Two thrillers

Donald Hamilton, Death of a Citizen (London: Titan Books, 2013). 227 pages.

Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013). 292 pages.

The thriller may be the only literary genre with its emotional effect in its name. The pastoral, the satire, the epithalamion—they point to the contents. The big ones (comedy, tragedy) refer to their origins. Sonnets, elegies, epistolary novels testify to how they are to be written. The thriller alone makes no secret of its aim—“to thrill and shake,” as the Bastard says in King John, “Even at the crying of your nation’s crow.”

Donald Hamilton

The name is relatively new, at least historiographically, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. In American criticism, it first began to show up in articles lamenting children’s (especially boys’) bad reading habits. The thriller’s climb to respectability began with progressive educators, the first shakers of the canon, who urged teachers to stop worrying, to lay off the moralistic preening over the classics, and to let schoolchildren follow their inclinations, no matter how disreputable: “For only books with ‘thrill’ are potent enough to develop the reading habit, to make pupils love books.”[1]

By now, primarily through the efforts of Kingsley Amis, whose criticism was animated by the same spirit as Jim Dixon (viz.: to razz the donnish establishment, in this case out of its disdain for popular books and common readers), the thriller is taken wholly seriously by professional literary critics. John Fraser, a damn good one, has an entire section of his website devoted to thrillers. “What counts,” he says,is what happens next—and next—and next, and having numerous suspense points, large or small, at which one’s anxiety increases. Being able to step through a door into that kind of experience and lose yourself there for an hour or two can be a blessing.I don’t entirely believe him, and not only because I have argued that the relief of suspense-aroused anxiety is not a literary experience. A book’s capacity to make you “lose yourself . . . for an hour or two” sounds very much like what Longinus (or Pseudo-Longinus) called sublimis (when he was translated into Latin) or (misleadingly) “sublime” in English. I’ve always thought a better translation would be “transports.” A powerful work of fiction transports you into a different life, a different place and time, instilling in you the absolute conviction that what you are reading about, what you feel in the hairs on your skin, is real and is happening to real people.

Why some transportation vehicles accept every passenger who boards, while others routinely break down or expel passengers in the middle of the journey, is a literary question that may never be solved. What is clear is that some must be learned to be ridden, like a horse; and that a one-for-all name for the riding experience (“escape”) is nowhere near adequate.

Donald Hamilton was the creator of the American-born rival to James Bond, although he himself was Swedish-born. His series of Matt Helm novels reached a total of twenty-seven in all. They are not as well known as Ian Fleming’s novels, in part because the cinematic versions, with Dean Martin in the starring role in four movies from the ’sixties, were laughable self-parodies. Since Hamilton’s first Matt Helm title was published in 1960, though, the books have remained great favorites with an underground readership, and now Titan Books has begun reprinting them every other month or so, in order of publication.

Death of a Citizen was the first, and it has all the nicks and scratches of having been written for a series—the background that must be pieced together, the loose ends to be tied up in a later book. Hamilton denied that he had conceived the book as the first of a series, but Gold Medal pitched the original 25-cent paperback as featuring “a new series character.” Matt Helm was an agent for a U.S. spy agency during the Second World War. He has retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has become a dedicated fisherman (“fish don’t bleed much”) and well-remunerated author of “stories bursting with violence and dripping with gore.”

The requisite femme fatale—what would elsewhere be called a Bond girl—shows up on the first page. A professional assassin with a “paratrooper’s knife somewhere in her underwear” and a “capsule of poison taped to the nape of her neck,” Tina ran with Helm during the war, murdering German Nazis and generally making life difficult for the Axis powers in Europe. Fifteen years later she is better looking and better dressed, but I’m afraid just as obvious (as the James Mason character says in a similar connection in North by Northwest).

The plot jolts into motion with the classic, perhaps the defining, thriller sentence: “It wasn’t exactly a friendly gesture, leaving dead bodies in my bathtub.” The usual intrigue, the double cross and the narrow escape, follow. I must admit that I was unable to lose myself for an hour or even a quarter. There is plenty of next—and next—and next, but the problem is his serial protagonist. Matt Helm has been called (by Anthony Boucher, the dean of crime-fiction criticism) “as credible a man of violence as has ever figured in the fiction of intrigue,” a “genuinely tough and tough-minded protagonist.” Whether he is a person, though, is another question. “It seemed very odd to be coming home, like any businessman returning from a trip,” he reflects at the end of his spy adventure:I parked in the drive. The door burst open, and Beth [his wife] came running towards me and stumbled into my arms. I held her kind of gingerly. If you feel a certain way about a woman, and your work involves, say, a garbage truck or a butcher shop, you like to clean up a bit before you put your hands on her. I couldn’t help feeling I must stink of blood and gun power, not to mention another woman.Personality in fiction is a point of view, a distinct and chronic way of scrutinizing the world, even a display case of obsessions and irritating habits (think of Gatsby’s “Old Sport”), but wanting to shower after murder or adultery hardly qualifies. What Hamilton substitutes instead are what he calls “tools and techniques,” the physical details that give fiction a sense of the real. He never gets a gun or a car or a hotel lobby wrong. His characters don’t have unique outlooks on life—they have unique styles of violence. The politics are murky too. Are Matt Helm’s antagonists working for the Soviets? Who knows? All you need to know is they want to kill him, which should be enough to make them evil, but he kills them first.

The only thriller writer I have read with any regularity and pleasure is Charles McCarry. Eight of his novels have featured the repeat protagonist Paul Christopher, a poet and a spook for the CIA. McCarry’s novels give the sense of exploring a history—Christopher’s personal history, including his family background and political principles, are enmeshed with the country’s as well as that of the spy agency for which he works. The novels do not venture beyond the Cold War; or, that is, not much beyond the period during which McCarry himself was employed as a field agent for the CIA (1958–1967). As he acknowledges in a recent interview, he no longer knows anyone at the agency and has “no idea” how it now operates.

The Shanghai Factor is his first “stand alone” spy novel. An unnamed American spy reporting to a Washington, D.C.-based agency known only as Headquarters is living under cover in Shanghai, pretending “to be a Canadian, anti-American to the bone and proud of it.” The pretense is effective. His “progressive gibberish” makes the Chinese want to strike up friendships with him, and before long he is recruited by the CEO of a powerful state-run Chinese company and returned to Washington in a kind of counter-intelligence role. He remains loyal to the U.S.—McCarry’s heroes always remain loyal to the U.S.—but he soon finds himself in a dance with a cultured Chinese spy to see who can “turn” whom from loyalty to betrayal. There is no violence. McCarry’s plots rarely turn on violence. As the narrator says,The entire basis of espionage is trust. Spying could not exist without it. If such trust is imperfect or not quite complete, then it is like all other varieties of trust. Ask yourself—do you, does anyone trust absolutely his spouse, his doctor, his lawyer, his best friend, his employee, his mother? Trust is selective. In practice, the agent trusts his case officer to protect him, to keep secrets that are a threat to his life and the lives of his entire family. . . . In return the case officer trusts the agent not to set him up for capture, torture, imprisonment, and perhaps death. . . . Within an intelligence service, colleagues may dislike one another and often do, but they trust one another absolutely. It is part of the contract, part of the mystique. It is the indispensable element. Its perversion makes treason possible and all but undetectable among professional spies, but when uncorrupted it is the code that drives the system.The Shanghai factor (of the book’s title) is the difficulty for an American to know with any certainty what is true with the Chinese, which puts trust in question and absolute trust out of reach, perhaps forever. “How do I know this is true?” asks the book’s epigraph, a quotation from Laozi. Something like this is what most Americans find so beguiling about China, and may have been what drew McCarry to the subject. That, and Chinese women. The narrator has two Chinese lovers over the course of the novel; neither one resembles a Bond girl. They are whole persons who look nothing alike.

The Shanghai Factor may be a spy novel, but it is not a thriller at all, despite a couple of nail-biting scenes. Reading it, I suddenly understood why. The thriller lays down a substratum of realistic illusion (“a solid sense,” as Donald Hamilton said, “of dealing with real people involved in real intrigue in real places”) so that the astonishing eruptions of violence and the implausible getaway machines, which are the final appeal of the genre, are not dragged down by modernity’s disbelief in the supernatural. The children of postmodernity are not prisoners of any such disbelief, however. For over a decade now, cinematic violence has been stylized and untethered to natural constraints. Within the return of the supernatural, the days of the thriller are numbered—except among aging aficionados, who demand reprints of older classics. And except in the hands of canny professionals like Charles McCarry, who transform the genre into moral and political reflection, a hard twist on realism’s screw.

