Future of the book

Still skeptical that the digital book will replace the codex, Nige wonders whether, unlike musical selections, there is “something special about books that will preserve them far longer than other media as ‘something you own.’ I’m fairly sure there is,” he suggests, “but it’s hard to say—especially in the light of such innovations as Kindle—quite what it is. Is it just their satisfying tactile qualities? The fact that you can use a physical book in a three-dimensional way—up, down and through—that can’t really be reproduced?”

Although I appear to be more excited than Nige about the digitizing of books (as the new motto has it, “Search Is Everything,” and digital texts are more easily searched than print), I am also skeptical that the codex will disappear entirely. Elsewhere in this Commonplace Blog, I have posited a distinction between books that are “needed for practical activities,” and for which a wireless reading device like the Kindle is perfect, and books that are “collected, treasured, preserved from destruction”; and in light of this distinction, I argued that ereaders “will not entirely replace ‘paper-and-binding’ books, because not all books are meant only to be used.” Even later I held that the irreplaceable tactile qualities of some children’s books make them unlikely candidates for digitization.

Nige obliged me to go back and examine my reading habits, though. And two things immediately struck me. First, the availability of digital texts has not only made it far easier to acquire them, but increases the chances that you will do so. Last Sunday, a dinner guest told me that he had found the title of a dissertation that was smack on the subject of his son’s senior-year high-school research paper. I flew to the computer, accessed my university library database, and obtained a .pdf copy of it for him. The whole transaction took maybe five minutes. Similarly, while researching my Commentary piece on Charles McCarry, I learned that Henry Cabot Lodge’s father had been a poet—George Cabot Lodge. Within minutes I found a Google-books copy of his Poems, 1899–1902 and downloaded it. I never would have invested in Lodge’s Poems otherwise, and probably would not even have taken the trouble to hunt them down.

But then there is the other side of the story. The months that I spent in research on The Elephants Teach were among the most enjoyable and memorable of my life. I remember sitting cross-legged between the stacks, doggedly reading my way through the entire print runs of the Educational Review, the English Journal, the School Review, the Bookman, and other old journals. Not only did I find things that I otherwise would not have, were I to have relied on a computerized search algorithm. But because I found my “search terms” by reading them in context, they were not isolated ideas, which formed a sort of universal Oversoul quite independent of how their authors used them. In reviewing The Elephants Teach, Grudin commented on this quality of the book:

Many of these people and their writings are trailing into oblivion—ploughed under, in effect, by the very machinery that they set in motion. Thanks to Myers’s considerate presentation, these almost-forgotten people speak to us with a renewed eloquence, providing insightful responses to issues that will not die.I do not quote this to congratulate myself. (Well, not only to congratulate myself.) I have always been grateful to Grudin for noticing this quality of my book, which was the direct result of my research methods—methods, alas, which few scholars will imitate in a dictatorship of etexts.

The future of the book, though, may be out of writers’ and readers’ hands. Michael Malone, a prominent journalist who covers Silicon Valley, believes that the war over digital books will be one of the engines of the economy after its recovery. He argues that Google and Amazon have already divided the universe of print between them. Google snaps up every book when its copyright lapses, while Amazon aims to offer every newly published book in a Kindle-friendly format. “This means that, essentially, Amazon now controls the world’s new ideas,” Malone writes, “while Sony [which has entered into a deal to make Google’s books available on its Reader e-Book] owns Mankind’s memory.”

I remain skeptical, because I am old enough to remember the enthusiasm for other new technologies that were going to replace print—surely you remember microfiche—but then I don’t even own an iPod or a smart phone.

Orange Prize long list

The long list for the Orange Prize, awarded annually since 1993 to the best full-length novel in English by a woman during the previous year, has been released. I cannot imagine—get my finely balanced mind around—a more outrageous—or disgusting, maybe even obscene—abuse of a literary prize than to advance—to pervert, really—the political cause—the extraliterary ideological conspiracy—of women, who should probably prefer to be called “womyn” or “wopersons” to avoid any taint of the word men altogether. Whatever happened to gender-blind, objective considerations of rose-gray pure literary merit? I’d organize a boycott if the long list did not include so many good novelists (with the notable exceptions of Toni Morrison and Curtis Sittenfeld).

Will that suffice? I didn’t want to disappoint my good friends at Blog of a Bookslut. Besides, I couldn’t pass up the chance to establish myself as a “literary notable.”

