A Commonplace Blog

Jewish sin and repentance

2011-10-09T19:42:00.004-04:00

Another Yom Kippur, another difficult fast. It never seems to get any easier. Toward the end of Avinu Malkenu yesterday, during the Neilah service with just minutes to go in the day, I had one of those brief fugitive experiences of transcendence, a chest-shuddering certainty of God’s presence, which justifies the fast. Maybe I was only dizzy.

Or maybe I was distracted most of the day and only cleared my head toward the end. Just a couple of hours before Kol Nidre on Friday afternoon I read a memoir-essay by Neal Pollack, the comical author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. Its title, “Yom Kippur for Shul-Haters,” caught my eye precisely because the essay was not written for me. I feel at home in shul. A skeptic’s view is always good, though, for concentrating the mind.

Pollack is remarkably open about his dislike for the holiest day on the Jewish calendar:. . . I simply don’t buy what the holiday has, theologically, to offer. It’s hard to atone for your sins when you don’t believe in the concept of sin, and particularly not in the concept of sin when bundled into a mass confessional before a basically uncaring judge who decides, one day a year, whether or not you’re going to live or die. Perhaps, in a certain cultural context, that made sense once upon a time, but it doesn’t now, at least not to me.And what makes sense to him is really all that matters. As I tweeted in annoyance, Judaism is great when it agrees with him. When it doesn’t, well, you don’t really expect him to dump his personal preferences, do you?

Since Pollack was the one to bring up theology, however, it might do some good to clarify his own. In a word, his theology is confessional. Or, to be less coy about it, his thinking is not Jewish at all, but Christian. It is the Christian who demands prior belief as a condition of performing religious acts. For the Jew, things are rather different. As Arthur A. Cohen explains, “All Jewish beliefs interpret and elaborate the mystery of acts themselves, determining finally that many, even those regarded as critical, derive their justification from no rationalization, no human logic, but merely because they are the will and ordinance of God.”

For the Jew, in other words, the act is prior, and belief trails along afterwards, picking up wrappers and butts of meaning, which usually turn out to be worthless—every Jewish authority interprets the act differently—eventually concluding that it is done because Jews do it. The truth is that Jewish ritual is the enactment, the physical embodiment, of Jewish belief. You don’t have to believe in its educational benefits to read to your children; nor abandon the practice when you learn that it has none. You read to your children to create and deepen a relationship with them.

No real surprise that Pollack’s religious instincts are Christian rather than Jewish. He is a secular Jew who takes his cues from American culture rather than Jewish tradition, although he tries hard to raise a laugh about his own Jewish ignorance:It wouldn’t be fair to call me a non-observant Jew. I lead my extended family’s first-night Passover seder every year. When we light Hanukkah candles, I force my [son] to sing Maoz Tzur. I belong to Jewish cultural organizations and mailing lists and know the meaning of the phrase tikkun olam. Certain scenes in Barry Levinson’s Avalon bring me to tears. But when it comes to the High Holidays, and, in particular, Yom Kippur, I’m about as Jewish as the guy behind the counter at my neighborhood bodega.For those who don’t know, tikkun olam is a favorite phrase among Jewish social activists who hold Judaism in high esteem when it seems to vindicate their activism; less so when it doesn’t. As Hillel Halkin wrote in COMMENTARY in the definitive essay on the phrase:They represent the ultimate in that self-indulgent approach, so common in non-Orthodox Jewish circles in the United States today, that treats Jewish tradition not as a body of teachings to be learned from but as one needing to be taught what it is about by those who know better than it does what it should be about.Add Neal Pollack to their numbers. But what about the Jewish concept of sin? Is Pollack right not to buy into it? On Yom Kippur, Jewish confession is collective—he is right about that—but the reason it is collective is that the sin being confessed on Yom Kippur is collective. Pollack may be laboring under the dominion of the image of the Roman Catholic confessional. The Jewish concept of sin is much closer to the classical belief in the pollution of entire city, brought about by unspeakable crime, which Sophocles draws upon in Oedipus the King. Thus Creon reports the word of Phoebus to Thebes:An unclean thing there is, hid in our land,
Eating the soil thereof: this ye shall cast
Out, and not foster till all help be past. (vv. 110–12)And the katharsis of classical tragedy is similar to the atonement of Yom Kippur. Moderns sentimentalize katharsis into a satisfying moral belch, a relief from the mild dyspepsia of fear and pity. The ancients conceived it as a cleansing purgation of the defilement that affected the whole society.

So too the Jews. At Sinai, God promised the children of Israel that they would be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation—but if and only if they listened to his voice and guarded his covenant (Exod 19.5–6). God’s promise is conditional; Israel’s collective behavior during the rest of the year calls the if-clause into question; and Yom Kippur restores it.

When I worked out the logic of the day to my satisfaction and got his yuck-yuck prose out of my head at last, I was able to pray, and join in the atonement. Someday perhaps Neal Pollack will do the same. Next year in Jerusalem!

The regional basis of a hard heart

2011-09-23T16:15:00.007-04:00

Last night, during the Republican presidential debate in Orlando, Florida, Governor Rick Perry defended his state’s decision to admit the children of illegal immigrants into Texas universities at in-state tuition rates. “If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought there through no fault of their own,” Perry concluded, “I don’t think you have a heart.”

Perry’s words have been roundly booed by the right, and even my colleagues at Commentary, who are likely to agree with Perry on the substance, winced at the comment (here and here and here).

What has gone little remarked is that the Texas House adopted the original state law (HB 1403) in 2001 by a vote of 130 to 2, while the state Senate voted 27 to 3 in favor. How can it be that a law which won overwhelming approval from a Republican-dominated legislature has come to be almost unanimously rejected by the national party just ten years later?

If you grow up in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas, you don’t grow up thinking of your Mexican-American friends and classmates as illegal immigrants or children of illegals. The cultures of the border states are shot through with Hispanic influences. Larry McMurtry says somewhere that the most interesting cities in America are those that are the most thoroughly Hispanicized. You are at home with the influences, because you are home in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas.

Thus Governor Perry struck a chord with many of us when, in the first presidential debate, he spoke of “Anglos” instead of “whites.” Northern conservatives were disgusted, but I’ve always preferred the spicy ethnic term. “White” erases differences—between Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, for example—while “Anglo” acknowledges the most significant difference in the southwestern states. The counterbalancing term is chicano. Together they identify the inhabitants by their history.

My guess is that Bostonians would consider anyone heartless who wished to stigmatize their Irish classmates, and those who grew up in Buffalo would probably feel the same about their Polish friends. Heartlessness is a regional phenomenon; no one can accept without protest that the people he grew up with are somehow alien. Those from outside the region who speak of them like that—they are the ones whose voice and phrasing sound so strange.

Men and friendship

2011-09-22T15:46:00.004-04:00

This morning I heard from a longtime friend who, like me, has recently moved from Houston to another city. “Big community here and easy to get lost,” he wrote. “The wife and kids seem to have plugged in socially, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about meeting folks.”

Me too. Is it a male thing? Or a middle-aged thing? Or both at once? My buddies are scattered around the country—Iowa, Houston, New York, Boston, D.C.—and I am apparently in no hurry to add to their number. On Sunday afternoons I watch the Texans on satellite TV with chile con queso and a beer as my only company. I’m not lonely, but I worry that maybe I should be.

At a certain point, men no longer go out of their way to cultivate friendships. For twenty years, when I arrived in College Station, I would find my heart rising to see Bedford Clark in the office across the hall. We would close the door and trade witticisms and outrages. Now at Ohio State, I have no colleagues—I don’t belong to a department—and it feels strange not even to get the looks of hostility I used to get from leftist English professors. (No one at Ohio State knows that I am a spy from the other side.) But I can’t say that I miss having colleagues. I miss Bedford.

I think men, as they age, come to value the history that they share with their friends—their friendships are repositories of memory—more than they value “shared interests” or whatever else it is that draws younger persons together. Not that men don’t look for excitement. Just not in new friendships. And many men, even when tempted by the excitement of new sexual experience, withdraw into familiarity. The prospect of developing a new history with a new wife, and uprooting and plowing under the old history, is horribly unattractive—no matter how good-looking the new woman might be.

Men aren’t lazy about friendship. They are committed to habit. Come to think of it, this also explains why male friends can go months without talking to each other, and yet neither one will feel as if the friendship has lapsed or even diminished.

Maybe not just an archive after all

2011-09-22T14:21:00.007-04:00

So I’ve decided that A Commonplace Blog will not “continue to exist, but as an archive,” despite what I originally wrote below. I find that I have other things to say, about other things than books.

Patrick Kurp is to blame, as usual. The two of us were swapping messages this morning, because Texas A&M University suspended my email account yesterday afternoon without advance warning (after scrubbing me from the English department server last month), and I was feeling sorry for myself. Twenty years I taught at A&M, and the university can’t seem to get rid of my final traces quickly enough. “Write about it, of course,” Kurp said, “and laugh.”

So this is where I will repair to write and laugh. The model will be something like Permanent Morning, where the essayist Walter Kirn is able to write astonishing pieces like this. Perhaps everyone needs a place to reflect upon his experience without self-pity or even without always knowing the right thing to say.

LITERARY COMMENTARY

2011-08-16T14:45:00.007-04:00

As of today, A Commonplace Blog will be succeeded by a new book blog hosted and sponsored by Commentary magazine. The new blog will be called Literary Commentary. This is its RSS feed.

Like this one, the new book blog will contain reviews of new books and reconsiderations of older books. It will contribute to Commentary magazine’s work of “tak[ing] inventory in and increase the storehouse of the best that has been thought and said.” Many of the same features will also be features of the new blog—book lists, the rediscovery of neglected writers, the careful dismantling of badly constructed literary reputations. A Commonplace Blog will continue to exist, but as an archive.

Literary Commentary will focus on the current literary scene. It will contain “news” of the book world, the publishing industry, the Republic of Letters. But more than anything, it will concentrate furiously—perhaps I should say pitilessly—on the question whether this book or that is any good.

Thank you with all my soul to the readers who have stuck with A Commonplace Blog till now. And I hope you will join me regularly in the activity of Literary Commentary. Again, you can subscribe to its RSS feed here.

UPDATE: Comments will be enabled at the Commentary site in a week or two.

UPDATE, II: Link fixed. (We didn’t like the original URL for the blog.)

#overrated

2011-08-12T13:53:00.004-04:00

It’s the question that everyone has an answer to. What is the most overrated book of all time? The three titles most often cited are Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Bible.

That was the case two years ago, when readers of A Commonplace Blog named their least favorites. And it was the case again yesterday, when fourteen writers and editors told Slate the books they didn’t really like. Elif Batuman and Daniel Mendelson both admitted to Ulysses, while Tom Perrotta and Jonathan Rosen came up with The Catcher in the Rye. Matt Weiland, a senior editor at Ecco, tried to be funny by offering the book of Genesis (“its style is so sloppy and varied it seems almost to have been written by committee”). Get it? Critical scholarship has changed our estimation of the Bible for all time! Ha ha.

The only real surprise was Francine Prose’s choice. (Prose continually surprises. That’s one mark of a writer worth following.) Beowulf was her choice. “I felt nothing when Beowulf was killed,” she said. “Mostly, I was grateful that the poem was almost over.” Far more interesting was why she was reading the Old English poem in the first place: for a course on representations of evil. Now there’s a reading list I’d like to have.

On Twitter afterwards, I added to the confusion by challenging friends and other writers to name their most overrated novel. John Podhoretz suggested A Farewell to Arms; Max Boot, The Naked and the Dead; Rachel Abrams, Everything Is Illuminated; David Harsanyi, Infinite Jest; Sam Schulman, The Death of Virgil (a book I suspect Schulman of having invented). More than one person offered One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children (“we already said One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Schulman complained). My own choice is well-documented.

But what’s the goal of the game? I believe in pricking overinflated reputations as much as the next critic, but too often the game can edge over into mockery and envy. The goal should be to encourage readers to put down bad books and pick up better ones—books that succeed where the overrated books fail. John Podhoretz recommended Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Put Out More Flags (1942), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961) instead of Mailer’s Naked and the Dead. Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) is a better choice than One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In the end, though, what matters is the quarreling and the debate—the partisanship for some books and against others. Down with reading circles, book clubs, and bubbling uncritical enthusiasm for the latest reads!

The tyranny of suspense

2011-08-12T11:20:00.003-04:00

Don’t know when exactly A Commonplace Blog will move into its new digs and hang out a new shingle. In the mean time, I need to get back to regular book blogging.

A couple of days ago Jonah Lehrer had a provocative squib in the Frontal Cortex, one of Wired’s science blogs. Lehrer reported the outcome of a study by two researchers at UC San Diego, who studied the effect of “spoilers” and concluded that “almost every single story, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable when prefaced with a spoiler.” Lehrer’s title summed up the results: “Spoilers don’t spoil anything.”

Lehrer goes on interestingly to speculate about the significance of the findings, but he misses the obvious. Namely: the research exposes the phoniness of suspense stories. Literature is not a game of suspense. We don’t read to find out what happened, but how—and how it could have ended differently.

In far too much bad fiction, suspense has replaced drama as the motive force of storytelling. There is, in fact, an entire subgenre of fiction dedicated to the ignorant error—“thrillers.” Suspense, however, is the sworn enemy of good fiction.

To create suspense is to induce anxiety—that is, to cause distress. And naturally, then, the craving is for relief. You read as quickly as possible to discover what happens, to allay your uneasiness, to release the tightness in your chest. The outcome is not a literary experience—literature is the freedom to dream up other possibilities—but the unpleasant feeling of being manipulated. Anxiety has a “coercive character,” Karen Horney says. So does suspense.

Why then the widespread lust for thrillers and the obsession (as Lehrer puts it) with avoiding spoilers? My guess is this. Suspense has filled the vacuum left by the abandonment of tragedy in modern literature. Lehrer points out that, “for thousands of years,” the stories that were widely told and widely enjoyed were “incredibly predictable, from the Greek tragedy to the Shakespearean wedding to the Hollywood happy ending.” (That’s quite a jump, from Shakespeare to Hollywood, passing over the novel without a word, but Lehrer’s subject is science, not literary history.) The latest research confirms the preferences of those thousand years, Lehrer says: “We like it best when the suspense is contained by the formulaic, when we never have to really worry about the death of the protagonist or the lovers in a romantic comedy.”

While he’s right about the worry—for reasons I’ve suggested—Lehrer is wrong about the containment. In fact, it’s just the opposite. (He’s also wrong about comedy, which still performs its traditional function.) What we like best is that things might turn out differently; Oedipus might not murder his father and marry his mother, or might not recognize that he has done so; Lear might not mistake a loving daughter for a hateful one. We are afraid for them—afraid that nothing can be done to avert their terrible tragedies—and we pity them when the worst befalls them. Lehrer is right that we usually know in advance what will happen. But how it happens—the accidental errors, the blown opportunities for repair, the avoidable recognitions—plays upon our emotions. The scuffle between inevitability and possibility, between containment and spillage, is the source of what used to be called the “tragic pleasure.”

(Romantic comedy operates on the same principle. As Lehrer says, the lovers’ coming together is “incredibly predictable.” The fun lies in the obstacles that hilariously delay the inevitable.)

By contrast, the resolution of a thriller is usually both pat and far-fetched. I don’t think I’ve ever read (or watched) a suspense story without feeling let down at the end. The difference lies in the emotions. Fear and pity are compliments to human freedom, to the possibility of change and variation in human stories; suspense and anxiety are the taxes paid by an impoverished culture of reading to the literary tyrant that occupies the throne once held by tragedy.

The end of the beginning

2011-07-29T14:30:00.005-04:00

Several people have written—friends, readers, the morbidly curious—to ask when I am coming back, if A Commonplace Blog will resume normal operations, whether there is anything wrong.

The truth is that my twin sons and I returned from our five-thousand-mile cross-country trip several days ago. Until now I have written nothing about the trip, not so much because I am no kind of travel writer (although I am not), but because the inhuman beauty of the American Southwest reduced me to silence. According to the National Park Service, the Paiute Indians told the story that the weirdly shaped “hoodoos” in Bryce Canyon were formed when the Legend People, who were not people but huge animals that looked like people, were turned to stone. But no matter how much I squinted, I could not see what the Paiutes saw. The landscape stretching from the Mojave Desert, which the boys and I crossed on the old U.S. 66, north through the Grand Canyon and up past Capitol Reef National Park, seemed the perfect setting for a science-fiction movie on another planet. At a viewpoint overlooking Bryce Canyon, eighty-three hundred feet above sea level, a Dane pointed to the town in the distance and asked if I knew its name. “I want to retire there,” he said when I told him. But I couldn’t agree. I couldn’t imagine human life there. The sheer complexity of the geological history on display swallows up any thought of work or politics, makes humanistic speculation pointless.

Now that I am back home, though, I have a lot of work to do—reviews of Roland Merullo’s novel The Talk-Funny Girl, which I have been enthusiastically recommending to friends and family, in person and tweets, Ron Hansen’s retelling of the Snyder murder case, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, which disappointed me, and a stack of new novels by women—Jean Thompson, Ann Patchett, Dana Spiotta—to get to.

I have not been writing about them here, because next week A Commonplace Blog is migrating to a new host, a new venue. Although I can’t say anything more about the move right now, I am excited about it and the opportunities it will give me to reach a wider audience. Lecteurs fidèles! Just a few more days!

Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues

2011-06-07T17:30:00.002-04:00

This evening marks the beginning of the two-day Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the “forgotten festival,” as Michael Carasik describes it at Jewish Ideas Daily. Early the next morning, I am loading my twin eight-year-old sons into the car for a month-long cross-country excursion (California beaches, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon). Despite my better judgment, I have loaded up my Kindle with new novels. I’m traveling light. My blog will be in hibernation for the duration.

In July, when regular book-blogging resumes, you can expect a major announcement about the future and provenance of A Commonplace Blog. Until then, a short summer reading list of recent American and British fiction:

• David Bezmozgis, The Free World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March). I am not convinced that Bezmozgis is nearly as promising a writer as his publicity would lead you to believe, but his first novel—part of a new wave of immigrant fiction in America—is readable and intrinsically interesting. The inter-generational friction between an old Communist Party official and his son, trained by Western culture to pursue sensual adventure, is nicely done. The Jewish stuff, not so much. A good “case,” though.

• Jim Krusoe, Toward You (Tin House Books, March). For those who read Charles Willeford’s Shark-Infested Custard on my recommendation and liked it, another memorable amoralist with an unforgettable voice. The death of a stray dog leads a man to confront his mistakes (not that he cares).

• Linda Grant, We Had It So Good (Scribner, April). The author of When I Lived in Modern Times returns with her fifth novel. In the same vein as Zoë Heller’s Believers, Grant’s energetically written novel follows the lives of a couple from the Flower Generation as they age into a realistic appraisal of their times.

• Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May). Mukherjee’s eighth novel is not her best, by any means. (Jasmine [1989] holds that honor.) But her latest returns to the theme that Mukherjee has copyrighted—the bloody cultural crossroads between traditional and new India. Here she takes on the rise of the great Anglophone country to which America “outsources” so many of its customer-service jobs that the very idea has become the source of humor. Mukherjee does not play for laughs, although her touch is light and humorous.

• Francine Prose, My New American Life (Harper Collins, May). Like her fifth novel, Household Saints (1981), her latest is completely foreign to Prose’s personal experience. This time around she tells the story of an Albanian immigrant. Her ventriloquy does not make for her best writing, but anything by Francine Prose is better than almost anything by almost any other American novelist now writing.

Enjoy your summer, everyone! Talk to you again in July.

Memorial Day is not victims’ day

2011-05-29T13:30:00.000-04:00

Over at Contentions, I reflect upon Memorial Day by contrasting Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” to Robert Lowell’s thirty-years-later “For the Union Dead.” Twenty years in the South elevated Tate above Lowell in my estimation.

The books we never abandon

2011-05-20T15:47:00.008-04:00

Cross-posted from Contentions.

“[T]he end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated,” John Podhoretz warns, reporting the news that Amazon now sells more digitalized Kindle-friendly texts than hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

I remain skeptical that the codex, the paper-and-binding book, will disappear completely. For two reasons. First, there is a distinction between books that are consumed and never returned to—consumer books—and books that are collected, treasured, preserved from destruction. If nothing else, there is the Bible. For someone like me, who taught for two decades in the South, it is hard to imagine Christians abandoning their favorite Bible—the one they read at night, the one they carry to church—for an electronic copy. For many Christians, the first Bible is a major event in their lives. (For Jewish children, the equivalent is receiving their first siddur or prayerbook.) The book is often presented to them in a public ceremony, engraved in gold with their name. (Can you even inscribe a Kindle copy?)

But not only Bibles. Every reader has books that are special to him. Randall Jarrell used to say that he owned several copies of Christina Stead’s Man Who Loved Children (1940), because he so loved the novel that he pressed it upon friends (and friends never return books). Books to be used up and discarded—bestselling fiction, self-improvement guides, popular biographies, books on current affairs—belong nowhere else but on the Kindle. There is, however, another class of books altogether.

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and far more often) worth reading at the age of fifty,” C. S. Lewis said. And that brings me to my second reason for doubting the final disappearance of the “physical book.” Namely, children don’t learn to read on the Kindle, but from the pages that they turn excitedly with their parents. “Talk to it, Daddy,” my son Saul used to say when I opened a book to start reading aloud. When he grew older, he began to acquire his own first books—fine printed editions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The House at Pooh Corner—which he would proudly take to preschool with him, even though he could not even read them.

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only,” Lewis also said. I am willing to grant that “literary” readers have always been and will remain a minority, but trained in childhood to love the physical qualities of print on paper, the minority will always insist on a few bound books.

Update: The three-way debate on the question “That ebooks spell the end for ‘physical books’ ” was carried on much of the day on Twitter with John Podhoretz and Terry Teachout for the affirmative and me for the negative. Teachout believes the ebook will have entirely replaced the codex in five years, by which time paper-and-binding volumes will be, in Podhoretz’s words, “luxury items.” God willing, we will all live, as Teachout says, to see who’s right.

The Contentions post above started the free-for-all. I’d like to add only one thing to it. As a literary scholar, I too subscribe to the electronic textualists’ motto “Search Is Everything,” and it is undeniable that etexts are easy to search, but I am not convinced that the gain in speed and convenience is not overbalanced by another kind of loss.

Here is a small example of what I mean. Searching for the quotation from Lewis with which I end the post above, I stumbled upon the earlier sentence about books read at ten and again at fifty. Far more elegantly than I, Lewis makes my point about the books a person returns to again and again; and those books, I remain convinced, will be in tangible form for a long time to come.

Using a search-and-find function on an extext, I would have found the one Lewis quotation and not the other. Because I had to thumb an old copy of Of Other Worlds on my bookshelves, I accidentally found a sentence that deepened my own thought. In a single anecdote, that for me is the advantage of the codex over the extext.

Update, II: John Steele Gordon, another COMMENTARY contributor, weighs in here. On my side, more or less.

Black discs and retrieval machines

2011-05-20T11:04:00.002-04:00

Even my conservative friends are enamored of the argument that books are going the way of the vinyl LP. (True, the vinyl LP was introduced in 1926 and largely replaced by the compact disc in the mid to late ’eighties—a history of sixty years—while the codex appeared in the first century C.E., giving it a history of two thousand years. But, hey, technology marches on!)

Replying to my argument that the “physical book” (as he prefers to call it) will not be entirely replaced by digitalized texts for the Kindle and iPad, John Podhoretz alludes to the size of my own personal library, and reassures me: “Don’t worry; the fact that new books will no longer be printed except in the way that, say, new vinyl records are still released for high-end stereo fans will make your own collection far more valuable over time.”

Terry Teachout joins in. He says that John is right. “One generation from now,” he predicts, “the physical book will be for antique collectors only—like black discs.” In a later tweet, he adds: “[T]he same pattern of technological adoption has taken place repeatedly over the past quarter-century.” My problem, he says, is that I am “confusing the container with the thing contained.”

I don’t think so. Several years ago, in an essay on Holocaust writing in Comparative Literature, I began by contesting a bedrock presupposition of serious and thoughtful readers like Teachout:The study of literature is widely presupposed to be the interpretation of texts. As an object a book can sit around for years, resting comfortably on a library shelf, but as a text it does not exist at all unless it is read, interpreted, understood. A book is printed and bound; a text is worded and meant. The problem, then, is to discover the meaning beneath the words.What Holocaust writing teaches us, I argued in dissent, is that a “literary text makes a claim on its readers that is logically prior to meaning.” And what is that claim? The claim of a person.

Much mischief is caused by disembodying a text from the person who created it. And something similar, I think, is happening among those who prematurely celebrate the “end of books.” The mistake in both cases is to disregard the materiality of reading.

Although I have advanced this argument before, I have been hesitant to make it the centerpiece of my case against electronic texts, because it relies upon empirical research—and not enough research has been conducted into the effect of different reading platforms upon understanding, retention, the ability to immerse oneself in a text. What research there is, however, suggests that print enjoys certain advantages over electronic media. Anne Mangen, a reading researcher at Norway’s University of Stavanger, has found that the “phenomenology of reading intangible text” suffers by comparison to reading from a printed-and-bound book. She writes:The tactility of a mouse click, of touch screen page turning or of a click with the e-book page turner bar, is very different from that of flicking through the print pages of a book. The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions—clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens or scrolling with keys or on touch pads—take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone.Because the printed text is tangible, “physically, tactiley graspable,” as Mangen puts it, the difference in reading is enormous. While we scan the text on a screen, we read a paper-and-binding book with our hands and fingers in addition to our eyes. Reading, Mangen observes, requires manual dexterity. It is not merely an activity of mind.[1]

Every parent knows this. Children fall in love with books as physical objects long before they experience them as meaningful texts. As I have noticed before, children’s books celebrate their materiality: there are board books, touch-and-feel books, lift-the-flap books, pop-up books, musical-sound books. These are not the precursors to hypertext; they are early training in the handling of books. Or, as Mangen says with rather more scholarly rigor, they are reminders that reading is a multi-sensory experience.

Older readers know this too. Reading a book requires intense concentration, but it also leaves a physical memory. We recall a passage as falling on a left- or right-hand page, at the top or bottom or in the middle. We thumb the remaining pages and place an incident or argument in a spatial context, not just in time. The multi-sensory aspect of reading a book is an aid to memory, just as language instructors (who teach their students to write and read and speak and listen and pick up objects while translating their name) have always suspected.

And not merely “older readers” in the sense of having grown up in pre-Kindle days. In a recent survey by the Book Industry Group, nearly seventy-five percent of college students—the same youngsters who started using cell phones and iPods from an early age—said they prefer to study textbooks in print rather than on a screen. They too must share the intuition that reading a “physical book” gives them a better chance to understand, retain, and immerse themselves in their reading.

Books are nothing like vinyl LP’s. In reality, the black discs differ only marginally from compact discs or even MP3 files. What Podhoretz and Teachout overlook in their joyful analogy is that the different media simply require different retrieval machines. The hardware has changed—from “high-end stereo equipment” to CD players to iPods and iTunes—but the fundamental mechanism of playback is unaltered.

Indeed, technological progress has made retrieval of the music on the earlier formats increasingly burdensome. I own about a hundred vinyl LP’s that have never been rereleased in another format, but I no longer own a turntable. Without the right machine, I have no way of getting to that music. (I wonder too if Teachout himself has not confused the music with the performance. I’d be eager to learn how scores are being treated in the electronic age.)

At all events, this is a problem that I have worried about when it comes to ebooks, and despite reassurances, I remain worried. Perhaps it is only my personal experience—I am an Orthodox Jew who cannot use electronic devices on Saturday, and I lived through Hurricane Ike and the sixteen-day power outage that followed—but I don’t think it is outside possibility that the loss of a retrieval machine could mean the permanent loss of a text.

But a paper-and-binding book requires no retrieval machine beyond a human being, who reads it with his whole person. The end of mankind’s two-thousand-year adventure with books might be of concern, then, to more than book collectors.
____________________

[1] Ann Mangen, “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion,” Journal of Research in Reading 31 (2008): 404–19.

Philip Roth and the politics of literary prizes

2011-05-19T13:00:00.005-04:00

Cross-posted from Contentions.

The American novelist Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, a British award handed out every other year for a writer’s entire body of work. Now, literary prizes are nothing more than a means to sell books; only fools confuse them with the recognition of literary merit. There is no shortage of fools in the Republic of Letters, however.

Plans are under way in Australia, for example, to engender a down-under version of Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction by women. Not that the prize itself should be sneered at. The Orange Prize has done what it was intended to do, bringing attention to terrific novels like Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, and Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times. Perhaps the Australian prize will have similar good luck.

No, what is foolish are the reasons given for the prize. “What we are concerned with is the systemic exclusion of women writers over several decades,” the novelist Sophie Cunningham told the Guardian. The very idea that the literary marketplace is capable of a system of any kind is crack-brained. Nor is it immediately obvious why publishers would tolerate the “systemic exclusion” of books that appeal to at least half the reading public (and probably, given women’s reading habits, far more than half). Nevertheless, Cunningham went on to say that the new Australian women’s prize would not be needed “if writing by women was rewarded and valued on its own terms, with equal merit to the way that work written by men is.”

All the women’s prizes in the world will not change the fact that literary merit is not equal, nor is it assigned by sex. Those who seem to be calling for a Title IX regime in literature, where praise and prizes and even book recommendations must be split 50-50 between men and women, are not really interested in literature. For them, literature is merely the jurisdiction in which they happen to seek power and privilege.

