Modern Library Revue: #22 Appointment in Samarra

Modern Library Revue
May 18, 2009 | 3 books mentioned 8 3 min read

Related Books:

coverFor no reason at all, I always thought this book was about horses and cavalry officers. (This is a good example of why, when you ask me a question and I answer, you should be careful to ascertain whether I know the answer, or if it’s just a feeling I have. Especially when I am giving you directions.) So, this novel, which I never wanted to read because I thought it was about horses, piqued my interest when I saw it mentioned in conjunction with Revolutionary Road (which I’ve yet to read) and forgotten novels about men feeling sad even though they have a lot of nice items in their homes. Because, rather than horses, that’s what Appointment in Samarra is about. It is about the nameless malaise of the moneyed man of the modern era – the madness which no Cadillac can assuage. And it’s about alcoholism. Two of your popular literary themes, really.

coverSo I read it, and it’s great. It’s like a lewd version of The Beautiful and Damned, but set in Pennsylvania, where people are slightly less fancy. The novel centers around Julian English, a cash-poor upper-cruster, who runs a Cadillac dealership. (Fitzgerald upper-crusters are too posh to even have jobs, let alone jobs in the automotive industry.) Julian drinks to excess with great frequency, and one day he throws a drink in a man’s face at the club, because the man is rich and fat and Irish Catholic and just de trop, somehow. And even though everyone in Gibbsville, PA is always doing grotesque drunken things at the club, this is for some reason the limit, and society begins to close ranks against Julian. After that, things go to complete shit very quickly. Julian, through desperation or madness or sheer orneriness, continues to behave badly, digging himself deeper with his peers and his wife, all the while drinking enough to kill an ox. At the end of the novel, his demise (figurative or literal, take your pick) is so inevitable it’s not even a spoiler. The title, taken from the epigraph, taken from Maugham, tells all.

Two things struck me about this book. One, it’s very spicy. I would imagine that it made an absolute scene upon its publication. The story talks a lot about all the fooling around that Julian and his wife Caroline did before they got married, and the romps they have after. It also talks about drunken foursomes, college girls “going the limit,” Parisian sex shows, men exposing themselves to helpless females, and “experienced” lady reporters. It’s the antidote to talking about the good old days when people cherished modesty.

coverSecondly, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this comparison, in addition to having obvious similarities with Fitzgerald (the man and the work), Appointment in Samarra is like a depression-era, mid-atlantic precursor to Under the Volcano. Not in its scope; Appointment in Samarra is a crude, meaningless sketch compared to the insanely complex (although perhaps equally meaningless) cosmologies that Malcolm Lowry wove together around Geoffrey Firmin. But the core of each novel is similar – the last day (or three) in the life of a man who is doomed. Each man (educated, posh), should be able to take himself in hand and pull himself together and stop drinking and stop perpetrating pointless cruelties on their respective wives, but they can’t, and they don’t, and you know they won’t from the first. They share the same fatal trajectory. But while Appointment in Samarra is easier and more fun to read, I thought Under the Volcano was sadder and better (so did the Modern Library, it seems); Firmin feels like a more real character, maybe because he was more of Lowry than English was of O’Hara. Or maybe because Lowry, a doomed, disastrous virtuoso, pulled himself together for one monumental achievement, while O’Hara, who sounds like a more garden-variety pain in the ass, managed to spread his talent out over a longer career. That’s just a feeling I have, though.

is a contributing editor at The Millions and the author of The Golden State. You can read more of her writing at www.lydiakiesling.com.

Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #19 Invisible Man

Modern Library Revue
March 31, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 3 7 min read


I recently read Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, in which she spoke with American Communists past and present (1977), and asked what they had to say about it all. Her accounts described people who were perpetually waiting for “the revolution around the corner”; eventually, the revolution proved to be too long in coming. In Gornick’s book, the power that Communism offered its adherents really came through, sometimes in a creepy way, as people described a willingness to abandon spouses and families in service of the party’s aims. But I don’t think I’ve read a book that better conveys the sheer ordering power of ideology, any ideology, than Invisible Man, wherein the advent of Communism, christened “The Brotherhood” by Ellison, actually has a perceptible effect on the novel’s form.

The first half of Invisible Man is meandering chaos as the narrator encounters people who hugely affect his movements in the near- and the long-term. Casting an eye around your frame of reference, you reach for comparable narratives, like the Odyssey or the Divine Comedy, where itinerant heroes have adventures, or bump into people and listen to them say astonishing things at length. But Invisible Man has something else going for it, a nightmarish sense of powerlessness. This is partially a function of events; nothing goes the way it is meant to for the narrator and, by extension, his reader. He is invited to deliver his graduation speech to a gathering of white town fathers, and instead gets thrown into the boxing ring with a bunch of other terrified black boys. At college, he is assigned to ferry around an important white benefactor, and by solicitously catering to the man’s whims, ends up in a black dive full of rioting mental patients and prostitutes. In this interlude I felt that molasses-like feeling characteristic of bad dreams. The narrative brilliantly impels anxiety through its disjointed quality, which it shares with one of Ellison’s great influences, “The Waste Land”:
“What is wrong with this gentleman, Sylvester?” the tall one said.

