Miles Franklin short list

The shortlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award was released yesterday.

One of the nominees is a personal favorite. Tim Winton is compared in the official release to Ian McEwan and Philip Roth (“major chroniclers of the human condition”). He far more closely resembles Richard Russo. His novels are similarly loose, yet driven by narrative rather than theme or thesis. They invite you to keep reading, partly because they never invite you to stop, underline a passage, and ponder. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Literary intellectuals have become too tolerant of essayistic digressions and sententious reflections. Winton’s novels don’t loop back on themselves. They drive forward. Here is hoping that Breath, his novel about surfers, brings home his fourth Miles Franklin Award.

Perry Middlemiss’s page dedicated to the award is here. It includes a list of every award-winner since 1957.

Update: The Guardian says that Winton holds the “pole position” for the award (h/t: Books, Inq.).

Top 10 forgotten prize winners

The American Book Exchange has compiled a list of the Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels (h/t: Books, Inq.). First on the list is James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, which I named earlier as a celebrated book whose author had outlived his reputation. Martin Dressler hardly belongs on the same list as The Able McLaughlins and Lamb in His Bosom, though. How about Edna Ferber’s So Big, John Hersey’s Bell for Adano, or Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres?

A more useful list would include prize-winning novels that have been forgotten, but do not deserve to be:

( 1) Thomas Williams, The Hair of Harold Roux (National Book Award, 1975)
( 2) Adele Wiseman, The Sacrifice (Governor General’s Award, 1956)
( 3) Linda Grant, When I Lived in Modern Times (Orange Prize, 2000)
( 4) Jean Stafford, The Collected Stories (Pulitzer Prize, 1970)
( 5) Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils (Booker Prize, 1986)
( 6) Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a Midget (James Tait Black Prize, 1921)
( 7) Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (Governor General’s Award, 1960)
( 8) Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (National Book Award, 1957)
( 9) Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (Governor General’s Award, 1997)
(10) Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (Lambda Award, 2002)

The error behind Amazon’s

So Larry Kramer, who has also collected eighteen thousand signatures on a petition calling for a boycott, does not think—not for one second—that a computer glitch caused some books by prominent homosexuals to lose their Amazon sales rankings and become harder to find in searches. Michael Lukas goes even further. The glitch “targeted” homosexuals’ books, he yells: “Not only does the incident reek of blatant bias, it also displays a profound ignorance of literary history.”

That is quite a lot for one mistake to accomplish. If Kramer and Lukas do not believe that a programming error caused the “deranking” of some books, what do they believe was behind it? Lukas is clear on the point, offering a “short list of titles that Amazon might consider for the next round of censorship” and wondering darkly whether “this is the company we want controlling the future of literature.” But aren’t these contradictory ambitions? If Amazon seeks to corner the book-buying market, why would it also seek to shrink the size of the market? Do Kramer and Lukas really believe that it is good business to eliminate homosexuals’ books from a bookstore’s inventory? How would that be in Amazon’s interests? Are homosexual writers and readers such an insignificant public that the company could afford to offend and exclude them?

The programming error suggests exactly the opposite. Amazon was apparently trying to revise its search algorithms to make it easier for customers to find books on what are politely described as “gay themes.” But here is just exactly the source of the problem. And it is evidence of special pleading on the part of homosexual writers and readers. They want books with “gay themes” to be distinguished from all other books—set apart in a separate universe, with its own separate foundation and its own separate prizes—and they annex an ever-increasing area of literary history to this universe, but then they object, as Daniel Mendelsohn does in the same New York Times article in which Kramer is quoted, that “the words gay and lesbian were clearly flagged” when Amazon sought to revise its search algorithms. Since they themselves insist upon euphemisms like “gay” and “lesbian”—to speak more plainly would be a slur—they are the ones who have installed euphemism at the heart of the process and complicated the effort of distinguishing their writing from everyone else’s. They want to be singled out. They bridle at being singled out. Perhaps the very idea of “gay literature” is to blame for the whole snafu.

Post and run

Hate to post and run, but last two days of Passover start in half an hour. Comments here are moderated, because in the past I have received antisemitic remarks, advertisements for Viagra, links to irrelevant websites, and self-publishing novelists’ self-promotions. No way, then, to reply till Thursday night, when I shall be back online, and with any luck, someone will have accepted my challenges. Talk to you then.

Would someone explain. . .

. . . what either occurrence of the word literary refers to in the following sentence: “Th[e] ability to enlist various kinds of writing not themselves per se ‘literary’ in the creation of literary form is part of what has allowed fiction to retain its vitality. . . .” If both refer to the same thing why is the first handled with quotation marks? And if they refer to different things how do the quotation marks specify the difference? Help me. I’m lost.

The gods cannot be proved

In a provocative day-after-Easter post, Elberry considers the historical basis of Christianity—the subject also of an early essay by Michael Oakeshott, which I commend to him. Basing a religious understanding upon historical events is objectionable, Elberry says; few would find themselves driven to Christ even if it could be proved that his resurrection was a historical fact. “The gods cannot be proved,” he writes. Oakeshott elaborates:

Religion demands not that the necessity for the existence of what it believes in should be proved, for that is an academic interest, but to be made intensely aware of the actual existence of the object of belief.[1]That is, the historical claims of Christianity serve the purpose, not of fixing an event in the past, but of giving it “a permanent and not merely a temporary meaning.” Through rituals like the Easter service, Christians reexperience the resurrection in the present. Not for nothing do the Jews recite from the Haggadah during the Passover seder:In every generation, one is obliged to regard himself as though he himself had actually gone out from Egypt, for the Torah says: “You shall tell your son on the day saying, ‘For the sake of this, the LORD did for me when I went out from Egypt.’ ” Not only our fathers were redeemed by the Holy One, blessed be he, but he also redeemed us with them, for so it says: “And he brought us out from there, so that he might bring us and give us the land which he had promised to our fathers.”These claims are not proofs, but invocations. They are attempts to reexperience the actual existence of God—in the same terms that generations of believers have experienced it. While nonbeliever and naïve believer assume that the Bible and its historical events are intended to be a “compelling demonstration of God,” they are better understood as an effort to provide language adequate to the experience of his actual existence.

