Unconsumed Holes

“But can a novelist, or any writer for that matter, really notice too much or dwell too much on what he notices?” The question was posed a few weeks back by Sam Tanenhaus, on the New York Times Book Review’s Papercuts blog. The question served as a pivot in Tanenhaus’s presentation of rival readings of a passage that appears in John Updike’s novella “Of the Farm”:

Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain.

First, Tanenhaus offered James Wood’s distrust of the passage, from his new book How Fiction Works (FSG): “Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye.” A little later he presented Nicholson Baker’s appreciation of the same passage, from Baker’s Updikeophiliac U & I (1991):

I cried at the aforementioned description of the raindrops on the window screen like a crossword puzzle or a “sampler half-stitched”: it killed for the time being a patch of screen description of my own, but that didn’t matter, because Updike’s paragraph was so fine that my competitiveness went away; and when I found that Elizabeth Bishop’s 1948 New Yorker short story called “The Housekeeper” also had a screen whose clinging raindrops “fill[ed] the squares with cross-stitch effects that came and went,” this parallel only demonstrated to me how much more Updike could do with the same piece of reality: he had lifted it from the status of incidental setting and made its qualities part of the moral power and permanency of his mother’s house…. What I liked so much about “Of the Farm” was that Updike’s terror was under control; the proportion between consumed and unconsumed holes was just right; you could still see through the mesh of the screen, but the clinging metaphorical figures, such as the droplet-needlework image itself, were there in cross-eyed, painstaking abundance.

Tanenhaus’s question is useful, for it serves to remind readers of the precise function of criticism: answering fully such questions as “can a novelist, or any writer for that matter, really notice too much or dwell too much on what he notices?” As a form of argumentation, literary criticism is charged with making defensible cases for indefensible positions. “Defensible” in the sense that one must marshal proof, in the form of quotations from a work of literary art, that make a case for the integrity or incoherence of such a work. “Indefensible” in the sense that however much proof one marshals, one is only offering a fleeting thinking-through of a thing–not its destruction, much less its salvation.

Weekend Listen: Hallali!

Last week, Arthur Krystal suggested in our discussion that contemporary culture now suffers from a dearth of great art. Krystal quoted Eliot’s statement about Yeats—“He was one of those whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them”—and said, in so many words, “show me a poet or a novelist of whom one can say the same today.”

The question of “greatness” is an interesting one, worth debating, but as the long weekend looms and, undone by aestivation, I’d rather point you towards it than argue for it. This weekend’s weekend read is therefore devoted to the most significant, serious, and joyous literary artist of our time—the poet Frederick Seidel.

“Joyous,” of course, may seem like a questionable adjective to apply to poems in which death and the declines and disappointments of the body coexist with the ecstatic use of same. But if the content of Seidel’s poems—typically the self, and not infrequently a persona blended with or standing for that of the poet—may creep into the dark, the means Seidel marries to such material are anything but shadowy. To again quote Krystal quoting someone else, “Tom Mallon once observed, [that much contemporary poetry reads] like ‘prose that has been annoyed into verse.’” Seidel’s scansions are full-fledged and if they annoy it’s by intent, not by incompetence. They are informed by the history of poetry on paper as much as the story of poetry in song—the sung being the forerunner of anything memorable said.

So, in a labor-saving Labor Day edition of the weekend read, don’t read. Listen to Seidel read. Twenty-two of his poems, ranging in length from one minute to nine, are available to hear; and his is an agreeably disagreeable voice to have in one’s head, the great voice of the current culture’s consciousness, whether we’re listening or not.

An Abnormal, Morbid, or Disfiguring Outgrowth

“The westerly excrescence of the continent of Asia, which we call Europe, came to dominate the world during the course of the second millennium AD.” This sentence begins a book to be published next week, Europe Between the Oceans (Yale), by Barry Cunliffe. I suggest that all but the most ardent button-pusher should be seduced by a book that begins this way.

“The westerly excrescence of the continent of Asia” is a phrase that feels like bathhouse leer: loaded with intimation, but withholding information. What, exactly, is the author hiding under his “excrescence”? Climbing, rung by rung, the word’s definitional ladder, leads not to denomination, but only to greater perplexity. My OED tells me that an “excrescence” is both “1. something that grows out, a natural growth or appendage;” and “2. an abnormal, morbid, or disfiguring outgrowth.”

As we overtake the comma, we reach “which we call Europe”—and arrive at our excrescence. Cunningly, Cunliffe has tagged Europe thus: both normal and not so. In the space of not-quite a sentence, and with special thanks to a well-chosen word, we readers understand that a revisionist history is in our hands, one that does not begin, sleepily, “This is a revisionist history of Europe.” Rather it begins, alertly, as such a history.

I’m only in the first half of the oversized, 500-page Europe Between the Oceans. So far, it tells the story of Europe’s rise as a matter more of matter than of art: how land and water tell, if not the whole story of civilization, somewhere between much and most. Smartly and beautifully, Cunliffe has jammed his story with pictures, maps, drawings, and every kind of rarity. Rarest of all, though, seems to be its author’s equal command of landmasses and language.

On a Very High Shelf

Not a Nabokov notecard

Last weekend, Die Zeit published scans of four notecards from the 138-notecard-manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura. Composing on notecards allowed Nabokov to set down his books out of sequence; he said he could see in a flash the whole of a novel and its details, and as notecards accumulated in the shoeboxes where they were stored, Nabokov could shuffle them into final order before his wife, Véra, typed up a more conventional manuscript.

Nabokov fanatics who got their hands on a paper edition of Die Zeit (the cards were not published online) read the author’s tidy, penciled letters, and recognized that the text of three of the cards had already been published. “Her painted eyelids were closed,” begins notecard nine (number written in the upper right corner and circled neatly); “render at last what:” ends notecard eleven. Those framing phrases and what runs between them appeared in 1999, in The Nabokovian, the journal of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society.

Setting aside as premature any discussion of quality, we can consider quantity. The three notecards mentioned contain a grand total of 178 words. If that’s the average for any three of the 138, the whole of The Original of Laura—to be published around the world as a book in fall of 2009—will run something under 8,200 words. The Great Gatsby, a short novel, is 50,000 words.

I concede that the world of letters is under aggressive assault from the button-pushers; I admit that “intellectual life” is an idea and an ideal hard to liberate, these days, from quotes. Still, I would suggest that it might be considered something more than merely a marketing coup that the looming, if still-distant, publication of what amounts, in length, to a short story by a writer of difficult and excellent books, can still make international news. It might even be cheering.

Weekend Read: “Not a bad way of making a living”

This week on Sentences I’ve shared my enthusiasm for the essay generally and for those by Arthur Krystal specifically. Reading Krystal on on beauty, sin, typewriters, laziness, death, duelling or reading itself is to find oneself in unusually good mental company.

As Krystal said in conversation in my previous post: “Sometimes I think that I never think except when I write essays. They exercise the mind. Writing about beauty, God, sin, or the aphorism is like going to a mental gym; you firm up muscles you don’t use in your daily life.” Krystal’s essays provide a reader with similar exercise, beneficial reminders of the necessity and utility of thinking things thoroughly through.

Below, as your weekend read, I propose the title essay of Krystal’s latest book The Half-Life of an American Essayist. It offers a clear look at the qualities that make Krystal such good reading: lightness of touch, fineness of mind, depth of engagement, and a resourceful, flexible, rigorous style. The essay also provides an uncomfortably practical answer to why so many readers and writers lately complain that literary criticism just isn’t happening.

With thanks to Arthur Krystal and to David R. Godine, Publisher, for permission to reprint.

The Half-Life

By Arthur Krystal

Somehow, without ever intending to, I’ve ended up a freelance intellectual. Not quite a man of letters, not really a critic anymore, but a sort of literary mule–a cross between haphazard journalist and restive seminarian. And it’s no fun. Magazines that actually pay for the sort of things I write can be counted on the fingers of a hand that’s encountered a sharp piece of machinery. I write, as it happens, essays with a literary bent, and though there are plenty of small periodicals that welcome such pieces, they pay honorariums of three hundred dollars or less. And since I’m unwilling to write, and probably incapable of writing, about more trendy subjects, I can forget about all the glossy magazines that pay quite well by a writer’s standards.

Even a “successful” essayist, one who regularly places his or her work in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, will have a tough time getting a book of essays published. An essay may create a stir in a magazine, as Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast” did in 1988 when it appeared in Harper’s, but essays in book form tend to cancel each other out. No one buys a book because it contains a famous essay. This, of course, does not dissuade essayists from wanting to see their pieces collected; it just makes publishers leery of collecting them. Only if you’re an established literary figure with a sizable fan base, whom publishers want to keep happy, will your scattered pieces rise and converge. No one, let me assure you, wants to keep me happy. Collected literary essays, especially, do not sell. They are hard to market, they receive very few reviews, and little, if anything, is spent on promoting them.

That said, I decided some years ago to publish a book of essays. My agent at the time wished me luck and washed his hands. So I did what all writers do when they start out: I made phone calls and I wrote letters. Editors at a number of publishing houses asked to see the work, but lost interest once they received it. “Hey, these really are literary essays. What was I thinking?” is what I imagine they said to themselves. In the end, Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, decided to take a chance, and Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature found its way into the bookstores.

Bear in mind, these are, once again, literary pieces. None of this “creative non-fiction” nonsense, which is just a pretentious term for memoiristic writing. Although, commercially speaking, essay writing is a sucker’s game, memoirs remain a draw; and if you’ve had the good fortune–from a writer’s point of view–to have been abused as a child, survived a shipwreck or cancer, spent time in jail, or been addicted to Internet porn, your chances of getting published are better than average. Memoirists simply write personal essays–period. Their work is no more creative than any other kind of essay; quite the reverse in fact. Writing interestingly about Jane Austen requires more imagination than confessing to having slept with someone named Jane Austen from Beaumont, Texas. And if I may say so, literary essayists have to rely more on their strengths as writers than on their imperfections as human beings–though I like to think I’m just as flawed and miserable as the next person.

