"Being born is craps. How we live is poker."

We used to live down the street from a tiny branch of the Chicago Public Library. And while it would be churlish to complain about having a library within staggering distance of home, the way I took to describing its offerings was that if you went in looking for something specific, you'd be disappointed, but that if you went in looking for something, you'd be fine.

About two years ago, I realized that Netflix had reached that point. There was plenty to watch, but . . . not that, and not that, and not anything from that era, and not that other thing. I was saved, however, by the discovery of the University of Chicago Library's DVD collection. That, and the acquisition of a Chromecast, which opened up a world of streaming and rental options, dropped me unexpectedly into a world where I could see, if still not quite everything, at least far, far more movies I actually wanted to see than I would likely watch in a lifetime.

So I've been watching a lot of westerns. Film critic David Bordwell wrote a post recently that, while also addressing many other issues, helps explain why: If you can watch anything, how do you choose? My solution was to spend 2019 watching only movies from the '70s. And, to leaven those—that much time with '70s interiors can't be good for you—westerns.

This year, I've let the '70s go for a bit. But the westerns have stayed. What's drawing me to them? Personal history, in part. I've enjoyed westerns since I was a boy. I grew up listening to old Lone Ranger radio programs and watching the Disney Davy Crockett TV series on VHS. It's more than that, though. It's the landscapes, which I didn't even notice when I was a kid. The horses, presented matter-of-factly as just another tool, yet regularly surprising you with their beauty and magnificence. The music, full of motifs that still stir the blood.

Then there are the themes. I'm far from a manly man. I have no interest in proving my toughness. Fights should probably be backed down from most of the time, to be honest; there are usually other ways to achieve your aim. I'm not restless, have no need to strike out into the unknown. I'm solitary but I don't need full solitude.

Honor, though? That works. The idea that you owe it to yourself and those around you to live truthfully and honor your commitments, that you should say what you mean and do what you say. That's at the core of most westerns, and it gives the best of them the same grounding that you find in the best of Joseph Conrad: a reason to tell this story, to care about these people.

As with Conrad, there's plenty of bad in westerns, too. Even if you try to stay away from movies that are explicitly about taking land from Native Americans, you still every once in a while come up against a scene where their lives are implicitly regarded as less valuable than those of others. And if we're being honest, we have to acknowledge that even movies that are about conflicts among white settlers are also about the displacement of native peoples. I'd understand if that put you off westerns entirely. For me, it's one more bit in the balance, another refraction of the story they're telling—and of the story America was telling about itself as the twentieth century wore on.

But this is a book blog, right? Here's where we get to that. A subset of the westerns I've been watching lately has been movies about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. An extremely brief shootout that occurred "around 3:00 PM" on October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, it has been the subject of untold works of fiction and nonfiction, books and films. Each one takes a slightly different angle on what is at base a story of the Earp brothers—capable, yet prone to failures and trouble, family men who again and again wound up in violence—and their friend Doc Holliday, who has come down to us as a gunman who dreamed of better things.

Some of the films, including My Darling Clementine (1946) and Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), present the gunfight as a dramatic triumph, the moment when heroes win and the West moves one step closer to being "civilized." Other films, including the two that were released almost simultaneously in the early 1990s, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, treat it as at best a source of regret, the moment that the Earp's luck starts to run out. Those films aren't necessarily better—some days I'd take My Darling Clementine, with Victor Mature playing a truly menacing Doc Holliday, over them all—but they do feel more true to life.

The place I've seen the gunfight presented most clearly as tragedy, however, is in Mary Doria Russell's Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (2015). It's a sequel of sorts to her 2011 novel Doc, which paints a powerfully sympathetic portrait of Doc Holliday. Here's the opening of that book:

He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle. The disease took fifteen years to hollow out his lungs so completely they could no longer keep him alive. In all that time, he was allowed a single season of something like happiness.

That was enough to hook me. A century and a half after his death, Holliday is more myth than man, and Russell doesn't shy away from that. The book is as much a romance as anything else, with Doc the person we're falling in love with. (Russell herself noted on Twitter: "John Henry Holliday didn't have a mama to love him when he was grown so I have taken him for my own. Loved that boy.") At the same time, however, we buy him, this gunfighter who is quick to kill but also somehow conveys "a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but who don't want revenge." Living under a death sentence from young adulthood, raised and educated for a life wholly different from the one he found ("A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West."), Russell's Doc is compelling and charismatic, but also alcoholic and self-destructive. "In a stand-up contest," she writes, "remorse and self-loathing can battle whiskey to a draw."

The book is full of memorable lines like that:

He meant no harm, of course. Helpful people never do.

What could Penelope offer Odysseus but illness and death if he returned to Ithaca?

A conviction of his own disgrace had taken hold of him. He had begun to live down to his opinion of himself.

Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora's box.

Everything but sloth, he realized. Dodge City was diligent in sin.

Bein' born is craps. How we live is poker.
Epitaph greatly expands the story, bringing each of the Earps—brothers and spouses both—to life, but that portrait of Holliday that we carry from the earlier book is just as important to its power. We watch the Earps and Holliday trying and failing to make stable lives, often undermining their own efforts. In Tombstone we see them come closer than ever before to making it work. And then we reach this line, which, after all the foregoing, reads like the fates taking a tragic hand:

There are five armed men in the O.K. Corral.

When I read Epitaph, I literally put the book down at that point and took a walk. I needed more time before letting this happen to these people I'd grown to care about.
The gunfight itself takes up only a few pages, as you can see in this photo. 

But from it will spin out death and despair, the end of their brief spell of peace and happiness in Tombstone.

I wrote above that the core of what draws me to westerns is how they handle honor. The O.K. Corral story isn't really about honor so much as it's about mistakes and human failings. The Earps could have walked away from that fight, Holliday even more so. The honor here comes instead in the telling, in taking these people and lives from our past seriously and helping us understand, if not exactly how it happened, then at least how it might have happened, and why we should still care.


 
  

A post that is not quite a post

When I restarted this blog three weeks ago, I said that I would try to post most weeks, usually on Sunday mornings. That is still my plan, and there will definitely be weeks when I’m wholly absent. This weekend—which I’m spending away from home with friends I’m rural seclusion with books and bourbon and a fireplace—is the Platonic form of the weekend when I won’t post: the blog, reconstituted, is meant to be an outlet and engagement rather than an obligation.

But. This is the third damn week. I shouldn’t be AWOL so soon. Therefore, a compromise: I’ll link to an essay I wrote for Lapham’s Quarterly in the years the blog was dormant, on a subject I’ve blogged about many times: Samuel Johnson. Specifically, on a dream about his brother that Johnson mentions in his diary, a line that I spent ten years thinking over before, with the help of an excellent editor at Lapham’s, Sarah Fan, figuring out what I wanted to say about it.

I’m proud of this essay. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll plan to see you in this space again next week.

Woolf and Lamb, their time and ours, the artist and the art

In the early days of January, I set aside a few books to be regular companions through the year: a volume each of Virginia Woolf's diaries, essays, and letters, and The Charles Lamb Day Book, a quote-a-day volume drawn from the full range of Charles Lamb's work.

One day recently, reading both of those companion authors, I was brought up short—and not in a good way. I'm going to quote both below, in service of thinking about them, so if you'd rather the pleasantness of your Sunday morning not be broken, I'd suggest passing over this post.

In the Lamb entry for January 24, taken from a letter to Edward Moxom, appears the line,

I maintain it, the eighth commandment hath a secret special reservation by which the reptile is exempt from any protection from it; as a dog, or a n------, he is not a holder of property.

Neither Lamb nor Methuen, the publisher of this 1925 volume, elided the slur as I have done.

Then, in Woolf's diary entry for January 9, 1915, when she was almost thirty-three, I came across the following:

On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.

