He's Ba-a-a-a-ck

Source: Wiki

For the nonce at the gym yesterday, I fired up a Librivox audio of Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle.  You've heard of Rip?  Of course you have, wonderbuns.  He's probably America's most visible literary icon, ahead of Tom Sawyer and oceans ahead of that white whale.  Curiously, prior to yesterday, my only encounter with the real thing was back around the age of six when they were desperately serving up diversions to keep me from turning into a monster while recovering from some long-since forgotten childhood ailment.  No, wait, that wasn't the original Rip:  it was the Classics Comics version--my source of all culture through most of the latency years, and I must say, a fond memory, right up there with Picture Stories from the Bible and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.

And while memory may be untrustworthy, yesterday's encounter suggests they get full points for faithfulness.  Whatever you say about Irving (probably not very much) he did know how to tell a story.  But here's an insight that I can entertain in my dotage though it would not have been available to me back then.  That is: the whole tradition of "back from the dead" stories.  I can see now that there are literary echoes just all over the place.  Wiki does offer a  catalog of "forerunners," although oddly, it doesn't seem to mention any of the items that come to my mind.

I'm thinking, for example, of Odysseus, hero of the world's first great homecoming story (also one of the world's first buddy stories, but leave that for another day).  There are obvious differences: Odysseus seems to have had a better relationship with his wife, and Rip doesn't slaughter all the suitors, but still.  Twenty years. Think of it.

Another that comes to my mind is Balzac's Colonel Chabert.  I see that it was published in 1832, just a few years after Rip.  A casual Google search confirms that others have noted the similarity, though I have no idea how much the critics make of it.  Again, it isn't exact.  The Colonel is not asleep; he is just away and thought dead.  The notable similarity between Balzac and Irving is that they both draw on the  insight as to how much the world has changed: in Rip's case, the American Revolution, in Balzac's, the French.  The interesting difference is that the Colonel finds he is profoundly unwelcome: the world has changed and there are plenty of people (by which I mean "his wife")  for whom it would be far more convenient if he were dead.

Which naturally brings me to mind another riff on the "what do we do now?" theme, but this time, for real.  I'm thinking Martin Guerre, subject of a respectable movie, a piece of high-concept history and a superb little novel:  this time the theme is "is he or isn't he," and I won't be the spoiler.

And finally to my own favorite Henry James story (competition is thin: I'm not a huge James fan).  That would be The Jolly Corner, about Spencer Brydon who returns to New York and the family home after 30 years in Europe. Once again, we have the theme of "how the world has changed!"--but this time the pivotal figure aside from Spencer himself is--oh, I shouldn't be a spoiler now, should I? 

Update:  Ignoto reminds us of the ultimate comeback story.

You Just Can't Get Good Help Anymore

Washington Irving, already a celebrity of sorts as a literary gent, takes his ease as a guest of the Governor of Granada in the palace/fortress of the Alhambra. Probably no site on the travel itinerary better suited his taste for romantic storytelling, tinctured with unvarnished malarky. Here he considers his situation in the hands of his staff, including (among others) Antonia, the de facto proprietress, and Mateo Ximenes, his personal attendant--considers, and finds it suitable:

The good dame Autonia fulfils faithfully her contract with regard to my board and lodging; and as I am easily pleased, I find my fare excellent; while the merry-hearted little Dolores keeps my apartment in order, and officiates as handmaid at meal-times. I have also at my command a tall, stuttering, yellow-haired lad, named Pepe, who works in the gardens, and would fain have acted as valet; but in this he was forestalled by Mateo Ximenes, "the son of the Alhambra." This alert and officious wight has managed, somehow or other, to stick by me ever since I first encoun- tered him at the outer gate of the fortress, and to weave himself into all my plans, until he has fairly appointed and installed himself my valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire; and I have been obliged to improve the state of his wardrobe, that he may not disgrace liis various functions; so that he has cast his old brown man- tle, as a snake does his skin, and now appears about the fortress with a smart Andalusian hat and jacket, to his infinite satisfaction, and the great astonishment of his comrades. The chief fault of honest Mateo is an over- anxiety to be useful. Conscious of having foisted himself into my employ, and that my simple and quiet habits render his situation a sinecure, he is at his wit's ends to devise modes of making himself important to my welfare. I am in a manner the victim of his officiousness; I cannot put my foot over the threshold of the palace, to stroll about the fortress, but he is at my elbow, to explain everything I see; and if I venture to ramble among the surrounding hills, he insists upon attending me as a guard, though I vehemently suspect he would be more apt to trust to the length of his legs than the strength of his arms, in case of attack. After all, however, the poor fellow is at times an amusing companion; he is simple-minded and of infinite good humor, with the loquacity and gossip of a village barber, and knows all the small-talk of the place and its environs.

So Washington Irving, The Alhambra, composed around 1829, available here.  I'd say that anyone who condescends to his tour guide "simple-minded and of infinite good humor" ought not be surprised if he finds himself first in the queue for the guillotine. 

So Much Hope

Actuated by my investigation of The Prince,  I pulled down my copy of its companion-piece, The Discourses, to fill an idle hour the other night.  Shorter Discourses: it's wonderful--provocative, shrewd, funny and a rattling good read.  Also proof of what a little age and experience can do for you.  I clearly read it before--my underling and checkmarks are all over the piece.  But I remember it as a bit of a grind, something I did because I felt I ought to more than because I really wanted to.  Much different today, and I think the difference has more to do with paltry achievement than anything vaporous like wisdom.  I know more about Italy today (even a bit of Italian) and I know more about Livy: I'm much better able to get my mind around the sinewy dynamism of something like this:

Affermo, bene, di nuovo, questo essere verissimo, secondo che per tutte le istorie si vede, che gli uomini possono secondare la fortuna e non opporsegli; possono tessere gli orditi suoi, e non rompergli. Debbono, bene, non si abbandonare mai; perché, non sappiendo il fine suo, e andando quella per vie traverse ed incognite, hanno sempre a sperare, e sperando non si abbandonare, in qualunque fortuna ed in qualunque travaglio si trovino.

