On the Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men and Women

Essays
August 13, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 36 7 min read

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“You should sign up for this,” my sister said, showing me an article about a bookstore that doubles as a matchmaking service. At the Brooklyn indie, lovelorn bookworms choose their prospective romantic interests based on their list of favorite authors pinned to a cork board. The article went on to point out that women never wrote down Jack Kerouac as one of their coveted authors.

My decade-long enamor with the poets and writers of the Beat Generation was about to pay off. As the only woman who adored Kerouac, I would be the vixen of the literary matchmaking board.

covercoverNow, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a girly girl. My regular weekend activity includes clothes shopping, I feel naked without nail polish on, and my favorite color is pink. In fact, it was while reading the fashion magazine Seventeen my senior year of high school that I stumbled upon a mention of Ann Charters’s The Portable Beat Reader and quickly became obsessed with all things Beat related. After reading Jack Kerouac’s road-trip novel On the Road, it only seemed natural to pack my bags and move across the country for college. As Kerouac wrote, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

coverWhile attending Scripps, a women’s college in Southern California, my interest in Beat literature grew as I went on a San Francisco pilgrimage to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, infamous for its involvement in the obscenity trial over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. When I returned, diploma in hand, to the East Coast, I attended talks by Beat writers at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. I tucked Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage,” in which he asks “Should I get married? Should I be good?” into my heart. That would be the poem I want read at my wedding, I thought. When I read On the Road, I connected to Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, shambling after friends, being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening, seeing beauty in the mundane, and hitting the road in his eternal quest for meaning — topics I thought both men and women could relate to.

Until my sister showed me the matchmaking article, it had never occurred to me that the author of On the Road could be a cement divider on Lover’s Lane. I had met guys who’d been inspired by Kerouac. They thrilled at the freedom of stuffing beef jerky in a backpack, wearing the same band t-shirt for days, and hitting the road with no plan but more life experience. It’s true I didn’t personally know any women who admired Kerouac, but I figured he just wasn’t on their radar since fifty years had passed since On the Road was published. There were plenty of women I knew through books who had loved Kerouac — women like Edie Parker-Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, and Helen Weaver, who wrote memoirs about their romances with Kerouac. Overcome with his prose prowess as I was, it was easy to overlook the parts that weren’t exactly rom-com material — the failed marriages, the refusal to acknowledge his own daughter, the fact that he lived with his mother until the day he died — particularly since I didn’t read his novels as love stories but as poetic travelogues.

Then I encountered a woman who openly disdained Kerouac — and all that he seemed to represent. It occurred to me that women saw him as a misogynist vagabond, the bad boy who had left their broken hearts in a trail of exhaust fumes. He didn’t like being tied down by responsibilities, or women. Perhaps those female readers who actually did like his writing feared adding Kerouac to their list of favorite authors for a literary matchmaking board because they didn’t want to end up with someone like him: a penniless drifter, a dreamer, an alcoholic.

coverIf I am to be terribly stereotypical, I’d say the literary crush I hear most women talk about is Mr. Darcy, the cute fixer-upper worth the effort because of his money and social standing. Sure, maybe he’s a bit aloof at first, but in the end Mr. Darcy’ll put a ring on it. Of course, dating-savvy women wouldn’t necessarily include Jane Austen as their favorite author for the literary matchmaking board: they’re smart enough to know they might scare off potential male suitors if they implied they enjoy staying in on a Friday night to watch BBC films on television, possibly having to get out the smelling salts during the “pond scene” in Pride and Prejudice.

Instead, women might disclose preferences for less polarizing authors. Female authors would be perfectly acceptable to list, so long as they’re “serious” or witty authors like Toni Morrison, Tina Fey, and Jennifer Egan — and not authors whose books feature shopping bags, pearl necklaces, or candy hearts on the covers. Words like “wedding” and “feminist” probably shouldn’t be anywhere in the title either. There’s nothing wrong with reading these books — in fact, wanting to get married and being treated as equal are both positive desires — it’s just that, well, if on your first date you wouldn’t bring up the number of kids you want to have (unless, of course, you’re on The Bachelorette), then you also would probably subtly edit your reading tastes when you know you’re being judged by them. Like with clothing, it’s best to leave a little mystery.

Men’s disinterest in Austen and other female authors has, of course, been its own cause for consideration. Last year, in an article entitled “Men Need Only Read Books by Other Men, Esquire Post Suggests,” The Atlantic Wire rightly took issue with the fact that only one female author was listed in Esquire’s “75 Books Men Should Read.” However, guess which male author The Atlantic Wire specifically mentions, as if he is the driving force behind men’s exclusion of female writers: “hard-living, macho writers like…Jack Kerouac.” Interesting. I would have called him a life-affirming, sensitive author. It was Kerouac, after all, who wrote, “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

In the past few years, culture critics have speculated that in general men read less than women and that specifically they don’t read much fiction — Kerouac presumably excluded. It appears, then, that men and women read quite differently. If men are more likely to read nonfiction, it seems likely that men are reading to obtain information. In contrast, women maybe read fiction for the entertainment of a character-driven story. And this is where it gets interesting. Every so often, social debates arise whether women are more “sympathetic” than men, “sympathetic” being defined by dictionary.com as “acting or affected by, of the nature of, or pertaining to a special affinity or mutual relationship.” If it is true that women are more sympathetic, either because of their genetic makeup or because they have been conditioned to be so, then perhaps women read relationally, placing themselves within the story. It would be natural then for female readers to cast themselves as the female characters instead of the male characters. In a work written by a man, the female character is usually going to be the subject of the male gaze. If that work happens to be On the Road, you’re going to end up with women like Marylou and Camille, flat characters being two-timed by hyperactive car-thief Dean Moriarty. It’s no wonder then that many women, even when they put his personal lives aside, don’t relate to Kerouac’s writing.

I don’t believe all women — or all men — think and act and read the same way, though. I never automatically put myself in the stilettos of the female character in a book. I read On the Road through the eyes of the eager narrator, Sal Paradise. Even if I didn’t agree with his every action, I desired Kerouac’s joie de vivre.

More than that, I was also the narrator of my own story, my own life. After reading Kerouac, I became the one dashing out the door for my next adventure. If I had a week off of work and wanted to take a vacation, I packed my bags and hopped on a bus or a plane. I took a Greyhound across the United States. I saw Stonehenge. I visited shrines in Kyoto. And I did it by myself, sometimes couch-surfing with friends who lived near my chosen destination before venturing off on my own to a hostel.

I was never looking for someone to jumpstart my story, to open the car door for me, to give me permission to do something. It didn’t occur to me that I needed a boyfriend or even a friend to accompany me to art galleries or readings or to make my life full. I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac. And so I never signed up for the matchmaking board. I didn’t believe in lonely nights. I was a reader. If I wanted company, all I had to do was pick up a book — or my car keys.

