Friday, July 18, 2008
`The Novel Is Alive, Of Course'
In the Fall 1978 issue of the literary journal Ploughshares, Roger Sale published an audacious essay, “The Golden Age of the American Novel,” which begins like this:
“The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove this, however, I can only try to say what I think such later evaluators might find in our fiction to praise or even to envy.”
The context here is critical. Thirty years ago, “Theory” was in its ascendancy in the academy and even, sadly, among readers and non-academic critics. “Post-” proliferated. Good sense, scholarship and the joys of reading and writing were already in jeopardy. Sale was working hard to be a celebrator, not an elegist, and he argues a good case. He overestimates the worth of some writers, particularly Mailer, Heller, Pynchon and Robert Stone, but recognizes Bellow as “our finest living novelist” and lauds good novels by less-well-known writers, including Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin, Richard Stern’s Golk, Theodore Weesner’s The Car Thief and Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall.
Sale is no fuddy-duddy in his tastes. He defines two loose categories – “imperial” (close to James Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism”) and “realistic” – and drums up enthusiasm for both modes. Clearly, his sympathies lie with the latter:
“My suspicion is that one reason realistic fiction has never received the attention it deserves is that it is not easy to describe its ways and means, and that the more obviously eccentric, experimental, high flying fictions often make and keep their lofty critical status because they are easier to describe and appreciate. One is always tempted to say that a realistic novel is just there.”
Which is why such writers as William Maxwell and Shirley Hazzard have been ignored by a certain sort of critic or read with incomprehension. The obsession with novelty and self-conscious “experimentalism” (what could be more subtly, deftly “experimental” than Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow?) has blinded some readers to the sublimity of first-rate realistic fiction. Sale again:
“What I'd like to suggest is that the great vitality of the novel at present does not lie simply in those novels which are distinctly different from earlier novels, but in its way of being "realistic" as well, so that the plainest and most straightforward realistic fiction of the last fifteen years or so can be seen as being both distinctly different from earlier realism and allied to the more obviously unrealistic imperial fiction.”
With some sadness I reread Sale’s essay, reprinted in his 1979 collection On Not Being Good Enough. In part, the sadness is personal: I’ll never again read contemporary fiction with the sense of elated discovery I did in the 1960s and 1970s. So many novels and stories seemed new and exciting, in part because my timing was superb. The sadness, however, is also historical: I would have a difficult time mustering a list comparable to Sale’s for the subsequent 30 years. Sale was courageously correct in his assessment of American fiction circa 1978 but – I’m reluctant to say – no longer. The exceptions – Marilynne Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Roth’s 15-year renaissance, a few others – are sadly solitary.
There was a time when I bought new works of fiction by many writers in hard cover as soon as they were published – Nabokov, Bellow, Beckett, Malamud, Singer, Guy Davenport, Pynchon, Gass, sometimes Roth and Updike. No longer. Most are dead or my tastes evolved beyond recognition. I regret sounding gloomy and have tried to find solace in sentences taken out of context from another essay in On Not Being Good Enough, “Mumford and Fuller,” a review of books by and about Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller. He admires Hugh Kenner’s Bucky but with reservation about Fuller’s thinking:
“Having long ago decided that life is not simply a matter of despairing and gloomy occasions, I do not feel moved to decide to live in a world of instances of hope and synergetic pattern either…One can admire them, and live at the heart of empire too, and yet not necessarily want to join in the chorus.”
Any chorus.
“The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove this, however, I can only try to say what I think such later evaluators might find in our fiction to praise or even to envy.”
The context here is critical. Thirty years ago, “Theory” was in its ascendancy in the academy and even, sadly, among readers and non-academic critics. “Post-” proliferated. Good sense, scholarship and the joys of reading and writing were already in jeopardy. Sale was working hard to be a celebrator, not an elegist, and he argues a good case. He overestimates the worth of some writers, particularly Mailer, Heller, Pynchon and Robert Stone, but recognizes Bellow as “our finest living novelist” and lauds good novels by less-well-known writers, including Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin, Richard Stern’s Golk, Theodore Weesner’s The Car Thief and Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall.
