Holiday blues and greens
December 30, 2010
Relatives enjoying Christmas appetizers at the Gridley residence; note high-class footwear and napkins
The week between Christmas and New Year’s has long been for me a time of increasing sadness. The feeling goes back, I suppose, to the childhood malaise when all the presents have been opened, explored, exhausted, their magic reduced to mundanity, and a new trove of toys can’t be expected until one’s birthday. Partly, too, it’s the letdown after any big festivity, especially one accompanied by too much food.
Yet by the time I’d reached my thirties, I was also sensing a difference in character between the two holidays that bookend the Ameri-Christian winter celebration. For all its commercialization, Christmas remains a family day, when you hug relatives you barely remember and enjoy the warmth of an extended clan along with Aunt Kay’s mince, apple, pumpkin, and lemon meringue pies. (How did she ever bake so many?) New Year’s Eve, in contrast, is the quintessential party/dating time, the night of silly noisemakers when we get dressed up, get drunk, and strive to get laid. For a wallflower who was terrible at drinking and partying, the choice was clear. Christmas I loved; New Year’s I detested. All those people having fun on New Year’s—I looked down my bumpy, nerdy nose at them.
Moreover, to the extent that my secular soul could be moved by religious images and music, I always found the tale of Christ’s birth and death haunting and poignant, and this added to my enjoyment of Christmas. New Year’s was empty revelry, with no redeeming content. Party hats, streamers—bah, humbug.
Recently it occurred to me that Judaism puts its important days in a better order. The High Holy Days in the fall start with the New Year and slide inexorably toward Yom Kippur, the day of repentance, so that, in a sense, you end the holiday season on a downer. But it’s a meaningful downer, and after fasting, confessing, and perhaps participating in all five traditional prayer services, you should feel enlightened and unburdened. Unlike Christians, who exit the holidays with a hangover.
In an attempt to bring a serious note into New Year’s, then, I’ll quote from my favorite Christian holiday lyrics, which mix Christmas and New Year’s references in a philosophical blend. In his review of a recent Piffaro concert, Tom Purdom mentioned how much he admired these sixteenth-century verses. To the tune of Greensleeves:
The old year now away is fled,
The new year it is enterèd;
Then let us now our sins downtread,
And joyfully all appear.
Let’s merry be this day,
And let us all both sport and play.
Hang grief, cast care away.
God send you a happy new year!The name day now of Christ we keep,
Who for our sins did often weep.
His hands and feet were wounded deep,
And his blessèd side, with a spear.
His head they crowned with thorn,
And at him they did laugh and scorn,
Who for our good was born.
God send us a happy New Year!And now with New Year’s gifts each friend
Unto each other they do send;
God grant we may all our lives amend,
And that the truth may appear.
Now, like the snake, your skin
Cast off of evil thoughts and sin,
And so the year begin:
God send you a happy new year!
The Importance of Place
December 18, 2010
Years ago, when I was reading a lot of Western writing—meaning books by authors of the American West, not genre “Westerns”—there was much talk about the importance of place in literature. This somewhat vague concept includes not just the physical attributes of a place but the meanings humans bring to the locale. American writers of the twentieth-century West became especially sensitive to place and its implications. Why? Several reasons come quickly to mind:
(1) Western writers shared a sense of outsiderness, feeling isolated from the supposed cultural centers of the East. For them, making place important was a form of self-assertion.
(2) Western landscapes are so dramatically different from those of the East—often harsh, dry, empty—that it seems they must intrude on a story, affecting the thoughts and emotions of the characters.
(3) Some Western experiences just don’t exist in the East. In Vermont you’ll never encounter a grizzly bear or a surfer, unless s/he’s on vacation.
(4) Because of Western geographic and climatic conditions, patterns of settlement differ. Could a suburban Connecticut tale, with neighbors right next door, be transplanted to a desert region of Arizona where you have to drive an hour to find a dentist?
(5) The West, being the new region, lacked the traditions of the East. It had little history, at least as far as Euro-American settlers from the East were concerned, and much of its real history was soon distorted into myth. Hence it was a locale, as Gertrude Stein remarked of Oakland, with no there there. Western writers focused on the sense of place in part because of the lack of human depth to their place.