Such a person is Carmen Callil, the British publisher who founded Virago Press in 1973. Declaring that she does not “rate him as a writer at all,” Callil quit the Man Booker International Prize jury in a huff when it became clear that the other two judges would not bend to her will and award the prize to someone else than Philip Roth. “Emperor’s clothes,” she sniffed. “In 20 years’ time will anyone read him?”

Whether anyone reads Roth in 20 years will not be decided by a literary prize. Perhaps what will decide the question—and perhaps what her colleagues wished to honor Roth for—is the very commitment to literature that Callil rejects so bitterly. In a career that began 53-and-a-half years ago with the story “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” in COMMENTARY, Roth has exemplified what I have elsewhere called the moral obligation to write well, which distinguishes the great writer.

Not the end of books

2011-05-19T11:19:00.002-04:00

Over at Contentions John Podhoretz warns that “the end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated.” I don’t think so.

Defending Philip Roth

2011-05-18T13:06:00.002-04:00

Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, and a judge on the prize jury has quit in a huff. “Emperor’s clothes,” says Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press. “In 20 years’ time will anyone read him?”

I try to answer her question here.

The paradoxical politics of creative writing

2011-05-13T15:09:00.010-04:00

Note: Blogger went down some time on Thursday, May 12th, taking down everything posted since the previous evening along with it. To date the missing posts have not been restored. So I am republishing my little essay on the politics of creative writing. And I’ve used the occasion to add a sentence or two.

It took him eight months, but Wednesday in the Los Angeles Review of Books Mark McGurl finally replied in print to Elif Batuman’s widely read onslaught against academic creative writing, “Get a Real Degree,” which appeared in last September’s London Review of Books. As McGurl puts it, Batuman “unloads as many charges against the discipline of creative writing as one can easily pack into 8000-plus words. . . .” But he isn’t particularly exercised by her critique. After all, Batuman writes from the perspective, he says, of a “cultural conservative, reanimating a whole herd of dead horses from the 1980s Culture Wars, when the right began a long, twilight struggle against the ‘tenured radicals’ of the university.”

I’m not at all sure that any such description of Batuman is accurate, and I am more than sure that she herself would find it off-target. One minute McGurl is criticizing her “snarky slurs” against Beloved, the very next minute he is calling her literary journalism’s Ann Coulter. Snark is, like, acceptable only when it comes from one side of the political aisle? When an academic wishes to dismiss a writer from serious consideration, he calls her a right-winger.

Over at The Suburban Ecstasies, Seth Abramson does a good job of exposing McGurl’s errors “great and small” (and says some nice things about me), but he merely hints at the political incoherence of McGurl’s critique.

The incoherence comes through most clearly when McGurl interrogates Batuman’s claim that “Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical.” In reply, McGurl repeats the word democracy several times, as if that will do the trick. Creative writing’s ambition to establish an “aesthetic democracy” can sometimes seem like a “sentimental gesture,” he allows, but it really is a noble ambition. While her elitism would confine most Americans who might otherwise prefer the writing life to “working at the register,” Batuman is not troubled by such economic conditions. According to McGurl, she feels “only contempt for those who have dared to think and act otherwise, in case a more democratic culture turns out to be possible.” (By contrast, his own contempt for commerce is so deeply embedded into his thinking that he barely notices it.) Still, the two of them have something in common:As even Batuman concedes, creative writing represents something “wonderful about America,” though I don’t think, as she does, that it’s the idea that that “all forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch.” That sounds good, but in practice it is so often a sadistic or self-loathing desire. Rather, I think the best thing about America is the idea of democracy upon which it was imperfectly founded, and I’m happy to see any signs, however conflicted, that we can still imagine, and even facilitate, greater social access to the high pleasures of excellent writing.McGurl is a canny and profoundly learned scholar; I’m a bit embarrassed for him that he would carelessly repeat such phrases without any recognition of their historical provenance. (It also never occurs to him that the difference between them on what is most wonderful about this country may owe more to differences in personal circumstance than politics: Batuman is the daughter of Turkish immigrants, who must have reinvented themselves from scratch in America.) Nevertheless, the politics on display here derives from the same source as creative writing itself. Both are classic expressions of American progressivism.

Although he knows it very well, McGurl did not write The Elephants Teach; I did. He can’t be expected to overhear the echoes of creative writing’s progressive origins, which I detail in Chapter 5 (“The Sudden Adoption of Creative Work”), as readily as I do. Hughes Mearns, a progressive educator who founded it as a school subject, conceived of creative writing as a progressive reform along the same political lines as the enactment of child-labor laws and the uprooting of municipal corruption. His plan was to democratize literary culture—to make it more responsive to more people—because Mearns was every inch the anti-elitist. In an article written for the Saturday Evening Post in 1912, Mearns ridiculed the elitist attitude toward culture:Culture is an incommunicable communion with Nature; it is clean hands and a pure collar; it is the possession of great-grandparents—white, Christian preferred; it is the achievement of tolerance; it is the proper use of “shall” and “will”; it is a knowledge of Hegelian philosophy; it is Greek; it is Latin; it is a five-foot shelf of books; it is twenty thousand a year; it is a sight of truth and a draught of wisdom; it is a frock coat and pearl gloves. . . . No one ever saw it; it cannot be measured or chemically analyzed; the fellow that claims it loudest never has had it; the chap that really has it never mentions the matter; and it can be obtained only by a studious cultivation of one kind of education—my kind!As I have pointed out before, scholars routinely get creative writing wrong through ignorance or neglect of its original conception as a progressive school reform. To treat it as an epiphenomenon of American higher education—as even Batuman does—is to grab a shovel to hammer a board.

Progressivism is encoded in creative writing’s DNA. What is more, this progressive legacy also explains what is at issue in the debate between McGurl and Batuman, and why neither has achieved a victory over the other. Both democracy and elitism belong to the progressive inheritance—their mismatch, as Peter Berkowitz wrote recently in a brilliant analysis in the Policy Review, “reflects an enduring paradox with deep roots in the progressive tradition.” On the one hand, American progressives espoused democratic reforms; on the other hand, these reforms were formulated and installed by an undemocratic elite—the progressive reformers themselves—sometimes against the will of the people. Berkowitz goes further:The paradox of American progressivism, old and new, is rooted in the gap between its professed devotion to democracy, or the idea that the people legitimately rule, and its belief that democracy consists in a set of policies independent of what the people want. The paradox may not inhere in every single progressive utterance or program, but it typifies progressivism as a whole. It certainly receives expression in the disjunction between official progressive aims. On the one hand, progressives proclaim their intention to democratize American politics by making it more responsive to the will of the people and giving the people greater say in government. On the other hand, progressives favor the steady enlargement of the national government’s responsibilities, which increases the distance between the people and government, while supporting the expansion of an educated administrative elite, which reduces government’s accountability to the people.This account will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has eavesdropped on the debates over creative writing. The positions have changed little over the years. As I described them fifteen years ago:On one side are those who blame [creative writing] for an astonishing array of ills: the collapse of literary standards; an overproduction of homogeneously bad writing, the decadence of the age. . . . On the other side are those who defend creative writing as a democratization of culture and a happy awakening of interest in literature and the literary life.If, however, creative writing is recognized as an institutional representation of the paradoxical politics of progressivism, the debates begin to seem beside the question. Suddenly metaphors like Donald Justice’s “pyramid scheme” (quoted in my book) or McGurl’s “Ponzi scheme” begin to seem shrugging guesses; the expansion of an educated administrative elite, enlarging its turf from coast to coast, accounts for the amazing boom in graduate writers workshops over the past half century. And except when they are advanced to justify what Batuman calls “writing being produced in a knowledge vacuum”—progressive aims explain the knowledge vacuum—the democratic slogans of the nationalized bureaucracy that staffs America’s creative writing programs can be seen for what they are. Namely, rhetorical cover for their own privilege.

Literary writing may or may not be inherently elitist, but the creative writing faculty sure is.

When I Lived in Modern Times

2011-05-04T13:11:00.000-04:00

The British novelist Linda Grant is in the States today to tout her new novel We Had It So Good, but with her royal-wedding tweets still chirping in my ears (see here and here and here and here and here and here), I returned to the novel that first caused me to fall in love with the sound of her voice. When I Lived in Modern Times (London: Granta, 2000) was Grant’s second novel (she has now written five). It won the Orange Prize in 2001 for the best work of fiction by a woman, which is the only reason that it came to my attention. I was teaching my annual course on the contemporary novel at Texas A&M University. Every year I would assign the previous year’s award winners. The reading list for spring semester 2002 included Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Pulitzer Prize), Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin (Man Booker Prize), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (Governor General’s Award), Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (Whitbread Prize), and Philip Roth’s Human Stain (PEN/Faulkner Award). I later included three of those titles on my roll of the decade’s best English-language fiction, but my favorite was When I Lived in Modern Times.

Grant’s subject is the “great transformation” that occurs in the months after the end of the Second World War—“the world itself,” she writes, “was metamorphosing into something else. . . .” Evelyn Sert, the twenty-year-old daughter of a single Jewish mother—her grandparents emigrated to Great Britain from Latvia—decides to journey to British Mandate Palestine. She is filled with the spirit of Zionism (“Only the birth of our own country can avenge the death of six million,” she cries. “That’s the resurrection”). But the truth is that her mother’s death leaves her feeling even more homeless than before:Inside my head the kings and queens of England were stacked like pancakes in chronological order going back to the Wars of the Roses but no one I was related to had ever set foot on English soil until forty-five years ago. What could an immigrant child be, except an impersonator? I felt like a double agent, a fifth columnist. And I knew that as long as I lived in this country it would always be the same. I walked among them and they thought they knew me, but they understood nothing at all. It was me that understood, the spy in their midst.Perhaps if she had been a third-generation Jew in America, where everyone feels like a double agent—these days, even the WASP’s—Evelyn might not have felt so out of place. But she knows better. “I was a Jewish child in a country where, unlike America, there was no contribution I could make to the forging of the national identity,” she sighs. “It was fixed already, centuries ago.”

And so to Palestine. Evelyn enters the country illegally, lying to a customs agent that she is a Christian tourist, not a Jewish settler. Her surname is “odd” because her father was from “the Outer Hebrides.” At the Jewish Agency, Evelyn is less successful at passing herself off as something she is not. She has come to build the new Jewish state, she announces; but she has neither military nor agricultural experience; nor has she studied engineering, nor architecture. She is not totally useless, she protests. She is a hairdresser! She gets a laugh and is packed off to a kibbutz.

On the kibbutz she is introduced to sex and hard labor, but she remains a city girl at heart. She misses the chaos of urban life. After a few weeks she leaves for the “white city” of Tel Aviv—“a new Berlin,” as a German Jew later says to her, “a city for the masses and for the intellectuals, where we would build a modern life for ourselves.” Evelyn arrives on the back of a motorcycle belonging to a demobilized British soldier, a native-born Jerusalemite named Levi Aharoni. “But since your Hebrew isn’t so good, and we’re going to be talking in English,” he says, “you can call me Johnny.” He joined the British army to fight fascism, but now that the British have become the enemy of Jewish immigration, Johnny has joined the Irgun, the military wing of the Revionist Zionist movement.

Before she learns this much about him, Evelyn becomes Johnny’s lover. In the mean time, she finds an apartment and a job as a hairdresser, introducing the wives of British colonial officers to the newest styles. Recognized by one of them as the Christian tourist who came over with her on the same boat, Evelyn dyes her hair blonde and takes on a new identity. She becomes Priscilla Jones, married to a soldier posted to Tiberias. As a British policeman complains to her about Palestine, “It’s the worst bloody place for getting people’s identities straight.” Johnny sees her value as a “spy in their midst,” and manufactures a false passport in the name of Priscilla Jones. Information that she passes on enables the Irgun to kidnap a British official.

Thus she enters “the dark center of our struggle against the colonial masters.” The Irgun bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. And Evelyn is whisked to safety underground before the British can arrest her. Johnny is not so lucky. Implicated in the deaths of twenty, he is arrested and quickly convicted and sentenced to death—one of the olei hagardom to be hanged under British rule. Evelyn is suddenly not so excited to be “moving through history.” As the British begin to withdraw from Palestine, she realizes that “Priscilla Jones would have to be folded up and put away,” but with the arrest of Johnny, she realizes that she has no clear and distinct Palestinian individuality either. “The British imperial identity was disintegrating in front of us, the new Jewish one was being born,” she says, “but I was nameless and invisible and my little ego couldn’t bear it.”

Just days before Johnny’s arrest, she had resolved:Whatever happened, I would never leave Palestine, this strange, violent, mixed-up place where things were not always pleasant, indeed rarely so. Where people’s manners were bad and they spoke roughly, but to the point. Where everyone came from somewhere else and everyone had a story to tell and these stories were not always inspiring or lovely. Where life was chaotic, because that is what life is. Where the past was murky and tragic and the future had to be grasped by the throat. Where Europe ended and the East began and people tried to live inside that particular, crazy contradiction.But in the end, she is unable to do so. Evelyn is swept up in the British counter-exodus and borne back to the country of her birth. She leaves Palestine just as the Jews are taking command of their own history and their own political fate. She understands what is happening, even if the British evacuees do not: “They’ve been Jews for absolutely centuries,” one says to her, “and most of that has been spent in exile, one way or another. Why do they want to change their tune now?”

There is perhaps no better book for explaining why—and for recreating the terror and exhilaration of the British Mandate’s final days—than Linda Grant’s brilliant and absorbing When I Lived in Modern Times.

The rhetoric of triumph

2011-05-02T15:21:00.004-04:00

Over at Contentions, I use a little literary criticism to compare President Obama’s speech last night reporting the death of Osama bin Laden to President Bush’s speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln eight years ago on the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

Like a trampled corpse

2011-05-02T10:20:00.002-04:00

They who behold you stare;
They peer at you closely:
“Is this the man
Who shook the earth,
Who made realms tremble,
Who made the world like a waste
And wrecked its towns,
Who never released his prisoners to their homes?”
All the kings of nations
Were laid, every one, in honor
Each in his tomb;
While you were left lying unburied,
Like loathsome carrion,
Like a trampled corpse
In the clothing of slain gashed by the sword
Who sink to the very stones of the Pit.

Isaiah 14.16–19 (NJV)

Epitaph on a Tyrant

2011-05-02T09:58:00.005-04:00

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

W. H. Auden
January 1939

Reading the Holocaust

2011-05-01T19:19:00.013-04:00

Today is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jean Améry once said that he would like to “introduce certain Auschwitz books into the upper classes of secondary school as compulsory reading,” although he never named the books he would assign. (His own Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, published in German in 1966 and translated beautifully into English by Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld in 1980 under the title At the Mind’s Limits, would have to be among them.)

On Thursday the Forward published its version of such a reading list. Organized in alphabetical order and consisting of twenty-two items—starting off, in fact, with Améry’s book—the Forward bibliography is a convenient listing of essential titles.

I have few quarrels with it. I would not have included Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which has never impressed me as anything more than a derivative account of the Holocaust (its only claim to originality is to narrate Auschwitz in cartoons), but otherwise the list is pretty good. I’d like to re-do it, however, by putting the books in order and making a few different and additional recommendations. The literature of the Holocaust is so vast that newcomers to the subject are disheartened from beginning.

(1.) Elie Wiesel, Night (Yiddish [longer version], 1955; French, 1958; English, 1960). Perhaps the time has come to acknowledge that Wiesel is not a great writer. Nevertheless, there is no better book for introducing first-time readers to the horrors of Auschwitz. Wiesel’s lack of finish—even his occasional “corniness,” for lack of a better word—contribute to the book’s immediacy and lasting effect.

(2.) Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz (1994). Originally a 1982 article in the Atlantic, the book version is expanded but still astonishingly short at just over one hundred pages. It is an explicitly third-hand account of the Nazi Vernichtungslager, which aims to synthesize an enormous amount of historical and literary knowledge.

(3.) Tadeusz Borowski, The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Polish, 1946, 1948; English, 1967). The greatest writer of Holocaust fiction was not even Jewish. Borowski was a Polish Communist who was condemned to Auschwitz for political crimes, and witnessed the extermination of European Jewry first-hand. Unlike Wiesel, he does not inflate his language or heighten the emotional appeal. The very flatness of his reporting, in words that could have been chiseled in stone, makes his stories unforgettable. Yale University Press will release Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories translated by Madeline G. Levine in October. Borowski’s stories invented Holocaust literature.

(4.) Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews (1975). The fourth English-language history after Gerald Reitlinger’s Final Solution (1953), Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of European Jewry (1961), and Nora Levin’s Holocaust (1968), Dawidowicz’s book is still the best introduction to the history of the Holocaust. At 353 pages, not counting the back matter, it is relatively short and manageable; more importantly, it is well-written; most important of all, it advances a provocative thesis, implicit in the title, which has influenced the study of the Holocaust ever since. Having got this far, the reading can become more focused and intense.

(5.) Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (2004). As I have written elsewhere, there is a fundamental distinction between the Holocaust and the Final Solution. The former is the Jews’ name and represents the victims’ point of view; the latter, the Germans’ and the perpetrators’ point of view. No one is better than Browning at tracing the development of the German Nazis’ policy of genocide, although Saul Friedländer’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007) is another compelling historical account of events from within the thousand-year Reich. Browning also champions an influential and provocative position on the Shoah, which stands in opposition to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). Browning’s position is summed up by the title of his earlier book about a police battalion that murdered Jews in Poland: Ordinary Men (1992).

(6.) Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (Italian, 1958; English, 1960). Now available under the misleading title Survival in Auschwitz, Levi’s is an Auschwitz memoir for adults. Unlike Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, Levi does not try to find a “meaning” in the Lager; he does not believe that suffering ennobled the Jews who were gassed and burned there. A chemist by training and profession, Levi turned an objective and analytical eye upon Auschwitz. He became the greatest memoirist of the Holocaust.

(7.) Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits (German, 1966; English, 1980). His position is best summed up by the title of one of the five essays in the book: “The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew.” Améry is best known, however, for examining the fate of the intellectual in Auschwitz. Primo Levi replied in a chapter of The Drowned and the Saved (1986), his last book.

(8.) David Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (1996). A great Jewish scholar who pioneered the source-critical analysis of the Talmud, Halivni is an Auschwitz survivor who, like Elie Wiesel, grew up in the Transylvanian town of Sighet. His memoir, published when he was sixty-nine, might have been called “Survival After Auschwitz”—survival not merely of one individual, but of an Orthodox Jewish modus vivendi the German Nazis threatened (but failed) to wipe out.

(9.) Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Hebrew, 1990; English, 1993). A gripping memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by one of its leaders—“Antek.” Edited and translated by Barbara Harshav, the book is also enormously informative. It is nearly a reference work in addition to a narrative reconstruction of the most important act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

(10.) Chaim Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary (written in Hebrew from September 1, 1939, to August 4, 1942; published in English translation in 1965). The diary that everybody knows is Anne Frank’s, but Chaim Kaplan’s is the single most important diary to come out of the Shoah. Kaplan lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and participated in the Oyneg Shabes collective history project. A Hebrew teacher and Orthodox Jew, he watched the approach of the German destruction through the lens of Jewish concepts and categories. Bearing witness through his diary was, for him, as for all of the “ghetto scribes,” a holy obligation. Abraham Lewin’s ghetto diary, published in English under the title A Cup of Tears (1988), and Emanuel Ringelblum’s Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (English, 1958), fill out the picture. If you can find it, Joseph Kermish’s collection of documents from the ghetto’s underground archive, To Live and Die with Honor (1986), belongs in every library. If you can’t find it—or even if you can—Who Will Write Our History? (2007), Samuel D. Kassow’s study of Oyneg Shabes, is an indispensable work of scholarship.

(11.) Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, Sacred Fire (written in Hebrew from September 14, 1939, to July 18, 1942; English, 2000). The weekly divrei Torah of the “Piacezna rebbe,” delivered to his Hasidic followers in the Warsaw Ghetto, were first collected and published as Esh Kodesh in Israel in 1950 and quickly became a classic of Orthodox Jewish religious literature. The critic David G. Roskies distinguishes between literature of the Holocaust and literature from the Holocaust. Shapira’s sermons are a unique example of the Jewish response to the monstrous events as they unfolded. Nehemia Polen’s study The Holy Fire (1999) places Shapira in the context of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Jewish thought.

(12.) Etty Hillesum, Etty: The Letters and Diaries, 1941–1943 (written in Dutch from March 8, 1941, to October 13, 1942; English translation, 2002). Hillesum is beloved by Christian readers, who are deeply touched—and reminded of their own religious commitment—by her willingness to be a servant. She is largely unknown to Jewish readers, who avoid her as if she were the exclusive property of Christians. The unabridged edition of her diary was published in this country by Eerdmans, a Protestant publishing house in Grand Rapids. Yet Christians are keenly aware of the dangers of “appropriationism,” showing a respect for her that she has been denied by the Jews. She is one of the best writers to come out of the Holocaust, and among the most deeply moving—even if her religiosity is not traditionally Jewish.

(13.) Moshe Flinker, Young Moshe’s Diary: The Spiritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe (written in Hebrew from November 24, 1942, to after September 1943; English translation, 1965). The diary of a seventeen-year-old Dutch Jew kept while his family was in hiding from the Nazis in Brussels. Less practical and detailed, more conscious of the approaching end and its place in Jewish history and thinking, Flinker’s diary is more representative of the Jewish experience in the Holocaust than Anne Frank’s.

(14.) Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 (written in Yiddish from September 6, 1939, to September 17, 1944; English translation, 2002). A monumental and comprehensive first-hand account of the destruction of Vilna, the cultural center of Eastern European Jewry, which records not merely the Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews, but also its war against Jewish culture.

(15.) André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just (French, 1959; English, 1961). Although the first American novel about Auschwitz was Meyer Levin’s Eva (also published in 1959), the first Holocaust bestseller in America was Schwarz-Bart’s Prix-de-Goncourt-winning novel, based on the legend of the thirty-six just men who, unknown to themselves, keep the world alive.

(16.) Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky (French, 1961; English, 1964). The autobiographical novel of a Ukrainian Jew from Lvov who passes as a Gentile to escape the Nazis, but is captured and imprisoned in an extermination camp.

(17.) Jiri Weil, Life with a Star (Czech, 1964; English, 1989). A slim hard-headed graceful novel about a Jew who pretends to kill himself, then hides from the Nazis in occupied Prague.

(18.) Henryk Grynberg, The Jewish War (Polish, 1965) and The Victory (Polish, 1969; English translation in one volume, 1993). Two short novels about a Jewish family that survives the Holocaust by moving through a series of hiding places, finally pretending to be the family of a Polish officer captured by the Nazis. In the second volume, they desperately await the advance of the Red Army.

(19.) Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939 (Hebrew, 1974; English, 1980). A novel about Austrian Jews gathered in an Alpine resort, unaware of the approaching Holocaust.

(20.) Tova Reich, My Holocaust (2007). A ferocious satire on Holocaust kitsch and possessiveness among American Jews. Not to every taste.

(21.) Miklós Radnóti, Foamy Sky (Hungarian, 1946; English, 1972). Written in pencil in a small exercise book, Radnóti’s posthumous collection Tajtékos ég contains odes to his wife, letters, and poetic fragments.

(22.) Abraham Sutzkever, Di festung: lider un poemes geshribn in vilner geto un in vald, 1941–1944 (Yiddish, 1945; English, 1981). The definitive English-language edition of Sutzkever’s work was published in 1991 under the title Selected Poetry and Prose by the University of California Press. In addition to his ghetto poems, the volume contains pre- and post-Holocaust poems and prose.

(23.) David G. Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (1989). A masterful anthology which places the “literature from the Holocaust” in a tradition of Jewish writing about political evil.

Joining COMMENTARY

2011-05-01T08:26:00.001-04:00

Just a quick note to announce that I have become the Online Editor of Commentary magazine, where I will be working with editor John Podhoretz and Jonathan S. Tobin, who was elevated to the position of Senior Online Editor, to make the best magazine in America even better. My primary job will be to edit the magazine’s blog Contentions, but I’ll also help around the house. And blog there myself now and then, when I have something topical and pressing to say.

I should also note that, for only $1.99 a month, you can now get Commentary delivered to your Kindle. Podhoretz’s monthly editorials and Andrew Ferguson’s “Press Man,” his monthly column of press criticism, alone are worth the price. The May issue of the magazine includes Noah Pollak’s exposé of B’Tselem, the Israeli “human-rights” organization, Omri Ceren’s examination of the Goldstone Report in light of its author’s admission that most of it was a lie, and a wonderful essay by Algis Valiunas on Montaigne.

The inadequacy of literature

2011-04-28T14:52:00.009-04:00

For a long time now, on this blog and elsewhere, I have been hawking the idea that literature is not a special class of human efforts (“Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value,” as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language puts it, or “fiction, poetry, or drama that seeks to be judged by ‘literary’ criteria,” as Daniel Green once preferred), but really nothing more than a particular window on the human parade, a distinct and self-governing arrangement of intelligence, a special method for organizing the data of experience.

On this showing, a book that would not be considered “literary” by most people—Darwin’s Origins of Species was a favorite example of the critic E. D. Hirsch Jr.—is literature nevertheless, because it can be read from a literary angle. English departments would read Darwin one way; history departments another way; philosophy departments a distinctly different third way. If I am right that “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition”—then Darwin would be read, when he is read as literature, for the good writing.

I stand by this definition. Literary critics read the same book differently from historians, philosophers, economists, natural scientists, practical men. Reading a book historically is what turns it into history; philosophically, into philosophy; and so on. The same for literature.

Only recently I have been struck, and damned hard too, by the inadequacy of this view. Not the woebegoneness of the definition. No, I mean the limitation, the built-in defect, of the whole literary approach. Sixty-eight years ago, Bernard DeVoto had gave the deficiency a name. He called it The Literary Fallacy. As I paraphrased it elsewhere, this is the fallacy of believing that human experience can be absorbed, both understood and expressed, wholly in literary terms. In the hands of a literary critic, it is the fallacy of reading a book with no check or control outside, but evaluating it instead wholly on the basis of its “fascinating” subject, its “canny strategy,” the “stunning contemporary facts embedded in the text,” its “astonishing” revelations, the “interesting alternative view” it offers, its “urgency,” its timeliness, its success at provoking conversation.

These phrases are the property of Anna Clark. A week ago, on her blog Isak, perhaps in honor of Passover, Clark demonstrated all the shortcomings of reading a book as literature (and nothing more). Her demonstration, in fact, was a bravura performance, maybe the best example of literary criticism’s inadequacy that I have ever encountered.

The book under her review was John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s infamous Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, first published four years ago and preceded by a London Review of Books essay laying out the authors’ thesis in 2006. Mearsheimer and Walt freshen up the old theories of a Jewish world conspiracy, familiar at least since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forged by the Russian secret police late in the nineteenth century, although the two American professors resort to special pleading, the desire to have it both ways, in passages written between the appearance of the magazine article and their book (“it is . . . wrong—and objectionable—to argue that Jews or pro-Israel forces ‘control’ the media and what they say about Israel”).

Clark evinces no knowledge whatever of the background to Mearsheimer and Walt’s book. And though she quotes the “exclamatory blurbs” on the jacket of The Israel Lobby (“The biggest literary controversy for years,” “It detonated an explosion”), she is a stranger to the controversy and the explosion. This is the most basic (and among the literati a sadly frequent) version of the ignoratio elenchi. Because she is ignorant of its refutations, Clark is unable to follow Mearshimer and Walt’s argument carefully enough to understand it as anything more complicated than an autotelic “literary” machine—a well wrought urn, in other words.

Yet the reception of The Israel Lobby was not merely the “biggest literary controversy for years.” The book was widely and extensively refuted. Indeed, its publication was an occasion for political unity, as critics from Left and Right joined together to refute Mearsheimer and Walt. “They quote only those people who basically have this point of view and don’t take a serious look at anything in a more profound way,” Dennis Ross was quoted as saying by the Washington Post. He said the book was “masquerading as scholarship.” In the Los Angeles Times, Max Boot asked why, if the Israel lobby were powerful enough (in the authors’ words) “to stifle criticism of Israel,” it would “allow such a scurrilous piece of pseudo-scholarship to be published?” Even New Yorker editor David Remnick, no reliable friend of Israel, was troubled by the absence of any larger perspective, any outside check, in The Israel Lobby:It’s a narrative that recounts every lurid report of Israeli cruelty as indisputable fact but leaves out the rise of Fatah and Palestinian terrorism before 1967; the Munich Olympics; Black September; myriad cases of suicide bombings; and other spectaculars. The narrative rightly points out the destructiveness of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and America’s reluctance to do much to curtail them, but there is scant mention of Palestinian violence or diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000, Israel offered “a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli control.” (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told Yasir Arafat, “If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.”) Nor do they dwell for long on instances when the all-powerful Israel lobby failed to sway the White House, as when George H. W. Bush dragged Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid peace conference.And Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who described himself modestly as an “occasional critic of Israel,” confessed that he was moved by Mearsheimer and Walt to burst into “Hatikvah.” “[T]heir argument is so dry, so one-sided,” he concluded—“an Israel lobby that leads America around by the nose—they suggest that not only do they not know Israel, they don’t know America, either.”

The authors falsified quotations, suppressed facts, advanced unsubstantiated claims, and relied heavily upon dubious and shaky sources. The “revisionist” Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose work on the Palestinian refugee problem was of great value to them, quipped that if Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay were “an actual person, I would have to say that he did not have a single honest bone in his body.” And as Bret Stephens observed in Commentary, the most striking thing about their finished book was the complete absence of original scholarship. “Scarcely any primary source materials cited; no first-hand interviews; no hint that either Mearsheimer or Walt ever bothered to visit Israel during the course of their researches or so much as spoke to an actual member of the ‘lobby’ against which they level heavy charges of working at cross-purposes with vital U.S. interests,” Stephens said. “How many readers will notice this travesty of academic standards?”

