Reply to my critics

On theism.

It is objected that my fifth proposition in defense of theism (“Where is God in propositions about him? He is the is”) still belongs to the form God is P, “only using the copulative grammatically as a descriptor,” as Jim H. says. But this is evidence merely of the limitations of language. I am not seeking to define God, but to describe his presence. When Moses goes to the Israelites and says, “God of your fathers has sent me to you,” he warns, they will protest, “What is his name?” God replies: “Ehyeh-asher-ehyeh. . . . Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you’ ” (Exod 3.13–14). A little later, after convincing the people (4.31) but then failing to secure the liberation of the Israelites in the first interview with Pharaoh (ch 5), Moses reproaches God. “Why did you send me?” he wails (5.22). God replies that Pharaoh will soon release Israel “because of a greater might.” Then he reintroduces himself to Moses: “I am YHVH,” he says. “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make myself known to them by my name YHVH” (6.2–3).

Is God lying? Has he a bad memory? Abraham invokes YHVH by name (Gen 12.8), Isaac builds an altar at Beersheba and does the same (26.25), and in his dream of a stairway reaching to the sky, Jacob is addressed by God, who stands beside him and says, “I am YHVH, God of your father Abraham and God of Isaac” (28.13).

But these incidents do not contradict God’s claim to Moses in Exod 6.3. According to me, what he did not make known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the secret of his name, its meaning, which is rooted in the copula lihyot. In the Sabbath hymn “Adon Olam,” the Jews sing in praise: “V’hu hayah, v’hu hoveh, v’hu yiyeh—And he was! And he is! And he will be!” If you take the letters of the copula’s conjugation and recombine them, you end up with YHVH. As a student of mine once quipped, the name is a contraction of hayah and hoveh and yiyeh—sort of like “He wasiswillbe.” The name contains all possible conjugations of to be.

Now, usually the verb to be is suppressed and merely understood in Hebrew. When God addresses Israel at Sinai, for instance, he introduces himself by saying, “Anokhi YHVH eloheykhah—literally, “I YHVH your God” (Exod 20.2). Early in the Hebrew bible, though, the word is expressed, and in a most interesting form. The first words out of God’s mouth: “Y’hi or vayhi or” (Gen 1.3). The English translations do an injustice to the stark parallelism of the Hebrew. What is worse, they shift the tense, which remains the same when repeated in the Hebrew. Although not exactly right, this is closer than the traditional renderings: “God said, ‘Light is,’ and light is.” No cause-and-effect relationship is being implied, however. Rather the Hebrew is saying simply that light is because God says that light is. The is-ness of the light is God’s speech; that is, God himself.

God makes himself known by being. Heidegger’s first metaphysical question (“Why is there something rather than nothing?”) is not a problem for theists. Because he is. Or, rather, to answer in Hebrew: Why is there something rather than nothing? Is.

Texas novels

Commenting on my list of the fifty greatest English-language novels since Dickens and Eliot, Pat Burns asks if I “have a list of top Texas novels.” You must understand, first, that I am not a Texan. I have merely lived in Texas longer than I have lived anywhere else. What is more, I have passed my Texas life in two of the least Texan milieux—academe and Orthodox Judaism. Even if that were not true, though, my love and appreciation for Texas would have been whipped up by novels. Here are ten.

Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us (New York: Stokes, 1937). Three cons bust out of prison in Oklahoma and head to Mexico, robbing banks across Texas along the way. Basis of films by Nicholas Ray (1949) and Robert Altman (1974). Reprinted in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s.

Billy Lee Brammer, The Gay Place (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961). A trilogy of short novels about a Texas politician who suspiciously resembles Lyndon B. Johnson, by a Texas Observer reporter who covered him. One of the few good works of American political fiction.

Max Crawford, Lords of the Plain (New York: Atheneum, 1985). A native of the llano estacado whose first novel, Waltz across Texas (1975), was set on a ranch near Lubbock, Crawford narrates the Comanche wars of the 1870s from the perspective of a U.S. Army captain. Decidedly not Dances with Wolves.

William Goyen, House of Breath (New York: Random House, 1950). A self-acknowledged follower of Truman Capote (“whose genius I respect”), Carson McCullers (“a good friend”), and Tennessee Williams (“whose work I admire”), Goyen began his career at thirty with this plotless stream-of-consciousness evocation of growing up in a Piney Woods town. You either adore Goyen’s lyrical prose, or it makes you gag.

Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986). The surprise winner of the National Book Award in 1987, defeating Beloved. Paco Sullivan, the sole survivor of a massacre at a Vietnam base camp, gets off the bus in the small town of Boone, Texas, finds a job as a dishwasher, and stays. Everyone in town wants to know his story.

Paul Horgan, Whitewater (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1970). A young man yearns to escape the provincial deadliness of a small Texas plains town. But once he leaves, he finds that his thoughts keep returning. In the tradition of My Ántonia by a neglected Catholic novelist.

William Humphrey, The Ordways (New York: Knopf, 1964). A three-generation family chronicle set in northeast Texas. A Confederate veteran, wounded at Shiloh, attempts to settle on the frontier before retreating with his wife to Red River County. There the Ordways flourish and fan out. A novel in the tradition of the Snopes trilogy.

Tom Lea, The Wonderful Country (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952). The Texas border circa 1875. As a boy, Martin Brady shot the man who killed his father and then fled to Mexico. Fourteen years later he wants to return home. An accident strands him in the border town of Puerto where Indian troubles and the coming railroad make life complicated and interesting.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Knopf, 1992). His most accessible novel. The first volume of his Border Trilogy. In the spring of 1950, the sixteen-year-old main character is evicted from a Texas ranch. He and a friend ride for Mexico where they end up as vaqueros. Less violence and knotty prose than is usual for McCarthy.

Larry McMurtry, Moving On (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970). My favorite on the list. The novel that drew me to Texas long before I moved here. Sprawls from academe to the rodeo, from Houston to a lonely ranch in the Panhandle. McMurtry once complained that Texas writers seem only to write about the plains or small dusty towns (like Thalia in The Last Picture Show, for example). The Houston scenes in this novel correct that error. The academic scenes are among the truest and funniest I have ever read. Better known for Lonesome Dove—a fine Western, don’t get me wrong—McMurtry is at his most ambitious in this novel, which seeks to cover the whole state.

Greatest novel ever

Yesterday I told my class in the Twentienth-Century American Novel what I firmly believe: Lolita is the greatest novel written in English of all time. The Modern Library’s board of experts ranked it fourth. The Radcliffe Publishing Course, in its “rival list,” placed Nabokov’s novel eleventh. As a preliminary to defending my nomination of Lolita, which I will offer in my closing lecture on the novel and post here on Monday, here is a list of the greatest English-language novels published since the era of Dickens and Eliot. I have included only fifty titles. One hundred were too much work for one day. Only restriction: one book per author. No double-dipping.

(  1) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
(  2) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
(  3) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
(  4) James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
(  5) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
(  6) Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
(  7) Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
(  8) Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970)
(  9) E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)
(10) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
(11) Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)
(12) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
(13) Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
(14) Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934)
(15) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
(16) William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
(17) Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
(18) Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)
(19) J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
(20) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
(21) C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56)
(22) Esther Forbes, A Mirror for Witches (1928)
(23) Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)
(24) Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness (1964)
(25) Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels (1957)
(26) Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1939)
(27) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
(28) Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
(29) Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948)
(30) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
(31) Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954)
(32) Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
(33) Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947)
(34) D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
(35) David Garnett, Lady into Fox (1922)
(36) Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
(37) Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
(38) J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
(39) Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)
(40) L. P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda (1944–47)
(41) Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)
(42) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
(43) Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prarie (1935)
(44) Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
(45) Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
(46) Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
(47) Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)
(48) J. F. Powers, Morte D’Urban (1962)
(49) Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
(50) Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

These are my favorites—the best-written, the most provoking and memorable, the titles I am likeliest to reread when stuck between books.

His necessary and sufficient realism

Toward the end of his novel, after Lolita has been stolen from him by Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert returns briefly to Ramsdale. His object is to visit Quilty’s uncle, a dentist in town, hoping to learn the nephew’s whereabouts. He takes a room in the same downtown hotel where he had arrived with a bag more than five years before. Walking through the lobby on his way to the appointment with Dr. Quilty, he encounters Mrs. Chatfield, who pounces on him with a “harsh cry of recognition,” smiling fakely, her face “all aglow with evil curiosity.” Humbert imagines her asking whether he had “done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank LaSalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”

My student Courtney Reed, on a hunch, researched the case. What she found, in her words, was that the “story itself is eerily similar to the big idea of Lolita.” Here is the story. One day in June 1948, Florence Horner, also known as Sally, came home from school and asked her mother, Mrs. Ella Horner, an unemployed seamstress in Camden, N.J., if she could go to the Jersey Shore with two classmates and their father, a man named “Warner.” Sally was eleven. After talking to “Warner” on the phone, Mrs. Horner agreed to let her daughter go. On June 14, she walked Sally to the bus station where they met “Warner.” The man and the girl boarded the bus together and departed for the shore. Some time later, Mrs. Horner received a letter from Sally, saying that they were going to stay at the shore longer than originally planned. Then she wrote that “Warner” was moving to Baltimore and taking her along. Mrs. Horner finally became suspicious and contacted the local police. No trace of Sally or “Warner” could be found.

