As for Stevereads, the home of, among other things, these rabble-rousing, comprehensive year-end book-lists, it’ll be moving too: not back to its original Blogspot home but rather to a new website, SteveDonoghue.com, where I’ll be gathering not only Stevereads but, eventually, all of my online writing into one convenient (albeit longwinded!) location. These epic year-end lists will continue there, as will everything else as soon as the sawdust and moving crates are cleared away!

So: one old site – Open Letters Monthly, with its endless backlog of literary gems – and two new sites – Open Letters Review for all the book reviews and book news you need to get through your day, and SteveDonoghue.com, for the ongoing autobiography of my reading! I hope to see you all there!

As for Stevereads, the home of, among other things, these rabble-rousing, comprehensive year-end book-lists, it’ll be moving too: not back to its original Blogspot home but rather to a new website, SteveDonoghue.com, where I’ll be gathering not only Stevereads but, eventually, all of my online writing into one convenient (albeit longwinded!) location. These epic year-end lists will continue there, as will everything else as soon as the sawdust and moving crates are cleared away!

So: one old site – Open Letters Monthly, with its endless backlog of literary gems – and two new sites – Open Letters Review for all the book reviews and book news you need to get through your day, and SteveDonoghue.com, for the ongoing autobiography of my reading! I hope to see you all there!

It’s time to update your address book–or at any rate your Feedly, your RSS feed, your blogroll, or whatever tool you use to keep tabs on Novel Readings. From now on, new posts will be going up only at the site’s new address:

https://rohanmaitzen.com/novelreadings/

I hope to see you there!

I have often but not always marked the occasion of a new issue of Open Letters Monthly here. The thing about publishing on the first of every month, regular as clockwork, is that it seemed predictable enough that people who cared shouldn’t have any trouble remembering the schedule and finding the new issues on their own! I feel as if I should not let the December 2017 issue go by without acknowledging it, however, because as some of you already know from our announcements on Facebook and Twitter, it will be the last one.

We’ve made our official statement about this on the site itself, and I’m not going to say more here about the collective discussion that brought us to this point. Speaking just personally, I feel a potent mixture of regret and relief. Open Letters Monthly is pretty venerable in internet years–it was founded in 2007–and has had a very good run. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that at its best Open Letters Monthly was as good as any literary journal you’ll ever read, and I will always be very proud to have been part of it. It has also always been a lot of work, all of it challenging and most but not all of it rewarding. Though I feel ready to move on from it, I also know that I have OLM to thank for where I am now as a writer and critic, and thus for the new opportunities I hope to keep reaching for. I learned an enormous amount from my co-editors and from our contributors–about writing and editing above all, from the intense hands-on experience, but also about books and criticism, and about literary culture more generally and how I would like to participate in it.

For our final issue, we opted to highlight some of our favorites of the many essays and reviews we have both written and edited over the past decade. The result is a sampling that I think truly epitomizes what we always hoped Open Letters would be: a place that showcases smart, engaged writing on a wide range of topics, writing that is detailed and probing but also has plenty of personality. It is our plan to keep Open Letters available in its entirety so that people can still browse and enjoy its rich archive. We will all also still be reading, writing, and talking about books in a range of venues, so keep your eyes open for us!

On that note, I should add that I have no plans to give up Novel Readings, which actually predates my own association with Open Letters Monthly by a couple of years. I moved the blog from its original location to the OLM site in 2010. I always find change difficult, and I remember very clearly how anxious I felt when I made that decision. I feel a bit anxious now too, but as we all know, change is the only real constant! So as OLM winds down, so too will new posting at this site. When the time comes, I’ll put a note here to make sure everyone who wants to can find me at my new address.

**** (4 of 5)

For a brief window in the 1690s – until the night Mrs Purcell shut her husband out in the cold – London was the go-to place for young composers in search of top tuition and an appreciative audience. Italians like Arcangelo Corelli were keen to study with Henry Purcell and English composers grew in confidence. Then, one November night in 1695, Mrs P decided not to stay up til her old man got back from the theatre and poor Henry caught cold and died, or so the story goes. Two centuries would elapse before England bred another composer of his quality.

John Blow (1649-1708) was Purcell’s early teacher and an established composer in his own right. His musical response to the tragedy was partly competitive – others were also producing Purcell laments – but also discernably personal. In the spirit of the times Blow does not indulge in an excess of grief. His arias, written for two countertenors, are free of the stuffiness of church odes. Blow uses the metaphor of birdsong to evoke Purcell’s soul rising to heaven. In The Power of Harmony he cheekily quotes a phrase of Dido’s Lament to remind the world of what it lost. Samuel Boden and Thomas Walker contrive just the right shade of lightness to carry this off.

Other works on the album toddle along in Purcell’s shadow – song for St Cecilia’s Day and a Chaconne in G minor being written very much a la mode. Jonathan Cohen conducts the Arcangelo ensemble and the sound is crystal clear.

___
Norman Lebrecht has written 12 books about music, the most recent being Why Mahler? He hosts the blog Slipped Disc, writes a monthly essay for Standpoint magazine and is writing two more books.

 
After more than ten years of long-form writing about books and the arts, Open Letters Monthly will end its run this month with the December 2017 issue. We’re proud of our contributors and grateful to you, our readers. OLM was born “dedicated to the proposition that no writing which reviews the arts should be boring, back-patting, soft-pedaling, or personally compromised,” and we aimed for the ideal review, “one that combined an informed, accessible examination of its quarry with gamesome, intelligent, and even funny commentary.” We hope you found that here. Starting on January 1, many of our editors and contributors will be bringing you Open Letters Review, which will continue the tradition of lively and challenging book reviews and arts commentary that Open Letters Monthly championed for so long, and you’ll find the rest of us elsewhere, reviewing books, composing essays, and writing novels. We hope you’ll follow us to these new venues, and we look forward to seeing you again.

And now, please enjoy our final feature, OLM’s Year in Reading for 2017.

 
Greg Waldmann, Editor in Chief

I came to Gore Vidal for the insults and stayed for the prose. Like a lot of young critics I believed in definition by negation, thinking, during bouts of self-satisfaction at one of my labored-over barbs, that I would climb up the professional ladder by mastering the art of the takedown. I grew out of this nonsense eventually, and with it I thought I grew out of my Vidal worship. I still came back for that gorgeous style, and though his wit still tickled, I grew uneasy at the apparent ease and frequency with which he made categorical judgments, be they about the state of the novel, the worth of a writer I admired, or the forces behind America politics. I admired his style but I also distrusted it, and besides, he had said a lot of silly things after 9/11.

This year I’ve found myself doing more rereading than usual – it’s a coping mechanism, is my lame excuse, a way of getting by in Donald Trump’s America – and of all the books I’ve returned to none have made a larger reimpression than United States, a massive, 1,300-page collection of essays spanning forty years of incidental writing. There, on page 12, was the subtlety and humility I’d missed before. A critic, Vidal writes,

is a man dealing with the private vision of another, with a substance as elusive and amorphous as life itself. To pretend that there are absolutes is necessary in making relative judgments (Faulkner writes better than Taylor Caldwell), but to believe that there are absolutes and to order one’s judgments accordingly is folly and disastrous…. By the nature of his own process [the critic] is eventually forced, often inadvertently, to accept as absolute those conditions for analysis which he has only tentatively proposed.

Vidal wrote those words in 1953, and though I continue to believe he moved too far away from their wisdom as he aged – I lost count of the number of times he would grouch half-convincingly about the morbid state of literature, for paragraphs or pages even, before an essay gets going – they freed me to enjoy his other qualities.

There is still that cutting wit. Vidal had an uncanny ability to diminish his victims, reducing the Beats to foolish children – “They were not even alienated. They just went. And felt. Then as swiftly as they appeared, they vanished; nothing but a whiff of marijuana upon the air to mark their exuberant passage.” – or shrinking Norman Mailer to a wasted talent stunted by his priapic obsessions:

Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more change, get through to us so that we will know. Actually, when he does approach a point he shifts into a swelling, throbbing rhetoric which is not easy to read but usually has something to do with love and sex and the horror of our age and the connection which must be made between time and sex (the image this bit of rhetoric suggest to me is a limitless gray sea of time with a human phallus desperately poking at the corner of it).

This isn’t just funny: it’s accurate, too. Vidal returns often to the dulling effect male machismo inflicts on American art, resulting in novels where “women figure only as interlocutors of some agonized Man, awash with testosterone, as he tries to do and be what a man must do and be in spite of women.” Likewise he is apposite on the obscure pretensions, held by some literary theorists, of making art that would not only reflect but shape the atomized twentieth century: “There is not much likelihood that Robbe-Grillet will be able to reinvent man as a result of his exercises in prose. Rather he himself is in the process of being reinvented (along with the rest of us) by the new world in which we are living.”

I think what I blew past on my second run through these essays was the ability on display here. Vidal’s penchant for generalization is more feature than bug because he has the talent necessary to make his point felt, rather than just understood. He complains in one essay of sloppy writers who employ words for “transient emotive effects, never meaning,” not because he was a literalist but because he knew the former was necessary to make the latter useful.

And in my earlier encounters with this writing I hardly noticed that Vidal can be quite tender at times. Reflecting on Edmund Wilson’s diaries, he finds that

Wilson’s record of conversations and attitudes haunt a survivor in much the same way that the background of a Thirties movie will reverse time, making it possible to see again a People’s Drug store (golden lettering), straw hats, squared-off cars, and the actual light that encompassed one as a child, the very same light that all those who are now dead saw then.

This master of words was well-aware of their limitations. For a time I fretted over my obsession with style, and that made me suspicious about the ease with which Vidal employed his gifts. But he recognized that content was useless without adequate form, and he had the talent to make each half of that equation worthy of the other. On the not infrequent occasions when he perfected that alchemy, there were none better.

 
Sam Sacks, Founding Editor

The oldest depiction of an authentic bookshop that I know of is a detail on a 12th-century scroll painting called Spring Festival on the River, by Chang Tse-tuan. At his booth in an open marketplace, a bookseller stands at attention behind a counter and in front of a shelf of texts (the Chinese already had movable-type printing by this point). He has two customers, who are perusing would-be purchases with their backs to the viewer. The bookseller wears a small smile, friendly and relaxed if also a little bit lofty. He is completely in his element.

The joy of the image is its immediate, utterly disarming familiarity. Travel the globe today and you can find variations on the mise-en-scène everywhere you go. Bookstores are magical less for their ability to surprise than in their sacred consistency. They connect us to the past and they ground us in the present. When I visit a new city I get my bearings by going to the first bookstore I can find. So fundamental and unchanging is the physical interaction between bookseller and book-buyer that the great archipelago of bookstores around the world feels like a single dispersed country, for which passports are distributed to anyone interested in reading.

The universality of bookstores, and their unparalleled ability to make even the most wayward voyager feel welcome, receives a fitting celebration in an exuberant and wide-ranging monograph by Jorge Carrión, titled simply Bookshops (the excellent English translation is by Peter Bush). Carrión’s study, complemented by a host of tantalizing photographs, chronicles the cultural history of the bookshop and at the same time it browses the shelves of shops throughout the world today, thereby underscoring the continuity between the past and the present. Because reading is a solitary pursuit, bookshops—unlike online retailers—serve a crucial role of providing a communal space for readers to congregate and mingle. Carrión does a lovely job describing the “cardiac rhythms” of those enclosed spaces:

From at least the time of ancient Rome, bookshops have been spaces for establishing contact, in which textuality becomes more physical than in the lecture theatre or library, because they are so dynamic. In bookshops it is the readers who are on the move, who bring copies on display to the counter, interact with the booksellers, take out coins, notes or credit cards and exchange them for books, and who, as they move around, observe what other people are looking for and buying. Books, booksellers and bookshops stay relatively still in comparison with customers who are constantly coming and going, and whose role inside is precisely to circulate. They are travellers in a miniature city whose aim is to provoke the letters—still inside the book—into motion as long as the reading (and its recollection) lasts.

A tempting litany of stores are honored in these pages, from Clásica y Moderna bookshop in Buenos Aires to Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier to Green Apple Books in San Francisco. (Wonderfully, Carrión also writes about the proprietors of each outfit, reminding us that bookshops have authors as well.) The writing is spontaneous, improvisational and highly digressive, yet however far afield Carrión ventures, his gladdening book never comes unmoored. He need only wander into the nearest bookshop for readers to feel, once again, instantly at home.

 
John Cotter, Founding Editor

The preponderance of nonfiction writing and even some of the of novels I read this year were research for a book in progress. Among them you’d find stacks of stuff on 18th century medicine, the growth of the clinic, the novels of Jonathan Swift, the experience of torture, and the dynamics of soundwaves. Since this was 2017, I also spent a good deal of time reading articles online about the oligarchy that conquered our country with the Citizens United ruling, and the ways it enabled them to install a sinister fathead in the highest office in the land. But one needs breaks from that kind of stuff, and so I read for pleasure too.

Browsing Green Hand Books of Portland Maine, I came across Howard Mansfield’s Bones of the Earth, a collection of linked but wonderfully varied essays about sticks (Boston Post canes, Cambridge’s Washington Elm), rocks (stone-bridges, headstones) and what humans do to land when they make it a town. These weren’t subjects that particularly interested me before I bought the book, but they interest me now. Mansfield, a writer new to me but an old hand at the game, somehow builds up high-stakes drama from strip malls and asphalt and an old woodsman named John Kulish who came of age in the New England woods in the winter of 1933 when “it never rose above zero all January,” who could paddle his canoe right up to a sleeping moose to pat its nose, and who learns about grief by studying otters:

If you kill one otter, the other will stay nearby, “sometimes for many weeks, searching and waiting for its beloved.” He had seen no other animals do this, he said. “The otter mates for life,” he’d repeat. Tears came to his eyes when he said this.

Mourning was on my mind, and it must have been this that led me to Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. Here Laurel Hand returns home to Mississippi to bury her father and make sense of the life he left when he died, and the life she left when she moved away. She has to tuck the idea of ‘home’ away for good, say goodbye to home. The novel’s by Welty, so it’s wry and wise, and it sweeps more about life into 180 pages than some writers manage in careers. Here I found grief’s “blind struggle against rescue,” Laurel’s chagrin at her father’s trophy wife, a member of “the great, interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them,” and Laurel’s conclusion that “life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”

 
Steve Donoghue, Managing Editor

Whether due to random timing or some combination of bitterness and simple alarm, the American book-publishing scene in 2017 featured a bumper-crop of biographies of US Presidents. Books of all sizes came to market dealing with the greats, the near-greats, and, with a tip of the Tammany top-hat to Chester A. Arthur, the totally forgotten. Indeed, the year’s highest-profile biography was the life story of President Ulysses Grant, told by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Chernow at epic length and, happily, with a level of even-handed astringency its subject would have approved.

Equally epic in length and far more incendiary in light of the last year in American politics was Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow, which tells in unprecedented – and narratively gripping – detail the story of Obama before he stepped onto the national stage as in many ways one of the least likely US Presidents in history. Obama’s immediate predecessor also featured in a remarkable book this season: Mark Updegrove’s The Last Republicans studies the relationship between George W. Bush and his father, the first President Bush, and the book so frequently rises above its admittedly holiday-friendly treacly premise that it ends up delivering some fascinating insights into the strangest family dynamic of them all.

It’s a family dynamic that happened once before in American history, as William Cooper makes clear in his The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics, which is excellent on JQA’s embattled presidency but also equally good on the relationship between the first and second President Adams.

And naturally in any such season, the man who (temporarily, it turns out?) tops the list of Worst US Presidents gets some new attention, this time in the form of Don Fulsom’s deliciously dishy The Mafia’s President: Nixon and the Mob, which breaks little new ground but tells its sordid story well. And wrapping up this small slice of Presidential biographies is a book that does manage to break new ground, about the man who pardoned Nixon: Scott Kaufman’s Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford deals with the strange Ford presidency in more fascinating and intelligent terms than any writer has yet done.

 
Rohan Maitzen, Senior Editor

For me, 2017 was a big year for reading historical fiction. I’ve actually always been a big reader of historical fiction–and I mean that “always” literally, as one of the first books I ever read all on my own was Jean Plaidy’s The Young Mary Queen of Scots, which I then reread over and over until my copy was in tatters. By the time I was a teenager I had a whole shelf of Plaidy’s books, including her “grown-up” ones about Mary, Queen of Scots: Royal Road to Fotheringay and The Captive Queen of Scots. I also had (okay, still have) a large selection of novels about Richard III.

I don’t reread most of these books any more, but I do frequently reread Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles which I’ve had almost as long. My mother gave me The Game of Kings, the first in the series, for my birthday in 1979; I can still remember the breathless excitement I felt as I raced to its dramatic conclusion for the first time–and how late I stayed up to finish the last novel in the series, Checkmate, when I finally got my hands on it a couple of years later. I was excited to learn that The Lymond Chronicles were being reissued this year by Penguin UK: I seized the opportunity to write about them, which in turn gave me a perfect excuse to read them through yet again from start to finish. It was, once again, a thrilling experience: Dunnett serves up a heady blend of high melodrama and intellectual ambition, with a memorable cast of characters entangled in plots at once painfully intimate and compellingly grandiose.

Sarah Moss is about as different from Dunnett as you can possibly imagine, but her recent novels Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children were also highlights of my reading this year. Set in nineteenth-century Britain, they might be considered “neo-Victorian” novels, but that term tends to raise expectations of Dickensian brio and extravagance. Instead, Moss writes with meticulous self-control, building intensity gradually through her attention to the interplay between individual psychology and historical conditions. Like Dunnett, she is expert at scene setting, though in her case more through deftly deployed details and evocative images than through luxurious exposition. Her prose and her plots are both in a lower register than Dunnett’s, and at times I missed the pulse-quickening excitement of The Lymond Chronicles, but different purposes serve different ends, and both authors in their own ways immerse us artfully in worlds not our own. I read a number of other historical novels in 2017–including Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, Michele Roberts’s The Walworth Beauty, and Simon Tolkein’s No Man’s Land)–but I feel pretty sure that Moss and (as always) Dunnett are the only ones I will reread.

 
Zach Rabiroff, Editor

This year was the centenary of the Russian Revolution, and like Cossacks to the Don, the whole publishing industry was drawn ineluctably back to the waters of Bolshevik history. Not that this was a cause for complaint: as always with such anniversaries, amid the avalanche of redundant Romanov biographies and quick cash-ins were a handful of genuinely fascinating, thought-expanding, and moving works of historical study. Works, in this case, like October by cult-favorite science fiction author China Mieville, who attempts to turn the past hundred years of Soviet historiography on their head. Rather than see the revolution as the first inevitable step toward totalitarian dystopia, Mieville wants us to reimagine the revolution as Russians saw it at the time: a moment, however brief, of genuine possibility for social justice and a more equal political order.

Alas, Mieville is, more often than not, defeated by blunt reality of his subject: try as he might to make Lenin and his gang look vital and inspiring, the narrative can’t help but descend into long stretches of interminable committee meetings punctuated by bread riots. Yet there remains something compelling about his mission, quixotic as it is, to restore some John Reed-esque sense of inspiration to early days of post-tsarist rule:

It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, and excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

Even mutedly optimistic musings, however, can find no place in the second book on this year’s reading list, volume two in Stephen Kotkin’s projected three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, titled (in oddly Beckettian fashion) Waiting for Hitler. Kotkin aims at all times for the adjective definitive, and his combined 2,160 pages of biography (and counting) can occasionally be numbing in their relentless accounting of brutality, genocide, and a surprising amount of paperwork (Stalin here emerges as the very model of prosaic malevolence). Yet Kotkin, too, is alive the possibilities of contingency in history. At every turn of his story, the biographer takes a moment to remind us of what might have been but never was, as in this contemplation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler’s Germany:

What if Stalin had lived up to his reputation for supreme cunning and just accepted the offer of a junior partnership under Nazi Germany (the way Mussolini had done)? Of course, such a surprise embrace would not have removed the German land army from Finland, occupied Poland, or Romania. But might it not have thrown Hitler, his military men, and Nazi propaganda for a loop, and, as Stalin wished, refocused them all on Britain?

We shall never know.

If Mieville regards the Revolution as a shimmering moment of hope, and Kotkin sees it as merely a cavalcade of bad decisions, Yuri Slezkine, in his monumental history The House of Government, conceives of a much grander historical pattern at work. For Slezkine, the Russian Revolution was merely the latest manifestation of a historical pattern repeated by homo sapiens since time immemorial: an outburst of religious messianism that progressed through the cyclical stages of apocalyptic ecstasy, impatient readjustment, frantic self-abasement, and finally a resigned return to secular mundanity.

Slezkine shows us this story through the lens of the titular Moscow apartment building, and the myriad intertwined stories of the upper-echelon Bolsheviks who inhabited it. What ought to be too-convenient framing device instead becomes a narrative coup, as Slezkine allows the story of the Russian Revolution to unfold slowly, intricately, and through a succession of impressionistic vignettes across the first two generations of Communist Rule.

Throughout, Slezkine has a novelist’s eye for the lives, love affairs, and changing fortunes of a huge cast of historical personages. Critics have inevitably fallen to using the term “Tolstoyan” to describe The House of Government, but for once the word is fully warranted. The book is not only epic in its scope, but immensely powerful in its emotional impact, especially as the book reaches its climax with the self-immolating Red Terror of the late ‘30’s. In these sections, the book’s subjects are allowed to speak for themselves with devastating effect, as in this passage recounting the last meeting between two old friends, Ilko Tsivtsivadze and Aron Piatnitsky, each living under the creeping shadow of Stalinist purges:

Ilko looked completely green, with bluish lips and tears in his eyes.

In a quiet, trembling voice, he said: ‘Yesterday I was expelled from the Party.’ He told us how it happened.

Piatnitsky was truly something to see. He forgot himself and became just a comrade: he urged Ilko not to torment himself so, comforted him, and offered advice. They parted beautifully. Ilko, shaken and unhappy, gave him his hand. Piatnitsky said: ‘Think of the things we have done and gone through for the sake of the Party. If the Party requires a sacrifice, no matter how hard, I will bear it all joyfully.’

Was he saying this to comfort Ilko or to sanctify his own last, difficult journey? I do not know…only the tears were choking me, and no one could have been holier or more beautiful to me at that moment than that man…

Slezkine’s book is not only the best of this year’s Russian histories; it’s the most probing, provocative, and brilliantly experimental historical saga in recent memory. And it was by far the highlight of my year in reading, 2017.

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Our Year in Reading Continues

The books that meant the most to me this year recount the rise of—and resistance to—fascism in 1930s and 40s. These might be books from the past, but they feel all too timely.

Mihail Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years, first published in 1934 and now available in English in a lively translation by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, is a brilliant and moving exploration of the apparent incompatibility of Jewish and Romanian identity as experienced by an introspective young man intent on making his way in a profoundly anti-Semitic society. Hans Keilson’s 1944 Diary, ably translated by Damion Searls, records its author’s experiences in Delft, Holland during the last full year of the war. Keilson, a German Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who wrote several excellent novels and practiced as a child psychiatrist, was given a false identity by the Dutch resistance and so was able, although always at great risk, to leave the house of his protectors. Yet these relatively privileged circumstances hardly mitigated his feelings of shame, guilt, and anger of living in fear. At first glance the depredations described by Keilson and Sebastian are miles away from the rarified elegance of the Ferranese Jewish community at the center of Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962). Yet this story about a young man’s fascination with the reclusive, cultured, and conservative Finzi-Contini family begins with the racial laws enacted in Italy after 1938. The languorous idyll the narrator looks back on—filled with tennis parties and heartfelt talks about literature—is destroyed not because paradises are made to be lost but because its participants are deported to the death camps. William Weaver’s warm and elegiac translation brings a vanished society to life.

These books are marvelous, but even they pale in comparison to my book of the year. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, written in the late 1950s but not published until the 1980s, is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. The story of the book’s creation—the KGB confiscated the very typewriter ribbons Grossman used, yet a copy of the typescript was able to be smuggled to the West where it first appeared—is almost as epic as the plot. Set during the pivotal months of late 1942 and early 1943, Life and Fate focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad, But its vast canvas reaches beyond that climactic battle: we see how mercilessly the S.S. Einsatzgruppen destroyed Jewish life in their march through the Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union; we see how quickly someone who specialized in denouncing traitors to the Soviet cause is himself denounced. The audacity of Grossman’s work is to argue that Nazism and Stalinism were, if not identical, then not so different.

But Life and Fate isn’t just a work to respect. It’s also a book to love. What Life and Fate has in spades is flow, momentum, energy. It has life. Combining the warmth of Chekhov with the scope of Tolstoy, Grossman’s magnum opus is that paradoxical thing, an intimate epic. In Robert Chandler’s translation, Life and Fate is a book to lose oneself in, even as one learns so much from it about the terrors of the 20th century—terrors that no longer seem so distant.

