December 7, 1941: The Review reviewed

At the beginning of every week, Levi Asher runs an enjoyable feature that he calls “Reviewing the Review,” in which he slices through the pages of the previous Sunday’s New York Times Book Review with irreverent scissors.

Sixty-eight years ago today—a cloudy Sunday morning in New York with temperatures in the mid-fifties—the New York Times Book Review was published as usual, but then quickly swallowed by events. Many of its reviews must have gone unread as New Yorkers learned some time after 2:30 in the afternoon that their country had been attacked without warning by Japan. The Review might as well have been set in an alternate reality; except for a small advertisement for Japan Inside Out, a book by Syngman Rhee under the imprint of the Christian publisher Fleming H. Revell (“Dr. Rhee brings warning to the United States that, while watching Hitler, Japan is carrying out her long cherished plan”), no hint of a Japanese threat appeared anywhere. The books that received respectful attention were a “social estimate” of Hollywood, a five-volume Dictionary of American History, a historical novel about eighteenth-century Dublin by Oliver St. John Gogarty (Joyce’s Buck Mulligan), and a biography of the Nazi diplomat who negotiated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. There were also tributes to the romance writer W. H. Hudson and a Christmas list of the year’s best books. The editors of the New York Times Book Review, if not the rest of the country, were still watching Hitler, or trying not to.

It must be admitted right off that 1941 was not a particularly good year for American literature. The most important literary event of the year was John Crowe Ransom’s introduction to what he called The New Criticism. The name stuck—for good. American fiction was not so lucky. In Fiction of the Forties, Chester Eisinger lists nine works of fiction as the year’s best:

Gerald Warner Brace, Light on a Mountain
Howard Fast, The Last Frontier
Caroline Gordon, Green Centuries
Andrew Lytle, At the Moon’s Inn
Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
John P. Marquand, H. M. Pulham, Esquire
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
Wallace Stegner, Fire and Ice
Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green

The best works of fiction overlooked by Eisinger are Janet Lewis’s novella The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s first English novel. Fitzgerald’s unfinished Last Tycoon was also published during the year. Allen Tate came out with Reason in Madness, a collection of essays. Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form appeared from the Louisiana State University Press. William Alexander Percy—Walker Percy’s legal guardian—finished Lanterns on the Levee, his autobiography. Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life won the Pulitzer Prize.

American fiction was going through a bad patch. The Review’s Book and Authors column announced that a distinguished jury impaneled by the Limited Editions Club had selected For Whom the Bell Tolls as the American book, published in the past three years, “most likely to attain the stature of a classic.” The jurists were Sinclair Lewis, Sterling North, and Clifton Fadiman, who preferred Hemingway’s hard-boiled sentimentality to Native Son, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Big Sleep, or Faulkner’s Hamlet.

England had the better year in 1941. T. S. Eliot wrote and published “The Dry Salvages,” the third of his Four Quartets. Auden saw The Double Man into print. Elizabeth Bowen compiled her fifth volume of stories, Look at All Those Roses. Joyce Cary published two novels: The House of Children, which won the James Tait Black Prize, and Herself Surprised, the first volume of his trilogy of novels about England from Edwardian days to after the Great War. Ivy Compton-Burnett published Parents and Children, another of her books about domestic tyranny. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge collaborated on The Long Weekend, their social history of England from 1918 to 1939. Patrick Hamilton published Hangover Square. Arthur Koestler wrote his first book in English—Scum of the Earth. C. S. Lewis delivered his lectures on Paradise Lost at University College, North Wales, although the Preface was not revised and printed by Oxford University Press till the following year. Charles Morgan published The Empty Room. Osbert Sitwell told a ghost story in A Place of One’s Own. And Virginia Woolf’s posthumous Between the Acts was published.

The editors of the Book Review recommended a few of the year’s good books, but they dropped into the hole of three long pages of deservedly forgotten novels, starting with Hilde Abel’s Victory Was Slain (“democracy in Austria was executed by that nation’s own politicians well before the Hitler march”). Samples:

• “The Timeless Land is a historical novel of the settlement of Australia. The stuff of epic drama is given by Eleanor Dark, the author, a living expression that is worthy of its subject.”

• “John Faulkner’s novel of men and work is a sensitive study of just what happens when a government attempts to help the helpless. Men Working.” By William Faulkner’s younger brother.

• “Jacob is a wise and subtle book in which the author, Irving Fineman, identifies himself with the biblical character and present[s] Jacob in the ever-interesting role of a human in stress rather than a patriarch in the pages of antiquity.”

• “A book about Nazis that is a novel first and not a political pamphlet is That Lofty Sky by Henry Beetle Hough. It proves better anti-Nazi propaganda than many another book that attempts to be propaganda because it does not sacrifice truth.”

• “Piercing to the core of the problem of the Negro living in a world of white men, Royal Road, by Arthur Kuhl, is an effective spotlight on tragedy. It is a simple, heart-breaking tale of a gentle Negro whose doom was written in the color of his skin.”

• “John Myers Myers”—a name that I can second—“has written a rousing tale of fighting and feasting and drinking and adventuring in general, the setting far away in time, the tenth century. The hero is a wandering fighter-poet who ranged Europe when feudalism was something new. Mr. Myers calls his novel The Harp and the Blade.”

• “Elizabeth Lee Wheaton’s novel, Mr. George’s Joint, is a freshly original and richly authentic picture of some aspects of Negro life in the South, of Negroes bent on ‘pleasuring themselves’ [sic!] while they can.”

The reason for the list’s woosiness becomes clear when you read the Review’s lead article—Bosley Crowther’s long consideration of Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers by Leo C. Rosten. Described by Terry Teachout as an “unerring index of middlebrow taste,” Crowther was exactly the right choice to review Rosten’s book about “the oddest community in America and the most screw-whacky business in the world.” Rosten himself was a middlebrow’s middlebrow, producing during his long career The Education of H*Y*M*A*N   K*A*P*L*A*N (1937), which introduced Gentile America to Jewish humor (you’ll pardon the expression), as well as The Joys of Yiddish (1968), which for the language of Eastern European Jewry ditto.

By December 7, 1941, the social research behind Rosten’s Hollywood had already dated, but “as a philosophical reflection of the society which works at making films it stands as one of the few really cogent books in cinema literature,” Crowther concludes. So cogent was it that, except for library reprints, the book was never reprinted. “Mr. Rosten has promised to supplement this present work with a second volume devoted to the economics of film production,” Crowther reports, “and to the vital problems of labor, morality codes and censorship.” He never delivered on his promise. With the world at war, nobody really wanted to read about Hollywood morality codes and censorship. There was enough middlebrow philosophy on war, totalitarianism, collective responsibility, and the sentimental dream of human brotherhood to fill the gap.

After reassuring yourself that you will never have to pick up Rosten’s book, you turn the page to find tributes to W. H. Hudson, the “Genius of the Pampas,” by the literary scholar William York Tindall and the Argentinian historian of philosophy Angélica Mendoza. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway destroyed Hudson’s reputation for all time, ridiculing Robert Cohn for reading and rereading Hudson’s 1885 novel The Purple Land:

The Purple Land is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books.Tindall and Mendoza try their best, but are unable to resuscitate Hudson for a new generation. “His appeal is to youth,” Tindall allows—the “young in years” and also “those who are young in heart.” Although his style is “perfect for its purpose,” with words that are “lucid and fastidiously chosen, the rhythms easy and natural,” Hudson’s books will continue to be read “for their substance, his picture of the youth of a great continent and of the wild life of its plains.” Mendoza claims Hudson for Argentinian literature—and your reaction, sixty-eight years later, is that Argentinian literature is welcome to him.

About the only relief is provided by the Review’s unfamiliar heft: sixty-five pages, including eighteen full-page advertisements. Sections are devoted to new books of poetry—Edna St. Vincet Millay’s Collected Sonnets, Paul Engle’s West of Midnight, Dilys Bennett Laing’s Another England, Louise Townsend Nicholl’s Dawn in Snow—and a sixteen-line poem written in alexandrines by John Peale Bishop is printed above a promise to review his Selected Poems very soon. Other sections are handed over to “new books for younger readers,” new mysteries, and even seven new “Western and adventure” titles.

The most interesting book reviewed in the entire issue—the only book that pricked my interest—was a history of nineteenth-century Virginia health resorts such as White Sulphur Springs. They sound something like the Standish Sanitarium in A Day at the Races. Every summer, high society from North and South would relocate to the Virginia mountains—a “general muster under the banner of folly,” as the English novelist Frederick Marryat wryly commented—to live in Queen Anne cottages and take advantage of the healing waters. No great men make an appearance in The Springs of Virginia; Perceval Reiniers’s book is cultural history more suited to a later decade, although it avoids theory in favor of anecdote and illustration. Even H. I. Brock’s review is delightfully informative. I will probably never read Reiniers’s book, but now I know something I didn’t know before. Not many book reviews can accomplish as much.

