Best American fiction, 1968–1998

Haven‘t posted since Xmas Eve because I‘ve been working on a longish review of Francine Prose’s Goldengrove, which I liked a lot. None of the reviewers so far has got it.

To take a break, I whipped up one of those Amazon lists. In my case, a list of the best American fiction, 1968–1998. Perhaps you’d be interested. At all events, here it is.

It’s a good rule not to read a novel before ten years have passed and the novelty has worn off. Here are the best American books of fiction from the post-Vietnam period, excluding “meta-fictionists” like Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo, and displaying a clear preference for novels (in Larkin’s phrase) about ordinary people doing ordinary things. In order of publication.

1. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

The list author says:
“[T]he novel that inaugurates a new period in American fiction.”

2. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

The list author says:
“After Portnoy, the deluge (of sex). Still the funniest and most daring American novel on the theme.”

3. Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow

The list author says:
“A Holocaust survivor versus the counterculture. Bellow’s best. Or second best.”

4. The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow

The list author says:
“Doctorow’s best, before he became mannered. The new Left comes to grips with the old Left. Perhaps the best fictional treatment of the sixties.”

5. The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin

The list author says:
“Elkin’s best, perfectly suited to his talents. A marvelously comic anticipation of the talk radio craze.”

6. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

“The best storywriter of the past six decades.”

7. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

The list author says:
“A historical novel of Gettysburg. Clears away the ‘fog of war’ and leaves a striking image of the battle in under 350 pages.”

8. Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The list author says:
“Or maybe this is Bellow’s best. The definitive treatment of the postwar literary scene, the poets, the writers, the critics, the hangers-on, the New York intellectuals.”

9. The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris

The list author says:
“Out of print. Where are the New York Review Classics when you need them? Why hasn’t Michael Chabon pitched his ex-teacher? The astonishing tale of an attempt to reach the North Pole via balloon ca. 1897.”

10. The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

The list author says:
“Yates’s second superb novel after Revolutionary Road (1961), and after everyone had written him off. A short novel that follows two sisters through life; unbearably sad, masterfully wise.”

11. Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino

The list author says:
“A concession to fans of self-conscious fiction. This is the best of the type. A novel in progress is taken over by its characters.”

12. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The list author says:
“Posthumous novel by a New Orleans writer who died unknown. Title derives from Swift. So does the narrative method.”

13. Godric by Frederick Buechner

The list author says:
“A historical novel based on the life of the twelfth-century St. Godric after he has returned from his Holy Land pilgrimages to live as a hermit at Finchale. Told in his voice--a rollicking and crisp de-Latinized English.”

14. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

The list author says:
“A wonderful late short novel. Two boys survive the deaths of parents--one by murder--in rural Illinois of the twenties.”

15. The Collected Stories by Eudora Welty

The list author says:
“One of the four great storywriters of the second half of the American century. Never repeats herself; never fails to delight.”

16. Black Robe by Brian Moore

The list author says:
“Moore may not qualify for this list. A native of Belfast, he lived in Malibu for 25 years prior to his death in 1999. Black Robe is a novel unconcerned with political correctness on a P.C. theme—the effort by Jesuits to convert the Algonkins.”

17. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

The list author says:
“The most successful American novelist to adapt the detective story to different and ‘more serious’ ends. You won't be able to decide whether you are in actuality or an alternative world.”

18. Wheat that Springeth Green by J.F. Powers

The list author says:
“The great chronicler of American priests on baffled efforts to separate Church and drek.”

19. Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver

The list author says:
“Full disclosure: Carver was my teacher. Still, is there anyone better at the details of the lower-middle-class dead-end life?”

20. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

The list author says:
“Only partly a novel about the slave trade. Also a philosophical novel raising questions about identity, existence, and God. All in an articulate, yakkety, fast-moving style.”

21. Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

The list author says:
“In 1906, in upstate New York, a young nun develops stigmata. A novel about the mystery (and possibility) of religious passion.”

22. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The list author says:
“In recent years, the question of sexual identity has been thrown wide open. No one is better than Eugenides at exploring that frontier. A novel told in the first person plural!”

23. Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley

The list author says:
“A satire on Washington lobbyists—in this case, a lobbyist for the tobacco industry—by a writer than whom no one knows Washington better. (Yes, he is William F.’s son.)”

24. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser

The list author says:
“A late 19th-century entrepreneur—a hotel developer—who comes to believe that ‘his only error was to have dreamed the wrong dream.’ Not an anti-business novel at all. Rather, it is about the ambivalence of artistic fulfillment.”

25. The Complete Stories by Bernard Malamud

The list author says:
“Better remembered for The Natural and The Assistant. His best stories are far better. He takes up a stance at the edge of suffering, where it begins to shade over into fantasy. Or hallucination.”

26. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The list author says:
“The greatest novel on this entire list. Both a technical achievement, fully justifying the Nathan Zuckerman persona, and a furious unsparing moral examination of American values and compromises since the sixties.”

27. Waiting by Ha Jin

The list author says:
“Odd how many excellent novels from this period are about something else. A novel about Communist China from the sixties to the eighties. Not a sweeping pageant, however, but ordinary people doing ordinary things—in a completely alien culture. Only in America!”

Understanding this for what it is—a list of recommendations in an online bookstore and not a mini-canon of American fiction for the period—I’d still bleg for additions and subtractions if I thought it would do any good.

On Christmas Eve

What does an Orthodox Jew do on Christmas Eve? The tradition in the Myers household is to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. Yesterday, in a Newsweek “web exclusive,” University of Chicago law professor Andrew M. Rosenfeld offered some “mortgage lessons” from Capra’s film. His conclusion? The film is “a reminder of a simpler time, and simultaneously a stark reflection of what went wrong in the current crisis.” Oh, boy.

Needless to say, that’s not the lesson that Capra and his script writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett intend to hammer home. They are quite explicit about it. (Goodrich and Hackett, by the way, are the ones who turned Anne Frank’s dagboek into The Diary of Anne Frank. More on that in a moment.) You will recall that, in the film’s last scene, after he is rescued from scandal, prison, and financial ruin by his friends in Bedford Falls, George Bailey finds the angel Clarence’s copy of Huckleberry Finn among the many small contributions of those who rushed to his aid. The book is inscribed with Capra’s message: “Remember no man is a failure who has friends.”

According to the financially astute and hard-edged Henry Potter, that is precisely what places the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan at financial risk. “You take this loan here to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his brains in his taxi.” The bank turned him down, but Bailey Brothers loaned him $5,000 for a home. “I handled that,” George volunteers. “I can personally vouch for his character.” “Friend of yours?” “Yes, sir.” “You see,” Potter concludes, “if you shoot pool with some employee here you can come and borrow money.” Sounds like Sen. Christopher Dodd and Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, except that a taxi driver is no senator.

Pace Rosenfeld, there are no mortgage lessons to derive from It’s a Wonderful Life. In his defense, he is not the only one trying to yank an inappropriate economic message from a classic film this Christmas season. At the Dissent site, Nicolaus Mills of Sarah Lawrence College crows that George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street is a “Christmas story that we [at Dissent] can’t get enough of,” because in it “the Christmas spirit triumphs over commercialism and doubt.” No, the film is about sophisticated modern efforts, through professional psychiatry or the snobbery of those who know better, to translate faith into psychosis or a fairy tale. Commercialism has nothing to do with it, unless you are on the lookout for every opportunity you can find to bash capitalism.

There is a deeper problem with both It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, and it’s the same reason they can be watched on Christmas Eve by Orthodox Jews and celebrated in Dissent by graying socialists. The films have been almost entirely de-Christianized. As far as I can tell, Christ’s name sounds only in a carol at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. And Fred Gailey succeeds in proving that Kris Kringle actually is Santa Claus only because he does not undertake the more difficult case of proving that God was once incarnated in a flesh-and-blood man who is no longer around to be prodded, examined, questioned, and smiled at.

