Patrick: Lagniappe

He paused for a moment, and then his face brightened. ‘Have you ever thought,’ he said, ‘of making your son a missionary?’
A sort of sigh emanated from his wife.
‘In a warm country,’ she said, ‘a long way off?’
Mr Lorton nodded.
‘Healthy but remote,’ he said,‘where his moral enthusiasm could have full play?’
‘And where his personal appearance,’ said Mrs Lorton, ‘could scarcely fail to be such a protection to him?’
‘Quite so,’ said Mr Lorton. ‘I can conceive of no one eating dear Augustus.’
Mrs Lorton smiled not unkindly.
‘No one at all,’ she said, ‘not even the most debased.’
--Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford
 

David Foster Wallace and the Magic Circle
I just finished reading DFW’s latest book, a collection of short stories called Oblivion.  As is true for most of DFW’s other works, it is a book that demands a lot from the reader.  This circumstance is not necessarily a demerit.  Paul Johnson, in the current Spectator, makes the point that for certain great writers, it’s the “omissions, reticence and silence which did the trick.”  Johnson cites as one example Jane Austen, who is the unrivalled mistress of “hesitations, reticences, lacunae and other subleties.”  Austen’s works are short, but very, very deep.  Johnson quotes Virginia Woolf, who regarded Austen as “a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface.  She stimulates us to supply what is not there.”  Johnson also quotes Mary Lascelles, whose book on Austen, Jane Austen and Her Art, he considers the best treatment on the subject:  “It is a mark of a great writer that he or she takes the reader into the magic circle of composition, and gets you to join them in the art of creation.”

DFW is often criticized for being the exact opposite of this kind of writer who refuses admittance to the magic circle.  He throws everything in.  His gaze—omnivorous.  His first-person narrators out-Jamesian Henry James in their subtlety and intellectual acuity.  I must admit I, too, find his technique, although exhilarating at times, also, quite exhausting.  Matters are not helped by his grammatical quirkiness.  One short story in Oblivion, titled Another Pioner—and quite a long one, too—is composed of a single paragraph.  Sentences stretch for pages and contain nested parentheticals, many times set off by “m” dashes.  Clauses frolic, merge and subsume one another.  Here’s a sample from the title story, Oblivion:

I even went so far as to try consulting or ‘seeing’ a professional Couple counselor—again, an action undertaken on my own and, as it were, ‘sub-rosa,’ as I knew quite well Hope’s, her stepfather’s, and the bulk of her true and adoptive family’s (with the exception of Vivian whose allegedly ‘Recovered’ memories and hysterical public accusations at the extended family’s Holiday get-together at Paul and Theresa’s extraordinary vacation home off the Manasquan inlet had led to herself and Hope’s ‘falling out’ and to the entire extended family’s unspoken prohibition of any mention of the entire subject, besides which were Dr. Sipe’s own sentiments respecting the issue of ‘therapy’’s eligibility as a Medical expense for the purposes of Health Care plans and ‘Managed Care,’ which were well known and vociferous) feelings vis a vis the ‘therapy’ issue, and knew also, by that point, that Hope’s flat, tight-mouthed refusal, were I to broach the issue, even to consider ‘seeing’ the counselor with me as a ‘couple’ would frustrate and aggravate me all over again, and simply escalate or further the scope of the marital conflict—only, there-upon, to my considerable chagrin, to repeatedly have, suffer or endure a series of ‘therapeutic exchanges such as, in substance, the following:"

Let’s end the sentence there, shall we?  So, is DFW a nut?  Yes, but, in the way that all great artists are “nuts.”  This sentence operates on several levels.  First, it advances the point of the story, which is ably dissected and explained in the current issue of the London Review of Books (I highly recommend the LRB to you, at least visit their website).  Second, this is the sentence of a master grammarian, as Kathryn has previously explained.  DFW is showing off here.  Of particular interest are the multiple possessives and the different types of possessives.  You have here the very odd creature of the double single-quotation mark [(i.e., ‘therapy’’s) DFW does this several times in the book (oh, and he loves multiple nested parentheticals [like this one]].  You also have the multiple noun possessive (i.e., Hope’s, her stepfather’s, and the bulk of her true and adoptive family’s . . . feelings [the ellipse is itself a marker for the long parenthetical in the sentence]).  This sentence has, in all, depending on whether you count the multiple noun possessive as one possessive, which I shall do, a total of eight possessives.  Plus the parenthetical.  Plus the “m” dash.  Plus multiple “n” dashes.  Plus multiple single-quotation mark words, set off in a David Lettermanesque “ironic,” or is that ‘ironic’ suggestiveness.

So, is that it?  Or is there more?  I think there is. DFW does want you to enter his magic circle.  He does leave a lot out for the reader to interpret and discover.  And I have one word for it: OuLiPo.



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Patrick: Lagniappe

For a similar reason, even had I been attracted to it, the profession of Medicine would have been unavailable, while from that of the Law, nobler in very way, I was equally precluded.  For some time, however, we canvassed very carefully the strong claims of Diplomacy, for which in many ways, as my father agreed with me, I was admirably fitted.  And I am still convinced that both as attaché and ambassador I should have found congenial and Xtian employment. Unhappily, however, such a career involved the acquirement of the French language, with attendant dangers, to which my father could not persuade himself to expose me.  Whether he was right in this is perhaps open to argument, and I have since met several apparently devout men who have not only spoken this tongue with reported fluency, but have deliberately sojourned in the country of its origin.  Personally, however, while reluctant to condemn them, I must confess to sharing my father’s views, and I am happy in the knowledge that the vicar of my parish holds precisely the same opinion.
--Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford
 

Wolf-Pack Watch II
It is apparently very tiring for the New York Times to have to generate multiple bad reviews of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. But Jacob Weisberg manfully rises to the task in the latest issue of the New York Times Book Review (which, for cryin’-out-loud, includes a glowing review of Jimmy Buffet’s [yes, that Jimmy Buffet of the floral-print shirt who evokes some kind of weird ‘60s flashback in drunken herds of addled baby-boomers] novel of, what else?, the sea and a lighthouse—although not in Margaritaville).  Whereas and wherefore the first NYT critic hacked at Wolfe for being “peculiarly dated” and “peculiarly lackadaisical,” in, I suppose, using the same peculiar adverb in consecutive paragraphs, our new batter, Mr. Weisberg, whacks at Wolfe for creating a character “whose momma would whisk her right on back to Possum Hollow,” but, instead, she “first asserts her lil’ backwoods self.”  Am I the only one who finds this stereotyping of rural denizens neither witty, clever nor fresh?  I know, I know, Mr. Weisberg, with a wink and a snort, would defend himself by saying that he was merely parodying Wolfe’s heavy-handed drawing of the character.  Please.

So, what other heavy-handedness have we got here?  Hmmm, this says Wolfe’s novel provides a “comic-book version of college.”  Oh, and that limp bit over there talks about “the novel’s didactic lesson.”  Hold on a second, let me lift up this old sock: ahhh, here we go—“it is by far the weakest of his novels.”  Wait, wait, I know I left something else under these dirty towels.  Yep, I knew it: Wolfe’s cardboard characterization “speaks to the author’s boredom with his own limited creations. That Wolfe . . . cannot make real Charlotte’s emotional collapse underscores the extent to which he remains a writer of outward appearances rather than inner dimensions.”  Uggh, how repulsive.  Let’s just dump the used laundry back on top of that, shall we?

Okay, so we know to avoid that shallow, stupid Tom Wolfe who doesn’t know a college frat party from a hole in a ground.  So what author should we turn to for insight and authority?  Why, the aforementioned party of the second part, Jimmy Buffet.  This review, titled “Wise Old Jimmy Buffet,” tells us that his novel, A Salty Piece of Land is “a tangy tale, at times turbulent and unpredictable as the ocean, at times as wistful as the whitecaps on the waves.” Also, his “prose style now seems to flow in a fresh, fanciful, finely imagined fashion.”  Oh my goodness, call the alliteration police, there’s a multiple offender on the loose.  So, there you go.  Don’t read Wolfe whose whitin’ would make woo wince.  Instead, boffo Buffet’s book best be bitten into, along with a lime and some salt.  And if there’s someone to blame, yes I know, it’s the NYT’s own durn fault.



