Salinger’s death

J. D. Salinger’s death on Wednesday at the age of ninety-one puts an end to one of America’s strangest literary careers. John Podhoretz has a nice summary here. I said pretty much all I have to say about Salinger last July, shortly after he sued to prevent the publication of a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.

“Perhaps there is gold to be mined in his New Hampshire home in the form of the manuscripts he was said to labor over,” Podhoretz writes. And that is the only question outstanding about Salinger. My guess is that nothing substantial or finished will turn up. Although The Catcher in the Rye is among the fifty greatest English-language novels published since 1880, Salinger never published anything else approaching it. Increasingly it looked like a freak. Although Nine Stories contained some charming stuff, and influenced some better writers who came after him, Salinger had just the one book in him. One book is sufficient for literary immortality, though—if the book is immortal. I don’t know whether Catcher is. But it has sure proved to be durable.

Update: John Podhoretz has posted a parodic obituary that appeared on Facebook.

Conservative novels

At the National Review’s staff blog, The Corner, John J. Miller has released the magazine’s list of top ten conservative novels:

  1. Allen Drury, Advise and Consent
  2. John Dos Passos, Midcentury
  3. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet
  4. Elmer Kelton, The Time It Never Rained
  5. Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome
  6. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
  7. Charles McCarry, Shelley’s Heart
  8. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
  9. Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka
10. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

The list is admittedly bare and unadorned, since the February 8th issue of the magazine will also include a “capsule review of each,” according to Miller—and probably a defense of its inclusion.

As Dos Passos’s title suggests, only American novels published “since the 1950s”—to be more exact, since 1959, when Allen Drury’s political potboiler was first published—were considered. Even with those restrictions, the list is strangely disappointing.

Drury, Dos Passos, and Kelton deserve a place only on a list of recommended books far more extensive than this one. (Well, the late Dos Passos, at least. In his fifties he may have turned against his own youthful Leftism, but his literary talents did not keep pace with his political opinions.) Tom Wolfe, with all his stylistic gifts, is not really a novelist. And The Thanatos Syndrome is not Percy’s most interestingly conservative book.

Only three novels on NR’s top-ten list really merit their inclusion, I think: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Shelley’s Heart, and Gilead. (Full disclosure: last year I extravagantly praised McCarry’s novel in Commentary on the occasion of its reprinting by Overlook Press. It is, in my view, a polit­ical classic which examines in complex human detail how the American Left came to exist at all, let alone to complete its long march through the institutions.) And of course here on A Commonplace Blog I categorized Bellow’s masterpiece as one of the ten best English-language novels since the death of George Eliot (an unremarked conservative novelist in her own right).

The question, of course, is what makes a novel conservative. There are nearly as many definitions of conservatism as there are conservatives. The best, because the most comprehensive, belongs to Michael Oakeshott, who says that conservatism is “not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.” It’s a habit of mind; it’s a natural inclination. It is a “propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else.” Its motto is not Faust’s dying words (“Stay with me! You are so beautiful!”); Faust is a great liberal; its motto is “Stay with me! I am so attached to you!” The conservative is thus suspicious of change. He is “not inclined to think that nothing is happening unless great changes are afoot.” What is more, he knows that change is a “threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction.” “Radical change!” moaned J. V. Cunningham, another notable conservative—“the root of human woe.”

From this angle, conservative novels would come in two leading varieties: one that enjoys a life and a world, another that grieves at their loss, its damage to people’s identity. And the most conservative American novelist of all time, then, would have to be Nabokov. Pnin combines a deep pleasure in America with the sadness of losing Russia. A good deal of Timofey Pnin’s charm (and awkwardness) derives from that combination. No expression of tragic conservatism is more poignant than Pnin’s resolution “never to remember” Mira (whom he once loved, who died in Buchenwald), “because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible.”

Welty’s last novel The Optimist’s Daughter, written in the aftermath of her mother’s death, is another conservative novel on this understanding of conservatism. Returning home to Mississippi for her father’s funeral, Laurel McKelva Hand must confront memories of her parents as well as her husband and the happiness she lost when they died. At the end of the novel, though, she realizes that “For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love”—a love she still enjoys, even after the death of those she loved. (Not incidentally, James once said that “an optimist is pretty like to be a conservative.”)

But Oakeshott’s “disposition” to enjoy the continuity of present and past is not the only meaning of conservatism, especially in America. Its essence, according to Robert Nisbet, is “the protection of the social order—family, neighborhood, local community, and region foremost—from the ravishments of the centralized political state.” A book like John Williams’s Augustus, the 1973 historical novel which tells the story of the Roman republic’s descent into imperial dictatorship, neatly expresses the horror of the state, particularly since it is narrated by the emperor himself. (Williams is also the author of Stoner, another conservative novel, which is about the unshakable attachment to scholarship.)

But not just the state. The conservative also mocks the ravishment of traditional institutions by liberal elites, and perhaps more than anything, he scorns ideology—the rage to pursue an abstract ideal at the expense of the heat generated by human contact, the insistence upon knowing what is best for people, the inability to leave them alone.

The former spirit is nicely typified by The Mackerel Plaza, Peter DeVries’s hilarious send-up of liberal Protestantism with its horror of a back-sliding piety; the latter, by American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s conscience-stricken account of the New Left’s seduction by terrorism.

Roth’s novel shows that the best conservative novels are not always written by conservatives. There is, in fact, a special genre of conservative American novel that pokes fun at liberals, and some of the richest examples are written by liberals. In Wilfrid Sheed’s People Will Always Be Kind, 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. (President Obama was only twelve when it was published.) The Believers is a more recent example of the genre.

Finally, Walker Percy’s most fulfilling conservative novel is The Second Coming. Will Barrett has become suicidal since the events narrated in The Last Gentleman. But then he meets a girl, a former mental patient, living in an abandoned greenhouse. She is recovering from madness by learning to enjoy what is available. She finds an old wood-burning stove in the basement of a ruined house, and she teaches herself to hoist it into the greenhouse. Otherwise she is so alienated from the world, and especially its abstractions, that she can make little sense of them. Will and she become friends by educating each other. As he puts it, “I need you for hoisting and you need me for interpretation.” Only a conservative could say such a thing.

Silence

Life has come crashing down, leaving me with small energy and less to say. Will resume blogging sooner rather than later, though.

Update: I am grateful for the expressions of concern. I have not been sick. Ordinary life, and what James calls the harassment of its obligations, is what has plagued me. The house, the cars, the commute, the job, the wife—they have not given me the peace in which to collect any thoughts. Sometimes it just all catches up with you.

Literary Life

Larry McMurtry, Literary Life: A Second Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 175 pp. $24.00.