The effort is doomed to failure. As Elberry points out,If there is any determining purpose, a god, it lies outside of the world, or it is just another counter we push around, a pebble we shift from pocket to pocket. If an absolute meaning is to be communicated to the world it must do so within the world; and so it cannot be absolute, or it would destroy the world—that is, it would not be apprehendable in worldly terms; the world would end where it began.The prooftext for his view, a brilliant anticipation of the kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum or God’s self-withdrawal from creation, comes at the end of Exodus, when the children of Israel have completed work on the Tabernacle: “Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud had settled upon it and the Presence of the LORD filled the Tabernacle.” God must leave for man to enter. He can only be sought in his absence.

Elberry has it exactly right, and the atheist, exactly backwards.
____________________

[1] Michael Oakeshott, “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity” (1928), in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 63–73.

Posterity makes its choice

Over the first days of Passover, I rested from my labors and reread Cakes and Ale (1930). It is W. Somerset Maugham’s best, the only one of his novels, as Joseph Epstein says, that is “completely successful.” A hilarious “easel picture” of literary life in Edwardian England (“I have painted easel pictures,” Maugham later confessed, “not frescoes”), the novel can also stand on its own as Maugham’s artistic credo. That it was once regarded as a roman à clef, having great fun at the expense of Hugh Walpole and the two-years-deceased Thomas Hardy, is no longer very interesting or significant. Contemporaries found the portraits so exact that, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “there were loud cries of ‘Slay the Monster!’ ” Six months after the novel was published a counterattack appeared under the title Gin and Bitters by “A. Riposte.” But who now reads Hugh Walpole, or giggles at the scandal of describing Hardy’s novels as boring?

And yet a good part of the fun in reading the novel is to be found in its literary opinions. When asked whether he remembers any of Edward Driffield’s remarks about literature, for example, Ashenden (the book’s narrator, who knew the Grand Old Man of English Letters when both were much younger men) replies,

[W]hen I was lunching with the Driffields a few years ago I overheard him saying that Henry James had turned his back on one of the great events of the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses. Driffield called it il gran rifiuto [the great refusal]. I was surprised at hearing the old man use an Italian phrase and amused because a great big bouncing duchess who was there was the only person who knew what the devil he was talking about. He said, “Poor Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they’re having tea just too far for him to hear what the countess is saying.”This is at once unerringly true and wide of the mark. Something like it could also be said of Maugham himself, of course. Cakes and Ale he calls his novel, meaning not bread and water. Moreover, the one time he tried to cook up a novel around one of the great events in world history—England at war—he wound up with a blackened pot of melodrama. As Granville Hicks said, The Hour before the Dawn (1942) included “a German spy, a conscientious objector, an escape from France after Dunkirk, and an air raid, to say nothing of a collection of landed gentry, some evacuees, and a triangle”—everything, Hicks concluded, “except a literary conscience.”

The critics never approved of him. David Daiches spoke for the clan when he dismissed Maugham as an “accomplished professional” who lacked “any original vision of humanity or any great distinction of style.” The lack of an original vision did not seem to dissuade book buyers (and theatergoers), who approved of him sufficiently to place him in “the £20,000 a year class,” as the New York Times reported in 1925—more than $97,000 in U.S. currency. Popular approval had its costs, however, which Maugham continued to pay for the rest of the century. As Anthony Daniels (better known as Theodore Dalrymple) wrote in the New Criterion in 2000, “[A]dmitting to an admiration for Maugham is to an intellectual what voyaging overseas once was to an orthodox Brahmin: it leads automatically to a loss of caste.”

Maugham was unapologetic about being a popular writer. In a central passage of Cakes and Ale comparing literary reputations, Ashenden says:The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes it choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen still-born from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose.The modern quarrel between popularity and posterity is Maugham’s theme. With the exception of Driffield, who must have “thought about his writing, but never mentioned it,” the literary men of Cakes and Ale are the sort whom I described yesterday as bureaucrats of literature. They are anglers for succès d’estime if not £20,000 a year.

Alroy Kear, the author of some thirty books, has enjoyed a career that “might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature,” because no one else among his contemporaries has “achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.” Kear rises in the world of letters by means of what would now be called social networking and seizing every opportunity to advance himself:He could be counted on to reply for literature at a public dinner and he was invariably on the reception committee formed to give a proper welcome to a literary celebrity from overseas. No bazaar lacked an autographed copy of at least one of his books. He never refused to grant an interview. He justly said that no one knew better than he the hardships of the author’s trade and if he could help a struggling journalist to earn a few guineas by having a pleasant chat with him he had not the inhumanity to refuse. He generally asked his interview to luncheon and seldom failed to make a good impression on him.Driffield’s widow has asked Kear to write the late great novelist’s biography. In typical fashion, Kear had sent a letter to Driffield several years earlier, professing admiration for his novels, was invited to visit, and eventually came to know him well. At first he hesitated over the biography, but he has decided to do it. “[I]f I can make a pretty good job of it,” he tells Ashenden, “it can’t fail to do me a lot of good. People have so much more respect for a novelist if he writes something serious now and then.”

