams in Hardy are rarely (if ever?) repressed, finding life in wild, dramatic action.

The humor, too, would be a problem. Hardy's novels are almost entirely humorless, at least when it comes to their central characters and concerns, as Anthony Powell noted in a 1971 review for the Telegraph:

Hardy's failing was a total lack of humour, which, one feels, might have prevented some of the absurdities. He could do knockabout up to a point, or irony, but one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Conrad, to see the missing quality that is possessed by most of the great novelists in one form or another.

Hardy's humor is almost always found in the rustics around his protagonists, the characters who see no disjunction between their dreams and their surroundings, who harbor neither hope nor fear of change--they're Shakespearean jesters (though fortunately less irritating). Gentle satire of Pym's sort, even if you could explain its essential reference points of contemporary social intercourse, would I suspect fall entirely flat with Hardy. As Penelope Fitzgerald notes in her perceptive review of Pym's last novel, A Few Green Leaves,

High comedy needs a settled world, ready to resent disturbance.

--and Hardy's world is anything but settled. What we get in Hardy is the friction caused by different rates of change, between an old way of life that is inexorably being lost (but slowly enough that the fact can be denied) and a new freedom that is emerging too fitfully (and that ultimately may not wholly compensate for what's been lost). Tess as a gas station attendant in Hardy would involve disgrace and rage in at least equal parts with fierce independence; as a Pym character she would be merely a figure of speculative village gossip.

No, much as Pym loved Hardy, the reverse seems unlikely. But birthday mates they are despite. This year, Pym, rightfully, is getting the lion's share of attention: her centennial has sparked a wonderfully astute appreciation by Carrie Frye for the Awl, while bloggers at My Porch and Fig and Thistle are hosting a Barbara Pym reading week. From My Porch's gallery of Pym covers I learned that the New York Times once called her "the novelist most touted by one's most literary friends," while Shirley Hazzard simply noted that "her books will last." Indeed. It's unlikely we'll be around for her bicentennial, but I hold out hopes that her books will.

Tracking and trailing and other useful skills

In Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang (1965), Archie Goodwin offers the following practical advice:

If you think you have a tail on a subway train and want to spot him you keep moving while the train is under way, and at each station you stand close enough to a door so that you might get off.

Simple, no? And potentially useful, should I find myself picking up a tail when I'm in New York for work again this week.

It also reminds me that a couple of favorite books when I was a kid were essentially how-to manuals for this sort of work, pitched at kid level. The first one I encountered was my father's copy of The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook (1959). He would have had the first edition--which, as the brief but informative Wikipedia entry for the book tells us, had to be replaced in 1966 when Dominic A. Spina, the retired NYPD detective who served as the book's voice of authority, was indicted on corruption charges. Spina was eventually acquitted, but not before he'd lost his role as advisor to the Hardy Boys (and, one assumes, a more thankless advisor to Chet Morton).

The Detective Handbook, however, never grabbed me like its straightforwardly enchanting title led me to hope it would. It was too dry, and, even to a kid's eye both its techniques and tone seemed a bit dated by the time I was reading it in the early 1980s. What I wanted was to be a brilliant private detective; what it taught was how to be a cop.

So imagine how excited I was when our local library got copies of two books in a UK series of spycraft manuals aimed at kids, The Good Spy Guide to Tracking and Trailing and The Good Spy Guide to Secret Messages. Both were written, the Internet tells me, by Judy Hindley, and the series, from Usborne Books, also included a volume on fakes and forgeries which ten-year-old me would also have enjoyed.

What made the Usborne books was their illustrations, which were in cartoon style but at the same time extremely effective at conveying the point at issue. I still distinctly remember the image of the bad spy using a shop window to look over his shoulder at his quarry--not realizing that if you can see someone in a window or mirror, you know they can see you. For a budding pre-teen spy/detective, that was hot stuff.