The present volume, the middle layer of a triple-decker memoir, “is mainly about how the books came to me,” Larry McMurtry says. A self-described “midlist author,” McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning cattle-drive saga Lonesome Dove (1985), although he has written better novels and worse—thirty in all. “Little of my work in fiction is pedestrian,” he ventures, trying to account for “the literary establishment’s long disinterest” in his work, “but, on the other hand, none of it is really great.” A contemporary of Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, and Joyce Carol Oates, he is neither a literary celebrity nor an advanced novelist with a cult following. Why then does he suppose that very many readers, most of whom have read only a few of his books—I myself have read only ten—will be particularly interested in how the books came to him?

He himself does not really care about his novels once they are written:

I had expected to be thrilled when I received my first copy of my first book [Horseman, Pass By, 1961], but when I opened the package and held the first copy in my hand, I found that I just felt sort of flat. . . . I learned then and have relearned many times since, that the best part of a writer’s life is actually doing it, making up characters, filling the blank page, creating scenes that readers in distant places might connect to. The thrill lies in the rush of sentences,not in talking about them afterwards. Literary Life is not about the genesis of “midlist” fiction, then. What really diverts McMurtry is gossip.

Thus he confides that his friendship with Ken Kesey, formed when they were both Wallace Stegner Fellows in creative writing at Stanford in 1960, soured after Lonesome Dove captured the Pulitzer Prize. The last time that John Updike sent a letter, he chided McMurtry on the price of a “nice copy” of E. B. White’s Every Day Is Saturday that McMurtry, who doubles as a rare-book dealer, was asking—even though it was a “very good price.” Willie Morris was so upset with McMurtry’s review of The Last of the Southern Girls that he crossed to the other side of the street every time he passed McMurtry’s bookstore in Washington. Calvin Trillin ate all the sushi, “as is his habit,” at a reading at the 92nd Street Y. Susan Sontag stormed out of a PEN American Center fund-raising gala, because she was seated at a table with people who didn’t know who she was.

Not all the gossip is about writers. For several years Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, used the third floor of McMurtry’s Washington bookstore as a study. Wieseltier kept a framed portrait of the French enthusiast for violence and pornography Georges Bataille on his desk along with “scholarly papers on anesthesia and anesthesiology.” Why McMurtry encouraged the worst habits of the man who once said “Maybe I am so sick of self-importance because I am so given to it” is beyond understanding.

Wieseltier excelled at “the phenomenon of networking, as practiced at the highest level in D.C., Paris, London, and a few other capitals.” Although he claims no talent at getting to know people of any importance, McMurtry includes gossip about other such non-writers as Peter Jennings, the director Peter Bogdanovich and his best girl Cybill Shepherd, former San Antonio mayer Henry Cisneros (who “brusquely insulted” him, though he doesn’t say how), Washington hostesses Barbara Howar and Katharine Graham, and Pamela Harriman, the “greatest horizontale of her era.”

His reason becomes clear when McMurtry reveals that his “idols” include the gossip columnist Taki Theodoracopulos. He has subscribed to the Spectator, he says, while living in three different cities, “just in order to read him.” What does he admire about Taki? “I suppose because he is able to make a lot of rich strangers interesting,” he says. And, sadly, this is typical of the literary comment in his memoir. It is loose, and McMurtry has taken no effort to screw it down tight.

As a great fan of the novelist Janet Lewis, whom I have praised here and here, I was heartened to learn that McMurtry appreciates her too. “Her brilliant novella The Wife of Martin Guerre is one of the finest of American short fiction,” he says without saying more. (What does he mean by “short fiction”? Earlier in the book he had complained that writing programs are founded upon “an obviously mistaken theory, the theory being that it is easier to write something short than to write something long.” And then he goes on to suggest that short stories are a separate species of fiction, unrelated to the novel, although he does not elaborate. Is he assigning Lewis’s Wife to the former rather than the latter? With what consequences? He doesn’t say.)

McMurtry is faithful to his method. Terms of Endearment is his best novel, although he does not say why. After reading one hundred and sixty studies of the novel, he concludes that the best are F. R. Leavis’s Great Tradition, along with Leavis’s wife Queenie’s Fiction and the Reading Public, “adding, for its brilliance, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature,” which is concerned with the novel only in part. Why are these three the best? He doesn’t say. The “Scroll” edition of On the Road is better than the “tamer, shorter version that Viking tidied up and published in 1957.” Why? It is “a far richer book.” Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety are “both excellent novels, though, personally, I have a slight preference for Crossing to Safety.” Say no more!

What is gained by preserving such comments, which do not even rise to the level of a bored and disengaged interview? Beyond the need to scratch the itch to write, I mean. McMurtry recently announced that Rhino Ranch, published last August, would be his final novel. And I must say that I am not surprised. I once craved his writing so desperately that I attempted the superhuman feat of plowing through the 800-page Lonesome Dove at a single go, the same day it was published, staying up all night to do so. But I stopped reading him the very next year. Texasville (1987) was a steep falling off from his previous books, but it was even worse than that. It was slapdash and superficial, with a significance that was skin-deep. It was a candid record of McMurtry’s self-satisfaction.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize and seeing three of his novels turned into successful and critically acclaimed films (Hud, from his first novel Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment), perhaps McMurtry had nothing left to prove. Perhaps he had settled for another kind of success after giving up on the literary establishment’s ever showing some interest in his work. Literary Life is mistitled, because it does not recall a literary life but rather the decline into literary indifference of a man who many years ago wrote some pretty decent books.

The moral act of writing

“Writing,” Patrick Kurp remarks this morning, “is a moral act (a tautology if we assume every human act possesses a moral component).”

This statement needs to be fleshed out to be exact, I am afraid. I worry about the sentence quoted by Jake Seliger a few days ago from Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981): “He’s not merely a monster, he’s a great moralist too.” The moralist is a monster—of morality. He does not engage in moral reflection, but in moral legislation. He knows right and wrong clearly and in advance, because he has reduced human experience to a universal code, which admits of no exceptions. If he cooked as badly as he moralizes, his dishes would be tasteless reproductions of laboratory-tested recipes. He is under the delusion that morality, like good cooking, can be set down in black and white, and he is just the man to do so.

But this is not possibly what Kurp means. He doesn’t mean that writing is a moralizing act. A great writer is not a monster and a great moralist too. Nor does Kurp mean, I think, that writing is the labor to produce what the novelist John Gardner called, to the consternation of those who might otherwise have agreed with him, “moral fiction.” For Gardner, writing in 1978, this was a species of fiction distinguished from (and opposed to) experimental fiction or metafiction or self-conscious fiction. It is a paradox universally acknowledged that fiction can be amoral or even immoral in intention while holding itself to a chaste and persistent morality in realizing its intentions.

Writing is a moral act, because it demands complete autonomy (to be in thrall, whether to an employer or an ideology, is not to write but merely to recirculate stock phrases and received ideas), freedom from coercion of any kind, including moral fashion, and the refusal to quit until an adequate reaction to the literary situation at hand is carried off. What Michael Oakeshott said about religion applies equally well to writing. “In religion,” Oakeshott said, “we achieve goodness, not by becoming better, but by losing ourselves in God.” In writing a man achieves goodness—that is, morality—not by becoming a better man through the habit of composition, nor even less by laying down the moral law, but by losing himself in the text he is now writing.

