Calisher dead at 97

The novelist and story writer Hortense Calisher has died in her beloved New York at the age of ninety-seven. As the Times obituary notes, critics tended to split into two camps—those who preferred the novels and those “who found her prose style and approach to narrative better suited to short stories.” I belong to the latter camp. Here, for instance, is the opening of “In the Absence of Angels,” the title story of her first collection (1951), a story set in a women’s prison:

Before cockcrow tomorrow morning, I must remember everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz. It is not at all strange that I should use the word “cockcrow,” for, like most of the others here, I have only a literary knowledge of prisons. If someone among us were to take a poll—that lax, almost laughable device of a world now past—we would all come up with about the same stereotypes: Dickens’ Newgate, no doubt, full of those dropsical grotesques of his, under which the sharp shape of liberty was almost lost; or, from the limp-leather books of our teens, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” that period piece of a time when imprisonment could still be such a personal affair. I myself recall, from a grade-school of thirty years ago, a piece named “Piccola,” called so after a flower that pushed its way up through a crevice in a stone courtyard and solaced the man immured there—a general, of God knows what political coloration.The voice was quirky, but it could be a little tiring to listen to; and the occasion retreated into literature. “I've begun to think that any art form is avant-garde to begin with,” she wrote in the preface to her Collected Stories (1975), “by having hurtled itself over and through our animal and psychic barriers to become—itself.” And that is the impression even her best stories give—as if she were trying to reinvent the form at each go. “In literature one need never say farewell,” she added. She never did. Her last novel, Sunday Jews, was published when she was ninety-one. Calisher’s fiction will always be there for those who admire the courage of her continual fresh starts.

The authority to comment

A quarter century ago, Gerald Graff argued that propositional assertions are a key element of fiction customarily overlooked or discounted by critics. Fiction is “hyper-assertive rather than non-assertive,” he said, able to make “stronger, more universalizable” claims than reliably “factual” discourses like history and philosophy.¹

By the time I journeyed to Northwestern University to study under him, Graff had not so much renounced this view as he had walked away from it like a bad memory. It was perhaps the last remaining scar of Yvor Winters’s influence upon him. (Graff wrote a dissertation under Winters that became Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, his first book. Although I was drawn to him because he had been Winters’s student, Graff was non-committal about that passage of his curriculum vitae, and would say very little in reply to my eager questions. He talked me out of writing a dissertation on Winters, his wife Janet Lewis, and the “school” of poets and critics associated with them.)

In the years since then the assertorical view of literature has grown in my estimation. Consider the following passage from The Longest Journey. When Agnes returns to Sawston from a visit with Mrs Failing, she learns that an enemy has come and gone, and Rickie spoke with him! About what? Rickie won’t say. It is not that he was reluctant to tell her. “It was only the feeling of pleasure that he wished to conceal,” Forster writes. “Even when we love people, we desire to keep some corner secret from them, however small: it is a human right: it is personality.” What else are these if not assertions, demanding to be weighed as such? They invite the response “True, true.”

To deny that literature is a compound or even miscellaneous form of discourse, which necessarily includes assertions, is to miss a large part of what is going on in literary texts. Many novels contain what I call the digression-into-theme. Roland Merullo’s Fidel’s Last Days, for example, in a passage I merely alluded to in my review, swerves into the following at a crucial moment when Carolina Aznar Perez meets her contact in Cuba:

From the beginning of her career, from the first days of her CIA training in a windowless room in northern Virginia, she had been taught the most essential lesson: People are human begins first, and spies second. Human beings first, and soldiers second. Human beings first and government officials second. The greatest of mistakes was to forget the fact that in addition to their official duties, men and women were motivated by their individual psychological makeup, their need for sex, love, admiration, money, revenge, protection, security, approval. Bush, Clinton, Castro, Hussein, Kennedy, Mussolini, Hannibal, all the way back to Pontius Pilate and the Old Testament kings—there was the title and the office, and then, beneath that, buried in the mystery of the human personality, something else. History was the sum total of these “something else’s.”Merullo begins the passage by attributing his assertions to a “lesson” that Carolina learned in her CIA training. By the end of the passage, however, this pretense has dropped away. It is difficult to believe that a CIA trainer would drill recruits in the lesson that History was the sum total of these “something else’s.” That lesson is Merullo’s. One might almost suspect that his novel was written up to this proverb.

What gives fictional assertions their validity? They are not produced by logical argument; they are not always corroborated, as neither Forster’s nor Merullo’s are, by the evidence of the drama. My hypothesis is that they are validated by authority. Because you are taken in by the author’s world—because you are persuaded that it exists, that it is peopled by the characters he sets in motion, performing acts that he tells you happened—you come by degrees to trust his authority to comment upon other worlds too, including yours.
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1. Gerald Graff, “Literature as Assertions,” in American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age, ed. Ira Konigsberg (Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, 1981), pp. 135–61.

Recommendations from elsewhere

An excellent essay on Marilynne Robinson by Garret Keizer, a former Episcopal priest and author of Help: The Original Human Dilemma. (H/t: Elegant Variation.) Will this do for a defense of Home, Frank, or must I still write one of my own?

Brad Bigelow suggests Charles Simmons’s 1978 novel Wrinkles, a “remarkable work of art” about aging.

Richard Marcus has good words for Martin Millar’s 1987 debut novel Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation, just reprinted by Soft Skull Press.

Patrick Kurp is reliving the excitement of reading The Adventures of Augie March, which excitement (I can testify from the recent experience of reading it in the hospital) never goes away.

Mark Athitakis, as I noted below, just finished Ron Rash’s Serena. A “thoughtful portrait of the entire structure of a logging town and how various classes behave within it,” he concludes.

After reading Joseph O’Neill’s overpraised Netherland, Nigel Beale goes back to the far more “original, playful, celebratable” London Fields by Martin Amis.

Afaa M. Weaver recalls John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, and finds it entangled with his own life.

Jessa Crispin is angry at Marghanita Laski (twenty years dead), whose 1949 novel Little Boy Lost reduced her to tears, despite its lack of sentimentality.

Meanwhile, I lent my copy of Goldengrove to a friend—one of the people for whom I started this blog, actually. She returned it and said simply, “Wow.”

Full of Life

In the Manchester Guardian’s book blog, Rob Woodard looks back at John Fante’s Ask the Dust, a 1939 novel which has been described as a masterpiece. Everyone seems quite taken by the novel’s influence upon Charles Bukowski, who called Fante “my God” and was single-handedly responsible for getting his work back into print. (The sorry thought that there would have been no Bukowski without Fante is almost enough to make you wish there had been no Fante.) Ask the Dust is the second volume of a trilogy—or perhaps a tetralogy, if his late-in-life novel Dreams from Bunker Hill, dictated to his wife four decades later, after Fante had gone blind from diabetes, is included—of vaguely proletarian novels about a second-generation immigrant’s struggle up from poverty and fight for a piece of the American pie.

Mark Athitakis linked to Woodard’s post on Fante yesterday, which is how I came upon it. And in one of those marvelous coincidences that blogging seems to encourage, earlier today Athitakis wrote about the novelist Ron Rash, mentioning his “notion that strong female characters are lacking in American fiction.” It’s a fairly stupid notion (did I mention Isabel Archer, Mrs Todd and her mother in The Country of the Pointed Firs, Cather’s Ántonia, Glenway Wescott’s Grandmothers, Janet Lewis’s Wife of Martin Guerre? Just how many names do you want?). By coincidence, however, John Fante also contributed a strong female character to American fiction. In what is, to my mind, his real masterpiece.

