AP English and literary knowledge

The other day a Texas A&M graduate wrote to the English department, soliciting help from the “literature people” in fighting the efforts of parents’ group in the north Texas town of Cleburne who seek to remove Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth from the reading list in Advanced Placement English.

Apparently the AP teacher gives incoming students the choice over the summer to read either Follett (an Oprah’s Book Club selection) or Edward Rutherfurd’s London. Both books come in at more than eight hundred pages, though Follett’s extra hundred and forty may tip the balance for most students in his rival’s favor. The parents complain that The Pillars of the Earth, a historical novel of twelfth-century England, contains two graphic rape scenes and more explicit sex and violence, making it inappropriate for seventeen-year-olds. Perhaps sensing the difficulty of defending it on substantive grounds, the novel’s champions take a procedural tack. Students have a “constitutional right” to read the novel, and a public school teacher has the “academic freedom” to assign it. “You can only ban a book if you find it is pervasively vulgar,” one supporter told the school board in an open meeting. But no one has proposed banning the book—that is a bloody shirt. The parents group wants to strike it from the AP reading list, acknowledging they have no ambition to see it removed from the shelves of the district’s libraries.

No one has raised the obvious question. Why do high-school seniors need to know the book? By his own frank admission, Follett writes “entertainment fiction.” The style of his novel about the building of a medieval cathedral is annoying in the extreme. As the Wall Street Journal’s reviewer observed, “A problem in writing about times long ago is a novelist’s uncertainty about his voice. How did people talk way back then? How did they express affection, anger, lust? The writer must invent his diction and create his tone. Mr. Follett seems to have decided that 12th-century Englishmen favored 20th-century cliches (‘mindless brute,’ ‘hot and bothered’). . . .” The reviewer then supplied some examples of the novel’s typical prose: “But William was a real servant of the devil. Aliena thought: When will we be rid of this monster?” Or: “Oh, Richard, you're caught in a terrible web, and it's all because you saved me.” And: “Torturing a man without killing him was like stripping a girl naked without raping her.” Or: “William had lost count of the alehouses they had wrecked, the Jews they had tormented and the virgins they had deflowered.” After becoming frustrated with Follett’s compulsive resort to a particularly cold-fleshed cliché (“his heart was in his mouth”), one reader toted the number of its occurrences and found seventeen in all. Despite the limp writing, The Pillars of the Earth was listed among the one hundred books most often “challenged” by the patrons of public libraries during the nineties, according to the American Library Association, and for some that will be reason enough to tackle it.

Given world enough and time there might be a place in the high-school English curriculum for Follett’s potboiler. The notion, though, that there are certain works of literature which, as Hugh Kenner once wrote, “every civilized American should be familiar with, seems not to be commonly advanced.” And no one in Cleburne, Texas, seems to have advanced the argument that, regardless of explicit sex and violence, The Pillars of the Earth offers nothing of any value whatever for students of English literature. According to the College Board, the purpose of Advanced Placement is to help high-school seniors “develop the content mastery and critical thinking skills expected of college students.” Over the last three decades, nearly three hundred different literary works have been featured in questions on the AP exam. You might wonder at the clear prejudice for the second half of the twentieth-century, and the relatively high number of mediocre books by “minority writers” (Bless Me, Ultima, Ceremony, Monkey Bridge, My Name is Asher Lev), but the list of works that AP teachers have been asked to teach is a serious one. The author most frequently cited was Shakespeare; sixty some questions were about him. The single work referred to most frequently was Invisible Man with Wuthering Heights close behind. Neither Follett nor Rutherfurd are to be found, because reading neither will assist students in developing content mastery and critical thinking.

Why then does an AP teacher ask her students to read either? My own experience of AP, four decades ago, makes me suspicious of her motives. I had the sort of English teacher who believed that literature was the study of noble sentiments and overflowing feelings. “Every year she would read A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas,” recalled the romance novelist Kathryn Lynn Davis, another of her students, “and every time she would weep at the same parts, just as though she’d never read it before.” I wanted to throw up. She would describe to her class how she watched soldiers returning home from war and thinking to herself, “Somewhere out there is he whose heart is destined for mine, and I may never find him.” I winced, even though I pitied her spinsterhood. (Davis is more discreet: “She would tell really bizarre stories in class.”) If she ever wrote a novel, she confessed, she would call it Blue Remembered Hills, a line from Housman (“Into my heart an air that kills”). Even though I had dogeared and heavily underlined my copy of Housman, her cloying enthusiasm for him nearly caused me to abandon him for good. Instead, I kept my Housman secret. I memorized Howl for a class assignment, and derived much adolescent pleasure from her open disgust at my performance. I trace my lifelong dislike for the Romantics to her influence. And my critical contrarianism was set deeply in concrete by rebelling against her book choices. She assigned Tess of the D’Urbervilles; I stubbornly wrote a paper on V. She praised beauty and softly undulating phrases; I developed a white passion for direct statement and elbow-throwing truth. She gave me a D for the class.

Then the AP test rolled around. Two “open-ended” questions were posed:

(1.) Choose a character from a novel or play of recognized literary merit and write an essay in which you (a) briefly describe the standards of the fictional society in which the character exists and (b) show how the character is affected by and responds to those standards. In your essay do not merely summarize the plot.

(2.) Choose a work of recognized literary merit in which a specific inanimate object (e.g., a seashell, a handkerchief, a painting) is important, and write an essay in which you show how two or three of the purposes the object serves are related to one another.For the first I chose Artur Sammler and described his “screwy visions” of a society in which “dark romanticism” had taken hold. For the second I chose Rubashov’s pince-nez in Darkness at Noon and tried to show how his handling of them diagrammed his progress toward a public confession of treason. And now I must brag. I received the highest possible score on my exam, the first student from my high school in several years to receive a 5. In those days your AP teacher called to tell you your score. “I can’t believe you got a 5,” my teacher kept repeating, perhaps a little unprofessionally; “I can’t believe you got a 5.” Her incredulity served to confirm my decision to pursue a career in literature. If she could be so wrong, and my decision to write about Bellow and Koestler instead of her weepy favorites so right, then perhaps I was on to something.

The ersatz elitism of AP English is a lousy preparation for college-level work in literary study, and I suspect that The Pillars of the Earth and London, impractically long historical novels about long-ago England, appeal to that flowery-scented superiority which some AP teachers seek to cultivate in their students. Can it be admitted at long last, though, that English literature is a discipline of knowledge rather than a fine sensibility; that some works of English literature must be known before others; that there are even some works every civilized American should be familiar with, although there will be much disagreement over what they are; and that an AP English teacher who assigns “entertainment fiction” instead is not doing her job?

The murderer’s fancy style

Speculating on the table manners of dictators, Nige quotes Lolita. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” Humbert Humbert says.

But what does he mean? (Humbert, that is.) Nige quotes him to humorous effect, because it is pretty obvious that Humbert is not offering up a universally acknowledged truth. Here, for example, is Jack Henry Abbott, who stabbed a waiter to death just six weeks after Norman Mailer had got him freed from prison:

[Y]ou have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest. Slowly he begins to struggle for his life. As he sinks, you will have to kill him fast or get caught. He will say “Why?” Or “No!” Nothing else. You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder. You’ve pumped the knife several times without even being aware of it. You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the end: “Please.” You get the odd impression that he is no imploring you not to harm him, but to do it right. If he says your name it softens your resolve. You go into a mechanical stupor of sorts. Things register in slow motion because all your senses are drawn to a new height. You leave him in the blood, staring with dead eyes.Nothing particularly fancy here. Perhaps the quadruple prepositional phrases, which delay the word gentleness from being connected with murder. The style is not nearly as distinguished as Mailer and Jerzy Kosinski maintained when Abbott was still in prison. What is impressive is the extraordinary consciousness of a murder’s every detail accompanied by not the slightest itch of remorse. This is the prose of a sociopath.