Not Anna Clark, for one. For her it is enough that The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is “engrossing and sharp-eyed”; and from the vantage of literature, perhaps it is enough. When a book purports to rip the mask off American support for the Jewish state, however, a literary approach to it will not suffice. Some other means will be required to probe its claims. To praise a book’s literary effect will not be nearly enough, as Clark so amply documents, if it substitutes falsehoods and fantasies for the truth.

Novels about Jesus

2011-04-24T11:42:00.004-04:00

On this Easter morning I have been thinking about all of the bad fiction about Jesus of Nazareth written by those who believe in him. Some of it has attained fame (Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, Lloyd C. Douglas’s Robe, Thomas B. Costain’s Silver Chalice), but for a reader outside the church, pretty much all of it is pretty hard to take. Have there been any good novels?

Various non-believers have come at the Gospel story from various non-Christian angles. Probably the most controversial was Nikos Kazantzakis, whose Last Temptation of Christ (1951) was placed on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. George Moore was determined to leave a realistic account of the life and wrote The Brook Kerith (1916), imagining an entirely human Jesus who nevertheless survived the crucifixion. D. H. Lawrence’s last book was The Man Who Died, published the year before he died in 1930. Resurrected to become a wanderer, Jesus finds himself in an Egyptian temple and falls in love with a priestess there, who believes he is Osiris.

The Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch wrote The Nazarene in 1939, and caused a literary scandal. (He was very nearly written out of Yiddish literature, although Time magazine was quick to reassure readers that “it should not offend Christian sensibilities.”). Robert Graves wrote King Jesus (1946), one of his weakest historical novels (a recent reviewer called it “Graves’s Satanic Verses”). Norman Mailer wrote a novel in the form of Jesus’ autobiography, The Gospel According to the Son (1997), which sounds like a knockoff of Kazantzakis’s novel, if Michiko Kakutani is to be believed—quite a leap of faith in its own right.

The late Reynolds Price wrote a novella, an “apocryphal gospel,” entitled The Honest Account of a Memorable Life (1994), originally published in Theology Today. It may be more interesting as theology than fiction.

Except for Price, though, I am forced to conclude that only someone who is neither a believer nor a non-believer could possibly write a good novel about Jesus of Nazareth.

Update: A reader writes to suggest The Master and Margarita, while adding that he suspects Bulgakov was not “a believing Christian.”

Christians and Passover

2011-04-22T18:13:00.008-04:00

A reader of my Reflections on Good Friday at Contentions writes to advise me that not all Christians who celebrate Passover are doing so to “co-op” the holiday or “claim it as [their] own.”

I have every confidence that this is the case. I have written before now of my deep respect and affection for Evangelicals and Catholics who are proud to share a “great spiritual heritage” with the Jews.

At the same time, I must admit that the Christian observance of Passover makes me queasy. I don’t mean those observances that “Christianize” the holiday, which are described so well by Michael Medved in his essay “The Preposterous Politics of Passover” in this month’s Commentary and by Diane Cole in her Wall Street Journal report last week on Passover as the new Christmas. Those are little more than revivals of supersessionism.

I mean that even strictly faithful reproductions of an Orthodox Jewish seder by believing Christians leave me feeling queasy. Perhaps the problem is that I fail to grasp the theology behind such reproductions. Exactly what are these Christians affirming? “B’khol-dor vador hayav adam lirot et-atsmo k’ilu hu yatsa mimitsrayim,” the Haggadah says—“in every generation, a man is to regard himself as if he himself had gone out from Egypt.” In as far as Christendom comes out of Israel, and Israel went out from Egypt, some such affirmation can be faithfully uttered by Christians, I suppose.

But what about the blessings scattered throughout the Haggadah? The melekh haolam, the king of the universe, is thanked for “choosing us from all people and lifting us up above all tongues and making us holy through his commandments [mitsvot].” Do Christians really believe that following God’s commandments, guarding the Sabbath and keeping kosher and observing the laws of marital separation, is what sanctifies them? Or do they not believe, instead, that faith in Christ Jesus is the source of holiness?

Perhaps I will please no one and offend many by saying that Christian Passover seders are in my opinion just as inauthentic and unavailing as the “seder” that my sister-in-law is staging tomorrow night—three and four days after the appointed time—because it is more convenient for friends who work. Offensive or not, I will surprise no one who reads this blog by saying that I am hostile to do-it-yourself religion. To celebrate Passover is to understand that the liberation from Egypt was merely the necessary prelude to receiving God’s law at Sinai.

Passover means nothing unless it means a renewal of the dedication to keep all of those laws, including the obligation to remove the words mashiv haruah umorid hageshem from the daily “Eighteen Benedictions” once Passover begins—something that I would bet not even the most thoroughly Judaized Christians think to do.

Viktor Frankl and Auschwitz

2011-04-21T11:49:00.003-04:00

Although it is not widely read or appreciated as such, Viktor Frankl’s celebrated book Man’s Search for Meaning is a Holocaust memoir. When it was first published in German in 1946, it bore the title A Psychologist’s Experiences in a Concentration Camp. In the opening paragraph, Frankl calls his book “the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors.” But the “great horrors,” he immediately observes, “have already been described often enough”—even though he is writing little more than a year after the Soviet Army had liberated Auschwitz. His intention lies elsewhere. What he wants is to describe “the hard fight for existence” in the camps, the “unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one’s own sake or for that of a good friend.”

Everything that follows must be read in the light of Frankl’s intention. But it rarely has. The Los Angeles Times critic Robert R. Kirsch, who did more than anyone to establish the book’s reputation in English, set the tone of the discussion early on. “This work was more than a narrative of suffering,” he wrote; “it was in fact the kind of response which makes suffering meaningful.” The book was read as an account of triumph against all odds. As talk about the Holocaust began to rise into many Americans’ mouths in the early ’seventies, Frankl began to be consulted as a witness to its meaning for latter-day bystanders. The Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy summed up the message. Frankl, he wrote, “said that often the men who survived were those who had a strong, unwavering reason he survive: ‘he who has a strong enough why can endure almost any kind of how.’ ”

In the words attributed to him here, Frankl is quoting the twelfth maxim in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, a fact that McCarthy conveniently ignores. The full version, translated by Walter Kaufmann, has a rather different effect: “If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.” Frankl too chops off the end:As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygenic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.Although he echoes the Nietzschean doctrine that “Excess strength alone is the proof of strength,” Frankl distorts and sentimentalizes the maxim’s original meaning by quivering Nietzsche’s arrow against the English. Something like that, however, is his method throughout Man’s Search for Meaning.

Compare the story that Primo Levi tells in If This Is a Man. Levi explains “the whole process of introduction to what was for us a new order”—a new order of human existence. In his first days in Auschwitz, he does not understand that the old order has been totally replaced:Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the [barrack] window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum,” he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.There was no why in the death camps. Frankl’s entire “search for meaning” was an adventure belonging to an entirely different order of experience.

And once it is understood as referring, not to ordinary experience, but to a world (in Levi’s phrase) from which “the only exit is by way of the Chimney,” Frankl’s advice for “bearing the terrible how of existence” can be seen for what it is—a failure to plumb the depths of the Holocaust. “Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross,” he writes. Required? Yes, by the German Nazis. “One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph,” he writes, “or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.” And in either case, one would almost certainly be gassed and burned and dumped in a mass grave. “[A man] may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp,” Frankl writes. “Dostoevski said once, ‘There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ ” Who is worthy of the gas chamber?

Man’s Search for Meaning infuriates me precisely because my own thought, under the influence of Stage IV cancer, veers dangerously in Frankl’s direction. Here are two things to remember. No human experience is comparable to Auschwitz. There is no possible advice that floats like ash from the crematorium’s chimney. The Holocaust is another world, and any effort to adjust it to the ordinary world of ordinary human experience is a perversion and a lie. Perhaps if he had written a cancer memoir—if he had written about suffering that stops short of human understanding’s limits—Frankl might have offered words of wisdom to those in extremis.

But perhaps not. Although I too have written that the response to affliction is an elective decision fully within human command (and though I too would be superficial and mawkish if I were to write such a thing about the Holocaust), I distance myself from Frankl by disputing the connection between why and how. The search for meaning is not man’s search. The real question is how to do any good, or as Etty Hillesum put it just days after learning for a certainty that the Germans “are after our total destruction,” the problem is one of “offering what little assistance I can wherever it has pleased God to place me.”

Fashions in forbidden speech

2011-04-18T10:49:00.001-04:00

I have begun to blog for Commentary’s Contentions, and my first post of any real substance is up this morning. I posted it there rather than here, because I have already discussed the question here. There I will be more topical, occasionally even political; here I will continue to investigate the occupied territories that once belonged to the Republic of Letters.

It seeks me out that sometime did me flee

2011-04-15T17:32:00.003-04:00

I do not want to be melodramatic. I have a white terror of melodrama. But on the other hand, I know that I must serve as a public witness. What little talent that I have probably assigns me such responsibility.

At all events, my cancer has returned. No need to plunge into the concrete particulars of my case. Suffice it to say that, when I was initially diagnosed, my doctors gave me one to three years to live, although there was also a ten percent chance that I would live ten years. Anatole Broyard, who contracted the disease before me, got just fourteen months. My friend Denis Dutton persisted for two years with it. So far I have survived three-and-a-half years. (And don’t ever let anyone tell you there is no such thing as survivor guilt.) My doctors now say that my odds of living another five years are fifty percent. Or, in other words, I have a half-and-half shot being among the ten percent who live ten years.

Not bad. If I write somewhat more than usual about death and dying, though, you’ll understand why. And forgive me, I hope.

“Breaking faith with readers”

2011-04-11T08:30:00.004-04:00

On Saturday, when I would rather be doing something else than reading it—okay, not a day goes by when I would not rather be doing almost anything else than reading it—the New York Times came out in editorial support of Bill Steigerwald’s indictment against Travels With Charley. The book, say the editors with barely suppressed anger, is “shot through with dubious anecdotes and impossible encounters.” They are outraged that Steinbeck “misrepresented dates and places and had not spent all that time alone with his dog.”

Their last phrase is precious. It performs the excellent service of establishing just how little is at stake in this whole phony controversy. The logic runs like this. If Steinbeck was not “alone with his dog,” as he claimed to be, how can he possibly be trusted on any other subject? And indeed, the Times headlined its editorial “The Truth About Charley.” The truth, in the paper’s eyes, is that Steinbeck’s book has been exposed for all time as nakedly untrue.

But has it? Here is a passage from Travels With Charley. Steinbeck describes his experience of driving U.S. 90, a “wide gash of a superhighway, multiple-lane carrier of the nation’s goods.” (Sometimes called the Southern 66, it is now identical to Interstate 10 for much of its length.) Although he says that he took this route to make up time, Steinbeck is rattled when the minimum posted speed is “greater than any [he] had previously driven”:Instructions screamed at me from the road once: “Do not stop! No stopping. Maintain speed.” Trucks as long as freighters went roaring by, delivering a wind like the blow of a fist. These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truth about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders.The passage contains another obvious untruth. Rociante, the truck that Steinbeck drove on the trip (pictured at right), did not even have a usable rear-view mirror! Steinbeck’s view of “the car behind” would have been blocked by the camper. When he goes on to complain, then, that there were “[n]o roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets” alongside the road, it must follow, I guess, that Steinbeck is not to be believed.

In truth, anyone who has driven America’s Interstate Highway System, created by an act of Congress in 1956, will agree with his prediction that, once the superhighways stretched “across the whole country” (the original plan was only completed in 1992, thirty years after Steinbeck wrote), “it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a thing.” Whether the poodle Charley was along for the ride when this thought first occurred to him, or whether he could see any cars in his rear-view mirror while thinking it, is utterly irrelevant. As Steinbeck wrote, as plainly as possible, the journey recorded in Travels With Charley was “designed for observation.” It was not written to leave a faithful “representation” of encounters, dates, and places. Remove the dog from the picture and its charm may be reduced, but not its faithfulness.

Take the following thought experiment. There is no such place as the United States of America, no road called U.S. 90, no coast-to-coast system of superhighways. In fact, there is no earth inhabited by human beings. A science-fiction novelist from Omega Centauri imagines the planet earth, human beings, a place known as the United States of America, a road called U.S. 90, a coast-to-coast highway system. If he writes that it will soon “be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a thing,” he really has (in the Times phrasing) “misrepresented dates and places.” The rest of his book is likely to be “shot through with dubious anecdotes and impossible encounters.” But what is the truth of his remark about driving across the country without seeing a thing?

In a novel—the systematic perfection of a make-believe world—the remark would have truthfulness only in relation to the whole. As I have said elsewhere, a novelist must keep faith with the conditions of his world. It is precisely Toni Morrison’s failure to do so in Beloved that many readers overlook in describing it, wrongly, as a great novel. Because they share her racial politics, they are prepared to forgive Morrison when she breaks faith with her fictional world.

But Travels With Charley is not a novel. And the editors of the Times hotly declare, “Books labeled ‘nonfiction’ should not break faith with readers.” Maybe so, but what the editors fail to grasp is that they take the existence of this country, U.S. 90, and Interstate highways so deeply for granted they fail to notice when Steinbeck keeps faith with them on these subjects. When he fibs to them about being alone with his dog, though—when, to use a more precise terminology, he resorts to a literary device to give shape to his amorphous observations—the editors are prepared to demand the return of his Nobel Prize in literature.

A book like Steinbeck’s depends for its truthfulness on the relation of its observations to the world that its readers already know. The flesh-and-blood poodle that Steinbeck named Charley, the actual poodle who found many things obscure, could have been known to only a few people who knew Steinbeck personally. The editors of the Times are so familiar, however, with the possibility of traveling alone with a poodle they are offended to learn that Steinbeck did not actually travel alone with Charley (or not all the time), instead of being grateful to him for bringing the possibility to life for them. Steinbeck did not break faith with them. What he may inadvertently have done is to expose the inconsequence of the things in which they are prepared to invest faith.

Confusions with Charley

2011-04-07T21:04:00.007-04:00

It would be difficult to cook up a literary exposé that is less earth-shattering than Bill Steigerwald’s accusation in the April issue of Reason that Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck’s 1962 account of a motoring trip around America, was “not only heavily fictionalized; it was something of a fraud.” Steigerwald accuses Steinbeck of distorting his itinerary, inventing encounters, and lying about “roughing it,” sleeping arrangements, traveling alone with his poodle Charley, the places he stopped to visit. The book is stuffed with “creative fictions,” Steigerwald concludes. “Maybe Travels With Charley should be shelved with Steinbeck’s novels instead of in the nonfiction section.”

Where the book is shelved does not change what the book is, though. Not that Steigerwald is alone in kicking around a confused idea of fiction. The authorities contacted by the New York Times to comment on the story do little better. “Any writer has the right to shape materials, and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out,” says Susan Shillinglaw, a Steinbeck scholar at San Jose State University. “That doesn’t make the book a lie.” Travels With Charley is not not true, then—is that what you’re saying? It can’t be fiction. It’s not not true.

“Steinbeck was a fiction writer,” his biographer Jay Parini allows, “and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. . . . But I still feel there’s an authenticity there.” Authenticity—isn’t that what something is supposed to have when it’s not exactly true, but you want to protect it from being called false? The throwback jerseys that the pros wear to honor their sport’s past are described as “authentic,” which is another way of saying they might make the players look as if they belong to yesteryear, if you squint really hard and use your imagination.

Bill Barich is the only one quoted in the Times with anything intelligent to say about the whole mess. Although his opinions about America were “darker” than he admitted in the book, and though his writing was “colored by the fact that he was so ill,” Steinbeck remained perceptive in Travels With Charley, Barich says. “I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country,” he adds. “His perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that.”

Barich’s comment suggests that Travels With Charley is a specific kind of book in which the emphasis is upon the pronouncements that the author delivers, not the events that he narrates. At issue in such a book is whether the author’s views, observations, and insights are counterfeit or genuine, not whether the events actually happened. This is a kind of book with a long and distinguished pedigree. The genre includes many travel narratives, starting perhaps with Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and gathering in Twain’s Roughing It (an obvious precursor to Steinbeck’s book) before reaching perfection in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and V. S. Naipaul’s trilogy on India. But the genre also includes hard-to-classify books like Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Thoreau’s Walden, Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley” collections, Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, and A. J. Liebling’s Honest Rainmaker. It is a genre at which Americans have particularly excelled.

Nock’s description of his Memoirs traces the distinctive lines of the genre: “a purely literary and philosophical autobiography with only enough collateral odds and ends thrown in to hold the narrative together.” Or perhaps even better: plenty of philosophy (views, observations, and insights) with only enough narrative to hold the book together. The narrative is a fiction, a contrivance, a ruse to give the book a coherence that, given its disjointed contents, it would otherwise lack. That is its only fictional quality. It asks to be judged, as Barich judges Travels With Charley, on the value of its wisdom.

Yet Barich also tells the Times he is “fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book.” Did he make up the “perceptions” that Barich finds to be “right on the money”? Is that even possible?

The concept of fiction has been betrayed by its choice of partners. On one hand it is identified with fraud and lies; on the other, it is counterpoised with nonfiction (a concept that, if possible, is even more stupefying). But a book can contain “creative fictions” without being fiction, and can be fiction without being a lie. American literary thought would benefit from abandoning classification by either/or, and beginning to examine the different and distinctive ways that fiction operates in different and distinctive kinds of book—even books as silly and forgettable as Travels With Charley.

Diagnosed with cancer

2011-04-05T11:54:00.004-04:00

The biblical scholar James L. Kugel has written a new book on life in the shadow of death. Diagnosed with cancer ten years ago, Kugel doggedly finished The God of Old, a study of the religious experience (as Jack Miles put it) “before the time when God came to seem omniscient and omnipresent,” and only then did he set to work on In the Valley of the Shadow, published in February by the Free Press.

The diagnosis of cancer sent Kugel on a “quest for the foundations of religious belief,” writes Eve Levavi Feinstein at Jewish Ideas Daily. “While Kugel’s previous books focused on Jewish and Christian traditions, In the Valley of the Shadow deals with basic, universal questions and seeks answers wherever they may lie”—including in neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

Still, Kugel ends up preferring the God of old. Modern man now has, as Feinstein says in summarizing his views, “so much stronger a sense of power and agency,” which may explain “why true religious experience is so rare today.” Or, as Kugel himself says, “man is very big, and God is very far away.”

The God of the Hebrew Bible, whom Adam and Eve hear moving about the garden, with whom Abraham argues and Jacob wrestles, who permits Moses a glimpse of his backside, could be near at hand for the cancer patient, if somehow he cover recover the ancient belief. As Kugel says on the last page of The God of Old, written in the full awareness of his cancer, “[A]ncient Israel somehow came to believe that it is simply God’s nature to hear the victim’s cry, that despite all the evidence to the contrary and despite all common sense, this was, in Israel’s view, a realistic portrayal of God’s essential nature.”

How surprising to learn from Feinstein, then, that Kugel believes the “sickening question” asked by most cancer patients (How could this happen?) is not the right question. For Kugel the right question is some variation of Who said life is fair? On his own evidence, God said life is fair. It is modern man, a stranger to God’s closeness, who confidently rejects any notion of life’s fairness—until he is diagnosed with cancer.

For someone like myself, though, living for the past three-and-a-half years under the shadow of a Stage IV cancer diagnosis, neither question is right. Both of Kugel’s questions are “sickening.” The first is an expression of self-pity, which may be forgivable as an immediate reaction to overwhelming knowledge, but which shades over into denial the longer it is asked. The second question is a denial of another kind: it denies that there is any pity—any fairness—in the universe.

Both questions, it seems to me, are attempts to ask the meaning of cancer. But cancer is not a text to be interpreted or puzzling behavior to be understood in context. It is an organic process to which the human body reacts as an organism. This is why I am irritated when I am told to “fight” my cancer. Perhaps the drugs which are administered to me can be said to “fight” the cancer. At best I am ringside at the fight.

As an organism, I react to cancer in ways that I am unable to control. As a person, though, I respond to it—and not to an organic process, but to a human drama. My response is entirely within my control. I can elect self-pity or a universe without pity or take an altogether different stance. The right question, then, is How am I going to respond?

A diagnosis of cancer is a life-changing event, and the only question is what changes to make. In his new book, Kugel describes the change movingly:[T]he main change in my state of mind was that the background music had suddenly stopped—the music of daily life that's constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities. Now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence. There you are, one little person, sitting in the late summer sun, with only a few things left to do.My own change was not nearly so moving. I remember that I was sitting in the back of the house, rocking slowly in the chair that my wife and I had purchased five years earlier for her to sit in comfortably while she nursed our newborn twins, and I was feeling profoundly sorry for myself. I was struggling without success to read some hefty book. Chemotherapy had left me with “chemo brain,” a state of mind in which everything was fuzzy and no idea ever wandered. “I can’t think any more,” I moaned softly to myself; “I can’t think any more.” Suddenly I stopped rocking. “Wait a minute,” I said; “that’s a thought.”

From then on I decided that, if I could no longer think as well as I once did, I could still direct streams of thought over the objects I chose. If I could no longer roughhouse with my boys as roughly as I once did, I could still roughhouse with them. If I could no longer be married to my wife “forever,” as I once promised, I could still be married to her for as long or short a time as remained to me.

The error that so many commit, upon hearing a diagnosis of cancer, is this. Cancer is not the concluding sentence, but a revision in a work that remains unfinished.

Hoffman’s Hunger

2011-04-04T12:52:00.006-04:00

Not every Jewish writer who earns international attention is an anti-Zionist. The Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, who makes short work of the whining about “the inhumanity of Israeli policy” and understands only too well what animates Palestinian Arab culture, is famous throughout Europe for his intellectual thrillers. Hoffman’s Hunger, originally published in the Netherlands in 1990, was the first of his twelve novels to be translated into English. (To date only one other, God’s Gym, has been Englished. Both were published by the Toby Press, and remain in print.) In an article written last year for Standpoint, Winter named Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer as his literary influences—Kafka for his depiction of a “world that could not be controlled,” Singer for his “poor and vigorous and colourful Jews.” It is not an exaggeration to say that his fiction is a heady mixture of these two great Jewish novelists’ themes, nor that Winter belongs in their company.

Set in the last months before the disintegration of Communist Eastern Europe, Hoffman’s Hunger follows the adventures of the new Dutch ambassador to Prague. Felix Hoffman is a “twentieth-century nihilist (his view of himself).” A Jew who was orphaned by the Holocaust, he was raised by a Catholic family in Den Bosch, a small city in southern Holland where Winter himself was born and raised. After marrying a beauty who bore him non-identical twin daughters, Hoffman was “deliriously happy,” even though his diplomatic career was not on the fast track. At the age of eight, though, one of the girls develops leukemia and turns before his eyes into a “little wizened crone with gentle eyes.”

On the day she dies, Hoffman “become[s] his own prisoner.” For the next two decades, he does not sleep. Alone at night, he begins to begins to eat, “demolish[ing] plate loads of food with a rapacious hunger” that goes on all night. His wife “gave his hunger a name, along the lines of ‘Parkinson’s’ or ‘Alzheimer’s’—she called it ‘Hoffman’s Hunger.’ ” His fragile self-control breaks down completely. Hoffman subverts his marriage, his career, his health. His other daughter dies of a drug overdose after sinking to pornography. By the time he is posted to Prague at fifty-nine, Hoffman is a “sleepless alcoholic with chronic hunger who had forfeited his right to exist long ago.”

His two-decade insomnia is not merely a waste product of grief. In her final days, his daughter Esther comes to accept her imminent death. And like so many patients with terminal cancer, she offers consolation to her family instead of seeking it:     “It’s all right, Daddy, it really is all right.”
     “It won’t be all right until you’re better.”
     “No. Just let me be as I am. I know.”
     “What do you know, darling?”
     She smiled, from somewhere beyond the pain.
     “I know, Daddy. . .”
     “But what, Esther darling? What do you know?”
     She said it once more, barely audible this time. “I know, Daddy. . .”Esther dies before she can tell her father what she knows. Hoffman is haunted by her last words. They keep him awake for twenty years.

He endures the long nights by eating constantly and reading a translation of the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, a treatise on human understanding by Spinoza circa 1662, which Hoffman finds in the attic of the Dutch embassy. As he struggles with the book, he realizes that what Spinoza wants is to devise a method that would “provide perfect knowledge and point the way to supreme wisdom.” Thus it could be, for Hoffman, another means to acquire Esther’s final knowledge.

Hoffman’s Hunger takes its structure from Spinoza’s treatise. After a chapter that feints toward the subplot or parallel narrative, the novel opens with the first paragraph of the treatise, and by the time that Hoffman finishes the book five months later—or, rather, by the time he realizes that Spinoza left it unfinished—his story is almost over (except for a coda in one last chapter).

The novel’s plot is the intertwining of two different stories about men who betray their countries. The men and their stories parallel each other—two fat men who are tormented by a “hungering after repletion,” two cases of bad health, two bad marriages, two acts of treason undertaken to feed the hunger—but their ends are different.

Hoffman finds redemption. Although he decides that he is no patriot, although he has no qualms about paying back the country that had betrayed his parents to the Nazis, he is not motivated by politics. And though he is spared by the Velvet Revolution, which diminishes his crime of passing secrets to the Czech Communists, he does not find redemption in politics. Human freedom is renewed in Eastern Europe, but Hoffman is a “professional outsider, a permanent refugee.” He is excluded from the celebration. For him, “[i]t seemed out of the question that a lasting peace would descend upon Europe.”

Redemption comes from an unexpected quarter. On the run from the KLPD, Hoffman holes up in the family’s summer home in Vught, site of a Nazi transit camp. Unwashed and stinking, he is a “specimen of human despair and arrogance.” He admits that he has “brought destruction upon his own head and was searching for some way of atoning.” He finds the way in Spinoza’s Tractatus. The book “suddenly appeared to him as a kind of liturgy.” While the great philosopher had gone in search of ultimate truth, Hoffman himself is particularly concerned to discover how the average layman might learn to pray again. He is not a believer, but he knows that he must pray if he is to atone for the “stupidity” and “egoism” of his twenty-years hunger—he must “pray, without believing.”

In telling how Hoffman came to pray, Leon de Winter has told one of the great Jewish stories. I don’t mean simply that he has written one of the greatest Jewish novels of the past century, although he has, but also that he has unforgettably captured the predicament of the modern Jew, and how he finds his way out.
____________________

Winter’s books include:

Over de leegte in de wereld [stories] (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1976). The Day before Yesterday, trans. Scott Rollins (New York: Vehicle Editions, 1985).

De (ver)wording van de jonge Dürer [“The Corruption of Young Dürer”] (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1978).

Zoeken naar Eileen W [“Looking for Eileen W”] (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1981).

Place de la Bastille (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1981).

Vertraagde roman [“Delayed novel,” travel writing] (Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 1982).

Kaplan (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1986).

Hoffman’s honger (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1990). Trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans (New Milford, Conn.: Toby Press, 2007).

SuperTex (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1991).

De ruimte van Sokolov [“Room for Sokolov”] (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1992).

Serenade (Amsterdam: CPNB, 1995).

Zionoco (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1995).

De hemel van Hollywood [“The Hollywood Sky”] (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1997).

God’s Gym (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2002). Trans. Jeannette K. Ringold (New Milford, Conn.: Toby Press, 2009).

Het recht op terugkeer [“The Right of Return”] (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2008).

Chic literary disgust

2011-03-29T07:54:00.004-04:00

A friend sent me this translation of an interview with Nicole Krauss in the Tel Aviv daily Yediot Ahronot: “American Jewish writer Nicole Krauss offers her insight on Israel: ‘I cannot help but to react furiously to the policies of [Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin] Netanyahu and of his anti-democratic ministers; they are almost fascists. . . . I get physically sick when I see the inhumanity of Israeli policy which is incompatible with Jewish or democratic values and pushes the country to the brink of existential abyss.’ ”

Judith Butler is not alone in using her Jewish identity as a human shield for attacks upon Israel. An entire generation of Jewish writers has but one connection to the Jewish people: a chic literary disgust for the Jewish state. What they don’t seem to understand is that the very existence of Israel, and its willingness to defend and take them in as Jews, makes their attacks easier and less costly—to themselves. The final shield is the Jewish state.

Why Judith Butler hates Israel

2011-03-25T10:50:00.013-04:00

As someone who is “unambiguously hostile” to the enemies of Israel, I was aggravated but not particularly surprised by Judith Butler’s essay in the March 3rd issue of the London Review of Books (h/t: Jesse Freedman, Books, Inq.).

Several years ago, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum accused Butler of collaborating with evil by resorting to a “hip quietism” that obscures the “difficulty of realizing justice in America.” Since then Butler has begun to emphasize her Jewish identity to give cover to a public critique of Israel, becoming an active collaborator with the evil of Arab irredentism.

Her new essay, entitled “Who Owns Kafka?” and superficially about the legal dispute over Kafka’s unpublished papers, opens with a long and winding libel of the Jewish state, whose National Library seeks possession of the Kafka archive. The very idea of Israel is so scandalous to her that Butler cannot bear to imagine Kafka’s papers being housed there, in a facility open to all researchers.

She is especially upset at the National Library’s claim that Kafka is an “asset” of the Jewish people. The claim, she says, is controversial, because “it effaces other modes of belonging or, rather, non-belonging,” and is particularly galling for Butler, because the library’s “legal case rests on the presumption that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish people.”