Goethe, in an unusually pithy phrase, once summed up the literary life in this way: “Experience is only half of experience.” I assume he meant by this that no experience is complete until it has been put through the intellectual wringer, which extracts every nuance and shade of meaning from what happens. As a writer, I believe that, temperamentally, I am better suited to the first half of experience. That is, I am disinclined to obsess over experience or write revealing essays about it. The end result is essays that book publishers don’t want to touch–the essays in this volume, for example.

These particular pieces cover a lot of ground, ranging from laziness and physiognomy to the cultural implications of the typewriter, from boxing’s appeal to writers to the growth of the Holocaust industry. Just try to get such pieces published in book form. Undaunted, I handed them over to my agent who, after glancing at them, was properly aghast. Publishers, he said, would think him “daft” for showing them such a book. He also informed me that I needed to get serious about what I wanted to achieve as a writer. Evidently, I needed “to write a real book,” not just something that would flatter my vanity. All books, it strikes me, are vanity, but he was right about this particular book’s prospects. Trade publishers turned it down right and left; always with misgivings, always with words of praise, always with best wishes. Only David R. Godine, an independent publisher who apparently likes bucking the tide, embraced the book’s contents. Something about the voice of the essays made them seem more of a cohesive work than a collection of disparate pieces.

How does one end up being a professional writer without a book, without a sustained narrative of fiction or non-fiction? It’s not that hard. All you need is a strong stomach for cheap food and a good education without a specific area of expertise. And let’s not discount temperament, which is what people mean when they say you make your own luck. As luck would have it, I am not a writer of books, but of essays. Why essays? Well, for one thing, the essay seems to suit me. Unlike books, an essay has a perfect length, depending on the nature of its subject, and there is something eminently satisfying in finding that length. Moreover, an essay obviously takes less time to write than a book and it can do the job almost as well. Raymond Chandler once claimed that he would stick to essays if they paid enough.

And because the essay form is how I convey thoughts and impressions, I write pieces that journals and magazines sometimes publish, but that book publishers shy away from. Welcome to the wonderful world of the freelance writer. Although most writers know early on that the writing life is for them, none, I imagine, ever said to himself, “Please, God, let me be a freelancer.” Freelancing is something you back into, usually because temperament and circumstance helpfully shove you along. One might even say that the very reasons one becomes a freelance writer are the reasons that make being a freelance writer so difficult: the desire to be independent, a hatred of authority, an aversion to regimen and, of course, the inability to play well with others. None of this matters when it comes to the actual writing, but it all, unfortunately, comes home to roost when dealing with editors, agents, and publishers.

Nobody really writes about the miseries, indignities, and small humiliations of being a marginal, albeit published, writer. Yes, writers are always bitching about how tough things are, but they rarely voice their complaints in print. Maybe they’re worried that magazine and book editors won’t like what they read. Or maybe writers feel it’s pointless to put into words what words cannot change. Well, I have no problem about grumbling out loud; I like to grumble and I’m too old to care if publishers take offense–which is highly doubtful.

There are more than a few things wrong with being a freelance writer, but let’s begin with the obvious: money–there’s not enough of it. While not all freelancers are hopelessly in debt–writers who cover fashion, fads, pop culture, sports, celebrities, and politics make out all right–those predisposed to write about books or ideas had better have a teaching gig or full-time job. Then there’s respect–also not enough of it. Magazine and book editors don’t go out of their way to make life miserable, but neither do they go out of their way to make it pleasant. Calls are not returned; letters remain unanswered; work lies unread. Finally: lag time–too much of it. To wait three months before hearing about a submission is not only annoying, it’s draining fiscally and emotionally. If the article is timely and deals with a recent event or recently published book, you lose the chance to sell it elsewhere. An editor not liking my work doesn’t bother me; an editor waiting three months to tell me he can’t use the piece does. Do I feel rejected? No. What I feel is inconvenienced.

Writers who scrabble for a living come in three denominations: the midlist writer who generally writes better than the big-name writer but has a much smaller following; the even less well-known experimental writer who refuses to sell out and publishes in out-of-the-way journals with names like Egg or Behemoth; and the somewhat successful writer who publishes in all the “right” places, but never really breaks out. To fall into any of these categories is to encounter neglect, rudeness, and indifference.

It’s toughest, of course, when you’re just starting out. Writers take jobs as copy editors, fact checkers, waiters, and receptionists. When they’re not marking up manuscripts or answering phones, they’re scratching, hustling, and networking. It’s not enough to have one’s work out there, the body must be out there as well. And though you’re hearing this from someone who never attended a writing school, writers’ conference, or artists’ colony–from someone who, as it happens, has burned bridges with a wet match–I know whereof I speak. My advice is: Be nice. Be nice to people with more power than you have, which means just about everyone. Get into the loop as soon as you can and befriend as many other writers as possible, since one of them may make it big one day. Never refuse an invitation to a book party and always show up wearing an Hermes tie and Carol Channing smile. And if you review books, be gentle as well as judicious. I know of at least two established writers who, when young, not only wrote well of other writers’ books, they also wrote fawning letters to writers already famous. Slippery, but smart. But… slippery.

Not that any of this will protect you from a simple truth about publishing: you may win an agent’s or editor’s respect, but common courtesy is extended only to those who fill the coffers. And for those who prefer courtesy to respect, this can be a problem. So what do you do? Well, the smart thing is to roll with the punches. A wrong step, a wrong word, and you will be cashiered out of the literary life for conduct unbecoming an unaffiliated writer. Of course, if you’re a prickly individual who feels like punching back, you’re in trouble. I may not get into a fisthght with a midget, as John O’Hara once did, but I’m quick to take offense and more than happy to return it. Anyway, you’ve got to admire a man who’s not too big to fight a midget.

It also pays to know what editors want and give it to them. Madonna has taken up the Kabbalah? Astonishing! Five thousand words would barely cover it. An ex-ballerina has written a book about the pleasures of sodomy? By God, it’s time to burn the midnight oil. But what if you can’t muster the enthusiasm? I, for one, don’t see why more editors aren’t interested in essays on death, despair, solitude, or Herman Broch’s excellent study of Hugo von Hofmannsthal–but that’s just me. That’s another problem with being a freelance: you’re never sure whether you’re writing what you want to write or writing simply to pay the rent. For example, I wrote about the evolution and significance of the typewriter, but what if every editor I approached had thought it a dumb idea–would I have tackled the subject? Probably not. Then there were essays I wrote because of some fatuous statements made by Joyce Carol Oates about boxing and Raymond Chandler. Had I been rich, I might simply have written Ms. Oates a snide note or just ranted to friends. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have written these pieces, but I wrote them because there’d be a payday at the end.

There are, it should be said, some good points about being a freelance writer: You can sleep late, set your own hours, work at your own pace, and not worry about someone looking over your shoulder. On the other hand, you tend to sleep late, you have to set your own hours, you work only when you feel like it, and there is no one looking over your shoulder. Lest you think I’m cranky, let me say that I don’t mind writing; I just mind writing for money. Yes, I’m aware that Dr. Johnson thought that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” But I take a different view. Writing for money is work even when you’re writing what it is you want to write. And if you’re writing only for money, even a lot money, it’s a tough way to make a living.

And maybe because writing seems to me both so important and so transparent (in the sense that it’s demonstrably good or bad), I wonder how writers can go public with their work before it’s ready. It’s not journalists with deadlines I’m thinking of; they’re like professional musicians who perform night after night–you expect a mistake now and then. Novelists, biographers, and historians, however, should be held to the same standards that apply to musicians during a studio recording. The tempo or interpretation may not be to your liking, but there’s no excuse for dropped notes or extraneous noise.

The essayist has an advantage here: it’s far easier to write a good essay than a good book. Most books–not just the ones identified by Henry James–are loose, baggy monsters. I can’t go after monsters; I have neither the desire, nor the equipment, nor the sitzfleish required to do the work. But that doesn’t mean I’m trying to get away with something. Quite the opposite. Because I don’t like to work, I insist that whatever work I do be perfect. I’m not saying it is, but if I’m going to work at writing, then I ought to be happy with what I write. All of which makes me irascible–not because editors meddle with my work, but because I’m never quite satisfied with it.

Furthermore, because I am dour by nature, I can’t help wondering if what I do is actually worth doing. I am, as I’ve written elsewhere, a veritable lazybones. And it occurs to me, as I write this, that laziness is a symptom of some deep-rooted pessimism, a feeling that, ultimately, actions don’t matter–at least one’s own actions don’t. Optimists, of course, go forth into the world and tweak or chip away until the world, bit by bit, changes. Indeed, the world is buoyed by the enthusiasm and energy of such people. I seem to be talking about “such people” as if they comprised a different species. In a sense, they do. The lazy and the energetic, or the pessimistic and the optimistic, do not carry the same electrical charge. One acts, and the other watches (if it’s not too much trouble).

In the days before psychiatry took the onus off melancholy (and the lazy are melancholic), virtue was equated with the work ethic. In such a world, the lazy were actually considered subversive. G.K.Chesterton went so far as to recommend the slammer for the hopelessly unhappy. In The Man Who Was Thursday, he imagines a “philosophical policeman” whose job “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; [philosophical policemen] go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists.”