His problem is the first Mrs. Driffield—a working-class beauty with a mischievous smile, a former barmaid, a tart who is spectacularly unfaithful, chucking Driffield and England over for another man and America. Kear does not want to “make a sensation,” nor does he want to be accused to “imitating Lytton Strachey.” He should like to do something “with a good deal of atmosphere, you know, and a certain gravity, and with a sort of aristocratic distinction”—in about eighty thousand words. “I don’t want to say anything that’s untrue,” he tells Ashenden, “but I do think there’s a certain amount that’s better left unsaid.”

Cakes and Ale is the reverse image, the book that Kear has no intention of writing. Telling the story as if he were writing a casual gossipy memoir, Ashenden says everything about Edward Driffield’s first marriage that Kear plans to leave unsaid—although an age that has been informed that Lincoln was gay or has learned that Flannery O’Connor liked racist jokes will find the revelations mild enough. The first-person narrative moves gracefully between the literary present, in which Kear hopes to forestall Ashenden from turning out anything about Driffield and “blowing the gaff,” and the extraliterary past, when Ashenden knew the Driffields as neighbors and friends and spent many happy hours in their company. Although he is no less a hack than his rival—Maugham scorches himself as badly as Hugh Walpole—Ashenden writes to a different standard. If Kear’s is a policy of “reserve and delicacy,” his is one of unembarrassed plainness. He explains in the novel’s last pages. No matter how badly he is treated by posterity and a “fickle public,” the writer has one compensation:Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.This was also Maugham’s credo. He did not seek to claim more for himself than he deserved. He knew his limitations as a writer; his prose style, which (as Theodore Spencer memorably put it) “conceals its real economy under an air of apparent garrulity,” perfectly suits the modesty of his literary ambitions. Like Alroy Kear, he hoped to be chosen by posterity. But he knew that his best chance was to be straight with it, and to leave questions of greatness to another time.

Doctrine suspended in the void

In the latest Weekly Standard, Edward Short begins a review of Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings by quoting from Henry James:

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions. It is a gift inestimably precious and beautiful; therefore, so far from thinking that it passes overmuch from hand to hand, one knows that one has only to stand by the counter an hour to see that business is done with baser coin. We have too many schoolmasters; yet not only do I not question in literature the high utility of criticism, but I should be tempted to say that the part it plays may be the supremely beneficent one when it proceeds from deep sources, from the efficient combination of experience and perception. In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother.Although Short does not identify the source, this passage comes from James’s essay “The Science of Criticism” originally published in the New Review in May 1891 and reprinted in book form two years later in Essays in London and Elsewhere. (The Library of America includes it in its volume of James’s criticism on American and English writers.)

James begins the essay by observing that, despite an affluence of periodical criticism in his day, it was curiously disconnected from the literature under review. Barren of examples and illustrations, a stranger to “literary conduct,” much criticism was characterized by a “deluge of doctrine suspended in the void”—not unlike many pronouncements on criticism one hundred years and more later. James marveled that literature was able to resist “such a periodicity of platitude and irrelevance,” and worried that it would not long be able to, “speedily going down beneath it.” How will anyone know if literature goes under? The signs will be obvious—“the failure of distinction, the failure of style, the failure of knowledge, the failure of thought.”

With the disappearance of many American newspapers’ book pages, the threat would seem to have disappeared too. But not so fast. James was concerned lest “the diffusion of penmanship and opportunity” prove fatal to literature. If book pages are disappearing, programs in creative writing are multiplying. As I observed in the Afterword to the new edition of The Elephants Teach, “the total number of degree-granting programs” in the U.S. has climbed to “well over three hundred.” In his scholarly study published earlier this month, Mark McGurl argues that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history”; he calls the era in American fiction The Program Era. The “multiplication of endowments for chatter” troubled James in his day. In our day, different institutions are endowed, and the multiplication increases.

The threat remains. Literature is highly susceptible to demoralization, and “nothing is better calculated than irresponsible pedagogy to make it close its ears and lips.” Since creative writing has relieved it of the responsibility for tutoring writers, criticism has become an even more unreliable pedagogue. Critics seem no longer willing to recognize that many books have “nothing to say to the critical sense, that they do not belong to literature, and that the possession of a critical sense is exactly what makes it impossible to read them and dreary to discuss them—places them, as a part of the critical experience, out of the question.” As I have said so many times that I have become a bore on the subject, literature is a title which is bestowed by critics, and if they fail to perform their duty, literature becomes a tear in the ocean of books. This is the sense in which Frank Wilson hits the target when he says that “any accurate and precise description of anything is necessarily implicitly evaluative.” Although descriptive utterances may be logically distinguishable from evaluative utterances, a critic must admit that some books are just too dreary to describe. Its evaluative commitment, its acceptance of the kingmaker’s role, is what distinguishes criticism from irresponsible pedagogy. Without Samuel there is neither Saul nor David.