(6) With open land for the taking, the West is where our migrants traditionally headed, and once there, they typically kept on moving. Even in the late twentieth century it was a territory where humans seemed more restless than mountain goats. Again, Western writers sensed what was missing, the deep rootedness that comes from staying in one spot for year after year, slowly changing with the neighbors, the growing tree in the backyard, the buildings that rise and fall, the succession of tragedies and comedies that give a place its character.
That last point resonates with me personally. My own family, like the Dennisons in my novel The Shame of What We Are, bounced around the East Coast until I was about eight, then skipped across the continent to southern California, where we continued bouncing and skipping. If that sun- and smog-blasted area could ever have felt like home to me, my family’s continuous uprooting made that impossible. The experience has been shared by many Americans, for whom dissatisfied wandering is a quintessential characteristic:
“Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.”
That’s Wallace Stegner in “The Sense of Place,” an essay included in his 1992 collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. He also quotes Wendell Berry’s famous line, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
These matters came to mind the other morning when, stumbling up the sidewalk on my way to work, I noticed a neighbor decorating her sidewalk tree. In our ultra-urban locale, holiday decorations tend to be muted. First off, if you put a Santa on your stoop, someone will steal him, which might bring a lawsuit by the elves for reckless endangerment of an icon. (Certainly the elves have powerful sway over the politicians and mega-lawyers downtown; there’s no other explanation for much of what happens here.) Second, since the houses are three stories high and joined to the neighbors’ in a block-long row, the notion of stringing bulbs or reindeer across the roofline is best left to a few crazy drunks or professional roofers. Even the people who bang on your door after a snowstorm and offer to shovel the sidewalk for $5 do not offer to hang Christmas lights.
So it was unusual that my neighbor—I’ll call her Martha—would be decking an outside tree, and her style of doing so seemed even less common: a three-foot cone of green boughs around the tree’s base. Insensitive as usual, I teased her that she was perverting nature by turning the poor maple upside down—bare at the top, pine-green at the bottom. Martha explained that she and her daughter had seen holiday decorations like this on a trip to Vienna, and they had agreed to do something similar at home. The daughter had taken photos as a reminder.
When I made it to the office and slurped my second cup of coffee, an appreciation of this slight interchange began to dawn on me, and it had to do with a slowly emerging sense of place. After the dozens of relocations of my early years, I’ve become firmly rooted in this neighborhood, so much that I don’t even like to leave for vacations. Though writer friends go away on “residencies” at “colonies” or “centers” in order to escape the daily mess and concentrate on their work, I’ve no interest in doing that. My only request is that someone get my daughter’s dog to stop barking at the empty sidewalk. (Shut UP, Alfie!)
Thus I could fit Martha’s behavior into its social and environmental context in a way not possible in my wandering early years, when I was always a tourist. I could smile about bringing a taste of aristocratic Vienna to working-class Fairmount, Philadelphia. More important, though, was the personal context, and that’s the crux of this tiny story.
Martha’s daughter, who had traveled to Vienna with her and taken the souvenir photos of the outdoor trees, died this past summer. A woman in her thirties with a young child. A mysterious stroke, then another, then a diagnosis of a cancer that had supposedly precipitated the strokes, then debilitating chemotherapy, then weeks of bedridden suffering, then another stroke that killed her.
Martha and her husband had been devastated by their daughter’s quick decline. Clearly the sidewalk tree, with its small tepee of greens and a ribbon near the top, was a memorial. Martha didn’t have to say that, and I didn’t remark on it. But I understood and appreciated, and she knew that I did, and this constituted a brief and very human moment in our cold winter season.
In its essence, the sense of place is about this sort of connectedness—to the environment, the society, the neighborhood, and most of all the people. Architects and planners have latched onto the concept, and there’s even a blog about it by Marilyn Finnemore. But I’m still not very good at connecting; distracted, hurried, impatient, I walked past Martha’s tree several more times before noticing it again.