One-book authors

In the Times of London, Luke Leitch compiles a list of literary one-hit wonders (h/t: Mark Sarvas):

• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
• Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind.
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces.
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
• Anna Sewell, Black Beauty.
• Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.

Commentators suggested Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Leopard, and Ken Kesey. (Wrong. Kesey published Sometimes a Great Notion two years after One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and then published two more novels back to back in the nineties: Sailor Song and Last Go Round.)

The obvious name missing from the list is Ralph Ellison, who was never able to follow up Invisible Man. Despite his late-in-life conquering of writer’s block, Henry Roth was really a one-book author. Call It Sleep was written by a different man from whatever garrulous old bachelor uncle wrote Mercy of a Rude Stream six decades later.

Cyril Connolly’s satirical novel about the literary intelligentsia, The Rock Pool (1936), was not merely the sole novel of his career, but at just over one hundred and fifty pages it was barely long enough to be considered a novel at all.

The Fathers (1938) was Allen Tate’s only novel.

Milton Steinberg wrote a novel about the Amoraic age, As a Driven Leaf (1939), but though he wrote a great deal of non-fiction on Jewish subjects, he did not live long enough to write a second novel.

Isaac Rosenfeld had time to write only one novel, Passage from Home (1946), about a young Jewish intellectual’s growing up, before he died at thirty-eight. He also wrote a remarkable short novel called The Colony, however.

Lionel Trilling never managed to finish a second novel after The Middle of the Journey (1947).

Randall Jarrell’s brilliant Pictures from an Institution (1954), easily the greatest (and far and away the funniest) novel ever written about academe, was followed by two more books of poetry, but no more fiction before Jarrell committed suicide in 1965. His friend John Berryman likewise wrote a single novel, Recovery (1973), which was published posthumously.

John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) is the best novel about the Japanese-American experience, but it is the only book Okada ever wrote.

Norman Fruchter published a fine novel about aging, Coat upon a Stick (1962), and then never wrote another.

Robert Granat wrote a thoughtful novel of the religious life, Regenesis (1972), described by Anatole Broyard as a novel that should “satisfy even those whose taste runs to the secular,” and then disappeared from the Republic of Letters.

Daniel James wrote a novel about an East L.A. graffiti artist under the name Danny Santiago, but when he was unmasked a year later as an “Anglo” rather than the author of the most authentic Chicano novel yet published, Famous All Over Town (1983) became the work of a one-book author.

Five best of Irish fiction

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, Stefan Beck has offered, over at the New Criterion’s Arma Virumque blog, a “Five Best of Irish Lit” (no Angela’s Ashes, he promises) in the style of the Wall Street Journal’s “Five Best” format:

(1) James Joyce, Dubliners.
(2) Flann O‘Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds.
(3) Frank O‘Connor’s 1952 story “First Confession.”
(4) J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man.
(5) Roddy Doyle, The Commitments—by which he really means Alan Parker’s wonderful 1991 film based on the novel.

Assuming that such native Irish writers as Swift, Wilde, Shaw, and Beckett do not qualify, because they turned their backs on Ireland, here are my five (taking for granted the place of Joyce and O’Brien on any such list):

• Sean O’Faolain, Bird Alone (1936). Banned as obscene by the Irish Censorship Board, this novel tells the story of a staunch Fenian, looking back over his participation in the Troubles, now ostracized and living alone.

• Elizabeth Bowen, A World of Love (1954). Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. Her best novel is The Death of the Heart (1938), but it is set in England; her best book about Ireland is her history of the family estate, Bowen’s Court (1942). This late novel, about the discovery of love letters from an unknown woman to a soldier who died in the First World War, is carefully plotted but simply told.

• J. G. Farrell, Troubles (1970). If Beck can include one ringer, so can I. Farrell was born in Liverpool, but his family was Irish. And this novel is set in a hotel on the South Wexford Coast. The Irish War of Independence looms in the background.

• Brian Moore, The Mangan Inheritance (1979). Moore was beaten to the punch by John Irving’s World According to Garp (1978), a novel on a similar subject, but this is the better book. A failed poet, descended from the famous Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, is left a fortune by his wife, dead in a car accident, making it possible for him to set off in quest of his bizarre family history.

• William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002). There is not much by Trevor that is not worth reading, but this novel is truly haunting. In 1921, the Anglo-Irish Gault family decides to leave Cork after the father shoots an arsonist, but nine-year-old Lucy does not want to leave—and then, through an astonishing chain of entirely credible incidents, she gets left behind.