Even better was the books' tone: they offered tips and tricks in simplified form but with full seriousness, at least to my memory. These were honest-to-goodness spy tricks, and the author didn't scoff at your reasons for wanting to know them: it was taken as a given that a life well lived might at any moment throw up a situation requiring some hunting or evasion, or a secret communicated by some carefully placed rocks or sticks--even if the reader lived with his parents in the middle of nowhere and had never seen a shady character.

I checked those books out of the library over and over and over again. And thinking about them now makes me glad that I didn't encounter the Nero Wolfe books at that age. I suspect that they would have entertained me greatly, like Agatha Christie's did, even as I missed a lot (their humor, for one thing). But the lure of Wolfe and Archie's perfect little world would have been too much--it would have represented everything I was hoping for out of life. Hell, it's hard to resist even now: as Donald Westlake wrote in his introduction to The Father Hunt,

One doesn't drop in at the house on Thirty-fifth Street for the plot line but for the house itself and its denizens--lovingly described, familiar, comfortable, though with Nero Wolfe in charge and Archie as Virgil never so comfortable as to bore.

Ten-year-old me was content to learn spycraft and detective skills assuming I'd one day have a use for them, and aching for the chance; having had the house on Thirty-Fifth Street to aspire to would only have made the waiting more unbearable.

Alice Thomas Ellis on secrets

When not beset by the other obligations that have rendered me an unreliable blogger lately, I've been reading Alice Thomas Ellis's The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), the first volume in The Summer House Trilogy, which Paul Dry Books has recently done readers the service of returning to print in the States. I've written already of my love of Ellis's fierce, astringent novels, a love that grows with each new one I encounter. Her observations are so acute--and, more distinctly, so uncompromising in their judgment--that The Clothes in the Wardrobe easily kept my Twitter feed busy all week. A sample:

Surely to make a great fool and spectacle of yourself for the sake of another is a form of martyrdom.

No one can love a person who knows a secret about him that he would prefer not to know himself.

Pride is the subtlest of sins, offering the most morally destitute some comfort.

She couldn't help disapproving of people. It seemed to be essential to her sense of identity.

If it is not possible to be free, perhaps to be hidden is the next best thing.

I told my mother with timid spite, hidden terror, and a certain mad braggadocio.

If she was a wife, she was, by conventional standards, a gloriously bad one.

Tonight, I'll add a scene that probably ought not to be taken straight as advice--in context there's more going on in this conversation than might appear at first read--but is fun to think of as such:

I wondered as I thought of secrets if I might find some release in telling Lili the thing that festered in my soul, and I asked her if she would listen.

She said something I found so odd that my vision of the world faintly changed and my despair lessened. If the world was not as I perceived it then it was possible that I was not damned. I felt no great assurance of comfort, but my conviction of evil grew a little less.

She said, "If you have a secret you don't want the world to know you must never tell it except to an enemy. And if you must tell your dearest friend your secret then you must tell others too, for inevitably the world will get to know and you will blame your dearest friend and lose him. So tell him, if you must, but also tell his brother and the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker and then you will never know who has betrayed you and you can, to some degree at least, go on loving your friend. If you tell your enemy, your hatred will be even more satisfactorily justified, but the best thing to do is tell the priest. No one else. He won't tell. The trouble is, sometimes people want to be betrayed. It makes them feel more at home and less lonely."

And if you don't believe in priests, your only option is the wind and the stars.

Medical advice from Bertie Wooster

From the opening of Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974):

"Jeeves," I said at the breakfast table, "I've got spots on my chest."

"Indeed, sir?"

"Pink."

"Indeed, sir?"

"I don't like them."

"A very understandable prejudice, sir. Might I enquire if they itch?"

"Sort of."

"I would not advocate scratching them."

"I disagree with you. You have to take a firm line with spots. Remember what the poet said."

"Sir?"

"The poet Ogden Nash. The poem he wrote defending the practice of scratching. Who was Barbara Frietchie, Jeeves?"