Update: A friend writes to disagree with my views on the thriller:Thrillers are the problem novels, where action is really [quoting John Fraser] “the successful solving of problems, at times a very rapid succession of problems. And those problems form part of larger sequences of problem-solving that entail a high degree of concentration.” In this sense, thrillers are the literature of an age of science, where the hero is a character who can solve problems life throws at him by the virtue of his own intelligence and skill. Much of the tension arises out of the uncertainties that are created as a problems are identified, solutions to them attempted and unexpected consequences must be dealt with.We’re on the same page in suggesting that thrillers arose as a belief in the supernatural declined (as the “age of science,” that is, became the official ideology of the intelligentsia). But then somehow we find ourselves in different books. I have never read a thriller without feeling let down when the “problem” facing the hero was solved. Howard Jacobson says it better than I ever could:The reason [whodunits] are never satisfactory is that the resolution doesn’t justify the waiting; the answer doesn’t live up to the question; the actual reason he dunnit is no match for the millions of reasons someone else might have. Even if you haven’t guessed right, it’s entirely without human significance that you guessed wrong. There is more drama in not being able to finish The Independent cryptic crossword.The “problem” is entirely a function of the plot, in other words: what happens to a person is far less significant than how he handles it, because it is the latter which invites identification with the hero.
____________________

[1] Thomas C. Blaisdell, “Let the Child Read,” Elementary English Review 7 (January 1930): 2–5.

The audacity of revenge

Scott G. F. Bailey, The Astrologer (Moses Lake, Wash.: Rhemalda, 2013). 253 pages.

Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who was among the great figures of the Renaissance, died suddenly in Prague on October 24, 1601. Scott G. F. Bailey’s premise in this nimble debut novel is that Brahe was poisoned on orders from Christian IV, the king of Denmark. The Astrologer might be described as a historical thriller in which scientific knowledge seeks retribution against political power, only to discover that love scorned is the fiercer enemy.

Tycho Brahe

Soren Andersmann, Bailey’s title character, has sworn revenge for Brahe’s murder by assassinating Christian. The son of a stone mason but “small and sickly as a youth,” lacking the “physique to earn a living with [his] hands,” he was educated at Wittenberg and then installed at court as tutor to the crown prince, who is also named Christian. A self-proclaimed disciple of Brahe, Soren is without talent for mathematics, and so he becomes the court astrologer rather than Brahe’s successor as royal astronomer. He is an articulate spokesman for the new scientific knowledge, or what would now be called a popularizer:Philosophers do not murder each other. Priests, princes, popes, and kings keep at the slaughter because they have no habit of intellectual inquiry. They are no better than the pagans whom God drowned in the Flood. . . . I place my faith in the Ark of knowledge, and I believe that science will save man from his innate depravity. Thus have I ever bent my knee to the great men of philosophy, alchemy, astronomy, and astrology. Thus did I thrive at university and thus did I crave employment with Tycho Brahe. . . .In addition to murdering Brahe, the king has also banned Soren’s book Nunc Scio Mysterium (“Now I Know the Mystery”). The book’s argument is that “what we can see is to be more trusted than what we are told without evidence,” but the crown prince warns that some men “will read it more broadly, as a political commentary.” Soren’s position at court is tenuous, although the queen seems to favor him; he is anxious about his future, although no warnings are made explicit. He draws up favorable horoscopes for the king in battle, no matter what the stars portend. All in all, Soren would feel better off if Christian IV were dead.

If you are going to kill the king, the old adage has it, you had better not miss; but Soren misses twice, in ghastly comic fashion. His assassination plots are elaborate Rube Goldberg machines—a box of poisonous snakes left open in the royal bedchamber, a poisoned bottle of wine shared with the king by a nobleman who had sworn off drink—and Soren is caught in the act by the king’s Swiss guard. With one hundred and fifty pages yet to go, the question naturally arises how the book’s narrator will get out of this pickle. “You are not the man to do this deed, astrologer,” the captain of the guard says, shocking Soren and the reader. “You will need our help.” Bailey has recovered the lost art of the cliffhanger!

He also gets many of the period details right, especially about the king’s mistress Vibeke Kruse (whom Bailey portrays as an addled but fetching girl impregnated by Christian) and about Brahe’s castle and underground observatory on the island of Hven. Sent there by the king to salvage Brahe’s instruments from the ruins, Soren learns instead about a different Brahe altogether—not the man of truth, but a tyrant who treated the residents of Hven with a cruelty worse than Pharoah’s. “If I believed all I heard of Tycho in my visit to the island,” Soren reflects toward the end of his visit there, “he was no great man at all, but an indifferent knave like so many others.” This is not a truth that Soren, the proud disciple of truth, wishes to know. “To believe this,” he says, “to deny Tycho, was to deny myself.”

Soren never appreciates the irony that he has no real self to deny. The man who claims to live by Brahe’s motto (“by looking at Heaven I see the Earth”) and then falsifies horoscopes to reassure the king is a man who contributes his own share to a world in which nothing is quite as it seems—in which we can no more trust what we see than what we are told. Soren is a familiar persona in Renaissance drama, the hanger-on at court, the angler for royal favor and position, the self-important man of learning whose learning consists almost entirely of “bug’s words,” sycophancy, and received wisdom. He is a little like Rosenkrantz (or Guildenstern). Come to think of it, he is a lot like Rosenkrantz (or Guildenstern). As the glancing allusions to Hamlet pile up—the names of the Swiss guards, the slightly anachronistic reference to tennis at the 17th-century Danish court, The Murder of Gonzago, which the crown prince acts out on the beach at Hven, Vibeke’s performance as a double for Ophelia, driven mad with grief over her father’s murder at the prince’s hands as well as the king’s erotic betrayal—it gradually becomes clear that Bailey is up to something very different in The Astrologer from run-of-the-creative-writing-mill fiction.

In the end, Vibeke burns down the castle at Kronberg, taking the lives of both Christians four decades before either man actually died. And Bailey’s secret is thus revealed. Despite its historical setting, The Astrologer is not really a historical novel at all. It is a self-concealing but ambitious attempt to resuscitate the revenge tragedy. The delight of reading it lies in the discovery and tracing of Bailey’s scheme. If his prose is adequate to the task and nothing more, if there is no larger message than the implicit rap at the shallow repetitiveness of contemporary fiction, then the sheer audacity of “reworking” Shakespeare in the 21st century—and without misstep—will be more than enough for most readers of The Astrologer.

On writing a memoir

With the sound of time’s wingèd chariot at my back, I have cautiously begun a memoir. I am no novelist. My peculiar talent, such as it is, is for phrase and argument, not for invention. Besides, I have memorized J. V. Cunningham’s poem “To a Student”:

Fiction, but memoir. Here you know
Motive and act who made them so.
Life falls in scenes; its tragedies
Close in contrived catastrophes.
Much is evasion. Some years pass
With Some years later. In this glass
Reflection sees reflection’s smile
And self-engrossment is good style.

Fiction is fiction: its one theme
Is its allegiance to its scheme.
Memoir is memoir: there your heart
Awaits the judgment of your art.
But memoir in fictitious guise
Is telling truth by telling lies.How many celebrated memoirs of the last twenty-five years—the boom times for “creative” or “literary” memoirs—are indicted by those last two lines! I prefer to look elsewhere for models. The Amateur Reader’s account of Elias Canetti’s The Tongue Set Free is tempting: it “follows his education, which means, mostly, his reading.” My life has been eventful, but the events have almost always been strained through books. (See the one chapter I’ve published, for example—my memoir of Raymond Carver. Four books are mentioned within the first seven sentences!) If I were honest, and cared as little about the literary marketplace as I claim to, my title would be Mediated by Books or Books Do Intercede For Me.

My memoir will include the story of my conversion, but it will not be a conversion memoir. It will include the story of my cancer, but it will not be a cancer memoir. I was convinced to undertake it by a former editor to whom I had described my ex-wife’s “mango-shaped breasts.” “You have got to write a memoir,” he demanded. The problem in writing a memoir, though, is not to describe the right shape of things, but to give some shape, any shape, to the disordered chapters of a life without resorting to the falsity of “contrived catastrophes.” Nabokov says it best: “[T]he true purpose of autobiography,” he writes in Speak, Memory, one of the great examples of the genre, should be “[t]he following of . . . thematic designs through one’s life.”