I don’t know much about Valentine Davies, the author of Seaton’s script. His biography suggests an accomplished Hollywood hack who was able competently to handle ’most any assignment from baseball fantasy (It Happens Every Spring) to bio-pic (The Glenn Miller Story). The de-Christianizing of It’s a Wonderful Life really should come as no surprise, though, once you learn that Goodrich and Hackett wrote the script. Eight years later their stage play The Diary of Anne Frank would invent an almost entirely de-Judaized Anne. She delivers the playwrights’ message in her third-to-last speech:

I know it’s terrible, trying to have any faith . . . when people are doing such horrible . . . But you know what I sometimes think? I think the world may be going through a phase, the way I was with Mother. It’ll pass, maybe not for hundreds of years, but some day . . . I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.¹In the original dagboek, however, the passage was strikingly different. In the entry of Saturday, July 15, 1944, reviewing a book with “the challenging title What Do You Think of the Modern Young Girl?” she writes,It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.But she does not stop there, as she does in the play. She goes on:It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions.²Her belief in the goodness of people—her faith that “this cruelty too shall end”—is not some vague, abstract, universal sentiment. It is an act of Jewish defiance in the face of a state-sponsored campaign to destroy the Jews.

Imagine a Christmas film as firmly sunk in the local circumstances of an actual Christian’s life. Almost as many Jews and socialists would not see it as did not see The Passion of the Christ.
____________________

1. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 168. Ellipses in the original.

2. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, definitive ed., trans. Susan Massotty (New York: Doubleday, 1995), p. 332.

Introduction to structuralism

A historical document from some time in August 1979. I was thinking of returning to graduate school; I asked a friend who had recently finished his PhD at a good program in the Northeast (and who has since earned a reputation for himself in Victorian studies) for an introductory list of titles on structuralism, which is what literary theory was called at the time. Here is what he jotted down, in his own handwriting, in the commonplace book that I was keeping at the time. Abbreviations are his:

• Barthes, S/Z
• F. Jameson, Prison House of Language
• Foucault, The Order of Things
• Derrida, “Structure, Sign, & Play . . .” in The Structuralist Controversy
• Bataille, Death & Sensuality
• Edward Said, “Abecedarian Culturae” (Last Chapter of Beginnings)

Bataille was a personal eccentricity; Barthes has since been demoted to a literary journalist; Said’s Orientalism, published the year before, had yet to make its splash. Otherwise, though, the necessary pieces were in place.

Five definitions of style

(1.) The extra in the writing.

(2.) The record of an author’s decisions—what to include, what to leave out, when to occupy a seat, when to move on.

(3.) “The way words use the writer.” (J. V. Cunningham’s joking inversion of a student’s inanely obvious definition.)

(4.) If form is what remains the same when everything else has been changed (Cunningham) then style is everything that can be changed.

(5.) If form is what satisfies expectations raised in the reader (Kenneth Burke) then style is what raises expectations.

The Lolita Man

Bill James, The Lolita Man (New York: Foul Play Press, 1998). 158 pp. $10.00.

Last Saturday the British writer and editor Mary Jackson put up a disturbing little essay at Pajamas Media, arguing that it has become suspicious and even dangerous for men to show concern for children not their own—they risk being treated as perverts. She quotes Boris Johnson, now the mayor of London, who complained two years ago in the Telegraph about a “system of presuming guilt in the entire male population just because of the tendencies of a tiny minority.”

This system, which one of Jackson’s commentators describes as Every Man a Perv, has had terrible effects, not just upon men who must check their normal impulse to help children, but upon children who need other men in their lives beside their fathers. When I was a high-school sophomore, hired as a “stringer” by the local paper to cover sporting events that a reporter couldn’t get to, I was befriended and tutored in the art of sports writing by a bachelor columnist who lived alone, in a beautiful stone cottage, around the corner from me. I spent hours in his company, going over my copy, debating the merits of baseball versus football, discussing the books he had put into my hands (he introduced me to A. J. Liebling). Now of course such a relationship would be impossible. Any parent who allowed it would be called negligent.

The denigration of normal men is not the only consequence of the general dirty-mindedness. When all men are potential perverts, actual perverts disappear into the crowd, losing their special brand of evil. They can no longer be distinguished from other men. Reading Jackson’s little essay, I couldn’t help thinking of Bill James’s novel The Lolita Man, probably the best portrait of a pedophile in the English language.

Originally published in 1986, The Lolita Man was the second of James’s long-running series of “Harper & Iles mysteries” which now numbers twenty-five titles. A 79-year-old Welshman and former newspaperman whose real name is James Tucker (under which name he published a study of Anthony Powell), James is nothing like his contemporaries P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. He is not absorbed with motive nor does he have a young girl’s murder serve as a pretext for an investigation of something more interesting. His prose is not elegant but angular and unadorned, and his Britain has less in common with Adam Dalgliesh’s than with Theodore Dalrymple’s. Crime is not an isolated incident there, but a rising tide that the police are nearly powerless to hold back. “The detective is dead,” Iles explains in the novel by that title. “Which detective?” Harpur replies. “I hadn’t heard.”

Jerk. The detective as species. . . . Courts won’t hear confessions, they throw out informant cases, still give every career villain the right to silence, disbelieve police evidence as a matter of course. Judges disallow material recorded in trap situations—alleging we’re provocateurs. Juries are threatened and bribed. Villains keep special insurance funds for nobbling them. Where’s detection?The best the police can hope for is gunplay, so they can shoot too; they plant evidence where necessary; they do whatever they can to avoid going to trial. Not likely to please the civil libertarians, as Iles acknowledges, but there is something more important than approved procedure. Quoting Halifax’s Character of a Trimmer, he insists that the law must be “in good hands”—his and Harpur’s, not the lawyers’. The point is not, as cliché has it, that a thin line separates law enforcement from “crookedness”; but rather that the line separating them is not procedural.

James’s best novel is Roses, Roses, the tenth in the Harpur & Iles series, which opens with the murder of Harpur’s wife and then in alternating chapters leads her up to the stabbing, at least as Harpur imagines it must have gone, and then shows him in a race to solve the crime. In The Lolita Man, James was still experimenting, still searching for the right approach. The technique of alternating chapters is already in place—Harpur’s investigation alternates with diary entries by a fourteen-year-old girl who is being stalked by the Lolita Man—but he also tries something daring. Starting with the fifth chapter, he lets the pedophile speak for himself. Commences then a complex and suspenseful three-way dance in which the Lolita Man stalks the girl, who knows she is being watched by the man she calls Mr Dark Eyes, but who is also (unbeknownst to her) being watched by Harpur, who suspects that she may be the next victim, and who is known and watched by the Lolita Man, whom Harpur does not know.

The story begins when Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur is summoned to the King Richard Hotel where a thirteen-year-old girl has been raped and strangled. She is the fifth girl to die in the same way. Even in the presence of the corpse, Harpur is elated that the murderer might have been seen in the busy hotel. “Christ,” he reflects, “the Lolita Man had started acting like that first Lolita man in the book, visiting hotels with his little bird.” It will not be, alas, that easy. When Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles arrives, he too is elated, but for a different reason. He says,
This guy is unique, isn’t he? All the sexologists tell us rapists hardly even kill. Oh, I know there’s the Boston Strangler and that joker who got among the Chicago nurses, but it’s rare and especially in the rapists of kids. We’ll be in the textbooks.Thus James gets his two disclaimers out of the way early on. His pedophile is no Humbert Humbert, who was an “artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy.” Nor is he a typical child-abuser, who is statistically more likely to be a woman or (if a man) then a family member.