I may be exaggerating my own laziness, but I can tell you from long experience that being an aimless, melancholic, bumptious freelance writer is not conducive to producing a large body of work. I may jump over many hurdles in publishing (or, more accurately, knock them over), but one thing I cannot always do is find things to write about. In thirty-odd essays, I’ve written about everything that has ever interested me. So why continue? Certainly if I had more money, I would write less. Maybe I’d write an essay with the title “Show Me Your Precursors,” and–who knows?–maybe I will write a piece on Hermann Broch and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. On the other hand, there’s a chance I’ll just hang it up, or perhaps turn that hand to writing haiku; seventeen syllables and you’re out.

That said, I believe in the essay, particularly the literary essay. I believe that in the right hands–those extending from the sleeves of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling and a dozen or so others–the literary essay, although it may begin by addressing books, always ends up being about the interaction of society and culture. And because language and thought are inseparable, I believe that the essay remains the artistic form in which consciousness achieves its fullest expression. All in all, not a bad way of making a bad living.

The Books Remain Closed: A discussion with Arthur Krystal

In my previous post, I talked about the essay as a form, as a showcase both of thinking and for thinking, for exploring a subject in all of its contradictory complexity and not, as it more often manifests these days, as a forum in which a writer merely hammers away at a point with which its reader likely already agrees.

Arthur Krystal is a favorite among contemporary practitioners. His work displays an irrepressible commitment to independent thinking and eventful writing. “My Holocaust Problem,” a piece from his latest book The Half-Life of an American Essayist, should be mandatory reading for…well, it should be mandatory reading. It isn’t available on the web, and as it might take a day or two before you get your hands on a copy, I offer, for your interim entertainment, a few questions with Krystal.

In 1996, in a much-discussed essay for this magazine called “Closing the Books”, you meditated on the curious state at which, at midlife, you had arrived. You later described the essay and the state it sketched in the introduction to your first book, Agitations (Yale, 2002): “Why should I,” you wrote, “someone who had spent much of his life reading, editing, and writing about books—find it nearly impossible to read contemporary fiction, poetry, and criticism or, for that matter, to reread the great books of the past?” I wonder, a dozen years on, to what degree your reading reflex may have been refreshed. Have you opened the books again?

The ability to respond to prose and poetry hasn’t entirely disappeared, but it has been dulled. This is a dicey business to discuss. There are many people who still depend on novels and poems for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, and they tend to dismiss someone who feels differently. Clearly, I’m either depressed or I just don’t get it. Thing is, I’m not on meds, and since I believe that I do “get” Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Larkin, and Auden, I also believe that I’m able to appreciate what novelists and poets are doing today. And yet very little strikes my fancy. I can’t prove it, but I think the fault lies in the literary firmament and not in me.

It’s the firmament’s fault, is it?

I suppose I can’t absolve myself entirely of my views, can I? As I acknowledged in “Closing of the Books,” my inability to be moved by current fiction may be a function of age, my age. As the body droops, one’s interest in things not of the body may droop as well. Therefore, people who want to write should ignore me. After all, what do I know besides what I know? Glad you asked. I know that one has to be a genius, a veritable genius, these days to write an original and historically significant poem or novel. The same applies to painting and classical music. And by “significant,” I mean something that will not only astonish but will change forever how we regard the form. And as you know, I don’t think this is possible anymore. And this, too, is a function of age, the world’s age. When an art form is just emerging, when an aesthetic movement is still developing, genius isn’t necessary to create memorable works. Talent and knowledge are sufficient. Geniuses arise, of course: Beethoven, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Vermeer, Picasso, Joyce, but you’ll also find a great number of tillers in the field who do interesting work by virtue of the fact that such work hadn’t been done before.

Such as?

I don’t think Richardson, Defoe, and Fielding were geniuses, yet their work is important. And when modernism flourished, writers like Ford, Forster, Conrad, Lawrence–none of them a genius, in my opinion (though Conrad comes the closest)–wrote wonderful novels. Bach, of course, was a genius, and so were Da Vinci and Raphael, but think of all the painters and composers during the Renaissance and the Baroque Period who created fantastic works. And think of all the good movies that got made in the Twenties and Thirties by people who were smart and competent but hardly geniuses. Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies. That and the inevitable etiolation of genres and formal methods of creation now account for the dearth of great art. Can I be wrong? I suppose. You could argue that the idea of “greatness” is itself a false category, an artificial and socially constructed yardstick. But if we’re talking about the human need to create and respond to momentous works of human endeavor, then, please, show me a poet or a novelist of whom one can say, as Eliot said of Yeats: “He was one of those whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them”?

I see a different significance in Eliot’s quote. It isn’t that there are no poets or novelists today who are part of “the consciousness of [our] age which cannot be understood without them”, but that the culture no longer takes seriously critics who make such claims. Critics now have to waste time remedially, arguing for the importance of art in a way that Eliot never would have thought to argue. The minority that was paying attention to Eliot the critic, not to say reading Yeats the poet, needed little convincing that art was the place you went to for deep information about being. Whereas now, the proliferation of books with titles like “Why Literature Matters” and “Why Poetry Matters” defend a kingdom that has been conquered: not the kingdom of art, but the little fiefdom of intellectual life that took art’s centrality very much for granted. Fred Seidel, for one, is a poet who, to my mind, is a great artist, challenging the form while documenting, with uncomfortable conscientiousness, the grim stupidities of our self-involved age. And yet I ask poets about him and they say who?

What you say is true, but let’s not forget that Shelley was defending poetry against charges of frivolousness by Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Love Peacock. Macaulay, who wrote poetry, also thought it required a certain unsoundness of mind. The novel, too, had its detractors, as did opera and certain styles of painting. The reason that Arnold was defending poetry as late as 1870 is that the notion of art’s irrelevance has always had a certain currency, especially since the advent of science. So while I take your point that the assumed centrality of art is a thing of the past, I also think that this centrality describes a somewhat limited past–in fact, a Romantic and modernist past. The postmodern world, even as it summons a defense of literature, cannot save literature. I don’t say that good poems or novels can’t be written today; I just feel that that they can’t have the significance they once had, and this is a terrible thing to admit. Frederick Seidel is certainly an arresting poet, but the fact remains that this age cannot cede to poets the importance that earlier poets could aspire to, and this, I think, works subliminally to their disadvantage.

I don’t expect readers or writers to buy into this. And simply because I believe it doesn’t mean that I’ll push books away from me. In point of fact, I’ll still pick up the occasional well-received novel–Tree of Smoke, Saturday, Netherland, Gilead–and I’ll duly note the author’s skills and intelligence. But ultimately all disappoint–disappoint because they don’t cause me to reevaluate my opinions about fiction or about life. This doesn’t mean that the novels don’t work as novels; they just don’t increase my sum of knowledge in a truly significant way. Nor does it mean that I don’t enjoy reading. Actually, I have to read; I still have, as we used to say, a jones for reading. So I’ll start a lot of books and once in a while even finish one. I thought Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” pretty damned good, and there are parts of Roth’s American Pastoral and The Human Stain that impressed me, although there were also parts that made me want to throw the books across the room. I liked Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, liked it better than Franzen’s The Corrections, which I couldn’t finish. And I continue to read essays and articles. I’ll also glance occasionally at the literary reviews and quarterlies to check out the poetry. This I do, however, with some trepidation because the poems invariably seem, as Tom Mallon once observed, like “prose that has been annoyed into verse.” All this makes me sound as if I’m still in the game, but compared to the days when novels truly meant something to me, I’m just a dabbler, a Sunday painter, nothing more. In short, not much has changed with me.

Although “Closing the Books” made very clear that the years that preceded its appearance were largely devoid of literary reading or rereading, the years since have certainly suggested that, if you aren’t reading new literary fiction, you do continue to read literary criticism. In 2001, say, you edited a book of literary essays, A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Reader’s Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs. For readers who’ve not spent time with the volume, it collects criticism that those three men contributed to the periodicals that were sent to the members of the clubs—”buy” reviews that were meant to educate, not to say cajole, their readership into purchasing that month’s selections. What pleasures did the reading (and selecting) of those essays—essays not infrequently about novels and poetry—provide you that reading fiction no longer does?

For the record, the project of editing A Company of Readers was initiated years before I began to experience a disaffection with books. Barzun had asked me in the mid-Eighties to collect the reviews and essays that he, Auden, and Trilling had written for the book clubs they organized in the early Fifties. Unfortunately, Diana Trilling refused to give permission to reprint her husband’s work, and the project languished until after her death in 1996, the same year that “Closing the Books” appeared. So, yes, there seems to be an implicit contradiction between the sentiments expressed in the essay and the work involved in publishing the book.

In any case, reading belletristic criticism–what once was known as “letters”—is never something I found myself unwilling or unable to do. What I disliked, and what I spent much of the 1970’s and 80’s reading, was the theoretical criticism that emerged from the academy, which was shaping or rather warping students’ perspective on books. Reading Auden on Dostoevsky, or Trilling on Henry James, and then reading Lacan on Poe, or Derrida on Baudelaire, is the difference between visiting Florence on a fine Spring day and being stuck on a bus in Bosnia Herzegovina in the dead of winter–without a coat–with nothing to eat, etc. The point is not that I stopped appreciating criticism, I simply stopped reading turgid, self-important, aggressively abstruse criticism.

What seemed obvious to me then–as it does now–is the absolute inappropriateness of applying certain philosophical ideas to literature. Just as you don’t analyze and judge a nineteenth-century novel by how well it reflects Hegel’s dialectical materialism, so you shouldn’t apply the tenets of Lacanian psychology or DeManian deconstruction to Willa Cather or William Shakespeare.

You studied with Barzun at Columbia, and acknowledge him as an influence. Which of his essays have you most often re-read? Which of his books do you most value (or recommend)?

