Ivebeenreadinglately

On John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophe" novels (from 2008)

2022-01-11T08:35:00.003-06:00

I wrote this in late 2008 on spec for a publication, but it was never published. My notes remind me that after writing it I came across a post on the Penguin blog drawing this same connection. I don't think I unwittingly lifted the concept from them, but the link I had to their post is dead (link rot is the bane of the web), and it seems worth at least noting that up top in case I'm wrong and they deserve full credit.

Thirteen years later, it turns out to have unpleasant resonances with our moment, all the way down to my mention of the possibility of a pandemic.

For those of us fortunate enough not to have lost our jobs, and to still have our possessions in our houses rather than scattered about the lawn by sheriff’s deputies, the deepening financial crisis has been a bit hard to fully digest. Its causes are complicated and poorly understood, its effects (so long as we don’t look at our 401(k)s) still a bit distant. We know there’s a serious problem—such ordinarily staid figures as Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson wouldn’t be looking so stricken were there not—and we extend real sympathy to those who’ve already felt its effects, but for the most part we’re left to go about our daily lives much as usual, the only change a slowly growing cloud of dread hovering just outside our peripheral vision.

It’s a situation that would, I think, have piqued the imagination of British science fiction novelist John Wyndham (1903–69), and the half-dozen suspenseful, well-crafted novels he published between 1951 and 1968 seem the perfect literary accompaniment to today’s slowly growing disaster. Wyndham’s approach to science fiction, harking back to H. G. Wells, is rooted in the classic “What if?”, but his specialty was teasing out the ramifications of changes—often seemingly minor—to the basic ground rules governing human society. What if nearly everyone went blind, as happens in his best-known novel, The Day of the Triffids (1951)? What if science discovered a way to dramatically extend the human lifespan, as in the surprisingly feminist Trouble with Lichen (1960)? What if the children of a small village were to display unexpected—and unsettling—powers, as in The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)? What if the sub-prime mortgage market were suddenly to melt down . . . ?

In The Day of the Triffids, the result of the mass blindness is an almost instant collapse of society (abetted, one must point out, by a particularly well-imagined species of ambulatory killer plant). The Day of the Triffids is dramatic and frightening, but it’s nonetheless a fairly straightforward apocalypse novel, if one of the best of the genre. But it’s in his other novels that Wyndham displays his particular genius. They’re less spectacular, but far more insidious—and much harder to shake once they’ve been returned to the shelf. For in them, nothing falls apart instantly; rather, the situation deteriorates slowly, and all the while the characters are forced to continue, more or less unchanged, their daily routines, shadowed by worry and never quite believing the widespread assurances that everything is going to be fine.

The Kraken Wakes (1953) offers the best example of this approach. Mike and Phyllis Watson, journalists who write radio scripts (and whose banter and resourcefulness makes them seem like nothing so much as Nick and Nora Charles transplanted to an episode of “Lights Out!”), witness something inexplicable when they’re on a honeymoon cruise: a group of glowing red objects, somewhat like meteors, blazing through the sky and crashing into the ocean, where they disappear in a cloud of steam. Though the couple reports on the sighting, little is made of it, and even when accounts of similar events begin trickling in from around the globe, the prevailing public mood is one of curiosity rather than worry. Years later, Mike Watson reflects on that failure to understand the gravity of the sightings:

It began so unrecognizably. Had it been more obvious—and yet it is difficult to see what could have been done effectively even if we had recognised the danger. Recognition and prevention don’t necessarily go hand in hand. We recognized the potential dangers of atomic fission quickly enough—yet we could do little about them.

Over time, though most governments prefer to pretend otherwise, it becomes increasingly clear that the unidentified flying objects were an invasion fleet, and that some alien race has begun colonizing the ocean floor. Eventually, the problem becomes acute, as the aliens begin destroying naval vessels and disrupting shipping lanes, wreaking havoc on the global economy and leaving political and military leaders at a loss for effective responses.

Yet even these earth-shaking events do relatively little to change the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Living on land and unable even to see the miles-deep alien incursion, they are left to merely consume the limited available news and wonder what steps their government should take. As events slowly unfold over a number of years, the prevailing mood is one of dread and uncertainty rather than panic, and even when the aliens begin attacking coastal towns, and it becomes impossible to deny that humanity is in a struggle for its very survival, people’s panic has almost no outlet in action. Even Mike and Phyllis, who are attentive to the dangers from the start, and who have far better sources of information than the average citizen, aren’t sure what they can do: they attempt to take precautionary measures, like laying in stores of food, but the very uncertainty of the threat leaves them, for the most part, in a maddening state of abeyance.

That is what Wyndham is best at: portraying the fundamental—and for the most part unacknowledged—uncertainty of life, and the essential futility of our attempts to control for it. Because we have little choice, we tell ourselves that tomorrow will be like today, but in reality we can never be sure. Wyndham’s work is shadowed by the Bomb and the disinformation of the cold war, but his lessons are no less applicable today; the immediate threat of nuclear holocaust may have receded, but the increasing interconnectedness of our world has opened us up to new dangers, from global pandemics to rippling financial crises. Human society perpetually teeters on a knife’s edge, and the smallest of changes to such a complex system could have entirely unforeseeable effects. Last time the global economy melted down on this scale, the result was the New Deal—but also the rise of fascism; who’s to say what will follow this time?

Though Wyndham was always well-regarded in the United Kingdom, and nearly all of his novels remain in print there, in the United States his work has been largely ignored, aside from The Day of the Triffids. But the New York Review of Books has recently republished what may be his most perfectly realized novel, The Chrysalids (1955), a tale of post-apocalyptic fundamentalism, and apparently Steven Spielberg is planning a movie of his final novel, Chocky (1968), so maybe we are on the verge of a Wyndham revival. Would it be too much to hope that it might be accompanied by a financial revival as well?

On movies and family

2021-06-27T12:30:00.003-05:00

"How did you get over it?"

"I watched Sal Mineo in Rebel without a Cause, and I thought, 'I can't be the only person who has these feelings.'"

—Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore (1996)

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My parents got a VCR in 1982, more or less the minute they were available at a reasonable price. The passage of time helps me see how unusual that was. We were comfortably middle class, but we didn't watch much TV. We didn't have cable. We certainly didn't have the giant, space station–style satellite dishes that some neighbors had.

But this wasn't TV. It was movies. My parents loved movies, and where we lived, out in the country, they were hard to come by. We got about five TV channels. The single-screen theater in our small town went in and out of business over the years like a firefly blinking on and off. Once it opened for a few winter months but had no heat. Another time it opened but was so forlorn that the operator answered a phone call from my dad asking when showtime was with, "When can you get here?" Any time it was shuttered, the nearest movies were an hour's drive away.

So when my parents got the chance to bring movies into their home, they jumped at it. If seeing Star Wars in the theater at three years old was the beginning of my love of movies, our VCR was the beginning of my education in their history and breadth. My parents are not scholars, of movies or anything else, and our family viewing was that of enthusiasts. We saw a lot of recent films—if Siskel and Ebert gave it their thumbs up, we would rent it. When Hitchcock's color works were restored and released on video, we watched them all over the course of a year or so. We saw the movies my parents remembered from childhood and youth; my brother and I have seen Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956) more times than any Gen Xer should have.

What a lifeline it must have been for my parents.

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Film curator and critic Michael Koresky published a book last month, Films of Endearment, in which he details a year of watching movies with his mom.

It was explicitly a project, with structure. The idea—disrupted slightly by the pandemic—was to watch one movie a month, progressing through the 1980s via a film from each year of the decade that the two of them had seen together when Michael was younger. And the films chosen all had women at their center.

Our parents' tastes tend to be the first we know, and the work of trying to understand them (then, for many of us, eventually rebel against them) occupies a lot of time in childhood and youth. Watching how our parents react to culture is one of the first ways that we attempt to grasp what it is, means, and can be in our lives, how it reflects and refracts and influences them. This new movie-watching project gave Michael a chance to revisit his early encounters with those tastes, to see them with the full experience of forty years of life and discuss them with his mother in the more open, knowing environment of a parent-child relationship in adulthood.

As Michael and his mother together watch 9 to 5 (1980), Terms of Endearment (1983), Aliens (1986), and many more, he draws a picture of a relationship, to each other and to culture, that is familiar, comforting, and sweet. Encountering these films again, he's reminded, and thus reminds us, how much of our early selfhood is built with the pieces of life, the alternatives and approaches, that we see played out on screen, and of how the work of culture is necessarily interactive—how we aren't always sure of our understanding of or reaction to art until we've had a chance to discuss it with someone we care about.

For the past few years, the water table of my emotions has been unusually high, so that even the most inadvertent or indifferent spadework will unexpectedly discover fresh springs. I don't think I'm alone in that. Michael's book, with its stories of family and movies and love and loss, kept bringing my heart right up into my throat.

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In mid-March 2020, when so many of us went home from the office and battened down, I started using what had been my commuting time to watch movies. I've watched a movie nearly every day since. There were a few gaps here and there caused by travel or other interference; you shouldn't deform your life for a stunt unless you've at least got a book deal in hand. But I've seen about five hundred movies in the past fifteen months.

A run like this would have absolutely wiped out my childhood video store, a mom-and-pop operation out in the country that smelled like pipe smoke and shared space with the proprietor's homemade ceramics. (You could buy a mug shaped like a boob, if that was your thing.) Now, however, Criterion Channel alone would have been able to keep me going. As any serious film buff is quick to say, not everything is streaming. But, lord, it's a lot, and when I think of those early VCR days, and the dearth of options before that, I marvel.

When I was a teenager living in the country but pining for something more, I saw culture as a checklist. To quote Woolf, it was an "ingenious picture puzzle, to be fitted accurately together." You follow the lead of someone like Ebert, visit the monuments, and eventually you'll have seen and know it all. You'll then be complete, the sophisticated person you imagine you want yourself to be. Some people never grow out of that approach. But ideally you get knocked off your moorings pretty young and start to see that the world is bigger and more multifarious than your ability to organize or contain, and you learn to chart your path through it via some combination of inclination, enthusiasm, education, and experiment.

Watching five hundred movies in a year showed me that even if you've taken that approach to movies for decades, the breadth of film culture and history can still astonish you. Throughout the year, following the path of a star or genre opened onto rooms that turned out to be in mansions that were themselves in whole other countries. It was a delight every day to keep exploring, tracing threads—a week of Technicolor Westerns, a month of Joan Crawford, half a dozen Wong Kar Wai films—and making discoveries.

It was also a lifeline. I had a much easier year amid COVID than most people did, but I still needed distraction and comfort, and movies—many of them made by people born long enough ago that they lived through our last pandemic—helped provide it. I'll never not be grateful that movies, and the technology to deliver them to my basement or backyard, were there for me.

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My paternal grandfather, Harold Stahl, died on May 31. He was ninety-five and had stayed in pretty good health up until very near the end. As passings go, it was about as peaceful and welcome as anyone could ask for.

Grandpa was born in 1925 in rural southern Illinois, one of six children in a farm family. In 1943 he was drafted; he had to wait until the war was over to finish high school. After the war, he returned to his small town and married his high school sweetheart. The marriage stayed strong until his death. Together, they set to farming. He would do that until retirement, raising two kids along the way, one of whom, my father, was his partner in farming for almost twenty years. It was a happy, successful life.

I sometimes imagine other paths for him. He worked as part of a team of medics during the war, and he was always interested in medicine. It's easy to imagine him having become a doctor. But neither he nor my mother's father took advantage of the GI Bill. I never thought to ask them why, but I suspect it had to do with a sense of urgency, of time rapidly being lost.They wanted to get their lives underway.

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My dad's parents were never into movies. Their relationship to culture overall was always limited. They read the newspaper, and Grandma read some fiction. (Like every house in 1982, they had a paperback of John Jakes's The Bastard on the shelf.) They listened to country music, but casually, satisfied with whatever the radio offered up. They followed baseball, but other than that and the news, didn't watch a lot of TV. They got a VCR in about 1986, and they used it to watch a single movie, once: The Long Riders, a Western about the James-Younger gang that I remember seeing at our small-town theater in 1980. I was six, but I nonetheless recall enough of what I now recognize as post-Peckinpah blood to make me confident they disliked it.

That indifference to culture has always been hard for me to understand. I suppose you could see something admirable about it: Their attention, essentially, stayed local, on their own lives and the community around them. What they had sufficed; they didn't need other people's stories and dreams to fill their days. Wendell Berry's more grounded characters might understand.

What is it like to not have that part of the mind engaged? To not live with a constant background buzz of thoughts about narrative and Jimmy Stewart and genre and landscape and and and? What is it like to not engage with these other lives on the screen, to not have them as models and influences and springboards for thinking about how one might choose to live?

That lack always left a gap in our interactions. Scrape culture completely off the palette, and the conversational colors you have to work with start to show their limits. My maternal grandmother was a counter-example, engaged with culture until her death at age ninety-six. She loved going to movies, even as her sight deteriorated. One of my favorite moviegoing memories is of me and my dad taking her to see Star Wars on its re-release in 1997. Her husband, my maternal grandfather, had just gone through bypass surgery and was recovering, and we were with her in Oklahoma City to help out. That day, the way we could help was by joining her in distraction, and Star Wars was what she wanted to see.

That interest in culture meant that we always had something to talk about. We'd discuss family, talk news, but we also would chat about books and long-gone stars. We shared a richer world than what I shared with my dad's parents.

"It has always annoyed me when someone tells me I talk about movies too much," Michael Koresky writes in Films of Endearment. "My response is that talking about movies is talking about life."

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Over the past year, I've watched dozens of postwar crime films, a genre that it's all but impossible to understand without taking into account the fact that nearly all the male characters had just come back from war. They had used weapons. Many of them had killed, and seen friends killed. As James Jones put it in World War II, on the return to civilian life:

The first sign of change was the coming of the pain. As the old combat numbness disappeared, and the frozen feet of the soul began to thaw, the pain of the cure became evident. The sick-making thoughts of all the buddies who had died. The awful bad luck of the maimed. . . . About the last thing to go was the old sense of esprit. That was the hardest thing to let go of, because there was nothing in civilian life that could replace it. The love and understanding of men for men in dangerous times, places, and situations. Just as there was nothing in civilian life that could replace the heavy, turgid, day-to-day excitement of danger. Families and other civilian types would never understand that sense of esprit, any more than they would understand the excitement of the danger.

The veterans of World War II were expected to come home and pick up life where they had left it, not missing a step of the march. But you can see the unacknowledged trauma of their experience throughout the art of the period, and particularly in noir. As Marc Svetov put it in an issue of Noir City,

The portrayal of veterans in such films as Best Years of our Lives, The Men (1950), Pride of the Marines is optimistic—hope for reintegration into society is never really in doubt. In film noir, by contrast, the fate of veterans is unclear; it’s unknown whether social integration or a good life will come to any of the men in High Wall (1947), The Blue Dahlia (1946), Nobody Lives Forever(1946) and many other noirs. In the more mainstream films of the era, servicemen are depicted as solid, functioning Americans, ready to return to society, in some cases as heroes. Film noir took a different tack. It put a question mark to all of it.

Sometimes war damage is explicit, as with a case of shell-shock in The Blue Dahlia. Most of the time it's implicit. I keep finding my thoughts returning to Robert Ryan's dangerously restless character in Clash By Night (1952). Bored by civilian life, he brims with a violence that has no acceptable outlet. The world is settling down around him, and he doesn't fit.