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.

Book 2, Ch. 29, unfinished at his death in 1527 (Leslie Walker and Brian Richardson trans., 1974)

What gets me here is not just the dynamism and the style by the resiliency: he begins on what might sound like a pessimistic note ("they may weave its warp, but cannot break it").   Yet he turns instantly to a kind of determined hopefulness.  Doesn't take long to recall another great Renaissance thinker in a near-canonical moment:

[E]ven if the breath of hope which blows on us from that New Continent were fainter than it is and harder to perceive, yet the trial (if we would not bear a spirit altogether abject) must by all means be made. For there is no comparison between that which we may lose by not trying and by not succeeding, since by not trying we throw away the chance of an immense good; by not succeeding we only incur the loss of a little human labor. But as it is, it appears to me from what has been said, and also from what has been left unsaid, that there is hope enough and to spare, not only to make a bold man try, but also to make a sober-minded and wise man believe.

So Francis Bacon, Novum Organum 114 (1620)The reader is left to make his own inferences about any change of attitude from the times of Machiavelli and Bacon to the preen day.

Irvin Who?

Quick now: who hosted the 1935 Academy Awards?  

You don't know, do you?  And if I tell you that the answer is Irvin S. Cobb will you still be as unenlightened as you were before?  Maybe, and that fact is interesting in itself.   It was Cobb  I was quoting (from memory) the other day in a comparison (perhaps impertinent) to the ghost of Hamlet's father.  The exact quote is 

 Kentucky rotgut] smells like gangrene starting in a mildewed silo, it tastes like the wrath to come, and when you absorb a big swig of it you have all the sensations of having swallowed a lighted kerosene lamp.  A sudden, violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victim's watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across.

Gangrene is good; I missed that.  I find the text in an old favorite of mine, not yet discarded: The American Treasury, 1455-1955--"select, arranged, and edited" (it says here) by Clifton Fadiman, assisted by (the soon-to-be-disgraced) Charles Van Doren (at p. 254)  My copy says I acquired it in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1957, which is to say, just about the time I flamed out of Antioch College and began by unsteady foray into journalism.  

The Treasury accords Cobb two other claims to fame.  One:

There is this to be said for New York City: it is the one densely inhabited locality--with the possible exception of Hell--that has absolutely not a trace of local pride.

Id., at 73.  Well, I guess I wasn't there, but if he was writing in the time of Jimmy Waker or Grover Whelan, I suspect that as to New York City, this is flat wrong. As to Hell--well, it is good he included the qualifier, because I've read my Dante and I'd say that Hell is suffused with local pride.  

The third Cobb item in the is his supposed riposte on hearing that his boss,  Charles S. Chapin of the World was ill:

I hope it's nothing trivial.

At p. 994.  Fine again, except that I could swear I've heard it Ben Hecht, to Gene Fowler possibly to others.  You find all this somewhat less than hilarious?  Okay,  except that it's all the more interesting how these crashing banalities come from the mouth of one who was (per Wiki) the most highly paid journalist of his time.  Some compare him to Mencken, another celebrity journalist, except I suspect that  the comparison does more to highlight the differences than the similarities.  Mencken, for his part, had a way of shaking things up--of disturbing the verities in ways that may continue to matter (like my bud Dos Passos he went sour in his old age, but let that pass).

Cobb on the other hand seemed to like nothing so much as to comfort the comfortable.  It is a Cobb novel that underlies Judge Priest, the 1934 John Ford movie--Will Rogers, Hattie McDaniel and, yes, Stepin Fetchit.   David Thomson in his "personal introduction to 1,000 films" describes Judge Priest as "outrageous, shockingly racist, and serenely opposed to all forms of progress or argument.  At the same time" (Thomson continues) "it feels like a yarn spun on a porch in the late afternoon sun, and it reminds us of how closely and mysteriously allied such story-telling can be with the blunt lineaments of fascism."

Might  be a bit much to blame Ford on Cobb, but my guess is that what Thomson calls "the blunt lineaments" are right there in the original. 

Oh, and I see there is a fourth and final Cobb item in the Fadiman collection:

Epitaph: a belated advertisment for a line of goods that has been permanently discontinued.

Probably cheesy to observe that Cobb  may have wound up describing himself.

Afterthought:  Apparently not quite forgotten.  Evidently there is a bridge that bears his name someplace.  And the Paducah Wal-Mart is located on Irvin Cobb drive.

Be Careful What You Wish For (Department of Honest Toil)

Well, one more Dreiser, but on a hobbyhorse of mine.  That is: we talk with nostalgia about the good old days when we all had jobs. Well, maybe, in a sense, sort of, sometimes.  But one thing we forget is how many of those jobs were god-awful--demeaning, soul-killing exercises in extraction, designed to bleed you dry before your time.  "But they never worked in the mills," my grandmother is said to have said of her children; "they never worked in the mills."  I don't think she had contempt for millworkers or mill work; just compassion for her own, and delighted that they escaped such a fate.  

Which brings me back to Dreiser, and his first great hero(ine)--Sister Carrie, making or taking her chances as she found them, never particularly happy (I suspect she didn't have a clear notion what happiness might be), but sometimes a keen observer:

It was so sad to be ragged and poor. The hang of faded clothes pained her eyes. 