The whole of this passage is disturbing and disheartening, but that last line is flat-out shocking. "Certainly," she writes. "Certainly."

What to do with this? I love Lamb and Woolf, as writers and, in many ways, as people. Like Henry James, they are writers whose work I have trouble separating from my knowledge of and interest in their lives. Their published works nestle in my mind alongside their letters, notebooks, diaries; biographies inflect, and, largely, increase my appreciation of their creations. I admire Woolf and Lamb, both for the work they created and for the way they played the hands life dealt them: Woolf's valiant struggle against mental breakdown; Lamb's abiding care for his mentally ill sister ("When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world."), even after she murdered their parents. I would find it hard to know as much as we now do about these two, to have read as extensively in their work as I have, and not admire them. I could no more read their work now as something separate from their lives and characters than I could a letter from one of my siblings.

Which is not to say that I've ever been under the illusion that either is perfect. Woolf could be tone-deaf and ignorant to the point of cruelty on issues of class, and, despite her marriage to a Jew, made antisemitic comments in her writings. Lamb, meanwhile, laid bare his prejudices against a number of groups that differed from him—blacks, Jews, Quakers, Scots—in his essay "Imperfect Sympathies." Of Jews, he writes,

I should prefer not to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. . . . Old prejudices cling about me.

Some people would credit Lamb for being frank about these views, but like many people today who pride themselves on "just asking the question" about supposedly taboo subjects, he shows an interest only in acknowledging those views, not in understanding their roots, questioning their validity, or moving beyond them.

That image of the contemporary "question raiser" is perhaps a good path to the question of why, if I already knew that Woolf and Lamb were flawed, these passages stopped me in my tracks. It's at least in part because of the way that #MeToo and other developments have brought the question of how we deal with art by bad people to the fore. And unlike so many ginned-up controversies, this one is both real and legitimately complicated. There are plenty of people who are interested in using the question solely as a straw man in service of dismissing the larger project of widening the circle of inclusion in society, but there are also plenty of people legitimately trying to answer the question. It's possible to conceive of a  wide range of answers that are valid, with the test of that validity ultimately being up to each person as they address each work of art. (For a really good discussion of this subject, I recommend the "What to Do with What's in the Box" episode of the Relentless Picnic podcast.)

Is it unfair to judge people like Woolf and Lamb by the standards of our era rather than theirs? Certainly. The past was terrible. I've never forgotten the opening lines of Simon Dickie's 2011 book Cruelty and Laughter:

Eighteenth-century Britons—or a high proportion of them—openly delighted in the miseries of others. Women as well as men laughed at cripples and hunchbacks. They tormented lunatics and led blind men into walls. Wife beating was a routine way of maintaining order within marriage—"an honest Englishman hates his wife" went the catchphrase. Types of violence that would now count as rape were almost mainstream sexual behaviors. Social hierarchies were part of God's plan, and those less favored were habitual figures of fun. Gentlement beat their servants and scoffed at the hungry peasants who crouched along the road outside very major town.  Yet social equals were no more likely to sympathize. Useless old women, village idiots, starving paupers, bastard bearers from the next parish—none of them attracted much sympathy from their own kind. Ridiculing and inflicting pain were everyday amusements, and powerful forces were defending them. Violence, intolerance, and schadenfreude were all tolerated as unavoidable side effects of British liberty, if not its very foundation.

Our own time features plenty of cruelty. Dickie, however, makes a strong case that on this measurement, at least, we've made some progress. (Similarly, I was shocked reading a scene in Little Dorrit last month in which Gowan, not a good man but far from a villain, reprimands his dog with. a blow to the head, then by striking him "severely with the heel of his boot, so that his mouth was presently bloody.")

By those standards, the casual racism I encountered in Charles Lamb's Day Book is nothing but a phrase—tossed off in a letter, barely the product of thought, far more an indication of the waters in which he swam than a personal deficiency. And even the staggering cruelty of Woolf's certainty in her diary is of its era—perhaps more bluntly expressed, but in keeping with a time when eugenics was on the march. Would we want to be judged in the future by the ways in which we reflect our own flawed society? Would we wish posterity to extend to us the forbearance of temporal understanding? We are inextricably of our time, even if we should, and, one hopes, do, try like hell to rise above it. (D. J. Enright: "It is not so much that one is out of sympathy with the age, it's the only age one has, as that the age is out of sympathy with itself. But then, the age is out of sympathy with itself.")

Yet the very reason we turn to artists in life is that we expect more. Not more in an explicitly moral sense, but more in the sense of seeing clearly—but the two are inextricable. As Iris Murdoch continually reminds us, seeing clearly is at the core of both morality and art. Is it strange that Woolf, wrapped up in the thinking of her time—and herself such a creature of the mind that she would struggle to conceive living with it damaged in a way that possibly limited thought—should fail to see the essential humanity of intellectally disabled people? No, not at all. But some people in her own time did. And we have come to expect more from her. She showed us, again and again, a mind of penetrating insight into human life and thought and being; she put that on the page like few others, in ways that remain thrilling a century later. Even her casual writing flashes with insight—the reason I was reading her journals in the first place was because they are full of memorable thoughts. So when she falls, it hurts.

What do we do with this kind of knowledge about artists? I don't have a prescription; this work of judgment is I believe fundamentally individual. When it comes to someone like Bill Cosby or Louis C.K., or in a different way Woody Allen, the answer is easy: I'm done. To enjoy their work required accepting a certain presentation of themselves and their worldview that was predicated on agreement that they were, while flawed, fundamentally good people. If they turn out to be, to varying degrees, monsters, that collapses completely.

Woolf and Lamb, on the other hand? It's more complicated. I'm not going to stop reading them, and I doubt I'll even stop admiring them, at least to a degree. There remains much to admire. And their work will, I am sure, continue to matter. But I will approach it with more skepticism. I'll question it more thoroughly. And, saddest of all, I'll wonder what might have been, had they been able to question themselves and their thinking more thoroughly. Art made by good people can be bad; art made by bad people can be good. But bad morality is usually rooted in a failure of understanding, and no art is ever the better for that.

The return of the sun . . . and this blog?

{Lake Michigan photo by rocketlass.}

While I am on the one hand very much a creature of moderation—regular schedule, regular life—at the same time, I am not someone who does things by half measures. I commit to the things I choose as undertakings. It's no accident that I've been working at the same place for nearly twenty-one years now, lived in Chicago longer than that, been married nearly that long.

Which is why I want to say up front: I may be back. I gave up blogging a few years ago around the same time the bulk of the Internet's attention turned away from it to the faster-paced, more ephemeral arms of social media. My reasons were more prosaic: I had taken up the piano in moderate seriousness, and that, combined with the time needed for a new dog and a slightly longer commute to a then-new home, ate up the time I had previously devoted to blogging. For a good long while, I didn't really miss it. I had the interactions with other book people that I wanted via Twitter. I got more diligent about landing writing assignments for other venues. Lately, however, I find myself missing it. The voice is different from other writing. The way of approaching and thinking about the books I read is different. The interaction with other readers is different.

So here I am. My aim, for now, is to post most weeks, most often (taking a page from Phil Christman's newsletter) on Sunday mornings. But it's possible that I will find myself failing to make the time even for that. It's possible I won't find the voice again. I'll assess around the end of the year. For now, however, I'm going to try.

I'll start modestly. Yesterday was essentially the first truly sunny day in Chicago this year, and, oh, did we feel it. It made the month-opening entry for February in The Daily Henry James, from The Princess Casamassima, seem well timed:

The winter was not over, but the spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled citizens, by way of a change, to see through it. The town could refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds; it lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty suntints and faint transparencies. There was warmth an there was light, and a view of the shutters of shops, and the church bells were ringing.