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Patrick: Lagniappe

Nor did we confine ourselves, while at the seaside, merely to terrestrial amusement, and we would frequently indulge, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, in the enjoyable practice of pedal immersion. Wholly precluded, of course, for constitutional reasons, from the fuller development of the art involved in swimming, we nevertheless found this to be a most laughable and even exciting occupation; and I can recall at least two occasions when, owing to a momentary inadversion, our rolled-up trousers became partially submerged. A smart run home, however, a cup of hot milk, and immediate retirement to bed sufficed, in both instances, to protect us from any untoward results.
--Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford
 

Norman Mailer: Forgotten Comic Genius, Part IV
Mailer, the maestro, rises from one great artistic height to yet, another higher clime.  Having eviscerated the pretentious Freudian/existential drivel of his contemporaries, he turns his throat-slit saber onto the mightiest beast of all: the self-regarding poet; Robert Lowell, turn and face your destroyer.  So, who could resist poking fun at that serious, mopy figure who spouts clunky chunks of non-rhythm and no-meter on some lofty topic?  Well, most of the “big ideas” have already been covered: love, requite, love, despite, love, contrite.  Trite. Trite.  Trite.  If one is to write a proper parody, it needs to be on a serious topic that is highly inappropriate for a comic treatment.  How about cancer?  Not too many poems written about that.  Isn’t it too malignant?  Come to think of it, I believe a lovely sonnet might be written on the topic of syphillis.  I’ll give you the first four lines and you may add the rest:

Upon a maid I met while drinking ale/I asked of her, “a hearty tipple, miss?”/At first she laughed, “that little rusty nail?”/”I’d rather romp and give a cripple kiss.” 

Before I get carried away, here’s the first few lines of Mailer’s cancer canto:

Dead Ends
Cancer? They said. What do you know about cancer?
That the cause is so simple we dare not look.
Nothing is simple but a simple mind,
   said my host
      and they laughed at his wit
            which was tone
             to their ears
         for the essence of the urbane
         is the well-burnished god of oneself
         glowing like a brass heart
         in the fireplace of manner.

Still, I said, if you will allow me
            to insist on a theme
           which irritates your laughter
     I would submit that the simple
      subtends the complex
      in such a way
         that the complex may never comprehend the simple.

Existentialism bores me, said the host.
    As you know, my passion is precise.
    I say you take advantage of my house
      and flaunt the magic of the simple
          because your mind retains no longer
          those indispensable acids of the scholar,
          the lacework, trace, and dry-point of knowledge.

Talk about clumping about in a giant’s boots with no sense of proportion or line. The best effect is to read this turgid screed aloud so as to experience the rattling chains of the words as they drag across the floor.  , I am merely giving you a small taste, a lagniappe, as it were, of the entire poem.  Cancer, cancer, boil the chancre—there’s cancer for everyone.  And, as you see, existentialism too rears its hoary head and gurgles at us, spewing “indispensable acids.”  All this is a bit too difficult for me to follow.  But, then again, “the simple subtends the complex.” To experience this monstrosity in all of its Rabelaisian glory, I suggest you buy the book, Advertisements for Myself, for yourself.  Mailer, my skipper's cap is off to you—a national treasure that should make the likes of Milton Berle and Bob Hope cry, “Uncle,” or at least, “Step-Cousin.”
Pardon my enthusiasm, I can’t resist leaving you with the last few stinky feet of this wonderful comic poet creation:

But I found my wit before the door
         and turning said
You mean, Find mother
         in the clutch of another
Your life is a hole
And cancer is the death of the hole.
And if the hole upon
              hole
        is the dead of poetry
        as a scheme in rhyme
        well fail me never
            dear wit
       cancer is the boredom
       where sound cannot be.

The hole, the hole, my cancer for a hole—as King Richard III might have blurted out at the end. Good night sweet princes and princesses, don’t forget to put the cancer out.


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Patrick: Lagniappe

Unable at last, owing to his acute sensibilities, to witness my agony any longer, my father was obliged, with the deepest reluctance, to confine himself to a separate bedroom. But it was in this extremity that is almost Quixotic unselfishness shone, if possible, with an added lustre. From the time of his marriage to the day of my birth, and as soon thereafter as the doctor had permitted her to rise, my father had been in the habit of enabling my mother to provide him with an early cup of tea. And this he had done by waking her regularly a few minutes before six o’clock. In view of the fact, however, that he was now occupying a different bedroom, and that, owing to my indisposition, she was awake most of the night, he offered to excuse her should she chance to be asleep at that hour, from the performance of this wifely duty. Needless to say, it was not an offer that she could accept. Indeed, in his heart he had not expected her to do so. And I have even considered the incident, in later days, as illustrative of a certain weakness in my father’s character. But I have never been able to regard it without affection or to forbear mentioning it on appropriate occasions.
--Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford
 

Norman Mailer: Forgotten Comic Genius, Part III
Hoo boy, I don’t think you can handle what’s coming up next.  Strap yourselves in—we’re going on a Mailer-fueled rocket ride to Planet Manic.  This is an excerpt from an alleged work-in-progress titled, no snickering please, The Time of Her Time.  It concerns a modern-day Lothario, Sergius O’Shaugnessy (Dickens, you have met your master) who lives in Greenwich Village and earns his keep by, get this, giving bull fighting lessons.  Here’s Sergius’s ruminations with respect to women who climb the “slopes of Mt. O’Shaugnessy”:  “what it came down to was that I could go an hour with the average girl without destroying more of the vital substance than a good night’s sleep could repair, and since that sort of stamina seems to get advertised, and I had my good looks, my blond hair, my height, build and bullfighting school, I suppose I became one of the Village equivalents of an Eagle Scout badge for the girls. I was one of the credits needed for a diploma in the sexual humanities . . . .”  Yes, yes, the mixed metaphors are simply over the top.  But that “vital substance” could be right out of Dr. Strangelove and the stealing of General Jack Ripper’s vital fluids (which probably was stolen from this earlier work of Mailer’s). 

And, here’s a sample of Sergius’s witty conversation with another conquest who “was still far from formed, there had been all sorts of Lesbian hysterias in her shrieking laugh”: “But this new chick had been a mistake—I had met her two weeks ago at a party, she was on leave from her boy friend, and we had had an argument about T. S. Eliot, a routine which for me had become the quintessence of corn, but she said that Eliot was the apotheosis of manner, he embodied the ecclesiasticism of classical and now futureless form, she adored him she said, and I was tempted to tell her how little Eliot would adore the mannerless yeasts of the Brooklyn from which she came.”  No comment, it’s just too good. 

So what does this Love Song of Prufrock Eliot make Sergius want to do?  “Her college-girl snobbery, the pith for me of eighty-five other honey-pots of the Village aesthetic whose smell I knew all too well, so inflamed the avenger of my crotch, that I wanted to prong her then and there, right on the floor of the party, I was a primitive for a prime minute, a gorged gouge of a working-class phallus, eager to ram into all her nasty little tensions.”  The wrong-headed erotica (“pronged”) mixed with the school-boy alliteration just can’t be beat. So, can this get any funnier?  Oh yes, indeedy, just sit back and enjoy the pronging.