“A man’s dying outside!” I said.

“Yes, and it’s good to die beneath God’s great tent of sky.”

“He’s got to have some whiskey!”

“Oh, that’s different,” one of them said and they began pushing a path to the bar. “A last bright drink to keep the anguish down. Step aside, please!”
The narrator is then duly punished for letting the benefactor go astray. He is sent to New York, gets a job (no thanks to his evil college president), gets blown up, gets electrically lobotomized, and gets discharged back into the world without knowing his ass from his elbow:
Things whirled too fast around me. My mind went alternately bright and blank in slow rolling waves. We, he, him — my mind and I — were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either. Across the aisle a young platinum blond nibbled at a red Delicious apple as station lights rippled past behind her. The train plunged. I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem.
And then the Brotherhood appears, to bring order to the chaos. Discovering the narrator’s remarkable powers as an orator, they send him for his training in the science of social change. Maybe I’m imagining it all, but once I arrived at this point in the novel, I lost my sense of anxiety and impotence. Not only the substance of the narrator’s life, but the text itself, took a form I could more easily follow. That’s the beauty of Marx’s ideas; a man can get control over his own story.  Sooner or later, though, he will realize that someone else is writing the story for him: “The world was strange if you stopped to think about it; still it was a world that could be controlled by science, and the Brotherhood had both science and history under control.”

Soon, like many people in the twentieth century, the narrator finds that for all their science, the Brotherhood is thinking at a scale that has ceased to be relevant to the particular circumstances of men like him, or his Harlem neighbors, who worry about getting evicted or shot by the police. The people he calls “the transitory ones”:
…ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood — birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents. We who write no novels, histories or other books.
Reading Invisible Man, I thought about The Adventures of Augie March, which was published a year later, and which also describes meandering and haplessness in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Bellow and Ellison were friends and roommates, and their novels form a pair of sorts. But Bellow’s meanderings seem so often to lead to opportunity; they can be described as “rollicking.” In America it is the privilege of the white man to rollick, even if he is a poor Jew born into moderate squalor. The black man, in this novel at any rate, can only be fucked around; his hope, in this novel, is to discover his own way of doing things. I say “man” because a woman in this novel can only be fucked, full stop; she does haven’t much hope of decent treatment, by the novelist or anyone else. Too obscure for learned classification, women are chattel and bait.

I felt Ellison’s novel invited me to compare its narrator to Augie March and feel sorrowful for the injustice inherent in American life, but Ellison may have protested this. In his great essay “The World and the Jug,” a riposte to the critic Irving Howe, Ellison criticized Richard Wright for his belief in the novel as a weapon. “True novels,” Ellison wrote, “even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject.” And Invisible Man does end, somehow, on an affirmative note, even though the narrator is living underground and philosophizing from some kind of vast coal scuttle. The reader’s chaos and disorientation returns, but this time, things seem like they are in hand:
In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived…Thus having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
As with American Communism, there is something of a pall over Ellison’s legacy — a sense of things left undone, a general wanting in his solidarity with other black writers and intellectuals. He repudiated the influence of Wright on his literature, when Wright gave him his first leg up as a young writer. He is said to have taken a dim, threatened view of later generations of black writers. But it seems to me that Ellison, as a black writer, was never quite allowed, by himself or others, to relax comfortably into the quirky individuality, even dickishness, that was the birthright of his white authorial contemporaries.

Invisible Man was Ellison’s only novel, his other work a smattering of stories and essays. Among his essays, he is chiefly remembered for the aforementioned stirring and dramatic exchange with Howe, a white man who, evidently, was not expecting pushback when he praised, with offensive qualifications, Invisible Man in an essay about Richard Wright and James Baldwin:
What astonishes one most about Invisible Man is the apparent freedom it displays from the ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country — I say ‘apparent’ because the freedom is not quite so complete as the book’s admirers like to suppose. Still, for long stretches Invisible Man does escape the formulas of protest, local color, genre quaintness and jazz chatter.
Howe’s assessment of Black writing, as something dictated by the social conditions that “formed a constant pressure on his literary work…with a pain and ferocity that nothing could remove,” prompted an exchange that would go three rounds and would lead Ellison to lob this stinger: “Many of those who write of Negro life today seem to assume that as long as their hearts are in the right place they can be as arbitrary as they wish in their formulations.”  Referendums on the relative fairness of Ellison’s and Howe’s remarks continue to be published today.