 "And they have to work so hard!" was her only comment.

On the street sometimes she would see men working— Irishmen with picks, coal-heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some work which was a mere matter of strength— and they touched her fancy. Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy— a pale, sombre half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling. Her old father, in his flour-dusted miller's suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in a window. A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blastman seen through a narrow window  in some basement where iron was being melted, a bench-worker seen high aloft in some window, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details of the mill. She felt, though she seldom expressed them, sad thoughts upon this score.  Her sympathies were ever with that under-world of toil from which she had so recently sprung, and which she best understood.

--So Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie: a Novel (Kindle Locations 1932-1938).

So much for honest toil. But the thing is in Carrie's world, plenty of them didn't even have the privilege of being exploited.  Her companion and sometimes protector, George Hurstwood, supports himself variously as a saloon keeper and embezzler, and at last falls from grace. Whereupon he discovers a new slice of life among the bums on the Bowery:

He mingled with a crowd of men— a crowd which had been, and was still, gathering by degrees   It began with the approach of two or three, who hung about the closed wooden doors and beat their feet to keep them warm. They had on faded derby hats with dents in them. Their misfit coats were heavy with melted snow and turned up at the collars. Their trousers were mere bags, frayed at the bottom and wobbling over big, soppy shoes, torn at the sides and worn almost to shreds. They made no effort to go in, but shifted ruefully about, digging their hands deep in their pockets and leering at the crowd and the increasing lamps. With the minutes, increased the number. There were old men with grizzled beards and sunken eyes, men who were comparatively young but shrunken by diseases, men who were middle-aged. None were fat. There was a face in the thick of the collection which was as white as drained veal. There was another red as brick. Some came with thin, rounded shoulders, others with wooden legs, still others with frames so lean that clothes only flapped about them. There were great ears, swollen noses, thick lips, and, above all, red, blood-shot eyes. Not a normal, healthy face in the whole mass; not a straight figure; not a straightforward, steady glance. 

Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie: a Novel (Kindle Locations 6435-6439).

Mr. Dooley and the War Lovers

Oh, now I know why I've been rattling on about Theodore Dreiser.  It's because I have been reading Evan Thomas' admirable The War Lovers, about the great spasm of bellicosity that led us to grab an empire we didn't need from paltry and pathetic Spain--and the spasm of aversion and regret that almost restrained us.

They say that history is written by the victors but it isn't quite that.  The real point is that the victors' story is so full of cheery self-congratulation that you lose sight of all the reservations and second thoughts even if they are right before your eyes.  So we remember Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst, the bumptious bullyboys who carried us into the Spanish American war as if it were a picnic.  You tend to forget people like Thomas Reed, speaker of the House of Representatives who threw up his hands in dismay when he saw he couldn't do anything to stop it.   And beyond the leaders: one of the virtues of Thomas' book is that it shows you the mindless awfulness of the war fever as it possessed not just the leaders but the masses of Americans who cheered them on.  Another virtue is that he shows how even at high tide, war fever was far from universal--and how, as the war slogged on in the Philippines, more and more Americans came to wonder what it was all about, and even Roosevelt himself seemed almost (but not quite) ready to distance himself from what was, in large part, his own creation.

Which beings me to one of the most refreshing creatures in the whole menagerie--Finley Peter Dunne, Chicago newsman, sometimes friend and colleague of Theodore Dreiser, supra, surely one of the sharper political commentators we've ever had the good fortune to enjoy. It is Dunne who created Mr. Dooley, the Chicago saloon keeper who did so much to deflate the pretensions of the war madness.  Of course he didn't prevail; he wouldn't have been funny if he had prevailed.  But it's a bit of a consolation to recall that he was able to hold an audience--to evade lynching--even at the height of the war enthusiasm.   In the following excerpt he instructs his friend Hennesey on the correct approach for us to take against a country which, as Mr. Dooley suggests, most of us couldn't have found on the map.  "Mack" is William McKinley, nominally the President of the United States but often a seeming spectator at his own sideshow.  Anyway:

I know what I'd do if I was Mack," said Mr. Hennessy. "I'd hist a flag over th' Ph'lippeens, an' I'd take in th' whole lot iv thim." 

"An' yet," said Mr. Dooley, "tis not more thin two months since ye larned whether they were islands or canned goods. Ye'er back yard is so small that ye'er cow can't turn r-round without buttin' th' woodshed off th' premises, an' ye wudden't go out to th' stock yards without takin' out a policy on yer life. Suppose ye was standin' at th' corner iv State Sthreet an' Archey R-road, wud ye know what car to take to get to th' Ph'lippeens? If yer son Packy was to ask ye where th' Ph'lippeens is, cud ye give im anny good idea whether they was in Rooshia or jus' west iv th' thracks ?" 

"Mebbe I cudden't," said Mr. Hennessy, haughtily, "but I'm f'r takin' thim in, annyhow."
"So might I be," said Mr. Dooley, "if I cud on'y get me mind on it. Wan iv the worst things about this here war is th' way it's makin' puzzles f'r our poor, tired heads. Whin I wint into it, I thought all I'd have to do was to set up here behind th' bar with a good tin-cint see-gar in me teeth, an' toss dinnymite bombs into th' hated city iv Havana. But look at me now. Th' war is still goin' on; an' ivry night, whin I'm countin' up the cash, I'm askin' mesilf will I annex Cubia or lave it to the Cubians? Will I take Porther Ricky or put it by? An' what shud I do with the Ph'lippeens? Oh, what shud I do with thim? I can't annex thim because I don't know where they ar-re. I can't let go iv thim because some wan else'll take thim if I do. They are eight thousan' iv thim islands, with a popylation iv wan hundherd millyon naked savages; an' me bedroom's crowded now with me an' th' bed. How can I take thim in, an' how on earth am I goin' to cover th' nakedness iv thim savages with me wan shoot iv clothes? An' yet 'twud break me heart to think iv givin' people I niver see or heerd tell iv back to other people I don't know. An', if I don't take thim, Schwartzmeister down th' sthreet, that has half me thrade already, will grab thim sure. 