So, our lover boy decides to make his move. “I had the message again, I was one of the millions on the bottom who had the muscles to move the sex which kept the world alive, and I would grind it into her, the healthy hearty inches and the sweat of the cost of acquired culture when you started low and you wanted to go high. She was a woman, what! she sensed that moment, she didn’t know if she could handle me, and she had the guts to decide to find out.” Could anything be wittier than that “healthy hearty inches”?  So, anyhoo, we’re now into the “act” itself where are lovely lady is being handled.  “I worked on her like a beaver for forty-odd minutes or more, slapping my tail to build her nest, and she worked along while we made the round of the positions, her breath sobbing the exertions, her body as alive as a charged wire and as far from rest.”  Oh, come on, there’s never been anything funnier written about the “act” then that beaver quip.  But then, all good nest building must come to an end, which leads to this fantastic pillow-talk exchange:

Of course it was easy to find satisfaction with Arthur, “via the oral perversions. That’s because, vaginally, I’m anaesthetized—a good phallic narcissist like you doesn’t do enough for me.”
In the absence of learned credentials, she was setting out to bully again. So I thought to surprise her. “Aren’t you mixing your language a little?” I began. “The phallic narcissist is one of Wilhelm Reich’s categories.”
“Therefore?”
“Aren’t you a Freudian?”
“It would be presumptuous of me to say,” she said like a seminar student working for his pee-aitch-dee. “But Sandy is an eclectic. He accepts a lot of Reich—you see, he’s very ambitious, he wants to arrive at his own synthesis.” She exhaled some smoke in my face, and gave a nice tough little grin which turned her long serious young witch’s face into something indeed less presumptuous. “Besides,” she said, “you are a phallic narcissist. There’s an element of the sensual which is lacking in you.”

This isn’t a tin ear.  This is an ear made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Only a great comedian, with a fine sense of the preposterous, could come up with such leaden, and yet hilarious, dialogue.  So, how can Norman tops this, you may well ask?  How about with the worst poem ever published.  Let’s save this coup de grace for the last post.


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Patrick: Lagniappe

‘A boy,’ she said. ‘It’s a boy.’
‘A boy?’ said my father.
‘Yes, a boy,’ said Mrs Smith.
There was a moment’s hush, and then Nature had its way. My father unashamedly burst into tears. My mother’s mother kissed him on the neck just as the two fellow-members burst into a hymn; and a moment later, my mother’s five sisters burst simultaneously into the doxology. Then my father recovered himself and held up his hand.
‘I shall call him Augustus,’ he said, ‘after myself.’
‘Or tin?’ suggested my mother’s mother. ‘What about calling him tin, after the saint?’
‘How do you mean – tin?’ said my father.
‘Augus-tin,’ said Mrs Emily Smith.
But my father shook his head.
‘No, it shall be tus,’ he said. ‘Tus is better than tin.’
--Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford
 

Norman Mailer: Forgotten Comic Genius, Part II
Yesterday, we were discussing that unjustly unremembered comic novel, Advertisements for Myself.  Let’s dive right into the good stuff today, shall we?  Here’s the first few sentences for one of the short-pieces in the book,  Advertisements for Three War Stories:

‘The Paper House,’ ‘The Language of Men,’ ‘The Dead Gook’ and ‘The Notebook’ were all written in the same period and they were all written quickly. I used to start a story in the morning and if I didn’t finish it in the same day, I would give it up, I would decide it wasn’t meant to be written. In a few weeks I wrote ten stories by this method. ‘The Paper House’ was done in a day, so was ‘The Language of Men.’ ‘The Dead Gook’ was an exception and took two days. What I liked about writing these stories was that I had no responsibility.

Where do I start with this comic gem?  First, we have the choice of story titles, both pretentious and outre at the same time.  And then we have the narrator describing how long he wrote each, as if he actually kept a diary that tracked the production of his narrative output like some kind of factory manager (indeed, the rest of the Advertisement continues in this vein).  Of course, “The Dead Gook,” would take longer than the rest.  But this allegedly unconscious skewering of the author (a la Augustus Carp) is not enough.  Mailer then throws in that he liked these stories best for having no responsibility for them.  As if he had some sacred flame to keep.  Precious.

Let’s move on to another Advertisement, this one meant to stand alone and entitled, Last Advertisement for Myself Before the Way Out. Here, the author is sort of describing his place in American Letters compared to other great American authors (another delicious conceit):

Still! There is the fault of others, and the fault of oneself, and I have my debts to pay. Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine. As I add up the accounts, I cannot like myself too much, for I was cowardly when I should have been good, and too brave on many a bad chance, and I spent my first thirty years abusing my body, and the last six in forced marches on my brain, and so I am more stupid today than I ought to be, my memory is half-gone, and my mind is slow; from fear and vanity I paid out too much for what I managed to learn. When I sit down, soon after this book is done, to pick up again on my novel, I do not know if I can do it, for if the first sixty pages are not at all bad, I may still have wasted too much of myself, and if I have—what a loss.

Again, I stand in awe of this comic master.  Here’s almost a pitch-perfect parody of Wilde’s De Profundis.  Mailer caught the maudlin tone just right [N.B.: before, dear reader, you start to cast aspersions, let me assure you that I love Oscar Wilde and am a great admirer of his, although I fear he dissipated his great talents].  What a loss, indeed.  Then, in the very next paragraph, we get this laugh-out-loud manifesto from our “author”:

If it is to have any effect, and I can hardly look forward to exhausting the next ten years without hope of a deep explosion of effect, the book will be fired to its fuse by the rumor that once I pointed to the farthest fence and said that within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.

Boy, it’s hard to start with what’s best here.  The puffery and grandiosity are truly tres magnifique. But the juxtaposition of great authors with the decidedly second rate: “Doystoyevsky and Marx” and “Joyce and Freud” (heck, even the pairing up is funny) is again, perfect.  And to include Spengler, of all people, that’s too rich.  The mixed metaphors are good too, what with fuses and fences and hurricanes and long balls and who knows where this kitchen-sink word-painting kitsch will end.

Okay, enough, I can’t take much more for today.  Let’s pick up with the very crème de la crème in the next post.  That’s what I love about Mailer, it’s only onward and upward with him.


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Patrick: Lagniappe

Trials of my infancy. Varieties of indigestion. I suffer from a local erythema. Instance of my father’s unselfishness. Difficulty in providing a second godfather. Unexpected solution of the problem. The ceremony of my baptism. A narrow escape. Was it culpable carelessness? My father transfers his worship to St James-the-Lesser-Still, Peckham Rye.
--Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford

[N.B.: Yesterday’s lagniappe concerned that odious middle-class figure, the “self-deluded, puffed up” unconscious hypocrite. Today’s lagniappe quotes from the title-piece to chapter two of an minor British comic classic, Augustus Carp, Esq., which anatomizes this vice in a mordantly humorous vein.  I highly recommend this novel.  But be warned, it is very British and very dry, like a char-broiled Ozona, Texas summer day.  If that’s your preference, you’ll love this work.  Which means you will chuckle to discover three chapters devoted to the discomfiture caused to the Carp paterfamilias by a new church lectern shaped as an eagle rampant.  If your humor does not run in this vein, you will tear your hair out by its roots during the frog-march of tedium imposed by this excellent Xtian gentleman.]
 

Norman Mailer: Forgotten Comic Genius
Having posted about Augustus Carp, I started thinking about other comic masterpieces that have unfairly slipped beneath the waters of Lethe, i.e., oblivion.  As you might have guessed by now, I am a fan of comic novels—particularly those of the British persuasion.  When I’m feeling my oats to a greater extent, I’ll try to tackle that ticklish troika: Firbank, Waugh and Powell. Today, however, I wish to dwell on a forgotten writer I have come across who hales from these boisterous shores and has written a great, if not the great, American comic novel.  His name is Norman Mailer and, boy howdy, is he a knee-slapper.

Some of you may recall vaguely that name.  He wrote a few minor works during the heat of the Sixties concerning levitating the pentagon and what not (another laff riot: The Armies of the Night).  He also wrote some funny stuff about Hollywood where everyone is really in Hell—making fun of all those pretentious stuffed shirts like Sartre and his play, No Exit—in a work called Deer Park (why, Deer Park, bub?  Because that's where Louis XV would go for a stroll to hunt down the wild wantons who willingly stocked/stalked its grounds--you do the math).  But, in my opinion, his great comic masterpiece is an early work: Advertisements for Myself (which, as a bonus, contains some of the funniest bits from Deer Park).

