Best. Poetry. Review. Ever

“I like this poem because it is all denotation and no connotation; because it has only one level of meaning; because it is not ironic, paradoxical, complex, or subtle; and because the meter is monotonously regular.”

For details, go here (link).

Booklist

Thanks (again) to Patrick Kurp (link), this time for putting me onto D.G. Myers, and in particular this remarkable new "best fiction" list (link). I like it because it includes stuff that I (a) actually read; or (b) think I might actually want to read. I'm not nearly as well schooled on this topic as Myers (or Kurp), but I've read with great pleasure and profit, e.g., Bernard Malamud, J.F. Powers, Flannery O'Conner, Raymond Carver, Stanley Elkin and Saul Bellow. I enjoyed the Cheever stories when I was young, and Portnoy (snigger snigger). And what a pleasure to find that I don't need to apologize for reading Christopher Buckley. The only choice that seems to me to misfire is Eudora Welty: I've tried, but she just leaves me cold. But in general, his judgment is so good that I am emboldened to go back and try people that I thought I could safely overlook (Paul Auster), or even those I had been actively evading (Philip K. Dick). And I must say I do think he is wrong to exclude Marilynne Robinson.

There's an interesting followup post here, in which Myers responds to Kurp (with a fully justified salute to Cynthia Ozick). Indeed, I think the whole blog belongs in the aggregator.

Afterthought: Unless I missed it Myers nor Kurp nominated this woman. But cf. link. [And: okay, Canadian, right.]

Book Fair: Kurp on Thoreau

I’ve never met Patrick Kurp, but I think I’ve gotten to know him over the past couple of years through my regular reading of his weblog, Anecdotal Evidence. You could say that AE is a “literary” blog, but this term is imprecise. Patrick is strong on poetry, particularly modern poetry, but he reads widely; and he is especially strong on the nature and possibility of literature, on what it means to lead a literary life. I am delighted to have Patrick here today as a contributor to the Underbelly summer Book Fair

The Journals of Henry David Thoreau was published in 14 volumes by Houghton Mifflin in 1906, 44 years after the author’s death at age 44. A century later you can still find that first edition in university libraries and discriminating book shops, where its heft and stolidity lend it a misleadingly stuffy, off-putting appearance. Its contents, more than Walden or “On Civil Disobedience,” are the essential Thoreau -- flinty, funny, closely observed, beautifully written. What Whitman said of Leaves of Grass may be said with greater justice of the Journals: "This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man." The first entry, written when Thoreau was 20 and newly graduated from Harvard, is dated Oct. 22, 1837:

“`What are you doing now?’ he asked. `Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.

“He” is Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor, neighbor, rival and landlord. One of many ways to read the Journals is as Thoreau’s prolonged wrestling match with Emerson, his senior by 14 years. Thoreau starts, like his friend, as a good transcendentalist, an heir of the English Romantics and German idealism. Emerson was merely the catalyst; Thoreau, the unprecedented American compound. Read him with precursors and historical context in mind, but mostly read him as a word-generating wonder of nature. His published Journals total more than 2 million words, a bottomless tonic for readers weary of postmodernism. At the bottom of the year, on Dec. 26, 1854, he writes:

I went to walk in the woods with R. It was wonderfully warm and pleasant, and the cockerels crowed just as in a spring day at home. I felt the winter breaking up in me, and if I had been at home I should have tried to write poetry.

A week and a half later, on Jan. 7, 1855, he notes:

The delicious, soft, spring-suggesting air, -- how it fills my veins with life! Life becomes again credible to me.

Thoreau is read as a naturalist, folksy philosopher, proto-environmentalist, anarchist, cranky Yankee and abolitionist. All are true but incomplete. What unifies them is Thoreau the writer. In the Journals you witness his evolution from callow romantic poseur to a prose artist of the first rank. Readers of the Journals tend either to favor the earlier, self-consciously “philosophical” years, or the later, more densely scientific passages. I’m a partisan of the latter, though the demarcation is never absolute. His best biographer, Robert D. Richardson, has called the Journals “a vast accumulation of fact and observation across which Thoreau could strike a line of purpose at any time.” They are the American volume to take to that bookless desert island, and Thoreau is the master of American prose, his only rivals being Lincoln and Henry James. Here, chosen at random (Sept. 25, 1851), is a sample:

Some men are excited by the smell of burning powder, but I thought in my dream last night how much saner to be excited by the smell of new bread.

Afterthought: For those not ready to tackle the 14-volume Houghton Mifflin edition, there is a crisply-edited one-volume Penguin edition of the journal from 1851 (link). Again, all the Book Fair posts here.

Patrick on the Second Rate

Ooh, Patrick Kurp knows how to hurt a guy (link)! First he’s knocking my (former) chosen profession and next he’s knocking the Great American Novelist. The profession would be journalism, where I spent my 20s, and I’ll try to fashion some non-trite nostalgia about those days later. The novelist would be John Dos Passos and I have pretty much given up on commending him to any but the already converted.

