John Wayne and Girl In Landscape.

When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.

That’s Joan Didion, in a 1965 essay called John Wayne: A Love Song, in which she confesses that “although the men I have known have had many virtues…they have never been John Wayne.” They have not – how could they have? – lived up to that standard of masculinity set for her at the age of eight when she first saw Wayne in War of the Wildcats.

Jonathan Lethem’s Girl In Landscape is about the child perceiving John Wayne’s sexual authority and figuring out what to do about it. The child is a thirteen-year-old immigrant from Earth, relocated with her father and younger brothers to a rickety frontier settlement on the Planet of the Archbuilders. Her dad is an earnest liberal, keen on reaching out to the planet’s natives, the remnants of a once-mighty race who now dwell in idleness among the ruins of their civilisation.

John Wayne appears in the character of the first settler in the valley, who has a far more ambivalent relationship to the natives. He is the only one who speaks their language, understands their customs, even participates in their rituals. But he has contempt for them, and he fears being corrupted by them. He is

tormented and tormenting. His fury is righteous and ugly – resentment worn as a fetish. It isolates him in every scene. It isolates him from you, watching, even as his charisma wrenches you closer, into an alliance, a response that’s almost sexual.

That’s Lethem writing (in his 2005 essay collection The Disappointment Artist) about John Wayne’s character in The Searchers, which he has acknowledged as the inspiration for his novel. Girl In Landscape is the The Searchers inverted, told from the point-of-view of the young girl rather than the cowboy antihero. But Lethem has softened and decomplicated the story for the comfort of modern readers. His natives are benign, meditative pacifists, rather than the murderous Comanches of the original, making the settlers’ terror of their sexuality seem paranoid and ludicrous.

Eventually, the young girl stands up to the cowboy, and although her motives are laudable, her methods are extremely dicey. In the final chapter we see the beginnings of a friendlier, stabler, more matriarchal society – the antagonistic male forces have been banished, at least temporarily, and order reigns. It’s a satisfying conclusion for modern readers, because we’re not really comfortable having John Wayne around – not the women, who (despite their lingering girlish ideals of maleness) aren’t eager to be tossed over his shoulder and carried off like chattel; not the other men who find themselves feeling shrunken and irrelevant in his presence. But of course, it’s convenient to banish John Wayne, when there are no Comanches around.

M.

People who write in the margins of books.

Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia carries the subtitle Notes In The Margin Of My Time. Scribbling in the margins is a metaphor that recurs throughout the book, and I’m not sure metaphor is the right word because it seems to be literally true that James has built these essays around passages he has marked, and comments he has pencilled into the margins, of his prodigious library over a half century of reading.* For instance, in his essay on Egon Friedell he writes:

I own three copies of the handsome, single-volume post-war edition put out by Beck. My intention was to use one of them as a workbench, and put into its endpapers the notes that have gone into this book. But I ended up defacing my beautiful Phaidon edition, perhaps guessing in advance that my graffiti would be labours of love.

I have just received a vivid lesson in the benefits of writing in the margins, as I spent most of an evening hunting through the 851 pages of Cultural Amnesia for a half-remembered line about (to paraphrase) a lengthy book made still longer by all the notes the reader inevitably finds himself making in the endpapers. I couldn’t find it.

I never write in books, and I detest those who do. In another essay – I won’t try and search for it – James attempts to extrapolate, from notes in the margins, the politics of the previous owner of a certain German-language book he has acquired secondhand. The only thing I’ve ever gleaned from a marginal note is that the previous owner was too lazy to reach for a bookmark. But perhaps James frequents used bookshops with a more erudite clientele.

If you must write in the margins, you might as well do all your note-taking there; once the text has been violated, no amount of gentlemanly self-restraint can restore it to innocence. The lowest form of book-defacer is the one who marks a single passage in a book, then stops; this mark can easily be missed by the future browser as he riffles the pages prior to purchasing.

I own two books like this. One is Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful Of Dust. In an otherwise virgin copy, some fool has used a pen to bracket this paragraph, in which a character passes the time with a game of solitaire – “patience”, as the Brits call it:

Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated.

I assume the defacer was an English student; this passage is pregnant with symbolic possibilities, containing as it does the actual word “symbols”. But its significance to the larger story is obscure. Mrs. Rattery is a minor character, a bluff American aviatrix who wanders in at a vital juncture in the plot, then soon wanders out again. Her elaborate game of patience has no bearing on her relationship to the other characters; she’s not a schemer or an organizer. Nor is “order [growing] out of chaos” a theme of A Handful Of Dust – quite the opposite; like most of Waugh’s novels, it’s about the breakdown of the old social hierarchies. Perhaps my hypothetical English student intended to use Mrs. Rattery and her game of patience as a metaphor for Waugh-as-writer, although that would make for a rather generic essay; all writers, except the bad ones, establish “sequence and precedence”.