The premise of Advertisements for Myself provides an unlimited supply of laugh-out-loud jokes (even the cover is hilarious, featuring the author in his best fake “come hither” look while wearing a nautical cap like the Skipper’s from Gilligan’s Island). M uch like the faux first-person autobiographical narrator of Augustus Carp, Advertisements for Myself is supposedly a collection of the author’s reprinted pieces.  But, here’s the ingenious part, each is introduced by some self-serving remarks about its importance to the author’s oeuvre (hence, the word “Advertisements” in the title).  It’s hard to tell which is funnier, the supposedly self-aware commentary or the short-pieces themselves.

Before we dive into the rib-breaking guffaws, let’s look at the beginning of this wonderful satire.  My hat’s off to Mailer (or at least my skipper cap), for his having apparently waded through hundreds of volumes of pretentious works by puffed-up authors in order to write this clever parody.  He starts with two tables of contents: one interspersed with his self-proclaimed “advertisements” which are mini-introductions to each “serious” piece. The second describes all the serious pieces by their own genres—fiction, essays and articles, and what not—and then lists the “advertisements” as a new genre altogether: “biography of a style.”  Oh, that’s just too delicious.  Dead on target, Mailer!

Okay, that’s plenty for now, let’s get to the meat in the next post.


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Patrick: Lagniappe

The poor man is democratic out of necessity, the nobleman is democratic out of freedom. Have you ever noticed . . . that the unconscious hypocrite is a pure middle-class type? Your aristocrat may be a villain, and your beggar may be a criminal; neither is self-deluded, puffed up with philanthropism and vanity, like a Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie. And the French, who are the most middle-class people in the world, have produced a satirical literature that is absolutely obsessed with this vice.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy
 

Taboo Art Topics: Paintings Under Glass
[N.B.: Warning! The following post is a cranky complaint that has little to do with literature—please send your protests to the appropriate parties. Thank you. The Management.]

One of the most amusing conceits today must be the ululating of the art critics condemning the unwashed masses for failing to appreciate the strange otherness of the unknown.  Sure, it might be described as “transgressive,” but that’s just code for “liberating.”  These all-too-knowing art-critic hierophants delight in telling their thralls that they are not afraid to confront—or, better yet, antagonize—any topic and that this state is one that all should seek to obtain. They neglect to acknowledge, however, that there are certain taboo art topics that they dare not discuss.  These topics fall into a dichotomy [n.b.: yes, I am like Auden and Kierkegaard in seeing things, at times, as Either/Or] of procedural and substantive issues.  What I mean here is that an issue is procedural if it concerns the structure around a piece of art, such as the economics of the art market or the museum market (two overlapping, but different markets with different concerns).  On the other hand, substantive issues concern the content of the art itself—what can and cannot be depicted and the methods that can and cannot be used in rendering the subject.  Today, I wish to discuss a particularly annoying procedural issues that, as far as I can tell, is absolutely verboten to discuss: the aesthetic deficiencies inherent in placing glass on top of paintings in museums.

First, let’s get to the why of this taboo topic which has little to do with politics unless one still believes in politics as a conflict of  economic classes in the classical Marxian sense.  Let me point out here that there is nothing wrong in viewing things through the prism of capital accumulation and class conflict as long as one realizes that it is just that, a prism, and there are many, many other ways to view life, in all its messiness.  There is no secret code, no Rosetta Stone, to solving all of life’s issues through some kind of totalizing world view. Indeed, the sure mark of a charlatan is to claim just that.  Snake oil always cures everything.  But, having said that, snake oil, although failing to cure major ailments, might still cure the piles.  And that’s Marxism for you—it’s good for piles.  So what does Marxism have to do with glass on paintings?

Well, why do you think museums put glass on paintings?  That’s right, to protect their investments.  Not long ago, there was a deranged young man in Europe who would swallow lots of food coloring and an emetic, then he would rush into a museum, and vomit up bright yellow or green on a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh. Also, there is a famous incident where another deranged young man, now a well-known art critic who deserves oblivion, spray painted Guernica when it was at the MoMa.  And, there are well-documented instances of deranged young men—notice how defacing art always involves young men, curious—slashing canvases.  So, it would seem museums are justified in protecting these works for future generations by putting them under glass.  Right?

Wrong. Museums have abandoned their mission to make available the greatest paintings for the public by nullifying to a large extent the aesthetic enjoyment thereof.  Have you ever seen someone stand in front of a painting by Caravaggio, you know, one that has a particularly lively play between light and dark (chiaroscuro for you art thralls) and comb his hair by his reflection in the glass?  He might as well.  Glass backed by a dark surface makes a fine mirror. There is a novelist, I would love to say it is Ronald Firbank, that has one of his characters do just that.  And that’s all these paintings are good for once the glass goes up: personal grooming aids.  This is particularly true when the museum has a harsh light shining on the painting.  Such lighting makes sense without the glass, but once the glass is put up, the entire work is obscured.

So, do you ever see anything written about this wide-spread travesty?  No.  If one thinks about it, the scattered acts of vandals, no matter how deplorable, should not justify the widespread destruction of the aesthetic experience for millions of museum visitors.  One, instead, should expect such random acts to just happen like the occasional hurricane or earthquake—not respond by trying to destroy all the works ahead of time.  And, in any event, one can’t put glass on every painting (oops, perhaps I shouldn’t give curators another bad idea). But, no; you, the dumb, mewling public, you, are supposed to go to the museum anyway and oooh, ahhh over the paintings in spite of the fact that any penny-dreadful reproduction of them would serve you better than the actual physical enjoyment of the works themselves.  Why is that?  One word: iconostasis.

Iconostasis in Eastern Orthodox churches is the rood screen separating the altar from the rest of the church and upon which are hung the holy icons.  There has been a concerted effort in art circles to transfer this notion to art museums—although no one calls it iconostasis [N.B.: for a funny take, although from a distinctly philistine perspective, on the churchy interior of the newly reopened MoMa, go here].  Instead, curators say that there is an inherent aesthetic enjoyment in standing before the authentic work itself that one cannot derive from a reproduction no matter how perfect it might be (and, the scared curator might note as he furtively pulls at his collar, that technology is getting better and better everyday).  So, if we turn the paintings around, and just the backs (reversos-art thralls) of the canvases are on exhibit, then that should be just as good (or, better yet, put glass on top of them and shine lights on the glass so you get the same effect).  And the curator would be right—if the modern art experience in a museum is akin to the function performed by the iconostasis.

 
Why have an iconostasis? Well, you need something to protect the altar from the masses. As a pale substitute, you place icons—holy paintings—on the iconostasis for purposes of prayer and reflection (for some good photographs of same, go here). It does not matter what the artistic quality of the icons might be.  Rather, the spiritual quality in which they are imbued is of the utmost importance. It would be blasphemy to criticize possibly the greatest icon painter of all time, Andrei Rublev, who was active in Russian during the late Fourteenth and early Fifteenth Centuries, by pointing out that his depictions of the human figure tend to be too elongated and reminiscent of the Mannerists.  That’s not the point. And the modern museum curator wants you to think the same thing as you stand in front of a black, muddy canvas that has been converted into a mirror with the help of modern glass and lights.  Sure, the title card might say it is a Rembrandt, and although you can’t tell what it is, that’s not the point:  your job is to stare at it in gaping awe, while the spirit washes over you. 

Yes, some might argue, wrongly, that art museums are supposed to be the new churches.  But, even if you buy into that rigmarole, are you really willing to give up the aesthetic experience for what that entails?  Do we need an iconostasis in the National Gallery?  Or are today’s curators more like the Wizard of Oz who admonishes Dorothy to ignore that little man behind the curtain?  And who is that little man?  Let’s give Marx the last word: Why, Benjamin Franklin, himself, winking at you from the cozy confines of his oval on the hundred dollar bill (which, by the bye, is definitely not glassed in).
 