I thought of Ellison when reading a modern-day exchange about race between public intellectuals — Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait. In a powerful essay in The Atlantic, Coates refutes the belief, shared by conservatives and progressives, in some derelict streak in black culture, and points instead to white supremacy as one of the “central organizing forces in American life.” In the context of Coates’s argument, Ellison might seem to willfully downplay this force, emphasizing in his response to Howe that his own influences took the form of Marx, Freud, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Hemingway, books which “were to release me from whatever ‘segregated’ idea I might have had of my human possibilities.” But in Coates’s piece I heard strong echoes of Ellison’s rejection of white attempts to universalize and pathologize the black experience, as here:
Oddly enough, I found it far less painful to have to move to the back of a Southern bus, or climb to the peanut gallery of a movie house — matters about which I could do nothing except walk, read, hunt, dance, sculpt, cultivate ideas, or seek other uses for my time — than to tolerate concepts which distorted the actual reality of my situation or my reactions to it…I could escape the reduction imposed by unjust laws and customs, but not that imposed by ideas which defined me as no more than the sum of those laws and customs.
While Ellison evidently wanted to be remembered more for his fierce advocacy of the individual and the artist and his need for representation — “All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority,” he once told The Paris Review — his writing to Howe here is a resonant comment on the right of people to say who they are, rather than be told. In this he speaks even for the obscure birds, those men out of time, about whom the Invisible Man asked in his thrilling final line: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you”?  And still today, people do not hear.

The review of Invisible Man in the New York Times began, amazingly, “Ralph Ellison’s first novel, ‘The Invisible Man,’ is the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read.” Ellison never completed his gargantuan second novel, Juneteenth, which was Frankensteined and published after his death to thin reviews. For whatever reason, he paid the cost of being, as he put it “an individual who aspires to conscious eloquence.” But if Invisible Man is the most fully-realized embodiment of your conscious eloquence, that’s a hell of a legacy. How else might that Times review have begun? “The most impressive work of fiction by an American”? It would not have been an audacious claim.

Modern Library Revue
| 3 books mentioned 3 7 min read
● ● ●
Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #36 All the King’s Men

Modern Library Revue
April 20, 2012 | 3 books mentioned 10 5 min read

The epigraph to All the King’s Men is from Purgatorio, which happens to be my personal favorite stop on Dante’s guided tour of the celestial realm. It is so favorite a favorite that I had one of its scenes, a somewhat impressionistic rendering of a Doré rendering, tattooed on my forearm in a fit of youthful bravado. (If I have any regrets about this, they are that I have only a dwindling supply of bravado, and only two arms, and only one life to encounter moving things and be altered by them for the duration.) Anyway, it’s an exceedingly helpful epigraph for reading this novel; once Dante has been invoked, he has a way of suffusing everything and providing a theme and trajectory to the work: down, and then up, up, up.

The Divine Comedy has a lot of politics in it, Guelphs and Ghibellines and so forth, because Dante was a political animal who went through the wringer and finally lived out his days in exile, a self-described “party of one.” After centuries, most of us read the poet’s verse and the footnotes prepared by dedicated historians and have only the vaguest sense of who everyone was. Still, we know that they are meaningful in their perdition or their grace.

Robert Penn Warren’s tortured narrator, Jack Burden, was a party of one if ever one there was: a failed law student, historian, journalist, henchman, ungentlemanly Southern gent. Like Dante, he is prone to sudden sleep and wandering into error. Warren evidently protested the designation, but I’ll allow that All the King’s Men is a novel about politics in the Dantean sense — politics happens in the story, Guelphs and Ghibellines and hicks and state power and porcine Duffy and inscrutable Stark. But it’s not Willie Stark who makes the lasting impression in this novel. It’s Jack Burden, party of one, who midway through the journey of his life finds himself in a dark wood, the right path lost. He is here to tell us about several generations of honor and shame, about soiling your good name and living, or not living, with the results. There is no one in this novel, save perhaps the long-suffering Lucy, who does not stain him or herself with some kind of wrong.

Dante was a party of one, but he was also a patriot, if we can try and understand the word outside of that dubious 19th-century invention, the nation state. Dante was a Florentine who loved his city; he celebrated and indicted it in his lovely poem in his beloved language. Reading All the King’s Men, I thought a lot about patriotism. This novel is written so beautifully, so stylishly, and feels so American — with all the muddled greatness and shittiness that descriptor implies — that my decrepit patriotism pricked up its ears like it sometimes does when I read a stunning novel about America, in fine American English.

After two foreign wars and all manner of troubling happenings on the domestic front, the thinking American, even while she tells herself that states are a construct, can find herself looking wistfully for uncontentious and productive symbols of homeland pride. In these moments, I settle on rock ‘n’ roll, because I believe that is a genuinely good American invention, one that people from other countries (with the exception of the squares and grumps who turn up in any society) have taken up with great gusto and badass results.

But then, if we work past the hugely powerful instinct to take national ownership in a thing, pride must be tempered by the fact that this American cultural good arose from an indelible stain upon our history. Put very simply, there would be no rock ‘n’ roll, no jazz, if there were no slaves in America. So you recalibrate your patriotic enthusiasm — rock music is a great good with a great evil woven into its roots.

All the King’s Men is a novel that puts shame front and center — personal shame, familial shame, state shame. And see in this novel, that other, larger shame: it’s a novel with “nigger” on the first page, its world reels from the sin of a woman sold down the river. Maybe it’s because the hot, schismatic South has ever had some kind of weird claim on Americanness, but there is something about All the King’s Men that like rock ‘n’ roll seems profoundly American, something paradoxical that makes a person feel like holding up her head about the accident of her citizenship to say, “We made this, so we can’t be all bad,” even while the thing in question in fact confirms that we can be and are that bad — on the national scale, on the universal scale, we’re that bad.