"It ain't that I'm afraid iv not doin' th' r-right thing in th' end, Hinnissy. Some mornin' I'll wake up an' know jus' what to do, an' that I'll do. But 'tis th' annoyance in th' mane time. I've been r-readin' about th' counthry. 'Tis over beyant ye'er left shoulder whin ye're facin' east. Jus' throw ye'er thumb back, an' ye have it as ac'rate as anny man in town. 'Tis farther thin Boohlgahrya an' not so far as Blewchoochoo. It's near Chiny, an' it's not so near; an', if a man was to bore a well through fr'm Goshen, Indianny, he might sthrike it, an' thin again he might not. It's a poverty-sthricken counthry, full iv goold an' precious stones, where th' people can pick dinner off th' threes an' ar-re starvin' because they have no step-ladders. Th' inhabitants is mostly naygurs an' Chinnymen, peaceful, industhrus, an' law-abidin', but savage an' bloodthirsty in their methods. They wear no clothes except what they have on, an' each woman has five husbands an' each man has five wives. Th' r-rest goes into th' discard, th' same as here. Th' islands has been ownded be Spain since befure th' fire; an' she's threated thim so well they're now up in ar-rms again her, except a majority iv thim which is thurly loyal. Th' natives seldom fight, but whin they get mad at wan another they r-run-a-muck. Whin a man r-runs-a-muck, sometimes they hang him an' sometimes they discharge him an' hire a new motorman. Th' women ar-re beautiful, with languishin' black eyes, an' they smoke see-gars, but ar-re hurried an' incomplete in their dhress. I see a pitcher iv wan th' other day with nawthin' on her but a basket of cocoanuts an' a hoop-skirt. They're no prudes. We import juke, hemp, cigar wrappers, sugar, an' fairy tales fr'm th' Ph'lippeens, an' export six-inch shells an' th' like. Iv late th' Ph'lippeens has awaked to th' fact that they're behind th' times, an' has received much American amminition in their midst. They say th' Spanyards is all tore up about it. 

"I larned all this fr'm th' papers, an' I know 'tis sthraight. An' yet, Hinnissy, I dinnaw what to do about th' Ph'lippeens. An' I'm all alone in th' wurruld. Ivrybody else has made up his mind. Ye ask anny con-ducthor on Ar-rchy R-road, an' he'll tell ye. Ye can find out fr'm the papers; an', if ye really want to know, all ye have to do is to ask a prom'nent citizen who can mow all th' lawn he owns with a safety razor. But I don't know." 

"Hang on to thim," said Mr. Hennessy, stoutly. "What we've got we must hold." 

"Well," said Mr. Dooley, "if I was Mack, I'd lave it to George. I'd say: 'George,' I'd say, 'if ye're f'r hangin' on, hang on it is. If ye say, lave go, I dhrop thim.' 'Twas George won thim with th' shells, an' th' question's up to him."

--From Mr. Dooley in Peace and War, first published in 1898 and available at  Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.  "George" is elsewhere identified as Mr. Dooley's cousin George Dooley, of whom his Chicago expositor says "whin we come to find out about him, we'll hear he's ilicted himself king iv th' F'lip-ine Islands. Dooley th' Wanst."  

Theodore Dreiser Tells You All You Might Want to Know about Sex

Theodore Dreiser and Henry James.   Perhaps not an obvious pairing, but perhaps more durable than might appear at first blush.  Start with the simpler stuff.  You'd have to admit that James could write, after a fashion, if you like that sort of thing (I'm ambivalent).  Dreiser, strangely, couldn't write at all.  Further: I think it's fair to say that they both wanted to tell the truth about their world, although it is an interesting question what kind of world each thought his to be.  Dreiser surely saw him as an expositor of "America," though probably understood that it was only a slice of American life.  I take it that James, too, though of himself as "American" and he may not have noticed how much of his time and  life took place overseas (for my money, one of his best pieces of work is his story "The Jolly Corner," about a narrator who comes back after a long stay away and finds the old place a ghostly shadow of its former self).

And here's an intriguing convergence: both took women seriously.  I was going to say "understood women," but who am I (and who were they?) to say?--we are not, after all, women.   Still, "understand" or not, they both seemed to recognize women as creatures with lives of heir own--lives with purposes and disappointments that they  might not even share with men.

But there is one interesting and glaring difference.  Thus James, for all his seriousness doesn't seem to understand how babies are made.  Dreiser seems at times to understand it almost too well.  It got him in trouble; it gained him notoriety it drove him and almost defined him.  

