“Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our drAn astonishing writer. I love his metaphors:
“Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our dreams, unshaved and reproachful.”
“In the hollow of her neck there was a smudge of red paint, just where a grandmother in a play might have worn a cameo on a black ribbon.”
”The sitter was posing as though his profile was about to go on the coin of the realm.”
“Outside, saltimbanques of snow were leaping up and flipping backwards.”
The story is set unpromisingly in a 1950s midwest America. The narrator at its start is 17. He attends Eton boarding school. No, not the real Eton but a fake Eton which is just across the street from an arts academy somewhere in the midwest. The two young populations rarely mingle, but our narrator, bored to death, has decided to be different and make the crossing. He meets Maria, an artist, with whom he’d rather fall in love than be gay. For at the time “The three most heinous crimes known to man were Communism, heroin, and homosexuality.”
The nearby filthy metropolis to which they abscond is Detroit. The law student William Everett Hunton has to be experienced on the page to be believed; he is a cock-crazy maniac, who prefers them short but “beercan thick.” Then there’s Tex the bookseller and Mason his unpaid clerk, and Lou, one of the narrator’s lovers, and Sean, another lover who goes mad so incapable is he of dealing with his “criminal” nature.
Then comes the summer after the narrator’s freshman year at the University of Michigan. During this joyous weather his father (humorless, business-minded) seeks to drive the narrator’s gayness out of him through a superfluity of yard work. The old man’s apoplectic at his ex-wife’s suggestion that his son is gay because of the divorce. The guilt-ridden father naturally hates his son for this and takes it out on him in yard work. His new step-mother tells of how much the old man has wanted to kill him. We find out later, tellingly, that dad hates men, doesn’t trust them, and is very much a loner, if a successful one.
Last I heard, a month ago, there were 77,000 young men still in so-called regression therapy programs run by US churches. That‘s 2018. Can you imagine what the climate must have been like in the late 1950s? And this is a narrator who knows what he is by the time he’s out of adolescence. Sadly he’s in thrall to a speed-freak psychiatrist who promises to cure him. His father is footing the bill. He is sick shamed by what he is: the crimes he commits, his disease. He yearns for the no-self of Buddhism. He dearly wants the cure his wired shrink has promised him. He hates his incessant men’s room cruising. No one wants to be gay, you see. The mainstream medical establishment still views homosexuality as an illness, and so it remains a pathology described in the pages of the DSM. No wonder James Baldwin moved to Paris about this time, 1955. No wonder White lived there for 16 years.
(“In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it. The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ for people ‘in conflict with’ their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.”—from Psychology Today)
The queer railery scenes are quaint, the old-fashioned shrill queenliness funny. “We piled into a car with some friends of his, all a few years older than I, and as we passed a policeman directing traffic, the driver lowerered his window and shouted, ‘Love your hat, Tilly!’” “Hush, you’re a caution,” someone in the backseat said, “don’t upset Lily law, she be bad, that girl.” I’m no fan of sex in novels, but at least White’s has the virtue of alacrity, like violence in Poe.
This fiction gives voice to an historically maligned population, and that’s vital, but in the end it transcends social function. I’m trying to think of some of the great American novels of the 20th century. You can draw up your own list. I’ll include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I think this novel stands securely among them. There’s not a false page in it. The novel then ends with the Stonewall Uprising, the first roar of Gay Pride in 1969. By this time the narrator is 29.