Image via [email protected]/Flickr

(www.stephanienikolopoulos.com) is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Essays The Millions Interview

Borges, Burgin, and Infinity

Essays The Millions Interview
February 10, 2017 | 4 books mentioned 2 8 min read
1. The first thing you notice is the books. They line the walls of Richard Burgin’s house. His large foyer is uncluttered and, one gets the sense, rarely used. But just beyond that is a room with a large desk against one wall, a piano against the other. Stacks spill over from all sides of the bookshelves: a Japanese translation of one of Burgin’s books, a candid photo of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a poster in French for a reading Burgin gave in Paris in 2011. This is all evidence of an eclectic, accomplished life. The life is also an eccentric one. Burgin, who has authored nineteen books, does not use a computer. Every few weeks an assistant takes his spiral notebooks of prose and types them into word documents. He’s never learned to drive a car. He’s intrigued by technology but not adept at its use. He occasionally has to call his assistant and ask that she log into his NetZero account and read him his emails remotely. Back in his 20s in New York, he once invited his literary friends to an apartment party but on the day of the gathering a romantic entanglement in Boston caused him to miss his flight home. He called a neighbor who had a spare key to his apartment and asked him to leave the door open. Burgin later heard his party had been a hit. Ask Burgin when his life in letters began, and he’ll tell you that an early pivotal moment was as an undergraduate in a Spanish class at Brandeis University when he was assigned “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. This was 1967. Borges was read widely in Latin America and Europe, but much of what would make him famous in the United States was not yet widely available in English. “The Aleph” rearranged Burgin’s conscious the way a grenade could be said to rearrange a room. The story, like most of Borges’ work, is fantastical. Its protagonist seeks to write a poem that describes every square inch of the entire planet down to the minutest detail. To do this he utilizes an object called the Aleph, through which he can see everywhere at once. Even if one were able to experience the infinite, the story posits, it would be impossible to convey this experience to another human. Infinity is therefore linked to isolation, and it was this perspective on infinity that most fascinated Burgin. Within weeks he’d read everything else Borges had written that had been translated to English. He considered Borges a literary god. This reaction to Borges had everything to do with the fact that Burgin, only twenty, had already been contemplating the idea of infinity for several years. 2. Burgin’s parents were both child music prodigies. His mother, Ruth Posselt, was a violin soloist and his father (also Richard) served as concertmaster for 42 years for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Burgin’s father used to tell his son that art is the last illusion. He said that artists who acted as if their work would be remembered after their death were fooling themselves. Maybe someone’s work would last a hundred years but not five hundred, not a millennium. It won’t last forever. Artists delude themselves about the impermanence and importance of their work. What artists make isn’t going to endure. It’s not the usual fodder of father-son chats, but Burgin’s father was nothing if not a serious man. And Burgin felt his father had a point. He’d always been a voracious reader and, even as a young man, it irked him that this fundamental truth of artistic mortality went unacknowledged in fiction. The avoidance of the topic seemed proof that art was, as his father said, all based on a lie. Burgin came to think of this as the conundrum of infinity. Then Borges appeared. Finally, Burgin thought, someone writing about the conundrum, rather than writing around it. Then, while Burgin was still an undergraduate, Borges accepted the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, which was only a twenty-minute drive from Brandeis. Upon hearing the news, Burgin was so ecstatic that he ran without stopping all the way from Harvard Square to his student housing in Central Square a mile away. It was a spring day, the warming weather lent itself well to optimism. He’d spend the summer preparing for Borges’ arrival. 3. “These were the days when people still listed their numbers,” Burgin says. “Writers, even famous ones, didn’t hide behind answering machines and caller ID.” As part of the Harvard fellowship, Borges would give six public lectures in Boston -- but Burgin wasn’t content to be only a spectator. He called Borges one afternoon and though Burgin’s memory of that initial conversation is clouded by the excitement he felt at the time, whatever introduction he made worked. He and Borges set a date for a drink. Burgin first laid eyes on the man through a window on the ground floor of the building where Borges was staying. The 67-year-old was being helped into an elevator. He walked with a cane. But despite his age and being nearly completely blind, Borges exuded an easy gravitas. His genius was palpable. He put those around him at ease. As a gift that first meeting Burgin brought a vinyl recording of Bach’s fourth and fifth Brandenburg concertos on which his father played violin. Burgin wrote about this first meeting: “[Borges] always makes you feel that it is he who is the grateful one, and that your company is the only gift he needs.” What blossomed that first meeting wasn’t a friendship, per se, but Burgin was invited back. For the second meeting he brought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, hoping to save some of Borges’s words and create an audio souvenir. The second meeting went as well as the first. The two men discussed Borges’s stories, of which Burgin had a near encyclopedic knowledge. Back at his apartment, listening to the tapes, Burgin realized that Borges’ words, even in casual conversation, were art. The realization led Burgin to subsequent meetings, which he again recorded. Burgin transcribed by hand the interviews and compiled them into a book, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, published in 1969. The book runs 150 pages and covers Borges’ thoughts on a host of writers, from Henry James to Kafka to Sartre. He discusses the bombing of Hiroshima and the Nazis. He talks with Burgin about the problem of time and, of course, infinity. The timing of Conversations could not have been better. More of Borges’ works were becoming available in English. Literary Americans were becoming Borges fanatics and regarded Burgin’s book as an important contribution to the understanding of this new preeminent voice in world literature. Borges is accessible, but he is also an endless riddle. Reading Borges tends to begat reading more Borges which eventually leads to reading about him in hopes of finding something that will explain the mind from where it all comes. At the time of its publication, Burgin’s book was practically the only book in English about the Argentinian. It sold well for a book of its kind. It was reviewed positively in Harper’s and The New Yorker and many other outlets. The New York Times ran two pieces on it, one in the daily and the other in the Sunday book review. In 1969, Burgin was only 21, less than a year out of college. “I thought it would always be that easy,” Burgin says. His next book would take him fifteen years. 4. After Boston, Burgin lived in New York before moving to Philadelphia, where he taught at Drexel University. At Drexel he founded Boulevard, an internationally distributed literary magazine currently in its thirty-second year of publication. John Updike, John Ashberry and Singer were in early issues, Joyce Carol Oates in its most recent. Former U.S. Poet laureates Charles Simic and Billy Collins are frequent contributors. In 1996, the magazine moved from Philadelphia to St. Louis when Burgin took a teaching job at St. Louis University. Ranking literary magazines is a fickle business, but on most lists of journals Boulevard can typically be found somewhere in the top twenty. Fifteen years after Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, Burgin published his second book, also a book of interviews. This time they were with Singer, who had won the Nobel Prize several years earlier. Burgin’s first book of short fiction, Man Without Memory, came out later in the eighties, and the nineties saw two more collections and a novel. He’s published steadily since. Several of his stories have won prizes. He composed music prolifically. His career is a success by any reasonable measure. Still, if you talk to him long enough he’ll mention that none of his books were ever picked up by a big New York publishing house, that innovations in individual stories were never recognized by the literary establishment. None of his books of fiction got the attention that the Borges book did. But, he says with a smile, “I’ve never met a writer who feels like he or she got as much as they deserved.” You get the sense that this lack of recognition gnaws on him, that ambition can turn in on itself and become something like bitterness. However, it needs to be said that this is an aspect of his personality that will only reveal itself if you talk to him over the course of several weeks for several hours at a time. If you talk to him for just a few minutes, he’s going to tell you about his son. 5. Burgin, like his father before, talks to his own son about how an artist should regard infinity and the impermanence of what they make. These conversations aren’t purely academic. Burgin’s son (who goes by Ricky) is a budding filmmaker. In the fall of 2016 the two of them adapted Richard’s story "Do You Like this Room?" into a short film titled All Ears. The story concerns a man and a woman after their second date, back at the man’s house. The woman is a therapist and the man could be easily categorized as someone in desperate need of therapy. He suggests they play “the god game,” in which one person plays the part of god and the other plays the fearful believer. The conversation quickly turns dark and then the action does too. Richard worked with his son in adapting the story into a script and at one point in the writing process the younger Burgin crossed out half the dialogue his father had written. Richard responded by telling his son, “I think you’re extremely talented and I have no doubt your talent will one day eclipse mine. But I’ve published nineteen books and you’re 19 years old. Do you really think you write better dialogue than me?” “Yes,” his son replied. “I do.” All Ears has been received favorably thus far. Ricky has submitted it to festivals and it’s currently viewable on YouTube. The 16-minute film is solid work for a filmmaker of any age, but it’s especially accomplished given the project was helmed by a college sophomore. Ricky recruited the entire cast and used his father’s house as a shooting location. He designed the sets and transformed his father’s unused foyer into a troubled man’s bachelor pad. He hung lights, storyboarded and blocked shots. The first day of filming came. The man and woman leads arrived along with the film’s small crew. Richard disappeared. He wanted to give his son space to direct, though he couldn’t resist eavesdropping. He listened through a wall as his son gave measured, astute feedback. The set was filled with actors and professionals who were all in their late twenties and early thirties, but it was the nineteen-year-old who owned the room for the ten hours of shooting that day. Burgin’s face glowed as he recounted this later. “He was so frighteningly good,” he said. “I could never have done that, had that confidence at his age. I was stunned.” And when he talks to his son about the conundrum of infinity? “He says it makes his head hurt. He asks me why anyone would waste their time with such an idea when there’s so much work to do.”
Essays The Millions Interview
| 4 books mentioned 2 8 min read
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Essays