My lifelong symptoms of displacement are widely shared by Americans, I suspect, even those who weren’t hauled from place to place as children, and I worry about what this means for our cultural future.
In All Candor
November 30, 2010
On my other, more static website, Gridleyville.com, I’ve long concluded the introduction with a joke:
“It should be obvious by now that this website has nothing to do with the hamlet of Gridleyville, situated near Candor, New York. Sam Gridley greatly admires the name of that town but, in all candor, has never been there.”
The pun always makes me laugh rather than groan, which is all anyone needs to know about my sense of humor. As my wife often grumbles, no one else finds it funny.
But, come to discover, the jest has a deeper layer of meaning. It seems that about 1919 the eminent writer and philosopher Kenneth Burke rented a summer cottage in Candor for $5, from a man named Sam Gridley.
Although the price matches my idea of good commerce, that wasn’t I. Nor was it an ancestor of mine, I don’t think. We’ve never had real estate moguls in the family.
But wait, there’s more: In 2007 the U.S. Navy commissioned a ship named the USS Gridley, and it belongs to the Burke class of destroyers.
This is enough for a conspiracy theory.
But the truth remains: I still haven’t set foot in the real Gridleyville. Perhaps I will, though, to see whether the Burkean aura suffuses visitors with a deeper understanding of human nature—and of weird coincidence.
Fondness for a Show
November 27, 2010
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
A press of work in the day job has kept me from this blog awhile. Looking back, I see that my last post was a frivolous one on November 11, Veterans née Armistice Day. In my own defense I can point out that I’m frequently unaware of the date and even the day of the week. On holidays I look around and wonder why the office is empty. My cell phone, which displays date and time, tells me as I begin writing that it’s 11/27 and 12:06, and only by close attention to the punctuation marks can I figure out which is which.
Thus a much-too-late note for Armistice Day, or perhaps an early post for Chanukah-Christmas. (Thanksgiving gets ignored, I’m afraid. Football and food induce sleep, not bloggery.)
In earlier posts I’ve mentioned the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who, though personally safe from the Holocaust, killed himself in despair in 1942, soon after finishing his memoir The World of Yesterday. Below is an excerpt from his chapter about the onset of World War I, the war to end wars that brought us the Veterans Day that we now use to remember many subsequent wars. What’s striking is the innocent belief that things were going to be all right, even after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that sparked the conflagration.
The coffins of the murdered royalty were quietly taken to Artstetten and interred there. Vienna, whose perpetual fondness for a show was thus deprived of a great opportunity, had already begun to forget the tragic occurrence. … In less than a week, however, attacks suddenly began to appear in the newspapers, and their constantly mounting crescendo was regulated too consistently for them to have been entirely accidental. The Serbian government was accused of collusion in the assassination, and there were veiled hints that Austria would not permit the murder of its supposedly beloved heir-apparent to go unavenged. One could not escape the impression that some sort of action was being prepared in the newspapers, but no one thought of war. Neither banks nor business houses nor private persons changed their plans. Why should we be concerned with these constant skirmishes with Serbia which, as all knew, arose out of some commercial treaties concerned with the export of Hungarian pigs? My bags were packed so that I could go to [poet Emile] Verhaeren in Belgium, my work was in full swing, what did the dead Archduke in his catafalque have to do with my life? The summer was beautiful as never before and promised to become even more beautiful—and we all looked out upon the world without a care. I can recall that on my last day in Baden I was walking through the vineyards with a friend, when an old wine-grower said to us: “We haven’t had such a summer for a long time. If it stays this way, we’ll get better grapes than ever. Folks will remember this summer!”
He did not know, the old man in his blue cooper’s smock, how gruesomely true a word he had spoken.
(Bison Books edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964)
What would Zweig make of today’s maneuvering in the Mideast and the Korean peninsula? Perhaps even more to the point, would he see in our “perpetual fondness for a show” a way of deluding ourselves about the future?
Nostalgia, Part 3: Clouds of Glory
November 2, 2010
William Wordsworth, from Wikimedia Commons
“. . . trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home . . .”
Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” offers perhaps the strongest explanation of the types of nostalgia that I’ve been exploring in recent posts.
Wordsworth’s poem is famous because he describes a universal sensation, the inkling that once—when?—we connected more deeply with life’s mysteries. That time at the beach, holding Mom’s hand, when we clambered out over the rocks—why is that scene stuck in the mind? what was it we saw or said? Or on that summer sidewalk in a far-off city, in the flickering leaf-shadows under a street lamp, we felt a stirring that seemed almost to tell us—
Uh-huh. Wherever quavers like that were tugging us, most of us never quite made the connection, and in time we got busy and ceased to think about it. That’s certainly true of me. In fact, I discount most of my adolescent mysticism as the fumes of an overheated sexual furnace. And yet, when I take time to reflect, I miss feeling that way. In my notes for a recent story, I jotted that the protagonist was “yearning for yearning,” that is, wishing he could once more experience the unfulfilled urges that drove him crazy as a young man.
Recently I had a chance to read a draft of Byblos, an extraordinary novel-in-progress by a friend, Miriam Seidel. It tells two stories that on the surface seem widely disparate: the burning of the great Alexandria library in the time of Caesar and Cleopatra (and, yes, those characters appear in the novel); and the personal travails of Nina, a female dot.com entrepreneur in the early twenty-first century. The modern-day plot takes Nina back to her childhood home in upstate New York, where she experiences mystical connections not only to her younger self but also to a kind of spiritual zone that ultimately connects the two plots. She realizes that, in some way, numinous sensations like these sustained her through her difficult years of growing up in a discombobulated family.
Normally I have minimal tolerance for mysticism, especially if it comes too easily (see my grumpy comments about “Suzanne” in “Nostalgia, Part 1”). But Miriam grounds her spiritual flights in a deep sensory appreciation of the earth and its creatures. At the old homestead, we get a vivid sense of the tangled trumpet vines, the pallid mushrooms, the worms, the stones, the mucky pond with its slimy frogs, the cicadas screeching in the summer heat—along with Nina’s attempt to rediscover something important from her childhood that has gone missing. Heading for the pond, she rips her legs on a patch of brambles. Opening herself to all of this, she reaches out tentatively to sense the hidden links that bind the people and animals and rocks and plants together. She can’t name or describe these links, but she ends up putting her sensations to use by—well, I’m not going to reveal the end of the novel.
This kind of mysticism is grounded enough, literally and figuratively, for me to appreciate, and I believe that Miriam’s version is truer than Wordsworth’s because it blends the ugly with the pleasant, the hostile with the welcoming, the scummy pond with the pretty trees.
Old Willie did have talent, though, and I don’t mean to diss him. He’s worth quoting for the final words on the subject:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Nostalgia, Part 2: Old Technologies
November 1, 2010
It’s usually a chance sensory experience that kicks off nostalgia—a sight, smell, sound, an odd trace of breeze on the skin. Or it could be an encounter with a long-neglected object: that old shirt in the closet, a broken watch in a dresser drawer.
It seems nostalgia is more and more in vogue, maybe because our population is aging, or perhaps because we’re so sick of the present (an emotion that kicks in powerfully during election season). Yet most of us don’t think hard about the objects that have disappeared from our lives, or about the behaviors and feelings that went with them. One remedy is Ann de Forest’s blog Obsolescing, which focuses on fading technologies and their attendant experiences. Ranging over subjects as diverse as vinyl records and incandescent light bulbs, she points out
the distress and sorrow we feel as the objects of our life, the utilitarian technologies that once surrounded and defined us, fade into memory. News of a past technology’s demise makes us suddenly, desperately long to hold, to touch, to smell, to hear the things of our past. Like Orpheus leading his beloved from the Underworld, we look back to reassure ourselves that the everyday things we have known and loved and remember still exist in their full corporeal presence. (That’s why we revel in the sensory details—the typewriter’s clacking keys, the mimeograph ink’s distinctive scent.)
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t throw things out, you have abundant opportunities for such feelings as you wander through your own house. See the photo above for evidence.