Humbert is not a sociopath. Just two sentences after calling attention to his prose style, he asks his readers—addressed as “ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” because Lolita takes the form of a speech for the defense—to consider the purpose for which he is writing: “Look at this tangle of thorns.” Alfred Appel’s note is of little use: “[A]nother H.H., the penitent, confessor, and martyr to love, calls attention to his thorns, the immodest reference to so sacred an image suggesting that the reader would do well to judge H.H.’s tone rather than his deeds.” Why Appel was unwilling to spell out the reference is unclear. Here is the account in the Gospel according to Matthew, as translated by Ronald Knox:[T]he governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the palace, and gathered the whole of their company about him. First they stripped him, and arrayed him in a scarlet cloak; then they put on his head a crown which they had woven out of thorns, and a rod in his right hand, and mocked him by kneeling down before him, and saying, Hail, king of the Jews. And they spat upon him, and took the rod from him and beat him over the head with it. At last they had done with mockery; stripping him of the scarlet cloak, they put his own garments on him, and led him away to be crucified. (27.27–31)Instead of Roman soldiers, Humbert is putting the crown of thorns on his own head. He does not mean to identify himself immodestly with Christ; he means to seek Christ’s atonement. The novel entitled Lolita will be his act of repentance in which he seeks to repair the damage that he has done to the girl who cried herself to sleep “every night, every night.” In the last pages of the novel, on his way to turn himself into the police for murdering Quilty, he stops on a bluff overlooking a little town in a valley. He becomes “aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like a vapor. . . .” He contemplates the peaceful and geometric landscape. Even more beautifulwas that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.His confession could not be more clear. At the end of his book, Humbert acknowledges, publicly, that he has committed the crime of stealing her childhood from Lolita. The passage never fails to move me, no matter how many times I read it. It builds slowly, carefully swelling the melody of children at play, to the finale of confession. The knowledge of his guilt emerges from Humbert’s art in summoning, in prose, the reality of that musical vibration. But I would not describe this passage—perhaps the best paragraph of English prose written since 1865—as “fancy.” It is not simple; the sentences are long, averaging some forty words; and its Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score is 12.0, although it is difficult to imagine many high-school seniors who would be patient enough to read it with full comprehension to the end. But complexity is not at odds with plainness. As a public confession of the intimately personal, this passage is appropriately written in an exacting plain style.

But in this passage Humbert is not a murderer. The killing of Quilty might even be an act of rough justice. Here he is, at last, an admitted pedophile—no longer “an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy,” who seeks to fancy up his crime by calling it nympholepsy instead. The adjective fancy, used as the antonym of “plain,” dates from the mid-eighteenth century and derives from cookery and fashion. Over the course of his novel Humbert gradually sheds his verbal ornamentation, his fine writing, as he comes to atone plainly for the evil he has done, not to a fancy of his imagination, but to this Lolita, his Lolita. You can always count upon a murderer for a fancy prose style when he wishes to dissemble his true monstrosity. You can count upon an honest man, who makes repentance, for a plain style.

The novel and the car

Matt Kenseth won the rain-shortened Daytona 500, the opening race of the 2009 NASCAR season, yesterday. In an unexpected and wonderful post earlier in the day, Edward Byrne praised stock car racing: “Nowhere else in sport does the risk of one’s life become so apparent, and at Daytona the danger exists for the full 500 miles as the racers never escape from one another, tense and focused for hours, always only one mental slip or one mechanical defect away from tragic disaster, from death.” Despite novels and poems on many different sports, “rarely have serious authors examined stock car racing,” Byrne says.

Rarely? I do not know of a single novel on the theme. There have been movies aplenty, including Pixar Studios’ Cars, the perfection of the genre. (The sequel is scheduled for summer 2012.) As a symbol of American freedom, the car plays an important supporting role in road novels like Charles Portis’s Dog of the South (1979). The car as a visual treat (“whose design matches the aesthetics one might find in modern works of art,” as Byrne describes the stock cars in yesterday’s Daytona race), the appeal of cars as captured by Old Car and Truck Pictures, a site that I haunt as if it were a showroom, is found only in Nabokov:

A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease [Quilty] switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages specializing in “stage-automobile” operations, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French Gray . . .Ellipses in the original. Although his credo was that “Literature does not tell the truth but makes it up,” Nabokov did not make up these colors. Shell gray was one of the colors in which Chrysler New Yorkers and Windsors were available in 1950. So too for Chevrolet Fleetlines and Stylines, which could be purchased in thistle gray in 1951.

There was never an American car named the Melmoth, although the name sounds plausible. (It was an allusion to Melmoth the Wanderer, a four-volume Gothic novel from early in the nineteenth century.) There was an American car named the Marmon, however, and it appears in Wright Morris’s first novel My Uncle Dudley (1942), a Depression-era picaresque. The unnamed “Kid,” who narrates the story, and his uncle Dudley find themselves stranded in Los Angeles. “You had enough milk and honey?” the uncle asks. They hit upon a scheme. They round up six passengers who are willing to share expenses to Chicago. With the money they buy an old Marmon:On the sidewalk in front of a garage was a big car with little wire wheels, an old Marmon but she still had class. AIRPLANE ENGINE—SWEET RUNNER, the windshield said. We walked on by—there was even a tire on the spare. All of them held some air and the one up front had some tread showing, retread maybe but showing anyhow. We crossed the street for a side view and she really was some wagon, belly right on the ground and a high, smooth-lookin hood. The little wire wheels did something to me somehow. We went back and walked by again and she had seven seats—could be eight with three riding in the front. I looked inside and the dash was keen as hell. She had a rear-end transmission and somehow I liked that too.The story, a sort of Canterbury Tales along Route 66, is nothing out of the ordinary. But Morris’s novel pays attention to something that few other road novels do: the experience of driving. A man is more sensitive to the first signs of trouble with his car than with himself, Erich Fromm says somewhere in The Art of Loving. As if that is not the way a man should be. The Kid, who drives the Marmon on the cross-country trip, knows otherwise: “She felt good up through the floor board and through my shoe. She knocked a little on the rise—but that was cheap gas. I let her out a bit on the flat and at forty-five she was loose and idle, fifty-five drew her up where she was snug. When a car is snug she feels like a cat in your hands. And when you are snug with the car you purr right back.” Take that, mental disease!

When the car breaks down or gets a flat—a locus classicus in road novels, even in Lolita—the men climb out of the Marmon and swap stories and philosophies. And in one remarkable scene (best thing in the novel), they compare hands. Then, the car fixed, the flat patched, they climb back in, and the Kid resumes the drive. There are few American novels devoted to this, a central rite of passage for the American male. John Coy has a low-key children’s book called Night Driving (1996), with evocative illustrations by Peter McCarthy, about a son’s car trip with his father. I enjoy reading it to my own sons far more than they enjoy hearing it. (Their tastes run these days to Batman and Spider-man.) In no other American book that I can think of is the drama contained wholly in a car. Allan Seager wrote a lovely fictional memoir entitled A Frieze of Girls (1964), tracing his growth through a series of girlfriends, but there is no equivalent American novel—nothing that could be retitled A Frieze of Cars. Except for Morris and one or two others, most American writers neglect the meditative, out-of-body experience in which you dutifully follow the road’s stitching for hundreds of miles, even though you are not seeking any source.

Top 100 blogs

The Times of London has put up a list of the one hundred best in what reporter Bryan Appleyard calls the “blogscape” (a better word than “blogosphere,” he rightly says). In the category of Words, seven are named:

• Patrick Kurp’s Anecdotal Evidence. If Kurp is not the dean he is the best of us book bloggers.

• Frank Wilson’s Books, Inq.—The Epilogue. Appleyard characterizes it as a “hub” where “many bloglines intersect.”

• James Wolcott’s blog at Vanity Fair. The prose is “high-dandy,” as Appleyard calls it.

• Jessa Crispin’s Blog of a Bookslut. The blog is not “from several hands,” as Appleyard the paper has it (he they may be thinking of the monthly web magazine). Crispin is reliably amusing from a reliably “hip” perspective.

• Joseph Sullivan’s Book Design Review. Lots of jacket art—more jacket art than book design, really—with critical comments interspersed.

• The Orwell Diaries. Published by the Orwell Prize, the blog follows the diary, day by day, as Orwell wrote it: “Each diary entry is published on the blog exactly seventy years after it was originally written by Orwell, beginning in 1938. . . .”

• And, finally, this self-same Commonplace Blog.

The Times includes Nigeness under the category of Original Thinkers, but Nige thinks originally in strikingly original words. He is more literary than philosophical, but should be read no matter what category he belongs to.

How they ignored Lincoln

Little did I know, when I tried earlier today to redraw the map of American literary English to include Lincoln, that I would be nearly alone among book bloggers in even mentioning the second centenary of his birth. Edward Byrne, who reread “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” in Lincoln’s honor, was one of the few others.

Over at the Valve, Rohan Maitzen celebrates Darwin Day. It was indeed an extraordinary coincidence that two of the greatest prose writers in English should have been born on the same day. But Maitzen, a Canadian, is not interested in Darwin the writer. He represents a “view of life” in which she finds “grandeur.” And just in case you are in any doubt over what she means, a few days earlier she had said that, if you were in a “Darwinian kind of mood,” you’d probably get a kick out of an interview in which Ian McEwan boasted that atheists enjoy a “much greater and livelier sense of interest and connection with the world. . . .” (What has become of the Valve, by the way? Originally created as a “literary organ” of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a counter-MLA founded to advocate “the teaching of literature as literature,” the collective blog is more likely to discuss Obama and the stimulus package, the plight of adjunct professors, teaching film or comics in composition classes, the Suleman octuplets, Paul McCartney’s “You Never Give Me Your Money,” robots.)