Grandpa Harold was fairly lucky in his experience of the war. Serving in Japan in the early days of the occupation, he certainly saw plenty of horror and destruction, but as far as I know he avoided actual combat. For him, the war was perhaps less traumatic for its violence and danger than for its disruption—the way it stripped four years out of his life. When I look at pictures of him and Grandma from the early 1950s and see how clearly determined they were to be immediately, wholly adult, I think of that, and understand the urgency they must have felt. They had to catch up to life.

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If you want to sit for a minute with the seductive appeal of midcentury America, I know of a couple of ways. One is to stare at this photo of Paul Newman in Venice in 1963.

But that may just be me. One that's more likely to work for others is to go to Dodger Stadium on a June night, and, as twilight creeps over Chavez Ravine, let your gaze slip a little, your focus drift away from the game and toward the ballpark itself, its cleanly geometrical concrete and plastic, the hills, the perfect southern California sky. It's 1962. The postwar boom is underway, the future all potential. Lines on graphs only go up.

It's flawed, of course. There was rot and lies and cruelty underneath, as there almost always is when we're talking about a collective dream. Hell, Dodger Stadium itself was built on some of it. But good god, in a time when optimism—a creed I largely hold with—seems more divorced than ever from the facts, that moment when we looked ahead with hope can't help but shine.

I have a smaller, more personal point of reference for that feeling, too, one that could hardly be farther from the glamour and style of Los Angeles. In the early 1950s, my paternal grandparents bought a new house in the country in rural southern Illinois, a few miles from where they'd lived in the first few years of their marriage. It was a small house, surrounded by fields, with a barn for the animals and a shed for the tractor.

A gravel driveway covered the hundred yards or so to a two-lane state highway. Across the highway, a matching drive covered a similar distance to a house owned by another young couple, the Erkmans. Both couples would stay there, neighbors and friends, raising families and farming, for almost forty years.

A farmhouse in the country is an island. At night, it's the center of a circle carved from the darkness by a utility light on a pole in the yard. There's a feeling of the frontier about it,—hints of the farmstead in Shane—even if there's a neighbor in sight and a small town seven miles away. I picture those two young couples standing on their porches at the end of a day of farming, pausing for a minute and looking up at the sweeping rural sky slowly draining of summer light. The war was behind them. Their homes were here. Their toddlers were sleeping inside. Their neighbors were across the way, just in sight. Everything was heading the right direction.

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We learn who and what we want to be from those around us, but for most of us that cast comprises far more than the people we actually know. We find models in the art we experience.

Not everyone sees a recognizable future version of themselves to aspire to on screen. Michael Koresky, who is gay, notes that in Films of Endearment:

I've often wondered if other kids were seeing themselves on movie screens. For me, movies were an escape, not a mirror. I felt an estrangement from what I was seeing, comfortable in the fact that these were other people's stories. Husbands and wives, people who worked hard in very adult-looking offices to have their two-car garages or palatial city apartments; men and women who had bouts of marathon sex, who went on expensive vacations, who remodeled kitchens and paid for elaborate weddings, who raised adorable children who never resented them. For reasons as yet unexamined, none of that seemed in the cards for me, so I saw movies as time marching forward, vessels for a linear progression perhaps not meant to include me.

I can't imagine how hard it must be to almost never see yourself in the stories on screen, particularly at the very moment in your life when you're most in search of models and guidance.

But I also can't imagine simply not looking there at all. I watch Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), with its distillation of the hopes and anxieties of the young couples trying to settle down in the wake of the war, and I wonder where, if not from sources like that, my grandparents drew their models for who they wanted to be and how they wanted to live in the coming years.

Was local rural society robust enough that it sufficed? Did they see there others living lives of a shape they wanted for their own? Perhaps. There was an oil boom on, and the local population was growing. The town nearest them, Enfield, was looking ahead to crossing the 1,000-resident line and changing, formally, from a village to a town. The nearby small town I grew up outside of would build a big new high school in the 1950s. Main Street would be filled through that decade with new shops owned by locals that would linger on into my own childhood, only to have Wal-Mart dispatch them in the late 1980s with all the dispassion of a paid assassin.

By the time I was growing up, the boom was long gone. Enfield never reached 1,000 residents, and it's still declining. My own hometown was looking ragged. It was obvious my siblings and I weren't going to stay. All I knew of urban life when I was sixteen was what I'd seen on screen, but I knew that it was what I wanted. For me, at least, it was going to be better than this.

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Watch as many old movies as I have lately, and you end up spending a lot of time on Wikipedia. How old is Lizabeth Scott in Desert Fury? (A: 24.) What about Joan Crawford in The Unknown? (A: No one is sure, even now! (Probably about 25.)) You see the arcs of careers, the growth of talent, the shifting relationships, both work and personal.

You also see death. For every Olivia de Havilland, there's a Wendell Corey, dead from drink at fifty-four. Lee Marvin, that towering force of nature, only made it to sixty-three; Clark Gable didn't even reach sixty. Poor Carole Lombard, good lord. Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926, a year after my grandfather, and she's been dead nearly sixty years. What different lives the two of them had, on every axis.

Fate deals us all different hands, then it compounds the unfairness by how much or little we're made to pay for our mistakes or rewarded for our good choices. Bad habits or errors of judgment snuff out one life, while another person, similarly heedless, skates. Virtue is not always rewarded, vice haphazardly punished. To have made it to ninety-five in good health, with family around you, is to have been afforded an uncommon grace.

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We went to the movies Friday night for the opening of F9. It was big and loud and deliriously, lovably dopey, and we were there with a group of friends and surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd and we loved every minute. We watched staggeringly beautiful people do staggeringly stupid things in a story that carries almost no lasting cultural, intellectual, or emotional weight, and it was glorious.

To have made it through the pandemic and be going to the movies again is a joy and a gift.

On Ishiguro

2021-03-04T20:23:00.000-06:00

Below is a survey of Kazuo Ishiguro's whole career that I wrote back in 2009 for the "Quarterly Conversation" a site that, alas, seems to have wholly gone missing from the internet. Written on the occasion of the publication of Ishiguro's first book of short stories, "Nocturnes," it seems worth posting anew here the week of the publication of his new novel, "Klara and the Sun."

For what it's worth--scorekeeping at a minimum, I suppose--I thought the one novel that Ishiguro published between this piece and "Klara," "The Buried Giant," was a complete failure, almost to the point of being unreadable. That said, I was no less quick to get the new one, and I am no less excited to see what he's done this time.

Were it not for the fact that Kazuo Ishiguro's six novels all share a fundamental concern with the way that people actively create the self they present to the world--expressed in each novel through tight first-person narration--it would be easy to think of him as two different writers struggling within one body. The first of those writers is a careful, understated realist, observing society and the attempts of flawed, frequently repressed individuals to find a place for themselves within it; think of a slightly less buttoned-down Henry James. The second is far stranger, influenced by Kafka and maybe even Proust, and he writes of individuals whose own self-deceptions, self-denials, and blind spots warp their understanding of the world to the point where we, the readers, can't even be sure that what they're describing bears any resemblance to reality. Though the separation isn't nearly so clean as such a classification scheme implies--there are interesting overlaps and resonances between the two approaches--it's nonetheless instructive to consider the differences they reveal.

The former writer, far better known and more widely appreciated, is most clearly exemplified by Ishiguro's most popular novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which beautifully tells the story of the controlled emotional life of a head servant in an English country house as World War II approaches. That Ishiguro is also on display in An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which focuses on a guilt-ridden Japanese artist in the years after the war. Both these novels slowly reveal a meticulously calibrated consciousness, with which Ishiguro always plays a double game, here and there letting us perceive just a bit more about the narrators' feelings and lives than they are willing to acknowledge even to themselves; the meaning of a whole novel can turn on a word, an endearment, a phrase accidentally let slip that reveals far more than the narrator intended, or perhaps even understood.

Looking back, we can see that the second, more unpredictable Ishiguro has also been present in some form from the start of his career. His debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which is narrated by a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing, subtly works against its realistic surface until by the end our faith in the narrator has been completely undermined--while our sympathy, and our even our pity, has only grown. But it wasn't until The Unconsoled (1995), a frustrating, flawed, but remarkably compelling doorstop of a novel, that we saw what this other Ishiguro was really capable of. Where his previous novels had been masterpieces of concision and clarity, The Unconsoled is, intentionally, a rambling mess, a relentlessly repetitive journey through one of one of those nightmares where we're constantly nagged by a sense of important tasks left undone. As an amnesiac pianist named Ryder wanders through a nameless Central European city, unsure about his relationship to the people he meets, let alone the obligations he's taken on, Ishiguro forces us again and again to confront Ryder's lack of understanding and his--and thus our--impotence in the face of a rebarbative and mysterious world.

The Unconsoled was published near the end of my undergraduate years, and a favorite professor and I discussed it at length. (She said, only half joking, that she washed her hair a dozen times in the course of reading it: overwhelmed again and again, that was the only way she could clear her head enough to allow her to return to Ishiguro's world. The novel does have that sort of effect.) Neither of us was entirely sure what Ishiguro was trying to do with the book, but nevertheless we were impressed, even astonished, by this unexpected change in his writing--and we both wondered, worried, even, where he might go from there. Not to make too great a claim for the book, but like Finnegans Wake it seemed to represent an end rather than a beginning, a playing out of an ultimately sterile--if fascinating--logic. To move forward as a writer, Ishiguro would have to figure out a way to reconcile this more complicated, experimental style with his earlier, more obviously controlled writing--to do otherwise would risk incomprehensibility on the one hand, stasis on the other.

And with his next novel, it seemed that he understood that: for much of its length When We Were Orphans (2000) appears to be at least somewhat in the vein of Ishiguro's more realistic fiction. If his narrator--a self-described famous detective in 1930s England who is haunted by the loss of his parents years ago in war-torn China--is perhaps a bit more obviously damaged and unreliable than earlier characters, the trappings of the mystery genre with which Ishiguro dresses the story succeed brilliantly in distracting the reader enough that we don't realize how far gone the narrator is until he returns to China and his fragile psyche collapses, taking every hint of external reality with it. It's a dramatic and unsettling novel, but it's also unsatisfying: its two halves, rather than being united by the disintegrating consciousness of the narrator, remain in an awkward tension that ultimately spirals out of control, and the expectations raised by the realistic beginning are neither fully fulfilled nor fully confounded.

It's perhaps understandable that Ishiguro followed When We Were Orphans with his most conventional novel since The Remains of the Day. Never Let Me Go (2005), despite some sci-fi trappings (and even a brief descent into memorable gothic imagery near the end) remains essentially a realistic novel, focused on the stunted emotional understanding of a young woman who slowly discovers the reasons she is condemned to second-class citizenship. In its close tracking of the narrator's efforts to construct a self that can fit into the limited place the world is willing to allow her, the novel harks back to the precision and clarity of Ishiguro's first novels, and it was extremely well received, being named, for example, by Time magazine as one of the hundred best novels published since the founding of the magazine. But as someone who still sees in The Unconsoled a breathtaking expansion of Ishiguro's powers, I couldn't help but be disappointed at its failure to break out of its self-imposed form; it may be churlish to be frustrated by a well-made book by a smart, talented writer simply because he's already shown a mastery of this approach, but that's what I felt, and it's what I still feel four years later when I return to the book.

* * *

All of which makes Ishiguro's newest book, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, particularly interesting. A collection of short stories by an established novelist always seems like a stopgap--or at best a transitional volume, something to keep a writer's name in front of readers in the years between major works. But in the case of Ishiguro, who works slowly, the book can't help but take on more importance: despite the fact that he's been publishing for nearly thirty years, his output remains relatively slim, so any additions to his oeuvre are worth attending to.

Befitting that importance, Nocturnes feels not so much transitional as oppositional, a working out of Ishiguro's two narrative approaches in shorter form. Ishiguro has explained that its five stories--all of which feature music or musicians in prominent roles--were conceived as a single, multi-part work; what's fascinating about that is that from story to story Ishiguro moves between his realist mode and his more subjective, even fantastic approach--and, in the stories "Come Rain or Come Shine" and "Nocturne," for the first time he successfully marries the two. As we've come to expect from Ishiguro, all five stories are first-person accounts, tightly constrained by the consciousness and perceptions of their narrators. Characters recur, and the narrative voice, even as its owner changes, retains a certain casual, colloquial, even awkward tone that will be familiar to readers of Never Let Me Go. While the voice differs less than one might expect from story to story, its mimicry of the patterns and habits of thought remains convincing within each story nonetheless.

Despite--or perhaps in a reflection of--the tension inherent in Ishiguro's exploration of his two modes, the structure of the book feels carefully planned, with stories gaining in resonance from the way they seem to comment on their neighbors, as well as by their place in the overall order. The stories that bookend the volume, told by a jobbing guitarist in Venice, are straightforward and beautiful, pitting the promise of music (and thus art in general) against the disappointments and compromises of daily life. Unusually for Ishiguro, they are mostly about people other than the narrator, who for the most part watches others and attempts to figure out their motivations. The resulting stories are closer to Henry James or Edith Wharton than anything Ishiguro's written since The Remains of the Day; ignore the colloquial tone of this opening passage from "Crooner" and see if it doesn't read like a set-up for a classic story from an age less skeptical of realist technique:

The morning I spotted Tony Gardner sitting among the tourists, spring was just arriving here in Venice. We'd completed our first full week outside in the piazza--a relief, let me tell you, after all those stuffy hours performing from the back of the cafe getting in the way of customers wanting to use the staircase. There was quite a breeze that morning, and our brand-new marquee was flapping all around us, but we were all feeling a little bit brighter and fresher, and I guess it showed in our music.

Those two stories are clear and straightforward, throwing into relief Ishiguro's recurrent concern with our ability to deny our deepest feelings even to ourselves, as well as, in the latter, the question of how to define and value creativity and artistry--and how they then define us as people--propositions that Ishiguro addressed explicitly in Never Let Me Go. The first time I read them, I thought them too simple, even half-formed, but the second time through they were powerful and convincing, "Crooner" even unexpectedly moving.

The middle story, "Malvern Hills," is also entirely in a realist mode: a self-involved young singer-songwriter moves in with his sister for the summer, grudgingly working in her cafe in exchange for room and board. Despite some nice evocations of the beauty of the tourist-beset hills, it's a more awkward story than "Crooner" or "The Cellists," focusing more on the occasional eruptions of underlying resentment and misapprehension that we've seen before from Ishiguro's characters, and while the narrator's conflicts with his sister and brother-in-law are convincing, his casual encounters with a couple of Swiss tourists feel half-formed, and the story only half resolves, like a song that doesn't end on the tonic.

Which leaves us the second and fourth stories, "Come Rain or Come Shine" and "Nocturne," the most exciting in the collection, and the most exciting stories I've read this year. Both begin firmly in a realist mode, with clearly flawed narrators spinning somewhat self-justifying accounts of their lives leading up to the events of their stories--but before too long, both veer into truly strange territory. Strictly speaking, "Nocturnes"--which ultimately sees a jazz saxophonist who's undergone plastic surgery for the sake of his career sneaking around a deserted hotel in the middle of the night with a flighty female celebrity, both their heads swathed in bandages--manages to marry the strange and the quotidian the best. It shifts from realist to fabulous (and creepy) and back remarkably smoothly, the modes succeeding in commenting on each other--and their relationship to outside reality--in a way that Ishiguro has never managed before.