Originally published by Little, Brown in 1952, Full of Life was Fante’s third published (fourth written) novel. Upon its publication, the critic Joseph Henry Jackson warned in the Los Angeles Times that it was “in danger of being underestimated.” And that is exactly what happened. Even in the fifties, the novel was probably better known as the source for the 1956 film starring the incomparable Judy Holliday. Released by Columbia Pictures, it was directed by Richard Quine, who later made Sex and the Single Girl and How to Murder Your Wife. Although its screenplay was written by Fante himself, the film almost entirely de-Catholicizes the story. (Is that even a word?) It removes the Catholic subplot from Fante’s novel and drains it of (most) its Catholic meaning.

John Fante (the narrator bears the author’s name) is a thirty-year-old writer with three novels under his belt. He lives in “that jumbled perversity called Los Angeles, right off Wilshire Boulevard,” with his 24-year-old wife Joyce. She is pregnant with their first child. And they have recently bought their first house.

One morning when he is upstairs in the bathtub, Fante hears a scream (“a theater scream, Barbara Stanwyck trapped by a rapist”), and he rushes downstairs to find that Joyce has fallen through the termite-infested kitchen floor to the ground three feet below. Strapped for cash, Fante decides to return home to the small town of San Juan in the Sacramento Valley and enlist Papa, “the greatest bricklayer in California, the noblest builder of all!” “He’ll do it for nothing,” Fante crows.

It’s not that simple. An exile’s return never is. Mama and Papa are first-generation immigrants from Abruzzi. They offer their son food, prayer, advice. Now, Fante has tried his best to shed all evidence of his Italian ethnicity, including his Catholicism, and to assimilate into L.A., where he enjoys “the temper of our time,” “the snarl of cars and the hooting of busses.” He angrily rejects his parents’ beliefs and practices: “Superstition,” he says. “Ignorance.” But when Papa agrees to return with Fante to L.A., he brings the superstition and ignorance with him.

The clash between Fante’s modernity and Papa’s traditionalism turns the L.A. house upside down. Papa takes one look at it and will have nothing further to do with the kitchen repair. “That’s no job for me,” he says. “Get a carpenter.” He is a stonemason. What he wants is to build Fante and Joyce a new fireplace—a massive structure of Arizona flagstone, six feet high and ten feet across. “For my grandson,” Papa says, dreaming of Fante’s unborn child. “It’ll last a thousand years. Nothing in the world’s gonna knock down that fireplace. Last longer than anything in Los Angeles.” Fante reflects:

I pictured the scene, not a thousand years hence, but only ten or fifteen, when our house would doubtless be torn down to make room for a parking lot, cars driving in and out, but always around Papa’s indestructible fireplace, because it defied all efforts to tear it down.Fante is opposed, but Papa finds an unlikely ally in Joyce. Although she is seven months pregnant, she throws herself into the project. She mixes the mortar for Papa: “All day long she prodded the mortar with a hoe, kneading it, stroking it, adding water. She was like a child making mud pies.” She shovels sand into the mortar box, carts it indoors. Fante is appalled. “Keep this up and you’ll have a miscarriage,” he warns. “Won’t hurt her,” Papa disagrees. “Back in Abruzzi, woman works right up to the last day, washing clothes, cleaning house, fixing the land.” “Look, Papa,” Fante says. “This isn’t Italy.”

But it is. By building the massive fireplace, Papa transforms the house into an Italian sanctum. And its influence upon Joyce is deep and unsettling. She begins to find herself drawn to the Church of Rome.

At first Fante is amused, dismissing her religious stirrings as a phase of pregnancy which will “pass as soon as her figure returned.” Joyce had always been an atheist, which made things easy for him. He knows how hard it is to be a good Catholic. “To be a good Catholic,” he muses, “you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross.” Joyce is serious, though. She reads her way from Chesterton and Belloc and Thomas Merton and François Mauriac to canon law, Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, St. Augustine, the papal encyclicals, and the Catholic Encyclopedia.She went shopping for rosaries, a statue of Saint Elizabeth, and a number of crucifixes. She brought little bottles of holy water and attached a bronze font inside the door of her bedroom, within easy reach of her hand, so that she could make the sign of the cross with consecrated water whenever she entered the room. The statue of Saint Elizabeth went on an elaborate knick-knack shelf in the corner. She heaped flowers before it, lit candles, and read the saint’s works.Joyce takes instruction. And she ends by deciding to convert. Fante goes to church with her. It all comes back to him, “the memory of the old days when [he] was a boy and this cool and melancholy place meant so much,” and because he wants to please his wife by consecrating their marriage in a church ceremony, he agrees to an interview with a no-nonsense priest who, like him, is of Italian descent, establishing between them a “violent familiarity.”     “Well, let’s get down to business. Fante, your wife intends to join the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Any objections?”
     “No objections, Father. . . .”
     “And what about you? Your father here, this great and wonderful man, tells me that he sweated and toiled to give you a fine Catholic education. But now you read books, and, if you please, you write books. Just what do you have against us, Fante? You must be very brilliant indeed. Tell me all about it. I’m listening.”
     “I don’t have anything against the Church, Father. It’s just that I want to think—”
     “Ah, so that’s it! The infallibility of the Holy Father. So you want to know if the Bishop of Rome is really infallible in matters of faith and moral. Fante, I shall clear that up for you at once: he is. Now, what else is bothering you?”And one by one, the priest dispatches Fante’s doctrinal hesitations with the rapidfire logic and delivery of Groucho Marx. One of the funniest scenes in postwar American fiction ends with Fante concluding that the priest will “never be a bishop” and his wife’s agreeing, although she adds that “he’s really a saint.”

Despite himself, Fante discovers that “it was not so easy to come back to your church, that the Church changeless was always there, but that [he] had changed.” He finds that he is just not ready.Born a Catholic, I could not bring myself to return. Perhaps I expected too much; a shudder of joyful recognition, the dazzling splendor of faith reborn. Whatever it was, I could not return. There before me was the road, the signposts clearly marking the direction to peace of the soul. I could not take the road. I could not believe that it was so easy.Four days before her child is born, Joyce enters the Church. Fante immediately feels the change in her—“a maturity, a quality of womanhood not associated with her pregnancy; a tradition, rather an identification with Mother Church, with the Church’s high reverence for women. . . .” He tries again, but again finds that he is not ready for confession. Papa attempts to force him. “Get in there.” He pushes his son toward the confessional, but Fante clings to a pew and refuses to budge.

Because of its artless candor, Full of Life is the most probing account I have ever read of the religious return. Fante is honest about his doubts, but he is equally honest about the highs and lows, the joy and tedium, of Catholicism. He does not withdraw from the religious experience into a well-armored skepticism. As a consequence, he finds himself surprisingly moved to tears by the ceremony in which Joyce is accepted into the Church.

The novel eschews any ambition to be “profound.” Its surface appears to be shallow, quick-paced, dialogic rather than discursive. It does not worry theological problems; it strokes the ordinary nap of domestic intimacy. But it also knows the depth of intimacy which religious feeling opens up and reveals. There are other reasons to prize the novel. Italian-American novelists like Mario Puzo, Hamilton Basso, and Paul Gallico may have achieved a larger readership, and poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima may have received more respectful critical attention, but no one has ever improved upon Fante’s portrait of the tension between two generations of Italian-Americans and the mixed-blessing debt that the second owes the first. Precisely because of its humor and lightness of tone, Full of Life is that unexpected thing—not The Power and the Glory, but a great religious novel that appears out of nowhere, while you thought you were watching Father Knows Best or I Love Lucy.

The novel is in print, in paperback, from Harper Perennial.

The meaning of patriotism

My Ántonia is a novel that aspires to the Virgilian ambition to be “the first . . . to bring the Muse into my country.” The phrase is Cather’s translation of two lines, slightly misquoted, from the Georgics (3.10–11), Virgil’s celebration of the rural life: “Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas. . . .” Jim Burden’s professor at Lincoln, modeled upon Basil Gildersleeve’s pupil James T. Lees, had “explained to us that ‘patria’ here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born.” The novel represents, then, not “the triumph of mind over Nebraska,” as the critic T. K. Whipple memorably quipped, but rather a full-length redefinition of patriotism. Cather traces the love of one’s country back to the local, the nearby, the small community in which a person is rooted, and as the title of My Ántonia suggests, in the people who stay on there, especially the women who bear children and raise families there, “battered but not diminished” by experience, leaving “images in the mind that did not fade—that grew stronger with time.”