"A lady of some prominence in the American war between the states, sir."

"A woman of strong character? One you could rely on?"

"So I have always understood, sir."

"Well, here's what the poet Nash wrote. 'I'm greatly attached to Barbara Frietchie. I'll bet she scratche when she was itchy.' But I shall not be content with scratching. I shall place myself in the hands of a competent doctor."

"A very prudent decision, sir."

There's nothing so comforting after a busy weekend of work than putting oneself in the hands of a competent gentleman's gentleman.

In the beginning

One reason I appreciate blogging is that it mostly relieves you of the stress of writing an opening. While each post is an individual piece of writing, it also has a place in an ongoing conversation; a blogger is allowed to presume that he and his readers are already friends, having been chatting about books for years now, with today's post just another byway in an endlessly digressive, destinationless journey. The problem of openings is thus solved.

Novelists, on the other hand--well, I feel comfortable assuming that it's hard for them not to obsess about that first paragraph. It's the handshake and greeting of someone new at a party--but unlike a meeting in real life, if your new acquaintance doesn't instantly find you engaging, he can just turn his back on you without apology or risk of censure, and you may never get a chance to convince him he got the wrong impression.

In just the past few days, I've read three great openings. Each one is different in tone and substance from the others, but they all succeeded: they made me want to keep going.

The first is from Dan Kennedy's caustic, uncomfortable--but very good--dark comedy American Spirit:

Ten years ago when someone asked Matthew the question, "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" he remained silent and tried to look like he had an answer and was only considering how to phrase it. Inside the head, however, the only answer he could hear was, Those days will eat me alive, and Matthew knew that probably wasn't what you were supposed to say. It's ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that's standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has. But it is hard to find a hint of promise in a calendar found suddenly blank; Monday through Friday wiped clean against one's own wishes or plans, a wide-open grid of Valium-and-Heineken-kissed dead end days with a horizon way past the weeks on the page. Maybe thirty-five now, maybe forty, close enough anyway--in America these days, one's forties seem to start at twenty-five.

What a combination of ominous content and tightly rhythmic prose! The implied whisper I always hear in italic speech--Those days will eat me alive--makes that unvoiced thought shiver with actual fear. And there's no way I wouldn't want to keep reading a writer who can manage the knocking of consonants (and consonance) in "It's ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that's standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has," with its hint of a corporate lingo persisting with bloody-nosed bravado amid failure. Kennedy's book is kin to other recent novels of male failure and degeneration--there are echoes here of Sam Lipsyte and Benjamin Anastas--but Kennedy's attention to his prose, and the compelling way he conveys his protagonist's internal narration, with its mix of startling truth and mediated (and medicated) self-deception, makes it stand out.

The second comes from one of my old standbys, Rex Stout. The problem of opening for a genre novelist, especially one writing about a series character, is on the one hand less acute (because his readers already know his work) but on the other more difficult (because he's written about these characters and similar situations over and over and over again already). In Death of a Doxy (1966), Stout solves the problem by simply throwing readers right in:

I stood and sent my eyes around. It's just routine, when leaving a place where you aren't supposed to be, to consider if and where you have touched things, but that time it went beyond mere routine. I made certain. There were plenty of things in the room--fancy chairs, a marble fireplace without a fire, a de luxe television console, a coffee table in front of a big couch with a collection of magazines, and so forth. Deciding I had touched nothing, I turned and stepped back into the bedroom. Nearly everything there was too soft to take a fingerprint--the wall-to-wall carpet, the pink coverlet on the king-size bed, the upholstered chairs, the pink satin fronts on the three pieces of furniture. I crossed for another look at the body of a woman on the floor a couple of feet from the bed, on its back, with the legs spread out and one arm bent. I hadn't had to touch it to check that it was just a body or to see the big dent in the skull, but was there one chance in a million that I had put fingers on the heavy marble ashtray lying there? The butts and ashes that had been in it were scattered around and it was a good bet that it had made the dent in the skull. I shook my head; I couldn't possibly have been such an ape.