And it is at this point in the argument that the passage quoted by Short (reproduced above) appears. The critical sense is not widely distributed—at least not as widely distributed as English departments across the land. The critic’s function is “sacrificial”; indeed, the critic sacrifices himself to the founding of literature. “To lend himself, to project himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till he understands, and to understand so well that he can say, to have perception at the pitch of passion and expression as embracing as the air, to be infinitely curious and incorrigibly patient”—these are the self-sacrificing qualities of a critic. That they are unusual goes without saying. To be instead a servant of doctrine, to know in advance what any literary text will say, to decide what to read on the basis of irrelevant criteria like authors’ race and sex, to intone magisterially about “literature as a whole” and then to restrict it to only those who deliver an “aesthetic experience”—these are among the ways in which schoolmasters, administering budgets and alloting classroom space and angling for a promotion, pretend to the world that they are critics. They are not. They are bureaucrats of literature. They may “continue to talk about it long after it has bored itself to death,” and they give every appearance of making sure that their descendants will hear about it in this fashion, but they will “acquiesce in its extinction.”

An undeserved honor

Many thanks to Mark Sarvas of Elegant Variation for including A Commonplace Blog among the “Top 10 Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs.” As Frank Wilson observed, it is a pity that Sarvas momentarily forgot Patrick Kurp’s Anecdotal Evidence, the best of the best. The same day that Sarvas’s ten best appeared at Blogs.com, after all, Kurp quoted from the “funniest literary account of a Seder”—from Isaac Rosenfeld’s only novel, Passage from Home. This was a polite correction of my post on Passover reading below.

At all events, I apologize for not being around to greet any new readers on Thursday or Friday. Please make yourself at home. Help yourself to a Coke or a handful of chips.

Hag kasher v’sameyah

A happy Passover to kol Yisrael. Tonight Jews all over the world sit down to read, study, and reenact a famous work of literature called simply Haggadah—the narrative. As if there were no other.

The National Review asked five Jewish intellectuals for recommended Passover reading. Other than commentaries on the Haggadah, the only books that received a mention were Leon Uris’s Exodus, Aaron Wildavsky’s Moses as a Political Leader, and Marcy Goldman’s Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking.

Yosef Ḥaim Brenner’s novel Breakdown and Bereavement (1920) might seem an odd choice for Pesaḥ reading. As the Israeli critic Gershon Shaked describes it, the novel is about a “neurotic individual who tries to become a ḥalutz (pioneer) but whose tendencies toward moroseness and despair are only exacerbated by his experiences in Palestine.” But the novel is not a political allegory. In the words of Hillel Halkin, its English translator, it offers a “last, lingering glimpse of Palestinian life in the twilight days of the Ottoman Empire. . . .” Breakdown and Bereavement is a portrait, that is, the first Jews to arrive in Palestine from the new Exodus, although for complicated historical reasons it was called the Second Aliyah, and the enormous task they faced. That Brenner was pessimistic about their chances is irrelevant, because he was proven wrong. And his novel remains great—a reminder that the work of Jewish freedom is unfinished.

An antidote to the spirit of Brenner’s novel is another about making exodus to the holy land—Linda Grant’s Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times (2001). An altogether unexpected novel from a British feminist who had written a history of the sexual revolution, the novel is about the last days of British Mandate Palestine and the first heady stirrings of Jewish independence. Grant’s heroine Evelyn Sert realizes, when she arrives in Palestine, that she is “part of a grand narrative that had started before [she] was ever born.” She belongs, that is, to Haggadah. And in arriving in the land that will become Israel, she has “come to the place where no Jew need ever invent himself again or pretend to be someone else he wasn’t.” Offhand I cannot think of a better summary than that of the Passover message. Grant was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for last year’s Clothes on their Backs, but the earlier novel is her masterpiece. It is one of the undiscovered jewels of modern English-language fiction.

Not that anyone should notice, but starting this evening I will be offline for three days—two holy days and then the Sabbath.

Happy Easter to those who did not have to hunt down the last crumb of ḥamets last night. (Here is a bleg, my dear Christian readers. What are the best Easter books?) May the reexperience of his death and resurrection lift every Christian to new heights in the coming year.

And to my fellow Jews, in the coming months may you have plenty of ḥaroset and not so much ḥazeret.

Criticism and the police

Daniel Green continues to police the stray and fugitive remarks about literary criticism that steal across the literary blogscape. His latest warning comes in response to some reflections on criticism by the fiction writer J. Robert Lennon, although he does not spare Nigel Beale, an unrepentant recidivist who keeps “fall[ing] back on his core notion that criticism is essentially an evaluative act.” Green instructs them in the law, barking that, in addition to its mission of being “at least as much descriptive as evaluative,” criticism must also take into account the “larger context of literature itself, within which the reader must approach the work. . . .” The most “substantive” criticism, you see, is written by “literary critics who conceive their first and primary commitment to be to literature as a whole, defined as an ongoing collective enterprise with an identifiable history to which current works inevitably have a meaningful relationship and among whose current exponents some equally meaningful connections can be made.” Wake me when the sentence is over.

Set aside the fact that Green’s conception of literature is question-begging and circular. “[E]verything written in the forms of fiction, poetry, or drama is literature,” he finally concluded after long pestering from me, “if the author intends it to be taken as literature.” Until he locates the key to unlock the self-enclosed circle of his own confusion—a first responsibility which he has never accepted onto himself—Green is disqualified from speaking of “literature as a whole.” The phrase, when used by him, is vacuous.

But what could the phrase possibly mean? Even adopting a more coherent version of Green’s late Victorian ideal, literature-as-a-whole would include fiction, poetry, and drama written in many different languages, most of which will not be known with sufficient fluency for the writer and critic to make “meaningful connections.” Does every poem refer helplessly to every other poem ever written? Even if it were possible to conceive what this might mean, how would the conception be useful? How would it work?