James’s Lolita Man is a patient watchful stranger in need of love, not help (“love, only love, love from a girl, a girl not too old, a girl really young, a gentle and kind girl from a nice private school with high class navy and red uniform, a girl who has not been playing around with boys, letting them close to her, using foul language”). He lives in a “tomb alone” until he finds the “right girl,” but when he does he is properly thankful:Tonight in my prayers I gave thanks that I have been able to find her among so many. Please God let it be that I do not lose her. Do not send me back to that black pit. Prayer is such a help in my life.The voice is much creepier than “that first Lolita man.” Humbert Humbert is aware of the “cesspool of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.” A part of him knows in advance that “nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture” with his Lolita. Nor is he totally cut off from the human nexus. “Imagine me,” he beseeches his readers; “I shall not exist if you do not imagine me. . . .” Nabokov’s Lolita, as I’ve suggested elsewhere on this blog, is dedicated to the proposition that imagination might be redemptive, recreating time backwards, transfiguring a monster, giving a dead girl eternal life in a book bearing her name.

James’s vision is entirely different. In his world, imagination cannot make the monstrous wonderful again; to believe otherwise is, as Iles puts it, “eyewash”; the truth about human society—the “dark pressures” of experience—are stronger and more lasting.

And James’s Lolita Man is the greater monster, because he does not think of himself as a monster. He believes, in fact, that he is “the only one who can save [the girl he is stalking].” He finally moves to snatch her when he reflects that “I haven’t done enough for her, only watching.” He must protect her from Harpur, whom he suspects—faithful to the system of Every Man a Perv—of wanting “dirty sex” with her. He breaks into her room, thrilling her (“I could smell some strong tobacco in my room like they use in those French cigarettes”) but leaving himself distraught at not finding her there.

At this point the alternating chapters suddenly stop and Harpur is left alone with the sound of his own voice, unable to locate the girl he has been tailing. For some thirty-five pages, nothing is heard from either of them—the girl or Mr Dark Eyes. The effect is chilling. How will it end? Not in any way calculated to satisfy expectations. James’s novels never do. But the ending does establish something worth knowing. The impulse to protect a child does not unmask a normal man as a Lolita man, and to worry that it might is to give up on a far more troubling problem. Namely: how much to redeem with imagination, and how much to let the truth have.

Seriousness

Matthew Arnold is to blame. He is the one who concocted “high seriousness” as the ultimate standard of greatness in English poetry.¹ And by now, “serious” has almost become the name of a subgenre. There is “serious fiction,” and there is everything else. Practically everybody understands that “serious” is not the opposite of “humorous,” but rather of “frivolous.” What, however, does the word itself mean?

It comes from the Latin serius for “grave”; and at first it seems to have meant just that—sorrowful, sad, fretful. (Dickens three hundred years after it began to appear widely in English speech contrasted serious to smirking.) Since then it seems to have diverged into two different traditions of meaning. One is headed by St. Thomas More, for whom “serious” was a synonym of “earnest.” The other is headed by Sir Thomas Elyot, who spoke in The Governour of Socrates’ “serious disciples.” In this tradition—by far the ascendant one today—“serious” became a term of rather vague approbation. The disciple, for instance, is praised for his seriousness because he has nothing else worth praising.

The term is vague because it has no natural opposite. What is unserious? In fact, serious is opposed, in any plain man’s vocabulary, to humorous, to pleasurable; the serious employments of man are on one side, wearing dark colors and a frown; the light and trifling amusements are on the other side. When a plain man says, “Are you serious?” he means, “You’re not joking, are you?” He doesn’t mean: “Is what you are saying of lasting importance; is it weighty; does it require considerable thought; is it spoken with fervent intent?”

In the first chapter of Book V of Tom Jones, Fielding equates seriousness with dullness. The English pantomime, he writes,

consisted of two parts, which the inventor distinguished by the names of the serious and the comic. The serious exhibited a certain number of heathen gods and heroes, who were certainly the worst and dullest company into which an audience was ever introduced; and (which was a secret known to few) were actually intended so to be, in order to contrast the comic part of the entertainment, and to display the tricks of the harlequin to better advantage.
     This was, perhaps, no very civil use of such personages; but the contrivance was, nevertheless, ingenious enough, and had its effect. And this will now plainly appear, if, instead of serious and comic, we supply the words duller and dullest; for the comic was certainly duller than anything before shown on stage, and could be set off only by the superlative degree of dullness which composed the serious.This passage also describes what has happened to so-called “serious fiction.” It is so dull that in comparison to it even teenaged girls who love vampires, forensic pathologists pursuing criminals through cyberspace, or boys being raised in graveyards by ghosts seem fascinating company.
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1. “[T]he superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness. . .” (“The Study of Poetry” [1880] in Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. William Savage Johnson [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913], p. 88).

Truth in “error”

Rohan Maitzen laughs at her students. Whatever gets her through the hard slog of reading exams, I suppose. She quotes a few bloopers, misspellings, and historical scramblings, but then exposits, with straight-faced irony, her students’ literary theory: “Night is a non-fiction novel, realism is when you decide to write realistically about reality, and unreliable narration is when you don't believe what you are saying.”

I dunno. All three of those propositions sound pretty good to me. Night is no more an autobiography than is The Education of Henry Adams; both are what Perry Miller called “artificial constructions.” The infinite regressiveness of the definition of realism unerringly identifies the central problem with trying to define it at all. And who is the very best unreliable narrator ever? Huck Finn, right? Does he believe what he is saying when he describes Jim as “white inside”?

Update: Been thinking about this. Upon reflection, it stikes me that the real error lies not with their propositions above, but rather with students’ inability to write the next sentence. Undergraduates rarely have the training or inclination to use the word because. They don’t even try to argue for their views. To mock the obvious incorrectness of the answers is to miss the point that they are “wrong” only in light of a contrary view (i.e., the teacher’s), the correctness of which is assumed and no more defended than is the students’.

There are, it seems to me, two cures for this ill. Either drill the students in the correct answers, perhaps with the use of classroom chants accompanied by calisthenics, or place the correct answers—the propositions that the teacher wants the students to recall—firmly within the context of an argument (or narrative); and make that argument (or narrative) coherent, persuasive, and memorable. The goal is not to get students to parrot your opinions, but to grasp where literary and historical facts fit into a larger whole, which will give them whatever meaning and value they have.

The Raven and the Whale

Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956).

The Neglected Books Page is one of my favorites. When I am stuck for something to read, I turn there first. But of all the recommendations by all the different writers collected there, my all-time favorite is Robert Conquest’s. Originally writing in the Los Angeles Times nine Christmases ago, Conquest said:

It’s hard to think of a really fine book that is totally neglected. Still, I seldom come across anyone who has read Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium doubtless because its theme is chiliastic sects of 500 years ago. But (especially in its expanded later edition), it is uniquely wise and informative about the nature, recruitment and delusions of such movements–then and now.The phrase “neglected books” usually summons up novels that are forgotten once they are no longer novelties. Conquest’s words serve as a reminder of another class: books that are even more likely to be neglected, because they were not widely bought and read to begin with.

Such a book is Perry Miller’s Raven and the Whale. The title is a misleading advertisement, a ploy to excite interest by disguising his real theme. Miller sets the record straight on the first page: “The present book, let me say once and for all, is only incidentally concerned with Moby-Dick or even with Herman Melville: it is preoccupied with Melville’s America. . . .” Or, more exactly, it is preoccupied with the literary culture and publishing world, specifically in New York City, where Melville developed into a great artist. (And where Poe “dreamed of becoming a literary power.”)

At the center is a competition of journalistic critics who were the lions of mid-nineteenth century—the age’s equivalent of James Wood and Michael Dirda—“who survive today hardly as names, even to antiquarians.” On the near side were the Whigs grouped around Lewis Gaylord Clark’s Knickerbocker Magazine; on the other side of the field was Young America, the party of “literary nationalism,” Democratic in its politics, led by Evert Augustus Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews.

Out of these unpromising materials, Miller carefully builds up one of the most distinguished contributions to American intellectual history, and probably its best read. His account of the culture war between “Young America” and the Knickerbocker regiment has much of enduring value to say about the tactics, weapons, and collateral damage in such wars—then and now. Book reviewers, for example, served as a kind of press gang, signing up new recruits, and the decision not to review a new book was no less tactical and partisan. Miller is good at tracing the influence of this “war of words and wits” on Melville and Poe (suddenly Book XVII of Pierre, “Young America in Literature,” makes a lot more sense, and the biting reviews by Poe, to say nothing of his contemporaries’ opinion of him, come into clearer focus).