To say the least, this is not the customary meaning of patriotism, then or now. As Woodrow Wilson prepared to take the nation to war in the winter of 1916–17, former president William Howard Taft—the man whom Wilson had defeated to win the White House—said that the country was “seeing an exhibition of patriotism that we have not seen since the days of the Civil War. We are going to rally behind the President.” In an editorial the next day, the New York Times welcomed “[t]his awakening of national patriotism, this solidarity of opinion,” which had routed “the ignominous pacifism preached so loudly and widely.”[1]

Cather was not a pacifist, but as she told Mary Jewett in a December 1916 letter, she did not believe that real happiness was possible until the war was over. That winter she conceived and wrote the bulk of My Ántonia. Her intention was not to write an anti-war novel, but to reclaim patriotism from those like Taft and the Times who identified it with solidarity of opinion and the cause of world-wide misery.

She announced her theme in the opening pages. Writing in her own voice to establish the novel’s pretense of being a formless memoir by another hand, she describes its author. Jim is a friend from childhood—they “grew up together in the same Nebraska town,” sharing a “kind of freemasonry”—and is now the legal counsel for a railroad company. “He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches,” Cather writes. “His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development.”

What follows is the story of a country’s development. Jim arrives in Black Hawk, Nebraska, an orphan at the age of ten, peering out and seeing “nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” After leaving home for law school, he returns twenty years later to visit Ántonia, where she is living with her husband and ten or eleven children “on a farm, in one of the loneliest countries in the world.” And that’s where the novel ends. In between he includes the famous tale of the Russian wedding party (bride and groom are thrown to the wolves), because a country is also built up by the tales that immigrants bring to it, and the histories of those, like him, who have exiled themselves. One does not have to live in a country to belong to it, as Jim knows.

A country needs more than exiles, however. That is why his book is about Ántonia and not Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, Norwegian Anna, or any of the other girls with whom they grew up. As his New York editor says in explaining why Jim has written an entire book about a Czech-American farmer’s wife, “[T]his girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.” She provides meaning to the country by staying on. A country also includes its exiles, but only because some people, predominately women, maintain it as a home to which the exiles can return. To understand that a country is primarily defined by them is to grasp what Cather means by patriotism.
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[1] “The New Birth of Patriotism,” New York Times (February 6, 1917): 7. In his address to the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Taft called for a draft, which Wilson proclaimed with bipartisan support three months later.

More chance than zero chance

Sooner or later every book-blogger suffers a bout of restless leg syndrome. The self-doubt. The hand-wringing. The earnest resolutions. Darby M. Dixon III is better than anyone at capturing the tones of a blogger’s existential Angst (h/t: The Millions).

Dixon’s answer to the why-O-why-do-I-do-this stumper seems inadequate, but only at first. “[W]hat that reason for blogging is, is that I’ve got a passion for fiction and that that’s something other people ought to know about,” Dixon writes. (People ought to know about the fiction, he means, not the passion.) The answer seems inadequate to him too, because it does nothing whatever “to nullify or eliminate any of the sources of gut-wrenching guilt that accompany every half-hearted post, every one-line entry, every radio-silent week (or two) (or three).” But it does, as he puts it, “leave the door open” to an effect that is not altogether negligible. “What it means”—what his passion for fiction, translated into blogging means—“is that there’s more chance than zero chance that some of what’s in my head might make someone reach for a book that they might not have reached for otherwise.”

Even though I have only been keeping this Commonplace Blog for eight-four days, or have only reached the seventy-seven post mark (which seems to be the standard unit of measure for these things), I agonize about it on a daily basis. Since I am an academic, I worry that it doesn’t “count” as publication. I am afraid that I am wasting my time. I fret that no one is reading the blog; and then, when someone does read it, I fret about my reputation, my immortal part, about being called “silly” and a “racist.” (Epitaph: “he was a silly racist.”) I wonder if I am showing too much ankle, or perhaps should show a little more. I am assailed by a sudden lack of confidence that the books I have been praising recently—Francine Prose’s Goldengrove, Roland Merullo’s Fidel’s Last Days, Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels—are the really important books of our day. I torture myself with the thought that I am the only one in creation who drops the article in a book title when it follows a possessive. (Revised epitaph: “he was a silly racist stickler.”)

There are compensations, however. To blog is to get out from under the heavy hand of editors who believe they can write better than you. In recent years I’ve had editors alter my sentences to “read better,” and have opened the print version to find that allusions or metrical language or parallel structure or sometimes even grammar had disappeared—and cliché or nonce words had replaced them—because the editors failed to recognize them. To blog means also that you need never compose another begging letter. You don’t have to recommend yourself for a plumb assignment any more. If you want to review a book you review it—even if it were published half a century ago. And as a result, no more envy. No more opening the book pages and saying, “Why did they give it to that yutz? What about me?” (No more book pages at all any more, or vanishingly few, but that’s another story.) You got something to say, you go ahead and say it.

Patrick Kurp, who has been at this for going on three years, wrote in response to the anxious noises that I was making:

Writing about books, we’re already a minority, and writing about the sort of books we value and with some care makes us a minority within a minority. . . . Over the weekend I received a lengthy e-mail from a retired lawyer from Seattle, now living in Thailand, who wanted to talk about Walker Percy and Philip Larkin. That’s a guy I never would have known without the blog.For that matter, Kurp is a guy I never would have known without this blog. And as he suggests, the books and their readers are the whole point. I started blogging in part because friends, knowing that I am an English professor, would ask my opinion of writers they couldn’t make up their minds about or wanted recommendations—not for books to kill the time softly, but to improve themselves as readers. Gradually over the last year, while I have been on leave from teaching, I have begun to realize that there is an underground of book lovers in this country who read every chance they get, who do not wholly trust their own judgment, who would follow a book discussion to the promised end if they only could.

I am not saying that we book-bloggers serve them, but better them than ourselves. As long as there is more chance than zero chance that some reader somewhere will discover that, even if she is a minority of a minority she is not a minority of one, perhaps this blogging is not an utter self-indulgence.

Fidel’s Last Days

Roland Merullo, Fidel’s Last Days (New York: Shaye Areheart, 2008). 268 pp. $23.00.

Just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution comes Roland Merullo’s ninth novel, a political thriller about a conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Fidel’s Last Days is neither alternate history nor an elbow-nudging political roman à clef. To keep his novel from being overtaken by events, Merullo sets it at some indeterminate time in the recent past or near future. The book knows nothing of an acute intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding and a transfer of power to Raúl Castro. And when he introduces an American politician—one of the conspirators is the vice president of the United States—Merullo lists no party affiliation. Unlike such recent political fiction as Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint or Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, his novel does not depend upon partisanship for its appeal. Apologists for Castro won’t like it, but they hardly constitute a major party, even in the U.S.

Merullo’s description of the vice president puts his true allegiances on display. Edmund Lincoln is rich, having “made a fortune more quickly than seemed mathematically possible,” but despite six years as governor and two terms as senator and vocal opposition from “the liberal press,” he remains something of a mystery: “no one seemed to know the full extent of his influence,” although it is pretty clear that he need not inform any higher-up of his decisions (the “president was a pretty face, a figurehead”). The eyes of a certain kind of reader will widen with the expectation that Merullo intends to draw a portrait of Dick Cheney, but that would be to mistake his method. Rather than ripping from the headlines, Merullo takes hints from them. His real interest is in carefully building up a world in which such a vice president might live and labor, a co-conspirator in a plot to overthrow a dictator.