Here in Chicago, the winter is much farther from over than it is for a Londoner. But yesterday felt like the first real step towards its banishment.

Thanks for reading. See y'all around these parts for a while, let's hope.

Thoreau at 200

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I have been ecstatically excited for months now about a book I'm handling publicity for in my day job at the University of Chicago Press: Laura Dassow Walls's new definitive biography of Henry David Thoreau. I've been a Thoreau reader for years--since the publication of the one-volume edition of his journals by the NYRB Classics line a few years back, he's been an almost daily companion--but Laura's book showed me a depth and complexity, and an aliveness, that I didn't think possible. It's an incredible book. If you don't want to take my word for it, take a look at the roundup of praise I put together for the Press blog last week on Thoreau's bicentennial.("Superb," "compelling," "a great service to American letters," "remarkable," "engaging," "every page feels essential," and so on . . . )

This all sent me back to Walden for the first time since I was 19. I knew from having read Laura's insightful chapter on it that it was a more heterogeneous, more strange book than I recalled or than its general reputation might have it, but I still wasn't prepared: it's nothing like a straightforward account of time in the woods. If it were published today, it would be structured carefully, from his decision to set out on this experiment through the moment he returned home, and its observations would be carefully arranged, themes and larger points drawn through the book in a way to maximize their impact.

Instead, it's a grab-bag of Thoreau's thoughts. It's more like reading his journal than I expected. He opens with the idea of moving to the woods, then immediately veers off into extended thoughts on other related topics. It's about 40 pages before he gets back to the details of his experiment in living--and then almost immediately he veers off again. Like everything he wrote, it is driven by his broad and intense interests, by what's engaging him at a particular moment--and, ultimately and most importantly, by his keenly observing eye. He never merely looked at the world: he looked closely, and thought about the meaning and importance of what he saw.

A century and a half after publication, many of Walden's phrases are familiar, repeated so much that they've become barnacled unto cliche. But if you can even briefly see some of them fresh, their power--both of ideas and of phrasing, is undeniable. I'll leave you with one from late in the book. Try to see it as if you've not known these lines before; see if you feel the thrill I did.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less comples, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Happy summer, folks.

My mysterious Texan correspondent

After a ridiculously long hiatus (which I'm tempted to explain in sub-Nabokovian style: work, summer), how 'bout I try to ease ever so gently back into this blogging thing?

I've received another missive from my anonymous occasional postcard correspondent from Texas. This one seems to have been inspired by the postcard itself, a scene of colonial punishment that led to thoughts of Sir Magnus Donners. Donners, a major minor character (if you'll allow it) in A Dance to the Music of Time, is known in gossip circles for having unusual sexual tastes--ill-defined, perhaps, but thought to include various forms of domination and bondage. Which gives the moment quoted on the reverse of the postcard, which occurs during a tour of Donners's country house, Stourwater, a frisson of light discomfort.





Always a pleasure to hear from Texas in this fashion. And to receive a missive that clarifies that it's dated according to the New Style.

Byron

Lord Byron is one of those figures about whom I feel compelled to read--yet am very much glad never to have had to meet in the flesh. "He is as remorseless as he is unprincipled," wrote Mary Shelley, who was, let us remember, patient enough to put up with the all but intolerable Shelley. Were we to meet Byron, would his charm charm? Or would our (or my, at least) innate skepticism toward the hearty and demonstrative save us? It seems unlikely; it saved so few. Women, men--everyone fell for Byron. And no one loved Byron more than Byron. As Anthony Powell put it, "Shakespeare had an extraordinary grasp of what other people were like; Byron of what he himself was like."

I'm fresh off Fiona MacCarthy's excellent biography of the poet, which succeeds at the not simple task of making us see, at least to some extent, Byron's appeal, while never denying the ways in which he could be high-handed, unthinking, and cruel. She also helps us imagine his fame--which, rooted in a combination of class, scandal, a sense of generational change, and propelled by an epic poem published at the right moment, can be hard to grasp. Obviously no poets are parallel figures today--perhaps a particularly flamboyant film star? A Jude Law who also was the author of Infinite Jest? Yet however much we push ourselves to imagine a different era, when we open Childe Harold to its first lines we are instantly reminded of how vast is the gulf between then and now:

Oh, thou, in Hellas deemed of heavenly birth,
Muse, formed or fabled at the minstrel's will!
Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
Yet there I've wandered by thy vaunted rill;
Yes! sighed o'er Delphi's long-deserted shrine
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still;
Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine
To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine.

That's the poem that was such a sensation as to catapult its creator to stardom overnight. The later work Don Juan, at least, does open more promisingly--it's hard to top Byron's first lines there:

I want a hero, an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.

But even it quickly descends into unpromising territory, its second and third stanzas dense with names of figures of contemporary fame. (To be fair, it does get much livelier.)

One reads about Byron today, however, not so much for himself--for the balance between his charm and his self-obsession is ever precarious, even in his truly wonderful letters and journals)--as for his place in his circle and his cultural moment, and for the way that everyone around him weighed in at some point. Mary Shelley's take is above; here's Claire Clairmont, writing a bitterly creative mock obituary:

He dead extended on his bed, covered all but his breast, which many wigged doctors are cutting open to find out (as one may be saying) what was the extraordinary disease of which this great man died--His heart laid bare, they find an immense capital I carved on its surface, and which had begun to pierce the breast--They are all astonishment. One says, "A new disease." Another: "I never had a case of this kind before." A third "what medicines would have been proper" the fourth holding up his finger "A desert island."

Then there's Byron's own takes on his contemporaries. Keats's poetry was "a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and onions"; after Wordsworth published Poems, in Two Volumes, he wrote, "I reviewed Wordsworth's trash of the time." And there's his incessant baiting of Southey. This comes rom a letter to James Hogg: "Southey should have been a parish-clerk, and Wordsworth a man-midwife--both in darkness. I doubt if either of them ever got drunk, and I am of the old creed of Homer the wine-bibber." Then there was the very public assault in Don Juan:

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey.

Though I think we have to note that "mouthey" is little but a lazy answer to a thorny problem of rhyme, the charge of quaintness at least seems fair.

Now that I've finished MacCarthy's biography, and seen poor Byron safely dead in Missolonghi, I'm left with two outcomes: first, a desire, which I will probably act on this month, to read Don Juan for the first time in nearly twenty years, and, second, the list below, which I am beginning to think may be my greatest contribution to literary culture:

Mary Shelley: Kanga
Percy: Rabbit
Wordsworth: Owl
Keats: Piglet
Byron: Tigger
Charles Lamb: Pooh

My Twitter friend Hannah Hedgehog and my actual friend Caleb Crain both astutely noted that William Hazlitt can serve as Eeyore, at which point our Romantic Hundred Acre Wood is fully populated. As Anthony Powell wrote of some of the more scabrously satirical verses of Don Juan, "It surely must be admitted that this is the right sort of stuff."

Of Wars, Secret and Civil, the Marvel Way

Marvel Comics launched the twelve-issue Secret Wars miniseries on an unsuspecting public in 1984.



In that series, for the first time, nearly the whole universe of Marvel heroes and villains was brought together in a single story, a story that--though it took place in between issues of all the regular monthly books (despite the miniseries itself taking a year to run its course)--had immediate consequences, some major, for a number of long-running characters. The Thing left the Fantastic Four to go walkabout in space; Spider-Man suddenly had a new, alien costume. Secret Wars was a big, big deal.