He is even better at showing that the war’s worst casualties were those writers whose development was stunted and whose talents were shrunk. Among these, for example, was Charles Frederick Briggs, “the first in our literature to make use, by comic indirection, of the brutality of New York life—prostitution, murder, crime, competition, filth. . . .” Now almost entirely forgotten, Briggs is an unacknowledged forerunner of New York novels of slum life, poverty, and the underworld starting with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods in 1902 and including such books as Call It Sleep, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Victim, The Real Cool Killers, and V.

What comes across more strikingly than any other quality is Miller’s respect for the obscure and unimportant figures in his book. The Raven and the Whale takes them seriously, even though most of them are third- and fourth-rate writers. The result is a human comedy, a collection of lively anecdote and a war-memorial to men who cared passionately about raising up from scratch what Miller calls “an independent, a completely native and unique, literature” in America.

The seventh and last book published during his lifetime was Miller’s first venture into the nineteenth century, although he had edited the definitive anthology of The Transcendentalists six years earlier. A Chicago native and Harvard man for thirty-two years prior to his death in 1965, Miller was far better known as the intellectual historian of The New England Mind (two volumes, 1939 and 1953). He may even have been the first to use the phrase intellectual history to refer to a new genre of history.[1]

What is even more important is that Miller created a new way to write intellectual history. At a time when historians are being hectored to get with the theoretical program of the last thirty years, to abandon specialization, to stop tracing concepts and arguments in order to make history comprehensible only in reference to itself, and to reintegrate intellectual figures into the social and political milieu, Miller had already done all that, and more—by not being hectoring about it. Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001) is a later book in the same tradition of combining analysis and biography into a readable narrative of intellectual history. Miller was the first, however. And remains the best.
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[1] Felix Gilbert, “Intellectual History: Its Aims and Methods,” Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971): 80.

The politics of the politics of literature

Politics is one of those words, like “race” or “love” or “satisfaction guaranteed,” that has a stable instability of meaning. Everyone thinks he knows what he is talking about when he talks about politics, but I’m not so sure. It would be nice if the word could be restricted to discussions of practical arrangements, proposals to innovate or preserve, institutional mission statements, bureaucratic policies, the charters of social associations. The likelihood, however, is small. Michael Oakeshott explains why:

The language of politics is the language of desire and aversion, of preference and choice, of approval and disapproval, of praise and blame, of persuasion, injunction, accusation and threat. It is the language in which we make promises, ask for support, recommend beliefs and actions, devise and commend administrative expedients and organize the beliefs and opinions of others in such a manner that policy may be effectively and economically executed; in short, it is the language of every-day, practical life. But men engaged in political activity . . . in order to make their opinions and actions more attractive, are apt to recommend them in the idiom of general ideas; and in order to make the opinions and actions of others less attractive are apt to denigrate them in terms of general ideas.[1]The reverse is also true, especially among intellectuals. You abridge the conceptual experience of agreeing with another man’s argument by speaking as if he belongs to your party. To place a man in the opposite camp is to refute him.

Here politics serves as a sheet of pregummed stamps for identifying allies and enemies. But the politics of literature is far more complicated. One small example. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is one of the great novels of the late twentieth century, in my opinion. On September 11, 2001, its stature grew. Unlike Don DeLillo (“There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists”) or Paul Auster (“if these two-bit explosions forced people to rethink their positions about life, then maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all”), Roth demonstrates that terrorism is a “crime [that] could never be made right.”[2]

The novel was celebrated by writers publicly identified as conservative. Carol Iannone, for example, whose nomination to the National Endowment for the Humanities by the first President Bush had provoked a tantrum on the academic Left six years earlier, praised the novel in Commentary. The father of a beloved daughter who sets off a bomb that kills a local doctor, Roth’s hero Swede Levovbegins to grasp that America is [his daughter’s] stand-in not only for the hard reality of her own family and its experience but for the inherent, flawed limitedness of the human condition, ‘for everything that was imperfect in life.’ And in his agony the Swede also begins to apprehend something else: that behind the righteous indignation and ‘idealism’ of the radical movement that snatched away his daughter lies a kind of counter-truth to decency—namely, the sheer, malicious joy of violent wasting. . . .[3]Edward Alexander, once described to me by an academic Leftist who had studied at the University of Washington as “beyond the pale,” wrote that Roth’s novel delivers a powerful rebuke to Leftist clichés (“Everything is political. Brushing your teeth is political”), but not by putting up an opposing rhetoric:[T]he truly potent critic of sixties radicalism in American Pastoral is neither Roth’s narrator Zuckerman nor . . . Swede Levov, nor any other character sickened by the arrogant ignorance of the kamikaze radicals; rather it is the counter-image of productive labor in the glove factory that the Swede . . . takes over from his father. . . . Work is real; idealistic sloganeering about exploitation of workers by profit-hungry bosses is idle wind.[4]When it came time to face the public reaction to The Plot against America seven years later, however, Roth was prepared. Writing in the New York Times Book Review prior to publication, he declared that President George W. Bush, “a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one,” had affirmed his book’s moral: “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy.” The public isn’t always so docile, though. Ruth R. Wisse dismissed Roth’s Book Review article as a “preemptive strike.” The politics of the novel itself is “irrelevant,” Wisse continued—“except perhaps inadvertently.” For if Roth intended The Plot against America as a warning about the possibility of antisemitism, even in a country that has never been host to a pogrom, the danger lies not with Bush, but in the potentiality for ahomegrown anti-Semitic coalition, combining elements of the isolationist Buchananite Right . . . with the much more energetic and influential forces of the anti-Israel and anti-American Left.[5]Even when it contains injunctions, accusations, and threats, a literary language may not have any practical effect—or not the effect its writer intended. That’s because literary persuasion is of a different order from political persuasion. In a public speech or a newspaper column, I am trying to win adherents to a cause. Once my relation to the cause becomes mediated by style, however—a concern to write well—I am no longer trying to win adherents but readers, and to persuade them of the reality (not the social justice) of what I have to say.

The political commitment of the literary Left, then, is extraliterary. It rarely serves any purpose in literary texts, or not the purpose originally hoped for. Depending upon the institution in which he operates, the Leftist may even be a conservative, opposing such innovations as, for example, hiring political conservatives for the sake of ideological diversity. Even then, many activities which are advertised as political are anything but. Signing petitions, publicly expressing “support” or “opposition,” marching in public demonstrations, affixing a bumpersticker on the car—these are cards of identity. They are neither persuasive nor effective. They are, in truth, an affirmation of one’s self-esteem, a means of establishing one’s purity of heart, a reassurance (to oneself) that one stands with the angels.

This is not politics, however, but confession.
____________________
[1] Michael Oakeshott, “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University” (1962), in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 206.

[2] Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 41; Paul Auster, Leviathan (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992), p. 244; Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 69.

[3] Carol Iannone, “An American Tragedy,” Commentary 104 (August 1997): 55.

[4] Edward Alexander, “Philip Roth at Century‘s End,” New England Review (Spring 1999): 183–90. Alexander is author of Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

[5] Ruth R. Wisse, “In Nazi Newark,” Commentary 118 (December 2004): 65–70.

Pulling out a quotation from Cunningham

In his amused nod at my post on theory, which I discuss below, Mark Thwaite does say that he enjoyed the quotation that I “pull[ed] out” from J. V. Cunningham.