Here is a small example. Jane Austen was born in 1775; Nahman of Breslov, the famous Hasidic rabbi, was born three years earlier. Both wrote fiction. Nahman’s Sippurei Maasiyyot, a collection of thirteen mystical tales, was published, in Yiddish and Hebrew, in 1816—the same year in which Austen wrote Emma. On any conception of it, literature-as-a-whole would have to contain both Austen and the Breslover, but in what conceivable sense do both of them belong and contribute to the same “ongoing collective enterprise with an identifiable history to which current works inevitably have a meaningful relationship”? What are the “meaningful connections” that might be drawn between these two “current exponents”? And what difference would they make?

What we have here is evidence of the decay of faith. And Daniel Green is a pious mutawwa, a one-man Committee for the Prevention of Literary Vice, correcting this one and that one, enforcing conformity where he can no longer enjoy a community of belief. The time of the religion of literature has long passed.

Swept along by Stanley Elkin

Earlier this morning Nige recorded his first encounter with Stanley Elkin’s brilliant and rollicking Dick Gibson Show. “Elkin is, among other things, an absolute master of the spiel,” Nige writes—“once he gets going, he has you, there’s no resisting, he sweeps you along on his torrent of words. Rather than a man writing a novel, he sounds and feels like a man talking to you, urgently, hilariously, endlessly inventively, twisting and turning the language, keeping it alive, always keeping you with him. . . .”

I studied under Elkin at Washington University in St. Louis. In fact, I wrote my masters thesis on The Dick Gibson Show—surely an academic first of some kind, as I put it elsewhere. Nige’s description of his prose, the best thing I have ever read about the experience of reading him, reminds me of the principle of style that Elkin enunciated one day in class. A student complained about Conrad’s lack of verbal concision. She held that “Less is more.” Elkin became impatient. “Less is less,” he said irritably. “More is more. Enough is enough.”

One small correction. Nige writes: “The Dick Gibson Show is loosely structured—as with Bellow, the structure is hardly the point. . . .” This is not wrong at all. Elkin’s novel is loosely structure indeed, but it has a structure. Elkin adopts the Enlightenment commonplace, which divided European history into the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Golden Age. And perhaps this might be described as a flexible structure rather than a loose one, like a card file, since Elkin is able to expand and contract it as suits his needs (“Enough is enough”), while proceeding more or less steadily toward his goal.

My full-length essay on the novel is here. The time has come for an Elkin revival.

What to do about Rochester

Lord Rochester’s verse poses a problem of a different magnitude from Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Instead of the occasional blemish, or what Mark Athitakis points out is a bizarre obsession with how women smell, there is top-to-bottom misogyny:

Love a woman? You’re an ass.
’Tis a most insipid passion
To choose out for your happiness
The idlest part of God's creation.

Let the porter and the groom,
Things designed for dirty slaves,
Drudge in fair Aurelia’s womb
To get supplies for age and graves.

Farewell, woman! I intend
Henceforth every night to sit
With my lewd, well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.

Then give me health, wealth, mirth, and wind,
And if busy Love intrenches,
There’s a sweet, soft page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches.By the time of his death in 1680 from syphilis, gonorhea, and Lord knows what else, Rochester’s reputation for scurrility in verse was so well-established that for a century or more the editors of anthologies would attribute any bawdy poem to him.

Rochester never intended his rake-hell verses to be published. He wrote them for his own amusement, and that of his friends. As his close friend Robert Wolseley later said, he did not write “for any public or common entertainment whatever, but for the private diversion of those happy few whom he used to charm with his company and honor with his friendship.” The trouble is that Rochester’s verses are amusing. “The Imperfect Enjoyment”—a satire on what is now called, with medical primness, erectile dysfunction. “Signior Dildo”—an encomium to that “noble Italian.” “Upon His Leaving His Mistress”—so that she might “be the mistress of mankind.” “Upon His Drinking Bowl”—a toast to his saints Cupid and Bacchus. To read Rochester is to reexperience what it must have been like to sit with a circle of Restoration buddies, drinking heavily and trading incredibly well-made and witty obscenities.

Apart from its private amusement value, how can such a sinful poet be as great as Rochester so clearly is? Here is why. His character, as Kenneth Burke would say, “is based upon an integrity, or constancy,” and not upon a fixed and universal mode code (which is the real perversion of morality). Rochester had at least the integrity of being constant in his sin. He does not seek to set himself up as a moral champion, but only to achieve that integrity or constancy of keeping faith with his friends and enjoyments, no matter how imperfect.

The quantification dodge

In his April Fool’s Day post, Will Wilkinson takes on what he calls “the meaning dodge.” What he means by this phrase, although he is not sure what meaning is, is that the appeal to its “meaning” is resorted to when an experience can be defended in no better terms. His example is having children. In Gross National Happiness, Arthur Brooks studied the numbers closely, and concluded that “Marriage makes people very happy, but children have the opposite effect: The happiness of couples, and the quality of their marriage, falls after the birth of the first child.” I dispute this conclusion. I have four children, and have never been happier. But this datum will be dismissed as “anecdotal,” of course, and thus my experience rendered meaningless.