Longtime readers of Nero Wolfe stories will, I think, recognize immediately that there's something off here: we've seen Archie Goodwin at plenty of crime scenes, and in plenty of places where he shouldn't be--but this time the worry feels different, more deep-rooted. So we read on, and we soon learn why . .  .

I'll close with the opening of Alice Thomas Ellis's The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987):

I remembered her all my life. For years the image of her had hung in my mind like a portrait in a high room, seldom observed but unchanging. Sometimes, unawares, I would see her again suddenly revealed in the vaulting halls of my head. She was sitting on a grassy bank, leaning forward a little, a cigarette between her fingers, and she was speaking. I could not remember what she was saying, nor even if I had understood her, but I knew that what she was saying must be, in some sense, significant. She wore a cream-coloured cotton frock with large puffed sleeves, sprigged with tiny brown flowers; he stockings were cream-coloured too and on her feet were white, barred shoes. Her hair grew in dry red curls, dark red like rust or winter bracken. She was not at all beautiful, but even with her likeness before me I had always assumed that she must be, since she carried such conviction in her forgotten words and her enduring appearance. Her name was Lili.

This one, I'll admit, comes close to cliche: even a beginning writing student could see the way to create suspense and intrigue with an opening like this. What saves it for me is the imagery ("the vaulting halls of my head," "dark red like rust or winter bracken"), and the fact that the words--the content of the woman, in some sense--have been lost, and what remains is simply the deep understanding of her significance. Ellis's novel is now, thankfully, back in print, available as part of The Summer House Trilogy from Paul Dry Books. I've raved about her quite a bit before, and my enthusiasm is undimmed.

Observing May 12, 1937

Wandering my bookshelves on Saturday, I happened to pull down a volume from the Faber Finds series: a publication from the Mass Observation program in England titled May the 12th. Being as the day itself was May the 12th, I opened it up.



For those of you who don't know, Mass Observation was a program aimed at setting down the character of everyday life in Britain, the ephemeral as much as the important. From 1937 until the early 1950s, a combination of volunteer diarists, paid investigators, and mail surveys built up an archive of British daily life that, years later, can astonish you with its evocative detail. David Kynaston's incomparable histories of postwar Britain draw heavily on Mass Observation reports, and the result is that his books convey the texture of daily life, and the immediacy of individual voices, like few histories.

Because I was supposed to be working--prepping for publicity calls or working on my Donald Westlake book, one or the other--I didn't sit down and read May the 12 from cover to cover. But I did flip through it and note some passages worth sharing, in case you were wondering what was going on in England at this time of the year seventy-six years ago, the day that George VI was crowned at Winchester Cathedral.

The first I'll share comes from a twenty-eight-year-old single woman who worked as a children's nurse and identified herself as a Conservative and a member of the Church of England:

One Wednesday, May 12, 1937, I was awakened at 2.10 a.m. by a newsboy yelling Daily Mail. I crawled out of bed and was quite surprised to see that the Hotel opposite and the streets were alive with all types of people. I admit I thought London had gone crazy and felt annoyed with the world in general. I returned to my bed, determined to sleep. It was impossible, the rush of cars and noise of heavy traffic was deafening. I tried counting sheep but to my horror found I was counting human footsteps. I think I must have dozed off when I was suddenly awakened by a man's voice shouting through the keyhole, "Nurse, it's a quarter to five." It was the cook. That seemed to me the last straw. For a moment I wondered if he had taken leave of his senses, but the steady tramp of feet on the pavement outside brought home to me in a flash that the Great Day had dawned. "At least," I said to myself "I hope their Majesties are also getting up at this unearthly hour." I dressed and after the inevitable cup of tea I went to the nursery.