We’re that bad — but some of us can really write.

Can Robert Penn Warren ever write. He’s a poet, and his prose is full of poetry and swagger. It’s not a style I thought I favored; I think of my literary tastes, ironically, as running prim and anglophilic. But perhaps it’s not a style I favor only because it is often imitated, unwittingly or the reverse, with such excruciating results. There are rioting metaphors on every page; cliches lurk around every corner. A hometown hero, a depressive journalist, a yellowing diary, a buried secret, a war, a zaftig bivalvular ex-wife, all written so beautifully I can hardly stand it. My copy is dog-eared the whole way through, the better to find the remarkable passages that proliferate therein.
We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the summers before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been falling a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if had been a driven, needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like nothing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn’t like any of those kinds of rain. It was as though the sky had sagged down as low as possible and there were a universal leaking of bilge down through the black, gummy, dispirited air.
They flow like this, one after another, in a manner that sometimes sounds free-wheeling and unconstructed, like a drugstore poet shooting the breeze between sips from his soda pop. But try to write a letter and sound like Robert Penn Warren. Try to write a story.

I rejoice in this great American novel, a reminder of people’s capacity for those universal states, perdition and grace. Jack Burden says “what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost.” Jack Burden asks if we are only as a good as the worst thing we’ve ever done and we have to concede it is so. It is so, but there’s a chance of heaven yet. Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.

Modern Library Revue
| 3 books mentioned 10 5 min read
Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #38 Howards End

Modern Library Revue
May 27, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 4 6 min read


I borrowed Howards End from my local university library, an early edition in a sturdy and narrow-margined library binding. Pages from these kinds of books don’t tear — over half centuries and quarter centuries of tugging and smoothing and creasing by grubby fingers, they achieve a fine cloth-like texture that no e-reader can hope to replicate. I think that libraries are worth our patronage for the feeling of these pages alone. They are the impressions worn by feet on the path to the Parthenon. They are the pig’s teeth wedged in a wych-elm by superstitious peasants.

People who love books are always telling high school students that reading opens doors, that old books will surprise you with their sudden relevance, the startling light they can cast onto your own life. This is such a true thing about reading that it feels stupid to say of one or another book that it reminded you of a feeling you’ve had, or that its themes resonate in the present day.  On this front, Howards End should have lots to say to me. Like its Miss Schlegels, I am a bookish, opinionated lady with claims to progressive values. Like that of the Schlegels, my imperial nation is rife with inequality, class division, and economic precarity for the Leonard Bast class of people with aspirations but no advantages. Even the search for a suitable lodging is familiar: “We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.” There is much to which I can relate. But Howards End makes me think instead about things that are different and gone — farmland and buildings and ideals and ways of thinking and kinds of conversation and styles of beautiful writing.

There is a painful, almost superfluously beautiful quality to Forster’s writing that attracts me to this book even while I find that Forster’s class sensibility, fine as it is and perfect in Passage to India (revued here), ultimately can’t do the necessary and make Leonard Bast a real person. He dies, as he lived, a silly, pitiful, and unprepossessing little man. (This may be a failure of imagination on my end, but it is difficult to see how Helen Schlegel could be so susceptible to his obscure charm as to succumb utterly to it in a hotel sitting-room.)  But if Passage to India showed Forster at his most pointed about people, Howards End is his ode to places (and not only the place for which it is named):
Shropshire had not the reticence of Hertfordshire. Though robbed of half its magic by swift movement, it still conveyed the sense of hills…Having picked up another guest, they turned southward, avoiding the greater mountains, but conscious of an occasional summit, rounded and mild, whose colouring differed in quality from that of the lower earth, and whose contours altered more slowly. Quiet mysteries were in progress behind those tossing horizons: the West, as ever, was retreating with some secret which may not be worth the discovery, but which no practical man will ever discover.
Forster’s writing mixes poetry and aphorism in a way that makes whatever he writes sound totally convincing and meaningful, even if, for all I know, it is nonsense. Of Margaret Schlegel’s gradual retiring from society, he writes, “It was doubtless a pity not to keep up with Wedekind or John, but some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power.” Of life he writes, “It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.” People write in all kinds of good ways, but it is a tragedy that nobody writes like this anymore.

Howards End, published 1910, is technically a pre-war novel in the WWI sense, and it frequently invites you to think of it on those terms (“the remark, ‘England and Germany are bound to fight,’ renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation”). A few years later, the stolid Wilcox men who form the upstanding backbone of British society in Margaret’s perception would be largely unavailable for theoretical debates with liberated young women; they would likely be dead, along with nearly a million of their compatriots, or maimed, along with the rest.

That said, another book in my pile this spring had me thinking about a different war. Just after Howards End I read W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, a book whose construction around a portentous negative space has the effect of drawing all neighboring books into its central darkness, like a dying star. Everything becomes tinged with this darkness. (I have also been working through the novels of Anita Brookner, many of which feature Jews so thoroughly English that their eastern European origins signify only as a piece of ponderous furniture or a grandmother’s accent, and I began to wonder if these novels, too — if all novels — are actually about the Holocaust.)