Literary mashups

A Canadian reporter has asked my opinion of literary mashups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Christine Rosen’s essay “Doing a Reverse Bowdler” in the December issue of Commentary is the definitive answer. Rosen concluded:

Ultimately, these mashups present a postmodern puzzle: the books themselves are an argument that we need not learn anything from books—at least not those books in the literary canon. After all, how can you write a novel of manners in an era that recognizes none? And so the canon becomes embellishment for what we really seek: easy entertainment.But why dismember Jane Austen for “easy entertainment”? And why is it doubtful that we’ll be seeing Crime and Punishment and Mummies or Remembrance of Things Mutant on bookstore shelves any time soon?

For one thing, Austen has already been swallowed up by popular culture. The spanking new mashups represent merely the latest attempt to “update” her. As of a decade ago, over sixty sequels to her novels had been published, starting in 1913 with Sybil G. Brinton’s Old Friends and New Fancies, and the pace has only quickened since then—with titles like Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart and Mr. Darcy’s Great Escape due to be released this year. To say nothing of the multivolume Jane Austen Mystery series or the Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries. Not only has each of her six novels been filmed, starting in 1940 with MGM’s Pride and Prejudice, from a script by Aldous Huxley, but she has also been the source or inspiration for films like Clueless or The Jane Austen Book Club or From Prada to Nada, now filming, which is described as a “Latina spin on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.” And then there are the self-help books like The Jane Austen Companion to Love and Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners: Compliments, Charades and Horrible Blunders. As Martin Amis observes, “Jane Austen, with her divine comedies of love, has always effortlessly renewed herself for each generation of readers”—and if she can’t quite do it on her own, assistants will be glad to step in.

In part, then, the mashups are just an aftermarket product like chrome rims or rear spoilers. But they must also appeal to new readers, who want something like a video-game version of Austen. Not that the two audiences are all that different: neither has any real desire to encounter Austen firsthand. If they were entranced by Austen rather than secondary effects like Regency manners or the self-improvement of romance, they would continue their reading, not with sequels and mashups, but with Austen’s literary heirs—and I don’t mean the authors of “chick lit.” (Her direct line of descent is through George Eliot out of Henry James to Edith Wharton.) The mashups and sequels appeal to a crowd not far different from college students who read Cliff’s Notes instead of the novels on a course list: they are the sort of person who prefers hearing about sex to having it.

Do the mashups portend anything for literature’s future? At the beginning of the year, I predicted, jokingly, that Amazon would release a Kindle that is fully compatible with Nintendo’s Wii. I am starting to think better of the joke. Some kind of “interactive” fiction is coming. But only novels with an extraliterary reputation, which have clambered off the page into a culture of received images—The Count of Monte-Cristo, perhaps, or The War of the Worlds or even Lolita, I am sorry to say—will lend themselves to future mashups with a user interface. No one who is absorbed with words will be particularly interested in creating an avatar of himself to explore the Château d’If or fight off a Martian invasion of England or accompany Humbert Humbert in chasing down Quilty.

Update, I: Misty Harris, the Canwest News Service reporter who asked about literary mashups, has told me that, earlier today, “Quirk Books announced a third mashup in its series, to be released in June: Android Karenina. (I hope you're sitting down.)”

Update, II: In a review of his You Are Not a Gadget in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Harlan Reynolds quotes Jaron Lanier on the wider provenance of the publishing phenomenon: “Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups. It is a culture of malaise.” Lanier is troubled by the slogan of online culture (“Information wants to be free”), which has the effect of devaluing original work. If longterm projects are completed and published only to be pirated and file-swapped and mashed up, how many will invest the time and effort in longterm projects?

Our national incoherence

Slavery, as Walker Percy says, is America’s original sin. The American people are a massa damnata, a “lump of sin,” which must be exorcised regularly. Thus Sen. Harry Reid’s comments from the 2008 presidential campaign, reported on Friday in Marc Ambinder’s Atlantic blog, that Barack Obama is a “ ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’ ” has set off the well-rehearsed routine of public accusation, confession, and forgiveness. In Christian theology, “concupiscence” is the result of original sin; in America, the result is a tongue-tied incoherence. None of us knows how to talk about race. We don’t speak our minds but the moral fashion, because we are deathly afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Sen. Reid’s comments were certainly impolitic, especially when uttered to a reporter, but why were they wrong? Both of his phrases are current in American conversation—at least when used in the publicly sanctioned ways.

Thus the term light-skinned can be used by “whites,” but only to establish that they are on the correct side of the “race question.” Just last month, in the St. Petersburg Times, Steve Persall pointed out that, “in early previews” of Disney’s new animated film The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s suitor “was noticeably light-skinned, causing pundits on both sides of the race question to doubt Disney’s dedication to diversity.” To avoid trouble, Disney darkened his complexion before the film’s release.

The month before, in the Manchester Guardian, Hadley Freeman faulted Lee Daniels’s film Precious for “its depiction of skin colour. A particularly poignant expression of Precious’ self-loathing is her hatred of her dark skin: she dreams of having ‘a light-skinned boyfriend’ and when she looks in the mirror, she fantasises that she sees a white woman.”

African Americans use the term more pointedly. In a July article on “colorism” in the Washington Post, the law professor Alice M. Thomas was quoted in rhyme: “If you are light, you are all right. If you are brown, you can stick around. If you are black, get back.” Adopting more scholarly tones, the economist Darrick Hamilton observed that, among husband-hunting black women younger than thirty, there is “a premium associated with light-skinned complexion.”

So Sen. Reid’s wrong was to use the expression light-skinned while being “white”? Or to use it in reference to an actual person instead of cartoon characters, erotic fantasies, or generalized marriage preferences? I must admit that the exact nature of his moral offense is unclear to me.

Same goes with the phrase negro dialect. It was common in philological scholarship after 1870, although it was replaced in contemporary linguistics by “black English” after 1969 and “ebonics” by the mid-seventies. It is frankly more unusual in current speech, but shows up occasionally. In his musical “Passing Strange,” for example, the singer and songwriter Mark Stewart (known on stage as Stew) remarks that his mother liked to assume “the Negro dialect” when she scolded her son about his lack of religion. In this way, according to New Yorker drama critic Hilton Als, he “send[s] up the standard American theatrical device of making black performers sound more ‘real’ by substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’ ”

“Whites” sometimes use the phrase too, and not ironically. In reviewing a novel entitled Orange Laughter for the Washington Post in 2000, Carolyn See complained that it was “populated by familiar figures and stock situations and Negro dialect as heavy as a migraine headache.” Earlier that same year, in his New York Times column “On Language,” William Safire informed his readers that the “earliest recorded uses of uh-huh were in the late 19th century by magazine fiction writers transcribing Negro dialect, more as exclamation than affirmation.”