But Patrick goes on to catalog a sampling of the “second-rate,” and he has set me to thinking. Okay--I’ll grant him Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, a couple of famous-for-being-famous blowhards never so well employed as when eating each others’ brains out like Dantean sinners.

Hemingway—well, I think I am beginning to see a theme here: it's not so much writing per se as celebrity: Patrick doesn’t like celebrities who trade on the false coin of writerhood without producing anything of importance. And Hemingway certainly went through something like a 40-year dry spell, during which he did little except call attention to himself and produce galumphing portentousness like The Old Man and the Sea.

But Hemingway did write The Sun Also Rises and a dozen—okay, half a dozen--stories that capture time and place so convincingly that you can’t see those times and places without him. And that is enough, I think, to give him (however grudgingly) a pass.

John Didion certainly counts as a celebrity, although it is hard to say she is insufferable is Hemingway, Mailer or Vidal. As a writer? Well, she certainly isn’t “first-rate” in the sense that Shakespeare or Chekov are first rate. But that can’t be the only test. Short of Shakespeare, I suspect she may turn out to be one of those writers who speak for a time and a place the way Hemingway spoke for a time and a place—and with a lot less to forgive.

I don’t know what poor Steven Crane is doing in this company. He wrote a couple of priceless little items and then died, without ever making a nuisance of himself in any important way. Maybe Patrick is annoyed at the way we impose Red Badge of Courage on schoolchildren. Fine, but then let’s at least keep Maggie, a Girl of the Streets—no schoolchildren there.

But I’ve got a couple of more general thoughts. One (I guess this is trite), I can’t think of anybody who is first-rate all the time. Certainly not Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Maybe Proust comes close, but even there, we have some longeurs. But two (perhaps not as trite)—for a remarkably large number of writers, I’d say that their best stuff is not their best and (if you get my meaning) vice versa. I’ve long thought that Buddenbrooks was a much better book than Magic Mountain, certainly than Doktor Faustus. Say what you will about the late novels of Henry James, I still won’t be persuaded that they are as good as Portrait of a Lady or the best of the novellas. I’m not sure Virginia Woolf ever wrote a really good book, but she wrote magnificent lines and paragraphs (okay, might be a guy thing). And Joyce—dare one say that one would trade perhaps 80 percent of Ulysses for Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist?

I almost called this post “In Praise of the Second-Rate,” but I can see that that is not quite my point. It’s not so much first- and second-rate, as it is over- and under-valued. I certainly agree that celebrity is not the same as achievement, or even talent. But I don’t want the best to be the enemy of the good, and even a fathead like Hemingway can once in a while be a pretty good writer.

Hooboy, That's a Relief

One of the many pleasures of reading Patrick Kurp's excellent blog is that he relieves you of the obligation to pretend to like stuff that you never much liked in the first place (link).

A Load Off My Mind: Kerouac

Ha, that’s a relief! Per Andrew Carroll (Theodore Dalrymple), I do not need to respect Jack Kerouak as a great writer (H/T Kurp).

Throughout the book, which covers a period of years, Dean Moriarty does not do a single decent thing and does many bad ones. We are told that in one year he stole 500 cars, as if this were a mere matter of fun or romance; it does not seem to occur to Paradise that this means that his friend must have caused considerable suffering and anguish, solely to gratify himself very briefly. It is a tediously obvious point, but the fact is that most people are attached to their vehicles, if not emotionally, then for very practical reasons; they find it upsetting when they are stolen. Only someone fundamentally indifferent to the interests and feelings of others would not think this not very difficult thought.

When the pair of them engage to drive a Cadillac from the south to Chicago, to deliver it to its owner there, they wreck it. They feel no guilt about this, because the owner is a rich man who can probably afford ten Cadillacs. Of course, they don’t know this in advance; perhaps the car is his sole asset, but his wealth provides them with a post facto exculpation of their irresponsibility. For them, the question of honor, honesty, and due care for what belongs to another simply does not arise.

Moriarty treats women abominably and uses them solely as objects for his gratification; he is violent towards them; no single instance of consideration towards any of them is given in the book; he has several children by them, all of whom he abandons without a moment’s hesitation or subsequent thought for their fate, though he himself is the victim of an unfortunate upbringing. This, it should be noted, makes him not less, but more culpable, inasmuch as he is perfectly aware of the effect that such an upbringing can have upon a child.

... In fact, it is the extreme banality of On the Road, combined with a glamorous aura of anarchy (in the midst of a society in which there is always enough gasoline for the anarchists to resume their journey, of course), which has made it perennially attractive to youth—an age of man always tempted by bad taste—ever since its publication. If Dean’s utterances are profound and worthy of record, then anything that any of us says is likewise profound and worthy of record; if Dean is a philosopher, we are all philosophers. In this respect, the book is like a soap opera that reassures untold millions that the day-to-day flux of their existence is not without significance, or else why would something so closely resembling it be on television?