That said, it's "Come Rain or Come Shine" that is the true standout. For the first twenty of its fifty pages, it, too, seems like an ordinary, straightforward story: the narrator, an itinerant teacher of English who is clearly too old to still be living such a rootless, hand-to-mouth existence, goes to stay with old friends from college. Though there are indications that, as so often in Ishiguro's work, the narrator is living in the past to an unhealthy degree, refusing to acknowledge the changes that time has wrought, when we learn that he has been invited as part of a misguided, even cruel attempt to patch up his friends' disintegrating marriage, we think we understand the rough pattern the story is likely to take--which makes it all the more surprising when Ishiguro instead plunges into the truly strange. The surprises in the story are a substantial part of its pleasures, so the less said the better, but the deftness with which Ishiguro moves from the world of ordinary human motivations to pathology and comic--yet troubling--absurdity is stunning, as is the resolution of the story, which is unexpectedly calm, kind, and even generous.

An author who can keep you reading--and keep you anticipating his every new work--despite frustrations and disappointments is a rare and satisfying artist. I've not regretted any of the time I've spent reading Ishiguro's work; even the novels that aren't fully satisfying offer much to admire and think about. That makes it all the more exciting to read this collection--and especially those two crucial stories--and get the impression that Ishiguro has made peace with his warring tendencies, and that he finally may see the difficult but rewarding way forward.

Haunting the autumn

2020-11-01T10:34:00.007-06:00

Chicago closed its lakefront parks in mid-March, after an unseasonably warm day brought crowds of a size that was worrisome at that early stage of the pandemic. When the park reopened in June, one thing I noticed immediately was the disappearance of a number of familiar desire paths, those "paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning," as Robert Macfarlane puts it. With no feet to follow what Macfarlane calls their "free-will ways," the grass had reestablished dominance, obscuring the scars of human activity.

By the end of the summer, most of them had returned. One, however, which has been a part of my running route for two decades, turned out, unexpectedly, to be an expression, it seems, of my desire alone. That's it below. Three months of treading it every other day, once in each direction, had just enough effect to make it barely legible. To the extent that you can pick it out, you're seeing an image of my devotion to habit.

—

There's so little to us when we're young. There was a time around age eighteen when I viewed, and presented, the fact that I was a Van Morrison fan as a salient aspect of my self. We have so little experience, have made so few lasting decisions, and the core elements that are likely to last—namely, our relation to our family and the specific ways in which they've set us spinning and launched us into the world—are the part we're least likely to see the value of attending to or foregrounding at that age. It's no wonder we build a carapace of tastes and likes and call it a self.

If we're fortunate, over time we outgrow that shell, and while we retain bits of it—I'm still a Van Morrison fan—those become attributes rather than essence. (If we're not fortunate, we become one of those people screaming online about the need to release the Snyder Cut.) That fact, as much as a belief in the inherent dishonesty and toxicity of nostalgia, is what keeps me from pining for youth. I recognize the me of that era; I'm still keeping a number of the same desire paths visible through the undergrowth of adulthood. But the limits are so obvious, the center so ill-defined, that I can't imagine wanting to be back there. (When I read the Romantics, which I do with love, I nonetheless find myself, when I hit lines like this,

To spread a rapture in my very hair,
-- O, the sweetness of the pain!

remembering when, age fifteen, I listened to Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" dozens of times on repeat, actively pushing myself to access some presumably deep, hitherto untapped, well of loss and pain.)

Time builds the self that replaces the one we actively construct as teens. And it does so through accretion, less by way of active choices than by unthinking repetition. We make habits, then those habits make us. Samuel Johnson, one of our greatest thinkers about the good and the bad of the habitual, wrote in "The Vision of Theodore":

It was the peculiar artifice of Habit not to suffer her power to be felt at first. Those whom she led, she had the address of appearing only to attend, but was continually doubling her chains upon her companions; which were so slender in themselves, and so silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived. Each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn, and when, by continual additions, they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken.

Habit is the stuff of adulthood, the organizing principle atop which is built the whole web of life and obligation that at times can feel inescapable, as Henry James notes in "The Great Good Place":

There was no footing on which a man who had ever liked life--liked it, at any rate, as he had--could now escape from it. he must reap as he had sown. It was a thing of meshes; he had simply gone to sleep under the net and had simply waked up there. The net was too fine; the cords crossed each other at spots so near togegther, making at each a little tight, hard knot that tired fingers, this morning, were too limp and too tender to touch.

Habit binds us, yes, but it also eases our passage through the world, freeing us from the risk of squirrel-like impulse or tharn-like terror. At the same time, however, it smooths the world's edges. Habit is the reason four years can pass in adulthood and leave little impression, whereas four years starting at fourteen remade our whole universe.

—

The pandemic has thrown me more than ever back on habit. It was already my mode. Every morning, I think through how I'll organize the handful of things I do each day: Work, piano, dog walks, exercise. In normal times, however, that planning is frequently disrupted by outside events, activities as simple as going out to a movie or as complicated as a trip to Japan. Since March, however, the days have varied little. There's a comfort there, especially given how fortunate my family has been through all of this. But the risk of the deadening of impression is very strong.

Autumn, therefore, came as a sort of—well, salvation feels too dramatic. Correction, perhaps, is better. A distinct change in a way that the arrival of summer didn't present. As the shadows lengthened and the light slipped lower on the horizon and gained a golden tint (How much of our reaction to that light is atavistic, how much cultural?) I attended.

And here's where nostalgia comes into play. For years now at this season I have made a habit of reading ghost stories, tales of the weird or uncanny. It's the closest thing to a deliberate reversion to youth that I experience, and this year I finally figured out why it engages me. Even leaving aside my earlier caveats about our young selves, nostalgia is beset by the problem that the feelings of youth are hard to recapture, and even harder to re-create. Christmas morning will never again glow like it once did; first-day-of-school feelings are too dissimilar from what's evoked by the first day of a new job to re-emerge. But being scared? Oh, yes, that stays with us. And the sensorium of autumn—so brilliantly evoked by Ray Bradbury,

October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .

—can still be potent enough to activate it in a way that is separate from our more mundane adult fears.

Pressing deliberately on that feeling, opening myself up to the ways in which, to quote Mark Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie, "the domestic world does not coincide with itself," helps me to fully live in and engage with the season, to push back against habit ever so briefly. I may still be treading the same desire paths as always, but I'm not letting them pass underfoot without notice right now.

"Custom is commonly too strong for the most resolute resolver," writes Johnson, "though furnished for the assault with all the weapons of philosophy." The added weight of a pandemic, and its forced circumscription of life, adds to the challenge. Autumn, it turns out, is a more potent weapon than philosophy.

Winter, however, is wielded by the other side. And it's almost here.

Sumer is i-goin out

2020-09-06T10:01:00.002-05:00

One of the very few notes of grace that has been vouchsafed us by this awful year is the position of Labor Day, which, perched as it is on the latest eligible day, allows us to retain summer, at least in a technical sense, as long as possible.

----

Summer comes, alleviating at least some of the strains of the spring, as it's always done, in times of plenty and times of plague.

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.

Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

Sumer is i-cumin in—

Lhude sing, cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med

And springth the wude nu.

Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,

Lhouth after calve cu,

Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth—

Murie sing, cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu,

Wel singes thu, cuccu.

Ne swik thu naver nu!

----

As a rural kid who didn't see much of his friends from the end of one school year to the start of the next, I've always seen summer at least to some extent as a time of transformation. I'd return in late August to a school whose people and relationships had been wholly transformed by the sun and heat and absence of responsibility. It could be unsettling, but, as I got older and, through access to a car, could better maintain those connections, it also proved to be both beautifully seductive and largely false. At that age, the changes are real, but they're time's doing, not summer's. And if you're lucky, you're still you at the end of them.

I feel for those kids who, in the summer of 2020, are being denied those experiences by the virus. You get only so many summers; the summer when you're sixteen you get only once.

----

Part of the allure of summer is its sense of promise, of immortality. On a sunny day in mid-June, who can believe that time can pass, that all this can end? Our appetite in May is vast--we will squeeze every bit of life out of this coming summer! August arrives, however, and some afternoons find us inside, artificial aids helping us hide from the heat. Summers blur and blend and disappear in memory, though some stand out, for reasons obvious and not. The summer when I read the whole run of Ben Grimm's short-lived solo comic, much of it somehow while sailing through the air on a frisbee swing. The summer I first went to YMCA camp, and the one when I last did. The summer when I was in England for a few days and got to experience the late-night golden-warm light and wee hours birdsong. The summer when we got Jenkins, and together he and I discovered the joys of long, aimless, quiet walks.

Time has been strange this year, but I did not let summer pass without heed this year. Wordsworth was regularly in my ear.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

This was our time to expand and experience. We won't forget the summer of 2020, in part because we'll need to draw on it to warm us through the fall and winter, as we're forced back indoors and away, once again, from loved ones.

"When I think back to those days," one of W. G. Sebald's characters writes in The Emigrants, "I see shades of blue everywhere--a single empty space, stretching out into the twilight of late afternoon."

----

And then summer goes. Historically it's brought new tasks--harvest, canning, preparations for winter. We should take care this year to attend to that last task, in multiple ways.

But it's also always brought a new beauty, explicitly evanescent in a way that summer's beauty hides. Here's John Clare:

The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,

The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;

Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

Autumn has long been my favorite season, its colors and chills and the way that baseball simultaneously winds down and intensifies. I'll love it once it's properly here. The river birch in our back garden, which in six weeks will be shimmering with golden leaves, would on its own be sufficient to fire that love. As would be the ghost stories native to October. The migrating birds, the marvel of which our homebound life this spring enabled us to experience in a wholly new way, will come through once again, and we'll get to share the grace of food and water with them.

Canada geese, as if to prove a point, honked overhead amid this morning's quiet rain, stretching their wings on practice flights.

----

"The days were few then at Dunnett Landing," writes Sarah Orne Jewett in The Country of the Pointed Firs, one of the great summer books, "and I let each of them slip away unwillingly as a miser spends his coins. I wished to have one of my first weeks back again, with those long hours when nothing happened except the growth of herbs and the course of the sun. Once I had not even known where to go for a walk now there were many delightful things to be done and done again, as if I were in London. I felt hurried and full of pleasant engagements, and the days flew by like a handful of flowers flung to the sea wind."

----

The theme to the 1963 film Summer Holiday, performed by Cliff Richard, was a huge hit in the UK but never made an impression over here. I didn't know Richards's bouncy recording of it when I came across the song in a collection of fakebook arrangements and learned it on the piano, and I've always heard it with a hint of melancholy. An end-of-summer song rather than an early summer song.

Here's my so-so playing, if you want to hear it.

Summer Holiday from Levi stahl on Vimeo.

----

Thomas Hardy can see us out. This is "The Later Autumn."

Gone are the lovers, under the bush
Stretched at their ease;
Gone the bees,
Tangling themselves in your hair as they rush
On the line of your track,
Leg-laden, back
With a dip to their hive
In a prepossessed dive.

Toadsmeat is mangy, frosted, and sere;
Apples in grass
Crunch as we pass
And rot ere the men who make cyder appear.
Couch-fires abound
On fallows around,
And shades far extend
Like lives soon to end.

Spinning leaves join the remains shrunk and brown
Of last year's display
That lie wasting away,
On whose corpses they earlier as scorners gazed down
From their aery green height:
Now in the same plight
They huddle; while yon
A robin looks on.

Retreating from everyday horror into fictional horror

2020-08-23T09:29:00.005-05:00

Hoo, boy, it's been a long time since I wrote, huh? Back in late January, when I restarted this blog after five years away, I said my hope was to write at least every couple of weeks. And I did it. Until the pandemic. And then . . . not much. The days keep sliding by--"August sipped away like a bottle of wine," as Taylor Swift puts it on her new record.

I've got the time. It's not that keeping me from writing. It's that everything we can say about pandemic life is already starting to harden into cliche. Yet at the same time simply writing, "Here's what I've been reading" also seems false, like a denial of the conditions of strange dread under which that reading occurred.

That dread, though--it's brought me back here because yesterday I read a novel that took me wholly out of it for a while, substituting its own horrors for the ones around us. Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians is a horror novel that shocked and surprised and even all but scared me at a couple of points. I started it in the morning and simply tore through it.

The novel tells the story of four male friends, all American Indians from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, and the unexpected supernatural--or is it hyper-natural?--consequences of an incident ten years ago when they slaughtered some elk. To a genre that has long relied lazily on cursed Indian burial grounds and such, Jones brings the perspective of contemporary Native people, living in the twenty-first-century world while also engaging in different, often self-contradictory ways, with tradition.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is the way Jones simply puts us into these people's lives. He doesn't over-explain or act as our guide--he simply shows what life is like for Indians living in or around a reservation today. That life is a lot like the lives of any Americans who are surrounded by poverty, deprivation, and disinvestment overlaid with racism. We're in a world of junk cars and hard-labor jobs and limited opportunity. But it's also a world, within the reservation at least, of long memory and familiar community. The young men mock the tribal stories they were told as children even as they tell and retell contemporary versions from their own lives. Jones takes that vexed relationship with tradition and makes of it something dramatic and compelling, unafraid to mix the quotidian contemporary and the elements of myth. There's a basketball game in this book played for life-and-death stakes against a not-wholly-human creature, for god's sake, and it works, both as Walter Tevis–style sporting event where we care about the moment-to-moment plays and as a full-on fight with death.

At this point, I should apologize: I didn't think I'd be writing about this book, because I haven't been writing, so I don't have the usual batch of passages to share. But this one, selected almost at random, will give you an idea of Jones's voice and of his easy way with the milieu:

Off-rez, people always used to default-think that Lewis and Gabe were brothers. Gabe, at six-two, had always been a touch taller, but otherwise, yeah, sure. In John Wayne's day Lewis and Gabe would have been scooped up to die in a hail of gunfire, would have been Indians "16" and "17," of fort. Cass, though? Cass would have been more the sitting-in-front-of-the-lodge type, the made-for-the-twentieth-century type, maybe even already wearing some early version of John Lennon shades. Ricky, he'd be Bluto from Popeye, just, darker; put him in front of a camera, and all he could hope to play would be the Indian thug off to the side, that nobody trusts to remember even half a line. Of Lewis and Gabe and Cass, though, he was the only one who could struggle out a sort-of beard, if he made it through the itchy part, and didn't have a girlfriend at the. "Custer in the woodpile" was the excuse he would always give, smoothing his rangy fourteen hairs down along his cheeks like Grizzly Adams.

At risk of sounding like the crime fiction reviewer who's only read Chandler and Hammett and thus compares everyone to them, there are definitely aspects of this book that called to mind Stephen King. The comfort with slang and multiple registers seen in the passage above, for example. Jones also shares with King the desire to have us to know almost every character who appears in the book; we're in and out of the heads of most of them at some point in an effectively kaleidoscopic way, and even those for which we're not granted that access are deftly, compactly sketched. What calls to mind King even more, though, is how well Jones depicts physical pain and endurance, and the strange alchemy of will and the body that enables people to keep going long after they should have given up.

That's where horror is at its best for me, when it reminds us that the one thing we have that the unfeeling world can't take away from us is our refusal to let it have its way. That is in a way a sentimental vision--eventually we all lose that contest, after all--but it's at the heart of what makes stories like these resonate and feel valuable, especially at a moment like now when our ability to exert our will on the world seems so limited.

If you're looking for a book to take you out of that world for a while even as it mixes its myths with truths about it, The Only Good Indians is waiting for you.

Deep in our own heads

2020-05-17T09:23:00.003-05:00

Feeling a little scattered these days. Aren't we all? How to get back some coherence?