Americans daily receive a mixed message. On the one hand, we are urged to consider race whenever we compile a reading list or celebrate achievement (Obama is “the first African-American President,” Wayne Embry was “the first African-American general manager in the NBA,” Michael Beach was “the first African-American to play a romantic leading role in a Shakespearean play on the main stage at Juilliard”); on the other hand, we are dissuaded from talking about race by the consequences of talking about it wrongly—and by the utter incoherence of what passes for right and wrong in race talk.

It is time to dispense with race, which does not exist in any event, as a classification of any kind.

Update: Peter Beinart defends Sen. Reid by saying that, except for his use of the word Negro, which was “unplesantly retro,” “everything else about his statement is undeniably correct.”

The problem, then, would seem to be that of a name. Since race does not exist as a scientific category—geneticists have found that skin color is controlled by just one of at least 19,599 protein-coding human genes, reducing it to a genetically insignificant difference between persons—the problem of trying to distinguish and designate a group variously known as Negroes and blacks and African Americans is magnified. There is no easy solution to the problem. What do we call “African Americans” who aren’t, well, from the U.S.? The most elegant solution is to expose the problem as a non-problem. We need to stop talking about race altogether just as we have stopped relying upon phrenology to make judgments about people.

Doing both at once

The Language Log recently fielded a query about the difference between two English sentences:

(1) He was playing a violin when the visitor arrived.
(2) He was playing the violin when the visitor arrived.Geoffrey K. Pullum replied sensibly that, while “[b]oth (1) and (2) are simply saying that he was engaged in violin-playing when the visitor arrived,” there is nevertheless a discernible difference between them:If you view violin as a count noun denoting individual objects 4-stringed objects with f-holes, then if he was playing a particular one of those objects, sentence (1) is appropriate. But you can also view violin as referring to a sort of abstract object, the species of musical instrument known by that name around the world. In that case the claim is that he was participating in a sort of worldwide fraternity of violinists by engaging in the relevant activity. No particular violin is relevant. And that makes the second sentence acceptable.This seems exactly right, even though it reminds me of Brenda’s quip in Goodbye, Columbus. When a young man goes on pretentiously about “the film,” Brenda snaps, “Which film?” In both cases, the definite article denotes a class or category, what in literary criticism would be called a genre: it is prefixed to a noncount noun, which refers to a tradition of human activity or what Pullum calls a “worldwide fraternity.” (More in a moment on why I prefer the former phrase.)

But then Pullum makes a claim that strikes me as inexact at best, false at worst. While I can only play one particular violin or watch one particular film at any one time, I stand in what he calls a “player-of [or watcher-of] relation to the whole species” whenever I play or watch. Consequently, “whenever one happens, the other one always happens as well,” he concludes, emphasizing every word.

But is that true?

Here are two similar sentences:(1) We are studying a novel this week in Myers’s class.
(2) We are studying the novel this week in Myers’s class.Pullum would be on safe ground, in my opinion, if he were to argue that no one in my class could possibly do (2) without also doing (1). The study of the tradition of the novel is forever dependent upon the study of discrete and individual novels. But is the reverse the case? Is someone who reads a novel to kill a stretch of time—before falling asleep at night, say, or on the beach during vacation—necessarily engaging with the tradition?

Accepting Pullum’s language makes me even more skeptical. Is a middle-school student, enrolled in orchestra as an elective, who never practices and leaves his instrument at school—I have just described myself at a younger age—really “participating in a sort of worldwide fraternity of violinists” when he saws at the strings lackadaisically in class?

I don’t think so. On my view, an activity like playing the violin or studying the novel is a fusion of what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle termed repertoires and abilities. Mastery depends upon both: the ability to play a violin or study a novel is nothing without a repertoire of pieces to play or novels to read. But what is more, the ability is latent within the repertoire, much as hidden features of a video game are unlocked by beating a level of difficulty.

However, neither playing a violin nor studying a novel depends upon the ambition of mastery. I can be content to play badly—I was content to play badly—or I can finish the work in a course on the novel without accepting the premise upon which the study of the novel is founded.

What must be added to his account in order to justify Pullum’s claim that “whenever one happens, the other one always happens as well,” is deep caring. If and only if I value the activity can I possibly belong to its worldwide fraternity whenever I perform the activity. Wanting to acquire the ability is not enough. I must also want the repertoire. I must want to come into possession of it, to feel at home in it. Then and only then can it be true that I am doing (2) whenever I do (1).

The word for this fusion of ability and repertoire is tradition. Whether I belong to a worldwide fraternity is irrelevant, as long as I alone am capable of enjoying the tradition.

Moral fashions in criticism

Reflecting on the trolls who commented on a review he had written of James Cameron’s visually stunning and dramatically birdbrained new film Avatar, Jake Seliger ruefully observed that he had forwarded many of them a link to Paul Graham’s clear and instructive essay “How to Disagree.” A few months ago I myself was led to Graham, one of the best web-based essayists, by following a link provided by Seliger (thanks again, Jake!). This time I poked around his site a little further and discovered an even better essay by him on “What You Can’t Say.”

Graham points out that there are moral fashions just as there are fashions in clothing. What they have in common is that they are “arbitrary” and “invisible to most people.” The difference is that, while you stumble upon old photographs of yourself and laugh at your bell bottoms and girl’s-length hair, you rarely do the same when you turn up old letters that you have written.

A moral fashion, on Graham’s definition, is socially acceptable speech and thought. In every age there are certain things that cannot be said; they are mistaken for wrong, when in truth they are merely unfashionable. Since a “conscious effort” is required to “see fashion in your own time,” a test for moral fashion is to examine what you have said in the past that has got you into trouble. Graham calls it “the conformist test.”

A good example from the literary world is the Publishers Weekly list of the Top Ten Books of 2009. It contained no women, which provoked an immediate uproar. Women were excluded from the list, proclaimed the Manchester Guardian, headlining the story. While Louisa Ermelino, speaking for the publishing trade journal, said that the list’s compilers “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” the poet Erin Belieu replied that “when PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ ” On the contrary, what Belieu was announcing—in a code that she was incapable of overhearing—is that it is wrong to issue a book list containing no (or an insufficient number of) women. To do so, especially while claiming to ignore gender, is to violate a taboo.

I was reminded of the trouble that Patrick Kurp and I got ourselves into when we released our list of the Best American Fiction, 1968–1998 at the end of 2008. Andrew Seal was so offended by the “absence of women of color on the list”—to say nothing of the fact that “there are more Philip Roth books (3) on there than books by men of color”—he solemnly pledged, as a New Year’s resolution, not to read any “white-guy-literature” for twelve months.

A year later, he is proud of himself for having kept his resolution. Scott Esposito is proud of him too. What they both fail to notice is that his success establishes little beyond Seal’s literary conformism.