Perhaps Butler is worried that being known as a Jew will efface her connections to feminism and the Left, but the worry is misplaced. The notion that Jewish identity somehow cancels out any other identification is so numbskulled that only an intellectual ambivalent about her own identity could come up with it. A human being is a convergence of identities; she is the experience in which her loyalties and commitments overlap. My children belong to their mother and me, but they also belong to the Jewish people, the student body of the school they attend, their teams and scout troops, the United States of America. Belonging to a people or an institution is nothing like investing all of your retirement savings in just one stock.

The question whether Kafka belongs to the Jews is an altogether different question, and I won’t even try to offer a definitive answer here. What I will do, though, is to quote the answer of a much greater scholar than either Butler or me. Writing in August 1931 to Walter Benjamin, who asked for a “hint” about his opinion of Kafka, Gershom Scholem said:I have of course already had “individual thoughts” about Kafka, although these do not concern Kafka’s position in the continuum of German literature (in which he has no position of any sort, something that he himself did not have the least doubt about; as you probably know, he was a Zionist), but his position in the continuum of Jewish literature. I advise you to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which I regard as the sole subject of Kafka’s production [worthy of] being treated in a work of literature. There, you see, are in my opinion also the vantage points from which one can describe Kafka’s linguistic world, which with its affinity to the language of the Last Judgment probably represents the prosaic in its most canonical form.[1]It is most inconvenient for Butler that Kafka was a Zionist, and was thus at odds with pretty much her entire argument, but she struggles to make the best of it. “So far as we’re concerned with assessing the rights of ownership,” she says, “it probably doesn’t matter whether or not Kafka was a Zionist or whether he planned seriously to move to Palestine.”

Except it turns out that it does matter, after all. In contesting the “presumption” that “the state of Israel . . . represents the Jewish people,” Butler advances a distinction between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, and holds that Israel cannot possibly represent the Jewish people because not all Jews are Zionists. Why, just look at her!

Her problem is the factual one that the overwhelming majority of Jews are Zionists. Oh, there are a few marginal Jews, like Butler and her Berkeley neighbors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, for whom Jewishness is a claim to special status without much in the way of Jewish learning behind it, who are not. But to say no more than this is to be coy and misleading. The kind of Jew that Butler has in mind, who is not represented by the state of Israel, is not merely non-Zionist, but loudly and proudly anti-Zionist. But how then can an anti-Zionist like Butler, unrelentingly antagonistic toward the Jewish state, argue in good faith that Israel has no right of “ownership” to his papers unless she is able to separate Kafka from his well-recorded Zionism?

Here’s how. Butler proposes to divide “Jews who are Zionist [from] Jews who are not, for example Jews in the diaspora for whom the homeland is not a place of inevitable return or a final destination.” On this showing Kafka, who never “planned seriously to move to Palestine,” was no Zionist. (Butler conveniently ignores the historical facts of the Third Aliyah to Palestine. In August 1920, the British mandatory government restricted Jewish immigration to 16,500 a year, and only for those who could prove that they would be employed upon arrival. Two years later, the British stipulated that future immigration should not exceed Palestine’s ability to absorb new immigrants, and adopted a system of granting permits by employment categories. How many Jewish novelists would be permitted into the country is unclear.)

At all events, Butler’s distinction is completely ahistorical. Her classification of “Jews who are not [Zionists]” has never existed in Jewish literature and thought, anywhere, at any time. The more accurate distinction was advanced by Peter Beinert last year in the New York Review of Books. “Among American Jews today,” Beinert said, “there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included.”

Butler would claim the secularized Jews, who throb in sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs, among those who are “not” Zionist (while concealing her belief that non-Zionists are identical to anti-Zionists). It is undeniably true that most of the Jews living in the diaspora will never relocate to Israel, but it does not follow that they are not Zionists. And only the smallest of minorities think like Butler. The American Jewish Committee’s annual survey of Jewish opinion for 2010 found that thirty percent of American Jews feel “very close” to Israel, while another forty-four percent feel “fairly close.” While only twenty percent admit to feeling “fairly distant,” the camp of those like Butler who feel “very distant” includes just five percent of American Jews.

But is it really presumptuous to suggest that Israel represents the Jews? Butler is able to defend her assertion that it does not only by sneaking from one meaning of the word representation to another. It is one thing to say that Israel stands for the Jewish people as the physical embodiment of a spiritual ideal. It is quite another thing to hold, as Butler does, that the state of Israel acts as if it has been delegated to speak for the Jews as a whole. She writes:[I]f it is to represent its population fairly or equally, [Israel] must represent both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The assertion that Israel represents the Jewish people thus denies the vast number of Jews outside Israel who are not represented by it, either legally or politically, but also the Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens of that state.But this is nonsense, both politically and conceptually. Israel is not the political deputy of Jews living in the diaspora, and it is not the symbolic emblem of non-Jews anywhere. Because it is a representative democracy in which all of its citizens are empowered to vote and to elect delegates to the Knesset, Israel does, “fairly and equally,” represent its non-Jewish citizens: just as President Obama represents the United States, even though some American citizens dissent from his policies. Even for those who disagree with him, however, the United States represents an image of something larger and more noble than its current policies.

And that is what Butler cannot stomach. In her view, exile is the proper condition for the Jewish people. Although she cites the little-known Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin in support of her view, a far better-known spokesman is the novelist Michael Chabon. I have already discussed the nostalgia for exile in the last paragraphs of my Sewanee Review essay on him, but perhaps a little more might be said. Israel may not be a perfect state—no state is—but it exemplifies the Jews’ three-thousand-year-old dream of self-determination in their own land. For Jews like Judith Butler, who have exiled themselves from Jewish languages and institutions, perhaps the only warm refuge is to be found in a passionate hatred for the Jewish state.
____________________

[1] Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship [1975], trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), p. 170.

The bias of self-selection

2011-03-23T14:53:00.010-04:00

The “leftist domination of college faculties,” sighs David French of the Alliance Defense Fund in a post at National Review Online, is “by now inarguable.” The argument has shifted to its cause.

Two new studies by academic sociologists have found that “self-selection” rather than bias accounts for the scarcity of conservative professors on university campuses (h/t: French). “There are just many more liberals than conservatives in the ranks of graduate students," the sociologist Neil L. Gross told the Chronicle of Higher Education. The fact that there are few academic conservatives “does not seem to be the result of bias or discrimination against them,” but appears rather to be the effect of self-selection among those who consider academic careers.

What is left out of account, though, is the way in which self-selection on the part of college faculties is a function of their power. Another term for it is faculty governance, which places exclusive responsibility for hiring and promotion in faculty hands. It is the faculty itself that is self-selecting, and with no outside checks on its power—sometimes the deans who are appointed to oversee the personnel decisions of departments are in collusion with them—why then should it occasion much surprise when the faculty selects more and more of its own kind?

The distinction between bias and self-selection, in other words, is without a difference. Let me illustrate from my own experience in the English department at Texas A&M University.

Every year the professors in the department are evaluated by a committee of their peers on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). A mid-range score of 3 is defined as “meeting departmental expectations.” In 2004, Paul Hedeen and I published Unrelenting Readers, an original anthology of contemporary poet-critics (the first of its kind), with a historical introduction, detailed biographical notes, and a comprehensive index. The next year, the evaluation committee, which was chaired by a full professor notorious in the department for his contempt for conservatives, gave me a score of 2 in research.

Now, perhaps a new co-edited book fails to meet “departmental expectations” in English at Texas A&M. Yet the same year that Unrelenting Readers was published, a leftist colleague co-edited a collection of conference papers with the University of Delaware Press. He received a 5 in research.

When I asked for an explanation, I was told that the presses were not comparable, even though Story Line, which has since gone out of business, was the leading publisher of the New Narrative poetry at the time, with writers like Bruce Bawer, Donald Hall, Mark Jarman, Frederick Morgan, Louis Simpson, and Richard Wilbur on its list. (I hadn’t realized that the University of Delaware’s was such a distinguished press.) When I threatened to file a grievance, the department head bumped my rating to 2.5 and promised me a raise commensurate with an even higher rating. Like a fool, I backed down and took the money. Fool? More like a whore.

There is more to the story. The chairman of the evaluation committee had already divorced his wife of twenty years and married one of his own PhD students at Texas A&M. Although two or three of us voted against her, she was hired on tenure track when she finished her dissertation, and though the same two or three of us voted against her again, she was duly tenured six years later.

Another example of self-selection rather than bias, I suppose.

Jabotinsky’s “Samson”

2011-03-21T16:13:00.006-04:00

Now that Israeli Apartheid Week has come and gone, and now that the Jews have answered with the holiday of Purim, perhaps there is time to look into Vladimir Jabotinsky’s biblical novel Samson.

Jabotinsky is better known as the founder of “Revisionist Zionism,” a movement in opposition to Labor Zionism, which held that the aim of Zionism should be the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine and the reestablishment of a Jewish state there; nothing short of that. After being banned from Palestine in 1929 by the British, Jabotinsky organized the Irgun to drive them out, although he died (in 1940, on a fundraising trip to New York) before his hopes were realized. Menachem Begin succeeded him as head of the Irgun. The Israeli Likud Party is the direct descendant of Jabotinsky and his followers.

Born in Odessa in 1880, Jabotinsky was the rare political leader who was also a distinguished novelist. The slim roster includes Benjamin Disraeli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Mario Vargas Llosa, and who else? When the Guardian gathered the ten best novels by politicians, Jimmy Carter and Newt Gingrich had to be enlisted, along with an obscure political allegory by Sir Winston Churchill, because otherwise ten could not have been found. Jabotinsky was left off the list, even though the great Ruth R. Wisse had enshrined Samson in The Modern Jewish Canon nine years earlier. Even before that, Maxim Gorky was reputed to have complained that Zionism stole Jabotinsky from Russian literature.

Samson appeared first in serial form in 1927 in a Russian-language journal published in Paris. In book form, it was published in Russian in 1928 and in two separate German editions later the same year. (Whether Jabotinsky, who was fluent in German, rewrote his own novel or it was translated by a second hand is a riddle I have been unable to solve.) At all events, it was the German version that was translated into English in 1930.

As closely as possible, given the scarcity of detail, Jabotinsky follows the biblical tale of Samson (Judg 13–16). What attracted him to the tale is the prophecy that is foretold before Samson’s birth: “He will be the first to save Israel from the Philistines”—the people who conquered coastal Canaan in the twelfth century B.C.E. and occupied it for the next six hundred years, ruling over the descendants of Israel. Jabotinsky’s Samson is transformed by painful experience from a gang leader to a lone “brigand,” gradually developing the rudiments of a political consciousness. He is keenly aware that the Philistines have acquired the knowledge of iron smithing, which is the source of their power. Samson makes it his life’s purpose to obtain iron for the scattered and disunified tribes who are not yet called Jews.

Unlike the Bible’s Samson, Jabotinsky’s is not a chieftain, a settled leader (shofet in Hebrew, misleadingly translated “judge”) with a political seat. What Jabotinsky recreates is the chaotic period between the death of Joshua and the establishment of the monarchy when the Israelitish tribes were led by a succession of champions, who would throw off an occupying power until a new conquerer would descend upon them, requiring a new champion. Jabotinsky’s Israelities live from hand to mouth, having been robbed of “their land, their speech, their customs, their art, their gods, and finally even of the will to live their lives in their own way.” And his Samson is a fighter.

Everyone remembers the “young lion” that roars at Samson out of nowhere when he is on the road to Timnath (Judg 15.5–6). Samson tears
the cat apart with his bare hands. Jabotinsky dwells upon the anecdote, spinning it out into an adventure. In the novel, the young lion becomes a panther, and Samson leaps upon its back, interlocking his limbs with the cat’s:Sneezing, snarling and howling, they rolled over on the ground together, and it was hard to distinguish the cries of the man from the cries of the beast. But the panther could do no further harm. It struck wildly at the air with its paws, throwing cascades of earth and stones in all directions. Its case was oddly similar to that of a cat with a bell tied to its tail. Its bellows of fury changed gradually to howls of pain, for Samson was slowly wrenching its fore-legs out of joint by turning his elbows outwards and pressing down the beast’s neck with his clasped hands. This took some time, but at length the characteristic sound of cracking joints was heard, and the panther howled in a tone common to all great beasts of prey in their death agony—a tone which makes it difficult to recognize the species of animal. Its fore-legs now hung limp, as though only loosely attached to its body. Once more it reared up on its hind legs, and threw itself backwards in an effort to crush the devil that rode it; but Samson’s fingers were already choking its throat on both sides. Soon the snarls and howls died away, and nothing could be heard but the death-rattle of the throttled beast, the menacing hiss of breath between the man’s clenched teeth and the heavy, regular beat of the long tail.This passage may seem as if it belongs in a boy’s book or a swashbuckler (if there can be swashbucklers without swords), but it has a firm intention behind it, both literary and political. If the Jewish writer, as Isaac Babel wrote at about the same time in his Odessa Tales, is a man with “glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart,” then Jabotinsky wanted to give Jewish writing a good shake, although he too wore glasses. As he wrote in 1938 to a young man who was contemplating suicide over antisemitic bullying at school, “Surrender is the dirtiest trick in creation; and suicide, being the symbol of surrender, is like a call for universal betrayal.” His writing is like a call to action. Jabotinsky wanted to rouse a generation of Jewish heroes, even among the bespectacled intelligentsia. He wanted to dispel autumn from Jewish hearts.

But Samson is also an exciting novel—a heroic novel—because Jabotinsky was not writing a Tendenzroman. Some Jewish critics, according to his biographer Shmuel Katz, were struck by what they detected as a militaristic subtext in Samson’s farewell message to his people:Tell them two things in my name—two words. The first word is Iron. They must get iron. They must give everything they have for iron—their silver and wheat, oil and wine and flocks, even their wives and daughters. All for iron! There is nothing in the world more valuable than iron. . . . The second word they will not understand yet, but they must learn to understand it, and that soon. The second word is this: a king! Say to Dan, Benjamin, Judah, Ephraim: a king! A man will give them the signal and of a sudden thousands will lift up their hands. So it is with the Philistines, and therefore the Philistines are lords of Canaan. Say it from Zorah to Hebron and Shechem, and farther even to Endor and Laish: a king!Jabotinsky was disgusted by the insinuation that Samson was an obvious costume for his political views. “I am getting angry with all the Jewish critics who see in it a tendentious novel,” he wrote to a friend. “Even if the author were a pacifist Samson in his day would have had to dream of iron and a king.”

It may be true that Jabotinsky was drawn to his subject by Samson’s combative antipathy to the Philistines, but once the subject was chosen, the novel Samson is distinguished before anything else by its adherence to the conditions of that particular story. Thus Samson could not be the sworn ideological foe of the Philistines, because—in the words of the biblical book of Judges—his hatred for the Philistines is founded upon a taanah, a pretext for a quarrel (14.4). He was born to fight the Philistines.

In the Bible, Samson’s hatred grows out of a wrong that is done to him. His father-in-law gives his Philistine bride to another man, and offers her younger sister (“more beautiful than she”) in her stead (15.2). Jabotinsky expands this incident with grisly and hair-raising detail. Samson refuses the younger sister, who has always desired him (it is she, not his future wife, whom he had noticed among the Philistine women in Timnath); he kicks her in the face to get away from her; then he seeks out and destroys the house of his rival, while his wife flees in terror and confusion. Samson agrees to leave Timnath after his father-in-law agrees to bring his wife to him in his own village of Zorah. But in reprisal the Philistine who has cuckolded him murders Samson’s wife and father-in-law, rapes the younger sister, and burns down their household.

With that the enmity between Samson and the Philistines is sealed forever. But Jabotinsky slyly weaves in another strand of the story, which otherwise—as in the Hebrew Scriptures—might stand as a separate and unrelated chapter. In Jabotinsky’s version, the younger sister reemerges as Delilah. This is the only twist of his plot that was retained in the 1949 film Samson and Delilah for which Cecil B. DeMille had purchased the rights to Jabotinsky’s novel. After Samson confuses her for her older sister (“Then you didn’t die? Or did you die and come back again?”), she conceives a jealous hatred for Samson. It is her appearance in the Philistine temple in Gaza, many weeks later, after Samson has been captured and blinded, that occasions the final destruction. She is holding his child, and taunts him with it:It will grow brave and strong like its father and I, since my milk has turned to poison, shall teach it to hate its father’s race. And so, out of the judge and protector will come an enemy and destroyer.Instead, in the well-known denouement, Samson pulls down the temple, killing the future enemy of Israel along with his present tormentor and the most prominent of his people’s oppressors. The collapse of the temple is narrated by an Egyptian survivor, who witnessed it firsthand. His conclusion is that Samson possessed “that intangible quality, dwelling in the soul of a whole people, that distinguishes it from all other nations of the earth”—the quality that would come to be known as ahavat Yisrael, the Jews’ love for the Jewish “race,” which would lead them against all odds, and no matter who opposed them, to seek a country of their own, where they could protect themselves against enemies and destroyers. Jabotinsky’s magnificent novel gives voice to the unconquerable spirit within Zionism.

Apartheid Week

2011-03-15T11:39:00.018-04:00

The seventh annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” is being held on university campuses across the United States this week to renew the call for destroying the Jewish State—if not by military aggression or by terrorism, then by what its organizers call “Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).”

What is little appreciated by those who toss around the term apartheid so loosely, however, is that the most passionate believers in “apartness” are Arab Muslims. They are so deeply committed to purging “Muslim land” of any Jewish presence at all that they will decapitate a three-month-old child in her bed. Apartheid is the official policy of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, which will not permit Jews to reside there; it is the popular custom in the rest of the Arab world:

Country	Population
Egypt	73,365,915 Muslims 200 Jews
Algeria	32,333,219 Muslims 100 Jews
Morocco	32,069,316 Muslims 5,700 Jews
Iraq	29,672,300 Muslims 50 Jews
Saudi Arabia	25,731,776 Muslims 0 Jews
Yemen	21,119,004 Muslims 200 Jews
Syria	15,451,798 Muslims 100 Jews
Tunisia	9,762,350 Muslims 1,000 Jews
Libya	6,461,454 Muslims 0 Jews
Jordan	5,702,783 Muslims 0 Jews

By contrast, at last count Israel was home to 5,839,764 Jews and 1,229,424 Muslims. About 16.5% of the population is Muslim, that is. There are sixty times more Muslims in the Jewish State than there are Jews in the entire Arab League.

Israeli apartheid? No one should expect the Arab propagandists behind the anti-Israel demonstrations on campus to respect the truth, but perhaps the casual observers, students and faculty, might take a second look at the numbers. Or perhaps they might want to consider what the organizers of “Israeli Apartheid Week” really have in mind when they speak of apartheid.

Wharton and the tragic sense

2011-03-11T13:20:00.009-05:00

Although it may be wide of the target, Kevin Neilson’s suggestion that there is some “family resemblance” between Edith Wharton and Sigmund Freud—he goes so far as to call them Edith Freud and Sigmund Wharton—is a welcome reminder that the two great writers were contemporaries. As such they were faced by the same historical crisis, and their writings can be read as immediate reactions to that crisis. In fact, the two are far more interesting when their reactions are seen as strikingly different from each other’s, even strongly opposed.

Six years older, Freud was born into the rapidly modernizing and secularizing Jewish middle class in Central Europe. The Jews of the Habsburg Empire were only granted full legal emancipation in 1867, eleven years after Freud’s birth. By then his family had settled in Vienna after his father’s business failure. And Freud had already been enrolled for two years in a competitive and highly respected Realgymnasium, where he established himself as a brilliant student. Although he later said that he “never felt within [his] depth” in Vienna, claiming to yearn for “the marvelous forests of [his] childhood,” the truth is that he had left the past of his Galician Jewish parents far behind.

Freud was thoroughly at home in Vienna, because he was a champion of modernism in a capital of modernism. For him, the crumbling of traditional communal structures, as symbolized by the gluttonous expansion of Vienna in the late nineteenth century, was a happy development. Psychoanalysis was intended to be a great engine of social readjustment for modern man, who found himself cut off and isolated. As Philip Rieff puts it:The essentially secular aim of the Freudian spiritual guidance is to wean away the ego from either a heroic or a compliant attitude to the community. . . . [Freud] was not impressed by the clerical strategy of confirming faith by strengthening the individual’s identification with the community. Whatever flush of interior health rises on first being received back into any community of belief after the sickness of alienation is quite temporary, Freud held. The old faiths have themselves produced the sickness they still seek to cure. . . . What is needed is to free men from their sick communities. To emancipate man’s “I” from the communal “we” is “spiritual guidance” in the best sense Freud could give to the words.[1]The crisis of the “I” who remains in thrall to the communal “we” despite the emancipatory surge of modernity—there is perhaps no better account of the human problem in their time, as understood by both Freud and Wharton.

The difference is that Freud’s reaction was therapeutic. However the psychoanalytic goal is phrased, the fact remains that Freud sought the reintegration of the neurotic into society. Wharton did not believe any such reintegration was possible. Human society was, as she wrote in The Reef (1912), an island of captivity surrounded by “the wide bright sea of life.” Her sensitive maladjusted characters itch to get off the island “into a life that’s big and ugly and struggling,” as Owen Leath tells George Darrow. But the choice is not so simple. At the end of the novel, after Anna has learned the truth about her husband’s affair with her stepson’s fiancée, she reflects:The truth had come to light by the force of its irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well policed suburb to dark places one need never know about. Here they were, these dark places, in her own bosom, and henceforth she would always have to traverse them to reach the beings she loved best!The “hidden powers” that churn “beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse” are not Freud’s neuroses, however. They are the “chaos of attractions and repulsions,” or what Wharton described in The Age of Innocence as a “battle of ugly appetites.” Society’s “ordered surfaces” may hold man in bondage, but human freedom is a mere “chaos of attractions and repulsions.” And where Freud sees the hope of reconciling man to society, Wharton sees such reconciliation as crossing through the darkest places of human experience forever to reach those a man loves.

Wharton’s reaction, in other words, is tragic. No emancipation of man’s “I” from the communal “we” is possible, and thus no therapeutic adjustment, but no life outside the community is possible either. Man does not live upon a wide bright sea. At best he accepts his imprisonment, for the beings he loves if not for himself. To escape captivity would be to abandon them, and to dwell in darkness alone.
____________________

[1] Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City: Anchor, 1961), pp. 361–62. Originally published in 1959.

Wharton and dreams

2011-03-10T14:36:00.010-05:00

Over at Interpolations, Kevin Neilson suggests that Edith Wharton “shares a family resemblance with Freud.” Granted, my impressions of Freud have been colored by Joseph Skibell’s darkly playful Curable Romantic, which sketches the great psychoanalyst as some combination of Sherlock Holmes—nothing that happens in his presence is lost on him—and a bully who delights in publicly enforcing The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Even so, I am skeptical about the resemblance.

Neilson focuses upon the “language of secret signs” in Wharton, qualifying his argument by saying that “this language emerges in a social context instead of a dreaming state.” Because Wharton’s characters “block their true thoughts and feelings,” Neilson says, their “repressed” desires are manifested as “innuendoes” (“flashing eyes, a subdued tone, a fugitive glance, a clandestine touch, an upturned lip, or a cluster of yellow roses anonymously sent”). Neilson theorizes that these actions and gestures are “[l]ike dreams according to Freudian categories. . . .”

I think Neilson is mistaken, but I want to pick up the knife at the sharp end. How does Wharton represent dreams in her fiction? For Freud, according to Neilson, “Dreams are disguised wish fulfillments.” But is this how Wharton understands the unconscious life?

In The House of Mirth, published six years after The Interpretation of Dreams—the exact difference in the writers’ ages—the word dream can refer either to ambitions for success or to the images and sensations experienced during sleep. There are probably nine occurrences of the latter:

(1.) After watching the tableux vivants in Chapter 12 of Book I, in which Lily Bart had stood as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd, Lawrence Selden seeks her out. Selden, of course, is already in love with Lily, who is in a daze of pleasure from the effect of her performance. She takes his arm. And then: “Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations.” Selden acknowledges his love for her; they briefly kiss; Lily begs him to love her but not to tell her so, and flees. The encounter is explicitly compared to the “unreality” of a dream, but it is the talk of love and the stolen kiss—not the unspoken and unconsciously denied—that are “dream-like” here. Lily does not repress her feelings for Selden; she knowingly runs away from them.

(2.) The next chapter opens with Lily waking from “happy dreams.”

(3.) She finds a note from Selden awaiting her when she wakes. He must go to Albany for the day, and asks when he might see her the day after. She muses upon his note:The scene in the Brys’ conservatory had been like a part of her dreams; she had not expected to wake to such evidence of its reality. Her first movement was one of annoyance: this unforeseen act of Selden’s added another complication to life. It was so unlike him to yield to such an irrational impulse! Did he really mean to ask her to marry him? She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behavior seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity. It was all the more agreeable to find that this reasonableness was maintained only at the cost of not seeing her; but, though nothing in life was as sweet as the sense of her power over him, she saw the danger of allowing the episode of the previous night to have a sequel. Since she could not marry him, it would be kinder to him, as well as easier for herself, to write a line amicably evading his request to see her: he was not the man to mistake such a hint, and when next they met it would be on their usual friendly footing.The “episode” of Selden’s kiss was the dream. Counterposed to it is the knowledge (or decision) that “she could not marry him.”

(4.) That same morning, in a different house, Selden’s cousin Gerty Farish “woke from dreams as happy as Lily’s.” If they were “less vivid” than Lily’s they were “better suited to her mental vision.” For her emotional life is not as extravagant as Lily’s, and Gerty is not as pretty.

(5.) That evening Selden dines with Gerty. She is unexpectedly saddened when she realizes that her cousin had “come to talk to her of Lily—that was all!” Learning from her that Lily will be attending a musical evening at Mrs Fisher’s house, Selden places a “cousinly kiss upon her cheek,” and goes. Left alone with her cousin’s kiss, Gerty finds her jealousy for Lily flaming up. But what right had Gerty to “dream the dreams of loveliness”? She was plain; Lily was beautiful. And she knew perfectly well that a “dull face invited a dull fate.” For such as her, “dreams of loveliness” must be willfully put away, like childhood toys.

(6.) The doorbell rings, and Lily stands at the door. She confesses that she does not want to be alone; she asks to stay for the night. She tries to explain:       “Oh, Gerty, the furies . . . you know the noise of their wings—alone, at night, in the dark? But you don't know—there is nothing to make the dark dreadful to you——”
       The words, flashing back on Gerty’s last hours, struck from her a faint derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery, was blinded to everything outside it. . . .
       “Lily, look at me! Something has happened—an accident? You have been frightened—what has frightened you? Tell me if you can—a word or two—so that I can help you.”
       Lily shook her head.
       “I am not frightened: that’s not the word. Can you imagine looking into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement—some hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem to myself like that—I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts—I hate ugliness, you know—I’ve always turned from it—but I can’t explain to you—you wouldn’t understand. . . .”
       Gerty knelt beside her, waiting, with the patience born of experience, till this gust of misery should loosen fresh speech. She had first imagined some physical shock, some peril of the crowded streets, since Lily was presumably on her way home from [Mrs] Fisher’s; but she now saw that other nerve-centres were smitten, and her mind trembled back from conjecture. . . .
       “Lily! you mustn't speak so—you’re dreaming.”Of all the novel’s allusions to dreaming, this is the most revealing. And what it makes clear is that, for Wharton, dreams do not belong to “unreality,” as Selden and Lily “accept” in the Brys’ conservatory. They are, instead, a different mode of reality, sometimes “happy,” sometimes (as later in the novel) (7.) “evil” and (8.) “dissatisfied,” sometimes even (9.) “incoherent.” They are, in short, visions of another life, a road not taken, or an “ugliness,” a “dark dread,” that one might fall victim to.

Wharton’s dreams are not “disguised wish fulfillments,” then. They are the socially unacceptable options that her characters have deliberately rejected, but that delight them upon occasion like fairies or dismay them upon occasion like furies.

Her men and women live, as Wharton herself put it in The Age of Innocence, in a “hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought. . . .” But what Neilson calls the “secret language of signs” is the despotic social code they live by. Their dreams represent not what they have repressed, but what they have rejected—at no small cost to themselves. If Wharton has a family resemblance to anyone it is to her two-years-older contemporary J. M. Barrie, whose Peter Pan, staged the year before The House of Mirth was published, literalizes the dream-realm in which Wharton’s characters might have lived, but decided not to.

Supersessionism returns

2011-03-08T10:50:00.015-05:00

With Christians under attack in the Muslim world—in Ethiopia, in Pakistan, in Egypt—now is hardly the time to start a culture war with their “elder brothers,” as John Paul II described the Jews.

Yet that is exactly what a writer at Pajamas Media did yesterday. Clayton E. Cramer, a software engineer with an M.A. in history, argued that replacing the abbreviations B.C. and A.D. in school textbooks, substituting B.C.E. and C.E. in their stead, will “offend the still-large majority of Americans who culturally or religiously identify themselves as Christians.” The only reason to make the switch, he declared confidently, is to “signal[] one’s sensitivities.” He wondered if the new usage is not a “form of culture war.”

But when I posted a comment observing that the usage is hardly new—the term B.C.E. was introduced into English in 1881—and that it is almost universal among Jewish scholars, I was the one to ignite a culture war. “B.C.E.” and “C.E.” are scholarly terms, I argued; scholars prefer them because they are theologically neutral, and textbook writers are simply following scholarly convention.

The newer terms are theologically neutral even if—as for the Jewish writers who introduced them, and for me as well—C.E. stands for the “Christian era” and not the “common era.” Indeed, the first writer to use the term C.E. in English was Elias Hiram Lindo. In his Jewish Calendar for Sixty-Four Years, published in England in 1838, Lindo spoke openly of the “Christian era.” In an interesting footnote, he did not use the term B.C.E. but rather A.C. without further explanation.