I also have a copy of Graham Greene’s The Ministry Of Fear in which someone has singled out this observation:

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of the nose and mouth, and yet we protest: This isn’t me…

The mark was made in pencil, so I might attempt to erase it, though I’m sure a shadow will remain. Oddly enough, half-erased marginal jottings play a part in the story of The Ministry Of Fear. The hero, who stumbles into a Nazi espionage plot, spends some time in an asylum run by a pacifist doctor. On a bookshelf the hero finds a book of Tolstoy’s, and notices some rubbed-out pencil marks beside the following sentiment:

Remembering all I have done, suffered, and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one’s country…

The “ignoble” attempt to erase his approving checkmarks is enough to make the doctor a suspect: “This was an opinion to be held openly if at all,” thinks the hero. I wonder if some future owner of my copy of The Ministry Of Fear will think I’ve ignobly repudiated my opinion on the inaccuracy of police photographs?

M.

* This is an awkwardly constructed sentence which I’ve chosen not to rewrite. Let it serve as an inside joke for those who’ve enjoyed James’ riff on Edward Gibbon, where he excoriates that learned figure for sentences even more awkward than this one.

Catch-22: Not as great as remembered.

If any time in the last fifteen years you’d asked my opinion of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, I would have replied without reservation that it was a great book. Fifteen years is how long it’s been since I read Catch-22 as a teenager.

Picture my disillusionment when I picked it up again this week and came across writing like this:

The swarthy, middle-aged lieutenant colonel with the rimless, icy glasses and faceted, bald, domelike pate that he was always touching sensitively with the tips of his splayed fingers disliked the chaplain and was impolite to him frequently. He kept the chaplain in a constant state of terror with his curt, derisive tongue and his knowing, cynical eyes that the chaplain was never brave enough to meet for more than an accidental second.

Heller occasionally falls into this narcotizing pattern of adjective-adjective-noun, adjective-adjective-noun, which I assume signifies a lapse of his self-editing faculties. Why do we need faceted, bald, and domelike? Why curt and derisive, knowing and cynical? It’s not so much the redundancy – after all, none of these twinned or tripleted adjective are quite synonymous, although they’re often close enough to suggest a simple failure of decisiveness on the author’s part. The problem is the rhythm. Good writing modulates, syncopates, takes a pause then skips across the room. Too much of Heller’s prose just clops along like a three-legged horse.

Still, I can’t dismiss Catch-22. For every ungainly passage there are two inspired ones; the story of Major Major Major Major’s swift and humiliating rise through the ranks, for instance, or this description of the “soldier in white”, a plaster-encased mummy in the casualty ward:

Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar. A silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear, stoppered jar on the floor. When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty, and the two were simply switched quickly so that stuff could drip back into him.

Heller can’t help but use more than the necessary number of words (a silent zinc pipe?), but that’s okay. The soldier in white, a helpless conduit for the recycling of clear fluid, is the perfect emblem for a book of paradoxes, circular arguments, and self-negating statements. The term “catch-22″ is now used rather too vaguely to mean something like Hobson’s choice. The vagueness was inevitable; in the novel, the regulation is brought in whenever the author is in want of a bureaucratic absurdity, paradoxical or not. The elegant recursiveness of the term as it ought to be used is demonstrated in this  scene where Yossarian goes to his squadron’s flight surgeon to get his reckless tentmate grounded:

“Is Orr crazy?”

“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.

“Can you ground him?”

“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”

“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”

“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”

“That’s all he has to do?”

“That’s all. Let him ask me.”

“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.

“No. Then I can’t ground him.”

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

At its best, Catch-22 reads like the kind of bleak farce Kafka might’ve cooked up in collaboration with the Marx Brothers. At its worst it’s just frantic and amateurish (like the Marx Brothers at their worst). Here’s an example of Heller at his best and worst, just after Kid Sampson meets his messy end on a raft offshore:

Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They scampered for their things in a panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water were struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind. Kid Sampson had rained all over.