In Search of Lost Words: Novels on Dementia

Essays
August 3, 2017 | 4 books mentioned 1 7 min read
André’s disintegrating mind stars in The Father, a play by Florian Zeller (translated from French by Christopher Hampton).  André’s dementia progresses rapidly through one short act.  By the time the curtain falls, he can no longer decode his environment, including his daughter and son-in-law.  The audience, too, is left befuddled, unable to distinguish André’s imagined family from his real one.  A recent production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre underscored André’s bewilderment by casting alternating black and white actors as the elusive, double sets of daughters and sons-in-law. More often, we are privy to dementia’s impact on the people surrounding the patient.  Marita Golden plumbs both perspectives—that of victim and family. As she was researching her new novel, The Wide Circumference of Love, Golden stumbled over a disturbing question:  Why are older African-Americans almost “twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to develop the disease or other forms of dementia?”  Writing for The Washington Post, she spotlights medical studies that ignore people of color, resulting in a glaring knowledge gap. Against the background of whites-only scientific inquiry (some of which is currently being remedied), Golden shows where love fits in.   She reports on a family in which the mother was stricken in her early 60s.  The husband is frank:  “To watch the slow deterioration of my wife, the loneliness and the isolation…. Sometimes I pray.  Sometimes I cry.”  Their police officer son, moving home to help, is stirred: “My mother and I were already close...but actually we got closer, as mother and son, and we got closer as a family.” Golden reminds us that dementia disrupts “cognitive skills such as memory, judgment and language,” thus destroying the writer’s hammer and chisel.  “The words hurl through his lips with a familiar bad taste,” she writes at the opening of The Wide Circumference of Love.  “Words are that slimy, slippery, burn inside him like a house on fire.” The novel tells the story of Gregory Tate, a beloved African-American architect in Washington, D.C.  Gregory’s wife, Diane, a family court judge, and two adult children have made the agonizing decision to place him in an Alzheimer’s facility named Somersby. Each family member must first cope with, and then adapt to, Gregory’s slide into confusion, violence, and finally, wordless silence. Diane is particularly well drawn.  Without making light of her burden, she maintains her humanity and sense of humor, struggling to find joy. …Diane had slowly wriggled into the skin of an unalterably new life…she would retire from the family court…. Howard University’s law school had offered her a professorship…. There was so much to look forward to, but the present she feared would never be past. A loyal and devoted spouse, Diane feels that everything she does at Somersby is “sacred, an act of faith.”  She takes Gregory’s admission there as her cue to examine her past and move forward.  In their unique ways, her children do the same.  Even Gregory, through whatever fog he inhabits, begins again. The Wide Circumference of Love supplies hope by interrogating love in all its permutations.  It explores marriage through sickness and health; love between parent and child, even when it is hidden or fraught; and romantic love, however unexpected or inconvenient.  Just as important, the book probes love’s favorite companion—forgiveness.  In Golden’s novel, forgiveness and love partner to open the future. Erwin Mortier, the prize-winning Belgian author, deploys memory and language to brilliant effect in his memoir about his mother, Stammered Songbook:  A Mother’s Book of Hours (translated from Dutch by Paul Vincent).  Mortier is not a chronicler of hope, but of thorny, ruinous reality.  He equates mental failure with mortality:  “Death that sits at table here is called Mum.” Mortier records his mother’s memory loss, and the family anxiously trying—and failing—to buttress that loss.  Here’s Mortier’s father: He has become her memory.  More and more often she comes in uncertainly, a little closer to him…. If she can’t get any further than stammering, she looks at him wide-eyed.  If the answer doesn’t come quickly, there is a hail of approach. It is words and language that Mortier seeks, lost not only to the patient, but to the family as well. The disease is kicking her out of time and booting us out of language.  Words seem to me a kind of breakfast cereal at the moment:  undoubtedly healthy, but rather tasteless. I chatter till [sic] I burst, chatter till I’m blue in the face and interrupt other people.  I just rattle and gabble on, spew out language, teeth chattering, with a mouth full of dry oats.  Where can I come ashore?  And if I’m not chattering, I’m crying. In brief chapters composed of short, heartrending sentences, Mortier gives a stunning and raw portrayal of his experience—his childhood and childlike view of his mother; his siblings’ reaction to their failing parent; his father’s generous caretaking, defeated by his mother’s increasing need.  All of this is set against receding piles of words: What strikes me most about her, what makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed her bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her.  I can no longer hear the music of her soul; that whole vibrating fabric of symbols with which she wove herself into the world—or conversely, the world into her. The fewer the words, the less the connection, so that by the memoir’s end, Mortier’s mother is a “glacial valley”: …an ice field has scraped over her, and the earth has been scoured away by the masses of ice.  In the bare stone, wide furrows are legible.  Every relief has been smoothed out. Marion Coutts’s memoir, The Iceberg, presents this battle for words even more starkly.  Her husband, Tom Lubbock, chief art critic for the Independent, is dying of a brain tumor.  He is losing his words (and livelihood) just as their toddler son, Ev, begins hungrily to acquire language.  Coutts, too, is a chronicler, documenting her husband’s disease with the precision of an investigative reporter (in fact, she is a filmmaker and visual artist).  Her reporting is anything but detached; Coutts’s sentences are awash with the love and passion she feels for the man slipping away from her, the man who is the father of her child. Disappearing words mark the slippage: There are these simple words that are starting to cause him trouble:  small, single, only, speak, one, tiny, all, short, sign, slow, same, few, lips, stop, sold, lone.  Tracking elusive words was always Tom’s pleasure but now it has added urgency. This, while their son teems with language: …his great unfurling slides of patter run alongside me from about hip level.  My mum made me an omelette and the omelette was tasty it was eggy and so I had an eat.  I wanted it in triangles.  Ham is my best friend.  Mum, look!  The sky looks like milk!  If a cow went on its back its milk would go up in the air. Coutts struggles to keep up with her son, while staying as close as possible to her husband.  She is desperate to understand him as he loses ordinary communication: My love is cryptic.  He speaks in mysteries.  He speaks a language that is singular.  Communication with Tom is nothing like speaking any other language.  It is at the same time known by heart and deeply foreign. Late in the day (Why did they leave it so late, you cry) we are trying to elide language altogether and invent a communication that bypasses all known words.  We do not have a lot of time…. the language we are looking for must circumvent the brain. Coutts wraps her friends into her family’s experience, leaning on them with an honesty that most caretakers would envy.  The book is spliced with her emails, updating their friends on Tom, detailing what she needs from them. His spirits are very good.  He is thinking, talking, his language very tricky by seeming stable.  He wants above all to work on writing projects, and with friends to help he can. The three members of Coutts’s family face what is before them, not only with courage but with an infectious zest for living.  They travel; they take walks and make picnics.  This affirmation of life is one of the great gifts of Coutts’s memoir.  If her experience is unbearably painful, her family’s zeal inspires.  They embrace life, whether at the end or the beginning.  Love is the mainstay of that embrace; love sustains them through to the end. And yet. Grief is not something to be avoided.  The characters in these three books live in the fullness of their grief.  As Diane recalls in The Wide Circumference of Love: A therapist friend told her once the process of grieving a spouse took seven years…. Who did the polling?… How could you tell when the grieving was done?  She still grieved her mother, her brother, and the father she had not known.  Had grieved them all her life. It is through their access to both love and grief that these characters make their way in the world.  Astonishingly eloquent and present, Coutts summons the words to express these two emotions at the end: It was snowing the day we buried you… Unplanned, we formed a circle as the words went up….  You have moved through us and now you are gone, leaving us standing.  And so are the living comforted. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 1 7 min read
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Essays