The National Book Critics Circle continued its roundup of finalists for its annual prizes, examining Helene Cooper’s autobiography The House on Sugar Beach yesterday and studying Allan J. Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation earlier today. The Circle last glanced at Lincoln just before Election Day—in connection with Barack Obama, naturally.

Richard Marcus reviews a DVD from the Lee Boys. Roger K. Miller discusses Jesse James. The New York Times’ Paper Cuts interviews British novelist James Hamilton-Paterson. Mark Sarvas visited the Norton Simon Museum, and brought home Instructions for American Servicemen in France During World War II, the facsimile of a “pocket guide” prepared by the U.S. Army. Bianca Steele considers an argument against traditional meter. Jerome Weeks reviews Brendan McNally’s Germania, an “oddball thriller” by a local author. Ron Silliman lists the books that he has recently received. Maud Newton returns to Muriel Spark. Jessa Crispin admits that she forgot to say Happy Darwin Day yesterday and supposes she should wish her readers a happy Friday the 13th instead. “Did you know,” she asks, “Friday the 13th used to be celebrated by all day sex?” Knowledge that is worth having!

Have our literary intellectuals lost interest in Lincoln? Do they not rank him among the great writers? (Our greatest presidential writers in order: Lincoln, No. 1 . . . Long pause then Adams and Jefferson bracketed second, closely followed by Grant (4) Theodore Roosevelt (5) Reagan (6) Obama (7).) Or is a once-in-a-lifetime national holiday, the second centenary of our greatest president’s birth, too contaminated by patriotism to be deserving of mention?

Jumpy beat of American English

“I prefer American English,” Stuart Evers writes in the Guardian’s book blog, trying to explain why three-quarters of the titles he owns are by Americans: “I like the way it sounds; its rhythms and its cadences. Give me a diner over a café, a sidewalk over a pavement, a bar over a pub and definitely a gas station over a petrol forecourt.”

Philip Roth said something remarkably similar in The Counterlife, trying to explain why he wished neither to make aliyah nor to become a more traditionally Jewish writer: “My sacred text wasn’t the Bible but novels translated from Russian, German, and French into the language in which I was beginning to write and publish my own fiction—not the semantic range of classical Hebrew but the jumpy beat of American English was what excited me.”

I don’t quote Roth to diminish Evers in any way. Since the death of Sir Malcolm Bradbury, rare is the British writer who has celebrated the writing from these shores over that of his own island. Evers does not say exactly why he prefers sound of American English. He does go on to praise the “sibilance” of the phrase gas station, saying that you can hear the sound of tires inflating. Well, maybe.

And Roth’s “jumpiness,” while a more thoroughgoing explanation, is also not sufficient. Much American English has a jumpy beat, but not all. Not the South’s English. The urban mongrelized English, the trollop among languages that will sleep with any language on earth and introduce new bastards into the vocabulary (nada, blitz, kosher, macaroni), the linguistic encounter that makes rapid code-switching necessary and acceptable, is what Roth describes. But he is a city boy. And a second-generation American Jew. The jumpy English of the Newark streets is what he grew up speaking.

The South’s English is more oratorical, or as Richard M. Weaver would put it, more sermonic. And ironically, it owes more to the semantic range of classical Hebrew than to the language of the streets. But this is not to say that it does not have a beat and flourish all its own. The ignorant visitor says that the Southerner drawls. He does not. He draws out his point. Slowly. At length. Taking the time to enjoy it. As a Yankee teaching in the South, I have long enjoyed the linguistic clash that occurs when I talk with my students. The Southern tradition of deference is strained to the breaking point by my Jewish intellectuals’ habit of constantly interrupting them. Their English is obliged, if only for a time, to become more jumpy; mine, more periodic.

Yesterday of course was the second centenary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. In honor of the day I reread the Second Inaugural Address. The son of a border state who was raised in the “West” belonged nevertheless to the tradition of Southern oratory. Lincoln was fully conscious of the debt that he owed to that Bible-haunted style of American speech. He refers directly to the Bible and quotes Matt 18.7. More than that, he enters into the language of the Authorized Version, and makes it his own. Consider: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” God tells man after he has eaten the fruit (Gen 3.19). In Lincoln this is turned and adapted, but to a slightly jumpier beat: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” he says after affirming that North and South read the same Bible and pray to the same God. Lincoln suggests that slavery is an offense that continued “through His appointed time,“ but that “He now wills to remove. . . .” Replying angrily to Eliphaz the Temanite, who had argued that suffering is punishment for sin, Job says:

Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? As a servant earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for the reward of his work: So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me. (7.1)Not only does Lincoln allude to these words, in which Job compares man’s “appointed time” to the length of a slave’s servitude, but he also loops the argument through a periodic sentence of seventy-eight words and ten clauses. But immediately then he draws up short, hotly interrupting himself: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” This is a rhythm more naturally associated with postwar American novelists like Bellow and Ellison, but it has been a part of American literature for nearly two centuries. It is what, I think, Evers and Roth mean by the sibilance and jumpy beat of American English. It is somewhat better described as a language that denies itself no available resource and that ranges from phrases appropriate for God to the rapidfire back-and-forth of the combative pavements.

But if she was not a lesbian?

Reading the scholarship on Death Comes for the Archbishop, I stumbled upon the following passage from a ten-year-old article. The author is discussing the eclipse of her reputation during Cather’s own lifetime. Critics like Granville Hicks, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling—all three on the intellectual Left—attacked Cather for “her neglect of contemporary social realities, her retreat into a nostalgic past that forswore the complexity of modern life.” But more was involved. The attacks derived not merely from their politics but “from the critics’ fundamental misogyny.” Their “ideas of radicalism seldom extended beyond the white male identity.” (Not surprisingly, our author finds all three “tremendously overrated.”) Then he tries to explain how Hicks, Wilson, and Trilling could have been so short-sighted:

Just as Cather’s identity as a woman, and probably also her lesbianism, enabled her to appreciate the position of ethnic minorities, so too was the mainstream critical denunciation of the works closely tied with the preconceptions of her critics.¹What is striking is how much is taken for granted in this little passage. How much is set off, like a holy of holies, from argument! There is no external evidence whatever that Cather was a lesbian; not a single reference to sexual relations, not even in passing, is found in her extensive correspondence.² Nevertheless, Cather’s lesbianism is now the common opinion of literary scholars. And this merely suppositional lesbianism is then supposed to be fons et origo of what is in fact one of Cather’s great literary achievements—her “appreciation,” her deep imaginative sympathy, for “ethnic minorities.” It is nothing for which she deserves praise. It is a “preconception.” All lesbians—all women, for that matter—share it.

But what if Cather was not a lesbian? What if she captured “The Hired Girls” so memorably, not because she lusted after them, but because she could imagine herself as one of them? What if she understood the Navajo and Hopi so well (“It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it”) because she studied them closely, and not because, as a lesbian, she too felt as if she belonged to an ethnic minority. (Cather never once uses the terms ethnic or minority in her letters.) What if scholars never learn the complete facts about Cather’s friendship with Edith Lewis? They observe that she and Lewis lived together from 1912 until Cather’s death in 1947, and they snicker knowingly. If the known facts admit another possible explanation, though, and if nothing further can be determined, then how can a lesbian relationship between the women be so positively assumed? Why wouldn’t the alternative explanation be equally plausible? (Because it doesn’t enjoy lesbianism’s prestige, that’s why.) What if Cather sought, with Edith Lewis, a refuge from the stupefaction of sensuality that she describes repeatedly, and with obvious distaste, in Death Comes for the Archbishop:His fat face was irritatingly stupid, and had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby’s legs, and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was embedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same greedy way upon the girl who served the table—and who seemed to regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another.Perhaps she lived with Lewis precisely to avoid “sensual disturbance,” and to put all her creative energies into her writing instead. I advance this merely as an alternative explanation of the known facts, which has the logical effect—not that literary scholars are affected by logic—of invalidating the assumption that Cather was a lesbian. Outside a political preference for lesbianism over chastity, there is no reason to accept one explanation over the other. Except, perhaps, that the alternative explanation also accounts for Cather’s clear tendency, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, to sympathize with Bishop Latour’s celibacy over Padre Martínez’s debauchery. It is, as the Bishop says, a question that had been “thrashed out many centuries ago and decided once for all.”
____________________

1. Nicholas Birns, “Building the Cathedral: Imagination, Christianity, and Progress in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Religion and the Arts 3 (1999): 1–19.

2. James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 141.

Kindle and kids’ books

With all the buzz over Amazon’s Kindle 2, and all the handwringing and fist-pumping over the possibility that ebook readers will replace paper-and-binding books, no one has given any thought to children’s books and whether hand-held devices will appeal to kids.