This is an astonishing book! I also enjoyed White’s remorselessly grim Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel. I look forward to catching up on his output, which is ample, though this one calls for immediate re-reading....more
Part 1 is engaging but a little dull. Part 2, which is the so-called simple astrological experiment Jung conducted to test his theory, is all statistiPart 1 is engaging but a little dull. Part 2, which is the so-called simple astrological experiment Jung conducted to test his theory, is all statistical math and thus incomprehensible to me. But Parts 3 and 4, addressing similarities between Synchronicity and certain aspects of the world as explained in Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, not to mention parallels with Virgil, Agrippa, Synesius, Kepler, Hippocrates and Schopenhauer, alone repays one’s interest....more
Brilliant. A wonder and a joy! It's the mid-1930s and Herr Professor and Frau Mitwisser, being Jews, have fled Hitler's Germany with their big family.Brilliant. A wonder and a joy! It's the mid-1930s and Herr Professor and Frau Mitwisser, being Jews, have fled Hitler's Germany with their big family. Thanks to the charitable Quakers, known for their tradition of religious tolerance, the Mitwisser Family is brought to New York, to Albany, where the professor begins to lecture at the Quaker college. Mrs. Mitwisser is deeply depressed, however, sometimes verging on the delusional, having had to abandon her high-profile scientific pursuits. (She'd worked closely with Erwin Schrödinger). She has now withdrawn from the rest of the family and lies inert in a remote sitting room. Our narrator, eighteen-year-old Rose, answers an ad in an Albany newspaper and comes to work for the Mitwissers. Actually, the ad is hilariously vague as to just what Rose's duties are going to be, but she answers it anyway because she has to get out of her cousin Bertrand's apartment since he's fallen in love with the loudmouthed Communist Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards), and Rose has fallen for Bertrand who, though very kind, just thinks of her as a "kid," which she resents.
The Mitwisser household also includes sixteen-year-old Annaliese, three younger boys (Heinz, Willi and Gert) and a toddler daughter (Waltraut). Soon they move to the Bronx because the professor, torn from Europe's great libraries due to the imminent war, has to continue his scholarly study of a heretical group of tenth-century Jews, the Karaites, at the New York Public Library. Interlarded with the story of the Mitwissers and Rose and the Karaites is the story of The Bear Boy. As a child, during the decade of The Great War, this fellow became the model for his father's dazzlingly successful series of children's books. Now in mid-life he's a lost soul who hates his immense wealth and lives a semi-debauched, drifter's existence. That's pretty much the setup, so I'll leave you hanging there.
Suffice it to say, the novel's language is rich without being daunting, its plot sprightly, and its structure awe inspiring. I really came to care for these vividly drawn characters, even the cynical Bear Boy, whose influence as patron of the Mitwisser household causes major friction between the professor and his wife. Cynthia Ozick is my new favorite writer. I plan to read everything she's written. Also exquisitely good are her The Messiah of Stockholm and The Puttermesser Papers, both of which I have reviewed....more
Of the five or six Simenons I've read, The Strangers In the House strikes me as the one generating the most narrative pleasure. A discussion of the plOf the five or six Simenons I've read, The Strangers In the House strikes me as the one generating the most narrative pleasure. A discussion of the plot-line would tell you little about the joys of this volume--it's all in the actual writing--so I'll limit myself to the following. At the core of the novel is a man, Loursat, a lawyer, who has lived a deadened life since his wife left him for another man eighteen years ago. Now, with the commission of a murder that takes place in his own home, he returns to life. He is awakened when he undertakes the defense of an innocent young man and is driven to stands of principle he had previously thought beyond his burgundy-numbed mind. I found the book an emotionally powerful marvel. The final trial scene is handled in a way that seems fresh and appealing even today, seventy-two years after publication (1940). Instead of hauling each witness through the dock, Simenon let's us know of all the preparation that has gone into the defense and, while the prosecutor is prattling on and everyone listens, Loursat mentally makes his argument, mostly by recalling bits of deposed testimony. I don't say this is a striking innovation on Simenon's part, but it is, again, so perfectly executed. The book's considerable pleasures lie in its compression, in the author's ability to emphasize only the most salient aspects of the story. No word, as they say, is wasted. One last note, I have never been so gripped by the simple description of a physical structure since Bleak House. Though Dickens had the luxury of length, Simenon does not. He merely possesses a model linguistic economy. Many thanks to New York Review Books for winnowing this one from the Andean heap....more