A secretive non-governmental organization called the Orchid, “founded by men who remained miraculously anonymous” and “staffed largely by former intelligence employees,” has undertaken the Havana Project—an international conspiracy to remove Fidel Castro. Ex-CIA agent Carolina Aznar Perez, recruited seven years before, has been assigned to smuggle the weapon into Cuba. She is well-suited to the role. Not only is she a onetime spook; she is also the daughter of fugitives from Castro’s island paradise. Her uncle Roberto Aznar, or “as he was known in émigré circles, the Grand One,” is an anti-Castro leader of the “Miami Diaspora.” Carolina has been raised on the belief that “[i]f what you did ultimately helped people—the Cuban people especially—then it had God’s blessing.”

In Cuba, meanwhile, Carlos Arroyo Gutierrez has been selected to carry out the murder. Minister of Health and Castro’s personal physician for six years, Carlos is well-placed to realize the long-deferred dreams of the anticastroistas. Not only do monthly checkups leave him alone with el Comandante; he too has become an opponent of the regime. An “enormous hatred” has been growing in him compounded of horror, the murder of dissidents and suspected counter-revolutionaries, “the constant fear, the cascade of lies,” with Castro’s secret police “at the center of it all.”

Merullo stitches the two panels of the plot tightly together, alternating between Carolina’s and Carlos’s part in it while turning aside occasionally to glance at a Communist official, another conspirator, or a traitor. If there are no pleasingly round characters the reason is that Merullo has rejected E. M. Forster’s famous advice in Aspects of the Novel “to pot with plot, break it up, boil it down. Let there by those ‘formidable erosions of contour’ of which Nietzsche speaks.” He has written a thriller precisely because it is one of the few contemporary genres that relies upon plot in the old sense of a scheme to achieve some unwelcome end. Character is reduced to drama rather than drama (whatever drama there is) rising like waves of heat from character.

But why a political thriller? If Irving Howe was right that a political novel is “a novel in which the political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting” then Fidel’s Last Days is not a political novel. Although there is enough political talk, it is on the level of the “common vision” belonging to the Orchid’s three founders:

Throughout history there have always been destructive and constructive forces. As the world has grown smaller, those forces have become concentrated. Democracy is on the side of good, as you can imagine. And we support democracy and free-market principles wherever we can. Avidly. At the same time, as you can also no doubt imagine, democratic process can be cumbersome. The forces of evil know this, and take advantage of it. In certain instances, even the most well-meaning governments act too slowly, or in too much of a mixed fashion. The full might of their goodness cannot be brought to bear. Which is a problem the forces of evil are not burdened by. For instance, our government has a policy of not assassinating political leaders. A moral stance. And yet, think of the lives and trouble that could have been saved if assassinations could be used judiciously.If this sounds more like a businessman’s creed than a philosophy of governance, that’s not surprising. Two of Orchid’s founders are “heads of large conglomerates,” and all three are fabulously wealthy. Merullo intends the speech to come across as abstract and rather pallid, because it is his conviction that men and women are motivated not by principle but by concrete experience.

Far more authentic, and more representative of the novel’s tone, is Carlos’s lover Elena:Here, in Cuba, the people have made a life, in spite of everything, against the greatest odds. You’re going to destroy that now? And build what in its place? Do you even know?This is the voice of whatever is the opposite of ideology—call it the anti-politics of unexceptional life. Not that Merullo denies the existence of evil nor even avoids the word. The difference between Elena and her beloved Carlos, who misses her warm presence in bed and breakfast with her in their apartment after she leaves him, is that life under totalitarianism, which teaches the Cubans to trust no one, which causes the officials to become the men they once cursed, which turns the faces of ordinary citizens self-protectively away from them, is for him “no way to live.”

What is required to bring about “some measure of truth in [his] life, some measure of goodness in [his] country,” however, is not itself truthful or good. After executing a political prisoner upon a directive from the head of the secret police, Carlos throws his lot in with the conspirators, and to escape detection, to keep functioning, he must operatein full deceit mode. It was strange: He’d always thought of himself as a truthful man. Now, lately, lying had become as natural to him as taking a breath.Something similar happens to Carolina. She has devoted her whole life to a career in espionage, but she remains torn: “some quiet, nagging tone sounded in the back of her thoughts.” And she wonders regularly whether she would not be happier if she were married with a house full of children.

This is Merullo’s true subject. What becomes of men and women when they commit themselves to a cause greater than themselves, sacrificing personal integrity, ambition, close relationships, even their lives? A political ideology, as Merullo knows, is merely one variety of such a cause. As Carolina reflects,The life she lived was a lonely life of constant small and not so small deceptions in the name of a great cause. It had become a life of almost continuous wariness. Not fear. She was rarely afraid. But everything in her working life had a shadow over it now, false fronts, a dimension not visible to the eye of the ordinary world.Merullo owes more to Eric Ambler than to Martin Cruz Smith, to whom one reviewer unfavorably compared him. An assassination conspiracy is for him just one corner of the usual politics, which denies “the mystery of the human personality,” burying it under title and office. History, he knows, is the sum total of those mysteries.
____________________

Merullo’s previous novels:

• Leaving Losapas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).

• A Russian Requiem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993).

• Revere Beach Boulevard (New York: Holt, 1998).

• In Revere, in Those Days (New York: Shaye Areheart, 2002).

• A Little Love Story (New York: Shaye Areheart, 2005).

• Golfing with God: A Novel of Heaven and Earth (Chapel Hill, N.Car.: Algonquin, 2005).

• Breakfast with Buddha (Chapel Hill, N.Car.: Algonquin, 2007).

• American Savior: A Novel of Divine Politics (Chapel Hill, N.Car.: Algonquin, 2008).

Richard John Neuhaus, 1936–2009

Father Richard John Neuhaus has died of complications from cancer at the age of seventy-two.

A native Canadian who emigrated to the United States, Neuhaus was a preacher’s kid who followed his father into the Lutheran clergy. He served as pastor of St. John the Evangelist, a predominantly black and Hispanic church in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and during the Vietnam War joined with Abraham Joshua Heschel to form Clergy and Laity Concerned, an anti-war group. In 1968 he was a delegate to the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, representing Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

Roe v. Wade changed everything for him. By 1984 he had left New York to start up the Center for Religion and Society at the Rockford Institute, a northern Illinois think tank founded in 1976 to “preserve the institutions of the Christian West.” Five years later, in a dispute over “the racist and anti-Semitic tones” of its magazine, Neuhaus was “forcibly evicted” from the Institute (the phrases are his). He returned to New York to create First Things, a bimonthly journal of religion and ideas.

In 1990 he converted to Catholicism, and the next year was ordained a priest by Cardinal John O’Connor of New York. As the foremost public intellectual advocating the return of religion to The Naked Public Square (the title of his best-known book, published in 1984), Neuhaus influenced an entire generation of young writers, as can be seen from the beautiful tributes to him by Jody Bottum, the current editor of First Things, John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary (the Jewish first cousin of First Things), and Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

Neuhaus was my editor just once—I reviewed a biography of Jerzy Kosinski for him—although he sent me a complimentary letter after I had reviewed The Best American Poetry, asking me to recommend some poets who might read well in his journal’s pages. I also met him once, briefly, when I was in New York for a job interview, crashing with Jody Bottum in Neuhaus’s upstairs apartment. Even in our short encounter, I was touched by his genuine interest.