What Sally had not told her mother was that LaSalle had witnessed her stealing a five-cent copybook from a five-and-dime. Posing as an FBI agent, he threatened to send her to a juvenile detention center unless she agreed to go away with him. Accompanied by a young woman about twenty-five whom LaSalle called “Miss Robinson,” they fled immediately to Baltimore. Miss Robinson disappeared, and Sally posed as LaSalle’s daughter, enrolling in a Catholic school. “He told me that if I went back home, or they sent for me, of if I ran away I’d go to prison,” Sally later told authorities. From Baltimore they relocated to Dallas, where LaSalle worked as an auto mechanic and Sally once again enrolled in a local Catholic school, passing herself off as LaSalle’s daughter. After a stretch in Dallas, they drove to San Jose.

Finally, in March 1950, three weeks after arriving in San Jose, while staying in a motor court, Sally seized the opportunity of LaSalle’s having gone shopping to phone her older sister in Beverly, N.J., asking her to “send the FBI right away.” Santa Clara sheriff’s deputies arrived and arrested LaSalle when he returned from his shopping trip. Described by crime reporters as “thin-faced and gray-haired,” he protested that he was the girl’s legal guardian; he claimed to have married Mrs. Ella Horner back in New Jersey. Upon investigation, he turned out to have a long criminal record, including a conviction for rape and arrests for bigamy, indecent assault, and enticing minors. LaSalle initially denied Sally’s accusations of sexual intimacy or that she had held the girl against her will. Extradited to New Jersey, he unexpectedly confessed and plead guilty two weeks later, and was sentenced to thirty to thirty-five years for violating the state’s “Lindbergh law.”

Two and a half years later, Sally Horner died in an automobile accident. She was fifteen.

Nabokov liked to say that reality is the only word that should also be squeezed between the tongs of quotation marks. As I observed below, the colors that he assigned to Quilty’s cars were actual paint codes in American-made cars in the early fifties. And then this case, which bears such an uncanny similarity to the plot of Lolita that I almost suspect Nabokov of discovering in it the germ of his novel, and then concealing the source in a parenthetical sentence in an unimportant scene in a late chapter. Nabokov was a master illusionist—to conceal his necessary and sufficient realism.

Birthdays

Today is the ninety-sixth birthday of Ralph Ellison. Also born today, four years earlier, was Wallace Stegner. Yesterday was Montaigne’s. And the day before that: John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the author of this blog, who turned fifty-seven on Friday. Mrs Commonplace wanted the books off the floor, but was undecided how to go about it. A Kindle would keep future purchases from winding up there, but would do nothing to relieve the present clutter. She decided upon a Bosch router instead so that Mr Commonplace would perhaps be enticed to build new bookcases. It remains to be seen whether this ploy will succeed.

Never enough Liebling

I’ve got news for Patrick Kurp. I also own a first of The Road Back to Paris. I began reading A. J. Liebling when I was an undergraduate, having picked up somewhere a paperback copy of The Most of A. J. Liebling, edited by William Cole nine months before Liebling died. This was the first of six Liebling anthologies. The temptation to excerpt him is irresistible, but it never seems to succeed. In a Foreword, Liebling says that he left the selections up to Cole, “because I could not myself get the manuscript down below a million words.” Cole did a good job, “but I regret the rest of the million.”