I’m not sure if a “biting wind” is a good metaphor for the resistance of the sea; wind pushes, it doesn’t pull. And once again Heller’s twinned adjectives (“gentle, knee-high”; “viscous, clinging”), tend to weaken rather than reinforce one another. But Heller catches the right details; the bathers cringing from the tainted waves, those in the ocean “forgetting in their haste to swim” as they lumber to shore, everyone fleeing yet unable to look away from the scene of the tragedy. Later the lower half of Kid Sampson’s body washes ashore “like a purple twisted wishbone”, and the men of the squadron, unwilling to touch it, creep down to the beach to peek at it through the bushes.

Overall, I still think Catch-22 is a pretty great book. I can grudgingly forgive its prolix, overlong, redundant excesses. But it’s a relief to escape at last from Joseph Heller’s world to one where the author has scrupulously considered each word and set it in its proper place in relation to the others; I’m now reading J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. Heller’s voice drifts too often to that prophetic pitch that appeals to intelligent eighteen-year-olds but wears the patience of grown-ups less certain of their intelligence. Give me an author with the humility to scratch out a line.

M.

George Orwell is not like you or me.

Here’s George Orwell’s description of Barcelona early in the Spanish Civil War:

Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal … Almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy … Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night … I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side.

Orwell goes on to say that “There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

It’s lucky Orwell is such a compelling storyteller, or I would have been obliged to stop reading Homage To Catalonia right there. This state of affairs, this chaotic, violent, graffiti-stained shambles, a half-wrecked city lorded over by Puritans with guns who’ve driven out (or worse) the priests and the “bourgeoisie” – this Orwell sees as “worth fighting for”? I understand that he was keen to fight fascism, and that in 1936 Spain was the one front where fascists could be fought. But who could blame an idealistic young leftist for arriving in Barcelona, taking a look around at the filth and the madness and the thuggish sloganeering, and concluding, “Not my fight”?

But this was the middle of the 1930s; one of those occasions when capitalism had managed to make itself look very bad – bad enough, perhaps, that it was possible for an intelligent person to convince himself that,

It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”. Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control.

(This is Orwell paraphrasing, semi-approvingly, the position of POUM, the Marxist faction whose militia he joined on arriving in Spain.)

Times were different. One clue is the business about the tips. (After being lectured for the sin of having tipped an elevator-boy, Orwell on his second visit to Barcelona months later, after the revolutionary fervor had faded, noticed that “[i]n a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back.”) Seventy years on, it’s hard to grasp a mindset where tipping is seen as a symbol of capitalist exploitation. I was raised to believe that in certain encounters, tipping was the correct thing to do; and I’ve always tipped waiters, taxi-drivers, and barbers, even when I was unemployed, even when, as has often been the case, the person receiving the tip was undoubtedly better off than I was. I recognise that the custom of tipping is nonsensical – why do we tip waiters in fancy restaurants but not the underpaid drones behind the counter at Wendy’s? But I can’t see how it would help the working poor if tipping were eliminated altogether; indeed, I doubt that unlucky elevator-boy at Orwell’s hotel was grateful for his manager’s intervention.

Similarly, when in my life waiters have failed to treat me as an equal, it has usually been because they saw me as beneath their station, not above it; and while many “shop-walkers” have introduced themselves to me by first name, I can’t think of any who’ve cringed before me, unless the empty politesse of greeting me with “Sir” is seen as a mark of subservience. I’m not crazy enough to say that class distinctions have disappeared, only that without benefit of revolution, we’ve reached a state in the development of our bourgeois democracy where class is far more fluid and complicated than Orwell and his contemporaries were capable of imagining.

So I’ve decided to cut Orwell some slack, as I finish off Homage To Catalonia. The world of 1936 was very different from our own, and it’s a testament to the vitality and immediacy of his writing that we can forget for a minute how very different Orwell is from us.

***

In May of 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona between pro-Communist policemen and their nominal allies in the Marxist POUM and the anarchist CNT. Orwell describes an American doctor running up to him on the street:

“Come on, we must get down to the Hotel Falcón … The POUM chaps will be meeting there. The trouble’s starting. We must hang together.”

On the evidence of these lines (“chaps”, “we must hang together”), one might conclude that Orwell had never actually conversed with a living American. At any rate he had no feeling for how Americans talked. I’m guessing he rarely went to the movies.

M.

The Great Railway Bazaar (Paul Theroux).

Sometimes I finish a book and, as much as I enjoyed it, I find I have nothing to say about it. Empty of useful insights, but wishing to draw attention to the book’s greatness (and also, maybe, to prove to the world that I’ve read it?), I resort to quoting from it at length.

So here are some highlights from The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux’s 1975 account of his 24-country grand tour of Europe and Asia.