Sale is no fuddy-duddy in his tastes. He defines two loose categories – “imperial” (close to James Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism”) and “realistic” – and drums up enthusiasm for both modes. Clearly, his sympathies lie with the latter:
“My suspicion is that one reason realistic fiction has never received the attention it deserves is that it is not easy to describe its ways and means, and that the more obviously eccentric, experimental, high flying fictions often make and keep their lofty critical status because they are easier to describe and appreciate. One is always tempted to say that a realistic novel is just there.”
Which is why such writers as William Maxwell and Shirley Hazzard have been ignored by a certain sort of critic or read with incomprehension. The obsession with novelty and self-conscious “experimentalism” (what could be more subtly, deftly “experimental” than Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow?) has blinded some readers to the sublimity of first-rate realistic fiction. Sale again:
“What I'd like to suggest is that the great vitality of the novel at present does not lie simply in those novels which are distinctly different from earlier novels, but in its way of being "realistic" as well, so that the plainest and most straightforward realistic fiction of the last fifteen years or so can be seen as being both distinctly different from earlier realism and allied to the more obviously unrealistic imperial fiction.”
With some sadness I reread Sale’s essay, reprinted in his 1979 collection On Not Being Good Enough. In part, the sadness is personal: I’ll never again read contemporary fiction with the sense of elated discovery I did in the 1960s and 1970s. So many novels and stories seemed new and exciting, in part because my timing was superb. The sadness, however, is also historical: I would have a difficult time mustering a list comparable to Sale’s for the subsequent 30 years. Sale was courageously correct in his assessment of American fiction circa 1978 but – I’m reluctant to say – no longer. The exceptions – Marilynne Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Roth’s 15-year renaissance, a few others – are sadly solitary.
There was a time when I bought new works of fiction by many writers in hard cover as soon as they were published – Nabokov, Bellow, Beckett, Malamud, Singer, Guy Davenport, Pynchon, Gass, sometimes Roth and Updike. No longer. Most are dead or my tastes evolved beyond recognition. I regret sounding gloomy and have tried to find solace in sentences taken out of context from another essay in On Not Being Good Enough, “Mumford and Fuller,” a review of books by and about Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller. He admires Hugh Kenner’s Bucky but with reservation about Fuller’s thinking:
“Having long ago decided that life is not simply a matter of despairing and gloomy occasions, I do not feel moved to decide to live in a world of instances of hope and synergetic pattern either…One can admire them, and live at the heart of empire too, and yet not necessarily want to join in the chorus.”
Any chorus.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
`The Point of Style is Character'
In elementary school they graded us “A” through “E” in the major subjects – Reading, Arithmetic, Science – and “S” (“Satisfactory”) and “U” (“Unsatisfactory”) for the minors – Physical Education, Art and Writing. The last referred to handwriting or penmanship, and was the only subject in which I consistently earned awful grades, a long line of “U’s.” My mother sat me at the kitchen table with the day’s Cleveland Press (R.I.P., 1982), and had me transcribe the front page in longhand with a pencil. Despite her efforts, I became a newspaper reporter and my handwriting remains wretched. Naturally, I take pride in my illegibility, detest those who possess a calligrapher’s hand and can’t help but sympathize with my 8-year-old whose penmanship is even more aesthetically offensive than mine.
My wife has hired a handwriting tutor for Michael. She visits for an hour once a week and I supervise the daily exercises, feeling like a hypocrite. Michael inscribes his letters and numbers from the bottom up – bad form, apparently – so my job is to reinforce the down stroke. Habit is hard, even at 8. He asks, “Who cares? Why’s it so important?” I tell him he’ll be judged by his handwriting, as we’re judged by our manner of speaking. If the teacher can’t read what you’ve written, etc., etc. I don’t believe it either but we’ve entered into a conspiracy of contemptuous resignation and have agreed to play along with the game. This, too, is an important lesson for children.
Howard Nemerov looks at it otherwise. In “Writing,” from his 1958 collection Mirrors and Windows, he celebrates elegant handwriting – and by extension, all writing – as an aesthetic/moral/spiritual exercise, at least for the purposes of his poem:
“The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
“Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.”
This is a beautiful poem, one of Nemerov’s best, though his conceit means more to me than the acts of writing he describes. Those final four lines remind me of Keats’ “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” I’ve never skated or watched others do so, except in movies and on television. The notion of incisions left by skates on ice as a form of script is new to me, but apparently not to others. In the title poem from his 2003 collection The Calligrapher’s Shop, Ben Downing writes:
“As if on ice
A figure skating rubricant had mapped
“his arabesques with slathered blades, the rise
and roller-coaster dip of letters swelled
even past my ignorance; my eyes
“alone could estimate, yet not quite melt,
The igneous devotion frozen there.”