Joanna Scutts, Contributor

2017. Is it really over? Are we still here? Reading was pretty much impossible this year, since Twitter scrolling aka being stung repeatedly in the eyeballs by tiny rage-wasps, doesn’t count (and yet I couldn’t stop.) Somehow in the midst of all that I was writing, and then reading my own writing, then being pulled along in the cogs of the book-publishing machine, until a finished book appeared with my name on it, though it still mostly feels like it happened to somebody else. But when I did read, I mostly read history. I read a lot about the Greenwich Village radical scene of the 1910s, because my other baby this year was a history exhibition, and Christine Stansell’s American Moderns stands out among that huge research stack as the gold standard for intelligent, complex, biographically informed but not limited cultural history. Her account of the anti-immigrant, anti-radical crackdown on the Village scene at the outbreak of World War One is chilling, and as all chilling things these days are, all too relevant.

I mostly missed the chance to read anything very new. I did tear through Monica Hesse’s American Fire, which early on contains the line “Arson is a weird crime.” It really is, and the eastern shore of Virginia, where the story is set, is a weird place, and I’d never given much thought to either of them, but this book made them both real. I’m deep into Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond right now, and finding it beguiling in its self-conscious strangeness. Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun was a warm and funny take on Mrs. Dalloway set in San Francisco and starring a mature Nigerian woman refusing (mulishly) to go gently into any good night. Finally, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s vibrant Bone reminded me what’s really missing from my reading life is poetry, and that’s what I plan to correct next year. If we’re still here.

Laura Tanenbaum, Contributor

Over the last five years or so, a lot of my reading and writing has had to do with the history of the feminist movement. In a year that started with the inauguration of an avowed misogynist and sexual assaulter to the most powerful position in the world, followed by the one of the largest feminist demonstrations in history, I’ve inevitably been looking at this reading and writing in a new light. Most recently, I wrote an obituary for the pioneering feminist critic and artist Kate Millett, and I’ve been diving back into her work, especially Flying, the autobiographical book she wrote following the surprise success of Sexual Politics, which thrust her into a media spotlight eager to build up and then tear down “stars” of the flourishing feminist movement. In Flying she travels, makes a film, tries to have an open marriage, meditates on her strained relationships with parents, friends and lovers, all in the context of the community that the feminist movement had built, wondering whether if they will be able to live in the new world they have envisioned.

On a somewhat lighter note, the purest reading pleasure I had this year was probably Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, which received renewed attention this year thanks to an HBO adaptation. Published in the late nineties when I had just started graduate school, it had long been a favorite of the young feminist grad students and aspiring artists I was meeting then, recording what turned out to be the final days of the East Village art scene Millett had also been a part of. Updating the loose feel of Flying, Kraus delightfully blends memoir, fiction, art criticism and high-end gossip. Neither of these books are the “serious” works of feminist theory and history we also need to help us navigate the moment, but both brought me a lot of pleasure in recounting the messy, exhilarating and heart-breaking paths others have taken.

Jennifer Helinek, Contributor

So much of my reading this year has been about balancing classic and contemporary books. Previous years have been entirely dominated by one or the other, but in 2017 I was at my happiest when I found a way to connect the two (intentionally or unintentionally).

One such connection was provided by the contemporary novel Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. A retelling of Sophocles’s Antigone set in present-day London, it examines British Muslim identity, the performative nature of tragedy, and the tension between the powers of the state and of the individual. In addition to being an enjoyable, action-packed read, it gave me a welcome excuse to revisit all three of Sophocles’s Oedipus Cycle plays (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone). Some of the jewels of ancient Greek drama, they’re filled with glorious speeches, wordplay, and agonizing plot developments that make them thrillingly, unapologetically grandiose reads.

An unexpected union of classic and contemporary came from my recent reading of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, the 1929 essay most famous for exploring the reasons behind women’s absence from the literary tradition. Although most discussed for its feminist messages, its meticulous construction is equally powerful – the way Woolf plays with expectations of narrator and protagonist, her subtlety and sarcasm, and the sublime phrases she uses to describe fiction itself, as when she contends that “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

Having also read Middlemarch and Mansfield Park for the first time this year, it was wonderful to see the way Woolf discussed Eliot and Austen (even and especially considering that I didn’t always agree with her interpretations). She also touched on the life of the 17th-century English duchess and author Margaret Cavendish, conveniently bringing my reading year full circle, as my favorite contemporary novel of 2017 was Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton. A slim, fictionalized account of Margaret’s life, it creates a beautiful portrait of this extraordinary woman: her whimsy, her intense introversion, and her peculiar mix of insecurity and self-obsession. A brilliant book that I want to give to all the brilliant women and men in my life.

Tony Perriello, Contributor

In 2017, I read a good deal more nonfiction than I normally do. Most of it was driven by other kinds of media I was consuming throughout the year, which I hope to continue to do. Part of it was probably via osmosis having a significant other who happens to run Nonfiction November on Booktube, but who knows?

Olive and I have been slowly working our way through Seinfeld for the first time, and during a long drive we listened to Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything. We’re noticing how the show evolved each season and how it became the cultural landmark that it is. This gave us essential context through which to further understand its impact, as well as some fascinating behind the scenes insights.

I play a lot of video games and have dabbled in making them over the years, so I was especially interested in Significant Zero, Walt Williams’s memoir of his time in the video games industry and working his way up to being a Lead Writer on the critically acclaimed game Spec Ops: The Line. It’s an honest unfiltered look at what it’s like to work in the industry, coupled with musings on where video games are and how they can evolve.

This year, I felt incredibly fortunate to be alive to experience the third season of Twin Peaks as it aired. To prepare I listened to Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity on audiobook, narrated by David Lynch himself. Lynch practices and evangelizes transcendental meditation, and gives insight into how it augments his life. It’s a brief and enjoyable dive into what he gets from meditation, what he feels like it can offer everyone, and how it drives his creativity and work ethics.

Next year, I hope to continue this pattern of letting other kinds of media I consume inform what kind of nonfiction I read. As someone trying to read more nonfiction, this feels like a no-brainer method to encourage it.

Levi Stahl, Contributor

The persistent tug of low-level news-based depression that marked 2017 made the appeal of cozy mysteries more apparent than ever. And, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books aside, there’s no series more cozy than the Brother Cadfael series, which I enjoyed more than ever this year. Working under the name Ellis Peters, Elizabeth Pargeter between 1977 and 1994 wrote twenty-one volumes set in the twelfth century in and around the Abbey of St Peter and St.Paul in Shrewsbury, just on the English side of the Welsh border. At their heart is the Benedictine monk Cadfael, a veteran of the Crusades who turned to the peace of the abbey late in life. He found it, but it didn’t dull his interest in the doings of the outside world, and the secret springs that feed men’s hearts. When bodies turn up (at, one must admit, a surprising rate), he finds a way to offer them, if not the Lord’s justice, then at least man’s, leavened with generosity and a loving acceptance of human weakness.

The draw of these books is similar to that of most cozies: opening them, you’re entering a familiar, welcoming world. And what better setting for that than a monastery, a community built around the idea that nothing changes, that the round of holy days and festivals is eternal, that the vagaries of everyday life are nothing compared to the permanence of belief? Even so, the monastery can’t help but be affected by the turbulent world around it–England at the time was in civil war–and the contrast between that and the confident security of the abbey beautifully replicates our own relationship to the series, and to cozies in general, as readers. Like the abbey, they are a reliable respite and refuge. We must return to the world eventually, but we’ll be better for the time we spent there.

These are books that one rations. For me, they’re travel reading: vacations or work trips begin with a new Cadfael. And as the end nears–I’m down to three unread–the sadness of knowing I’ll run out is palpable. But so is my gratitude. If all things must pass, few things are eternal, why not trade a few ephemeral news cycles for the peace of the Abbey, and a world where things can and will be put right?

Irma Heldman, Mystery Columnist

Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath police tackles a very cold case in Beau Death. It’s the 17th in Lovesey’s fine series (after 2016’s Another One Goes Tonight), and one of the highlights of 2017. A wrecking ball flattening a row of townhouses exposes a male skeleton in one of the attics. It is seated in a chair wearing the remains of 18th-century clothing. Diamond goes up in the cherry picker to get a closer look, loses his balance and comes perilously close to a catastrophic nosedive. The “drop-jawed” terror in his pudgy, helmeted face is caught by a press photographer. It quickly goes viral which, alas, is not lost on his officious boss, Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore (aptly named in Diamond’s view). As far as she’s concerned, the eyes of the world are now upon them and he is to pull out all the stops to investigate what was almost surely a suspicious death:

“See that the remains are collected and given a post-mortem. No shortcuts. Get to it, Peter.” …In this mood Georgina was implacable.

By the time Diamond assembles his CID team, they are inundated with callers. The prevailing suggestion is that their skeleton is Richard Nash, the dandy and womanizer widely known as Beau Nash. Two or three callers cite the description of the clothes. Its coal-black wig and white tricorn hat are Nash trademarks. Diamond puts Sergeant Ingeborg Smith in charge of the briefing and she gets busy on the internet.

They learn that he arrived in Bath in 1705. Bath then was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Vegas. Nash won big time at gambling, and after a duel which he rigged (the evidence for this is overwhelming) he took over as master of ceremonies (the MC presided over all the important occasions) and became known as the King of Bath. He helped transform Bath into one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Then he fell on hard times and there is a strong belief that he may have died a pauper. Or maybe not. Moreover, as Leaman one of the detectives points out on his iPhone, there is a plaque outside the Theatre Royal: IN THIS HOUSE RESIDED THE CELEBRATED BEAU NASH AND HERE HE DIED FEBY 1761. Still, for Diamond, ever implacable, a plaque is no proof.

This is borne out by his lady love, Paloma Kean, who owns a successful agency providing costume illustrations for television, film and stage. For Diamond, her grasp of Bath lore is not only impressive but ever helpful. She also casts doubt on Beau’s actual burial in the Abbey despite local reports: “You need to talk to an expert, if only to discover for sure what happened to the body.”

The expert is Dr. Claude Waghorn a long-winded, pompous forensic pathologist brought in from the university to oversee the delicate task of recovering the skeleton’s remains. Diamond dubs him “a nit-picker in a cherry picker.”

Waghorn, embodying Diamond’s worst fears and dashing his dream of unsettling the Beau Nash Society of scholars, proves that the skeleton is much more contemporary. Dem bones aside, the kicker is his Y-front underwear. Diamond has barely digested Waghorn’s findings when a cocaine-addicted stager of fireworks is shot to death in the middle of a spectacular display of his on the Royal Crescent. Now Diamond finds himself with two murders on his hands and they appear to be related. Adding to his woes is Constable Dallymore’s insistence that Diamond attend a meeting of the Beau Nash Society which demands dressing in full period regalia. A scene Paloma laments missing. Diamond is not amused!

As Beau Death elegantly demonstrates, nobody is better than Lovesey at mixing puzzle and procedural. Diamond, with his mordant humor as armor, is, as always, razor-sharp, erudite and thoroughly engaging. The solution hinges on a tiny incongruity that Diamond’s eye for detail catches. It is Lovesey’s signature that the killer is improbable albeit the clues to his/her identity are there before your very eyes. This is one of the best in a classy, always entertaining series.

Peter Diamond would probably have relished P.D. James poet-policeman, Adam Dalgliesh’s short pronouncement that “Murder is a contaminating crime.” This sentiment is tightly woven into what are called “Six Murderous Tales.” They comprise a volume of previously uncollected short mysteries, Sleep No More, by the late, great Baroness James of Holland Park, a.k.a. the “Queen of Crime,” who died in 2014. When The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories came out in 2016, we thought we would read no more of her, which makes this collection a real treat.

James chooses to focus chiefly on the villains, either making them the stories’ protagonists or blurring the boundaries by depicting them as delightfully ambiguous, when not downright unreliable as narrators. They are not always the bad guys per se, but they are always individuals who play a disturbing part in the story. Even more intriguing, none of them get what might be called the traditional comeuppance or just desserts.

“The Murder of Santa Claus,” the longest story, uses a marvelously evoked country-house setting at Christmas 1939 to bring together an uncomfortable roster of guests. The host makes his rounds at midnight as Father Christmas with dire consequences. Then there’s “The Yo-Yo,” which takes place in 1936, the year a man became complicit in a murder he recalls 60 years later. In both, James succeeds in enveloping the reader in the atmosphere of the period, before pulling them back uncomfortably to the present day. “The Victim,” which is about a timid librarian who plans a deadly revenge on the man who stole his wife, ends with a grisly twist. In “Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday,” a man confesses, perhaps only in jest, to killing his own brother. “A Very Desirable Residence” shows how far someone will go to secure the eponymous residence. And “The Girl Who Loved Graveyards” gives us the story of an orphaned girl whose memories about her father and grandmother have formed her creepy attachment to cemeteries.

Sleep No More is vintage James. Every one of these stories is a gem. This is a must-read from a world-class crime writer who is sorely missed. I like to fantasize that Knopf has a pipeline to the hereafter and P.D. will surface with a whole new set of stories.

Justin Hickey, Editor

My near-crippling curiosity about every subject and book out there led to another fractured, though sublime, year in reading. I indulged my soft spots for authors who combine the sentimental and wacky, and others capable of jarring readers with savage proficiency.

Operation Tenley, by Jennifer Gooch Hummer, is a middle-grade fantasy about recognition-obsessed 13-year-old Tenley Tylwyth. She wants desperately to appear on the TV show America’s Next Most Inspirational Teen. This modest goal is hampered by the fact that she’s started developing the superpower of wind-control. Enter the Fair Ones, fairies who fly using propellers, not wings, and live on a distant asteroid belt from which they monitor human “clients.” A Fair One named Penn 1 must intercede on Tenley’s behalf before Mother Nature herself steals the girl’s wind powers. Keeping so much divine absurdity in check is the reason why Tenley wants to be on TV: to find her estranged father.

Ryu Murakami—who deserves to be as widely acclaimed as the placid Haruki, his non-relative—presents a different kind of parental longing in Coin Locker Babies. As the title implies, the narrative revolves around two unrelated infant boys abandoned in coin lockers. Kiku and Hashi meet at the Cherryfield Orphanage and as adults end up following quite different passions, the former pole-vaulting and the latter singing. Aside from using one of the most profane opening lines imaginable (seek it out because there are certain things I won’t, not even for art’s sake, type), Murakami gleefully batters his characters with pet alligators, scissored tongues, and William Burroughs-style sex mayhem. These random, shocking moments remind simultaneously that the characters are the author’s to risk, and that they suffer viscerally, at length, as we sometimes do.

Stephen Akey, Contributor

The British philosopher and public intellectual Roger Scruton may or may not be, as left-wingers generally view him, a fox-hunting Tory aristo reactionary snob. But he is also the author of one of the best books of 2017, a slim volume of nuanced and (mostly) non-ideological reflections on exactly what the title promises: On Human Nature. He’s a conservative, all right, but a conservative in the philosophical sense of Edmund Burke or René Girard: given the history of human affairs, it might seem reasonable to doubt that unrestricted license can ever deliver the best of all possible worlds. At any rate, Scruton is especially persuasive on a subject that more traditionally “liberal” philosophers have preferred to avoid: the existence of irremediably evil human beings (such as, in my opinion, our President), “visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil” who are “in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy.” He is also right to find the deepest treatment of such metaphysical realities as evil, sin, and redemption not in philosophy but in art, and ends his book on a note of remarkable humility, with a reference to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Wagner’s Parsifal: “In the wake of these two great aesthetic achievements, it seems to me, the perspective of philosophy is of no great significance.”

My other favorite book of 2017 is The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Richard White. O.K., technically I haven’t read it yet (it’s 941 pages and I just got it), but I’m so excited to have another volume in the exemplary but irregularly appearing Oxford History of the United States series that I have reason to hope this one will continue the tradition of wholly accessible scholarship that illuminates exactly what we most need to know about our political and cultural history.

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Music is not as central to my identity as it has been for some: I don’t collect vinyl and I’ve never connected in any profound way with the MTV sound my cohort grew up with (and I’ve never understood its importance to them, outside of the obvious role it played in social cohesion, flashing the right signs as a way of blending in). But even if our tastes begin as a pretense they soon become who we really are, and one of the great lessons I’ve learned over the last ten or so years is to periodically try to disrupt that ossification. I’d pick categories of sound and study them, heading off to the library with an empty knapsack and coming home with a dozen CDs of opera or early jazz or whatever was charting. I’d listen to all of them, save favorites, assemble secret playlists.

When I’d visit my friend Adam, he’d sit me in his living room, pour me a drink and walk me through early Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, pointing out what had been new (and, so, important) and what I’d otherwise miss. After a few glasses I’d forget most of the details he was so painstaking about, but I loved hearing him talk about it, and I loved the sense that I was learning, deepening, better understanding these things that were so loved.

But my own taste tended to the lugubrious, to music that unfolded slowly: all those great ECM recordings of simple and gut-stirring stuff like Erkki-Sven Tuur, Paul Giger, Valentin Silvestrov and, later, John Luther Adams and Gavin Bryars. I love the blues (John Lee Hooker, Asie Payton) and pop that doesn’t stray far from the blues, or pop that’s both smart and can laugh at itself (my desire is to be buried with Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions and Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones). When I first heard Robert Ashley’s TV opera Perfect Lives, at a time when—through grad school—I had an institutional subscription to the Directory of American Music, I thought I was in Heaven. For two months I listened to it almost constantly, while I worked or fell asleep, or tidied, or showered. It’s “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s wandering piano that keeps the sound on its toes just as much as Ashley’s off-beat modulation.

For a long time I’d been living with ringing in both ears, accompanied by the odd vertigo attack, where the room would spin and then reset itself, spin and rest, as though I were dangerously drunk. I’d grab onto the couch or the floor, grit my teeth and wait out the few hours it lasted, all the while sure I was falling, falling and never hitting the ground. Visits to otologists at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary confirmed that the culprit was probably a condition called Ménière’s disease, and that there was really nothing for it. I should try to eat less salt, avoid caffeine, maybe take water pills? I tried all of these. Gradually, with each vertigo attack, it was predicted that I’d lose a bit more hearing. One day it would be gone – both the vertigo and the hearing. There was no telling when that day would come. Nine years? Twenty? Two?

Oddly, my experience of this condition seems to be unique: five years later, my hearing still fluctuates daily, and is more often absent than present, but it sometimes re-appears in full, and I’m my old self again, if just for a day or an hour. My doctors—and by now I’ve seen at least 20—are visibly irritated by this, often incredulous. Sometimes they shrug. One, an ENT at the Mayo Clinic, tried tough love, minus the love: “Well yes, you’re unique, but we won’t know why until you’re dead and we cut you open.” My hearing was bad at Mayo, in Minnesota during last winter’s polar vortex, and so in lieu of music, I’d recite Yeats to myself, calling the poems up on my phone between hour-long tests, trying to get through them all in my head while the MRIs growled and whirled, or while I was covered in beige powder and wheeled into a giant toaster to measure my brain’s response to heat.

It’s ironic, in a way, that music is disappearing for me, because for years I was notorious among more than a few of my friends for abhorrent taste. It wasn’t just young friends: 60-year-olds hated what I played in the car every bit as much as 20-year-olds did. We’d be driving along and yukking it up and I’d pop in Congolese rhumba icon Papa Wembe’s “Awa Y’okeyi” and everyone would be patient for a couple of beats. Then somebody would break in with “Alright, what the hell is this?” and derision would ensue. The CD would come out and some indie thing slid into its place.

There are still days when I can hear Papa Wembe with something like normal hearing, but on most days I pop in hearing aids first thing when I wake up, and those hearing aids communicate real sound by pixelating and then reconstructing it. The once-rich piano becomes a toy piano, heard as though on a radio through a radio. When the notes begin to fall on top of one another, they blend and muddy. It’s possible to pick up the thread, but it comes through memory, not the sound around me. At a friend’s wedding last month I went out to dance, but after a few bars of each new song I’d be sure to lean in to ask my wife what it was. Because it was a wedding, and wedding songs are wedding songs, I generally knew them all. It may seem incredible, but even “Billie Jean” (which I used to jog to daily) is indistinguishable from static unless the hearing-impaired listener knows it’s “Billie Jean”—then you can follow the beats, and the rhythm falls into place, even if the melody and the sense of the words are lost.

My case is different than that of most Ménière’s sufferers. For one thing, both ears are affected, which is rare. For another, in every case known to me or to my doctors, hearing only fluctuates for a short time, usually in the period immediately preceding and following a vertigo attack. In my case, however, this is not so: my hearing has fluctuated for years; in the last year, it’s been dipping and rising every hour. The problem is that hearing aids are usually assisted by neural plasticity. If my hearing were declining steadily, gradually, or would settle at a certain level, my brain would have time to catch up, to begin to process what sound was now like, the new normal. But because I’m jerked around from clarity to distortion and back, I can’t adapt: the hearing aids aren’t working prosthetics, only amplifiers (and in the same way your speakers cease to produce crisp sound at high volumes, my hearing aids cease to provide sensible data when I’m forced to activate the highest settings).

There are few days when I can hear without aid now, but they still happen. I was able to hear a little background music at a cookout this week (sadly, it was The Traveling Wilburys). On the drive there and the drive back, I played Tom Waits’ “Town with No Cheer.” I played it because it had been stuck in my head (if you’ve ever had hearing of any kind, you’re prone to earworms) and because my memory is not eidetic, I ached for detail, and waited through weeks of roaring tinnitus and silence to have it. Then I was rewarded.

What makes the song so moving for me is what I can’t hear now: the fade-in and fade-out of Waits’ voice in the persona of a dry local. He begins every phrase with something like a shout and then winds down to a defeated whisper, like a drunk lamenting his sobriety. The harmonium and synthesizer sound, respectively, of carnival and defeat; they merge and blur. Most days now the sound comes to me as though from down the street, as though the speakers were shorting out, and as though I didn’t know the tune.

But what I’ve lost isn’t just a set of structured sounds, but the world those sounds create, a world you can live inside: Bach on a snowy afternoon, hard blues on a long night’s drive, the background mood in a restaurant or at a party (or, increasingly, any public space not yet colonized by ESPN on flatscreen TVs). Music is color. When you’re young you’re the hero of a movie, and the Heifetz you play in your car or the Velvet Underground you first try out sex to isn’t just background, it’s location and weather. You feel it on your skin.

So many of the big, meaningful scenes of my life have become centered, in my memory, around music, and not just concerts (though concerts are huge). I think of the time I spent every last dollar I owned on a 3-disc set of Einstein on the Beach and put it into the stereo while I drank coffee and thought about finding a real job; from the first notes (the numbers, chanted) I felt like I’d walked into a new life. Or the time Adam and I spent an hour driving through fogbound Portland, Maine and playing Genesis’s “Mama” over and over, not able to get enough of its brutal camp. There was the time Coleen and I debated the respective merits of various Johnny Cash records on New Year’s Eve while apportioning drugs on the back of one of the jewel cases. Or when Jaime and I realized, after seven years, off and on, that it was finished between us, this time for good, but she hung around my tiny apartment all afternoon because neither of us wanted our new lives to start quite yet. I played her Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville, Summer 1914”—she’d never heard it, didn’t know who Barber was—and we listened to every note and were ourselves silent, wholly owned, her cigarette smoke uncurling above us.

But as much as I didn’t care about new music then, I regard it now as one of the major obstacles to understanding human language. Just as I didn’t understand how to share in the fruits of the cool in Bikini Kill and Run DMC when I was younger, so now the aural pain that pounds out of corner stereos and ceiling speakers obscures the very words around me. Half of the time I don’t even know music is present, but because of the way my ears and brain can’t settle on a steady input, any music completely obscures all proximate sounds.

If I’m really struggling to understand speech, I’m the joykill who asks that the music—the background sound of good times, Shelley’s “where the spirit drinks until the brain is wild”—be turned low or off. Part of the fun of the music at those parties, or in those restaurants or—god help us—elevators and supermarkets, is the way it connects us with our past. You hear a bad Billy Joel song in the freezer aisle at Safeway and time is refuted: you’re twelve years old, driving off to football camp, or to dancing class, your mother’s station wagon one major metal antenna.

Back in college my friend Vita gave me an EP cassette she’d found in a free bin at Newbury Comics, from a local group called, I think, Fledgling, and while the A side didn’t do much for me, the B side wouldn’t let go. The name of the song didn’t seem to appear on the tape, but the slow plucking of strings and the sudden rush of a woman’s raw voice and the rhythm kicking in … well, I loved the song. And I carried that EP from apartment to apartment until I no longer owned a means of playing it One bit of the lyrics always got to me, just as the tune moves to an upswing: “when there’s so much out there you can’t imagine / it’s such a drag but it’s so much better than me…” The way she held out that “so” both times, dug into the “better,” clipped the “me” …

Twelve years later—maybe six months before all these symptoms began—I was walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge one evening, past the Lizard Lounge, and as I sometimes did on a whim when I had an hour to kill on a weekday night, I walked down to the grotto to hear whoever was playing.