The Goodreads list of best memoirs leads off with a book that isn’t even a memoir (Anne Frank’s Diary) and includes ghost-written books, fraudulent books, memoirs in fictitious guise, and puddles of sentimental goo—except for Holocaust literature, there is little over twenty-five years old. The sole redeeming feature of the list is that Dreams from My Father ranks no higher than #38. The Education of Henry Adams, perhaps the greatest autobiography ever written, is not ranked at all.

Every would-be autobiographer should worry about the scene in Brock Brower’s The Late Great Creature (1971) in which the aging Boris Karloff-like horror star asks the magazine writer who is doing a feature on him what he’d really like to write. When the magazine writer confesses he’d like to write his autobiography, the horror star says: “Then may I say that I sincerely hope . . . that you soon find a halfway decent subject for it?”

There’s nothing worse than a memoir without a halfway decent subject. I’ve read dozens of them. A good memoir does not require a famous author, but it does require a good theme. Excluding Holocaust memoirs, which belong to a separate category, here are some of the best (or, at least, twenty-five of my English-language favorites, in addition to the ones I’ve already named):

• J. R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip (1956). In middle age, the British editor of the Listener finds the love of his life—a German shepherd named Queenie (name changed to prevent jokes about the author’s homosexuality). Not a dog book, but rather a chronicle of unexpected happiness. An NYRB Classics book.

• William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982). “I am not a walker in the city seeking narcissistically to capture myself,” Barrett writes in a slam at another remarkable memoir (see Alfred Kazin, below). What he is is the great portraitist of the New York intellectuals with all their changing loyalties, hot hatreds, and never-ending feuds.

• Richard P. Brickner, My Second Twenty Years: An Unexpected Life (1976). Brickner was only twenty years old when a car accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. All of the words that have been overused to describe memoirs (“honest,” “candid,” “unsparing”) were patented by him, but in supple unself-pitying prose.

• Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage (1993). A charming memoir of Greenwich Village in the ’forties by the New York Times book critic and master stylist, who also wrote autobiographically about the prostate cancer that killed him.

• Whitaker Chambers, Witness (1952). From Communism to anti-Communism to Christianity. Even today, the accuser of Alger Hiss remains a pariah to the literary world. Proof? Although Witness is undeniably one of the great American autobiographies, it will never be reprinted in a Library of America edition.

• Cyril Connolly, “A Georgian Boyhood” in Enemies of Promise (1938). Written in defense of Connolly’s claim that every critic is a “product of his time” who merely “affect[s] impartiality . . . while claiming authority over the reader. . . .” Connolly lifts the covers on his own critical authority by telling the story of his early life till leaving for Eton at eighteen.

• Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time (1989). The great Jewish historian was one of the last witnesses to see Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, while it was still a flourishing center of Jewish learning. Barely escaping the Nazis, she returned to New York to work at YIVO and watch helplessly as the Jews of Eastern Europe, the bearers of what she called the “Golden Tradition” in a remarkable anthology by that title, were put to death.

• Midge Decter, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War (2001). As Dorothy Gallagher phrased it in her New York Times review, Decter’s book is an “argument against the 1960’s and 70’s in the form of a memoir.” One of the great practitioners of the harsh style, she is the mother of another great practitioner of it—the late Rachel Abrams, better known on the ’net as Bad Rachel, who died from stomach cancer last Friday at the age of sixty-two.

• Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (1987). A memoir of the philosopher’s public battles against Communism, this is the rarest of books: a drama of ideas.

• Maureen Howard, Facts of Life (1978). Childhood, education, and career presented in vignettes by a writer who realized, nearly too late, that the women her age were ignoring their beauty and freedom while “we all yearned for the goods of dissatisfied middle age.”

• Alfred Kazin, Walker in the City (1952). Maybe the best New York book ever written, even with its narcissism (see William Barrett, above). Kazin is remarkably attuned to the textures, sounds, and colors of the Brooklyn in which he grew up, and he captures them along with his young self.

• Robert Lowell, “91 Revere Street” in Life Studies (1959). Could this slim 30-page memoir of his family, published as an afterthought in Lowell’s first volume of “confessional” verse, be the best thing he ever wrote? The prose is flawless. You’re afraid to touch it.

• Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). I am going out on a limb here to say that Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is McCarthy’s best book—perhaps the only book of hers that will be remembered. Orphaned at six (along with her brother, the actor Kevin McCarthy), she was raised by her memorably cruel Uncle Myers (“no relation to us”). His “impartial application of punishment . . . did nothing to establish discipline,” she writes, but it did train her in a “policy of lying and concealment,” teaching her to become a “problem liar”—a novelist, in other words.

• Willie Morris, North Toward Home (1967). “Get the hell out of Mississippi,” his father urged the young Willie Morris, who took the advice to the University of Texas, the Texas Observer, and then to New York and Harper’s, where at the age of thirty-two he became the youngest editor in the magazine’s history and an aider and abettor of the New Journalism.

• Wright Morris, Will’s Boy (1981). The first volume of Morris’s autobiographical trilogy takes the novelist from his birth in 1910 (and the death of his mother six days later) to his first years of college, not yet “corrupted by an idea” nor “dampened by disappointment.” What does take shape over these years is Morris’s distinctive voice and style, which he demonstrates by intercutting passages from his novels.

• Albert Jay Nock, The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943). An autobiography in the tradition of Henry Adams’s, Nock’s says practically nothing about himself or his career. He doesn’t even name the schools he attended or give the titles of his books. What he writes instead is an autobiography of his thinking, and it benefits from the fact that Nock is not an influential philosopher but a “superfluous man” with ideas that few will subscribe to, but that he takes wholly seriously.

• Norman Podhoretz, Making It (1967). The dirty little secret of the New York intellectuals: ambition. More important to them than sex (although sex is pretty damn important to them).

• Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (1995). The Jewish philosopher (who converted to Christianity on her death bed) managed to finish this tough-minded account of her “life affair” before her death of ovarian cancer at the age of forty-eight. An NYRB Classics book.

• Philip Roth, Patrimony (1991). Roth’s “true story” of his father’s final illness. He tries neither to lyricize it nor to mythologize it—he tells it straight, in the plain “unseemly” prose for which he is famous. A guided tour to what I have called elsewhere the strange and distant planet of late-stage cancer.

• Lore Segal, Other People’s Houses (1964). Originally published as a novel—and if it is a novel it is among the best of the ’sixties—it is the story of an Austrian Jewish family who are refugees from Hitler and their efforts to find a new home in England, the Dominican Republic, and finally the U.S.

• Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents (1985). The Anglo-American novelist and critic tells the story of growing up as the son of the famous Anglo-Catholic publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, who transplanted him from Britain to America as a boy, saving him from cricket and enabling him to discover baseball.

• Jim Thompson, Bad Boy (1953). Published as a paperback original to appeal to the readers of his unique brand of violent crime fiction (Nothing More than Murder, The Killer Inside Me), this is Thompson’s coming-of-age story—memoir as pulp fiction.

• Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (1993). Among the New York intellectuals, it is a popular sport to revere Lionel Trilling and trash Diana, his wife of forty-six years. This is a deeply flawed book, a widow’s attempt to defend herself and salvage her reputation, but the experience that shapes and informs it—a decades-long marriage—is almost never the subject of a book, certainly not one as interesting and well-written as this one.

• Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (1964). “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography”—Waugh’s great opening sentence. He was sixty-one when he wrote it, and he planned a multivolume autobiography, but A Little Learning was all he lived to complete.

• Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). Welty “shows us how close we all are to literature,” Anatole Broyard said in praising this book, “if we only knew it.” Only a hundred pages in length, Welty’s autobiography explores how her parents and her earliest reading conspired to make her into a writer—a great writer, although she is far too modest to admit she is that.

There are other obvious classics—Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, Richard Wright’s Black Boy—but you know me. I prefer the relatively obscure to the absolutely famous. Maybe that’s what I should call my own memoir: Jew the Obscure.

Fiction of the ’sixties

John Williams’s Stoner has been getting a lot of buzz lately, with stories in the Independent (a “slow-burn sensation,” at least “Until now”) and at the Millions (“through each decade, the book continued to be remembered”). Earlier in the week Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times phoned to interview me about my essay on the novel for Commentary. I won’t say anything about the interview, except to predict that Appleyard, unlike most of the other literary journalists who have written on it in recent weeks, will not focus on the novel’s publication history and reception, but on Stoner itself.