Two confessions. First, Cunningham was my teacher. When he was a visiting professor at Washington University in 1976, he gave a seminar on the history of literary criticism. On the first day of class, he was delighted to find that, on the student roster, the course was listed as “History of Literacy Criticism.” For what it is worth, Cunningham set my feet upon the career path that I continue to stalk. Only much later, though, did I realize how deeply he had penetrated all of my thinking about literature and literary scholarship. At the time, I believed that he had given me his blessing as a writer. One day in class he gave the assignment to fill the blank in this epigram by Sir Henry Wotton:

He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, _________, and died.My classmates twisted themselves into elegant polysyllabic knots. Stumped, I wrote simply: “went to bed.”He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, went to bed, and died.The correct answer, of course, is somewhat more distinguished:He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died.Still, “that is the best wrong answer I have ever received,” Cunningham said. And in some respects, I have been trying to supply him with good wrong answers ever since. My firm conviction that it is just as important to write well in scholarship as in fiction, and infinitely more needed, is straight Cunningham.

Second, I didn’t just pull the quotation out of a hat. From the beginning of my PhD studies in English, his words have served as my program. Cunningham defined an ideal that I measure myself against in every professional thing I do. I mention this, and I quoted his words in my theses on the history of literary theory, because that ideal has disappeared from graduate training in English. It is undeniable that the traditional disciplines of literary scholarship, which Cunningham lays out with such memorable exactitude and brevity, have been replaced by the need to acquire a theoretical “approach.”

The last time I taught a graduate seminar at Texas A&M—I won’t teach one again—I was contacted in advance by a student who wanted to know what my approach would be. “How do I decide?” I asked him. He did not enroll in the course. Another student, who did enroll, complained on the course evaluation that my approach was “atheoretical,” even though, in a seminar on Evil in the American Novel since 1940, we had read a pretty healthy dose of recent philosophical writing on the problem of evil. I can guess what the student meant. I had not located my ideas in relation to some currently dominant figure of thought. I had started over again, as if from scratch, with each novel on our syllabus. I was entirely unsuspicious in my hermeneutics. I actually believed that the novelists had something to say, and I was interested what it might be. Silly of me, I know.

A silly pop at theory

Over at the Ready Steady Blog, Mark Thwaite mistakes my seven theses about the history of literary theory for a “silly pop at Theory” (the capital-T is his). They are silly, he explains, because “attacking Theory (which is so capacious) in such a bluff way always strikes as fatuous.” Ah, yes, the capaciousness of theory. Just about as capacious as the soft-drink aisle in a supermarket, and just about as varied.

Oops. That was an attack, and despite Thwaite’s assertion to the contrary, my intention in the earlier post was historical rather than polemical.

To propose, for example, that literary theory was neither a school nor a style nor a movement is not to attack it, but to notice a historical problem. Theory was understood by some people to form something distinct and distinguishable in the past, but if I am to narrate its history, I must be able to say what distinguished it from other similar things. Capacious or not, theory was treated as a unity; and if—like Thwaite—I speak of Theory rather than theories, and if I see it as an intellectual event or grouping of intellectual events, I ought to be able to define its conceptual unity. If there is nothing unique to theory capable of accounting for the popular description of it as a genuine departure in literary criticism then there is small reason to speak of it at all. To accept its adepts’ account of it is not to write as a historian, but as a publicist. And to reject that account is not to polemicize against the adepts. Their account will have a place in the story too—just not pride of place as a necessary and sufficient condition.

If I were going to “pop” anyone it would not be theory’s adepts, but its historians. Look, the problem that confronts any historian of criticism is how to proceed. Given a capacious miscellany of writings, should the historian emphasize individual critics or collective ideas? How, in short, do you organize the story? The usual solution is to adopt the school-and-movements approach with separate chapters (or sections) on structuralism, deconstruction, reader response, feminism, New Historicism, queer theory, etc. You might as well write a textbook: an admission of failure, that is, a submission to the miscellaneousness of the subject.

Another possibility would be to write something like Wimsatt and Brooks’s Short History of criticism (1957). At least then you wouldn’t be a bore. In their Introduction, the authors acknowledge that their book “could be called ‘polemic’ or ‘argumentative.’ Call it An Argumentative History of Literary Argument in the West.” In fact, it was a retelling of criticism’s history from the New Criticism’s point of view.

Such an attitude strikes me as profoundly unhistorical. Approval or disapproval of his subject entails a fundamental error on the historian’s part. “My concern,” as I wrote in The Elephants Teach, my first attempt to write a history of criticism, “is not that of the debater, who argues the status quo ante must be altered or preserved, but that of the historian, for whom the present situation arouses a curiosity to know how things got to be this way.” I read someone like Thwaite, and I wonder how something can be both capacious and unified by a capital-T at the same time. If I end up concluding that the thing is neither I have not joined the debate, but sought to translate the question into a different idiom altogether.

Writing about the certainty of death

Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness (New York: Ballantine, 1993). 156 pp. $15.00.

Patrick Kurp has a long satisfying post up this morning about the poet L.E. Sissman, who died of Hodgkins’s disease in 1976 just about a decade after first being diagnosed with the disease. “No one,” Patrick comments, “has written so unromantically and with such wit about the certainty of a foreshortened life. . . .”

The lack of romance is the keynote of Sissman’s poetry, but it is also the key to writing about the certainty of death. Sentimentality or self-pity mars most such writing, and renders it useless for anyone who looks for help in how to think about his fast-approaching death. There are not many writers who are both clear- and tough-minded in the face of death.

One other is Anatole Broyard. A longtime book critic for the New York Times, Broyard is remembered now largely because he was an African-American who “passed” for white in an age when “passing” had long since ceased to provide any advantages. In his biographical essay “The Passing of Anatole Broyard,” Henry Louis Gates mentions Broyard’s prostate cancer (although he mangles the diagnosis somewhat) and also the critic’s characteristic reaction to it:

Broyard spent much of the time before his death, fourteen months later, making a study of the literature of illness and death, and publishing a number of essays on the subject. Despite the occasion, they were imbued with an almost dandyish, even jokey sense of incongruity: “My urologist, who is quite famous, wanted to cut off my testicles. . . . Speaking as a surgeon, he said that it was the surest, quickest, neatest solution. Too neat, I said, picturing myself with no balls. I knew that such a solution would depress me, and I was sure that depression is bad medicine.” He had attracted notice in 1954 with the account of his father’s death from a similar cancer; now he recharged his writing career as a chronicler of his own progress toward death. He thought about calling his collection of writings on the subject Critically Ill. It was a pun he delighted in.And that’s it. One expects more basic (and accurate) information from a critic of Gates’s standing.

The collection of writing on Broyard’s “progress toward death” was published posthumously as Intoxicated by My Illness. It concluded with the brilliant story “What the Cystoscope Said,” first published in the Pocket Book collection Discovery #4 edited by Vance Bourjaily and reprinted in Fiction of the Fifties (1959) edited by Herbert Gold. The narrator never identifies the cancer that kills his father. (Broyard’s own father died from cancer of the bladder.) The cystoscopy that unmans him, the “little surprise” that Peter Romain receives from his doctor “to get the inside story on you,” is a test to measure the health of the urethra and bladder. It is commonly administered to differentiate bladder from prostate cancer.

Gates mimics the euphemistic language of the story’s doctor, who describes Romain’s cancer as “incurable” (Broyard’s was “inoperable,” Gates primly says). It would be more direct and accurate to say that both men had a cancer that had similarly metastasized. As Dr. Windelband says to Romain’s son, “The cancer has reached his bones.” Despite advances in medicine, Broyard was no more fortunate forty years later. When it is localized, prostate cancer is one of the most curable cancers; according to the American Cancer Society, the relative five-year survival rate for men with localized prostate cancer is 100%. When it “spreads” to the bones or lymph nodes, however, average survival time is one to three years.

Broyard got fourteen months. During that time he wrote a number of short essays, delivered a talk at the University of Chicago Medical School, and sporadically kept a journal. From this material his widow extracted four essays and not quite ten pages of notes and reflections.

The tone is established at the outset. “I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate,” Broyard writes. Gates describes this as “dandyish, even jokey,” but Broyard is neither striking a pose nor cracking wise. “When you learn that your life is threatened,” he explains, ”you can turn toward this knowledge or away from it.” What follows is an object lesson in turning toward the knowledge of one’s near death.