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Kathryn: W. S. Merwin

On Friday, W. S. Merwin gave a poetry reading at the Katherine Anne Porter House. It was a wonderful reading in a relatively intimate space, given the stature of this poet. The crowd overflowed the room, and the Porter House staff opened doors and windows so people standing outside could listen through the screens. He read from works spanning his five-decade career, opting mainly for shorter works. Here is a photo I took of him:

He seems very kind. When I mentioned that my husband read Merwin's poem "Little Horse" to me during our wedding ceremony, he said that he wished he'd known; he would have read that poem during the reading. My favorite poem from the reading, "To the Consolations of Philosophy," is at PoetryMagazine.org. The poem begins

Thank you but
not just at the moment

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Patrick:  Lagniappe

The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also a scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. Frederick imagined that she had married him for security (this was one of the troubles between them), but what he did not understand was that security from the telephone company or the grocer was as nothing compared to the other security he gave her, the security from being perpetually in the wrong, and that she would have eaten bread and water, if necessary, in order to be kept in gaol.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy
 

Vibrations Among the Redwoods, Part II
I was very lucky and had the chance to hear W. S. Merwin at a poetry reading this past week.  I won’t say much about it because I am sure Kathryn will probably post at length on this topic.  Merwin is one of my favorite living poets. The reading centered on various tangents vectoring out from the world of botany.  In the course of it, Merwin referred to a number of his influences, including, of all things, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Merwin also made an off-the-cuff remark about Osip Mandelstam and how he did not feel comfortable with his contemporaries because he viewed his contemporaries as being Ovid, Virgil and Dante. This deep erudition, worn so very, very lightly, reminded me of the redwoods.  Merwin may be one of the few left.

But now we are back in the deep forests of these barked titans. Let us hike to one of the mightiest of them all, Henry James, and press our ear against his rough surface.  In The Portrait of a Lady, published, in serial form, during 1880-1881, Henry James, has M. Merle first describe and introduce the character of Gilbert Osmond to Isabel Archer in the course of a disquisition on the faults of Isabel’s gravely ill cousin, Ralph Touchett, whose father, at Ralph’s insistence, will soon give Isabel a fortune.  M. Merle points out that Ralph has no occupation:

“’He is very cultivated,’ they say; ‘he has got a very pretty collection of old snuff-boxes.’ The collection is all that is wanted to make it pitiful. I am tired of the sound of the word; I think its grotesque. . . . But I persist in thinking your cousin is very lucky to have a chronic malady; so long as he doesn’t die of it. It’s much better than snuff-boxes.”

In the same paragraph, M. Merle goes on to describe Gilbert Osmond as being cut from this same cloth:

“He is Gilbert Osmond—he lives in Italy; that is all one can say bout him. He is exceedingly clever, a man made to be distinguished; but, as I say, you exhaust the description when you say that he is Mr. Osmond, who lives in Italy. No career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything. Oh yes, he paints, if you please—paints in water-colours, like me, only better than I. His painting is pretty bad; on the whole I am rather glad of that. Fortunately he is very indolent, so indolent that it amounts to a sort of position.”

As becomes clearer later on in the book, Gilbert and Ralph, are mirrors of one another, but of opposite magnetic polarizations (please forgive me mixed-metaphor police, it is merely a venial sin).  Ironically, it is Ralph’s illness, as M. Merle half-way intuits, which gives him his humanity, his humaneness. Otherwise, he could just as well wind up with the vile character of Gilbert Osmond.  The passage leaves little doubt as to how James himself feels about Gilbert.  The description of the pointless pursuit of the snuff-box bibelots will be shown, on a grander scale with Gilbert Osmond, to simply spur a character consumed in accidie to greater heights of folly and cruelty.  Ralph does not suffer from accidie because he suffers physically, in truth.  His pain gives him no time for boredom and spiritual sloth, as I discussed earlier with respect to Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain.

Let’s not lose sight, though, of our redwoods amidst all this pain.  Here’s another redwood, James’s good friend, Edith Wharton.  In 1912, some thirty years after The Portrait of a Lady, she publishes The Reef, a novel about the ill-fated consequences of a brief fling that threatens to destroy the approaching connubial bliss of two sets of soon-to-be newlyweds when it is discovered that the groom of one pair, George Darrow, had a tryst with the bride of the other. The book concerns the ramifications of this situation as the characters seem to be hopelessly trapped on these tragic breakers, hence the title, The Reef. Darrow’s soon-to-be-bride, Anna Leath, is the widow of Fraser Leath, Darrow’s successful rival for her hand the first go-round. Here is Wharton’s description of Mr. Leath:

“Mr. Leath’s art was water-colour painting, but he practised it furtively, almost clandestinely, with the disdain of a man of the world for anything bordering on the professional, while he devoted himself more openly, and with religious seriousness, to the collection of enamelled snuff-boxes. He was blond and well-dressed, with the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a thin nose, and the habit of looking slightly disgusted—as who would not, in a world where authentic snuff-boxes were growing daily harder to find, and the market was flooded with flagrant forgeries?”

Do you see what Wharton has done?  She has poked a bit of fun at James by painting a very minor, indeed wholly absent and dead character, in the same brushstrokes as James does for his chief antagonist, even down to the snuff-boxes and watercolors. I n using the same leitmotif, she is agreeing with James that a short-hand sketch of a dull, lazy dilettante can be best summed up by snuff-boxes and watercolors.  She is leaving her calling card for James to discover in the immortal, literary afterlife and to chuckle over.  It is the secret handshake; the wink and the nod; the whispering between the redwoods.
 

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Patrick:  Lagniappe

Ah, she said to herself now, I reject this middle-class tragedy, this degenerated Victorian novel where I am Jane Eyre or somebody in Dickens or Kipling or brave little Elsie Dinsmore fainting over the piano, I reject the whole pathos of the changeling, the orphan, the stepchild.  I reject this trip down the tunnel of memory which resembles nothing so much as a trip down the Red Mill at Coney Island, with my aunt and her attributive razor strop substituting for Lizzie Borden and her axe.  I reject all those tableaux of estrangement: my father in his smoking jacket at the card table with his nightly game of solitaire for ever laid out before him, my aunt with her novel by Cardinal Wiseman that is reading for the fifteenth time, and myself with the cotton handkerchief that I must hem and re-hem because the stitches are never small enough; I deny the afternoon I deliver my prize-winning essay at the Town Auditorium and there is no family there to applaud me because my father is away on a hunting trip, and my aunt, having just beaten me for me error in winning the prize (‘You are too stuck-up already’), is at home in her bedroom having hysterics; and also the scene at her summer resort where the lady looks up from the bridge table and utters her immortal tag line, ‘Surely, Mr. Sargent, this isn’t your daughter!’ It is all too apropos for acceptance.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

[N.B.: Mary McCarthy’s fiction tends to be thinly veiled reworkings of incidents and people in her own life—see my Lagniappe on Master Humphrey’s Clock for why that’s just fine and I wish more writers would put down interesting things they know rather than navel-gazing fantasy that no one, and I mean no one (do you hear me John Updike with you book on Gertrude and Claudius) cares about. This excerpt, taken from her first work of fiction, is, unsurprisingly, about herself: a young orphan who had to grow a carapace of burnished steel or be diced to bits--although it was not strong enough for the likes of the vile Lillian Hellman.]
 

Vibrations Among the Redwoods
Never having done so, and based merely on my own musings, I imagine that walking among California’s giant redwoods must be a singularly humbling exercise.  There, with the feeble sun’s shafts swimming lightly among the behemoths, you experience the sensation of a small flea, crawling among the hairs of your head.  These silent sentinels have communed amongst themselves for a millennium before you came to gaze upon them; and they will continue in their uncanny community for a millennium after you serve no purpose other than to fertilize their distant relations.  And yet, standing there, an insignificant presence beside their yawning, silent vastness, you feel an odd vibration in the air, as if, upon waves of sound too slow and low for our ears, they are speaking to one another, deep to deep.  This experience, I imagine, is how the literary immortals, literature’s giant redwoods, talk to one another still in the vasty deep [N.B.: Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep; Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man, But will they come when you do call for them? (I Henry IV, act iii, sc. I, l. 53)].

