Not being American myself, I have no particular interest in US presidential history, unless that history can be shoehorned into an entertaining biopicNot being American myself, I have no particular interest in US presidential history, unless that history can be shoehorned into an entertaining biopic, preferably with a British actor in the lead role. (I wonder who they’ll get to play Obama when the time comes. Liam Neeson?)
This book, though. This book is something else. ‘Political biography’ is too pissant a term for this Ahab-like undertaking. I’d call it a biographie-fleuve, but I don’t think that’s a real word even in French. Let’s just call it a great big fucking book, in every sense of the various adjectives.
It’s somehow fitting that, in the same week that The Path to Power was keeping me up till 3 or 4 a.m. every night, I was also working my way through the first two seasons of Breaking Bad. Seen side by side like this, LBJ the wheeler-dealer and Walter White the meth dealer share a certain resemblance; they inhabit the same moral penumbra. Both men get caught up in a dangerous game that they turn out to be really, really good at, and both have, shall we say, an open-door policy vis-à-vis the dark side. Of course, LBJ never strangled anyone with a bike lock (as far as we know) but he still had enough blood on his hands to incarnadine the multitudinous seas, or at least turn them a ghastly pink.
People are going to be arguing about Robert Caro’s portrayal of Lyndon Johnson for decades to come, but even on the most generous interpretation of the facts, it seems pretty clear that the 36th POTUS was at once a crook, a liar, a shameless toady, a serial adulterer and a complete physical coward. Just for starters. He was also, and equally clearly, a political genius who did more to liberate and enfranchise his fellow citizens than any president since Lincoln. So there’s that too.
Still, for all Johnson’s Shakespearean complexities, this wouldn’t be the great big fucking book it is if Robert Caro had stuck to his safe, biographical bailiwick. Almost more fascinating than its central figure are the rich little digressions and sidelights it contains. To use an unfashionable word, it’s an edifying book: it teaches you stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to know, stuff like the history of the Texas Hill Country, or the domestic chores of farmers' wives, or the rococo politics of dam-building under the New Deal, or the grotesque career of Pappy O’Daniel. And then there’s the plain old gossip, such as the astonishing fact that the young LBJ had a passionate and very illicit affair with one of the most beautiful women of the day, who, decades later, would end up burning all his love letters out of mortification over the Vietnam War. See? Who wouldn’t want to know that?
Bring on volume two! And season three! I'm starting to get a taste for all this skeevy ambivalence and moral murk....more
So this is weird, but it turns out Michelle Orange is my female doppelganger, at least in terms of her curriculum vitae, which mirrors mine in uncannySo this is weird, but it turns out Michelle Orange is my female doppelganger, at least in terms of her curriculum vitae, which mirrors mine in uncanny ways. We both grew up in London, Ontario, where we both rode the Gravitron at the Western Fair (though I wonder if she ever puked over the gunwale of the nearby Pirate Ship, as I once did). Then, in the 90s, we both moved to Toronto, studied English and became insufferable. Finally there’s the fact that both of us spent time on the West Coast, trying to find ourselves or whatever, but that’s almost obligatory for Canadians of our generation, so maybe it doesn’t count.
Still, I don’t want to make too much of our similarities, especially since Orange bristles, in one of her essays, at the very idea of having a doppelganger. In any case, our paths eventually diverged when she left for New York to pursue a writing career, while I...did not. Plus, on the evidence of this book, her youthful metaphysical crises were a bit more interesting than mine: in her twenties, she took up extreme jogging out of spiritual angst, whereas I, less original, took up recreational jogging because I was a fat-ass. So, yeah, different people.
There’s a certain dickish way in which I could imagine myself dismissing This Is Running for Your Life: 'Basically, it’s the sort of thing that smart women in New York tend to write: you know, personal essays about Facebook and movies and, like, the special problems of being a smart woman in New York. Joan Didion’s skirt must’ve rustled a bit when Orange fell out and hit Katie Roiphe on the way down.’ That’s the dickish response, as I say, and there’s something to it. Orange is certainly clever, but it’s a manic, brittle cleverness that sometimes falls into bathos, as in this line: ‘Puberty can go off like an IED in the Iraqi desert: one morning you wake up in a German hospital and spend the next six years learning to walk and talk.’ Not to commit the same solecism here, but that’s the kind of mesmerizing awkwardness I associate with Jennifer Lawrence at an awards ceremony.
But for the most part, I read this collection with real pleasure, complicated and distorted by real envy. As with the above-named Lawrence (sorry, but like every other loser on the planet, I can't stop thinking about her lately), Orange’s charm and talent cover any number of lapses. She takes some fairly unpromising subjects—a visit to her grandmother’s nursing home, Ethan Hawke’s face—and works out from there, ruminating, making connections, showing off her syntax and, in short, doing good, honest, essayistic-type stuff. I get the feeling Orange (like a certain young actress) has a brilliant career ahead of her. Which, I guess, is something else that sets her apart from me. But we’ll always have that stupid Gravitron.
Sorry, I just like saying his name, even though I have no idea what to do with that consonant cluster at the end. IGombrowicz, Gombrowicz, Gombrowicz.
Sorry, I just like saying his name, even though I have no idea what to do with that consonant cluster at the end. If I ever learn another language, it just might be Polish. This is somewhere between a whim and a resolution. It’s a whimsolution.