Neuhaus wrote seventeen books by himself and coauthored, edited, and contributed to many more. The book that has meant the most to me is As I Lay Dying, a brief meditation that Neuhaus wrote after surviving (barely) a bungled medical treatment that resulted in the rupture of an undiagnosed intestinal tumor. An expansion and development of “Born toward Dying,” an essay that had originally been published in First Things in 2000, the book ranges across the literature of death (the Book of Job, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, the Dies Irae) to conclude:

There is nothing that remarkable in my story, except that we are all unique in our living and dying. Early on in my illness a friend gave me John Donne’s wondrous Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. The Devotions were written a year after Donne had almost died and then lingered for months at death’s door. He writes, “Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university, and gone a great way in a little time, by the furtherance of a vehement fever.” So I too have been to a good university, and what I have learned, what I have learned most importantly, is that, in living and dying, everything is ready now.I first read Neuhaus’s As I Lay Dying about a year ago, when I was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic prostate cancer and given only a short time to live. My great friend Bedford Clark put the book into my hands, and Father Neuhaus stayed by my bed as I received chemotherapy and struggled not to slip beneath the waves of despair. A year later, not fully recovered but responding to treatment and with a much better prognosis, I too know that I have been to a good university. But I also had a good professor in Father Neuhaus, who taught me to make everything ready.

May he rest in peace.

Identity and freedom

Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer was greeted by a protest over her country’s war in Gaza when she took the court in Auckland, New Zealand, earlier today, Haaretz reports. “I am not the government of Israel and I am not representing Israel in politics,” Peer said after her match, which she lost. “I am a tennis player and that’s what I represent now.”

By common opinion, she does not have that choice. She is identified with Israel and is not at liberty to dissociate herself. That she prefers to identify herself with tennis is inconsequential. Identity is a passive construction; the object of classification is made to appear the subject of her relationship with a group or institution by the neat trick of hiding the agency at work. She doesn’t decide for herself whether to represent Israel or tennis; the decision is made for her. Identity on the current conception entails a loss of freedom.

Toni Morrison has pleaded with us “to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served.”¹ Fat chance. We are all in the group classification business now. To identify a person is more momentous than recognizing her. She must be assigned to her group, moved around on a board like a cast-metal token. (And in the game of group classification, she can only occupy one square at a time.) Thus we substitute representation for responsibility:

I can hear you say, ‘What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!’ And you’re right. I leap to agree with you. I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? . . . Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.²Shahar Peer does not agree to represent the Israeli government, and I do not agree that the “characteristics” that I share with the writers I admire include “white maleness” nor even that it is “significant.”³ But our disagreement is not acknowledged, and so we are not recognized. Why should anyone be surprised, then, when Israeli tennis players and “white male” critics seem so irresponsible, declining to answer for their genocidal country or their racist canons? Whom should they answer to, seeing that they have no identity in themselves?
____________________

1. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 90.

2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 14. Originally published in 1952.

3. “Significance is always ‘meaning-to,’ never ‘meaning-in,’ ” and unless the two are carefully distinguished “the result is bound to be a now familiar state of confusion,” for significance is literally without limit (E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967], p. 63).

A family of readers

One of my favorite family photos shows me as an infant lying in the summer sunshine on a blanket next to my young father, who had recently graduated from Indiana State Teachers College and taken a job as the science teacher at a small-town high school not far from Crawfordsville. If you look closely you can see that he is reading The Grapes of Wrath. Years later, scouring the bookshelves in my parents’ room, I found that old copy of Steinbeck. But I also found, and just as eagerly read, Morton Thompson’s Not as a Stranger (the scene in which Dr. Lucas Marsh tends to a young boy who has docked his own penis put me off medicine forever), The Caine Mutiny, Andersonville, Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent. My folks may have read bestsellers, but they read serious bestsellers—big important social-issues stuff.

My two-year-old son Isaac has begun asking to take books to bed with him. The next morning he will be found lying quietly, on his stomach, like his grandfather in the photo, turning the pages and carefully studying what he finds there. Like all three of my boys, he enjoys being read to. (“Talk to it, Daddy,” my son Saul used to say when he wanted me to read a book aloud.) I suspect, however, that what the boys really enjoy is sitting in my lap, spending time with their father, doing what they see him doing for long hours without them. Not every good reader comes from a reading family. My guess, in fact, is that he is more likely to develop like a professional athlete from bestsellers to less serious and more venturesome books if he doesn’t inherit the reading habit and must work himself up. (By the time I was a teenager, my father was obsessively reading Alistair MacLean.) Yet the single greatest influence on a child’s becoming a reader later in life, of any books at all, is whether he grows up in a household of books, in a family of readers.

Gone to the library

While everyone else bemoans the decline of the printed book, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics, point out that public libraries are seeing double-digit increases in circulation and new card requests. “As consumer spending recedes in the face of the credit crisis,” they wonder, “will libraries become more popular than shopping malls as a destination?”

I have a somewhat different question—one that has troubled me for some time. If library patrons are checking out a newly published book instead of buying it, and if public libraries are funded by the government, isn’t the time fast arriving when the government both subsidizes the market for new books and severely limits it? Instead of twenty library patrons going to Barnes & Noble or logging on to Amazon and buying twenty copies of Goldengrove, they go to the local branch and get on a waiting list for the library’s one copy. Francine Prose is denied nineteen sales, although she is guaranteed at least one—and twenty readers for her next novel, if they liked this one. Or do libraries create readers for titles they might otherwise never have heard of? And customers, then, for later books by the same author? I wish the Freakonomics boys had thought to ask about, and to investigate, the economic effect of public libraries on new book sales.

But this trend also raises the question of what public libraries are for. As John J. Miller wrote two years ago in the Wall Street Journal, public libraries are becoming “ruthless” (a librarian’s word) in weeding out books that do not circulate widely. These include “classics” like The Mayor of Casterbridge or The Sound and the Fury that get newspapers worked up, but some copies of those books will always be around. I’d be more worried about the sort of titles that end up at the Neglected Books Page. Once a library has weeded them from its collection, and in an ethically dubious act, makes extra money by selling off its copies, where will they be found? If public libraries do not exist to preserve a cultural heritage, why are they being subsidized by the public? Why should the government support a competitor to Barnes & Noble and Amazon?

Fiction to come

This promises to be a “great year for books,” C. Max Magee says at the Millions, chronologically listing the novels to expect in 2009, including titles by “Pynchon, Atwood, Lethem, and Zadie Smith.” Here are some books he missed (and since I have been accused of letting political considerations get in the way of my recommendations, I list every book that might be worth reading). To keep the list at manageable length, only Americans are included.

January

• Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf). A parallel six-day period in July, 1959—brother and sister in a small West Virginia town—and nine years earlier, when their father is in Korea.

• Lewis Robinson, Water Dogs (Random House). A man goes missing in a blizzard.

February

• T. C. Boyle, The Women (Viking). Frank Lloyd Wright’s life is told through the experiences of the four women who loved him.

• Barbara Hall, The Music Teacher (Algonquin). A recently divorced violin instructor spends most of her time mourning her perceived failures.

• John Haskell, Out of My Skin (Farrar Straus & Giroux). A would-be movie reviewer, looking for romance, takes an assignment to write a magazine article about celebrity look-alikes.

• Antonya Nelson, Nothing Right: Short Stories (Bloomsbury). In the southwest, people try to keep themselves intact as their personal lives explode around them.

• Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone (Knopf). A devout young nun leaves India in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen.

March

• Steve Amick, Nothing but a Smile (Knopf). It’s 1944 and an illustrator for Stars and Stripes has returned to Chicago.

• Tim Gautreaux, The Missing (Knopf). The hunt for a stolen child along the Mississippi between the wars.

• Daniel Klein, The History of Now (Permanent Press). Philosophical novel about the presence of the past in a New England town.

• Olen Steinhauer, Tourist (St. Martin’s). The arrest of an assassin forces an ex-spy to go back undercover.

• John Wray, Lowboy (Farrar Straus & Giroux). A teenaged schizophrenic has wandered away from a mental hospital into the New York subway believing that the world will end within a few hours.

April

• Frederick Barthelme, Waveland (Doubleday). Life after divorce and Katrina along the Mississippi gulf coast.

• Charles McCarry, Shelley’s Heart (Overlook). A stolen presidential election reveals a wider left-wing plot. Reprint of 1995 novel, part of Otto Penzler’s project to bring all of McCarry’s fiction back into print.

• Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor (Doubleday). Coming of age in 1985 in the East End of Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals has built a world of its own.