I have had this experience a couple of times recently from reading Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Reef. First, in James's work, the female antagonist, who brings the heroine, Isabel Archer, to ruin, is named Madame Merle.  Her antecedents are American but she has become the model of a modern European.  In other words, she is French to the core.  James, like Dickens, chooses names that may have some meaning beyond mere tokens and place-markers for the reader.  In The Bostonians, the prize fought for by the two contending protagonists, Verena Tarrant, has a name quite common to a certain gynecological term, which is appropriate, given, in James’s eyes, that she is the personification of femininity, in all its glories and defects. The two protagonists are the rigid feminist Mrs. Chamberlain (apt name, that) and Basil Ransom, the dashing, Southern confederate veteran who demands of Verena the ransom of her talent for public speaking in the service of feminism. Guess who wins?  In any event, James does not merely pluck names for his characters out of the air on a whim.  Typically, their names are meant to “fit” them in some way.

The “fit” for Madame Merle seems obvious to me.  Merle, is merely one letter off from a certain coarse French term used to describe human waste (switch out the “l” for a “d”).  Indeed, James does not constrain himself from describing his displeasure with this character.  Here, he has Isabel reflect on Madame Merle’s morality:

She had once said that she came from a distance, that she belonged to the old world, and Isabel never lost the impression that she was the product of a different clime from her own, that she had grown up under other stars. Isabel believed that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course the morality of civilised persons has always has much in common; but Isabel suspected that her friend had esoteric views. She believed, with the presumption of youth, that a morality which differed from her own must be inferior to it; and this conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a woman who had raised delicate kindness to an art, and whose nature was too large for the narrow ways of deception.

Notice in the typical master-stroke of description, that James does not clearly commit himself to describing, from on high, how he views M. Merle.  Oh, no, he is like Tolstoy, in that he describes his characters with, a cold, detached, almost scientific, precision (as opposed to Jane Austen who had no trouble calling a prig a prig).  But, unlike Tolstoy, James cannot help himself but to give one clues to his own feelings—and, I believe, his characters names assist us on this point. In the above description, we have James dutifully transcribing Isabel Archer’s impressions, with the authorial comment that Miss Archer viewed her own morality as superior because of the presumption of youth.  In other words, James is giving us a clue here that Miss Archer’s presumption is just that, a presumption which is not an axiom to be applied at all times in all cases.  This might lead one to believe that she is false in her belief here that her morality is superior to that of M. Merle’s.  Ahh, not so fast.  Even if the presumption is not an axiom, it still might be true in a particular case and, as we learn later on in the book, it is, indeed, correct here with respect to M. Merle.  But, the presumption has another defect to it, as well.  That is, even though it allows one to see that one’s morality is superior to another’s, it also assumes that, coming from the same civilization, in the main, the two morality’s are fairly similar and that M. Merle’s “nature was too large for the narrow ways of deception.”  Again, as is learned later in the book, this assumption is false.  So, through indirection, James throws us off the scent here.  But when we finish the book and come back to this passage, we realize that this is James talking:  He sees M. Merle as both cruel and deceptive.  These are the two traits that are an anathema to James. Cruelty is probably the greater sin in that it is almost impossible for him to write about it except through the most elaborate veils of indirection and oblique reference.  Deception, on the other hand, he will boldly confront and condemn. I’ll probably write about his horror of lying soon, particularly since it is so quaint today in a culture that gives lip service to condemning the liar and yet embraces him on the sly, or, in some cases, in flagrante delicto.

This exposure of the lying and cruelty, and James’s condemnation of it, is meant to demonstrate that he truly feels that M. Merle is merde. She is irredeemable. She is a monster. So what does this have to do with the redwoods?  Well, perhaps I just like communing with nature.  Okay, perhaps not.  In one of Dickens’ last novels, Little Dorritt, which concerns the corrupting influence of power as exemplified by the misuse of commerce and government, the great commercial fraud in that book, the banker who commits suicide when his fraud is exposed, is none other than Mr. Merdle.  Here is Dickens’ initial description of him—who, like Austen, can call a merde a merde; although here, like the annoying commercial jingle, he asks, “Got merde?”:

Mr. Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the city necessarily. He was chairman of this, trustee of that, president of the other. The weightiest of men had said to projectors, “Now, what name have you got? Have you got Merdle?” And the reply being in the negative, had said, “Then I won’t look at you.”

And critics have commented on Dickens’ uncouth but in no way ribald sense of humor.  That might be true in English, but decidedly not in French.  Anyway, let’s skip to Merdle’s suicide where Dickens renders his awful judgment:

For by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle's complaint had been simply Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men's feasts, the roc's egg of great ladies' assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more acknowledgment within some ten or fifteen years, at most, than had been bestowed in England upon all peaceful public benefactors, and upon all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their works to testify for them, during two centuries at least--he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared--was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.

So what does this all add up to—just a pile of Merdle or Merle?  Perhaps, or perhaps the great literary giants spot the little references and innuendos in one another’s works and pay secret compliment to them in their own works.  It’s like a secret handshake—a way of saying that we all belong to this very exclusive fraternity and speak in an obscure language which only other initiates may appreciate.  At least that is my conceit.  Not only, in T. S. Eliot’s view, does the circle of greats widen with the entry of another great who changes the relationships between all the other members of the circle, but also, these members speak to one another in veiled tones and half-heard whispers for their own recondite enjoyment.  So, yes, the redwoods do whisper among themselves.  And they whisper: merde.
 

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Patrick:  Lagniappe

Moreover, he was enjoying himself enormously. He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural, since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy
 

Come on in, the poetry's fine!

I don't know why it's happening all of a sudden, like the brisk norther coming down to sweep out the stale, moldy air left over from summer, but I am grateful for the continuing changes morphing the once-staid New York Time Book Review ("NYTBR") into a interesting outlet of literary criticism (hat tip, perhaps, to the new fiction editor, Sam Tannenhaus).  This week is the Poetry Issue; and it's full to the brim with delicious goodies.

Some of those goodies include such dainty chocolates as John Ashbery's ruminations on James Tate and Harold Bloom, for once, due to space limitations, decidedly not the interminable gasbag, offering a lucid interpretation of Ashbery's Litany.  I highly recommend the issue, if, for no other reason, than that it seems that any major venue offering an entire anything on poetry criticism deserves our full-throated applause.  Bravo!

The quality of the poetry criticism is another matter.  Bloom's short piece is a good example of the quagmire that such criticism now finds itself, like a lost Tommy searching for his unit in the rained out shell-holes of the Ypres salient during a moonless night:  All is dark, lights out, with only the occasional flash of the phosphorescent Very lights to freeze him to the ground or the distant flash of an artillery round; otherwise all is shadows and dark, bulky, broken things rearing up in the black night.  Bloom seems frozen to the ground, too.  Here is the most certain living critic, pronouncing literary delphic judgments as if Zeus himself were whispering into Bloom's ear.  But, when Bloom approaches a poem, he suddenly shies away like a young colt bristling at the bridle.  He doesn't know where to start and dawdles over a line here or there.  Finally, he gives up on trying to make any aesthetic judgment and instead attempts to provide a straight forward description of what the poem does and how he, personally, feels about it.  It's the literary equivalent of seeing a hammer on the floor, picking it up and describing the salient features that make it "hammer-like" and then exclaiming how you, at that particular moment, holding the hammer in your hand, feel about it.  This might be interesting--as are Bloom's observations--but not particularly illuminating.  Why is that?