To be strictly accurate, I did not study with Barzun at Columbia. I took only one course with him, a course on the writing of history, and I’m quite sure that my views on poets and novelists were formed before we met. If they hadn’t been, Barzun would never have bothered with me. He didn’t want acolytes; he wanted people with whom he could discuss books. That said, let me add that I have been matriculating at Barzun University for the last thirty-five years and that I’ll probably never know enough to graduate. He’s approaching his one-hundredth-and-first birthday and he just finished re-reading G. Lowes Dickinson’s A Modern Symposium (1905), a book I had never even heard of. Recommending essays and books by Barzun is easy. As long as your area of interest isn’t quantum mechanics or animal husbandry, there’s probably a Barzun work that’ll work for you. I happen to like the essays in The Culture We Deserve. Of course, I happen also to have chosen and edited them. If from Dawn to Decadence seems too daunting, try Clio and the Doctors. If you read poetry, then read his Essay on French Verse. And if you want to know why we shouldn’t be in Iraq, go online and find an address he delivered over twenty years ago called “Is Democratic Theory For Export?”

51 years ago, Barzun reviewed Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano for Harper’s. He was utterly unconvinced by the book, and said so. Lowry replied to Barzun by letter, a lengthy, significant attempt to communicate the seriousness, not to say success, of Lowry’s aesthetic intentions and their implementation. My sense of late is that our literary culture, small and shrinking as it is, could only benefit from more creative writers doing as Lowry did: by responding directly, but publicly, to critics with whom they disagree. Given the critical disengagement of which you wrote in “Closing the Books,” do you see any utility to a creative writer engaging, critically, a culture where fewer readers are reading well, if at all?

This is actually an uncharacteristic piece by Barzun; he’s usually not so uncharitable, and so the novel must really have rubbed him the wrong way. I had reservations about the novel as well, but I liked it better than Barzun did. Then again, I like Lowry’s letter more than I remember liking the novel.

Sure, why shouldn’t writers engage their critics? It’s quite possible, even likely, that their responses will be more penetrating than their novels. The only problem is that a critical defense of a creative work can only explain what the writer was trying to do; it can’t change what he or she actually did. Being intelligent about your book isn’t the same as writing an intelligent book. But for students of literature, a writer’s defense is always illuminating. In a real sense, James’s Prefaces are replies to critics who haven’t even weighed in. And if you’re–how shall I put this?–someone on whom a lot is lost (to bring in James again), then reading an author’s response to his or her critics may actually change your mind about the book.

As for me, I occasionally received letters from writers when I was reviewing, but not many, and none that ever altered my opinion in the slightest. Nor do I receive many letters about my own work. Why more people don’t deluge me with their opinions about my take on Paul Valéry’s Notebooks or Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is a mystery that passeth understanding. Only two pieces of mine ever elicited a lot of mail. One was a piece on laziness I did for the New Yorker, which energized a dozen or so lazybones to get in touch with me, and the other was “Closing the Books,” which spurred even more people to castigate, denigrate, and threaten me. I felt fulfilled.

Last year, Cynthia Ozick claimed in these pages that literary criticism about fiction is not happening, and you responded publicly in the magazine’s letters section. Although your letter had, like any good piece of argumentation, a number of working parts, and although your tone was one of admiration and respect for Ozick as writer and thinker and distinguished literary being, the upshot of your reply was that what Ozick was calling for—more and better criticism of fiction—was, however commendable, obsolete. As you aphoristically had it: “Need makes us unrealistic, and hope makes even the wisest among us naïve.” What about literary criticism as a literary form still calls you to editorial and epistolary activity whereas fiction—upon which such criticism depends—can’t stir you to similar ardor?

This is, if I may say so, one of those questions upon which everything–even a red wheelbarrow–depends. The allusion is slightly off center, and I only bring it up because I still think it’s important to read poetry and fiction. I don’t know to what extent literature influences one’s actions or one’s relationships, I just know that reading great books when you’re young is one of the most pleasurably intense experiences you can have if you’re temperamentally inclined that way. And the fact remains that one remains “literary” even if one is chronologically challenged by contemporary fiction and poetry. So I still respond to arguments about books, even if the books themselves don’t matter so much to me. Let me state this in another way. Better yet, let me lean on Keats. In talking about Energy, which he thinks the essential quality of poetry, Keats says “and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy–For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as truth.” What an astonishing thing to say by a poet whose work is distinguished by imaginative imagery and sensuous particulars. But Keats himself doesn’t find a radical disconnect between intelligence and poetry. He believes the mind derives its character from the quality of the emotions it experiences. At the same time, he also recognizes that the real or the concrete, however beautiful, is still a hint, a foreshadowing, of the Ideal. The great thing about Keats is that he responds emotionally both to the eagle and to the Idea of the eagle. Unhappily for me, I seem to have lost all sense of delight and awe when it comes to fictional eagles–maybe because so few novels, if you’ll pardon the trope, actually seem to soar. For me, fiction is an endangered species while the Idea of fiction is still around, flapping its wings. In other words, ideas about fiction interest me in a way that fiction itself no longer does.

Although you’re a great advocate for literary criticism as an editor, the majority of your published work has not been literary criticism per se. You will write, now and again, directly on the work of a writer (as you did recently for Harper’s, on Paul Valéry or on Jacques Barzun for the New Yorker), but more often you write on subjects—death, fencing, the aphorism—that put your skills as a literary critic in the service of a larger idea. In other words, you write essays. In The Half-Life of an American Essayist, you wrote: “The essay seems to suit me. Unlike books, an essay has a perfect length, depending on the nature of its subject, and there is something eminently satisfying in finding that length. Moreover, an essay obviously takes less time to write than a book and it can do the job almost as well.” At the risk of asking you to repeat yourself, what does the writing of an essay, beyond perfectability and its rewards, offer the essayist?

A literary essayist, one who isn’t given to confessional writing, is like an actor hiding behind or within a role. Since I feel no inclination to write about my life except when I have to shore up some thesis about Life, I take on subjects that reveal my sensibility without revealing facts of a personal nature. Another reason I’m drawn to the form is that writing essays makes me think–really think, which isn’t so easy to do nowadays: too many distractions; too much to think about that’s immediate but not terribly important. I’m not being cute here: Sometimes I think that I never think except when I write essays. They exercise the mind. Writing about beauty, God, sin, or the aphorism is like going to a mental gym; you firm up muscles you don’t use in your daily life. One more thing: I write essays because I like writing sentences, especially those that would probably never come into existence but for the process of writing. Those who write will know what I mean by this.

The essay is a finished work, a perfectible thing, filled with sentences that wouldn’t exist but for the process of writing. Whereas, another of your literary activities is screenwriting, an imperfect thing, one filled with sentences that often cease to exist when sent on to directors and actors. Though there is a distinguished line—from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, from Pinter to Stoppard—of literary people who write or have written screenplays, how does the essayist in you with the exercised mind feel about your film work? A screenplay will be toyed and tampered with by an endless round of hands, and while one can well understand that the difference in recompense must bring with it an unambiguous feeling of virtue, I nonetheless wonder if the altruistic perfectionist who writes your essays ever lodges complaints. Or does screenwriting, as a form, offer satisfactions distinct from but equal to those that writing essays allows?

Yes, yes, yes–complaints are lobbed, lodged, and logged. But, then again, complaints are levied against editors and copyeditors who tamper with one’s ineffable prose. There’s a difference, of course. Harper’s editors, on those occasions when they tame my mulishness, tend to improve my work. In Hollywood or on the indie circuit it’s a different story. First of all, the folks one meets in the movie business are not really literary, though some pretend to be–a rather pointless pretension since movies are fundamentally not a literary form. And this is what makes the process–somewhat paradoxically–both frustrating and fun. I should admit up front that I don’t do much screenwriting these days and that I’ve only worked with five directors (one of whom pretty much ignored everything I had to say), and so my experience is limited. But what I have learned is that I don’t mind working with others when it comes to developing screenplays (notice I said “developing” instead of “writing”) for the same reason that I wouldn’t mind working with other professionals in their own chosen fields. I’m a visitor to planet Hollywood, not a resident. And I understand that a movie is like a building and that its specifications must accord with the money and materials available. Truth is, when you’re working with smart people who feel more or less the same as you do about a project, the process of making a movie can be fun–just as long as you don’t consider yourself an artiste or auteur. I think that’s what drove Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler to distraction. Of course, I had to learn to enjoy the process. When I wrote my first screenplay, I thought it was inviolable and I bitterly resented listening to a director rearrange the scenes and change my dialogue. In fact, the first two directors with whom I worked, whose names shall go unmentioned, did not exactly win my heart or my respect. But overall I can’t kick, except, of course, for the fact that it’s so hard to actually get something made. So what else is new?

A Strangely Elegant, Convex-shaped Writing Machine

In its name is the essay’s difference: where other literary modes–novel, poem, play–succeed or fail, the essay, by definition, tries. Too short to be definitive on any topic, the essay can’t manage the comprehensive. It aspires to adequacy, fluency. An essay can argue well, to be sure, but usually argues best for itself and for it’s writer’s best self. “I am myself the matter of my own book,” the namer of the essay said at the beginning of his book of 107 attempts, better and worse, at defining the form.

If the essay is an essentially uncertain thing and historically a form that would reckon with uncertainty, it is interesting how, in our modern acquaintance with it, the form has become a font of certainty. For in the small percentage of the population that reads an essay at all, our tendency is to gravitate toward those of which we can be certain. In the mood for indignation? Krugman. Do you like your outrage with a bit more spice? Dowd. Feeling, rather, like a laugh? Sedaris. Care to be reminded, once again, that hope of governmental decency is in vain? Hersh.