Our "dry sink"
For me, the items with meaning tend to be ones that were used by others: for instance, the dry sink in our dining room at which my grandmother used to wash dishes in her own grandmother’s house. The very term dry sink is so outmoded it sounds like an oxymoron. Yet I picture her there as a girl—with a basin of water, I guess, and a towel, and harsh soap—in the drafty wooden home in a tiny riverside town. I try to imagine what she might have been thinking. It’s the mystery that draws me, the realization that I’ll never know that girl’s experiences.
As for my own old junk, I’m not terribly distressed at this point. That old typewriter that we bought when we started our business in 1982—the only piece of technology we needed then!—holds no deep resonance for me. It’s just there because sometime in 2042 I may need to type a mailing label (if mail still exists then). Similarly, an old telephone lurks in the closet because we may someday donate it for use as a theater prop. Or because plastic will become scarce after the apocalypse.
I suspect, though, that if I weren’t so busy—if I had time to stop and really contemplate these old objects, as Ann has been doing—I’d have more serious pangs. When we stop using a certain technology, we change our patterns of behavior, our ways of thinking, and so, to some degree, it’s the mystery of our own selves that we’re losing.
P.S. Thanks to Mayowa Atte at the Pens With Cojones blog for the fine review of my novel The Shame of What We Are. He found the book “weirdly enlightening” to read. It was that way to write as well.
Nostalgia, Part 1: Diaries and Heroes
October 30, 2010
After Marcy Casterline O’Rourke posted a rave review of my novel The Shame of What We Are on Amazon, I wondered who she was and why she liked the book so much. Exploring her own blog entries, I realized that we’ve both been pondering the past lately, and maybe that’s what first attracted her to Shame, which is set in the 1950s and 1960s. (Though this doesn’t explain her lofty rating of the novel; for that, we’d need to know what she was smoking.)
One of Marcy’s blogs focuses on her late husband, the actor Tom O’Rourke, and she talks about reading a diary he left behind, using it to fill in details of his life before she met him and puzzle out facets of his character that, after decades of marriage, she still didn’t understand. “The Great Mystery of Tom,” she titles one post. Her musings are both pointed and poignant.
Oddly (or perhaps not) I’ve just finished the first draft of a short story about a man who rediscovers his own adolescent diary. This proved difficult to write, because for me nostalgia is often painful. Beyond the poignancy and bittersweet pang, it leads to a deep sense of embarrassment about my younger self, and that happens in this new story, in which the character becomes ashamed of the young man he unearths.
Joanie & Bobby in 1963
Here’s another—not fictional but all-too-real—case in point: Last night I reconnected with a major icon from my youth. Our niece Anna, for no reason that we can fathom, has become a fan of folk music, and her greatest star, higher in the pantheon even than Pete Seeger, is Joan Baez. Hence we went with Anna and her family to Joanie’s concert last night in Philadelphia. Anna wore a handmade T-shirt with a 1960s image of our favorite folk diva; it must have taken her hours to draw with permanent markers.
So, there was the bittersweet sensation of remembering when Joanie (who looked a bit stiff and sore) was a young barefoot maid, and we too were young, and the music meant that the times they were a-changin’, that the deep achy yearning that swelled in our souls could find its place in the world and we would somehow connect not only with the zeitgeist but with the oversoul, the mystery at the heart of things.
It’s bad enough remembering inchoate hopes like that. But here’s where it gets really rough for me. The first time I saw Joan Baez in concert, she was indeed in her barefoot-maid stage, and a heckler yelled at her from the audience, “Why don’t you wear shoes?” She shot back, “That would spoil my image.” Today that seems a perfectly apt, funny reply. To my idealistic younger self, however, it was like a slap in the face. I wanted to believe, I guess, that she chose to go barefoot in the simple, honest, pure way in which I might grab a jacket out of the closet: “Hmm, it’s over 65 degrees and I’ll be on stage most of the night, so I won’t need shoes.” To realize that she might consider something as crass and commercial as her “image,” even with an ironic twist, shocked my entire belief system.