Any reader of Liebling is liable to join in the regret. The last of the Liebling anthologies before the appearance of the two new Library of America volumes was called Just Enough Liebling. No title could have been farther from the truth. The Library of America comes close to restoring the rest of the million. The volume of war writings includes The Road Back to Paris plus Mollie and Normandy Revisted. The second volume includes The Sweet Science, his classic volume of boxing reports, which I have described elsewhere on this blog as a literary masterpiece, plus his inimitable report on The Earl of Louisiana, Huey’s brother who had been declared legally insane while still in office, which doubled as the basis of a mediocre film with Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich, and his collections of press criticism (Liebling invented the genre of press criticism, now ubiquitous in the blogscape) and his memoirs of meals. (An unashamedly fat man, Liebling was a legendary gourmand.) But there is much else that devoted reader of Liebling will regret the absence of: his early collections, Back Where I Came From (1938) and The Telephone Booth Indian (1942), his travelogue to Chicago, the Second City (1952), The Honest Rainmaker (1953), his comical biography of the horseracing reporter James A. Macdonald who wrote under the pseudonym John R. Stingo (and who never allowed “facts to interfere with the exercise of his imagination”), and the boxing essays collected posthumously under the title A Neutral Corner (1990).

Liebling liked to say—for a long time I tried to emulate him in this—that no one who wrote any faster wrote any better, and no one who wrote any better wrote any faster. The truth is that few wrote better:

I once did one long, hard job of rewrite. There was a big fire in Fall River, Massachusetts. We had an office there, but the two or three men who staffed it were not nearly enough to cover the story. So most of the night staff of the [Providence] Journal was sent down to the fire, and I remained in the office to write the running story as they telephoned it in. I did at least five thousand words that night. It taught me how few synonyms there are for fire—just blaze, flames, and conflagration, and conflagration is lousy. I must have used each about four hundred times. Some fellows that age would have weakened and used “holocaust,” but I didn’t, and it is one of the few things in my journalistic career of which I am justly proud.The best thing about Liebling, besides his matchless prose, is the pressure he puts upon the narrow and impoverished categories in which literature is stuffed and arranged upon shelves.

Theism defended

Several days ago, at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Chicago, the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame squared off against Daniel Dennett of Tufts, a leading spokesman for the New Atheism who has been described by Stephen Jay Gould as a “Darwinian fundamentalist.” The entire account of their skirmish, “live-blogged” by an anonymous young philosopher, is worth reading.

Plantinga advanced a probabilistic argument against evolutionary naturalism, arguing that the complexity of the cell is more likely under theism than as a result of what Richard Dawkins has called “the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered.” That is, it is more probable that complexity results from intelligence than from randomness. The sworn enemy of evolution is naturalism, not theism.

According to Plantinga, what theism denies is natural selection, not evolution; for God might have selected evolution as the means for revealing his intelligence. But naturalism has no means of accounting for the truth of its own claims. If natural selection is (as Dawkins puts it) “the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life,” and if human theories (including the theory of natural selection) are a result of this blind and purposeless chance, then how can anyone know whether any theory (including the theory of natural selection) is true? The assertion of its truth is circular and question-begging. The theory might only be the random result of blind chance. Without reference to an intelligence independent of natural selection there is no possible defense of the theory of natural selection.

In reply, Dennett was largely abusive. Theism corrupts “our common epistemological fabric”; it is a fairy tale; it is no better than astrology. At one point he compared theism to Holocaust denial. And this is particularly rich, coming from an apostle of atheism. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored industrial-scale campaign to obliterate a people who had remained intact for millennia out of their unshakable belief in God. The Holocaust was a collective organization of militant atheism, which clamored for the removal of God’s chosen people—theism’s most irrational symbol—from the face of the earth. To associate the spiritual heirs of its victims, who decline to abandon theistic belief out of a refusal (in Emil Fackenheim’s words) to hand Hitler a posthumous victory, instead with those who wish to cover up the crimes of the perpetrators is to engage in propaganda little more sophisticated than the slur that the Israelis are the New Nazis. So much for respecting “our common epistemological fabric”!

Because it cannot defend its dogmas in its own terms, naturalism is reduced to calling names. The inevitable consequence of its denial of intelligence and purpose is what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “dictatorship of relativism.” Note well: Benedict does not intend an assault upon the natural sciences, which he credits with having “greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos.” What troubles the Holy Father is the “self-limitation of reason,” the narrowing of human rationality to the conviction that “only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation” can lead to truth. The scientistic conviction is not itself verifiable or falsifiable through experimentation; the belief in science’s all-sufficiency is not itself a scientific truth. But it serves as a claim to status and power. And because it also serves to silence any other inquiry into purpose and meaning—philosophy, literature, history—it raises the ego and its relativistic pursuits to absolute rule.