The utility of such certainty is not to be misjudged: whether they are editorialists, humorists, or journalists, such dependable essayistic voices have enormous use to readers, who, by finding bylines upon which they can depend, obtain useful information, continuing education, or simply confirmation of their worldview. And yet, this modern incarnation of the essay, for all its utility–buoy in a sinking world–is not the limit of the form, only its most practical and practicable manifestation. “Human kind/cannot bear very much reality,” is the going phrase, and as reality is unstinting in its ability to flummox us with vacillations between a beautiful world and a miserable one, who needs of an essay similar indecision? A funny world, or an indignant world, or an indecent one may not be reality, but such fleeting certainty is tonic: when certain, we’re freed from having to think at all.

Whereas, in its purer state, the essay bears the reality that we cannot bear. It wavers, states, reformulates, contradicts itself: the essay is–at its best–a flip-flopper.

Of contemporary practitioners of this art of fruitful vacillation, Arthur Krystal is an essayist of unfashionable and excellent undependability. Reading Krystal on beauty, sin, typewriters, laziness, death, duelling or reading, one has no sense of what one is getting into–beyond something one feels impelled to get more deeply into. This, say, is how Krystal’s essay, “Against Type,” begins:

In 1882, for the sum of 375 marks (plus shipping), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche bought himself a typewriter. He didn’t call it a typewriter; he called it a schreibkugel—literally, a “writing ball.” The schreibkugel had been developed (”invented” is a tricky word when it comes to typewriters) seventeen years earlier by a Danish pastor and teacher of the deaf and dumb, Hans Rasmus Johann Malling Hansen. Impressed by the speed with which his students signed, Hansen figured that they could also write faster if all their fingers were engaged; and inside of two years he produced a strangely elegant, convex-shaped writing machine that worked from top to bottom. The keys bore only capital letters and were arranged on rods in a semicircle at the-top; when tapped, they thrust obliquely downward toward a common point on the platen, partially obscuring the paper that lay curved on a wheel rising from the machine’s base. In effect, the typist could not see what was being typed. Nietzsche, whose own eyesight was famously weak, and getting worse, was thrilled with his new possession: “THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF /IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS,” he pecked out. Unfortunately for the novice maschinenschreiber, the writing ball soon went kaput, and Nietzsche, uncomplainingly, went back to his pens. Still, six weeks of use was all he needed to form the conclusion (dutifully typed): “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”

Krystal’s tools, too, work on our thoughts. His style is what we might call “conversational,” albeit of a polyclausal and uncommonly polished kind. Alliteration cinches syntax (”tricky…typewriters”; “figured…faster…fingers”; “point on the platen, partially…paper”; “weak…worse”), but not in the showboating manner of the self-important sensualist. Krystal’s stylistic choices are always put in the service of making better sense: from his description of Hansen’s writing machine, a police sketch artist could draw a mock-up (from which the thing could be built). Freighted though it is with history, foreign vocabulary and technical description, the prose is lightfooted and lighthearted, so swift and sure, in fact, we scarcely notice that we are already being moved through history towards the idea that ends the paragraph and which is the theme of what will follow–a wondering over the wonders of literary style, through time.

To read one Krystal essay is to become a Krystal reader, and to want more than his two fine books, Agitations (Yale 2002) and The Half-Life of an American Essayist (Godine 2007) as company. This week on Sentences, therefore, will be devoted to things Krystal–such as Krystal himself, to whom I’ll pose a few questions, Wednesday.

Weekend Read: “May Christ send you sorrow and a serious illness”

In these pages, in 1947, Jacques Barzun reviewed Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano. Barzun’s review, a terse paragraph in a long essay that bundled many books together with the titular twine of “Moralists for Your Muddles,” was short and sour: he found the Lowry a waste of time. The paragraph in which he dispatched it ran as follows:

Mr. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano strikes me as fulsome and fictitious. Mr. Lowry is also on the side of good behavior, eager to disgust us with sub-tropical vice. He shows this by a long regurgitation of the materials found in Ulysses and The Sun Also Rises. But while imitating the tricks of Joyce, Dos Passos, and Sterne, he gives us the mind and heart of Sir Philip Gibbs. His three men and lone woman are desperately dull even when sober, and, despite the impressive authorities against me on this point, so is their creator’s language. I mean the English language, since Spanish also flows freely through his pages. “The swimming pool ticked on. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?… The failure of a wire fence company, the failure, rather less emphatic and final, of one’s father’s mind, what were these things in the face of God or destiny?” What indeed when so reported? Mr. Lowry has other moments, borrowed from other styles in fashion–Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, the thought-streamers, the surrealists. His novel can be recommended only as an anthology held together by earnestness.

Lowry was upset by this summary judgment, and wrote Barzun a letter. For students of civil behavior, not to say critics and novelists who might think to make of their public literary activity an object lesson in adult solicitude, Lowry’s post-mortem attempt to stay his executioner is instructive. File it with Philip Roth’s (unsent) letter to Diana Trilling on the subject of her dismissal of a novel of his. Lowry’s own reply only further confirms my sense that one can do better, even in this uncivil time, when receiving criticism however harsh (not to say when meting it out) than the hurling of insults. It is perhaps useful to be reminded that when people exchange words about art, we are witnesses not, as the lately popular coinage has it, to a “Literary Smackdown!” but to civilization—a term forever in need of definition.

And so, for your weekend read, I propose Lowry’s response to Barzun. It is drawn from the excellent new anthology of Lowry’s uncollected writings, The Voyage that Never Ends, well-assembled by Michael Hofmann (New York Review Books). With thanks to Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic and Edwin Frank of New York Review Books for assistance and permissions. Thanks as well to the civilized Kelly Zinkowski, who put Lowry’s letter under my nose.

To Jacques Barzun

Dollarton, B.C., Canada

May 6, 1947

Dear Mr. Barzun:

You’ve written, to my mind, such a horribly unfair criticism of my book, Under the Volcano, that I feel I may be forgiven for shooting back.

Granted that it has been overpraised to the extent where an unfavorable review seems almost welcome, and granted that your review may end by doing me good, it rankles as an even harsher criticism, if just, could never do; and I feel that this is not only unsporting but weakens your whole general argument; people simply won’t listen to your very necessary truths if you do this kind of thing once too often.

Ah ha, I can hear you saying, well I can tear the heart out of this pretty damned easily, I can smell its derivations from a mile away, in fact I need only open the book at random to find just what I want, just the right food for my article: I do not feel you have made the slightest critical effort to grapple with its form or its intention. What you have actually succeeded in doing is to injure a fellow who feels himself to be a kindred spirit.

I do not think there was any need, either, to be so insulting about it. You are intitled to “fulsome and fictitious” and you can say if you wish (though it is not specifically true and there is certainly no irrefutable evidence of the former) that I am “on the side of good behavior and eager to disgust you with tropical vice.” But when you say “He shows this by a long regurgitation of the materials found in Ulysses or The Sun Also Rises” are you not overstepping the mark in an effort to be scornful? For while few modern writers, myself included, can have altogether escaped the influence, direct or indirect, of Joyce and Hemingway, the “materials” in the sense you convey are not to be found in either of these books. “And while imitating the tricks of Joyce, Dos Passos and Sterne, he gives us the heart and mind of Sir Philip Gibbs.” What tricks, precisely, do you mean? A young writer will naturally try to benefit and make use of what he has read, as a result of which, especially in technique, what Van Gogh I think calls “design-governing postures” are from time to time inevitable. But where I found another writer in the machinery–the writer you are reading at the moment, Richards has pointed out, is nearly always the villain–I always did my utmost to sweat him out. Shards and shreds of course sometimes remain; they do in your style too. But so far as I know I have imitated none of the tricks of the writers you mention, one of whom at least once testified to my originality. As a matter of fact–and to my shame–I have never read Ulysses through, of Dos Passos I have read only Three Soldiers, and of Sterne I have never been able to read more than one page of Tristram Shandy. (This of course does not rule out direct influence, but what about what I’ve invented myself?) I liked The Sun Also Rises when I read it 12 years ago but I have never read it since nor do I think I’ve ever been particularly influenced by it. Where the Volcano is influenced, its influences are, for the most part, other, and for the most part also I genuinely believe, absorbed. Where they are not you can put it down to immaturity; I began the book back in 1936 when I was 27 and doubtless, in spite of many rewritings, it carries a certain stamp of that fact. As for Sir Philip Gibbs are you not just being gratuitously cruel? Perhaps if you would really read the book you would see that quite a lot of it is intended to be–and in fact is–funny, as it were a satire upon myself. Nor, I venture to say, do I think that, upon a second serious reading, you would find it dull.

After Sir Philip Gibbs I can almost forgive you for juxtaposing at random two not very good passages from Chapters III and IX as though they were contiguous, as an example of bad reporting. But even if those passages are not so hot, what of the justice of this kind of criticism? I’d like to know what you’d do with the wretched student who loaded his dice like that for you.

The end, I suppose, is intended to crush one completely. “Mr. Lowry has other moments, borrowed from other styles in fashion, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, the thought-streamers, the surrealists. His novel can be recommended only as an anthology held together by earnestness.”

Whatever your larger motive–which I incidentally believe to be extremely sound–do you not seem to have heard this passage or something like it before? I certainly do. I seem to recognize the voice, slightly disguised, that greeted Mr. Wolfe himself, not to say Mr. Faulkner, Mr. Melville and Mr. James–an immortal voice indeed that once addressed Keats in the same terms that it informed Mr. Whitman that he knew less about poetry than a hog about mathematics.