On Ambition, Cocktail Party Invitations, and the “Bizarre Compulsion” to Write

Essays
November 24, 2008 | 4 books mentioned 1 5 min read
Recently there's been a ruckus regarding the blatant pursuit of literary fame, especially where the n+1 editors are concerned. In the current issue of Poetry, Adam Kirsch plumbs the depths of literary ambition and the desire for personal recognition, and classifies Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men as "a chemically pure example of the kind of literary ambition that has less to do with wanting to write well than with wanting to be known as a writer." Kirsch uses Gessen's blatant ambition, both the theme and the generating force behind his novel, as the springboard to consider the writer's desire for acknowledgement. While Kirsch criticizes Gessen's "naive directness," it becomes obvious that if Gessen's work is a vehicle for recognition and status, he has done well for himself. Not only was Gessen lauded at the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 soiree recently and a co-host of the New New York Intellectual series at the New School, but he continues to write for esteemed periodicals like the New York and London Review of Books and receive acknowledgement, if not praise, from established critics, Kirsch included. Gessen is certainly not the first writer to wear his ambitions on his sleeve. He follows in a long line of writers, including Laurence Sterne. Sterne claimed he wrote Tristram Shandy, "not to be fed, but to be famous." And become famous he did. Not only did he have a race horse and a country dance named after his novel, but he became a celebrity. His popularity did not wane with the less favorable reviews of the later portions of his serialized work, because, according to the Columbia History of the British Novel, his fans "wanted not just the book but the man behind the book (one reader said ‘I'd ride fifty miles just to smoke a pipe with him')." Perhaps if Gessen were more honest about his ambitions, we could find something humorous, or at least endearing, in it all. Perhaps then his readers would write in that they'd want to have a smoke with him too.And yet, despite all odds, there are the writers who seem indifferent to fame. Edward P. Jones is one of those. In his essay, "We Tell Stories," he divides writers into two groups: those who aspire to "be invited to a lifetime of cocktail parties" and those who write because of some "bizarre compulsion." If Gessen falls into the first group, Jones (by his own admission) falls into the second. This was apparent on Thursday evening, when Jones read from an enclave on Tenth Street known as the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, in what by appearances was once a living room, replete with a fireplace and mantel, a multi-paned front window, and a crowd of attentive readers sitting on folding chairs. From his second book of short stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children, Jones read about temptation (in the form of the Devil himself, appearing at a Safeway off Good Hope Road) and transformation (going blind, literally, in the blink of an eye).In person, Jones is humble and unassuming, and he sounds calm and wise, if not quite comfortable speaking in front of a large audience. His voice came alive when reading the scene from the bus in "Blindsided," where Roxanne first goes blind, a scene that deftly combines compassion, humor and desperation. One senses that Jones's imaginative generosity would be constrained if he paid more mind to increasing his literary status than developing his characters and telling their stories. While speaking about writing The Known World, he posits that if he'd read forty books to research his novel as he'd initially planned, "the characters may have taken a back seat." And this, to Jones as well as to his readers, would have been detrimental, because "the research doesn't matter if the characters aren't there."Jones's humility and lack of ambition were enough to make the man sitting next to me comment in disbelief. Perhaps it is precisely this long gestation - Jones's long periods spent growing and developing his characters - his willingness to stand back, and his lack of desire to conquer literary heights that has made his work so remarkable and the lives of his characters, even in his short stories, stretch far beyond, one feels, the pages they're written on. While Jones hinted at currently searching for new characters, the only thing he admitted to working on was "getting back to Washington in one piece." He spoke a few times of a woman in the desert, as if he's tilling and planting the seeds for his next crop. We can wait.Jones tramples the idea of literary celebrity. If Gessen worships at the altar of literature, and through writing hopes to elevate himself, Jones hopes to deflate such notions of becoming a literary chosen one. To Jones, writing is an act of compassion and communication, and his process not so different from any other task: "And we are not noble, just human. We get up to our day, however wonderful, however horrible, as they have been doing since there were white blank pages, before the blank computer screen, when there were only grunts and hand gestures, and we tell stories."Besides, good writing is timeless, and literary celebrity is often short-lived. There is backlash, capricious fashion, and the the vicissitudes of time. The quest for literary renown isn't new, nor is praise from the literary world consistent. A little article entitled "Literary Fame," appearing in the Buffalo Courier and reprinted in the November 12, 1890, New York Times, speaks of fleeting fame, specifically Herman Melville's, and how easily one can slip from favor. A year before Melville's death, so little was said of him that most people already thought him dead:Forty-four years ago, when [Herman Melville's] most famous tale, "Typee," appeared, there was not a better known author than he, and he commanded his own prices. Publishers sought him, and editors considered themselves fortunate to secure his name as a literary star. And to-day! Busy New York has no idea he is even alive, and one of the best-informed literary men in the country laughed recently at me statement that Herman Melville was his neighbor by only two blocks. "Nonsense!" said he. "Why, Melville's dead these many years!" Talk about literary fame! There's a sample of it.
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 1 5 min read
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36 comments:

  1. Great essay.

    One thing that always seemed strange to me were the staunch defenders of Kerouac often refusing to accept his biseual relationships, and, indeed, dismissing them in order to revel in Kerouac’s (and Sal’s) multiple heterosexual affairs.

  3. I’m kind of shocked to read this, as I think every Kerouac fan I’ve ever known was female. The author might be interested in a novel released this year, “Kiss the Morning Star” by Elissa Hoole, about two teenage girls who are inspired by Kerouac to do a road trip of their own.

  4. I was shocked too when I read that article about the literary matchmaking bookstore that said women don’t like Kerouac, since I am a woman and love his writing. It’s been fascinating to discover how polarizing Kerouac can be.

    Thanks for the book recommendation, Amy. I’ll definitely check it out!