For more than thirty years now, Marvel and DC have been trying to replicate that excitement, and the sales it generated. By the time the second Secret Wars series arrived in 1985, Marvel had figured out that they should run the events concurrently with the timeline of the monthlies, and explicitly tie in as many of them as possible. That's the formula they've repeated nearly every year since. Sometimes the scale is smaller--a series will be confined to the X books, or the Avengers-affiliated titles--but the concept is the same: make a big Event that readers will feel they can't miss, which will lead them to buy more comics.

The closest Marvel has come to repeating that success was with its Civil War series in 2006.




In that series,the accidental destruction of a whole town and its inhabitants by a relatively young, little-trained superhero team leads Congress to pass a superhuman registration act, requiring anyone with superpowers to register, and to essentially become a military or policing agent of the government. This splits the heroes, and that split is embodied in the rift that develops between longtime best friends Tony Stark, who supports registration, and Steve Rogers, who views it as un-American.

I was largely on a hiatus from reading comics when Civil War was published, and its obvious political incoherence kept me away for years. The biggest problem with superhero comics is that they rest on a concept of vigilante justice that is insane; though occasionally comics have taken that question seriously, for the most part if you're going to read superhero comics, you have to basically pretend it's not an issue--no series will hold up if you give that question serious thought. But that problem is at the heart of the dispute in Civil War. Tony Stark is right: you can't have superpowered vigilantes running around. Cap's position is indefensible. Yet the way the government uses the registration act, which includes secret prisons and "rehabilitated" criminals put to nefarious uses, makes Stark's position impossible as well.

Read today,  as I did (including every crossover--98 comics in all!) over the summer, Civil War remains almost wholly incoherent in its politics. What's most striking a decade on is how powerfully the issues bring back the air of America during the George W. Bush administration, to which the story is all but explicitly a reaction. For all the problems of the premise, and for all that the parallels are at times overplayed, the way it captures the inchoate, ambient fears and excesses of that period is striking.

What's most important, however, and what makes the story interesting despite its flaws, is that the central question is one that would divide heroes, along lines by which any fan could roughly sort them, and that say something interesting about the characters. Luke Cage, for example, is never going to trust the government, whereas Peter Parker can be coopted by Stark's authority and attention. It's a fundamentally interesting divide, and one that, especially when embodied by Steve and Tony, rests on, and draws power from, decades of storytelling.



For fans of long standing, watching Steve and Tony fight over a principle is painful, both because we've watched their friendship develop over decades and because we see how they each represent different aspects of heroism. They're at their best when they're working together; when they're irreconcilable, heroism feels imperiled to a degree that a villain like Doctor Doom can never threaten.

This past year, Marvel went back to the well for Civil War II. And while the politics of it are more interesting, the dividing question more legitimate, the results weren't nearly as good. The question? If you've got a hero whose power brings him visions of future crimes and disasters, how should you use that power? Can you ethically detain (or worse) people who have yet to commit a crime? Well, of course you can't. But what if he sees that the person in question is going to kill thousands and thousands of people?

Not an uninteresting dilemma, right? The problem, however, is that it's not a dilemma that naturally sorts people. It doesn't quite speak to a person's character or background the same way that registration did. (You could ally it to racial profiling, certainly, and get somewhere in sorting some characters, but that doesn't end up playing a big part for many characters in this story, in part perhaps because even today, after strenuous (and I think honest) efforts, the Marvel Universe remains pretty white.) The key antagonists this time, rather than Captain America and Tony Stark, are Captain Marvel and Tony Stark--and you could imagine either one on the other side without a lot of trouble. (Want to guess? OK: Captain Marvel is pro-precog crime prevention, Tony against.) The same goes for nearly every other character. So rather than a battle of ideologies, we get, well, just battles.

 That said, the series did lead to two comics that I'm quite grateful for, and that demonstrate almost to a T the potential of endless serial narratives that continue for decades. Both are mostly about characters talking, with little to no fighting; they're about people coming to terms with themselves and their relationships to each other. In one, Invincible Iron Man #14, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato, Tony goes to an AA meeting to get his head straight and focus on something other than the battle with Captain Marvel.



At the meeting, however, is . . . Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, who is also a recovering alcoholic.



Their dialogue, constrained initially by the setting, which they both respect, is tentative, difficult, tense.



It feels real, and it feels like an actual place where these characters, with their backstories, together and apart, might have ended up.

The other is Scarlet Witch #9, by James Robinson and Joelle Jones, in which Wanda's brother, Pietro, the speedster known as Quicksilver, arrives to basically order her to sign up with Captain Marvel.



Pietro has been a persistent difficulty Wanda's whole life, in the way of siblings but taken a bit further. He's always been a domineering hothead, ready to give orders and judge and condemn while rarely looking at his own actions.



This time, for a number of  reasons, Wanda has had enough. Watching Pietro realize that something has changed, that this relationship is now what it was, is wonderful for anyone who's been reading about these characters for decades.



Each of these stories is only twenty-two pages. The total word count can't be more than a couple thousand. But because these stories rest on nearly fifty years of earlier stories, we get so much from every panel, every word of dialogue; we see its refractions back through time and memory. It ends up bearing so much more weight, so much more power, than any standalone story could.

Month to month, reading superhero comics as an adult can be frustrating. No other medium with which I'm involved is as clearly deformed by the needs of the marketplace (like in its endless crossovers, to take but one example). So often it fails to realize its potential, brought down by simplicity, pathology, or the low and narrow expectations of its fan base. But every once in a while you get a comic like these two, and you remember why you're drawn to this medium, the connection it makes between your long-gone childhood self and the adult you who knows better but still looks to stories of people and events that are larger than ourselves but nonetheless, time and again, resolve to the human.

Rachel Cusk's Transit

Sometimes a novel captures you from the first lines, and it takes you a while to figure out quite why. Here's Rachel Cusk's Transit (2016):

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.

I was sold. Part of what drew me in is obvious: the audacity of opening with a spam e-mail; the matter-of-fact prose; the simple past tense of the first sentence, refusing as it does to offer any temporal or physical scene-setting beyond "this happened," and thereby throwing us right in the stream of "this is happening."

It was only once I got well into the novel, and flipped back to reread the opening lines, that I realized the deeper attraction: Cusk, through her protagonist, was giving someone else the floor. That the person was lying, that their lie was banal, commercial, mattered not. They were speaking, and Cusk's protagonist was listening.

That, I realized, is why reading Transit is such a thrilling, engulfing experience. It's a novel about listening. Cusk's protagonist, Faye, is a writer who has recently returned to London after a divorce and is juggling a remodeling of her new flat with the responsibilities of divided parenthood. But that's what we get in the interstices. Most of the novel consists of other people telling stories about what's going on in their lives, and telling them with typical solipsism and self-dramatization. They're largely unremarkable stories of contemporary London life, but Cusk imbues them with the interest and drama of a story told you by an old friend.

I'll give you one extended example, which I suspect won't carry a lot of weight outside the context of the book, but will at least let me try out one theory of how Cusk makes them, in toto, so compelling. Here, an acquaintance at a dinner party tells Faye about her childhood and her own experience of parenting:

Her own parents, she said, had been a real love story: they had never wavered in their attention to one another through all the years of their marriage, despite the fact that they were bringing up five children so close in age that in the family photo albums her mother had appeared to be continuously pregnant for several years . They were young parents, she added, and tirelessly energetic: her childhood had been one of camping trips and sailing expeditions and summers in the cabin the had built with their own hands. Her parents never went off on holiday on their own, and treated all family occasions with great ceremony, eating with their children every night around the kitchen table, to the extent that she could not remember a single evening meal when they were absent, which must have meant that they rarely, if ever, went out to dinner together. While Jonathan and I, she added, eat in restaurants nearly every night. She left for work so early and returned to late, she went on, that she almost never aw Ella eat at all, though of course the nanny fed her the correct food, as Jonathan and Birgid had instructed her to. To be perfectly honest, Birgid said, I actually avoid Ella's mealtimes--I find myself things to do in the office instead. Since Ella's birth Jonathan had started to make roast meat and potatoes for lunch on Sunday, as it was a tradition in his family and he thought they should repeat it for Ella's sake.