The error that most theists commit is seeking to enter into debate with scientistic naturalism on its terms. But the existence of God cannot possibly be verified or falsified through experimentation. And the search for “evidence” of his existence is doomed to disappointment (or, what is worse, to simpler and more elegant explanation in scientific terms). What if, as in the Hebrew bible, the existence of God is simply not a problem? What if, as Plantinga said in Chicago, “belief in God is warranted even if the believer has no reason for this belief”? What if the problem, instead, is not to account for what the believer is tempted to advance as “evidence,” but to acknowledge it—and to account, if for anything, then for its power to move the believer to gratitude or recognition? Not everyone will be so moved; not everyone will be so ready to speak, like Cather’s Bishop Latour, of miracles “so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always”; but for some this will constitute a significant human problem, which does not yield to a satisfying scientific explanation.

As one such person, let me offer six propositions in defense of theism.

(1) If God can be defined then he is subordinate to human reason.

(2) Any proposition of the form God is P (whether P is replaced by “omnipotent,” “just,” the Christians’ “love,” or any other predicate) is a vulgar error.

God is love. Then by conversion
Love is God, and sex conversion.

                            J. V. Cunningham (1971)(3) The only possible exception—the proposition God is God—is a meaningless tautology.

(4) Yet rabbinic tradition not only predicates attributes of God, especially in the thirteen middot, but also insists upon their fundamental importance.“A covenant has been made with the thirteen middot—when the children of Israel recite them they will not be turned away emptyhanded” (b. Rosh Hashanah 17b).(5) Where is God in propositions about him? He is the is.“And God said to Moses, ‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.’ He continued, ‘Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you” (Exod 3.14).(6) Propositions about God are not philosophical efforts to define him, but liturgical efforts to praise him. As here:Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
     For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
     And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
               Praise him.

                            Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

Literature without children

The novel entitled Lolita is “the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,” says Humbert Humbert, concluding the novel. Next week I begin teaching it. Even before I begin, I am in despair. Although most of the students are likely at least to purchase the book and haul it to class, the number of those who attempt much more will be vanishingly small. I am under no illusion that reading is anything but a minority pursuit or that a minority of a minority read as if they lives depend upon it. But I am not really talking about reading. I am talking about something that precedes reading—a dim recognition if not respect for the fact that books do not merely furnish a room, but sink piers until they rest on bedrock for the foundations of a civilization.

“Unlike animals,” writes the pseudonymous Asia Times essayist Spengler, “human beings require more than progeny: they require progeny who remember them.” This is the basis of culture: man makes and draws and writes and shapes and builds to “overcome mortality,” creating a “dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn.” If the young are unwilling even to pick up the artifacts of their culture, or only go through the motions of doing so, they are accepting that they will be defined by the physical limits of their lives, and nothing more. No wonder so many of them will soon begin to poison their bodies with alcohol and drugs, if they have not already done so. Oblivion is the only alternative they can imagine to a life without meaning or transcendence.

But I don’t blame them. As Pierre Ryckmans observes, most people would never read at all if they were not told about it first. I blame those who have told the young about books and reading—their miserable teachers, and many of the writers themselves.

I belong to a generation of critics and professors who have small interest and less understanding of books, except in as far as they can be made to serve as something else—an occasion for a little sex chat, a gavel for bringing to order a meeting of the Central Committee, a level and theodolite for defining the limits of their lives, or a map to where the foundations lie so they can seek to destroy them.

Even worse are the writers themselves. Only recently, after the birth of four children in five-and-a-half years, as I sit exhausted and happy from changing diapers, winding up toys, cooking dinner, pulling pajama tops over fine-haired heads, reading bedtime stories, and picking clothes off the floor and turning off lights, have I begun to appreciate how very little of ordinary life—family life—gets into American writing. Daisy Buchanan’s entire life seems arranged to relieve her of the burdens of motherhood, while Brett Ashley decides courageously that she is “not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children.” In no way does this distinguish her from most women in American fiction. Outside of My Ántonia, I cannot think of a single American novel that celebrates a woman’s sexuality by acknowledging the deepest fulfillment of it—in childbirth. The contrast with the Hebrew bible, in which barrenness is a curse that lifts women to greatness in asking God’s help to overcome it, could not be more striking. Dolores Haze’s is not the only voice missing from the concord of children at play. American literature is a low-fertility-rate literature.