  5. Good for you, loved your independent spirit. I tried to emulate my mentor Doris Lessing, still caught up in the relationships sagas, but struggling with it, seeking and finding her independence form having to seek a match later in life.
    Johanna van Zanten

  6. I think… yes, first: all men are the same in the same way that all women are the same (or did I get that backwards?)…

    And, for what it’s worth, personally, I have read thousands of works of fiction (literally — when I was in highschool I averaged 3 books a day, for several years). And, of course, this included reading numerous books authored by women (Pat Cadigan, Ursla K Le Guin, … and many dozens of others, but you get the idea…). But I have read none of the authors you list here.

    There’s a lot of books out there.

  7. (and I forgot to announce my gender, here, but you can probably figure that out from my thinking that female authors i read were relevant but that male authors I read were not…)

  8. I suppose if you read literature in order to find people you’ll be attracted to, these issues might be interesting. But we now have Craigs List for that. What makes me respond to On The Road isn’t my opinion on whether Kerouac would be a good boy friend for me, but whether the work as a whole is of aesthetic value.

    But I guess I’m old fashioned.

    Carry on.

  9. On the Road inspired me, a woman (egads!), to embark upon a six-month “kerouaking” journey across country in an 1981 Dodge transvan. Why would any reader, man or woman, care about Kerouac’s husbanding potential? I certainly don’t base my favorite authors or fictional characters on their likelihood to “put a ring on it”. An author’s love life is just about as important as his hygiene. Wallow in your filth so long as you continue to write good books. If I made it my business to rate an author on his treatment or judgement of women, A Farewell to Arms and In Cold Blood tragically wouldn’t be on my favorite books list.

    PS – Edit your reading tastes for no one.

  10. I outgrew my Kerouac obsession a few years ago, but I’m not sure when and how… I’m still waiting to outgrow my Bukowski one (as are most of my friends who are probably tired of hearing about him by now).

    I will say that I know an equal number of men and women who are enamored with Kerouac. I always respected his prose in his early novels, even if I felt I had to ignore the fact that he was a real bastard to do it.

    On The Road also has the most musicality and moments of pure prose brilliance… probably because it was the novel he worked hardest and longest on editing. The seven years of hard work he put into it really show…

    I’m a man who reads a LOT of fiction. Comics, graphic novels, and straight literary fiction… with an occasional aside into a modern and\or urban fantasy (a la Neil Gaiman). I sometimes sigh when I look at my bookshelves and realize how masculine they are… some day I’ll even that out.

  11. I am a Kerouac enthusiast in Calcutta, India. Reading Kerouac’s books and reflecting on the large number of broken marriages, I have often wondered: Is that a critique of the American dream set in 1950s suburbia?

  12. This was so much fun to read! As a man who used to consult On the Road like a Bible every night before bed, I really appreciated your take on Jack Kerouac and his split audience. You reminded me of what may be the inverse of your own experience, in that personally I harbored a years-long crush on Maxine Hong Kingston, though I never knew another man who really liked reading her. Naturally, the book that won me over was her Tripmaster Monkey (her take on the Beats), but I felt a little changed by her writing and wished I could meet her. Thanks for the essay!

  13. To me “being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening” is exactly why I stopped reading the Beats at 22. I hated that feeling of mythologizing every moment as it is happening, though it seems in line today’s Twitter/Facebook culture of constant documentation.

  14. @Uttaran Das Gupta:

    No, not really. On the Road is really more a book of the ’40s than the ’50s. It takes place from 1947 to 1950 during the Truman Administration, when a lot of new postwar housing tracts were just being built and before the concept of ’50s suburbia and the “American dream” business had really made its mark on the national psyche. (Kerouac wrote the first draft in 1951, though it took several years and a lot of revision before he could get it published.) And the Beat writers were really all urbanites, anyway — the America of On the Road (at least as I remember it) consists solely of cities and the vast, empty countryside between them.

    On the other hand, it’s fair to say the book did have that impact on many suburban kids of the late ’50s and ’60s who read the book.

  15. I am a woman with no desire to ever be married or have children, yet I love Jane Austen. Loving P& P has no basis in one’s desire for marriage. I just love Austen, and her usually well written female characters.

    I am also a woman who loves to read history books, yet I always hear about how it’s the menfolk who enjoy these. Whenever I used to get emails from Borders for Mothers Day, Borders recommended embroidery books for Mom. The following month, Borders recommended history books for Dad. I (and my female friends) love history!

    Now to Kerouac: I hate his books so damn much! So, in that respect, I do fall in with most girls, but it’s not, as you say, out of a desire to “catch” Kerouac in a relationship, nor a resentment b/c Kerouac represents all the boys who don’t want to be tied down. As I said, I don’t want to be married myself, so I should totally be on board with Kerouac, but I just can’t stand him.

  16. Pingback: Kerouac Divides Men and Women « The Floating Library

  17. On the Road is one of my favorite books of all time too (as a woman)! It was just blowing my mind away the whole time I was reading it.

  19. Stephanie, you have captured my feelings about Kerouac (an author I love) and his writing perfectly. “I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac.” Exactly right!!!! Thanks for a great read.

  20. I wonder if the author or other females have read _Visions of Cody_ and if so, how did they respond to that book? It seems to have the most misogynistic leanings of his oeuvre (which is unfortunate because so much of the writing and the experimental form is exquisite).

  21. Pingback: Barnstorm | Wednesday Linkstorm

  22. Hmmm. Well, On The Road is one of those books that delivers different messages depending on the age at which the reader reads it. I first read it when I was 16 or so, in England … and it was powerful enough that, at the first opportunity, I moved to America. And I’m still here at 38. I’m now officially an American citizen. I read it again in my twenties and appreciated the musicality of his irrepressible be-bop, jazz-infused, rule-breaking spontaneous prose much more. And then I just read On The Road again last year after buying the original scroll edition published for the 50th anniversary. Now that I have kids I realize that it’s Kerouac’s willingness and ability to absent himself from responsibility that is the great pounding heart of the book. At least that’s what attracts men to it because, at various times, it’s what we all want to do. But we don’t have a monopoly on that either. It just seems to be a more masculine trait.

  23. I am a graduate of UConn, where Ann Charter’s taught. I took a class called “the Beats” with her, and the composition was easily 75% female. The one person that didn’t like Kerouac? Me. Good typist, horrible author.
    Ann Charters was not upset my dislike of Kerouac, she even read bits of my essay on why I didn’t like him aloud.
    I still prefer Ginsberg anyway. I’ll still probably see the movie, too.

  24. Pingback: Clip: On the Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men and Women « Stephanie Nikolopoulos

  25. Firstly … go Nikki. A girl after my own heart. I did the same thing across Australia in a 1976 Bedford.
    I’ve always loved the hedonism of On the Road. I never bothered trying to identify with the women because Sal felt like my own alter ego. I’ve behaved in the same way on various road trips.
    BUT … you know the story, the legendary circumstances in which he wrote the book, a ream of paper fed in one of the typewriter and a novel coming out the other end three weeks later. It has always bugged me that he had a woman to feed him, look after his kids and wipe his arse during the writing of the novel and that he never properly acknowledged that.
    Can’t help it. As a woman writer with kids, it just bugs the hell outa me.

  26. I read On The Road over 30 years ago and have always felt inspired by Kerouac”s free-wheeling musical prose. The story of his (search for the) freedom of being On The Road is reflected perfectly in the poetic and, yes, crazy phrasing. When I get constricted by rules and structure in my writing I read Kerouac…and Brautigan…It always sets me free again.

    Thanks for the splendid article. Bookshop match-making is a hilarious concept!