In short, the usage antedates political correctness by many decades. Jewish writers prefer it, not because they wish to “signal” their “sensitivities,” but because the traditional B.C. and A.D. abbreviate a theology, as I put it in my original comment, that they find obnoxious and irrelevant. The name for that theology is supersessionism, although it is sometimes called “replacement theology” or “fulfillment theology.” It holds that the Jews’ role in history was “fulfilled” with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, after which God’s new covenant with the Church “superseded” the old covenant with Israel. Thus all prior history, including Jewish history, was simply “Before Christ”—that is, leading up to the messiah’s arrival. And since then we have been living the years of “Our [sic] Lord.”

Now I did not think that I was saying anything particularly controversial by describing this theology as both obnoxious and irrelevant to the Jews—obnoxious because it writes them out of their own history, irrelevant because to them the messiah has yet to arrive. The reaction to my comments, which ranged from accusing me of falsehood and duplicity to calling me a “Jewish bigot” who displays a “contempt for Christians and Christianity,” only begins to measure the depth of my own naïveté.

But that’s what two decades of teaching Evangelical Christians in the American South will do to you. Let me explain. In twenty years at Texas A&M University, I encountered exactly two antisemites, and only one of them was a believing convert-seeking Christian: and he was a man of my own age. With few exceptions, the younger generation of Christians that I encountered in my classrooms were the sort who would have been condemned for the Judaizing heresy five hundred years earlier. Especially in my course on the Bible in literature—in which I taught only the Hebrew Bible, and from a bilingual Hebrew-English text—they signed up to explore their religion from a Jewish angle. “Studying with you is like studying with Abraham,” a student once said to me reverently. “F. Murray Abraham?” I nearly said, but didn’t.

The younger generation of Evangelical Christians, at least in my experience, are entirely innocent of theological antisemitism. They have never even heard of supersessionism. Most of them appear to attend churches which have been deeply influenced by the doctrine of dispensationalism, which teaches that God has not—could not—revoke his promises to Israel (“God is not man to be capricious, or mortal to change his mind” [Num 23.19]). Thus the “old” covenant remains in effect. Christianity does not supersede Judaism, but adds to it.

This revolution in Protestant Christian thought has been matched by equally revolutionary theological developments within Roman Catholicism. The Second Vatican Council, convened by John XXIII in 1962, began the work of repudiating the Church’s antisemitism and anti-Judaism and refashioning a new relationship with Israel, founded (as John Paul II later put it) upon “the great spiritual heritage common to Christians and Jews.” Under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the repudiation of supersessionism has become Church doctrine. When he visited the Rome Synagogue, Benedict quoted the prayer that his predecessor had offered at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, to emphasize their common belief on this issue:God of our Fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the nations: we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.To make sure that no one overlooked the significance of calling Israel the “people of the covenant” rather than the “people of the old covenant,” Benedict went on to remind his listeners that the Church now officially holds that the principles laid down at Sinai “remain eternally valid,” that the Jews “were chosen by the Lord before all others to receive his word,” that the catechism teaches that the “Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation,” that the Church has undertaken to institute “a renewed respect for the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament,” and that Jews share equally with Christians the task of “preparing or ushering in the Kingdom of the Most High. . . .”

Supersessionism is officially dead in the Evangelical Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Even the more recent attempts to resuscitate the theology have foundered on the bold views of Christian leaders. Thus the Rev. Brian W. Harrison has recently argued that supersessionism “was never at any stage abandoned” by the Church. Despite quoting John Paul II to the effect that God’s covenant with the Jews is “irrevocable,” Harrison maintains:Never, in fact, has any papal or conciliar document affirmed that the covenant God made with Israel through Moses, with all its distinctive cultic, civil, dietary and other prescriptions that still form the basis of Judaism, still remains valid and “unrevoked” for Jews after the coming of Christ. It is a great relief, therefore, to see that he United States bishops voted overwhelmingly in August 2008 to eliminate a statement to that effect that had made its way into the new Catechism published with the authority of the episcopal conference. The uncorrected version stated, “Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them.”But if the Jews’ covenant with God remains “eternally valid for them,” how exactly was it “revoked”? Since I am not a Catholic, I am agnostic on the question whether a “dual covenant” theology is heretical, although an outsider might fairly conclude that the eternal validity of two separate covenants is implied in John Paul’s and Benedict’s views. The new supersessionists insist they are merely moderate supersessionists, taking their stand somewhere between “extreme supersessionism” and “dual covenant theory.” And perhaps even those Christians who are less eager for supersessionism’s return also face the dilemma of reconciling the famous words quoted in the Gospel according to John (“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes to the Father, but by me”) with a post-Holocaust respect for the spiritual integrity of the Jews. But that is not my theological problem.

This much I would observe. If God’s covenant with the Jews remains “eternally valid for them,” and if anyone can convert to Judaism, then perhaps there is at least one other way to the Father. But it is precisely when I say things like that that supersessionism raises its ugly head.

Great House

2011-02-16T17:07:00.021-05:00

Nicole Krauss, Great House (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 289 pp. $24.95.

Last December, when I surveyed the year’s best Jewish books for Jewish Ideas Daily, I left Nicole Krauss’s Great House off the list. Although eight other women were listed, I was accused of being a “serious male chauvinist.” Wow, the last time I heard that expression I was still driving a Mazda GLC. But I get what I am being accused of. I really do—even if it is better to be a serious male chauvinist than a frivolous one. What I don’t understand, though, is how you trust a critic if you suspect that his recommendations are made, in part or whole, to avoid the unpleasantness of being called a bad name. The current rule of literary criticism that every book list must include a sufficient (but unspecified) proportion of women resembles nothing so much as the National Football League’s requirement that African American candidates must be interviewed for every coaching vacancy (no exceptions allowed). How does anyone, including the candidates themselves, know whether the African Americans are being taken seriously? How does the indignity compensate for the bias?

I left Great House off my list of the year’s best Jewish books because I didn’t think it was among the year’s best. I realize that Nicole Krauss is a woman, that she is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, that her novel was praised in the New York Times Book Review by Rebecca Goldstein (although I’m pretty sure I am not to suppose that Goldstein praised it because it was written by a woman), that it was nominated for the National Book Award, that Krauss’s last novel, The History of Love, is highly regarded by many readers. None of these is a particularly good reason, however, for believing that the novel is particularly good.

Great House is about the adventures of a desk that passes from writer to writer as it makes its way from Budapest through Hitler’s Reich to London and then to New York and from there to Jerusalem, then back to New York, coming to rest finally in a storage unit. “It was made of dark wood,” says one of the book’s four narrators, “and above the writing surface was a wall of drawers, drawers of totally impractical sizes, like the desk of a medieval sorcerer.”

One of the desk’s nineteen drawers is mysteriously locked, but when it comes to solving the mystery, as Ron Charles snapped in his Washington Post review, “[D]on’t bother.” The solution to the mystery is disappointing. Much the same could be said for the symbolism of the desk. It turns out to have been Nazi plunder, stolen from a Hungarian Jew who perished later in a death march, and like the Golem of Prague in Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, it symbolizes the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. As Karen Long observed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “The Holocaust is offstage, and ever-present.” It “overshadows every breath taken in Great House,” Frances Guerin wrote reverently at the blog FX Reflects.

Which distinguishes Nicole Krauss very little from other young Jewish writers, three generations removed from the Jewish struggle to inform the world about the Holocaust, and in whose fiction it is “ever-present,” even when it is “offstage.” It “overshadows” any other fact or value of being Jewish. Ruth Wisse once told me that the world learned from the Holocaust how easy it is to kill Jews. Young Jews apparently learned how easy it is to be sad, and proud of one’s sadness.

That sadness dominates Great House like clutter in a house where no one picks up after himself. All of the characters in the novel are sad—the four narrators, the men and women they love and have lost, their parents and children, the people they know or meet in passing (there are no friends in the book)—while none even tries to find any occasion for joy. Two lines in Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly, about a major league catcher dying of cancer, could have served as Krauss’s epigraph. “It is sad,“ says one teammate; “it makes you want to cry.” “It is sad,” counters another; “it makes you want to laugh.”

But the general dismalness suits Krauss’s purpose. Readers are more likely to pay attention to the intricate carving of a prose style if they are not encouraged to hurry on to the next part. And sure enough, at the Huffington Post, Jane Byrne claimed that Krauss “cannot write a bad sentence: pound for pound, the sentences alone deliver epiphany upon epiphany. . . .” It would be more truthful, though, to say that Krauss cannot write a simple sentence. To borrow a phrase from the late Wilfrid Sheed, as recalled by his friend John Simon in a tribute published in the Weekly Standard, her prose is “fine sentence-by-sentence writing at the expense of form.”

In her review, Rebecca Goldstein tried to put the best possible face on this defect in the novel. Its narrative structure, she said, “mirror[s] the characters’ own shattering and require[s] readers to reassemble the full story for themselves.” Or, in other words, her readers are required to piece together a coherent story, because Krauss chooses epiphany—giving the appearance of divinity to her prose—over storytelling. The result is a hard slog:Now his face crumbled, but just for a fraction of a second, really, resuming its former appearance so quickly that someone else might have missed it altogether. But I caught it, and as it crumbled I saw through to another face, the face one wears alone, or not even alone, the face one wears asleep or unconscious on the gurney, and in it I recognized something. This is going to sound foolish, but though I lived with Lotte and, as far as I knew, this Daniel had never met her at all, in that instant I felt that he and I were aligned in some way, aligned in our position toward her, and that it was only a matter of degrees that separated us. It was absurd, of course. After all, I was the one keeping him from whatever it was he wanted from her. It was a mere projection of myself onto this young man clutching his briefcase in front of the skeleton of my hydrangeas. But how else are we to make decisions about others?Although Krauss uses such tangible words as face and briefcase and hydrangeas, the epiphany in this passage does not belong to any world in which faces and briefcases and hydrangeas are real and tangible. Her perceptions belong to a dream world, glistering and poignant, in which people do not meet, but encounter each other in word-choked solitude. In the end, the book is a flimsy poplin of these splendid perceptions, symbols, and quivers of feeling in which even the allusion to such hard and unforgiving events as death marches and Nazi plunder are out of place, because they belong to a different world.

But I don’t mean to give the impression that Great House is merely a technical flop, a dreary overlong book of less than three hundred pages. The worst thing about the novel is its image of man. Fairly early on, one of the narrators—the only one whose story is not connected to the haunted wandering desk from the Holocaust—explains what he is doing in the novel: namely, setting forth Krauss’s theme. An Israeli, he tries to guide his son:Sitting in the garden wrapped in a shawl, recovering from your forays into the world, you read books on the alienation of modern man. What does modern man have on the Jews? I demanded. . . . The Jews have been living in alienation for thousands of years. For modern man it’s a hobby. What can you learn from those books that you weren’t born knowing already?The Jew, in short, is the symbol of man’s unhappiness, his estrangement from a world that (only recently) he has discovered is monstrous and bitter. This is not a particularly Jewish sentiment to be heard from a Jewish writer. As the late Irving Kristol pointed out in a 1947 essay recently reprinted in The Neoconservative Persuasion, this is much closer to the Christian conception of the Jew. Kristol called it “The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew.”

On this conception, the Jew is both cursed and divine: “He is high up to the heavens, and he is low to the very depths of hell, but never does the Jew stand with two feet upon earth.” He is, in short, a symbol and not a man. Historically the Jews have suffered badly from being treated as supra-human, but there is nevertheless a tendency among some Jewish intellectuals and writers “to accept the stigma and glorify in it.” For many other Jews, though, living after the “efficient massacre of European Jewry,” the myth is intolerable. Many post-Holocaust Jews would prefer a “debasement to the human.” And if nothing else, Kristol concludes, the abandonment of the myth would require that adistinction is drawn between that concept of the “chosen people” which plays a unique role in Jewish theology—as an affirmation of the loving contract between God and man—and the more modern interpretations that are based, in one form or another, directly or by reaction, upon the stigma of the supra-natural Jew. Judaism is neither a divinely intoxicated form of liberalism nor an intellectual’s masochistic apologia for the historical sufferings and present alienation of the Jews. It is a religion—and a religion of quite ordinary men.An ordinary religion in an ordinary world of quite tangible objects and sometimes unbearable events does not appeal to Nicole Krauss, however. What she prefers is a world that is not real, in which nothing really happens.

Borders on the edge

2011-02-11T14:04:00.005-05:00

I am not happy that my prediction about Borders seems to be coming true. No one who lives by books is happy to see any bookstore close its doors.

At the same time, I do not subscribe to the theory that ebooks are putting Borders out of business. Robert McCrum believes that Borders is falling victim to “internal mismanagement.” Bob Warfield suggests that the store “got greedy and quit serving the customer.”

I wonder if the reasons don’t lie elsewhere. In Houston, I lived two minutes from a Borders store. And though I held a Borders card loaded with plenty of Borders Bucks, I rarely went there—even after a long day of writing when I needed to flex my tired Sitzfleisch. (I preferred to wander the aisles of Lowes.) I found that I had less and less patience for the pretentiousness of the store with its hip and up-to-the-minute Staff Recommendations, its placards inviting me to another reading by a local mediocrity, its tables piled with the latest variety of multiculturalism to take literary form, its easy chairs strategically located where a slumping shopper could hold aloft his copy of David Mitchell or William T. Vollman so that I could be sure to admire his taste and judgment, its library desks occupied by high-school kids whispering and texting when they were supposed to be cramming for the SAT.

Inevitably, someone would be sitting in front of the shelves where I wanted to look for a book. Now, I am physically unable to ask someone to move aside when he can see for himself that he is blocking another person’s way. Besides, when I would finally circle back to the shelf after half an hour of lurking elsewhere, the book for which I was searching was never to be found. Borders carried plenty of books that were getting the buzz, but of those that had stood the test of time, not so many. If you needed a specific title by George Eliot or Joseph Conrad, and if you wanted something better than a Signet or Bantam, you were wasting your time.

Borders tried hard to look like a salon, not a bookstore. Whenever I would climb upstairs where Literature was located, I would be struck by the open space with its loosely arranged furniture. I could not help imagining the shelves that were lost to reading nooks and gathering spots (to say nothing of the vast expanses handed over to the coffee shop and musical recording sections). After a while, I felt strange and out of place, even unwelcome, in the store. The accidental discovery was unlikely to occur there, unless I stopped reading the book pages or listening to literary gossip, and the comprehensive plunge into an unfamiliar sub-world of books was impossible, because (except for popular and “literary” fiction) the sections of the store got smaller and smaller every year. My private test for a bookstore is the size of its philosophy section. At Borders, philosophy was lucky to get two short shelves. Even then, most of the titles would be by Derrida and Foucault.

I will not be happy to see Borders go, even though I have not been a regular Borders customer for several years now. But its demise will say nothing whatever about the book trade, except perhaps that a bookstore ought to sell books and not a book-furnished pastime.

“Most essential”? “Jewish fiction”?

2011-02-10T01:39:00.045-05:00

Yesterday Jewcy unveiled the “50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years.” Jason Diamond, who compiled the miscellany, is remarkably open about the incoherence of the list. “Our criteria for this list,” he shrugged, “was any work that could be considered ‘Jewish fiction’: written by a Jewish author or dealing heavily with Jewish topics and themes, all written in the last 100 years.”

By “Jewish author,” Diamond appeared to mean anyone with any Jewish connection at all. Thus Marcel Proust, the seed of a mixed marriage, who was baptized into the Church of Rome and never considered himself Jewish, is nevertheless Jewish by Jewcy’s standards. Any name that will permit the Jews to shep a little nakhes, and self-respect be damned.

By “Jewish fiction,” Diamond appeared to mean almost anything that was not non-fiction. Thus plays (The Death of a Salesman, Angels in America), comic books (A Contract with God), children’s books (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Where the Wild Things Are), and bestselling potboilers (The Carpetbaggers) make the list. But if this is the definition of Jewish fiction, where is the Jewish poetry?

And Yiddish fiction? Two titles—by the Singer brothers. Nothing at all, however, by the most important Yiddish writer ever. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman was begun in 1895 and finished in 1914, just coming in under Jewcy’s hundred-year wire. His Railroad Stories first appeared in book form exactly a century ago.

And if plays by Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner are to be numbered among the fifty “most essential” Jewish books then surely one of Jason Diamond’s friends might have taken the time to remind him of The Dybbuk, which was written by S. An-sky in 1914. If Diamond had bothered to reread the books on his list—or even to read them for the first time—he might have been provoked by Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy, or Yiddish in America” (published in his eighth-ranked “Pagan Rabbi” and Other Stories) to recall Jacob Glatstein or Chaim Grade, even if he had never heard of David Bergelson or the Singers’ sister Esther Kreitman or Der Nister or Joseph Opatoshu or Sholem Asch or Moshe Kulbak or Peretz Markish or Israel Rabon or Chava Rosenfarb.

Yiddish was the language in which the Jews burst into modern fiction. To reduce Yiddish fiction of the past one hundred years to the Singer brothers, as great as they are, is to make a violent abridgment of a major achievement, or display one’s ignorance.

Even worse, the only Hebrew-language writer for whom Jewcy found room was forty-three-year-old Etgar Keret. Meanwhile, S. Y. Agnon, the father of modern Hebrew fiction and the only Israeli writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is nowhere to be found. Perhaps Jewcy believes that he belongs on a list of the “less essential” Jewish fiction? Along with Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman, I suppose.

Let’s be honest. The Jewcy list of “50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years” is what results from a parlor game among Jews for whom Jewishness means anything and nothing.

By contrast, here are Ruth R. Wisse’s prose fiction selections from the last one hundred years of The Modern Jewish Canon (2000):

(  1.) Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman (Yiddish, 1895–1914)
(  2.) Franz Kafka, The Trial (German, 1914, 1925)
(  3.) Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (English/American, 1917)
(  4.) David Bergelson, Descent (Yiddish, 1920)
(  5.) Yosef Haim Brenner, Breakdown and Bereavement (Hebrew, 1920)
(  6.) Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, Miriam (Hebrew, 1921)
(  7.) Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry (Russian, 1926)
(  8.) Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Samson (Russian, 1928)
(  9.) Moshe Kulbak, Zelmenyaner (Yiddish, 1928)
(10.) Israel Rabon, The Street (Yiddish, 1928)
(11.) Avigdor Hameiri, The Great Madness (Hebrew, 1929)
(12.) Joseph Roth, Job (German, 1930)
(13.) Sholem Asch, Three Cities (Yiddish, 1929–1931)
(14.) Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (Polish, 1934) [also on Jewcy list]
(15.) Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (Enlgish/American, 1934) [also on Jewcy list]
(16.) Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray (Yiddish, 1935)
(17.) Israel Joshua Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi (Yiddish, 1936) [also on Jewcy list]
(18.) Esther Kreitman, Deborah (Yiddish, 1936) [republished in 2009 as The Dance of the Demons]
(19.) Jacob Glatstein, Homecoming at Twilight (Yiddish, 1938) [republished last year as The Glatstein Chronicles]
(20.) Der Nister (Pinhas Kahanovitch), The Family Mashber (Yiddish, 1939, 1943)
(21.) S. Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night (Hebrew, 1939)
(22.) Arthur Koestler, Thieves in the Night (English/British, 1945)
(23.) A. M. Klein, The Second Scroll (English/Canadian, 1951)
(24.) Albert Memmi, Pillar of Salt (French, 1953)
(25.) Haim Hazaz, The Gates of Bronze (Hebrew, 2 vols., 1956)
(26.) Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel (English/American, 1958)
(27.) Vasili Grossman, Life and Fate (Russian, 1960, 1980)
(28.) Amos Oz, The Hill of Evil Counsel (Hebrew, 1960)
(29.) Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky (French, 1961)
(30.) Yehuda Amichai, Not of This Time, Not of This Place (Hebrew, 1963)
(31.) Chaim Grade, The Yeshiva (Yiddish, 1967–1968)
(32.) Albert Cohen, Belle Du Seigneur (French, 1968)
(33.) Henryk Grynberg, The Victory (Polish, 1969)
(34.) Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (English/American, 1969)
(35.) Yaakov Shabtai, Past Continuous (Hebrew, 1970)
(36.) Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi” and Other Stories (English/American, 1971) [also on Jewcy list]
(37.) Chava Rosenfarb, The Tree of Life (Yiddish, 1972)
(38.) Shulamith Hareven, City of Many Days (Hebrew, 1972)
(39.) Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939 (Hebrew, 1974)
(40.) Adele Wiseman, Crackpot (English/Canadian, 1974)
(41.) A. B. Yehoshua, Mr Mani (Hebrew, 1990)
(42.) Philip Roth, American Pastoral (English/American, 1997) [also on Jewcy list]

To Professor Wisse’s canon I would add eight additional titles, to bring the list to fifty:

(43.) Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (English/American, 1925)
(44.) Jiri Weil, Life with a Star (Czech, 1964)
(45.) David Grossman, See Under: Love (Hebrew, 1986)
(46.) Leon de Winter, Hoffman’s Hunger (Dutch, 1990)
(47.) Angel Wagenstein, Isaac’s Torah (Bulgarian, 2000)
(48.) Zoë Heller, The Believers (English/Anglo-American, 2009)
(49.) Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (English/British, 2010) [also on Jewcy list]
(50.) Steve Stern, The Frozen Rabbi (English/American, 2010)

Five Books of Reagan

2011-02-07T11:36:00.003-05:00

Now that even Obama ♥ Ronald Reagan, according to today’s Time magazine cover, it may be safe to celebrate the centennial of the fortieth president’s birth. Reagan was born one hundred years ago in Tampico, Illinois. It was as a Westerner, however, that he appeared on the national scene. “He came ‘out of the West,’ ” Irving Kristol wrote, “riding a horse, not a golf cart, speaking in the kind of nationalist-populist tonalities not heard since Teddy Roosevelt, appealing to large sections of the working class, to the increasingly numerous religious fundamentalists, and even to the growing if still small number of conservative and neoconservative intellectuals.”

Much of the writing about President Reagan has stumbled over the difficulty of understanding the man. To those who knew him he was full of paradoxes. He could be gracious, outgoing, and friendly, but also distant and impersonal. He could seem passive and disconnected, but he could frame an issue unforgettably and find the exact words to do so. To his political opponents he was an “amiable dunce,” but he spanked them politically again and again. George P. Schulz, his secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, explains the mystery better than anyone. “How could a man of supposedly limited knowledge and limited intelligence accomplish so much? How did he get elected and reelected the governor of our largest state? How did he get elected and reelected president of the United States? How did he preside over a time of unprecedented prosperity, the winning of the cold war, and the demise of communism worldwise?” Schulz asked. “Well, maybe he was a lot smarter than most people thought.”

The best writers don’t set out to understand Reagan in himself—the frustration of the undertaking is what twisted Edmund Morris’s authorized biography into a fictionalized memoir—but to study him in his relations, as befits a politician. Here are the five books anyone interested in learning more about Reagan should start from.

(1.) Donald T. Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (1988). In his history of the ’seventies, David Frum said that former members of the Reagan administration created a “new American style”—the political memoir that has “some cruel or hurtful story to tell about the president they had served.” The best of these was published by Donald Regan, treasury secretary and chief of staff under Reagan. It is notorious for breaking the story that Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer while in the White House, although it is far more noteworthy for its firsthand detail about the President at work. The book is surprisingly compelling, probably because it was ghost-written by the novelist Charles McCarry.

(2.) Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991). Cannon started writing about Reagan while covering Sacramento for the San Jose Mercury News. Since his first book on the political standoff and cooperation between then Governor Reagan and Jesse Unruh, speaker of the California state assembly, Cannon has written four more. His biography of Reagan during the White House years is the best single volume about the tumultuous and transformational presidency. A friendly critic, Cannon is rarely unfair to Reagan. Liberal readers, hoping for a harsher portrait, will have more to complain about than conservative readers.

(3.) Reagan, In His Own Hand, ed. Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (2001). The most unexpected and astonishing discovery about Reagan since his death is that he was a writer—not just a good writer, but pretty nearly a non-stop writer. “He was constantly writing,” recalled Dennis LeBlanc, a member of Reagan’s security detail from 1971. “He would always fly first class. He’d sit by the window, and I’d sit in the aisle seat next to him. It didn’t matter whether or not there was a movie being shown and all the lights were out—he’d turn on his reading lamp and would be constantly writing.” A young historian found the scripts to over a thousand radio broadcasts that Reagan delivered between 1975 and 1979. Along with a few speeches, some early writing, and a few other things—including the public announcement of his Alzheimer’s, which Reagan wrote and delivered for himself—these provocative and revealing scripts are reprinted, without editorial correction, in this unique book. The one indispensable title in any Reagan collection.

(4.) Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004). Reagan was a Christian, but he neither attended church with any regularity nor did he publicly “witness” to his faith. Yet he appealed to believing Christians, because they recognized the religious tones in his voice. Kengor, a University of Pittsburgh-trained political scientist, shows that Reagan’s religious faith was central to his political thinking and policy decisions. He also tackles the problems raised by Nancy Reagan’s dabbling in astrology, as revealed by Donald Regan (above). The coherence of Reagan’s political career comes into focus after reading Kengor’s book.

(5.) Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (2006). Missing from the archives are the transcripts of the hundreds of talks that Reagan gave to General Electric employees from 1954 to 1962, while he was a public spokesman for the company. Evans supplies the missing link in Reagan’s career. From his time as the anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild to the famous speech at the Republican national convention in 1964, which shot him into national political prominence, Reagan quietly metamorphosed from a Roosevelt Democrat into a Goldwater Republican. Evans tells the story thoroughly and well.

When he was a boy, Reagan’s favorite book was apparently Harold Bell Wright’s Printer of Udell’s, a 1903 novel about an orphan who becomes a Christian. As an adult, he preferred the Western novels of Louis L’Amour, upon whom he bestowed the presidential medal of freedom in 1984. The “serious” poets and novelists, who reviled him while he was president, were ignored by him in return.

A letter from Nachman

2011-02-04T11:53:00.002-05:00

NOTE: Jonathan Rosen, the novelist and editor of Nextbook, passes along the following letter, which he received the other day. “I had it typed and am sending it more as a curiosity,” he says. His private opinion is that the letter was written by Kafka pretending to be Nachman, and he could kick himself now for not saving the original handwritten copy. “I could have made a fortune at Sotheby’s,” he says.

Dear Professor Myers,

I have sent this letter to Jonathan Rosen in the hope that he will forward it to you.

I am writing about your review of Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, a review which depressed me very much, and believe me I was depressed to begin with, even before I died 200 years ago—though since dying I am no longer so manic as I used to be. Also I’ve learned English.

Before you stop reading let me say quickly that this is not the letter of a crazy person. You will be happy to know that death has rendered me completely sane. I am no longer Chasidic—which is a form of madness all its own; I now go to a Conservadox shul, which is very easy in olam habah since nobody drives anyway. Also you cannot die of boredom because, thank God, you are already dead.

Briefly, I want to congratulate you on your review in Commentary. For Burnt Books is a dangerous book that deserves destruction! And you did an admirable job.

Quoting from Kamenetz’s seventeen-year-old book The Jew in the Lotus a passage voicing disappointment in American traditional Judaism was a masterstroke. I admire the way you make it seem as though Kamenetz’s disaffection is a sign of bad faith and evil intention. Nobody considering major Jewish institutions twenty years ago could ever have believed they did not address the spiritual concerns of young American Jews. One might as well say that about religious institutions today! They are on a solid spiritual footing, even if they are no longer getting twelve percent annually because they fell, out of a desire to nourish the wellsprings of Torah, for the seductions of that monster Madoff and who could ever have seen through that?

Ridiculous to allow Kamenetz his fanciful approach just because his orthodox grandparents came to America and stripped faster than Gypsy Rose Lee (who funny enough is here too) and is now groping his way back, having the Chutzpah even to create a Jewish studies department in Louisiana. A man who does not know his right hand from his left, not to mention the town of Kamenetz-Litevsk from Kamenetz-Podolsk? True his reference to his name and the town of Kamenetz is intentionally fanciful, like the talking Kafka mug in the first chapter, but I am glad that Professor Nadler (Shlita) set the record straight—he must be a wonderful teacher, one of those men who lead lives of piety, faith and learning, using what they know as a lever to lift up the world and never, as the evil urge prompts, as a crowbar to beat down the ignorant.

Anyway, it is important to make Kamenetz’s seventeen-year-old criticism of Jewish institutions, which doesn’t appear in Burnt Books, seem like a modern American phenomenon born of ill will and ignorance and not part of the self-examination that is as old as the Prophets and really even older. But even if people saw it as prophetic, what kind of idiot would want all the people to be prophets? Only the very very learned can be critical of the very very unlearned. Dr. Johnson—who I’ve become quite friendly with here in the afterlife (what a head for Talmud!)—was wrong when he said you don’t have to be a carpenter to criticize a table. You do have to be a carpenter to criticize a table.

Also, I’m of the opinion that the prophets could really be quite anti-Semitic.

It is important to fault Kamenetz—may his name be blotted out!—for situating Kafka inside of a Jewish context. Who would want to put a writer so assimilated, dark and Germanic inside a Jewish framework? His pathetic gropings after Chasidic tales, his stabs at learning Hebrew, his messianic doubts and yearnings? His confusion of the personal and psychological with the currents of Jewish history? That would make Judaism a game any Jew could play. And Judaism is not a game!