Sitting there, listening and longing, my heart fluttered into my throat. Every moment I’d lived with the song compacted, contracted. I felt absorbed and released and excited for hours after. I tried to explain to my girlfriend how amazing it had been, but it’s like trying to tell a dream. I can still rehearse those songs in my head, and that’s a pleasure, but, like memories, the mind re-makes old songs as it repeats them; you hear the real thing again and you connect with it again, smile at what you’ve missed.

We’re lucky now, in that we live in a world where total deafness is rapidly becoming a thing of the past as cochlear implants become more advanced and increasingly adaptable. But while many implanted patients can hold conversations again or even talk on the phone, these otherwise-miraculous devices are notoriously bad with music. The University of Washington is doing fascinating research in this area, but nobody thinks they’ll be replicating “real” hearing anytime soon. Tones will still blend, a slamming door will be identical to a barking dog, the whistle of a teakettle and the wail of a siren one.

And so my troubled but beautiful-to-me life with and around music is probably drawing to a stuttering stop. Gradually, that time, spent time, acquires a lasting shape, even if it’s an aleatory and unintentional one, my whole life with an art.

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John Cotter is author of Under the Small Lights, a novel.

Adapted from an image by Martinak15 on Flickr

These questions nip at the heels of all of Kermode’s books, but the comparison between angels and literature is made specifically in his evergreen study The Sense of an Ending, drawn from a series of lectures he gave at Bryn Mawr College in 1965. The year is important because the threat of nuclear annihilation lent intense clarity to Kermode’s main point: Humans, personally and collectively, are preoccupied with trying to understand their deaths. For life to have meaning, to amount to more than just a sequence of events, that meaning must be projected backwards from an ending that provides the key to interpreting everything that preceded it.

Fiction mirrors this process. A common complaint of a failed novel is that it just portrays one damn thing after another. But a great work of literature endows its actions with a higher order of consequence that transcends mere chronology and, as Kermode puts it, charges the story with meaning. Endings are not terminations but completions.

Now think again about angels. In medieval cosmology, Kermode explains, angels occupied a kind of middle zone between Earth and the heavens. Humans lived inside time; God was eternal.

The angels required their own order of time because they were not pure being, yet were (on most interpretations) immaterial, acting in time yet not of it, any more than they participated in God’s eternity. Immutable, not subject to time, they were nevertheless capable of acts of will and intellect, by which change is produced in time.

Kermode points out that St. Thomas Aquinas designated the medium the angels inhabited the “aevum.” But the label is unimportant; what’s significant is that angels were the intermediary—humankind’s broker—to divine truth.

And so it is, Kermode writes, with fictions. We know that stories are invented, their connections manufactured and their meanings contrived, yet we read them with “conditional assent.” They provide the glancing instants when sluggishly corporeal humans commune with something outside of time—what St. Augustine called the periods of the soul’s attentiveness. They show us eternity, but only for a moment.

St. Thomas and St. Augustine make frequent appearances in Kermode’s criticism, and he read them and bantered with them the way that most people do the sports page. He was himself a nonbeliever, but because he could give conditional assent to concepts like omniscience and immortality he could fluently translate these thinkers into the secular era and therefore mingle their ideas with those of contemporary theorists, even those as radical (at the time) as Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. Kermode practiced criticism during a phase of intense rupture in the academic world, when most literary scholars had divided into reactionary camps, contentiously alienated from each other, from the precepts of the past, and most of all from the reading public. Kermode’s genius was in traveling freely among these schools of thought, and even among the styles of writing, employing their competing theories but not being defined by them—and also subtly demonstrating their commonalities. He was the age’s great critical syncretist.

Syncretists are necessarily outsiders and Kermode lived, he writes in his charming (if selectively revealing) memoir Not Entitled, as “a sort of one-man diaspora.” He grew up on the Isle of Man—an island off of an island. Throughout his life, by his reckoning, he was subject to a misfit restlessness that was hard to discern from his fastidious manner but would suddenly show itself in precipitous decisions to change teaching jobs or move around the country. He writes that he had little competence with things of the world, and was never comfortable as a husband, father, or even as an editor (he was rather cluelessly in the middle of the debacle at the literary journal Encounter when Conor Cruise O’Brien sued it for libel and exposed its connection with the CIA). Even his books, for all their wisdom and probity, seem born of a fundamental instability, as they are mostly either redactions of lectures or collections of occasional pieces. He has no out-and-out magnum opus.

Nor, consequently, is he tied to one particular argument. “It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us make sense of our lives,” he writes at the start of The Sense of an Ending, perhaps the closest thing he has to a defining text. “They are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.”

A fascinating contrast with this seemingly modest definition of the critic’s vocation can be found in the writing and thought of Kermode’s near-contemporary Harold Bloom. Writing in his 2011 “critical self-portrait” The Anatomy of Influence, Bloom attempted not only to distill the main argument that will stand as his legacy but to depict the nature of his entire relationship with literature. He stakes his name on the so-called anxiety of influence, the belief that “the inescapable condition of sublime and high art is agon”—that is, that the inspiration for all great artists comes from their struggle against the work of their forerunners.

Bloom came to this theory, and to a love of literature, by what he describes in explicitly evangelical terms as a born-again experience. The overwhelming effects of reading Hart Crane at age 10, Macbeth at 13, and Northrop Frye at 17 are presented as related road-to-Damascus conversions. “Literature for me is not merely the best art of life,” he writes. “It is itself the form of life, which has no other form.”

Thus the coals of poetry touched Bloom’s lips and he was fated both to subsume himself to the creeds behind his criticism and to wage everlasting battle against his wrong-thinking adversaries. He has consistently denounced his opponent theorists, especially the New Critics and the deconstructionists, with the passion of St. Augustine attacking the heresies of the Pelagians.

Set Bloom’s revelations alongside this formative moment from Not Entitled, which comes after a young Kermode has unsuccessfully dabbled in theology. It amounts to a sort of anti-epiphany:

Now, as the smoke dropped onto Mr. Shave’s church on that evening of newspapers, buckets, and damaged fruit, the street-long cable-slot still gleaming in the shoplights, I ended my career as best philosopher, seer blest, eye among the blind, and so forth. The next step was, as might be foretold, to enter the prison house of my own incommunicable intuitions, and soon to be committed to the long labor of learning how to know something a little better than I did and to know how to say it with apparent clarity to others…. It is an acceptable condition, in which we are able to believe that we communicate, that we may be distincts yet not divided.

Naturally, Bloom considered Kermode an enemy. “He’s not terribly fond of me,” he said of Kermode in an interview, “and I cannot say that I’m enormously fond of him.” But you will find no trace of antagonism in Kermode’s numerous reviews of Bloom’s books, only interest, frequent amusement, punctuations of annoyance, and the slightly awed, slightly incredulous respect that scrupulous agnostics feel for true believers. For Bloom was someone Kermode had no trouble recognizing from his studies—an heir to apocalypse critics, who invested the full meaning of literature into a single belief for which he spent his life proselytizing.

The irony is that it should be the Jew from the South Bronx who followed the footsteps of the Christian apostles while the “solid low Anglican” Manxman modeled his style off, of all things, rabbinical midrash.  Allusions to midrashic commentary—the Jewish tradition of reinterpreting the fixed words of God in order to sift their many meanings and discover their applications to changing times—appear constantly in Kermode’s books. It was his lodestone, the great sanction and example for the potentially blasphemous exercise of looking at canonical texts in new and varied ways.

Strict midrashic scholars argue, of course, that there is no parallel to their practice in the secular forum of literary studies. But look at the bounty of sources Kermode introduces, in a review of a work of biblical history, to illuminate how one interpretation of the Adam and Eve story came to dominate all others:

One sees at once that that the biblical tradition rests far more on this augmented version [scripture plus commentary] than on the plain version [scripture alone], and that sixteen hundred or so years later the learned Milton developed it in what might be called, though probably not by the Jerusalem experts, a poem that can be thought of as an enormous midrash…. [Commentators] argued over the concept of what would later be called Original Sin and invented the idea that the transgression in the garden amounted to the Fall of Man. That Satan “took the serpent as a garment” and that through his envy “death entered the world” was now established, though the plain text does not say so. The fault of Eve (“From a woman was sin’s beginning, and because of her we all die”) may have been simply that she was a woman, as Philo supposed; without the stress of desire Adam would have given no offense (a persistent idea, echoed later by Saint Ambrose, and later still by Andrew Marvell, writing about “that happy Garden-state/While man there walked without a Mate”).

Elsewhere he could apply the same variegated, argus-eyed scrutiny to a writer like Don DeLillo, who is about as far from Milton and Marvell as it is possible to be:

Underworld belongs to a category of the Great American Novel, to which all the really big writers aspire. Structurally it has some resemblance to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and that thought prompts the reflection that Pynchon also wrote an exceptionally fine novella, The Crying of Lot 49. If there are two traditions of great American writing it is proper to show up in both of them. One of them may be said to originate with Hawthorne, the other with Melville, one lean and self-absorbed, the other heavy, expansive, determined to contain a world. On the whole the heavyweights have prevailed in recent years; one no longer hears much talk of, say, Glenway Westcott, a lean writer of whom Gertrude Stein remarked that “he has a certain syrup but it does not pour.”

Kermode’s justifications for his borrowing from Judaism’s ancient critical method appears in the lectures compiled for his 1975 book The Classic. Here he asks how, in the secular era, we are supposed to decide which books to regard as classics.

The question is knotty, Kermode writes, because traditionally such literature was known by its revealed grace. Virgil was a classic because, in one of his eclogues, he foreshadowed the birth of Christ. But Virgil also wrote the founding epic of the divinely appointed Roman Empire—and he was preceded by Homer and followed by numerous other poets, from Dante to Milton, whose greatness rested on their prophetic vision of “certain, unchanging truths.”

T.S. Eliot, in a similar set of lectures twenty years earlier, had done his best to uphold this standard for classics, but Kermode recognized that it had lost currency in modern times, in which engraved verities have faded and “truth in art … will have the hesitancy, the instability, of the attitude struck by the New World, provincial and unstable itself, towards the corrupt maturity of the metropolis.” By compelling the classic to adapt with the shifting times, Kermode was inverting its very function. In the past, it was a repository for ultimate answers; now it is determined based on its ability to field the most questions, to enrich the most diverse forms of inquiry.

In essence (though Kermode was suspicious of essences), this is an argument for plurality, for an idea of a classic that does not require any special dispensation in order to understand it. Kermode passionately advocated for the deathless relevance of traditional masterpieces while opposing the tyranny of elect knowledge. It was this combination of conservatism and progressiveness that made him such a unique defender of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the other New Wave schools of literary theory that were cropping up more and more as his career continued.

Kermode’s interest in these theories was real and, as he explains in Not Entitled, he resigned from his prestigious seat at Cambridge after being attacked for speaking out for a poststructuralist professor who had been denied tenure. But he never came close to committing himself to them (indeed, he considered Roland Barthes, who announced the death of the author, to be yet another iteration in the lineage of apocalypse writers). “The new literary theory,” he writes, “was another country in which I went to live without feeling truly at home.”

He puts those ideas to fascinating use in 1985’s Forms of Attention. In the book’s second chapter he analyzes Hamlet through the lens of semiotics, a field that investigates texts purely on the basis of their lexical patterns. Kermode observes that Shakespeare’s key rhetorical device in the play is doubling, meaning he creates dramatic dissonance by joining two not quite compatible words or phrases around the conjunction “and” (you may be sure that Kermode knows and endlessly applies the appropriate technical term, hendiadys). The chapter is a tour de force of postmodernist gibberish, but it is bottomlessly intelligent and draws from Kermode’s virtually eidetic knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays.

Once again Kermode is relying on conditional assent. When he undertakes to study Shakespeare’s rhetorical strategies, he does so in full earnestness. Once the study is complete he steps back and frames the field of semiotics within a larger historical perspective. His point is twofold. He wants to demonstrate that Hamlet’s greatness is such that it is inexhaustible: you can always find new things to say about it through new approaches. As for the worth of the interpretative theory, that can be judged by its fruits: any study is good if it helps to preserve the valued object; it is bad if it leads to its destruction.

“The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity,” he once wrote for the only sermon he ever delivered, “is to an incalculable extent a history of error.” It seems odd to cherish a thinker who constantly distanced himself from his own ideas, who regularly pointed up their insufficiency; it seems that there must be something meek about him. But Kermode’s humility was his strength, and it was born from his private, intensely devotional love of literature. Before writers like St. Augustine, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, and Wallace Stevens it would be ridiculous to be anything other than humble.

Kermode’s willingness to be proved wrong in any opinion is also the reason that, as many people have commented, his book reviews always seemed so serenely incontrovertible. Because he had no ideological agenda, there was no soft underbelly of irrational belief to attack. You had simply to face him on the merits of the arguments on the page. To do that, you had to know as much about literature as he did, which disqualified effectively everyone.

Yet no one understood better than Kermode that there is a difference between an argument being incontrovertible and it being true. Along with the provisionality of his approach—his ability to draw from the well of his passion for books without toppling into it—came the awareness that criticism is, at heart, a performance. Kermode’s writing is always challenging, but it is leavened by a spirit of shared entertainment, a tacit acknowledgment that interpretation is a kind of game—something, he notes, that the rabbis recognized “without for a moment supposing that what they were doing wasn’t serious; the most serious thing in the world, in fact.”

Kermode wrote criticism for no higher purpose than to perpetuate the lives of great works of art, for, as he wrote, “the medium by which all texts survive is commentary.” To that end he joined a nearly unrivalled knowledge of the Western canon with a playful lightness of thought. He could travel across colleges as well as across millennia, trying out ideas and then setting them within their historical contexts. He possessed a mind that could change in time, and that made his criticism as timeless as any we can hope to have.

____
Sam Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for The Wall Street Journal and is an editor of Open Letters Monthly.

Take her first full-length novel, Adam Bede: it’s rich, intelligent, and moving, but also technically awkward. Chapter 17, for instance, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” interrupts the action to deliver a lesson on Eliot’s signature brand of sympathetic realism. It’s a marvellous set piece, but that’s its weakness as much as its strength: Eliot hadn’t yet learned how to make such philosophizing integral, rather than disruptive, to the movement of her fiction.

Then there’s The Mill on the Floss, brilliant, profound, and emotionally gripping, but also unbalanced, as Eliot herself acknowledged (“The ‘epische Briet [epic breadth] into which I was beguiled by love of my subject in the two first volumes, caused a want of proportionate fullness in the treatment of the third, which I shall always regret.”) And the ending! It is equal parts shocking and bewildering, and as a result it has provoked endless controversy. Henry James didn’t see it coming and made feeble excuses about its not being anticipated by the rest of the novel (not true!); F. R. Leavis thought it “revealed immaturity”; feminist critics have found it variously profound, tragic, incestuous, metafictional, triumphant.

Felix Holt, Eliot’s most explicitly political novel, is also one of her least popular, and the blame lies largely with Felix himself: though interesting for the ideas he embodies, he is otherwise as compelling as a cardboard cut-out. And Daniel Deronda strikes most readers as uncomfortably bifurcated. Leavis notoriously advocated “freeing by simple surgery the living part of the immense Victorian novel from the deadweight”—that is, Daniel’s involvement with the Zionist Mordecai, leading up to his discovery and embrace of his own Jewish identity—thus, Leavis thought, leaving us with a greater novel, Gwendolen Harleth. Others have as energetically argued that Daniel Deronda’s two parts in fact make a compelling whole. As it happens, I agree with them (and I consider the ending of The Mill on the Floss the only possible one for the novel), but where there’s so much critical smoke, there must be at least a small authorial fire.

Only about Middlemarch, which James rightly concluded “sets a limit to the development of the old-fashioned English novel,” do most critics agree that Eliot achieved “perfect mastery.” Here, her means and her ends are wonderfully congruent; it contains nothing superfluous to its design, nothing inadequately incorporated or imperfectly completed.

Only one masterpiece? Not a very impressive record, it seems, at least on Lewes’s terms. But consistency in perfection is a lot to expect of any artist, and especially of an artist working in a medium as fluid and methodless as fiction. And does it in fact, make Eliot a lesser novelist that most of her novels are thus imperfect? My answer, as you probably expect, is no, and Lewes himself (who, after all, became Eliot’s husband) hints at why. “There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed,” he continues in “The Lady Novelists”;

there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never set foot; but although this is obvious to every reader, it is equally obvious that she has risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she has not seen. Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete.

Let’s defer to the comments (or, better yet, altogether) any debate over whether Lewes’s assessment of Austen is adequate, and focus on a more general question: what’s the value in risking failure? If consistent “mastery” requires playing it safe, perhaps we should actually consider failure part of, rather than a problem for, our standard of artistic greatness. Is imperfection too high a price to pay, after all, for ambition? A good test case is the one of Eliot’s novels that comes closest to complete failure: her deeply researched, profoundly conceived, and now almost universally unread novel of Renaissance Florence, Romola.

I could write a whole essay about Romola that ignores its defects. You will be quick enough to spot them on your own; what you might appreciate a little help with is identifying its strengths—getting past, or through, the difficulties it poses to a sense of why, in spite of them, it is a novel well worth your time. You see, I do greatly admire Romola. It contains moments of psychological acuity and dramatic intensity unsurpassed in Eliot’s other fiction. But I’d be lying if I pretended that my admiration didn’t come at the cost of a lot of persistent effort. And what would be the purpose of that denial, anyway? I’m not trying to sell you copies of Romola, after all (though if you are going to buy one, consider the facsimile edition from Broadview Press that includes Frederick Leighton’s beautiful illustrations). No: instead, let’s confront the trouble with Romola and see where it leads us.

Romola opens with the arrival in Florence of Tito Melema, an enigmatic Greek shipwreck survivor seeking to re-establish his fortunes. Tito’s youthful beauty and scholarly aptitude quickly win him friends and patrons, including the blind old scholar Bardo de’ Bardi; before long Tito and Romola, Bardo’s devoted daughter, fall in love and marry. Romola has led a secluded life as her father’s amanuensis, but no upbringing could have made her suspect that Tito’s bright surface conceals a character of malignant selfishness and a history of dishonor and betrayal. Tito’s career flourishes, but as Romola learns his true nature she becomes increasingly alienated from him and struggles to reconcile her sacred vow of marriage with her conviction that he is unworthy of her devotion. Her personal crisis is reflected on a national scale in the story of Girolamo Savonarola, the charismatic preacher who urged religious and political reforms and eventually faced excommunication for his defiance of the Pope. Both Romola and Savonarola struggle to understand “where the duty of obedience ends, and the duty of resistance begins.”

That all sounds pretty interesting, right? So what exactly is wrong with Romola? The chief objection, made since the novel’s first publication, is that Eliot’s extensive research overwhelms both the characters and the action: as one of Romola’s earliest reviewers put it, “Sometimes the antiquarian quite drowns the novelist.” It’s not so much the passages of historical explanation, though there are many of this kind:

At the close of 1492, the year in which Lorenzo de’ Medici died and Tito Melema came as a wanderer to Florence, Italy was enjoying a peace and prosperity unthreatened by any near and definite danger. There was no fear of famine, for the seasons had been plenteous in corn, and wine, and oil; new palaces had been rising in all fair cities, new villas on pleasant slopes and summits; and the men who had more than their share of these good things were in no fear of the larger number who had less. For the citizens’ armour was getting rusty, and populations seemed to have become tame, licking the hands of masters who paid for a ready-made army when they wanted it, as they paid for goods of Smyrna. Even the fear of the Turk had ceased to be active, and the Pope found it more immediately profitable to accept bribes from him for a little prospective poisoning than to form plans either for conquering or for converting him.

They had now emerged from the narrow streets into a broad piazza, known to the elder Florentine writers as the Mercato Vecchio, or the Old Market. This piazza, though it had been the scene of a provision-market from time immemorial, and may, perhaps, says fond imagination, be the very spot to which the Fesulean ancestors of the Florentines descended from their high fastness to traffic with the rustic population of the valley, had not been shunned as a place of residence by Florentine wealth. In the early decades of the fifteenth century, which was now near its end, the Medici and other powerful families of the popolani grassi, or commercial nobility, had their houses there, not perhaps finding their ears much offended by the loud roar of mingled dialects, or their eyes much shocked by the butchers’ stalls, which the old poet Antonio Pucci accounts a chief glory, or dignita, of a market that, in his esteem, eclipsed the markets of all the earth beside. But the glory of mutton and veal (well attested to be the flesh of the right animals; for were not the skins, with the heads attached, duly displayed, according to the decree of the Signoria?) was just now wanting to the Mercato, the time of Lent not being yet over. The proud corporation, or “Art,” of butchers was in abeyance, and it was the great harvest-time of the market-gardeners, the cheesemongers, the vendors of macaroni, corn, eggs, milk, and dried fruits: a change which was apt to make the women’s voices predominant in the chorus. But in all seasons there was the experimental ringing of pots and pans, the chinking of the money-changers, the tempting offers of cheapness at the old-clothes stalls, the challenges of the dicers, the vaunting of new linens and woollens, of excellent wooden-ware, kettles, and frying-pans; there was the choking of the narrow inlets with mules and carts, together with much uncomplimentary remonstrance in terms remarkably identical with the insults in use by the gentler sex of the present day, under the same imbrowning and heating circumstances. Ladies and gentlemen, who came to market, looked on at a larger amount of amateur fighting than could easily be seen in these later times, and beheld more revolting rags, beggary, and rascaldom, than modern householders could well picture to themselves. As the day wore on, the hideous drama of the gaming-house might be seen here by any chance open-air spectator—the quivering eagerness, the blank despair, the sobs, the blasphemy, and the blows:—

“E vedesi chi perde con gran soffi,
E bestemmiar colla mano alia mascella,
E ricever e dar di molti ingoffi.”

But still there was the relief of prettier sights: there were brood-rabbits, not less innocent and astonished than those of our own period; there were doves and singing-birds to be bought as presents for the children; there were even kittens for sale, and here and there a handsome gattuccio, or “Tom,” with the highest character for mousing; and, better than all, there were young, softly-rounded cheeks and bright eyes, freshened by the start from the far-off castello (walled village) at daybreak, not to speak of older faces with the unfading charm of honest goodwill in them, such as are never quite wanting in scenes of human industry. And high on a pillar in the centre of the place—a venerable pillar, fetched from the church of San Giovanni—stood Donatello’s stone statue of Plenty, with a fountain near it, where, says old Pucci, the good wives of the market freshened their utensils, and their throats also; not because they were unable to buy wine, but because they wished to save the money for their husbands.

It’s an overwhelming cascade of details, and this is just a single paragraph from the novel’s first chapter: the prospect of a novel composed along these lines might well scare off all but the hardiest readers.

The principle at work in Romola, as Eliot herself explained, was “to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself”—the same principle as she followed in her novels of English life, such as Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss. Raveloe and St. Ogg’s, however, were much closer to home for Eliot and her original audience and so required much less effortful reconstruction; many readers have agreed with Leslie Stephen that despite “the remarkable power not only of many passages but of the general conception of the book it is a magnificent piece of cram.” And even if we grant Eliot significant expository latitude for moving her story back four centuries and across to Italy, it remains difficult to justify the chapter “A Florentine Joke,” which recounts (in what feels like real time) an elaborate prank involving a monkey dressed as a baby, and from which I will spare you any quotation.

Who can really say, though, how much detail is too much? Even today, novelists like A. S. Byatt, in The Children’s Book, or Hilary Mantel, in A Place of Greater Safety, pile on the information without fear or drastic repercussions. One reader’s tedious excess may be another’s delightful indulgence. Romola’s abundant accumulation of historical particulars alone would not necessarily have condemned it to literary history’s dread ‘remaindered’ pile. It becomes self-destructive only in combination with the novel’s idiom, which is—not always, but often enough—both archaic and pedantic.

To be sure, the language of Romola would not have read as strangely to devotees of Scott (George Eliot emphatically was one), or to readers of Bulwer-Lytton or William Harrison Ainsworth, as it does to most of us. “By the rood of Bromholme,” exclaims Ivanhoe’s Cedric the Saxon. “I always add my hollo,” says a yeoman to Prince John in the same novel, “when I see a good shot or a gallant blow”; “Sayst thou?” replies the Prince; “then thou canst hit the white thyself, I’ll warrant.” “HO, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?’ begins Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. “Alas, no!, dear Clodius; he has not invited me,” replies Diomed; “By Pollux, a scurvy trick! for they say his suppers are the best in Pompeii.” Contemporary readers are likely to find such language either funny or tedious, as Hilary Mantel recognizes: “How do you give the past a human voice,” she wonders,

without betraying it or making your reader furiously impatient? Too much period flavor, and you slow up the story. “Nay, damsel, be not afeared,” may be authentic, but it will make your reader giggle. If you give way to an outbreak of “prithee” and “perchance,” then perchance your reader will hurl the book across the room.