Henry James, from his notebook, March 29, 1905:

The question, however, is with, is of, what I want now,and how I need to hark back, and hook on, to those very 1st little emotions and agitations and stirred sensibilities of the first Cambridge hours and days and even weeks--though it's really a matter for any acuteness, for any quality, of but the hours, the very first, during which the charms of the brave handsome autumn (I coax it, stretching a point with soft names) lingered and hung about, and made something of a little medium for the sensibility to act in. That was a good moment, genuine so far as it went, and just enough, no doubt, under an artful economy, to conjure with.

Lord, I hope we're not still doing this when the "brave, handsome autumn" arrives, but I have my fears. The stasis we're in certainly doesn't feel anything like a "medium for the sensibility to act in." Differentiating moment from moment feels like the most I can manage right now, as a creature of habit who find himself now somehow even more of one, without the usual interruptions of outside activity to punctuate the days.

But it's worth remembering that these pains are minor compared to those being suffered by many of our fellows. And even more so when set in the context of a reminder like this, which opens Francesca Wade's new book Square Haunting:

A few minutes past midnight on Tuesday, September 10, 1940, an air raid struck Mecklenburgh Square. From number 45, John Lehmann heard gunfire rumbling in the distance, the hum of airplanes at an insistent crescendo until "three whistling, ripping noises" directly overhead were followed by the unmistakable tinkling of breaking glass. Climbing out of bed, he opened the blackout curtains to find his windows shattered and the London skyline obscured by flames. His friend Stephen Spender's house on nearby Lansdowne Terrace, usually visible from his second-floor window, appeared to be enveloped in a burning cloud. "Well," Lehmann found himself thinking, surprised at his state of calm, "poor old Stephen's the first to go."

As some of you will know, Lehmann was, fortunately, wrong: Spender survived the war and lived into the 1990s. The fear, however, was real. For most of us living in the shadow of COVID, the immediate fear for our lives has passed, transmuted into fear for our livelihoods and our communities. That's a wholly legitimate fear, but I will confess that reading even that one paragraph about the Blitz offered a bracing restoration of perspective.

We're all in our own heads a bit right now, aren't we? Even as we attend work meetings via video and chat with friends on the phone or partners or roommates (or pets) in person, our inner monologues, I think, are rising in volume. How could they not, as we're faced with such a strange combination of new experiences and stultification? The moment-to-moment living of our lives has shifted to autopilot, but the deep bass thrum of fear is ever present, telling our minds they need to work overtime solving the problem. But it's a problem our minds can't solve, so they simply . . . work. To little avail.

That situation made Anita Brookner's The Rules of Engagement seem wholly apt for our moment when I read it recently. The novel, which tells the story of Elizabeth, a middle-aged woman, and her mostly failed marriage and brief affairs, leaves the reader almost completely in the head of its protagonist. Relatively few novels strike a realistic balance between our external interactions and the movements of our minds--in most novels dialogue flows back and forth without acknowledging the unspoken reactions, the flights of thought and reference, the lightning interpretations that necessarily occur between the end of one person's speech and the start of another's. Anthony Powell, in his way, does this. James certainly does, sometimes to a fault. Brookner in this novel pulls it off brilliantly, and to an explicit effect: We are in Elizabeth's head primarily because that is where she is trapped. She has no real confidantes, in part because society refuses to admit that a married woman might need them, that her dissatisfaction might be legitimate.

What that means ultimately is that Elizabeth is not only always assessing her own thoughts and actions but also doing the same for those of the people around her--and rarely seeing or taking an opportunity to check those assessments. Here's a brief example:

"Thank you for dinner."

"It was my pleasure."

It did not then seem as if it had been a pleasure. He had retreated into his earlier mournful self. What he had no doubt wanted was not something I could supply. The brief recitation of his emotional history had served some purpose, but I was not able to evaluate this. No doubt it had been defensive, even pre-emptive, in order to forestall any more leisurely enquiries. It now seemed entirely irrelevant, yet I knew that I should give it further thought. He seemed to regret it, but it was in keeping with his general stoicism not to offer excuses.

As the advice columnists so often have to remind us, if we want to know what someone thinks or feels, our best course of action is to ask them. Yet again and again we don't. It's a default form of self-protection in many cases, rooted in fear of responsibility and involvement. Yet it's also a denial, one that can easily warp us, of the separate reality of those around us. James Schuyler, in "Hymn to Life," captures the problem in a plainspoken way:

Reticence is not a bad quality, though it may lead to misunderstandings. I misunderstood silence for disapproval, see now it was
Sympathy.

I think far more often than is probably reasonable about Reed and Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four, and how many times Reed has discovered an existential threat to the cosmos and decided that he had to solve it himself, rather than burdening his wife and family with the terrible knowledge. Always, Sue finds out. Always, she's righteously angry. It's a playing out in superhero terms of a drama common to many a deep relationship. Reed substitutes his own judgment for that of his wife, assumes that she shouldn't have to handle the stress of his knowledge, shouldn't have to help bear the burden, rather than honor her separate existence and trust that she can be a full participant in their shared life. It's the purest solipsism, one that cuts us off from so much of what relationships have to offer.

Schuyler again:

You see death shadowed out in another's life. The threat Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
If it is hard to believe in. Stopping in the city while the light
Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop, and
Yet it is not less individual a fate for all that.

We are all in our heads. We are all there alone. But we can open the doors. Right now that's more than ever worth the effort.

Still at home

2020-04-19T10:44:00.000-05:00

A mention by a friend on Twitter yesterday got me thinking again about the best new novel I read last year, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport. In my review of the book for the Seattle Review of Books, I praised it as the first book I've read that

that [. . . ] thoroughly acknowledges the toxic mix of guilt and dread that is the bassline of life in Western society amid a climate change disaster that our every action exacerbates.

For an educated, attentive Westerner, climate change, and the guilt and fear that accompanies it, has in the past decade or so become a constant part of thought. It's there eroding our wellbeing at all times, in ways that, relative to the scale of the disaster and human culpability for it, are extravagantly minor, yet that cumulatively steal a not-insignificant portion of life's everyday pleasures. A warm snap in February? No longer an unmixed good. The first arrival of goldfinches in the spring? They're awfully early again this year, aren't they? A hike in the woods? Yes, but we had to drive there.

Part of the problem is that the scale is all wrong. Individually, we can do next to nothing about climate change. Yet it is, in part, as individuals that we will experience, and suffer from, its effects. And it is as individuals that we confront, moment to moment and day to day, our thoughts.

Lately, our thoughts have been infected by a new strain of dread. Five or six weeks into lockdown, for those of us not in frontline occupations the immediate fear of infection has subsided. It's still there, but it's no longer a countdown clock ticking at the back of our minds from the last time we rode the subway. Now the fears have turned social, political, economic. If we're lucky enough to still have a job, the fears are about the larger economy, and about our seeming lack of a clear path back to even half-normal. (Or even a true acknowledgment that that path, wherever it winds, will not be short.) What do we look like on the other side of this?

I've spent my whole career working in or with bookstores, so that's where I find myself turning when the larger questions get to be too much. They're almost all closed right now, and they're hurting. But they're also taking orders and shipping, and I'm drawing at least the most modest of solace in ordering something from every store where I know a staff member. And, unlike the way I usually approach my reading, which mixes books new to the house with stuff that's been lingering on the shelves unread for years, I'm stacking my stay-at-home purchases and reading my way right through them, on the logic that something about the current situation led me to choose these books, so perhaps I'll find they have something to say to me right now. Wild, Cheryl Strayed's 2012 memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest trail certainly does. This bit rang particularly true right now:

I'd loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When I made camp in the evenings, I rushed through the tasks of pitching my tent and filtering water and cooking dinner so I could sit afterwards in side the shelter of my tent in my chair with my pot of hot food gripped between my knees. I ate with my spoon in one hand and a book in the other, reading by the light of my headlamp when the sky darkened. In the first week of my hike, I was often too exhausted to read more than a page or two before I fell asleep, but as iI grew stronger I was reading more, eager to escape the tedium of my days. And each morning, I burned whatever I'd read the night before.

She's burning the book because she didn't want to carry any more weight in her pack than she had to, but even knowing that, there's a certain drama to the act, no? Strayed's book itself is just what I want right now: It takes me someplace I can't go (and, to be honest, was never going to go), and it has a strong narrative pull that enables me, for a bit, to keep COVID thoughts at bay.

Philip Ziegler's The Black Death is a different sort of response to the moment. It's a reminder that things could certainly be worse. We aren't losing a third to a half of our population to COVID, and while there's a lot we still have to learn about the disease, we at least understand the basics of how it works and how it might be stopped. Yet there are parallels, and Ziegler's book offers plenty of moments that snag and stick like burrs on a hike, discovered only much later, lingering in my thoughts. Like this:

But if one were called on to identify the hall-mark of the years which followed the Black Death, it would be that of a neurotic, all-pervading gloom. "Seldom in the course of the Middle Ages has so much been written concerning the miseria of human beings and human life," wrote Hans Baron, going on to refer to "the pessimism and renunciation of life which took possession of mankind in the period following the terrible epidemics of the middle of the fourteenth century." It was a gloom which fed upon extreme uncertainty and apprehension. The European of this period lived in a constant anticipation of disaster.

Climate change, considered seriously, has given us a trial run for that feeling. Yet we still--at least, I think, we reasonably well-off Americans--tend to default to the assumption that things are going to be okay. I'll cop to that. I've been extremely fortunate. My life has gone well. And narrative concepts and structures are so deeply embedded in me and my thinking that, as little interest as I have in being any kind of hero, I can't help but imagine myself as the protagonist of my own life--and to assume that life is ultimately a story that will have a reasonable, satisfying shape to it. Our current situation reminds me of how presumptuous that is, both on an individual and a societal level, even as it reveals how incredibly deep the roots of that outlook are in my personality.

COVID has laid bare so many of the underlying assumptions about our lives and society--and most of them do not put us in a good light. Inequality is deadly. Failing to acknowledge our interconnectedness is deadly. Neglect of infrastructure is deadly. Dealing with crises rather than working to prevent them is deadly. And we, myself certainly included, are complacent about what we have. A passage from Phil Christman's thoughtful new book about the Midwest, Midwest Futures, comes to mind:

That we take such a good place for granted, as though its usefulness for human life were proof of its dullness and interchangeability, allows us to misuse it, and ourselves, and each other, who are marked as boring by having come from this boringly good thing, or marked as threatening because they didn’t. It takes a thousand years for the earth to make three centimeters of topsoil. (Climate change encourages floods, which wash topsoil out to sea.)

At the same time, I hold with Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo that optimism isn't an assumption or a plan, but an ethical stance. It enables us to continue, to do the work that could help justify our belief in it. I can worry about worst-case scenarios, but I have to on a fundamental level believe we'll get past them.

In the current moment, that work, for many of us, consists mostly of letting time and distance do their work. So we try. I'm reading. I'm watching the birds at our feeder. I'm seeing a movie a day. I'm working on finicky little finger exercises for the piano, devised by Czerny to facilitate madness. I'm being grateful for my wife and our dog and cats. And I'm thinking about this line from Wild:

Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.

That's as succinct an assessment of where we are right now as any I've come across. Stay strong and well, friends.

Staying home

2020-03-22T10:48:00.002-05:00

{Anonymous art seen today on my block.}

I woke up this morning trying to remember whose was the last hand I shook. It was probably in the last days of February. It would also represent the last physical contact I've had with anyone other than rocketlass.

—

Today was the first day it felt at all eerie. Walking Jenkins, I arrived at Foster Avenue to . . . nothing. As someone who grew up in the country, I'm still, all these years later, pleasantly surprised by how quiet city Sundays can be. Even in Tokyo, out for an early run, I've found solitude. But this was different. Foster is always tough to cross with a dog, almost no matter the hour. But it was ours today to idle across at will. I was reminded, by their absence, of some of the images from James Schuyler's "An East Window on Elizabeth Street":

Across an interstice
trundle and trot trucks, cabs, cars,
station-bound fat dressy women

In the distance, I spied runners, on opposite sides of the street, both heading towards the lake, towards the sun. Schuyler again, from his still-bustling city:

The furthest-off people are tiny as fine seed
but not at all bug-like. A pinprick of blue
plainly is a child running

Otherwise the street belonged to us, and the spring-bright cardinal singing from the very top of a bare tree, and the woodpecker diligently breakfasting, unseen, on another.
--

I watched an episode of Columbo last week and found myself tensing at the proximity of the characters during a dinner party. We are a malleable species. We make adjustments, and take them more deeply within ourselves than we realize, with incredible, perhaps even frightening, speed.

—

Everyone—and by everyone I mean, as we so often do, a small group of people I interact with online—is turning to Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Neither a work of history nor of journalism, though it draws from both wells, it uses the story of an outbreak of plague in 1664 to prepare readers for a potential future outbreak. We live in a different time, in largely different ways, but there are notes that resonate. Here is Defoe on how people respond to the threat of having their houses shut up, with them trapped inside, a virtually certain death sentence, which was prescribed by the authorities when members of a household were discovered to be infected:

It would fill a little Volume to set down the Arts us'd by the People of such Houses, to shut the Eyes of the Watchmen, who were employ'd, to deceive them, and to escape, or break out from them.

Thus far, in our plague, there seems to be less of that, and more of outright defiance, of pretending that youth or money or, quite simply, one's own essential position as the center of the universe, will protect one.

Defoe's opening calls to mind the early part of this year, up to the first days three weeks ago when we started seriously discussing at my office the possibility of having to send everyone home to work. At that point, though we knew intellectually that there was a threat, that information was hard to turn into suitable levels of fear or concern—everything still felt distant.

It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return'd again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Roterdam, whither they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It matter'd not, from whence it come; but all agreed, it was come into Holland again.

We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of Men, as I have liv'd to see pracstis'd since. But such things as these were gather'd from the letters of Merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true Account of it, and several Counsels were held about Ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private.

That last bit is familiar enough to sting.

If you've not read Journal of a Plague Year, the episode of the Backlisted podcast that focuses on it is a good starting point.

—

Thus far, my life hasn't changed dramatically. That's largely a mark of intertwined privilege and luck. Rocketlass and I both have jobs that can be done remotely, and neither of us works in a sector of the economy that's an immediate casualty. Like everyone, we're at risk from the larger catastrophe (to say nothing of the virus itself), but for now the only effect is that we're at home.

Our society has never been quite sure how to think about work relationships. With rare exceptions, they're not exactly friendships—but in a good workplace, they're also not not friendships. You care about these people and their lives. You appreciate their abilities and their character. You look forward to their insights, and their jokes. In a crowd of strangers, they glow like a lighthouse, guiding you to comfort and safety

At the core of the relationship, for most of us, is the simple dailiness of it. Every day, you're going to see these people, and—most of the time—you're going to see them in a situation where everything is nice and clear. You know what you're supposed to do, you know what they're supposed to do, and you'll do a lot of it together. Most of the time, that's a distinct comfort.

As I left the office a week ago, unsure when I'd go back, I did a mental count: Nine people in the Books Division had been there when I started, including three in my department. Nine people whom I have seen more or less every day, barring two-week stretches of vacation here and there, since 1999.

When Silicon Valley tells people they should bring "their whole selves" to work, they're trying to take advantage of people. You should never take your whole self to work. Work isn't buying your whole self. The realms should be separate. But that doesn't mean you can't be yourself at work. I'm largely the same person at the office as I am at home—marginally less sweary, but that's about it. As a colleague and a boss, I'm pretty transparent: I am who I seem to be.