And yet Austerlitz and the second World War seemed to form a fitting complement to Howards End — the latter’s interest in civilization and the built environment and the natural world and material culture slotting into Sebald’s voids in the same realms. The character Austerlitz has spent in his life in “investigations into the history of architecture and civilization,” and the novel Austerlitz is full of symbolic architectural monstrosities — “the accumulation of stone blocks” — and spaces stuffed with meaning. The novel’s narrator describes London, its “districts…crisscrossed by innumerable streets and railway lines, crowding ever more closely together as they marched east and north, one reef of buildings above the next and then the next, and so on, far beyond Holloway and Highbury…” I was reminded of Margaret Schlegel’s similar impression of London as she puzzles through her sister Helen’s disappearance: “The mask fell off the city, and she saw it for what it really is — a caricature of infinity…” She searches in St. Paul’s, “whose dome stands out of the welter so bravely, as if preaching the gospel. But within, St. Paul’s is as its surroundings — echoes and whispers, inaudible songs, invisible mosaics, wet footmarks crossing and recrossing the floor. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: it points us back to London.”

I didn’t see clearly what a tender and hopeful book Howards End is until I read Austerlitz. And a sad one. It’s a prelapsarian mirror image. How devastating Forster’s observation about the “civilisation of luggage” becomes when you consider the eventual mounds of plundered luggage sitting in warehouses around Europe. Or Mrs. Wilcox’s lament: “Can what they call civilisation be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?” How poignant half-German Margaret is, with her belief in the “salvation that was latent…in the soul of every man.” How sad to contemplate her mantra, “Only connect,” in the context of Austerlitz’s dead mama and papa and his abrupt transformation to a little Welsh boy. How sentimental Forster seems when he writes that:
London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilisation which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!
I have always found there to be something lumpy and friendly and comforting about Howards End — it’s like a big, old sweater. But I see that there is something a little weird about that. I yank it away from Austerlitz’s gravitational pull, and I don’t quite see now why it should feel like such a hopeful, tender, happy novel, when it leaves a dead man and an imprisoned man and a crumpled man in its wake. Perhaps because it’s sort of a feminine triumphal. Fighting for her right to spend the night with her pregnant sister in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel delivers the most just and crushing indictment of misogyny and the double standard ever written. And she gets her way, and the dead Mrs. Wilcox gets her way, and the men die or are locked up or have a nervous breakdown, each condition divesting its victim of all former imperiousness and other unsavory qualities. The women win, and they get their beautifully cozy pastoral unwed mothers’ commune, an easy distance from London. They found a Home, and they will “create new sanctities” in it. It does sound nice.

In my sturdy library copy, generations of readers have penciled their notes and little stars. I tip my hat to the analytical one, a Marxist no doubt, who helped me to see that Leonard Bast’s ignorance of the Sunday paper signified “commodifying, economizing knowledge at every turn!” I raise a glass to the one who wrote of Leonard’s meager dwelling that it is “projected fake, shallow, comme moi!” I applaud the one who pointed out succinctly on the penultimate page that Margaret’s husband “becomes a pussy.” We are all more alike than we are different.

Only connect, and all that.

 

Modern Library Revue
| 3 books mentioned 4 6 min read
● ●
Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #26 The Wings of the Dove

Modern Library Revue
November 5, 2013 | 3 books mentioned 16 8 min read

I have tried several times to read The Wings of the Dove and always stalled somewhere around page 30, when Kate Croy and Merton Densher meet in Kensington Gardens. A couple of months ago, after spending my summer reading back-to-back Stephen King novels, I was restlessly scanning the bookshelf for something new and experienced the intellectual version of the thing where anemic people yearn to eat dirt. I had surfeited myself on easy reading; my brain, sensing the slow atrophying and death of its parts, compelled me to reach for Henry James, and together we chugged right through the gate of Kensington Gardens and all the way to the end. When you’re ready, you’re ready.

I was so ready to read The Wings of the Dove that it caused me to have a mystical experience of the sort typically associated with psychotropic drugs. Let’s say that my previous efforts with this book were equivalent to the disappointing herbal cigarette from a store called Groovy Vibes, or a bag of mulch obtained at the concert from someone’s questionable cousin. But this time I got, so to speak, the good shit. You eat the Henry James mushrooms, you look upon his dense thicket of sentences, his plodding parade of commas, and suddenly the text, and the entire world, come into insane focus. The mere act of securing myself a sour-smelling BART seat and opening the paperback was enough, for the two weeks it took me to finish the novel, to return me to this heightened state.

As it happened, reading The Wings of the Dove coincided with a breakthrough in my note-taking. Rather than trying to hold my book and write out long quotations on the train, rather than snapping acid-weakened corners with excessive dog-earing, I realized that it’s possible to take a picture of the choice passage with my spiffy phone. Since discovering this tactic I have used it to very good effect with some books. However, when my consciousness-elevating sojourn with Henry James ended, I was confronted with nearly a hundred photos of pages — a mute and largely meaningless mosaic of text and image like an ill-considered senior art project. Looking at them now is like reading the mad scrawl of someone who has actually taken drugs. Perusing these “notes,” all I can  hope for are a few good flashbacks.