Or perhaps that is the meaning of meaning—the statistically insignificant experience that nevertheless is experienced as significant; significant, that is, in some other terms than statistics. Wilkinson is dubious. Unless a finding is quantifiable, it does not exist for him:

How does one validate that x is in fact meaningful, or more meaningful than y? If meaning is going to carry a justificatory load in weighty personal and political deliberation, we can’t just wave our hands about it. Intellectual virtue requires care. We need to get started on measuring meaning.Here is a classic example of the ignoratio elenchi or category mistake. For Wilkinson, the only form that “intellectual virtue” can take is quantification, measurement, the reduction of experience to numerical value. But is this claim quantifiable? Or is it an appeal to meaning—the assertion that measurement is more valuable than any other method of evaluating an experience? On what basis, though?

What such thinking represents is the imperialism of science. I couldn’t resist the phrase, but in truth, real scientists are far more modest in their claims than their unscientific cheerleaders. Since science is, as Michael Oakeshott said, “the attempt to conceive of the world under the category of quantity,” real scientists confine themselves to quantification and what claims quantification can support.[1] But quantification cannot support all claims: “ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people”; “ ’Twere profanation of our joys/ To tell the laity our love”; “In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”

Indeed, the opposition of quantification to meaning belongs to meaning, because it cannot be quantified. Wilkinson may boggle at meaning for as long as he wishes, but he cannot do without the concept. In his insistence that “we should try to quantify” all things, he is otherwise engaged in what Viktor Frankl famously called “man’s search for meaning.”

Frankl sought to found psychotherapy on a human “will to meaning.” This was an explicit repudiation of Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalysis, which held on the contrary that either the “pleasure principle” (or will to pleasure) or the “will to power” (or the striving for superiority) are at bottom of human conduct. In Frankl’s view, the “striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” But what is meaning? Frankl explained:By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.[2]Meaning lies outside the immediate experience (or verbal utterance), pries open the system, and connects it with something larger. It is public; it can be reproduced; it can be shared. It yields the conviction that discrete events are not random and accidental, but parts of a whole. It produces the will to science, without which the results of scientific experimentation would be what Wilkinson dismisses as “lumps in the rug.” It is the proof of human consciousness.

Wilkinson calls for a “new field of ‘meaning research,’ ” but the field has flourished for some time. For lack of a better name, it might be known as the humanities. Its empire has been scaled back, but it cannot be destroyed altogether without destroying the very basis of the almost religious belief in science’s sole and ultimate good.
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[1] Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 176.

[2] Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon, 1959), p. 115.

Clearance items

History is what cannot be fooled.

Where the writer is obscure, he is still in the process of getting things done; where he is clear, he is finished.

A good writer rarely takes his own advice.

You can look at anything closely enough. The question is whether it repays your attention. (Attention must be a loan, then.)

By describing a writer’s style, you ought to be able to describe the personality he puts forth—the kind of person his writing makes him out to be.

For there to be a violation, there must be a duty.

The style conducts the argument that the plot controls.

You can’t sneak around anywhere without starting a dog barking.

News may be true and still not be the truth.

The minute an authority becomes the authorities, it is time to turn tail and run.

A man in a baseball cap cannot be taken seriously.

Conservative-bashing is the gay-bashing of the American intelligentsia.

Literature is not a claim that the world is textual; it is an effort to organize the world in terms of a text.

Certain elements of American society, when they disapprove of something, endeavor to get it banned. What is needed is more intelligent persons who ask with honest puzzlement why anyone would think to waste his time with such a thing.

Isaac Rosenfeld

Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 240 pp. $27.50.

By one of those coincidences that lead me to suspect that God has a bizarre sense of humor, a new biography of Isaac Rosenfeld arrived on April Fool’s Day, while I was assembling a literary hoax around one of his detractors. Wallace Markfield shamelessly exploited Rosenfeld’s life, making his funeral the comic subject of his first novel. To the end he remained bitter that Rosenfeld, who died with only one book to his name, was better known and more highly regarded than he. Shortly before his own death, Markfield told Heeb, “As a writer, [Rosenfeld] became a gas bag.”

If so it was not the worst thing he could have become. Rosenfeld was afforded only thirty-eight years on earth to finish what he started. In this sympathetic but unsparing biography, Steven Zipperstein—a literary historian whose last book was a biography of the cranky secular Zionist Ahad Ha-Am—reveals that, in addition to Passage from Home (1946), Rosenfeld chipped away at five more novels that remain in manuscript. His friends expected a “Gogol-like masterpiece” from him about Greenwich Village, where his apartment “acquired the standing of a legendary bohemian enclave.” Rosenfeld confided to a friend:

Some day soon I hope to start a story about the village which should say everything I’ve been thinking and feeling about the village, life in general, people, friends, love, sex. . . . I think I’ve come to understand the matter somewhat better now, and if I can clean out the insides of my own head it may do me some good.It was a promising theme. Despite serving as the basis for Paul Mazursky’s delightful film Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) and Anatole Broyard’s posthumous memoir Kafka Was the Rage (1993), the postwar bohemian life of Greenwich Village has never inspired an even minimally good novel. Rosenfeld was the writer to do it, but though “[h]e completed a small mountain of work on the theme,” as Zipperstein reports, he was never able to finish his Village novel. Nor was he able to complete the expansion of his award-winning novella “The Colony,” about Gandhi and Nehru, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and time at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs. Mother Russia, a novel about the Soviet Union under Stalin, added up to three hundred pages in manuscript before Rosenfeld abandoned it. What he compiled were “incomplete manuscripts that he knew to contain nuggets of brilliance for which he was reaching,” Zipperstein says, “but that he couldn’t sustain.”