Kamenetz—but let me just call him Rodger K. so I don’t have to write his full name—Rodger K., by suggesting that a modern Jewish writer like Kafka felt incomplete without a figure of traditional Judaism emblematized by me, is giving Kafka far too much Jewish credit. Readers who love Kafka must not now suddenly find that they have a reason for studying Judaism too for that is the wrong way to come to Judaism. And there are wrong ways as well as right ways to come to Judaism! Martin Buber, that numbskull, mistranslated all my tales and my tales were themselves mistranslations of Torah Judaism. I’m lucky they let me into paradise.

In any event, the religious stumblings of modern Jewish writers are the wrong way!

How embarrassing that Rodger K. should laud me for my stories and not for my Torah commentary, which is the true essence of my being and will light real fires of return in Jewish souls instead of the bad techno music of a few drug addicts I mostly inspire. I have in fact stopped telling stories altogether.

I agree that it is dangerous and misleading to suggest that I, a Chassidic rebbe, was fascinated with the wayward children of the enlightenment, and that Kafka, assimilated ignoramous that he was, was meanwhile looking back past the Enlightenment for inspiration from a Chasidic writer. As if these two figures needed each other to feel whole and might suggest a larger pairing of tradition and new creation. Empty metaphors! You did well to ignore this.

I’m also glad you didn’t mention in your excellent review the part of the book where Rodger K. feels shame at his own inability to read aloud from the psalms in Hebrew. Shrewd not to reveal his own dissatisfaction with his Jewish education, his own desire to know more, just as Kafka desired to know more and to learn more in a literal straightforward way alongside all his deeper spiritual struggles. It would only have stirred up misplaced sympathy for the author, who is describing his book as if it were the beginning of the journey and not the end of the journey—and what kind of guide admits he doesn’t really know the way? Sure Dante got lost in a dark wood, but he was Catholic.

I’m also glad that you did not bother with the larger framework of the book, based on my belief that a burnt book still has meaning and value. Rodger K’s mushy implication that lost lives are still present, and by extension that the traditional Jewish world—that can seem to ignorant American Jews so fully removed by physical distance, by time, and by tragedy—is nevertheless worth recovering and maybe even in some form has left invisible traces—is really quite pernicious because it makes of the lost world a metaphor and fosters cheap identification. It is rigor that will speak to the young, not vague promises of recovery and spiritual connectedness!

In short what I most admire is your recognition of the utterly destructive nature of metaphors themselves when it comes to Judaism. Christianity made Judaism a metaphor and where did that get us? If metaphors raised out of Jewish context were allowed to dominate, then Theodore Hezl, that secular ignoramus, would be considered a hero, even though he became a dramaturge of Jewish history because he was such a lousy playwright and really didn’t know squat about the Torah.

It doesn’t surprise me that the book was edited by Jonathan Rosen, whom I don’t actually know – —I only sent my letter to him because his address was in God’s rolodex, I hope this won’t make him hesitate to forward my letter—but he is, let’s face it, a heretic whose book The Talmud and the Internet argued, I believe, that Mark Zuckerberg is just as good as Rabbi Akiva. Or so I imagine—I have not actually read it; I was going to read it but it was trashed by Commentary and since they were right about the Cold War and the Middle East I figured they must be right about literature too.

I have to stop now. Even the dead have high blood pressure (go figure) and besides, I have other work to do, and coffee with Eliezer Berkowitz [sic].

So let me just end by expressing once again my gratitude and admiration.

Sincerely,

Nachman of Bratslav (peace be upon me).

Burnt Books

2011-02-01T19:01:00.000-05:00

My review of Burnt Books, a dual biography of Kafka and the Breslover rebbe by the Jubu hipster Rodger Kamenetz, is out in the February Commentary. While the book is “practically worthless,” as I conclude, it is an interesting example of what passes for religiously engaged writing by someone who is satisfied neither with the Jewish tradition nor with Jewish scholarship.

To be a fully committed Jew, a person might devote himself to the Jewish religion or he might devote himself to Jewish learning; he might even do both. A great many Americans with one or two Jewish parents dabble in this or that fraction of the whole and call it Judaism. Kamenetz is their master.

Once a year, it seems

2011-01-28T06:24:00.003-05:00

Once a year, it seems, a virus invades the family, knocking everyone out for a spell, one by one. This past week a particularly stubborn and enfeebling stomach virus attacked the kids and then the parents. At all events, I have been acting the nurse and then the patient rather than writing anything here for the past week. Just so you know.

Blurring the liberal arts

2011-01-21T14:09:00.016-05:00

The guardians of the liberal arts, like Mary Crane, have made the same mistake as the Jewish socialists and Yiddishists who emigrated to this country in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. In the epilogue to World of Our Fathers (1976), Irving Howe tried to explain their mistake, while also minimizing it:Jews in America would remain Jews; their institutions would survive, flourish, and multiply; their religion would be kept alive by a phalanx of sentinels, and it could be chosen by anyone, [born] Jewish or not, who was drawn to its promise. But very little of what held the immigrant Jews together—the fabric of their ways, the bond of common tradition, the sharing of language—was able to survive much beyond a century.In fact, the Jewish institutions that survived were religious institutions with foundations sunk deeply into the Jewish religious tradition. The ventures established by Jewish secularists as the maskil alternative to religious institutions—the Yiddish newspapers and theaters, the workmen’s circles, the educational alliances—all disappeared with the secularists themselves. In a letter to the historian Lucy Dawidowicz, Howe was more candid. “We secularists lost the battle,” he said sadly—although he added: “through no fault of our own.”

Dawidowicz would have nothing of it. Jewish secularists, she told Howe, had no one but themselves to blame for Jewish secularism’s failure to survive. “The fault was that the secularists valued secularism and socialism over Jewishness and Jewish continuity,” she said. The Jewish content of what the securlarists “wanted to transmit—or were competent—to their children was too meager to be meaningful to sustain any Jewish identity, since it lacked the original grounding in Jewish traditional life that the first generation of Jewish secularists had had.”

The guardians of the liberal arts have made exactly the same mistake. They themselves are securely grounded in the tradition of the liberal arts—they know the languages and literatures so well they can dispense with them—but they have small interest and less intention of giving their students anything approaching the same grounding. Like the early Jewish secularists in this country, they cannot see that it is their very grounding in the tradition that enables them to “blur [its] boundaries.” Their revolt against the liberal arts belongs to the liberal arts.

But not their students’. Since they are strangers to it, the students can only revolt against their estrangement from the tradition. Who can marvel that, just as the children of Jewish secularists drifted away from Jewish life, students have drifted away from the liberal arts. For them, blurring the boundaries has meant they are unlikely to learn very much at all. Their teachers, the guardians of the liberal arts, valued something else, including their own self-image as enlightened revolutionaries, over the liberal arts and the continuity of liberal arts education.

Wilfrid Sheed, 1930–2011

2011-01-21T10:21:00.008-05:00

Wilfrid Sheed died Wednesday of a bacterial infection in Great Barrington, Mass. He was eighty years old.

In a nearly fifty-year career, Sheed wrote eight novels, including Max Jamison (1970), the best thing ever written about a critic, and a political novel called People Will Always Be Kind (1973), which (as I observed earlier on this blog) is about a “golden-tongued young liberal senator runs for president, although he is not sure what he will really do if he gets elected—or, for that matter, what he really believes.” After Transatlantic Blues (1978), a novel about a cultural personality whose life is divided between England and the United States (much like the novelist himself), Sheed abandoned the novel for nearly a decade, and only wrote one more.

His later books were memoirs, a kind that was only beginning to come into fashion. His lavishly illustrated book on Clare Boothe Luce (1982) was described by his publisher as “part memoir, part biography.” “I’m not dead sure what it is,” he admitted. Much the same could be said of Frank and Maisie, his three-years-later book about his parents, the independent Anglo-Catholic publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. Still not sure what exactly he was writing, Sheed gave it the subtitle A Memoir with Parents.

My Life as a Fan (1993) tells a story that only Sheed could tell. Brought to America at the age of nine, he adjusted to his new country—he became an American—by following major league baseball. It a measure of the difference between the sports and countries that one cannot imagine a similar book being written about cricket in Great Britain. Sheed’s very best book may have been his final memoir. In Love with Daylight (1995) tells the story of someone who survived paralytic polio at the age of fourteen only to be stricken late in life with metastatic cancer of the tongue. As he wryly puts it, the only diseases that he ever contracted were incurable.

Sheed may never have been cured, but he was not defeated by his diseases (nor by addiction to prescription drugs). He cited two principles that kept him afloat. The first, discovered when he was battling polio as a teenager, was that “God, or the Great Whoever, has been so lavish in His gifts that you can lose some absolutely priceless ones, the equivalent of whole kingdoms, and still be indecently rich.” This wisdom, confirmed by suffering, was his inheritance from his parents’ Roman Catholicism. Although he never succeeded in surrendering himself to the Church in the way that his parents did—his ambivalence is on rich and rewarding display in his second novel, The Hack—Sheed remained a Catholic for the rest of his life. He was more than a cradle Catholic and less than a renegade.

The second principle came out of his literary commitments:Writing survives everything, even the most paralyzing depression. Recently I came across something I had to write in this condition and found it surprisingly ingenious, like a chicken dancing with its head cut off. Technique can apparently cover for anything short of rigor mortis.Only a certain kind of writer understands this, a writer for whom a high personal criterion of style is non-negotiable. If you never permit your style to flag, if you never lower your standards for the parts of speech, you might even endure the worst of patches.

There in a single nugget-like idea is the reason that Wilfrid Sheed deserves to be remembered. He was a writer who never let down his style.

The burden of the liberal arts

2011-01-20T12:18:00.010-05:00

The best way to improve the standing of the liberal arts is to stop defending them. Or so says the director of the newly created Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College. Losing students everywhere, threatened by the rise of for-profit colleges, in danger of being severely cut back even at research universities, the liberal arts don’t need explanation and defense. They need rethinking. “I believe that liberal arts education needs to rethink its scope and definition for the 21st century,” Mary Crane argues. The possibility that the gran ripensamento of the last forty years might actually be behind the liberal arts’ decline never darkens her mind.

A Shakespeare scholar appointed to “foster[] innovative programs in the liberal arts” at the Jesuit school, Crane wants more and more of what students are already in flight from. After all, why should the humanities be central to a liberal arts education? “As fields like cultural studies and area studies blur the boundaries between the humanities and social sciences,” she says, “the center of gravity may have shifted in productive ways that we need to acknowledge.” Because, you know, the demand for cultural studies remains “innovative” after four decades.

On Crane’s own evidence—she quotes Louis Menand as saying so—the decline in liberal arts enrollments began in 1970. This was the same year that the term cultural studies was first introduced to the Modern Language Association. The critic Benjamin DeMott reported on a conference he had attended at Richard Hoggart’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Hoggart, of course, had coined the term six years earlier in founding the center. His was the best paper at the conference, DeMott said:Professor Hoggart’s claim was that conventional English teachers’ attitudes about proper taste, good literature, high culture, the degraded life of the masses, etc., are, on the whole, disabling; they prevent teachers from using the full resources of mind and feeling in the labor of clarifying immediate experience. The way to know the truth of (for example) the consumer ethos, Hoggart proposed, is to move toward it, to invite classes into an encounter with the thing itself, and to press teacher and student alike to record and interpret the encounter with alertness to nuance, sensitive, imaginative consciousness.[1]The phrasing had not yet been reduced to formula, but the innovation is recognizable nevertheless in DeMott’s description. Students in cultural studies classes are “invited” to “move toward” the “immediate experience” of culture—not cultural artifacts, but the “thing itself.” DeMott’s example is particularly telling. Not human greatness nor even human depravity but the “consumer ethos” is what the student might “know the truth of.”

When Crane warns, then, that the humanities should not be treated as a synonym for the liberal arts—that they should not be “conflated with a Western intellectual tradition”—she is fostering innovation along deeply rutted paths. Since the early ’seventies, “we” have tried to save the liberal arts by abandoning them. Perhaps it is time to take a different path.

And perhaps the advice of someone else who taught in the Boston area some years ago might be more likely to reverse the decline, and even to attract students who are tired of calls to “rethink” their intellectual heritage. In 1907, after resigning his professorship at Harvard, William James returned to Cambridge to address alumnae of Radcliffe College. “Of what use is a college training?” he asked the women who had already gone through it. His answer was succinct. It should, he said, emphasizing every word, “help you to know a good man when you see him.”[2]

Not even someone of his distinction could get away with saying something like that today. But James, who introduced real innovations into American culture and did not merely talk about fostering them, felt no pressure to call into question the Western intellectual tradition in order to establish his fides as an academic reformer. The teacher of the liberal arts, he said, must give his students a “sense of human superiority.”

To accomplish this much, his curriculum “not only consists of masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces.” Not just literary criticism’s famous “close reading” or the “close and small-scale cultural reading” that Hoggart urged as its replacement, the method of the liberal arts is what James called the “sifting of human creations”—that is, the study of “human efforts and conquests” as “so many quests of perfection on the part of men. . . .” James explained:You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar [its original meaning], art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.Instead of pushing the humanities to the margins, James suggested that even scientific and technical subjects might be recentered as humanities. By sifting human creations, by distinguishing greatness from celebrity, “we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time,” he said, and “we acquire standards of the excellent and durable.” A liberal arts education “ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks.”

Such an education might even prove useful in what Mary Crane calls “our era of globalization,” in which we still prefer a good plumber to a bungler and an honest president to a liar. She imagines a liberal arts education “freed from the burden of defense,” and released into dwindling significance. William James understood that the liberal arts might lead to a different sort of freedom—the freedom to accept the burden of human judgment.
____________________

[1] Benjamin DeMott, “Cultural Studies,” PMLA 85 (March 1970): 308.

[2] William James, “The Social Value of the College-Bred,” in Writings, 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1242–49. Originally published in McClure’s Magazine in February 1908.

Fit and natural speech

2011-01-18T14:59:00.005-05:00

In a comment to my post on dialogue in the novel, Fabio asks an excellent question: “What makes one character’s ‘voice’ fit, and the other’s fake?”

The word fit, of course, summons the literary principle of decorum. Once upon a time it was held that speech should be appropriate to the occasion or a person’s station (another obsolete concept). Neither writers nor critics believe in decorum any longer. The closest thing is the technical demand that a character exhibit consistency (or at least not be inconsistent). Classically, decorum was a moral concept, but then literature was considered the dramatic representation of virtues and vices. Perhaps the most authoritative source was Horace’s Ars Poetica:Qui didicit, patriae quid debeat et quid amicis,
quo sit amore parens, quo frater amandus et hospes,
quod sit conscripti, quod iudicis officium, quae
partes in bellum missi ducis, ille profecto
reddere personae scit convenientia cuique.
Respicere exemplar vitae morumque iubebo
doctum imitatorem et vivas hinc ducere voces. (ll. 312–18)In Leon Golden’s 1995 translation:He who has learned what he owes to his country, what he owes to his friends, by what kind of love a parent, a brother, or a guest should be honored, what is the duty of a senator, what is the function of a judge, what is the role of a general sent into war—he, assuredly, knows how to represent what is appropriate for each character. I bid the artist, trained in representation, to reflect on exemplars of life and character and to bring us living voices from that source.By “living voices,” Horace seems to mean voices that are useful to the quandary of living but also voices that speak a language which is living, current, not obsolete. Contemporary writers would probably take such advice to heart while laughing off the suggestion that they owe anything at all to country, honor, or duty.

The uppermost principle in contemporary fiction is that speech must sound right. The quality of eavesdropping, in which the chitchat on the page sounds just like what might be overheard any day under natural conditions, is prized above everything else. But there are problems with such a conception of “dialogue” in fiction.

First of all, the most lifelike speech in American fiction is characteristically the least eloquent and meaningful. In some writers (Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie), naturalness is equated with inarticulateness; in most others (whose dialogue rarely achieves any distinctiveness, precisely because it is the imitation of standard idiom), the men and women are most emphatic and intelligible about practical concerns, especially love and other kinds of friction between adults. Here is a pretty good example, taken almost at random, from a novelist whose dialogue typically rises above the norm. It is taken from Paul Auster’s Sunset Park:     I don’t mean to pry, [Bing] says, but I was wondering if you have any plans.
     Plans to do what? Miles asks.
     To see your parents, for one thing.
     Is that any of your business?
     Yes, unfortunately it is. I’ve been your source for a long time now, and I think I want to retire.
     You already have. The moment I stepped off the bus today, you were given your gold watch. For years of devoted service. You know how grateful I am to you, don’t you?
     I don’t want your gratitude, Miles. I just don’t want to see you fuck up your life anymore. It hasn’t been easy on them, you know.
     I know. Don’t think I don’t know.
     Well, are you going to see them or not?
     I want to, I’m hoping to . . .The ellipses are in the original, where they belong. The only way to get out of such an interchange is to let it trail away. A passage like this, which gives the impression of being much longer than its one hundred and thirty five words, helps to explain Nabokov’s impatience with dialogue in fiction. Nabokov considered it the resort of lazy novelists. It is hard to tell, outside the lackluster witticism about the retirement watch and one more page to add to his growing total, what Auster gains from this back-and-forth.

The bigger problem is the set speech in which a character must finally say something definitive. In Being Polite to Hitler, Robb Forman Dew has a character explain why he becomes involved in the effort to pass the Ohio Civil Rights Bill in 1959, even when he knew that “the issue wasn’t going to enhance [his] authority” or brighten his political future in the state:     “There’s no better way for a person to become a racist than to grow up in the middle of a society that generally has no idea of the bigotry they all live with. Later on you can’t believe you were part of it. You perpetuated it. You finally just can’t believe the things you’ve absorbed growing up. Just imagine! In nineteen forty-four, I was in a B-seventeen flying over Czechoslovakia,“ Sam [Holloway] said. “The flak guns suddenly opened up, and we were hit . . . oh, at least eighty times. We made it home because those P-fifty-ones just showed up out of nowhere. They covered us like glue. It turned out they were the Red Tails. The Tuskegee Airmen. And I couldn’t get over it—I’ll never get over it, I guess. The base where we were stationed was segregated!
     “So there we were! In a godforsaken muddy swamp of a place and I looked around. Every one of us was sure that the next flight would be the one when we’d get blown to bits. But God forbid you eat in the same mess hall as any of those black pilots!”Ignore the unlikelihood that, to the pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress, the fighter planes seemed to “show[] up out of nowhere,” and that they “turned out” to be P-51 Mustangs from the 332nd Fighter Group, the famous Red-Tail Angels, when they were assigned to escort the bomber to its target all along. (Ignore too the ellipses, the American novelist’s acquiescence to the convention of inarticulateness.)

A declamation like Sam Holloway’s is the counterfeit of reflection. Its self-congratulatory quality, in which a man says both that racists are unaware of their society’s bigotry but also that he was uniquely aware, undermine what Dew is trying to do. She wants to arrange speech that is representative of a larger and more comprehensive point of view—the point of view belonging to her circle and class. The trouble, as I said before, is that the opposition to her point of view is without form and void.

Just imagine! There were men who defended the segregation of the U.S. Army during the Second World War. And their defense might even be worth listening to: they had reasons in addition to motives. But don’t ask Robb Forman Dew to imagine what their reasons could possibly be. She can’t imagine them, or she won’t. And if the segregation of the military is wholly indefensible then Sam Holloway’s dignity and courage in opposing it (at this late date) turn to ash. His speech has little purpose beyond establishing that, for Dew, there are simply two kinds of people. There are the self-aware, like Sam, and there are the racists, thickly unaware of their society’s bigotry. No dialogue between them is possible.

Small wonder most contemporary American novelists prefer the vacuousness of interpersonal twittle-twattle. Apparently that is the only point of view they trust themselves to know with any authenticity.

Five Books of New York

2011-01-13T14:43:00.006-05:00

Edmund White brought down his decalogue of New York books in the Guardian yesterday. The list is particularly good, not merely because it was compiled by an excellent writer (who thereby sheds light on his own writing), but because it contains several books that I was unfamiliar with.

In White’s spirit, then, here is a Pentateuch of New York books I am hoping you don’t know yet. The problem, of course, is how to narrow the list. Many of the best novels about New York are about Jewish immigrants to the city (The Rise of David Levinsky, Bread Givers, Jews Without Money, Call It Sleep), but I have already recommended them elsewhere. Same with Chang-rae Lee’s terrific Native Speaker, which is not only one of the best immigrant novels ever written but probably the best about one of the “outer boroughs.”

What is wanted are definitive accounts of defining New York experiences. Such as:

(1.) W. D. Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889). After the Civil War, the cultural center of the United States shifted from Boston to New York. Howells’s great novel not only chronicles the shift, but is also a major example of it. Basil March relocates to New York to start a magazine and meet social radicals. The novel is the New York intellectuals’ book of Genesis. Perry Miller’s Raven and the Whale covers the prehistory. Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel The Unpossessed picks up the story half a century later, when the Jews barged onto the scene. Thomas Bender’s 1987 history of New York Intellect is an academic overview, reliable and free of jargon.

(2.) Dawn Powell, Turn, Magic Wheel (1936). Powell told her diary that she had “the perfect New York story” for her first New York novel. (Her first six novels were largely set in her native Ohio.) The perfect story: adultery and reputation-burnishing in the literary world. It is as if Cakes and Ale were written over in the style of Evelyn Waugh, only more aphoristic and even more fast-paced. Powell is hard on publishers, critics, blurb-writers, agents, second-rank novelists, would-be novelists, washed-up novelists, and novelists’ wives, ex-wives, and mistresses. Anyone who dreams that if he can make it there he can make it anywhere should read Powell first.

(3.) Calder Willingham, Natural Child (1952). The most unusual (and perhaps most insightful) novel ever written about the Young Man from the Provinces who comes to New York to pursue artistic dreams. In this case, the young man is a young woman, and the province from which she hails is the South. The outsider’s perspective, and the ear for regional differences in speech and self-understanding, make Willingham’s book a rewarding read. To say nothing of the humor, which makes the book a breezy and enjoyable read to boot. William Styron tries to cover much of the same ground in Sophie’s Choice, but does so without humor and with much earnest pseudo-philosophizing. In a peculiar way, Ellison’s Invisible Man, published the same year as Willingham’s novel (and far better, of course), belongs to the same genre.

(4.) Louis Auchincloss, The Embezzler (1966). A precursor to Bernie Madoff, Guy Prime was a “symbol of well-born affluence, of the grandeur of old New York.” He traveled in the highest social circles of New York in the ’thirties. Then he betrayed his class by embezzling $350,000 from his country club. Life among New York’s filthy rich was the native ground of the late Louis Auchincloss, who died almost exactly one year ago. The Age of Innocence, which features an embezzler in a subordinate role, is the classic account of the class at its zenith. Steven Millhauser’s brilliant 1996 novel Martin Dressler, about a New York hotelier a century ago, may be the best novel ever written about American business.

(5.) Ruth R. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988). Covering fifty years of New York’s largely unknown literary history, the great critic’s best book tells the story of Di Yunge, the gifted young Yiddish poets who washed up on Manhattan’s shores in the early decades of the last century. Wisse focuses upon two of the group—Mani Leib and Moishe Leib Halpern. Suddenly the minor characters in Abraham Cahan’s and Anzia Yezierska’s novels spring to life, along with the coffeehouses where they argued and the newspapers that competed bitterly for the dwindling Yiddish readership in New York. Although narrower in scope—perhaps because it is narrower in scope—Wisse’s book is everything that Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers should have been.

I would have liked to end the list with Richard Price’s wonderfully sordid crime novel Lush Life (2008), set in a quarter of the city rarely visited by book readers, but I seem to have run out of space.

Dialogue in the novel

2011-01-12T12:32:00.009-05:00

It’s not the same as recorded speech. A better word for the back-and-forth between persons in most novels would be chitchat. The word dialogue entered the English language in the thirteenth century as a name for a specific type of writing in which the action or argument develops as an interchange between two or more points of view. This is, in fact, the earliest use of the word. Not until two centuries later did the technical term become a synonym for casual conversation.

The unattractive word dialogism, which has gained prestige through its association with the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is now more likely to be substituted for the dramatic interplay of thought in the novel. Originally, though, the order was reversed.

In his Arte of English Poesie (1589), for example, Puttenham observes that the forms of poetry and the manner of its writing are as diverse as its subject matter. Some poets write of heroes, while others are “more delighted to write songs or ballads of pleasure.” Some are taken with “the perplexities of love,” while others write only for the stage. “There were yet others,” he continues, “who mounted nothing so high as any of them both, but in base and humble style by manner of Dialogue, uttered the private and familiar talk of the meanest sort of men. . . .” He names Theocritus and Vergil as practitioners of the kind, identifying the eclogue (or “shepherdly talk”) as a subgenre of the larger class.

The fiction of speech in another man’s mouth, however, is called something else entirely:We are sometimes occasioned in our tale to report some speech from another man’s mouth, as what a king said to his privy counsel or subject, a captain to his soldier, a soldier to his captain, a man to a woman, and contrariwise: in which report we must always give to every person his fit and natural, and that which best becomes him. . . . So if by way of fiction we will seem to speak in another man’s person . . . [t]his manner of speech is by the figure Dialogismus, or the right reasoner.Most contemporary novelists are exercised only by dialogismus. That is, they trouble to make the speech that they assign to their characters sound “fit and natural,” a tribute to their own “ear” for ordinary utterance, but the words rarely if ever advance a distinct and distinguishable point of view.

Jonathan Franzen is perhaps the most glaring example in contemporary fiction. As if he were an entomologist collecting specimens, Franzen excels at characters who sound like someone at the next table in Starbuck’s, whose conversation you find yourself eavesdropping upon. In The Corrections, he noticed the way that some people end their sentences with a rising so, as if they were about to go on, although they don’t. In Freedom, he is deft with the word like. “We haven’t even started on jealousy yet,” Patty tells Richard. “This is, like, Minute One of jealousy.” Or later:I know who fucked it all up. I know it was me! But, Richard, you knew it was harder for me. You could have thrown me a lifeline! Like, possibly, for that one minute, not talked about poor Walter and his poor tender feelings, but about me instead.Patty is the most arresting and interesting character in the novel, because she is the one with the most sharply individualized speech. At the same time, she is also the character with the least developed point of view, the least reflective, the least likely to swerve into politics. In a book with ambitions to be the Great American Novel of Liberal (or, at least, Anti-Bush) Ideas, this is a deep flaw. Far worse, though, is what I called in my review Franzen’s lack of integrity: his refusal to create fit and natural speech for political viewpoints with which he disagrees. As a consequence, the only truly convincing character in the novel is the one who is furthest removed from its core of conviction.

What I am suggesting is that the two treatments of dialogue in the contemporary novel—the scrupulous mimicry of everyday speech and the studied exclusion of differing points of view—are connected at the level of basic assumptions about the nature of fiction in today’s literary culture. Reading Luke Ford’s interview with Robb Forman Dew, I was struck by the following exchange:Luke: “Do you have any friends who are conservative Republicans?”
Robb, quickly: “No. I don't think I could. Are you?”
Luke: “Yes.”
Robb: “You are? You really are? Oh no. You can’t be.”In the interview, conducted four years ago, Dew supplies the premise to her brand new novel Being Polite to Hitler. When she was a child, she explains, two things broke her family apart—“religion and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Her uncle Brent, an “airplane navigator in the Pacific,” supported Truman’s decision to drop the bombs on Japan. “My father thought there was no excuse for dropping a bomb like that on a civilian population,” she recollects. “That the government should’ve dropped it on an unpopulated island and said, ‘This is what will happen.’ ” Brent dismissed the idea as “romantic.”

In Being Polite to Hitler, the horror of the atomic bomb is the psychological landscape of the novel. The novel opens in October 1952, when “there was not a single community [in America],” according to Dew, “that didn’t harbor an unacknowledged dread and anticipation of some sort of retribution for having perpetrated an act of aggression previously unmatched by any other country.” The dread worms its way into the lives of every character in the novel, spreading frustration and unease. No other response is possible, because the only admissible point of view is that “dropping a bomb like that on a civilian population” was an “act of aggression.”

Robb Forman Dew can no more imagine a different conception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than she can imagine having conservative Republican friends. And in this she deviates little from Jonathan Franzen, who is otherwise a much superior novelist. Their novels suffer as a consequence, however, because it is just impossible to enter into dialogue with what can neither be imagined nor believed. In Bakhtin’s terms, their novels are monologic, a long rehearsed speech by a single uninterrupted voice. Or, as I would prefer to call them, they are examples in American fiction of “begging the question,” which establish their premises by shutting out anything that might aggravate them.

Backlash against Gribbenizing

2011-01-07T14:46:00.010-05:00

Since I first commented on it, Professor Alan Gribben’s edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been condemned from all sides. I have found not a single voice raised in its defense. If I did not believe that he deserved as much notoriety as Dr Thomas Bowdler—if I did not believe that the verb to Gribbenize was a deserving addition to the critical lexicon to characterize the editing of texts and speech for the sake of bringing them in line with political correctness—I would almost feel sorry for the man.

I do feel sorry for his critics, who cannot seem to understand why the Gribbenized Huck has them so worked up. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, columnist Tony Norman called it “linguistically and morally incoherent.” His standards are not literary, however. Stoutly maintaining that Huckleberry Finn “holds a mirror to our times just as it did Twain’s,” Norman says:Removing “nigger” from the pages of one of our most prophetic and subversive novels creates a space for even more glibness and self-deception by preserving the conceit that we’re a society that doesn’t “see” color.The hip use of the popular critical term space suggests that Norman is hardly a stranger to the dictates of political correctness. He merely disagrees that Gribbenizing the novel will serve the larger purpose of finding fault with “our” American society.