But I don't really like to eat at lunch, she said, and Ella is fussy, so Jonathan ends up eating most of it on his own.

See what I mean? There's not much to it: this is a story of contemporary parenting being told to us by someone it's been told to. But when you pile story on story, when you realize that Faye is actively listening to everyone she meets, each of the stories gains interest, power. And Faye's occasional pressing and stray responses ("It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk.") remind us that one of the ways we test our apprehension of the world is by listening to, and pushing against, the way that others apprehend and attempt to explain it.

Then there's the quality of judgment. We justly prize empathy in artworks--the "Everyone has his reasons" of The Rules of the Game--admiring the ability of writers like Tolstoy to show us each person, in his error, without damning him for it. It's weak novels that judge.

But we are judging beings. We may fight it, but it's there. And as Faye tells us these stories, even though she utters nary a word of explicit judgment, we realize that she, too, is judging. These people, time and again, are failing in key ways. Life and limitations make it inevitable, and we teach ourselves to acknowledge that, to cut people slack, but the judging faculty never wholly atrophies. What makes Faye's implicit judgment so bracing is, in part, simply that Cusk is acknowledging it. But more than that is the second layer: Faye is judging herself right alongside these people. Her own story barely takes shape in this book, told in asides and responses, but it has its own failures, the biggest involving parenting: her sons appear primarily as troubled voices down a phone line, offering up problems she's too distant and distracted to solve. It's that dual, or maybe even treble, vision that elevates Transit to greatness: we are reading Cusk's account of a woman who has taken up listening, in part, perhaps, to defer thinking about her own life, and who finds herself unable to stop shadowing others' stories with her own, setting their actions alongside hers, judging herself as she's judging them. "How often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others," Faye thinks at one point.

That scrim, that remove, that sense that we are in Faye's mind while its foreground is being given over to listening to someone else, makes reading Transit an unusually absorbing experience. Attending closely to another mind even as some part of our own mind is weighing, assessing, judging what we're hearing--in a sense, Transit replicates the reading experience itself.

The Caine Mutiny

The first book I read this year was a Herman Wouk's 1952 Pulitzer Prize winner The Caine Mutiny, a Christmas gift from a friend of discerning reading taste. Wouk's novel had the misfortune to be published a year after James Jones's From Here to Eternity, which won the National Book Award, as Wouk explained in a foreword to a 2003 paperback:

Early in 1951 there appeared a gigantic army novel, From Here to Eternity, at once beautiful and brutal. . . . It won critical hurrahs and instant vast popularity, and my book came out in its shadow to a discouragingly poor start.

However, in a reminder that the early 1950s were a different, distant era, Wouk goes on to say that sales began to perk up a bit, and then one particular retail decision fanned them into a flame:

The Doubleday people . . . advised me to go and see for myself at Macy's, which was having a price war on the two books with Gimbel's. . . . It was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime sight, people lining up through the department store and out into the street just to buy my novel, or From Here to Eternity, or both.

What also speaks powerfully of another era is what Wouk says he was told about early attempts to sell film rights: "Nobody is interested in World War II anymore." Just a bit more than five years after victory, another war--in which staggering numbers, by our contemporary standards, of American soldiers would be killed--quietly underway in Korea, and what people wanted, if the movie scouts were to be believed, was to move on.

You can understand it, certainly. Read any good memoir or novel that encompasses V-E Day and the weariness that underlies the relief is palpable. But at the same time, looking back at the literature from the period, we realize that while the men who served may have wanted to leave the war behind, it wasn't quite done with them yet.

The Caine Mutiny is an interesting example of that. It's in a lot of ways a distinctly untroubled book, given the subject, but at the same time it's about how the war years turned a whole lot of callow boys into men. Wouk's main character, Willie Keith, sees the Navy simultaneously as his duty and, once he gets there, as a job. Through the course of the book's 500+ pages, he'll struggle with the central fact of military service: that it's designed to strip you of your individuality in order to serve a larger goal, and that to do so it has to in many ways be a dumb, brutal, machine-like system. But whereas James Jones's Robert Prewitt is determined to fight that machine, even if it costs him everything, Willie Keith is focused on living through the experience, and helping his shipmates do the same. Reading about Prew is a bracing, troubling experience; reading about Willie Keith's service is like watching a version of the growth and maturation we all (one hopes) experienced in our early adulthood. As a portrait of that process, and its acceleration in wartime, The Caine Mutiny is wholly convincing.

What remains most interesting about it after all these decades, however, is the turn it takes partway through. (Given the prominence of the film version, I'll assume there's little that can surprise you, but if you've not read or seen it, you might want to stop reading here.) Up through the titular mutiny, we've more or less been on Willie Keith's side. We see his flaws, and we do get some other perspectives, but he's our focal point and the character who most readily draws our sympathy. So when the mutiny occurs, and Keith plays a major part, we blow right past our nagging questions about its propriety. The moment is dramatic, and our protagonist has chosen a side, so we align. But then . . . the trial comes, and Wouk does something remarkable: he shows us how Keith was wrong--and therefore, by extension, so were we. Neither side is clear-cut, but the very fact that Wouk is able to upend our understanding, push against our sympathy, is impressive, and  would in itself be enough to recommend the book. It's a feat of storytelling.

These days, The Caine Mutiny still lives to a large extent in the shadow of From Here to Eternity. Wouk is seen as a craftsman, Jones more like an artist; Jones's story of individuality and self-torment draws more interest than Wouk's tale of men setting out to do a difficult job. But both novels are worth reading, and both, I think, belong, with James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, in the small group of essential novels about the war.

The post has arrived, or, We begin to read Clarissa

"The first impression the reader receives from Samuel Richardson's masterpiece is of its great length."

That's Angus Ross, opening his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which, indeed, impresses by running to 1,499 oversized pages. And while I've long since been convinced by friends who have sung the novel's praises (including in this space) that Ross's next line--"and rightly so, since that is an integral part of the work's reach and meaning"--is true, and that the novel is worth reading, I've never been willing to make the commitment. As my friend Maggie put it:

I read nine other books while working my way through this one, and I'm haunted by what I could have read instead. Three Dickens! The entire works of Graham Greene!

I simply could never bring myself to commit the time. Even with as much and as quickly as I read, it would likely be a month's labor.

Enter my Twitter friend Stephanie Hershinow, scholar of eighteenth-century literature and  Richardson fan. At breakfast in New York last month, she revealed a scheme for reading Clarissa that seemed eminently manageable: read this epistolary novel by reading each letter on the date it carries, beginning with the first letter, dated January 10, and finishing with the last on December 18. A year of broken-up reading--this would do!

Now it is January 10, and I am embarking. You're welcome to join me, and some other folks who've been caught. There will be some posts here throughout the year, and if you're on Twitter you can find us at #Clarissa. The first letter is a mere two pages! Join us!

"I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family . . . "

2016

One of the great, if less heralded, discoveries of the literary world of Twitter and blogging is that, yes, those of us who read all the time are also always reading in all times. For every new novel being championed, there's someone out there ready to chat about diving back into Trollope, or just discovering P. G. Wodehouse. And, because there's little cachet in keeping up with the non-new, encountering company on the journey always feels extra special: you're there because you want to be there. This year more than ever, as the news insisted on being bad, the past between pages exerted a powerful pull.