The most striking thing about the Review as a whole is its topicality. In an addition to a long notice of Satan in Top Hat, a biography of Franz von Popen, the Review’s editors assigned reviews of a short book detailing “the organized activities of British women” in the war effort (“especially in the three main types of war work—service with the army, navy and air forces; voluntary work among civilians; and work in the official civil defense directed by the Ministry of Home Security”) and two accounts of the European war (Lion Feuchtwanger’s Devil in France, on the Nazi occupation, and Raymond Daniell’s “picture” of wartime London). Herbert W. Horwill’s literary letter from London asks “why the present war has yielded such a scanty crop of poetry.” After quoting the opinions of Stephen Spender, Edwin Muir, and Robert Graves, Horwill turns to British politicians, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who appealed for more British war poetry. “[O]nly 1.5 per cent of the paper consumed in this country [is being] used for books,” one pointed out. “Books have been rationed more than beer and betting,” said another.

The reviewers’ critical vocabulary may be more sophisticated, but the Review has changed little in its bias for the literature of topical comment. And this explains why, in sixty-eight years, the Review’s lists of the year’s best books have always overbalanced onto the side of social-problem novels and politically orthodox nonfiction (at least how the Times’s editors define political orthodoxy). Another word for topicality, come to think of it, is Midcult—mass culture’s pretense of being high culture. And the last thing wanted by readers in the middle is to be worried on a Sunday morning over warlike threats from ancient imperial powers with an implacable hostility toward the United States—then or now.

Updating fallacy

Just now catching up on my reading of the book blogs, which I shamefully neglected during my ten-day stay in California. I am tickled to find that, while I was gone, Andrew Seal gave another demonstration of how not to do literary criticism. For reasons that are still not clear to me, he dusted off an old essay by the feminist scholar Nina Baym, which he found in a school anthology, and decided to use it as a “still serviceable model” for complaining about the exclusion of women from American fiction.

This is not, of course, the procedure of a rational inquiry. Seal announces that he is “updating” Baym’s essay, because it excites him and “feels largely on target.” Instead of examining its “bracing rush of argument,” then, he accepts its validity as a given, and bracingly rushes to his real concern: confirming its findings (“yep, guess we still do that”) by applying them to eight randomly selected novels written by men during the past decade. Seal is numb to the irony of treating as canonical—that is, established by the authority of republication in an anthology—an essay that reproaches the “canon” of American literature.

But what if Baym’s argument is false? If so it follows that “think[ing] through its major claims . . . in light of the American fiction of the past ten year[s]” is sound and fury. The first duty in reading literary criticism is to think through its claims, not by industriously extending them to further corroborating examples, but by scuffling to falsify them. If and only if the claims resist falsification can they be validly extended to texts undreamed of in the original critic’s philosophy. A critical argument may “generat[e] enthusiasm and a feeling of recognition” and yet be utterly false.

Does Baym’s argument hold up?

At least the argument is clear. “As late as 1977,” Baym declares, “that canon [of American literature] did not include any women novelists” for the simple reason that literature is read “always through the perspective allowed by theories,” and until very recently “theories of American literature” posited “a literature that is essentially male.”[1]

Neither major nor minor premise is true. Baym is not really interested in whether they are true, because she offers no argument in support of either. They are for her axiomatic: claims that are so obvious they need no further proof. In literary criticism, however, there are no axioms, because there is always something else from which a critic’s assertions follow. To treat a controversial claim as axiomatic is merely to explore the familiar contents of an ideology, to invite colleagues to rehearse the well-practiced tenets of a party.

Consider the claim that, as late as 1977, the American canon did not include any women novelists. It is impossible to determine what the word canon refers to. Course syllabi? Examination lists? Baym’s notes from lectures she heard as an undergraduate? Who knows? The vagueness of the referent liberates Baym from having to defend the claim.

For if she were referring to literary history, the claim would be demonstrably false. In his History of American Literature (1896), Fred Lewis Pattee devotes an entire chapter to “Woman in Literature” in which he discusses Helen Hunt Jackson at some length, describing her Ramona as a “matchless work of art,” and also includes longer or shorter sections on Harriet Prescott Spofford, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, while glancing at Rose Terry Cooke, Jane G. Austin, Mary E. Wilkins, Mary Hallock Foote, Alice French, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louise Chandler Moulton, Blanche Willis Howard, Mary Hartwell Catherwood, and Margaret Deland. Elsewhere in the book he dilates upon Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe, while paying less attention to Louisa May Alcott. In a book intended as a school text, Pattee lists the following novels by women as “required reading”: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Stowe’s later Oldtown Folks (1869)—a book described in a 1953 article in College English by Ruth Suckow as an “almost lost American classic”—along with The Story of Avis (1877) and Jack the Fisherman (1887), both by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Ramona (1884).

Except for Stowe, none of Pattee’s canonical women novelists received much attention in the twentieth century. Other women displaced them. The main figures were Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow. Critical discussion of them began in the ’twenties. Elizabeth Monroe singled out all three for praise and extended treatment in The Novel and Society in 1941, and Alfred Kazin did the same the next year in On Native Grounds. More women entered the “canon” in short order. Eudora Welty was first given the serious critical treatment in the ’fifties, Flannery O’Connor at the end of the decade (the first articles were on Delta Wedding and Wise Blood). Kate Chopin’s Awakening was rediscovered in 1956 by Kenneth Eble, and began attracting widespread scholarly notice in the late ’sixties. Alcott was firmly entrenched in American literary scholarship by the ’seventies.

Baym’s major premise is either too vague to qualify as a truth-claim or is factually untrue. What, then, of her minor premise? Is it the case that literature is read “always through the perspective allowed by theories”?

Again, the imprecision of the claim makes it difficult to know exactly what Baym means. If she means that apriori assumptions always precede the reading of a literary text, who would quarrel? But clearly she means something more:

There are . . . gender-related restrictions that do not arise out of cultural realities contemporary with the writing woman, but out of later critical theories. These theories may follow naturally from cultural realities pertinent to their own time, but they impose their concerns anachronistically, after the fact, on an earlier period. If one accepts current theories of American literature, one accepts as a consequence—perhaps not deliberately but nevertheless inevitably—a literature that is essentially male.Theories are collective, cultural, subsuming. They begin with a hypothesis; they employ a common vocabulary; they depend upon “the idea of Americanness” or “the idea of the best”; that is, they are an explanation of “some qualitative essence.” They are, in short, full-blown and widely accepted interpretations that are just waiting for new texts to be worked in.

But is it true that this is how unfamiliar books are read? A common cultural interpretation of an entire literature precedes the encounter with a new text, and reading it involves—perhaps not deliberately but nevertheless inevitably—making sense of it in the terms of the common cultural interpretation? Pretty clearly, Baym is advancing some literary version of a Kuhnian scientific paradigm (“universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”).[2] And her concept of “the perspective allowed by theories,” which defines the reading of literature, suffers from many of the same problems as Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm.

For young critics like Seal, the suggestion that there are any problems at all with Kuhn’s paradigm is not merely heretical, but absurd. The concept of the paradigm is axiomatic in a certain broken-backed style of criticism wildly popular in academic departments of English, where Seal memorized his errors a few years ago. How is it, though, that (in Baym’s words) “we never read American literature directly or freely, but always through the perspective allowed by theories,” but somehow we enjoy unmediated access to this very assertion? Or is it only American literature that is filtered through a ready-made perspective? And are we really sure that such a perspective even exists?

No doubt many sweeping interpretations of American literature are similar, but does this similarity leave us no choice but to believe in the hocus-pocus of a single common theoretical perspective? The truth is that Baym’s argument is non-falsifiable because it twirls around in circles: the “basic American story” is found to be antagonistic to women because antagonism to women is defined in advance as the “basic American story.” That’s just what makes it a “theory” or “perspective” or “paradigm.”

More to the point, how did someone like Nina Baym come to shake off the prevailing theories of American books, which encouraged her to accept a literature that is essentially male, in order to adopt a different paradigm in which women novelists are included? Is it possible that she arrived at an interpretation of the American novel that differed from the prevailing theories? On her own showing, though, these theories do not allow a different interpretation. How then was she able, all on her own, to shift the paradigm?