But be that as it may. It is the “styles in fashion” that hurts. Having lived in the wilderness for nearly a decade, unable to buy even any intelligent American magazines (they were all banned here, in case you didn’t know, until quite recently) and completely out of touch, I have had no way of knowing what styles were in fashion and what out, and didn’t much care. Henry James’ notebooks I certainly have tried to take to heart, and as for the thought-streamers (if you’re interested in sources) William would doubtless be pleased. And I’m glad at least it was earnestness that held the anthology together. Nonetheless I shall laugh–and I hope you with me–should in ten years or so the Voice again be heard decrying some serious contemporary effort on the grounds that its author is simply regurgitating the materials to be found in Lowry. I shall laugh, but I shall on principle sympathize with the author, even if it is true.

Be this as it may. Any other kind of duello being inconvenient at this distance, I had begun this letter with the intention of being, if possible, as intolerably rude as yourself. I even bought an April Harper’s to provide myself with material and sure enough I found it springing up at me, just as to you, from my work, your ammunition: for did I not immediately find you lambasting Señor Steinbeck in vaguely similar terms, although at much greater length, accusing him of almost everything except stealing his bus from me–you of course didn’t know I had one, it is in Chapter VIII (a crime I may say of which he is innocent and vice versa) and speaking of his anti-artistic emotion of self-pity, by which I take it you do not of course mean your own anti-artistic emotion of self-pity by any chance?

There is an interesting passage here too:

In the makers of the tradition, that is to say in Balzac, Dickens, Zola, Hardy, Dostoevsky, down to Sinclair Lewis and Dos Passos, there is an affirmation pressing behind every grimness, an anger or enthusiasm of despair which endows mud with life and makes it glow like rubies. The energy of mind makes even a surfeit of facts bearable, while plot enmeshes the characters so completely that the reader is compelled to believe in a fated existence, at the very moment when he knows that he is only the sport of the writer’s will.

Good: but why, at that rate, are you so ready to jump upon the affirmation pressing behind the grimness in the Volcano? So ready to jump upon it indeed as soon as you saw it (because it was in capital letters doubtless) that you quite missed the anger or the enthusiasm of despair that it was following? Did you not trample the one to death without even taking the trouble to see if the other was there at all, without taking any trouble, in short, except to exhume Sir Philip Gibbs from his dull grave in order to have a cheap sneer at my expense? And if so, why? I could tell you, but this is as far as my rudeness will take me.

For one thing, I have just got another batch of reviews, all of them good, and all of them more irritating than yours. For another, the book is to be translated into French: the very tough editors, I am relieved to say, think more highly of it than you, which is something. And for another I just have news from England that one of my best friends–Anna Wickham, the poet, if you’re interested–has just hanged herself in London.

God has raised his whip of Hell

That you be no longer weak

That out of anguish, you may speak

That out of anguish, you may speak well.

She once wrote. My wife, by a coincidence having bought me a week ago, in Canada, the only edition of her poems (praised by D. H. Lawrence–and why didn’t you drag him in?) that can have been sold in 20 years, bought them for me indeed two days before Anna died. So life is too short or something.

And the grammar of this letter is bad. And it will remain so. So, doubtless, are the semantics. And the syntax. And everything else.

With the general tenor of your criticism in Harper’s I am enormously, as I hinted, in accord. That for instance political books should be read with the historian’s scepticism, and with the historian’s willingness to see the drama of both sides, that we suffer from intellectual indigestion, philosophic bankruptcy, and adulterated “brews” of one kind or another–be they behavioristic or what-not, that we are being done down by half thoughts, regurgitated unthoughts found in so and sohow true: I might remind you, though, that there are sometimes deeper sources and not everything comes up your own service elevator.

I think I said that the Volcano had been over praised and also praised for qualities it probably doesn’t possess and I think that one of the things I wanted to say was that that seemed no good reason for you to tear it to pieces for faults it doesn’t possess either.

I wish, sincerely, that you would read it again, and this time, because you don’t have to write about it, look instead for what may be good in it. It sings, I believe, considerably–the whole thing–in the mind, if you can stand the partial bankruptcy in character drawing and what actually is fictitious about it, the sentences like Schopenhauer’s roast geese stuffed with apples.

But on the side of good conduct no. I myself savagely reviewed it for a preface for the English edition–though they would have none of it–thus–never mind the “thus” but ending: All applications for use by temperance societies should be accompanied by a case of Scotch addressed to the author. Now put it back in the three-penny shelf where you found it.

Moreover I had even toyed at one time rather lovingly with the notion of having Hugh and Yvonne killed off while too sober and the Consul returning cheerfully and drunkenly to his duties to mescal and the British Crown under a miraculously transformed and benign Poppergetsthebotl.

You might also remember that so far as the latter was concerned I was doing what I fondly believed (in spite of L’Assommoir) to be a pioneer work. The Lost Weekend et al did not come along until, as always happens, it was virtually finished, and at that for the fifth time. Moreover it will both horrify and relieve you to learn that it was only the third of a book, if complete in itself, most of the rest having been destroyed by fire.

And if you want sources–what about the Cabbala? The Cabbala is only in the sub-basement of the book but you would discover therein that the Cabbala itself is identified with the “garden” and the abuse of wine with the abuse of magical powers, and hence with the destruction of the garden, and hence with the world. This myth may have somewhat confined me: for though one might sympathize with Mephistopheles, Faust is a different matter. But perhaps I cite this only to show you how much more loathsome the book might have been to you had I put this on the top plane. I very much believe in what positive merits the book has, however. (I don’t know if Sir Philip Gibbs ever thought about the Cabbala, I have a gruesome suspicion that that is precisely the sort of thing he may have thought about.)

At all events I am now writing another book, you will be uninterested to learn, dealing roughly speaking with the peculiar punishment meted out to people who lack the sense of humour to write books like Under the Volcano. So far, I am pretty convinced that nothing like it has been written, but you can be sure that just as I am finishing it–

Sans blague. One wishes to learn, one wishes to learn, to be a better writer, to think better, and one wishes to learn, period. In spite of some kind of so-called higher education (Cambridge, Eng.) I have just arrived at that state where I realized I know nothing at all. A cargo ship, to paraphrase Melville, was my real Yale and Harvard too. Doubtless I have absorbed many of the wrong things. But instinct leads the good artist (which I feel myself to be, though I say it myself) to what he wants. So if, instead of ending this letter “may Christ send you sorrow and a serious illness,” I were to end it by saying instead that I would be tremendously grateful if one day you would throw your gown out of the window and address some remarks in this direction upon the reading of history, and even in regard to the question of writing and the world in general. I hope you won’t take it amiss. You won’t do it, but never mind.

With best wishes, yours sincerely,

Malcolm Lowry

P.S. Anthology held together by earnestness–brrrrrr!

Prayers Mistakenly Submitted

I have been spending some time lately with the Michael A. Lofaro Edition of James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. The Lofaro was published earlier this year by The University of Tennessee Press, and is one of the most interesting scholarly editions of a work of fiction that I can recall. Lofaro is a professor of American literature and American and cultural studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; his edition carries the subtitle “A Restoration of the Author’s Text,” which fairly describes its purpose.

Agee died before his novel could be published and editor/publisher David McDowell took charge over the book. As the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the book has become a modern classic, one might suppose that an argument over its editor’s acumen would be moot. After all, wrote McDowell in a note to the reader, he did so little:

This novel, upon which [Agee] had been working for many years, is presented here exactly as he wrote it. There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except for a few cases of first-draft material which he later re-worked at greater length, and one section of seven odd pages which the editors were unable satisfactorily to fit into the body of the novel…. The title, like all the rest of the book, is James Agee’s own.

Yet we learn from the 226 pages of back-matter that accompany this new edition that McDowell exaggerated his restraint. “The title,” Lofaro writes on the first page of his commentary and notes, “is most likely one created by David McDowell. No evidence has yet been uncovered that would help determine Agee’s intent regarding the title of the novel. He most often referred to it as ‘the book.’”

I have no familiarity with Agee’s papers, and would not question the veracity of Lofaro’s counter-claim. (Though anyone who has done some digging through the linear feet of the literary archives of a late writer knows too well that while such troves do indeed offer the answers to burning questions, they often contain multiple, incompatible answers to those questions.) My only grumble with Lofaro is that we have to reach the 213th page of his scrupulous iteration of variants before we find a rather astonishing table:

And so on…

And so on, through the end…

The mind reels. From this simple table we learn that more than ten of Agee’s original chapters were deleted, a brute fact incompatible with McDowell’s claim that only “seven odd pages” of Agee’s manuscript were cut. Readers of this magazine read four of those cut chapters last year, and they seem like anything but what one might call “first-draft material.”

It would be time wasted to debate the disingenuousness of McDowell’s “A note on this book.” But we should still ask: to what end were McDowell’s editorial acrobatics? That is the larger question that the Lofaro edition asks, and it’s a useful question, particularly when not a few writers find themselves in the position of having their novels edited desultorily. Over the years a number of younger writers have confessed to me their frustration at seeing their manuscripts tidied but barely touched before flowing into type (just as any number of readers have asked, “Is anyone editing these things?”). Novels need good editors, editors of taste and vision, to reckon with the imperfections that the novel, in seeking its perfections, generates. The list of books that have been shaped by editors as much as their writers is long and interesting; the invocation of the name Max Perkins serves as flag and totem to the cause.

In the case of Agee’s novel, we readers and amateurs of literature have a rare chance, if it suits us, to see just what an editor does or can do. And specifically, if one were to read the Lofaro Agee first and the McDowell Agee second a reader would be able to judge firsthand not just what, but how well, Agee’s editor really did do, after all.