Sometimes, a metaphor possesses more beauty and meaning than its referent. For that to be true and for the poem to remain beautiful and meaningful, as it is with Nemerov’s and Downing’s, seems like an unlikely triumph.
There’s too much to learn and enjoy to worry about trifles. I’m pleased Michael is writing stories and drawing comic strips (he posts a new episode of “Space Man Stiff” every day on the bulletin board in the kitchen), and don’t care that I can’t decrypt some of them because of his handwriting. Before we were married, my wife and I worked for the same newspaper, and she interviewed a handwriting analyst who requested writing samples from three co-workers. Mine came back described as “bulbous,” which was gratifying because it reminded me of Captain Beefheart’s line on Trout Mask Replica: “A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ‘n’ bulbous. Got me?” Despite all that we celebrate our 10th anniversary next week.
My wife has hired a handwriting tutor for Michael. She visits for an hour once a week and I supervise the daily exercises, feeling like a hypocrite. Michael inscribes his letters and numbers from the bottom up – bad form, apparently – so my job is to reinforce the down stroke. Habit is hard, even at 8. He asks, “Who cares? Why’s it so important?” I tell him he’ll be judged by his handwriting, as we’re judged by our manner of speaking. If the teacher can’t read what you’ve written, etc., etc. I don’t believe it either but we’ve entered into a conspiracy of contemptuous resignation and have agreed to play along with the game. This, too, is an important lesson for children.
Howard Nemerov looks at it otherwise. In “Writing,” from his 1958 collection Mirrors and Windows, he celebrates elegant handwriting – and by extension, all writing – as an aesthetic/moral/spiritual exercise, at least for the purposes of his poem:
“The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
“Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.”
This is a beautiful poem, one of Nemerov’s best, though his conceit means more to me than the acts of writing he describes. Those final four lines remind me of Keats’ “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” I’ve never skated or watched others do so, except in movies and on television. The notion of incisions left by skates on ice as a form of script is new to me, but apparently not to others. In the title poem from his 2003 collection The Calligrapher’s Shop, Ben Downing writes:
“As if on ice
A figure skating rubricant had mapped
“his arabesques with slathered blades, the rise
and roller-coaster dip of letters swelled
even past my ignorance; my eyes
“alone could estimate, yet not quite melt,
The igneous devotion frozen there.”
Sometimes, a metaphor possesses more beauty and meaning than its referent. For that to be true and for the poem to remain beautiful and meaningful, as it is with Nemerov’s and Downing’s, seems like an unlikely triumph.
There’s too much to learn and enjoy to worry about trifles. I’m pleased Michael is writing stories and drawing comic strips (he posts a new episode of “Space Man Stiff” every day on the bulletin board in the kitchen), and don’t care that I can’t decrypt some of them because of his handwriting. Before we were married, my wife and I worked for the same newspaper, and she interviewed a handwriting analyst who requested writing samples from three co-workers. Mine came back described as “bulbous,” which was gratifying because it reminded me of Captain Beefheart’s line on Trout Mask Replica: “A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ‘n’ bulbous. Got me?” Despite all that we celebrate our 10th anniversary next week.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
`Distant Plangencies'
My 8-year-old and I, as usual, arrived at his school too early so we sat on the floor outside his classroom, reading and waiting for the teacher. Michael had finished rereading one Harry Potter novel in the car and brought along another, as he put it, “for backup.” I, too, was rereading: Guy Davenport’s “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” in The Geography of the Imagination.
After a few minutes, another kid sat beside me, pulled a book from his backpack, opened it in his lap and started to read. I couldn’t see the cover but it appeared to be an adult book from the public library. Another boy, one I already knew to be a Harry Potter enthusiast, walked up to Michael, thrust out his arm and cast a flamboyant spell. Michael responded in kind and it turned into a spell-casting version of a jazz “cutting contest” – two adepts trying to outdo each other – though they soon exhausted their repertoire of spells and were reduced to almost, but not quite, hitting each other with spell-casting gestures.
Out of nowhere, the first kid, the one reading the adult library book, exploded with a Potter spell of his own and vaporized the other two, or something. He smiled and went back to his book. I asked what he was reading.