Speaking of the Wall Street Journal’s “Five Best” series, by the way, Shelley‘s Heart (see below) was named one of the five best political novels, second only to The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope, a novelist who spent eighteen formative years in Ireland.

Charles McCarry

Just finished a piece for Commentary on Shelley’s Heart, the seventh of Charles McCarry’s novels to be reissued by the Overlook Press. (It is due out next month.) Originally published in 1995, it is one of the best novels ever written about the American left. His next novel was Lucky Bastard (1998), the account of a charismatic and winning young American, a sociopath, liar, and rapist, who is groomed for the presidency by Soviet agents. And together these two novels place McCarry in the small group of Americans who have written with distinction about what Irving Howe called “politics as a milieu or mode of life.”

McCarry is customarily described as a spy novelist, although his novels more closely resemble The Secret Agent than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A field agent under deep cover for the CIA from 1958 through 1967—he never held a desk assignment—McCarry began his career as a novelist with The Miernek Dossier (1973), a variation on the epistolary novel (it includes dispatches, memoranda, intelligence reports, transcripts of phone taps, intercepted Soviet wire traffic, the documents that make up a CIA dossier on a foreign agent). He originally began to write about espionage, he told the Australian national paper The Age, to “summarize my experience in the field as an intelligence officer and write what would be more authentic than some of the things I had read about the business.” From the beginning, though, his intentions were more literary than journalistic. Although he never returned to the documentary mode, he signaled in his first novel that he was more interested in fiction than in espionage.

The Miernik Dossier was followed by five more novels about Paul Christopher, a lapsed poet who practices journalism as a cover for “tradecraft.” The Tears of Autumn (1975), his second novel and the best of the Christopher books, introduced his technique of the historical “what if,” retelling the known facts as if they were produced by scheming and covert operations. President Kennedy is assassinated in retaliation for the American-led overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem.

The Secret Lovers (1977) suggests the importance of literature in what McCarry called “the life-and-death struggle between East and West for the soul of our generation.” American agents smuggle the only copy of an anti-Communist novel out of the Soviet Union. Couriers die to get the novel to safety, and when it is broadcast into the Soviet Union on Radio Free Europe, its author is a doomed man.

The Better Angels (1979) established McCarry’s reputation as something of a prophet. The novel foretells suicide bombing and the destruction of passenger jets as tactics in Islamic terrorism. It also explains why McCarry prefers clandestine agents to ideological purists. The latter believe that “some men did good in the world and others did evil,“ and that they have “joined the right side.” The former, who do not believe in a cause but a country,

perceived that nothing ran unmixed in men or causes or nations. Evil was permanent and it was everywhere. What mattered was that it should be channeled, tricked into working for your side. That was what an intelligence service was for.The Last Supper (1983) is one half a historical novel, tracing the beginnings of modern American espionage to the Second World War and the creation of a group called the Outfit. The other half of the novel involves the slow unmasking of a double agent, in which a famous TV reporter with “progressive” sympathies, a cross between Geraldo Rivera and Dan Rather, plays an unwitting role. With this novel, McCarry begins to acknowledge his fear and loathing of the post-sixties journalists, whom he sees as the worst—because the most divorced from reality—of the ideological purists.

Second Sight (1991), a long complex novel that takes Paul Christopher from childhood in pre-Nazi Germany and to retirement in partisan Washington, was his most explicitly political—but only in isolated passages. He compared the Sixties counterculture to the Hitlerjugend, speculated that U.S. news media “exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries,” and described a “politics of self-congratulation” whose partisans had merely to hear Richard Nixon speak to want to kill him.

McCarry had served as the chief speechwriter for vice presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge during the election of 1960. Although he says little about Lodge’s running mate—he came to admire Lodge himself greatly, describing him as one of the most down-to-earth men that he had ever met—McCarry understands the part that Nixon plays for the American left. At a Washington dinner party in Second Sight, a journalist finds himself, for the first time in his life, “in the same room with someone who was willing to defend Richard Nixon.” The defense is shocking, offends him deeply: “They have made Mr. Nixon stand for evil and they think that all it takes to be virtuous is to hate him.”