I think you could probably separate the world meaningfully into those who view the morning cuppa as a pleasure and those who refer to it as "inevitable."

I'll quote two passages from the next observer, identified only as a Platonist. (Seriously!) After opening his notes with, "I noticed with malicious pleasure that the weather was not fine," and assuaging his regret at the lack of rain with hope that the situation might change, he starts to go about his day:

After breakfast I put some hair oil on my head, as a prophylactic against threatening baldness, noting the resemblance between the King and myself in respect of this action. At this time (10 a.m.), when I was in my bedroom, I was a little startled to see a bird (a sparrow, I fancy) beating its wings for a short time (perhaps three seconds) against the window-pane. For a moment I thought it was perhaps imprisoned between the panes of the open window. On going nearer I concluded that it had seen, and was trying to get out, a daddy long legs or some such creature, which was motionless in an approximately upright position (i.e. head near ceiling) against one of the panes. I thought (i) of "nature red in tooth and claw" (ii) that the bird was observing the source of its sustenance, even as the Coronation crowds would be doing, (iii) that the bird's observation of the daddy long legs ought to be included in mass-observation. I noticed also the terrifyingly fragile and almost beautifully exact structure of the insect. (I wondered whether it was technically an insect, and counted six legs on it.) I thought also that it was too transparent for decency. This last thought arose from my squeamishness.

The second passage comes from later in the day:

At about 5:45 an unexpected incident happened to me, to which I recall no parallel in my life. I opened a "printed paper rate" postal communication from the Cambridge Preservation Society. This communication had reached me about three weeks earlier, but, having been extremely busy, and perhaps also not anxious to explore a request for money, I had left it unopened. (The envelope bore the words "Cambridge Preservation Society.") Inside, besides the printed communication from the Cambridge Preservation Society, I found a sealed envelope addressed to a person whom I did not know, and bearing undistributed tamps to the value of 1-1/2d. Rather impulsively, I opened it up, and found inside a document evidently not belonging to the communication from the Preservation Society, and of a suspicious and perhaps illegal nature. In some alarm at my unintentional but still reckless participation in an affair that might possibly lead to legal proceedings, I resolved to send the document to the Secretary of the Cambridge Preservation Society. This, coming at the end of a boring and long-drawn out stretch of work, too me by surprise.

But what was in the envelope? What sort of shady dealings? Money, murder, general mayhem? Alas, Mass Observation will never know!

I'll close with a passage from a 21-year-old woman from a small village in Essex. After spending the day in the village listening to the broadcast of the service, she helped serve the village's free supper and managed some of the details of the public dance. Then she went off on her own adventures:

After this I went to a more sophisticated dance at a nearby town where they had a pageant representing the different colonies in the Empire--then home to bed at 4 a.m.--slightly whistled!

With which we gain a new word for drunkenness, one that even Edmund Wilson's Lexicon of Prohibition knows not. Work be damned, that seems enough achievement for one weekend, no?

John Ford and cultural lenses

Still waylaid by work and such, but I did want to take a moment and share an essay I just read from Film Comment in which Kent Jones takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford. It's not strictly speaking book-related, but I wanted to share it because 1) I'm a Ford fan and 2) this passage encapsulated a particular problem of contemporary American cultural life better than any writing I've come across before:

It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

Can we really afford to keep saying “them” instead of “us?” Is it useful to keep looking back at the past, disowning what we don’t like and attributing it to laughably failed versions of our perfectly enlightened selves?

Jones nails it: despite the fact that we should know better, that we've seen the past products of American culture ourselves and know they're more complicated than that--and that our own era is always more complicated, more two-steps-forward-one-step-back than the surface narrative would suggest, we're still stuck in this very 1960s mode of gawping at history. The past is littered with moral failures; the present is as well. Saying that we've gotten better at recognizing humanity and fighting injustice need not require us to simplify the past nor amplify its flaws.