***

After travelling by train from London to the eastern frontier of Iran, Theroux finds himself forced to cross rail-less Afghanistan. This is just after the end of the monarchy, but a few years before the communist takeover which inaugurated the current and ongoing round of civil wars:

Afghanistan is a nuisance. Formerly it was cheap and barbarous, and people went there to buy lumps of hashish – they would spend weeks in the filthy hotels of Herat and Kabul, staying high. But there was a military coup in 1973, and the king (who was sunning himself in Italy) was deposed. Now Afghanistan is expensive but just as barbarous as before. Even the hippies have begun to find it intolerable. The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent.

In Burma, Theroux watches savage stray dogs fighting for scraps of food thrown from the windows of the moving train:

“Why don’t they shoot those dogs?” I asked a man at Toungou.

“Burmese think it is wrong to kill animals.”

“Why not feed them then?”

He was silent. I was questioning one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect. Because no animals are killed all animals look as if they are starving to death, and so the rats, which are numerous in Burma, co-exist with the dogs, which have eliminated cats from the country. The Burmese – removing their shoes and socks for sacred temple floors where they will spit and flick cigar ashes – see no contradiction. How could they? Burma is a socialist country with a notorious bureaucracy. But it is a bureaucracy that is Buddhist in nature, for not only is it necessary to be a Buddhist in order to tolerate it, but the Burmese bureaucratic delays are a consistent encouragement to a kind of traditional piety – the commissar and the monk meeting as equals on the common ground of indolent and smiling unhelpfulness. Nothing happens in Burma, but then nothing is expected to happen.

Theroux arrives in Vietnam in late 1973, during a moderately sedate interval between the Paris Peace Accord (which ended direct U.S. involvement in the war) and the start of the North Vietnamese offensive which will capture Saigon a year and a half later. Reflecting on America’s pathetic entanglement in the conflict, he writes:

The conventional view was that the Americans had been imperialists; but that is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power – road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings… Planning and maintenance characterize even the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a legal system there aren’t many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren’t pledged to maintain.
…
Some [soldiers] watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms – a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men – these boys – had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone, the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
…
[T]he Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism. The tragedy was that we had come, and from the beginning, had not planned to stay.

(The parallels with more recent events in Iraq are too obvious to bother commenting on. I’ll mention that the people who use terms like “imperialism” when discussing American overseas adventurism are also apt to toss out words like “hubris” and “arrogance”. That’s wrong. Theroux reminds us that America’s empire-builders are actually rather diffident: they don’t put up statues or grand buildings to commemorate their victories; they have no desire to stick around and lord it over the natives; their fondest wish is to pacify whatever goddamn foreign muckhole they find themselves stuck in and get back home to Paducah. The besieged forces of liberalism – or of pro-Western despotism – should always keep in mind before calling Washington for reinforcements: you’ll get five, maybe six years, tops, to wrap up your little war, before the Americans get sick of it all and scoot.)

And finally, on riding the Super Express between Tokyo and Kyoto:

[T]he conductor came by, and when he had finished punching everyone’s ticket he walked backwards up the aisle, bowing and saying, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” until he reached the door. The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

***

On a Russian ship crossing the Sea of Japan, Theroux meets an American man and wife who claim to be “into the occult” and proceed to describe a number of supposed supernatural encounters. Theroux, in his turn, narrates M.R. James’ “The Mezzotint” – “the most frightening story I know.” I wasn’t familiar with the story, but it’s available online: a very creepy setup, I found, but the ending is a bit meh. Maybe I’m just jaded.

M.

–

The last time I read one of Paul Theroux’s travel books, back in 2006, it inspired me to speculate about another of America’s botched nation-building attempts.

New Maps of Hell (Kingsley Amis).

Granting a year or so between writing and publication, it’s been almost exactly a half-century since Kingsley Amis conducted his 1960 survey of science-fiction, New Maps of Hell. I wish Amis had revisited the subject later in his life; I’d be interested to see him assess his own prophetic powers from the vantage point of 1970 or so, by which time the genre had already gone a long way to correcting at least one of the deficiencies he’d identified.

That deficiency is in the area of sex. As Amis points out,

Amid the most elaborate technological innovations, the most outré political or economic shifts, involving changes in the general conduct of life as extreme as the gulf dividing us from the Middle Ages, man and woman, husband and wife, lover and mistress go on doing their stuff in the mid-twentieth century way with a kind of brutish imperturbability… The sentimental consensus that this is perhaps the only part of human nature that can never be changed…is a disappointing trait in science-fiction writers, who as a rule are almost over-excitable in their readiness to see as variables what are normally taken to be constants… Though it may go against the grain to admit it, science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo.