It is more than a matter of intellectual honesty. A sentence of death can be a gift—deliverence from the unknown into the cause of urgency. One is narrowed to the immediately relevant and no longer responsible for social expectations or graces:
I can’t help thinking there’s something comical about my friends’ behavior—all these witty men suddenly saying pious, inspirational things. They are not intoxicated as I am by my illness, but sobered. Since I refuse to, they’ve taken on the responsibility of being serious.Perhaps Gates cannot tell the difference between jocularity and wit. Jokes are appreciated by academics, but not an assemblage of Ideas put together with quickness and variety. Wit is Broyard’s weapon against despair, but also the preservation of his identity. He is defined, not by his cancer, but by his thought and words.

The best thing in the book is the long essay “The Patient Examines the Doctor.” Although he does not abandon his epigrammatic and allusive approach (his talent for developing a scene or argument was damaged by nineteen years of writing a regular book column for the New York Times), Broyard circles around and around a sharp and significant point. From his side, the patient and his doctor are a couple (“what the French call un couple malade, a marriage of doctor and patient”), which the doctor would do well to understand. Instead, the relationship between doctor and patient is too often like a marriage in which husband and wife no longer talk to each other. Broyard’s doctor was a famous urologist:
He knows all there is to know about the prostate, but I cannot sit down and have a talk with him about it, which I find a very great deprivation. . . . What a curious organ. What can God have been thinking when he designed it this way? I would like to have a meditation, a rumination, a lucubration, a bombination, about the prostate. I can’t do it. I’m forced to stop people on the street and talk to them about it.Okay, the last line is a joke. Until then, though, Broyard is making a serious point. A patient’s feelings toward his doctor are like the love that a wife feels for the husband who has fallen out of love with her. The problem is that most doctors cannot locate a middle ground between brutal directness, in medicine’s technical vocabulary, and pious, inspirational banalities.

If only for reprinting “What the Cystoscope Said” in a collection of Anatole Broyard’s own writing, Intoxicated by My Illness would deserve praise. It is better than that, however. It is capable of teaching physicians—teaching all of us—a different language for terminal disease.

Seven theses about the history of literary theory

(1.) Literary theory was not a philosophical or critical “school,” because it did not arise from the articulation of specific theoretical views. Nor was it a style, despite the weakness of many theorists for verbal jawbreakers and clouds of rhetorical incense; there was no constancy of form; there were too many differences of manner among the different theorists ranging from the downright argumentative behavior of Stanley Fish to the imperious condescension of Fredric Jameson. Literary theory was not a movement, because it had no common ideology (although it did have a common suspicion of other people’s ideology). Its conceptual unity was a mirage, disappearing the closer anyone came to it. What there was was a common enemy. Whether abused as “formalism” (Geoffrey Hartman), “intrinsic criticism” (Paul de Man), New Criticism with its “fixed object” and “plodding dullness” (Frank Lentricchia), or the “reign of interpretation” (Jonathan Culler), the status quo ante in American literary criticism was everywhere reviled. Theorists were united by their antipathies. Theory was a reaction.

(2.) Theory did not arrive with Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Georges Poulet, Jean Hippolyte, and Lucien Goldmann to attend the conference on the “Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man” held at Johns Hopkins University on October 18–21, 1966. This get-together belongs, as François Cusset says in French Theory, to its prehistory. Theory arrived when American literary academics began voluminously quoting Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Todorov, Poulet, Hippolyte, Goldmann (and Foucault!), substituting for argumentative logic, as Cusset says, a “newly enchanting crisscrossing of names. . . .”

(3.) Where theory did not break with the previous generation of Anglo-American critics was in assuming that literature was a school subject, and treating it as such. Literary theorists were less interested in breaking down and reassembling literary texts in their lectures, however, than in reciting the dazzling shibboleth of Barthes-Derrida-Lacan-Foucault. Where poems were once self-moved, now theoretical discourse was.

(4.) When asked by the Carleton Miscellany in 1964 to define “Graduate Training in English,” J. V. Cunningham wrote:

If I read books I should know how books are made and where to find them. If I read Shakespeare I should know it may not be Shakespeare. We call the one bibliography, the other textual criticism. If I read a language I should know the language, whether it be of Tudor London or contemporary Western American. We call this philology. If what I read has any real reference I should know something of the referent. We call this history. If the referent is, in part, as it is in Lycidas, prior literature, I should know that. We call this literary history. These are the disciplines of graduate study. . . .Twenty years later the disciplines were new and went by new names—“print culture,” “the death of the author,” “intertextuality,” l’arbitraire du signe, “Always historicize!” and the “reconstruction of the canon.” Perhaps these were more like doctrines than disciplines, but graduate students were nevertheless expected to be trained in them.

(5.) It is off the mark to characterize theory, like Harold Fromm in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (1991), for example, as the “reduction of literature to politics.” The theorists were never serious about their politics. It was merely how they ornamented—or, as the fashion magazines might say, how they accessorized—their critical prose. Ornamentation is not a style but a pretense to one. This is not to say that the theorists did not have a recognizable style, only that the “reduction of literature to politics” was not it. Their politics revealed their social origins: the theorists sprang from the Left. It was their class background, the relations into which they entered through their schooling, the old neighborhood for which they were nostalgic.

(6.) Although not especially political, theory was a tool that was well-designed for the academic Left. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” permitted the theorist to know better than everyone else—general readers, earlier critics, the author himself.

(7.) Politics also provided the terms by which theorists defended the value of theory, when they bothered to argue for it at all. Theory stood against the entrenched interests of cultural production. It was “calculated to lead,” said Robert Con Davis, “not just to theoretical interpretation but to radical change.” It prepared students for the revolutionary struggles ahead. The defense was silly and self-serving, of course, appealing mainly to the theorists’ idealized image of themselves. But it was also telling. It was an acknowledgment that theory could hardly be defended from within. Its value was to society at large. Thus did the latter-day Platonists carry the fight to aging Aristotelians.

The year’s best books

Practically everybody has a list of the year’s best books. Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog, even compiled a list of the top ten top-ten lists. Anna Clark goes the Times one better, ticking off eleven of the year’s best. Mark Athitakis offers his favorites of 2008, which is relieved somewhat by a compelling case for Ha Jin’s Free Life (“published a year too early” in 2007). Miriam Burstein gives an eclectic list of the books she has enjoyed this year. Largehearted Boy has put together a comprehensive list of the best-book lists.

C. Max Magee has it right, though, when he says that “a list of the ‘Best Books of 2008’ feels fairly meaningless when you walk down the aisles of your favorite bookstore or library.” These lists suffer under the “tyranny of the new,” he insists. A nice phrase; but what else would you expect from lists of the best books published during a particular year? Since the fifty-two weeks stretching from January 1 through December 31 are an arbitrary period of time, the annual best-book lists groan with pointlessness. Why not the best books by authors whose names end in N? Or the best never to have been issued in paperback? As I wrote many years ago in a very different context, “When an irrelevant criterion becomes paramount, the inevitable result is the humiliation of quality.” And also, I might have added, the elevation of mediocrity.