They (and Erin Belieu too) also fail to notice that there are moral fashions in criticism. Nowhere, perhaps, is this clearer than in the discussion of women in literature. In 1854, the New York Times predicted that a good time was coming to women writers in the U.S.:

For here and nowhere else, are they just in the social position to give scope to all their genius. Whatever a women is or has, she is very sure of full reciprocation in these States. She always has the open ear, the awaiting heart, of the best public; and thereby her sensibilities are put exactly in such a relation to her intellect as to supply all the inspiration she can use. . . . Our prophesy is—that the most popular forms of our future literature will be written by American women. They see to-day further into the meaning of American life, character, prospects, than men do. They are nearer the heart of humanity—deeper into the spirit of the age—happier in the revealings of faith, than their rivals among men.Eighteen years later the Times continued to hold out hope for woman’s future in American literature: “She is already a great power in literature, and in the number of publications from her pen. If she goes on for the next twenty-five years as she has gone for the last twenty-five years, she will produce as many works as her alleged lord and master, man.”

And, indeed, after the turn of the century the Times found “Women Running Neck-and-Neck With Men in ‘Best Seller’ Race.” During the period of 1895 to 1902, the paper reported, only five of the twenty-eight most popular American books were written by women—Mary Johnston, who wrote two, Alice Hegan Rice, Mary Cholmondeley, and Bertha Runkle—but by 1905 the numbers had turned around: “Thirty books figured on the list for that year of the most popular works of fiction. Of these seventeen were by men and thirteen by women—a higher proportion of the latter, unassisted by male collaborators[,] than in any previous year in the history of American fiction.” The Times treated the whole thing as a friendly competition. Their increasing success “was such as to make the heart of female authors glad,” while male authors were making a comeback on the most recent bestseller list: “apparently alarmed by the encroachments of the weaker sex,” the men had “rallied together.”

A century ago, the number of women on book lists was also tabulated and compared to the number of men, and the sexes were treated as literary blocs, but the fashion was to celebrate women’s proportion rather than condemning it. That it was neither high enough nor low enough, neither right nor wrong, was invisible to almost everyone.

The Dying Animal

The January issue of Commentary is out, and Philip Roth’s novella The Humbling is reviewed by Sam Sacks, editor of Open Letters Monthly. I am sick with envy. I had begged for first shot at Roth’s latest, but my reputation as an unrepentant fan, sporting face paint in Bucknell orange and blue, carrying an oversized foam hand with

R
O
T
H

spelled out on the raised index finger, made me the obvious choice to pass over. I was left with no other option but to laud the book here (“Brilliant and a little frightening”—D. G. Myers, A Commonplace Blog). Sacks is more skeptical, especially of Roth’s books since American Pastoral.

“A green rubber phallus is described with more zeal and embellishment than are any of the people,” Sacks writes in the review’s best line. Sex remains Roth’s main subject. His characters “have never renounced” it, no matter how old they get; “their terror is that it will renounce them,” Sacks says, because they know that the “libido is life’s fuel gauge.” Not perhaps an error-free account of The Humbling, something like this is surely the case with Roth’s best novel of the past dozen years. The Dying Animal (2001) is the clearest statement about Roth’s lifelong preoccupation with sex. “[P]leasure is our subject,” reports David Kepesh, the narrator and tour guide. “How to be serious over a lifetime about one’s modest, private pleasures.”

Kepesh, who back in 1972 found himself transformed into a gigantic breast in the novella The Breast before being restored five years later to his public role as The Professor of Desire, is now seventy years old. He still teaches the seminar in Practical Criticism at Columbia, still selects one girl each semester to share his bed the next, and still—with his long white hair, his wattle, and his little pot belly—still he serves as “the great propagandist for fucking.”

The quest for pleasure through miscellaneous promiscuity is at odds with marriage and family, of course, and Kepesh is their sworn enemy. They are “the standard unthinking”; he is determined “never to live in the cage again.” Married in his twenties, he fathered one child—a son, Kenny—but then he was swept up in “the sixties revolution,” the “great overturning,” which extended “orgiastic permission to the individual” and diminished “the traditional interests of the community.” In his mid-thirties, he was particularly impressed by his female students. The birth-control pill had granted them “parity” with men at last, and many of them took full advantage:They weren’t interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs. They knew where the pleasure was to be had, and they knew how to give over to desire without fear.Having those girls in class was too much for Kepesh. He walked out on his wife and eight-year-old child, “follow[ing] the logic of this revolution to its conclusion.” Henceforth he would cultivate the “disorder” and “liberation” of those years, because he took them “seriously” and in their “fullest meaning.”

Although he complains that his “education in genteel notions of seriousness” was a weighty obstacle to living out his own revolution, the truth is that Kepesh’s insistence upon taking pleasure and disorder seriously—setting out to study and master them, as if professionally, rather than indulging them playfully—is simply the adjustment of his fine education to different ends. He remains a literary critic; his text is now “this wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation” rather than novels translated from Russian, German, and French; but he remains dependent upon “genteel notions of seriousness.” How else to tackle his biggest problem—namely, turning “freedom into a system”?

In The Human Stain, published the previous year, Nathan Zuckerman spelled out the novelist’s credo when it comes to sex. One can’t say that sex is not an important part of life, because it always is. And why? It is “the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.” The paradox is no accident: sex may “de-idealize” a man, but all the while he remains “everlastingly mindful” of the fact. There is no escaping mind—until the very end when a man is reduced, finally, to “the matter we are.” In The Dying Animal, Kepesh advances a different view of sex:[O]nly when you fuck is everything you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself. It’s not the sex that’s the corruption—it’s the rest [of life]. Sex isn’t just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death.Except, of course, that it isn’t. Sex is in league with death, as Roth’s title, taken from Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, makes clear: the heart of man, “sick with desire,” is “fastened to a dying animal.” Unlike Kepesh, Yeats’s “aged man” does not seek revenge on death; he longs for release from nature altogether, and from countries where the young “neglect Monuments of unageing intellect”; he prays to be gathered instead “Into the artifice of eternity.”

For Roth, sex represents the refusal to surrender to what Walker Percy calls angelism, the neurotic condition in which one fantasizes of deliverance from man’s biological destiny. For Kepesh, though, sex is itself angelic: in taking “revenge on death,” the rutting man could delude himself into believing, even if momentarily, that death shall die. But this is not Roth’s view.

In short, The Dying Animal belongs to the same literary class as Lolita, in which a moral monster arraigns himself by means of his own self-defense. The life of sexual freedom has never before had “a social spokesman or an educational system,” Kepesh says, but his attempts to fill the gap end in absurdity. The “great propagandist for fucking” calls into question all propaganda for fucking. No one could build a better case for sexual license, but Roth subtly undercuts Kepesh’s case throughout the novella.