The last two days my son Saul, six next week, has carried The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The House at Pooh Corner to school. He can read neither book. Both, however, are fine editions—small octavo volumes with sewn signatures, clear ten-point type with one-point leading, nice thick paper. Saul likes the feel of them in his hands. It is hard to imagine his carrying a Kindle with the same pride.

And what about pop-up and lift-the-flap books? My two-year-old son Isaac can’t get enough of them. He takes them to bed, and in the morning he “reads” them quietly to himself until his father comes to lift him out of the crib. For Isaac, lifting the flaps is what constitutes “reading.” And again it is hard to imagine his taking a similar delight in a Kindle, even if Amazon could solve the technical problem of how to lift the flap on an electronic text.

I am only thinking out loud. It seems likely, though, that Saul and Isaac are forming their book-handling habits at an age before they are capable of reading. A Kindle is not going to change such habits; at best it will assist them. Don’t ebook readers appeal only to those, in other words, who are already hooked on books?

The fox’s apology

Few are those who, having been introduced to Sir Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, are not anxious to proclaim themselves a hedgehog. Who would wish to know many small tricks when he could know one great one? Not intellectuals, that’s for sure. “Virtually by definition,” Theodore Dalrymple writes in the current issue of the City Journal, “they like to address themselves to large and general questions, not small and particular ones. . . .” An intellectual congratulates himself upon being centripetal, not meandering; he does not “come across” or “happen upon” something, he goes looking for it. A good part of being a hedgehog involves feeling superior to foxes.

I have been a fox all my life. I sweat the small stuff. I get hung up on details. I’m all over the place. I know the Arcadia and Moll Flanders, but I can’t explain why the novel or the concept of the individual emerged when they did. I know that literature is good writing where “good” by definition has no fixed definition, but I don’t know what makes writing good in every instance. I know Derrida holds that the endless deferral of meaning constitutes the essence of life, and Foucault that truth is a function of power, without knowing either to be the case, or how to apply these theories in advance to texts I haven’t read. I know there are writers, like the young J. V. Cunningham when he was first starting out, who are sure that their thought forms a system—what holes in it they are sure can be worked out—but I am resigned to being more like the the older Cunningham, who found himself “left with limited insights, the plain implications of experience but restricted in generality, and cold assumptions whose systematic development unfolds as one lives them.”

Perhaps something more impersonal can be said for the fox. How many are there in literary history! Erasmus and Montaigne are the ideal types; the Renaissance humanist, with his motto humani nil a me alienum puto, belongs to the species almost by birthright—More, Castiglione, Vives, Reuchlin, Sidney. Except for some early hedgehogs like Milton and Bacon, English literature is very nearly a literature of foxes until the Romantics arrive to push them out—Donne, Jonson, Burton, Hobbes, Herrick, Browne, Dryden, Locke, Pepys, Rochester, Johnson, Swift, Addison and Steele, Pope. And while the fox does indeed treasure happenstance as a principle of discovery, figuring the world of learning will never bend to his will, he is not entirely without method. His method, though, is eclectic.

I don’t mean that the fox is merely various. The word for his method is not accidental. It comes from the Greek eklektikos, “selective.” In the history of philosophy, it refers to the practice of sifting the schools and doctrines to separate the valuable from worthless. It is what Donald R. Kelley, editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas and chief proponent of eclecticism at the moment, calls a Higher Plagiarism. It borrows what is true and rejects what is false, and assembles the truths into a temporary dwelling. It looks with suspicion and disgust upon the sort of education in which a pupil submits to the authority of a recognized master, replacing it with a kind of serial discipleship—sitting at the feet of this one and that one. It licks the icing off books.

Such foxy eclecticism has strengths and weaknesses. Its weaknesses are well-known, since the hedgehogs are forever pointing them out. It is not sufficiently exercised, they grunt and snuffle, about context or redundancy or even error or irrelevance. Their objection has The Anatomy of Melancholy and the Journal to Stella dead to rights, but the fox would prefer to do without the objection than do without the books. The strengths of his eclecticism are less obvious, but no less real. Easily familiar with human ignorance, it is not easily taken in by intellectual giants who turn out to be Egyptian pretenders or Nazi collaborators. Although there has been tension between them, it makes common cause with skepticism—for both are equally suspicious of dogma and claims to knowledge before the fact. Its habits are, in Kelley’s phrase, inadvertantly comparative and necessarily historical. Its method of critical selection enables the eclectic fox to skirt the trap of sectarian disputes. And while it does not gaily dismiss contradictions with allusions to bulk and multitudinousness, it is able to subscribe to opposing views—the belief, for example, that the Hebrew bible is both divinely inspired and compiled by human hands—and still get business done. For it is not a confession, but a life.

When I started this blog—ironically late, if Bianca Steele is correct—I selected its title with care. For nearly four decades I have kept commonplace books. They have spilled over into volumes; they clutter my desk. Whatever I have seen into print can be traced back to them; they are ultrasonographs of my published offspring. But they contain much else besides, and serve additional purposes. They are everything that hedgehogs dislike—they are fragmentary, merely dredged up and raked in, a slow stumble through literature—but they suit my native abilities, such as they are. And what is more, they provide literary precedent for book blogging, as I realized when I finally started this project sixteen weeks ago. Not every book blog is written on the model of the commonplace book; perhaps not even the best are written on the model of it; but it is a traditional model, a convenient and useful model, and one that once enjoyed a greater prestige than it does today.

As Ann Blair wrote in the Journal of the History of Ideas, “Strictly speaking, the commonplace book was a humanist innovation, but like most Renaissance practices it adapted a concept with a glorious ancient pedigree to suit contemporary . . . needs.” It became the “crucial tool for storing and retrieving the increasingly unwieldy quantity of textual and personal knowledge that guaranteed copiousness in speech and writing.” As such it was perfectly suited to “the Erasmian ideal of eloquence through copia rerum or abundance of material.”[1]

Book blogging on the model of the commonplace book has attracted some of the most interesting foxes now writing about books—Patrick Kurp, Bill Peschel, Elif Batuman, Nige, Perry Middlemiss, Michael Gilleland, Ron Slate, Nigel Beale. These are writers united not by doctrine or ideological commitment, but by an ambition to copiousness and eloquence—and the secret handshake that passes between those who have spent a life among books. They are proud to be foxes. They don’t avoid hedgehogs; they just don’t want to be one. They are happy knowing many small tricks. Or, rather, such knowledge brings them great happiness. And besides, they know that David Garnett’s little novel would not have been nearly so charming if it had been called Lady into Hedgehog.
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[1] Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541–551.

Historical novels of faith

Yesterday I started teaching Death Comes for the Archbishop. As befits a student of Gerald Graff, my custom is to place course reading in the context of brewing and simmering literary debates. I wanted to contrast her “narrative,” as Cather preferred to call it, to the postcolonial novel (“The Church can do more than the Fort to make these poor Mexicans ‘good Americans,’ ” Bishop Latour reflects. “And it is for the people’s good; there is no other way in which they can better their condition”). So far so good. Now, what is a postcolonial novel?

Luckily I came across a passage in a Guardian essay from nine years ago in which D. J. Taylor asks the same question, then provides a kind of answer:

What kind of books are these, in which the white man’s burden, taken off into a quiet clearing and stealthily unpacked, turns out to contain all kinds of alluring plunder? In her penetrating study, Traces of Another Time [1990], the American critic [Margaret] Scanlan defined this genre as the “sceptical historical novel.” The public past it outlined is not one of triumph and achievement, but one inglorious and violent. It focuses on defeat rather than victory . . . and draws attention, however subtly, to stupidity and arrogance rather than to heroism.Matthew Kneale’s Whitbread-winning English Passengers (1999) provoked Taylor to ask the question, but he mentions several other Commonwealth novels that “mine these themes of imperial duplicity and decay”: J. G. Farrell’s brilliant Siege of Krishnapur (1972), William Boyd’s Ice-Cream War (1981), Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1987), Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar (1988), Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1991). Tracing their descent through Heart of Darkness (1898), which he names as the “core text,” Leonard Woolf’s Ceylonese Village in the Jungle (1913), A Passage to India (1924), and Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934), Taylor decides that recent postcolonial novels represent a “literary tradition in late maturity, rather than a dazzling new strike into the historical unknown.”

Since the United States has never been an imperial power, despite Leftist sloganeering, postcolonial novels show up in American literature only when, like Updike’s Coup (1978) or Vikrem Seth’s Suitable Boy (1993), they are set in a former outpost of the British Empire. Otherwise, like Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) or Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), they belong to immigrant literature.