…[ N]either Sal nor Dean are very interested in anything at all apart from themselves, and even in themselves only in the shallowest, most inconsequential possible way. They travel across America four times, but they express only the most cursory interest in the people they meet, and often no interest in them at all if they cannot use them in some dishonest way or other; the history of the country does not arouse their curiosity or enthusiasm; neither do questions of politics or economics; nature, in the form of landscape, flora, and fauna, entirely escapes their notice. If On the Road is a Bildungsroman, it is one that is very short on the Bildung.

Update:Gilleland nails it (link).

The Best Shakespeare Intro: Another Nominee

Patrick Kurp says the best introductory guide to Shakespeare is the set of lectures by W. H. Auden (link). It’s hazardous to challenge Patrick on a matter of literary judgment, but I will dare to revise him by adding just one word: Auden is the second best introduction to Shakespeare. The first is the volume by Mark Van Doren--with the unadorned monicker Shakespeare, recently republished as an NYRB Classic (link).

I first read Van Doren’s intro about 52 years ago in the Kettering Library at Antioch College. I guess I thought it was CliffNotes (although we didn’t have CliffNotes); anyway, I was looking for knowledge on the cheap. I read it again in the new edition a few months ago and I’m still astonished at what a treasure I had stumbled on, all unknowing. Things I thought I “just knew” about Shakespeare—or worse, things I thought I had figured out for myself: here they all were set forth with a kind of grace and elegance that can only speak for itself. And I never suspected. Talk about pearls before swine.

I don’t have a copy of Van Doren at hand—I gave my last to a deserving (I hope) high school senior. Happily, I did just stumble on a second copy of Dan Wakefield’s warm-hearted memoir, New York in the 50s, where he recalls, inter alia, his encounter with Van Doren at Columbia.

When I saw Van Doren in class…for the first time, his hair was gray and I had no idea of his age (fifty-eight) which was anyway irrelevant for he didn’t seem old but ageless, like the visage of one of the presidents on Mount Rushmore. His face had that craggy granite look of being hewn or chiseled by hard-won experience and knowledge, but it wasn’t grim or set in a stare of stony, locked-away wisdom. His eyes gave off a love of his work (which included the students seated before him) and the world, and he had a playful and wry sense of humor.

--Dan Wakefield, New York in the 50s 25 (1992)

I never laid eyes on Van Doren (although I guess I remember him vaguely as a TV personality of his time)—but I think it's a good description of his style: “hewn or chiseled by hard-won experience and knowledge but [not] grim or set in a stare..” Next time I lay my hands on a copy, I’ll cite some examples.

I cheated in quoting Patrick. What he really said was that Auden’s was the best and most entertaining introduction. Thus qualified, he’s probably onto something. Auden’s introduction is excellent in its own right, and it is indeed entertaining, as only Auden can be. Van Doren is subtler, less obtrusive. But in this case, much as I enjoyed Auden, I have a feeling that entertainment value may be a bit of a problem: there is a lot of invaluable Shakespeare here, but maybe just a tad too much Auden.

But it’s a small matter. The real point is that either one of them is light years ahead of any product of more recent vintage (I name no names). To match either Auden or Van Doren, you really have to go back to Johnson or Coleridge. But I’ll still end by citing just one more encomium for Van Doren. The writer says:

Professor Van Doren enlightens us, not because he has any special knowledge or private advantages, but because his love of Shakespeare has been greater than our own.

That’s quoted from the Van Doren NYRB web page. The writer is, of course, W.H. Auden.

Doris Lessing: At Least One Good Book

Patrick Kurp lightens the burden of his past with a refreshing and well deserved swipe at John Hawkes, and a sideswipe at Doris Lessing (link). I can't find his email address at the moment so I will have to respond in public. Like Patrick, I have never finished The Golden Notebook, but I am intrigued by the fact that Lessing herself apparently grew irritated at its cultic status among serious and sensitive young women.

But Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949 to 1962 (1997) is a wonderful memoir of London in the 50s, London before London was London. I love her story about going to Leicester Square on New Years' Eve--it must have been about 1950--to look for the action. But no one was there: in those days, London was like that.

Patrick also discusses Lessing's somewhat iffy relationship with Clancy Sigal. As it happens, Sigal's Going Away is an even better memoir (lightly disguised as a novel) of more or less the same period, this time in America. Seems to be out of print, pity. Might be a good candidate for the New York Review of Books Classics Reprint line.

Use a Donkey, Go to Jail

Running around and trying to put out a midterm, so not able to write about stuff I’d like to write about. Left to link to other good stuff.

Like the ever-dependable Patrick Kurp, though I am not quite certain what moral I should draw from this piece

Or Patrick Lang, speaking on a subject that he really knows something about (clarification: I think Lang almost always knows whereof he speaks; I wish others would profit from his example).

Or Glenn Greenwald, who just keeps getting better and better (put up with the Salon gateway: not all that burdensome, and worth it).

Or Elizabeth Warren on another tsunami.

Or this, which beggars description. But here’s a teaser:

He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.