But McCarry was merely polishing his knife-sharp critique of the left. Shelley’s Heart takes it to its logical ends. The novel is not only his best, but also his most ambitious—a 600-page thriller about a leftist plot to take over the government. For many readers, the chief obstacle to admiration of the novel will be its genre. But no other kind of writing is so well suited to McCarry’s purposes. The political thriller, which depends upon a plot in the old sense of diabolical secretive intrigues leading to catastrophe, is the only literary form that gives readers the chance to suspect, or at least to entertain the notion, that a conspiracy to take down the government might be possible. True lovers of literature have more in common with conspiracy nuts than either is prepared to admit. Only in the labyrinthine twists of a conspiracy, not usually in real life and certainly not in “literary fiction,” can the insatiable reader’s hunger for plot be satisfied.

The problem is that anyone who suggests such a thing in connection with the American left is liable to be slapped with the accusation of engaging in the “paranoid style.” McCarry solves the problem by placing his novel’s premise in the mouth of a conservative politician, who is hated to the verge of derangement by his enemies. The American left, he warns, is “a vanguard elite with a secret agenda,” which “stopped being a popular movement a long time ago” and has “survived for half a century by lying to the people.” McCarry avoids loading more weight onto his donnée than it can bear by risking (and not caring overmuch) how it may be received. That it may be dismissed in some quarters as a paranoid rant does not mean that it is not true.

Few novels rival Shelley’s Heart as a group portrait of the American left—Mr Sammler’s Planet, perhaps The Bonfire of the Vanities. I try to explain why, with greater detail, in my Commentary piece.

The Overlook Press has yet to reprint The Bride of the Wilderness, a seventeenth-century “prequel” to the Christopher saga, which I didn’t much like, although John Gardner and Orson Scott Card praised it highly. Lucky Bastard will follow, capping Peter Mayer’s campaign since 2005 to bring all of McCarry’s novels back into print (along with publishing two new Paul Christopher novels, Old Boys and Christopher’s Ghosts). McCarry also coauthored three political memoirs, two with Alexander M. Haig and one with Donald T. Regan (which revealed to the world Nancy Reagan’s consultation with astrologers), but these are unlikely to be reprinted in Mayer’s uniform edition of his work.

Born in June 1930 in the western Massachusetts city of Pittsfield, where Melville did his best writing eighty years before, McCarry joined the U.S. Army upon reaching the age of eighteen instead of enrolling at Harvard, where he had been accepted. For three years he reported for Stars and Stripes, then continued as a reporter for four years in Ohio after his discharge. He met his wife Nancy there, marrying her in September 1953. Three years later he moved to Washington, D.C., to become the speechwriter for James P. Mitchell, a Democrat from New Jersey who served as secretary of labor under President Eisenhower. After a year on the job he was ready to move on. McCarry had begun writing short stories at night, and on the strength of half a dozen sales had decided to transplant himself to Europe. Not wanting to lose his talents, Mitchell contacted Allen Dulles, who recruited McCarry for the CIA. He was twenty-eight. Ten years later he retired to Washington and his first intent—writing novels.

Although Christopher Hitchens sneered in the pages of the New York Review of Books that his fiction is written out of “the self-pity of the American right,” McCarry is not himself a conservative. He describes himself, in fact, as a “bleeding heart.” The difference is, as he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve been on this planet for more than three quarters of a century, and all my life I've associated decency with my country.” He has more in common with Hitchens than either would be comfortable in acknowledging. After September 11th, Hitchens bitterly criticized those in the “mainstream left” who seek to “rationalize” Islamic terrorism by pointing to American evils. “No political coalition is possible with such people,” he has written, “and, I’m thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think.” McCarry differs in having developed his critique of the left several years before September 11th, and in abandoning any hope for a political coalition with such people even earlier.

Charles McCarry may be the best political novelist that the United States has ever produced.

No other book has the same effect

Over at the Blog of a Bookslut, Nina MacLaughlin has a remarkable look back at Scott Spencer’s 1979 novel Endless Love. MacLaughlin captures the experience of reading it: “[I]t’s the type of book that if your roommate—or boyfriend or girlfriend or dog—walks in while you’re reading it, you will feel as though you’ve just been caught with someone’s hand down your pants. It is mesmerizing, graphic, completely engrossing.” MacLaughlin recalls her first encounter with the novel as “one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life.”