Stoner was published in 1965. Another novel from the same decade, which is beginning to generate some buzz because his daughter Katherine Powers is publishing his letters in the form of a novel about family life later this summer (Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life), is J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban (1962). Not coincidentally, both it and Stoner have been reprinted in lovely NYRB Classics editions. The other thing the books have in common is that they are both one of a kind. Nothing else like them—not even their authors’ later books—was ever written again.

A strong case can be made that the ’sixties were the best decade for American fiction—better even than the ’twenties. There are the obvious classics (Rabbit, Run, Catch-22, The Moviegoer, Revolutionary Road, Pale Fire, V., Herzog, A Fan’s Notes, Portnoy’s Complaint), and the last of those titles suggests how important the ’sixties were as a transitional decade or even a fulcrum for prying open the sexual reticence of the American novel.

But I am thinking of the minor classics from the ’sixties, the underground classics, the amazing books that still hold up and repay reading and rereading:

1960
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times
Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree
Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
John Updike, Rabbit, Run

1961
R. V. Cassill, Clem Anderson
Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

1962
Bruce Jay Friedman, Stern
Norman Fruchter, Coat Upon a Stick
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur
J. F. Powers, Morte D’Urban
Clancy Sigal, Going Away
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave

1963
Wright Morris, Cause for Wonder
Thomas Pynchon, V.

1964
Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin
Saul Bellow, Herzog
Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me [Ed.: Later addition—see below.]
Thomas Berger, Little Big Man
Thomas Gallagher, Oona O’

1965
James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy
Maureen Howard, Bridgeport Bus
Richard G. Stern, Stitch
John Williams, Stoner

1966
Evan S. Connell Jr., The Diary of a Rapist
Ross Macdonald, Black Money
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
Charles Portis, Norwood
Wilfrid Sheed, Office Politics

1967
Stanley Elkin, A Bad Man
James B. Hall, Mayo Sergeant

1968
Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes
Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne
Charles Portis, True Grit

1969
Leonard Gardner, Fat City
Leo Litwak, Waiting for the News
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Thomas Williams, Whipple’s Castle

By any measure, that is an astonishing run of great and near-great fiction. What is fascinating is that several of the decade’s books which are now recognized as classics, including Revolutionary Road and A Fan’s Notes, were largely neglected during their own publishing season. They were elevated to agreed-upon greatness only later. Even The Moviegoer’s 1962 National Book Award was something a rediscovery. At the time, many critics complained that no one had ever heard of Percy’s first novel.

Such, perhaps, is the decade’s keynote. Not many readers of this blog, I would wager, have read Clem Anderson, Going Away, Cause for Wonder, Oona O’, Bridgeport Bus, Office Politics, I Am Mary Dunne, or Whipple’s Castle. And if I were to suggest that these books would be a better use of their reading time than the latest celebrated titles (Philipp Meyer’s The Son, for example, or Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic), I’d be dismissed with a condescending laugh. The pressure in the literary culture is to “keep up,” to “keep current.” Few will acknowledge that this pressure serves the business interests of the publishing houses, but not literature. Nine-tenths of what passes for literary discussion at any given time is merely book advertising under the pseudonym of literary criticism. The best critics, the best readers, are (in Rohan Maitzen’s wonderful phrase) fearlessly behind the curve.

A good place to start falling behind is with the fiction of the ’sixties.

Update: No sooner had I posted this list than the British novelist Linda Grant tweeted: “Did women not start writing fiction till the 70s?” What does it say about me that I never anticipate this objection, although it has become a routine of the literary life? What does it say: besides the fact that I don’t think about fiction in gender terms, I mean. Three of the names on the original list—Flannery O’Connor, Dawn Powell, Maureen Howard—are women’s names. I replied to Grant as I have taken to replying to such accusations: “[S]ince three women are too few, what percentage would be adequate?” This question is never answered. The implication is “more—no matter how many women you have included on whatever list, male critic.”

In plain fact, I’d considered and silently passed over several novels by women—Hortense Calisher’s False Entry, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, Mary McCarthy’s The Group—because they are not novels that, in my experience, repay rereading (the standard advanced above). In reply, Grant recommended that I consult the Virago backlist to see whom I had “missed.” I asked Grant which of the novels on Virago’s list was an American novel from the ’sixties. Instead of naming a single title, Grant shot back: “Just suggesting you refresh your own memory about the ‘woman's novel.’ ”

So in the end Grant simply wanted to change the subject—from American fiction of the ’sixties (my subject) to women’s writing (hers). Her insinuation that as a critic I am “forgetful” of women writers was a bit surprising, it seemed to me, coming from a writer whose novel When I Lived in Modern Times I had praised extravagantly, ten years or more after it was first published, in an effort to keep its reputation alive. Perhaps it is too much to expect that such a writer might familiarize herself with my other critical writings to see whether it is really true that my “memory” of women’s writing needs “refreshing.” And I won’t defend my record as a critic here. (I’m tired of doing so. I’m tired of being expected to do so.) Since Grant would not, however, I closely examined the Virago list and found one novel that I should have included on my list above. So I’ve added Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me, a novel that is delightful in its harsh and biting tone.

But Grant did not ask me to include a specific book. She was not really interested in books at all. She was interested in an abstract demand for literary equity, which might have been satisfied by any books, as long as their number was right.

Update, II: I’ve been thinking a lot, ever since Linda Grant obliged me to do so, about fiction by women during the ’sixties. My old friend Carol Sklenicka, who is writing her biography, makes a strong case for Alice Adams’s Careless Love (1966) in the comments section.

Jessamyn West published a “companion” to The Friendly Persuasion (a prequel, really, but the word was not yet in existence) entitled Except for Me and Thee in 1969. In the New York Times Book Review, Carlos Baker found it “paler” than the first book, but praised its picture of domestic life on the Indiana frontier—“thankful, satisfying, unsentimental.” He also identified himself as among those who “are always eager to begin a new book by Jessamyn West.”

Joy to Levine! (1962), Norma Rosen’s first novel, about a New York office worker being squeezed out by women and automation, was described by Harper’s as “beautifully poised between pathos and comedy.”

Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (1969), Judith Rossner’s second novel, is a striking and unusual study of three siblings who are voluntarily orphaned by their Communist parents and grow up alone on Long Island.

None of these novels is great, perhaps not even near-great, but they shouldn’t be entirely forgotten either—especially since they are not generic novels by women, but interesting books with interesting strengths and equally interesting flaws.

There was a genuine masterpiece by a woman that was published as a novel in 1963—Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses. The trouble is that, as marvelous as it is (its prose is magical), the book is not really a novel; it is a memoir. It was published as a novel only because it was written before memoirs were all the rage. As another famous woman would later say, “What difference does it make?” Quite a lot, I think. Segal’s next books—Lucinella (1976), a comedy of the New York literary world, and the hilarious interracial immigrant romance Her First American (1985)—are wildly inventive.

Other People’s Houses doesn't require the aid of invention. It traces her Austrian Jewish family’s flight from the Nazis in 1938 ending in America and her marriage in 1961 to David Segal, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Much of the dialogue is “fictionalized,” I’m sure, but the book takes its structure from the Segal family’s rambling experience and does not transmute it into art, no matter how beautifully it is written. Does it belong on a list of great ’sixties fiction? Can we agree it belongs on any list of great writing from the ’sixties (along with, say, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem), and leave it at that?

Serial protagonists

Reading in bed with my wife this weekend, I was struck by the convention of the serial protagonist, a convention which is so common among mystery writers that, if a famous detective does not have more than one book devoted to him, later writers will supply the lack—just as Joe Gores did with Spade and Archer, his 2009 “prequel” to The Maltese Falcon. Ross Macdonald tailed his “new-type detective” Lew Archer from ca. 1948 to ca. 1975 in a series of eighteen novels published during the same time period (1949 to 1976). Edith Wharton, by contrast, saw her own protagonist named Archer through about the same stretch of time—twenty-six years—in the single volume of The Age of Innocence.