It’s painful to remember being that naive, that stupid. And to make matters worse, Joan sang the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne.” Not only was that once my favorite song, but I considered it truly poetic, profound, inspirational. A woman who dresses in rags and feathers and leads you to a mysterious river/harbor where you meditate upon Jesus walking on the water—heavy stuff, man! But today when I hear lines like “you know that you can trust her / For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind,” I feel the opposite of trust. Sloppy, simple-minded, juvenile, semi-fake spiritualism, I call it now.
So, picture me at the concert in a balcony cheap seat, uncomfortable with memories of idealizing Joanie, growing more restive as Cohen’s pseudo-poetry wafts in ethereal waves over the rapt audience. … My wife reaches over and lays her hand on mind. I squeeze back in reluctant acknowledgment. Then she leans in and whispers, “Remember when you used to sing ‘Suzanne’ to me? Will you sing it to me tonight?”
I want to hide under my chair.
Luckily, though, we’re old enough that, after the long concert, a bus ride to our neighborhood, a short hike to our door in the brisk fall air, we fall harmlessly asleep.
Of Zweig and Patience
October 18, 2010
Stefan Zweig (standing) with his brother Alfred
A year or two ago my wife and I discovered Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), an Austrian writer whose memoir The World of Yesterday paints a lively picture of Europe before, during, and after World War I. Zweig knew every poet, novelist, dramatist, and artist on the scene; a devoted pan-Europeanist, he translated dozens of his friends’ works and wrote biographies of cultural figures ranging from Erasmus to Nietzsche to Balzac. In 1942, shortly after he finished the memoir, in exile in Brazil and despairing as Europe dove deep into another round of self-butchery, he and his wife took their own lives.
In the memoir’s last chapters, he speaks of the disbelief and agony that he and others like him experienced as they witnessed Hitler’s rise. On a Sunday morning he hears the radio news of the declaration of war, “a message which meant death for thousands of those who had silently listened to it, sorrow and unhappiness, desperation and threat for every one of us.”
After reading the memoir, we were moved enough to explore his other work. Despite his vast output of nonfiction and drama, Zweig found time for a number of novels, stories, and novellas—intense psychological works that examine the characters’ thoughts and emotions in exquisite, sometimes excruciating, detail. His writing is marvelous, his characters strange enough to feel very contemporary. And yet I have the typical problem of our A.D.D. age: attention span.
Look at the following passage from The Post-Office Girl (trans. Joel Rotenberg, New York Review Books, 2008). The title character, Christine, a penurious young woman from a small town, has been invited by a rich aunt to visit a magnificent resort in the Alps. When her aunt tells her to “freshen up” before lunch, Christine is amazed, bewildered, awed, and humbled by the luxurious hotel room she is given. We join the action, if it can be called that, about halfway through a two-page paragraph:
Discovery upon discovery: the washbasin, white and shiny as a seashell with nickel-plated fixtures, the armchairs, soft and deep and so enveloping that it takes an effort to get up again, the polished hardwood of the furniture, harmonizing with the spring-green wallpaper, and here on the table to welcome her a vibrant variegated carnation in a long-stem vase, like a colorful salute from a crystal trumpet. How unbelievably, wonderfully grand! She has a heady feeling as she imagines having all this to look at and to use, imagines making it her own for a day, eight days, fourteen days, and with timid infatuation she sidles up to the unfamiliar things, curiously tries out each feature one after another, absorbed in these delights, until suddenly she rears back as though she’s stepped on a snake, almost losing her footing. For unthinkingly she’s opened the massive armoire against the wall—and what she sees through the partly open inner door, in an unexpected full-length mirror, is a life-sized image like a red-tongued jack-in-the-box, and (she gives a start) it’s her, horribly real, the only thing out of place in this entire elegantly coordinated room. The abrupt sight of the bulky, garish yellow travel coat, the straw hat bent out of shape above the stricken face, is like a blow, and she feels her knees sag. “Interloper, begone! Don’t pollute this place. Go back where you belong,” the mirror seems to bark. Really, she thinks in consternation, how can I have the nerve to stay in a room like this, in this world! What an embarrassment for my aunt! I shouldn’t wear anything fancy, she said! As though I could do anything else! No, I’m not going down, I’d rather stay here. I’d rather go back. Bur how can I hide, how can I disappear quickly before anyone sees me and takes offense? She’s backed as far as possible away from the mirror, onto the balcony. She stares down, her hand on the railing. One heave and it would be over.