Just think of all those sci-fi stories from the 1950s with their alien diplomats, flying cars, and rocketships to Venus, and mom still bustling contentedly about the home (perhaps in a jumpsuit instead of a dress), giving orders to the robot butler and dialling up dinner on the auto-range, while dad jetpacks off to the office to earn his paycheque. As Amis hints, there is something stunted in the psychology of (nearly all male) writers who could extrapolate from current social trends such vivid consumerist and conformist dystopias, not to mention summon up extraterrestrials and cosmic cataclysms of the profoundest weirdness, yet fail to foresee how in the very immediate future birth control and Betty Friedan would radically remould the relations between sexes.

But Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land came out just one year after New Maps of Hell, and by the end of the 1960s Heinlein and other writers were fully exploring the sexual revolution. This is what makes Amis’ vantage point so interesting – he’s hovering right on the rim of the old sci-fi cosmos, that quaint place of housewives with their robot butlers, while the new cosmos, more sophisticated (that is, more grown-up in its attitudes toward sex, not necessarily better written), has yet to show up on his viewscreen. Or so I would argue. Would the Amis of 1970 still say that the genre had not yet “come of age”? Would he still describe it as having “thrown up a large number of interesting and competent figures without producing anybody of first-rate importance”?

Even if New Maps of Hell weren’t a fascinating time capsule, even if it weren’t written with the typical Amis dry wit (of which more below), it would still be worthwhile as an introduction to a lot of authors I hadn’t heard of, or knew only by name. I’ve already placed an order on Abebooks. I’m particularly awaiting a collection of short stories by Katherine MacLean, a largely forgotten female pioneer in the field, who (judging from the brief excerpts Amis provides) appears to have been a progenitor of the great James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon.

***

Just because I find it amusing, here is Amis’ synopsis of Damon Knight’s famous short story “The Country of the Kind”:

[A] practising artist…[is] apparently the only one left in a world built on universal benevolence and unbreakable social graciousness, a world that is hellish because without conflict. The artist, when not engaged on impromptu sculpture, goes round breaking into people’s houses and pouring hot soup over their furniture, a gesture again unjustified and justified. By a nice symbolical touch, he has been operated on at the authorities’ direction and given an intolerable smell which cuts him off from all human intercourse. Some readers will not be able to avoid seeing in all this a comparatively sober account of the behaviour of their own arty friends…

M.

Good books in ugly covers.

I’ve just finished Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, about his early writing days in Paris. Here’s a passage that made me happy. Hemingway has just been befriended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who brings him a copy of his newly-published The Great Gatsby to read:

A day or two after the trip Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust-jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book-jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn’t like it. I took it off to read the book.

Of course, Hemingway loves the book and decides because of it to forgive Fitzgerald for being a huge pain in the ass.

I did some Googling and this must be the book cover Hemingway was referring to:

On the blog from which I borrowed this image, Sexuality in the Arts, the author describes the cover as “marvellous”. I tend toward Hemingway’s view, that it’s kind of atrocious.

One pictures Hemingway as one of those guys who doesn’t give a crap what anyone thinks of him. So it’s touching to hear him say he’s “embarrassed” by an ugly book cover. Possibly he means that he’s embarrassed on Fitzgerald’s behalf – embarrassed that Fitzgerald didn’t have the good sense to veto this ugly cover art – but that doesn’t explain why Hemingway removes the book-jacket before reading the book. I think he doesn’t want to be seen in the cafés reading a book that looks like “bad science fiction”. Hemingway is an artiste, after all. He’s got to keep up appearances.

***

Of all the books in my collection, the one I’d be most embarrassed to be seen reading in public is Kingsley Amis’ Collected Short Stories:

The illustrator’s name is Arthur Robbins. Robbins illustrated the covers for a number of Amis’ books when Penguin reprinted them in the early 1980s. They’re all more or less ugly:

Unfortunately these ugly Penguins are the ones that turn up most frequently in secondhand book stores, at least the ones I visit. I’ve been trying to avoid them as I piece together my Kingsley Amis collection.

***

My friend Jenn hates what she calls the “short, fat” paperbacks. By which she means “mass market” paperbacks, thick and wrapped in shiny covers, the kind you find on racks near the checkout counter in Wal-Mart. I gather she finds the Wal-Martish associations embarrassing. I don’t share this particular embarrassment, but I can see where she’s coming from.

My friend Olin likes the smell of book glue, and he always subjects his books to a sniff test before purchasing. I don’t have an olfactory response to my literature – or if I do I’m not conscious of it – but again, I can see where Olin is coming from.