The plain truth that new books are not read “through the perspective allowed by theories,” and if they were, Andrew Seal would not have to study the perspective in order to extend it, rather woodenly, to eight novels by males in the last ten years. He would, instead, read the novels in its terms unconsciously, without any intellectual freedom, as if no other terms were even conceivable.

But that is not how we read. We read new books against a lifetime of reading books, and as we open a new book we toss a net of expectation over its unread portion, which we pull back and adjust as we go along—as the book is converted from expectation to memory. By this means we are able to avoid such stupidities as saying, for instance, that Delphine Roux, the French professor in The Human Stain, is an “encroaching, constricting, destroying” woman who proves that Philip Roth “conform[s] to the American myth,” according to Nina Baym, whereby men are “beset” by women, but “struggling to break free” of them—even though the agent of Coleman Silk’s freedom is Faunia Farley, another woman conveniently ignored (because inconvenient to his theory) by the theory-besotted Andrew Seal.
____________________

[1] Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33 (Summer 1981): 123–39.

[2] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. x.

Conservatives and the university

Stanley Fish examines the research of several conservative scholars, who asked why it is that “the vast majority of academics in the humanities and social sciences self-identify as left-of-center (as they surely do),” and he summarizes their conclusions: “conservatives are not being kept out of the academy by a liberal power structure.” The American university’s ideological imbalance is probably intractable, because it is the result of “many factors not under conscious control.”

Fish is so well satisfied by this answer that he goes on to suggest that arguments for “intellectual diversity”—the scare quotes are his—are “less philosophical than strategic.” The only reason that anyone on the Right calls for a diversity of sources, ideas, theorems, concerns, inclinations, methods, and approaches is to hoist the Left on its own petard. Peter Wood, to whom Fish attributes this view, has already corrected its shallowness.

Even so, the question is a challenging one. Why should the American university be more ideologically balanced than it is now? The answer is not immediately obvious.

David Bernstein offers one reply. Namely: even though a Gallup survey in late October found that forty percent of the American people identify themselves as conservative, American academics are so ignorant of basic conservatism that they are unable to spot the phoniness of racist remarks ascribed to a famous conservative. Bernstein might have added that an even larger portion of the Western intellectual and literary tradition is soaked with conservative thought and expression. It is bad enough to assume without further inquiry that Rush Limbaugh praised slavery and Martin Luther King’s assassin. It is far worse to treat Milton, Dryden, Swift, Austen, Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Thackeray, Newman, James, Yeats, and Conrad—to name only a few English writers—as standing on the Left alongside thee and me.

Fish is right, though, that such an answer conceives the university as a representational institution, which it is not. In criticizing my mentor Gerald Graff’s ideas on education many years ago, I abused this conception, pointing out that ‘genuine arguments do not occur between representatives of a ‘view’ or ‘side.’ ”

But right there is the real point. Intellectual diversity—without the scare quotes—is a necessary precondition to genuine arguments. Lack of resistance and disagreement is a grave warning in scholarship, suggesting that conclusions are no longer the product of rational inquiry but have become merely common opinion, taken for granted as what “everyone knows.” (That’s an allusion to the first chapter of The Human Stain, by the way—the best dissection of political correctness in academe yet written.) Leftist academics should know their Kuhn well enough to recognize a paradigm when they see one, but when it comes to their own academic departments, they prefer to be surrounded by those who are bounded by the same tradition that binds them. When I was being considered for an appointment at Texas A&M, I submitted a paper on the New Historicism as a writing sample—precisely because the A&M department was known as a hotbed of the “new movement in Anglo-American literary scholarship.” Instead of welcoming the disagreement, however, many in the department opposed my appointment on the grounds of my opposition to their ideas. “Why should we hire someone who is against us?” a historicist asked one of my champions.

Perhaps it is true that conservatives are not being kept out of the academy by a liberal power structure. But it is equally true that their intellectual habits lead academic liberals to resist the resistance of conservatives, and to be careless with truth and satisfied with error to at least that degree.

Bored by the year’s best

Jean Hannah Edelstein is bored by this year’s lists of the year’s best books. Not even the controversy over the Publishers Weekly list was enough to shake her out of the doldrums, although she admits with a yawn that a list without even one woman is an act “bizarre discrimination.” (Rather than inadequate discrimination, of the literary kind.)

The New York Times has also released its annual list of the one hundred “notable” books of the year, which is slated to appear in Sunday’s Book Review. The editors were careful not to repeat Publishers Weekly’s mistake: twenty of the forty-five choices in the fiction category and thirty-four of the one hundred titles are by women.

Still, I sympathize ferociously with Edelstein. With three or four exceptions—William Trevor’s Love and Summer, my old friend Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, Thomas Mallon’s elegy for the lost art of writing letters, and perhaps Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty, although I cannot imagine actually reading it—the books on the Times list bore me too. “A senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission assails the Bush administration’s depiction of the event as so much public relations flimflam.” Really? The Times finds this notable? How new! How different! The editors have the uncanny knack for making even a book by the always entertaining Christopher Buckley sound dreadful: “In its moments of real ambivalence, this loving and funny filial memoir of Bill and Pat Buckley is surprisingly strong drink.” I’ll pass, thanks: ambivalence gives me gas.

Last year about this time I pointed out why the annual lists of the year’s best books are worthless. But the point bears repeating. First, a calendar year is an arbitrary slice of time that bears no relation to what is happening in literature. Second, editors and critics are too close to the year’s books; they require at least a decade to separate the books worth rereading from those that need to be carted off to the Salvation Army.

Here, for example, are the Times’s “notable books” of fiction from exactly a decade ago. Several of the same authors appear: Paul Auster, Christopher Buckley, A. S. Byatt, Geoff Dyer, Jonathan Lethem, Valerie Martin, Jean Thompson, Sarah Waters, and Colson Whitehead. But except for Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems, 1966-1996 and Ha Jin’s Waiting, not a single important book.

Edelstein says it best. Annual lists of the year’s best are a testament to the “bizarre discrimination” of editors and mainstream critics. Like candid snapshots, they capture literary orthodoxy in the act of pretending to be something it is not—informed and reliable literary judgment.

“What have you been reading?”

I really have to find a different question. To avoid small talk, I ask acquaintances and family members, after an absence, what they have been reading. No question seems to cause more distress—more shifting eyes, more evasive mumbling, more apologetic explanations, more confessions of professional overload and boredom. What to do about Iran would be an easier question for most people.

Not one person in a hundred keeps to a reading regimen. Every American over the age of thirty-five exercises regularly, or feels volubly guilty about not doing so. But almost no one approaches middle age with the ambition of getting around to George Eliot at last. Ask someone his favorite kind of food and he will answer as if he’d been waiting to be asked; his list will be ranked and comprehensively annotated. Ask him about his favorite genre and he won’t even bother to look puzzled; he will laugh at you.

My wife is a mystery buff. When she runs through a favorite writer—Nero Wolfe, Anne Perry—she heads to Murder by the Book, a local Houston bookstore specializing in mysteries. She interrupts the clerks—a word that, for six hundred years, meant persons of book learning—mentions Perry’s or Wolfe’s name, and they take her by the elbow and lead her to the shelves to locate kindred souls. Try that in a Borders or Barnes & Noble. The college kid with facial piercings behind the counter will not even know his own store’s inventory.

As is family tradition, my wife and I took the nieces and nephews and the aunts and uncles to the bookstore after Thanksgiving for their “holiday” gifts. Overwhelmed by topical trash and the Black Friday crowds, we grabbed a stack of paperback Goldengroves off the Buy One Get the Second 50% Off table and fled for home, where we distributed them like cards and talked about safer topics—sports, children, war.

Books are becoming a private vice in America like pornography or online poker.

Thanksgiving

“And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff—no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people—one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments . . . for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”

—Philip Roth

A Commonplace Blog will be in sleep mode for the next ten days to celebrate Thanksgiving in California with the whole family.

Things I will not be writing about

• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, the index that Christopher Beam of Slate yucked up for it, or the reasons for the elite disdain toward her.

• Who really wrote Dreams from My Father, or whether it really is one of the top three books of the decade.

• Yuri Foreman’s super welterweight title, although it’s way cool.

• Whether Dmitri Nabokov was right to publish The Original of Laura, or what John Banville thinks of it.

• Yann Martel’s opinions on Canadian politics.

• The Bad-Sex-in-Fiction Award.

• The war between Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker.

• Gore Vidal’s receiving a nod for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

• Tuition hikes at the University of California, or the pampered students’ tantrum over them.

• My impatience for Martin Amis’s new novel The Pregnant Widow to hit the bookstores.