May

• Esther Broner, The Red Squad (Knopf). Comic novel about sixties radicals who discover forty years later that they were under surveillance.

• William Gay, The Lost Country (MacAdam/Cage). Four people on the road end up in the town of Ackerman's Field, where they will be inextricably drawn together.

• Elmore Leonard, Road Dogs (William Morrow). Two ex-cons, one white, one black, an FBI agent, and a psychotic cheating wife.

June

• Arna Bontemps, Drums at Dusk (Louisiana State UP). Reprint of a 1939 novel. Love and violence at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791.

• Denis Johnson, Nobody Move (Picador). Mistaken identity, blackmail and murder, wronged alcoholics, and colostomy bags.

• Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House). A group portrait of New York City in the seventies.

• Walter Mosley, The Tempest Tales: A Novel-in-Stories (Washington Square). The afterlife of a black man shot dead by police when they thought he was pulling a gun.

• Jean Thompson, Do Not Deny Me: Stories (Simon & Schuster). Author of Who Do You Love, a 1999 National Book Award finalist.

• Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women (Scribner). Author of Where She Went and The Gardens of Kyoto.

July

• Allan Appel, The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air (Coffee House). Author’s note: “[H]aving to choose between Judaism and tearing up the town on motorcycles and figuring out the relationship between the two, all under the cloud of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Los Angeles of 1962.”

• Kevin Canty, Where the Money Went: Stories (Nan A. Talese). A meditation on relationships and love from a man’s point of view.

• Robert Cohen, Amateur Barbarians (Scribner). A small-town New England school principal tries to bail out of his settled life while a luftmentsh from New York tries to bail into it.

• Michael Idov, Ground Up (Farrar Straus & Giroux). Two intellectuals are determined to recreate the perfect Viennese coffeehouse on the Lower East Side.

• Ward Just, Exiles in the Garden (Houghton Mifflin). A senator’s son turned news photographer contrasts himself unfavorably with an adventurer and antifascist commando.

• Lydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories (Harper). A young writer whose fiction has appeared in the Best New American Voices 2007 and The O. Henry Prize Stories: 2006.

• Lucinda Rosenfeld, I’m So Happy for You (Back Bay). A “witty account of the jealousies that lurk within even the kindest female hearts.” —Zoë Heller.

• Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage (Simon & Schuster). Autobiographical novel about his 27-year marriage to Margaret Joskow, who died from bladder cancer in 2004.

August

• Robert Ferrigno, Heart of the Assassin (Simon & Schuster). Third volume in a dystopic trilogy about America under Islamic rule.

• Victor LaValle, Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau). The survivor of a suicide cult working as a porter in Utica, New York, is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators.

• Maud Carol Markson, Looking After Pigeon (Permanent Press). After her father disappears, five-year-old Pigeon must face a new and bewildering life with her mother and older siblings in an uncle’s house on the Jersey shore.

• Valerie Martin, Confessions of Edward Day (Nan A. Talese). Author of the Orange Prize-winning Property and Mary Reilly, a rewriting of the Jekyll-Hyde story.

• Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden (Houghton Mifflin). A sixteen-year-old poses for a silver-haired painter.

• Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic (Knopf). A weekend on Cape Cod, in which the past swamps the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance.

September

• Pat Conroy, South of Broad (Nan A. Talese). A 600-page “epic” about a serial killer and a high-profile murder in the 1980’s.

• Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf). First novel in fourteen years by author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Like Life.

• Philip Roth, The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin). An aging man embarks on an affair with a ravishing young lesbian.

• William Styron, The Suicide Run: Five Stories of the Marine Corps (Random House). Posthumous collection of stories about soldiers returning home from war.

October

• Paul Auster, Invisible (Henry Holt). Autobiographical novel of a young poet’s coming of age at Columbia in the ’sixties—and beyond.

• Richard Powers, Generosity (Farrar Straus & Giroux). The happiness gene is discovered.

December

• Gail Godwin, The Red Nun: A Tale of Unfinished Desires (Random House). An eighty-five-year-old nun dictates a memoir of her school’s history.

Tyranny without literature

“Literature is a realm of freedom,” I wrote yesterday. Perhaps I ought to have said “fiction” instead of “literature,” that old bore, although every kind of writing affords the writer at least some conceptual freedom. After all, writing enables you to modify the way things are. To paint every blade of grass in creation a bright shade of pink would take an eternity, if it were possible at all; but in writing you can accomplish the feat in a sentence. In writing all things are possible. This is not to suggest that writing is not also subject to necessity, for it is the process of a human mind, which is captive to all the limitations of human existence. The best writing knows as much, and provokes a conflict between freedom and necessity.

Consider this uncollected sonnet by Philip Larkin written when he was thirty-one and perhaps on holiday from his library post at Queen’s University, Belfast:

Autobiography at an Air-Station

Delay, well travellers must expect
Delay. For how long? No one seems to know.
With all the luggage weighed, the tickets checked,
It can’t be long. . . . We amble to and fro,
Sit in steel chairs, buy cigarettes and sweets
And tea, unfold the papers. Ought we to smile,
Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats
You’re best alone. Friendship is not worth while.

Six hours pass: if I’d gone by boat last night
I’d be there now. Well, it’s too late for that.
The kiosk girl is yawning. I feel staled,
Stupefied, by inaction—and, as light
Begins to ebb outside, by fear; I set
So much on this Assumption. Now it’s failed.

The hoped-for ascent into the heavens, the success of holiday, depends upon indifferent despotic time, which turns anticipation to “inaction.” The conventional wisdom (“travellers must expect Delay”) is not reassuring. There is, in fact, no consolation or pastime to be found—not in cigarettes, sweets, tea, or the papers. In the stupefying limbo that every traveler has experienced, when no one can explain the delay nor estimate when it will end, even ordinary human contact becomes menacing. A glimmer of possibility appears after six hours: if he had taken the boat he’d be there by now. Gary Saul Morson calls this “sideshadowing” in contradistinction to “foreshadowing”:

By contrast, sideshadowing admits, in addition to actualities and impossibilities, a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not. Things could have been different from the way they were, there were real alternatives to the present we know, and the future admits of various paths. By focusing on the middle realm of possibilities, by exploring its relation to actual events, and by attending to the fact that things could have been different, sideshadowing deepens our sense of the openness of time.[1]Larkin’s peculiar genius is to make even the admission of real possibility into cause for groaning. But that does not change the fact that the poet visits, however briefly, with whatever dissatisfactions, the middle realm; the realm of freedom. In truth, the poem itself is a testament to that realm, because it exists—with its humor, sharp observation, and ironic self-pity—over against the actuality of delay and failure. It insists, in the quiet fact of its existence, that the present moment, with all its unhappiness, is not the only time that matters.

Without the freedom to do otherwise—to be otherwise—the human being is a slave. And it does not make a whole lot of difference whether he is enslaved by the color of his skin or because of the color of his skin. The conviction that actuality is the only dimension open to a man is the final tyranny.
____________________

[1] Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 6. Italics are his.

The spirit of party in criticism

My reply to Andrew Seal has ignited a debate—although, to be fair, more of it has been conducted at Blographia Literaria than over here. Probably because of my well-known conservatism.

After telling his readers that he had visited my blog to reply to me, not too intemperately, he hoped, Seal said ruefully:

[I]f there’s any irony left in the canon wars, it’s that, despite the fulminations of conservatives about the neglect of Milton for Morrison, a liberal-minded kid like me could go through a contemporary English Department and come out feeling like what he really missed out on was contemporary literature from marginalized groups. I guess a liberal might say that I wasn’t all that brainwashed after all, and a conservative would say (as Myers does) that all I got out of it was white guilt. Given that I did get my Milton and some other great literature besides, I think the conservative view might be just a touch inaccurate.So that’s what I said. In truth, there is evidence that Seal got something more out of his literary education. Here are two things: (1.) the secure knowledge that conservatives oppose Milton to Morrison. And (2.) there is some such phenomenon as “contemporary literature from marginalized groups.”