Anyway, Gombrowicz...This story is well known in certain circles, but it’s biographically inescapable. In the summer of 1939, Witold Gombrowicz, then a rising young Polish writer, goes on a cross-cultural junket to Argentina. He’s hardly off the boat when the Germans invade Poland, so he and his fellow countrymen get ready to sail back home and be patriotically slaughtered (in the best Polish traditions). Just as the ship is pulling away, Gombrowicz grabs his suitcase and jumps ashore. Thus, at the age of 35, with no money, no friends and no Spanish, he maroons himself in Argentina, where he will hang on, often penniless, for over two decades. He will never set foot in Poland again.
In a sense, though, Gombrowicz never really left his homeland. He carried the problem of Polishness with him into exile, scratching it like a persistent rash during his years in South America. It bored and infuriated him, but he kept going back to it.
As a Canadian, I’m no stranger to collective navel-gazing, but Polish self-consciousness seems to have a very different metaphysical heft to it. Whereas Gombrowicz experienced Polishness as this massive plenitude weighing down on him, Canadianness—and the very noun is awkward—tantalizes by its absence. Gombrowicz could spend decades interrogating his cultural identity, arguing with it, cursing it. A Canadian can only shrug, make a lame joke and change the subject.
‘Diary’ is a misleading title for this collection of rants, essays and ruminations. Published serially in a Polish émigré paper, these pieces are more properly feuilletons, a word with zero cultural traction in English (though many blogs are essentially feuilletons). The great advantage of this form is its elasticity: it can hold anything from shopping lists to high-flown literary theory (Gombrowicz indulges in both, and everything in between). In my current state of disenchantment with the novel, I find this discursive, fragmentary approach more honest, more true to life, than the planed and chiseled contours of fiction. Gombrowicz, being a novelist, would no doubt disagree—at length, and with crushing eloquence. So I offer this thought in the timid spirit of FWIW.
Whatever you want to call it, this book provides yet more evidence that being a genius in a cultural backwater is a very dubious gift. Among other things, it means having nobody to talk to (just ask Kierkegaard, or one of his warring pseudonyms). But Gombrowicz suffered under a double obscurity: first as a major writer in a minor language, and then as an exile in a country even more peripheral than his own. Throw in the fact that, from his vantage point, communist Poland was little more than a giant sarcophagus, offering an unresponsive face to his cries and complaints, and you have all the conditions for an absolute, soul-destroying, career-killing solitude.
It would be too much to say that Gombrowicz triumphed over these circumstances—for one thing, triumph wasn’t his style—but the Diary represents a kind of artistic accommodation with disaster. He lost everything a writer can lose—country, language, audience—and he still turned it to account, making something beautiful and true out of the very marginality that should have silenced him.
Bernard Lewis has acquired more languages than most people have sexual partners.
That lead-in was intended as hyperbole, until I did the math and realiBernard Lewis has acquired more languages than most people have sexual partners.
That lead-in was intended as hyperbole, until I did the math and realized it was potentially true in my case, depending on how you count languages (and sexual partners). So now I feel like a slacker in both departments.
Lewis published this memoir just a few months ago, at the inconceivable age of 96. True, he had a bit of help putting it together, but so what? Even supposing I make it to 96, I don’t plan on doing much beyond drooling into my All-Bran, so I’m awarding him an extra star just for coming out.
Still, Notes on a Century isn’t a great memoir. While surprisingly brisk and lucid, it’s just not that interesting. The few times it threatens to get spicy, Lewis draws back, coyly drawing a veil over his wartime service in MI6 by invoking the Official Secrets Act, and later cutting short a discussion of academic taboos on the grounds that they are, after all, taboos. Come on, man! You’re older than God and, professionally speaking, almost as untouchable. Publish and be damned, I say. But maybe that’s just the insouciance of early middle age talking. ...more
For anyone who’s a fan of Western civilization—as I am, most days—the fall of France in 1940 represents a s Oh France, why must you be so full of fail?
For anyone who’s a fan of Western civilization—as I am, most days—the fall of France in 1940 represents a spectacular, game-seven meltdown on the part of the home side. Born decades later and a continent away, I can still access some vicarious shame at that whole debacle. A great, modern democracy folding up like a set of Wal-Mart patio furniture – well, it’s something you never want to see, any more than you want to see your dad cry.
Scum of the Earth is Arthur Koestler’s brilliant, bitter take on the French collapse. Its main theme is that 1940 was more than just a military disaster; it was a complete moral capitulation. In his view, France—sour and divided, and half in love with easeful death—was already whupped before the first panzers nosed their way out of the Ardennes.
Koestler had good reason to be pissed off. Living in Paris when the war broke out, he was rounded up with hundreds of other ‘undesirable aliens’ and placed in an internment camp. Most of these men, including Koestler himself, were refugees from fascism, and asked for nothing better than to join the French army and fight the Nazis. Instead, the government let them rot in atrocious conditions and, when the Germans came, simply handed them over to the Gestapo (helpfully providing their dossiers). Koestler managed to escape to England, where he immediately sat down and wrote Scum of the Earth, at least in part as a well-deserved fuck you to France.