If postcolonial novels are more broadly redefined as skeptical historical novels, though, several American examples leap to mind, starting with such “anti-westerns” as Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958), E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960), and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964). More recent efforts to inject skepticism into the historical novel would include Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979), Morrison’s Beloved (1986), Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1996), Jane Smiley’s All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998), Valerie Martin’s Property (2003), and Geraldine Brooks’s March (2005). These would more appropriately be called revisionist novels if the term had not been corrupted, as I have written elsewhere, by neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust.

Accept the name skeptical historical novels, then. What is striking to me is the number of novels, over the same course of time, that mine American history, not for themes of duplicity and decay, but for triumph and achievement: Paul Horgan’s Distant Trumpet (1960), Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971), Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels (1974), Mary Lee Settle’s Scapegoat (1980), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), Hugh Nissenson’s Tree of Life (1985), Thomas Mallon’s Henry and Clara (1994), Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler (1996), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004). They belong to the same literary tradition as Willa Cather. Call them historical novels of faith—not necessarily religious faith, but the faith that, even if men and women living in the past may not have shared the crochets and opinions of the present, they were neither stupid nor arrogant as a consequence.

Repertoires and abilities

For nearly four decades now literary scholars have been keeping themselves awake with the bogey of the canon. The time has long passed for giving the bad idea a decent burial. I propose to replace it with Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between repertoires and abilities.

Ryle sets out to answer Socrates’ question “Can virtue be taught?”[1] It can, but only if it is cared about—deeply. Deep caring is the proof that education has succeeded. “[W]e can properly be described as having learned or been taught standards of conduct when, under the influence of other people’s examples, expressions, utterances, admonitions, and disciplines, we too have come to care deeply about the things they care deeply about,” Ryle writes.

The reason most of us laugh at moral education is that “the idea strikes us as ridiculous that there should exist expert tutors or crammers in fidelity, modesty, or generosity. . . .” But this is to reduce education to only one sort—what Ryle calls “instructing by dictating,” or what is now derided as a sage on the stage. But there is another sort of education. Ryle gives the example of learning to play the piano. “The wisest theorists in the world can lecture as eloquently as you please,” Ryle says; “but the clearest memories of their doctrines will not, by themselves, enable Tommy to play the piano.” Starting with five-finger exercises, practice is also needed—ten thousand hours of practice to become a virtuoso, if recent research is to be believed. “Learning doctrines by heart is one sort of learning,” Ryle concludes; “learning to do things is another sort, and one which is not generally much assisted by learning doctrines by heart.”

For these two sorts of learning, Ryle suggests the shorthand terms repertoires and abilities. They are usually confused, because both can be acquired. But the ability to play the piano is not the same as a repertoire of pieces that can be readily played, from a familiarity with them. What is more, a repertoire is nothing without the ability to use and enjoy it. And the abilities are implicit within the repertoire. They are not an abstract set of movements, like swinging the arms or standing on tiptoe, but the concrete skills required to play these pieces in exactly this way.

Ryle goes on to argue that there is a third category—the value of conduct. I may acquire the ability to do something, but this is no guarantee that I will use it morally. For instance, a man may be a well-trained surgeon, but there is nothing in his training to prevent him from killing instead of healing patients on the operating table. Indeed, his training has equipped him to kill more efficiently, if he chooses. Similarly, you may acquire an ability to play a game, but this will not insure that you will play the game to win. These motives and desires are separate and distinct from the abilities and repertoires.

You must also, therefore, learn to care deeply for the things you are handling, the actions you are performing. The very fact that a repertoire is a selection, Ryle observes, embodies the necessary degree of necessary caring. If you care deeply enough about playing the piano you don’t play just anything at all. No one cares deeply for an arbitrary gathering. A person cares only for what has been selected with care and preserved out of the conviction that it is worth something.
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[1] Gilbert Ryle, “Can Virtue Be Taught?” in Education and the Development of Reason, ed. R. F. Dearden, P. H. Hirst, and R. S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 44–57.

Fiction and the empirical turn

The reason there are not more good novels about sports, Mark Athitakis speculates in a reply to my post on football novels, is that “most sports are too defined by their mythologies—it takes a diligent and attentive novelist to collapse their clichés and find something new to say about the subject.”

This hits the mark, or at least where mediocre sports novels are concerned. Malamud’s Natural, a novel that Athitakis singles out as a better novel about baseball, is instead a perfect example of what he is talking about. Here, for example, is the notorious scene in which Harriet Bird shoots Roy Hobbs, after asking if he will be the greatest player ever. When he answers, “That’s right,”

She pulled the trigger (thrum of bull fiddle). The bullet cut a silver line across the water. He sought with his bare hands to catch it, but it eluded him and, to his horror, bounced into his gut. A twisted dagger of smoke twisted up from the gun barrel. Fallen on one knee he groped for the bullet, sickened as it moved, and fell over as the forest flew upward, and she, making muted noises of triumph and despair, danced on her toes around the stricken hero.The original incident involved Eddie Waitkus, a 29-year-old slick-fielding first baseman and decent hitter, but no candidate for greatest player who ever lived. During the 1949 season, while hitting a soft .306 for the Philadelphia Phillies and leading the All-Star balloting, he was shot in the chest by Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who had been infatuated with the ten-years-older ballplayer ever since he broke in with the Chicago Cubs, crying when he was traded to Philadelphia and building a little shrine to him in her bedroom. On June 16, she left a note saying that it was “extremely important” to see him “as soon as possible.” Waitkus went to her room in the Edgewater Beach Hotel on Chicago’s North Side, where they were both staying. He told what happened next:When she opened the door, she took a look and said, “Come in for a minute.” She was very abrupt and businesslike. I asked what she wanted and walked through the little entrance hall over to the window. When I turned around there she was with this .22-caliber rifle. She said, “You’re not going to bother me any more.” Before I could say anything else, whammy!Waitkus, who had fought with the U.S. Army on New Guinea, winning four battle stars, joked to reporters: “I guess I zigged when I should have zagged.” He marveled, “She had the coldest looking face I ever saw. No expression at all. She wasn’t happy—she wasn’t anything.” Asked why he had gone to her room, Waitkus said, “I thought it might be someone I knew—someone from downstate or a friend of a friend.” He did not know the girl, although he may have met her without remembering. “We ballplayers get a lot of letters from girls and don’t pay any attention to them,” he explained. “We call them ‘baseball annies.’ ”

Away from reporters, Waitkus confided to friends that the bullet’s impact felt like six men slamming him against the wall. Four operations were required to drain his lung, but remarkably he recovered and returned to baseball the next season, batting leadoff and playing all 154 games for the pennant-winning Phillies, winning the Associated Press “comeback of the year” award. But the story did not end happily. His son was convinced that the shooting changed Waitkus forever, turning him into a reclusive alcoholic and perhaps even contributing to his death from lung cancer at fifty-three. “Different doctors through the years have expressed the theory that the stress of the shooting, combined with the four operations, allowed the cancer to take hold,” the younger Waitkus told Ira Berkow of the New York Times nearly four decades later. “So I think Ruth Steinhagen was more successful than she thought.”

Steinhagen herself was released from the Kankakee State Mental Hospital two and a half years after the shooting, pronounced sane, all criminal charges against her dismissed. She disappeared from public view. The next month Waitkus’s claim for $3,500 was dismissed by the Pennsylvania Workmen’s Compensation Board, which ruled that the ballplayer was “not in the course of his employment” when shot in a hotel room.

I have repeated the Waitkus story at some length to contrast its irreducible factuality, its hard-surfaced concreteness, to Malamud’s lyricism. The story of Eddie Waitkus is richer and more chilling than the myth of Roy Hobbs. For that matter, Waitkus is a more interesting ballplayer—or at least a more interesting case—than Malamud’s hero. Throughout the summer Roy Hobbs blazes away with his golden bat:It was not really golden, it was white, but in the sun it sometimes flashed gold and some of the opposing pitchers complained it shone in their eyes. . . . There was a hot rhubarb about that until Roy promised to rub some of the shine off Wonderboy. This he did with a hambone, and though the pitchers shut up, the bat still shone a dull gold. It brought him some wonderous averages in hits, runs, RBI’s and total bases, and for the period of his few weeks in the game he led the league in homers and triples.What were the numbers? Who knows? Not knowing, how can it be believed that Roy’s averages are “wonderous”? While he may have “led the league in homers and triples,” that is not particularly informative. Leagues have been led (since 1930) by as few as 22 homers and eight triples. Maybe he played in a weak league.

By contrast, it can be said with exactitude and certainty that Waitkus hit .285 in his eleven-season career, getting on base at a .344 clip—just about the rate of an average hitter, or thirty-seven fewer times every 500 at-bats than Stan Musial, who debuted the same season—with a slugging percentage (.374) that ranks second-worst all time among first basemen with at least 4,000 at bats. And though one baseball historian grades him A- in the field, he played at a position where good or bad fielding has a relatively small effect upon the game and where much more robust offensive production is usually expected. The real question about Waitkus is this. How did he manage to play eleven seasons as a regular in the big leagues?