The answer to "why" is also furnished in the issue.  Jim Harrison, commenting on why he likes Ted Kooser and Gary Snyder, remarks, "[t]his is not to say they are the best poets of our time--I find such rating attempts paltry and onerous--but the poets whose work most soothes and enlivens me."  Robert Pinsky, in his essay, starts off with the pronouncement, "[t]here is no 'most' or 'best' in art.  No Top 10 or First Place on the scale of art: the large scale, where Ben Jonson is more famous than this year's celebrity."  In other words, the only acceptable poetic criticism is that which is self-consciously solipsistic, where one judge is as good as another as long as each judge is limited to delineating his own personal preferences.  So at least with respect to standards, poetry criticism has suffered the ultimate defeat of atomization and self-referentialism.

How powerful is this atomization?  As I mentioned above, even the likes of the Bloom-Beast, who will boldly go where no critic has gone before, blanches before the terrible, weed-choked gate marked in rusty letters, "poetry."  Indeed, because, of this prohibition, a negative review in the same issue of the NYTBR such as A. O. Scott's of Dana Gioia's Disappearing Ink, a collection of poetry criticism, is perversely fatuous.  It is perverse because Scott takes Gioia to task for being too nice in his criticism and, as a result, having his pieces "disproportionately loaded with abstractions, cliches and nuggets of wisdom so uncontroversial as to be inane."  No, what is inane is some critic trying to do the Tom Wolfe-treatment on a book of poetry criticism.  The profession itself, due to its solipsism, is, by its very nature, "loaded with abstractions" and "cliches."  To criticize a dog for barking is the height of fatuity--as Aesop's old fable of the scorpion goes, "I couldn't help it, it's my nature."

So, how did the once useful profession of poetry criticism come to such a pass?  Ah, that is a post for another day.  I admit, I find it a mystery.  It is not as self-explanatory as the corruption of art criticism where there is a clear economic motive (a taboo I will write on soon, I hope).  There is no money in poetry, at least until recently with the giant bequest made to Poetry magazine.  But this corruption happened long before that.  Why?

[N.B.:  There is also in the issue of the NYTBR a fine review of Czeslaw Milosz in the accepted hammer style described above.  Also, there's a nice appreciation on the passing of Anthony Hecht--although it fails to mention his great gifts as a formalist and, instead, in typical, solipsistic fashion, apologizes for his perceived fault of "impersonality" and assures the skittish reader that such impersonality "never dulls emotion."  Thanks dad.] 

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Kathryn: Cloud Atlas 2

Here’s a little lagniappe, a passage from the last section of the book, the second part of “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”:

My next cogent remembrance is of drowning in salt water so bright it hurt. Had Boerhaave found my body & thrown me overboard to ensure my silence & avoid tiresome procedures with the American consul? My mind was still active & as such might yet exercise some say in my destiny. Consent to drown, or attempt to swim? Drowning was by far the least troublesome option, so I cast about for a dying thought & settled on Tilda, waving off the Belle-Hoxie from Silvaplana Wharf so many months before with Jackson shouting, “Papa! Bring me back a kangaroo’s paw!”
      The thought of never more seeing them was so distressing, I elected to swim & found myself not in the sea but curled on deck. . . .

Is Cloud Atlas a Novel or a Collection of Short Fiction? BTW, I thought I’d tie this discussion into Patrick’s posts on short fiction. Cloud Atlas is subtitled “A Novel.” I think the subtitle is provided purely as clarification, perhaps as an anxious declaration. One could make the claim that this book is a set of linked novellas. The device of nesting them is clever, but it does not, to me, lend the book an overarching trajectory or complexity of the kind usually associated with novels. When I ask myself what the book is about, I get something vague about how humans (1) prey on one another and (2) communicate across time, but I don’t really come up with a plot, per se. Six highly plotted plots, but not a plot.

I suppose one ought to say that the book is simply itself and argue against the need to shoehorn the work into existing categories. But that subtitle seems to me to betray an anxiety on the part of the author or (more likely) the publisher as to the identity of the book. Anyone out there who’s read the book care to comment?

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Lagniappe
‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘whenever a man starts to tell you he’s going to break with you, he uses your first name, even if he’s never used it before.’
‘I wasn’t . . . ‘ said Jim.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, you were. Well, I’m going to be nice. I’m going to help you out. I’m going to say all the proper things.’ She took a breath and began to recite. ‘There is no future in this, it can’t lead anywhere, it would only hurt us both, it wouldn’t be any good unless it were serious and under the circumstances it can’t be serious; if we once loved each other, we might not be able to stop, so we had better stop now. Or I could say,’ her voice dropped, ‘if we once loved each other, we would be able to stop, so let’s stop before we find that out.’
The taxi drew up in front of her apartment, which was on a street with a quaint name, in the Village.
‘Good night,’ she said. ‘Please don’t see me to the door.’ She jumped out of the taxi with a kind of exaggerated lightness, just as she had done at the hotel. She ran up the steps and opened the outer door.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

Spaniards Spurn Cervantes
Catchy journalistic headline, no?  No.  Okay, well, the New York Times today  has an interesting article concerning the apparent indifference that Spaniards have for Cervantes.  That’s not too surprising since this endlessly inventive literary giant does not really “fit” within any particular national culture, the way Dickens, say, is quintessentially “English” (as opposed to being “British,” a touchy topic I might post upon at a later date).  Rather, he is like Laurence Sterne, who decided to invent post-modernism about two centuries before some tenure-bait professor came up with the neologism.  Actually, one can make a decent argument that Cervantes was the true father of post-modernism. Which, by the bye, should clue you in that if a “new” genre is based on it being a self-referential game demonstrating the nullity of any ordering rules, then there truly is nothing “new” under the sun.  Further, such a turn is merely the opening gambit.  You better be able to raise and come up with some decent cards besides being merely “clever” (John Barth, do you hear me?).  Cervantes, of course, was holding a royal flush with two jokers: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (let’s call Rocinante the four of clubs).

So, as alluded to in the article, it is not surprising that Cervantes is not revered in Spain given his universal qualities that do not make him a particularly “Spanish” writer.  In short, he was a cosmopolitan that just happened to be born in Spain. I don’t care that the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote is coming up in January.  I don’t recall any great hoopla made over Laurence Sterne, either (of course, the 200th anniversary of his death was in 1968, when everyone was probably too busy frolicking in their strawberry fields forever to notice Sterne’s—or anyone else’s, for that matter—passing).

Given Cervantes’ cosmopolitanism (he was wounded during, arguably, the true first European Great War, at the Battle of Lepanto—which reminds me of G. K. Chesterton’s immortal poem  on that subject: “Don John of Austria is going to the war”), it is no surprise, although lamented by the NYT, that the Spaniards would embrace a decidedly lesser light, the playwright and rival of Cervantes, Lope de Vega.  Lope de Vega’s plays are still regularly performed in Spain to the delight of audiences old and young, as the cliché might go (de Vega wrote in a broad, satirical manner lampooning the Spanish character and customs).  Lope de Vega is a quintessentially Spanish writer.  So, it is no surprise he is hugged tightly to the Spanish bosom.

Okay, so Cervantes’ house is torn down and his own grave is under a street named for Lope de Vega.  Further, Lope de Vega’s house is maintained as a kind of shrine in the middle of Madrid.  I can vouch for this personally, having traveled to Madrid to go on one of those self-conscious Cervantes tours, but stopping off at this holy shrine of Lope de Vega because it was close to the bullfighter hotel I was staying in (cliché, thy name is Patrick).  Anyhoo, I didn’t speak any Spanish, and the holy friars . . . errr . . . tour guides of the house didn’t speak any English.  So they reverentially walked me through the interior pointing out in dumb show the great man’s desk, bed pan, etc.  Ahh, the holy bedpan, which ritually received the literary leavings of Lope.  Truly, has any literary figure been so intimately grasped by an adoring public?  Perhaps it's best to leave that question unanswered.  Again, though, the point (what, you have a point, I thought this was a disquisition on a peculiar Spanish playwright's personal habits) here is that it should surprise no one that the great, world-striding figures are loved abroad and treated, if not with disdain, then with indifference, at home.  There now, Henry James, do you feel better?