I’ll probably have a new theory next week, but as of now, I believe that one of literature’s noblest functions is to rescue things from oblivion. Which sounds pompous, but just amounts to this: bearing witness, getting it all down. You read a book like Scum of the Earth and suddenly a whole vanished world is before you again, with its stinks and slang, its gadgets and ambience. And then there are the people: ordinary people, mostly, who leer up out of the book for a page or two, say something trivial or profound, and fade back into history. At one point, Koestler catalogues some of his fellow internees in the filthy barrack at Le Vernet:
There was also the ex-Buddhist monk from Mongolia who sold postcards of nudes in Montparnasse cafes, and Balogh the Hungarian, who had been commander of a warship on the Danube and a stamp-collector, and who had been invited by King George V to London in 1912 to show his collection…There was Dessauer, the ex-rabbi and medical orderly, who wore his wristwatch on the wrist of a prosthesis which replaced his right arm; at night the prosthesis with the watch hung on a nail over his place in Barrack 33, and whoever wanted to know the time took Dessauer’s arm and carried it to the oil lamp next to the entrance. And there was Herr Birn, a German business man who had spent the four years of the Great War as a civilian prisoner in England and had learnt all the variants of the Italian opening by heart from the chess book and now, interned for a second time, learnt with the same German thoroughness the variants of the Queen’s Gambit, and yet, when it came to playing, lost every game within twenty moves.
So there they are: the exotic offscourings of wartime Paris, all doomed by some combination of French malice and French inertia. But a writer remembered them and put them in a book: a tenuous afterlife, you might say, but more than most of us will enjoy. ...more
Vladimir Nabokov was the Niles Crane of 20th-century literature: snooty, fastidious, and comically inept at being a normal guy. (And it’s part of his Vladimir Nabokov was the Niles Crane of 20th-century literature: snooty, fastidious, and comically inept at being a normal guy. (And it’s part of his fastidiousness that he would have despised my handy, pop-culture analogy). Even his ailments had something snobbish about them. I mean, synesthesia? Who has that? And what kind of douche decides that sleep is too plebeian? Would it have been so hard to come down with herpes and depression like everyone else?
Needless to say, Speak, Memory is one of the most brilliant autobiographies ever written, and I’m just delaying the moment when I throw my panties on the stage along with every other reviewer here. But first I need to make fun of Nabokov a bit more. Six pages into his foreword, he tosses off this gag-inducing little metaphor:
I hope to write some day a “Speak on, Memory,” covering the years 1940-1960 spent in America: the evaporation of certain volatiles and the melting of certain metals are still going on in my coils and crucibles.
That’s a fairly standard trope, I guess: the artist as alchemist. What irritates me about it is the self-complacency it implies: this is the uptown equivalent of hanging a “Genius at Work” sign on your cubicle wall. It’s tacky, not to mention unbearably precious. Also, wasn’t alchemy discredited centuries ago as a bogus pseudo-science?
In one sense, though, the metaphor is well-chosen, because Nabokov really did view art as some kind of occult jiggery-pokery:
I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
I dunno. It’s not that I expect every artist to justify the ways of God to man, or forge the conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul (blech), or help me free my mind so that my ass may follow, but that strikes me as a depressingly sterile notion of art. Games, magic, deception: it all sounds like an elaborate Easter egg hunt. Or a Dungeons & Dragons marathon. Either way, it’s something I grew out of a long time ago. And if you point out that Nabokov wrote Lolita, whereas I’ve written a bunch of book reports for a stupid website, I won’t have much of a comeback for you. Except shut up.
I clearly have huge problems with some of the assumptions behind Speak, Memory, but the book itself is just so damn beautiful that I can’t stay mad at it for long. People talk about Nabokov’s style as if it were some glittering, rococo gush, but his elaborations are never merely ornamental: they’re in the service of an almost preposterous precision. He wants to get it exactly right, and if that means ransacking the OED and piling up his clauses into syntactical Jenga towers – well, you’ll just have to sit there and take it. Or go play Wii. The fact is, the world is so immeasurably complex, and our perceptions are so deliriously rich that even the most exhaustive representation of one tiny patch of reality can only be a gross simplification – a thing of sticks and squiggles, daubed by a gifted chimpanzee. Nabokov’s prose is a bit less of a simplification than anyone else’s, that’s all. Meaning, he comes as close to honouring the riotous profusion of experience as any human being is likely to get.
There. I told you the panties would come off. ...more
It’s strange but arguably true: millions of people died in Siberia because a philosopher in London had carbuncles on his ass. Chaos theory now makes aIt’s strange but arguably true: millions of people died in Siberia because a philosopher in London had carbuncles on his ass. Chaos theory now makes a little more sense to me.
In a famous riff on Hegel, Marx once said that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Marx’s own biography suggests a different sequence. His life was a grubby, shambolic farce that somehow gave birth to a world-historic tragedy. Francis Wheen, the author of this generally excellent biography, snidely pooh-poohs the idea that Marx bears any responsibility for the Gulag, but this seems as naïve as the reductionism it was meant to counter. If Stalinism was a misreading of Marx, it was at least a plausible misreading. It can’t be a coincidence that every communist regime in history got Marx wrong in exactly the same way.
But, okay, Marx himself was no monster, and Wheen does a good job of humanizing the old bogeyman – almost too good a job, actually: his Marx is not just human, but hilariously, embarrassingly, disastrously human. For the first two-thirds of the book, Marx comes across as a bit of a loser, a schlemiel: living in rented rooms, shamelessly sponging off rich relatives and his good buddy Engels, refusing to get a real job, cowering in his study while his wife turned away creditors, fathering children with grim Victorian persistence (including one with the housekeeper), lancing the aforementioned carbuncles with a razor, getting massive boils on his penis, snoring on the sofa all day long while his kids romped among dirty dishes and broken furniture, confidently predicting revolution every other week (always wrongly), going on benders, writing thunderous, 200-page jeremiads against anyone who looked at him sideways, letting a friend fight a duel in his place (and take a bullet in the head), growing a freaky beard, malingering, and constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY complaining...