Here's a remarkable instance, perhaps not Dreiser at his best but in a sense perhaps most typical.  Once again, we're lifting from Newspaper Days, his autobiography, perhaps best characterized as a monumental effort at self-understanding:

Mrs. X, as I shall have to call her, for I have entirely forgotten her name as well as the number of the house, was entirely different to the two or three women I had known thus intimately heretofore.  She was so small, well formed, pretty, chirpy, with a pagan practicality and directness which was tonic to me at this time, but, for all that, with distinct signs of her thirty years about her.  I liked her very much indeed.  As it was, however, I still had such a sniveling and sniffy attitude in regard to all sex relations that I considered myself very much of a wastrel, if not a deep-dyed villain.  Say what one would, according to my point of view a the time, due to my raising, of course, fornication was a crime—a mortal sin, as he Catholics say—but alas, somehow vastly delicious and humanly unescapable.  No one should really do it—t was not right—but still, if one could and never be found out--.  You know the  American point of view.  In addition I was dreadfully fearful lest I be led into a life of crime or shame by this, or disease—the various diseases springing from this relation being so very much discussed at the time.  And I was always fearful lest (she being promiscuous and I not!) I would acquire some contagion, so that I was for purifying myself with the greatest care, afterwards.  I fancy, due to her American or Midwestern bringing-up, of course, that she may have entertained, or had in the pat, many notions to the same end.  Still, compared to myself, she was a creature of the world and probably noted and was amused by many of my shy puritan ways.  The mere act of silent secretive friction was sufficient for me, whereas I recall now that I was quire shocked—deliciously show of course (even if I looked on it as evil)—at some of her expressions in the process, the direct vigorous way in which, after the first two or three times, she approached this pleasure.
 “You like that!”
 “You like to do it to me?”
 .And the way she bit my neck and cheek, in lieu of love-savageries which I should have indulged in, I presume.  She was so small, and curled herself about me so tightly and pinched and uttered such muttered scrams when her orgasm was upon her that I was astonished, even if pleased.

Once again, that is the Black Sparrow reprint from 2000, T.D. Nostwich editor.

Update:  I've just now stumbled on this lovely narrative account of Dreiser's long and sometimes troubled friendship with H. L. Mencken.

Dreiser Visits the Allegheny County Library

Does anybody read Dreiser these days?  Mencken admired him, but then, does anybody read Mencken?  I read Dreiser when I was young, thanks to Mencken as presented in (I think) the old Vintage Mencken, with an inviting introduction by Alistair Cooke.  I'm pleased to see that the Mencken is still in print--there appears even to be a Kindle and wonder of wonders, it appears to be free (I haven't tried it).

But Dreiser--as Mencken understood (how could he miss?)--Dreiser is one of those great paradoxes of the literary world: a gripping, hypnotic novelist who is at the same time a terrible writer: clunky, ham-handed, overdone in almost every way.  Like Faulkner on his (too frequent) bad days.  And most of all, like Balzac. Yes, Balzac.   Two of a kind, those guys.   They both get drunk on the city--on its richness and on their struggle.  And neither one can write a simple sentence.You find yourself sucked in, and you can't imagine why.

I'm thinking of Dreiser as I disport myself with his autobiography Newspaper Days, finished in 1920 when he was 48 (he had another 25 years to live). which I've got a Black Sparrow edition from 2000, edited by T. D. Nostwich.  It has all the Dreiserian virtues and defects and it offers what is, for the moment, one remarkable insight.  How, you ask, did Dreiser becomes so--well, so Balzacian?  I suppose the answer should be obvious.  But here he is prowling the stacks at the Allegheny County Library in Pittsburgh in 1894 (which would make him 22):

[H]having nothing else to do, or at least nothing immediately pressing, I came here and by the merest chance picked up a volume entitled The Wild Ass' Skin, by one Honoré de Balzac, no less,.  I examined it curiously, reading incidentally a preface which fairly shimmered with his praise. ...  I turned to the first page and began, and from then on until dusk I was sitting in this charming alcove , beside this window, reading.  And it was as if a new and inviting door to life had been suddenly thrown open to me.  Here was one who, as I saw it then, thought, felt and understood and could interpret all that I was interested in.  Through him I saw at a glance a prospect so wide that it fairly left me breathless--all Paris all France, all life through French eyes, and those of a genius. ... It was for me a literary revolution, and this not only for the brilliant and incisive manner in which the man grasped life and invented themes or vehicles whereby to present it.  In my own estimation at least, the type of individual he handled with most enthusiasm and skill, the brooding, seeking, ambitious beginner in life's affairs--social, political, artistic, commercial (Rastignac, Raphael, de Rubempré, Bianchon) was, as I thought, so much like myself, their exact counterpart.

Afterthought:  Well yes, of course.   Might have guessed it, had I given it any thought (maybe it's in Mencken).  Balzac, c'est moi, he might have said, as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary.  As Thoreau said, the shock of recognition.  But one point sidetracks me.  Dreiser responds to Balzac's great gallery of young men.  Well he might, but it seems to me that Balzac is just as good at characterizing the old: Old Goriot, Cousin Pons, Cousine Bette, and (for my money, perhaps the best of them) Eugénie Grandet.  In fact Dreiser mentions the old ones, in a paragraph next to the one just quoted.  But it is clearly the young--those his own age, facing life the same way he felt he faced life--who capture his attention.  And their creator, one might say, who taught him how to write.

"Story of a Little Girl With No Father or Mother About a Cow"

There are few cows, since they get eaten.  A cow has legs at its four corners.  Beef patties are made from a cow, everybody gets one patty, but potatoes grow separately.  A cow gives milk herself; other animals try, but can't.  It's a pity they can't, it would be better if they could.  The girls are full of meat patty; they've gone to bed by themselves and they smell.  I'm bored.

--Andrey Platonov in a draft for Happy Moscow, reprinted in a footnote to the New York Review of  Books edition of the novel, "translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others," at 234-5.

The Making of Mark Tushnet

The first time I ever noticed Mark Tushnet was 45 years ago in a class on the history of English law.   He suggested that he thought that maybe we had been to quick to dispense with outlawry as a form of social control.  I thought the remark clever, suggestive and probably good for a couple of extra points though I couldn't escape the notion that he probably enjoyed being a bit provocative.