Both these unfortunate ideas are the consequence of party-spiritedness in criticism. Two decades ago, when I was a new hire at Texas A&M University, already pigeonholed as a conservative because I had published essays and reviews in Commentary and the New Criterion, a public forum on the canon was arranged in the English department, and I was invited to represent one side. Trouble was, I did not view the debate over the canon as an either/or. I had published an essay in the Sewanee Review in which I argued that “the canon is a bogey, an invention of critics’ overfevered imaginations,” and that “the entire debate over the canon has been misconceived.” The various lists and bibliographies that have been mistakenly called canons, I tried to show, are arbitrary; they are selections without a larger principle; they are founded not on a distinction but on convenience. (I am perfectly aware that my own list of the best American fiction, 1968–1998, fits these requirements. No canonical listing can claim to be the final selection, because the very character of canonical-listing precludes finality. My list was intended as a convenience for those who might wish to begin reading the era’s fiction.)

I still believe much of my twenty-years-old argument, although I am sure that I would frame it far more devastatingly today. Not that it would make any difference. I was and am reputed to be a conservative. In the public forum at A&M, no matter how many times I repeated my claim that the canon is a monster hiding under the beds of terrified English professors, I was heard to be saying something like “How dare you neglect Milton for Toni Morrison!” (The irony only deepens. I have been guilty, in public, of confessing my uncompromising loathing for Milton. When I took a seminar on Milton in graduate school—one of the best classes I took—I sought refuge in a paper on the history of Milton criticism. Because I have also publicly argued that Philip Roth is the greatest American novelist since 1968, I have been accused, by an antagonist who wished to demonstrate my self-evident unfitness as a scholar, of neglecting Milton for Roth!) As a conservative, I am identified with positions and propositions that I have sternly repudiated, in print, with iron logic and soul-swaying rhetoric. And it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

Far more important than resolving to “diversify” our literary knowledge by reading more gays and women and men who are not white would be to rout the spirit of party in criticism altogether. And among other things, this would entail that critics bid farewell to the doctrine of “contemporary literature from marginalized groups.” Literature does not come from groups, marginalized or otherwise, but from individual men and women; and it is a product, not of the immutable racial and sexual identities they receive at birth, but of innumerable choices. Literature is a realm of freedom, including the freedom to dissociate yourself from antipathetic ideas, even those espoused by a group with which you otherwise identify.

On reading narrowly

Andrew Seal casts a cold eye over the Best American Fiction, 1968–1998, and observes:

[T]here are more Philip Roth books (3) on there than books by men of color (2, unless I missed one). And if you’re a woman and not Southern, you have about as good a shot getting on the list. And that doesn’t even cover the absence of women of color on the list. And I can’t say for sure (since I haven’t read all the books on the list), but it seems to me unlikely that any has a significant gay theme.I can go farther than that. There are no—repeat, no—Hispanics on the list. No Native Americans. And just one Asian-American! Worse than that, fully twelve of the forty titles* are by Jews. Seven are historical novels. You’d seem to have a really, really good shot if you are a Jew who has written a historical novel.

But wait. Seal says nothing about genre. His only concern is identity, where identity is conceived only in the immutable facts of birth (race, gender, sexual preference). Charles Johnson, for instance, the sole “man of color” on the list, is also a Buddhist. And this fact about him is of at least equal importance—to Johnson himself, to any estimation of his writing. About religious confession Seal is silent. Like many Americans of his age and experience—he identifies himself as a recent college graduate—Seal has learned the lesson well that religion is not worthy of discussion. Or worse. Thus when he says that he is “terrified of becoming one of these narrow readers,” and concludes that Kurp and I “never bother themselves with questions about what kinds of books they’re not reading” (his italics) the word kind exposes Seal as every inch the “narrow reader” he accuses us of being.

In fact, Kurp and I openly bothered ourselves with the kind of fiction we were leaving off our list. We were explicit about the kind. We called it metafiction or “experimental” writing. Because our conception of kind differs from his, Seal fails to notice this. Nor does it seem to occur to him that there is a fundamental difference between reading a book and subsequently recommending it. From the fact that we do not list, say, A Boy’s Own Story or Love Medicine or High Cotton, it does not follow that we have not “really been reading widely in the thirty-year period in question” during which there were “quite a few more books by gays, by women and by men who are not white” (again, his italics).

It does follow, however—and here Seal is right and here also I need to stop speaking for Kurp, who can defend himself—it does follow that identity by birth is a criterion of literary judgment that I thoroughly reject. Understand me correctly, though. As I held earlier on this blog, there is no writing without identity, there is no literature without prefixes. But also: “If there are no writers without identities it does not follow that writers’ only identities are their race and sex.” And even if they were it is not at all clear what it would mean for someone to write as a “white American man.” To describe, say, Vladimir Nabokov and Jeffrey Eugenides in these terms—to consign them to the same category of books that Seal resolves not to read this coming year—is to put their significant and fascinating differences under erasure. And to do this is to commit the same injustice against them that Seal is afraid is being committed against “women of color.”

Several years ago, when the English department at Texas A&M University was rewriting its course descriptions to include more women and men who are not white, a colleague bounded into my office. “Do you know any sixteenth-century woman playwrights?” he asked breathlessly. I didn’t, and he bounded off to find someone who did:ENGL 317. English Renaissance Drama. (3-0). Credit 3. Non-Shakespearean drama in England from the building of the first public theater in 1576 to the closing of the theaters in 1642, including such authors as Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Mary Sidney, Beaumont and Fletcher and [Elizabeth] Carey. Prerequisite: 3 credits of literature at the 200-level or above.I am not a Renaissance scholar. Perhaps these six truly are the representative playwrights of the era. The old Norton anthology of The English Drama preferred Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, Philip Massinger, John Ford, and James Shirley. And that was the point, wasn’t it? To break with the lists of the past? But including women—scrambling to come up with the names of women to include—in order to satisfy an apriori expectation that such a list should include women (forget about men of color), in utter ignorance of whether there even are any, is to abandon literature as it has actually existed for an idealized image of what it should be.

Literature just is a selection of masterpieces. There is no getting around this obstacle. The problem is what criteria of selection you are going to use. To advance identity as the overriding consideration is merely to postpone a solution, because you must still decide what titles from your privileged group to select. The minute you have to choose between books you are in a pickle that appeals to identity won’t get you out of. Practical constraints of time and energy make the selection of masterpieces for reading and casual study not only necessary but forgiving, for given such constraints this narrowness, sir, is no crime. There is an alternative, although it is not likely to be one that Seal is interested in pursuing. It is humanly possible to read everything in a thirty-year period, good, bad, and indifferent, by men and by women, by white men and by men who are not white, by gays and by straights. This is the way of the literary scholar. Within that period the scholar is the very opposite of a “narrow reader,” although outside it, given those damn constraints, he reverts to the ordinary human type—if he has time and energy left over to read anything else at all.

For literary critics there are, as I see it, only two choices. Either the course of intellectual honesty, where a man admits that there are books that are not worth reading, or the course of literary preening, where he pretends to enjoy books because he thinks he should.

Oh, by the way. I have a book to recommend to Andrew Seal. It is by Shelby Steele and it is entitled White Guilt.
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* Patrick Kurp and I have been dickering in private, “like boys trading baseball cards,” as he puts it, over what books to include, what to kick off the list. He agreed to give up Fat City; I agreed to retain Peter Taylor. The quotient of “white American men” remains unchanged!