Aside, that is, from one thing: At the office, managing a staff of twenty-eight, I am an extrovert. And I'm good at it. I'm there for my staff and my colleagues, and part of my job is, and always has been, going back to my retail beginnings, performing in that way. I like it. But it takes it out of me, and on the weekends I'm quiet. I have friends whom I love, but I tend to spend most of my off hours quietly, reading, playing piano, running, watching movies.

The stay-at-home order, therefore, represents no major rupture for me. I'm fortunate enough to have space, and a wife, and pets, and a tendency to live this way already. How are the true extroverts dealing with it?

—

I have long read Thomas a Kempis, not for his religion, but for his focus on quiet and solitude. He's apt:

The man who has not diligently practiced holy repentance is not worthy of heavenly consolations. If you want to experience this repentance in your heart, go to your room and shut out the din of the world, as it is written: commune with your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Retire to your room and there you will preserve what you usually lose by leaving it.

If you keep to your room you will find delight in it, but if you only visit it, it becomes irksome and annoying. If, at the time of your conversion, you had accustomed yourself to stay in your room and remain there, it would now be your good friend and a source of great pleasure to you.

"Enter into your room, and shut out the clamor of the world."

—

In part because of those general preferences, the crisis hasn't quite hit me emotionally yet. It's still mostly about logistics: How do we do this, how do we deal with this, how do we recover from it? Fears are mostly focused on the economic damage; somehow the human damage, perhaps unreasonably, is still hard to process. I'm fortunate to not know anyone who has been diagnosed, and to be healthy myself, thus far. And while I know all but nothing about medicine, I do have an educated layman's knowledge of business, the economy, and government, so I find myself thinking about the economy and tools for recovery. It's sobering. Even America—the richest society in the history of the world, one that, because of its role as the world's banker, can simply print money as needed—is going to have a hard time recovering. The prospects for the less well-off parts of the world are terrifying. We'll need a New Deal–level US recovery program, and a Marshall Plan on steroids if we want to help the rest of the world. And I worry about our ability, and willingness, to do either.

Regardless, we will come out changed. My city, your city, they'll never be the same. It feels simultaneously melodramatic and apt to quote Sir Edward Grey's remark on the eve of World War I:

The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime

As I walked this morning past shuttered stores and restaurants and bars and wonder which will be around to re-open, I found myself thinking of some lines from Jana Prikryl's "To Tell of Bodies Changed"

A painter once squared himself against a difficult question

and said no one could just create

a landscape,

but isn't it true

that expectation builds a neighborhood
and there is nowhere else that you can live.

What are my expectations, now? What will my neighborhood be?

—

Then there's the actual virus, and the fear of catching it (or having those we love catch it). Knowing its general latency period, it feels as if there's a stopwatch ticking in the background, counting down the days since we last interacted with possibly infected strangers. Every twinge in the throat, every flash of headache, every urge to cough . . . is it beginning? It's a special kind of horror, one that is wholly new to my life, and that I, at least, can only deal with by trying desperately to ignore it.

It keeps bringing to mind, not anything obvious like "The Masque of the Red Death," but rather my favorite J. G. Ballard story, "Escapement." A brief, potent story, it tells of a man who, while sitting with his wife one evening, realizes slowly that he's slipped into a time loop, wherein a section of time fifteen minutes long keeps repeating itself. Yet even as he begins to grasp this, his wife remains uncomprehending. The loop plays itself out—Ballard does something interesting where it tightens on itself until the kink straightens out, essentially—but then his wife, watching TV, says, "Why do they keep on doing that? . . . They've done it twice already." "No," he replies," I don't think they have."

It takes the husband a minute, but it clicks. She's slipped into it, and he's not going to be able to retain his knowledge of what's happening. And here, the end, is the bit I keep thinking of, as I wonder whether we're about to slip into something unpleasant:

""Darling," I said, putting my arm around her. "Hold tight."
"What do you mean?"
"This is the merry-go-round. And you're driving."

—

For now, though, I'm well and it's morning and it's quiet. The actions available to me to mitigate this disaster are few, and I'm taking them. I hope you are, too, and that you're well.

Sun helps. Pets help. Poetry helps. Specifically James Schuyler:

The day
offers so much, holds
so little or is it
simply you who
asking too much take
too little? It is
merely morning
so always marvelously
gratuitous and undemanding,
freighted with messages
and meaning

Stay well, friends. I don't know what the other side of this will look like, but I do know that I want to see you there.

The women of Horizon

2020-03-08T08:13:00.000-05:00

"From now on you must be free to do anything you want."

A reasonable, if perhaps a bit extravagantly phrased, injunction from a mother to her daughter. But when Angela Culme-Seymour's mother delivered it to her daughter in the 1920s, when Angela was in her mid-teens, the follow-up was, to our ears, distressingly of its time: "When you're older, you must have lovers. You're so pretty you should have heaps of them."

D. J, Taylor's book The Lost Girls: Love, War, and Literature, 1939–1951 places us right in the gap between those first and second wishes. Drawing on a heap of published and unpublished writings, he re-creates the world of the wartime magazine Horizon, a world centered, in both social and literary terms, on its editor, Cyril Connolly. It's a world where women—or at least women above a certain class—were beginning to have ambitions that went beyond marriage, but were having them in a society that still had no real idea how to handle the concept.

Taylor weaves profiles of a dozen or so women with an account of the history of Horizon and, inevitably, the life and whining of Cyril Connolly, whose gravitational pull distorts nearly all the lives it comes near. "To know Cyril Connolly was, instantly, to be part of his schemes," Taylor writes. Anthony Powell, reviewing a collection of Connolly's writing, put it this way: "Connolly's outstanding quality is his pervasiveness, his determination that you are going to like what he likes." That was true of art and literature, and it was also true of Connolly's greatest concern: himself. Most of the women featured in Taylor's book were romantically involved with (or married to) Connolly at some point; almost none of them escaped at least doing underappreciated drudge work for him. They proofed manuscripts and answered letters and corrected proofs and dealt with visitors and balanced books, and they also listened to his self-pity and forgave affairs and tolerated comparisons with other women and largely refused to stand on their rights. Which, while maddening all these decades later, is also understandable: mostly they didn't even consider that they might have rights.

"Nothing, of course, is quite so relative as emancipation," Taylor writes, and that's the sad truth at the core of his book. Compared to their Edwardian forebears—whom Anthony Powell remembers from childhood being tut-tutted for their drinking and smoking—these women thought they had almost everything. Many of them lived on their own and earned their own income. They chose lovers and friends without regard to their parents' wishes. They participated in the cultural life of their day. They were, it's reasonable to believe, frequently happy. To Taylor's credit, they come to life in these pages in a way they largely haven't before, when they've been relegated to supporting roles in the biographies of better-known men. In particular Barbara Skelton, a writer best known these days as the model for Pamela in A Dance to the Music of Time, and Sonia Brownell, primarily known now as Orwell's widow, are treated with a respect and appreciation that enables them to stand on their own, agents of their fates.

The more we learn about the lives of these women, the more we chafe along with them at the restrictions that limited them. The simplest is that something like Horizon would have been inconceivable with a woman at the helm. While many of these women had men dancing attendance on them, none could have assembled a coterie like Connolly, and none would ever have been afforded anything like the regard given Connolly's every pronouncement. Certainly, Connolly was a rare talent—all these years later, his writing still sparkles. But could none of these women, or some other woman who never even got the limited opportunities granted this group, have shown as much if given the chance? We'll never know.

Thinking about Taylor's book carries extra potency this weekend: On Friday, my 96-year-old grandmother died. She had a good, long life. She had a family she loved and was loved by. She was happy. If you'd asked her, I don't think she'd have said she felt she missed out on anything or was kept from anything she wanted. Unlike the women Taylor chronicles, she didn't attempt to push boundaries. But she also wasn't encouraged to, and I can't help wondering what she might have done under other circumstances. Grandma Jackie was smart. She was a reader and continually engaged with culture and current events. She had a phenomenal memory. What might she have done? What talents did she—and countless other women of her generation, to say nothing of our own—not unlock because society didn't make a place for them?

"Being born is craps. How we live is poker."

2020-02-23T10:42:00.000-06:00

We used to live down the street from a tiny branch of the Chicago Public Library. And while it would be churlish to complain about having a library within staggering distance of home, the way I took to describing its offerings was that if you went in looking for something specific, you'd be disappointed, but that if you went in looking for something, you'd be fine.

About two years ago, I realized that Netflix had reached that point. There was plenty to watch, but . . . not that, and not that, and not anything from that era, and not that other thing. I was saved, however, by the discovery of the University of Chicago Library's DVD collection. That, and the acquisition of a Chromecast, which opened up a world of streaming and rental options, dropped me unexpectedly into a world where I could see, if still not quite everything, at least far, far more movies I actually wanted to see than I would likely watch in a lifetime.

So I've been watching a lot of westerns. Film critic David Bordwell wrote a post recently that, while also addressing many other issues, helps explain why: If you can watch anything, how do you choose? My solution was to spend 2019 watching only movies from the '70s. And, to leaven those—that much time with '70s interiors can't be good for you—westerns.

This year, I've let the '70s go for a bit. But the westerns have stayed. What's drawing me to them? Personal history, in part. I've enjoyed westerns since I was a boy. I grew up listening to old Lone Ranger radio programs and watching the Disney Davy Crockett TV series on VHS. It's more than that, though. It's the landscapes, which I didn't even notice when I was a kid. The horses, presented matter-of-factly as just another tool, yet regularly surprising you with their beauty and magnificence. The music, full of motifs that still stir the blood.

Then there are the themes. I'm far from a manly man. I have no interest in proving my toughness. Fights should probably be backed down from most of the time, to be honest; there are usually other ways to achieve your aim. I'm not restless, have no need to strike out into the unknown. I'm solitary but I don't need full solitude.

Honor, though? That works. The idea that you owe it to yourself and those around you to live truthfully and honor your commitments, that you should say what you mean and do what you say. That's at the core of most westerns, and it gives the best of them the same grounding that you find in the best of Joseph Conrad: a reason to tell this story, to care about these people.

As with Conrad, there's plenty of bad in westerns, too. Even if you try to stay away from movies that are explicitly about taking land from Native Americans, you still every once in a while come up against a scene where their lives are implicitly regarded as less valuable than those of others. And if we're being honest, we have to acknowledge that even movies that are about conflicts among white settlers are also about the displacement of native peoples. I'd understand if that put you off westerns entirely. For me, it's one more bit in the balance, another refraction of the story they're telling—and of the story America was telling about itself as the twentieth century wore on.

But this is a book blog, right? Here's where we get to that. A subset of the westerns I've been watching lately has been movies about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. An extremely brief shootout that occurred "around 3:00 PM" on October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, it has been the subject of untold works of fiction and nonfiction, books and films. Each one takes a slightly different angle on what is at base a story of the Earp brothers—capable, yet prone to failures and trouble, family men who again and again wound up in violence—and their friend Doc Holliday, who has come down to us as a gunman who dreamed of better things.

Some of the films, including My Darling Clementine (1946) and Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), present the gunfight as a dramatic triumph, the moment when heroes win and the West moves one step closer to being "civilized." Other films, including the two that were released almost simultaneously in the early 1990s, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, treat it as at best a source of regret, the moment that the Earp's luck starts to run out. Those films aren't necessarily better—some days I'd take My Darling Clementine, with Victor Mature playing a truly menacing Doc Holliday, over them all—but they do feel more true to life.

The place I've seen the gunfight presented most clearly as tragedy, however, is in Mary Doria Russell's Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (2015). It's a sequel of sorts to her 2011 novel Doc, which paints a powerfully sympathetic portrait of Doc Holliday. Here's the opening of that book:

He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle. The disease took fifteen years to hollow out his lungs so completely they could no longer keep him alive. In all that time, he was allowed a single season of something like happiness.

That was enough to hook me. A century and a half after his death, Holliday is more myth than man, and Russell doesn't shy away from that. The book is as much a romance as anything else, with Doc the person we're falling in love with. (Russell herself noted on Twitter: "John Henry Holliday didn't have a mama to love him when he was grown so I have taken him for my own. Loved that boy.") At the same time, however, we buy him, this gunfighter who is quick to kill but also somehow conveys "a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but who don't want revenge." Living under a death sentence from young adulthood, raised and educated for a life wholly different from the one he found ("A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West."), Russell's Doc is compelling and charismatic, but also alcoholic and self-destructive. "In a stand-up contest," she writes, "remorse and self-loathing can battle whiskey to a draw."

The book is full of memorable lines like that:

He meant no harm, of course. Helpful people never do.

What could Penelope offer Odysseus but illness and death if he returned to Ithaca?

A conviction of his own disgrace had taken hold of him. He had begun to live down to his opinion of himself.

Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora's box.

Everything but sloth, he realized. Dodge City was diligent in sin.

Bein' born is craps. How we live is poker.
Epitaph greatly expands the story, bringing each of the Earps—brothers and spouses both—to life, but that portrait of Holliday that we carry from the earlier book is just as important to its power. We watch the Earps and Holliday trying and failing to make stable lives, often undermining their own efforts. In Tombstone we see them come closer than ever before to making it work. And then we reach this line, which, after all the foregoing, reads like the fates taking a tragic hand:

There are five armed men in the O.K. Corral.

When I read Epitaph, I literally put the book down at that point and took a walk. I needed more time before letting this happen to these people I'd grown to care about.
The gunfight itself takes up only a few pages, as you can see in this photo.

But from it will spin out death and despair, the end of their brief spell of peace and happiness in Tombstone.

I wrote above that the core of what draws me to westerns is how they handle honor. The O.K. Corral story isn't really about honor so much as it's about mistakes and human failings. The Earps could have walked away from that fight, Holliday even more so. The honor here comes instead in the telling, in taking these people and lives from our past seriously and helping us understand, if not exactly how it happened, then at least how it might have happened, and why we should still care.

A post that is not quite a post

2020-02-16T16:38:00.001-06:00

When I restarted this blog three weeks ago, I said that I would try to post most weeks, usually on Sunday mornings. That is still my plan, and there will definitely be weeks when I’m wholly absent. This weekend—which I’m spending away from home with friends I’m rural seclusion with books and bourbon and a fireplace—is the Platonic form of the weekend when I won’t post: the blog, reconstituted, is meant to be an outlet and engagement rather than an obligation.

But. This is the third damn week. I shouldn’t be AWOL so soon. Therefore, a compromise: I’ll link to an essay I wrote for Lapham’s Quarterly in the years the blog was dormant, on a subject I’ve blogged about many times: Samuel Johnson. Specifically, on a dream about his brother that Johnson mentions in his diary, a line that I spent ten years thinking over before, with the help of an excellent editor at Lapham’s, Sarah Fan, figuring out what I wanted to say about it.

I’m proud of this essay. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll plan to see you in this space again next week.

Woolf and Lamb, their time and ours, the artist and the art

2020-02-09T10:49:00.003-06:00

In the early days of January, I set aside a few books to be regular companions through the year: a volume each of Virginia Woolf's diaries, essays, and letters, and The Charles Lamb Day Book, a quote-a-day volume drawn from the full range of Charles Lamb's work.

One day recently, reading both of those companion authors, I was brought up short—and not in a good way. I'm going to quote both below, in service of thinking about them, so if you'd rather the pleasantness of your Sunday morning not be broken, I'd suggest passing over this post.

In the Lamb entry for January 24, taken from a letter to Edward Moxom, appears the line,

I maintain it, the eighth commandment hath a secret special reservation by which the reptile is exempt from any protection from it; as a dog, or a n------, he is not a holder of property.