First there is Kenny, the son whom Kepesh deserted three-and-a-half decades earlier. Although he himself has yielded to adultery—the apple did not fall far from the tree—Kenny rejects his father’s arguments for “claiming personal sovereignty” and deserting his wife and son. “You’re a hundred times worse than I thought,” he tells Kepesh. “The long white pageboy of important hair, the turkey wattle half hidden behind the fancy foulard—when will you begin to rogue your cheeks, Herr von Aschenbach? What do you think you look like? Do you have any idea?” But it is not merely that Kepesh is ridiculous, and oblivious to his own ridiculousness. He is also a sexual predator. “These girls go to college,” Kenny says to him, “and they shouldn’t be protected from you? You are the living argument for protecting them.”

Then there is the unnamed “you” to whom Kepesh addresses his confessional narrative. At one point, relating how he tries to talk an old lover out of marrying (“One stands in awe of the masochistic rigor required”), Kepesh interrupts himself: “Why, why are you laughing? What’s so hilarious?” He assumes it is his “didacticism,” his readiness to adopt the stance of a sexual educator, but in fact, the hilarity lies in the genteel seriousness of Kepesh’s sexual wildness, the ascetic discipline of his licentiousness, the strict purity of his impurity; to say nothing of his obtuseness to the human need for attachment, a pull that is stronger than sex or death.

Kepesh himself experiences the pull. Much of the novella is taken up with his account of a love affair, eight years before, with Consuela Castillo, a young woman of twenty-four, “the daughter of wealthy Cuban emigrés,” who has “the most gorgeous tits in the world.” When he loses her, he suffers for the first time in his life:This need. This derangement. Will it never stop? I don’t even know after a while what I’m desperate for. Her tits? Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it’s worse than that—maybe now that I’m nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free.Or maybe death and the maiden—Kepesh helpfully refers to Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, to emphasize the point—have combined to make him aware of what he has denied himself for so long. His closest friend tries to warn him, and Kepesh knows that he is right: “He who forms a tie is lost, attachment is my enemy. . . .” In the end, though, when Consuela is diagnosed with breast cancer, he is powerless to resist her summons. She learns that her doctors have “decided to remove the entire breast,” she is alone, and she wants Kepesh with her. He gets up to go. At last the anonymous interlocutor speaks:     “Don’t.”
     What?
     “Don’t go.”
     But I must. Someone has to be with her.
     “She’ll find someone.”
     She’s in terror. I’m going.
     “Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you’re finished.Finished as a propagandist for fucking, finished as a spokesman for “emancipated manhood,” finished as an unattached libertine. And just starting out as a man upon whom someone else might depend.

V. S. Pritchett once quipped that “The Age of Reason conceived wild nature and the noble savage to be tamer than they were.” In The Dying Animal, David Kepesh conceives the cage, the masochistic rigor of attachment, to be much weaker than it really is. And Philip Roth, in one of his best books, shows that the case for the “wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past” ultimately cannot stand up to it.

Athitakis celebrates second

Mark Athitakis’s American Fiction Notes is celebrating its second anniversary today. Athitakis keeps the rest of the literary blogscape informed and honest. Head over and congratulate him on what he has accomplished in two short years.

Predictions 2010

An American will win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It will not be Barack Obama.

The Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics’ Circle Award will be given to three different novels. All three authors will be professors in creative writing programs. Applications to their programs will continue to decline.

Martin Amis’s twelfth novel The Pregnant Widow will be universally reviled by critics on the Left. They will not prevent it from becoming a bestseller in both the U.K. and U.S.

Philip Roth will publish Nemesis, his twenty-seventh novel, leading even more critics to scoff that he has reached the end of the line. They will be wrong. Again.

Another sex scandal will engulf another “famous” poet. No one will notice.

Borders will announce the shuttering of about a third of its retail stores and will lay off half its work force.

Amazon will unveil a Kindle that is compatible with Nintendo’s Wii gaming system.

The Modern Language Association will vote at its December convention to condemn the successful Israeli strike upon nuclear installations in Iran, which by then will have had the effect of galvanizing the Green Movement to overthrow the mullahs and create a fledgling democratic régime. The English professors won’t care.

Christopher Buckley will finish his novel satirizing a posh conservative writer who fell for a messianic left-wing presidential candidate. Two years later he will announce that he is voting to reelect Obama.

Oh, that Jewish problem

“Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?” This was the bait to trap unwary Modern Language Association conventioneers into attending a panel discussion earlier in the week. According to a story by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed, six somewhat prominent literary scholars sat together at a long conference table in the Philadelphia Marriott on Sunday evening to mope that American Jewish writing is “not a hiring priority” and “not considered a research specialty” in most English departments, because Jews are not viewed as being “distinct from other white ethnic groups.” To most academics the Jews are no different from other white people, and they are no better off when they insist that they are different: “Jewishness has been associated with Israel” and therefore with “colonialism and racism.”

When Jewish writers are included on the reading lists for courses in ethic literature the students complain they do not belong, because American Jews have not experienced the same “truly marginal status of people of color.” They have “have found their place” in American society, and need no extra boost from the literary curriculum. Thus nearly every English department in the country has at least one specialist apiece in black literature, Native American literature, what is clumsily known as Latino/a literature, and sometimes even Asian-American literature. But few have anyone who specializes exclusively or even primarily in American Jewish literature. Aside from antisemitism, which the panelists were quick to dismiss as an explanation, why should that be?

The answer is not hard to find.

English professors these days pursue many different research interests from many different angles—they share neither a common body of knowledge nor a common repository of methods—but they are unified by one thing, which functions as a shibboleth among them. They are actively hostile to the social order. Their professional obligation, as they conceive it, is to sow the seeds of indignation and discontent, to nurture the green shoots of ressentiment, to give voice and expertise to oppositionality. “Ethnic literature” is included in the literary curriculum to challenge white privilege. But American Jewish writing does not readily lend itself to such a project.

There are exceptions, of course—the Communist propagandist Mike Gold comes to mind, along with a few other proletarian novelists of the ’thirties—but for the most part American Jewish writers have been absorbed with something other than social problems. If Jewish literature, as the critic Baal-Makhshoves famously said, is one literature in more than one language, then several questions confront the Jewish writer before anything else. In what language is he going to write? If he decides upon the landsprakh, the vernacular of the gentile majority, will he succeed in thoroughly cleansing his style of all traces of Jewish bilingualism? Not even a writer like Philip Roth, who found that he must write in “the jumpy beat of American English,” was able to be the writer he wished to be without occasional recourse to Yiddish and the liturgical vocabulary of Judaism.

Even to wrestle with the language question, to forge his style in the wrestling match, is to locate the writer within Jewish literature. And as a direct consequence, his writing in larger or smaller part will be constructed as an “internal dialogue between Jews,” which the great critic Ruth R. Wisse calls “the natural form” of Yiddish and perhaps all Jewish writing. But if he is also an American writer, who is equally determined to enter into dialogue with great American writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway (all of whom had Jewish problems of their own), then his writing will necessarily be—to use the word in its only legitimate sense—multicultural.

Any scholar who would specialize in American Jewish writers, then, would have to master both American and Jewish literature—and not merely popular Yiddish fiction, but the real literature of the Jews, the religious literature of the Jews, starting with the Hebrew bible and plunging into the sea of the Talmud. He would, in short, have to be a scholar of Jewish religion as well as literature.