When the war is a war of ideals

One reason that Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels (New York: David McKay, 1974) is among the best fiction of the past forty years is that it was written to reclaim and reconceive the American war novel. Within a few years of the Second World War, John Horne Burns’s Gallery, Vance Bourjaily’s End of My Life, Irwin Shaw’s Young Lions, and Mailer’s Naked and the Dead had established an orthodoxy. The war novel was to narrate combat and army life at the platoon level, and at that level, as a reviewer said about a reprint of The Gallery, the grunts were “disillusioned with what they had to go through for their country.” Novels of the Vietnam war like Going After Cacciato (in which a platoon is sent after a deserter) or Dog Soldiers (which suggests by its title that an ex-G.I. is merely extending his tour by running heroin) diddled with the formula, but did nothing to change it. The battle scenes may be hallucinatory, but the grunts still die as cattle, and what else needs to be said about war?

A veteran of Korea and later a policeman, Shaara approached the battle of Gettysburg with a different set of convictions and a different armature of methods. The Killer Angels narrates the battle from multiple perspectives on both sides, but except for the opening chapter, which relates what is observed by a southern spy, the centers of consciousness are all officers—Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Lewis Armistead from the Confederacy; John Buford and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the Union. The difference in vantage is like becoming a parent. Rather than viewed from the bottom, where the battlefield is confusion and the war aims obscure or absurd, Gettysburg becomes a conflict of strategies and philosophies—a continuation of policy rather than an uninterrupted anarchy. Nor is the attitude a gruff fatalism as urged on his men by General Savage in Twelve O’Clock High:

I don’t have a lot of patience with this what-are-we-fighting-for stuff. We’re in a war, a shooting war. We’ve got to fight. And some of us have got to die. I’m not trying to tell you not to be afraid. Fear is normal. But stop worrying about it and about yourselves. Stop making plans. Forget about going home. Consider yourselves already dead. Once you accept that idea, it won't be so tough.This is just the grunt’s attitude, elevated and given dignity and courage.

Shaara’s officers have a more thoughtful attitude, and when called upon to address their men, they strike a more thoughtful note. Chamberlain has been sent some mutineers, one hundred and twenty men from a regiment that has been disbanded, and he is authorized to shoot any man who refuses to do his duty. Like him, they are from Maine, and he knows he cannot shoot them; if he does he will never be able to go home. He must talk them into fighting, but what can he say? “A man who has been shot at is a new realist,” he reflects, “and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?” You teach him the language of idealism:This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we’re here for something new. . . . We’re an army going out to set other men free.But these are not empty and high-minded words. Chamberlain bends down and scratches the dirt. He continues:This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man was born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here’s a place to build a home. It isn’t the land—there’s always more land. It’s the idea that we all have value, you and me, we’re worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I’d die for, but I’m not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we’re all fighting for, in the end, is each other.Shaara was drawn to the project of writing The Killer Angels by “the words of the men themselves, their letters and other documents.” He did not merely transcribe nineteenth-century writing, though, because it was a “naïve and sentimental time, and men spoke in windy phrases.” He wrote the novel, in part, to revive the language of idealism, to give it currency again, to make it plausible and persuasive to “the modern ear.”

The idealism was not exactly his. Shaara was the native of a different century. But unlike other American war novelists, he understood that ideals can be just as concrete as the names of villages and the numbers of roads and can give to war a terrible beauty. Here is Longstreet, witnessing the end of the battle:A few guns were still firing a long way off; heartbroken men would not let it end. But the fire was dying; the guns ended like sparks. Suddenly it was still, enormously still, a long pause in the air, a waiting, a fall. And then there was a different silence. Men began to turn to look out across the smoldering field. The wind had died; there was no motion anywhere but the slow smoke drifting and far off one tiny flame of a burning tree. The men stood immobile across the field. The knowledge began to pass among them, passing without words, that it was over.Shaara believed that some causes were worth fighting and dying for, and he admired the men who believed in the causes for which they risked their lives even when he did not admire the cause. Small wonder that The Killer Angels was written to demonstrate that a war novel need not be a “trauma novel.” Smaller wonder that there has been no other novel like it in the past forty years.

How just war theory defends

Quoting an IDF spokesman on the objectives of war in Gaza, a notorious blogger asks, “How does just war theory defend the deaths of many innocent civilians as a means to increase ‘deterrent strength’?”

Like this. According to the philosopher Brian Orend, writing in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, just war theory imposes six requirements “for any resort to war to be justified”:

(1.) Just cause.
(2.) Right intention.
(3.) Proper authority and public declaration.
(4.) Last resort.
(5.) Probability of success.
(6.) Proportionality.

Let’s take these one by one.

Just cause. Only one just cause is recognized by most philosophers: namely, to stop aggression. “An aggressor has no right not to be warred against in defence,” Orend writes, underlining every word. Hamas-controlled Gaza has struck the state of Israel with over six thousand rockets in the past three years, a violation of Israeli sovereignty and a widespread indiscriminate threat to the lives, welfare, and property of Israeli citizens. The Israeli government has a duty to protect its sovereignty and citizens, or it has forfeited its right to exist. Since the destruction of the Israeli government would be a preliminary step in the achievement of Hamas’s ultimate objective to destroy the Israeli state, Jerusalem has the moral obligation to defend its rights. Whether it really is the case that “The operation’s real purpose is to improve the standing of two politicians, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, in impending elections” is thus irrelevant. The current government of Israel must govern its territory and citizens; not Hamas through rockets.

Right intention. “The only right intention allowed is to see the just cause for resorting to war secured and consolidated,” Orend holds. Revenge, expansion, ethnic hatred—these ulterior motives are corrupting. Last night Barak, the defense minister, was explicit about Israel’s war aims:

Our aim is to force Hamas to stop its hostile activities against Israel and Israelis from Gaza, and to bring about a significant change in the situation in southern Israel.That is, the intention is to achieve the just cause for which Israel has gone to war: namely, to stop Hamas aggression.

Proper authority and public declaration. Except for Hamas and its partisans—a not-insignificant portion of elite opinion—Israel is a legitimate state, and its government patently has the proper authority to take the state to war. What is far more telling, prior to launching attacks Israel engaged in the morally scrupulous but militarily dubious practice of “roof knocking,” warning Gazans of impending strikes by phoning them and warning them to get out. This is more of a public declaration than most countries would issue.

Last resort. All the liberal hand-wringing over the Israeli blockade of Gaza misses the point. Israel tried everything to stop the rocket attacks on its territory and citizens. The international public outcry over these attacks, which as everyone knows was far angrier and more extensive than the well-mannered and restrained demonstrations against Israeli action in Gaza, failed to stop them. Diplomacy failed to stop them. Citizens of Gaza, rising up against their government, failed to stop them. Israel faced two choices. Either abandon its territory and citizens under attack from Gaza or go to war to defend them.

Probability of success. Oddly enough, this is the requirement that gives me the most trouble. In light of its hesitant and deferential behavior in the Lebanon war of 2006, I am not confident that Israel has the will to succeed in achieving its war aims. No one doubts the IDF’s capacity to do so, however.

Proportionality. And this is the requirement that gives me the least trouble, although French President Nicolas Sarkozy was quick to accuse Israel of using disproportionate force. Proportionality is not a matter of arithmetic, placing the greater number of Palestinian Arab casualties against Israeli deaths. (And if it were a matter of arithmetic, as I suggested in an earlier post below, Israel still trails badly in the number of rocket or missile strikes.) Orend identifies a principle overlooked by those who condemn the “disproportionate force” of the IDF attacks. “A state must,” he says, “weigh the universal goods expected to result from it . . . against the universal evils expected to result, notably casualties.” The italics are his. Orend does not mean to be sweeping. He means only that the warring states must tally something more than their own benefits and costs. To justify the inevitable casualties and damage, a victory in war must secure an aim that benefits the region or even the international order.

Here is what few minds come to when thinking about the war in Gaza. As Victor Davis Hanson put it with furious exactitude, one of the parties to the war is “a constitutional state” and the other is “a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.” Hamas is not a legitimate governing authority; it is the sworn enemy of governing authority—that is, of secular human civilization. To remove it from power would benefit the entire world.