And yet, damn it, the man was a genius. Deirdre McCloskey, a hardcore neoliberal (and therefore the furthest thing imaginable from a Marxist) calls him the greatest social critic of the nineteenth century. As a philosopher and economist, he was a horror show, but as a writer and all-around shit disturber, he has few equals. If only he’d stuck to journalism...
The last years of Marx’s life were spent traipsing around the fashionable spas of Europe, where he charmed the other guests with his witty anecdotes and impeccable manners. He was also a doting grandfather. Eleven people showed up for his funeral. ...more
I dunno. I was expecting something a little jazzier, a little more hip to the jive. The title and subtitle seem to promise a searching, po-mo genre beI dunno. I was expecting something a little jazzier, a little more hip to the jive. The title and subtitle seem to promise a searching, po-mo genre bender, but How to Live is a fairly conventional biography that could have been written at any time in the last fifty years or so. The author comes across as an over-earnest popularizer: "See, kids? Isn’t Montaigne cool? Now I’m going to tell you about the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which is also super interesting. But first we have to go all the way back to the Reformation. Can anyone tell me what the Reformation was...?" Ugh. I may be an idiot, but I’m not twelve.
OTOH, thanks to this book, I can now add Montaigne to my mental list of writers whose penises were probably smaller than mine. So far, it’s just him and poor old Malcolm Lowry, but new candidates are always welcome. Send photos. ...more
Samuel Butler got off one of the great lines of the nineteenth century when he said of the Carlyles, “It was very good of God to let Mr. and Mrs. CarlSamuel Butler got off one of the great lines of the nineteenth century when he said of the Carlyles, “It was very good of God to let Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” But isn’t that a good definition of marriage in general: a legally-sanctioned concentration of misery? I kid, I kid. Settle down.
Personally, I’ve never had much luck with Thomas Carlyle. That lumbering bombast, those prophetic poses – ugh. And let’s not even get into his politics. Like Ezra Pound, another “romantic authoritarian,” he’s always struck me as a talented crank.
No, the real reason I read this (excellent) double biography was my ghoulish crush on Jane Carlyle. Poor, witty, wonderful Jane. To whom some fusty old Tory once said, “You would be a great deal more amiable, my dear, if you weren’t so damnably clever.” Of whom somebody else said that she could tell a story about a broom handle and make it interesting. Who wrote some of the funniest, liveliest letters I’ve ever read. (Going through these same letters after she died, Carlyle declared her a better writer than his friends Dickens and Thackeray. A stretch, certainly, but not by much.)
But after spending four-hundred pages with Jane, I’ve decided I wouldn’t want to be married to her. In the Carlyle household, she seems to have played the role of court jester, constantly pelting the resident genius with zingers while he just sat there grimacing and the guests shifted uncomfortably. Her whole outlook was fundamentally ironic and skeptical, which is fine, but when you’re married to an acknowledged Great Man, with a gloomy, tormented soul, who just wants to finish his porridge and get back to work on his latest tome – well, you’re going to have problems.
In her introduction, Ashton remarks that the Carlyles had one of the best-documented marriages of the nineteenth century, with heaps of letters and memoirs and scattered tittle-tattle for her to draw on. Yet certain insoluble questions remain, and to a prurient posterity (i.e. ME), these just happen to be the most interesting ones. Did Thomas and Jane ever actually have sex? (There were rumours of impotence and a “blank marriage”). Was Jane addicted to morphine, or merely an occasional user? Did she fall in love with Giuseppe Mazzini, the fascinating Italian republican? Was Thomas in love with Lady Ashburton, the equally fascinating socialite? We’ll never know for sure. Every life has its lacunas. Or did have, before facebook.
In the end, I guess there’s nothing to be learned here. The Carlyle’s marriage is just another episode in the eternal tragicomedy of male-female relations. I think Jane, at least, understood this early on. When she was still young and hopeful, she wrote to her depressed husband from the other side of England:
I wanted to kiss you into something like cheerfulness and the length of a kingdom was betwixt us – and if it had not – the probabilities are that with the best intentions I should have quarrelled with you rather. Poor men and women! What a time they have in this world – by destiny and their own deserving – But as Mr Bradfute used to say ‘tell us something we do not know.’ ...more
It takes a big man to admit how deeply he’s been hurt by a woman—and an even bigger man to do it without sounding like Conor Oberst. In his prime, IsaIt takes a big man to admit how deeply he’s been hurt by a woman—and an even bigger man to do it without sounding like Conor Oberst. In his prime, Isaac Hayes could feel secure enough to cry like a girl, because everyone knew he was still a bad mutha (shut yo mouth). More recently, Ghostface Killah taught us that even gangstas get all torn up inside, and that a kick in the nuts doesn’t have to impair your swagger permanently. And just this past summer, Cee-Lo Green tried desperately to “forget” (call me a prude, but I prefer the radio edit.)