All of which he would also have to bring into any class on American Jewish literature. And none of which does very much to work up righteous indignation toward the wrongs of American capitalism. Is it any wonder English departments are little interested in advancing the massively bookish and time-consuming study of American Jewish literature?

Update: The proper name for the field, by the way, is American Jewish literature. To reverse the adjectives is a blunder. Those who have created the literature are American Jews, not Jewish Americans.

Update, II: To speak plainly, English departments do not need American Jewish literature as a pretext to hire Jews, who are distributed throughout the subspecialties of English. Advertising for positions in African American or Native American or Latino/a literature is a way to guarantee “minority” applicants and then to engage in employment discrimination without appearing to do so.

Stripping away the prejudice

Why the Washington Post saw fit to publish it is unclear—it has small news value and less new insight—but the novelist Julianna Baggott, who teaches in Florida State University’s creative writing program, complains in an op-ed today about the eight-week-old Publishers Weekly list of the year’s hundred best books, which contained (as everyone knows by now) no women in the top ten. There is, Baggott whines, a prejudice against women in the literary world. “So how do we strip away our prejudice?” she asks. “First, we have to see prejudice.”

No, ma’am. First we have to establish prejudice. Every single complainant against the dismal PW list has merely assumed prejudice. “PW hasn’t yet owned up,” Baggott hiccups—even though ten of the twenty-six titles listed in fiction and poetry, excluding mysteries, are by women. That’s thirty-eight percent. How high must the percentage be to evade the prima facie guilt of literary prejudice against women?

The accusation has become so commonplace that it has begun to sound like a pre-recorded sales pitch. The unavoidable truth is that literary posterity is ruthless: it accepts only the best. For a while you can get away with substituting irrelevant criteria for literary greatness, but over time they will be ignored. Lists of the year’s best books will be ignored too.

Creative writing functionaries like Julianna Baggott can yelp that “The top [literary] prizes’ discrimination against women has been largely ignored.” And perhaps they will even be successful in bullying prize committees into bestowing more awards upon women. But in the long run it will make no difference. One of America’s Nobel Prize-winners in literature was Pearl S. Buck, upon whom no one wastes criticism any longer. Few people even read her. Her international prize is irrelevant; her sex is irrelevant. All that counts to posterity is the literary gift, which Buck, sad to say, did not possess in superabundance.

While it is dismaying that someone who devotes her life to the teaching of writing places more importance on gender politics, Baggott is hardly unusual in doing so. For most people, almost anything is more important than literature. In literature there is a single overriding value—how well something is written—and few people are ready to strip away the prejudice that life is more meaningful off the page than on.

The permanent home of language

Not too surprisingly, Patrick Kurp finds himself reading more books these days and fewer things online, including blogs. The reason? His “festering impatience with shoddy writing.” While “good writing is always rare,” he observes, it particularly hard to smoke out “in an age when seemingly everyone is convinced of his obligation to share his precious words.”

Part of the problem is sheer numbers: listserve lists, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other “social networking” technologies are merely the latest example of what Henry James called the “multiplication of endowments for chatter.” No one who has accepted the moral obligation to write well is on Twitter, except perhaps to draw attention to good writing elsewhere. Nor is settling for the ready-made phrases that come tumbling off the top of the head a necessary and sufficient condition for blogging or any other means of “instant publication.” The technology is not at fault; or, rather, its only offense is that it permits the indulgence of bad literary habits and worse principles.

The real problem is identified by the poet D. J. Enright, from whose posthumous memoir Injury Time (2003) Kurp quotes:

There are two reasons why people don’t make good writers: (a) they have nothing to write about, (b) they are not at home with the written word (however fluent they may be in the spoken word). The latter is by far the most potent reason. If you can write, you’ll find something to write about; having something to write about doesn’t make you a writer.The only thing that makes someone a good writer is being “at home with the written word.” What does Enright mean, exactly? More than being comfortable—relaxed, secure, free from anxieties—in the literary language. Something closer to being a native speaker of the written tongue: the good writer’s first language is the language of the page, not the streets or screen. By definition his sentences are not natural, but artificial: they are seized by hand from the floods of life that stream around and through us.

The influence of Christianity, with its preference for language that reflects Christ’s own social position—“humble, socially inferior, unlearned, esthetically crude or even repellent,” on Erich Auerbach’s description—encourages the suspicion of linguistic artifice.[1] Not merely the language of the gutter but the slapdash verbal guesses of the pavement and shop floor are twisted homage to Christ’s example.

Since the stylistic commonplace throughout Christendom is that low speech is authentic (and high language is affected and insincere), and since modern technology has made it easier and easier to translate low speech into written words, by progressively easing the manual labor required to do so, the armies of shoddy writing march largely unopposed across the globe. Those like Kurp who pull back from the latest technological novelties may appear to be seeking the literary equivalent of “sustainable living.” In truth, though, they are simply trying to remind the rest of us that ultra-high speed broadband and 45-nanometer processors may be really cool, but they are not indispensable for good writing. This is something else that Kurp learned from D. J. Enright. In a poem from the ’seventies, Enright wrote:I too would avail myself of the large and common
       benefits of modern technology.

That on the Wings of Imagination a chartered jet
       shall transport me to my inspiration.

That tapes may record the best and happiest moments
       of the happiest and best minds.

That a fine excess of surprising subject-matter
       be relayed to me by satellite.

That powerful pumps ensure the spontaneous overflow
       of powerful feelings.

That cameras shall arrest the vanishing apparitions
       which haunt the interlunations of life.

That sophisticated computers select the best words
       and collocate them in the best order.

                                   ∗

A pointed stick, some vegetable dye, a strip of bark
       removed by stealth from the public park.  [2]Technological marvels cannot solve the problem of writing. When all else fails, a pointed stick dipped in vegetable dye can be dragged across a strip of bark—but the need for inspiration, mind, subject-matter, strong emotion, memorable images, and the best words remains the same, no matter the technology used in tackling the problem.

The problem is the problem of language. And it dawns upon me that there is a reason those who prefer what J. V. Cunningham called “sinuous and exacting” language to low authentic speech—those like Kurp who spend less and less time with their eyes fixed on a computer screen—read so much fiction (in prose and verse) instead. The reason is this. Fiction is the only form of human discourse that hunts more after words than matter. If you insist, before anything else, upon “the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses”—if these are more important to you than “the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment”—then you stay home with fiction.[3] For it is the permanent home of language.
____________________

[1] Erich Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 40.

[2] D. J. Enright, “The Progress of Poesy,” in Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 166. Originally published in Sad Ires (1975).

[3] Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605): 1.IV.2. Bacon called these preferences the “first distemper of learning.”