Ross Macdonald

The tradition of the serial detective was established when Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes in 1887. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown followed in 1910. Agatha Christie created Hercule Poirot in 1920; Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Whimsey in 1923; S. S. Van Dine, Philo Vance in 1926; Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe in 1934. The detectives became so popular that the novels about them were often referred to by their name, not their author’s. Meanwhile, the realists who were the older and more comfortable brothers of the mystery novelists—the firstborn, who had inherited the father’s estate—almost never brought the same protagonist back for an encore. Mark Twain wrote two more sequels to Tom Sawyer, also featuring Huck Finn, but neither one is any good. Hemingway wrote a double egg carton of stories about Nick Adams. After committing suicide in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson returns seven years later to narrate Absalom, Absalom! In the last half century there have been Rabbit Angstrom and Frank Bascombe and who else? After a couple of novels about him, Nathan Zuckerman becomes a narrative voice rather than the lead character in his own drama.

I am trying to imagine what a Nick Carraway series of novels might have looked like. In the fourth or fifth novel of the series, Nick tells the story of the ambitious young stockbroker who jumped to his death after going broke on Black Tuesday—and impoverishing all of his clients. Or the Lucky Jim series of novels! Not content to expose the hypocrisy and deadwood at England’s red brick universities, Jim Dixon gets a visiting appointment to a land grant university in the midwestern United States and repeats his antics amid the alien corn. Jane Smiley never would’ve had to write Moo. Or Michael Chabon could have gone on repeating the success of his first novel. After deciding that the “trace a woman leaves . . . is better than a man’s,” Art Bechstein investigates The Mysteries of Grad School and learns that bisexuality might be better for his career.

Why do mystery buffs form attachments to recurring detectives while there is small demand for sequels to Invisible Man or Herzog or Song of Solomon or Mating? Is the serial protagonist a marketing device that more “serious” writers (read: market-obtuse writers) just fail to grasp? The mystery writer arouses a thirst to see the protagonist in action again. The realistic novel is distinguished, in part, by its ambition of telling the whole story, of leaving not one word to be added or taken away. Again, the serial detective is a character who is rarely glimpsed in full—he is an assortment of familiar gestures, a glossary of familar patter. His own story is backstory, and something of a mystery. The reader must piece it together from book to book. A realistic novel which left a character unfinished at the end would be recognized, by contrast, as a failure. It contains its own prequel and sequel. The tantalizing hint it offers instead, if it is any good, is a voice, a point of view, a peculiar and cockeyed way of squinting at the world. The “serious” novelist is a serial stylist. Perhaps this is not a particularly effective marketing device, but it works with some readers: they await a novelist’s next book to be swayed by the familiar sentences. The difference between mysteries and “serious” realistic fiction is not one of genre, or even literary practice, but of ambition.

Or so I’m guessing.
____________________

Patrick Kurp reminds me of Thomas Berger’s four novels featuring Carlo Rinehart: Crazy in Berlin (1958), Rinehart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), and Rinehart’s Women (1981).

A letter from Oakeshott

Early in 1990, I wrote a review of Michael Oakeshott’s essays on education, edited by Timothy Fuller and published by Yale University Press as The Voice of Liberal Learning, for the American Scholar. (The review eventually appeared in the autumn number of the quarterly, which was edited then by Joseph Epstein.) I sent a draft copy to Oakeshott, who replied the same day he received it.

19 March 1990
       Dear Professor Myers,
          Thank you for your letter which arrived this morning: it was most kind of you to write and I look forward to your piece in The American Scholar. Now I know that there is at least one person in the world who has understood & appreciates what I have had to say. What you are doing in respect to literary criticism is something I have never attempted, but I can see how it would go & it needs to be done. And what a delight it was to see the name of Sir Philip Sidney. The Liberty Press are bringing out, this summer, a new & enlarged edition of my book of essays called Rationalism in Politics which was first published a long time ago. I think there may be something in it to interest you & I will see that you get a copy.
                              Yours sincerely,
                                        Michael OakeshottEver since receiving it, I have displayed this letter, in a modest green-matted frame, on my office wall. It is, I tell visitors who ask, my charter as a literary critic. Michael Oakeshott died nine months later, almost to the day.

The verdict is in

In replying to my essay on the Los Angeles Review of Books policy to review first books positively or not at all, editor-in-chief Tom Lutz says all that is left of my argument, after you remove the bug from my ass and spice up the quotations from George Orwell and Arnold Isenberg, is “the standard, centuries-old idea that evaluation is an important part of the critical act.”

I’d be very disappointed if that were the case. But the problem may only be that I have been unclear. Let me be as plain as possible, then, and reduce my argument to propositions:

(1.) Evaluation is the critical act. It is not merely an “important part”; it is the whole. To speak of one is to speak of the other.
(2.) The critical act is a close-fitting interdependent system that requires (quoting Arnold Isenberg) a “value judgment or verdict[,] a particular statement or reason, [and] a general statement or norm.”
(3.) A critical verdict is not to be confused with evaluation. It is a partial evaluation.
(4.) If any part of the critical act is thrown into doubt, the entire system collapses.
(5.) To reduce critical verdicts to a single class of verdicts (e.g., “good”) is to throw the critic’s reasons and norms, upon which his verdicts depend, into doubt.

The sound you hear is the sound of collapse. And that, according to me, is the effect of the LARB’s policy of reviewing first books positively or not at all. My argument against it also falls back upon literary sociology, holding that the tenderness toward first-time authors reflects a generational shift toward the literary career and away from a conception of literature (in Cynthia Ozick’s words) as a “holy vessel of imagination.” (Philosophers continue to think about their vocation in terms almost as elevated.) Lutz suggests that I am a conspiracy theorist for thinking like this, but if I am, I am not alone. (Where did I put the aluminum foil?)

Perhaps the difference between Lutz and me can be put most starkly by laying his belief that “there are hundreds of great novels published every year” alongside my own skepticism that there are any more than one or two “great novels” published in a generation. Or, as Orwell says in the same essay I quoted yesterday, “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.” And I think that a bad book needs to be called a bad book, even when it is a first book.

Our ideas of criticism have been diminished, though, by conceiving of it as the pronouncement of verdicts, no matter how sophisticated the critic at disguising his use of good and bad. In the last few years, I have tried out reviews without verdicts. (Editors hate them and insist that a verdict be appended.) Here, for example, is a first-novel review that I’m proud of, which works hard not to invent synonyms for good or bad. You’ll see that I observe the author failed to overcome his central difficulty, I remark upon his historical ignorance, I note his reliance upon the pathetic fallacy and his stumble into anachronism. My conclusion is to classify the novel rather than to give it thumbs up or thumbs down—to offer directions for readers who might not have a literary GPS system rather than warning them off going there at all. Even if it is implied rather than stated as such, my verdict is pretty clear, but would I want it said that my final judgment is that Woodsburner is a “bad” novel? I’d prefer it be described as a novel in which the central difficulty is not overcome, etc.

Every book deserves as much attention as its author gave it in writing it. For a critic to give it any less is to duck his responsibility to it. And I don’t see how the responsibility is curtailed by the various excuses I’ve heard for treating a first book differently—it is an easy target; it has no larger importance; trashing it adds nothing to literary culture. The truth is that, in advance of reading it, the critic cannot know any of this. And the only question is whether he is going to be permitted to say exactly what he has discovered in reading it. Anything less than a full disclosure of the critic’s opinion is, take umbrage at the phrase if you must, fundamentally dishonest.

False positive

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a policy, which the editor Evan Kindley divulged in a Twitter back-and-forth on Friday, of reviewing first books positively or not reviewing them at all. The rationale behind the policy, Kindley explained, is “That most authors’ careers fade away on their own, and that it’s easy and not that interesting to eviscerate first-timers.” He allowed that the LARB “might make exceptions for insanely hyped debuts” like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, and would “certainly run a constructive critique of a first book.” But it’s only fair—“ethical” was his word—“to give writers a grace period.”

Of course, the LARB policy is little more than the advice Nick Carraway’s father gave to him, albeit in clumsier words: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had all the advantage that you’ve had.” Or as my father taught me—a lesson that clearly did not take hold—“If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.” It represents the Elwood P. Dowd School of Life: “For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

As career counseling, or advice for the lovelorn, this is good stuff. As a literary ethic, it might be called the law of youth soccer—there are no losers, only winners. Trophies for everyone! I was surprised, though, at how much support Kindley received for his position on Twitter—and at how many misconceptions about reviewing abound.