Grégoire Bouillier, being a bookish Frenchman, inclines more toward the emo end of the scale. After being dumped by his girlfriend in a particularly disorienting way—she just up and leaves one day, without a word—Bouillier spends years wallowing in sweet, sweet pain. L’Invité Mystère tells the story of how he clawed his way out of it, got his mojo back, and Learned To Love Again. In other words, it’s a sort of Mange, Prie, Aime for Parisian intellectuals. Sure, it boasts classier literary antecedents and more daring syntax than Gilbert’s book, but the trajectory is similar: heartbreak, acceptance, redemption. And that’s okay. Parisian intellectuals need love and redemption, too—I SUPPOSE. I’m just suspicious of any memoir that refines all the messiness out of life, reducing it to a pat narrative schema. That’s not how life feels to me. There’s triumph in it, definitely, and tons of failure, but there are also great heaping gobs of amorphous stuff, and distilling all that chaos into a three-act journey of self-discovery seems like a massive cop-out to me. Which is why nobody’s optioning my life story, I guess.
On a more gossipy note, I see reality keeps gifting Bouillier with fresh material. Sophie Calle, the conceptual artist that Bouillier hooks up with at the end of the book, has since been dumped by him, almost as brutally as he was dumped by his previous girlfriend. Apparently, he gave her the bad news in a “breakup email,” which she took and used as the centerpiece of a popular exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Ouch. It’s never a good idea to piss off a conceptual artist, Grégoire. And Sophie? If I may? As Ghostface puts it (in the radio version), “What he did was wack, but you don’t get your man back like that.”
People died differently in the nineteenth century, and they took a long time doing it. The appalling deaths described in the Goncourt Journal are enouPeople died differently in the nineteenth century, and they took a long time doing it. The appalling deaths described in the Goncourt Journal are enough to make you get down on your knees and thank God and Pasteur for antibiotics. Henri Murger, author of the source novel for La Bohème, contracted something called ‘senile gangrene’ and literally rotted to pieces; when his attendants tried to trim his moustache, his lip came off. The journalist Robert Caze punctured his liver in a duel and spent months dying in a fourth-floor apartment. And then there’s Jules de Goncourt himself, who by his late thirties was showing symptoms of advanced syphilis: memory loss, aphasia, paralysis and dementia, each stage being scrupulously recorded by his brother in the journal they had shared.
Why do I keep coming back, year after year, to this cynical, malicious, death-haunted book? Or did I just answer my own question? And while I’m on the subject, why are all my favourite books cynical, malicious and death-haunted? Why are they so freaking French, in other words? But let’s not talk about that now.
You know how they say every generation thinks it discovered sex? Well, maybe it would be equally true to say that every generation thinks it invented modernity. Already the fashions and gadgetry of the 90s—remember flannel shirts? The Discman? The ‘information superhighway’?—must seem ineffably lame to the smug fifteen-year-olds I see on the subway blasting that hippity hop racket out of their so-called ‘cellular telephones’.
On the evidence of the Goncourt Journal, though, the signifiers of hipness—irony, urbanity, a disaffected pose—were well in place long before Lou Reed first put on sunglasses and a sneer. Historically speaking, the brothers may have been stranded among the plush and gaslights of the Second Empire, but spiritually they were already living in their own private twentieth century. It’s not included in this translation, but there’s a passage in the original where the Goncourts and a bunch of their Boho friends are sitting around and bitching about how disgustingly modern they feel. When someone or other disagrees, good old Théophile Gautier gets up and declares himself so modern he wants to puke.
That’s another thing about the journal: it’s funny. The Goncourts knew all the leading writers of the day and used to host glorified piss-ups for them at a chi-chi restaurant in Paris. So you had all these impossibly witty guys hanging out and totally burning each other over oysters and champagne. You get the impression the Goncourts spent the whole night jotting one-liners down on napkins and muttering to themselves, ‘Oh man, this is gold.’
And what did they talk about, these assembled geniuses? Women, mostly. Sure, every once in a while there’d be a screaming match about prose style, but they always came back to women. Women and sex. It’s almost sweet, in a pervy, French sort of way. (At one point, Zola confesses that he fantasizes about pubescent girls: ‘Yes, it frightens me sometimes…I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.’)
With Jules’ death in 1870, some of the youthful piss and vinegar goes out of the journal, but if Edmond was a little more decorous than his brother, he was definitely the bitchier of the two. I don’t think I’ve read anything as eloquently catty as this tremendous putdown of Hippolyte Taine and his wife:
The stupid walk of that potbellied clergyman, with his sly, hypocritical gaze hidden behind his spectacles, and the swarthy, unhealthy ugliness of the horrifying wife, who looks like a diseased silkworm which a schoolboy has daubed with ink, make a truly dreadful sight for the eyes of an aesthete.
I have no idea what a diseased silkworm might look like, but it sounds really, really mean.
I’ve nattered on shamelessly but I don’t know if I’ve managed to convey just how awesome the journal is. That’s the problem with trying to talk about a book that’s a whole lot smarter and funnier than you are: it ends up judging you. ...more
When it comes to David Foster Wallace, I’m not exactly a ‘howling fantod’—more of a casual admirer—but I still find it difficult to write about him wiWhen it comes to David Foster Wallace, I’m not exactly a ‘howling fantod’—more of a casual admirer—but I still find it difficult to write about him without getting sappy. What made his death that much harder to take was the sense that we’d lost, not just a good writer, but a good man. And there isn’t such a plentiful supply of either quantity lying around that we can afford to be blasé about it.