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani agrees that the Gribbenizing of the novel is similar to “the politically correct efforts in the ’80s to exile great authors like Conrad and Melville from the canon because their work does not feature enough women or projects colonialist attitudes.” But she goes farther, sounding as if Huckleberry Finn is holy writ:Authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. Tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people in this day of mash-ups, sampling and digital books—the attitude that all texts are fungible, that readers are entitled to alter as they please, that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned.Unless this passage is intended as a swipe at her own editors, it is extraordinarily unreflexive. Anyone at all who writes for publication has his words “tampered with.” Kakutani would not defend a colleague at the Times who used the word nigger in his copy. Such a religious attitude toward literary texts on the part of those who are not religious in any conventional sense is a testament to the awful lack of transcendence in their lives. Twain’s text might be sacred if Twain himself surpassed the limits of human understanding. And I would bet my first edition of The American Claimant that Kakutani does not believe the Hebrew Bible is “sacrosanct”—at least not in the way that believers believe it. Namely: as a meaning for their lives.

That’s the thing. Both the Gribbenized edition of Huckleberry Finn and the self-righteous condemnation of it are founded on the same premise. Both are distempered by the exaggeration of isolated words, while ignoring the novel’s complex word-system of meaning. On one side, the word nigger (and to a lesser extent the word Injun) are unacceptable under any circumstances; on the other, the words are “sacrosanct” because they are Twain’s or because they are “subversive.”

Yet Twain’s meaning can prove elusive, especially for those who are concerned to make it seem less offensive than it is. Thus Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, rightly focuses on the novel’s meaning, but gets it upside down. The meaning he disseminates is earnest and poignant, but the meaning is not Twain’s:It is Jim, the character who is demeaned and hunted like an animal, who is most humane. While Huck’s father is an ignorant drunk who beats and robs him, Jim desperately misses his own family, and his conscience lashes him for having once hit his daughter unjustly.Getting Twain wrong in back-to-back sentences is a neat trick. Lowry has forgotten the passage in The Mysterious Stranger in which the narrator witnesses the torture of a heretic, and calls it a “brutal thing.” “No, it was a human thing,” Satan replies. “You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.” Jim has done nothing to deserve being called “humane” by Rich Lowry.

And as for conscience! Huck is alert to its message, because he knows that what he is doing in assisting a runaway slave is immoral. As they float down the river, searching for the lights of Cairo, Jim remarks that he is “all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.” Huck comes to with a start:Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson [Jim’s owner] done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.”Lowry is right that Huck is “lashed” by conscience, but not as he thinks. In Twain, conscience is the handmaiden of slavery, as are Miss Watson’s “book” (i.e., the Bible) and “manners.”

To be fair to Lowry, even Francine Prose—of whom I am acknowledged to be the World’s Biggest Fan—falls into the same error. In a New York Times symposium on whether “word changes alter Huckleberry Finn,” she says that the novel “portray[s] the mind of a young person trying to develop a moral conscience.” No, it doesn’t. It portrays the hopeless quest to escape from conscience and the rest of sivilization’s trappings altogether. As a novelist herself, Prose is merely rewriting Twain’s novel in the language that she would have written it in. And though she describes the sin of Gribbenizing better than anyone I have read (“If language is a bridge connecting us to the mind of the writer and the historical moment he is describing, then to tinker with that language—for whatever well-intentioned reasons—undermines not only the design but the solidity of that bridge”), she misses something far more important than language and historical moment.

A great novel is a disturbing comprehensive vision of the human experience. It persuades you, for a while, to watch the human parade from a weirdly angled window—to consider human life under the aspect, not of eternity, but of an odd and assertive particularity. This is what it means for a novel to be truly great: it changes your life. But not in any trivial self-improvement fashion. For a long time thereafter—if not forever—it affects the tone of every human encounter, the symbolism of every human gesture, the legitimacy of every human feeling. Even if you reject the great novelist’s vision, you are unable to shake the influence that it has upon the way that you view human actions.

No one who reads Huckleberry Finn can ever again use words like “nigger,” “humane,” “moral,” or “conscience” in the same way. And in that sense, Alan Gribben and his critics belong to the same fraternity of the fundamentally unchanged.

Etiquette for critics

2011-01-05T12:01:00.003-05:00

Happy families are all alike, but every generation is prudish in its own way. Since about the mid-’eighties—the term was first used in the New York Times in 1986, quoting a divinity student who used it as if it were readily familiar—my generation has been “politically correct,” which is our own way of being prudish. “Political correctness is a politicised version of good manners,” the philosopher Kenneth Minogue says in an interview, “offering power to the kind of meddlesome people who want to tell others how to behave” (h/t: Maverick Philosopher).

I wonder, though, if the more exact word is not etiquette. By themselves forbidden words are not immoral, after all, since there is no meaning (hence no offense against morality) without context. When my four-year-old son starts talking loudly in public about his “weiner,” I tell him not to use that word. “I have a penis,” he shouts. “You can’t use that word either,” I say—“not in public.” “What is ‘public’?” he asks. And I realize, with a sinking feeling, that I must instruct him in social appropriateness, not words.

Etiquette is the formal code of socially acceptable behavior, including verbal behavior. In an introduction to the second edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette (1922), Richard Duffy explains the word’s origin:To the French we owe the word etiquette, and it is amusing to discover its origin in the commonplace familiar warning—“Keep off the grass.” It happened in the reign of Louis XIV, when the gardens of Versailles were being laid out, that the master gardener, an old Scotsman, was sorely tried because his newly seeded lawns were being continually trampled upon. To keep trespassers off, he put up warning signs or tickets—etiquettes—on which was indicated the path along which to pass. But the courtiers paid no attention to these directions and so the determined Scot complained to the King in such convincing manner that His Majesty issued an edict commanding everyone at Court to “keep within the etiquettes.” Gradually the term came to cover all the rules for correct demeanor and deportment in court circles. . . .It is equally amusing to think of etiquette as Scottish Presbyterianism laid down as law by the Sun King. In literary criticism, the equivalent term is decorum, but appropriateness in literature is a question of whether a text’s materials (genre, subject, style, characters) are coordinated and in agreement. It is, in short, an intrinsic question.

The older critic who is worried that a text is “really not acceptable” and sets out to Gribbenize it—or, for that matter, the younger critic who dismisses Shakespeare as a WASP, achieving the rare feat of combining historical ignorance with historical error—are doing something other than literary criticism. They are seeking entry into what Emily Post calls the Best Society, which is (in her words) an “association of gentlefolk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.”

I prefer the fellowship of less gentle folk, who are not particularly afraid of hurting others’ feelings if it means saying things exactly as they must be said.

More books to Gribbenize

2011-01-05T08:52:00.001-05:00

Alan Gribben’s effort to make Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “acceptable” in the “new classroom” ought not to stop with Twain’s great novel. What about Moby-Dick? Wandering around New Bedford, Ishmael pushes into a building where he hears loud voices:It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.This passage is only marginally more allowable than what Twain is up to in Huck. But it is also more challenging to Gribbenize. How about something like this?It seemed the great African American Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred eumelanin-pigmented faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, an Angel of Doom that did not reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a people-of-color church; and the preacher’s text was about the dark color of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.In Chilly Scenes of Winter, Ann Beattie commits a double fault when she describes a character as a “fat oriental nurse.” This should be Gribbenized to read: “clinically overweight Asian American or Pacific Islander nurse.” And of course, when warning that Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises would become the next American classic to be Gribbenized, I completely forgot about Brett Ashley’s famous line: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.” This must be changed. Brett must not be permitted to call herself a bitch. She must say something like this: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a self-empowered woman whose sexual freedom challenges masculine privilege to define women’s sexuality as ‘chaste’ or ‘promiscuous’ for the political purpose of controlling it.” After all, that will expose Hemingway’s ideology, won’t it?

Hemingway is next

2011-01-04T20:24:00.015-05:00

A new sanitized edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be published in a $24.95 hardcover next month, and according to Publishers Weekly it “eliminates the ‘n’ word” (h/t: Abe Greenwald at Contentions).

Alan Gribben of Auburn University, editor of the squeamish new version, says that the word nigger, which appears over two hundred times in the novel, will be replaced by the word slave. I am trying to imagine the scene in which Huck, pretending to be his friend Tom, is greeted by Aunt Sally. She asks why he was delayed. Did the steamboat “get aground”? Huck explains:     “It warn’t the grounding—that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
     “Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
     “No’m. Killed a slave.”So much for Twain’s irony. “I’m hoping that people will welcome this new option,” Gribben says, “but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified.”

Not only textual purists. What is far more horrifying to contemplate is how anyone who studies the novel in “the new classroom,” where Gribben says the author’s intended version is “really not acceptable,” can possibly hope to understand Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s point in the novel is that human “sivilization” (including the institution of slavery) is little more than legalized violence. The only true freedom lies outside “sivilization” altogether, which is why, in the last sentences of the book, Huck decides to “light out for the [Indian] Territory ahead of the rest”—that is, decides to flee human contact altogether.

Man, as Twain wrote in an essay published posthumously in Letters from the Earth, is “the lowest animal.” But white men in the South considered black men to be subhuman. Just that is what the word nigger signifies. To Twain, such a slur is the highest conceivable praise. To be beneath humanity is to be an animal that, unlike man, does not go forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate its kind.

And which character in the novel does this describe? Which character risks capture and reenslavement to stand by his friend, who is wounded in the stylish and romantic pretense of “steal[ing] that nigger out of slavery”? Although Tom Sawyer holds the copyright on the word moral in the novel, the only character who exhibits the qualities that moralists contend they prize is Jim. For a misanthrope like Twain, Jim is admirable precisely because he is not a man but, um, er, a slave.[1] (If you can’t hear that the word nigger secures Twain’s anthropology, to a degree that “slave” fails to, then you probably should read the book in “the new classroom” under a teacher like Alan Gribben who prefers current moral fashions to the impervious and troublesome facts of literature from the past.)

Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises is surely next. Robert Cohn is described as acting “superior and Jewish.” The new edition will describe him, I guess, as superior and religious.
____________________

[1] To substitute the word slave is untrue to Twain’s entire way of thinking. “Man is the only slave,” Twain wrote around 1896. “And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another” (Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto [Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1963], p. 179). To call Jim a slave is to fail to distinguish him from the other men in the novel.

Withdrawing from literature

2011-01-01T21:34:00.006-05:00

If it is not merely special pleading, the hermeneutics of suspicion—or what Marilynne Robinson more accurately calls the hermeneutics of condescension—can’t apply to just one party to a critical dispute. The suspicious are not more exempt than the suspects. If I must be wary of reading lists that fail to include a sufficient number of women (or blacks or gays or Hispanics or whatnot), then shouldn’t I be wary of lists that include more than enough? If the motives behind the one are impure then the motives behind the other would be no less so, especially since the principle that determines the lists (exclusion or inclusion on the basis of group membership) is ex hypothesi the same in each case.

In a clever comment to my last post, Mel U tries to imagine Dr Johnson’s compiling The Lives of the Poets according to the principle of representative inclusion. But he doesn’t have to imagine it. I was an eyewitness to a similar absurdity (and be sure to read the Amateur Reader’s postscript). Those who insist upon irrelevant standards do not merely humiliate themselves; they contribute to the breakdown of critical discussion, by destroying the good faith upon which it depends.

The whole bother over Dead White Guys’ ascendancy in the “canon” (as if there were any such thing) has been a waste of valuable time and critical resources, because there is more to literary reputation than is dreamed of in race, class, and gender. As J. V. Cunningham taught his classes in the history of criticism many years ago, “It would be indecorous to ascribe a fault to Jane Austen.” Claire Harman expands upon the point in Jane’s Fame, her new study of How Jane Austen Conquered the World. As Barton Swaim put it in his review of Harman’s book:By the 1890s, editions of Jane Austen’s novels had become widely available. At the turn of the century, according to one anonymous reviewer, “every man of intellectual pretensions either likes to read her books or thinks it necessary to apologize if he does not”—a state of affairs that’s held true ever since. In 2010, it’s possible to think the Brontës preposterous and cloying, to think Thackeray cold and pretentious, and to dislike Dickens’s long-winded moralizing. It’s simply not possible for a literate person to think poorly of Jane Austen.In other words, perhaps the only English novelist above suspicion is a woman. How is that remotely possible, if the “canon” is an exclusive club of Dead White Guys?

The demand that writers should be read as representatives of “dominant” or “minority” viewpoints is not an exciting new youthful departure in literary criticism. It is a withdrawal from literary criticism. The time is long past to retire the fatuous and misleading categories of race, class, and gender.

Bye, bye, literature

2010-12-31T11:08:00.003-05:00

As the year coughs to a stop, I find myself thinking more and more about the disappearance of a literary culture in America where books are valued, if only by a minority, for their intrinsic qualities—their intelligence, their depth and breadth, the care they take with sentences. Even if it has begun to pick up speed recently, the decline has been going on for long decades. I realize that. “A literary craftsman in America,” Mencken said ninety some years ago, “is never judged by his work alone.” Now, however, he is rarely judged by his work at all.

“The universal reaction to book lists,” I wrote a few days ago, “is annoyance over what has been left out.” I should have added: followed immediately by an accusation of bias. If you don’t happen to think very highly of a writer—and if, because space limitations make explanation impossible, you are silent about the writer—you will be said to hold a grudge against the class to which the writer belongs. Worse yet, if you fail to mention a sufficient number of members of the writer’s class, although the required proportion remains vague and undefined, you will be dismissed as irredeemably intolerant if not bigoted toward the entire class.

I don’t know why it took so long for me to figure out what was going on. The accusation of bias has been leveled against me so often that I no longer take it seriously. Only recently, though, did it strike me that the accusation is more than simply a moral fashion. It is a learned response, an intellectual commonplace, picked up in school and college like mono or herpes. It is the voice of the academic literary guild, stripped of any theoretical sophistication, coming from the mouths of latter-day undergraduates who still hope for their professors’ approval.

Race, class, and gender (and their substitutes and equivalents, adopted by outsiders eager to get in on the game) have finally completed the tendency that Mencken observed so long ago. Their invocation no longer makes it hard to talk about a book’s intrinsic qualities. They have made it so that such talk, when it occasionally occurs, sounds like a dead language. Nobody understands what is being said, and assumes the worse. For any critical discussion that refuses to cloth itself in the vocabulary of race, class, and gender is nothing else—can be nothing else—than an expression of naked bias.

So much for literature.

Denis Dutton, 1944–2010

2010-12-28T13:22:00.010-05:00

My old friend, mentor, and collaborator Denis Dutton has died in Christchurch, New Zealand, of prostate cancer. He was sixty-six.

Dutton, a Southern California native who earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, founded the journal Philosophy and Literature, the listserve discussion group PHIL-LIT (which I moderated for him from its inception in 1994 until its demise in 2003), and the first of the great “web aggregators” Arts & Letters Daily. Perhaps he was better known, though, as the animating spirit behind the annual Bad Writing Contest. He also took great delight in publishing Alan Sokal’s postscript to the famous hoax. As he saw it, the two events were deeply related.

Denis was a lifelong opponent of fashionable gibberish served up in the name of postmodern profundity. Philosophy and Literature, one of the few academic literary journals to hold the line against “theory,” became the warm refuge of those who believed that the philosophical tradition offered a better framework and vocabulary for literary reflection. Dutton actively sought out articles to knock down the modish concepts of “theory,” one by one, as they rose to graduate students’ cheers. The best Festschrift that could possibly be published in his honor is a complete run of Philosophy and Literature under his editorship from 1977 until today.

Despite his abiding skepticism (“Skepticism is a good policy for any editor,” he said, “because it’s generally a good idea for any scholar”), Denis in person was good-humored, always smiling and finding reasons to smile. Generous and self-effacing, he was quick to give credit to someone else for his own ideas. We shared a short week together several years ago in College Station and Houston. He taught me how to “see” Van Gogh, and how to detect fraudulent “primitive art.” (He was a great collector of native art from New Guinea.)

Denis was first diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer two years ago. Since I had been diagnosed with the same disease a year earlier, we exchanged notes and phone calls on the subject, although he was “super-insistent,” as he put it, about keeping his own cancer secret. He reacted badly to hormone treatments, with a high fever for several days, and was not encouraged by his prognosis. The news of breakthroughs in treatment, though, gave him some hope. “[W]e may live long enough for some of these new treatments to start working for us,” he said. Alas, it was not to be.

Perhaps more of an academic entrepreneur than an original philosopher, he was nevertheless an unfailingly provocative writer. He influenced the academic culture with his irreverence, his impatience for trendy posturing, his commitment to argument and plain language, his love of beauty, and his encouragement of younger writers who shared his crochets. Denis liked to say that he “discovered” me as a writer. If that is true then I owe him an apology for not being a better one and bringing to him even more of the honor that he deserved.

I will miss him.

Deliberate omissions

2010-12-24T09:18:00.004-05:00

The universal reaction to book lists is annoyance over what has been left out. Everyone remembers the uproar at this time last year when Publishers Weekly named the Top Ten Books of 2009, and not one by a woman. It was assumed that women had been intentionally excluded, even though the list’s compilers said their intention was to “ignore[] gender and genre and who had the buzz.” If someone has offended you, though, you are entitled to dismiss his explanations. “[W]hen PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ ” said the poet Erin Belieu, “that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ ”

Naturally, then, my roster of the year’s best Jewish books provoked two local variations of the universal reaction. One commentator, noting the absence of David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (a novel that was originally published in 2008), assumed the only possible explanation is that I am an American Jew who doesn’t like Israeli books. Another commentator, noting the absence of “Jewish books that are marketed to the Orthodox Jewish community,” asked why the Orthodox are “always omitted by the non-Orthodox.”

Since I myself am an Orthodox Jew, that could hardly have been my intention. And in fact, my list contained at least two volumes by Orthodox Jews—Shaul Stampfer’s Families, Rabbis, and Education and Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies. But neither of these belong to the special class of books that, as my commentator put it, are “marketed to the Orthodox Jewish community.”

Jeremy Stolow’s scholarly study Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution examines this market. Published in April by the University of California Press, Stolow’s book might easily have been included in my list of the year’s best Jewish books, except that I am suspicious of its subtle hostility to Orthodox publishing. (Here is a deliberate omission that correctly fingers my ideology!) But it is also true that I don’t exactly read the titles published by ArtScroll, the imprint of Mesorah Publications in Brooklyn.

All of my liturgical editions—my prayerbooks, my mahzorim, my Passover haggadot—are ArtScroll books. But novels like Yael Mermelstein’s Second Chances, published by the Shaar Press in November, about “an ‘older single’ who longs to be married yet can hardly remember the name of her latest shidduch date,” or memoirs like Abraham Twerski’s Gevurah: My Life, Our World, and the Adventure of Reaching 80, which is “[m]ore than an autobiography” and “offers Rabbi Dr. Twerski’s wide-ranging perspective on our own concerns,” frankly do not occur to me.

But then neither do Jewish mysteries nor Jewish science fiction. I couldn’t name two figures in those publishing markets. Now, I am ready to admit that these are blindspots, huge omissions in my literary education and experience. The reason for the omission, however, is not that I disdain niche markets, but that I am not particularly interested in them as markets. My only concern is literature, by which I mean good writing. The simple fact that a book is written by a women or an Israeli or an Orthodox Jew is insufficient reason to recommend it. Nor is it enough to demand books by women or Israelis or Orthodox Jews if none is any good.

Year’s best American novel

2010-12-22T16:28:00.010-05:00

’Tis the season, as Christopher Benson says, for best-book lists. At First Things, Benson compiles his own list, which has a distinctly Christian flavor. Marilynne Robinson’s zinging Absence of Mind did not nose into his top twelve, but earned a mention as a “notable book.” It was, I think, better than that. Outside this disagreement, though, I am grateful to Benson for recommending books that I mostly had not heard of.

Tomorrow on Jewish Ideas Daily I give an accounting of the year in Jewish books, which aims to achieve much the same effect. Yesterday Juliet Linderman of Jewcy beat me out of the gate, reeling off the titles of Jewish hipsters’ favorite novels of 2010. Not one title makes both of our lists, although Linderman describes Joshua Cohen’s Witz as “also of note” while I enroll it among the year’s best.

The best American novel of the year, Jewish or otherwise, was Steve Stern’s gut-busting and surprisingly truthful fourth novel The Frozen Rabbi. I was unable to review it when it first came out, although Mark Athitakis had time before his wife gave birth to their first child to praise it.

As so often the case with contemporary novels, The Frozen Rabbi is told in alternating chapters. In one set of chapters, starting in 1889, the Hasidic tsaddik Eliezer ben Zephyr tumbles into a pond, where he is suspended in a state of frozen animation while he is bundled, in a series of plausibly improbable adventures, across Europe and into the New World. In the second set of chapters, set at the present time, a teenager named Bernie Karp, “[o]verweight and unadventurous,” finds Rabbi Eliezer in the basement freezer of his Memphis home, where an electrical storm knocks out the power and thaws the Boibiczer Prodigy, jarring him out of his ice-cold time machine and into a spiritually hungry age, sputtering Yiddish. Before long, Rabbi Eliezer learns English, after a fashion, and proves more than happy to feed the local hunger. He sets up as a shopping mall kabbalist, a more authentic Michael Berg. The patter is more authentic too, and twice as funny as anything Madonna thinks she believes.

When Bernie, who is startled into Jewish seriousness by Rabbi Eliezer’s defrosting, confesses that he has begun to experience mystical visions, the rabbi replies:     “Sweetheart . . . visions I dispense here [at the kabbalah center] like shalachmones at Purim; it ain’t so special, the visions.” Then sotto voce, “But I don’t tell to my congregation this.”
     The note of confidentiality heartened the boy enough to ask the first of his laundry list of questions: Did the rabbi’s “congregants” ever bring back any, um, like gifts from their meditative flights?
     “What are you kidding?” The rabbi was incredulous, or anyway pretended to be. “What you think, dveykuss, which you call conscious, is a cruise ship to the Bahama? Conscious . . . ness? is the end of the line; you get yours and you’re a satisfy customer, end of shtory.”And so it goes. Bernie’s faith deepens along with his Jewish literacy, while Rabbi Eliezer becomes alienated from the Orthodox Judaism of his first, fresh life. “If this ain’t Gan Eydn”—if postmodern America is not Paradise, he asks—“what is?”

The rabbi is the most unforgettable evangelist ever drawn up in American literature. (I want to hear no more references to Elmer Gantry.) But what is so surprising about The Frozen Rabbi is that, while Stern plays the part for laughs, he also has something arresting to say about the Jewish religious experience in the abundant consumer culture of the American present. Although not himself (apparently) a religious Jew, Stern understands just how countercultural, just what a dissent from the “Gan Eydn” of the shopping mall, religious Judaism is. He also notices what is happening in the actual world around him, where a younger generation returns to the Jewish seriousness discarded so carelessly by an older generation.

Bernie is a genuine mystic, trapped (as the rabbi puts it) “between this side and the other.” Naturally, then, things end badly for both of them, although not tragically. No one grieves over their ends. The family is embarrassed, while Bernie’s girlfriend feels only a lingering fatigue. “When’s the tragedy begin?” she asks herself, speaking perhaps for the reader. The tsaddik tries to explain: “There ain’t no world but this one and it’s already half in the crapper.” Neither of the two available options—being too much in the world and not in it enough—will redeem the soul that is restless for liberty.

The Frozen Rabbi is funny and pointed from first to last, because Stern is such an accomplished mimic. He knows the languages of Hasidism and hucksterism like a native speaker, but he also recognizes the phrases of the struggling mystic, who cannot fully credit his own experiences: he is able to write straightforwardly in a religious language, without parody or excess. The war between those languages, which I have argued elsewhere is perhaps the natural form of modern Jewish fiction, is what raises The Frozen Rabbi above any other American novel of the past year.

Against “net neutrality”

2010-12-21T12:20:00.010-05:00

In a comment to an earlier post, Shelley Shaver warns that today the Federal Communications Commission will begin the long process of regulating the internet through the badly misnamed principle of “net neutrality.” As my friend and editor John Podhoretz said earlier in the month, net neutrality is an “anti-sticky” idea. “No matter what you do,” he said, “you can’t remember what the hell it is.”

Nevertheless, everyone who depends upon the internet—which is, basically, every American with an active social, intellectual, or commercial life—should care about the principle. Under its name, the federal government is joining forces with companies that provide web content to control the ebb and flow of information and services on the internet. Net neutrality hides behind the abstract (and entirely relativistic) conception of fairness, but in truth it is a classic example of rent seeking. The web companies behind it want the aid of government power to obtain a share of net usage that they might not otherwise be able to obtain in an open and unregulated marketplace.

The first beneficiary of the new regulatory régime will be trial lawyers, which explains the Obama administration’s support of net neutrality. As FCC commissioner Robert M. McDowell wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, “The FCC’s action will spark a billable-hours bonanza as lawyers litigate the meaning of ‘reasonable’ network management for years to come.” [NOTE: Broken link fixed.]

And once the legal decisions begin to be handed down, the internet may start looking suspiciously like a contemporary American university campus, where “underrepresented voices” demand inclusion, where some phrases and ideas must not be uttered, and where certain voices are shut out altogether so that the “underrepresented” might be heard. The last thing the federal government should be regulating, because the thing it is least qualified to regulate, is intellectual content. On a university campus, the limited number of classrooms and classroom hours lends a glossy sheen of plausibility to the claim that content must be meted out according to some exalted notion of “fairness.”

But the internet is an infinity of human discourse. There is no end to the ways in which voices can make themselves heard. “Fairness” here is another word for privilege, which the internet exists to undermine and call into question.

Update: The best account of “net neutrality” that I have found belongs to the pseudonymous IT consultant who blogs for ZDNet under the name of Paul Murphy. He writes: “Net neutrality is not, of course, about neutrality—it’s about having government control and monitor what carriers are allowed to transmit, to whom, and at what rates with specific and immediate benefits to bandwidth hogs like [Y]outube and specific and immediate limitations on premium services contracts like those Apple put in place with AT&T to give their iPhone a performance advantage.” Read the whole thing.

Update, II: Meredith Attwell Baker is the other FCC commissioner (along with Robert M. McDowell) to cast her vote in a losing cause against net neutrality. In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, she explains her opposition, saying that the regulations adopted today are already outdated. They aim to regulate the internet as it was constituted ten to fifteen minutes ago, not the internet that must now struggle against the new regulations to develop and evolve.

Update, III: In the Denver Post, David Harsanyi goes beyond opposing net neutrality to call for abolition of the FCC, which has an “almost irresistible urge to protect the powerful instead” of consumers and innovative startups. In the Wall Street Journal, John Fund reveals who is behind the push for net neutrality.

The Shark-Infested Custard

2010-12-16T11:42:00.005-05:00

After registering my dissent on Kurt Vonnegut’s canonization by the Library of America, I guess that I have to come up with a better novelist—especially for those, like one commentator, who are “looking for wit, charm, and invention.”

They can do no better than Vonnegut’s four-years-older contemporary Charles Willeford (1919–1988). The two had much in common. Willeford too wrote paperback originals and he too found himself held captive in a “genre” (more accurately, a niche market). In Willeford’s case, the niche was detective and crime fiction. Late in his career, Willeford finally landed a multi-volume contract with a publisher of hardcover books. St. Martin’s Press released three of his four “Hoke Moseley” mysteries, the books for which he is best known, between 1984 and 1987. (The fourth title in the series was published posthumously by Random House.)

Unlike Vonnegut, though, there is little “naive” or sentimental and less that is moralistic about Willeford. His tendency, in fact, is in the opposite direction. Where Vonnegut’s mock resignation barely covers a conventional liberal outrage over man’s capacity for evil (“So it goes,” he says repeatedly in Slaughterhouse-Five), Willeford’s attitude is a derisive despair. “Oh, shit,” laughs a character in The Shark-Infested Custard, his best novel. “Here we go again!”

Originally written in 1975, The Shark-Infested Custard was considered “too depressing” by publishers at the time. It was finally published—by a small Bay Area house specializing in science fiction—in 1993, five years after the author’s death at sixty-nine. To call the novel “depressing” is to miss the joke, although it is true that “one needs to be a member of the family to appreciate the joke,” as Willeford once said in a critical essay.

The book’s title is the answer to an “old Miami riddle,” which doubles as the epigraph: “What is very sweet, bright yellow, and extremely dangerous?” A newspaper reviewer speculates that the riddle’s answer is an obvious metaphor for Miami, but Willeford sets his sights higher (or lower, depending on your anthropology). The Shark-Infested Custard is his image of man.

Not that I want to dismiss the novel’s detailed and fascinating portrait of Miami. Willeford is the best writer the city has ever produced—at least the Anglo half of the Miami model. He is one of the few postwar American novelists who is attentive to the fine and subtle distinctions that make one part of the country different from another.

About two-thirds of the way through The Shark-Infested Custard, however, much of the action shifts to Chicago, “cold freezing, miserable Chicago.” And yet nothing changes in the characters’ behavior. Their amorality does not belong to a city, but to them.

Four unattached men in their early thirties become friends when they settle in a “singles only” apartment complex, where all of the units are one bedroom, the “rents are on the high side,” and a man “could get all of the women he wanted simply by hanging around the pool.” Larry (an ex-cop who works for a security agency), Hank (a drug salesman), Eddie (an airline pilot), and Don (the Florida rep for a British silverware firm) are “charter members” of Dade Towers, the “first four tenants” to take possession. After a year there, they are close.