The answer: a high batting average, especially before the shooting, when Waitkus hit .296 in 448 games, combined with his graceful fielding, appealed to the unexamined assumptions and folk psychology of baseball men, who were still living by metrics and dogmas established three quarters of a century or more earlier for a game still in its infancy.

Since then a revolution has occurred. Bill James, who began self-publishing his Baseball Abstract in 1977 while working night shifts as a security guard at a Stokely Van Camp factory, almost singlehandedly changed the way ballplayers are evaluated. By introducing new statistical measures (secondary average, runs created, range factor), he was able to challenge baseball’s prevailing wisdom (that a .300 average is the mark of a good hitter, for example, or that a good fielder commits few errors). James has gained the reputation of being a statistical guru—the “Sultan of Stats,” as the Wall Street Journal hailed him a while back. This is to misunderstand his achievement. While he helped to invent sabermetrics, the in-depth statistical research into baseball performance, James does not consider it a branch of statistics. His characteristic procedure is to open an inquiry into an aspect of baseball by citing an assertion widely accepted as true, and then submitting it to withering examination, using statistics as his tool. “Sabermetrics,” he says, “is a field of knowledge which is drawn from attempts to figure out whether or not those things people say are true.”

James belongs to the empirical turn that has been negotiated in several disciplines of human thought over the past three decades. The law-and-economics movement, founded by Henry Manne in the early seventies, is another example. Experimental philosophy, with its slogan “No armchair speculation,” is one more. Two critics, E. D. Hirsch Jr. and Frederick Crews, have sought to guide literary study into empirical responsibility, although neither has met with much public success. Instead of new historical research into popular literary delusions, there is new historicism. As Crews says in an interview, “What’s happened in the humanities is a general assault on the idea of the empirical, the very idea of the rational, which is now associated with such social evils as racism, patriarchy, and so forth. And in the vacuum that is created by this denigration of the empirical, nothing is left but cliquishness, nothing is left but power.”

Kal v’homer, as the Jews say—how much more so in the field of human endeavor that prizes the armchair more than any other. I am speaking, naturally, of fiction. As Tom Wolfe detailed at length in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” his infamous Harper’s essay of 1989, realism had fallen out of favor in the sixties to be replaced by “fictions” in which the action had no specific location, the characters had no background, came from nowhere, and said nothing that indicated any class or ethnic origin, “with the emotions anesthetized, given a shot of novocaine.” The solution was basic research, or what Wolfe called reporting. It is “the most valuable and least understood resource available to any writer with exalted ambitions”; what is more, it is “essential for the very greatest effects literature can achieve.”

American novelists have sniffed at Wolfe, of course. And if I were to rephrase his argument, holding that American fiction badly needs an empirical turn, a rethinking of it as a means (in Crews’s words) “to study indefensible pretensions and to note how they cause intelligent people to shut off their critical faculties and resort to cultlike behavior,” I would be hooted out of the literary blogosphere. Their ignorance of sport except for its “mythologies” is not sufficient to explain the lack of good American sports novels; American novelists also have small belief and less interest in knowledge of any kind. That’s why the only American sports novels worth reading are those, like W. C. Heinz’s Professional, a 1958 book about a middleweight contender, by writers who have made a close study of their subject, as if it were something worth actually knowing.

Update: Here is a nice obituary for W. C. Heinz, who died a year ago later this month, saying just enough about The Professional to make you want to read more. Sports Illustrated puts the novel at #54 of its Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, but the list is remarkably uncritical.

On writing in books

Patrick Kurp admits had he “stopped writing in books a long time ago. It came to seem like a form of vandalism, and when I’ve reread my annotations I was most impressed by their fatuity: ‘Symbolism!’ “Foreshadowing!’ That sort of thing.” And now I must tell my students never to read Anecdotal Evidence, because on the first day of class I routinely urge them to “make the books [for the course] your own. Write your name in them. Underline. Draw question marks beside passages you don’t fully understand. Make notes in the margins.” Then I tell them a story.

My senior year at Santa Cruz I shared a house with the poet Mark Jarman and two others. Graduation Day arrived. Mark’s family was in town to see him receive his diploma. His sister wandered into our sunlight-drenched living room on a hill overlooking Monterrey Bay. (Not for nothing did I coin a phrase for the difficulty of completing one’s studies in surroundings of such natural beauty: “The agony of gorgeous days.”) I remember that I was reading Herzog. I had a pen in hand. “Getting a little studying done?” Mark’s sister asked. Nope. Just reading. “Then why are you underlining?” she demanded.

Why indeed? I had never asked myself the question. Without benefit of much reflection, I told her that, when I had been in the Boy Scouts, I had been taught, if I were ever to become lost in the woods, that I should break branches along the way to prevent myself from tripping in circles. (The truth of this warning had been borne in upon me a few weeks earlier when my friend John Kucich and I had become hopelessly lost in the woods high in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Without a fixed point of reference above the trees, we circled aimlessly for a couple of hours, frightening a stag at one point, who charged right past us, before we accidentally struck the road. Although we were both former Boy Scouts, we both forgot to break any branches.) “I underline in books for the same reason,” I told Mark’s sister sententiously; “to keep from going around in circles, and to find my way back.”

Opening the same copy of Herzog now many years later, I find my notes even more embarrassing than Kurp’s examples. Except for the conversation with Mark’s sister, which I scribbled on the end papers, most are even more groan-inducing than what I told her. “Ideas that depopulate the world,” Bellow writes. “That kill?” I have scrawled in the margins in fine-point blue ink. “Or that make the thinker more unique? More necessary?” Say again? A description of Ramona (she had “eyes that held metaphysical statements”) reminded me of my current girlfriend, with whom apparently I did not have a carefree relationship. A remark by Sandor Himmelstein, the Chicago lawyer who looked after Herzog one autumn, reminded me of Gordon Lish, my teacher Raymond Carver’s editor at Esquire: “We’re all whores in this world, and don’t you forget it.” Not that Lish was a whore. But this was his general attitude.

I also tell my students about the copy of Doctorow’s Book of Daniel which I prepared for a review in the student newspaper. At one place I underlined every word on the page. Every word. Boy, did that help me trace my way back to a memorable passage! Years later I had to hunt down another first edition of the novel to replace the one I had defaced.

I no longer underline every word on pages, but except for hardcover first editions of novels, I continue to read with a pen in hand, even on Shabbes, when I cannot use it to write. It is what I hold instead of a cigarette. Kurp suggests the habit may be just as bad, but I am a passionate scorer and composer of marginalia. Writing in books is something like Ascham’s method of double translation for me. My notes convert the author’s words into my own, and when I turn them back, I find that they have impressed themselves upon my memory. Perhaps the method does not work for everyone, or even very many, but it is the only form of intertextuality to which I subscribe.

Football novels

The heart-pounding finish of the Super Bowl yesterday (the Pittsburgh Steelers defeated Kurt Warner’s Arizona Cardinals by 27 to 23) led me to wonder why there are not more American football novels. Joiner (1971) is the most promising, and not because James Whitehead played football at Vanderbilt before an injury reduced him to literature. Eugene (Sonny) Joiner, narrator and protagonist, is an offensive lineman rather than a glamor player; he squints up at the game from an unusual position. (The Tex Maule novels that I started to read as a schoolkid, before “outgrowing” them, are entitled Quarterback, Linebacker, Running Back, Cornerback, and Receiver.) Ultimately, though, the novel falls victim to post-1968 nonsense. Styling himself a “radical historian,” Joiner teaches calculus and spelling to underprivileged children at a progressive school after he quits pro football, and becomes the disciple of a fifteenth-century Hussite.

Another ex-player, Peter Gent ran routes and caught passes for the Dallas Cowboys for five seasons in the sixties, then wrote North Dallas Forty (1973), a novel that was more distinguished for its rage at the professional sport than for its scenes of action on the field. Dan Jenkins’s Semi-Tough (1972) displayed a raw satiric talent, but was nearly as angry in tone as Gent’s novel, filled with gall. Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972) has great fun with the language of the game (“Monsoon sweep, string-in-left, ready right, cradle out, drill-9 shiver, ends chuff”), but to adapt what Philip Roth wrote about The Natural, it is not about football as the game is played at Kyle Field, but a wild, wacky football which is more metaphor than reality.

Much the same is true of Howard Nemerov’s far less ambitious novel The Homecoming Game (1957), which does not even try to describe what occurs on the field. Here a professor’s F, leaving the star ineligible for the big game, serves merely as a pretext for an exploration of moral ambiguity. John R. Tunis, the greatest sports novelist of all time, wrote only one book about football. All-American (1942) is the best of a bad harvest—understanding that it is a boys’ book and that, like all of Tunis’s books, it has more to do with a boy’s fumbling for values than handling a ball. No one is better at describing the action on the field, but many readers will find Tunis dated, and his moral concerns inartistic and unliterary.