Every protest’s novel

“All literature is protest,” Richard Wright shouted at James Baldwin. “You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.” Maybe so, Baldwin countered weakly, but not all protest is literature. “Oh,” Wright said, “here you come again with all that art for art’s sake crap.”[1]

The joke here is that Wright was protesting the label protest novel, which Baldwin had affixed to the front cover of Native Son in his famous 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Baldwin lumps Wright’s novel about a black man who “had committed murder twice and had created a new world for himself” together with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wright’s violence, he suggests, is merely the reverse image of Stowe’s sentimentality, which betrays an “aversion to experience” and is therefore “the mask of cruelty.”[2] So sticky was the label that it would not come off Native Son for years and years. “Wright has come to seem to us a belated writer of the Thirties,” Leslie Fiedler wrote a decade and a half later; “his novels mere ‘protest literature,’ incapable of outliving the causes that occasioned his wrath.”[3]

Few literary critics have thrown up such a brick. Native Son is one of the greatest novels ever written by an American, and is all the greater for the confusion surrounding the “protest novel.” If a protest novel does what Baldwin says it does (safely assigning its “unsettling questions” to the “social arena” and leaving its readers with a “thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all”) then Wright is wrong in insisting that “all literature is protest.” But if a protest novel is aimed not at society but at “art for art’s sake crap” then a goodly portion of American prose fiction, if not quite all of it, is protest literature. And Native Son is the model of its inward greatness.

A better term might be discursive novel, the kind of long fiction (it usually requires some length to say everything it aims to say) that is more concerned with message than technique, more concerned with saying something than with shaping something—the kind of writing in which art is identified with exactitude of the sentences rather than the perfection of the whole. The greatest novelists, with the obvious exception of Nabokov, have all been discursive.

Even James, with his contempt for “such large loose baggy monsters” as The Three Musketeers and War and Peace, “with their queer elements of the accidental and arbitrary”—even James, who demanded to know what these monsters could “artistically mean”—liked to indulge the discursive compulsion.[4] Consider, for example, the “generalization” that Basil Ransom formulates upon meeting Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians: “[T]he simplest division it is possible to make of the human race is into the people who take things hard and the people who take them easy. He perceived very quickly that Miss Chancellor belonged to the former class.” In his later fiction, James is careful to leave the discourse up to his characters, as when he instructs Fanny in The Golden Bowl to observe that a “person can mostly feel but one passion—one tender passion, that is—at a time. Only, that doesn’t hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the ‘voice of blood,’ such as one’s feeling for a parent or a brother.” But the source of the generalization does not change the fact that it is a generalization, which asks to be judged as true or false.

The discursive novel is not distinguished by its “queer elements of the accidental and arbitrary,” but by its digressive willingness to follow the scent of a proposition. It hearkens after the adventure of conversation, which neither follows a script nor advances an argument. Consequently, it displays a certain insouciance toward consistency, a quality of the discursive novel that throws critics who have been trained to peer closely at the working of well wrought urns. Sometimes, in fact, it is the contradictions that make a discursive novel such a fascinating thing to read.

That is certainly the case with Native Son. Wright has two messages to deliver in the novel. On the one hand, Bigger Thomas murders the white heiress Mary Dalton to feel a “certain sense of power, a power born of a latent capacity to live. . . . The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as a symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of [whites], like a man who had been created, but had now evened the score.”[5] Until Mary’s murder, Bigger had lived with choiceless choices.[6] He is given only what I have called elsewhere the monstrous illusion of choice. Living as a second-class citizen in a racially intolerant society, he is not a moral agent, choosing for himself among a range of options; he is the creature of the racist system that reduces his “choices” to two—whether to take a demeaning job or to starve, for instance (p. 12). The act of murder creates his moral autonomy: “It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him” (p. 105). For the first time in his life he is a man and not a slave, for only he is a man who has choices he can freely make.

On the other hand, Wright offers a Marxist determinist account of Bigger’s experience. Like Dreiser in Sister Carrie, Wright goes to great lengths to establish that the crime was involuntary, unwilled, accidental. Bigger finds himself alone with Mary in her bedroom—the treatment of black men accused of improper advances toward white women from the Scottsboro Boys in 1931 to Emmett Till in 1955 suggests why the very situation was fraught with terror for him—and to escape detection, he quiets Mary with a pillow over her face, which ends up smothering her. Boris Max, the Communist Party lawyer who defends him, convinces Bigger that, even after killing to be quit of them, whites still rule him: “He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping and waking; it colored life and dictated the terms of death” (pp. 331–32).

In his courtroom speech for the defense, Max argues that it is Bigger who is the real victim—of slavery, which “lasted for more than two hundred years,” and the racial oppression that succeeded it:

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. . . . Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs, and aspirations. (p. 391).And it is this new form of life—the lives of twelve million people, “stunted, stripped, and held captive within this nation, devoid of political, social, economic, and property rights” (p. 397)—which is to blame for the death of Mary Dalton and even for the death of Bessie Mears, Bigger’s own black girlfriend:Oh, yes; Mary Dalton is dead. Bigger Thomas smothered her to death. Bessie Mears is dead. Bigger Thomas battered her with a brick in an abandoned building. But did he murder? Did he kill? Listen: what Bigger did early that Sunday morning in the Dalton home and what he did that Sunday night in that empty building was but a tiny aspect of what he had been doing all his life long! He was living, only as he knew how, and as we have forced him to live. (p. 400)In short, Bigger was—in Dreiser’s phrase—merely a waif amid forces, powerless to control them. And in fact, the last section of the novel is entitled “Fate,” because the view it advances is a denial of Bigger’s free will.

The arguments are contradictory. Bigger Thomas cannot be both an autonomous moral agent and the plaything of social fate. In the end, he rejects Max’s determinism, saying, “[W]hat I killed for, I am!” (p. 429). He takes God’s name, in the form made familiar by the King James Version (Exod 3.14), because he will permit no other gods before him—no racist system of injustice will be permitted to have caused his actions. Bigger identifies himself with them; he is created by the murders he commits. He may have performed evil, but the evil was a voluntary performance, an act of will. And perhaps the worst thing to be said about the American political system in 1940, corrupted from top to bottom by racial intolerance and oppression, is that violence was the only freedom it granted its black citizens.

Until the end of the novel—until Bigger rejects Max’s defense of him—Native Son is strained by the tension between the two philosophies. As he struggles against Max’s explanations, he feels a “war raging in him,” Wright writes (p. 361). But the truth is that the war is raging within the novel. Native Son is written to settle the conflict between freedom and determinism, to work through the contradictions in Wright’s own thinking. The novel is the record of his inner philosophical torment. When he wrote it, Wright was still nominally a member of the Communist Party, but as he admitted later in the chapter that he contributed to The God That Failed (1950), he had already begun to harbor doubts. Native Son is not merely the transcript of his back-and-forth within himself over his future in the Party; it is an acting out, in public, of his ambivalence and inner division.

In writing his masterpiece, Richard Wright was not dedicated to the perfection of a self-consistent and perfectly balanced work of art. He was dedicated to discussion, to ironing out the vexing tangles of experience in words. And for that reason, Native Son may be the best example of a discursive novel—the best example of the human uses to which fictional discourse may be put—ever written.
____________________

[1] James Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard” [1961], in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 257.

[2] James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Collected Essays, p. 12.

[3] Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York: Stein & Day, 1964), p. 107.

[4] Henry James, Preface to The Tragic Muse [1908], in The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner, 1934), p. 84.

[5] Richard Wright, Native Son: The Restored Text, ed. Arnold Rampersad [1940] (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 164. Subsequent references in parenthesis.

[6] The term choiceless choice was introduced by the literary scholar Lawrence L. Langer to characterize the moral circumstances of the Nazi death camps: see Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 72.

The pursuits of peace

A former student at Texas A&M University—no one is called an alumnus there—wrote yesterday upon reading A Commonplace Blog’s name in the Wall Street Journal. After greetings and regards, he remarked upon the coincidence of having only just finished rereading Henry James’s American, which he remembered disliking intensely when I had assigned it to him in a course on the American novel several years ago.

A coincidence indeed: I too had been leafing through The American the other day. While compiling a list of veterans’ books, I had thought to include it, but James’s third novel lay too far afield of my subject—even though it may be the best novel ever written about an American combat veteran.

Everybody knows the story. Christopher Newman, thirty-six, is a “powerful specimen of an American.” He has made a “pile of money,” although he never says how—James, who lived on an inheritance from his grandfather, never lifts the veil on the sources of great American fortunes. Newman has come to Europe “to forget the confounded thing, to look about [him], to see the world, to have a good time, to improve [his] mind, and, if the fancy takes [him], to marry a wife.” In due course he meets the girl for him; he realizes that “he should like to have her always before him. . . .” She returns his feelings, but alas her family does not. They are an ancient French family, royalist in politics and related by blood to the Bourbons, and in the end they find it impossible to reconcile themselves to a “commercial person.”