Some book collectors collect first editions. Others collect “sets”, preferring to display a uniform, monochrome shelf of hardcover Dickenses or Jane Austens. Me, I don’t like hardcover books; they can’t be comfortably held open to the light while lying on one’s side in bed, which is how I usually read.

There are a handful of authors that I like well enough to wish to own all their works: Philip Roth, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis. But I prefer to put together my collection from used paperbacks bought for a few bucks apiece. Greene and Waugh can both be acquired cheaply in handsome orange-bound Penguins. Roth’s novels from the ’50s through the ’70s are easily found used in Bantam paperbacks, while his more recent novels are published by Vintage in trade format.

Amis has given me more trouble. I believe all his books are available in Penguins, but unlike the Waughs and Greenes, the Penguin Amises aren’t handsome at all. Depending on when they were printed, many of these Penguins are too ugly to own.

Panther published a number of Amis’ novels in the ’70s, often with naked or half-naked girls on the covers. Although they look a little like stroke books, these are less embarrassing than the Penguins. Unfortunately they’re also harder to find:

I own Amis’ most famous novel, Lucky Jim, in the baby-blue Penguin Classics edition:

At least I’m not ashamed to be seen reading it. But I don’t like the baby-blue Penguin Classics. There’s something stuffy and uninviting about them. The covers murmur, “I’ve been accepted into the canon. I deal with serious themes and may be taught as part of a college curriculum.” This studious dressing looks particularly wrong on a light comic novel by Kingsley Amis. At least the naked girls on the cover of the Panthers seem to go with the contents of the books. Even the Arthur Robbins drawings on the ugly Penguins are a better fit.

***

As gaudy as the first edition of The Great Gatsby is, I would have no problem reading it in public. Why? Because everyone knows Gatsby is “literature”. Even people who’ve never read it. Even people who couldn’t tell you wrote it. It doesn’t matter what they put on the cover. Anyone who sees you reading The Great Gatsby knows you’re a Reader of Serious Books.

It was different for Hemingway back in 1925. Fitzgerald was a new writer, not well-known outside of America. If Hemingway wanted to preserve his rep among the arty denizens of the Left Bank, they couldn’t get the idea that he read (ugh) science-fiction.

As for Kingsley Amis, the name might be vaguely familiar to literate people, but what are the odds that the waitress at the coffeeshop, or the cute girl sitting across from you on the train, will recognise I Want It Now, with its photo of a nude blonde girl sprawled across the cover, as a Serious Book? Sorry, buddy, but you’re going to have to find some other way to differentiate yourself from the ballcap-wearing herd with their iPods and Maxim magazines. Better pull out a Penguin Classic and save Kingsley Amis for when you’re at home alone.

M.

Humphrey Carpenter doesn’t get Evelyn Waugh.

I quoted from The Brideshead Generation, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1989 biography of Evelyn Waugh and his friends, already while discussing Nancy Mitford. I finished the book a month ago and since then it’s been sitting on my coffee table, multiple bookmarks poking out of it, waiting to be blogged about.

As a biography I think it’s quite good. Waugh is the focus of attention, although the early chapters are shared equally among his Oxford contemporaries – Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman, and Anthony Powell, among others. Graham Greene and Nancy Mitford turn up later in the book, and George Orwell puts in a cameo.

As literary criticism, however, The Brideshead Generation is a little exasperating. Carpenter examines the works of his subjects with reference to what was happening in their lives at the time of writing; this is excellently done. But sometimes he turns it around and attempts to explore his subjects’ characters by referencing their fictional works, and this is where he loses me. Am I being too easy on Evelyn Waugh (the man, not the author), or is Carpenter just being a literal-minded prig when he offers analysis like this?

The Loved One concludes with Dennis cremating [his love interest] Aimée without a shred of regret: “The fire roared in the brick oven. Dennis must wait until all was consumed. He must rake out the glowing ashes, pound up the skull and pelvis….” … Dennis is a writer, and at the end we are told that he will return to Europe carrying “the artist’s load, a great shapeless chunk of experience”. All through the story, Waugh has emphasized that Dennis is in a superior position by being an artist, and has suggested that this licenses his ruthlessness and dishonesty, and even permits him to destroy Aimée. The image of his smashing her burnt bones brings home violently what the novella has been telling us all along, that the writer has the right to manipulate, deceive, and finally destroy those around him if they can provide fuel for his art.