Never before had I been struck by how small a commitment American writers had made to the future—through children. Upon reflection, I wondered how many of them even bothered to raise families of their own. For a representative selection of American writers, I turned to the contents of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, the volume covering 1914–1945. Here are the number of children for each writer in chronological order:

Edgar Lee Masters, 3
Edwin Arlington Robinson, 0
Willa Cather, 0
Gertrude Stein, 0
Robert Frost, 6
Susan Glaspell, 0
Sherwood Anderson, 3
Carl Sandburg, 3
Wallace Stevens, 1
Mina Loy, 3
William Carlos Williams, 3
Ezra Pound, 2
Hilda Doolittle, 1
Marianne Moore, 0
Raymond Chandler, 0
T. S. Eliot, 0
Eugene O’Neill, 3
Claude McKay, 1
Katherine Anne Porter, 0
Zora Neale Hurston, 0
Nella Larsen, 0
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 0
E. E. Cummings, 1
Jean Toomer, 0
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1
John Dos Passos, 1
William Faulkner, 2
Hart Crane, 0
Ernest Hemingway, 4
Thomas Wolfe, 0
Sterling Brown, 1
Langston Hughes, 0
Kay Boyle, 6
John Steinbeck, 2
Countee Cullen, 0
Richard Wright, 2
Carlos Bulosan, 0

Forty-nine children born of thirty-seven writers—a child-to-writer ratio of 1.32, the fertility rate of a former Soviet Bloc country. By comparison, the total fertility rate in the U.S. in 1945, the last year of before the baby boom, was 2.49.

Why should I be surprised that my students are unable to recognize themselves in the mirror of the literary achievements which compose their American inheritance? The Sound and the Fury—told by an idiot, full of incestuous desire and suicide. The Grapes of Wrath—no future, no past, and too many people without either. An American Tragedy—thwarted desire, murder, or maybe not, prison, execution. Native Son—more murder, more prison. Sister Carrie, Appointment in Samarra—more thwarted desire, more suicide, with a little futility thrown in for good measure. After a while, a young man or woman of decent upbringing and normal impulses would not be crazy to conclude that this is a literature of a people in irreversible decline. That this is not true about the American people, but is true about its literature, says more about our books than our students.

In total despair

Kazimierz Brandys would tell his classes in Polish literature that “they are in front of a man who is in total despair,” according to Patrick Kurp, who quotes Pierre Ryckmans quoting him. Earlier today, in my class on Jewish literature, I knew exactly how Brandys felt. Oh, not for his reasons. Brandys claims that it is an “absurd task” to teach students to “understand the work of literature.” Since that is not what I try to do in my classes, I do not share his sense of the absurd.

But I was in total despair nevertheless. The class was scheduled to discuss Pirke Avot, a small miscellany of Tannaitic maxims, the closest thing in Jewish literature to the Greek Anthology, except in prose rather than verse, a tractate of the Mishnah tucked into the section dealing with courts and the legal system because the rabbis did not know where else to tuck it. It was also the first post-biblical text that the class had tackled—the first thing, since nine-tenths of them are devout Christians, which might have struck them as deserving the special name of Jewish literature. Avot is a strange work. It contains some famous sayings from Hillel, Jesus’s contemporary: “If I am not for myself who will be for me? But if I am for myself alone then what am I? And if not now, when?” But this is immediately followed by the dull and homely wisdom of Shammai, his great rival: “Make your learning of the Torah a fixed obligation. Say little and do much. Greet everybody cheerfully.” (And pull up your socks!) Avot goes on like this for five chapters, mixing the trivial and exalted, before ending with Ben Bag Bag and Ben He He (the names are part of its strangeness). I cannot imagine what I would make of it if I were a young Christian first encountering it with an Orthodox Jewish professor. In any event, I came to class prepared to be assaulted by confusion, some frank boredom, perhaps even outrage.

Instead, out of a class of thirty, I was confronted by more than half who did not have the text with them, had not purchased it for class, and had not read it in advance. I stared at them. My mouth opened but no words came out. For the first time in my professional career, I had absolutely no idea what to say to them. If Brandys thinks it is absurd to teach people how to understand the work of literature, then what is it to stand in front people who are unembarrassed to have no literature with them to understand or not or whatever. It is not as if Pirke Avot is difficult to obtain. Even if they could not get their hands on the course text they could have found it elsewhere—here, for instance, or here or here or here or here. You can’t teach anything at all about books, their refuge, their nourishment, their flickering light, to people who can’t even rouse themselves to pretend an interest in something they haven’t bothered to look for or pick up.