The mystery novelist Daniel Friedman, for example, conceives the reviewer’s role as telling book-buyers what to pick up and what to leave unopened (see here and here). The reviewer, in other words, is a literary Fodor’s, instructing the literary traveler where to spend the night and where to linger over dinner. His guidance is practical and timely and quickly outdated. (No one keeps a three-year-old Fodor’s lying around.) There is no intrinsic interest in what he says. His opinions are consumed—patronized, depleted—in the book-buyers’ following of them. At best the reviewer is a well-informed assistant to an adventure that less timid and uncertain readers might prefer to discover for themselves.

I don’t imagine that I speak for myself alone in saying that I have no desire whatever to fill any such role. Not that I think so highly of myself. If I am to be an assistant, however, I will be an assistant not to book-buyers, but to literature. I have always admired philosophers—have always preferred their passion for their subject to that of writers and critics, whose lukewarmness is legion—because philosophers are the sworn enemies of vagueness and confusion. Error is never afforded a grace period. It is corrected without regard to personal circumstances, which are too many in any case (marital status, health, age, psychological condition) to factor in with any degree of certainty. Philosophy is what philosophers protect, not the tender green shoots of younger philosophers’ careers.

The LARB’s very sensitivity to first-time writers’ careers gives weight to what I have been saying for some time—namely, literature (or, rather, creative writing) has become a bureaucracy, which shields its employees from markets and thus tends over time to put its own interests above the public’s. Why should I care whether a young writer settles comfortably into a literary career?—especially a writer whose mediocrity eats at the public reputation of literature. (Just look what the bureaucratic careerists have done to what is now called literary fiction so that readers know to avoid it.)

More troubling is the fundamental dishonesty involved. What, really, is the good being promoted? The book under review or the reviewing assignment completed and published? (Kindley was dismissive of the reviewer’s practical concerns, but it is no simple matter to place a review elsewhere when it was originally written for another publication. The critic is not quite so blithe to dismiss his investment of time and energy.) If the only values assigned to first books are going to be positive values, they will quickly become debased. Orwell understood the danger clearly:

For if one says—and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week—that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word “good”?If all first books are good in some fashion or other, what is the point of calling any of them good? No discrimination is involved, only a priori institutional policy. To lay down special rules for first books may seem to relieve the anxiety of criticism, but the problem of individual judgment is not solved; it is merely eliminated from critical practice. The consequences are not pretty. Arnold Isenberg wrote in 1949:A good starting point is a theory of criticism . . . which divides the critical process into three parts. There is the value judgment or verdict (V): “This picture or poem is good—.” There is a particular statement or reason (R): “—because it has such-and-such a quality—.” And there is a general statement or norm (N): “—and any work which has that quality is pro tanto good.”[1]If the critic’s verdict cannot be trusted then every element in his critical system is called into question. This seems a terrible tax to pay on the fragile ambitions of first-time authors.
____________________

Many thanks to Steve Abernathy for suggesting my title.

[1] Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” Philosophical Review 58 (July 1949): 330–44.

Unpacking my (academic) library

After nearly three years in Ohio, I was able to take my academic books out of storage yesterday and move them into my new fourth-floor green-apple-green office on campus. The office is as narrow as an elephant’s coffin, but there is room in it for eight bookcases. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who was jerked into reflection before his books were even on his shelves, I started in immediately to release my books from their boxed confinement and arrange them in a rough semblance of an alphabet—the A’s just inside the office door, the middle of the alphabet having to wait until I’d removed enough boxes to reach the shelves over by the window. Before leaving Texas, I had packed the books in “the mild boredom of order” and carefully noted the contents in Sharpie on all four sides of each cardboard box. I asked the movers to leave the boxes marked Aar–Aris and Aris–Barz in the hallway outside, and I attacked those boxes with a utility knife right away.

Before long, though, I was reduced to guessing where Henry James and Dr. Johnson would end up when, days from now, I would finally be done. I had gone without these books for almost three years, and though I had missed very few of them, I was warmed by their familiarity. My library is like an intellectual autobiography. As I lifted books out of their boxes, blowing the dust off the top edge, I was able to retrace my steps. There were the books from my undergraduate years, when I was an American studies major (just like Tom Wolfe!). There was John Kouwenhoven’s Made in America, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Seymour Martin Lipset’s First New Nation. There were the poets I read to keep up with my friends at Santa Cruz, all of whom seemed to be would-be poets—John Haines, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin. There were the books from graduate school—D. W. Robertson’s Preface to Chaucer, L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, William Empson’s Milton’s God. There were the philosophers on whom I broke my teeth when I first arrived to teach at Texas A&M, because the younger colleagues whose company I preferred were in philosophy—Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice. None of these would I buy again, or even reread, but I have no inclination to dispose of them (even if I knew how), and to own them—to stand them in the light on my office shelves—makes me happy.

The reason did not strike me until I had unpacked several volumes of essays by now-forgotten critics who were not prominent even in their own day—William Troy, Theodore Spencer, D. G. James, Benjamin DeMott (his Supergrow was badly damaged by mildew), W. C. Brownell, Maxwell Geismar, Mark Krupnick, John Fraser, Arnold Isenberg, F. W. Dupee, Eliseo Vivas. I who dislike story collections am a sucker for Selected and Collected Essays, and have been since long before I began to identify with their authors. Theirs are the books that give personal character to my library like drapes and wall colors in a room. What they suggest is that my library is also a geniza, where I keep and store (in Hillel Halkin’s words) “books of which no one had known; known books of which no copies had survived; the lost works of . . . poets and philosophers.” My library is a monument (or tomb) for a way of literary life that is quickly passing (and perhaps has already passed away).

Its motto is something I tweeted earlier this morning: If you are committed to good writing, then everything you write is in its defense. Substitute good scholarship or good thought for “good writing,” first here and then there, and you can account for the commitment that produced every book in my library. Can the same principle account for every book in the public libraries, which are furious to buy up multiple copies of current bestsellers for readers unwilling to invest their own money in things that cannot last? I may be the last man alive who recognizes some of the authors in my library, but there is something strangely consoling in that. My library is organized upon the principle that obscurity is not the same as being utterly forgotten. And who knows? Perhaps the principle will hold good even for me!

All the sad young onlooker narrators

With The Great Gatsby back in the news because of Baz Luhrmann’s new film version, so too is the special kind of narrator Fitzgerald enlisted for his great novel. On Twitter the other day I suggested the term “onlooker narrator” for Nick Carraway’s kind; in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth further subdivides the class into “mere observers (the ‘I’ of Tom Jones, [George Meredith’s] The Egoist, Troilus and Criseyde)” and what he calls “narrator-agents, who produce some measurable effect on the course of events (ranging from the minor involvement of Nick in The Great Gatsby, through the extensive give-and-take of Marlow in Heart of Darkness, to the central role of Tristram Shandy, Moll Flanders, Huckleberry Finn, and—in the third person—Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers).”

Booth’s own examples break down the subdivision, though. The “narrators” of Tom Jones, The Egoist, and Troilus and Criseyde are not characters in the narrative. The omniscient narrative style of The Portrait of a Lady might as well be called an “observer narrator,” since James drops into first person here and there—even though he is pretty clearly referring to himself, the author of the novel held in the reader’s hands. (If you ask me, so is Fielding.) But modernism is modernism: if the use of the first person indicates what Booth calls a “dramatized narrator,” then what is good for Fielding is equally good for James. After all, it represents a break with the omniscience of the Victorian novel, as implied by both E. M. Forster (“One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister”) and Zadie Smith (“One may as well begin with Jerome’s e-mails to his father”) before both of them proceed to write something very much like a throwback to the Victorian novel.

The far more beguiling technique, because far less common, is Fitzgerald’s secondary character who also participates in events. His access to facts is limited, because he is a person in the drama, but he conceives his role as a secretary, a gatherer and reporter of information—at least Nick does—and so he may try to find out about events he does not witness firsthand. If this kind of narrative is to succeed, the novelist (or his critics) must be able to answer the question that the Amateur Reader, during a discussion of Gatsby, posed on Twitter the other day: What does the narrator understand himself to be doing? The novelist Wright Morris adds one more question in his little-known 1975 book About Fiction: “How do we distinguish, with assurance, between the ‘I’ of the narrator and that of the author?”