The problem was that Rosenfeld was a born critic in an age that valued the novel almost to the exclusion of any other literary form. Worse yet, his native genre was the book review—a kind of writing that, no matter how well it wears, does not collect well. “ ‘Taking a good look’ is how he described reading,” Zipperstein writes in his book’s opening sentence. And this is a fitting place to begin, because reading was Rosenfeld’s method for ordering his mind and taming his demons. At the same time, he saw the life of reading as a life of limitation. As Zipperstein writes a little later, “[H]e refused to see books as the only way life might be understood,” while he never denied “his undying reliance upon them.”

An Age of Enormity (1962), a posthumous volume of his reviews, contains some of the best critical prose from the forties and fifties. The tight compass of the book review obliged Rosenfeld to concentrate his immense intelligence, and not to waste any words. Early in the history of this blog I quoted my favorite passage from his criticism. Here is Rosenfeld on the British novelist Henry Green, who was “overevaluated,” in his opinion:Perhaps Green’s advance reputation had something to do with this; he was known, for a period of several years before his publication here, to only a few in this country, who regarded his work as though it held the last light of truth in the modern novel. This is a disadvantage to all but the truly great. Of Green it must now be said, what there would otherwise have been no need to say, that he is not a major novelist, that he does not have a major sensibility, and that his work, granting its excellence, is nevertheless quite small. He is another English writer in the tradition which has become dominant since the death of D. H. Lawrence—the tradition of sensibility, manners, and the brilliant image, at the expense of everything else in the novel.The quick dispatch of Green to the right tradition, the aphoristic unbelabored distinction between major novelists and minor (who seek effects “at the expense of everything else in the novel”), the sure touch that enables him to whisk together literary history and literary criticism without the sauce’s starting to separate—this is superb writing, no matter what your own opinion of Henry Green. But the other problem was that, as a critic, Rosenfeld was the creature of his editors’ assignments. An Age of Enormity reprints essays from the Partisan Review, Commentary, the New Republic, the Nation, the Kenyon Review, and Jewish journals on Kafka, Orwell, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright, but also on Nancy Hale, Jerre Mangione, Anaïs Nin, Kenneth Patchen, E. B. White, and Jo Sinclair. Not a word about Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, or Kingsley Amis, and only passing remarks about Eudora Welty and John Cheever. Because his criticism was merely occasional, Rosenfeld was never encouraged to develop a comprehensive or coherent view of postwar English-language fiction.

Let me be honest. Rosenfeld’s name remains alive for two reasons. First, because he impressed, with his personality and literary promise, the reputation makers of his generation—Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Eliot Cohen (the founding editor of Commentary). He was embraced as the “golden boy” of the New York intellectuals, and then died far too early to fulfill their dreams for him. As Theodore Solotaroff recalled, some of his friends spoke the name Isaac as if it were “a magic word for joy and wit,” others as if “it were the most poignant word in the language.” Second, he was Saul Bellow’s best friend. Three years younger, he and Bellow became friends at Tuley High School on Chicago’s west side, and their intense bookish conversations, stuffed with references—as Rosenfeld listed them at the time—to Dalí, André Breton, Matisse, Picasso, Mann, T. S. Eliot, Huxley, Trotsky, influenced both men’s styles for the rest of their lives. They collaborated on a celebrated Yiddish parody of Prufrock called “Der shir hashirm [Song of Songs] fun Mendl Pumshtok” when they were graduate students at the University of Chicago in the thirties. Zipperstein reprints the poem, first published in an essay by Ruth R. Wisse, in its entirety—in a transliterated Yiddish with English translation. A small sample:Ikh ver alt . . . ikh ver alt . . .
Es vert mir in pupik kalt.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I feel my bellybutton getting cold.Bellow wrote about Rosenfeld repeatedly, composing his obituary for the Partisan Review (“The sight of one of his rooms with Isaac hard at work, smoking, capably and firmly writing on his yellow second sheets, would have made Hogarth happy”), recreating him as King Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King, and studying him in his propria persona and at some length in “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” one of his best stories. (It is the only extant piece of a novel about their friendship that Bellow planned to call Charm and Death.)

Perhaps significantly, Wikipedia has no biographical entry for Rosenfeld. [Update: An article on him was finally created there on May 10, 2009.] He was born March 10, 1918, in Chicago, the son of a “buyer for a downtown fancy food store,” as Zipperstein says. His mother died of influenza at twenty-one; Rosenfeld was barely a year and a half old. At the University of Chicago, where he became a Trotskyist—that is, a member of the anti-Stalinist Left—he won an undergraduate literary prize, but when he moved on to graduate work, he wrote a masters thesis on “animal nature” in Santayana and Dewey. That same year he married Vasiliki Sarantakis, two years older (“She wears earrings, looks Jewish, acts crazy, and I think the world of her”), with whom he eventually had two children, a girl and a boy, before they divorced ten years later. Rosenfeld enrolled at NYU to work toward a doctorate in philosophy, but while sick in bed with pleurisy, reading Moby-Dick, he decided once for all to switch to literature. He quit school, began writing for the Partisan Review, and when he won the an award for “The Colony,” he seemed to be on his way. Indeed, Rosenfeld worried that he had left Bellow in the dust. They published their first novels about the same time—Bellow’s Dangling Man in 1944, Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home two years later—but then the older friend began to outpace the younger, publishing The Victim followed by The Adventures of Augie March, which established Bellow as the leading novelist of his generation.

