'The Kind of Things I Love'

At the end of her Friday post on Orson Welles and his Chimes at Midnight, Di Nguyen at the Little White Attic appends a bookish cri de coeur, one I have echoed many times: 

“I increasingly feel at odds with modern culture,” she begins. “I’m indifferent to contemporary music, contemporary literature, contemporary art, most contemporary cinema.” Join the crowd, Di. For complicated reasons which most readers of Anecdotal Evidence will already understand, our culture is rotting from within and it may be too late to reverse the process of decomposition. Literature has always been a minority taste but seldom have so many of the people charged with preserving it – teachers, critics, even common readers – been so dedicated to its destruction. My parents were not readers. They were children of the Great Depression, too busy earning a living, but they respected learning and never discouraged my interest in books. In this, they were representative of the middle and working classes of their time. Di continues:

 

“My interest in Shakespeare feels like a niche. And when people now stage or adapt Shakespeare, they either fuck with the plays and impose some trendy ideologies, to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘subversive’, or butcher the plays, removing vast chunks of text, to be ‘more accessible’ to ‘modern audiences’.”

 

I once wrote that politics has destroyed more writers than vodka. I would amplify that to say that three fingers of egotism with a politics chaser can destroy a library. The dumb kids in our grade-school classes are having their revenge. Di concludes with a fear too awful to contemplate: “I’m afraid that the kind of things I love will no longer be produced, and the things I love from the past will one day be lost.”

 

On Thursday we moved a step closer to losing the things we love with the death of North Carolina novelist and poet Fred Chappell. I have written about him many times on the blog. For almost half a century he has defied genre prejudices and general readerly fickleness and kept me moved and amused. I periodically reread his novel Dagon (1968). His Midquest (1981) is one of the finest postwar American poems, and his Kirkman tetralogy ought to be the stuff of reading clubs.

 

In the afterword to The Fred Chappell Reader (1987), titled “A Pact with Faustus,” Chappell recounts his enduring love for Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a novel he first read as a boy growing up in “the grimy little town of Canton, North Carolina (pop. eternally 5,000; tucked away in the folds of the far western mountains of the state).” The essay works on two levels – as a bittersweet evocation of his boyhood friendship with Harry “Fuzz” Fincher, a musician (like the hero of Mann’s novel, Adrian Leverkuhn) and fellow Tarheel aesthete; and as a meditation on the interdependence in our lives of reading and writing. Chappell admits he eventually had to suspend his emotional projection into the figure of Leverkuhn, whom Mann based on Arnold Schoenberg:

 

“It is clear that I am no figure of literary ‘importance,’ that I have not the means and no longer any desire to transform the outer contours of the art. In my case adventurous experimentation with form seems to lead to overintellectualization, to desiccation, of content. I have got to where I should like for my work to be human, and I do not much care if it even becomes sentimental. Perhaps it would be nice if a few artists in our time decided to rejoin the human race, and I think that I would be glad to do so, however much I disagree with its politics.”

 

Chappell reminds us that the man of letters is an endangered species but he’s hanging on in unlikely places, and that good sense, reverence for our literary tradition, hard work and a dedication to writing well remain alive as ideals among a few wayward writers who will never make the bestseller list or show up with Oprah.