  27. This is a brilliant essay. I’ve long been attracted to Kerouac for the musicality of his prose, never better displayed than in the story Visions of Neal and the Three Stooges from his recording Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. It inspired me to write a radio play, Neal Amid, about the last minutes of Neal’s life and how he and Jack had altered the English language, as Jackie Robinson had altered the tempo of baseball.There is much curiosity and gentleness to be read in the Beats that is far more relevant today.

  28. Kerouac’s work is not about characters, it’s about stream of consciousness where ALL fare as they should, incidental and inclusive. That is the non-linear storyline, that’s the kick.

  29. Very nice essay. Here’s what I know, though I’m not sure what it means, and I’m just going to leave it here without judgement: I am a man. My favorite contemporary prose writers tend to be men–Sherman Alexie and Tim O’Brien come to mind here. My favorite contemporary poets tend to be women–Louise Gluck and Anne Carson pop into my head. My bookshelves show the same gender bias. Am I alone? Am I wrong to believe, even if mostly subconsciously, women generally write better poems and men generally write better prose?

    As for Kerouac? I’m pretty sure he mostly just made me want to be Gary Snyder for a chunk of my twenties. At the time, it seemed to me that Jack might have wanted to be Gary, too. Anyway, you got me thinking. I’m interested in learning of other experiences that may or may not sound familiar. Thanks!

  30. However polarizing, here we are some 55 years later still talking about On the Road. So, obviously Jack did something right.

  31. I don’t know, I always thought Kerouac’s ballyhooed joi de vivre felt phony, from his novels I get the sense he (and for the most part his whole circle of friends, the “Beats”) weren’t so much overcome with lust for life as they were obsessed with trying to find it, and until then pretending they had found so as not to draw attention to their failure to do so. Kerouac’s stories are preoccupied with actual or alleged sex lives of everyone else, and he talks at much greater length about the affairs of other people as he does about his own. One book (The Subterraneans?) was about precisely that, telling the history of a doomed romance, but belaboring the circumstances that ultimately drove her to cheat rather than the acts of intimacy he shared with her in the first place – and had he been less obsessed with other people’s sexual interests and proclivities, the relationship might not have crashed so quickly.

    The reason why Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) was such a hero to everyone is that even as a kid, he was able to live out the kind of lifestyle they all tried to emulate. But even Neal, the object of the little hero-cult, was an alcoholic (ok: they were all alcoholics but that proves my point, really, doesn’t it?) and prone to impulsive and self-destructive behavior.

    All this is a long way of saying that I think people don’t dislike Kerouac’s books because he was a romantic and a womanizer and untamable, but rather that they see through the act and what’s actually there isn’t very appealing.

  32. Jack Kerouac was a real person. D’arcy is an invented character. Obviously we know more about Kerouac because he exists outside a book.

  33. Stephanie … YES !! … Think NOT of Kerouac as “male” or “female” but simply as a Compassionate Creature of the Cosmos reporting back to us all on what is being seen / heard / felt / thought … He was a master movie-camera! … A movie-camera with a non-stop commentary on the images in the lens / brain / mind. … Jack could write like only he could write – because only he could think of the things he thought of when inspired by what he experienced. He was empiracle to the max – and damn good at it. He captured the beauty in everything, and he instinctively knew to the core of his being that: “ALL IS ONE.” … Read THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY !! … THis was a GREAT article on Jack Kerouac. Truly great! … Come to Lowell and talk with Uncle Billy !! – George Koumantzelis / The Aeolian Kid

  34. I always enjoyed Ti Jean, as a youth growing up in Providence RI I could relate to his descriptions of the local area, of the sorrowful working class men walking slouched hands deep in pockets. Dr Sax & Visions of Gerard being my favs. As a girl friend at the time (who introduced me to the Beats) said On The Road is a book better to have read than to read.

    Yes he was a jerk as a person, even more so as the alcohol slowly killed him, But I see him not as a jerk, but as another lost soul shattered and splintered by a brutal system of wealth and things.

    War is Over

  35. Kerouac (the man and his works) misogynistic/sexist – how? Can anyone reference me some passages in his books which show him to be thus? I maintain it’s a total myth dreamed up by Kerouac haters. I don’t like the writing of Ernest Hemingway but I’ve never bothered to go on a Hemingway site and say as much. Yet Kerouac haters pour onto onto any web article about Jack proud to proclaim that they don’t like/read his works and go on to attack his character. Strange. I suspect a conspiracy, and who by? probably a far right religious group, or people in that way minded. I repeat give me a reference where Jack is being misogynistic in a book?

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Essays

The Secondary Mourner

Essays
May 23, 2018 | 4 books mentioned 4 min read
What does that make us—the former in-laws and spouses? The family friends? We are mourners once removed, like second cousins no one’s ever met. Technically family, practically not.
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 4 min read
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Essays