Hollywood novels

Hollywood’s big night of self-congratulation culminated with the Oscar for best film going to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Sean Penn used his best actor’s acceptance speech to épater la bourgeoisie who oppose gay marriage. The morning talk shows graded and ranked the starlets’ gowns. The stuff that dreams are made of, the politics of futile leftist gesture, the glamorous marketplace of well-toned flesh—as long as Americans think of Hollywood in trivial terms it will seem trivial. Novelists have tried to construct a different picture, but not always successfully. Before any of the eight-and-a-half pound statues were awarded on Sunday, Frank Wilson Jesse Freedman had considered the “two most enduring” Hollywood novels, noting his “inability to connect” with either of them. He didn’t explain his reaction to The Loved One, but described The Day of the Locust as “surprisingly incomplete” and “curiously undeveloped.” Hollywood and the movies have exercised a pull on writers’ imaginations since Harry Leon Wilson wrote Merton of the Movies, which founded the genre in 1922. If Waugh and West don’t do it, there are several other good Hollywood novels that Frank Freedman might want to read instead. Three stand out.

Brock Brower’s Late Great Creature is the story of a horror-movie star, the product of the European stage like Bela Lugosi, but in talent more closely resembling native-born Lon Chaney. Born in 1900, Simon Moro is a contortionist genius who can shape his body into an imitation of anything, from a man-sized flapping raven to the dead. A bankable star of German cinema before the rise of Hitler, he is relegated in Hollywood to playing monsters or Nazis. “The bad Nazis I didn’t mind,” Moro says. “I could do them as objective reality, Brechtian, if not as a real character. Build up a loathing in the audience that was healthy. But the good Nazis.” The ones who turn against Hitler and die bravely. “They were migraines, maybe eight different pills I had to take to sleep at night. Such lies. The studio was trying to bank some sympathy for me, for after the war, that was the idea. My de-Nazification. But all I wanted to do was see that the public didn’t forget.”

After the war, though, his career fizzles. As the novel opens, Moro is sixty-eight and making a low-budget adaptation called Raven. Cast in the title role, he is working for the first time in eight years. The director, a veteran of beach movies, worries about the loss of the definite article. “Sure, it frees you a little more from the original,” he says, “but a straight Poe title really helps that Family rating.” Moro stages a sort of dramaturgic coup, wresting control of the film from the director for his own purposes—namely, to expose moviegoing for what it really is, a socially approved dangerous voyeurism.

Darcy O’Brien was the only child of cowboy star George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, a leading lady of the silent era. He was also a Joyce scholar, an English professor at Pomona College, when at thirty nine he published A Way of Life, Like Any Other, the story of a boy’s growing up with two Hollywood actors who were the spitting image of O’Brien and Churchill. After a glowing evocation of the star’s feted life (“great banquets . . . with steaks so big they drooped over the plates”), O’Brien gets down to work. The parents divorce and fail in their different ways to adjust to growing obscurity and enforced idleness. The mother, who makes Norma Desmond seem like a carefree lunchtime companion, bathes naked in front of her son, takes a string of lovers, threatens suicide, gets drunk every night, disappears from his life for years at a time, and finally—blessedly—dies. His father never remarries. He retreats into Catholicism and cares for his ex-wife’s elderly mother, letting the house fall to ruin while “he would lie abed, hour after hour, leaving undone the simple tasks that distinguish man from brute, the farmer from his animals.” To get his life moving forward again, his son looks up his father’s only living friends—an automobile salesman who interested him in the John Birch Society, and the director John Ford. His father seeks to dispense fatherly wisdom, but because his intellectual development was stunted by becoming a star, he has no wisdom to dispense: “The anus was an important thing. My father always washed it thoroughly with soap and warm water after defecating, unless he was caught in a public place, and the upshot of it was, he had the anus of a man half his age. If I wasn’t taking care of myself down there, I had better hop to it.” O’Brien conclusively proves that, while it may be many things, film acting is not A Way of Life, Like Any Other.

Larry McMurtry’s Somebody’s Darling was the occasion of the one and only fan letter that I have ever written to a novelist. Having greedily consumed his last three novels immediately upon publication, I could not wait to get home with my new purchase of McMurtry’s latest. I stayed up most of the night reading it. My laughter was so hard that, leaving me breathless, it developed into a full-blown asthma attack. I ended up having to go to the ER. I took Somebody’s Darling along with me and coughed with hilarity into my oxygen mask. Afterwards I sent McMurtry the bill. He replied with a postcard: “Dear David: Thanks for writing. I’m glad I made you laugh, and will definitely keep trying.” Nothing about covering my bill.