Although his narrative sympathies were with the American, James preferred to dwell among those who looked down upon American commerce. He had decided to settle in Europe. “My work lies there,” he explained later in defending the decision—

and with this vast new world, je n’ai que faire. One can’t do both—one must choose. No European writer is called upon to assume that terrible burden, and it seems hard that I should be. The burden is necessarily greater for an American—for he must deal, more or less, even if only by implication, with Europe; whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America.[1]But a Europeanized American writer must also deal with America. Living in Paris near the Place Vendôme, James wrote The American as his farewell letter to the United States.

Christopher Newman embodies the moral qualities that James most admired in his countrymen. He understands that the Bellegardes don’t think he is as good as they, but he knows better: “[H]is sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance, and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness.” The Europeans and even the Europeanized Americans believe that he is ignorant of the “social scale,” but he isn’t—he merely chooses to ignore it.

Valentin de Bellegarde, the family’s youngest son, recognizes what lies behind Newman’s social attitude: “Being an American, it was impossible you should remain what you were born. . . .” With his place on the social scale preassigned by birth, Valentin is not so fortunate: “What I envy you is your liberty,” he observes, “your wide range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take themselves awfully seriously, expecting something of you.”

But Valentin has no idea where such freedom comes from. He thinks it has something to do with business success: “[Y]ou strike me, somehow, as a man who stands at his ease, who looks at things from a height. I fancy you going about the world like a man travelling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock.” But though it is true that business is deeply ingrained into his personal habits—he is uncomfortable when he is idle—it is also true that a life of business has left Newman at loose ends:You think of me as a fellow who has had no idea in life but to make money and drive sharp bargains. That’s a fair description of me, but it is not the whole story. A man ought to care for something else, though I don’t know exactly what.The tour of Europe—the acquisition of culture and perhaps a European wife—is an attempt to answer the question what. If James was unclear about what an American businessman does at the office during working hours, he nevertheless understood the promise and limitations of a business life.

But he also understood that money-making and bargain-driving are the fruits of liberty, not its seed. Newman derives his “freedom to come and go” from a different category of experience. In the Louvre as the novel opens, he meets an old American acquaintance—Mr Tristram, now settled in Paris, who might as well have been speaking for James himself. Newman reminds him that they met eight or nine years before—that is, shortly after the American Civil War. “You were in the army,” he adds. “Oh no, not I,” Tristram replies: “But you were.” Newman admits that he was. “You came out all right?” Tristram asks. “I came out with my legs and arms,” Newman says—“and with satisfaction.”

The afterthought is ambiguous. Does he mean that he was gratified? That he had received the settlement of a debt, the redress of an insult? That he’d had enough? Newman is not given to talkative confession. James must supply his explanation, in narrative voice, a few pages later:Newman had come out of the war with a brevet of brigadier-general, an honour which in this case—without invidious comparisons—had lighted upon shoulders amply competent to bear it. But though he could manage a fight, when need was, Newman heartily disliked the business; his four years in the army had left him with an angry, bitter sense of the waste of precious things—life and time and money and “smartness” and the early freshness of purpose; and he had addressed himself to the pursuits of peace with passionate zest and energy.Everything that Newman has become can be traced back to his combat experience in the Civil War. He had received the satisfaction of knowing that the pursuits of peace are finer than those of war, but also of knowing that they are founded upon the readiness to pursue war. Although James himself never fought in the war—he was prevented by an old and “obscure hurt”—he was only three days away from his eighteenth birthday when Fort Sumter was bombarded by forces of the Confederacy. He came of age during the war; he saw that it had changed America, as it changed Christopher Newman, forever.

Among the pursuits of peace is literature. Although he relocated to Europe, James understood that it would be impossible to describe a “powerful specimen of an American” without describing the powerful impact of the Civil War. The American suggests that the veterans of the war would be the builders of the postwar American future, the proprietors of the American century to come. As Madame de Bellegarde says upon meeting Newman,What is that about your having founded a city some ten years ago in the great West, a city which contains to-day half a million of inhabitants? Isn’t it half a million, messieurs? You are exclusive proprietor of this flourishing settlement, and are consequently fabulously rich, and you would be richer still if you didn’t grant lands and houses free of rent to all new-comers who will pledge themselves never to smoke cigars. At this game, in three years, we are told, you are going to be made president of America.Well, perhaps not Newman—but several other veterans. James understood, as no other American novelist has, that the United States military is not merely one institution among many, but a constituent part of the American story. His third novel is a celebration of the men who serve, and who guard the pursuits of peace.
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[1] Henry James, November 25th, 1881, The Notebooks, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 24.

Not that Myers

Cynthia Crossen’s generous mention of A Commonplace Blog in the Friday edition of the Wall Street Journal briefly drove my traffic above two thousand readers. Another thousand clicked over on Saturday, which never happens: regular readers know that nothing new is to be found here on the Jewish sabbath.

Responding to a question from a reader who asked about “the best blogs/bloggers who focus on books,” Crossen says that she first encountered my writing in a “blistering critique of the ‘self-conscious, writerly prose’ of ‘serious fiction’ in Atlantic magazine,” but this was actually written by another Myers altogether—B. R. Myers of Dongseo University. I see from his Wikipedia entry that that Myers is a “supporter of the Green Party (United States), animal rights, and veganism.” Nothing could be further from my own political sympathies. Pave Paradise, and pass the barbecued brisket.

Being mistaken for another Myers is something I’m used to. In 1992, Harper Collins reprinted my Commentary essay on college sports in The Writer’s Library. For the first time in my career, I received the full biographical treatment:

DAVID G. MYERS (1942– ) received a Ph.D. in religion from the University of Iowa in 1966 and began his teaching career as an assistant professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where he is now a full professor. In addition to the 1978 Gordon Allport Prize from the American Psychological Association that he was for his research on group polarization, Myers has written several books: The Human Puzzle: Psychological Research and Christian Belief, 1978; The Inflated Self: Human Illusions and the Biblical Call to Hope, 1980; Social Psychology, 1983; and Psychology through the Eyes of Faith, 1984. Myers also has contributed articles to Psychology Today, Science Digest, Christianity Today, and Christian Century.I have always wondered whether any teacher ever encouraged her students to consider the essay, in which a 38-year-old Jew marveled that “universities continue to have anything to do with sports,” as the expression of a 48-year-old’s Christian belief. I don’t know why, since the contract I signed was mailed to me at Texas A&M University rather than Hope College, but the editors of the Harper Collins textbook assumed that this Myers wrote my essay.

It’s enough to make a man change his name to Mark Helpern.

At all events, a belated welcome to readers of the Journal. Please don’t be disappointed if my attitude toward “self-conscious fiction” is more ambivalent than B. R. Myers’s, although he and I may agree about seriousness.

Five Books of death at an early age

Ian Wolcott’s moving reflections on The Blood of the Lamb startled me into thinking about other novels in which the death of a child is an occasion for more than grief. Wolcott describes Peter De Vries’s unclassifiable 1961 novel, reprinted four years ago by the University of Chicago Press, as a “tragicomic (and more tragic for all its comedy) fictional re-creation of his own daughter’s death by leukemia.” As I remarked in my review of Rafael Yglesias’s Happy Marriage, “The terminal cancer patient has the relatively easy part. All she must do is to die. The spouse”—or, in De Vries’s case, the parent—“is left with her permanent absence.” The Blood of the Lamb examines the question of how it is possible to go on living with such absence.

Are there any other books that deserve its company? Toni Morrison’s Beloved might be fit into the same category, but I am already on record saying it belongs elsewhere. Ditto Cynthia Ozick’s pair of stories bound together as The Shawl, which is about a different magnitude of survival. Any others?

(2.) Gabriel Fielding, In the Time of Greenbloom (1957). Also reprinted in a Phoenix Fiction edition by the University of Chicago Press, although now out of print. When John Blaydon was twelve he fell in love with a year-older girl named Victoria. Their young romance, which is something like Humbert’s island of enchanted time with Annabel without the sniggering onlookers, comes to a violent end when Victoria is murdered. John lives the rest of his life with the consequences of her death.