The next time I noticed him, he had become one of the linchpins of the Critical Legal Studies movement, then the hot new thing in speak-truth-power law scholarship.  I'm vague on details (and the online CVs I've seen don't include his early stuff).  I recall he was writing a lot of those days (he seems always to have written a lot).  He remained clever and suggestive, but as I remember it, he pretty quickly moved beyond provocative to downright abrasive.  He seemed to enjoy ripping the socks of assorted feet of clay.

If you remember those days, I suppose you might say I have characterized the whole mischievous CLS crew, but Tushnet, though seemingly at the center of the action, always appeared to me to be his own man: a bit more serious, less juvenile--perhaps better "less frivolous"--than some of his CLS colleagues, a number of whom seemed to be cossetted Ivy League seminar brats determined to pee on their own bread.

I didn't pay much attention to Tushnet's work for many years--I've never in any serious way done con  law.  But I did read and enjoy his American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860, which I suspect might be one of his lesser known works.  I also skimmed at least one of his two books on the late Justice Thurgood Marshall for whom Tushnet had clerked.  I enjoyed what I read and in my recollection I found something there that I hadn't noticed in Tushnet's work before: a thread of warmth and affection for the brave old man (maybe it was just projection: Marshall has long  been a hero of my own).

I can't remember, then, exactly what prompted me to pick up A Court Divided, his history of the Rehnquist court, but I remember reading it with great enthusiasm over a long weekend while I was on my own in DC about 2006.  In some ways, it reminded me of what (little) I already knew of its author: serious, diligent, shrewd, but still independent minded.   Also firm in its views although I missed the edginess that I had noticed earlier (I went so far as to steal an observation of his for a talk I gave to a bar forum in  Fresno later that year.  "I think that Thomas is smarter than people give him credit for," I said (muted murmur of assent from the audience), "and that Scalia is not as smart" (undercurrent of growl).  On reflection, I really think he had Scalia's number: smart but shallow, a debater-boy, probably better suited for a Sunday morning talk show than the nation's highest court).

This is really a long buildup to a shoutout for In the Balance, his latest, a kind of a sequel to his Rehnquist book, certainly the best overview I've seen so far of the Roberts court.  Like his Rehnquist book, this new one is a remarkable mix of the doctrinal and the political.  He offers some excellent insights on the contrasting agendas of Democrats as against Republicans in seeking appointees to the high court; also a wonderful sketch of the nature and content of the "Supreme Court bar"--the small gaggle of lawyers (formerly including Justice Roberts) who do an outsized share of face-time with the justices on the bench.  But most of the book is a detailed account of the major cases: not just what they say, but how they got there, with some thoughts about what it tells us of the nature of the process.  It's pretty much of a lawyer book, not a popular book;  not for the faint-hearted, but on the off chance that I number among my readers anyone who is or soon will be tackling con law class, I'd heartily recommend it as near-essential bedside prep reading.

In short, it's got the virtues you would have seen in the young Tushnet, mostly cleansed of the impurities.   And I guess you could say I saw this coming in  my only other direct personal contact with the author.  I was on the elevator at Georgetown Law School one day, where he was then on the faculty--I guess this would be 2006, just after I had read he Rehnquist book.  I saw this short, chubby, blondish, baldish guy behind me.

"You Mark Tushnet?"  I asked.

"Yeh."

"I  enjoyed your book."

Momentary pause. Then: "Well, the publisher said it earned back its advance."

The door opened and he went out of my life, I suppose forever.






















                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   







 

How SJ Spent his Sybaritic Youth

While I am waxing nostalgic, it's a good time to catch up with our old friend SJ Perelman and see what he remembers about his sunshine years:

Whenever I stretch out before my incinerator, churchwarden in hand and, staring reflectively into the dying embers, take inventory of my mottled past, I inevitably hark back to a period, in the spring of 1926, that in many ways was the most romantic in my life. I was, in that turbulent and frisky epoch, an artist of sorts, specializing in neoprimitive woodcuts of a heavily waggish nature that appeared with chilling infrequency in a moribund comic magazine. It was a hard dollar, but it allowed me to stay in bed until noon, and I was able to get by with half as many haircuts as my conventional friends above Fourteenth Street. 

 So from the The Most of S.J. Perelman  290 (Steve Martin, ed.)   It's the opening of an essay called "Cloudland Revisited: Great Aches from Little Boudoirs Grow."  It's a kindofa, sortofa review of a book called Replenishing Jessica, which sounds like it might be the most boring saucy novel ever to escape the writer's garret.  And yes, I keep a copy of Perelman in the can, doesn't everybody?

Thoreau's Summer

For our New England friends, a note on as msrk of summer seen by Henry David Thoreau:

[A] word Thoreau associates with summer is “coolness”as this excerpt shows: “With or without reason, I find myself associating with the idea of summer a certain cellar-like coolness, resulting from the depth of shadows and the luxuriance of foliage, (327). Similarly, he expresses his grateful feeling to wend his way “to some pure and cool stream and bathe therein”(II: 277) Bathing was an important daily routine or “a religious exercise” nthat Thoreau practiced while he lived by Walden Pond (Walden 88).   Likewise, he comments on the waters of the river: “The river has a June look, dark, smooth, reflecting surfaces in shade. The sight of the water is refreshing as suggesting coolness” (IV: 116). We might accordingly say that the coolness of summer is linked with shadiness or umbrageousness and water to bathe in. Thus, the three words we have focused on are closely related to each other. The blitheness reminds us of the sunniness and heat of summer, which make the luxuriant foliage of the trees more appealing, because they provide cool shade.