At the risk of belaboring what, to me, is incredibly obvious, Dennis Barlow is a sonofabitch. Carpenter writes as though he thinks the protagonist of The Loved One is intended by Waugh to be a heroic figure whom the reader should admire. He’s not: he’s a lazy fraud and (it is implied) a hack writer. When Dennis gives up his heart – “something that had long irked him” – in exchange for that “shapeless chunk of experience” which he will sculpt into a great work of art, there is no reason to believe that Waugh applauds the barter. There is a note of tragedy to the passage that Carpenter completely misses.

Of course, just because we’re not meant to admire Dennis, that doesn’t mean we aren’t meant to identify with him. He’s at the centre of the story and we see much of the action through his eyes, and it’s natural that we’ll sympathise with him. Up until the end, where he shrugs off Aimée’s suicide and conspires to dispose of her body, he’s a likeable figure, a cynic in a world of guileless simpletons. So let’s assume that the author, too, identifies with his anti-hero. If it is therefore fair to psychoanalyse Waugh in the guise of his fictional creation – I’m not sure it is fair – it might be reasonable to conclude that the creator doesn’t like himself very much: Dennis is the self-absorbed monster Waugh fears himself to be, annihilating, for the sake of his writing, the innocent people who love him.

But I think this conclusion is as oversimplified as Carpenter’s. The implication of the psychoanalytic approach to literary criticism is that the author’s writings flow directly from his subconscious onto the page, and that they can and should be interpreted like dreams. But the author (especially a master like Waugh) knows what he’s doing. His imagination is mediated by his self-awareness, humour, and sense of irony. To the extent that Dennis is Waugh, which I’m sure is more than a little, Waugh was not unaware of that fact. It occurs to me now that Dennis may even have been intended as a little fuck-you to those critics (like Carpenter) seeking evidence of Waugh’s own undeniable misanthropy in his writing.

At any rate, Dennis is a provocative comic character. He’s not funny in the way that Carpenter apparently believes he was meant to be funny, in the manner of Bugs Bunny or Cyrano or Groucho Marx: we’re not supposed to cheer for him as he puts jerks and poseurs in their place. In some ways Dennis is more like Daffy Duck or George Costanza or Mr. Toad: a selfish creature of limited self-knowledge, at war with a hostile world. But with those characters, the humour comes from their inevitable comeuppance, whereas Dennis gets away scot-free.

Outside of Waugh’s own fiction, the closest analogue to Dennis Barlow that I can think of is Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. But even she suffers a downfall, and she redeems herself a little at the end by helping to bring Amelia and Dobbin together. There’s a fairly minuscule literature of anti-heroes who triumph in the end without betraying their essential sonofabitchness, while retaining our sympathy. They mostly exist in Waugh’s writing. One can see why Humphrey Carpenter would be confused.

M.

Voltaire in favour, temporarily.

In my haste to get down my thoughts on Nancy Mitford’s Voltaire in Love I failed to mention that I was only halfway through the book. The second half begins rather depressingly. Voltaire, who has spent much of his life in flight from official persecution for his writings, around the age of fifty itches to be accepted by court society. He devotes his energies to fawning over Louis XV (who nevertheless doesn’t take a shine to him), kissing the Pope’s ass (with greater success), and writing dull encomiums to the glories of France. These chapters are an embarrassing record of social climbing and hypocrisy. At one point, when some literary enemies get under his skin, Voltaire uses his influence to get them arrested. “I am glad to think,” he smugly records, “that this affair will serve to distinguish those who deserve the protection of the government from those who deserve its displeasure and that of the general public.”

Luckily for the reader, our hero is too tactless to remain in favour with the King for very long. Our heroine, too, manages to get in trouble over her casual manners. Because her husband (the Marquis du Châtelet, content to have his wife more or less permanently taken off his hands by Voltaire) has a high rank in the military, Mme du Châtelet enjoys “certain privileges usually reserved for Duchesses … One of these was to travel in the Queen’s retinue.” She arranges to catch a ride with the Queen and a passel of important ladies. As Mitford describes it:

The Queen herself left with Mme du Luynes and three other Duchesses straight from the chapel as soon as Mass was over. Two more coaches were waiting in the Cour d’Honneur to bring Mesdames de Montaubon, Fitzjames, Flavacourt, and du Châtelet. Hardly had the Queen driven off than Mme du Châtelet hopped into one of them, settled herself comfortably into the corner, and called out something like: “Come on, plenty of room!” The other women, outraged by this lack of manners, all got into the second coach, leaving [du Châtelet] alone in hers.

Unhelpfully for those readers not at home with the etiquette of 18th-century Versailles, Mitford doesn’t explain just what was so offensive about the Marquise’s conduct. I’m guessing it’s a question of precedence; she was supposed to wait until her social superiors, the Duchesses, had taken their seats before she took hers.