Consider, for example, a master list of the year’s best books from 1998. If Cyril Connolly is right that ten years is literary immortality then many of the following novels from the U.S. and U.K. should be happily familiar to you, since they were good enough for someone to nominate:

• Scott Anderson, Triage (American Library Association Notable Book)
• A. Manette Ansay, River Angel (New York Times Notable Book)
• Patricia Anthony, Flanders (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (Pulitzer Prize finalist; PEN/Faulkner Award finalist)
• Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Suzanne Berne, A Crime in the Neighborhood (Orange Prize)
• Julia Blackburn, The Leper’s Companions (James Tait Black Memorial Prize finalist; Orange Prize finalist)
• Lawrence Block, Everybody Dies (New York Times Notable Book)
• Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Marilyn Bowering, Visible Worlds (Orange Prize finalist)
• Michael Byers, The Coast of Good Intentions (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (New York Times Notable Book)
• J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Booker Prize)
• Jim Crace, Quarantine (New York Times Notable Book)
• Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Pulitzer Prize; PEN/Faulkner Award)
• David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress (James Tait Black Memorial Prize finalist)
• Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Dennis Danvers, Circuit of Heaven (New York Times Notable Book)
• Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting (Booker Prize short list)
• Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (New York Times Notable Book)
• Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (New York Times Notable Book)
• Michael Frayn, Headlong (Booker Prize short list; James Tait Black Memorial Prize finalist)
• Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls (National Book Award finalist)
• Jane Hamilton, The Short History of a Prince (Orange Prize finalist)
• Christopher Hart, The Harvest (James Tait Black Memorial Prize finalist)
• Nick Hornby, About a Boy (American Library Association Notable Book)
• John Irving, A Widow for One Year (New York Times Notable Book)
• Gayl Jones, The Healing (National Book Award finalist)
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (Pulitzer Prize finalist; PEN/Faulkner Award finalist; Orange Prize finalist)
• Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True (New York Times Notable Book)
• Alice McDermott, Charming Billy (National Book Award; American Library Association Notable Book)
• Timothy Mo, Renegade or Halo 2 (James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• Nicole Mones, Lost in Translation (New York Times Notable Book)
• Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Toni Morrison, Paradise (Orange Prize finalist)
• Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening (PEN/Faulkner Award finalist)
• Andrew O’Hagan, Our Fathers (Booker Prize short list)
• Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Richard Selzer, The Doctor Stories (PEN/Faulkner Award finalist)
• Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (New York Times Notable Book)
• Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (Booker Prize short list)
• Robert Stone, Damascus Gate (National Book Award finalist)
• Colm Toibin, The Blackwater Lightship (Booker Prize short list)
• Ardashir Vakil, Beach Boy (American Library Association Notable Book)
• Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (National Book Award finalist)

Just to scan this list quiets any anxiety that I might have missed a not-to-be-missed recent book. My teacher John Dizikes once told me that he never read a novel until it was at least ten years old—a shrewd practice. How many of the books on this list, outside of Borges’s, do you feel the same eagerness or responsibility to read as you do, say, Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark or Francine Prose’s Goldengrove?

If I am going to be honest I shall have to admit that the best book I read this year was Lolita. But then it is usually the best book I read during the year, since I reread it every year. I have to chuckle whenever I pick up the Vintage paperback with its blurb from Vanity Fair: “The only convincing love story of our century.” Thank goodness the blurb is outdated, because the truth is that Nabokov’s novel is the only convincing story of atonement and redemption ever written.

Update: I really should, like Roger O. Thornhill at an art auction, “get into the spirit of the proceedings here.” Here, then, are five recent additions to the library of Judaism, which should matter to anyone who wants to keep his collection current:

Justin Cammy et al., eds., Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). Includes essays by Cynthia Ozick, Hillel Halkin (“Writing Jewish”), Alan Mintz, Wisse’s brother David G. Roskies, and the young novelist Dara Horn (who is one of the editors). Also contains a bibliography of Wisse’s writing.

Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). A Jewish studies professor at Chicago, Fishbane accepts postmodernism’s challenge to theology, and sets out to reground the activity of philosophizing about God. Only then does he turn specifically to Jewish theology, concentrating upon interpretation (he is perhaps best known as the author of The Exegetical Imagination [1998], a study of how Judaism is shaped by the interpretation of sacred texts), halakhah and prayer, and less traditional stopping places.

Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka, eds., Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2008). A professor at the University of Toronto and a rabbi with Conservative semikhah, Novak is the author of weighty tomes—for once, the exact phrase—on Jewish/Christian dialogue, the concept of election, and covenantal politics. This Reader spoons out a generous but manageable sample.

Philip Rieff, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity, ed. Arnold M. Eisen and Gideon Lewis-Kraus (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). This posthumous edition is the final volume of his trilogy Sacred Order/Social Order. The late Philip Rieff (d. 2006) was convinced that there exists a permanent state of war “between those who assert that there are no truths, only readings, that is, fictions (which assume the very ephemeral status of truth for negational purposes) and what is left of . . . elites in the priesthood, rabbinate, and other teaching/directive elites dedicated to the proposition that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application in the light of the particular historical circumstance in which we live.” He fought on the latter side.

Eliezer Schweid, The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008). Schweid is the 1994 Israel Prize laureate; he teaches Jewish thought at the Hebrew University. Recently, expressing my unhappiness with Peter Cole’s anthology Hebrew Writers on Writing (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2008), which distorts the whole idea of Hebrew writing by narrowing it to prose fiction and verse, and asking a widely read young Israeli for the names of those who write Hebrew brilliantly in more traditional Jewish genres, I was told: “Eliezer Schweid.”

Why the university is dominated by the Left

On Bloggingheads.tv, Todd Gitlin takes up the “interesting question of why there are so few conservatives in the academy, or at least in the social sciences and the humanities. . . . I don’t know that there’s any research on it,” he says, going on to speculate that free-market conservatives are more drawn to commerce than to scholarship.

The more interesting question is why the Left dominates the social sciences and humanities. To answer that question might produce the reason there are so few conservatives in the academy. (Could it possbily be that the Leftists in charge of hiring decisions won’t hire them?) At all events, the radicalization of the university is old news. As George Will wrote four years ago in greeting the finding that 81% of humanities faculty in the U.S. are on the Left, “The great secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: ‘Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find.’ ” Pace Gitlin, though, there is some research on the question why.

In his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter sketched in a brilliant “Sociology of the Intellectual.” Things have not changed much in sixty odd years. The intellectuals he has in mind are distinguished by “active hostility to the social order.” Their job, as they see it, is “to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.” Not everyone who receives a university schooling ends up an intellectual, but a university schooling is nearly universal among intellectuals. The common training provides a common cause. Or, as Schumpeter phrases it, “the fact that their minds are all similarly furnished facilitates understanding between them and constitutes a bond.”

That is why, on the academic Left, “read Foucault” passes for a refutation. It is not merely that all university-trained intellectuals share the same references and citations, but what is more important, they accept the same auctores. Their lives have been changed by the same books. Small wonder that they progress rapidly “from the criticism of the text to the criticism of society,” for as Schumpeter observes, “the way is shorter than it seems.” It is shorter especially for those who read their favorite authors, not as literary critics nor as critics of the philosophical tradition, but as social critics.

Schumpeter traces the history of the intellectual from the monastery, where he was born, to the rise of capitalism, which “let him loose and presented him with the printing press.” Similarly, the patron slowly gave way in the last quarter of the eighteenth century to that “collective patron, the bourgeois public.” Although the intellectual conceived his role to épater the public, he found, much to his delight, that flabbergasting sells; the public would pay for his “nuisance value.”

The major change in the twentieth century was the expansion of the university—the emergence of Clark Kerr’s multiversity. The trend only accelerated in the years following the first edition of Schumpeter’s book. From 1930 to 1957 college enrollments in the U.S. more than doubled, and between 1960 and 1969 they doubled again, rising to over seven million. The faculty expanded along with enrollment.

The trouble is, as Schumpeter notes, the enormous expansion of the university created the conditions of what would now be called underemployment. “The man who has gone through a college or university,” he writes, “easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.” What is such a man to do? He “drift[s] into the vocations in which standards are least definite,” like journalism, literature, or scholarship, thus “swell[ing] the host of intellectuals. . . .”

The economic conditions breed discontent—the intellectual feels underappreciated and underpaid—and discontent breeds resentment toward the social order which does not recognize the intellectual’s genius and unique value. Add to this the fact that the system of emoluments seems capricious, rewarding some who are no more talented or accomplished than those who are deprived. Fern Kupfer, a four-book novelist who teaches at Iowa State University, fully understands the precariousness of her position:

When one of the graduate students in my [writing] program—looking longingly at my office, my piles of books, the few office hours posted on my door—confessed, “When I graduate, I want to do what you do,” I wanted to tell him: “You can’t. Because I’m already doing it.”Not You can, through hard work and literary achievement, but rather, Back off, boychik, I got here first. What are the chances that such an attitude, such a reality, will breed resentment in the longing student?