Romola stands up to the novels of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton better than to Wolf Hall, but the flamboyant vigor of Vanity Fair reminds us that the Victorians too had alternative models of historical fiction. Thackeray, for instance, illustrated his Regency characters dressed in 1840s costumes, even as he wrote their dialogue in pithy contemporary phrases. In doing so he serves his moral purposes, conflating past and present as he does fiction and reality. Eliot, like Scott, chose instead to accentuate the otherness of the past. This, together with her commitment to the literal foreignness of their Italian dialects, means that almost nothing any of her characters say sounds quite natural to our ears. Though at times of especially heightened drama the resulting faint air of unreality is surprisingly effective (“The draught is bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup—there is the vision which makes all life below it dross forever”!), other moments do indeed, as Mantel anticipates, induce giggles or worse.

My favorite cringe-worthy moment in Romola arises from just this unfortunate combination of archaism and translation: “Good-day, Messer Domenico,” says Nello the barber to an arriving customer; “You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni.” Awful, isn’t it? But it’s also the perfect illustration of the difference between an uninteresting failure—one that is just bad, lazy writing—and a failure that deserves our interest, maybe even our respect, because it’s in service of something worth trying. In this case, Nello’s cheesy phrase first makes me chuckle, then makes me think: why is it there? what does it fail at? Failure has to be measured against aspiration, after all. Here, with this phrase (a rendering of the colloquial expression “come il cacio sui maccheroni”) the aim is clearly to strike a note of authenticity that will make the past in a foreign country especially vivid to us. Weirdly, it sort of does that, doesn’t it? And it does so precisely because it cuts off any possibility of identification: “I would never say that!” we all exclaim. Yet artistically, it’s no good, for the same reason, and also for another—the overly-literal translation turns Nello’s speech into something nobody would say.

In this moment we have the larger failures of Romola in microcosmic form: the novel is too literally historical, too thorough, too manifestly researched, too distancing, to be great historical fiction, or great fiction of any kind. But just as the unfortunately leaden phrasing of Nello’s aphorism arises from a worthwhile impulse, so too the creaky pedantry of Romola is the unfortunate side-effect of something important, provocative, and difficult—something worth failing at—which is Eliot’s attempt to write historical fiction that is also philosophical fiction, to create not an entertaining costume drama but a novel of ideas.

What we are constantly aware of, reading Romola, is that the novelist is thinking. This can feel like a defect (Henry James complained that “the philosophic door is always open” in her novels, sending a “cooling draught” across them), and to be sure, in the best of all possible novels thought and feeling, philosophy and aesthetics, work together so seamlessly that we take this difficult merger for granted as we read. Eliot was aware herself of the risk of lapsing “from the picture to the diagram.” But too much overt thinking is a genuine defect only if our expectations of the novel are so low that we’d rather the failure be in the other direction—which is the impression often given by the steady stream of intellectually unambitious historical fiction crowded onto bookstore shelves today. It’s not that their authors aren’t competent or better at assembling their materials and telling an engrossing story, but readers of Philippa Gregory or Sarah Dunant or Carolly Erickson know (and presumably like) that their books turn on character and plot, not theories of historical or moral development.

The philosophical concerns of Romola are the central ones of Eliot’s oeuvre as a whole: the historical significance of religion and its gradual displacement by a humanistic ethos of fellowship; the social and moral dangers of egotism; the saving grace of sympathy. The difference in this case is the specificity with which these ongoing themes are connected to large-scale historical events and shown to be part of a necessary moral evolution at both national and personal levels. The central example is Romola herself, raised by her father to hate the dark superstition of religion. Their greatest grief is the loss of her brother, Dino, to its influence. “I have disowned him for ever,” Bardo tells Tito:

He was a ready scholar as you are, but … showing a disposition from the very first to turn away his eyes from the clear lights of reason and philosophy, and to prostrate himself under the influences of a dim mysticism which eludes all rules of human duty as it eludes all argument. And so it ended. We will speak no more of him: he is dead to me.

Eliot’s own treatment of religion is never so antagonistic: she has too much respect for the church as an institution that, whatever its doctrinal basis, has for centuries framed and supported people’s best instincts. And thus Bardo’s absolutism sits uncomfortably with Romola, who feels more strongly than her father does the pull of personal affection and loyalty. At the same time, the real evil of Dino’s conversion is shown to be that it leads him to seek wisdom in “the shadow region … apart from human sympathies,” when the simple dictates “of filial and brotherly affection” could have led him to warn Romola about Tito’s falseness and prevent the catastrophe of her marriage.

The same precedence of family and fellowship over dogmatic principle eventually causes Romola’s rift with Savonarola, whose rise and fall shape the novel’s larger narrative. At a time of personal crisis—when the truth about Tito’s character has become apparent—she sets off on a remarkable journey:

she had invented a lot for herself—to go to the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed woman could support herself in a lonely life there.

Among Eliot’s women, only the Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda attempts a similarly bold act of self-actualization. While the Alcharisi succeeds, however, adamantly refusing to live as a wife and mother and instead fulfilling her ambition to be a great singer, Romola is accosted by Savonarola and sent back to fill “[her] place”. “It was declared to me,” he tells her, “that you are seeking to escape from the lot that God has laid upon you”:

you are flying from your debts: the debt of a Florentine woman; the debt of a wife. You are turning your back on the lot that has been appointed for you—you are going to choose another. But can man or woman choose duties? no more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother. My daughter, you are fleeing from the presence of God into the wilderness.

Romola is awed into obedience to his commands and, temporarily, also into submission to his faith. Even in the initial moment of her dedication, though, his authority is as much personal as religious:

It was the first time she had encountered a gaze in which simple human fellowship expressed itself as a strongly felt bond. Such a glance is half the vocation of the priest or spiritual guide of men …

Romola finds her vocation following Savonarola’s edicts, “tending the sick and relieving the hungry,” but her work is worthy not because it’s in the service of God but because it makes life better for people on Earth. When Savonarola’s influence begins to run counter to this imperative—when he preaches not mercy but “severity”—when he declares to Romola, “the end I seek is one to which minor respects must be sacrificed” and one of those sacrifices is the life of her beloved godfather—then Romola rejects his guidance to follow a higher ideal: “God’s kingdom is something wider—else, let me stand outside it with the beings that I love.”

Savonarola’s failure is not that he is religious but that he is unloving. Having cast off his authority, Romola must discover for herself a source for “that supremely hallowed motive which men call duty, but which can have no inward constraining existence save through some form of believing love.” Temporarily adrift from ties of conscience, Romola drifts away literally in a boat, hoping to be “freed from the burden of choice,” to find either death “or else new necessities that might rouse a new life in her.” In a strikingly allegorical sequence, she finds herself in a plague-stricken village where the immediate needs of suffering people once again confirm her vocation, with no need for reference to either Savonarola or supernatural decrees. Ironically, the villagers, not knowing the truth about her mysterious arrival, later tell stories “about the Blessed Lady who came over the sea,”

legends by which all who heard might know that in times gone by a woman had done beautiful loving deeds there, rescuing those who were ready to perish.

Her entirely human actions, in other words, become the stuff of myth.

This is, in miniature, Eliot’s own view of the origins and value of religion: it has no authority as dogma, no standing as truth, but it provides an explanatory framework that serves until myths are replaced with reality. It also provides a structure through which people can help each other endure the inevitable hardships of life—but the examples of Dino and Savonarola suggest that religious conviction may impede as easily as it furthers that compassionate mission, while Romola’s actions show that religion is in no way necessary to it.

In emphasizing these philosophical aspects of Romola, I don’t mean to suggest that it has nothing to offer us as a novel. In the essay I’m not writing, the one that puts aside the novel’s defects, I start with more conventional measures of success in fiction, especially plot and character, both of which Eliot handles ably in Romola. Savonarola in particular is a complex portrait of a man “possessed by a never-silent hunger after purity and simplicity, yet caught in a tangle of egoistic demands, false ideas, and difficult outward conditions, that made simplicity impossible.”

Tito, too, is splendidly done. Of all Eliot’s erring egoists, he is the most charming. His descent into villainy is so easy and gentle that he hardly notices it himself: “He had sold himself into evil, but at present life seemed so nearly the same to him that he was not conscious of the bond.” His case exemplifies the insidious corruption of “following the impulses of the moment” rather than respecting the responsibilities incurred by the past, a moral imperative derived from Eliot’s determinism and literalized in Romola by the clutching hand of Tito’s betrayed foster father, Baldassare. Tito attempts to shake off his history: “the Past had grasped him with living quivering hands, and he had disowned it.” But the vengeful Baldassare stalks Tito through a series of suspenseful encounters, including a trial by Homeric allusion (which is much more thrilling than it sounds) and ending in horrifying violence.

Romola, in other words, has all the elements of successful fiction. For better and for worse, however, they are assembled in the service of ideas—ideas about the clash of competing worldviews and conflicts between irreconcilable measures of the good, about spiritual needs and political leadership, about human loyalty and fellowship, about the moral apparatus of nations as well as the moral imperatives of the individual conscience. The novel is deliberately set at a particular historical moment in which all of these ideas had a living urgency. It is also thick with the evidence that Eliot thought about all of this—so thick that it ultimately fails to balance the two qualities Eliot herself declared essential to historical fiction: “as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigor.” To be sure, the novel has both knowledge and vigor, just hardly ever at the same time.

But that’s a particularly difficult balancing act to pull off: it requires, as Eliot said, “a form of imaginative power [which] must always be among the very rarest,” “the rarest concurrence of acquirement with genius.” Mastery over the means to your ends is easier (though never easy) when those ends are more narrowly defined. If she didn’t pull it off, at least her attempt challenged her, as it continues to challenge her readers: “I began Romola as a young woman—I finished it an old woman,” she famously reported. Looked at in this way, her failure in Romola is an inspiration, as well as an education in what fiction can at least try to accomplish. We can do better, in our turn, than to dismiss it as “desperately wearying,” as Rebecca Mead did not long ago in the New Yorker. Henry James concluded that Romola is “on the whole … decidedly the most important” of Eliot’s novels: “not the most entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped.” As Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto observed, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Poor Andrea could never be Raphael or Michelangelo, but George Eliot did become the author of Middlemarch, something she could never have accomplished if she’d been afraid of failure.

____
Rohan Maitzen teaches in the English Department at Dalhousie University. She is a Senior Editor at Open Letters Monthly and blogs at Novel Readings.

Frederick Leighton’s illustrations for Romola have been reproduced from J. Thomas, P. T. Killick, A. A. Mandal, and D. J. Skilton, A Database of Mid-Victorian wood-engraved Illustration.

It was partly an accident of history that Burgess was asking those questions. He was born a modern, in 1917 Manchester in the wake of a century of political and social tumult. The arts had responded, as they usually do. Painting had drifted away from faithful representation and literature was struggling with the relativity of perception. In music the old diatonic harmony of the Classical period, where the main notes were comfortably separated, their relationships clear, gave way to chromaticism, notes that were closely spaced or did not belong to the key of the composition. New modes of expression grew out of this dissolving consensus, but the language of music was growing blurry. By the early twentieth century tonality had broken down altogether, and new composers were born adrift, forced to search out new structures and musical languages to speak to the age. Form changed, too. A familiar entity like the symphony, once a loosely connected work of four movements in sonata form, evolved toward the tone poem, a unified statement of artistic intent appropriate to the nineteenth century’s Romantics and the lonely individuals who followed.

Burgess’ mother had been a singer and a dancer, but he never knew her: when he was two she died of Spanish influenza, along with his sister Muriel. His father Joseph was a competent pianist who played sometimes in pubs and movie houses, but he was distant and often drunk, and he never taught his son the instrument. But music was all around. Burgess would pace the rooms above the cavernous pub owned by his father’s second wife, as he writes in Little Wilson and Big God, his first volume of memoirs, while “down below three pianos thumped and tinkled simultaneously, like something by Charles Ives.” Crummy house bands improvised soundtracks to silent films at the local cinema, and the family gathered around the piano to sing during the holidays. Most of all there was his crystal radio. Youth had been full of what Burgess calls “demotic” music, but in early 1929, some days after enduring a Wagner night put on by the Hallé orchestra, he found himself humming the theme from the Rienzi overture.

“One Saturday afternoon” not long after, he recalls in This Man and Music,

I scratched my crystal with the cat’s whisker, searching for Jack Payne and his BBC Dance Orchestra, when I got instead a kind of listening silence with coughs in it, and then a quite incredible flute solo, sinuous, exotic, erotic. I was spellbound. The velvet strings, the skirling clarinets, the harps, the muted horns, the antique cymbals, the flute, above all the flute. Eight minutes after that opening flute theme the announcer told me I had been listening to Claude Debussy’s L’Aprés-midi d’un Faune.

There is, for everybody, a first time. A psychedelic moment… an instant of recognition of verbally inexpressible spiritual realities, a meaning for the term beauty.

He made his parents purchase a gramophone and a shellac of the piece, along with a subscription to Radio Times. “The fact,” he writes in the autobiography, “that I knew enough French by now to understand the title was a kind of confirmation that music too could be intelligible. And, of course, a truth that still astonishes when we care to remind ourselves of it, music transcended language.” Burgess taught himself to play a serviceable piano and read music, his aim not to hurtle through Chopin etudes but to compose. He felt that music’s “eternal reality, as opposed to the evanescent reality of performance, lay in printed symbols.”

Burgess is a natural storyteller, and that makes him a personal mythologizer, so it’s difficult to know exactly how little encouragement he received. In This Man and Music he claims his father would not even show him middle C on the piano. In his memoirs, Joseph, offhandedly “pointing with a nicotined index,” marks the notes on the page and the piano, “a music lesson of exemplary brevity, the only one he ever gave, the only one I needed.” Still, Burgess was alone, for the most part. He composed ditties for the school paper, improvised at the piano, and read music literature. Soon he was ready to try large-scale composition.

Burgess faced a problem unique to his age: what language does one compose in? The Classical style was dead, and like any young enthusiast, prejudice and feeling had to do while judgment matured. “Music before Wagner had little appeal: it was orchestrally naïve, the trumpets and horns were mere bugles, the strings did not divide into a velvet shimmer, there was no bass clarinet or con anglais or percussion section,” the building blocks of a modern landmark like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. There was impressionism, twelve-tone music, serialism, neo-classicism, and all their local inflections. Burgess was very much taken by modern English composers like Elgar, but he also gravitated toward the safety of traditional forms of musical organization, like the old four-movement symphony.

He wrote his own first symphony in 1935, and here, from This Man and Music, is his hilarious description of the result:

What was the language of this symphony? A language altogether proper for a young man composing music in England in 1935. Diatonic, swift to modulate, inclined to the modal, Vaughan Williams harmonies, occasional tearing dissonances like someone farting at a teaparty, bland, meditative, with patches of vulgar triumph. Totally English music, hardly able to jump twenty-two miles into Europe.

(Later in life he asked an American conductor to explain what makes English music English. The American answered, “Too much organ voluntary in Lincoln Cathedral, too much coronation in Westminster Abbey, too much lark ascending, too much clodhopping on the fucking village green.”)

Burgess wanted to go to school for music, but was denied admittance on the grounds that he hadn’t passed a physics requirement. Chapfallen, he went for English instead, and music became a smaller part of his creative life. He was writing plays, poems and short stories, co-editing the University of Manchester’s magazine, and pursuing the social triumphs appropriate to a young undergraduate. Songs, not symphonies, filled out his blank staves now, soundscapes more suited to the conviviality of university life and the medical unit where he would soon be posted during World War Two. Burgess tried to get them published but there were no takers – another early musical disappointment, and there would be many more.

When he was discharged in 1946, Burgess needed a job, and found the only one that he was officially qualified for was teaching. He lectured for four years at teacher’s colleges, taught secondary school for a while, then enrolled in the Colonial Service and became an education officer in Malaya. He still composed, and even had some of his creations performed by local musicians, but as he puts it, “I, once destined to be a new Debussy, was pursuing a nice hobby.” Before he left Malaya, “the failed musician dug out some quires of thirty-stave music paper that had been mouldering with the shoes and clothes in that humid heat, and he composed a farewell gift for the Federation of Malaya – Sinfoni Melayu.” Burgess writes earlier in This Man and Music that he takes an empirical approach to music, and he brought into the symphony the lingual interests he had been pursuing there. He “tried to combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones as well as the instruments of the full Western orchestra.” But “the work was never to be played. It was never acknowledged by the Cultural Department to which I sent it.” (This didn’t stop him from writing, in the program notes to a performance of his third symphony in 1975, that his Malayan opus was in fact performed, but was stopped by a fight in the crowd, “still, in a kind of Platonic sense, waiting for its final chord.”)

In a way, the Sinfoni Melayu was a farewell to his dream of composing, too, for by then he had already started work on his third novel. “Destiny,” he writes, “seemed to have an unwished-for vocation ready for slow delivery.” Burgess claims a diagnosis of a terminal brain tumor turned that vocation into an imperative for his wife soon-to-be-widow: “jobless and pensionless, I had to turn the writing of fiction into a profession. I survived the terminal year, and so did the profession.”

He eventually became, of course, a famous novelist. Yet music still pulsed in the background, like a beacon that never dips under the horizon. He found “it was a temperamental necessity to me to cleanse my mind of verbal preoccupation by composing music. It no longer mattered whether the music would ever be heard: music was a kind of therapy… The struggle with words, their syntax and rhythms and referents, yielded to a concern with pure form.”

Burgess wrote about music, too. He reviewed concerts, ballets, operas, and books about music. Legend has it that he sent a cabman to the operas he was supposed to review. As Andrew Biswell, his best biographer, relates the story, “he would send [his driver] Sutton to new productions to make notes about the costumes and scenery, and then write his articles using Sutton’s notes and published opera scores, without ever having set foot in the theatre.” Whether or not this is true, Burgess is sharp and engaging on music, a field where most of the explicators are academics who learn everything there is to know about music except how to write about it.

Here is an excerpt from his review of Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven, where he’s talking about Ludwig Van’s capacity for growth:

He also had his ear, even when it was a deaf one, to the exterior world of sonic innovations. When Schonberg was told that six fingers were required to play his Violin Concerto, he replied: ‘I can wait.’ Beethoven did not want six fingers, but he did want a piano forte – once called by him, in a gust of patriotism, a Hammerklavier – that could, there and then, crash out his post-rococo imaginings. The fourth horn part of the Ninth Symphony was specially written for one of the new valve instruments: Beethoven knew a man near Vienna who possessed one. He was a great pianist and a very practical musician. His orchestral parts were hard to play but not impossible. Impossibility hovers, like a fermata, above the soprano parts in the Ninth, but sopranos were women, mothers, sisters-in-law.

Reading a volume of Monteverdi’s letters, he fumes at the indignities the composer endured:

On even the shortest list of supreme composers his name has to appear. And yet this superb artist was a slave to giddy patrons, a man trying to present images of order in an age notably disordered, subject to indigence and fear (at least on his son’s behalf) of the Holy Inquisition, always forced to fulfill the postures of humility before men unworthy to rule his bar lines.

Burgess is occasionally a cold or needlessly obscure writer (in his memoir, he opens a request for colorblind-friendly signage by saying, “I make a plea for the daltonians to all organisations that use a colour taxonomy on the oppository lines of a phonemic system”), but music-makers engage his sympathy, to say nothing of his erudition. He approaches music writing as one of them, poking holes in the cult of the conductor, celebrating the chroniclers of his art, and defending composers who’ve been dead since the seventeenth century.

I think this is because underneath his encyclopedic knowledge, sharp eye, and barbed wit, there is a nagging tingle of disappointment. Musicians and composers who write usually don’t mention their own work (novelist-critics don’t do it often either). Most who do are boasting. Burgess mentions his compositions all the time, but he is fishing for a different kind of attention. He closes a review of a famous percussionist’s memoir this way: “I would like to hear him play the percussion score I wrote for the Minneapolis production of Cyrano de Bergerac – sizzle cymbal slowly raised out of water, kitchen-utensil glockenspiel, cymbal placed on chromatic kettledrum and soft-rolled while the drum emits a slow glissando. He has probably done these things and more. He has also banged out a melodious book.” At the end of a review of two books about opera and literature, he writes, “I myself, who have suffered both sonic disciplines, have produced an operatic version of Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin. Ulysses is unique in having a professional soprano and a near-professional tenor, as well as a host of good amateurs, in its dramatis personae. But nobody wants my Singspiel.” Every other piece contains references to his compositions, sad, hopeless little suggestions for this player or that singer to take up his music, but they never answered.

But what of the music? The first thing that must be said is that it is incredibly hard to find. One commercial recording exists, of three guitar quartets, and it’s out of print. I have the luck to know a great Burgessian, who sent me a copy, but used discs can be scored from the Internet for a small premium over the original price. Some of the slow movements are very pleasant, but most of the pieces have a scattered feel, mixing styles and tempi uncomfortably, though not offensively. They suggest a Mediterranean-themed restaurant. From what I’ve heard of the rest of his music – and save a dull ballet called Mr. W.S., you can only find short excerpts online – this is where Burgess is at home, juggling ideas and trying to surprise the listener. I feel a little guilty rendering judgment on a lifetime’s work – over a hundred pieces, not including songs – when so little of it is available, but it’s clear that Burgess was not a great composer, and the few reviews he got said as much.

He could be defensive about that. “Whatever the music critics say,” he writes in Little Wilson and Big God, “I orchestrate well; I am in control of the tonal palette, or palate. When the tonal colours do not flash out, or when the mixture sounds wrong, it is always the fault of the conductor.” At other times Burgess seems to recognize that the greatest thing he could achieve was competence. Like a lot of writers, Burgess claimed he was rarely happy with his prose. He told an interviewer in the 1980s that he’d never written a great novel, and there was no bitterness in his voice. But on the occasions when he’s humble about his music you get the sense that he felt he could have been great, had he gotten proper encouragement and attention (the anger at family and educators in his memoir is unmistakable).

I think that failure nourished his innate curiosity about the nature of music, as though he needed to understand the thing that defeated him. He wrote two books about it. One, Mozart and the Wolf Gang (also published as On Mozart), appeared in 1991 on the bicentennial of the Austrian’s death, takes a lateral approach, illustrating music’s problems and celebrating the composer through dialogues, a libretto, straight writing, and a bizarre attempt to turn Mozart’s G minor symphony into prose. The “first movement” starts like this:

THE squarecut pattern of the carpet. Squarecut the carpet’s pattern. Pattern the cut square carpet. Stretching from open door to windows. Soon, if not burned, ripped, merely purloined, as was all too likely, other feet would, other feet would tread. He himself, he himself, he himself trod in the glum morning. From shut casement to open door and back, to and to and back. Wig fresh powdered, brocade unspotted, patch on cheek new pimple in decorum and decency hiding, stocking silk most lustrous, hands behind folded unfolded refolded as he trod on the squarecut pattern’s softness. Russet the hue, the hue russet…

That’s quite enough. It’s only ten pages, but they’re some of the longest in literature. Maybe someone had to try it.

If you’re familiar with classical music, the rest of the book has some ticklishly funny dialogue for you, as the great composers of the past mill about Heaven arguing like querulous children. “You have only one chord,” Prokofiev says to Wagner. “You hammered to death the secondary seventh on the leading note. The leading note of the dominant.” “Another pedant,” scoffs Wagner.

Mozart and the Wolf Gang, though, is really about Anthony Burgess, and the dialogues are a medium in which he debates himself. (One of the dialogues, in fact, is an argument between two characters named Anthony and Burgess.) They are debating the same questions Burgess raised almost a decade before in This Man and Music, a dual study of music and literature, where the arts intersect and where they don’t, and what practitioners of each can learn from each other. The same search underwrites his incidental prose.

“What is music?” is the question underlying it all, a query that prompts other mysteries. How do we talk about it? He distrusts the metaphor, but can’t bring himself to break with it. Objectively, pure music “is ultimately undescribable except in terms of its physical content,” he writes in a review of a book about Beethoven. It “cannot propose anything except self-referring structures,” which means that when we talk about it non-technically, we are really talking about “exalted motions of the mind induced by music.”

“This is, I need hardly say, all metaphorical talk,” he writes elsewhere.