Flipping hopelessly through the Henry James digital photo album, I find that some of my choice passages retain the startling magic that I felt during my trip. Some of them, in fact, leave me with the distinct impression that there is actually something a little bit trippy about Henry James. Kate’s beau Merton Densher, a journalist without enough money to be a suitable husband, is offered the chance to go to America and write a series of society dispatches for his paper; the advent of this opportunity is described as an “imprisoned thought” that “had, in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into Densher’s face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up in surprise from his mere inky office-table.” I see the imprisoned thought like a friendly little pterodactyl, the inky table, Densher looking up with a charming startled look on his guileless face (specifically, I see a young Daniel Day Lewis, as directed by Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola).

(If Henry James wasn’t the originator of the vision of hope as “the thing with feathers,” he certainly made something of it with all his lovely winged things. Here’s Mrs. Stringham, the companion of a young heiress named Milly Theale, when they first form their connection: “But this imagination — the fancy of a possible link with the remarkable young thing from New York — had mustered courage: had perched, on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later, it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.”)

As far as I know, the major complaint about Henry James is that he is insanely boring. But if you look at him the right way you understand that he is just relentlessly attuned to the dimensions of moments and thoughts, like people on drugs, or teenagers, or neurotic adults. It is easy to miss this when you are busy being grumpy about the incomprehensible passages that pop up all over:
Not to talk of what they might have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner; they took precautions of a courtesy that they had formerly left to come of itself; often when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking off, with the aftersense of their change.
I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but squinted at in just the right way, some passages reminded me a bit of Tao Lin’s Taipei, a book I am on the record as finding abhorrent. Here, when Kate thinks about her sister, who made an undistinguished marriage and is now saddled with undistinguished widowhood: “She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain, prosaic result of him, as if she had somehow been pulled through him as through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and with nothing in her but what he accounted for.” How, when I loathe the style of Tao Lin, can I see him preordained in a book I found so stirring? Some of it is merely coincidence, the deployment of similar analogy and rhythm, as here in Taipei: “He imagined his trajectory as a vacuum-sealed tube, into which he’d arrived and through which — traveling alone in the vacuum-sealed tube of his own life — he’d be suctioned and from which he’d exit, as a successful delivery to some unimaginable recipient.”

I think, though, that while there is a universe separating their prose, Henry James wields a real-time emotional barometer in the way that Tao Lin strives to do. The difference is that Tao Lin’s project is concerned only with the measurements of one person. Perhaps this is a more honest project, if we are to concede, à la Conrad, that life is ultimately a solo enterprise. But this can be such a limiting approach. In The Wings of the Dove, James devotes his prodigious abilities to the group, so that we feel, more or less, the preoccupations of Kate, of Merton, of the mysteriously ailing Milly, of her anxious minder Susan Stringham. James also manages to show the gulf that exists in human consciousness between certain hard revelations about the self and deeper, damning truths still unplumbed:
[Kate] saw as she had never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she blushed to see, that if, in contrast with some of its old aspects, life now affected her as a dress successfully “done up,” this was exactly by reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources.
Kate sees this, but she doesn’t see the way that this relatively common and redeemable “accessibility” to material things will cause her in the end to do something irredeemable. James scrupulously describes his characters while still managing to leave the impression of a final veil separating each person from what they really think of themselves, and one another.

Another key difference between James and Lin is that, if James, like Lin, has you living so much in the moment and inside the minds of his characters, his moments are all of them in service to a story. James strikes me as very bold and modern in his approach to the novel, but he does not abandon plot as a critical component of the form. When we learn about Kate’s knowledge of her own weakness for the finer things above, it is as critical a plot-point as Milly’s wealth, described inimitably thus:
…it was in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off…it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had mechanically possessed herself. She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried — that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were.
And the plot is a real doozy. Poor Kate with a dead mother and unsuitable father, taken in by a rich aunt, who forbids her marrying poor Merton even as the aunt finds Merton a charming companion. Merton goes to America, meets heiress. Heiress falls for Merton, which may or may not be a result of Merton’s excessive attentions. Heiress meets lady writer. Lady writer falls for heiress. Heiress and lady writer go to England, and meet Kate and Aunt. Heiress is discovered to have unnamed fatal disease with very few symptoms. Kate convinces Merton to woo heiress, even to marry her, so as to get her money. Merton demands sex in exchange for his promise. How did these nice people go so wrong? How will it end?

Another surprise, considering my earlier struggles with Henry James: this is actually a very sexy book. It’s a canard of old people that entertainment of yesteryear had a kind of chaste sexiness that you just don’t see today, when TV is a riot of exposed jugs and racy language. Usually I am inclined to disagree; the old movies that are allegedly sexy always just leave me feeling desolate over the thinness of Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman, unmoved by Cary Grant, and wondering if people used to go all the way to fourth base while exclusively doing close-mouthed kissing. But Wings of the Dove is such a suggestive book that if two characters had even the briefest conversation I fancied that they then ravished one another on a credenza. As Merton returns to London from New York, he yearns for Kate: “His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.”