Hostility is the product of rationalization from personal experience. “[T]he intellectual’s righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism,” Schumpeter concludes, “simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts,” and such thinking is little different—little better—than “the theory of lovers that their feelings represent nothing but the logical inference from the virtues of the beloved.”

The analogy is exact. Love is not a rational choice, although should you ask any lover why he favors his beloved he will reply with a long list of “reasons.” If I love you because you are beautiful and brilliant, though, what becomes of my love when you lose your looks or perhaps your mind? So too with the modern university intellectual’s pose of social hostility. It does not arise from a rational analysis of the American order, but as a distortion of one’s own personal circumstances. I should make better money; I should get the social recognition of a doctor or lawyer (my education is equal to or greater than theirs). To conceal the neurosis of this resentment from myself, I generalize it, transforming it into a social ideal. Why should a businessman make more than a teacher? (If a plumber thinks he can earn $250,000, however, he’s a joke.)

Thus personal resentment and feelings of superiority are translated into an idealized image of social concern and responsibility. The humanities or social science professor, hating society, sees himself as the better man. And only wishes to associate with those who share his ideals—that is, those with equally idealized images of themselves.

Update: The last paragraphs above are not as clear as I would like them. What I am trying to say is that the Leftist professor’s idealized image of a more perfect social order (the Serpent’s “I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’ ”) is really his idealized image of himself. In Schumpeter’s phrase, it “represents the logical inference” from his feelings of superiority to the capitalist order.

Update, II: In the comments section, Novalis asks a hard question. Although I make a good case, “[i]s i[t] really that simple? Couldn’t it also be the case that academics really do hunger for more meaningful work than is commonly available under a capitalist system?” But are these an either/or? Mightn’t it be possible that the hunger for more meaningful work is a rationalization of academics’ resentment at their social and economic position? On this view, “meaning” becomes a substitute for status, riches, and real political influence or what Schumpeter calls “the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.”

Bad students and good

Two recent pieces—an essay by Joseph Epstein in the Weekly Standard and a blog post by Miriam Burstein over at the Little Professor—have turned my thoughts back to the college classroom.

Epstein and Burstein make an odd couple. Taking off from New York Times columnist David Brooks’s praise of the high educational attainment among President-elect Obama’s appointments, Epstein expresses his doubt about a familiar academic type, now crowding into Washington—the “good student.” Burstein concentrates her fire upon the good student’s biggest fan—professors who complain about bad students.

The good student, Epstein explains, is

the kid who works hard in high school, piles up lots of activities, and scores high on his SATs, and for his efforts gets into one of the 20 or so schools in the country that ring the gong of success. While there he gets a preponderance of A’s. This allows him to move on to the next good, or even slightly better, graduate, business, or professional school, where he will get more A’s still, and move onward and ever upward. His perfect résumé in hand, he runs only one risk—that of catching cold from the draft created by all the doors opening for him wherever he goes, as he piles up scads of money, honors, and finally ends up being offered a job at a high level of government.The one goal of the good student is the marker of success. And while he is still in school, of course, that marker is an A. (The reputation of his school is another such marker.) What is wrong with that? Epstein asks.

Because there is a difference between the mark and the success, or, if you prefer, between academic success and the whole point of going to school, which is to learn some things. As the political scientist Harvey Mansfield regularly points out on the first day of his classes, the average grade at Harvard is a B plus. In many classes, then, it does not require much effort to earn an A. Taking the time thoroughly to research the subject of a research paper, in fact, would put a student at a huge competitive disadvantage, especially if he is taking two or three other classes and must budget his time. In graduate school, I marveled at the course requirement that I was supposed to turn out a “publishable paper”—knocking off in a month or so what the course instructor took six to twelve times as long to complete.

As game theory ought to have taught professors, students’ course work is determined by the choices that other students are making and not by the professor’s academic standards (such as they are). Students know how the game is played. In J. V. Cunningham’s words,If silence fails, then grace
Your speech with commonplace,
And studiously amaze
Your audience with his phrase.Professors consent to be amazed by good students, who study how to amaze them—mainly by repeating their phrases.

They are also amazed because the good student’s coevals, they loudly complain, are so ignorant and write so badly. Burstein is right to draw attention to any signs of a backlash, however graced with English department commonplaces, to the culture of professorial complaint about students. It is indeed “toxic,” as she quotes an English professor, but not for the reason he says. He says that it is “toxic to the professional socialization of graduate students and new professors. . . .”

It is doubtful that merely stopping the complaints about students will improve the “professional socialization” of English professors. The current regimen of submitting to the authority of some dominant figure—known in the parlance as learning an “approach”—insures that young professors will (in the words of Burstein’s professor) “inoculate themselves against either self-inquiry or student criticism for the rest of their careers.” No, the reason that complaining about students is so “toxic” is that it encourages professors to feel superior to them, reinforcing the worst professorial habits.

What are professors, after all, but former A students? Their complaints are the condescension of the good student, who by an astonishing creative act reproduces his teacher’s exact words, for the bad student. The principle of achievement remains the same whether seated among the desks or standing in front of the class. As Loye Young writes in his blog, “Regurgitation of conventional wisdom is a well-tested path to tenure and subsequent promotion to faculty administration positions.”

There is much to complain about in students’ preparation and writing abilities. The problem lies not in themselves, however, but in their stars. Academic achievement or success is prized above knowledge, and that is the distemper afflicting American higher education. “In order to succeed,” François Crusset says in French Theory, discussing academic stars like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Stanley Fish, and Fredric Jameson, “the only cardinal rule is to be constantly intellectually innovative, showing an originality undefinable according to an endogenous criteria (because new thought is not always easily recognizable as such),” and requiring therefore external recognition: publication by the best presses, repeated citation by junior colleagues, job offers from better universities at higher salaries.

But here is the thing. Constant intellectual innovation is at odds with the acquisition of knowledge. A body of knowledge is the basic tool of a scholar’s trade, and to be constantly innovating new tools is to be constantly starting over. In an academic environment where the stars are rewarded for innovation, and students are rewarded for aping the latest trend, is it any wonder that few people know very much? The alternative, after all, is just not going to appeal to many:To a Friend, on her Examination for the Doctorate in English

by J. V. Cunningham

After these years of lectures heard,
Of papers read, of hopes deferred,
Of days spent in the dark stacks
In learning the impervious facts
So well you can dispense with them,
Now that the final day has come
When you shall answer name and date
Where fool and scholar judge your fate
What have you gained?
                                              A learnèd grace
And lines of knowledge on the face,
A spirit weary but composed
By true perceptions well-disposed,
A soft voice and historic phrase
Sounding the speech of Tudor days,
What ignorance cannot assail
Or daily novelty amaze,
Knowledge enforced by firm detail.

What revels will these trials entail,
What gentle wine confuse your head
While gossip lingers on the dead
Till all the questions wash away,
For you have learned, not what to say,
But how the saying must be said.

Back in the saddle again

Back from a week’s Thanksgiving vacation in California. Read a woeful 9/11 novel by Jess Walter called The Zero. My wife and I took the nieces and nephews to Borders for the annual Thanksgiving book-buy. (In lieu of Christmas gifts.) I enjoy the event, probably because it places me in the position of house authority on books. My niece Laura picked out William Trevor’s Story of Lucy Gault on my recommendation (she said that she likes novels in which characters face family crises), and my nephew Paul accepted Johnny Tremain. (His mother is a historian of colonial America. I suspect that the choice was a compromise.) I found myself at sea, however, when my nice Hannah wanted a recommendation for another writer like Stephanie Meyer. I had never heard of Stephanie Meyer! What kind of literary snob am I!