Perhaps the problem is that football is understood (wrongly) as the least individual of sports, where ignorant coaching systems clash by night; or perhaps the problem is that Tom Buchanan cast the mold for football players in American literature, condemning them for all time to being represented as careless brutes. The truth is that it is the most masculine of sports, more so even than boxing, not merely because it requires manliness, which Harvey Mansfield defines as confidence in a situation of risk (boxing takes that too), but because it demands the masculine virtues—patience, patrimony, moral courage, physical strength, loyalty to friends, submission to legitimate authority, service to others.

What shapes literature

Time’s book critic Lev Grossman is convinced that, as the magazine’s headline announces, the digital age is reshaping literature (h/t: Daniel Green). “Literature interprets the world,” Grossman says, “but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since—well, since the early 18th century.”

The eighteenth century is significant, because according to Grossman (repeating a scholarly commonplace as if he were saying something original), the “novel in its modern form really got rolling” then:

This wasn’t an accident, and it didn’t happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.[1]But while this third-hand Marxism may seem to explain the rise of mass-market fiction, it does nothing whatever to distinguish Moll Flanders or Pamela from the Morte d’Arthur or the Arcadia. Why did the “large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class” not prefer the supernatural to realistic replica-worlds?

The older theory is that the novel came of age along with the individual, and thus the novel, understood as fiction in which human character is represented and developed, owes its emergence to a political concept. This older theory has not so much been disproven as discarded. We are all cultural materialists now, at least those of us who live by received ideas.

In the American university, cultural materialism has spawned a new discipline—the history of the book. (Bibliography, the old discipline, was materialist only in its exclusive concern with how books are made and where to find them.) And what would an academic fashion be without a French auteur? Roger Chartier, a historian of the Annales school who teaches at the Collège de France, stitched together the new discipline by combining reception theory with the study of printed objects. Its purpose, he explains, is to replace the “lazy familiarity with which literary history is transformed into a pantheon of great texts” with “another project altogether,” which aims at “reinserting works, whatever they might be, into the conditions and procedures that governed their writing, their distribution and their reception. . . .”[2]

As someone who believes that literature is shaped by material forces outside individual control, including how it is used, especially by what he calls “the political and economic powers,” Chartier is unruffled by the thought that electronic texts may replace printed books. To see into the literary future, “we must,” he says, “do two things”:First, we need to examine the changes that have begun, at an uneven rate, in the world today and place them where they belong within the revolutions in techniques for reproductions of texts, in the forms of the book, and in manners of reading. Then, taking into account the effects of meaning produced by the material aspects of writing, we need to reflect on the many consequences of our entry into the age of the electronic representation of texts and their reading on screens.[3]The effects of meaning produced by the material aspects of writing—there in a phrase is the assumption behind all such efforts as Lev Grossman’s to predict what will become of the novel. “Like fan fiction,” Grossman says breathlessly,it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer—electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints—and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.It sounds swell. I can hardly wait. But if any of this happens, it won’t be for the reason Grossman thinks. It won’t be because the material conditions of fiction-writing generate its meaning. It will be, rather, because the new technology ratifies what a writer has already been doing.

Let me illustrate. According to Chartier, the invention of the codex was fundamental and far more important than the invention of printing, because the transition from unrolling a scroll to turning a page gave the book “the form, structure, and organization it has retained up to the present.” And when discussing the history of the codex, it is ritual to point out that the new form of the book was first mentioned by Martial (14.184–92), who praised its compactness. The best of these is his epigram on a single-volume Livy:Pellibus exiguis artatur Livius ingens,
Quem mea non totum bibliotheca capit.

In this one book whole histories are told
That once whole libraries could scarcely hold.What few historians of the book go on to observe is that by the time he got around to praising the codex, Martial had already become the universally acknowledged master of the most compact form of writing known to man. The epigram, as its name implies, originated as writing upon—engravings, inscriptions, graffiti. A codex with pages simply gave Martial something more convenient to write upon.

I am just old enough to have lived through the technological transformation of writing from manual typewriters (my father, a professor at the local junior college, picked me up a secondhand Underwood, with blank keys for typing students, when the business department purchased newer models) through impatiently humming Selectrics with changeable “typeballs” into the earliest days of word-processing on an Apple II, when preparing a typescript was much like marking up .html, and finally to the sophisticated software of today, with drag-and-drop editing, simultaneous spell-checking, automated hyphenation, and even the capacity to embed right-to-left Hebrew or Arabic into English prose. How have these transformations, these alterations in the material conditions of writing, influenced meaning?

Not at all. They have made it easier for me to complete what I set out to write. Nothing more. Ralph Marvell, who “could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!” would not have been saved by purchasing a typewriter, which had reached a standardized design about the same time that Wharton was writing The Custom of the Country. Ralph is destroyed by intellectual errors—by believing that a creative temperament unfitted him for business, by a bad marriage, entered into for the wrong reasons, by the conviction “how killing uncongenial work is,” and not being grateful for the support it provides his son.

When technology accompanies a cognitive revolution, then and only then does it have much chance to shape literature. The invention of printing hastened the shift from listening to silent reading, which had already been under way for a millennium, or ever since Augustine came upon Ambrose seeking out the meaning of a page with his heart. Before Gutenberg, as the historian of ideas William A. Ringler points out, “all longer fictional English narratives had been in verse.”[4] Verse is an aid to listening; the prose novel emerged when printing made books more readily available, aiding the practice of silent reading. Meaning is produced not by the material aspects of writing, but by its intellectual conditions. And the ways human beings think, evolved over eons, are not so responsive to change.
_____________________

[1] This view is elaborated by Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

[2] Roger Chartier, “The End of the Reign of the Book,” trans. Eric D. Friedman, SubStance 26 (1997): 9–11.

[3] Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 5.

[4] William A. Ringler Jr., ”Beware the Cat and the Beginnings of English Fiction,” Novel 12 (Winter 1979): 113–26.

The Ghost Writer

In recent days I have been rebuked from all sides. On one hand I am too severe, holding a reductive and even dismissive view of the value of literature and literary study; on the other, I am too indulgent, giving in to the same basic background of general belletristic humanism covering the same set of books. For this Commonplace Blog’s landmark one hundredth post, then, I have decided to return for a deep drink at one of my purest fontes. I need to remind myself how I came to develop such objectionable beliefs about literature and criticism.

The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1979) was Philip Roth’s tenth novel. The first of his “Zuckerman books,” although an early draft of Nathan Zuckerman had been introduced eight years before in a story in Philip Rahv’s short-lived Modern Occasions, the short 180-page novel turned his career around. At the age of forty-six, Roth experienced a creative reawakening. His previous four novels, including the oddball fantasies The Breast and Our Gang, had shown a novelist with little idea what to do with his enormous literary gifts. In the character of Nathan Zuckerman, who doubled as his narrator, Roth discovered a solution to a literary problem that had bedeviled him since early in his career—namely, how to make use of those insights that only a writer would have.

The Ghost Writer is a lesson in literary paternity. The novel’s progress is deceptively simple. The time is 1956. Nathan Zuckerman, a 23-year-old postulate to the life of art, arrives for an overnight visit with Emanuel Lonoff, a story writer who resembles Malamud (bald, discovered late in life, a specialist in bachelors and other solitaries, married to a non-Jew). The action takes place entirely within the scope of Nathan’s sixteen-hour stay. The plot parallels Henry James’s late story “The Middle Years,” from which Lonoff has extracted an artistic credo (“Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art”), taped on the wall of his study, and which Nathan hungrily reads and summarizes before the visit is through.

The other houseguest is Amy Bellette, a 26-year-old former student of the famous writer. She is attractive (Lonoff describes her as being “from the country of fetching”). And since she looks somewhat like Anne Frank, Nathan spins out the fantasy that she actually is Anne Frank, having miraculously escaped the Nazis’ claw; he tries to imagine the reason why Anne would be hiding her real identity. If she were Anne in actual flesh, and if she would only agree to marry him, she would solve all his problems—she would be “the unchallengeable answer” to Jewish criticism.