One night, on a bet, Hank picks up a girl at a drive-in movie:She was about thirteen or fourteen, barefooted, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, and tight raggedy-cuffed blue jeans with a dozen or more different patches sewn onto them. On her crotch, right over the pudenda, there was a patch with a comic rooster flexing muscled wings. The embroidered letters, in white, below the chicken read: I’M A MEAN FIGHTING COCK. Her brownish hair fell down her back, well past her shoulders, straight but slightly tangled, and her pale face was smudged with dirt. She gave us a tentative smile, and tried to take us all in at once, but she had trouble focusing her eyes. She closed her eyes, and her head bobbled on her skinny neck.Within a few minutes, she has died of a drug overdose in Hank’s front seat. Her death is the error that determines the rest of the tragedy. For the four buddies, the girl ceases to exist, ceases to be a person, the moment she dies. From then on, she becomes a mere body (“The girl had voided, and the smell of ammonia and feces was strong”), and a practical problem (how to dispose of her without attracting suspicion). Not once do any of the men express remorse or grief or dread at early death. The closest they come is wondering whether to call the cops. Larry brings them up short:     “What’s your flying schedule?” [he asked Eddie].
     “I go to New York Saturday. Why?”
     “How’d you like to be grounded, on suspension without pay for about three months? Pending an investigation into the dope fiend death of a teenaged girl?”
     “We didn’t do anything,” Eddie said.
     “That’s right,” [Larry] said. “But that wouldn’t keep your name out of the papers, or some pretty nasty interrogations at the station. And Hank’s in a more sensitive position than you are with the airline, what with his access to drug samples and all. If—or when—he’s investigated, and his company’s name gets into the papers, as soon as he’s cleared, the best he can hope for is a transfer to Yuma, Arizona.”The men are exquisitely sensitive to their positions throughout the rest of the novel. They are given neither to introspection nor confession nor moral calculus. When Larry invites his friends to “talk about it now” and then “forget about it forever,” another of men says that he is “sorry about getting you guys into this mess.” “We’re all sorry,” Larry replies. “But what’s done is done.”

They are sorry about the “mess,” the complication and the plotting and the stains that are left behind, but they are not sorry for what they have done, because they do not see themselves as the agents of their actions. Indeed, they are not. “What’s done,” and cannot be undone, is the inevitable and tragic result of their amorality—their innocence of their own capacity for evil—which substitutes for any other code to live by. Two murders follow, and then grand theft, and then another inadvertent violent death, leaving the friends with the problem, once again, of carrying away a corpse. It’s at this point that one of the friends laughs, “Here we go again!”

But the joke is not on them. Larry, who narrates the first and last part of the four-part novel, thinks of himself as a good man, who is willing to do what it takes to protect his friends: “A man who is willing to accept responsibility is always loaded down with more and more of it,” he says, trying to account for the series of misfortunes in which his friends become entangled, “because there aren’t that many men around who will accept responsibility.” The joke is that his responsibility is not moored to anything. Larry and his three friends drift on the warm sunny breezes of moral fashion, congratulating themselves on the lives they have made for themselves.

Perhaps no more terrifying vision of the human experience, an inviting dish of happiness and self-fulfillment infested by the amoral predator called man, has ever been written, in a more bizarrely charming and witty prose.

Update: In a defense of the liberal arts, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson warns that business and finance can never be the “core elements in general-education requirements,” no matter how popular they become as undergraduate majors. “[T]he liberal arts train students to write, think, and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge,” Hanson writes. “Without that foundation, it is harder to make—or demand from others—logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.”

As much as I admire Hanson, I do not find this defense particularly persuasive. It adopts the instrumentalist reasoning of business and finance, at which the liberal arts will always prove to be mediocre. The Shark-Infested Custard offers a far more forceful defense. Without the liberal arts, which lead homo sapiens to become human beings, men become the amoral drifters of Willeford’s novel, sensitive to their position—their needs, their careers, their comforts—but to little else. Without that foundation, they are perfectly capable of making informed management decisions; Willeford’s men are skilled and successful. They are not capable of moral agency, however.

No on Vonnegut

2010-12-09T12:25:00.009-05:00

The Library of America has made the weird and unpardonable decision to release an omnibus volume of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The volume covers ten years of writing from 1963 to 1973, the period during which the novels Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions and the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House were published. Although I have been unable to confirm the exact contents, Vonnegut’s books are short enough that the Library of America volume is likely to include all five.

There is no possible justification for Vonnegut’s enshrinement in the Library of America, which exists “to preserve the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions. . . .” Even one of his champions—James Lundquist, in a 1977 single-author study—classifies his fiction as “ ‘naive’ literature because [Vonnegut] makes so much use of expected associations and conventions for the purpose of rapid communication with its readers.”

Which is simply the academic acknowledgment that Vonnegut was a purveyor of “midcult.” At least two other members of the league, Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck, have already been canonized by the Library of America. Perhaps I should not have been knocked off balance by news of his inclusion, then, especially since all three engaged in what another Vonnegut fan describes as a “career-long critique of America.” “I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship,” Vonnegut explained, “concerned about what the powerful people are up to.” A midcultist whose psychological reaction to this country was healthier—Herman Wouk, for example, or John P. Marquand—would never be considered for the Library of America.

What sets Vonnegut apart from other writers whose fiction “critiques” the U.S. is his good nature and a sense of broad popular humor that never stoops to rancor and is as likely to deprecate the author as the country’s power elite. “I can’t stand to read what I write,” Vonnegut said. “I make my wife do that, then ask her to keep her opinions to herself.” These qualities are not nearly enough to establish Vonnegut’s “significance” as an American novelist, though. Nor are his self-consciously midwestern values nor his parasitical attachment to science fiction. (It is writers like Vonnegut, who try to introduce it into the mainstream by poaching it for writing that is little more than social realism in disguise, who give science fiction a bad name.) What is worse, the disguise is adopted to conceal Vonnegut’s sentimental moralism. Christ is replaced by pacifism and being nice, but the message is finally very little different from that of E. D. E. N. Southworth or Susan Warner. It is a message of spiritual uplift.

Until 1969, his most famous book was Cat’s Cradle, a silly fable that college students all over the country seemed to be reading in unison. Then came Slaughterhouse-Five, his novel about the Allied firebombing of Dresden during the last year of the Second World War. As in all his books, Vonnegut was careful to spell out the Message: “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.” It is difficult to understand how anyone could experience the rush of moral knowledge while reading that sentence, but perhaps a certain kind of young reader feels something like personal unification—a delirious sense that his rebellion against the adult world is finally taking the firm shape of settled conviction—when swallowing Vonnegut’s books.

A recent critic calls Vonnegut, who lived through the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, “the war’s second most famous survivor,” after Elie Wiesel. (Francine Prose based an entire novel on the empty posturing behind such a claim.) Perhaps, though, this remark provides the key to his fiction, if not a reason to reprint it in an authoritative edition. The survivors of massacres and holocausts are indemnified against ordinary criticism, but also against the ordinary expectations—of subtlety, memorable characterization, layered prose—that readers bring to a work of literature.

Anthony Powell

2010-12-03T15:16:00.007-05:00

This month the University of Chicago Press is republishing, in ebook format, a landmark of twentieth-century English fiction—Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time. As a teaser, Chicago is offering the first book in the series, A Question of Upbringing, for free. (The remaining volumes sell for eight bucks a throw.) One of the great custodians of neglected fiction, Chicago has kept Powell’s large canvas of English society, inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s 1640 painting (see right), in print for several years in the four large volumes originally published in this country by Little, Brown. However, Powell patiently released his novel in twelve separate books about every other year, and that is how Chicago is marketing the ebooks.

Born in December 1905, the son of an army officer, Powell was educated at Eton, where he ran with the self-conscious aesthetes Harold Acton and Henry Green, and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where his older classmates included Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene. He began his literary career in the ’thirties with five satirical novels. They were duly praised, but next to the two-years-older Evelyn Waugh, who had already satirized the generation of the “bright young things” in two brilliant novels before he had got off his first shot, Powell was a slight figure. After publishing What Became of Waring? in 1939, he did not write another novel for a dozen years.

During the long silence between his last prewar novel and A Question of Upbringing (1951), Powell devised and perfected the unique narrative style of A Dance to the Music of Time. The clue to that style lies in the one book that he published during this period. John Aubrey and His Friends (1948) is a biography of the man who invented the art of biography in English. The Aubrey book prepared him to write in the voice of the biographer, which Powell uses to great effect (and with unbelievable consistency) in his long masterpiece. Although told in the first person by a character named Nick Jenkins, the narrative is remarkably impersonal. Jenkins never tells stories to settle scores.

Although he later wrote a four-volume autobiography and two late-in-life novels that showed enduring keenness of mind and observation, Powell is best known for A Dance to the Music of Time. The novel, which took him nearly two-and-a-half decades to finish, concluded with Hearing Secret Harmonies in 1975. The last installment of the long Dance ends with the death of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the great villains in English fiction. Although the novel’s ending echoes its beginning so many years earlier, Powell did not spend much time tying up loose ends. “I found I didn’t want an ‘end’ of that sort,” he said. “I was very anxious that one should not be absolutely washed out at the end. It was very important that the reader should not feel there was not a single other word to be said”—an odd statement about a twelve-volume novel of a million words, but one that reveals a great deal about his philosophy of literature and life. Powell was remarkably curious about human personality in all its forms, and did not believe that a comprehensive portrait could ever be drawn. “You can form the basis of perhaps half a dozen people from one human model,” he once said, explaining his methods, but also the degree of his success at illuminating the mysteries of character.

Powell conceived of himself as a satirical novelist first and foremost. Asked by the New York Times Book Review in 1981 to name the book he wished that he had written, Powell replied memorably:Books you would like to have written are not the same as favorite books. In the second category comes Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, not quite neatly enough put together for the first. I paused long over Dostoyevsky’s The Devils . . . finally settling for the Satyricon of Petronius, although written 2,000 years ago and only half the length of a detective story, remains of what was probably a third as long as Proust. . . . Petronius had the first version of the modern novel, but my version would have emphasized girls more than boys.Citing In Search of Lost Time instead of A Dance to the Music of Time is characteristic of Powell, who was never grandiose despite the grand scale of his great novel. For most American readers, in fact—especially those who associate English satire with Evelyn Waugh—Powell is likely to seem too gentle and generous to qualify for the satirist’s mantle. If Waugh overplays the absurd, as V. S. Pritchett once said, Powell underplays it: he is “moved by sense rather than by outraged sensibility.”

What is more, Powell does not seem nearly so anomalous, wacky, and inimitable as Waugh. While there are no “sons of Evelyn,” Powell has several distinguished literary descendants. Without A Dance to the Music of Time, it is impossible to conceive of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels or George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series. Indeed, Fraser was quite open about the influence, writing a masters thesis on Powell which was one of the first scholarly studies of the great novelist.

Powell died in March 2000 at the age of ninety-four, having lived long enough to see A Dance to the Music of Time turned into a four-part television movie. (Oddly, it was not directed by his son Tristram Powell, who directed TV versions of Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer and Kingsley Amis’s Old Devils.) “Writing a book,” Powell said, “is a question of instinct balanced against contrivance.” Few twentieth-century novelists have shown more exquisite balance for so long.

Hanukkah

2010-12-02T09:34:00.006-05:00

Among my pet peeves is the common American greeting, “Happy holidays!” The intent is to offend no one—which, at this season of the year, means the Jews. But the expression reveals an abysmal stupidity about those who are to be spared any offense.

For the Jews, the “holidays” occur in the fall, at the beginning of the Jewish year: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot. During that season, religious Jews greet one another by saying “Hag sameyah!”—that is, “Happy holiday.”

Hanukkah, which began last night, is not a hag, it is not a holiday, in the same sense of the word. It certainly does not measure up to Christmas. It might be described as a second-rate Sukkot, an eight-day celebration inserted into the calendar by Jews who were not always permitted to observe their highest holidays at the proper time of year.

The word hanukkah means “rededication,” and the holiday commemorates the rededication of the Temple upon the retaking of Jerusalem by Judah the Maccabee in 165 BCE. Yesterday, during the Hanukkah program at my son’s preschool, a teacher tried to explain the significance of the rededication by comparing it to the rebuilding of a synagogue. Perhaps the comparison serves to instruct preschoolers, but it is all wrong.

In Jewish life today, the Temple has been moved to the home. The Sabbath dinner table is explicitly compared to the altar, and the Sabbath bread, the hallah, is treated as if it were a Temple sacrifice. Hanukkah, then, might more appropriately lead to a rededication of the home, although no one I know celebrates it in this fashion.

In Israel, the military aspects of the holiday are emphasized. Hanukkah represents the underdog’s triumph over a hostile alien force that would desecrate the Temple site, looting it for alien worship and seeking to obliterate all traces of Jewish history there. At this season, Israelis rededicate themselves to a defense of Jerusalem at all costs. This is a meaning that I can enter into as eagerly as any other Zionist, but it is not the American meaning of the holiday.

In America, Hanukkah has become the Jewish answer to Christmas. Among religious Jews, this is harmless enough. The secular practice of gift-giving has enough to recommend it without an additional religious dimension. Among non-religious Jews, though, Hanukkah becomes one of the few remaining Jewish rites. And then its secular qualities are redolent of the abandonment of the Jewish religion.

But the holiday has another spiritual dimension, among religious and secular Jews alike, which lifts Hanukkah above its relatively ordinary status in Judaism. Precisely because it is the Jewish Christmas, it is the holiday that enables American Jews to participate in the American civic religion. It is, from this angle, a celebration of American Jews’ extraordinary religious freedom.

Not just “Happy Hanukkah,” then, but “Happy holidays” indeed—the glittering American holiday that stretches from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. During this season, Jews are greeted warmly with the reminder that they are home in America. Only a self-important prig could be peeved at such a greeting.

Let Franzen ring

2010-12-01T16:43:00.003-05:00

“Let Franzen Ring,” my sour review of Freedom, appears in the December issue of Commentary. In it, I try to assign Franzen a place in the ranks to which he belongs, among maestros of “midcult” like John Steinbeck, John Hersey, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, MacKinlay Kantor, Allen Drury, Harper Lee, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Irving, Elizabeth Kostova, and David Wroblewski.

Yesterday I happened to be reading Alfred Chester’s bloodcurdling critique of J. D. Salinger (also published in Commentary), and I stumbled upon a passage that makes the point that I was trying to make against Franzen, and does so far more sharply:[T]he intense charm of [Salinger’s first two] books came from the fact that his characters were responding to our world which also happened to be theirs. Their world will go as soon as our world goes . . . because it was never trasmuted; it were merely depicted. What once was the most moving scene in The Catcher—when Holden tries to explain his anguish over American civilization to the absurd girl he’s with at Rockefeller Center—has now become flat and insufficient. The time for disgust over Cadillacs has passed and Holden’s suffering does not seem interesting or real enough itself, to make us separate it from its object, thereby turning the object into symbol and the suffering into our own. All his lament makes us want to do is to prod him gently, wake him up, and say: nobody cares about Cadillacs any more.[1]Nobody cares about the Bushes any more, Franzen; or not enough, at least, to blame them for his suffering. Wake up! It takes something more than encouraging readers to share your disgusts to make great literature.
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[1] Alfred Chester, “J. D. Salinger,” in Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Edward Field (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1992), p. 79. Originally published as “Salinger: How to Love without Love” in Commentary (June 1963).

Foreign Bodies

2010-11-23T11:06:00.005-05:00

My review of Cynthia Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies is on the front page of Jewish Ideas Daily this morning. In her latest book, Ozick rewrites The Ambassadors, the novel that is by most accounts Henry James’s masterpiece. Ozick does not agree. She thinks that James is at his best in some of the short stories.

James is a touchstone for Ozick. Not only has she written about him repeatedly in her literary essays (the kind of writing, for my money, she is best at). What is more, she made him a character in Dictation (2008). Nevertheless, she is of two minds about him. On the one hand, from an early age she was a member of his “cult.” He embodied the life of fiction for her, as for so many other young writers. In “The Lesson of the Master,” an essay originally published in the New York Review of Books and reprinted the next year in Art and Ardor (1983), she testifies to the danger of his influence. “I thought it was necessary—it was imperative, there was no other path!” she wrote—“to be, all at once, with no progression or evolution, the author of the equivalent of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove,” as if James himself had never served an apprenticeship, turning out lesser works.

On the other hand, a short while later she became a baalat teshuvah, a “returnee” to Judaism, a born-again Jew. She began to read widely in classic Jewish texts, and set about to reconceive literature in Jewish terms. The central text here is her long essay on Harold Bloom. He is a worthy adversary, because in his voluminous criticism, she wrote, Bloom is “engaged in the erection of what can fairly be called an artistic anti-Judaism.”

Bloom’s most famous critical idea is his literary adaptation of Freud’s Oedipus complex: according to Bloom, every writer seeks to liberate himself from a powerful literary influence by the “revisionary act” of “emptying” and “undoing” the great precursor, then taking his place. Ozick responds that no one can stand by this idea and be a Jew:The notion of “ ‘undoing’ the precursor’s strength” has no validity in normative Judaism. Jewish liturgy, for instance, posits just the opposite: it posits recapturing without revision the precursor’s stance and strength when it iterates “our God, and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Nearly every congeries of Jewish thought is utterly set against the idea of displacing the precursor. “Torah” includes the meanings of tradition and transmittal together.[1]What Ozick seeks in Foreign Bodies, then, is a Jewish “recapturing” of James’s Ambassadors. She reverses his meaning, but does not hope to displace him. The two books are meant to be read in tandem, as source and commentary. (Jewish tradition discourages the reading of the Torah without interpretive aids.) But though she explicitly reverses James’s meaning in Foreign Bodies, the book is not a “revisionary act” in Harold Bloom’s sense. In Jewish literature, what is prized above everything else is a hiddush, an innovative reinterpretation of a classic text. Among religious Jews, this is what it means to write a “novel.”
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[1] Cynthia Ozick, “Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom,” in Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 194. Originally published as “Judaism and Harold Bloom” in Commentary (January 1979).

Bellow’s letters

2010-11-12T14:10:00.010-05:00

Saul Bellow, Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2010). 571 pp. $35.00.

Not many more collections of letters written by American masters are likely to appear, although readers half a century from now might look forward to Michael Chabon’s Collected Text Messages or Jonathan Franzen’s Tweets. Saul Bellow is one of the last great novelists for whom letters were not really a convenient way to stay in touch, but a literary genre with unique opportunities for expression and equally unique demands. For him, personal letters were only rarely personal (and then they were not unique in any respect), but might be best described as a kind of informal literary reflection.

Rather late in life, Bellow wrote to Cynthia Ozick, wondering how it happened that “Jewish Writers in America”—a category that he calls “repulsive”—should have overlooked “the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry.” He can speak only for himself: “I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties,” he tells Ozick. “I was involved with ‘literature’ and given over to preoccupations with art, with language, with my struggle on the American scene, with claims for recognition of my talent or, like my pals of the Partisan Review, with modernism, Marxism, New Criticim, with Eliot, Yeats, Proust, etc.—with anything except the terrible events in Poland.”

But not only the events in Poland, and not only in the ’forties. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 is not mentioned even once, and the revolutionary events two years later are occasion merely to observe that “one still meets people from Harvard with a hear-no-evil fixation on the essential benevolence of the Soviet Union from first to last.” From first to last, Bellow is preoccupied with “literature”—that is, the high claims for the artistic status of certain modern masterpieces—and more regularly with the day-to-day business of writing.

Bellow’s first surviving letter, written a few days short of his seventeenth birthday to “sever relations” with a high-school flame, is a half-serious catalogue of a young writer’s values. Although the girl, with her “Young Communist League mind,” may dismiss him as a “[p]hrase-monger,” Bellow declares that he is in his element as long as he has his pen. Indeed he is. He resorts to letters for the rest of his life to commit himself to paper, to praise other writers, to carp behind their backs, to refine his literary thinking, and to perfect his phrasing. What is astonishing, in fact, is how much Bellow in his letters sounds like Bellow in his novels, darting unpredictably from topic to topic, plumbing philosophical depths with the lightness of a water strider, braiding his ideas into memorable sentences. How many other writers can write first drafts with such distinction and distinctiveness?

Apologizing for not writing sooner to tell Stanley Elkin that he was “the real thing,” for example, Bellow shrugs, “But that’s how lives are lived—one aimless good intention after another, impulses buried and occasions missed or frittered away.” Despite its semblance of generality, this is a comment on the writer’s life, a subject that was never far from his mind. Bellow was jealous of the writer’s prerogatives, and unwilling to claim more for novelists than they were equipped to provide. He writes to the critic Granville Hicks: “[T]here is only one way to defeat the enemy”—the enemy of literature, he means—“and that is to write as well as one can.” Argument is for philosophers, he says elsewhere. “Writers can only try to demonstrate in close detail without opinion,” he says to Louis Gallo while working on Herzog.

Not everything in this thick volume edited by the novelist and creative writing professor Benjamin Taylor is preoccupied with literature. I only wish it were. Am I the only one in the literary commonwealth who is embarrassed by Bellow’s marital gambols? In April 1962, after marrying Susan Glassman, he writes to his old friend Richard Stern, “One wife is becoming enough for me (O Bellowius senex!).” To Ralph Ross, in November, he says that he is “extremely lucky in [his] new wife Susan.” His third son is born two years later, an event that he notices in an aside (“Susie and Daniel will come home”—from the hospital—“on Sunday”). And a year after that he tells David Bazelon that he is “not in a position to tease [him] about multiple marriages, for perfectly obvious reasons. . . . I think we were both meant to set records,” he adds. And sure enough, in March 1966, he meets a 24-year-old girl, a typist at the New Yorker, and soon he is writing that he misses her so much “it’s like sickness, or hunger.” His “whole soul” goes out to her. With her he has a feeling he’s never had before, “that of being infinitely satisfied with another. . . .” Meeting her has made “humankind and the world look different.” True, he has been with many women, but “don’t you think I know how different from those women you are?”

Get back to literature—please. And luckily, Bellow does. Again and again. Thank God or the muse or whoever deserves thanks. There is just enough scandal here to arouse the secret gossip in every reader of great literature (Bellow detests Malamud’s New Life, as he repeats to several correspondents, finds “so many of the Southern writers gratuitously violent,” and has a famous falling-out with University of Chicago colleague Edward Shils, whom he describes as an “unlanced boil”), but more usual for him is the praise and encouragement of peers (Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, John Cheever) and his inconsolable grief over lost friends (Isaac Rosenfeld, Oscar Tarcov, John Berryman). In one of his last letters, he thanks the novelist William Kennedy for “bringing together” in his 2002 novel Roscoe “your singular and wonderful view of things with the idea of a large fiction. . . .” But this is something that Saul Bellow managed to do in nearly everything he wrote, especially if fiction means, at its best, what he describes to Martin Amis: here and there, “a single page containing what is absolutely essential to expansion or survival.” The Letters contain many such pages, establishing it immediately as a true masterpiece of American literature.

Veterans’ Day

2010-11-11T17:34:00.006-05:00

Today is Veterans’ Day, a day of gratitude and remembrance that should not go unremarked. Last year I examined veterans’ novels; no need to add further titles to the list. Although most of them aren’t very good, except for The Great Gatsby—your opinion of it changes forever when you read it as a veteran’s novel—I am increasingly struck by the disappearance of military service from the experience of most educated Americans, including most writers.

The case is different in Israel, where everyone but the haredim serves in the IDF. The result is an unaffected patriotism, and a sense of national unity, that is entirely missing in the elite precincts of American culture. (Watch this video of weightlifter Sergio Britva struggling to control his emotions as Hatikvah is played to mark his victory at the World Masters Weightlifting competition in Poland in September.) The loss of the martial virtues weakens an entire culture. Whole generations begin to rate themselves too special, “with a special kind of hide to be saved,” as Gen. Savage puts it in Twelve O’Clock High, to risk their careers, let alone their lives, for their country. (I’m a good one to talk. Even though my grandfather was a U.S. Marine who came under fire in the Dominican Republic, I dishonored his memory by becoming a draft-card burner—a coward who trembled behind the shrubbery of towering anti-war principle.)

In an essay that I have praised elsewhere, Lisa Schiffren shows how military values have been corrupted in American discourse:Discipline was reduced to authoritarianism; duty interfered with the higher calling of self-fulfillment; obedience was slavish submission to authority, which should be questioned at every juncture; the quest for glory was mere adventurism. Honor was found to be entirely a charade, unwinnable in any forum that involved defending the morally indefensible principles on which our culture rests.Although Schiffren goes on to lament the cultural invisibility of American war heroes (quick: name the first living soldier from the Iraq or Afghanistan wars to receive the Medal of Honor), I am concerned about the loss of something more ordinary—that is, unexceptional enlisted service, which demands nothing less of a man than determination and responsibility. While the country pauses today to respect genuine heroes like Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, it is important to honor too the ordinary serviceman, who is pretty much all that stands between American culture and an around-the-clock chattiness that tries to hold at bay the blank terror of death.

Cancer reading

2010-11-11T10:06:00.006-05:00

In a comment to my reflections on cancer etiquette, Don asks what reading I found helpful in going through the experience of life-threatening cancer.

One of the best things, which I have mentioned before, is the late Richard John Neuhaus’s As I Lay Dying, perhaps the only gift-book from a friend that helped in any way. Neuhaus is unsparing, but not despairing—hopeful without falling into the voice of uplift. (I am allergic to inspirational writing. And tapes are even worse. No one really ought to listen to me on this subject, then.)

In a similar vein, Martin Marty’s Cry of Absence (1983), a meditation on some of the Psalms after the cancer death of his wife Elsa, was oddly consoling. It will not be so for everyone, however. Building upon a distinction first advanced by Karl Rahner, Marty addresses those whose religious faith is “wintry,” who are intimately familiar with God’s absence and silence. That’s why the book, although deeply Christian, is marvellously appropriate for a post-Holocaust Jew. And of course Marty has the bonus effect of sending the grateful reader back to the Psalms themselves.

I have also recommended Intoxicated by My Illness by the New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, who died from the same kind of cancer that afflicted me. The best thing in the book remains his early story “What the Cystoscope Said,” based on his father’s death from cancer.

Encouraged by these books, I supposed that I was ready to stare directly into the abyss. Both Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die (1995) and Peter de Vries’s novel The Blood of the Lamb (1961), were nevertheless too much for me. In fact, almost none of the cancer titles on the exhaustive Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, compiled by the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine, was particularly welcome when I was at my worst. Only the poet L. E. Sissman, whom I have already praised for just this, spoke a language that sounded the right note of defiance and clarity.

Otherwise I recall with pleasure the novels that I read in the hospital, which plunged me away from myself into other people’s woes or wonders: J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban (a very different kind of death than what I was contemplating), Bellow’s second book The Victim (about a very different kind of victim), and perhaps best of all, John Williams’s Stoner, which taught me all that I needed to learn about the quiet moral dignity of endurance.

Cancer etiquette

2010-11-06T21:13:00.009-04:00

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens takes up the difficult and perplexing question of what to say to someone who has cancer. Hitchens, who has Stage Four metastatic esophageal cancer, makes some sharp observations, as usual for him. He urges you not to confide the anecdotes of those who survived (or succumbed). If you ask how he is, be prepared for candor. At the same time, though, don’t make the mistake of assuming that he is ready for bluntness in return.

In his best passage, Hitchens lights into the late Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture (“so sugary that you may need an insulin shot to withstand it”). In fact, I would add a piece of advice that it doesn’t occur to him to pass along. Don’t recommend The Last Lecture to someone with cancer. Pausch’s giddiness has nothing to do with real hope, nor with preparing oneself for death. If you recommend it, your friend will conclude—correctly, as it turns out—that you are not serious about what he is going through.

Hitchens is entirely serious, of course. When people ask how he is, “I get straight to the point and say what the odds are,” he writes. “The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five.” Astutely, he notes that such a melancholy reflection may lead the cancer patient to become “self-centered and even solipsistic.” So the patient has responsibilities too.

I was diagnosed with Stage Four metastatic prostate cancer (Gleason score, nine) three years ago last month. So perhaps I am qualified to weigh in. While Hitchens is right that “there is no such thing as Stage Five,” it does not follow that Stage Five is inevitable. At least it has not been for me—so far.

Even so, hope is a dicey thing. And as far as I can tell, no one else can raise your hopes for you. There is no standardized method for achieving it, no universally valid argument for its reality. Despair may be a sin, as my Catholic friends told me in the first weeks after my diagnosis, but their telling me so did nothing whatever to lift me out of it. I had to find my own way out. Every man’s capacity for hope is as unique as his taste buds.

Don’t try to make hopeful sounds, then. What I found consoling was the consolation that was offered to my wife. It helped enormously to know that she and the children would not be left alone, even if I were to leave them. Similarly, I guess, it gave me steel to understand that I was important and dear to some people. Three or four of my friends were particularly good at this, dropping into my hospital room to say, “I read something today that reminded me of you,” or, “I listened to something and wondered what your reaction would be.” Only two people thought to send me books—no one sent me any movies—and even though the books they sent weren’t really to my liking, they meant a lot to me.

Then there were those who never even contacted me, including my own sister. Nothing quite makes you more aware of the nothingness that awaits you on the other side of Stage Four cancer. My advice: say anything, keep it light and trivial if need be—better lightness and triviality, in fact, than the awkward groping for profundity—but say something. If you say nothing, because you are afraid that you will not know what to say, then you are abandoning the cancer patient to his worst fears, and indulging your own self-centeredness and even solipsism at his expense.

But silence is not the worst breach of cancer etiquette. The worst, in my experience, is to suggest alternative treatments, to announce that you’ve heard, vaguely and fourth-hand, of amazing breakthroughs in treatment. For then you put the cancer patient in a terrible predicament. He longs desperately to tell you to perform an anatomically impossible sexual act upon yourself, but he must remain polite—he must think of how to protect your feelings, while you have given no thought at all to protecting his.