On my emotional map of world literature, Wallace is right next door to George Orwell—which is odd because, aside from being wonderful essayists, they really don’t have much in common. The hidden link, I’d say, is their commitment to the same humble ideal: decency. This is a great word when you think about it. More down-to-earth than the pompous ‘virtue’, it’s one of the few ethical terms you can throw around without embarrassment or scare quotes. And I think that’s why they both prized it so much: it’s modest; it’s democratic. For the disabused British socialist and the anguished American post-modernist, decency was what was left over once you subtracted all the absolutes and ‘smelly little orthodoxies’. It wasn’t much, and maybe in the end it wasn’t enough for either of them, but it was all they had.
When Wallace gave this extended interview to David Lipsky back in 1996, he was about the same age I am now. Apart from the galling fact that he was already a Famous Writer and I’m, like, so not, I can relate to many of his concerns. The problems he dwells on are those of a youngish man who’s finally figured some stuff out, but whose shit is not, shall we say, as cohesively together as he would like: Am I on the right track, career-wise? How can I avoid being more of a dick than I have to be? Why can’t I keep a woman in my life, or do I even want to? Bandana or ponytail? (Neither, in my case, but it was the 90s, after all).
One of the neat things about Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is that, threaded through the book, hidden under all the slang and joshing, are the outlines of an artistic credo that Wallace is trying to get across. He’s quite diffident about it, pretends to a certain hesitation, politely considers Lipsky’s input, but what he keeps coming back to is the idea that literature mitigates loneliness. I don’t know if Wallace would’ve endorsed this image, but you sort of get the impression he saw humanity as a collection of prisoners in isolation cells--and a great book as the sound of another prisoner tapping on the wall.
It’s impossible not to read this interview prospectively (if that’s the opposite of retrospectively), with one eye on Wallace’s eventual fate. The thing is, he’s so lively here, so funny and gracious and likable, that you can’t help rooting for the guy, even knowing how illogical and hopeless that is. It’s a bit like re-reading some blubbery-sad storybook when you’re a kid and willing it, somehow, to turn out differently this time. But you learn pretty early on that it never does. ...more
Beset as one avowedly is by vernal distractions—I speak of those amplitudes of exposed bosom, those beguiling expanses of derrière sheathed in lycra, Beset as one avowedly is by vernal distractions—I speak of those amplitudes of exposed bosom, those beguiling expanses of derrière sheathed in lycra, whose appearance heralds, more surely than the robin, the advent of spring—thus beset, I say, it is doubtful whether a mere book review, however eagerly undertaken, could represent the ideal disposal of one’s lamentably scant provision of time and energy.
Yeah, I’ll stop now, cuz man, writing like Henry James is almost as exhausting as reading Henry James.
Depending on your mood and tolerance level, James’ hyper-mandarin late style can either be pure bliss or pure torture. Or, as in my case, some masochistic combination of the two. Reading A Small Boy and Others, I kept thinking, “Jesus, Hank, this is lovely. Just exquisite. But what the hell are you talking about?” Too often, his fussy little revelations get lost in the syntactical finery of the prose. It’s like opening an elaborately made-up parcel—ribbons, Styrofoam chips, tissue paper—only to find a ten-dollar gift card from Wendy’s. Gee, thanks, grandma.
Here’s what I mean (and this is a fairly straightforward sentence by his standards):
Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy.
Translation: there were a lot of drunks in the family. Sure, it’s kind of funny the way he puts it—or not funny, exactly, but ‘droll’, very droll (you can almost hear James’ effeminate titter at his own cleverness). But, come on, dude, a little brevity with your wit.
So by now you might be asking yourself: is this Henry James guy really worth the pain in the ass, because I’ve got four hungry children and a crop in the field, you know? Yes, yes, he is. Mos def (I only speak for A Small Boy: my thoughts on the big, dense novels of his last period are between me and God). There are solid compensations here for all the artsy-fartsy mannerisms he subjects you to.
Ostensibly a memoir, A Small Boy dispenses with most of the usual genre markers—like, you know, facts and dates and stuff—in order to reconstruct the moral ambience of James’ childhood. He tell us on the first page that he wants to write about his brother William (then recently dead) but soon forgets about this pious little project, leaving poor William a vague, otherworldly presence for most of the book. Instead, he gives us a series of highly-subjective impressions, both of places (New York, Paris) and of the curious ‘types’ that peopled them. And somewhere at the back of everything there’s this neat little submerged künstlerroman unfolding, too (What? Künstlerroman? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.)
James was an old man when he came to write A Small Boy, and there’s something avaricious about the way he fondles his glittering hoard of memories. Sixty years on, he’s still savouring ‘the orgy of the senses and riot of the mind’ that was his childhood. The strongest passages in the book—passages where he loses himself in a sort of delirium of recollection—are those that evoke the ‘lost paradise’ of old New York, as seen through the eyes of a strange, observant little boy who can only marvel at the bewildering profusion of the city:
I have still in my nostril the sense of the abords of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters, where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners all groceries; and the groceries indeed largely of the “green” order, so far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and implements…Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned…
James’ New York is still half-wild and only fitfully cosmopolitan; if a nascent theatre industry has already plastered Broadway with garish playbills, there are still goats grazing in vacant lots and coaches getting bogged down in unpaved streets. In this semi-urbanized Arcadia of ice-cream parlours and waffle stands, the young James ‘dawdles’ and ‘gapes’ (two of his favourite verbs) like some precocious flâneur, a Yankee Baudelaire in a sailor suit.