--So Michiko Ono Nature in her Prime: Thoreau's View of Summer, Kawauchi Review: Comparative Studies in English Language and Culture, 4-5 (2006).  An accessible version of the quoted passage is in the NYRB Classics reprint, The Journal: 1837-1861 217 (Damon Searles ed. 2009).

Point of View

The spectre of death in a marriage educes differing fears;  Here is Golde, wife of Tevye the Dairyman in the Scholem Aleichem story (not the bowdlerized Broadway version):

I am dying, Tevye; who will cook your dinner?

--Scholem Aleichem. Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (Penguin Classics) (Kindle Location 255). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition.

Compare Cleopatra, informed that Antony has committed suicide:

Noblest of men, woo’t die? Hast thou no care of me?

--William Shakespeare,  Antony and Cleopatra,  Act IV, Sc. 15.  Cleopatra goes on to say of Antony:

Oh, withered is the garland of the war.
The soldier’s pole is fall’n! Young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

...which may or not be true of Antony, but no one would have said of Tevye.

Mr. Irving Engages a Guide

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, for the health of the tourist business, like getting a good writer or performer on your side.,  What Hemingway did for the bullfight, what Melina Mercouri did for Sunday--the locals ought to put up statues to them and send royalty checks.

I wonder if one of the first of these is Washington Irving, whose Tales of the Alhambra are--well, actually they can be almost unreadably coy, pompous and fussy unless you take them in the right spirit and try to detach yourself from their excesses.   So constrained, he can still make serve as entertaining company for a visit of the old Moorish palace in Granada whose coffers he did so much to replenish.  Here the celebrated literary guide acquires the services of a guide for himself:

At the gate were two or three ragged superannuated soldiers, dozing on a stone bench, the successors of the Zegris and the Abencerrages; while a tall, meagre varlet, whose rusty-brown cloak was evidently intended to conceal the ragged state of his nether garments, was lounging in the sunshine and gossiping with an ancient sentinel on duty. He joined us as we entered the gate, and offered his services to show us the fortress.

I have a traveller’s dislike to officious ciceroni, and did not altogether like the garb of the applicant.

“You are well acquainted with the place, I presume?”

“Ninguno mas; pues senor, soy hijo de la Alhambra.”—(”Nobody better; in fact, sir, I am a son of the Alhambra!”)

The common Spaniards have certainly a most poetical way of expressing themselves. “A son of the Alhambra!”— the appellation caught me at once; the very tattered garb of my new acquaintance assumed a dignity in my eyes. It was emblematic of the fortunes of the place, and befitted the progeny of a ruin.

I put some farther questions to him, and found that his title was legitimate. His family had lived in the fortress from generation to generation ever since the time of the conquest. His name was Mateo Ximenes. “Then, perhaps,” said I, “you may be a descendant from the great Cardinal Ximenes?”—“Dios sabe! God knows, senor! It may be so. We are the oldest family in the Alhambra — Cristianos viejos, old Christians, without any taint of Moor or Jew. I know we belong to some great family or other, but I forget whom. My father knows all about it: he has the coat-of-arms hanging up in his cottage, up in the fortress.”— There is not any Spaniard, however poor, but has some claim to high pedigree. The first title of this ragged worthy, however, had completely captivated me, so I gladly accepted the services of the “son of the Alhambra.”

 --So Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra, "Palace of the Alhambra," available here.

We'll Huff and We'll Puff...

My cousin Dave, away from New England near 70 years now, takes delight in his latest discovery:

“Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.”

― Van Wyck Brooks.  My  mother had ol' Brooksie on display in the living room, as a mark of intellectual distinction.  I wonder how many people have any idea today who he was.

File this one for Columbus Day

I suppose I should have saved this for October and the celebration of the depradation of the native peoples,  but I just found it now and I'm afraid I will forget it then.  So:

Hail!  oh King of Aragon!
Reign!  oh princely paragon!
Down upon your marrowbone,

Long live the King!

Monarch mightier is he, sir,
Than Joe Smith or Julius Caesar,
Brigham Young or Nebuchadnezzar,

Long live the King

And hail to Isabella, too,
For she's a right good fellow too,
And a right good tune to bellow to

Is long live the Queen!

 So Constance Rourke in her classic American Humor: A Study of the National Character (NYRB 2004; original 1931).  This from a certain Columbus el Filibustro, the product of one John Brougham, working in the 1840s.  Roarke says he "produced a lusty, gay, and savage humor,"  which is within the bounds of acceptable exaggeration, and says his best work "will bear comparison with Gilbert and Sullivan," which is not (unless the purpose of the comparison is to remind how vastly superior G and S are).

But what gets me is the echo of T.H. White, memorable for, inter alia,

God save king Pendragon
Long may his reign drag on.

 ...which sounds to me lot like outright pilferage.  And also

Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks;
On him our hopes we fix--
He is our king.

 Which is, of course, not comedy at  all, or at least not intentionally so. I haven't troubled to determine whether this proper second verse precedes Brougham or follows him.

For rhyming, I suppose it is also proper to measure Brougham against

But oh ye lords of ladies intellectual, 
Inform us truly - have they not henpecked you all?

And if Lord Byron can get away with it, I see no reason to stick up our nose at Brougham.

Afterthought:  For perspective, note that five of the seven counties with the lowest incomes in the United States are in South Dakota.  Bet you can guess what is going on there.

From My Existentialist Phase

I seem to have gone through some kind of existentialist phase around 1976.  Here's an item from the card file:

In the long run...what is really chosen is oneself.  It is out of decisions that the self emerges.  A self is not given ready-made at the beginning.  What is given is a field of possibility, and as the existent projects himself into this possibility rather than that one, he begins to determine who he shall be.  It is in this context that the question of permanence versus provisionality must be considered.  A unitary self, as distinct from a series of unconnected acts can emerge only if there is a constancy of policies and commitments.