Oddly enough, Morris’s question comes up in praising Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which Will Wilkinson advanced as a classic of the “onlooker narrator” method. What are the others? The narrator must not be telling his own story, but someone else’s—not even his own story at a distance in time, making him an “onlooker” upon his younger self. He must be a witness, close to the action, even involved in it (peripherally), but not swept up in the catastrophe. All characters in fiction are “agents,” to greater or lesser degree; the smallest gesture may cause the universe to rock on its axis. Booth’s distinction between “observer” and “agent” is all thumbs, then. His example of Marlow in Heart of Darkness is on target, though (again) the line of demarcation between an onkooker’s narrative and a frame story is thin and faded. The method is also standard in detective fiction, when the detective tells in first person the solution to a mystery in which he is not implicated.

Despite the distinguished examples of Conrad, Ford, and Fitzgerald, though—despite the intrinsic fictional interest of the method—it is rarely tried. More recent examples are thus more difficult to come up with, although they are almost always enjoyable to read. Pnin is narrated by Pnin’s colleague, a fellow Russian emigré named Vladimir something. R. V. Cassill’s 1961 novel Clem Anderson is the story of a famous larger-than-life drunken and destructive poet (modeled upon Dylan Thomas), told by a witness to the destruction. Steven Millhauser’s 1972 novel Edwin Mullhouse goes a step further than Cassill: it is a faux literary biography of a great American writer, who dies at eleven, narrated by a friend who is six months older.

Calder Willingham (a clever novelist who does not deserve to be forgotten) used an onlooker narrator to tell the story of Rambling Rose (1972), a family housekeeper and the young narrator who has a crush on her. (Martha Coolidge’s 1991 film version mislaid the novel’s charm, because it could not invent an equivalent of the onlooker narrator’s voice.) Malcolm Bradbury’s Mensonge (1987) is both a hilarious send-up of literary theory and perhaps the best single-volume introduction to it—a professor who is “in the know” sets out to write the biography of theory’s most obscure theorist (“If I will thus have played some small part in lifting him from nowhere, and putting him somewhere, then I fancy my life, or one very small part of it, will not have been totally—despite what everyone says—in vain”). And though the last thing I want is to sprinkle any more praise on its head—in Mark Sarvas’s words, people are going to start thinking my relationship to the author is more bromance than Boswell—Christopher R. Beha makes brilliant use of a witness who is too self-involved to understand exactly What Happened to Sophie Wilder, but whose witness is indispensable to the whole picture.

Beha’s novel is a reminder than our method is native and necessary to the saint’s life, in which a scribe must testify to a saintliness he himself cannot lay claim to. But at least since Sholem Aleichem, it is equally native to Jewish fiction in which a famous writer serves as an amanuensis for a more responsible and less literary soul, who needs his story told. Who, after all, is Nathan Zuckerman if not a Jewish Nick Carraway?

Darlings of oblivion

Vladimir Nabokov was wont to fall into a reverie over nail clippings, bitten-off cuticles, tufts of lint plucked off a sleeve, bits of food picked from between the teeth and spat out. After disposing of these tiny scraps of human life, no one thinks of them any more. Since matter is neither created nor destroyed, what becomes of them? They go on existing, but in a realm beyond human concern. Nabokov called them the darlings of oblivion.

After nursing two of my children through week-long stomach viruses and then watching them bounce off to school this morning as if nothing had happened, I’ve been thinking about how much of human life consists of events that are also darlings of oblivion—the stomach cramps, the headaches, the sleepless nights, the full glasses of milk that are knocked over and spilled across the clean kitchen floors, the flat tires, the dead batteries, the traffic jams, the appointments that are late. Entire days can be lost to these events; they can be, at the time, as absorbing as tragedy; then, once they have passed, they are forgotten. How much of human life disappears into oblivion like this?

These darlings almost never find their way into literature. And why is that? Does literature represent an altogether different ideology of human experience—the ideology of the dramatic occurrence? Despite all the political radicals who have written literary masterpieces, does it turn out to belong to philosophical idealism, postulating the human being not as a material creature, defined by the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, but a spiritual being who recognizes himself in the heights and depths? Is literature, in short, a relic of pre-scientific understanding, a nostalgia entirely innocent of evolutionary psychology, consoling itself with the charming fantasy that all of human behavior is not a product of natural selection? Or in a way that neo-Darwinist thought never could be (since it denies to itself the very possibility of appeal to a non-materialist mind), is literature founded upon the necessary relationship between dramatic occurrences and the darlings of oblivion?

My cancer has left me with one leg that is a half-inch shorter than the other. I walk with a cane now and a permanent limp. Even worse, my bones creak and click together when I walk—nothing painful, but a little creepy. In a word, walking is effortful. I watch my five-year-old daughter Mimi dash off to class and I sigh with pleasure. I might as well be watching the Blue Angels for all I can imagine myself doing the same thing. Every morning I forget how difficult it has become to walk—every time I sit down, for that matter—and then I get up, and every stride absorbs my full attention. No more tumbling into ditches while walking around daydreaming for me!

The darlings of oblivion are not the contraries of the dramatic occurrences, not their contradictions and cancellations—they do not represent the fundamental truth about man. But they are not insignificant either. They are the discards and shavings, the elemental remains of elemental human living, which serve as reminders—they call to mind—that man is not merely mind. They give material reality to human experience, but they are not merely matter: they are also reminders. No wonder Nabokov called them darlings. He wanted them to have meaning, and more than oblivion. They are, after all, incapable of saying what they themselves mean—just as natural adaptation is incapable of formulating the theory of evolutionary psychology. Only the human mind is capable of such self-reflection, and of transforming ordinary events into dramatic occurrences—like the day-to-day struggle with cancer, for example.

First instinct of her generation

Claire Messud’s impatience with an interviewer from Publishers Weekly who asked it she’d want to be friends with her own main character caused a stir, but nowhere more so than at Slate, where Katie Roiphe attributed Messud’s impatience to a “certain prickliness on the part of women writers” which is “currently fashionable.”

First Messud’s outburst, which has gone “viral” (as the saying has it). She had just finished describing Nora Eldridge, the narrator of The Woman Upstairs, her fifth novel, as middle-aged, single, and angry. “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” Annasue McCleave Wilson, the interviewer for PW innocently asks. Messud explodes:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”Unlike the Paris Review, the publishers’ trade weekly does not explain the format and setting of its interviews—whether Messud was speaking extemporaneously, from an edited transcript of a face-to-face conversation, or is engaged in an email exchange is left undisclosed. Whatever the case, her response is remarkable. It summarizes an entire literary worldview and theory in one breath. It should be taped to the foreheads of all those readers who want characters they can “relate” to. Is this character alive? Is she, in other words, a human being? For a novelist of Messud’s realist presuppositions and allegiances, any other question made primary would be naïve and irrelevant.

Now, I’ve been an admirer of Messud for a while. Her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children, I wrote in Commentary, “is probably the best novel to come out of September 11.” So I’ll acknowledge that I was predisposed to applaud Messud’s response. And what is more, Messud says in far fewer words, far more memorably, what I had struggled to say about the real existence of fictional characters earlier in the year (“To pretend to know something about a character when the novel is silent about it is to reveal something about ourselves, not about the novel”).

At all events, what I heard in Messud’s outburst was a working novelist, a species whom, in its most powerful form, displays the highly developed instincts of a fearsome literary critic. What I heard was a serious writer viciously attacking a serious problem of literature.

But that’s not what Katie Roiphe heard. What Katie Roiphe heard was gender. In her opening sentence, she categorized Messud’s outburst as the “latest fracas over literary sexism.” She allowed that Messud “does not say overtly that her interviewer is being sexist,” but the question about befriending literary characters is implicitly sexist—Messud herself implies it is. How? By “listing male writers who would never be asked that question (and tacking on Alice Munro ‘for that matter’ to make it clear that her list had been about men).” Then, bored with the “fracas,” and having satisfied herself that she knows Messud’s mind, Roiphe hurries on to talk about her own literary experience.

Roiphe’s interpretation of Messud’s response was so distant from mine, so foreign to it, that I was thunderstruck. Belonging to a different sex and an older generation (Messud and Roiphe are fourteen and sixteen years younger than I), I concluded that I was merely demonstrating, once again, how out of step I am. Rereading the whole PW interview with a renewed attention to gender, I found that it had been Messud who first introduced its note. After naming the fiction about which she is passionate (Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Beckett, Camus, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, Thomas Bernhard), she went on to say:[T]hese books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.But damn me, I couldn’t stop hearing the voice of a writer who was setting herself an interesting literary problem to solve. If it is unseemly and dangerous for a man to be angry, a fortiori it is worse for a woman: what then would it be like? Gender revealed the problem but did not constitute it. Any more than the physical condition of a woman with an artificial hip, who sets off the metal detector every time she goes through airport security, is the problem. The problem, God forgive me for saying it, is a human one.