My quarrel with the book is part of the larger, class-based quarrel I’ve always had with James. His attitude is very much that of the rentier, someone who can afford to remain vague about certain large facts—sex and politics come to mind—while taking a dilettantish pleasure in the free play of his own capacious consciousness. In the Jamesian economy, consciousness is the ultimate consumer good, a luxury item only available to those with expensively-formed tastes and high-powered perceptions. I genuinely admire the man’s writing, but in the same way that I admire the sleek design of a Jaguar: a little resentfully, from a distance, and with the suppressed desire to smash its owner’s smug, stupid face.
But whatevs. A great book is its own justification, isn’t it? And scruples are for lightweights. I really did love A Small Boy, and if that makes me a traitor to my principles—well, that’s cool. I can get new ones. ...more
Back in my jazzbo days, I had this one Art Pepper LP. At the time, I didn’t know much about his life, but the album cover told a story in itself. TherBack in my jazzbo days, I had this one Art Pepper LP. At the time, I didn’t know much about his life, but the album cover told a story in itself. There was Pepper: a shady-looking dude, his once-handsome features coarsened by years of hard living, a bare forearm displaying crude jailhouse tats. He looked more like an old carny than a jazz musician. Yet the music itself was in stark contrast to this rough exterior: unguardedly tender and deeply beautiful, it had no earthly business coming out of that man’s horn. But that was Art Pepper: when he wasn’t being a white-trash fuckup—shooting smack, stealing auto parts, going in and out of prison—he recorded some of the loveliest jazz in history.
Straight Life, Pepper’s oral autobiography, doesn’t shed much light on this dichotomy. Pepper himself seems as mystified as anyone by the source of his talent. It was always just there, apparently, and could be summoned at will. No matter how strung out he was, no matter how many months it had been since he’d picked up a saxophone, put a battered old horn in his mouth and imperishable sounds poured out of him.
Part of the book’s magic is that, throughout, Pepper remains blithely unaware of his own assholery. He’ll tell these completely insane stories as if they were the most natural things in the world, fully expecting the reader’s sympathy and adoration, and the whole time your jaw’s hanging open and you’re thinking: “Holy. Fuck. I cannot believe you’re telling me this. But don’t stop now, you crazy son-of-a-bitch.” What makes it even more insane is that all of this stuff was dictated to his wife. The chicks he “balled”, the joys of heroin, the hare-brained robberies he pulled to support his habit: nothing’s off-limits, and everything’s recounted with the same naïve gusto.
Laurie Pepper, the wife in question, made a crucial (and brave) editorial decision: she sought out dozens of her husband’s colleagues and cronies, put them on tape, then interspersed Art’s narrative with these other depositions, thus setting up a counterpoint to Pepper’s self-mythologizing. So in one section you have Pepper reminiscing about his years in San Quentin, bragging about what a bad-ass he was and how he’d decided he needed to kill someone to cement his rep. And he totally would have done it, too—had the shiv made and everything! Then he got early parole. Bummer. A page or two later, one of the guys he was in the joint with—a real bad-ass— is laughing good-naturedly about what a “pathological physical coward” Art was. The book would’ve been amazing in any case, I think, but it’s these choral interludes that make it the stone-cold masterpiece it is.
In fairness to Pepper, it must be said that almost everybody liked him, even those who knew better than to trust him. They couldn’t help it. Like a lot of weak people, he had an insatiable need for love and a cunning ability to extort it.
The thing that fascinates and horrifies me about the man is that, while he experienced enough pleasure and pain for ten lifetimes, he never really learned anything, never repented, never changed. He wasn’t a malicious person, by any means, just incredibly selfish—one of those charming rogues who blunder their way through life, leaving broken hearts and ruination in their wake. If his talent exempted him from normal accountability to some degree, his physical beauty did the rest (everyone remarks on how hot he was, including Art himself). Men wanted to be his buddy and give him free drugs, and women wanted to take care of him. What chance did he have? Poor bastard. I don’t envy him one bit. But it must have been a freaky trip while it lasted. ...more
A ‘fag hag’ is a straight woman who enjoys the company of gay men. Even I know that. But what do you call a straight guy who digs lesbians? There’s goA ‘fag hag’ is a straight woman who enjoys the company of gay men. Even I know that. But what do you call a straight guy who digs lesbians? There’s got to be a slang term for that, right? Whatever it is, I think I might be one. Not that I have a lot of lesbian friends or anything, but at parties I tend to hit it off with outspoken, crop-haired women with alarming neckties. I just have a good rapport with them for some reason. Of course, I also have a good rapport with elderly ladies, pre-pubescent girls and close female relatives. Pattern? There’s no pattern here. What are you talking about?
Terry Castle is my kind of lesbian. She likes and admires men, has an irreverent sense of humour and takes an almost fanboyish interest in cool stuff like jazz and war. Plus, she’s one of the best literary journalists around: her book reviews have that mix of sass and erudition that is, with me, an unfailing erectile aid.
So I went into The Professor all excited, thinking it was a collection of her reviews. Nope. Turns out it’s a series of autobiographical pieces. This shouldn’t have been a problem in itself. After all, I’m the guy who’s been making himself obnoxious around here by crapping all over the novel and valorizing the personal essay. But now I see there’s a point where the personal essay can become a bit too…personal. For me, that threshold was crossed early on in The Professor, where Castle spends a whole page cataloguing the dozens of CDs she brought along on a road trip. Okay, she has surprisingly catholic tastes for a middle-aged English prof (Sonic Youth and Fatboy Slim had me raising an eyebrow) but a full page? Is this some kind of Rabelaisian list-making thing? Or just self-indulgence?