Once Kate and Merton are reunited, this “particular necessity” remains unmet in a spicy way:
If Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house, there would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps, one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion. She would have shaken her head — oh sadly, divinely — on the question of coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word, at a time, could reach.
When Merton finally understands the full extent of Kate’s plot — that he should lay hold to Milly’s fortune by marrying her before she dies, he is by then so full of unrelieved passion that he will do anything:
…he passed his hand into her arm with a force that produced for them another pause. “I’ll tell any lie you want, any your idea requires, if you’ll only come to me.”

“Come to you?” She spoke low.

“Come to me.”
Very few people really come out well in this novel, but there is still sympathy to go around. How awful to be Kate and belong to the chattel sex; for your earthly comfort to be tied up with the whims of your benevolent relative; how awful to have been brought up with fancies and expectations you can ill-afford, ill-equipped to earn a living. How sad for sex to be your only bargaining chip, so that when it’s gone you’ve got nothing left to trade. How sad to be Merton Densher, with an excess of chivalry deployed only when it’s too late. And how sad, of course, to be Milly, to be so young and rich and lovely, and dying and preyed-upon.

Just like you have to exercise your idiom when you’ve spent the summer devouring beach reads, you have to exercise your emotional register. When you are in a state of placidity, you must remind yourself of the way that it is possible to feel like a giant, throbbing nerve. But if mushrooms leave you fetal in a corner, if you’re too old for MDMA, thrill-seek with Henry James. He is there to remind you that every conversation, every interaction shared among human beings, is multidimensional and freighted with meaning.

Modern Library Revue
| 3 books mentioned 16 8 min read
● ● ●

8 comments:

  1. I've noticed that over the last few months this site has started to resemble a high school English class in regard to the books that it discusses and champions, which makes me feel like I want to delete it from my bookmarks. Actually, I think I will. I don't see the point of coming here anymore. Maybe I will check back in at the end of the year to see if your aversion to contemporary fiction, both domestic and foreign, has waned. I doubt it will, though. This site seems to be stuck in the past, dissecting corpses that have already been picked clean. Have fun.

  2. Anonymous, I know your IP address well, and if you removing us from your bookmarks means I won't have to delete your often rude comments, that's just fine with me. Since the above comment is about as close to civil as your comments have ever been, however, I'll leave it up for posterity.

  4. Wow, I love comment drama! You tell him/her, Max! And I feel sort of annoyed, because didn't I **just** interview Joe Meno about his book The Great Perhaps which came out **this** month of **this** year? If that's not contemporary, I don't know what is. Geeze!

  5. If I didn't comment on your site you wouldn't have hardly any comments. And you know my IP address? Ohhhhh nooooo! Are you going to send the Internet Police to come and take away my computer? You know, short of a death threat or something insidious like that, rude, agressive comments are par for the course. I've also left a lot of nice comments. If you don't want the rabble commenting on your site then you should put a velvet rope around it.

  6. My point isn't that I could or would track you down (though I do know where you work). I have much better things to do with my time than try to track down an Anonymous internet hater. My point is that whenever we get an obnoxious comment, it traces back to you (and I know this because of your IP and the way you attempt to wield your words like blunt objects). If you disagree with what we're doing here, why don't you try participating in a constructive conversation about it. We're nothing if not receptive to our readers, whose ideas drive much of the content on the site. And furthermore, as Edan pointed out, your complaint is borderline ludicrous. Nowhere have we ever written that The Millions' mission is to cover literary fiction exclusively. In the last 24 hours alone we've run a post that's gotten over a dozen comments and we've offered a unique look at a highly anticipated work of literary fiction… Your problem is what exactly?

  7. I for one find it refreshing that a blog devotes this kind of space (increasingly more precious in the digital medium, considering the attention span of most blog readers) to revisit minor classics. Anonymous, to readers who appreciate good writing, being "stuck in the past" is not something that invites derision. The reason we still talk about novels that were written before you were a twinkle in your daddy's eye is because they invite a renewed and earnest (key word there) dialogue. I happen to enjoy the fact that the Millions often suggests a tone that you characterize as "high school English class." It reminds me that there are others out there equally engaged in sifting through an historically vast literary landscape and constantly finding something that demands to be discussed anew.
    P.S. If you had at some point attended the aforementioned high school English class, you might remember that it's "with regard" and not "in regard."

  8. Ha! Not to mention: "…wouldn't have hardly any…" and "agressive." Perhaps Anonymous the First should crack open a literary "corpse" or two and improve his/her language skills.

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #71 A High Wind in Jamaica

Modern Library Revue
May 19, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 11 4 min read

I had no notion of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica before I read it.  I had never even heard of it before I saw it on the Modern Library list, which is unusual in that the Modern Library list is full of known, if unplumbed, quantities.  I’ve encountered no reference, read no synopsis, skipped no assignment, endured no cringing moment with the combative, be-sideburned, aesthete of my nightmares.  So I was very curious, and after months spent in an (admittedly low-grade) fever of anticipation, when it arrived in its plain brown wrapper I fell upon it, and read it right away.