Shakespeare as God

Essays
October 2, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 9 14 min read
My reading of Shakespeare tends to be seasonal: comedies in the spring and summer, histories and tragedies in the fall and winter. There are exceptions. A hot, sweaty tragedy like Othello or Antony and Cleopatra reads better in hot, sweaty weather, and a “problem” comedy like Measure for Measure seems less problematic during an autumn chill. I persist in this folly even when confronted with The Winter’s Tale, three/fifths wintry tragedy, two/fifths vernal comedy, and wholly a masterwork, because Shakespeare seems to me more rooted in the earth and its rhythms than any other writer. Samuel Johnson believed that “Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature.” Johnson was speaking primarily of human nature, but if we extend the term to mean the other kind too, we get a little nearer the mark. Shakespeare is the poet of everything. What then is the optimal time to read The Winter’s Tale – in winter if you feel the burden is primarily tragic, in spring if you feel the opposite pull, or maybe (if you feel the issue is eternally undecided) in a blustery week in late March when the crocuses have begun to push through? (The logical solution – to read the first three acts in the winter and save the last two for warmer weather – is, alas, a reductio ad absurdum. Not that I haven’t tried.) Theater people don’t have the luxury to be so choosy, and I’ve seen excellent productions of The Winter’s Tale at all times of the year, the most recent being a (winter) performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Simon Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall that left me in tears. A local high school production probably would have done the same. In my experience, The Winter’s Tale plays more effectively on stage than more celebrated works like Hamlet or King Lear, which are sometimes doomed by theatrical self-consciousness and present obstacles to staging (the storm on the heath, for instance) difficult to surmount. In particular, Act IV of The Winter’s Tale is so perfectly conceived that it seems as much carnival as theater. Slapstick, satire, music, dance, suspense, disguise, romance, bawdry, philosophy, sleight-of-hand: one mode of performance succeeding another, and all stage managed by the greatest dramaturge of them all. So yes, Shakespeare was a playwright – an actor, a director, a producer, in fact a man wholly of the theater – and The Winter’s Tale is a play. But we can’t always have the benefit of an actor as skilled as Simon Russell Beale interpreting Leontes for us, and even then, it’s his interpretation, not ours.  When we read the plays, we’re actor, director, and lighting designer at once. And what we’re reading, it’s worth pointing out, is very largely poetry. Seventy-five point five percent poetry, to be precise. The Winter’s Tale is just about the golden mean – 71.5% blank verse, 3.1% rhymed verse, and 25.4% prose, plus six songs, the highest number in the canon, and appropriate for the genius of wit and improvisation who sings them, the “rogue” Autolycus. How I love Shakespearean metrics! Iago has 1097 lines to Othello’s 860, 86.6% of The Merry Wives of Windsor is in prose, King John and Richard II have no prose whatsoever, 45.5% of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in rhymed verse, there are 150 named female characters in the canon as opposed to 865 male, and the actor who plays an uncut Hamlet has to memorize 1422 lines. (Cordelia, by contrast, makes her overwhelming presence felt with a mere 116 lines.) If there were a way of computing the Bard’s earned run average, I would want to know that too. Clinical as they might seem, these statistics do remind us of a salient fact: three quarters of Shakespeare’s dramatic writing is poetry. (The other quarter is pretty good too. Shakespeare wrote the best prose as well as the best verse in the English language, and if there were anything other than prose and verse, he would have surpassed everyone at that as well.) Polixines’s first lines in The Winter’s Tale are, “Nine changes of the wat’ry star hath been / The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne / Without a burden” (I.ii. 1-3). That’s a long way from, “It’s been nine months since I’ve been away from my kingdom.” Even if Shakespeare had phrased the lines in prose, they would have been suitably orotund, something like the courtly politesse Archidamus and Camillo speak in the opening scene. (“Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters (though not personal) hath been royally attorney’d . . . “) Nevertheless, they are in verse. No prose could match the effect of the bold initial spondee balanced by an unstressed pyrrhic before catching up with the regular iambic rhythm of the pentameter line. (“NINE CHANG/es of/the WAT’/ry STAR/hath BEEN . . .”) It’s like a bell going off. Surely what’s greatest about Shakespeare is not that he knows where to put his iambs and trochees but that he writes so expressively within character. Polixines’s periphrastic way of saying what could have been said much more simply is more than the eloquence one would expect of a king taking leave of another king. In evoking the moon and the waters and the shepherd’s eternal rounds, Polixines conjures the elemental, folkloric realities that the play will traffic in. There will be shepherds, long passages of time, lots of water, and boy will there be “changes.” Plus, this being Shakespeare, Polixines’ lines are almost gratuitously beautiful. He just couldn’t help it. On the other hand, beauty has a job to do. It compels attention, and if you’re paying attention to the words, chances are you’re also paying attention to what words do: tell stories, define characters, establish themes, orchestrate emotions, explore ideas. Not that it’s as easy as all that. There are times in The Winter’s Tale when it’s maddeningly difficult to figure out what the hell the characters are talking about. You are ill-advised to attend any production cold. Harold Bloom has grumpily admitted to boycotting most productions of Shakespeare out of frustration with tendentious interpretations. For me the problem is less directorial overkill than the sheer difficulty of doing Shakespeare at all – finding actors who can speak the verse properly, trimming the texts to manageable lengths, not overdoing the dirty jokes, and so on. I usually attend three or four productions a year and happily settle for whatever patches of brilliance (sometimes sustained for nearly a whole evening) I can get. And yet I wouldn’t want to deprive myself of the pleasure of unpacking the involutions of Leontes’s soliloquies in The Winter’s Tale at my leisure and with text in hand – partly because in the theater it’s so hard to follow what this lunatic is actually saying. Even his faithful courtier Camillo at one point has to confess that he’s mystified as to precisely what dark “business” his Highness is hinting at: Leon.      Was this taken By any understanding pate but thine? For thy conceit is soaking, will draw in More than the common blocks. Not noted, is’t, But of the finer natures? By some severals Of head-piece extraordinary? Lower messes Perchance are to this business purblind? Say. Cam.      Business, my lord? I think most understand Bohemia stays here longer. (I.ii. 222-30) It’s true that the density of this language depends at least as much on formal rhetoric – all those tropes and devices that Shakespeare had drilled into his head as a schoolboy – as on versification. But what the poetry gives us that prose could not (or not so well) is a sense of formlessness within form. Leontes is falling apart. His jealous ravings feed on themselves in an ever more frenzied cycle of psychological dislocation. You might call it a nervous breakdown. Yet no matter how feverish his utterances, they all stay within the strict boundaries of ten or sometimes eleven syllables. If you’re losing your mind in iambic pentameter, your mode of expression is necessarily compressed. No wonder Leontes is so hard to understand: Affection! thy intention stabs the centre. Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams (how can this be?), With what’s unreal thou co-active art, And fellow’st nothing. Then ‘tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost (And that beyond commission), and I find it (And that to the infection of my brains And hard’ning of my brows). (I.ii. 138-46) To my mind, no one has ever satisfactorily explained the meaning of the first line, but the sense of psychic violence is clear enough, as is the sense of delusion that Leontes unwittingly demonstrates in the following lines – he perfectly illustrates what he thinks he’s criticizing. Hard as it is to follow this soliloquy on the page, it’s that much harder in the theater, which doesn’t allow for second readings or leisurely reflections on dense ambiguities. Unlike the pattern of some other geniuses, the movement of Shakespeare’s late work (at least verbally) is toward an increasing complication rather than a simplicity or clarity of expression. Those Jacobean groundlings must have had remarkable attention spans, and no wonder. The linguistic transformation that they witnessed, according to Frank Kermode in Shakespeare’s Language, “happened in the writing of Shakespeare and in the ears of an audience he had, as it were, trained to receive it.” Dense, compressed, harsh, impacted: these qualities don’t stop Shakespeare’s later dramatic verse from being magnificent. Has anyone ever rendered the grosser tendencies of the male imagination with more obscenely “reified” imagery? What makes Leontes’s ravings especially sickening is that he pronounces them in the presence of his innocent son Mamillius: Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one! Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I Play too, but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamor Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been (Or I am much deceiv’d) cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is (even at this present, Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th’ arm, That little thinks she has been sluic’d in ‘s absence, And his pond fish’d by his next neighbor – by Sir Smile, his neighbor. (I.ii. 186-196) When Simon Russell Beale spoke these lines at BAM, that “sluic’d” went through the audience – or at least through me – like a wound. Sometimes it’s hard to believe just how graphic Shakespeare’s imagery can be. As a woefully inexperienced undergraduate, I thought Pompey’s description in Measure for Measure of Claudio’s offense against sexual morality – “Groping for trouts in a peculiar river” – vaguely amusing. Amusing yes, vague no. There are some things no book can teach you. The simplicity that many people would like to find in late Shakespeare as they do in the closing phases of Beethoven or Michelangelo is in fact there but selectively deployed and as much a matter of technique as of vision. Hermione’s protestations of innocence during the horrendous trial scene have a dignified plainness in contrast to the casuistry with which Leontes arraigns her. (“Sir, / You speak a language that I understand not.”) The language relaxes in the last two acts, as we move from suspicion and sterility to rebirth and reconciliation. Yet touches of lyricism occur earlier in the play (as in Polixines’s “We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun, / And bleat the one at th’ other”), just as echoes of Leontes’s rhetorical violence occur later in Polixenes’s rage at the prospect of a shepherdess daughter-in-law (“And thou, fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft, whom of force must know / The royal fool thou cop’st with”). Our Bard, who knew rhetorical tricks from hypallage to syllepsis, was not likely to disdain something so basic as plain contrast. Consider this contrast: Leontes, who earlier expressed the most extreme repugnance toward almost any form of physicality, now uses the homeliest of similes to express his wonder at the “miracle” of Hermione’s transformation from statue to living creature in Act V: “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.” Eleven lines later the loyal retainer Paulina, who has brought off the whole improbable spectacle, speaks the half line that is, for me, the most wrenching moment in the whole play: “Our Perdita is found.” How like Shakespeare – to expand emotionally by contracting linguistically. (Compare the lonely, cuckolded Bloom’s “Me. And me now” in Joyce’s Ulysses – the emotional heart, in four words, of a novel much given to logorrhea.) To gloss such a line would be almost an impertinence, except to say that being lost (“Perdita,” analogous to “perdition”) and found is in some sense what the play is all about. It’s not just Leontes who, rediscovering his wife and daughter, finds himself. Ideally, at a performance or in a reading, so should we. Self-discovery can be a pretty scary experience, which is why Tony Tanner in his Prefaces to Shakespeare wrote that the proper response to this play is one in which awe borders on horror: “It does not merely please or entertain. It should leave us aghast, uncertain of just what extraordinary thing we have just witnessed.” Iambs and trochees will get you only so far. They signify that Shakespeare thought poetically, and thinking poetically means expressing experience in a highly concentrated manner. It’s curious that as Shakespeare’s language grew increasingly dense and demanding, his plots moved in the opposite direction – towards the deliberate improbabilities of folklore and fable. Shipwrecks, foundlings, treasure chests, prophecies, oracles, and hungry bears: if the plot of The Winter’s Tale were to be retold stripped of its poetry, it “should be hooted at / Like an old tale,” as Paulina says of the biggest improbability of them all – the apparent transformation of the martyred queen from cold statue to living flesh. To the disappointment of some, the patterned contrivances of the four late “romances” (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest) necessarily entail a slackening of authorial interest in the particulars of character development. Othello’s jealousy is motivated point by excruciating point; Leontes’ jealousy just is. Sometimes it’s well to think back to Samuel Johnson’s point of view. Shakespeare is the poet of nature, and all that naturalism shines out amid the archetypal movements and resolutions of the late romances. Certainly these plays have evoked unusually personal responses. Northrup Frye, no critical slouch, wrote of The Tempest, it is a play “not simply to be read or seen or even studied but possessed.” When Eric Rohmer wanted to depict a transfiguring moment in the life of his heroine in A Tale of Winter (Conte d’hiver, 1991), he did so by having her attend a regional production of The Winter’s Tale and training the camera on her face during Hermione’s transformation scene. Nothing like seeing a clunky, old-fashioned version in French to make you understand what Shakespeare can do without language. Another curiosity about the romances is the degree to which they turn on the concept of forgiveness. “Pardon’s the word to all,” says Cymbeline late in the play of that title, jauntily brushing aside five acts worth of treachery, corruption, murder, and deceit. Was there something in Shakespeare’s experience that turned his thoughts in his last years to the possibility of forgiveness? Had his many years as an absent husband and father begun to gnaw at him as he contemplated retirement and a return to the wife and family he had clearly neglected? Or had his wife Anne – perhaps understandably in the light of their long separation – been “sluiced” in his absence, and had he, with all his attendant guilts and slippages, to pardon her for that? Was he thinking of the Catholicism he might secretly have been raised in and of the doctrine of grace that – it could be argued – subtly informs these plays? Or was it something simpler and even more personal – namely, brooding on the usual fuckups that everyone racks up over time and hopes to be forgiven for? Virtually nothing is known of the man’s inner life, but few people dispute the semi-autobiographical nature of The Tempest, with its sense of a valediction to the theater he had known and loved. So why not extrapolate a little from the work to the life? Depends on whose life, I guess. While I'm very much interested in Shakespeare’s life, I'm more interested in my own. What I extrapolate from The Winter’s Tale is that if Leontes deserves a break, so do I. There came a time in my life when I needed to be forgiven. I wasn’t. If I must take my consolation from a play rather than from any flesh and blood Hermione, that’s not quite so bleak as it sounds. Yes, I would have preferred real forgiveness to the literary kind, but I find it no small consolation that at the end of his life the world’s supreme imaginative writer returns again and again to a basic home truth: we must forgive each other. For me, reading Shakespeare is like going to church, except that in place of a God I could never and wouldn’t want to believe in, I “commune,” so to speak, with a mind that seems to comprehend all others and enforces no doctrinal obedience. This community of believers embraces anyone who has ever seen, heard, or read a word of Shakespeare’s and been moved to wonder and reflection. That’s what I call a catholic church. The forgiveness I’ve spoken of is not without cost. Antigonus and Mamillius die, and when Hermione steps off that pedestal, she speaks to her daughter, not to her husband. Part fairly tale, part moral exemplum, The Winter’s Tale is what religion would be if it could free itself of those hectoring, incomprehensible Gods. In the unveiling of the supposed “miracle” in Act V, the sage and long-suffering Paulina speaks the lines that could serve as the epitaph for all of late Shakespeare: “It is required / You do awake your faith.” The fact that the miracle turns out to be completely naturalistic (the “resurrected” Hermione has been hidden away for sixteen years and has the wrinkles to prove it) means only that the faith required transcends any particular religious dispensation. It’s a faith, first of all, in the reader’s or spectator’s willingness to enter without quibbling into the imaginative world that Shakespeare has created, but more than that, it’s a faith in life itself – in the human imagination, and in our capacity for endurance, transformation, and renewal. As Leontes exemplifies, our capacity for hatred, rage, and murderous insanity is pretty impressive too. To see whole and to understand these contradictions – that too is an act of faith. I don’t presume to know what this or any other play by Shakespeare ultimately “means.” They will not be reduced to “themes.” Obviously, the plays and sonnets teem with ideas, a few of which are near and dear to my heart, but I could no more sum up the “themes” of Shakespeare’s work than I could sum up  the “themes” of my own life. If his work has any unity of meaning, it is simply that of life itself – its abundance, its ongoingness. In Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, Caroline Spurgeon wrote that “The thought constantly in Shakespeare’s mind,” in The Winter’s Tale, is: the common flow of life through all things, in nature and man alike, seen in the sap rising in the tree, the habits and character of flowers, the result of the marriage of base and noble stock, whether it be of roses or human beings, the emotions of birds, animals and men . . . the oneness of rhythm, of law of movement, in the human body and human emotions with the great fundamental rhythmical movements of nature herself. Spurgeon was writing in 1935. We tend to be skeptical of such claims now. There are no universals; or, as Terry Eagleton bluntly put it apropos of a couple of poems by Edward Thomas, “If these works are not ‘just’ nature poems, it is because there is no such thing” (How To Read a Poem). If language and culture mediate everything we can know, why should Shakespeare, the playwright-businessman writing for a motley provincial audience of sensation seekers and esthetes, be exempt? Wouldn’t he be just as blinkered by the social prejudices of this time, just as imprisoned by the reigning discourse, as anyone else? So it would seem – until we turn to the plays themselves. There we find that our hearts speak to us in a different register than our minds do. There we find, as in Florizel’s wooing Perdita, precisely that sort of “universality” that is supposed not to exist: What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’ld have you do it ever; when you sing, I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms; Pray so; and for the ord’ring your affairs, To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function. Each your doing (So singular in each particular) Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, That all your acts are deeds. (IV.iv. 134-46) Ever been in love? Florizel speaks courtly Renaissance verse because he’s a prince. The shepherd’s son, who isn’t even granted the dignity of a name (“Clown”), woos the shepherdess Mopsa in rustic comic prose. Although Shakespeare grants Clown the full measure of his country kindness and courtesy, he won’t let him talk like Florizel. Such were the parameters of the Jacobean worldview. I doubt any lover anywhere has ever spoken so beautifully as Florizel, but if you have been in love you’ll recognize the feeling – the idealization that has yet to withstand the test of time but nonetheless ennobles both the lover and the beloved and creates, as it were, its own truth. How did the groundlings and the nabobs respond when they first heard those words at the Globe Theatre in 1611? My guess is that some of them reacted much as I do. They wept.
Essays
| 4 books mentioned 9 14 min read
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