(3.) Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (1966). Suspecting that “the world catastrophe which everyone fears . . . has already happened,” Will Barrett accepts an invitation to join a family of fellow Southerners when the younger son Jamie is released from the hospital. They are taking Jamie back to Alabama to die. No sooner does he arrive than Will packs Jamie away on a trip to New Mexico in a Trav-L-Aire camper. On his deathbed, Jamie converts to the Church of Rome, and Will, having helped him to “die better,” sees “for the first time the possibility of a happy, useful life.” Maybe Percy’s best novel.

(4.) Stanley Elkin, The Magic Kingdom (1985). A flock of dying children (“One case each of Gaucher’s disease, tetralogy of Fallot, osteosarcoma, cystic fibrosis, dysgerminoma, Chédiak-Higashi syndrome, progeria, and lymphoblastic leukemia”) travel from England to Disney World for a sort of Make-A-Wish come true. Elkin, who was himself living with a death sentence by this time—he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis thirteen years before—takes aim at the sentimentality surrounding children’s deaths. The truth may not seem them free, but at least it will prevent the dying from being prematurely smothered in syrup.

(5.) Francine Prose, Goldengrove (2008). When I reviewed this brilliant novel here last December, I abused the critics who naïvely assumed that it is about coping with grief. Nico’s older sister Margaret dies in a drowning accident shortly before graduating from high school, and what Nico is left with is not the need to cope but rather the necessity to reinvent personality in the collapse of a world. I have made my very deep admiration of Prose clear by now, but I remain perplexed by how little attention Goldengrove has received. It does not tug at the heart-strings nor go for the easy tears, but suggests far more profoundly that the presence of a loved one’s absence is the wellspring of either self-destruction or art.

Call It Sleep

Henry Roth’s classic 1934 novel Call It Sleep belongs as much to Jewish as to American literature. Although it dips liberally into modernist streams, it is not primarily a modernist text. Its next-to-last chapter, in which David Schearl “fools around” with the streetcar tracks and is knocked unconscious while his thoughts churn and a chorus jabbers, is routinely compared to the Nighttown episode of Ulysses, though it is probably closer to the pastiche method of U.S.A. The novel’s most striking innovation is its handling of Jewish bilingualism, which places Roth more comfortably in the company of Sholem Aleichem and S. Y. Agnon than Joyce and Dos Passos. And even though Walter Rideout enshrined it among his other examples of The Radical Novel in the United States, calling it “the most distinguished single proletarian novel,” Call It Sleep is not really anything like that either. David Schearl’s father is a member of the working class, first a printer and then a milkman, but his troubles on the job are caused entirely by his own psychological demons and not by exploitation at the hands of the bosses.

Roth is “mostly content with an implied criticism of capitalist society,” Rideout concedes.[1] And it is true that that Roth’s disdain for traditional halakhic Judaism has a quasi-Marxist clang to it. But Roth’s Marxism was never much more than quasi. His lack of political commitment left him unable to finish his next novel, about a one-armed Marxist labor organizer, and he did not write another for six decades. (I am among those who wish he had stopped himself from writing another.) His biography was more indebted to Jewish experience than to politics. His life fell into the basic pattern of the European maskilim, who were “weary and exhausted from studying the Talmud” and devoured secular enlight­en­ment “like the fruits of summer.” His too was the journey out from the Jewish religion to “something new that is rational.”[2] But his young protagonist’s progress is a reversal of the pattern, the rediscovery of a motif that reaches farther back into Jewish literature. David Schearl sets out on a religious search, compelled by a deep unsatisfied spiritual longing.

Several years ago, a literary scholar suggested that Roth’s David is a “hero-messiah” or “prophet-messiah” in quest of “God’s light.”[3] This is suggestive, but inexact. Far more accurate to call David what his mother calls him: the beloved only son. This is a figure who is more common in Jewish literature than the messiah. The book of Genesis might even be described as a genealogy of beloved sons from Isaac to Jacob to Joseph; God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, his only son (yaḥid), whom he loves (Gen 22.2), fixes the image for all time; and indeed, the biblical David is a beloved son before he is anointed the second king of Israel, making him the meshiaḥ (the “anointed one”). The Jews have long understood their special relationship to God in these terms, since Israel itself is called the first-born son of God (Exod 4.22). According to the great biblical scholar Jon Levenson, the career of the yaḥid falls into a recurrent pattern, and gives shape to much of the Hebrew bible: “The story of the humiliation and exaltation of the beloved son reverberates throughout the Bible because it is the story of the people about whom and to whom it is told. It is the story of Israel the beloved son, the first-born of God.”[4]

Consider the scene in which Albert Schearl beats his son with a wooden clothes hanger, which “flayed his wrists, his hands, his back, his breast.” Genya hears his cries, and rushes in, flinging herself between them:

     “With that!” she screamed hoarsely, trying to snatch the clothes hanger from him. “With that to strike a child. Woe to you! Heart of stone! How could you!”
     “I haven’t struck him before!” The voice was strangled. “What I did he deserved! You’ve been protecting him from me long enough! It’s been coming to him for a long time!”
     “Your only son!” she wailed, pressing David convulsively to her. “Your only son!”
     “Don’t tell me that! I don’t want to hear it! He’s no son of mine! Would he were dead at my feet!”
     “Oh, David, David beloved!” In her anguish over her child, she seemed to forget everyone else, even her husband. “What has he done to you! Hush! Hush!” She brushed his tears away, sat down and rock him back and forth. “Hush, my beloved! My beautiful! Oh, look at his hand!”[5]The binding of Isaac is reenacted as the beating of David. However, Albert is not acting upon God’s command. He flays his only son because he suspects that David is not really his son at all. He has heard the rumors that David may be the illegitimate offspring of Genya’s love affair with a Polish organist, with whom she dallied before she ever met Albert. David may be Ishmael rather than Isaac: not a beloved son at all, but a bękart (Polish, “bastard”).

The suspicions are groundless. Genya met Albert six months after breaking off the affair—and if she had been pregnant with another man’s child, she would not have been able to conceal her swelling from him. Nevertheless, questions about David’s paternity hang over the novel like a threat of violence. When asked his son’s age, Albert invariably adds a year—to magnify his misgivings. At the age of seven, David is enrolled in ḥeder, the one-room school in which Jewish boys are taught to read Hebrew by rote. He is responsive to his very first lesson:For awhile, David listened intently to the sound of the words. It was Hebrew, he knew, the same mysterious language his mother used before the candles, the same his father used when he read from a book during the holidays—and that time before drinking wine. Not Yiddish, Hebrew. God’s tongue, the rabbi said. If you knew it, then you could talk to God. Who was He? He would learn about Him now—    (p. 213).But the purpose of ḥeder is to introduce Jewish boys to Hebrew recitation—not to God. David quickly learns to “read Hebrew as fast as anyone,” although after two months he still does not understand what he reads. Even so, life at home levels out miraculously after he enters ḥeder, “and this he attributed to his increasing nearness to God” (p. 221). Not even the primitive methods of Eastern European rote learning can sour his spiritual hunger.

When he is finally introduced to the translation of the bible, David dislikes it (“And Moses said you mustn’t, and then you read some more abababa and then you say, mustn’t eat in the traife butcher store”), but when Rabbi Penkower breaks from lessons to tell the story of Isaiah 6, he is enthralled:“But when Isaiah saw the Almighty in His majesty and His terrible light—Woe me! he cried, What shall I do! I am lost!” The rabbi seized his skull-cap and crumpled it. “I, common man, have seen the Almighty, I, unclean one have seen him! Behold, my lips are unclean and I live in a land unclean—for the Jews at that time were sinful—”    (p. 227)David is convinced that he too has unclean lips, because he has said “dirty words” like “Shit, pee, fuckenbestit.” (Call It Sleep is one of the first American novels, by the way, openly to use such “dirty words.” The New York Times complained that it is “doggedly smeared with verbal filthiness.” Maybe David is right, then!) He goes in search of the “terrible light” that will cleanse his lips.