Merry shopping holiday

Since I don’t want to be one of those “Jewish guys” who “trash up the malls every year” with expressions of Christmas cheer that I have no right to, since I’m “not in the club,” I’d do better just to wish the readers of A Commonplace Blog a merry shopping holiday. If you “don’t believe Jesus was God,” but don’t want to “[c]elebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice,” you may notice that you receive no U.S. mail today, that traffic on the roads is light, and that there is no place to buy milk. But please don’t wish anyone a merry Christmas. You might be told to “buzz off.” Because, you know, I get angry when non-Jews wish me a happy new year at Rosh Hashanah. I yell at them not to “mess with” my holiday. As opposed, say, to treating Hanukkah—a minor post-biblical festival—as if it were the only Jewish holiday, the second-rate Jewish Christmas.

Oh, to hell with it. A merry Christmas to you! And joy to the world! I realize that I am committing “spiritual piracy,” but I console myself with the reflection that I am not alone:

Ceremonies for Christmas

Come, bring with a noise,
My merry, merry boys,
The Christmas log to the firing,
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all be free,
And drink to your heart’s desiring.

With the last year’s brand
Light the new block, and
For good success in his spending,
On your psalteries play,
That sweet luck may
Come while the log is a-teending.

Drink now the strong beer,
Cut the white loaf here,
The while the meat is a-shredding;
For the rare mince-pie,
And the plums stand by,
To fill the paste that’s a kneading.

                   —Robert Herrick

Even those who don’t believe that today is the birthday of the messiah can enter into the Christmas spirit—as the vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire knew very well.

Five Books of doctors

With the Democratic Party “unwavering” in its determination to rebuild American health care from top to bottom, regardless of public opposition and a lack of bipartisan consensus, perhaps it is a good time to escape the frustrations of politics by taking stock of doctors in fiction. Who knows what the medical profession will look like in a generation.

Despite the perennially huge American audience for medical dramas, which seem to have begun in the late ’thirties with the MGM series of films about Young Dr. Kildare, there has never really been a similar demand in literature. Another young doctor, Frank G. Slaughter caught the wave a few years later and rode it to millions of sales, scribbling nearly a score of bestsellers about doctors between 1941 and 1984. Except for Sinclair Lewis in Arrowsmith (1925), however—not a particularly good novel—few men and women have resorted to fiction to explore the realm of medicine.

The obvious medical novels are Der Zauberberg (1924) and La Peste (1947). Yet Mann’s focus is on the patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos. The medical personnel, including the doctors, remain in the background, faceless institutional functionaries. Not even Hofrat Behrens, the sanatorium’s director and chief of medicine, plays much of a role beyond repeatedly delaying Hans Castorp’s release from the captivity of unending treatment. Camus is far more interested in the thinking and behavior of medical men. Bernard Rieux may be the greatest portrait of a doctor in a medicine—and, not incidentally, he also turns out to be a good writer (or, at least, a good narrator). But it is never possible to forget the political and allegorical dimension of La Peste, which continually threatens to transform Dr. Rieux and his medical colleagues into transparent surfaces.

For a selection of novels about doctors, the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database at NYU is the place to start. The database is intended to be comprehensive, though, which is its vice as well as virtue. Because it is impartially unselective, chucking together books that merit serious attention with middlebrow potboilers, it offers small advice or direction to anyone who wants to read only the best. Nevertheless, what is surprising is that even so comprehensive a database contains so very few good novels that evince more than a glancing curiosity in the rational habits and moral competitions of medical doctors.

The best of them may be one that is rarely thought of as a doctor’s novel. Middlemarch (1871–72) is such a vast panorama that Tertius Lydgate is easily overlooked. He may be the novel’s most admirable character, though. A medical innovator, he is Eliot’s exemplar of the new sort of level-headed professional reformer and man of learning just coming onto the scene. Although he judges himself a failure in the end, Lydgate was a glimpse into medicine’s future.

Here are five more recent novels about fictional doctors in the Lydgate mold.

(1.) Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (1971). In a novel set in the near future, Dr. Tom More is a “not very successful psychiatrist” and bad Catholic who is prey to “depressions and elations and morning terrors.” Estranged from orthodox psychiatry, which “promotes adjustment to the environment, or, as I call it without prejudice, bestialism,” he has invented the lapsometer, a device that measures how far a man’s self has falled from itself. His colleagues scoff at him, but with the device More diagnoses not only the ills of the age, but theirs as well.

(2.) Norma Rosen, At the Center (1982). The Bianky Family Planning Center is an abortion clinic established in the memory of a young woman who died in an illegal abortion. Dr. Edgar Bianky and his two partners “preside over death all day,” but are determined to do good. The tension between the cross-purposes dominates their personal and professional lives. As one of them says, they have “let an idea, what was originally for human good, become more important than human good.” Rosen, the mother of the novelist Jonathan Rosen, has not written a tract; the novel is neither pro-abortion nor anti-abortion. Rather, it shows that the contest between high ideals and human realities is at the center of the medical life.

(3.) Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence (1986). Her sixth novel is set in post-war Italy. As a boy of ten, Salvatore Rossi was taken by his father to meet Antonio Gramsci, who had inspired the older man to become a Communist many years before. Long a political prisoner, Gramsci was by then dying in a Rome clinic. Rossi promises himself two things: to have nothing to do with politics for the rest of his life, and to become a doctor. At thirty, he is a successful neurologist in Florence. Then he meets a girl.

(4.) Ha Jin, Waiting (2000). Lin Kong, said one critic, is “China’s Dr. Zhivago.” Married by arrangement to a woman who will not agree to a divorce, Kong must wait eighteen years to marry the woman he prefers. In the mean time, they are not permitted to show each other any affection or even to take lunchtime walks around the hospital grounds. Married at last, Kong does not find the happiness he had hoped for. He “waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting.” His long and ultimately disappointing wait is a potent symbol of human experience under Chinese Communism. And the practice of medicine is little different under such conditions, Kong learns.

(5.) Robert Cohen, Inspired Sleep (2001). Ian Ogelvie is a thirtysomething psychiatrist and sleep researcher who is running clinical trials of a revolutionary drug that provides “inspired” REM sleep. Once upon a time he had been brilliantly promising and idealistic: “Over the years all the fat shiny plums of precocity—the internships, the fellowships, the awards, the publications—had fallen off the tree for him on schedule.” Now, however, he is the creature of his own career expectations. Then he meets Bonnie Saks, a fortysomething divorcée who has volunteered for the study because insomnia is preventing her from finishing a dissertation on Thoreau. The two are, in many ways, each other’s last chance. Neither love nor a cure is the final result.

The gaping hole in the fictional representation of medical doctors is their professional training. As Larry McMurtry says in his most recent memoir, almost no American novels have paid any attention to the experience of graduate school—Philip Roth’s Letting Go, his own Moving On—but how much more true of medical school! Except for Arrowsmith and Morton Thompson’s soap-operish Not As a Stranger, another of the big fat socially conscious bestsellers of the ’fifties, there is just no American fiction that undertakes to show how idealistic overachievers are turned into mere doctors.