Music is not about anything. Music has associations, but no referents. This sounds like a Ländler we once heard in Graz, and that effervesces with the very upper partials of the Changing of the Guard, and here is a fragment of a cowman’s ditty we remember lugubriously floating over a June-soaked hedgerow. All this is on the fringe of music, but it is more easily grasped than the main fabric.

That, I think, is why music is so mysterious. Burgess quickly grew out of his boyhood idea that the truth of a piece of music was contained in the score. He realized that unless you’re John Cage, a composition cannot fully exist until it is played, in much the same way that poetry is written to be spoken. (The reverse, of course, is also true.) But there is another component. In literature, the meanings of words are fairly clear, and we can usually speak with some degree of confidence about intentions of the writer and the meaning of the work. We can’t do that with pure music, though we try all the same. The problem, in other words, is us.

Not only listeners but composers, too. Their exact intentions are difficult to draw out, even in programmatic music like Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage or Debussy’s Estampes. (With opera the situation is less grave because music reinforces and interprets the libretto.) In This Man and Music Burgess provides an ideal example:

In the recapitulation of the first movement of [Beethoven’s] Fifth Symphony he stills the relentless allegro pace and interposes a solo oboe theme, adagio. Then he resumes the hurry. What does this mean? It means he is temporarily breaking the consistent rhythm of a public utterance: that oboe solo is not in conformity with the rhythm, therefore it must have a private significance. What is this significance? We do not know.

There is also the broader question of how we characterize composers, especially the great ones. However alike the forms they use, the best have a distinctive sonic identity, and that affects the music’s meaning, too. Burgess thought their genius lay in the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that they broke with convention, as Beethoven did in the example above. This alone is not a satisfying answer. In that review of Solomon’s Beethoven biography, he makes a telling remark: “Although Beethoven’s music is about sounds and structures, it is also, in ways not easily demonstrable, about Kant and the tyrant at Schönbrunn and Beethoven himself, body soul and blood and ouns.”

Beethoven was drawn to Kant and Napoleon, and his life was a parade of physical suffering and social indignity. The music he made seems to transmute that pain and grandeur; it’s cosmic and personal, above all intensely emotional. There’s an “ethical ring” to his compositions, as the writer David Dubal once put it. I believe all that, but I can’t really tell you why. I could say something about his frequent and violent changes in dynamics and tempo, or I could bring up his penchant for heavy, thumping bass figurations, but those words just hint at intention, they don’t translate it.

And then there is that final piece of meaning which no amount of textual analysis can explicate. We bring ourselves to music, and no two people hear the same piece in the same way. The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, for instance, is one of his most beloved and often-heard compositions. I have a friend who, whenever he hears it, thinks of a mournful young woman wreathed in steam, standing alone at a train station while the cars pull away. When I listen to it there are sometimes no images at all. I think of mortality and the passage of time. Sometimes I envision leaves carried across the horizon by a strong wind, which I suppose is a picturesque version of the same thing. It doesn’t matter that there were no locomotives in Vienna in Beethoven’s day, or whether he was thinking of time and mortality as he composed (though the march-like rhythm suggests that possibility). The meanings are no less true for being absolutely relative.

If music is even harder to truly understand than literature (and I make no claim to an answer), it is because it is the art that lives closest to human consciousness; our minds swim with and are carried along by abstract sound, not words and all their baggage. Burgess was a brilliant and intensely curious person. Had he been a mere listener, the meaning and nature of music would still have engaged him. But he was also a failed composer and a fine writer, so he studied music alongside literature. “Because we think in words,” he writes in This Man and Music, “the semantics of literature does not offer insuperable problems [as music does], though none of us understand the nature of a poem, play or novel as well as he thinks.” That nebulousness has frustrated and delighted readers all the same, and it is twinned by futile attempts to capture the totality of a moment, a life, or existence in words. We keep trying, though.

Humans “think in words,” Burgess says, which means to understand one mysterious art we have to solve it with another. We can try to do so empirically. Here is one of Burgess’ most perceptive but least artful explanations for music’s dynamism: he is explaining that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, one of the century’s finest vocalists, was great because he subordinated himself to the composer, and treated music as what it was, “a generalized emotional complex which each of his hearers shall recognize as part of his own actual or potential human experience.” He catches something of it there, but like Burgess, I can’t let go of metaphors.

One my favorite passages from his writings is at the beginning of Little Wilson and Big God, where he sits in New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1985, watching people go about their lives and thinking back on his own. “One goes on writing,” he says,

party because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive… But one pushes on because one has to pay bills. There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that some day that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it… When I hear a journalist like Malcolm Muggeridge praising God because he has mastered the craft of writing, I feel a powerful nausea. It is not a thing to be said. Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

Music and knowledge are like that, too. Burgess’ love of music spurred him to question and compose it all his life, and he died on the field, still fighting.

“We do not know what it is,” he once wrote, “except a great and sustaining mystery.”

____
Greg Waldmann, a Senior Editor at Open Letters Monthly, is a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.

Meg: Hell’s Aquarium

By Steve Alten
Variance Publishing, 2009

It was the perennially underrated John Arbuthnot, so willingly lampooned in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, who put it best: “The taste of the bathos is implanted by nature itself in the soul of man; till, perverted by custom or example, he is taught, or rather compelled, to relish the sublime.”

If this is true for bathos, how much more true must it be for bathyspheres, and so we come to what is perhaps the central question of modern hermeneutics: can a giant killer shark novel be good?

In unraveling the ichthyologic etiology of such a query, you’d expect the ur-text to be Peter Benchley’s 1975 novel Jaws, but that isn’t quite right. Benchley’s novel is actually a very smart, very urbane cautionary tale about human predators, about the voracity at the heart of human concupiscence. It has shrewd characterizations, multiple layers, and long evocative descriptive passages – in other words, in terms of giant killer shark novels, it wastes a lot of time.  

Because the important category when dealing with giant killer shark novels is that whole ‘giant killer shark’ part. That the shark be giant is absolutely de rigueur – despite the fact that some 90 percent of annual recorded shark attacks in the world involve fish smaller than basset hounds, such mishaps have zero dramatic potential. The egotism of the victim species adamantly determines the dimensions of the attacker, so sharks have to be huge … in fact, considering the navel-gazing capacity of the human race, it’s a wonder nobody’s written a giant killer shark novel in which the fish has gold-plated teeth.

The ‘killer’ part is the real key, though – it’s certainly the part that disqualifies Jaws. The “great fish” in Jaws kills people, but it’s just doing what sharks do, simply exploring a newly-discovered aisle at the supermarket. In that novel, if Benchley had decided on page 70 to fill Amity Sound with flopping baby seals, his big shark would have swerved clear of gristly humans without a second thought. The important thing isn’t that the sharks in question kill people. Golf ball-sized hailstones and falling terra cotta angels kill people, but they couldn’t be called killers, and by the same token neither could most sharks that swim in and take a bite, even a lethal bite. The dental damage alone isn’t enough – bite radius gets you squat in this town. As Freud might well have said, sometimes a shark is just a shark.

No, the giant killer shark has to embrace the killing. It has to transgress not just the five food groups but the Seven Deadly Sins. This rules out Jaws as firmly as if it had never been written, and it turns our attention rightly to the true source of the modern giant killer shark novel (‘modern’ because both Melville and Poe took faint nibbles at the genre a century ago): Jaws 2, the book written by seasoned, genuinely talented industry hack Hank Searls in 1978. In that story, which takes place a couple of years after the shark ‘Trouble’ of the events in Jaws ended in the destruction of the 22-foot great white shark that had been terrorizing the peaceful beach town of Amity, an offspring of that dead shark, twice its size, returns to the waters off Amity and proceeds to wreak havoc. At the novel’s climax, beleaguered Police Chief Brody, distracted by this new shark’s gourmandizing, lapses into a key piece of hysteria:

Incredible … Not a living creature … A force of nature …

He had the nightmarish thought that The Trouble … the shark off Amity Township … had never died at all. He had imagined it, not really seen it slipping dead into the shadows, it was immortal, invulnerable, would be here when all that he knew had left.

Chief Brody is wrong in the short term – he beats the huge shark in Jaws 2 (he gets it to bite down on an electrical cord, so kids, let that be a lesson to you) – but he’s dead right in the long run … literally, since in all subsequent Jaws novels he’s had a fatal heart attack and isn’t around to confront the increasingly more giant, more killer sharks that continue to bedevil his family. Future generations of Brodys have precious little success as shark-stopping heroes, although several of them do quite well as shark dental floss. But by then the germ is planted, the seed sown, the hook baited – by then the immortal, invulnerable shark is already born and swimming toward an isolated oceanic research station near you.

Ironically, actual nature works against the writers of giant killer shark novels, because in the natural world, there’s absolutely no doubt which life-form is the top relentlessly marauding predator on Earth, and it isn’t sharks. In the last twenty years alone, humans have virtually scoured the sea clean of living organisms – including millions of sharks of all species. These sharks are harvested in staggering numbers, shorn of their dorsal and caudal fins (which are used as the key ingredient in a fashionable soup), and tossed back into the sea mutilated and dying. No reliable estimates exist as to the extent of this harvesting, but it’s safe to say there will be no sizeable sharks left in the ocean in another ten years. After which, they’ll exist only in giant killer shark novels – although one wonders if shark extinction will also signal the extinction of the giant killer shark novel. Nobody writes killer buffalo novels anymore, after all.

Perhaps in some kind of unconscious reaction to this imbalance, the writers of modern giant killer shark novels have added one crucial ingredient to the immortal, invulnerable concoction Searls cooked up: science. No longer content to simply broker a Facebook meeting between a fat, bobbing Methodist and a rogue member of Carcharodon carcharias, they’ve set about, yenta-like, insuring such a meeting can’t not happen. Under normal circumstances, the bigger great white sharks get, the more seldom they bother to hunt for food anywhere near the ocean’s surface, where the pickings are comparatively slim. True, off California’s Farallon Islands every year you can find twenty-footers catapulting from the depths to punt baby seals ten feet into the air before chomping them into paintball-bursts of blood and blubber, but those sharks are just showboating dandies. Animals considerably bigger never indulge in gymnastics, preferring to prowl unobserved in the inky black where, presumably, much bigger prey hangs out (ten years ago a documentary team anchored a rotting carcass at 50 feet and filmed what happened, with quietly terrifying results: at first, the bait was worried by a crowd of six-foot sharks, but after a few minutes there came up from below a few ten and twelve-footers who dispersed the smaller fish, until they themselves were dispersed from below by a couple of eighteen-footers, who ate for only a few minutes before you could clearly see a ghostly-grey 25-foot behemoth rising slowly from the depths, causing those eighteen-footers to flee like minnows … and who knows what drove that behemoth away? We never find out, but only because the 25-footer ate the camera).

Such giant sharks seem perfectly content to swim, eat, and die far from vacationing Brodys, and to counter-act such unsuitable bashfulness, killer shark novelists improve on nature in the same time-honored way beauty pageant contestants do: with technological enhancements. Cloning technology comes in hand here (as it might in beauty pageants – who are we to judge?), as first seen in another seminal giant killer shark text, William R. Dantz’s 1992 Hunger, in which the Sealife Institute (there’s always an institute) genetically engineers a batch of killer sharks and clones into them the fun leaping ability of dolphins (the novel was published only a couple of years before we got conclusive video proof that sharks have plenty of natural-born leaping ability, but one senses Dantz would have been undeterred). There are two problems endemic to any giant killer shark novel: first, sharks can only eat you if you go in the water, and second, even in the water, humans still have that great big brain of theirs, sufficient for perhaps outwitting a huge killing machine with a brain the size of a peanut. In his fiendishly inventive twist, Dantz gets around both these problems – his sharks can leap like Flipper, and the very cloning process that gave them that ability also gave them the ability to think like Flipper.

Fortunately for mankind, the giant killer sharks in Hunger are all vanquished by the novel’s end (I think, though I could be wrong, that they’re all tricked into biting down on an electrical wire) – or ARE they? In classic thriller fashion, we’re left with a final scene in which it’s just possible the besetting evil is immortal and invulnerable (this gimmick is widespread throughout escapist literature and is given the definitive send-up at the conclusion of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode in which she faces Dracula, where the villain keeps trying to return, to the point where we hear Buffy’s annoyed voice-over saying “I’m standing right here!”).

Still, genetic enhancements will only take you so far (except, come to think of it, in beauty pageants): even the smartest, most agile shark inspires no terror in Iowa lakes. In the wake of Dantz’s book, the giant killer shark novel seemed washed up, an evolutionary dead end. Short of giving us sharks who drive land rovers, what could aspiring ichthyothrillers do?

In 1997, Steve Alten solved that problem in a quintessentially American way: if something isn’t working, make it bigger and try again. He dreamt up Meg.   Short for Carcharodon megalodon, a monstrous 60-foot 20-ton shark that roamed the tepid oceans of Earth’s Late Cretaceous Period, feasting on prehistoric sea-creatures (and, in the opening scene of that first Alten novel, Meg, a lucklessly waterlogged Tyrannosaurus rex). In Meg, Alten imagines a breeding population of Megs that takes up residence in the incredible depths of the Mariana Trench, where they swim and eat and mind their own business, unglimpsed by modern man – except for marine biologist Jonas Taylor, who spots a living Meg while on a deep dive and is greeted with the ridicule of his colleagues when he reports it. As you might expect, a Meg or two make their way to the surface and wreak havoc in the modern world, and in the manner of giant killer shark novels, events conspire to put Dr. Taylor in their path. In the end, he manages to net one alive.

The Los Angeles Times, blurbing about Meg, hit the nail squarely on the head: “Jurassic Shark!” Other critics were less eager to gobble it up, and Entertainment Weekly drolly reported that Alten’s publisher was unhappy with the draft of his second Meg thriller. A lesser writer might have seen blood in the water and paddled to shore while the paddling was good (Alten did swerve from his template, a couple of years ago, turning out The Loch, a very entertaining novel about, um, the Loch Ness Monster) – and perhaps a greater writer would have too. But Alten is at heart a P.T. Barnum-style showman (publicity photos show him spreading his arms inside the fossilized jawbones of a Meg – a stunt Melville would probably have declined), and he must have known that in Carcharodon megalodon he had an absolutely unbeatable gimmick.

In his latest Meg novel, the fourth in the series, he’s matched that gimmick with perhaps the greatest schlock-thriller title any such book has ever had. Ladies and gentlemen, surface-dwellers of all ages, welcome to Hell’s Aquarium.

Twenty years have passed since the events of Meg. Jonas Taylor, older but still tough as a nut, runs the Tanaka Institute (see?) with his imperious wife Terry (occasionally helped by their children, aspiring newscaster Dani and the novel’s hero, twenty-year-old college football dreamboat David) and his best friend James “Mac” Mackriedes. The Institute’s star attractions come straight from Hell: no less than five Megs – gigantic 60-foot Angel and her five offspring, each of which still dwarfs the biggest great white shark in our modern oceans. As the novel opens, the bleachers are full – and the incredibly predictable happens! Angel bites an Institute worker in half while the horrified audience screams – all except a small group of well-dressed foreigners, who turn out to be from Dubai. The crown prince of that tiny nation (which is real but, as anybody who’s ever visited it will attest, nevertheless feels invented) has built the world’s largest aquatic theme park, and he’s sent his trusted Feisal bin Rashidi to negotiate the purchase of some Megs to attract Western tourists – an uphill process, as bin Rashidi knows full well:

“ … most Westerners will never consider vacationing in our country because of the stigma associated with terrorism and the Middle East.”

Jonas smiles. “Well, at least it hasn’t stopped Haliburton from moving its headquarters there.”

Mac kicks him under the table.

Bin Rashidi’s smile remains frozen. “Thank you for demonstrating my point.”

“My apologies. And you’re right, there’d have to be something pretty special in Dubai to get me to fly halfway around the world to see it, I don’t care how tall your buildings are.”

“On that point we agree. We can also agree that very few people would ever travel to Dubai from North or South America to see a Megalodon when they could simply visit your facility here in California … even if they do risk being eaten.”

Mac winces. “Pick up your jock strap, Jonas, you’ve just been schooled.”

Jonas ignores his friend. “Point taken. So why the visit?”

The Dubai contingent gets down to business: they want to buy a couple of Megs, and they want a Meg specialist to oversee the animals’ introduction to Dubai. Jonas isn’t interested in the job, but if you look closely at his family reminiscences, you might spot a hint as to who his substitute will be: “Wasn’t it yesterday when I held my newborn son in my arms? Coached his little league team? Taught him how to scuba? To pilot a mini-sub? Where did all those years go?”

Where indeed. Turns out young himbo David can’t resist the summer-money Rashidi dangles before his eyes, and as fast as you can say “I’ll be OK dad,” he’s jetting off to Dubai to train the mini-sub pilots who’ll work with the Megs … a group of pilots that includes our hero’s love interest, Kaylie Szeifert, sporting features we’re told resemble “those of a young Stephanie Powers” (it’s not elaborated whether or not that’s a good thing). Kaylie announces herself:

“I’m here to make the cut, and I don’t take prisoners. And before any of you start prejudging me because of my ‘X’ chromosome, I spent the last two summers working at Hawkes Ocean Technologies, helping them test their new Deep Rover submersibles.”

As you could probably predict from that declaration, when crunch-time comes, Kaylie fumbles, panics, blacks out, screams, cries, and needs to be reassured approximately every 16 seconds by strapping young David (David’s sister Dani acquits herself much better in her more limited subplot), who wins her heart despite being callow, coarse, and offhandedly sexist (at one point he coaxes a mini-sub to peak performance while shouting “Hold on, baby, I own this bitch!” – speaking about the sub. I hope). The two of them become a team – and just in time, because it turns out the crown prince has a fiendish hidden agenda: he’s after bigger fish than any Meg.

And here’s where you just have to doff your cap to Alten: in the face of critical mockery and his publisher’s doubts, he took the basic “fish survives the Cretaceous” premise of Meg and amped it up to Meg-sized proportions. In Hell’s Aquarium, which is certainly the best Meg novel to date and quite possibly the best giant killer shark novel ever written, he gives us “the Cretaceous survives the Cretaceous.”

There’s a hidden patch of deep-ocean floor, you see, and there’s a lava-rock roof over most of it, see, and a mad scientist (you didn’t think you were getting out of this without one of them, did you?) discovered it, see, and here’s the best part: it’s got lots of gigantic ancient sea [add: – see – !] creatures in it, not just Megs! And as fast as you can say “I’ll be careful dad,” David and Kaylie find themselves down at the bottom of that hidden sea of monsters, and Jonas is hurrying to save them, enlisting the most unlikely ally imaginable to deal with all those prehistoric beasties (hint: she’s a giant killer shark). Alten writes the whole thing in a hyperkinetic present tense, turns and twists every scene until it squeaks (there’s a scene late in the book involving a shark autopsy that any thriller-writer would give a tonsil to have thought up – I wouldn’t be surprised if Alten danced around the room when it came to him), and takes care to keep his subplots constantly simmering. The whole thing fizzes with the kind of fun delirium only the most effective giant killer shark novels dare to attempt (one of those subplots takes this delirium to utterly unprecedented heights – it involves Natalie Wood’s younger sister Lana, who once upon a time played a Bond girl named Plenty O’Toole)(I am not, needless to say, making this up – I couldn’t if I wanted to).

 
Which brings us back to the question of hermeneutics, doesn’t it? In Hell’s Aquarium, Steve Alten has written a book that shares almost every quality with its toothsome prehistoric stars: it’s big, not quite mindless, streamlined, ruthlessly effective, and if it ever stopped moving, it would immediately sink out of sight. In it, we see the Hank Searls template in all its details – including occasional flashes of fairly good prose:

Small waves lap the sea wall. Somewhere close by, a metal bracket clinks against a naked flagpole, its hollow cadence set to the wind. The Pacific thunders in the distance. Monterey grays as a storm front moves in from the west.

And most certainly including the ludicrous over-rigging of the enemy on display in Hunger, as when one character, speaking of animal intelligence, says, “If you look at the relationship between brain size and body weight, sharks are right up there with mammals.” Not sure which relationship between brain size and body weight is being referred to here, but if it’s the one connoting intelligence, that character must have taken one too many fin-bumps to the head: sharks are exceedingly simple creatures, entirely incapable of thought (cf: beauty pageant contestants). Only very rarely do their hard-wired behaviors lead them to act like killer-thriller villains (Michael Capuzzo’s slam-bang fantastic 2001 book Close to Shore narrates one such instance and is not to be missed) – the rest of the time, they need a little helping hand from the hardworking hucksters of the writing world.

Steve Alten may just be the best of all those hucksters, and he’s written the Moby Dick of giant killer shark novels. Turn your mind off, open wide, and eat, eat, eat.

___
Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Columbia Journal of American Studies, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He hosts the literary blog Stevereads and is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly.

But if asked, “Where does your soul live?” I fear many of us would have nothing specific in mind. To simply answer, “Anywhere I can be myself,” is to trip over religion’s robes and invoke gauzy utopia. Perfect communities, after all, still have boundaries. What if, O my brothers and sisters, being yourself means clubbing a homeless man half to death?

British polymath Anthony Burgess challenged readers to look behind the gauze in his ultra-violent 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In it, our narrator is a fifteen-year-old hooligan named Alex, who guides us through his drug-charged nights and sex-addled days with chummy nonchalance. His violent behavior, by turns creative and destructive, is intoxicating to follow. He speaks to us in a heavy teen slang called Nadsat, framing a world that feels crafted by Burgess for his narrator to pillage; a scene where Alex and his gang (his droogs, as they call themselves) catch a man walking home from the library testifies sneeringly:

He had a book called The Miracle of the Snowflake… “You deserve to be taught a lesson, brother,” I said, “that you do.” This crystal book I had was very tough-bound and hard to razrez to bits, being real starry and made in the days when things were made to last like, but I managed to rip the pages up and chuck them in handfuls… “There you are,” said Pete. “There’s the mackerel of the cornflake for you.”

The stand-out words razrez (rip) and starry (old) are easily explained. Most of the rest of the novel, however, snares the reader in a linguistic fever dream. Words of Slavic and gypsy origin, like devotchka (girl) and chelloveck (man) appear alongside saccharine rhymes like appy polly loggy (apology). The latter is schoolyard tripe, reminding us that Alex is but a babe. The former is a stylish commentary on the Cold War, the terrifying height of which Burgess couldn’t help but encode in his writing. He asks us to wonder if the nuclear stalemate ended amiably, with cultural exchange, or continues down more sinister avenues (music idols of this world include Johnny Zhivago and Goggly Gogol).

But Nadsat forms only one layer in the hefty shale of black humor and social analysis comprising A Clockwork Orange. Adventurous readers have been chipping through it for decades, and publisher Norton celebrated the novel’s 50th Anniversary this October with a new hardcover edited by Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. In this ultimate version, we see a restoration of the text that relies on the original 1961 manuscript, the first U.K. and U.S. hardcover editions, the first U.K. paperback, and an album Burgess kept while writing the novel.

Biswell aims, “to include as much Nadsat as possible,” which I find to be a lovely, horrorshow endeavor (halfway through my second reading, I’d decoded Alex’s language in full and craved new words to absorb). He also includes: the final chapter left out of the U.S. version (featuring Alex’s redemption), the first chapter of an abandoned 1973 non-fiction book called The Clockwork Condition (which clarifies his own message in light of Stanley Kubrick’s daring film adaptation), and a clever 1987 interview between Burgess and Alex himself. Noticeably missing, however, is the Nadsat glossary found in previous editions. Instead, Biswell treats us to notes explaining some miscellaneous slang, and the many arcane references to the author’s contemporaries and favorite poets.

This is fairly royal treatment for what Burgess called “a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks.” But we won’t get too far in our enjoyment of Biswell’s bonus material without a deeper acknowledgment of A Clockwork Orange‘s cultural impact. Upon release, it sold slowly and befuddled some critics, Robert Taubman of the New Statesman among them. It’s “a great strain to read,” he said, which better describes John Garrett’s review for the Times Literary Supplement. Garrett called the novel “a viscous verbiage which is the swag-bellied offspring of decay.”

Superficially, these reactions to A Clockwork Orange‘s first third are justified. Alex and his gang (Pete, Georgie and Dim) prowl a dismally futuristic metropolis and its outskirts, where decrepit apartment blocks give way to lonely country lanes. The savage foursome (spiked high on victuals from the Korova Milkbar) shred both venues like crisp linen, beating, raping and torturing whomever they like. The police lack the speed and imagination to rout them, and if Alex cared to quote poet Robert Browning, he’d say, “[Bog’s] in his heaven, all’s [righty right] right with the world.”