It’s frustrating that instead of sharing witty observations about the books I read, I instead must expose my puzzlement over archaic customs and turns of phrase. On the other hand, I’m glad I was born into a era where I can afford to be mystified by the obscure social rules of our forebears.

M.

…In which I perform a Ron Rosenbaum on Ron Rosenbaum.

Ron Rosenbaum, who writes an occasional column for Slate.com, exemplifies that species of criticism that I complained about a while back, the kind that is altogether too angry about its subject, to the degree that you worry for the author’s cardiovascular health. In recent months Rosenbaum has fulminated against:

• The lame but well-meaning Oscar-bait movie The Reader.
• The musical career of Billy Joel.
• People who do crossword puzzles.

Granted, the Billy Joel and crossword puzzle pieces were intended to be humourous – I think – but that doesn’t excuse the chainsaw zeal Rosenbaum brings to levelling his midget foes. I mean, crossword puzzlers?

I’m waiting for Rosenbaum’s devastating attack on little old ladies who keep cats. In the meantime, he has written this article on nuclear war in popular literature. (I didn’t read the entire piece, warned off by a spoiler warning for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road near the end.) I have to admit to occasionally enjoying Rosenbaum’s writing, at least when he has taken his mood stabilizers, and this is an interesting article. But I think as usual he overstates his case; his case being that there is a definable genre of “second-generation nuke lit” that is more graphically pornographic – in the sense of violence-as-pornography – than earlier novels about nuclear war. He writes:

Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh.

To back him up, Rosenbaum musters a two-man lineup of modern-day airport thrillers: Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber and One Second After by William A. Forstchen. Then he wanders off down The Road, where I cannot follow.

I’m guessing that the germ of the article was this yucky scene of nuke-melted flesh that Rosenbaum found in the Strieber book:

[O]ne could say that a girl called Sally Glass feigned a moan of pleasure in the bed of a man whose soul was tired and found that the man’s face spattered her like hot grease.

Rosenbaum points out that “spattering is a common term for the money shot in porn of the filmed or literary variety.” Maybe so. But Strieber’s money shot is hardly new to the genre. You can’t get much more hardcore than Philip Wylie, writing in Tomorrow! (1954):

Ruth Williams still carried her dead baby. Its insides had come through its back, slowly, as she walked, and finally they’d jiggled so loose and slack that she stepped on them now and again.

Or (a different woman, a different baby):

[H]er insides must have popped. At least, she was sitting in a great puddle of blood, trying – his gelid eyes saw – to push things back inside her. But what stopped Ted was the fact that her organs seemed to be moving with a convulsive, blood-camouflaged, separate life. She kept pushing them against the rent across her abdomen and all of a sudden the biggest object let out a blat and Ted knew what it was: a baby, unborn – born, rather, right then, when she had stood up to run out – and the woman was trying to get it back within herself …

Wylie’s Triumph (1963) has more scenes of carnage, which I quoted in an earlier post.

I can’t say that Rosenbaum is wrong – he never claims that Whitley Strieber is the first nuclear pornographer to deploy scenes of melting flesh – but he doesn’t give enough examples to support his claim that “the genre has entered a new era”. On the basis of such limited evidence it seems to me that the new nuke porn is pretty much like the old.

At the risk of committing the kind of thesis creep that causes Rosenbaum to turn three seemingly dissimilar novels into “literary canaries in the dark coal mines of our paranoia”, I’d say that the nuke porn article is characteristic of the Rosenbaum style: he takes a little ember of aggrievement (the supposed smugness of crossword puzzle-solvers, the continued semi-popularity of Billy Joel, the spattered face of Sally Glass) and he huffs and puffs until he’s blown it up to a thousand words or so.

Done right, this can be a lot of fun. I was just reading the new article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, and marvelling at the way he can rig a flotsam of anecdotes into a seaworthy whole. Gladwell’s article is about David-versus-Goliath contests: underdogs, he says, overcome superior foes when they adopt non-conventional strategies, but often they throw away their best chance of winning because of internalised social pressure to “play by the rules”.

Gladwell seems to be extending the argument he made in Outliers, that what we call genius is really the product of old-fashioned elbow grease, available to everyone. Talentless scrappers like the Redwood City junior girl’s basketball team, he demonstrates, can humiliate athletes with superior innate skills – if they’re willing to put in the effort.

Rosenbaum’s article illustrates the opposite case. While Gladwell floats downstream on the river of his inspiration, Rosenbaum, for all his huffing and puffing, can’t get his dinghy to float.

M.