A mystical experience by the East River, where a “long slim lath of sunlight burned silver on the water” and David’s “spirit yielded, melted into the light”—the experience of merger with God known to kabbalists as devekut—leads to an even greater discovery. Three Irish boys, to whom David denies being a Jew to avoid getting his “lumps,” drag him to Tenth Street, where the streetcar tracks end at the docks, to show him “some magic.” Acting upon their instructions, he inserts a thin sword of zinc sheet-metal into the crack between the street and the rail:     Power!
     Like a paw ripping through all the stable fibres of the earth, power, gigantic, fetterless, thudded into day! And light, unleashed, terrific light bellowed out of iron lips. The street quaked and roared, and like a tortured thing, the sheet zinc sword, leapt writhing, fell back, consumed with radiance. Blinded, stunned by the brunt of brilliance, David staggered back. A moment later, he was spurting madly toward Avenue D. (p. 253)What he has done, of course, is to bring the zinc sword into contact with the underground conductor that supplies electrical power to the streetcars. Frightened and thrilled, David runs straight for the ḥeder, eager to tell Rabbi Penkower that he has witnessed God’s light. Finding the school closed, he breaks in through a window. The rabbi is furious when he finds David there, and accuses him of crawling in to steal the silver pointers used in Torah reading. “The book!” David stammers. “I came for the book!” He tries to explain that he wants to read the biblical story of Isaiah again, because he has seen a light “like Isaiah.” “Where?” the rabbi asks. “Where the car-tracks run I saw it,” David says. “On Tenth Street.” The rabbi starts laughing. “Fool,” he gasps at length. “Go beat your head on a wall. God’s light is not between car-tracks.” David falls silent: “The rabbi didn’t know as he knew what the light was, what it meant, what it had done to him. But he would reveal no more” (p. 257).

Still, he is the rabbi’s prize pupil—“a crown in among rubbish.” Several weeks later, Penkower has him recite from Isaiah for a school inspector. He starts to read in a droning voice, but then recognizes the book from its binding. The rabbi mistakenly thinks that David can understand the text:“Beshnas mos hamelech Uzuyahu vaereh es adonoi yoshaiv al kesai rom venesaw vehulav melayim es hahayhel Serafim omdim memal lo.” Not as a drone this time, like syllables pulled from a drab and tedious reel, but again as it was at first, a chant, a hymn, as though a soaring presence behind the words pulsed and stressed a meaning. A cadence like a flock of pigeons, vast, heaven-filling, swept and wheeled, glittered, darkened, kindled again, like wind over prairies. “Shaish kenawfayim shash kenawfayim leahod. Beshtyim yehase fanav uveshtayim.” The words, forms of immense grandeur behind a cloudy screen, overwhelmed him—“Yehase raglov uveshtayim yeofaif—”    (p. 367)The words are the first two verses of Isaiah 6 as they would be pronounced in Ashkenazi Hebrew. The school inspector is impressed: “Blessed is your mother, my son!” he says. At the sound of the word mother, David bursts into tears. How can he explain that his growing distance from Genya, created out of ḥeder and adventures on the New York streets, saddens him? David says instead that his mother is dead and his father was a Christian. “There’s truth in an old jest,” the school inspector says. Rabbi Penkower supplies the punch line: “That a bastard is wise?”

If his bastardy represents his humiliation, David must seek his exaltation—must prove himself to be a yaḥid instead of a bękart, must come into his inheritance as a beloved son—elsewhere. Running away from home to escape his father’s anger, he heads straight for Tenth Street, where he plunges a metal milk dipper into the crack, contacting the underground conductor. The surge of electricity “ripped through the earth and slammed against his body and shackled him where he stood.” Unable to release the dipper, “he writhed without motion in the clutch of a fatal glory,” and is knocked unconscious (p. 419). The power surge is so strong that streetcars on Avenue C are slowed as their lights flicker. Onlookers assume that David has been electrocuted, but he has only been delivered into a prophetic vision:David touched his lips. The soot came off on his hand. Unclean. Screaming, he turned to flee, seized a wagon wheel to climb upon it. There were no spokes—only cogs like a clock-wheel. He screamed again, beat the yellow disk with his fists (p. 427, italics in original)David experiences a confusing jumble of all the images that he has endowed with anagogical significance over the course of the novel. The homely and concrete details of lower-class immigrant life on the Lower East Side become the stuff that prophecies are made of.

Except that David does not see God. What he sees, when he comes to, is his father, “slack-mouthed, finger-clawing, stooped”—that is, visibly distraught—and David feels a “shrill, wild surge of triumph whip within him. . .” (p. 434). The novel ends with a reconciliation of sorts. Albert accepts the blame for what has happened; or at least he comes as close as it is possible for him to accepting the blame. He understands at last that Genya has been protecting their beloved only son from him, and in silent shame he goes for an ointment to treat David’s electrical burns. David hears him go:A vague, remote pity stirred within his breast like a wreathing, raveling smoke, tenuously dispersed within his being, a kind of torpid heart-break he had felt sometimes in winter awakened deep in the night and hearing that dull tread descend the stairs [as Albert went to work]. (p.440)Instead of the familiar progress from halakhah (Jewish law) to haskalah (secular enlightenment), David makes use of religious props to smack up against the reality of modern urban life in “this Golden Land,” the New World. He is not really Americanized; rather, the American scene is Judaized. In the end, David does not find religion, but he gets something almost as good—acceptance at last as his father’s son, as the David he is and could be.
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[1] Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 186–88.

[2] The quoted phrases are from a classic of maskil literature, Moses Leib Lilienblum’s autobiography Hattot Neurim (1876), excerpted in The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 123.

[3] [August] Lynn Altenbernd, “An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (Winter 1989): 673–87.

[4] Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 67.

[5] Henry Roth, Call It Sleep [1934] (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), pp. 84–85. Subsequent references in parentheses.

Veterans’ books

The literary attitude toward the military was fixed for all time by Rudyard Kipling’s famous line from “Tommy,” originally published in Barrack Room Ballads in 1892: “making mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.” Gratitude was replaced by a sophisticated disdain long before a horse-faced candidate for the presidency, himself a veteran who had launched his career by slandering other veterans, warned that the alternative to doing well in school is getting stuck in a war zone. In Edward Dmytryk’s 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, the defense attorney Barney Greenwald (played memorably by José Ferrer) puts paid to this attitude of preening superiority:

When I was studying law, and Mr. Keefer here was writing his stories, and you, Willie, were tearing up the playing fields of dear old Princeton, who was standing guard over this fat, dumb, happy country of ours, eh? Not us. Oh, no! We knew you couldn’t make any money in the service. So who did the dirty work for us? Queeg did!To hear Ferrer sneer the word knew is to be shamed out of condescension toward career military men. Queeg is such a career man, one of “these birds we call regulars,” as Herman Wouk puts in the stage play, “these stuffy stupid Prussians. . . .” Of course, most of them were not as sad as Queeg—“a lot of them sharper boys than any of us, don’t kid yourself, you can’t be good in the Army or Navy unless you’re goddam good. Though maybe not up on Proust ’n’ Finnegans Wake, ’n’ all.”[1]

Barrack Room Ballads and The Caine Mutiny are specimens of midcult, however. The highbrow attitude has not been affected by them. And a good part of the problem is that several of the greatest novels from the ’twenties, the remarkable decade that redefined American writing, are veteran’ books—disillusioned veterans’ books. The locus classicus is The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which “that dirty war” has left Jake Barnes without the equipment to be a full man. The Great Gatsby was also a novel about a veteran. Nick Carraway explains that he “participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless,” he adds.

Between those two attitudes—a lifelong maiming and an uneasiness with civilian life—most American veterans’ books can be arrayed.

The veterans of the Second World War wrote principally about their combat experiences. Only rarely do the novelists who came of age during the war cast a veteran in the role of protagonist—Bellow’s Eugene Henderson, Styron’s Cass Kinsolving. Perhaps the best-known novel about the veterans of the postwar period is Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) in which a paratrooper who killed seventeen enemy soldiers in the European theater returns home to land a job as a P.R. man for a Fortune 500 company.

The other novels about returning vets have all been forgotten. The best of them were probably The Tom-Walker (1947) by Mari Sandoz, better known for her books about the Plains Indians, and That Winter (1948) by Merle Miller, better known for Plain Speaking (1974), his oral biography of President Truman. Sandoz tells the story of three veterans from the same family—veterans of the Civil War, the Great War, and World War II. When her veterans fail to readjust to civilian life, the failure is not theirs. The purpose of The Tom-Walker is to criticize a society that has forgotten the virtues implicit in military service—a surprising point of view for a writer from the Left.

Miller’s purpose is similar: to show that the home front was worse than the veterans had left it. Three veterans share a New York apartment during the winter of 1945–’46. Together they experience just about every problem faced by their generation of soldiers in returning to civilian life. One is a son of wealth who drinks himself to suicide; another is a Jew who struggles to pass as a Gentile before the encounter with antisemitism propels him back to his father’s faith; the third is a writer manqué who, over the course of the winter, discovers his literary purpose.