Right, that is, for wayward teens ripped to the gills. Not so right for a homeless veteran who sings, “O dear land, I fought for thee/And brought thee peace and victory,” before getting thrashed. Not so right for a novelist and his wife, comfy in their rural home until Alex and the boys waltz in, trash the place, then give her the old “in-out” while her husband watches. The droogs also satiate their nightly cravings, like warriors unleashed from the garrison of daylight, wearing matching jackets, shoulder pads and bombastic jockstraps. This helps when brawling with a rival gang, yet another activity met with sadistic aplomb:

When they viddied us a-coming they let go of this boo-hooing little ptitsa, there being plenty more where she came from, and she ran with her thin white legs flashing through the dark… “Well, if it isn’t fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.” And then we started.

For all this, Alex himself is a noble little savage. He’s disgusted by poor hygiene and slovenly dress. He demands devotion from the boys for his quick-thinking leadership. He’s also capable, post-froth and off to sleep in his parents’ flat, of awesome respect for composers like Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. Listening to his elaborately arranged stereo, he says:

Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed.

Clearly, there’s something of young Alex worth saving. But first, true tragedy must shatter our brutal malchick’s world. This happens in the form of a botched home invasion, where Alex cracks a middle-aged woman over the head with a statue. While he fights off her many cats, the police arrive. The woman dies soon after, and Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in jail.

Ever the optimistic pleasure-seeker, Alex (now referred to as 6655321) loses himself in the violence of the Bible and classical music presented by the prison chaplain. He also happens to hear of an experimental treatment called “Ludovico’s Technique,” which, if successful, would commute his sentence to a few more weeks and cure him of his evil urges. But, as the chaplain warns, “Goodness comes from within. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

These words impress Alex little, and he begins the treatment fully intent on resuming criminality once free. He has no idea that he’s to take medication that induces nausea and then watch short films. He has no idea that the films feature rapes, beatings and WW II footage, and that this aversion therapy will rewrite his brain chemistry- will cause him to be nauseated by sex and violence. When Alex, stunned by his reduction to a lab animal, questions it all, his doctor explains:

What is happening to you now is what should happen to any normal healthy human organism contemplating the actions of the forces of evil, the workings of the principles of destruction. You are being made sane, you are being made healthy… You’ll be healthier still this time tomorrow.

Burgess’ point, that an individual’s violence is preferable to the state’s violence, failed to register with most readers (despite Brave New World and 1984 paving the way). By the mid-1960s, mixed reviews of A Clockwork Orange had helped sell just about four thousand copies (from an initial print run of 6,000). Luckily, at least two of those copies ended up in the hands of writer William S. Burroughs and artist Andy Warhol, creative risk-takers themselves. They adored Burgess’ novel, and from this underground appreciation swelled the movement to film it. Director Stanley Kubrick, drawn to the project because he liked the book’s “wonderful plot, strong characters and clear philosophy,” delivered his quixotically faithful adaptation in 1971.

Immediately, Kubrick rips away the gauze that Burgess had so thoughtfully parted for us. In the novel, Alex describes a hallucinogenic trip like so:

You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn’t care… Then the lights started cracking like atomics and the boot or finger-nail or, as it might be, a bit of dirt on your trouser-bottom turned into a big big big mesto, bigger than the whole world, and you were just going to get introduced to old Bog or God when it was over… That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

Master of his own medium, Kubrick sends his audience tripping in a black room with dozens of white tables shaped like naked, crab-walking women. The menu floats in bubble letters on the walls, and for the slip of a coin, Milk Plus (drencrom, vellocet or synthemesc) pours from the nipples of statues. Alex and his droogs are thrillingly iconic, wearing black top hats and bowlers (in a swipe at the government), fake eyelashes, white long-johns, and dingy cricket codpieces. When McDowell’s narration begins (each word like a sinister pet to the cheek), Kubrick’s spell is complete.

Like Alex during “Ludovico’s Treatment,” we can’t look away. The beating of the homeless man, the brawl with Billyboy’s gang, and the home invasions (Alex performs Singing in the Rain in one, kills with a giant alabaster penis in the other) are both repellant and alluring. At the time, Kubrick tap-danced on the line of what was viewable, and his film remains one of two (along with Midnight Cowboy) to receive an Academy Award Nomination for Best Picture, despite an X rating.

Burgess said that, “Kubrick’s achievement swallowed mine whole.” The world then proceeded to swallow the author whole, placing him on the permanent defensive regarding the material’s moral character. “The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about,” he said in A Flame Into Being: The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence (1985), “and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die.” This is because, for all that visual sumptuousness flowed like red red kroovy from Kubrick, he filmed the version of the book published in America – the version with no redemptive final chapter.

Which means, we do get Alex strapped to a chair, eyes clasped open, while Nazis march onscreen (to a Moog rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth). We do get Alex failing to restart his life because he wants to strangle the man renting his bedroom (and can’t, for the crippling nausea). We also see him abused by former droogs and his suicide attempt (after finding that music sickens him as well). Then, in the hospital with limbs plastered, Alex receives a visit from a politician. The suave man explains that it’s in everyone’s (but mainly the state’s) best interest for the youngster to heal and become a productive member of society. Alex agrees (accepting the bribe of a salaried job of his choice), and to celebrate, the politician wheels in huge speakers, understanding that the boy loves music. Beethoven’s Ode To Joy plays while the press photographs the pair shaking hands. Within a minute, ecstatic malfeasance creeps onto Alex’s face. He fantasizes about shagging wildly in the snow as the bourgeoisie clap. He assures us, “I was cured all right.”

Cured of brainwashing, yes. But how about that craving for sex and ultra-violence, little Alex? Kubrick filmed no final scene showing A Clockwork Orange‘s narrator choosing responsible adulthood. And in wrapping up an unvarnished marathon of chaos, perhaps a less bemusing end would have been appropriate. As it happened, Britain in the early 1970s suffered blackouts, strikes and three day workweeks. By 1973, newspaper headlines (and hooligans themselves) were blaming the film for vicious copycat crimes. Kubrick, already retired to his family’s country house, eventually pulled the film from U.K. theaters. Burgess, in the meantime (and until his death in 1993), faced the public.

Alex isn’t known for shyness himself. In a playful interview Burgess wrote for newspaper publication in 1987, he called A Clockwork Orange‘s director, “The gloopy shoot that put me in the sinny- Lubic or Pubic or some such naz.” The interview’s full text appears for the first time in Biswell’s 50th Anniversary edition of the novel. Biswell also provides marvelously researched notes, illuminating Burgess’ thoughts as he wrote. Scattered throughout A Clockwork Orange are Shakespeare quotes (Rest, perturbed spirit), literary street names (Boothby Avenue, Priestly Place), and antiquated English slang (rozz, sammy act). But it’s poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (Burgess memorized his works as a child) who benefits most from the author’s sly attention (double firegolds, shagged and fagged and fashed, lip-music).

While such details are piddling minutiae to many readers, they represent a monumental victory for Burgess himself. Biswell’s offering (and our subsequent enjoyment) of them proves we’ve ceased demonizing the novel and now consider it, first and foremost, literature.

This would be harder if Alex and his perfectly brutal world still scared us. Lined up with punk rockers and gangsta rappers, he’s just another social ill Western Civilization has co-opted (Bart Simpson dressed as him for Halloween twenty years ago). Besides, teens today have their own utopia of addictive video games, internet porn and weed. True adolescent mayhem is now the domain of mentally ill gunmen. Modernity, in other words, has been taming the young malchick for decades.

But lest Alex feel slighted, I send to him through the literary ether this passage from Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men:

The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection… The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power…

And if he doesn’t like it, he can kiss my sharries.

___
Justin Hickey is a freelance writer living in Boston and completing his first science fiction novel.

For Jarrell lamented his age – the “Age of Criticism,” as he termed it in his essay of that name – in which critics had ceased to be humble in the face of works of art, both great and minor:

Once, talking to a young critic, I said as a self-evident thing, ‘Of course, criticism’s necessarily secondary to the works of art it’s about.’ He looked at me as if I had kicked him, and said: ‘Oh, that’s not so!’(I had kicked him, I realized.) And recently I heard a good critic, objecting to most of the criticism in the quarterlies, say what real criticism did: what it did, as he put it, was almost exactly what people usually say that religion, love, and great works of art do. Criticism, which began humbly and anomalously existing for the work of art, and was in part a mere by-product of philosophy and rhetoric, has by now become, for a good many people, almost what the work of art exists for: the animals come up to Adam and Eve and are named—the end crowns the work.

Humility, for Jarrell, was a prerequisite to good criticism. First, because too lofty an attitude might – to the extent that writers paid attention to the critics (which they did, and do!) – end by distorting or even stemming the tide of poems and stories with which the critic was concerned. “Why stick one’s neck out so far for so little,” and create a work of art, when that work is almost certain to be damned with faint praise, or just damned altogether? Jarrell quotes Elizabeth Bishop saying, of the criticism-freighted journals of her day, “After I go through one of the literary quarterlies I don’t feel like reading a poem for a week, much less like writing one.” Much safer to stand back and write criticism than to make an almost necessarily imperfect work of art.

Mostly, however, critics should be humble because they are nearly certain to be wrong. “Art is long, and the critic is the insect of a day.” Their fondest darlings may be left in the dust by the judgment of history, while the same writers they disdained are considered geniuses by all the critics’ grandchildren. Consequently, as Jarrell wrote, “a great deal of the best and most sensible criticism of any age is necessarily absurd. . . . Goethe and Schiller thought so little of Hölderlin that after a while they wouldn’t even answer his letters.” Criticism is only the reflection of individual taste, and bears no greater claim to authority than that. I cannot tell you which poems will be read by the public in fifty years; I can only tell you which ones I will come back to.

For this reason, Jarrell was deeply suspicious of both the increasingly academic nature of criticism, and its systematization, of attempts to turn it into a scientific discipline by which the critic could definitively reveal which works were great and which were bad. Criticism should be “written by a reader for readers, by a human being for human beings,” he wrote, but he found that “a great deal of [it] might just a well have been written by a syndicate of encyclopedias for an audience of International Business Machines.” And the end result was that rather than write stories, poems or plays, young intellectuals settled down to increasingly “blinkered, methodical, self-important” dissections of them:

Chances are that it has never even occurred to the young critic to write a story or a poem. New critic is but old scholar writ large, as a general thing: the same gifts which used to go into proving that the Wife of Bath was really an aunt of Chaucer’s named Alys Persë now go into proving that all of Henry James’s work is really a Swedenborgian allegory. Criticism will soon have reached the state of scholarship, and the most obviously absurd theory—if it maintained intensively, exhaustively, and professionally—will do the theorist no harm in the eyes of his colleagues.

This increasingly “Alexandrian” sort of criticism might have been a harmless fad of the academy’s, but such work appeared not in scholarly publications, but in literary ones. Beyond this, Jarrell observed (and this was in the 1950s!) that the “reading public” didn’t read as much or as widely or as joyfully as once it did. Jealous of its time, distracted by television and more, readers turned to critics in order to know what books to read, such that most of what they ended up reading was criticism. “It is criticism, after all, which protects us from the bad or unimportant books that we would otherwise have to read; and during the time we have saved we can read more of the criticism which protects us.”

Perverse incentives, there, for the critic! All his cultural capital lies, like the Wizard of Oz’s power, in preventing anyone from peeking behind the curtain. Before that curtain, the critic is a wise guide to whom timid readers flock, nearly omniscient in his ability to discern the worthwhile from the worthless. Behind it, he is a bespectacled man from Peoria, and no different from anyone else. Even Jarrell could hardly blame the critics of his age for the fiction in which they conspired with the public – that there was a wondrous, timesaving way of reading only the good, the right, and the beautiful, and that was by listening to the critic, that authoritative source. Of course, Jarrell did blame them. Reading is not meant to be so narrow an exercise, nor to be approached with the same mixture of weariness and civic duty as making sure one eats enough fiber. And to Jarrell’s mind it was the critics, if anyone, who should know that.

Jarrell hoped that a critic was a creature borne from a love of reading, a love of art. He observed, nonetheless, that a great many critics gave “an odd impression about reading, one that might be given this exaggerated emblematic form: ‘Good Lord, you don’t think I like to read, do you? Reading is serious business, not something you fool around with in your spare time.’” What a sad discipline, critisicm! Not only does the critic stand between the reader and the writing, like the clowning Wall between Pyramus and Thisbe, he ends up getting in his own way. Jarrell writes that a true critic – and no critic is true all the time – is “an extremely good reader – one who has learned to show others what he saw in what he read.” And why should you want to show anyone anything about that, if not out of enthusiasm for reading itself?

Jarrell was not around for the 1980s, when English departments were gripped by the desire to squeeze everything ever written through the Derrida-Foucault-Baudrillard Play-Doh Fun Factory (which I escaped by being under the age of twelve at the time– I don’t think anyone’s deconstructed Anne of Green Gables yet), but he saw enough of like-minded gobbledygook in the formally-minded new criticism of the 1950s. “It is perpetually tempting to the critic to make his style and method so imposing to everyone that nobody will notice or care when he is wrong.” As a result, “the plagues of Egypt couldn’t equal all the references to Freud and Jung and Marx and myths and existentialism and neo-Calvinism and Aristotle and St. Thomas that you’ll sometimes see in one commonplace article.” Here again, the critic acts not as a guide to the reader, but as a wedge separating the reader from the work, confusing him, convincing him that reading a book is a difficult and dangerous undertaking. “In literature it is not that we have a labyrinth without a clue; the clues themselves have become a worse labyrinth.”

Well then, what is a reader to do, and what a critic? Jarrell suggests that both realize that the reality of the critic is the bespectacled man from Peoria, and not the wizard. The reader might try venturing into the world of literature without “a white hunter, native guides, and a $10,000 policy … bought from the insurance-machine at the airport.” He could read a story instead of a review, a poem instead of an analysis, and without being close-minded about it, attempt to have some conviction in his own taste. The critic, meanwhile, should remember that “critics exist simply to help us with works of art.” The reader and the work of art should be foremost in his mind – he writes for them, and not for the glory of criticism. He should “admit what he can’t conceal, that criticism is no more than (and no less than) the thoughtful and disinterested judgment of a reader, a loving and experienced and able reader, but only a reader.”

Did Jarrell himself admit what he couldn’t conceal? I first read Jarrell’s reviews and essays at least a decade ago; coming back to them was a happy experience. In “The Age of Criticism,” Jarrell writes that a critic should “disappear in the quicksand of his own convictions,” and he himself wrote a personal, personable criticism. In the reviews collected most particularly in Poetry and the Age, enthusiasm is the better part of his criticism, but his bread never wants leavening. When he sees what he likes, he is quick and effusive to point it out, but without slavish euphoria. When he doesn’t like what he sees, it is more in sorrow than in anger that he writes. He can be irritable – the quick-witted nearly always are – as when calling out Muriel Rukeyser for telling, not showing:

Are the questions pure and fiery? Always, in such poetry as this. The rhythm of every last word is crying: “Don’t ask questions – lie back, child! Don’t you want to be moved?” Yes; but more than this, and more specifically than this. Tell us the questions and we can see whether they’re pure and fiery. And—and it’s all so familiar . . . Miss Rukeyser almost asks us to be unjust to her, to treat her as an orator, not a poet, and to quote to her Kant’s crushing paragraphs (in the Critique of Judgment) about the difference between oratory and poetry.

It isn’t a hatchet-job, though. Elsewhere in the same essay, he praises Rukeyser’s original imagery and “considerable talent for emotional rhetoric.” She’s not a bad poet, he seems to be saying; it’s that she’s good enough to have written a better book than this.

In reviews of work he likes, he suffers the same fate as anyone attempting to convey an enthusiasm – everything you can say boils down to “well, it’s really very good.” The adjectives of English are much better equipped for disdain than delight, and while Jarrell goes to some lengths to explain what he favors in, say, Frost, the results are not always entirely persuasive. I don’t think I’ll ever reconcile myself to his view that Frost’s “Provide, Provide,” is an “immortal masterpiece,” but I certainly have given it more and deeper consideration since reading Jarrell’s take than I would have ever done otherwise.

Jarrell’s greatest talent might have been not for persuading you to his view, but for persuading you that there might be something in what he found beautiful, useful, or important and that – this is key – the only way for you to know would be to read it. I found myself pulling many books off my shelf, re-reading Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell. And I even took a chance on a totally unread book, mentioned in passing in “The Age of Criticism” and another essay, “Poets, Critics, and Readers” – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Before re-reading Jarrell’s essays, I hadn’t the least desire or intention to read Kim. Having done so, I am happy – I haven’t read such an unexpected book in ages. Unexpected in its themes, characters, and execution – like the White King with his ham sandwiches and hay, I don’t say there’s nothing better, just that there’s nothing like it.

Kim was unexpected also in its provenance. To read a book because it was mentioned favorably in an essay, in a piece of criticism, may not seem terribly odd at all, but it is odd for me. I subscribed for several years to the New York Review of Books, and I don’t think I ever read a book reviewed there. Rather than aid my reading, the New York Review seemed to get – there’s that Wall again – in the way of it. I don’t know about “disappearing into quicksand,” but Jarrell doesn’t get in the reader’s way; he aids.

And so, I suppose I need not apologize after all. For all I know, it is still an “Age of Criticism,” staffed by critics that “resemble one of the robots you meet in science-fiction stories, with a microscope for one eye, a telescope for the other, and the mechanical brain at Harvard for a heart.” But I have tried to write this piece as a reader, for a reader, and as a human being for other human beings. And if it persuades you not to view Jarrell as I do, but to pick up his essays and see if you agree, then, as Jarrell said, “the article will have been worth writing.”

____
Maureen Thorson is the poetry editor of Open Letters Monthly. Her first book of poetry, Applies to Oranges, is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. She lives in Washington, DC.

Paul McCartney: The Life

Sooner or later, everyone has to choose one. For anglophone children of a certain age, picking a favorite Beatle is a rite of passage akin to choosing a political party or deciding between the Yankees and the Mets. The Beatle you choose is more than just a statement of musical preference; it’s a totemic spirit, a symbolic encapsulation of a whole set of philosophical values and priorities that will follow you through your life. There’s a lot riding on that little moptop.

For the cool kids, of course, there’s John. Even going back to the band’s heyday in the 1960’s, John Lennon has ever been the Beatle with the greatest cultural cache. Edgy, political, possessed of a cutting and insouciant wit, John is the choice of football jocks and vinyl-spinning hipsters alike. George Harrison appeals to the bookish, quiet types; the boys and girls in the back of the classroom who spend most of their time writing thoughtful poetry in their private notebooks. About Ringo fans, the less said the better.

And then, for some of us, there’s Paul. Of all the Fab Four, Paul McCartney is at once the most accessible and the most puzzling. His musical genius is indisputable: here is the primary force behind some of the greatest pop masterpieces of the 20th century, from “Yesterday,” to “Hey, Jude,” to “Band on the Run.” His stylistic range arguably exceeds that of any of his bandmates, encompassing straightforward rock and roll jams (“I’m Down,” “Oh! Darling”); delicate, tuneful melodies (“She’s Leaving Home,” which Leonard Bernstein once compared favorably to the lieder of Franz Schubert); and sprawling, baroque, prog-rock epics (“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” or the magnificent second half of Abbey Road).

After a half-century of such musical virtuosity, Paul McCartney’s cultural credentials ought to be unimpeachable. And yet, there has always been something slightly cheap and disreputable about being a Paul person. For all his vast talent, McCartney’s can’t help but seem just a bit too commercial, a bit too populist, a bit too eager to please, for his own good. Next to Lennon’s confessional lyrics and sometimes alienating experimentalism, Paul is merely the proverbial writer of silly love songs. He is the Cute One, for better or worse. Serious fans need not apply.

Veteran rock writer Philip Norman is more aware of this reputation than most. In 1981, Norman wrote Shout!, one of the first soup-to-nuts biographies of the Beatles, and one of the formative texts in establishing Paul’s reputation as a heavyweight entertainer but a featherweight intellect and artist. Perhaps even more damning, Norman’s portrait of McCartney was as a fragile and defensive ego, bullying and browbeating his bandmates into following his lead even against their better judgements. Norman’s argument, on which he doubled down with the publication of John Lennon: The Life in 2008, provoked predictable flurries of outrage from McCartney admirers, not to mention from McCartney himself, who protested his depiction as the “great manipulator” of his erstwhile band. It’s safe to say, in other words, that when it comes to totem spirits, Philip Norman is definitely not a Paul.

The arrival of Norman’s new book Paul McCartney: The Life therefore comes as something of a shock. At 853 pages, and supplemented by a generous helping of glossy photographs from all eras of its subject’s life, Norman’s book is by far the most hefty and comprehensive McCartney biography to date (more than twice the length of Peter Ames Carlin’s Paul McCartney: A Life from just over half a decade ago). In his introduction, Norman acknowledges the unlikelihood of his new role as definitive McCartney biographer, and charmingly admits that his former hostility might have had something a bit more personal at its core:

Like almost every young male in the Western Hemisphere, my daily fantasy was to swap lives with a Beatle. And there was no question as to which one. Paul, a year my senior, was the most obviously good looking…If the adolescent female frenzies that engulfed them had any rational focus, it was the left-handed bass guitarist whose delicate face and doe-like eyes were saved from girliness by the five o’clock shadow dusting his jawline.

Paul McCartney: The Life is thus intended as both an apology and an apologia: a sincere attempt to find virtue in a subject that the author has long dismissed as an adjunct artist.

Norman takes us chronologically through the many beats of his subject’s life, beginning with McCartney’s childhood in a council flat in a working class neighborhood of postwar Liverpool. After an adolescence spent imbibing the sounds of American rock and roll broadcast over crackly radios, the great turning point came in 1957, when McCartney first met a slick-haired, scowling young guitarist named John Lennon at the St. Peter’s Church fete. The moment provides a choice set-piece for any Beatles writer, and Norman’s account, while offering little to surprise his readers, has a certain rough-hewn charm:

Now at last Paul could inspect the tough guy of the 86 bus [Lennon] at leisure without fear of reprisals. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans, and played an undersized, steel-strung Spanish guitar, nowhere near as impressive as Paul’s own cello-style Zenith. Under the toppling Elvis quiff, his wide-set eyes stared challengingly at this juvenile audience, as if he’d gladly have picked a fight with any one of them. Unlike most skiffle vocalists, he didn’t try to sound American, but sang in a Liverpool accent whose thin yet resonant tone burned like acid through the ambient sounds of children’s voices, clinking teacups and birdsong.

The two boys met backstage, and a night of illicit drinking and musical one-upmanship ensued. In short order, Paul was inducted into John’s rock group (then called the Quarrymen), and the defining pop songwriting partnership of the late 20th century was born. Roughly half of Paul McCartney: The Life is devoted to the Beatle years, and some of the book’s most interesting passages attempt to penetrate into the interpersonal dynamics of the band (and especially the Lennon/McCartney relationship at its heart), beginning in the very earliest years:

In many ways, Paul and John were not the total opposites they appeared. Both had the same passion for rock ‘n’ roll and ambition to play it to the same standard as their American heroes. Both were artistic, bookish, fond of language and addicted to cartooning; both had the same sense of humour, nourished by the aural anarchy of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers on BBC radio’s Goon Show, although John’s was ruthlessly cruel while Paul’s was subtler and kinder.

From the St. Peter’s fete onward, the band’s ascent was steady and unrelenting. The major facts are so well known as to defy the need for summary, but a short overview is perhaps in order: after rounding out their membership with guitarist George Harrison, bassist Stuart Sutcliffe (who later departed the group, to be replaced on his instrument by McCartney), and drummer Pete Best, the newly-christened Beatles embarked on a five-year flurry of musical activity, playing rowdy and raucous shows (sometimes three a night) in seedy dive bars of Liverpool and Hamburg. By 1961, they had attracted the attention of two key players in the band’s future: former record store operator Brian Epstein, who signed on as their manager and soon insisted on a matching look of band-uniform suits and haircuts; and record producer George Martin, who, alone among the London industry elite, decided to take a chance on signing the rocky but promising lads from the north.

Martin would later admit that his choice had more to do with marketing than musical judgement: at the time, the Lennon-McCartney partnership had produced little more than cut-rate attempts at mimicking the sound of Buddy Holly or Goffin-King records from America. His initial hope, rather, was that the group’s beaming charisma and knack for humorous quips would provide a selling point with or without songwriting chops. But as the band prepared for their first studio sessions (and as Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best as the group’s permanent and canonical drummer), something miraculous occurred. The rains fell, the floodgates burst, and Lennon and McCartney proceeded to pour out wave after wave of catchy, innovative, and wildly successful hits. “Please Please Me,” “From Me To You,” “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”:one chart-topping single followed another, and by 1964 the Beatles had become nothing short of a planetary phenomenon. Beatlemania had arrived.