This is a second volume of what is now a three-volume sequence. The new Copper Canyon Press edition W.S. Merwin Selected Translations contains three vThis is a second volume of what is now a three-volume sequence. The new Copper Canyon Press edition W.S. Merwin Selected Translations contains three volumes: (1) Selected Translations 1948-1968--a much loved book that I return to frequently, (2) this second volume 1968-1978, and (3) a third volume of poetry translated since 1978. The most recent set of translations I've yet to read. This volume I recommend highly....more
In The Lime Twig, as in a dream, the reader is never sure of his or her footing. One moves ahead tentatively, trepidatiously. It's rather astonishing In The Lime Twig, as in a dream, the reader is never sure of his or her footing. One moves ahead tentatively, trepidatiously. It's rather astonishing the intensity of suspense Hawkes is able to sustain. There's also this bit of ventriloquism he pulls off, since he's American but writing about an English racing caper and the vocabulary is very British. Why, an Anthony Powell on psychotropic drugs might have written it! Hawkes's talent for picking out the most vivid details when, say, describing a track crowd is stunning. He moves with dazzling facility from one puzzling scene to the next. You're never quite sure what anyone wants. Only slowly is this revealed, and then elliptically, discursively. There are those with criminal motives, thugs, meeting up here with relative innocents who thought they might penetrate this rough world to make a quick buck. How naïve. How tragic. Hawkes's Wikipedia page calls him a postmodernist. This comment must refer to other titles. For this narrative does not resort to self-referential metafictional devices. The erotic penultimate scene I found harrowing, exhausting. William Styron once said that a great novel always leaves us slightly exhausted in the end. The Lime Twig does the job in a mere 175 pages. A literary thriller of a very high order. I cannot praise it enough....more
Few texts, I have found, are as joyous to read as Moby-Dick. I could count them on one hand. An almost intoxicating abundance of narrative pleasure. DFew texts, I have found, are as joyous to read as Moby-Dick. I could count them on one hand. An almost intoxicating abundance of narrative pleasure. Did Melville not know that the whale is a mammal? So far it seems he does not, though he understands they’re vertebrates like us. Astonishing that I could have forgotten this since my third reading. This is my fourth.
Melville’s use of asides and soliloquy can only be described as Shakespearean. And the speeches of Ahab, too, in his stentorian throes, remind very much of the Bard. Then the ecstatic “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter seems so close in its dark frivolity to the night-town sequence in Ulysses. I wonder if Joyce knew it? Then there’s the idea of sperm whales as aggressive, which is not at all the case; they are placid animals. Not sure of their attitude though if you try to kill them. They just might take exception to your barbs.
Chapter 55 “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” is funny. The author critiques a number of errant depictions of whales, among them Perseus Descending by William Hogarth. Melville complains: “The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and it’s distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for Traitor’s Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower.” (p. 250)
Regarding Chapter 64 “Stubb’s Supper” there is something close to minstrelsy in the cook’s speech to the sharks, made at the insistence of Stubb, one of the mates. I could not help thinking it’s meant by Stubb to demean the black cook’s character. Melville gives the cook the freedom to speak his mind, and there’s no indication that he’s a slave, but rather a freeman who signed for the cruise like everyone else. Stubb puts him through his paces. It’s cruel; he’s ninety. We’re it not for the book’s general celebration of ethnic diversity—see Ishmael’s warm meeting with Queequeg, with whom he sleeps at the inn before sailing—were it not for this celebration of diversity throughout one might take offense here.
Whale killing is tragic, and an entirely worthy subject for one of our greatest writers.
“As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot holes of noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and little merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on his flank.
“‘A nice spot,’ cried Flask; ‘just let me prick him there once.’
“‘Avast!’ cried Starbuck, ‘there’s no need of that!’
“But humane Starbuck was too late. At that instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than insufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darting at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurgling‘s the spray column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.” (p. 331)
Published in 1851, it is not the most up-to-date reference work on whales. The narrator seems not to have believed that the sperm whale could in its numbers ever be driven to the edge of extinction. Moreover, the book was published before On the Origin of Species. Melville acknowledges the whale’s anatomical similarities with man, but he never sees that the whale like mankind is a mammalian. Several other mistakes of this magnitude also. But we don’t read Moby Dick for the science, do we? You read it for the prose. And that is an unalloyed joy!
Last note, I would be grateful to anyone who could explain to me Melville’s use of the semicolon in Moby Dick. There’s no rhyme or reason that I can see....more
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