“Shurshaschie in Buryane”

Here’s a sentence that stopped me this weekend:

For a moment he seemed to be in control of the whirlpool that had seized hold of him; then a thick black pitch seemed to pour into his eyes and nostrils—there was no air left to breathe, no stars over his head, nothing but this darkness, this ravine and these strange creatures rustling through the dry grass.

We are in the head of a Soviet commissar fighting in the Battle of Stalingrad. He has run to the lip of a ravine and is staring into its roiling contents, which his mind registers “as though a huge black cauldron were boiling”. There are “dim figures in the darkness,” German soldiers, which in the fear and horror of the tumult his brain sees as “a vast pit full of hundreds of poisonous snakes… slithering about in confusion, hissing and rustling through the dry grass.” Then comes the sentence above, in which the vessel of the self breaks, and contents spill.

The structure of this long sentence is straightforward, distillable to the form “For a moment…; then….” The first part of the sentence establishes a state, a roiling but reportable one. A ravine is before our reporter, one metaphorically filled with snakes and boiling water but literally with Germans shooting at Soviets. Our reporter is dependably seizing the particulars of the chaos of battle, but as the sentence shifts into second gear, we see him seized by them—by “then,” which ushers in a counterstate. Sight becomes darkness, blindness; no air, no stars, nothing, only sound. The ophidian Germans remain, but only as “creatures rustling through the dry grass.”

Soldiers battle in darkness. Such writing illuminates, even in translation. Robert Chandler is responsible for turning Vasily Grossman’s…

То казалось, он правит движением захватившею его водоворота, то ощущение гибели охватывало его, и казалось, густая смоляная тьма льется ему в глаза, в ноздри, и уж нет воздуха для дыхания и нет звездного неба над головой, есть лишь мрак, овраг и страшные существа, шуршащие в бурьяне.

….into the lucidity above, from Жизнь и судьба, which New York Review Books brought back into print in 2006 as Life and Fate. Without it, we non-Russianists could only experience Grossman via the blithe ejecta of Google Translate, which renders the richness above, thus:

That it seemed he had his seizure of traffic rules whirlpool, the feeling cover his loss, and seemed to flow thick tar him in the darkness eyes, nostrils in, and certainly no air to breath and there is no starry sky above head, there is only darkness, ravine and terrible creatures, shurshaschie in buryane.

Weekend Read: An unwritten, half written, rewritten difficult book

Two months ago, I wrote about the news of Dmitri Nabokov having announced, after protracted hemming and internationally reported hawing, that he intended to publish his father Vladimir’s final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura: Dying is Fun. At the time, and among other things, I mentioned that pieces of this mysterious novel had actually already unmysteriously appeared, nine years ago, in The Nabokovian, the twice-yearly publication of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS). You can read about the quite interesting circumstances of that advent here. As a bonus, that post also included, tucked into its distant tail-end, a piece of one of the pieces of Laura that IVNS had already shared with an uninterested world.

As the world always seems to take greatest interest in what is loudly hidden from view than in what it quietly and abundantly has, curiosity in and conversation about Laura has grown since Dmitri announced his intentions. When will it appear? readers now wonder. Who will publish it? readers ask. Is it any good? I can’t wait to find out. The first two questions have yet to be publicly settled, but the final one has been treated by Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd who, in the TLS, said:

I think it is a fascinating novel. It is very fragmentary, people shouldn’t expect to be swept away. He is doing some very brilliant things with the prose, the story just flashes by, the characters are rather unappealing. It seems a technical tour de force, just as Shakespeare’s later works where he is extending his own technique in very, very concentrated ways. [The text is as] grotesque in some ways as, and unsavoury in different ways from, Lolita. It’s the kind of writing that induces admiration and awe but not engagement.

For this installment of Weekend Read, the fun begins with a second snippet of a section of Laura that appeared in The Nabokovian. Who knows precisely at what juncture it arrives in this story said to be about comically fat Philip Wild, brilliant neurologist, but I can say that it does engage this reader:

A tear of no particular meaning gemmed the hard top of her cheek. Nobody could tell what went on in that little head. Waves of desire rippled there, a recent lover fell back in a swoon, hygienic doubts were raised and dismissed, contempt for everyone but herself advertised with a flush of warmth its constant presence, here it is, cried what’s-her-name squatting quickly. My darling, dushka moya (eyebrows went up, eyes opened and closed again, she didn’t meet Russians often, this should be pondered).

Masking her face, coating her sides, pinaforing her stomach with kisses—all very acceptable while they remained dry.

Her frail, docile frame, when turned over by hand, revealed new marvels—the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed, the incurvation of a ballerina’s spine, narrow nates of an ambiguous, irresistible charm (nature’s beastliest bluff, said Paul de G. watching a dour old don watching boys bathing).

Only by indentifying her with an unwritten, half written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what. . . .

As for more on Dmitri’s decision-making, not to say his engagement with his father’s posterity, I offer, as a more substantial contribution to your armchair entertainment, an interview with Dmitri. Not another one, you might say, if you’ve been following the news, but this interview, with Sueellen Stringer-Hye, is less self-promotional and more robust. It ranges from the personal to the technical, from the literary to the administrative, and all of it is lucid and fascinating. It appears in the current issue of The Nabokov Online Journal (NOJ), a publication of Dalhousie University, of Halifax. I came to the interview through the kind advice of Steve Crook, estimable librarian of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. “The Berg Collection,” their website says, “contains some 30,000 printed volumes, pamphlets, and broadsides, and 2000 linear feet of literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of more than 400 authors.” Among these authors is Nabokov père, whose manuscripts and books and letters and other objects reside there. Mr. Crook had the enviable task of archiving every last stitch of it, little glimpses of which, through the years, I’ve had the privilege of seeing. He has my thanks today for alerting me to the interview, which contains this from Dmitri:

If I were overseer of the world (as I sometimes fantasize) there are many changes I would consider. For instance, I would eliminate shopping malls, which seem to spawn mass shootings. I would cancel popular holidays that promote the most vicious human instincts. While I was at it, I might also consider the option of a third term for a current president if it is obvious that nobody can do the job better, thereby postponing by at least a year the energy, time, and expense of a futile election. When an election did become necessary, I would abolish the mention of religion in political contexts. I would drastically limit the expenditures that all the hoopla entails, and redirect all leftover funds, through strictly controlled channels, to the poor and the ill, upon whom we bestow such abundant lip service.

And it continues here. I propose it as your Weekend Read.

All That, For This?

A book I read this past weekend, not John Haskell’s American Purgatorio about which I wrote in my previous post, but one that comes out in the fall, was a raging disappointment. The writer’s work to date, though uneven, is distinguished. I greet the prospect of new work from this writer as an occasion: perhaps this latest effort will banish my doubts and fulfill my hopes. Perhaps the writer will avoid bad tendencies past and embrace best qualities and pull off a fully successful work of art.

The new book, through its first half, seems to be doing just that. Smart, restrained writing and, with the unfolding of each successive sequence, a deepening of intrigue. Soon, the novel becomes an intrigue-generating machine, marching us steadily uphill towards the elusive narrative summit at which, though we cannot see it, we sense that all will be revealed. Alas, we reach the summit, and discover that the breathtaking view we have been awaiting is, instead, a punch in the nose from an insignificant fist. What storytelling withholding had promised is delivered and we want to refuse receipt: all that, for this?

All workers in prose narrative withhold what they know is coming. Even those prose writers who profess to write because they do not know what is coming are no less complicit in the practice. Javier Marìas, for example, has claimed that he sets out to write a novel with a compass but no map, a way of saying that, for him, finding out what happens next is a pleasure that the writer in him refuses to give over completely to the reader. He wants that pleasure too, while writing.

As such, expectation for what is going to happen next is built deeply if differently into his storytelling. The attenuation of his plots, the luxuriant idling over and around and above and within moments that other novelists would elide entirely, may be appreciated, in part, as an inevitable product of his process: much rapt circling before the dive.

Building expectation through narrative withholding is an art, but delivering something that is the equal of such protracted absence is another art, and a more important one. “More important” in the sense that if we get to the end and feel that what has been intimated by the beginning is not, in the end, a treat but a trick, all the effort the storyteller expended in keeping things from us is wasted. Tricks are fine, and treats are nice, but truths trump both, and are the only thing, in fiction, worth waiting for.

Die A Painful Death

Enthusiasm is suspicious. Or so a critic sometimes feels.

Ruth Franklin, writing in the New Republic a few years ago about David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, expressed some discomfort over expressing the extremity of her appreciation for Mitchell’s work. Franklin bemoaned our staggeringly, achingly, stunningly, heart-stoppingly annoying contemporary tendency to blubber praise unto meaninglessness. As such, since every latest minted thing is now sold as the very greatest thing, when one does encounter a work of art for which one has unusually strong feelings, one feels at once exhilarated by the prospect of getting to trumpet the goodness of the new, and at a loss as to how one might go about distinguishing one’s real enthusiasm from all the mindlessly manufactured enthusiasm out there.

In the past, my answer has been to sit down and write five-thousand words that attempt to particularize my feelings, to corroborate my exhilaration with (for example) proof. When I wrote about the stories of Edward P. Jones for this magazine, I did so in a mode of admiration, and with a desire to point out the particulars of what I admired. I have received a fair number of letters about that piece from readers who, convinced by my focused enthusiasm, then went on to read Jones.

I also received, though, a few letters about the Jones piece that wondered why I wasted my time writing so approvingly of his work. It was not that they did or did not agree that he was or was not worth reading. Rather, they just found my enthusiasm suspicious. Surely I didn’t really like him that much? Surely I was just avoiding making an argument that would have shown my enthusiasm to be more complicated than mere appreciation? Surely I was hiding something?