These were heady days for a wide-eyed boy from Liverpool, and Norman paints an engaging portrait of the young McCartney as he attempts to navigate the bewildering new world of musical stardom. The swinging parties, endless press junkets, and gradual introductions to pills and herbs are dutifully related, but Norman’s most intriguing observation is just how shockingly professional the Beatles were. McCartney coped with his surreal new reality by largely treating it like just another nine-to-five job, albeit one that included a larger than average share of shrieking teenage girls. Of the band’s marijuana-drenched mid-Sixties years, Norman writes:

The one area that pot didn’t invade — yet — was Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting. Agreeing that it clouded their minds, they continued in the old way, giving themselves a maximum of three hours per song, then each writing out a fair copy of the finished lyric. Only if the song turned out well did they reward themselves by sharing a joint.

The unstated implication — that other rock groups might have approached the Beatles’ level of prolific output if they’d just have set their alarm clocks once or twice on a weekday — is decidedly humbling.

If Norman’s accounting of McCartney’s quotidian, workaday reality is insightful, his attempt to grapple with McCartney’s music is less so. Given the subject at hand, this is, to put it lightly, a problem. Between 1963 and 1969, the Beatles were the fastest-changing group in the fastest-changing era of rock music. We live in an era now when artists are not only allowed but expected to overhaul their musical identities from album to album, but the mutation of the Fab Four from cute, mop-topped teen idols (circa A Hard Day’s Night) to serious, sophisticated, rock and roll auteurs (circa The White Album and Abbey Road) was as unprecedented as it was hugely impressive. Paul McCartney played a leading role in that transformation, and as his close collaboration with John Lennon gradually began to fray, McCartney’s own music branched out into ever more adventurous places: complex, Brian Wilson-esque vocal harmonies; elaborately orchestrated mini-symphonies; and the first pop concept album to attract major attention, the period-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Any attempt to understand Paul McCartney must make a serious effort to understand the potent, mysterious creative alchemy behind this output.

Norman, alas, barely makes the effort. Turn to the book’s passage on “Yesterday” — McCartney’s watershed moment as a solo songwriter, and soon to be a perennial pop standard — and you’ll find a wealth of details about the song’s composition and recording, some of them colorfully amusing (McCartney briefly considered adding sound effects from the studio that worked on Doctor Who). What you won’t find is any substantive engagement with the song itself, about which the reader gets only the most perfunctory description.

Likewise, Norman comes to the astonishing suite that closes out the Beatles’ penultimate album Abbey Road — arguably the apotheosis of McCartney’s Beatles songwriting and production — he fits all of his musical analysis into just under two pages (significantly more space is devoted to the business negotiations leading up to the album). And what we do get too often descends into inane attempts at lyrical exegesis, as in this summary of one of Paul’s contributions:

“You Never Give Me Your Money” was an unmistakable reference to [Beatles manager] Allen Klein’s promises of fabulous wealth, which so far had produced only ‘funny paper’ like the management contract Paul alone had held out against signing. Outvoted and marginalised, his ‘one sweet dream’ was for himself and Linda to be ‘out of here…step on the gas and wipe that tear away.’

If Norman isn’t quite successful at shedding light on McCartney the musical composer, he is much more illuminating when it comes to McCartney the cultural provocateur. Norman makes the revisionist case that it was Paul, not John, who took the vanguard in leading the Beatles into the wild side of the Sixties. In this, he vastly outpaced Lennon, who had evolved into something of a quiet homebody. “By the mid-Sixties,” Norman writes, “the elastic-sided boot was firmly on the other foot. As Swinging London approached its zenith, McCartney was at the epicentre of its cultural avant-garde while Lennon rarely emerged from suburban Surrey.” Thus, Norman gives us a Paul who bought up records by Ornette Coleman and John Cage; became a regular fixture at art galleries and theaters; and pushed experimental literature and poetry (not to mention less licit substances) on his fellow band members. His newfound influences weren’t always well-taken, especially when it came to the Beatles’ long-suffering producer:

After [Paul’s] forays into avant-garde music, he now tended to regard the classically-trained George Martin as somewhat old-fashioned in refusing to rank the likes of John Cage and Luciano Berio alongside Mozart or Brahms. One evening when Martin and his wife, Judy, were having dinner at Cavendish, Paul insisted on playing him a whole album by the experimental saxophonist Albert Ayler and — when that failed to convert him — started an argument about what did and did not constitute ‘real music’, citing numerous other names of whom Martin had never heard, and did not want to. The slightly embarrassing situation was lightened by Jane’s deft switching of the subject to Gilbert and Sullivan.

What seems to baffle and frustrate Norman throughout his book is McCartney’s seeming unwillingness to let these envelope-pushing influences reveal themselves in his actual music. Time and again, Norman (like decades of writers before him) contrasts McCartney’s “clean,” “hit-making” sound with Lennon’s edgy, sometimes alienating experiments. In a sense, Norman is arguing for McCartney’s career as a low-key tragedy: who knows what Paul could have achieved if only he had been a little more brave about rattling the fences; if only he’d been less needy about pleasing the crowds. If only, in other words, he could have been a little more like his old pal John Lennon.

Indeed, despite the book’s title and ostensible focus, Lennon hovers as prominently over Paul McCartney: The Life as Paul himself. Even in the book’s second half, as Norman covers the long post-Beatles denouement of McCartney’s career, John is ever present as a foil and counterexample; the angsty, creatively vigorous Punch to Paul’s simple, smiling Judy. In Norman’s telling, while Lennon grappled head-on with matters of serious import like psychological trauma and revolutionary politics, McCartney was content to craft tuneful but increasingly empty ditties. Lennon’s first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, was a “final repudiation of the middle-class world into which he’d been born.” Paul’s post-Beatles debut, McCartney, by contrast, was “something of an anticlimax,” full of songs in “Paul’s softest, blandest manner.” John’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was a “somber, admonitory” plea for world peace; Paul’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” was “as insubstantial as tinsel.”

Valid as these rough assessments might be, it’s hard not to feel that the deck might be a bit stacked here. If the aesthetic standard by which Norman is judging rock and roll has more to do with political conviction than musical innovation (if, in other words, it matches precisely the standard employed by John Lennon circa 1971), then Lennon must perforce come out the winner. McCartney, by contrast, has always held to a very different standard: one in which populist showmanship and melodic craftsmanship count for at least as much as edgy authenticity. By holding these virtues anathema to real rock and roll, Norman can’t help but sell McCartney short.

Nevertheless, the book makes a powerful case that the continuing Lennon-McCartney rivalry, waxing hot and cold throughout the seventies, provided a continuing source of competitive motivation for both parties. Even as occasional enemies, the once and future duo continued to be defined by one another. Paul’s seventies masterpiece Band on the Run was, at least in part, at attempt to get the better of Lennon’s Mind Games, while John’s 1980 comeback Double Fantasy was spurred on by a chart-topping McCartney single earlier that year. Lennon’s murder in 1980, apart from being a tragedy and trauma in its own right marked the end of two musical epochs: it stripped McCartney of an ever-present creative daemon, and fossilized forever the martyred Lennon’s place in music history. It was a fact, Norman tells us, of which McCartney himself was well aware:

From here on, Paul would have to live with a perception of his and John’s character that seemed unalterable — Lennon the avant-garde, the experimenter and risk-taker, McCartney the tuneful, the sentimental, the safe…

In time, to friends like the designer David Litchfield — usually when he was drunk — he could even joke that in the contest they’d always waged, John’s death had been a final act of oneupmanship. ‘He died a legend and I’m going to die an old man. Typical John!’

That the perception in question is, in large part, being kept alive by biographies just like this one is an irony that goes unremarked upon. Thus, as Norman takes us into the 1980’s and beyond, Paul the artist recedes ever farther into the distance to be replaced by Paul the entertainer, Paul the consummate showman, and Paul the smiling elder statesman of a fading generation. Norman is a fine storyteller, to be sure: his account of McCartney’s infamous 1980 jail stint in Japan for marijuana possession reads like a surreal combination of madcap comedy and dark night of the soul:

The inmates socialized only for a short period each morning when they smoked their daily two-cigarette ration sitting around a tin can, into which they tapped their ash. Here Paul learned to put faces and names to his fellow inmates’ numbers, for instance his next-door neighbour, a Marxist student, also on a drugs charge, who spoke some English.

Four cells away dwelt a huge man doing time for murder whose tattooed back identified him as a yakuza or Japanese mafioso. Through an interpreter, this terrifying individual asked Paul what he was in for, then held up seven fingers to indicate his likely sentence. ‘No, ten,” Paul replied, making the yakuza roar with laughter. Later, he heard a shout from the yakuza’s cell of ‘Yesterday, please’, a request with which it was clearly wise to comply. Their guard shouted for silence but didn’t enforce it as he was listening, too, and instinctively responding even to this small audience, Paul acappella-ed three more songs.

But after the Olympian heights of the Beatles days, these long chapters of antics, arrests, and tabloid gossip begin to feel a bit like slumming; like following Mozart into the bordellos of Vienna. More paragraphs are spent on McCartney’s messy divorce from Heather Mills in 2008 than on his last two albums combined.

That tabloid business brings up another point, and not an insignificant one: in all the 800-plus pages of Paul McCartney: The Life, there is neither a footnote nor an endnote to be found. Norman is a reporter by trade, and it’s clear that at least some of his stories come from his own interviews (including, he tells us, an email correspondence with McCartney via his publicist). But the lines between reportage and speculation in this book can be blurry indeed, and it’s hard to know what to make of paragraphs like this one, on the inner life of the Beatles’ (gay) manager Brian Epstein:

[Epstein’s] epiphany at the Cavern therefore had little to do with the Beatles’ music. In their all-over black leather, they were four delectable bits of juvenile ‘rough trade’; a quadruple fantasy he could enjoy without his usual shame or fear of grievous bodily harm. He was to love them in a platonic, almost paternal way, calling them ‘the Boys’ until well after they became men, and dedicating himself to their welfare and protection.

But he was in love with just one. Not with Paul, the most obviously attractive, but with John, whose tough-guy exterior hid a middle-class upbringing not unlike Brian’s own, and who’d needed an all-protecting father figure since the age of six. So, yet again, a back seat for Paul — one which this time he took with some relief.

One assumes that Epstein (dead since 1967) did not speak to Norman on the record about his appreciation of the Beatles’ “delectable” leather outfits, nor did Lennon (dead since 1980) elaborate on his appreciation of Epstein’s paternal presence. If McCartney spoke openly about his relief to be free of Epstein’s advances, it would surely be noteworthy to say so. But in the absence of these or other sources, the passage (and others like it) can only be considered a flight of rather lurid fancy, and one which a reporter of Norman’s experience ought to be above.

Even setting these doubts aside, though, it would be difficult to call Paul McCartney: The Life a success. Philip Norman set out with a mission: to redeem Paul McCartney from a reputation as the safe and timid Beatle. He has found himself, instead, thwarted by the very assumptions he came to eradicate: that accessibility and authenticity are like oil and water; that a musician who pleases the crowd can never challenge it; and that one can be a great entertainer or a great artist, but never both. Whatever his noble intentions, Philip Norman has come not to praise Paul McCartney but to bury him. But the music, after all, might still have the last word. Whatever the rumors may have said, Paul isn’t dead yet.

____
Zach Rabiroff is an Editor at Open Letters Monthly. He lives in Brooklyn and works for a consulting firm during his daytime hours.

In “A Critic’s Manifesto,” one of my favorite essays on the art of criticism, Daniel Mendelsohn puts forth a definition and a raison d’etre for literary criticism. The purpose, he says, is to teach readers how to think, and a good critic effects this by combining both knowledge and taste to create “meaningful judgment.” Taste alone is not enough: “The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics.”

I thought of this essay while reading the reviews of Heroines by Kate Zambreno. “Much has been said lately about how women are reviewed less in the big literary sections,” Zambreno writes in Heroines, “but not about HOW they are reviewed.” I’m not sure that the “how” has not been addressed, but nevertheless, point taken. Because this hybrid work of nonfiction—call it a critical memoir, if you like—is about the way we talk about women who write, it seems as important, in a critical examination of the book, to look at its reception as it is to look at the text itself. And because some of the reviews have served essentially to trivialize and dismiss a book whose subject is in fact the historical, systematized trivialization and dismissal of work by women writers, it seems all the more urgent to question those responses.

The problem, to be clear, with the two reviews of Heroines I’ll be focusing on in this essay is not that they are “negative.” I don’t believe that criticism should only be admiring, and Heroines is a complex, contrarian work that invites argument. The problem is that they fail to judge the book in good faith; they do not accurately represent the book—its form and its formal concerns, its ambitions and intentions, its themes or even its basic subject—before rejecting it as unstudied and uninteresting.

I don’t wish to perform a meta–hatchet job on these reviews—just to show that their authors don’t reveal enough knowledge of or intimacy with the book and its purpose to give their judgment what Mendelsohn calls “heft,” and to put out a call for a more considered criticism, a criticism that teaches us how to read, to be better readers, not simply encouraging our worst habits and validating our laziness by telling us what not to bother with.

Zambreno explores this silencing primarily through the lens of “the mad wives of modernism”—women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, Jane Bowles, Virginia Woolf—women who struggled to be writers and artists in the shadows of their more respected and sometimes abusive husbands or the generally oppressive conventions of the time, women who were consistently pathologized, institutionalized, prevented from working. She writes of the treatments foisted on hysterical Victorian women (“hysteria” inherently gendered, coming from the root for “womb,” as in hysterectomy), the “rest cure” for nervousness satirized in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the bromides and sedatives prescribed for their fits. The side effects of these treatments were in some cases worse than the symptoms they were intended to treat; at least, they complicated the picture, but the effects of the drugs were not treated as separate from the supposed causes for taking them. (Leonard Woolf “repeatedly uses the word ‘violence’” to describe his wife’s behavior, Zambreno notes, but doesn’t distinguish between the underlying condition and the effects of her treatment: “the prescribed ‘hypnotics’ which in large quantities can lead to all the symptoms of mania.”)

Zambreno tells these women’s stories in a stop-start fashion, latching onto certain details, jumping from couple to couple, fast-forwarding and rewinding, weaving in quotations and references, and blending their stories with her own, as in this passage (the initial “they” refers to male authors, such as Gustave “c’est moi” Flaubert):

They represent their process as a pregnancy. That image of Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, carrying around underneath his shirt that bowling ball of a book, like a cancerous tumor, people give up their seats to him on the train because of the book he is carrying around with him, that book he is about to birth so ecstatically. Nietzsche, who thought of writing as a “spiritual pregnancy.” (Although writing elsewhere that the best cure for an intellectual woman with pretensions to write would be actual pregnancy.) Artaud’s daughters of the cunt (although he would stop speaking to his women friends once they became pregnant).

I am now taking prenatal vitamins because of my thinning hair. Stress, maybe the veganism. When I buy them I feel everyone watching me—am I paranoid?—I feel the cashier at Whole Foods giving me a special look.

If Molly Bloom was a real woman writer, she would probably be dismissed as mad and unnecessarily pathologized. We glorify our male literary hysterics who often channel women and condemn our female literary hysterics. They can play women, fetishize her excesses. Make fun of her frivolity. They don’t have to be women.

This blending, this back and forth—an embodiment of Zambreno’s intense identification with her “heroines”—is made possible in part by the form of the book, which is not organized into neatly labeled chapters (the Woolf chapter, the Plath chapter). Instead, the book just flows, with all the stories intermingling. (“I begin to cannibalize these women, literally incorporating them,” she writes, “an uncanny feeling of repeating, of reliving.”) It’s less like reading a typical scholarly work and more like taking a class with the author—a brilliant but eccentric and discursive professor. You go to class to hear her lectures, which are as much about the asides and digressions and the sudden rants as the ostensible subject of the class. This book is in some ways closer to a lecture than a text, complete with the open spaces left for discussion, for you to get in. I love books written in this form, discrete paragraphs with tenuous connections, as in Maggie Nelson’s lyric essay Bluets or Mary Robison’s novel Why Did I Ever, the latter supposedly written in such a way that if you wanted to you could read it backwards. (See also any number of philosophical or theoretical texts, from Pascal to Baudrillard.) When books plow forward in multiple-page-long paragraphs with few breaks and little white space, I can feel a kind of claustrophobia as a reader, a fear I’ll get trapped in the book with no place to escape, as in a subway train stopped in a tunnel. Heroines has a bite-size, Reese’s Pieces—kind of appeal: Read a lot or read a little! But more than that, the space between paragraphs gives the ideas room to breathe, room for lyric leaps.

Most poetry by nature leaves these gaps for the reader; Zambreno, as a writer of prose, seems to have poetic instincts, and she constructs the book so as to maximize these synapses, where the connections between memoir and criticism are not overtly explained, allowing for ambiguity, for the reader to fill the gaps. She swings back and forth between confessing scenes from her own passionate, occasionally co-dependent marriage to a writer and rare books scholar named John and scenes from the lives of Tom and Viv, Sylvia and Ted, Scott and Zelda. Insofar as there’s a narrative, it moves in a kind of zig-zag, forward but also back, obsessively. (Alice Fulton has called poetry “recursive”: “A poem beautifully, seductively, and partially resists the reader. When poetry resists successfully, it sends you back up the page as much as it sends you forward.”) If you come to this book expecting perfectly coherent, linear academic prose that constructs an argument sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, you might be baffled, even annoyed, by the more diaristic format. But it would be wrong—and lazy—to dismiss the text as an unedited journal. It is evidently honed and edited; as in “The Waste Land,” the stream of consciousness effects are not the result of an unedited brain dump or “automatic writing.” Unedited notes would jump arbitrarily from subject to subject; in Heroines, the links between points and paragraphs may be delicate, but the through-line is always there:

The violence, perhaps, of being made into an object.

The SCENES she throws (he incorporates it into his own SCENES, she is scratched out, she cannot write).

Lucia crying, “I am the artist!”

Zelda in the asylum hallucinating Fitzgerald’s voice: “I have lost the woman I put in my book. O, I have killed her!”

Perhaps Madame Bovary’s disease is not boredom. It’s being trapped as a character in someone else’s novel.

The fragments are arranged so as to reveal the connections that led to the final insight: the thinking as well as the thought.

In blending criticism and memoir, Zambreno again has excellent, albeit unacknowledged, company, including Janet Malcolm in Reading Chekhov, Wayne Koestenbaum in The Queen’s Throat, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Tendencies, Susan Howe in My Emily Dicksinson, Alison Bechdel in Fun Home, and many others who likewise don’t make the cut in Heroines’ bibliography.

Okay, but what is Winter’s point? Can you think of any book that includes in its bibliography every other book which is like it in form? That would lead to some unsustainably Borgesian libraries. And it’s not what bibliographies are for.

Winter seems to have come to the book looking for some other form of political activism; she says the book “takes Elizabeth Hardwick to task for not identifying a political component in the many medical and marital crimes committed against Zelda Fitzgerald, but it never opens a newspaper.” What might it find there? Something like this muddled complaint?

Zambreno complains that “we are weighed down in society by the expectation of capital, an advance or salary proves our worth or value,” without pausing to consider that most of us veterans of the Great Recession are actually weighed down by the expectations of paying the damn rent.

I’m not sure what this actually means—that one writes not to prove one’s literary worth but to put food on the table, I suppose? But this isn’t a counterargument; both things are true. You can trade money for food, and it’s also a symbol of status. Does it matter that housing and employment are lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than status or respect? Invoking supposedly more pressing or immediate problems is a good way to avoid protesting any injustice at all; it’s tantamount to telling a vegetarian there are more worthy causes than animal suffering or unsustainable farming practices (have you volunteered at a homeless shelter lately?), or telling a feminist that there are more universal problems than women’s rights.

Further, she complains that the book isn’t funnier: “If it’s unlikely that Zambreno has repressed the self, or even the id, in this book … at times she may have repressed her wit.” On the contrary, I found it frequently witty, but it’s a grimacing kind of wit, a wit through anger, as when she calls Bataille with his prostitutes a “Surrealist Charlie Sheen,” or when she notes, following a conversation with a male writer about the length of tomes such as Tristam Shandy, Ulysses, and Infinite Jest, that “canon” comes from a Greek word for “measuring rod.”

More troublingly, Winter’s review is not self-aware. She finds it “curious” that Zambreno must defend confessional art against “unknown attackers,” citing Girls as an autobiographical work that is also one of our era’s “most critically acclaimed”—but it’s somewhat obtuse not to acknowledge that Girls is also highly controversial, as abhorred as it is loved, and that Lena Dunham has been the recipient of a lot of published contempt and vitriol, much of it evidently gendered (she just doesn’t look like an actress, especially not one who should be parading around half-naked on screen). And Winter herself attacks the confessional bent of the book, implying that Zambreno’s admissions of masturbating while reading, indulging in “online shopping for vintage Herman Miller chairs,” or fighting violently with her husband are an expression of the “id” that would have been better off repressed.

And finally she accuses Zambreno of not having edited the book (“Perhaps asking a writer to self-edit is another form of repression”), calling the book “rough-hewn,” “let-it-all-hang-out,” “sloppy,” “self-handicapping.” This is not my experience of the book. As a random example of the style, take these two (consecutive) paragraphs, from page 75:

The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a writer. She writes as a means of survival. To fight against her utter isolation and invisibility. She keeps a journal she must hide.

Yet it’s so impossible to shut out all the voices. Not only: no one will read you (Nietzsche: non legor, non legar.) But: you are mad. When you are told that you are ill, that is something you internalize. Days I worry, wonder—what if I’m not a writer? What if I’m a depressive masquerading as a notetaker? Is this the text of an author or a madwoman? It depends perhaps on who is reading it. Who has read it first. For once you are named it’s almost impossible to struggle out from under the oppression of those categories—it is done, it is done at a price, and the price is daily, and it is on your head.

Although Heroines is not exactly transition-driven, this is not “sloppy” writing, any more than “The Society of the Spectacle” is sloppy. It feels sloppy to call it sloppy—I picture something much sloppier when I hear the word “sloppy”—but it’s also naïve to assume that any sloppiness is the result of poor or no editing, as opposed to a deliberate, labored-over effect. There are valid reasons why Zambreno might blur the distinctions between her heroines and herself—to enact the extreme identification she admits to, the completion of her empathy; to suggest that in her research, she confused her own experiences with those of her subjects; to suggest that her mental faculties were sometimes less than 100% acute—to toy with us, perhaps. Is the author a little crazy—by today’s standards? Would any of the “mad wives” be mad by today’s standards? Can we even evaluate them, more leniently now, outside of their labels, their categories already named?

Zambreno may take to task the constraints placed on women, both in life and on the page, but she is perfectly capable of writing about out-of-control behavior in a controlled manner. She can, as she puts it, “be disciplined and write of the undisciplined.” One doesn’t opt out of form and this book is far from formless. The form is deliberate, and nowhere (aside from pointing out that Zambreno didn’t invent the critical memoir) does Winter really comment on it, on the actual structure of the book and its purpose and effects. Does she assume the form is not considered? Whether or not the form of Heroines is truly innovative, it is not the default style for criticism or memoir, and not to remark upon it in a review of this length except to call it sloppy without convincing example is borderline dishonest.

In the end Winter seems to mock the very idea of “repression.” She diagnoses Zambreno with “precognition of rampant misogyny.” I resent this bored dismissal, this yawning refusal to grant that all the world’s problems haven’t been solved, or at least that “repression” is a problem worth getting one’s panties bunched about. Misogyny is rampant. (If you don’t have PMS, you’re not paying attention.) I feel protective of this book because I know how few its sympathetic readers are, how few people care what a “crazy” woman has to say about “crazy” women.

Earlier this year I met, for the first time, a certain writer I admire. She’s about my age, and we live in the same city, and I was excited to meet her. After we were introduced, she complimented me on my coat, on my dress. We talked about where we like to shop. As it turned out, we have similar tastes in clothes.

I was depressed for a week. I felt that there must have been something much more vital — and much more fun — to discuss between the two of us.

The crime here is one of “contextomy”—the fallacy of quoting out of context—and, as in Winter’s review, a stunning lack of self-awareness that is either intentionally misleading or simply obtuse. Because what comes before and after the above list of items of clothing is absolutely crucial.

In the quoted passage, Zambreno is visiting the Mary Reynolds Collection—Mary Reynolds was a bookbinder and Marcel Duchamp’s mistress—at the library of the Art Institute in Chicago, in search of works by Unica Zurn, which they (“unsurprisingly”) don’t have:

I always experience a kind of chilly, paternalistic air when in these rare books reading rooms, like they are worried your heat could somehow damage the immortal material. The tweedy rare book librarian doesn’t want me touch the more fragile books. He voices his skepticism about how much of the vision behind these extraordinary bound books are Reynolds’, he suggests that they are mostly Duchamp’s design, which he just told Reynolds what to do. Of course he thinks that. I mean, of course he thinks that. But it’s also a case of peddling—the items acquire more value being the brainchild of a great man, as opposed to his mistress.