Neither Lamb nor Methuen, the publisher of this 1925 volume, elided the slur as I have done.

Then, in Woolf's diary entry for January 9, 1915, when she was almost thirty-three, I came across the following:

On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.

The whole of this passage is disturbing and disheartening, but that last line is flat-out shocking. "Certainly," she writes. "Certainly."

What to do with this? I love Lamb and Woolf, as writers and, in many ways, as people. Like Henry James, they are writers whose work I have trouble separating from my knowledge of and interest in their lives. Their published works nestle in my mind alongside their letters, notebooks, diaries; biographies inflect, and, largely, increase my appreciation of their creations. I admire Woolf and Lamb, both for the work they created and for the way they played the hands life dealt them: Woolf's valiant struggle against mental breakdown; Lamb's abiding care for his mentally ill sister ("When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world."), even after she murdered their parents. I would find it hard to know as much as we now do about these two, to have read as extensively in their work as I have, and not admire them. I could no more read their work now as something separate from their lives and characters than I could a letter from one of my siblings.

Which is not to say that I've ever been under the illusion that either is perfect. Woolf could be tone-deaf and ignorant to the point of cruelty on issues of class, and, despite her marriage to a Jew, made antisemitic comments in her writings. Lamb, meanwhile, laid bare his prejudices against a number of groups that differed from him—blacks, Jews, Quakers, Scots—in his essay "Imperfect Sympathies." Of Jews, he writes,

I should prefer not to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. . . . Old prejudices cling about me.

Some people would credit Lamb for being frank about these views, but like many people today who pride themselves on "just asking the question" about supposedly taboo subjects, he shows an interest only in acknowledging those views, not in understanding their roots, questioning their validity, or moving beyond them.

That image of the contemporary "question raiser" is perhaps a good path to the question of why, if I already knew that Woolf and Lamb were flawed, these passages stopped me in my tracks. It's at least in part because of the way that #MeToo and other developments have brought the question of how we deal with art by bad people to the fore. And unlike so many ginned-up controversies, this one is both real and legitimately complicated. There are plenty of people who are interested in using the question solely as a straw man in service of dismissing the larger project of widening the circle of inclusion in society, but there are also plenty of people legitimately trying to answer the question. It's possible to conceive of a wide range of answers that are valid, with the test of that validity ultimately being up to each person as they address each work of art. (For a really good discussion of this subject, I recommend the "What to Do with What's in the Box" episode of the Relentless Picnic podcast.)

Is it unfair to judge people like Woolf and Lamb by the standards of our era rather than theirs? Certainly. The past was terrible. I've never forgotten the opening lines of Simon Dickie's 2011 book Cruelty and Laughter:

Eighteenth-century Britons—or a high proportion of them—openly delighted in the miseries of others. Women as well as men laughed at cripples and hunchbacks. They tormented lunatics and led blind men into walls. Wife beating was a routine way of maintaining order within marriage—"an honest Englishman hates his wife" went the catchphrase. Types of violence that would now count as rape were almost mainstream sexual behaviors. Social hierarchies were part of God's plan, and those less favored were habitual figures of fun. Gentlement beat their servants and scoffed at the hungry peasants who crouched along the road outside very major town. Yet social equals were no more likely to sympathize. Useless old women, village idiots, starving paupers, bastard bearers from the next parish—none of them attracted much sympathy from their own kind. Ridiculing and inflicting pain were everyday amusements, and powerful forces were defending them. Violence, intolerance, and schadenfreude were all tolerated as unavoidable side effects of British liberty, if not its very foundation.

Our own time features plenty of cruelty. Dickie, however, makes a strong case that on this measurement, at least, we've made some progress. (Similarly, I was shocked reading a scene in Little Dorrit last month in which Gowan, not a good man but far from a villain, reprimands his dog with. a blow to the head, then by striking him "severely with the heel of his boot, so that his mouth was presently bloody.")

By those standards, the casual racism I encountered in Charles Lamb's Day Book is nothing but a phrase—tossed off in a letter, barely the product of thought, far more an indication of the waters in which he swam than a personal deficiency. And even the staggering cruelty of Woolf's certainty in her diary is of its era—perhaps more bluntly expressed, but in keeping with a time when eugenics was on the march. Would we want to be judged in the future by the ways in which we reflect our own flawed society? Would we wish posterity to extend to us the forbearance of temporal understanding? We are inextricably of our time, even if we should, and, one hopes, do, try like hell to rise above it. (D. J. Enright: "It is not so much that one is out of sympathy with the age, it's the only age one has, as that the age is out of sympathy with itself. But then, the age is out of sympathy with itself.")

Yet the very reason we turn to artists in life is that we expect more. Not more in an explicitly moral sense, but more in the sense of seeing clearly—but the two are inextricable. As Iris Murdoch continually reminds us, seeing clearly is at the core of both morality and art. Is it strange that Woolf, wrapped up in the thinking of her time—and herself such a creature of the mind that she would struggle to conceive living with it damaged in a way that possibly limited thought—should fail to see the essential humanity of intellectally disabled people? No, not at all. But some people in her own time did. And we have come to expect more from her. She showed us, again and again, a mind of penetrating insight into human life and thought and being; she put that on the page like few others, in ways that remain thrilling a century later. Even her casual writing flashes with insight—the reason I was reading her journals in the first place was because they are full of memorable thoughts. So when she falls, it hurts.

What do we do with this kind of knowledge about artists? I don't have a prescription; this work of judgment is I believe fundamentally individual. When it comes to someone like Bill Cosby or Louis C.K., or in a different way Woody Allen, the answer is easy: I'm done. To enjoy their work required accepting a certain presentation of themselves and their worldview that was predicated on agreement that they were, while flawed, fundamentally good people. If they turn out to be, to varying degrees, monsters, that collapses completely.

Woolf and Lamb, on the other hand? It's more complicated. I'm not going to stop reading them, and I doubt I'll even stop admiring them, at least to a degree. There remains much to admire. And their work will, I am sure, continue to matter. But I will approach it with more skepticism. I'll question it more thoroughly. And, saddest of all, I'll wonder what might have been, had they been able to question themselves and their thinking more thoroughly. Art made by good people can be bad; art made by bad people can be good. But bad morality is usually rooted in a failure of understanding, and no art is ever the better for that.

The return of the sun . . . and this blog?

2020-02-03T13:10:00.001-06:00

{Lake Michigan photo by rocketlass.}

While I am on the one hand very much a creature of moderation—regular schedule, regular life—at the same time, I am not someone who does things by half measures. I commit to the things I choose as undertakings. It's no accident that I've been working at the same place for nearly twenty-one years now, lived in Chicago longer than that, been married nearly that long.

Which is why I want to say up front: I may be back. I gave up blogging a few years ago around the same time the bulk of the Internet's attention turned away from it to the faster-paced, more ephemeral arms of social media. My reasons were more prosaic: I had taken up the piano in moderate seriousness, and that, combined with the time needed for a new dog and a slightly longer commute to a then-new home, ate up the time I had previously devoted to blogging. For a good long while, I didn't really miss it. I had the interactions with other book people that I wanted via Twitter. I got more diligent about landing writing assignments for other venues. Lately, however, I find myself missing it. The voice is different from other writing. The way of approaching and thinking about the books I read is different. The interaction with other readers is different.

So here I am. My aim, for now, is to post most weeks, most often (taking a page from Phil Christman's newsletter) on Sunday mornings. But it's possible that I will find myself failing to make the time even for that. It's possible I won't find the voice again. I'll assess around the end of the year. For now, however, I'm going to try.

I'll start modestly. Yesterday was essentially the first truly sunny day in Chicago this year, and, oh, did we feel it. It made the month-opening entry for February in The Daily Henry James, from The Princess Casamassima, seem well timed:

The winter was not over, but the spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled citizens, by way of a change, to see through it. The town could refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds; it lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty suntints and faint transparencies. There was warmth an there was light, and a view of the shutters of shops, and the church bells were ringing.

Here in Chicago, the winter is much farther from over than it is for a Londoner. But yesterday felt like the first real step towards its banishment.

Thanks for reading. See y'all around these parts for a while, let's hope.

Thoreau at 200

2017-07-20T09:36:00.000-05:00

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I have been ecstatically excited for months now about a book I'm handling publicity for in my day job at the University of Chicago Press: Laura Dassow Walls's new definitive biography of Henry David Thoreau. I've been a Thoreau reader for years--since the publication of the one-volume edition of his journals by the NYRB Classics line a few years back, he's been an almost daily companion--but Laura's book showed me a depth and complexity, and an aliveness, that I didn't think possible. It's an incredible book. If you don't want to take my word for it, take a look at the roundup of praise I put together for the Press blog last week on Thoreau's bicentennial.("Superb," "compelling," "a great service to American letters," "remarkable," "engaging," "every page feels essential," and so on . . . )

This all sent me back to Walden for the first time since I was 19. I knew from having read Laura's insightful chapter on it that it was a more heterogeneous, more strange book than I recalled or than its general reputation might have it, but I still wasn't prepared: it's nothing like a straightforward account of time in the woods. If it were published today, it would be structured carefully, from his decision to set out on this experiment through the moment he returned home, and its observations would be carefully arranged, themes and larger points drawn through the book in a way to maximize their impact.

Instead, it's a grab-bag of Thoreau's thoughts. It's more like reading his journal than I expected. He opens with the idea of moving to the woods, then immediately veers off into extended thoughts on other related topics. It's about 40 pages before he gets back to the details of his experiment in living--and then almost immediately he veers off again. Like everything he wrote, it is driven by his broad and intense interests, by what's engaging him at a particular moment--and, ultimately and most importantly, by his keenly observing eye. He never merely looked at the world: he looked closely, and thought about the meaning and importance of what he saw.

A century and a half after publication, many of Walden's phrases are familiar, repeated so much that they've become barnacled unto cliche. But if you can even briefly see some of them fresh, their power--both of ideas and of phrasing, is undeniable. I'll leave you with one from late in the book. Try to see it as if you've not known these lines before; see if you feel the thrill I did.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less comples, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Happy summer, folks.

My mysterious Texan correspondent

2017-07-05T14:40:00.000-05:00

After a ridiculously long hiatus (which I'm tempted to explain in sub-Nabokovian style: work, summer), how 'bout I try to ease ever so gently back into this blogging thing?

I've received another missive from my anonymous occasional postcard correspondent from Texas. This one seems to have been inspired by the postcard itself, a scene of colonial punishment that led to thoughts of Sir Magnus Donners. Donners, a major minor character (if you'll allow it) in A Dance to the Music of Time, is known in gossip circles for having unusual sexual tastes--ill-defined, perhaps, but thought to include various forms of domination and bondage. Which gives the moment quoted on the reverse of the postcard, which occurs during a tour of Donners's country house, Stourwater, a frisson of light discomfort.

Always a pleasure to hear from Texas in this fashion. And to receive a missive that clarifies that it's dated according to the New Style.

Byron

2017-03-26T13:21:00.001-05:00

Lord Byron is one of those figures about whom I feel compelled to read--yet am very much glad never to have had to meet in the flesh. "He is as remorseless as he is unprincipled," wrote Mary Shelley, who was, let us remember, patient enough to put up with the all but intolerable Shelley. Were we to meet Byron, would his charm charm? Or would our (or my, at least) innate skepticism toward the hearty and demonstrative save us? It seems unlikely; it saved so few. Women, men--everyone fell for Byron. And no one loved Byron more than Byron. As Anthony Powell put it, "Shakespeare had an extraordinary grasp of what other people were like; Byron of what he himself was like."

I'm fresh off Fiona MacCarthy's excellent biography of the poet, which succeeds at the not simple task of making us see, at least to some extent, Byron's appeal, while never denying the ways in which he could be high-handed, unthinking, and cruel. She also helps us imagine his fame--which, rooted in a combination of class, scandal, a sense of generational change, and propelled by an epic poem published at the right moment, can be hard to grasp. Obviously no poets are parallel figures today--perhaps a particularly flamboyant film star? A Jude Law who also was the author of Infinite Jest? Yet however much we push ourselves to imagine a different era, when we open Childe Harold to its first lines we are instantly reminded of how vast is the gulf between then and now:

Oh, thou, in Hellas deemed of heavenly birth,
Muse, formed or fabled at the minstrel's will!
Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
Yet there I've wandered by thy vaunted rill;
Yes! sighed o'er Delphi's long-deserted shrine
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still;
Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine
To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine.

That's the poem that was such a sensation as to catapult its creator to stardom overnight. The later work Don Juan, at least, does open more promisingly--it's hard to top Byron's first lines there:

I want a hero, an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.

But even it quickly descends into unpromising territory, its second and third stanzas dense with names of figures of contemporary fame. (To be fair, it does get much livelier.)

One reads about Byron today, however, not so much for himself--for the balance between his charm and his self-obsession is ever precarious, even in his truly wonderful letters and journals)--as for his place in his circle and his cultural moment, and for the way that everyone around him weighed in at some point. Mary Shelley's take is above; here's Claire Clairmont, writing a bitterly creative mock obituary:

He dead extended on his bed, covered all but his breast, which many wigged doctors are cutting open to find out (as one may be saying) what was the extraordinary disease of which this great man died--His heart laid bare, they find an immense capital I carved on its surface, and which had begun to pierce the breast--They are all astonishment. One says, "A new disease." Another: "I never had a case of this kind before." A third "what medicines would have been proper" the fourth holding up his finger "A desert island."

Then there's Byron's own takes on his contemporaries. Keats's poetry was "a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and onions"; after Wordsworth published Poems, in Two Volumes, he wrote, "I reviewed Wordsworth's trash of the time." And there's his incessant baiting of Southey. This comes rom a letter to James Hogg: "Southey should have been a parish-clerk, and Wordsworth a man-midwife--both in darkness. I doubt if either of them ever got drunk, and I am of the old creed of Homer the wine-bibber." Then there was the very public assault in Don Juan:

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey.

Though I think we have to note that "mouthey" is little but a lazy answer to a thorny problem of rhyme, the charge of quaintness at least seems fair.

Now that I've finished MacCarthy's biography, and seen poor Byron safely dead in Missolonghi, I'm left with two outcomes: first, a desire, which I will probably act on this month, to read Don Juan for the first time in nearly twenty years, and, second, the list below, which I am beginning to think may be my greatest contribution to literary culture:

Mary Shelley: Kanga
Percy: Rabbit
Wordsworth: Owl
Keats: Piglet
Byron: Tigger
Charles Lamb: Pooh

My Twitter friend Hannah Hedgehog and my actual friend Caleb Crain both astutely noted that William Hazlitt can serve as Eeyore, at which point our Romantic Hundred Acre Wood is fully populated. As Anthony Powell wrote of some of the more scabrously satirical verses of Don Juan, "It surely must be admitted that this is the right sort of stuff."

Of Wars, Secret and Civil, the Marvel Way

2017-02-13T20:38:00.000-06:00

Marvel Comics launched the twelve-issue Secret Wars miniseries on an unsuspecting public in 1984.

In that series, for the first time, nearly the whole universe of Marvel heroes and villains was brought together in a single story, a story that--though it took place in between issues of all the regular monthly books (despite the miniseries itself taking a year to run its course)--had immediate consequences, some major, for a number of long-running characters. The Thing left the Fantastic Four to go walkabout in space; Spider-Man suddenly had a new, alien costume. Secret Wars was a big, big deal.