So John Macquarrie.  Existentialism 185-6 (1973).  On the next card, I find an echo, from someone who didn't think of himself as in any way an existentialist:

The sentiment of being is the sentiment of being strong.  Which is not to say powerful: Rousseau, Schiller, and Wordsworth are not concerned with energy directed outward upon the world in aggression and dominance, but, rather, with such energy as co9ntrives that the centre shall hold, that the circumference of the self keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impenetrable, predurable, and autonomous in  being if not in action.

That's Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), a book I remember reading with great pleasure and I think profit, though I could never quite get straight which was Sincerity and which Authenticity.  With both of the above, compare the bit on the next card from a near-forgotten early novel by a man who became famous later:

I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city.  It is one of those saying which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced their truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born in disorder.  From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king's crown, I had sensed this.  Now I was to discover that disorder has its own logic and permanence: the Greek was wise.

That is VS Naipaul, The Mimic Men 118 (1969).  From Palookaville, second hand and barbarous, that's all for tonight.

Appreciation: Adair Turner

Adair Turner's Economics after the Crisis is the kind of book you would want to be read by--well, by the kind of person who would not read this kind of book.   It's a succinct and elegant sketch of (a) a better world (heh); and (b) a better banking system, with a few added comments about heading off climate change.

Also, to be candid, an imperfect book.  It starts off strong, as much a delight to read as I've picked up his year.  Here, Turner offers a sketch of  conventional wisdom among the great and good.  He argues that they agree that (a)  the best thing a politician can do is to increase "wealth," perhaps in the form of gross domestic product; and (b) the best way to achieve (a) is to let the free market lion roar.  Oh, and (c) yes, income disparities will widen but you know what they say about omelets and eggs.

Turner is elegant and direct on (a).  Grant that if you are a begrimed Indian peasant dreaming that someday you might own a bullock cart, then any extra cash, however trifling, is bound to come as a boon.  But if you are at or around (just say) the current U.S. level, it is not at all obvious that an extra dollar will make you any happier--or, if it does, that the marginal accrual of happiness will be sufficient to outweigh the opportunity cost.

And turn to equality.  Here, for one, there is some reason to believe that the richest among us are not the happiest: there seems to be a lot of status anxiety in the Upper East Side and the Hamptons; enough to make you wonder whether it is really worth their while to strive for so much (Turner doesn't mention it, but my guess is this might be a generational new-money thing.  Most of the hateful ones have way more money than their parents--how could they not?  And there is a lot of evidence that upward mobility causes at least as much insecurity as the reverse).  Moreover there is good evidence that extremes of inequality in a society inflict social damage all the way down the line--for example, in solidarity and trust.

And as to the market--ah,  here, Turner gets  bit less steady.  He declares himself a committed free-market sort of guy (certainly when it comes to restaurants, as he mentions more than once).  But as to banking.  Hm.  I suspect maybe the trouble is that virtually all of  us except the banksters believe that cancerous, metastasized modern banking sucks wealth out of society.   The trouble is I don't know of anybody (not Adair) who can make a comprehensive case that this proposition is true.  He's pretty much reduced to saying thanking doesn't seem to do the job of (e.g.) allocating capital that it promises to do.   And that life seems to have been better (and banksters less of a nuisance) when  banking comprised a smaller chunk of the GDP.

Finally on regulation--I'd say that turner is noncontroversial but rather thin.  He wants s regulation that is stsble, steady, and that itself does not make the problem worse.  Well yes, but it's pretty thin soup.

Turner fleshes this brief book out with a few observations on climate change. I guess I can see why: he is a major player in Britain's climate change debate.  Also, perhaps, he simply had run out of other things to say.  There's nothing really to quarrel with here but it doesn't do much to improve the structure of the book as a whole.

On rereading, this note seems snide and dismissive.  Which is odd because I genuinely enjoyed the book and I think ratio of raw truth to dead trees (it's short) is about as high as you're likely to get.  Give it to your irritating uncle and tell him not to bother you until he's finished reading it.  That ought to keep him out of your hair for a while.

Green-energy Noir

My friend Larry wrote a novel called When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.  Now this:

#FailedNoir When The Sacred Windmill Closes @lawrenceblock Of all the alternative clean energy source facilities she had to walk into mine.
— greg bernhard (@GregBernhard) March 30, 2013

Heh,   The whole hashtag is kinda fun, BTW.  And FWIW, Larry is on a roll right now: the the forthcoming movie version of his Walk Among the Tombstones is in production and he gets to hang out on with Liam Neeson in a cemetery in Queens.

250 Years Ago: Boswell Takes Breakfast

Jame Boswell begins to appreciate the douceurs of London life:

I breakfasted with lord Eglinton. He generally breakfasts with his family above stairs, whom I shall now paint. It consists of three. In the first place, Miss or Mrs. Brown, who has lived with him seven or eight years. She is a good-looking woman, and I dare say is the best of her profession that ever existed. She is quiet, good-humoured, and diligent at slight pretty work. She is neither avaricious nor extravagant. She has a degree of laughing simplicity that is agreeable so far, but when she shows it too much it appears foolish. Next, there is Mrs. Reid the  housekeeper, who has been a great many years with my Lord. She is a good hearty wife, tells an old story, and looks after the family affairs most diligently. She is a Jacobite and a keen churchwoman, yet is she wantonly enough minded, and is not displeased that young people of different sexes should solace themselves with the enjoyment of each other. The third is Mrs. Charles Crookshanks. ...

--Boswell's London Journal 1762-63 (Frederick A. Pottle, ed.)