“Chinese history,” he said.
I asked to see his book: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis (Harvard University Press, 2007). I asked why he was reading it and he shrugged and answered like a true booklover:
“I like it. I like Chinese history.”
Obviously, he wasn’t fooling. I returned the book and he effortlessly re-entered it. Here was an 8-year-old Chinese-American kid who already knows more about Chinese history than I will ever know. And he finds time for Harry Potter.
In the second-to-last paragraph of “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (and of The Geography of the Imagination), Davenport writes:
“If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.”
The world is both bigger and smaller than we suspected, stranger and more familiar, so we might as well make ourselves at home. Elsewhere in his essay Davenport writes:
“The self, in any case, is a vacuum: nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind.”
After a few minutes, another kid sat beside me, pulled a book from his backpack, opened it in his lap and started to read. I couldn’t see the cover but it appeared to be an adult book from the public library. Another boy, one I already knew to be a Harry Potter enthusiast, walked up to Michael, thrust out his arm and cast a flamboyant spell. Michael responded in kind and it turned into a spell-casting version of a jazz “cutting contest” – two adepts trying to outdo each other – though they soon exhausted their repertoire of spells and were reduced to almost, but not quite, hitting each other with spell-casting gestures.
Out of nowhere, the first kid, the one reading the adult library book, exploded with a Potter spell of his own and vaporized the other two, or something. He smiled and went back to his book. I asked what he was reading.
“Chinese history,” he said.
I asked to see his book: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis (Harvard University Press, 2007). I asked why he was reading it and he shrugged and answered like a true booklover:
“I like it. I like Chinese history.”
Obviously, he wasn’t fooling. I returned the book and he effortlessly re-entered it. Here was an 8-year-old Chinese-American kid who already knows more about Chinese history than I will ever know. And he finds time for Harry Potter.
In the second-to-last paragraph of “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (and of The Geography of the Imagination), Davenport writes:
“If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.”
The world is both bigger and smaller than we suspected, stranger and more familiar, so we might as well make ourselves at home. Elsewhere in his essay Davenport writes:
“The self, in any case, is a vacuum: nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind.”
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
`An Idea Is a Mouth That Sells'
I recognized the type: young, smiling and earnest. They were seated behind a card table in front of the post office. They might have been Mormons but for the hand-lettered sign: “Can Bush’s I.Q. drop any lower?” One avoids such people as one does the insane but the closer of the pair rose to meet me and asked, “Sir, do you realize the entire financial structure has collapsed? Do you know what this means?”
A few minutes later, as I was driving my kids to the library and had time to evaluate my response, I thought of a line from “Life Cycle of Ideas” by the great Australian poet Les Murray:
“An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks.”
That’s it: Proselytizing is salesmanship, never altruism. This young man, transcendentally certain of his sentiments, believed he had something for me, a gift of enlightenment, when, in fact, he wanted something from me – membership in the flock. How I resent recruitment for any cause. It’s not in the Bill of Rights, I know, but the most precious right is the right to be left alone.
I ought to have kept quiet, smiled, perhaps said, “No thank you.” Instead (in my defense, I had spent the morning in the dentist’s chair), I said, “I don’t give a shit,” and stepped into the post office. In our box, with the Pottery Barn catalog and another 20-percent-off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond, was a letter from Barack Obama. I walked out with the catalog and wished the young man a good day.
A few minutes later, as I was driving my kids to the library and had time to evaluate my response, I thought of a line from “Life Cycle of Ideas” by the great Australian poet Les Murray:
“An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks.”
That’s it: Proselytizing is salesmanship, never altruism. This young man, transcendentally certain of his sentiments, believed he had something for me, a gift of enlightenment, when, in fact, he wanted something from me – membership in the flock. How I resent recruitment for any cause. It’s not in the Bill of Rights, I know, but the most precious right is the right to be left alone.
I ought to have kept quiet, smiled, perhaps said, “No thank you.” Instead (in my defense, I had spent the morning in the dentist’s chair), I said, “I don’t give a shit,” and stepped into the post office. In our box, with the Pottery Barn catalog and another 20-percent-off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond, was a letter from Barack Obama. I walked out with the catalog and wished the young man a good day.