This scene goes on for another long paragraph in which Christine frets over what to wear, worries what the maid will think, and finally “scurries down the stairs with downcast eyes.”
I admire this writing tremendously—“timid infatuation,” a carnation like a trumpet’s salute—but at some point in the piling of detail upon detail, I become impatient. “I get the point!” my inner voice yells at the author; “let’s move on, OK?”
Then I remember what Stanley Fish once said to a seminar of undergraduates. The more the culture emphasized reading fast, he declared, the slower he read. He engaged us in examining Milton line by line, word by word, almost syllable by syllable.
I try to keep that perspective in mind. No, I lecture myself, don’t read Stefan Zweig while you’re simultaneously watching baseball, checking e-mail, and snacking on the delicious nut-cranberry mix from Trader Joe’s. Both hands on the book, please. Both eyes on the text. Slowly, patiently. Writers as good as Zweig deserve this much from us, and more.
Welcome Back, CARVE
October 17, 2010
A new story of mine, “MG Repairs,” which despite the title has nothing to do with old sports cars, is now live at the Carve Magazine site. More important, this issue marks the provocative magazine’s restart after a year’s hiatus, during which the editor, Matthew Limpede, must have been asking himself, “Why the hell do I publish a literary magazine?” Apparently he found a good reason, or else he decided there’s no sensible answer to a question like that. Anyway, welcome back Carve!
Clicking on the magazine’s title or the image will take you there.
Fishing for Readers: The Apostles Creed of Literature
October 15, 2010
“The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.”
We hear so much about the need for a “hook,” something to grab the reader immediately, that I take more and more pleasure in authors who ignore that dictum, or who wrote before it became the Apostles Creed of Literature.
The sentence quoted above opens Some Do Not…, the first novel in Ford Madox Ford’s magnificent trilogy Parade’s End. Does anything, other than the balance and rhythm of the style, hook us? What are the men doing? Merely sitting. Who are they? Members of a humdrum group of bureaucrats. Where are they? In a railway car whose principal attribute is that it has no faults. This is an anti-hook.
As those who’ve read the trilogy will remember, Ford’s purpose here is to establish the stasis of pre–World War I English society—a stability that will soon be rudely interrupted. Hence the men are seen first as unmoving stereotypes. But even after establishing their stillness, Ford is in no hurry to bring us action. Not until deep in Chapter IV do we reach the scene when Valentine Wannop alters Christopher Tietjens’ life forever by barging up to him on a golf course to demand that he save her friend and fellow suffragette from being manhandled. In the meantime, Ford treats us to, among other things, a description of Tietjens’ companion Macmaster, including his origins, current position, aspirations, and the thesis of the new book whose proofs he has been correcting on the train; a brief history of Tietjens’ disastrous marriage, which leads to an explanation of why the two friends have embarked on a golf outing; a mention of Tietjens’ pastime of finding errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a philosophical discussion of monogamy; a long chapter with the wife, her mother, and a priest, who utters such observations as “’It’s a good maxim that if you swat flies enough some of them stick to the wall”; and, immediately after the opening quoted above, a leisurely survey of that boring railway carriage:
“The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly—Tietjens remembered thinking—as British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to The Times.”
The writing is confoundedly leisurely, as Tietjens himself might have said. It’s also brilliant, pointed, and amusing.
No hooks. The reader isn’t treated as a fish. I admire that, and envy Ford for living in a time when it was possible.
I first read Ford when I was quite young, and now I’m wondering if my convictions about him would change during a new read. By accident in browsing, I discovered one person who has recently come to Parade’s End for the first time and finds it fascinating: see the entry in Hannah Stoneham’s Book Blog, http://hannahstoneham.blogspot.com/2010/04/read-along-of-ford-madox-fords-parades.html.
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