Nathan is at an important crossroads in his own literary career. His family complains that his fiction is irresponsible toward them and the Jewish people. They have turned to Judge Leopold Wapter, a locally prominent Newark Jew, for advice. In a letter giving his “candid opinion” of a story by Nathan, the judge writes: “I do believe that, like all men, the artist has a responsibility to his fellow man, to the society in which he lives, and to the cause of truth and justice.” He encloses a questionnaire written for Nathan by his wife, opening with the challenge, “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?” The Wapters are exactly the sort of authority figures, the conventional and middlebrow spokesmen for a moral view of literature, whose counsel a young writer is bound to reject. The 22-year-old Nathan feels that he stands above such petty concerns:

Hadn’t Joyce, hadn’t Flaubert, hadn’t Thomas Wolfe, the romantic genius of my high-school reading list, all been condemned for disloyalty or treachery or immorality [that is, for lack of responsibility] by those who saw themselves as slandered in their works? As even the judge knew, literary history was in part the history of novelists infuriating fellow countrymen, family, and friends.Nathan, in other words, puts in a claim to special status. His biological father protests that “People don’t read art—they read about people.” But Nathan longs to practice the “religion of art.” That’s why he has sought out Lonoff, making a pilgrimage to one of the religion’s shrines. As he looks around Lonoff’s house, he thinks: “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and thought, This is how I will live.”

Lonoff himself, however, has no such romantic illusions about the religion of art:I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. . . .If Lonoff is without illusions, his wife Hope is even less so. For thirty-five years she has lived with Lonoff’s silence and impatience and bad moods. Now she is ready to give up on the marriage.

Nathan is on hand to witness the marital crisis. Although outwardly their life is placid and enviable—isolated in the Berkshires, far from literary politics—the Lonoffs are approaching the breaking point. The proximate cause is Amy. She works for the Widener Library, and has reputedly come to convince the writer to deposit his papers and manuscripts there, but the truth is that she and Lonoff are (or were) lovers. While it is not clear whether Lonoff’s wife knows this for a fact, Amy’s presence in the house creates a tension that eventually shatters Hope. She makes a scene at the dinner table, threatening to leave Lonoff and yield her place to Amy. For Nathan, who wanted to become Lonoff’s “spiritual son,” this is more of an introduction into the family than he could have bargained for.

Yet here we come to the real issue. Is Hope disgusted with the literary life she has led with Lonoff, or is she deeply wounded—does she feel rejected—by Lonoff’s desire for Amy?

That night Nathan overhears a scene in the bedroom above him. Amy begs Lonoff to run away with her to Florence and start a new life. When he refuses, she opens her robe and asks, “Oh, Manny, would it kill you just to kiss my breasts?” Lonoff will not, however, and Nathan is amazed at his superhuman control.

Why not? Why doesn’t Lonoff take Amy and run away with her? Hope gives her blessing, after all. And he confesses to Nathan that he wishes he could. He is tired of Hope; he is in love with Amy. Why doesn’t he do what both women seem to want?

The answer is pretty simple, although it will not please those who elevate erotic passion and the religion of art, which spring from the same source, above everything else. Lonoff stays with Hope out of a sense of responsibility. Not mere conjugal duty, although it is that too (“you don’t chuck a woman out after thirty-five years because you’d prefer to see a new face over your fruit juice”). More than that, Lonoff has a sense of responsibility to life that is revealed by his whole approach to art.

Just minutes after admitting to Nathan that he dreams about running away with Amy, Lonoff gets up and shows him how to use the record player. He explains the entire mechanism in close detail. Nathan reflects:And this, I realized, is the excrutiating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail, that makes you great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down. Standing with E. I. Lonoff over the disobedient arm of his record player, I understood the celebrated phenomenon for the first time: a man, his destiny, and his work—all one. What a terrible triumph!And what a young man’s remark! Nathan believes there is something sacramental about the life of art—that literature is a matter of “wizardry,” to use his word. It troubles him to find that, instead of being a wizard leading the “pure, serene, simple, and secluded” life of art, Lonoff is merely a 58-year-old man who fiddles obsessively with words and stereo equipment—a “passionate corrector,” to borrow James’s phrase.

So in chapter 3 (“Femme Fatale”) Nathan sets out Oedipally to overcome—to outperform—his literary pater. He “evolves a fiction” in which he imagines that Amy Bellette is Anne Frank, filling in her “middle years” between the Holocaust and creative-writing classes in postwar America. As his Amy/Anne tries to decide whether to come out of anonymity, she too grapples with the question of the artist’s responsibility:To keep her existence a secret from her father so as to help improve mankind . . . no, not at this late date. The improvement of the living was their business, not hers; they could improve themselves, if they should ever be so disposed; and if not, not. Her responsibility was to the dead, if to anyone—to her sister, to her mother, to all the slaughtered schoolchildren who had been her friends. There was her diary’s purpose, there was her ordained mission: to restore in print their status as flesh and blood. . . .Since she is his creature, however, the imagined Amy/Anne is captive to the same emotional conditions as Nathan. “Responsibility to the dead?” she demands. “Rhetoric for the pious! There was nothing to give the dead—they were dead. . . . ‘No atonement is required,’ said Amy to Anne.” And said Amy/Anne to Nathan, who is also searching for a way out of having to atone for hurting and angering his natural father.

Thus Amy/Anne’s conclusion is very close to Nathan’s own:[A]ll I wanted was revenge. It wasn’t for the dead—it had nothing to do with bringing back the dead or scourging the living. It wasn’t corpses I was avenging—it was the motherless, fatherless, sisterless, venge-filled, hate-filled, shame-filled, half-flayed, seething thing. It was myself. I wanted tears, I wanted their Christian tears to run like Jewish blood, for me. I wanted their pity—and in the most pitiless way.Anne Frank is, after all, “the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka”—perhaps the greatest Jewish writer of all time! And isn’t this just exactly the mantle that Nathan Zuckerman aspires to inherit? Isn’t this why, like Jacob in the tent of Isaac, he hovers around E. I. Lonoff and Felix Abravanel (modeled upon Bellow), hoping for a literary blessing? He evolves a fictional Amy/Anne so as to take revenge upon his critics and tormentors, and to earn their pity. “[F]iction,” as he puts it, is “the unchallengable answer to their questionnaire that I proposed to offer the Wapters.” Fiction: an evasion of responsibility by ducking into the sacred precincts of art.

Except, of course, as she reminds him, the girl he imagines is not Anne Frank. Her real name is Amy Bellette. Perhaps Amy Belles Lettres? That is, Amy Literature? In the language of current literary theory, Amy is “overdetermined.” Or, in plainer words, Nathan makes too much out of her. Even when he imagines the “real” Amy, she too is an aspiring writer. He narcissistically assumes, in short, that the basis of her attachment to Lonoff is the same as his—that of a postulate of art.

The truth seems to be less romantic. Amy is an attractive younger woman who has had an affair with her teacher, a famous and powerful older man. At least those are the terms in which Lonoff himself might describe things. “Stop dreaming,” he says when Amy fantasizes a life for them in Florence. “Melodrama, Amy,” he says when she uncovers herself for him. “Decide not to lose hold,” he says—“and then don’t.” Lonoff has a positive repugnance for exaggeration; his moral view, like his writing, is strict and to the point and even parsimonious. But it is also honest. Honest: and imbued with a genuine sense of responsibility.

For in the end Lonoff will not leave Hope. And he will not because he feels a sense of responsibility to her. Responsibility and affection. “Oh, Hopie,” he says tenderly when she threatens to leave. Hope will have none of it: “There is his religion of art, my young successor,” she shouts at Amy: “rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of!” There is another sense of “rejecting life.” If Amy and Florence represent life to him—a “second chance,” to use the phrase for what Dencombe seeks in James’s “Middle Years”—then by rejecting Amy he rejects life. But he does so because he shares the wisdom that Dencombe has also come to:A second chance--that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.These are the words from James’s story that Lonoff has taped on the wall of his study. And they are central to any interpretation of The Ghost Writer; they are almost Roth’s motto. What they seem to be saying is this. The artist’s responsibility (his “task”) is to the very things he doubts the most—that is, his deepest commitments; the people he loves, to whom he “gives what he has.” What Nathan wants to call “the religion of art” James (and Lonoff) prefer to call “the madness of art.” Why? Because the artist is first of all a flesh-and-blood person, and above all else a person exists in service to others. Only in as far as it serves others, doing what it can—only in its ethical dimension, in short—can his work justify itself. The rest of it—the wizardry, the revenge, the claim to special status outside the human nexus—is “madness.”

Nathan’s real father, that stern and moralistic critic, turns out to be right. People don’t read art. They read about people. And judge them as such. The lesson of Nathan’s visit with Lonoff is that the writer owes more to people than to art. Lonoff himself says as much to Nathan on the novel’s last page: “I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You’re a different person.” “Am I?” Nathan asks. “I should hope so,” Lonoff concludes—hoping that, as a writer, Nathan grows up, assumes responsibility, and learns that his “task” to get his people to “come out someday”—to come out right, true to themselves. If nothing else, the almost primal literary visit with Lonoff teaches Nathan that the true interest of fiction lies, not in the sacred hush of art and its special claims, but in the intricate and tortured interrelationships between people. People who do what they can for one another—in passion and doubt.