I want not to resort to the repellent vernacular of the internet meme, but my reaction to the book is difficult to express otherwise, so,

Wow.  Just….wow.

This is a nasty, wicked little book.  It’s wonderful.

Maybe everyone knows about this book already, the plot I mean, and I just missed that page in the dictionary of cultural literacy.  For those of you who were likewise not hip to the dark magic of this novel, it’s about a group of children on a pirate ship in the Caribbean.  Which it makes it sound like a fairy tale, a riff on Peter Pan.  When I read the introduction to my copy I thought, “This sounds ludicrous.”  And it sort of is ludicrous.  But rather than weave a swashbuckler about cutlass-wielding badduns, Richard Hughes made his pirates real men–weak, minor, foolish villains who nonetheless make (sometimes) fairly decent nannies.

A great feature of the book (oddly like To the Lighthouse in this regard), is the almost parenthetical, and thus hugely shocking, treatment of important and horrifying events.  So I can’t tell you about specific goings-on.  I will tell you that the story opens, titularly, in Jamaica, where things are colonially swampy and humid and decrepit, with excessive foliage and rotting aristocracy and covert racial violence.  The fecundity is palpable–the seen-better-days Britishers have five children, and vicious cats abound.  And then, through this corrupt Eden a destroying wind blows.  The children are sent off to England, and safety.

Enter pirates.

These pirates!  These children!  Separately and in concert, they are, sometimes, unbearably cute.  The children become friends with the ship’s pig:

They grew very fond of him indeed (especially Emily), and called him their Dear Love, their Only Dear, their Own True Heart, and other names.  But he had only two things he ever said.  When his back was being scratched he enunciated an occasional soft and happy grunt . . . When a particularly heavy lot of children sat down on him at once, he uttered the faintest ghost of a little moan, as affecting as the wind in a very distant chimney, as if the air in him was being squeezed out through a pin-hole.

One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.

‘If I was the Queen,’ said Emily, ‘I should most certainly have a pig for a throne.’

‘Perhaps she has,’ suggested Harry.

‘He does like being scratched,’ she added presently in a very sentimental tone, as she rubbed his scurfy back.

The mate was watching:

‘I should think you’d like being scratched, if your skin was in that condition!’

‘Oh how disgusting you are!’ cried Emily, delighted.

But the idea took root:

‘I don’t think I should kiss him quite so much if I was you,’ Emily presently advised Laura, who was lying with her arms tight round his neck and covering his briny snout with kisses from ring to ears.

‘My pet! My love!’ murmured Laura, by way of indirect protest.

The wily mate had foreseen that some estrangement would be necessary, if they were ever to have fresh pork served without salt tears. He intended this to be the thin end of the wedge. But alas! Laura’s mind was as humoursome an instrument to play as the Twenty-three-stringed Lute.

Richard Hughes knew what he was about with this cuteness; in a 1969 New Yorker interview he describes borrowing the various children of his friends (which included Robert Graves, according to the introduction to my copy), for research.  “Children are vulnerable, like pirates,” he remarks, and in this novel he exploits their respective vulnerabilities with great tendresse.  But the inane, creepily accurate patter of the children, and the farcical Mr. Mom-style antics of the pirates are the ground beneath which hums a constant current of anxiety, a current that flares without warning into terror, disgust, and profound sadness.  For every charming vignette–the children’s conflation of “pirate” with “pilot,” for example, or the Captain admonishing them about the precarious state of their drawers–there is an element of horror.  Sexuality and perjury and murder.  And that’s just the pirates.  The responsible adults fail to pass muster, in different ways.

To be sure, there are few ways to interpret kidnapping.  No one is inclined to be sympathetic to the vicious pirates who have ensnared the young.  But there is something shameful and perverse in the adults’ (the regular adults’, I should say) bloodlust, their fixation on the lascivious details of captivity.  Miss Dawson, the refined young woman who takes Emily in hand upon the children’s rescue, presses her for details on their bondage.  “She saw that Emily did not want to talk about the horrors she had been through: but considered it far better that she should be made to talk than that she should brood over them in secret.”  Young miss imagines the children “Chained, probably, down there in the darkness like blacks, with rats running over them, fed on bread and water.”  To divert Emily, she “took her down to her cabin and showed her all her clothes, every single item–it took hours.”

I left A High Wind in Jamaica feeling sad about the great adult poverty of understanding–the gulf between us and our childhood selves and one another, and our fragile grip on reality. It’s not that children are special pure angels, “If we saw the world through their eyes there would be no wars” and that kind of drivel.  I read Lord of the Flies.  And Hughes’ children at their best are charming rather than lovable, and at their worst they are vile.  But this novel does not reassure us that children grow up to be good and noble.  In Hughes’ bright, cynical light, the great institution Adulthood is revealed too as a load of rubbish.  It’s bracing, actually, his cynicism; it’s a wry and unusual vintage.  This novel is not uplifting, but it’s very good.

Modern Library Revue
| 3 books mentioned 11 4 min read
● ● ●
● ●
● ● ●