Because he forever compared himself to Bellow, Rosenfeld judged himself a failure. And that has become “the posthumous theme,” according to Zipperstein, which has been “attached to his life. . . .” As close as anyone has ever approached to being a child prodigy in literature (he published his first story, in Yiddish, at fourteen), Rosenfeld died of a heart attack, on July 15, 1956, at the age at which Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March. To call him a failure is to fail to recognize that his life was cut tragically short. Even so, one reads his erratically brilliant prose, especially his criticism, with a sort of impatience to know how he would have developed his ideas if his editors had only given him more room to stretch, and God more time. His description of the writer’s “social role”—a notion that angered him—suggests that he might have developed into the best of his generation. The writer, he said, is selected by fate to bethe one left alone at three o’clock in the morning, when it’s always the dark night of the soul; to be the man whom one encounters when there is no longer any uniform to wear . . . the man who is naked, who is alone, and the man who pretty much of the time is afraid: the man who sees himself as he really is in this flesh and in these bones and in these feelings, in these impulses, in these emotions; the man who confronts himself in his dreams and in his reveries.Odd how Zipperstein’s loving biography of him can lead you to mourn, half a century after his death, a man whom every writer and intellectual has confronted at one time or another, wrestling with his fears of failure, unrealized promise, or untimely death at three in the morning.

Shabbes the rabbi wore panties

Wallace Markfield, Rosenzweig’s Panties (New York: Stein & Day, 2009). 401 pp. $27.00.

Novels about rabbis are a rarity. Noah Gordon was able to call his 1965 novel simply The Rabbi, because it was very nearly the first of its kind. Harry Kemelman wrote a week’s worth of mysteries about the crime-solving Rabbi David Small, starting in 1964 with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. The only serious novelist to tackle the subject was Stanley Elkin, whose third-to-last novel The Rabbi of Lud (1987) marked his return to Jewish subjects.

All of which makes Wallace Markfield’s posthumous novel Rosenzweig’s Panties, released today by Stein & Day, an occasion for literary rejoicing. Although Markfield had made something of a first-novel splash with To an Early Grave in 1964—reviewers made the ritual comparisons to Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Chaim Potok—his second novel, Teitelbaum’s Window, was a disappointment even to his mother. As Daniel Belasco wrote in Heeb, Markfield “effectively withdrew from the literary scene” after publishing one more novel. “The American Jewish novel as a genre is quite dead,” he explained to an interviewer.

Not quite. Markfield told no one, not even his closest friend Alfred Kazin, who had done so much to lift Teitelbaum’s Window into the pantheon of Jewish classics with a glowing review in the Sunday New York Times, and who, as Markfield himself later said, “by any kind of moral or ethical principle should have turned it down,” that he was making one last stab at reviving the genre—with a dense, 400-page “confession” from Rabbi Kevin Rosenzweig, whose “sin” is transvestism. To be specific, Rabbi Rosenzweig enjoys wearing panties. Especially on Shabbes mornings, when he leads services at Temple Maaseh Kundes. He explains:

Ascending the bima to grasp the Torah like a demon lover, I feel the soft swish of Mrs. Rosenfeld’s frilly pink silk pass over my tuchis like the hand of a Japanese masseuse, who charges maybe twenty-five dollars an hour, thirty tops. Next week, I tell myself, I shall wear Mrs. Fackenheim’s white cotton grandma panties and pull them up over my stomach till the elastic band just tickles my nipples.As this passage suggests, Rosenzweig is also guilty of stealing his congregants’ underwear. Invited to Shabbes lunch, he excuses himself to “go to the little boys’ room, or, as we say in Yiddish, the Yeshivah bokher’s real Yeshivah,” and darts into the master bedroom, where an unfailing moral compass leads him straight to the missus’s chifarobe. Even he is shocked when he opens the underwear drawer of Heather Heschel, a “heavyset mother of three with a scrapbooking business on the side,” to find black crotchless panties. But that is not the only place he draws the line. “If I find a pair with even the shadow of a remnant of a blood stain,” he says, “I drop it like a pork chop.”

Such fastidiousness about biblical “cleanliness” is the only traditional taboo that has any hold over him. In the mornings, when an Orthodox Jewish male thanks God shelo asani isha, “for not making me a woman,” Rabbi Rosenzweig prays: “Blessed art Thou, O LORD our God, king of the universe, who hast made me to wear high-cut step-ins, and sometimes boyshorts.” The reason he likes to don panties, he explains, is “out of solidarity with one half of the Jewish race, who were subject for centuries to such unbearable restrictions as not having to pray three times a day.” The only times he does not put on women’s undergarments is when he must take the car to a wedding or funeral, “always mindful of Mama’s advice to ‘wear clean undies in case you should get into an accident.’ ” He drives commando, and upon arrival makes a bee line for the can, where he snaps open his attaché case and selects a pair of lacy hipsters. And when he finally does have an accident, sideswiping Mrs. Cohen-Levy’s car in the Temple parking lot, he starts shaking like a man in a fit, and temporarily promises himself to “go cold turkey on the knickers.”

Markfield’s literary problem was to sustain interest in Rosenzweig’s “sacred unholy predilection,” as the rabbi calls it, for four hundred pages. Halfway through the novel, then, “Going on a Bear Hunt” takes Rosenzweig into the Ontario woods with the president of his congregation, who confesses one night by the campfire—that he enjoys wearing pantyhose. The rabbi is both relieved and outraged. “Pantyhose!” he shouts. “Good God, man, don’t you get itchy in the crotch?” Markfield left the novel unfinished at his death seven years ago, and so was unable to write the last scene, in which Rosenzweig is finally exposed by a congregant whose vintage chiffon pin-up panties the rabbi stole. But that is the only defect in an otherwise penetrating peek at a rabbi’s private life.

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