Monday, July 14, 2008
`Concentrated and Nutty'
I favor a style simultaneously forthright and reticent, giving while withholding. This tension energizes sentences and keeps readers moving along, while never discouraging us from pausing to reread and savor. Rereading is commonly thought of as consuming a book once consumed, but good writers encourage us to reread phrases, sentences, paragraphs and more as we move through a book the first time or the fourth. There ought to be no unintentional vagueness, affectation, confusion, padding or euphemism. Say it once, say it squarely but don’t tell us everything you know. This is a common failing among bloggers, who lack nuance and a sense of play in their prose. Their sins are impatience and earnestness, resulting in a shotgun approach to discourse. Thoreau identified this failing in the work of Thomas De Quincey. In an Aug. 22, 1851, journal entry he writes:
“It is the fault of some excellent writers – De Quincey’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me – that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct; to frame these, that is the art of writing.”
Of course, most bloggers, most writers generally, are untroubled by the absence of art in their prose. Among newspaper editors of my acquaintance, there was an understanding that well-written copy (artful but not pretentious), sentences that transcend subject-verb-object, that play a bit with irony, that hint rather than holler, are suspiciously effete. Thoreau continues in his journal:
“Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.”
A frequent writer of diamonds in the blogosphere is Nige, proprietor of Nigeness. His posts are brief and usually erected around some everyday event. Last Friday, Nige saw a butterfly and called his post “On Paying Attention.” He could have turned his observations into self-congratulatory nature swooning, Instead, he considered the significance of being able to identify what we see – with the caveat that over-reliance on identification can turn into yet another human cul-de-sac. He even pulls off the extra-human feat of usefully and accurately citing an episode in A la recherche du temps perdu:
“There's a famous passage in Proust, where the narrator, anxious about his grandmother, races to Paris to see her. When he arrives, she is not expecting him and he witnesses, as it were, his own absence. In that absence, what he sees, shockingly, is not his grandmother but a florid-faced, mad old woman, sitting in a chair reading. Momentarily, he has not identified her, in the act of loving attention in which she is, not that mad old woman, but his beloved grandmother. Loving (ideally) attention is what makes us what we are - what, in every sense, distinguishes us - and without it, as King Lear demonstrates with horrific vividness, we are no more than bare forked animals.”
Read the entire post to appreciate how casually and without portentousness Nige leads us to his conclusion. His writing is, to use Thoreau’s words, “concentrated and nutty.” He doesn’t throw everything at us, and what he throws is generally worth catching.
Another blogger worthy of attention is elberry, who tends The Lumber Room (“flotsam and jetsam from a broken world”). Like Nige, one of his pals, he’s English, and on Sunday he gave us his version of that venerable form, the travelogue: “Oxford.” He’s acerbic, notices details and is consistently funny. What does elberry read while visiting the ancient university town?:
“i find a copy of Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable trilogy for £3 and read it in various dens, pubs, cafes and restaurants escaping from the rain. Sample glories from Molloy:
“`The more things resist me the more rabid I get. With time, and nothing but my teeth and nails, I would rage up from the bowels of the earth to its crust, knowing full well I had nothing to gain. And when I had no more teeth, no more nails, I would dig through the rock with my bones.’”
There’s a fine companion, grumbling about ugly Americans, reading the great trilogy, posting a picture of the most savory breakfast I’ve seen in decades, and quoting Theodore Dalrymple with approval. Despite Thoreau on De Quincey, the English seem to do some things better.
“It is the fault of some excellent writers – De Quincey’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me – that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct; to frame these, that is the art of writing.”
Of course, most bloggers, most writers generally, are untroubled by the absence of art in their prose. Among newspaper editors of my acquaintance, there was an understanding that well-written copy (artful but not pretentious), sentences that transcend subject-verb-object, that play a bit with irony, that hint rather than holler, are suspiciously effete. Thoreau continues in his journal:
“Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.”