Which brings me to my year-end list, such as it is. As usual, it's all hither and yon, disorganized and atemporal. There are new books here, certainly, but, as in any given year, the majority of what I read was by authors long dead, and they deserve a place, too. It's also incomplete, I'm sure. I read many, many very good books this year, books that surprised me or taught me things or opened new ways of thinking. They're not all here, probably because I didn't happen to spy them as I scanned my bookshelves tonight, but they were appreciated as I read them, and I'm sure they'll surface again, as good books do.

Herewith, some of the books that defined my year.

NONFICTION

Autumn: An Anthology of the Changing Seasons, edited by Melissa Harrison
This is the first I read of a series of four little paperback anthologies from the UK that bring together contemporary nature writers--of which that isle has plenty right now--and older works. The selections are short, making it a perfect bedside or morning coffee book. Perhaps the latter is better, because like all good nature writing the book leaves you more alert to the world you inhabit; as you step out the door on the all-too-routine walk to the office, a reminder that nature is never routine can be a blessing. (And now that winter is here, I've just started delving into that one, more as solace, perhaps, than in celebration.)

Silver Ley, by Adrian Bell
Having grown up in a farm family in a rural community, I've always been extremely skeptical of people who talk of going back to the land. What I always see ahead of them is shock at the labor and isolation, followed by failure in the face of the uneasy relationship between nature and commerce. This memoir, published in 1931 and brought back by Slightly Foxed, won me over despite. A young man from a genteel family of some modest means takes over a farm, along with the position in the town that accompanies it. It goes better than my dire predictions, but that's not the point. Rather, this is a quiet book about coming to terms with who you are, what you can do, and what you want from life and the people around you. It's beautiful and quietly sad.

Terms and Conditions, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
I have come to trust the editors at Slightly Foxed to the degree that I now simply pick up whatever is new from them whenever I'm in London, regardless of author or subject. Terms and Conditions was my reward: a new history, rooted in countless interviews, of life at English girls' boarding schools from the 1940s to the 1970s, it is hilarious and shocking and strange and occasionally sad. Any reader who grew up pining to be shipped off to a glamorous boarding school or any Anglophile who simply can't ever get enough of the weirdness of the English will likely enjoy it. I recommend reading it in public or at family gatherings, because the looks people give when you reply to their questions about what you're reading are priceless.

William Morris, by Fiona MacCarthy
This is a classic of doorstop biography, and it earns its length and detail by presenting a compelling, complicated, largely admirable William Morris firmly ensconced in his historical, political, and cultural moment. This is one of those books that you're brought to by a thread from elsewhere--in my case, from Penelope Fitzgerald's book on his close friend Edward Burne-Jones and A. S. Byatt's short book on Morris--and that then sends you off in a dozen new directions. Thanks to MacCarthy, I feel I understand the Arts and Crafts movement like I never have, in all its ambitions, good intentions, and contradictions. This is the kind of book that makes me speak of biographers with awe.

Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies, by Alexandra Harris
I wrote a bit about this book for Open Letters Monthly already. Suffice it to say that I read it in March and find it still, nine months later, affecting my reading--yesterday, in the face of below-zero temperatures, it sent me to the Anglo-Saxon poets and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Harris offers far more than simply a run through the history of writing on the weather--instead, we feel we understand how the weather actually infuses English literature, all but inextricable from it. And Harris is splendid company: authoritative and confident yet welcoming, and consistently reliable in zeroing in on the most interesting parts of a story. It's a landmark.

Henry James, by Leon Edel
This really is just a lead in to . . .

FICTION

This year was dominated for me by Henry James. I read some new books that I liked very much (Elizabeth McKenzie's off-kilter The Portable Veblen; Megan Abbott's fierce, obsessional You Will Know Me; Nina Stibbe's wonderfully comic Paradise Lodge, to take just three), but from the moment I dove into Edel's biography in February, I couldn't get James out of my mind. The James we meet in Edel's book is powerfully alive, and once I'd made his acquaintance I couldn't resist delving more deeply than before into his letters, masterpieces of the form, and then into his fiction--reading some previously unread novels, re-reading others, and recently embarking on what will be a long straight read-through of all his stories. This was the year that I finally knew I would eventually read all of Henry James.

Amid all this, I was proud to discover in Google Books The Henry James Year Book, a 1911 page-a-day book of James quotes that I was able to get republished by the University of Chicago Press as The Daily Henry James. It's been a source of consistent joy ever since, and a spur to continue every day to think about and engage with this man of great heart and great loneliness whose audacity in fiction was matched only by his caution in life. Few other writers draw my interest so powerfully to both their work and their lives--perhaps, in fact, only Virginia Woolf, who, like James, rarely put a paragraph to paper, fiction or nonfiction, public or private, that doesn't reward attention.

As the holidays approach, and I endeavor to replace frustration and tension and worry with the relative simplicity of gratitude, I'm grateful to these authors. They've been good company this year.

I'll leave you with a pleasingly dire quote from a letter James sent on January 1, 1893:

The year's end is a terrible thing, and the year's beginning is a worse.

And you? What did you read in 2016?

Elsewhere . . .

In recent weeks, when I've mostly been failing to write in this space, I have at least made a couple of contributions to Open Letters Monthly. The first was a sheer pleasure to prepare for and write: a review of Ruth Jackson's excellent new biography of Shirley Jackson, the writing of which gave me an excuse to re-read the Jackson books I'd read before and dig up all the ones I hadn't.

One thing that's always surprised me about Jackson is that people have had trouble reconciling the light, loving manner of her family memoirs and the darkness of her other fiction. And perhaps I would have, too, fifty years ago, when boundaries between genres were more rigidly policed, preventing serious fiction and the light diversions of women's magazines from ever polluting each another. Seen from our vantage, however, the two styles are clearly kin: humor is shot through both--rarely do even Jackson's most frightening novels fail to have moments of black comedy--and they share an appreciation of oddity and an attention to language, and in particular its rhythms.

At the same time, though, there is a distinct difference in prose style, one that I didn't have room to get into in my review. Take a look at this, from early in one of Jackson's creepiest, least explicable stories, "The Man in the Woods":

The cat had joined him shortly after her entered the forest, emerging from between the trees in a quick, shadowy movement that surprised Christopher at first and then, oddly, comforted him, and the cat had stayed beside him, moving closer to Christopher as the trees pressed insistently closer to them both, trotting along in the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit when they are frightened. Christopher, when he stopped once to rest, sitting on a large stone at the edge of the road, had rubbed the cat's ears and pulled the cat's tail affectionately, and had said, "Where are we going, fellow? Any ideas?", and the cat had closed his eyes meaningfully and opened them again.

You can find pleasantly showy passages throughout Jackson's writing; this one is fairly sedate, but it serves my purpose. The sentences are long and fluid, clause following on clause as cause on effect, and an aphoristic phrase ("the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit") is thrown in with the air of an afterthought.

Now look at this, chosen all but at random from Raising Demons, Jackson's second volume of family memoir:

Usually, whenever Beekman drove, Sally wanted to come too. And whenever Sally came, Jannie thought she had better come along. And when Beekman and Sally and Jannie came, Laurie figured that we might just sop in at a movie or some such, and if we did he wanted to be along. As a result, whenever I went shopping in the new car, everyone came except my husband, who could not, for a long time, look at the new car without telling me how we were going bankrupt in style. One Saturday morning I almost got off without Beekman, who was learning from Sally how to cut out paper dolls, but before I was out of the driveway they were calling to me to wait a minute, and by the time I finally tuned the car and headed off toward the big supermarkets I had all four of them with me, Sally accompanied by her dolls Susan and David and Patpuss, all dressed entirely in cleansing tissue, and carrying--though I did not know it when she got into the car--a pocketbook containing four pennies and a shilling stolen from her father's coin collection.