Maybe what it comes down to is a failure of sympathy on my part. Call it sexism or what you will, but there are certain areas of female experience—or let’s say, white, upper-middle class female experience—that I just don’t care about. Castle has a difficult relationship with her mother; she’s guiltily obsessed with home décor; she’s acutely status conscious—things she has in common with about, oh, 80 million other American women. And that’s fine. I’m not saying my own anxieties and preoccupations are any more interesting than hers, because they’re not. But at least I’m not trying to make a memoir out of them (yet).
Another bias of mine: I view memoirs as a form of disaster tourism. I expect to be appalled and horrified—from a safe distance. Political prisoners, sex maniacs, hopeless junkies: these are the people I want to hear from. I demand exoticism in autobiography. But the contours of Castle’s experiences are all-too familiar to me. Take away her gender and sexual orientation and her life starts to look a lot like mine: pathetic and mildly awful at times, but mostly sort of mundane and comfortable.
Certainly Castle is amusing about the absurdities of her bobo-lesbian lifestyle (lesbobo?) but is that enough? Do irony and self-mockery make solipsism okay? I want to say yes, if only to enable my own solipsism, but I’m not sure that’s the right answer. ...more
You know that weird, poignant vibe you get from old photos—all those smiling people, so interesting and life-like, and all so dead, dead, dead? That’sYou know that weird, poignant vibe you get from old photos—all those smiling people, so interesting and life-like, and all so dead, dead, dead? That’s the feeling Kilvert’s Diary gives me: a kind of naïve melancholy. To think that these colourful personalities, these vivid moments, are simply gone. And then to reflect that we’re going too, and just as fast. Hate to bring you down, kids, but there it is.
Maybe I’m projecting my morbid anxieties onto the book, but I don’t think so; I think this sense of the heartbreaking ephemerality of things is woven into the text by Kilvert himself. But that’s one reason people keep diaries, isn’t it? To salvage a few odds and ends before it all goes under. It may not add up to much, it may not make a damn bit of sense, but it happened and it was real and if we don’t hold on to it, who will?
All of which is very human and touching, until you remember that the average person’s diary is a vain, tedious little chronicle (unless you happen to be sleeping with that person, in which case it’s bound to be shattering, so just don’t.). Personally, I can hardly bear to look at my old diaries now, and when I do, the former self I meet there isn’t the sort of guy I’d want to chill out and play X-box with; usually he’s the sort of guy I’d want to knee in the groin.
So what makes Kilvert different? Well, unlike so many of us today for whom “blog” and “journal” are verbs, Kilvert just wasn’t that interested in himself. He didn’t waste a lot of time staring at the glittery snow globe of his inner life. The world was enough for him. It was a small, quiet, circumscribed world, but it gave him all the nourishment he needed.
As a curate in a rural corner of Victorian England, Kilvert saw his share of life’s unpleasantness. His duties brought him into daily contact with the poor and infirm; he visited their homes, drank their tea and listened to their stories (and horrifying stories they are, too: murders, suicides, insanity—my God, the insanity: every other house in nineteenth-century England seemed to have a mad relative stashed away in some upsairs room).
And he noticed things. That’s what I love about him: his endless delight in the quirks of human behaviour:
...A note was brought to me from David Vaughan and his son William was waiting outside. So I had him in and gave him some beer. He was rather shy and constrained and sat for a long time still with the tumbler of beer in his hand and looking at nothing. I could not conceive why he did not drink the beer. Then I thought he was ill. At last he faced round on his chair half wheel and pronounced solemnly and formally, ‘My best respects to you, Sir.’ After having delivered himself of this respectful sentiment he imbibed some beer. It was a bit of perfect good breeding.
It’s nothing much, I guess—just some guy drinking beer. But it’s characteristic of Kilvert that he picks up on the man’s exaggerated refinement. He’s clearly amused, but it’s a good-natured amusement; it’s generous.
The diary is full of moments like this, tiny, luminous moments that are just...there. When he’s at his best, his eye for the stray, telling detail is almost Tolstoyan:
[I:] tried to catch the 8.45 train but while Henry Dew and I were running along the line to the station we heard the train coming behind us and it glided past close blazing with lamps into the station where it stopped half a minute and was off again to Hay in spite of Henry Dew’s running and hooting. So I walked home. Past and left behind one roaring brook after another, Brilley, Rhydspence, Cabalva. Over the border out of England into Wales in the dark, and one man was bringing another deadly sick out of the Brilley Rhysdpence Inn, the old timbered house, into the road.
The lights of the train, the border crossed in the dark, the sick man carried out of the “timbered house”: he makes you see it all.
Every diary has its longueurs, and Kilvert’s is no exception. An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. These are fine in small doses, but as a dedicated urbanite, I find beautiful scenery kind of blah. Give me a nice, flat parking lot to look at, a strip mall— anything but some boring old mountain.
One other thing. Kilvert was a sexually-frustrated bachelor for most of the period covered by the diary. You get the sense he was quite the charmer, but even so it couldn’t have been easy for an upright, single clergyman to get laid back then. So there are a lot of impassioned descriptions of pretty women where the poor guy’s longing is embarrassingly obvious. And, okay, I can understand. But he also writes just as yearningly about very young girls. I’m talking eight, nine years old. It’s creepy—all the more so because he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s sexualizing them. What was it with Victorian men and their little-girl fantasies? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. ...more
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