Me too. Endless Love is not a particularly good novel, but to read it is to revisit those obsessive infatuations that, like a bout of insanity, utterly routed your life at various times when you were younger. I have found that I cannot go back to the novel—any more than I can reread old aching and embarrassingly prolix come-back-to-me love letters. In that sense, Endless Love is the kind of novel that belongs to a season of youth, rather like You Can’t Go Home Again. If you are past the age of thirty and if you have not read it, you will never be able to. (Same for Wolfe.) But if you are still young, and if you have ever been so obsessed with a girl that she occupies your every waking moment, then Endless Love will prove to be an unforgettable reading experience. Merely to pick up the novel will cause you to remember the sofa upon which you sprawled with it in your hand thirty years ago; you will remember the December chill outside your window; you will remember the slapdash sandwiches you made yourself when you unwillingly broke away from the book to eat; you will remember the girl you were aching for at that very moment. There is something profoundly unliterary about the whole experience, and it is a little bit creepy, but no other book will have the same effect upon you. Ever.

Miles Franklin long list

The long list for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious literary award in Australia, has been released (h/t: Matilda).

When Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, complained that “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” American book bloggers spun into a frenzy of refutation and abuse. The fact is, though, that Europe and the U.S. are too isolated and insular where Australian writing is concerned.

Of the ten finalists for the Miles Franklin Award, I have read only Tim Winton, whose Dirt Music won the award in 2002. (I taught it the next year in a course on contemporary literature in which I teach the previous year’s award winners from around the English-speaking world.) Those who take self-righteous resolutions not to read any books by white American males would do better to resolve to read more interesting fiction from Australia (and New Zealand too), where there is an entire literature unknown to Americans who dislike thinking of themselves as isolated and insular.

Pull out his eyes, Apologize, Apologize

In commenting upon my interpretation of Lolita as an act of repentance, R. J. Keefe is “heartened by [my] students’ insistence upon apology as a principle that perhaps clouded their literary perceptiveness. In a thousand cases out of a thousand-and-one, saying ‘I’m sorry’ is a moral act that’s both difficult and necessary.” I believe that it is neither, but rather that saying “I’m sorry” now serves as a substitute for genuine repentance.

More and more I have been struck by the rise of the conditional apology. “I am sorry if you are upset,” a person says—leaving the clear implication that you should not be upset, and that he is apologizing merely to placate you. The onus shifts onto you. A particularly sorry example of such a conditional apology was delivered to a friend. After twenty years of working for a company, he suffered misfortune—his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Neither the president of the company nor even the vice president of his division contacted him, offered any help or condolence, sent a card or flowers, visited his wife in the hospital. A few months later, a coworker’s wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. Knowing that this coworker was in better favor with the president and vice president, my friend wrote to them, urging them not to do to his coworker what they had done to him. The president wrote back: “I am sorry if you felt ignored by me.” The vice president wrote to protest. He knew for a fact that the president was concerned about my friend’s wife. Why, the president had said as much to the vice president!

Jane Austen was not impressed by the power of saying “I’m sorry.” Here are three passages from Emma in which the phrase is insufficient to effect repentance, and in fact stands in its way.

After quarreling with Knightley over whether Harriet ought to have turned down Mr. Martin’s marriage proposal, Emma reflects to open Chapter 9:

Mr. Knightley might quarrel with her, but Emma could not quarrel with herself. He was so much displeased, that it was longer than usual before he came to Hartfield again; and when they did meet, his grave looks shewed that she was not forgiven. She was sorry, but could not repent.Austen carefully distinguishes between feeling sorry and repentance. Knightley, of course, is the novel’s moral compass—the “true north of virtue,” as Stanley Elkin once put it in class. Much later, in Chapter 43, on a trip to Box Hill, he must reprove Emma for an unkind remark to Miss Bates, an old friend. Frank Churchill asks to hear one funny story, or three dull ones, from each member of the party. Miss Bates jokes at her own expense that finding three dull stories should be easy for her. “Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty,” Emma says. “Pardon me, but you will be limited as to number—only three at once.” Miss Bates is deeply hurt, but blames herself. When they are alone, Knightley lets Emma have it:Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endured than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong, without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?—Emma, I had not thought it possible.Harsh words, and well-deserved. Her reaction? “Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off.” Once again, feeling story prevents the correction of course that repentance would demand. Feeling sorry and laughing off the hurt, in fact, go hand in hand.