Oh, how it builds! As each child is added, the sentences get longer and longer, trailing more impedimenta in their wake. Whereas the sentences in the previous passage were long, but explicit in their structure, these pretend to embody chaos: they just go. The book is like that throughout, written as if in the rush of conversation with children and the confusions of parenting, a hard task of writing made to look casually effortless. If you're looking for light entertainment this holiday season, you could do far worse than Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages.

The other bit I wrote for OLM was much less involved: a brief note on my year in reading, focused on Alexandra Harris's wonderful Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. "English summers take their identity from the stretches of grey on either side," writes Harris. In the depths of a gray and dark Chicago winter, I feel strong kinship. If you're looking for a holiday gift for a bookish Anglophile, your shopping may be done.

Reading is bad for your social life, kids.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a cab heading to the airport early on a weekday morning, when I heard something on the radio that I think you folks will enjoy. The driver was listening to an FM top 40 station, and their wacky morning crew was on, being, well, wacky (as distinct from, you know, funny). Apparently they have a regular segment where someone calls in to tell them about a date that went wrong, and they then call the other party to get their side; today, the caller was a guy, Dan, who said he'd been on a couple of dates with a woman, Anna, he'd met through work. He'd thought they were getting along well, but then, after an evening when they went back to his place and fooled around a little, she'd abruptly stopped responding to his calls and texts.

As they dialed this poor woman's number, I was, quite frankly, dreading the next ten minutes of the ride. What could this exchange be except deeply awkward at best, crude and mean at worst? Initially, it seemed like my fears were coming true: they got her on the line, explained who they were and why they were calling, and, after establishing that the guy was on the line, she said, "Well, I guess we're doing this live on the radio, then."

This was not a promising opening. But then everything changed:

ANNA: "Do you remember, Dan, when you left the room to go to the bathroom? And you had a book on your bedside table? Do you remember what it was?"

DAN: "No?"

ANNA: "It was called House of Holes."

DAN (and ME, simultaneously): "Oh, no. No, no, no."

For those of you who don't know--and I'm assuming 98% of the radio audience that day fell into that category--House of Holes is a work of pornography. Sort of. See . . . it's by Nicholson Baker, a strange, wonderful, brilliant, sui generis writer who cares as much about words and sentences as anyone I've ever read and who seems determined to make each book he writes completely different from everything that he's written before.

What led him to write a novel about a futuristic, gleefully perverse pleasure resort where, to be crude about it, everyone and everything is DTF? Who knows? But while it's porny AF (might as well stick with the internet abbreviations what brung me), it's also goofy and funny and wide-eyed. It's not a great novel; I'm not even sure it's a successful one. But it's also nothing like the midcentury men's whack books that people like Donald Westlake were hired to write--whereas those tend to be soul-draining, Baker's book is, even if ultimately a bit of a mess, vivifying. I've written about it before--and even had a kindred experience to Dan's, of worrying about someone who didn't understand the book seeing it.

None of which, of course, can be explained on a Top 40 station to a woman and two DJs who are wholly unfamiliar with Baker. After Anna explained, in reasonably family-friendly language, what she'd discovered in flipping through the book, the DJs were cackling and Dan was left sputtering, with evident regret and sadness, "Didn't you notice that I have all kinds of books?"

It didn't work. You could tell he knew it wouldn't as he was saying it. Rarely have I felt such unexpected, powerful sympathy for a total stranger. Careful what you read, kids--or, at least what you leave on your bedside table when you might be sharing your bed.

Robert Aickman

With apologies for being remiss throughout October--hosting crowds of 20ish people every night as the Cubs romp to the championship does tend to throw off one's planning in other realms--I'll open November with a quick post on Robert Aickman, a subject more properly suited to the month just past. Aickman was one of the greatest writers of strange stories, turning out nearly fifty, all so good that for a while earlier this year, when most of his work was out of print in the States, I was scheming to find a way to publish a complete collection. His stories can be hard to describe--or, more properly, hard to describe in a way that gets across the discomfiting, uncanny, almost physical strangeness they convey.

A quick attempt at a generic outline: A man, often a low-end salesman or businessman, takes a wrong turn or encounters some travel difficulty in an area unknown to him, a vague semi-suburban landscape that's a bit down-at-heel, forgotten or bypassed. He makes reasonable decisions about how to handle this, like taking a room; there are hints even as he's securing lodging that something is off, but they're no more than hints, flashes of odd behavior by the proprietor, for example. Later, almost without us realizing it, things get supremely weird, and there is a sense that the man may have become trapped, subject to forces beyond his control. There are hints of sex, and even some Freudian imagery, but they're balanced or neutered by attention to other aspects of physicality, like eating or tiredness or bodily discomfort. Sometimes these events are recalled from a later time, or they happen only to have an unexpected sequel years later.

That description, I realize, is simultaneously vague and very specific, but that's almost the point: Aickman traffics in specific details about places and people and events that are fundamentally vague. A strong personality wouldn't ever quite fit in Aickman's stories, nor would a lavishly described locale. These are stories about what happens elsewhere, in the spots we pass through, to the people we don't think about, in the hours of the night we sleep through. There's a palpable air of menace, and of age--of an ancient quality to the land and its accretions that somehow has failed to bring them dignity or value, but instead has rendered them unfit for today, strange, dangerous. At the same time, this is almost all implied rather than stated: these aren't stories of atmosphere, quite, but they're also not really stories of action. They're stories, more, of  deterioration, of the quiet breakdown of logic, assumptions, even cause and effect. The protagonist thinks he's in one, fairly clear situation, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, he finds himself in another, wholly new and inexplicable situation. And you, the reader, have trouble even pinpointing when or why it all began to go wrong. I came across a telling line in Aickman's memoir The Attempted Rescue today:

I learned reading . . . very literally at my mother's knee. I remember having particular difficulty with the word "because." Much could obviously be made of this significant block, but I abstain.

If this intrigues you at all, I recommend you get the collection Cold Hand in Mind, which includes the masterpieces "The Swords," "The Hospice," and "The Same Dog," and also Sub Rosa, for "Into the Wood" and "The Inner Room," the latter of which is my favorite Aickman story. I also highly recommend the recent episode of Backlisted, an excellent books podcast, that focuses on Aickman--the two hosts and guest offer a similar take to mine above, but with a lot more analysis and back-and-forth, and some real insights into Aickman's work.

That podcast was what led me to Aickman's memoir. The hosts discuss it at length, and they read out a long section about Aickman's father that is truly, beautifully, unsettlingly strange. Even though I'd heard it read just over a week ago, I was still astonished when I read it last night:

My father, as I knew him, was impossible to live with, to be married to, to be dependent upon.

This is a vast subject, the framework and colouring of my universe. As I approach it so nearly, I warm and chill at the same time.

In the first place, there was his unpunctuality.

At the beginning of my life, he would rise from bed at ten or eleven, and even then, like me today, with much emotional agony. He would protest, non the less, every night, that he would be down for breakfast, and be indignant if this were doubted, but my mother soon learned that the only hope lay in bringing him breakfast in bed. Risen, he would potter for several hours with the problems and difficulties of his toilet, and then, in the early afternoon, he would struggle away to his office. Daily he would say that he would be back for Dinner, not by seven, he had to admit, but, absolutely, positively, by eight, or perhaps nine. Nightly, he would return at ten or ten-thirty, to find Dinner spoiled and my Mother in sulks. Quite often he would even miss the last train (which reached Stanmore at 12:10 a.m.), and appear in the small hours, having walked the four miles from Wealdstone (later the three miles from Edgeware, when the Underground was extended thereto), while my Mother's anxiety and resentment rose in the silent house, each time as if he had never done it before. As I grew older, even these times began to slip. On most days, he would not depart for work until the evening, and the last train back became his regular one. He always came back in the end, even if he had to walk all the way from London, which he did not infrequently.