For more than thirty years now, Marvel and DC have been trying to replicate that excitement, and the sales it generated. By the time the second Secret Wars series arrived in 1985, Marvel had figured out that they should run the events concurrently with the timeline of the monthlies, and explicitly tie in as many of them as possible. That's the formula they've repeated nearly every year since. Sometimes the scale is smaller--a series will be confined to the X books, or the Avengers-affiliated titles--but the concept is the same: make a big Event that readers will feel they can't miss, which will lead them to buy more comics.

The closest Marvel has come to repeating that success was with its Civil War series in 2006.

In that series,the accidental destruction of a whole town and its inhabitants by a relatively young, little-trained superhero team leads Congress to pass a superhuman registration act, requiring anyone with superpowers to register, and to essentially become a military or policing agent of the government. This splits the heroes, and that split is embodied in the rift that develops between longtime best friends Tony Stark, who supports registration, and Steve Rogers, who views it as un-American.

I was largely on a hiatus from reading comics when Civil War was published, and its obvious political incoherence kept me away for years. The biggest problem with superhero comics is that they rest on a concept of vigilante justice that is insane; though occasionally comics have taken that question seriously, for the most part if you're going to read superhero comics, you have to basically pretend it's not an issue--no series will hold up if you give that question serious thought. But that problem is at the heart of the dispute in Civil War. Tony Stark is right: you can't have superpowered vigilantes running around. Cap's position is indefensible. Yet the way the government uses the registration act, which includes secret prisons and "rehabilitated" criminals put to nefarious uses, makes Stark's position impossible as well.

Read today, as I did (including every crossover--98 comics in all!) over the summer, Civil War remains almost wholly incoherent in its politics. What's most striking a decade on is how powerfully the issues bring back the air of America during the George W. Bush administration, to which the story is all but explicitly a reaction. For all the problems of the premise, and for all that the parallels are at times overplayed, the way it captures the inchoate, ambient fears and excesses of that period is striking.

What's most important, however, and what makes the story interesting despite its flaws, is that the central question is one that would divide heroes, along lines by which any fan could roughly sort them, and that say something interesting about the characters. Luke Cage, for example, is never going to trust the government, whereas Peter Parker can be coopted by Stark's authority and attention. It's a fundamentally interesting divide, and one that, especially when embodied by Steve and Tony, rests on, and draws power from, decades of storytelling.

For fans of long standing, watching Steve and Tony fight over a principle is painful, both because we've watched their friendship develop over decades and because we see how they each represent different aspects of heroism. They're at their best when they're working together; when they're irreconcilable, heroism feels imperiled to a degree that a villain like Doctor Doom can never threaten.

This past year, Marvel went back to the well for Civil War II. And while the politics of it are more interesting, the dividing question more legitimate, the results weren't nearly as good. The question? If you've got a hero whose power brings him visions of future crimes and disasters, how should you use that power? Can you ethically detain (or worse) people who have yet to commit a crime? Well, of course you can't. But what if he sees that the person in question is going to kill thousands and thousands of people?

Not an uninteresting dilemma, right? The problem, however, is that it's not a dilemma that naturally sorts people. It doesn't quite speak to a person's character or background the same way that registration did. (You could ally it to racial profiling, certainly, and get somewhere in sorting some characters, but that doesn't end up playing a big part for many characters in this story, in part perhaps because even today, after strenuous (and I think honest) efforts, the Marvel Universe remains pretty white.) The key antagonists this time, rather than Captain America and Tony Stark, are Captain Marvel and Tony Stark--and you could imagine either one on the other side without a lot of trouble. (Want to guess? OK: Captain Marvel is pro-precog crime prevention, Tony against.) The same goes for nearly every other character. So rather than a battle of ideologies, we get, well, just battles.

That said, the series did lead to two comics that I'm quite grateful for, and that demonstrate almost to a T the potential of endless serial narratives that continue for decades. Both are mostly about characters talking, with little to no fighting; they're about people coming to terms with themselves and their relationships to each other. In one, Invincible Iron Man #14, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato, Tony goes to an AA meeting to get his head straight and focus on something other than the battle with Captain Marvel.

At the meeting, however, is . . . Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, who is also a recovering alcoholic.

Their dialogue, constrained initially by the setting, which they both respect, is tentative, difficult, tense.

It feels real, and it feels like an actual place where these characters, with their backstories, together and apart, might have ended up.

The other is Scarlet Witch #9, by James Robinson and Joelle Jones, in which Wanda's brother, Pietro, the speedster known as Quicksilver, arrives to basically order her to sign up with Captain Marvel.

Pietro has been a persistent difficulty Wanda's whole life, in the way of siblings but taken a bit further. He's always been a domineering hothead, ready to give orders and judge and condemn while rarely looking at his own actions.

This time, for a number of reasons, Wanda has had enough. Watching Pietro realize that something has changed, that this relationship is now what it was, is wonderful for anyone who's been reading about these characters for decades.

Each of these stories is only twenty-two pages. The total word count can't be more than a couple thousand. But because these stories rest on nearly fifty years of earlier stories, we get so much from every panel, every word of dialogue; we see its refractions back through time and memory. It ends up bearing so much more weight, so much more power, than any standalone story could.

Month to month, reading superhero comics as an adult can be frustrating. No other medium with which I'm involved is as clearly deformed by the needs of the marketplace (like in its endless crossovers, to take but one example). So often it fails to realize its potential, brought down by simplicity, pathology, or the low and narrow expectations of its fan base. But every once in a while you get a comic like these two, and you remember why you're drawn to this medium, the connection it makes between your long-gone childhood self and the adult you who knows better but still looks to stories of people and events that are larger than ourselves but nonetheless, time and again, resolve to the human.

Rachel Cusk's Transit

2017-02-07T21:21:00.000-06:00

Sometimes a novel captures you from the first lines, and it takes you a while to figure out quite why. Here's Rachel Cusk's Transit (2016):

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.

I was sold. Part of what drew me in is obvious: the audacity of opening with a spam e-mail; the matter-of-fact prose; the simple past tense of the first sentence, refusing as it does to offer any temporal or physical scene-setting beyond "this happened," and thereby throwing us right in the stream of "this is happening."

It was only once I got well into the novel, and flipped back to reread the opening lines, that I realized the deeper attraction: Cusk, through her protagonist, was giving someone else the floor. That the person was lying, that their lie was banal, commercial, mattered not. They were speaking, and Cusk's protagonist was listening.

That, I realized, is why reading Transit is such a thrilling, engulfing experience. It's a novel about listening. Cusk's protagonist, Faye, is a writer who has recently returned to London after a divorce and is juggling a remodeling of her new flat with the responsibilities of divided parenthood. But that's what we get in the interstices. Most of the novel consists of other people telling stories about what's going on in their lives, and telling them with typical solipsism and self-dramatization. They're largely unremarkable stories of contemporary London life, but Cusk imbues them with the interest and drama of a story told you by an old friend.

I'll give you one extended example, which I suspect won't carry a lot of weight outside the context of the book, but will at least let me try out one theory of how Cusk makes them, in toto, so compelling. Here, an acquaintance at a dinner party tells Faye about her childhood and her own experience of parenting:

Her own parents, she said, had been a real love story: they had never wavered in their attention to one another through all the years of their marriage, despite the fact that they were bringing up five children so close in age that in the family photo albums her mother had appeared to be continuously pregnant for several years . They were young parents, she added, and tirelessly energetic: her childhood had been one of camping trips and sailing expeditions and summers in the cabin the had built with their own hands. Her parents never went off on holiday on their own, and treated all family occasions with great ceremony, eating with their children every night around the kitchen table, to the extent that she could not remember a single evening meal when they were absent, which must have meant that they rarely, if ever, went out to dinner together. While Jonathan and I, she added, eat in restaurants nearly every night. She left for work so early and returned to late, she went on, that she almost never aw Ella eat at all, though of course the nanny fed her the correct food, as Jonathan and Birgid had instructed her to. To be perfectly honest, Birgid said, I actually avoid Ella's mealtimes--I find myself things to do in the office instead. Since Ella's birth Jonathan had started to make roast meat and potatoes for lunch on Sunday, as it was a tradition in his family and he thought they should repeat it for Ella's sake.

But I don't really like to eat at lunch, she said, and Ella is fussy, so Jonathan ends up eating most of it on his own.

See what I mean? There's not much to it: this is a story of contemporary parenting being told to us by someone it's been told to. But when you pile story on story, when you realize that Faye is actively listening to everyone she meets, each of the stories gains interest, power. And Faye's occasional pressing and stray responses ("It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk.") remind us that one of the ways we test our apprehension of the world is by listening to, and pushing against, the way that others apprehend and attempt to explain it.

Then there's the quality of judgment. We justly prize empathy in artworks--the "Everyone has his reasons" of The Rules of the Game--admiring the ability of writers like Tolstoy to show us each person, in his error, without damning him for it. It's weak novels that judge.

But we are judging beings. We may fight it, but it's there. And as Faye tells us these stories, even though she utters nary a word of explicit judgment, we realize that she, too, is judging. These people, time and again, are failing in key ways. Life and limitations make it inevitable, and we teach ourselves to acknowledge that, to cut people slack, but the judging faculty never wholly atrophies. What makes Faye's implicit judgment so bracing is, in part, simply that Cusk is acknowledging it. But more than that is the second layer: Faye is judging herself right alongside these people. Her own story barely takes shape in this book, told in asides and responses, but it has its own failures, the biggest involving parenting: her sons appear primarily as troubled voices down a phone line, offering up problems she's too distant and distracted to solve. It's that dual, or maybe even treble, vision that elevates Transit to greatness: we are reading Cusk's account of a woman who has taken up listening, in part, perhaps, to defer thinking about her own life, and who finds herself unable to stop shadowing others' stories with her own, setting their actions alongside hers, judging herself as she's judging them. "How often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others," Faye thinks at one point.

That scrim, that remove, that sense that we are in Faye's mind while its foreground is being given over to listening to someone else, makes reading Transit an unusually absorbing experience. Attending closely to another mind even as some part of our own mind is weighing, assessing, judging what we're hearing--in a sense, Transit replicates the reading experience itself.

The Caine Mutiny

2017-01-23T20:55:00.000-06:00

The first book I read this year was a Herman Wouk's 1952 Pulitzer Prize winner The Caine Mutiny, a Christmas gift from a friend of discerning reading taste. Wouk's novel had the misfortune to be published a year after James Jones's From Here to Eternity, which won the National Book Award, as Wouk explained in a foreword to a 2003 paperback:

Early in 1951 there appeared a gigantic army novel, From Here to Eternity, at once beautiful and brutal. . . . It won critical hurrahs and instant vast popularity, and my book came out in its shadow to a discouragingly poor start.

However, in a reminder that the early 1950s were a different, distant era, Wouk goes on to say that sales began to perk up a bit, and then one particular retail decision fanned them into a flame:

The Doubleday people . . . advised me to go and see for myself at Macy's, which was having a price war on the two books with Gimbel's. . . . It was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime sight, people lining up through the department store and out into the street just to buy my novel, or From Here to Eternity, or both.

What also speaks powerfully of another era is what Wouk says he was told about early attempts to sell film rights: "Nobody is interested in World War II anymore." Just a bit more than five years after victory, another war--in which staggering numbers, by our contemporary standards, of American soldiers would be killed--quietly underway in Korea, and what people wanted, if the movie scouts were to be believed, was to move on.

You can understand it, certainly. Read any good memoir or novel that encompasses V-E Day and the weariness that underlies the relief is palpable. But at the same time, looking back at the literature from the period, we realize that while the men who served may have wanted to leave the war behind, it wasn't quite done with them yet.

The Caine Mutiny is an interesting example of that. It's in a lot of ways a distinctly untroubled book, given the subject, but at the same time it's about how the war years turned a whole lot of callow boys into men. Wouk's main character, Willie Keith, sees the Navy simultaneously as his duty and, once he gets there, as a job. Through the course of the book's 500+ pages, he'll struggle with the central fact of military service: that it's designed to strip you of your individuality in order to serve a larger goal, and that to do so it has to in many ways be a dumb, brutal, machine-like system. But whereas James Jones's Robert Prewitt is determined to fight that machine, even if it costs him everything, Willie Keith is focused on living through the experience, and helping his shipmates do the same. Reading about Prew is a bracing, troubling experience; reading about Willie Keith's service is like watching a version of the growth and maturation we all (one hopes) experienced in our early adulthood. As a portrait of that process, and its acceleration in wartime, The Caine Mutiny is wholly convincing.

What remains most interesting about it after all these decades, however, is the turn it takes partway through. (Given the prominence of the film version, I'll assume there's little that can surprise you, but if you've not read or seen it, you might want to stop reading here.) Up through the titular mutiny, we've more or less been on Willie Keith's side. We see his flaws, and we do get some other perspectives, but he's our focal point and the character who most readily draws our sympathy. So when the mutiny occurs, and Keith plays a major part, we blow right past our nagging questions about its propriety. The moment is dramatic, and our protagonist has chosen a side, so we align. But then . . . the trial comes, and Wouk does something remarkable: he shows us how Keith was wrong--and therefore, by extension, so were we. Neither side is clear-cut, but the very fact that Wouk is able to upend our understanding, push against our sympathy, is impressive, and would in itself be enough to recommend the book. It's a feat of storytelling.

These days, The Caine Mutiny still lives to a large extent in the shadow of From Here to Eternity. Wouk is seen as a craftsman, Jones more like an artist; Jones's story of individuality and self-torment draws more interest than Wouk's tale of men setting out to do a difficult job. But both novels are worth reading, and both, I think, belong, with James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, in the small group of essential novels about the war.

The post has arrived, or, We begin to read Clarissa

2017-01-10T18:51:00.001-06:00

"The first impression the reader receives from Samuel Richardson's masterpiece is of its great length."

That's Angus Ross, opening his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which, indeed, impresses by running to 1,499 oversized pages. And while I've long since been convinced by friends who have sung the novel's praises (including in this space) that Ross's next line--"and rightly so, since that is an integral part of the work's reach and meaning"--is true, and that the novel is worth reading, I've never been willing to make the commitment. As my friend Maggie put it:

I read nine other books while working my way through this one, and I'm haunted by what I could have read instead. Three Dickens! The entire works of Graham Greene!

I simply could never bring myself to commit the time. Even with as much and as quickly as I read, it would likely be a month's labor.

Enter my Twitter friend Stephanie Hershinow, scholar of eighteenth-century literature and Richardson fan. At breakfast in New York last month, she revealed a scheme for reading Clarissa that seemed eminently manageable: read this epistolary novel by reading each letter on the date it carries, beginning with the first letter, dated January 10, and finishing with the last on December 18. A year of broken-up reading--this would do!

Now it is January 10, and I am embarking. You're welcome to join me, and some other folks who've been caught. There will be some posts here throughout the year, and if you're on Twitter you can find us at #Clarissa. The first letter is a mere two pages! Join us!

"I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family . . . "

2016

2016-12-19T21:11:00.002-06:00

One of the great, if less heralded, discoveries of the literary world of Twitter and blogging is that, yes, those of us who read all the time are also always reading in all times. For every new novel being championed, there's someone out there ready to chat about diving back into Trollope, or just discovering P. G. Wodehouse. And, because there's little cachet in keeping up with the non-new, encountering company on the journey always feels extra special: you're there because you want to be there. This year more than ever, as the news insisted on being bad, the past between pages exerted a powerful pull.