Two chapters later, as the novel begins its slow descent toward a conclusion, Emma seeks at last to repair her relationship with Jane Fairfax, a beautiful and accomplished young woman—a natural candidate for friendship—whom she dislikes for no reason that she can say. Jane, however, rebuffs Emma’s attempts at reconciliation. For her part, Emma is filled with remorse:She was sorry, very sorry. Her heart was grieved for a state which seemed but the more pitiable from this sort of irritation of spirits, inconsistency of action, and inequality of powers; and it mortified her that she was given so little credit for proper feeling, or esteemed so little worthy as a friend: but she had the consolation of knowing that her intentions were good. . . .Small wonder Jane is resolved to receive no kindness from Emma. She is still laboring under the moral error of believing that feeling sorry, very sorry, is enough to undo the damage she has caused.

It is not. It never is.

The enactment of moral experience

Lolita is the greatest novel ever written in English, because alone among English-language novels it is the enactment of a moral experience. Of the next five novels on my top-fifty list, only Ulysses has a similar ambition. Joyce sought to reproduce an entire day and an entire city—not to clock the day and map the city, but to raise them out of prose—while Nabokov’s intention (or, rather, Humbert Humbert’s) is what Abraham Joshua Heschel called the creation of time backwards:

The most unnoticed of all miracles is the miracle of repentance. It is not the same as rebirth; it is transformation, creation. In the dimension of time there is no going back. But the power of repentance causes time to be created backward and allows re-creation of the past to take place. Through the forgiving hand of God, harm and blemish which we have committed against the world and against ourselves will be extinguished, transformed into salvation.[1]Nabokov did everything in his power to dissemble his moral purpose. As Chrees pointed out in commenting on the Lasalle-Horner case which must have planted the seed of the novel, Nabokov claimed otherwise, saying that the “first little throb of Lolita” was prompted by a newspaper story about the “first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” Pure fiction, of course. Everything that Nabokov wrote was pure fiction—a fluent hushing-up of his true motives in writing. All art is deception, he told BBC interviewers in 1962, but deception “is only part of the game; it’s part of the combination, part of the delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought, which can be false vistas, perhaps. I think a good combination should always contain a certain element of deception.”[2]

Thus when he says later in the same interview that he has “no social purpose, no moral message,” that he merely enjoys “composing riddles with elegant solutions,” he does not mean that Lolita is devoid of moral intention. He means that the moral experience enacted in the novel cannot be abbreviated in a neat-and-tidy maxim to be inscribed upon the walls of a Japanese sentimentalist’s mind. There is no “message” that can be extracted from the novel without damaging it beyond repair. The novel is identical with its morality.

Here is the riddle that Nabokov set himself to solving in Lolita. How does a moral monster obtain repentance for the most unspeakable of moral evils? The son of a liberal anti-Communist, a fugitive from Berlin where his father was gunned down by right-wing extremists in 1922, Nabokov was acquainted with the worst crimes of the twentieth century. The first moral problem he faced in writing his novel was to restore unspeakability to evil. After the Great Terror and the Holocaust, he saw that evil had become a propaganda tool. Only one crime aroused an instinctive horror in the human breast:[D]epending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a viellard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.[3]It is difficult to imagine a more monstrous passage. Indeed, when other moral monsters set out to explain themselves they take pains to emphasize their essential goodness. Think, for instance, of the memoir that Rudolf Höss wrote in the six months before being hanged in April 1947 just a few steps away from the first crematorium at Auschwitz. Höss insists that he was given to “inner doubts and depressions,” that he suffered “deep human emotion.” Those who witnessed him at the time testified to his coldness and heartlessness, but this was merely a pose, an appearance. The outward calm that he affected “during these events which tear the heart apart in anyone who had any kind of human feelings,” was the result of a “tremendous effort” to strike a proper military bearing to his men. The question of how, away from his men, he could have possibly endured the “inner doubts and depressions,” if he really experienced them and was not merely spinning lies, is never even raised.[4]

Not so Humbert. He is remarkably open about “this horror that I cannot shake off” (p. 135). After satisfying his lust upon Lolita, an “ashen sense of awfulness” would creep over him (p. 137). Every day, as she climbed back into the car alongside him and they headed west, Humbert would be overcome with “an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed” (p. 140).