The only other time I've encountered thinking this cogent about our lingering Boomer cultural mindset, and its insistence on opposition and outsiderism (which necessarily requires insiders and villains) is in a post from New York magazine music critic Nitsuh Abebe a few years back. The post, titled "You Are All Still Boomers: A Sort of Modest Proposal," highlights the degree to which we're still wedded to that worldview:

We often worry about the health of our undergrounds, or worry about the possibility of having one. If we can’t find one, we get sad. People get older and shake their heads about it: where are the vigorous pop-culture insurgencies of yesteryear? It’s just a basic of our rhetoric: if I’m trying to explain to you why one piece of art is better than another, it’s a standard tactic to say, well, this thing represents an underground, a revolution, a next thing. And I don’t want to turn into Thomas Frank here, but this is so rote that it’s long been part of advertising, even, which’ll pitch almost anything as a counterculture alternative. Because advertisers know that’s just how we think.

And there are loads of perfectly good reasons for this — this whole map/narrative is often a workable and effective way of looking at things. I’m not necessarily arguing with it. The thing I find myself dwelling on lately, though, is that it’s also a pretty old way of looking at things. We could trace it backwards through art far enough into history that I wouldn’t know what I was talking about anymore. Wikipedia tells me the first use of the term “avant-garde” to describe the purpose of the artist came in 1825. And there’s the rise of a western-European bourgeoisie, with the image of the artist as anti-bourgeois. And there’s modernism. And then most of all . . .

Well, if you’re American, here’s the part that might depress you: the map/narrative we’re talking about is basically a Baby Boomer thing, isn’t it? Isn’t the use of this map basically an attempt to relive the narrative Boomers brought forward out of the 1960s? Obviously I’m pretending to be a bit naive here, because I think you probably realize this already: the template and narrative for how modern Americans think about counter-culture and social change is insanely influenced by the Boomer experience.

Acknowledging the lens is the first step to actually seeing what it reveals.

I'll close with a (perhaps inevitable?) turn to Mad Men, our culture's most prominent current ongoing engagement with history. Simply put, it is dull when it focuses on the sins of the past--Look, pregnant ladies are smoking! People are homophobic!--and fascinating when it shows us that every life is lived within constraints, and that the individual struggle to escape or come to terms with those limitations is what is interesting. The past may have been less enlightened than the present, but it was no less complicated and multifaceted. As Jones says, it shouldn't be "them" and "us"--it's all us. We'll be the past ourselves soon enough.

A bit of Waugh

As I warned last week, the combination of work and the early stages of assembling The Getaway Car: A Donald E. Westlake Miscellany have stolen away any hope of proper blogging this week.  But just now as I was flipping through The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III, I came across a section of their 1963 interview with Evelyn Waugh that seemed worth sharing.

First, when asked if he would like to choose any other historical period to live in, Waugh responds,

The seventeenth century. I think it was the time of the greatest drama and romance. I think I might have been happy in the thirteenth century, too.

I understand the appeal of the eighteenth century--what lover of words could fail to fall for the Age of Johnson? But the seventeenth, with the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War and essentially unending strife? And the thirteenth century? Really? One might almost as well opt for caveman days and fervently hope for a good cave and reasonably strong teeth.

The second part is a moment when Waugh reveals his reliable snobbishness and dyspepsia. After having it pointed out that he had never created a sympathetic working-class character, he replies:

I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them. No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or as pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

It's interesting that fifty years later, Waugh's position--that writers address the working class out of self-interest rather than actual interest--can still be found reflected in conservative politics, whose leaders not infrequently reduce any attempts to ameliorate inequality to simple vote buying.

The dyspepsia, however, gives way to enthusiasm quickly--and amusingly--with the next question:

INTERVIEWER

What about Pistol . . . or much later, Moll Flanders and--

WAUGH
Ah, the criminal classes. That's rather different. They have always had a certain fascination.
You can almost see the gleam in his eye as he makes that reply.