A frequent writer of diamonds in the blogosphere is Nige, proprietor of Nigeness. His posts are brief and usually erected around some everyday event. Last Friday, Nige saw a butterfly and called his post “On Paying Attention.” He could have turned his observations into self-congratulatory nature swooning, Instead, he considered the significance of being able to identify what we see – with the caveat that over-reliance on identification can turn into yet another human cul-de-sac. He even pulls off the extra-human feat of usefully and accurately citing an episode in A la recherche du temps perdu:
“There's a famous passage in Proust, where the narrator, anxious about his grandmother, races to Paris to see her. When he arrives, she is not expecting him and he witnesses, as it were, his own absence. In that absence, what he sees, shockingly, is not his grandmother but a florid-faced, mad old woman, sitting in a chair reading. Momentarily, he has not identified her, in the act of loving attention in which she is, not that mad old woman, but his beloved grandmother. Loving (ideally) attention is what makes us what we are - what, in every sense, distinguishes us - and without it, as King Lear demonstrates with horrific vividness, we are no more than bare forked animals.”
Read the entire post to appreciate how casually and without portentousness Nige leads us to his conclusion. His writing is, to use Thoreau’s words, “concentrated and nutty.” He doesn’t throw everything at us, and what he throws is generally worth catching.
Another blogger worthy of attention is elberry, who tends The Lumber Room (“flotsam and jetsam from a broken world”). Like Nige, one of his pals, he’s English, and on Sunday he gave us his version of that venerable form, the travelogue: “Oxford.” He’s acerbic, notices details and is consistently funny. What does elberry read while visiting the ancient university town?:
“i find a copy of Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable trilogy for £3 and read it in various dens, pubs, cafes and restaurants escaping from the rain. Sample glories from Molloy:
“`The more things resist me the more rabid I get. With time, and nothing but my teeth and nails, I would rage up from the bowels of the earth to its crust, knowing full well I had nothing to gain. And when I had no more teeth, no more nails, I would dig through the rock with my bones.’”
There’s a fine companion, grumbling about ugly Americans, reading the great trilogy, posting a picture of the most savory breakfast I’ve seen in decades, and quoting Theodore Dalrymple with approval. Despite Thoreau on De Quincey, the English seem to do some things better.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Memento Mori
Saturday morning we climbed Little Si, which a guidebook has the nerve to call a “hill.” Little Si stands beside Mount Si, in North Bend, Wa., and both are named for the homesteader Josiah “Uncle Si” Merritt. Round trip, the trail measures only five miles but most of it is vertical, a series of rocky switchbacks. When you reach the summit you’ve gained 1,500 feet in elevation. Our 5- and 8-year-olds accompanied us.
The lower trail is flanked by wildflowers, and that’s where I unexpectedly spied a memento mori – St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforate). The plant is raggedy and worthy of notice only for its bright yellow, five-petalled flowers. The common name comes from its traditional day of flowering – June 24, Midsummer and St. John the Baptist’s Day. In folklore, the plant is used to ward off evil, depression and other ailments, and today it’s on the “alternative medicine” shelf in the drugstore. In England: The Four Seasons, Ronald Blythe calls the herb “an all-purpose remedy for sickness, body and soul.”
I know a little about St. John’s wort because I spent much of the summer of 1995 harvesting it in upstate New York. I worked with a woman, a fellow reporter, whose husband had an accelerating case of multiple sclerosis. I never saw Mark walk, though a year before I met him he was still able to crawl up the stairs to the living room in his house. He used a high-tech wheel chair and had grown almost entirely dependent on others for the mundane tasks of living.
Mark looked for hope in the least likely places. He ordered a device that delivered electric shocks, the idea being to kill the parasitic flukes reputed to cause M.S. His kitchen counter was a cluttered pharmacy. He bought an expensive German food processor for making herbal remedies – among them, a tincture composed largely of St. John’s wort and 100-proof vodka. He bought the latter in one-gallon, plastic jugs and I collected the former in fields around Albany and Schenectady, stuffed it in plastic trash bags and stored it in the refrigerator in Mark’s garage.
I assumed these strategies were Mark’s way of boosting morale. I never took them seriously as medicine but neither did I try to dissuade him. Hope is for the hopeless. Mark, not yet 50 years old, died in 2001. His memory returns when I see the homely yellow flower. Here’s what Thoreau noted in his journal on Aug. 19, 1856:
“The small hypericums have a peculiar, smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like.”
The lower trail is flanked by wildflowers, and that’s where I unexpectedly spied a memento mori – St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforate). The plant is raggedy and worthy of notice only for its bright yellow, five-petalled flowers. The common name comes from its traditional day of flowering – June 24, Midsummer and St. John the Baptist’s Day. In folklore, the plant is used to ward off evil, depression and other ailments, and today it’s on the “alternative medicine” shelf in the drugstore. In England: The Four Seasons, Ronald Blythe calls the herb “an all-purpose remedy for sickness, body and soul.”