Which brings me to my year-end list, such as it is. As usual, it's all hither and yon, disorganized and atemporal. There are new books here, certainly, but, as in any given year, the majority of what I read was by authors long dead, and they deserve a place, too. It's also incomplete, I'm sure. I read many, many very good books this year, books that surprised me or taught me things or opened new ways of thinking. They're not all here, probably because I didn't happen to spy them as I scanned my bookshelves tonight, but they were appreciated as I read them, and I'm sure they'll surface again, as good books do.

Herewith, some of the books that defined my year.

NONFICTION

Autumn: An Anthology of the Changing Seasons, edited by Melissa Harrison
This is the first I read of a series of four little paperback anthologies from the UK that bring together contemporary nature writers--of which that isle has plenty right now--and older works. The selections are short, making it a perfect bedside or morning coffee book. Perhaps the latter is better, because like all good nature writing the book leaves you more alert to the world you inhabit; as you step out the door on the all-too-routine walk to the office, a reminder that nature is never routine can be a blessing. (And now that winter is here, I've just started delving into that one, more as solace, perhaps, than in celebration.)

Silver Ley, by Adrian Bell
Having grown up in a farm family in a rural community, I've always been extremely skeptical of people who talk of going back to the land. What I always see ahead of them is shock at the labor and isolation, followed by failure in the face of the uneasy relationship between nature and commerce. This memoir, published in 1931 and brought back by Slightly Foxed, won me over despite. A young man from a genteel family of some modest means takes over a farm, along with the position in the town that accompanies it. It goes better than my dire predictions, but that's not the point. Rather, this is a quiet book about coming to terms with who you are, what you can do, and what you want from life and the people around you. It's beautiful and quietly sad.

Terms and Conditions, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
I have come to trust the editors at Slightly Foxed to the degree that I now simply pick up whatever is new from them whenever I'm in London, regardless of author or subject. Terms and Conditions was my reward: a new history, rooted in countless interviews, of life at English girls' boarding schools from the 1940s to the 1970s, it is hilarious and shocking and strange and occasionally sad. Any reader who grew up pining to be shipped off to a glamorous boarding school or any Anglophile who simply can't ever get enough of the weirdness of the English will likely enjoy it. I recommend reading it in public or at family gatherings, because the looks people give when you reply to their questions about what you're reading are priceless.

William Morris, by Fiona MacCarthy
This is a classic of doorstop biography, and it earns its length and detail by presenting a compelling, complicated, largely admirable William Morris firmly ensconced in his historical, political, and cultural moment. This is one of those books that you're brought to by a thread from elsewhere--in my case, from Penelope Fitzgerald's book on his close friend Edward Burne-Jones and A. S. Byatt's short book on Morris--and that then sends you off in a dozen new directions. Thanks to MacCarthy, I feel I understand the Arts and Crafts movement like I never have, in all its ambitions, good intentions, and contradictions. This is the kind of book that makes me speak of biographers with awe.

Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies, by Alexandra Harris
I wrote a bit about this book for Open Letters Monthly already. Suffice it to say that I read it in March and find it still, nine months later, affecting my reading--yesterday, in the face of below-zero temperatures, it sent me to the Anglo-Saxon poets and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Harris offers far more than simply a run through the history of writing on the weather--instead, we feel we understand how the weather actually infuses English literature, all but inextricable from it. And Harris is splendid company: authoritative and confident yet welcoming, and consistently reliable in zeroing in on the most interesting parts of a story. It's a landmark.

Henry James, by Leon Edel
This really is just a lead in to . . .

FICTION

This year was dominated for me by Henry James. I read some new books that I liked very much (Elizabeth McKenzie's off-kilter The Portable Veblen; Megan Abbott's fierce, obsessional You Will Know Me; Nina Stibbe's wonderfully comic Paradise Lodge, to take just three), but from the moment I dove into Edel's biography in February, I couldn't get James out of my mind. The James we meet in Edel's book is powerfully alive, and once I'd made his acquaintance I couldn't resist delving more deeply than before into his letters, masterpieces of the form, and then into his fiction--reading some previously unread novels, re-reading others, and recently embarking on what will be a long straight read-through of all his stories. This was the year that I finally knew I would eventually read all of Henry James.

Amid all this, I was proud to discover in Google Books The Henry James Year Book, a 1911 page-a-day book of James quotes that I was able to get republished by the University of Chicago Press as The Daily Henry James. It's been a source of consistent joy ever since, and a spur to continue every day to think about and engage with this man of great heart and great loneliness whose audacity in fiction was matched only by his caution in life. Few other writers draw my interest so powerfully to both their work and their lives--perhaps, in fact, only Virginia Woolf, who, like James, rarely put a paragraph to paper, fiction or nonfiction, public or private, that doesn't reward attention.

As the holidays approach, and I endeavor to replace frustration and tension and worry with the relative simplicity of gratitude, I'm grateful to these authors. They've been good company this year.

I'll leave you with a pleasingly dire quote from a letter James sent on January 1, 1893:

The year's end is a terrible thing, and the year's beginning is a worse.

And you? What did you read in 2016?

Elsewhere . . .

2016-12-06T20:50:00.001-06:00

In recent weeks, when I've mostly been failing to write in this space, I have at least made a couple of contributions to Open Letters Monthly. The first was a sheer pleasure to prepare for and write: a review of Ruth Jackson's excellent new biography of Shirley Jackson, the writing of which gave me an excuse to re-read the Jackson books I'd read before and dig up all the ones I hadn't.

One thing that's always surprised me about Jackson is that people have had trouble reconciling the light, loving manner of her family memoirs and the darkness of her other fiction. And perhaps I would have, too, fifty years ago, when boundaries between genres were more rigidly policed, preventing serious fiction and the light diversions of women's magazines from ever polluting each another. Seen from our vantage, however, the two styles are clearly kin: humor is shot through both--rarely do even Jackson's most frightening novels fail to have moments of black comedy--and they share an appreciation of oddity and an attention to language, and in particular its rhythms.

At the same time, though, there is a distinct difference in prose style, one that I didn't have room to get into in my review. Take a look at this, from early in one of Jackson's creepiest, least explicable stories, "The Man in the Woods":

The cat had joined him shortly after her entered the forest, emerging from between the trees in a quick, shadowy movement that surprised Christopher at first and then, oddly, comforted him, and the cat had stayed beside him, moving closer to Christopher as the trees pressed insistently closer to them both, trotting along in the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit when they are frightened. Christopher, when he stopped once to rest, sitting on a large stone at the edge of the road, had rubbed the cat's ears and pulled the cat's tail affectionately, and had said, "Where are we going, fellow? Any ideas?", and the cat had closed his eyes meaningfully and opened them again.

You can find pleasantly showy passages throughout Jackson's writing; this one is fairly sedate, but it serves my purpose. The sentences are long and fluid, clause following on clause as cause on effect, and an aphoristic phrase ("the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit") is thrown in with the air of an afterthought.

Now look at this, chosen all but at random from Raising Demons, Jackson's second volume of family memoir:

Usually, whenever Beekman drove, Sally wanted to come too. And whenever Sally came, Jannie thought she had better come along. And when Beekman and Sally and Jannie came, Laurie figured that we might just sop in at a movie or some such, and if we did he wanted to be along. As a result, whenever I went shopping in the new car, everyone came except my husband, who could not, for a long time, look at the new car without telling me how we were going bankrupt in style. One Saturday morning I almost got off without Beekman, who was learning from Sally how to cut out paper dolls, but before I was out of the driveway they were calling to me to wait a minute, and by the time I finally tuned the car and headed off toward the big supermarkets I had all four of them with me, Sally accompanied by her dolls Susan and David and Patpuss, all dressed entirely in cleansing tissue, and carrying--though I did not know it when she got into the car--a pocketbook containing four pennies and a shilling stolen from her father's coin collection.

Oh, how it builds! As each child is added, the sentences get longer and longer, trailing more impedimenta in their wake. Whereas the sentences in the previous passage were long, but explicit in their structure, these pretend to embody chaos: they just go. The book is like that throughout, written as if in the rush of conversation with children and the confusions of parenting, a hard task of writing made to look casually effortless. If you're looking for light entertainment this holiday season, you could do far worse than Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages.

The other bit I wrote for OLM was much less involved: a brief note on my year in reading, focused on Alexandra Harris's wonderful Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. "English summers take their identity from the stretches of grey on either side," writes Harris. In the depths of a gray and dark Chicago winter, I feel strong kinship. If you're looking for a holiday gift for a bookish Anglophile, your shopping may be done.

Reading is bad for your social life, kids.

2016-11-20T14:27:00.002-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a cab heading to the airport early on a weekday morning, when I heard something on the radio that I think you folks will enjoy. The driver was listening to an FM top 40 station, and their wacky morning crew was on, being, well, wacky (as distinct from, you know, funny). Apparently they have a regular segment where someone calls in to tell them about a date that went wrong, and they then call the other party to get their side; today, the caller was a guy, Dan, who said he'd been on a couple of dates with a woman, Anna, he'd met through work. He'd thought they were getting along well, but then, after an evening when they went back to his place and fooled around a little, she'd abruptly stopped responding to his calls and texts.

As they dialed this poor woman's number, I was, quite frankly, dreading the next ten minutes of the ride. What could this exchange be except deeply awkward at best, crude and mean at worst? Initially, it seemed like my fears were coming true: they got her on the line, explained who they were and why they were calling, and, after establishing that the guy was on the line, she said, "Well, I guess we're doing this live on the radio, then."

This was not a promising opening. But then everything changed:

ANNA: "Do you remember, Dan, when you left the room to go to the bathroom? And you had a book on your bedside table? Do you remember what it was?"

DAN: "No?"

ANNA: "It was called House of Holes."

DAN (and ME, simultaneously): "Oh, no. No, no, no."

For those of you who don't know--and I'm assuming 98% of the radio audience that day fell into that category--House of Holes is a work of pornography. Sort of. See . . . it's by Nicholson Baker, a strange, wonderful, brilliant, sui generis writer who cares as much about words and sentences as anyone I've ever read and who seems determined to make each book he writes completely different from everything that he's written before.

What led him to write a novel about a futuristic, gleefully perverse pleasure resort where, to be crude about it, everyone and everything is DTF? Who knows? But while it's porny AF (might as well stick with the internet abbreviations what brung me), it's also goofy and funny and wide-eyed. It's not a great novel; I'm not even sure it's a successful one. But it's also nothing like the midcentury men's whack books that people like Donald Westlake were hired to write--whereas those tend to be soul-draining, Baker's book is, even if ultimately a bit of a mess, vivifying. I've written about it before--and even had a kindred experience to Dan's, of worrying about someone who didn't understand the book seeing it.

None of which, of course, can be explained on a Top 40 station to a woman and two DJs who are wholly unfamiliar with Baker. After Anna explained, in reasonably family-friendly language, what she'd discovered in flipping through the book, the DJs were cackling and Dan was left sputtering, with evident regret and sadness, "Didn't you notice that I have all kinds of books?"

It didn't work. You could tell he knew it wouldn't as he was saying it. Rarely have I felt such unexpected, powerful sympathy for a total stranger. Careful what you read, kids--or, at least what you leave on your bedside table when you might be sharing your bed.

Robert Aickman

2016-11-07T12:12:00.002-06:00

With apologies for being remiss throughout October--hosting crowds of 20ish people every night as the Cubs romp to the championship does tend to throw off one's planning in other realms--I'll open November with a quick post on Robert Aickman, a subject more properly suited to the month just past. Aickman was one of the greatest writers of strange stories, turning out nearly fifty, all so good that for a while earlier this year, when most of his work was out of print in the States, I was scheming to find a way to publish a complete collection. His stories can be hard to describe--or, more properly, hard to describe in a way that gets across the discomfiting, uncanny, almost physical strangeness they convey.

A quick attempt at a generic outline: A man, often a low-end salesman or businessman, takes a wrong turn or encounters some travel difficulty in an area unknown to him, a vague semi-suburban landscape that's a bit down-at-heel, forgotten or bypassed. He makes reasonable decisions about how to handle this, like taking a room; there are hints even as he's securing lodging that something is off, but they're no more than hints, flashes of odd behavior by the proprietor, for example. Later, almost without us realizing it, things get supremely weird, and there is a sense that the man may have become trapped, subject to forces beyond his control. There are hints of sex, and even some Freudian imagery, but they're balanced or neutered by attention to other aspects of physicality, like eating or tiredness or bodily discomfort. Sometimes these events are recalled from a later time, or they happen only to have an unexpected sequel years later.

That description, I realize, is simultaneously vague and very specific, but that's almost the point: Aickman traffics in specific details about places and people and events that are fundamentally vague. A strong personality wouldn't ever quite fit in Aickman's stories, nor would a lavishly described locale. These are stories about what happens elsewhere, in the spots we pass through, to the people we don't think about, in the hours of the night we sleep through. There's a palpable air of menace, and of age--of an ancient quality to the land and its accretions that somehow has failed to bring them dignity or value, but instead has rendered them unfit for today, strange, dangerous. At the same time, this is almost all implied rather than stated: these aren't stories of atmosphere, quite, but they're also not really stories of action. They're stories, more, of deterioration, of the quiet breakdown of logic, assumptions, even cause and effect. The protagonist thinks he's in one, fairly clear situation, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, he finds himself in another, wholly new and inexplicable situation. And you, the reader, have trouble even pinpointing when or why it all began to go wrong. I came across a telling line in Aickman's memoir The Attempted Rescue today:

I learned reading . . . very literally at my mother's knee. I remember having particular difficulty with the word "because." Much could obviously be made of this significant block, but I abstain.

If this intrigues you at all, I recommend you get the collection Cold Hand in Mind, which includes the masterpieces "The Swords," "The Hospice," and "The Same Dog," and also Sub Rosa, for "Into the Wood" and "The Inner Room," the latter of which is my favorite Aickman story. I also highly recommend the recent episode of Backlisted, an excellent books podcast, that focuses on Aickman--the two hosts and guest offer a similar take to mine above, but with a lot more analysis and back-and-forth, and some real insights into Aickman's work.

That podcast was what led me to Aickman's memoir. The hosts discuss it at length, and they read out a long section about Aickman's father that is truly, beautifully, unsettlingly strange. Even though I'd heard it read just over a week ago, I was still astonished when I read it last night:

My father, as I knew him, was impossible to live with, to be married to, to be dependent upon.

This is a vast subject, the framework and colouring of my universe. As I approach it so nearly, I warm and chill at the same time.

In the first place, there was his unpunctuality.

At the beginning of my life, he would rise from bed at ten or eleven, and even then, like me today, with much emotional agony. He would protest, non the less, every night, that he would be down for breakfast, and be indignant if this were doubted, but my mother soon learned that the only hope lay in bringing him breakfast in bed. Risen, he would potter for several hours with the problems and difficulties of his toilet, and then, in the early afternoon, he would struggle away to his office. Daily he would say that he would be back for Dinner, not by seven, he had to admit, but, absolutely, positively, by eight, or perhaps nine. Nightly, he would return at ten or ten-thirty, to find Dinner spoiled and my Mother in sulks. Quite often he would even miss the last train (which reached Stanmore at 12:10 a.m.), and appear in the small hours, having walked the four miles from Wealdstone (later the three miles from Edgeware, when the Underground was extended thereto), while my Mother's anxiety and resentment rose in the silent house, each time as if he had never done it before. As I grew older, even these times began to slip. On most days, he would not depart for work until the evening, and the last train back became his regular one. He always came back in the end, even if he had to walk all the way from London, which he did not infrequently.

Of such is the soil made in which weird tales grow, no? Trust me: try some Aickman.