Why does he not stop? Although he claims that years of concealing his yearning for little girls had taught him “superhuman self-control,” the opposite is very nearly the case. He is helpless before Lolita. Never once, though, does he try to excuse his behavior. Earlier on he had sought to dismiss the moral qualms by learned allusions to cultural relativism (in East India, “Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds”) and literary history (Dante with nine-year-old Beatrice, Petrarch with twelve-year-old Laura, Poe with thirteen-year-old Virginia). But not even he is convinced. As he looks back upon their flight, Humbert catches himself thinking thatour long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep. (pp. 175–76)All art is deception, but art is not all deception. And these slips of the mask, these wincing revelations of Lolita’s suffering and Humbert’s own devastation, point to the novel’s real purpose. In a word, Humbert writes Lolita to atone for his evil. (Not his crime: his crime is murdering Quilty, for which he is unrepentant.) The novel is his effort to recreate time backwards, to restore Lolita to the life he stole from her. Nabokov’s intention is slightly different—not to write a moral treatise on repentance, but to body forth its perfectly realized performance; to represent it, not as a moral formula, but as a self-understood action.

Jewish tradition, especially as advanced by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah, holds that true repentance (or teshuvah, “return,” in Hebrew) consists of five steps: (1) recognition of sin, (2) remorse, (3) giving up the sin, (4) restitution or repair, and (5) public confession. I am not saying that Nabokov was familiar with Jewish tradition, but rather that Jewish tradition has clarified a certain “logic” to repentance. Christian ideas of repentance differ only slightly, but the primary difference is this. Judaism teaches that sacramental efforts are adequate to atone only for sins between man and God. For sins between man and man, these distinct and reparative steps must be taken. And Humbert carries out each of them.

First, he recognizes the horror of what he is doing to Lolita even as he remains helpless to stop doing it. And as I wrote here a little over two weeks ago, Humbert finally acknowledges, in his last few moments as a free man, the sin he has committed against her—the sin of removing her voice from the chorus of children at play (p. 308). He does not try to dress it up as something it is not. He ceases to speak of “nymphet love,” stops holding that it is the “patrimonies of poets” and “not crime’s proving ground” (p. 131). Even the unvoiced question that he puts in the mouth of a Ramsdale neighbor (“Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle . . . had done to Sally Horner in 1948?”) is an indirect admission that, yes, he had (p. 289).

The second step—remorse—is the most difficult to reduce to an obvious discernible action. Although regret suffuses the narrative, it would violate Nabokov’s stylistic prohibition on direct statement for Humbert to babble how sorry he is. The closest is when he is able to say what his lust dispelled:I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred—I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever—for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)—and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again—and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be shattered. (p. 285)The tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, but the physical presence of Lolita, whom he was helpless to resist, quickly converted the remorse back into desire, atonement’s dross. It is only after losing her at last, and for good, that Humbert is able to deepen his tenderness for Lolita (“this Lolita, my Lolita,” as he repeatedly says) into remorse for the sin of “safely solipsizing” her—the sin of using her, borrowing “her brown limbs in the seculsion of the five-dollar room,” to satisfy his passion.

Third (and rarely remarked upon), Humbert gives up the sin:I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My accursed nature could not change. . . . On playgrounds and beaches, my sullen and stealthy eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a nymphet’s limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita’s handmaids and rosegirls. But one essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now on possibilities of bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic, in some out-of-the-way place; never did my fancy sink its fangs into Lolita’s sisters, far far away, in the coves of evoked islands. That was all over, for the time being at least. (p. 257)Do not let the final qualification throw you. Humbert is “reformed,” but he is neither so crude nor so superficial to believe he is cured. His very recognition that abandoning “the possibilities of bliss with a little maiden” is a merely temporary surcease from hell is a testament to the profound moral correction which he has negotiated. Moreover, in the next chapter, Humbert undertakes his first adult love affair—with a young woman who was “twice Lolita’s age.” He marvels that he mentions Rita at all: “There is no earthly reason why I should dally with her in the margin of this sinister memoir. . .” (p. 259). But there is every reason. His tenderness and fond memories for her (“she was the most soothing, the most comprehending companion that I ever had”) are proof that he has indeed given up the sin.

Fourth, Humbert tries to make restitution. After he receives a begging letter from Lolita, now seventeen, married, pregnant, and broke, he hunts her down where she is living in a cardboard shack in a coal-mining town and hands her an envelope containing four thousand dollars. He asks her to come away with him. “[Y]ou mean that you will give us that money only if I go with you to a motel,” Lolita says warily. But, no, there are no conditions. Humbert wants her to live with him, die with him, and everything with him; if she refuses she will still get her “trousseau.” Lolita refuses. It is out of the question, she says. She would sooner go back to Quilty, whom she loved and who wanted her only for a sex slave. She gropes for words of explanation. Humbert supplies them mentally: “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life” (p. 279).