Of such is the soil made in which weird tales grow, no? Trust me: try some Aickman.

The Daily Henry James, suitable even for October 1

The calendar has turned to October--which means, in these parts, a reacquaintance with the fine art of the ghost story, broadly defined.

First, however, I must beg an indulgence. This past week, a book arrived on my desk at work that I've been impatiently awaiting for months: The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master. It's a book I'm incredibly proud to be able to bring back to the world: originally published, privately, in 1911 as The Henry James Yearbook--with James's approval and, to the extent of a brief prefatory note, participation--it sank into obscurity almost immediately. When I stumbled on it in Google Books last winter, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. A quick e-mail to James biographer Michael Gorra confirmed my suspicion: this book was essentially unknown, and thus ripe for retrieval.

And it's such a pleasure. I'll confess to being, at this point, not wholly sound on James. The past five years or so have seen me go from someone who has read and enjoyed quite a bit of James to someone who thinks about and reads James a lot, who's visited James's house and read biographies and much of the letters and most of the novels and many of the stories. I'm now to the point where I expect I will eventually read it all, which, given James's decades of productivity, is saying something.

Yet I'm not sure I would have said that James would adapt well to the quote-a-day format. It's not even that his sentences are too long; rather, his thoughts are. How would a serpentine Jamesian thought hold up in isolation? I was wrong. James turns out to work wonderfully in this format. The book, which was assembled as a form of therapy after a breakdown by the adult daughter of a friend of the James family, mixes short and long passages, aphoristic insights and description, short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction. It draws on an impressive range of James's writings--one of the many pleasures it offers is that even a dedicated James reader will almost certainly encounter lines they've never read before, from obscure stories or essays. And it's such fun to open the book each day and find something new; not for nothing does Michael Gorra, in the foreword he wrote for the University of Chicago Press edition, call the book a "little charmer."

A search on my Twitter feed will turn up a number of entries I've enjoyed and highlighted. For today, I'll give you the entry that opens October. Each month begins with a slightly longer passage, before the entry for the first day of the month; this one, for October, is from "New England: An Autumn Impression," in The American Scene:

It may be an ado about trifles--and half the poetry, roundabout, the poetry in solution in the air, was doubtless but the alertness of the touch of Autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty jacket, who had already broken out with a palette and brush; yet the way the color begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes. One speaks, at the same time of the orchards; but there are properly no orchards when half the countryside shows, the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona. The apple tree in New England plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantily produces, and, engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and delicate. What it must do for the too under-dressed land in may and June is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.

As I've written before, for an American, New England is autumn, source of our ancestral stories and images and dreams of the season, and James conjures beautifully this one aspect of it, which in itself calls to mind both labor and leisure, beauty and utility, history and the everyday.


Here in Chicago, autumn came in a rush this year: summer, having lingered with its heat and sun too long, beating an overnight retreat about ten days ago. Instantly, it seemed, leaves rustled along the edges of the sidewalk in the breeze, and the park was patchworked with color. Jenkins, our still-new dog, turns out to like to chase leaves as the wind draws them from him; his energetic joy in the activity gives me yet another reason to love this turning of the year.

With the arrival of autumn, however, we also get the dark mornings, and the rapid drawing in of evening after work. What better, at either end of the day, than to leaven the loss with some Henry James? The Daily Henry James will be in a bookstore near you within about two weeks. You won't regret bringing it into your library.

Someone's got to do it: On Saint Sebastian and Aubrey Beardsley, with just a bit (of course) of Anthony Powell

We open today's post with the entry on Saint Sebastian from Foxe's Book of Martyrs:

Sebastian being born in that part of France called Gallia Narbonensis, was a Christian, and was lieutenant general of the vaward of Dioclesian the emperor; who also encouraged many martyrs of Christ by his exhortations unto constancy, and kept them in the faith. He being therefore accused to the emperor, was commanded to be apprehended, and that he should be brought into the open field, where by his own soldiers he was thrust thro' the body with innumerable arrows.

Martyrological legend has it that Sebastian survived the arrows and was given a chance to harangue Diocletian in person, only to then be clubbed to death. In the world of art, however, that death has almost no place, while Sebastian, looking calm, pious, even beautiful under a hail of arrows has been a common subject for centuries now, familiar from any number of works and artists.

I was not, however, familiar with this engraving of the scene by printmaker Jacques Callot.



What I like about this is the spaciousness of it: Callot chose to depict not merely the moment of death but the organized process of bringing it. This is an execution more than a martyrdom, Sebastian a small figure at its center

I doubt I'd ever have seen this engraving--being not a believer, I don't spend a lot of time on saints--had I not been flipping through a volume of Aubrey Beardsley's letters and found this reference to it in a letter to his friend Andre Raffalovich, a Catholic, of May 5, 1897:

I suppose Gray knows of Callot's singularly interesting eau-forte of the Martyrdom of St Sebastian. There is a charming soldier in the background picking up the arrows that have missed the Saint.

Had you noticed the soldier? I can't say I would have without Beardsley as my guide. I'm not sure I would describe him as charming. That feels like Aubrey being deliberately casual, decadently arch. There is, nonetheless an unusual quality to him. Does his awkward step signal caution? (Are there more arrows coming?) Delicacy? Even goofiness? Looking at his almost mincing manner, you can imagine him as a character from a Monty Python sketch, trying simply to do his job and finding himself utterly beset.

My first thought on encountering Beardsley's letter, and being led to the image itself, was that Anthony Powell would have loved this detail. I quickly turned to a pair of Powell's reviews of volumes of Beardsley's letters from the 1970s in hopes of finding a comment, but alas: it goes unremarked. Nonetheless, the whole of it seems to his taste: the discovery and highlighting of an inessential background figure; the realization that the artist put him there deliberately, and seems to have even perhaps taken some pleasure in doing so; and the acknowledgment he signifies that even the most dramatic moments of life retain their humdrum characteristics--there is always someone around just doing their job. I realize that an alternative response to this scene would be one of horror: a man is cooly going about his job as another is being murdered. But the bloodless quality of centuries-old tales of martyrdom, and my sense of Powell's own sensibility, suggests he'd take it lightly. As he once wrote of Beardsley, without obvious judgment, "He was without sentimentality.

A line from Powell's notebooks came to mind: "They are casting lots for my raiment at this moment." The gallows humor is kin to that arrow-gathering soldier, no? I also thought of a more sentimental way of reading a not-dissimilar scene, this one from Roger Ebert's 1983 review of Return of the Jedi, praising George Lucas's inclusion of small details:

Here is just one small moment in "Return of Jedi," a moment you could miss if you looked away from the screen, but a moment that helps explain the special magic of the Star Wars movies. Luke Skywalker is engaged in a ferocious battle in the dungeons beneath the throne room of the loathsome, Jabba the Hutt. His adversary is a slimy, gruesome, reptilian monster made of warts and teeth. Things are looking bad when suddenly the monster is crushed beneath a falling door. And then (here is the small moment) there's a shot of the monster's keeper, a muscle-bound jailer, who rushes forward in tears. He is brokenhearted at the destruction of his pet. Everybody loves somebody.

All drama has a center, which means it has a periphery, and on that periphery are a lot of people simply trying to get through their day. That Callot paused to think, "Not all those arrows are going to hit," then followed that thought out and had fun with it, makes me happy.

 Beardsley, meanwhile, can be forgiven a bit of gallows humor, even a shade of deliberate affectless decadence: read more than a handful of his letters and you'll begin to realize how awful tuberculosis must have been. Letter after letter is little more than a patient, mostly uncomplaining recital of symptoms and hoped-for routes to respite. His death didn't have the drama of a martyrdom, but he was able to see it coming for a long time.