I know a little about St. John’s wort because I spent much of the summer of 1995 harvesting it in upstate New York. I worked with a woman, a fellow reporter, whose husband had an accelerating case of multiple sclerosis. I never saw Mark walk, though a year before I met him he was still able to crawl up the stairs to the living room in his house. He used a high-tech wheel chair and had grown almost entirely dependent on others for the mundane tasks of living.
Mark looked for hope in the least likely places. He ordered a device that delivered electric shocks, the idea being to kill the parasitic flukes reputed to cause M.S. His kitchen counter was a cluttered pharmacy. He bought an expensive German food processor for making herbal remedies – among them, a tincture composed largely of St. John’s wort and 100-proof vodka. He bought the latter in one-gallon, plastic jugs and I collected the former in fields around Albany and Schenectady, stuffed it in plastic trash bags and stored it in the refrigerator in Mark’s garage.
I assumed these strategies were Mark’s way of boosting morale. I never took them seriously as medicine but neither did I try to dissuade him. Hope is for the hopeless. Mark, not yet 50 years old, died in 2001. His memory returns when I see the homely yellow flower. Here’s what Thoreau noted in his journal on Aug. 19, 1856:
“The small hypericums have a peculiar, smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like.”
Saturday, July 12, 2008
`Anything Awful Makes Me Laugh'
William Hazlitt married his first wife, Sarah Stoddart, on May 1, 1808, at St. Andrew’s Church, Holburn. Sarah was already pregnant with their son. In attendance were Hazlitt’s friends Charles and Mary Lamb, who had helped arrange the marriage. In Characters and Their Landscapes, Ronald Blythe writes:
“Lamb, for whom Hazlitt’s sex life was the only thing about his friend he could never take seriously, laughed so much during the wedding that he was nearly turned out of church.”
Seven years later, Lamb, a lifelong bachelor, wrote in a letter to Robert Southey:
“…I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”
Hazlitt is the superior writer, I suppose, though I cast a sentimental vote for Lamb, a lovable man and essayist. Speaking of Hazlitt’s friends, including Coleridge and Wordsworth, Blythe writes:
“Among these was Charles Lamb, Hazlitt’s senior by only three and a half years, but in whose (much tried) relationship there was a stable, protective element suggesting a much older man. The great difference, in fact, between Lamb and Hazlitt was that the former seemed to have received the gift of perpetual early middle-age and the latter, with his moodiness, his iconoclasm, his physical energy, his hero-worship, his passionate love and his general recklessness, appeared to have been cursed with everlasting youth. To outgrow innocence – one’s initial reflexes to important matters – was for Hazlitt a sin.”
Hazlitt was brilliant and his prose, at its best, is almost peerless, but he compromised his gifts with politics and emotional immaturity, and spent his final years writing a four-volume life of Napoleon. Better a fatherly man without children who could write “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” and misbehave at funerals.
“Lamb, for whom Hazlitt’s sex life was the only thing about his friend he could never take seriously, laughed so much during the wedding that he was nearly turned out of church.”
Seven years later, Lamb, a lifelong bachelor, wrote in a letter to Robert Southey:
“…I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”
Hazlitt is the superior writer, I suppose, though I cast a sentimental vote for Lamb, a lovable man and essayist. Speaking of Hazlitt’s friends, including Coleridge and Wordsworth, Blythe writes:
“Among these was Charles Lamb, Hazlitt’s senior by only three and a half years, but in whose (much tried) relationship there was a stable, protective element suggesting a much older man. The great difference, in fact, between Lamb and Hazlitt was that the former seemed to have received the gift of perpetual early middle-age and the latter, with his moodiness, his iconoclasm, his physical energy, his hero-worship, his passionate love and his general recklessness, appeared to have been cursed with everlasting youth. To outgrow innocence – one’s initial reflexes to important matters – was for Hazlitt a sin.”
Hazlitt was brilliant and his prose, at its best, is almost peerless, but he compromised his gifts with politics and emotional immaturity, and spent his final years writing a four-volume life of Napoleon. Better a fatherly man without children who could write “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” and misbehave at funerals.