Because he has broken her life, and because she will not join him in an effort to repair it, Humbert must do the next best thing. He insists that the world know how much he loved her, “this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child”—no longer a nymphet, but a flesh-and-blood woman—and “even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn,” even if the young virgin become an aging mother, “even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita” (p. 278). His emphasis upon Lolita’s thisness, what Joyce called haecceity, is the unshakable foundation of his effort to restore her individuality, to break the spell of her “nymphage,” to see her as the unique woman he has uniquely damaged. It is the necessary prelude to his final restorative act.

And so the entire purpose of his book is to make a full and public confession—repentance’s fifth and final step. Originally, upon beginning it, he had thought to use the manuscript at his trial, to save his soul if not his head. “In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita,” he says (p. 308). To do so would be to use her all over again as a means to his own solipsistic ends. His intention alters as the novel progresses and his shame deepens. He no longer seeks “to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets” (p. 134). Lolita is not a token. She is not the sample of a “great rosegray never-to-be-had” (p. 264). She is a person, this Lolita, and he has forced her to dwell “in a world of total evil” (p. 284). When Janet Lewis writes a short novel about a man who introduces a beloved woman into a world of evil, she imagines him saying, when he realizes at last what he has done, “I can but die by way of atonement.”[5] Humbert does not offer to die, because he seeks an atonement that is stronger than death. Since he has broken her life, since he has removed Lolita’s voice from the concord of children, he seeks now to “make you live in the minds of later generations.” Nabokov lends him the full armature of his art so that Humbert might recreate the time he has stolen from her and return her to the life he has broken. Repentance is but the ancilla of art, as he might have put it elsewhere (p. 259). It is the handmaiden to the superhuman effort to grant her literary immortality by way of atonement.
____________________

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Meaning of Repentance” (1936), in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996), pp. 68–70.

[2] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 9–19.

[3] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 174. Subsequent references will be inserted between parentheses.

[4] Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly, trans. Andrew Pollinger (New York: Da Capo, 1992), p. 165.

[5] Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), p. 108.

Beware of writers’ politics

Haruki Murakami may be a great novelist, but he is also a political buffoon. Most writers are. As the German novelist Daniel Kehlman said at the University of Göttingen not quite three years ago,

My god, Hölderlin and Kleist embraced patriotism and the German Nation, Kipling the English Empire; Claudel and Yeats were half-fascists; Pound and Benn whole ones; Céline and Jünger I don't even want to talk about, and Aragon, Eluard, Brecht, Heinrich Mann and Feuchtwanger and many dozens of Europe’s premier intellectuals wrote letter or reverential submission to and hymns about Josef Stalin. Writers have two main traits: they dislike pragmatics and they are often opportunists.Murakami is the latter variety. Invited to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, he seizes the opportunity to stand with those who seek to destroy the Jewish State. Inscribed on the wall of his mind, he sighs, is the slogan: “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” He goes on, as if addressing schoolchildren:Yes, no matter how right the wall may be, how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?I dunno. Maybe the value of truth? What value the works of a novelist who candidly prefers to be morally muddled? Murakami presses on:What is the meaning of this metaphor, of the wall and the egg? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high wall. The eggs are unarmed civilians who are crushed, burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of this metaphor that is true.Now, Murakami began his school lesson by warning that he had come to Jerusalem as a “professional spinner of lies,” but even an admitted liar might think twice about uncritically passing on discredited Hamas propaganda about the Israeli use of “white phosphorous shells.” Even more telling is the refusal to make moral distinctions. Only the “unarmed civilians” of one side—the side of the infinitely fragile egg—earn the novelist’s tender mercies. True, terrorists launch rockets at unarmed civilians on the other side of “the wall,” and then courageously hide themselves among their own unarmed countrymen. Despite their rockets and their ambitions to murder as many Jews as possible, however, they are mere eggs. We must mourn the breaking of such precious eggs as Nizar Rayan and Abu Zakaria al-Jemal and Said Siam. It is equally imperative not to show any concern for residents of the wall, even if their schools are hit by the eggs’ rockets. They are only eggs, after all, and unarmed Israeli children—well, they belong to the wall.

The officials of the Jerusalem International Book Fair, who awarded their prize to Murakami, ought to have rushed the stage, wrestled the trophy out of his hands, and presented it to the nearest anonymous bystander, who could not possibly have been a bigger moral idiot than the Japanese novelist.

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)