Although Miller may seem to have placed himself firmly in the Hemingway-sourced tradition of disillusioned veterans’ fiction, he belongs to a different mood. As the critic Malcolm Cowley astutely noticed, the novels to come out of the Second World War did not achieve the same historical effect as fiction written in the aftermath of the Great War. “They mark no such break with the standards of the generation that preceded them.” The veterans who produced them “are disillusioned,” Cowley wrote, “but not so much by the war itself as by our failure in victory to achieve our war aims. They complain about the lack of democracy in the Army, about the conduct of our occupying forces and about the general contrast between our ideals and our performance.”[2] The veterans of the Second World War who doubled as novelists were—with the notable exception of Gore Vidal—better men than the Great War novelists, but lesser writers.

There were a lot of them. But except for Oakley Hall’s Corpus of Joe Bailey (1953), which at least gave a start to the author of Warlock (1958), the other veterans’ novels at their best would provide material for an interesting literary history, if scholars were still interested in writing such things: James Warner Bellah, Ward 20 (1946), about wounded veterans in an army hospital; James Benson Noble, The Long November (1946), in which a private in the Canadian army, who longed for the smell of burning leaves while in combat, returns home to find it different than he remembered, but better perhaps than it was before the tyrants were defeated; Frank Fenton, What Way My Journey Lies (1946), about a veteran’s return to a Los Angeles that he can barely comprehend; Russell La Due, No More with Me (1947), winner of a Hopwood Award, about a Marine veteran whose girl jilts him, who goes on a bender, encounters social inequality and racial intolerance, but doesn’t abandon his ideals; Mitchell Wilson, The Kimballs (1947), in which a veteran returns to the town of his youth to battle a tyrant of a different kind; Monte Sohn, The Flesh and Mary Duncan (1948), in which a veteran must overcome his war-induced psychosis to live a normal civilian life; Fritz Peters, The World Next Door (1949), in which a veteran goes mad, believing that he is the second coming of Jesus Christ, and must be admitted to an insane asylum that makes the mental hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest seem like a resort hotel; and Frederick Boyden, The Hospital (1951), about the rehabilitation of wounded veterans who require plastic surgery.

By the time of the Vietnam War, military service was no longer a universal experience. The literary disdain had become the general attitude, at least among the sensitive young men of my generation. My own disdain is directed at myself: that I was a coward who burned his draft card, not out of idealistic conviction, but out of stark terror at the very thought of combat. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer document in their new book Start-Up Nation, the state of Israel draws upon the confidence, discipline, and expertise that is developed in young Israelis by compulsory service in the Israel Defense Forces. More and more, when friends ask where their children should go to college, I recommend that they enlist in the Armed Services instead. But the U.S. has not yet learned to tap the talent developed by the military in the same way that Israel has.

And one thing standing in the way is the literary disdain. The novels about Vietnam veterans are nearly unanimous in expressing it. The psychologically damaged Vietnam vet of, say, Richard Ford’s Ultimate Good Luck or Robert Olen Butler’s Alleys of Eden (both published in 1981), has become a stock figure in American fiction. He even shows up as the unhinged stalker in The Human Stain (2000); Roth need do little more than describe Faunia’s ex-husband Les as a Vietnam veteran (“One day he’s door gunning in Vietnam, seeing choppers explode, in midair seeing his buddies explode, down so low he smells skin cooking, hears the cries, sees whole villages going up in flames, and the next day he’s back in the Berkshires”) to establish that the man is dangerous and mad. The soldier who becomes an adult in the army—who learns the responsibilities of adulthood, defined by the U.S. Army as loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage—has disappeared from American literature.

But not from American life. Today we Americans honor the men and women who have guarded us while we slept. We do not honor them often enough, especially if we spend our lives among American books.
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[1] Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama in Two Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1954), pp. 93–94. The screenplay for Dmytryk’s film was written by Hollywood veteran Stanley Roberts with unspecified “additional dialogue” by Michael Blankfort. Greenwald’s speech was heavily revised, and improved, for the film version.

[2] Malcolm Cowley, “Two Wars—and Two Generations,” New York Times Book Review (July 25, 1948): 1, 20.

A cat’s death

There are cat people and there are dog people. Men are not supposed to prefer cats, but I always have. In fact, I resent the implication that, as the subtitle of a self-congratulatory little book had it a few years ago, there is a mysterious connection between women and cats. Of course, men don’t have a mysterious connection to much of anything. The problem with dogs, to my mind, is that they esteem just everyone; you have to go far out of your way to earn a dog’s mistrust and fear. Besides, almost any dog is a better man than I—more loyal, more resolute, more fearless. But cats depend on no man. They go their catty way, utterly indifferent to your opinion of them; and to earn a cat’s regard, then, is to achieve something.

My patch tabby Isabel—named after the pretty and independent heroine of The Portrait of a Lady—died earlier today of kidney failure. She was eighteen years old. She first attracted my notice in a College Station pet store when she was a scrawny kitten, the runt of the litter. While her siblings clamored for attention, she hung back, aloof and self-contained. I immediately claimed her.

Although she never weighed much more than six pounds, she could be fierce when called upon. Late one night, during Christmas vacation, when the Texas A&M students had left College Station deserted, I awoke to the sound of Isabel’s snarling. I lived in a shotgun apartment in those days, and when I leaped out of bed, Isabel was backing up in the hallway outside my bedroom door, unwillingly yielding ground, inch by inch. “What the hell is going on?” I shouted, and slammed the door.

Feeling guilty about shutting her out and unable to fall back to sleep, I climbed out of bed and went looking for her in the living room. A draft of winter air chilled me, and I turned to find that my front window had been crowbarred open so violently that the latch was torn out of the frame. I had slept through a break-in. But Isabel hadn’t. And she had stood off the burglar, who was probably brandishing the crowbar, trying her fiercest to keep him at bay until I awoke and frightened him off. If I had stirred only a few seconds later I might have received the crowbar across my forehead.

In short, my life was saved by a cat. Over the next fifteen years Isabel could do little wrong. She approved my choice of a wife, and took to sleeping on Naomi’s pillow instead of mine. She decided that her favorite was three-year-old Isaac. He was infinitely tender with her from a very early age, and she responded with gratitude. My daughter Mimi, now a year-old toddler, never learned not to hit her, but Isabel never reacted with anger. She bent her head against the onslaught, and when she saw her chance, skittered away.

Cats have not inspired the amount of literature that dogs have. There is nothing like Albert Payson Terhune’s Lad (1919) or Eric Knight’s Lassie Come-Home (1940) for cats, and thank heaven there is nothing like J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1965). There is a flourishing subgenre of cat mysteries, but I doubt that I shall ever read one. The witty British poet D. J. Enright published a book called The Way of the Cat in 1992, a year after Isabel was born. I know nothing about it, but perhaps I will seek it out and read it in her memory. Requiescat in pace.

The beginning of die Wende

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall, the concrete symbol of the Cold War, began to come down. Günter Schabowski, a member of the politburo, announced that permission to leave East Germany would no longer be denied. “Thousands of Berliners clambered across the wall at the Brandenburg Gate,” the New York Times reported, “passing through the historic arch that for so long had been inaccessible to Berliners of either side.” President Reagan’s confident prediction of how the Cold War would end (“We win, they lose”) was gloriously fulfilled.

As far as I am aware, not a single American writer with pretensions to literary importance has touched the fall of the Wall, one of the central events in the history of political freedom. Since 1989, when American novelists have selected Berlin as a setting, theirs has been postwar occupied Berlin (Theodore Weesner, Novemberfest, 1994), the divided Cold War city (Charles McCarry, Christopher’s Ghosts, 2007), or the vibrant reunified city that only wants to forget the Communists, although it remains haunted by the Holocaust (Ward Just, The Weather in Berlin, 2002). Perhaps because I have always admired Crazy in Berlin (1958), his first novel, I expected Thomas Berger—a writer who has never shied away from his German-American background—to take Carlo Reinhart back to the city where, as a U.S. soldier after the war, he had resolved “to know the German actuality.” Like Updike, though, Berger was apparently satisfied with a tetralogy, and with leaving his four-time protagonist in middle age.

But this can’t be right. There must be some American writer I am forgetting, who has had the presumption to imagine what it must have been like in Berlin twenty years ago this week.

German writers have required no presumption to do so. The Goethe-Institut lists thirty-five works by twenty-nine German writers on the fall and die Wende, the reunification of the two Germanies. In the Guardian’s book blog, Suzanne Munshower compiles the top ten books about the Wall, including Peter Schneider’s Mauerspringer (translated as The Wall Jumper in 1983)—“what might be the best Wall fiction ever written,” she says. The best single historical and political volume is William F. Buckley’s Fall of the Berlin Wall (2004).

From twenty years ago today until September 11, 2001, Americans famously took a “holiday from history.” American writers apparently had begun their holiday some time before, and declined to interrupt it even for the collapse of the Wall that had divided the world.