Everything else about her language suggests that Messud agrees. As a writer, she is concerned with illuminating, she says, a “particular human experience.” The question at the heart of her fiction is “how then must we live?” And this question can “only be addressed in the individual, not in the general.” Her narrator Nora is an angry woman, but she is also single and approaching middle age, and[a]s any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we’d planned.Messud habitually speaks the language of humanism, not feminism.

My point is not to scold Katie Roiphe, even if I believe the implication of sexism that she finds in the interview question that so angered Claire Messud is only the anger over sexism Roiphe herself brings to many literary encounters. If I am right about Messud’s motivation, however, it means that she is just as badly out of step as am I—that putting literary problems before gender is not the first instinct of her generation, nor of the literary present.
____________________

Update: Corey Robin blasts Katie Roiphe for being “inattentive” to Claire Messud’s words, anticipating many of the points I would make a little later.

An old story for the National Day of Prayer

An autobiographical story about prayer on the National Day of Prayer. Those who know both of us, at least through our writing, know that the young literary critic Michael Schaub was once my student at Texas A&M University. If I had anything at all to do with Michael’s development into such a promising critic, he is my greatest achievement in twenty years at A&M.

On Twitter, Michael and I tease each other a lot about our teacher-student relationship, now more than a decade and a half old, but neither of us has ever told the full story of how we became more than just names on a class schedule to each other.

Every semester, the A&M Christian Fellowship would bring an evangelical preacher named Tom Short to campus. He would preach in the central plaza on the College Station campus while students milled around, some listening, some jeering, some merely passing by. In the fall of 1996, Short was embroiled in a controversy over an antisemitic remark that he allegedly directed at a Jewish student. The next semester, shortly before Easter, I staged an unannounced protest during his spring visit to campus. But let Michael tell it. A sophomore at the time, he was writing for the Battalion (the student newspaper), and this is the story he filed with his editor:

      On a hot Thursday afternoon, David Myers walked to the mall in front of the Academic Building with his prayer shawl and prayerbook and began to recite his afternoon prayers. Yards away, evangelist Tom Short was speaking to a small group of students.
      “I was unfolding my prayer shawl, and Short said, ‘Here we're going to have some self-righteousness,’ ” Myers said. “He started to rant about how my prayers were wrong, how I shouldn't pray in public. But Jews have to pray in public.”
      Myers, an associate professor of English, addressed the crowd, telling the gathered students that “every man should have a right to choose how he's going to worship his God.”
      The crowd applauded Myers, who walked away, telling Short, “You're not worth listening to.”
      The A&M Christian Fellowship brought Short, a professional “campus preacher,” to speak on campus on March 20 and 21.
      The confrontation between Short and Myers punctuated a growing national controversy over religious intolerance on the Texas A&M campus.
      Short’s last appearance at A&M, last semester, made national news when he told Jewish student Lisa Foox that “Hitler did not go far enough” and that Jews were condemned to “burn in hell.”
      The incident led to A&M being listed as a major center of hate by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a civil rights organization for Jews.
      Rabbi Peter Tarlow of the Hillel Foundation said Short is an anti-Semite. “He's done A&M a lot of harm,” Tarlow said. “This reconfirms the stereotype that A&M only cares about white Christians.”
      But members of the A&M Christian Fellowship deny that Short advances anti-Semitic ideas.
      Melissa Villarrel, a junior education major, said Short’s message is positive. “He tells the truth, just like Jesus did,”" Villarrel said. “He is in no way anti-Semitic.”
      Short also denied charges of anti-Semitism in a tract he distributed at his rally. The tract states that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.
      “I don't have any hostility at all toward Jews,” Short said. “You can love a person and disagree with them. Anyone who knows me as a person would be shocked by that [allegation of anti-Semitism].”
      But Foox, a journalism major, disagrees. “If you put in a phrase that the Jewish people killed Jesus Christ, there's no worse form of anti-Semitism you can promote,” Foox said.
      Despite the attention that Short’s last visit brought A&M, campus leaders have not denounced his anti-Semitism, Myers said.
      “The administration, the local clergy have not made a public statement to condemn this man,” Myers said. “He is a force for division, hatred, and violence.”
      Short accused Myers of name-calling after the professor left the rally.
      Foox’s Mail Call letter [to the editor] last year prompted Short to write a response to the Battalion. “In his letter, he called me a liar like Hitler,” Foox said. “My grandmother's family was all killed in the Holocaust. This has been very, very difficult.”
      Short denies he ever made the remark that "Hitler did not go far enough."
      “I was grossly misrepresented,” Short said in his tract. “The Holoocaust was a terrible evil. None of the victims of the Holocaust deserved to have been persecuted as they were.”
      Short's denial of his anti-Semitism is ridiculous, Myers said. “This guy is an obvious anti-Semite,” Myers said. “Anti-Semitism is the teaching of contempt. I can’t think of a better phrase for what Tom Short does. He teaches contempt. The Holocaust came out of that kind of behavior.”
      Short said he has suffered from misrepresentations of his statements on the A&M campus.
      Short’s tract contains the sentence, “Whoever rejects Jesus Christ will surely be damned.”
      “Why would anybody not be a Christian?” Short said. “God does not give us the option to believe differently.”
      Tarlow compared Short to Hezbollah, the Muslim terrorist group. “At least he’s an equal opportunity hater,” Tarlow said. “Gays are still his favorite group to bash. And I guess we [Jews] are No. 2. But he's also started to bash Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Catholics.”
      Tarlow said he advises his congregation to react to Short's attacks with dignity. “Don't lower yourself to his level,” Tarlow said. “You can't expect everyone to go around loving you, but you can expect a certain level of civility.
      “Tom Short went beyond that level of civility.”
      Myers and Tarlow both said they worry about the image Short and the A&M Christian Fellowship are giving the university.
      “He's an intolerant bigot,” Myers said. “He's unchristian. He teaches contempt for homosexuals, non-Christians, nonwhites, anyone who’s not like him.”
      Tarlow said Short's appearances on the A&M campus prove the campus is insensitive to Jews.
      “Are there people here who are ignorant? Yes,” Tarlow said. “Are people insensitive? Often. Is the campus racist or anti-Semitic? No. This is not by any means Berlin, 1939.”
      Eddie Vitulli, a junior horticulture major and A&M Christian Fellowship member, said he supports Short’s “message of truth.”
      “He's preaching the gospel the way it’s supposed to be preached,” Vitulli said. “There's nothing wrong with that.”
      Short said he is confident of the message he preaches.
      “Sure, God hates, absolutely,” Short said, “God does not say, ‘Believe what you want to believe, follow what you want to follow.’ ”The story doesn’t end there. After the A&M Christian Fellowship complained to the Battalion that Michael could not possibly be objective because he is gay, his story was killed—even though neither the paper’s editor nor its faculty adviser tried to demonstrate any lack of objectivity in the story itself. The principle was clear: a gay man was prohibited from reporting on an evangelical preacher who is anti-homosexual, even if there were no evidence the reporter’s sexual orientation affected his reporting in any way whatever. Robert Wegener, the faculty adviser, explained to Schaub that his story was not newsworthy, despite the rather striking appearance of an Orthodox Jew in the middle of an overwhelmingly Christian campus, swaying in a tallit just feet from an angry preacher who was denouncing him.

What did the Battalion consider newsworthy instead on the day when Michael’s story would have run? The paper’s lead story was headlined, Resurrection Week: Activities focus on outreach, and it began like this: “Easter weekend is approaching and Resurrection Week, a week that commemorates the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is here.” Later in the story, reporter Jackie Vratil writes without attribution: “People of all kinds come out and participate in Resurrection Week.” All the news that’s fit to print!

Although I petitioned and agitated the Texas A&M administration for redress of the patent discrimination against Michael by a faculty member and an official organ of the university, nothing was ever done. I was successful in enlisting the English and philosophy departments in our protest—perhaps the only time my colleagues in English ever followed my lead in anything—but the administration waited out the incident in unbroken silence and permitted the official silencing of a young gay man, to say nothing of an evangelical Christian group’s intimidation of the student newspaper, to go unchecked. The experience cemented Michael’s and my friendship. It also taught me that Kierkegaard was wrong in saying that prayer only changes the person offering the prayer. It can also change a public, even if it is barely audible and offered in protest.