And, maybe, not just Henry James.  I wonder what other great literary figures there are who are more beloved abroad than at home.  We, in the United States, see Edgar Allan Poe as a great writer.  But the French see him as the great American writer.  I don't know enough about other cultures to make this kind of multicultural judgment.  But I am curious if others might have some view on this matter.

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Kathryn: Cloud Atlas
I enjoyed this book but really didn’t engage with it emotionally. Its cleverness made it worth the read for me, but in an English-majory sort of way. I fear Mr. Mitchell has been reading classic literary criticism and taking notes. (Paging the American Adam:You’re needed in the postcolonial wing.) Reading Cloud Atlas is a little like going into an ancient church to admire the architecture rather than to worship. And that's really not a gripe. I've enjoyed a lot of architectural forays into churches.

This novel has fine architecture. Mitchell has created a “sextet” of nested narratives (and, bonk, one of his characters writes a musical masterpiece described as “a sextet for overlapping soloists,” titled, bonk, Cloud Atlas).  (Warning: Spoilers ahoy.) Mitchell underscores the artifice of Cloud Atlas by having each narrative be an artifact in one of the other narratives, except for the heart of the book, “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” which appears in no other narrative.  A table of contents for the book would look like this:

1. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
2. Letters from Zedelghem
3. Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
4. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
5. An Orison of Sonmi-451
6. Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everythin’ After
7. An Orison of Sonmi-451
8. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
9. Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
10. Letters from Zedelghem
11. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing

A summary lifted (and twiddled with) from amazon.co.uk, originally by Travis Elborough:

The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the Zedelghem library of the aging, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered.  A manuscript about Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher having difficulties related to an author who gained notoriety and popularity by forever silencing a snide reviewer. And in a dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast-food waitress, Sonmi-451, sees a movie based on Cavendish's escape from forcible incarceration in a retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). Sonmi-451’s experiences are recorded on a kind of video, which Zachary stumbles upon in “Sloosh’a Crossin’.” All this is less tricky than it sounds; only the lone Zachary chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens," "brekker," and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far.

More soon.
 

Patrick: Lagniappe

‘I love you,’ he said, and listened to the words with surprise, for this was not on the cards at all, and he did not even know if it were true.
‘I know,’ she whispered, and as soon as he heard her say this he was convinced it was true and he began to feel joyfully unhappy.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

[N.B.: Note that last phrase “joyfully unhappy.” It seems quite the style, the vogue, the hot-cha-cha-cha-cha to cynically point out alleged oxymorons and chuckle gleefully.  Here’s an obvious oxymoron, “joyfully unhappy,” and yet it is not a self-contradiction.  It is the recognition that strong cross currents of diametrically opposed emotions can exist at the same time and create a knife’s edge of indecision.  Dostoevsky would understand that—Raskolnikov is gripped by such a conflict through much of Crime and Punishment. As Ms. Runcible—a nonsensical character who might have sprung (spooned?) from Edward Lear’s poetry but instead slithered forth from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies—might remark, such shallow cynicism is oh, too shame-making.]
 

The Wolfe-Pack Watch
Apparently, I am not the only one amused by the literature-impaired gimp gang-tackle of Tom Wolfe’s latest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. David Brooks, writing in yesterday’s New York Times has this to say:

It’s easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel; hundreds of people do it every few years. First, out of the thousands of sociological details Wolfe gets right, you pick out some he gets wrong (thus establishing your superior hipness). You mention that he obsesses over the superficial details of life while you ignore his moral intent (thus hinting at your own superior depth). Then you graciously allow that many of Wolfe’s scenes are hilarious, while lamenting that his characters are not fully developed. Then you call it a day.

Bravo! Read the whole thing here.  Brooks makes the telling point that Wolfe is trying to describe what happens to intelligent people when confronted by the moral atomization of society.  As you might guess, it ain’t pretty.  Anyway, it’s nice to see a writer of the caliber of David Brooks coming to Wolfe’s defense. But don’t worry, I’ll try to keep track of the more amusing negative reviews for your sardonic delectation.

In the Land of Pain, Part II
Yesterday, I described the context and translation of In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet.  Today, I wish to share a few of its bon mots.  Since this short work is something of a commonplace book on the author’s experiences of pain, a map of pain, as it were, the observations are necessarily fragmentary and incomplete.  The translator, Julian Barnes, does an able job of trying to link these entries together through his judicious use of footnotes.  Nonetheless, I think the poignancy of this work is mostly derived from its tentativeness, its sketchiness, its sense of exploring a dark and forbidding continent where no one returns.  In other words, it is the Baedeker’s to that pain and suffering unto death.  This may prove a comfort to some.  I have already alluded to the parallels between Daudet’s descriptions here concerning syphilis and the modern-day sufferers of AIDS.  In any event, here are a few of its observations I found particularly insightful:

-- ‘The illness of a neighbor is always a comfort and may even be a cure.’  A proverb from the Midi, the land of the sick.

--At night I wander the corridors and hear four o’clock strike, from all sorts of clocks and church towers, near and far, over a period of ten minutes.
Why doesn’t everyone keep the same time?  Various explanations occur to me. Essentially, our lives are so different one from the other, that it makes sense for the disparity to be symbolized in this way.

--Are words actually any use to describe what pain (or passion, for that matter) really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful.

 --No general theory about pain. Each patient discovers his own, and the nature of pain varies, like a singer’s voice, according to the acoustics of the hall.

--My poor carcass is hollowed out, voided by anaemia. Pain echoes through it as a voice echoes in a house without furniture or curtains. There are days, long days, when the only part of me that’s alive is my pain.

--Coming back again and again to the same place, like the wall you stood against as a child and on which they marked your height. A quantifiable change every time. But whereas the marks on the wall always demonstrated growth, now there is only regression and diminution.

--The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow—that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what’s missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation.

I think that’s enough ruminating on pain, for now.  Daudet, as one can see, was a very sensitive instrument. Near the end, he used his pain and transformed it into a source for doing good, as a way of showing that he was the master of his illness.  Daudet felt that illness should be treated as an unwanted visitor, and, to the extent possible, ignored.  In another sense, however, it must always be kept in view as a reminder of mortality, so as to spur the sufferer to constant efforts of self improvement, both for himself and others.  And that, perhaps, is Daudet’s greatest gift to us.


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Patrick: Lagniappe

The result was that the people who came to their cocktail parties, at which Nancy served good hors d’oeuvre and rather poor cocktails, were presentable radicals and unpresentable conservatives—men in radio, men in advertising, lawyers with liberal ideas, publishers, magazine editors, writers of a certain status who lived in the country. Every social assertion Nancy and Jim made carried its own negation with it, like the Hegelian thesis. Thus it was always being said by Nancy that someone was a Communist but a terribly nice man, while Jim was remarking that somebody else worked for Young and Rubicam but was astonishingly liberal. Every guest was a sort of qualified statement, and the Barnetts’ parties, in consequence, were a little dowdy, a little timid, in a queer way (for they were held in Greenwich Village) a little suburban.
--The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy
 

In the Land of Pain
Okay, I just attacked short fiction; and now I’m going to heartily recommend a very short book.  Ah, Patrick, thy name is fickle.  So be it . Anyhoo, I have just finished a quite curious work by one of the Nineteenth-Century’s second-tier French authors, Alphonse Daudet.  Daudet is little known, now.  But in his time, he was a well-beloved author, thought of in the same company as Zola and the Brothers Goncourt.  Then he sickened and died—struck down by the great sexual disease of that century, it’s AIDS epidemic: syphilis.  Lots of literary greats suffered from it such as Flaubert, Heine, Jules Goncourt and Maupassant (who, allegedly, saw the contraction of syphilis