“Nice day, isn’t it?” is a sentence we would more often than not mean literally, but which, owing to the fantastic capacity of the human animal to misunderstand almost anything, to some ears will sound like “Die a painful death.” Anyway, at some point soon, I hope to have the chance to write another five thousand easily misunderstood words of particularizing praise about John Haskell. If you don’t know, and the odds are you don’t, he writes short stories and, thus far, one novel.

Over the weekend I read the novel, American Purgatorio, and was left feeling like I need to sit with Ruth Franklin and keen a little. It’s the ____ novel I’ve read in _____. Upon finishing it, I went online and sent it to a few friends. If you should find yourself with an afternoon later this month open to the exertions of reading fiction, you might think to fit its 239 pages between lunch and dinner.

Weekend Read: “So the trail leads you here”

In my previous post, I touched upon the habit of rereading, suggesting that it’s a central feature of all reading experience. To mint a crude means of measuring literary quality, “better books” might be called those that remain loved by us when we reread them decades—and many experiences (literary or not)—later. Anything loved at twenty (that terrific pair of yellow pants) may not suit the forty-year-old who thinks to slip into them again. Whereas those books loved by a culture and which we might call classics are those that fit a culture through the decades and well past the decline of the cultures that spawned them.

As such, rereading in translation is a special kind of rereading. Some translations of works we have read before—Anna Karenina; In Search of Lost Time—however numerous their differences from immediate predecessors, are more like their predecessors than they are unlike them. The Russian and French languages have evolved in the last century but slightly, and however differently their translators might approach the particulars of fidelity, the sprawling totality of the novels defeats wholesale renovation.

Rereading poetry in translation is another matter, particularly when the source language is thousands of years out of date. Fans of Christopher Logue’s renovations of Homer’s Illiad know that translation can offer not merely a subtle shift in our sense of a style but a seismic alteration in our appreciation of a lyric or epic work’s landscape. Logue is as famous for the quality of his English Homer as for the novelty of his approach: knowing no Greek, he rewrites the poem from literal trots of the original. This very ‘liberal’ approach to rereading Homer can only work well, which is to say beautifully, which is to say dramatically, when the translator’s resourcefulness in his own idiom is, if not the equal of that of its source, excedingly well-matched to it.

John Tipton is a poet I have yet to read, but his new translation of Sophocles Ajax (Flood, 2008), in its vigor and careful tuning, its terse idiomatic grace, argues that he is a poet worth exploring. I heard about Tipton’s Ajax here, in another of Emily Wilson’s dependably and welcomingly intelligent essay-reviews. As Wilson said of the original:

Ajax was composed by Sophocles probably sometime in the 440s BC–the decade before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In this period, Athens was consolidating its military and economic power in the Greek world, forming new allegiances and breaking old ones. The city was also undergoing cultural and intellectual changes: the Sophists (”wisdom-teachers”) were introducing new ideas about science, society, religion and morality into the public and private spheres, which seemed to some citizens to threaten their traditional values and way of life.

Sophocles’ tragedy tells of Ajax–a great hero of the Trojan War, but never the greatest, a warrior associated with old-fashioned valor and physical courage. After the Greek victory over the Trojans, the Greek generals hold a contest to decide who should inherit the magical armor of Achilles, which his divine mother, Thetis, had given to him. Ajax’s archenemy, Odysseus, wins the competition. In Sophocles’ play, as in Homer’s Iliad, Odysseus seems–at least at first–like the exact opposite of Ajax: he represents brains over brawn; trickery over courage; the new sophistic values of flexibility, cleverness, and rhetoric over the old ideal of death before dishonor.

I loved reading Tipton’s account of Ajax’ agonistes, and propose, as your weekend read, the beginning of his translation, in which wise Athena talks to wily Odysseus outside war-ruined Ajax’ tent. With thanks to Flood editions and John Tipton for permission to reprint.

An Imaginary Kindle

As reading is said to be dying, at least by our latest and most trusted oracles, rereading must not be dying but surely should be, by now, dead. And yet, all reading is rereading, even when we read the book in our hands for the first time. Whereas, when we watch a work of cinematic art for the first time, we cannot, in a theater, pause to appreciate a particularly compelling moment, or ponder a movingly complex insight into the human condition. But from the first crack of its spine a book has the pause-and-rewind option available at all times. This is not a detail I would use to argue for the superiority of reading as a delivery device for narrative entertainment so much as I would suggest that it is a significant feature of the difference between such experiences.

I put forth that all reading is rereading, and know I am not alone in professing this axiom. All readers who are also writers, for example, reread–their own work, of course, compulsively, but also the work of the particular writers in whose endeavors they find themselves at home, whether owing to similarity or difference.

For readers one of the great miseries is to find oneself trapped on a bus without a book, and one of the greater miseries is to be trapped on a bus with a bad book, or merely a book that one has no desire, at the moment, to read. As such, the Amazon Kindle has been, if only conceptually, much on my mind. I haven’t used one, much less seen one, much less actually done any research about what they do. For me the Kindle is like cold fusion–a terrific idea of the space age that I’d be all for, if it were to exist.

My hypothetical Kindle is a device upon which would reside all the books I’ve read and which I either reread or know I will reread. It waits weightless in my (hypothetical) carry-on that I take with me on my (nonexistent) frequent international flights. At 40,000 feet, 15 hours from my (imaginary) destination, I could, uninvolved by The Widows of Eastwick, dip back into Pale Fire or The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill or Tatlin!. My Kindle would be a device devoted not to the new but to the old, a portable library of greatest hits without a miss, an iPod of ideal literature. But, of course, I do not travel. Bookshelves suffice.

This Incomprehensible Whatever-it-was

Philip Roth has an essay at the back of the paperback of Portnoy’s Complaint about how the first lines of his novels came to him. It’s a nice example of how Roth can take a tiny literality and squeeze more metaphorical substance from it than would seem possible (and, simultaneously, take a metaphor and squeeze it unto literality).

The essay is a piece of falsified autobiography ostensibly drawn from Roth’s twenties in Chicago. He’s teaching freshman comp, is involved with a woman whose father is in jail, and is trying to become a great writer, “to dazzle in my very own way and to dazzle myself no less than anyone else.” One rainy evening, Roth makes his way to a cafeteria to splurge on a dinner of rare roast beef. He loves going to the cafeteria to splurge $3 rather than the $2 he’d spend at the student commons, and he loves the sound of the “small Sicilian man with the big serving dippers who stood to the side of the guy who sliced up and served the roast beef.” We learn that beef is good, but words are better, for the small Sicilian, in a “singsong, accented delivery that gave a light musical emphasis to the first word,” repeats (”twenty-five to fifty times while I ate dinner”) an incantatory haiku: “Juice or gravy.”

Roth tells us that on one night, when he should have been grading a hundred freshman compositions and eating baked beans out of a can, he went to the cafeteria to eat alone at the same empty table and hear “the poet himself speak aloud the four-syllable haiku that always cheered me up.” Those four syllables get switched for the four chairs Roth finds empty at “his table” that night, and in front of “his” chair, empty as well, a sheet of typing paper waits “that a previous diner had forgotten or left behind at ‘my’ place”:

Typewritten on the paper, in the form of a long single-spaced unindented paragraph, were nineteen sentences that taken together made no sense at all. Though no author’s name appeared anywhere on either the front or the the back of the page, I figured that the nineteen sentences, amounting to some four hundred or so words, must be the work of a neighborhood avant-gardist with an interest in ‘experimental’ or ‘automatic’ writing. This page was surely a sample of one or the other. The author’s having forgotten this composition here at the cafeteria—while trying perhaps not to forget to remember to leave with his or her own umbrella—did not seem to me a catastrophe for literature or even for a literary career.

Roth reproduces the page. We read and recognize the nineteen first lines of his first nineteen books.

“Now this document—this gift—this burden—this prank—this incomprehensible whatever-it-was—this nothing” perplexes young Roth, but after several ensuing logical double-salchows, after young Roth and older Roth compare notes, we are led to the following disclosure: “What I eventually understood was that these were the first lines of the books that it had fallen to me to write.”

In a pig’s eye, says the reader, and all opinions of Roth’s sense of humor will line up neatly behind that utterance in two tonal rows, two very different articulations of those four syllables: either the derisive, or the delighted; the admonitory, or the altogether glad.

Weekend Read: “The queer world of verbal transmigration”

This week, I’ve touched on the matter of translation, a subject that rouses the interest and ire of anyone who invests in books, whether reader or writer. ‘Bad translation’ is, in some circles, a near redundancy:

Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration.The first,and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge.This is mere human frailty and thus excusable.The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers…. The third,and worst,degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape,vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public.This is a crime,to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.

That grim gradation of comes from a 1942 New Republic essay by, of course, Vladimir Nabokov. And as bracing as it is to read of a discipline’s indecent shortcomings, it’s also fun to read of its optimistic possibilities.

As such, for your weekend read, I propose you browse or perhaps download Essay on the Principles of Translation, by Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (1747-1813). The particular scanned copy of this sober exploration of the discipline comes from the New York Public Library, in which Nabokov himself sat, in the early 1940s, preparing the lectures on literature that he would soon begin to deliver, over the next 15 or so years, at American Universities. Tytler’s work is the antipode to Nabokov’s ire: largely calm, largely reasonable, but also largely unpracticable. It makes for a fine primer, though, one with which any working translator will agreeably disagree. And agreeable disagreement is something we could all use a little more of. The Tytler starts like this:

There is perhaps no department of literature which has been less the object of cultivation, than the Art of Translating. Even among the ancients, who seem to have had a very just idea of its importance, and who have accordingly ranked it among the most useful branches of literary education, we meet with no attempt to unfold the principles of this art, or to