Jill Peel is a director who has risen from the bottom of the film industry. She continues to feel a deep respect for the technical artisans, the makeup artists, editors, costume designers, cameramen, sound engineers, script girls, best boys, gaffers, and grips who supply the magical and dependable craftsmanship behind successful Hollywood movies, although they are insufficiently recognized even by the industry that wrings its bread from their sweat. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confines the technical awards to a separate night and smaller banquet hall. Go to the home page of the Oscars and try to find any news of them. For McMurtry, though, who values craftsmanship above all other qualities in fiction, it is they who are responsible for whatever significance the movies may have. Jill is one of them, and the novel takes up the question of what happens to a craftsman of undaunted integrity when she finds herself a commercial success, a hot commodity. Among the things that happen: she lights out for Texas (where else?) with a sixtyish screenwriter, a different kind of product from an older Hollywood, in tow. No novel manages to say more about the “art” of the movies, because no Hollywood novel is less concerned about dreams and more about the waking human comedy.

In addition to those three there are several more good novels about Hollywood or the film industry, all of which have been neglected in favor of (usually lesser) titles. Here is a full list:

• Katherine Albert, Remember Valerie March (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939). The first of its kind—the rise and fall of a film diva. Extremely scarce; deserving of a reprint edition.

• William Boyd, The New Confessions (New York: Morrow, 1988). A Scottish director goes to Hollywood, films Rousseau’s Confessions, gets blacklisted.

• Brock Brower, The Late Great Creature (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

• Robert Carson, Love Affair (New York: Holt, 1958). A film star, his career sputtering, marries a “beautiful narcissistic movie queen” to get back on top. Includes an early jape at the fashionable empty left-wing politics of film actors. By the writer of A Star Is Born.

• Richard Grenier, The Marrakesh One-Two (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). A screenwriter tries to get rich by doing the script for a life of Mohammed. The Muslim countries bid for the location rights.

• Doris Grumbach, The Missing Person (New York: Putnam, 1981). “Fabulous Franny Fuller,” movie star, pin-up girl, sex symbol of the thirties and forties. See Albert above.

• MacDonald Harris, Screenplay (New York: Atheneum, 1982). A young man who accepts a stranger’s invitation to “get into pictures” finds himself transported to the black-and-white world of the silent movies where passion can be expressed only within the limitations of censorship.

• Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet (New York: Random House, 1945). As Hitler comes to power in Germany a movie musical is made in London about old Vienna and a girl who sells flowers in the Prater.

• Clive James, The Silver Castle (New York: Random House, 1998). The adventures of a street urchin in Bombay's slums to Bollywood film star and back again.

• James McCourt, Kaye Warfaring in “Avenged” (New York: Knopf, 1984). “Cégèste, why must the show go on?” “But where else would the show go?” “Ah, that is clearly a metaphysical question. It has no relation to the facts of life as we know them—celebrity, amphetamine, cocaine, and world-round roller coasters.” And yet the show goes on.

• Larry McMurtry, Somebody’s Darling (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).

• Alan Marcus, Of Streets and Stars (Yucca Valley, Calif.: Manzanita Press, 1960). In the tradition of Day of the Locusts only funnier. Life among the grotesques who populate Hollywood, especially the “little people” of the studios.

• Darcy O’Brien, A Way of Life, Like Any Other (New York: Norton, 1977). Still in print in a New York Review Books edition.

• C. K. Stead, Sister Hollywood (London: Collins, 1989). A New Zealand girl deserts her family and decamps to Hollywood, where she has an affair with a producer, is arraigned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and enjoys success as a scriptwriter. Along the way she meets Bogart and Bacall.

• Bruce Wagner, Force Majeure (New York: Random House, 1991). Title refers to the clause in a screenwriting contract that lays out all possible reasons for cancellation without pay. By the writer of Nightmare on Elm Street and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

Down with the flu

To explain the sudden slowdown in posting. Everyone in the Commonplace house—both parents, all four children—have been down with the flu. And we all received flu shots too! No experience in fatherhood is more difficult than trying to care for sick children (and tend to a sick wife) when you are sick yourself. I want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my kipa and glasses, not enough energy to remove them, but noses need to be wiped, vomit cleaned up, temperatures taken, diapers changed, Diet Cokes fetched. When everyone is asleep at last, and I have a moment to write, I dive into bed and pull the covers. . . . I’d started a cheery reply to Frank Wilson’s dare-double-dare on Hollywood novels. I had some better ones to suggest. But they will have to wait.

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.