So already we’re primed to think of the woman’s body, its sloppy and damaging heat, in opposition to the “chilly” intellect of man. Then (still in the room):

I write notes in my notebook because I assume I’m supposed to.

I write: I am not a scholar.

I write also: I do not know French or German.

Then (emphases mine):

I also write down for some reason what I am wearing:

soft grey jacket with the high collar this is almost backless
black cloche hat
soft stretchy black pants (semi-harem) tucked into black boots
old old dark gray Hussein Chalayan cardigan, which has permanent pit stains

That “for some reason” reveals a pointed ambivalence, a questioning of her own instincts, because Heroines, with all its “buts” and “yets,” is fundamentally an ambivalent, a self-questioning text. (And ending the list with “pit stains” punctuates the disgust that Zambreno, as a woman, is made to feel toward her own body.) And after the list, she writes:

All my beautiful pieces I keep like in a museum, because I don’t want them ruined somehow by the stink or casualness of my body.

I leaf through old issues of Minotaure. The only female presence the gorgeous photos of Lee Miller and other Surrealist models, and Bellmer’s mechanical dolls.

I am realizing these muses of modernism were often objectified twice over, through literature and often through psychiatry (both reducing them to their BODY).

“She is the doll,” Hans Bellmer said when meeting Unica Zurn […] Later his photo of her naked bound torso on the cover of a Surrealist journal with the caption: Keep in a Cool Place. The meaning is clear: She is a piece of meat.

I quote at such length to make clear all the meaning and nuance that Keeler’s quotation excises from the passage. Keeler uses the list to demonstrate a shallow frivolity, a vanity that has no place in the text, zeroing in on the brand name. But of course the list is important to the text. Zambreno doesn’t report it so we’ll admire her fashion sense. She reports it as a kind of condemnation of a culture that considers a woman’s looks and sense of style before anything else, that objectifies the woman’s body, coupled with self-condemnation of her inability not to participate in this culture. Because that is the curse of the male gaze: the woman who must watch herself weeping (she references John Berger) at her father’s funeral.

For Keeler to dismiss Zambreno’s work as superficial, without representing the complexity with which the book tackles the subjects of “beauty” and superficiality and how women are so often dismissed with and caged by these terms, is a critical crime. She refuses to engage with all the book has to say about the specter of the “ugly feminist,” the gendered double standard, how men are never dismissed as simply being vain, even when they “write in a mirror,” the cultural trivialization of anything associated with the feminine. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own (Zambreno quotes this part): “Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’” Woolf goes on: “And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.” Woolf wrote this in 1928, and it’s still true. The work of the woman, the woman as subject, is considered trivial.

“I want you to stop writing fiction … whether you write or not does not seem to be of any great importance.”

“I know, nothing I do seems to be of any great importance.”

“Why don’t you drop it then?”

Mr. Fitzgerald tragicomically misses the irony of Zelda’s statement: Nothing I do seems to be of any great importance. He simply agrees! I feel this same poignant irony returning to Winter’s and Keeler’s reviews after having finished Heroines. They’ve so wholly missed the point, I find myself wondering why they bothered to review the book at all. Am I saying it’s impossible to criticize Heroines, because it’s a book about the problematic criticism of women? Of course not. Nor do I claim that Heroines has no flaws. But if you’re going to attempt the task, you have to be willing to grapple with the book’s form and subjects, and be wary of succumbing to the same fallacies the book is attacking. You have to at least acknowledge the parallel, when you call a book “messy” that is itself about how women’s work is so often rejected as “messy.” And good criticism should be as valuable after you read the book in question as before. It should reveal new readings, not make one question whether the reviewer reached the end.

Zambreno speaks of the exhaustion of defending women writers, this thankless task. I feel this too. While working on this piece, I had several minor arguments with a writer friend who betrayed a vague suspicion toward the book, assuming it dismissed him as a man and so preemptively dismissing it in turn. (Having a “women’s studies” sticker on the back doesn’t do much to increase your reading base.) In the book, Zambreno’s husband asks her if she thinks Fitzgerald drank out of guilt. Does the existence of a book like Heroines make my friend feel guilty, or rather annoyed that he is supposed to feel guilty? He’s not supposed to, of course—he’s not personally responsible for the patriarchy.

Women’s stories—like Zambreno’s, and the mad wives’ as seen through her eyes—should be read not out of a sense of guilt, or to evoke one, but for their own value. The final passages of Heroines are a plea for women to take back their stories: “The only way our narratives will be told is if we write them ourselves.” We must write them, and we must read them. They’re half of history.

____
Elisa Gabbert is the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and The Self Unstable (forthcoming from Black Ocean). She lives in Denver and blogs at The French Exit.

My brother’s reading fare tended to pulpy World War II novels with pictures of stubbly GI’s on the front cover and promises of hellish battles with “Japs”and “Krauts” on the back. But I wasn’t interested in war. I was interested in sex. The jacket copy – “A stunning novel of today’s angry, rootless, seeking young men and women in a frantic search for fulfillment” – didn’t spell it out, but I had every reason to hope that that frantic search for fulfillment would include lots of sex, and by the standards of 1957 (when The Temple of Gold was published) or 1968 (when I read it), it did. There was first of all the never-to-be-forgotten scene of the narrator’s initiation through the ministrations of his shy, buxom piano teacher, a college student named Miss Twilly who skips out of her commencement exercises to seduce the sullen but handsome high school protagonist, Raymond Trevitt. Returning to the novel after forty-seven years, I found that I remembered the key line exactly:

“My God, Miss Twilly,” I said. “They’re huge.”

Subsequently Raymond and his best friend adopt the name “Twillys” as their code word for the female endowment, and if that sounds all too like the smirking sexism of the fifties and sixties, well, it is. In a later scene a slightly older Raymond rapes a volatile, unbalanced beauty because – well, apparently because the bitch had it coming to her. Apart from such excruciations, rereading The Temple of Gold induced fewer cringes than I had expected. To be fair, the treatment of some of the female characters – an early girlfriend or two, even the beautiful but crazy rape victim Annabelle – is no worse and in some respects more balanced than that in much of the (male) fiction of the period. But I really didn’t care whether the book was any good back then, and I don’t care now. It stirred my soul in a way that a more complex work of fiction might not have. Complexity would have sent me packing.

Mesmerizing as the comparatively tame and, I hoped, instructive sex scenes were, what got to me wasn’t the dirty bits but what I can only call the novel’s structural tonality. Almost every page in The Temple of Gold was shot through with bitterness, grief, and disillusionment, as if the twenty-one-year old narrator had already wearied of life and its crushing disappointments. It didn’t matter that many of the characters were stereotyped (Raymond’s cold, prissy father, a professor of Greek at the local college, not to mention the pneumatic Miss Twilly, whom it was thrillingly easy to imagine as a Playboy centerfold) or that the plot consisted of one damn thing happening after another. Somehow the narrator’s voice pulled me in. And what that voice was telling me, to borrow the alternately hardboiled and supersensitive idiolect of Raymond Trevitt, was that the world was just really goddamned sad. There were more nuanced ways of saying the same thing, but I didn’t want and I wouldn’t have understood nuance. Actually, all this weltschmertz was rather intoxicating; better a sad world than a stupid and trivial one, such as I saw on TV – not that I was prepared to give up that particular narcotic. If the mere thought of a goldfish bowl sufficed to trigger Raymond Trevitt’s incorrigible melancholia, it sufficed for me too:

In the years that have passed since it happened, I have wondered and thought many times over about why I loved them so much. The only answer I can come up with is this: they seemed so goddam happy just swimming around and around. I suppose a guppy knows what he is and never did one die of hubris which, by the way, is a Greek word that you can’t translate into English except by saying that it sort of means pride. . . . You could put guppies in a huge pool or in a little dish and they’d still swim around and around, happy, I think, and never complaining. They’d found the handle. Which is more than most of us can say.

Furthermore, it followed that if the world was sad, so were the people in it. And from that startling perception followed two others: (1) people were entitled to a little sympathy, and (2) apparently the place to talk about such things was in books, because nobody outside of them, from what I could tell, seemed disposed to ponder, at least publicly, the Meaning of It All.

I’m still pondering the Meaning of It All. Forty-seven years ago that garish paperback novel taught me some things about reading that are with me still. One lesson imparted was that there were lives other than my own – a thought rather alien to the (or rather my) adolescent mind. Naturally, I read Goldman’s novel as a report to and about my consciousness, and that intimacy mattered to me hugely – it still does, whether I’m reading Louise Glück’s lyrical meditations on marriage and family or Samuel Johnson’s idiosyncratic interpretations of Shakespeare. The world that William Goldman depicted – white, suburban, and middle class – was recognizably my own, so I’d have to wait for other books to broaden my horizons. For the moment, however, reading about the secret resentments, frustrations, and pathologies of people very much like my own neighbors was sufficiently broadening. If middle class America, as The Temple of Gold strongly implied, was seething with repressed misery, two contrasting responses suggested themselves to me: scorn or empathy. I decided to empathize. I’ve empathized ever since.

Still, The Temple of Gold wouldn’t be the novel it is if its protagonist hadn’t lavished so much scorn on the hapless parents, mediocre teachers, and bitchy girlfriends who stand in his way or just annoy the hell out of him. Nor would Western literature be quite the same (or nearly so interesting) if Juvenal, Jonathan Swift, William S. Burroughs and their like hadn’t been around to piss on many of our most cherished beliefs. Nevertheless, if given the choice, I’ll always prefer empathy to scorn, and so, rather surprisingly, does the implacable Raymond Trevitt, who finds himself late in the novel consoling a fellow sufferer with the very words that had once infuriated him when they had been spoken by his father: “Everybody fails. Everybody fails everybody. Just like God. God failed. God failed on His own son in the Garden of Gethsemane.” Maybe Raymond’s dear old dad wasn’t so contemptible after all. Maybe mine wasn’t either.

Although The Temple of Gold wasn’t taught in my junior high school and has never, so far as I know, appeared on any syllabus anywhere, it powerfully supported the argument made by my English teachers: reading literature is good for you. It enlarges your capacity for sympathy and understanding, it forces you to question assumptions you’ve taken for granted, it teaches you that the world is more various and complex than your experience of it. Although The Temple of Gold would have appalled and dismayed them — some of it appalls and dismays me — I still think my teachers were more right than wrong. I came away from that book appreciably more sensitized to the difficulties of adulthood, though I still had a good ten years of adolescent self-righteousness ahead of me. And the remarkable thing was that this sensitization reached outward and inward; that is, The Temple of Gold heightened my awareness of the inner lives of others, while doing much the same for my own. Embracing Raymond Trevitt’s sadness, longing, and helpful hints for unfastening brassieres, I went deep into that fascinating subject, my thirteen-year-old consciousness, while wondering for the first time about all those other consciousnesses. And if a cheap paperback can do all that, what can’t a real work of literature?

It may be that, a budding critic even then, I was reading way too much into a fairly crude novel. I hope so. Because here is yet another lesson The Temple of Gold imparted: William Goldman wrote the novel but I collaborated with him. It wasn’t so much what I got out of it as what I put into it, or some mysterious combination of the two that has pretty much defined my life as a reader from then to now. This was a book to read slowly over time, partly to savor its warmed over existentialism, partly to keep under wraps a lurid paperback that no one needed to know had turned me inside out.

I still read books slowly over time. People somehow expect my apartment to be crammed with incunabula and variorum editions. In fact I own fewer than a thousand books, and none with any special distinction or value. I have, on the other hand, read most of those books, and some many times over. I guess I owe it all to William Goldman; if I can’t read a book with the same (or nearly the same) intensity that I brought to The Temple of Gold, I figure it’s not worth reading or I’m not ready to read it. This means, of course, that I am hugely ignorant in areas that engage me less fully than others; the history of the world, for example. I do know a lot, however, about the mental landscape of adolescent boys.

Once again, rampaging Ray Trevitt served as something of a role model. A poor student but a ferocious bibliophile, he storms through his father’s library, dismissing Milton and Chaucer as “worse than the Chinese Water Torture” but responding to “Donne with his ladies and Herrick with his broads.” Whoever these people were, some of them apparently spoke to Raymond Trevitt the way that William Goldman spoke to me. Furthermore, Raymond’s passionate encounters with the written word didn’t preclude passionate encounters of a more corporeal nature. You could read a lot of good books and get it on with all the pliant Miss Twillys out there. You could, maybe, find a meaningful correspondence between life and literature. I didn’t know much about either one, but I could dimly perceive how they might inform and enrich each other.

Whether The Temple of Gold delivered The Truth – if that quaint notion can even be entertained anymore – its narrator had a lot of interesting things to say about untruth. At the risk of sounding like Raymond Trevitt, the sheer amount of bullshit in the world never ceases to amaze. I’ve recovered from the shock. Raymond, setting off for his local college, has not:

If you believe the brochures, you would probably think that as far as beauty is concerned, right after the Taj Mahal comes Athens College. This is not true. For it is an ugly school, being made up almost entirely of buildings that are eyesores and which they would like to tear down, except they haven’t got the money. . . . . But instead of admitting that their school is ugly, the old graduates speak of it as being “quaint.” Talk to anyone who ever went to Athens and that word is sure to pop up. Quaint.

Though he may not know what the truth is, Raymond has an acute sense of what it’s not. That’s not such a small thing; it may even be the beginning of adulthood. Along the route of his via negativa he comes to appreciate those rare experiences of authenticity, as when, before college breaks up their intense bond, he strolls the shore of Lake Michigan with his best friend from high school:

So we walked along, not speaking but just walking quiet on the sand, under that sliver of moon. We walked for miles, hours, never once saying a word. Because right then, we didn’t have to. We knew all there was to know; ourselves, the world, each other, everything. Then, before dawn, we sacked out on the beach, like we had done that night in Chicago years ago. And, as I was slipping away, all I heard was the slap, slap, slap of the waves against the shore.

Never mind the bad prose. And never mind that this idyll, for the author no less than his protagonist, would be inconceivable with a female rather than a male companion. Is this experience any less real for being expressed (badly) by an angry adolescent? And don’t angry adolescents sometimes remember things that their elders forget? Anyway, isn’t that one of the functions of literature – to restore us to ourselves, or if that’s not possible, to investigate why it’s not? That’s asking a lot of Dante, let alone William Goldman, who, it’s worth noting, was only three years older than his protagonist. Nevertheless, I do ask it, and sometimes I find, even in the unlikely guise of a mass-market paperback from 1957, certain human truths that are nowhere to be found in the world of official pronouncements, job responsibilities, and institutional discourse. Though I wouldn’t dream of suggesting the truth will set us free, learning how to recognize bullshit is still pretty liberating and one of the lessons that literature continually teaches me.

____
Stephen Akey is the author of College, Library, and A Guide to My Record Collection. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Farrell is best known for the three novels of his Empire Trilogy, Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), and The Singapore Grip (1978). Each of these works of historical fiction is set at moment of crisis for the British Empire—the first in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-21), the second in India in the tumultuous year of 1857, and the third during the fall of British-held Singapore to the Japanese in 1942. Siege, which won the Booker prize in 1972, is the most accessible though ultimately the slightest. Grip is the most sprawling, compelling as a transition to work that never came to be and as an example of that much maligned genre, at least in Britain, the novel of ideas. But Farrell himself held the first novel in highest esteem, writing in the mid 1970s to a well-wisher: “I still feel that if anything of mine survives it will be Troubles.” I suspect he will be proven right. Troubles is a marvelous novel, funny, spry, composed of a ramshackle elegance. It’s populated by a series of vivid characters that we find moving even if not sympathetic. It deserves many more readers than it has had; it’s happy news that the New York Review of Books Classics has brought it back into print. Yet the novel is also confused and confusing, especially in its ideas about how to narrate historical events, a confusion that reflects the struggle of postwar British literature to come to terms with the inheritance of literary modernism.

At the center of Troubles—the most troubled, because least certain, character—is Major Brendan Archer. On leave in Brighton from the Western front in 1916, the Major meets and apparently becomes engaged to Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of an Anglo-Irish family; he doesn’t remember proposing, but she signs her letters to him “Your loving fiancée.” The story of this courtship, presented offhandedly and retrospectively—such that even the Major must interpret it only through clues and traces—indicates the novel’s approach to storytelling: main events are narrated indirectly, at second hand, or obliquely, through omission. In 1919, the war over, the Major hesitantly travels to Ireland to claim his bride, who lives with her father, Edward, her brother, Ripon, and a host of aged guests, mostly women, to say nothing of the dozens of almost feral cats, at a once glorious seaside hotel called, no longer quite appropriately, the Majestic.

Angela has two younger sisters, as well, the twins Faith and Charity, who are initially away at school, but, as the political situation and the family’s finances deteriorate, who return home; their shenanigans, mostly good-natured and often lascivious, enliven the second half of the novel. The line between prank and hurt is often crossed, though, as when they plug the Major with a snowball embedded with a stone, or when they lasso a priest cycling down the drive of the house:

According to the most dramatic version … he was plucked out of the saddle and hung there swinging gently to and fro while his bicycle sailed on into some rhododendron bushes. More probably, however, the noose missed him (luckily, since it might have broken his neck) but caught on the pillion, shrunk rapidly, tightened, halted the bicycle suddenly and tipped Fr O’Meara over the handlebars. Stunned though he was by his fall he was willing to swear that as he unsteadily tried to pick himself up two smiling angelic faces were looking down on him from above. … Almost everything with those two girls… had a habit of beginning amusingly and ending painfully.

They themselves almost come to ruin, when they are nearly raped by a pair of drunken Auxiliaries. Over the course of the novel, such events escalate from scrapes and narrow escapes to full-fledged disasters. Both Edward and the Major have unrequited love affairs with Sarah Devlin, the daughter of a local banker. And the political situation in Ireland goes from bad to worse. First, a statue of Queen Victoria is defaced. Then stones are thrown, halfheartedly it seems, at Edward’s car. But eventually insurgents burn some of Edwards’ tenants’ fields, hoping that the blame will fall on Edward himself. All the while, despite the Major’s best efforts to keep the place together, the hotel slides into ruin before being finished off by the increasingly mad manservant Murphy, who sets the building ablaze. Eventually all that remains is a “great collection of wash-basins and lavatory bowls which had crashed from one burning floor to another until they reached the ground.”

Memorable as they are, it’s not so much the events that distinguish the novel as it is the characters that suffer through them. It is remarkable that someone who never married, never had children, and never lived to be old is so well able to depict people in all these stages of life. The most striking thing about these portrayals is their fundamental generosity: the characters aren’t always especially likeable, but they are treated gently, with wry humor. Edward’s mother (and thus the twins’ grandmother), Mrs. Rappaport, is a fine example. Half-blind, lost in memories of her young married life in Calcutta in the previous century—an uncanny link to Farrell’s still unimagined next novel, which would be set in nineteenth-century India—Mrs. Rappaport is a tyrant who has affection only for a particularly vicious cat. On the night of a great ball, the last in the Majestic’s long history, which Edward throws in a final effort to retain its glory, she refuses to come down without a revolver strapped to her gown. (The twins are horrified, convinced that now no one will dance with them.) The old woman conflates the present colonial rebellion with the one of her youth:

[W]hen someone had happened to mention the “troubles” to her a day or two earlier, her mind had been sent back to heaven only knew what Indian station out in the middle of nowhere with a vociferous, gesticulating, hopelessly untrustworthy rabble of natives at the gates; the women had had to be armed, taught how to use a revolver and reminded to save the last shot for themselves. Now, sixty years later, on the one night in years that it mattered, the old lady had remembered her elementary weapon training, found her departed husband’s revolver and, thin lips quivering, buckled it on.

The old woman is deranged—but, perhaps, not quite. Events will soon prove her caution more well-founded than deluded.

Our awkward relationship with Mrs. Rappaport is typical: we don’t fully identify with any of the novel’s characters, and yet to some degree we identify with them all. That’s true even of the Major. As he’s the protagonist, we might expect him to command our full sympathy, especially since he’s so decent. Yet the Major is also standoffish, even priggish. Ultimately, Farrell’s characterization mimics the Major’s peculiar nature: at once drawn to others but also repelled by them, at once desperate to make attachments and always interested in others but also unable or unwilling to consummate that desire.

Because the novel follows the Major most closely, we can at least try to understand his reserve. It might be a function, for example, of his traumatic wartime experiences. Less explicable, however, are the other inhabitants of the Majestic. They are evasive and irresolute; the only thing certain about them is that, like the hotel itself, they have all seen better days. This is especially true of Angela, who at tea on the day of his arrival regales the Major with her past romantic exploits before promptly taking to her sickbed, from which she never reappears.

This odd development culminates in the first surprise of the novel, one that, retrospectively, given the ruin that is to follow, isn’t surprising at all: Angela dies. She thereby thwarts the Major, who had been planning ways to break off the engagement and leave Ireland but who had been unable to put those plans into actions because of her unavailability. He is left with only his embarrassed dissatisfaction and a final letter from Angela, which itself gets left behind, tantalizingly unopened, when the Major is forced to return to England to attend at the deathbed of his only surviving relative. The Major later finds the letter right where he left it, on the mantelpiece in the disused bar, when he returns to the Majestic more than a year later. Farrell characteristically prolongs the suspense almost excessively—before deflating it when the letter offers no revelations.

Further bathos arises on the Major’s arrival in London, where his elderly aunt proves not as sick as her doctor had made her out to be. But even this reversal isn’t definitive; several months later she takes a turn for the worse before finally succumbing (or, as the novel puts it, “vindicat[ing] herself by dying”). These sorts of attenuations and frustrations—a mixture, for the Major, of guilt and vexation and repressed emotion, and, for the reader, of black humor—are typical of Troubles, in which many significant events happen offstage. Further examples include Ripon’s scandalous marriage to a parvenu Catholic girl, the manservant Murphy’s descent into madness, and Edward and Sarah’s unhappy love affair, to say nothing of the increasingly incendiary outbreaks of violence in Ireland as a whole and the countryside around the Majestic in particular.

The effect of these obliquely rendered events is paradoxically heightened by the inability of anyone or anything in the novel to be clear and direct—including its title. “The Troubles” is a common term for the conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland. But it is unsettlingly euphemistic: how can these violent historical events be no more than troubling? Of course, in the sense of muddying, confusing or making turbid, trouble is indeed what we experience in the novel. And Farrell has played with the expression, generalizing from “the troubles” to “troubles”; his novel, he hints, won’t just be about politics, it will be about other sorts of worries too, but politics will always shade those worries.

Moreover, as the very idea of euphemism suggests, both political and personal troubles will be indirect, hesitant, even confused. And that’s just what we find in Troubles. For example, on the afternoon of the Major’s arrival, Edward leads the Major and other male guests, whom he has armed with a haphazard assortment of weapons, including a javelin, a pair of rapiers, and an old service revolver, on a chase through the grounds of the estate, convinced that he has seen a “Shinner” (that is, a member of the Sinn Fein). The hunt comes to nothing, but along the way Angela’s brother, Ripon, tells the Major about a shocking incident at a tennis party at a nearby country house that points to the confusion of the period.

A bicycle patrol of the Royal Irish Constabulary had found two individuals “tampering” with a canal bridge and set off after them. One of the men jumped on his own bicycle and tried to out-pedal the police. His plan goes well at first: the police collide with each other while attempting to ride without using their hands (the better to shoot with). But then the chain comes off the Sinn Feiner’s bicycle, and he flees into the estate where the tennis party is underway:

What a shock the tennis players and spectators had got when all of a sudden a shabbily dressed young man had sped out of the shrubbery and across the court to gallop full tilt into the wire netting (which he evidently hadn’t seen)! Under the impact he had crumpled to his knees. But though he seemed stunned, almost immediately he began to pull himself up by gripping the wire links with his fingers. Then someone had hurled a tennis ball at him. He had turned round as if surprised to see so many faces watching him. Then another tennis ball had been thrown, and another. At this the man had come to his senses and veered along the netting in search of an opening. Not finding one he had leaped up and clung to the netting to drag himself upwards. But by now everyone was on their feet hurling tennis balls. Then one of the women had joined in, throwing an empty glass but he still managed to pull himself up. Someone… had shouted for them to stop. But no one paid any attention. A tennis racket went revolving through the air and only missed by inches. Someone tore off his tennis shoes and threw them, one of them hitting the fugitive in the small of the back. He had paused now to gather strength. Then he was climbing again. A beer bottle shattered against one of the steel supports beside his head and a heavy walking-shoe struck him on the arm. Then, at last, a racket press had gone spinning through the air to hit him on the back of the head. He had dropped like a sack of potatoes and lay there unconscious. But when the breathless, red-faced peelers had finally arrived panting to arrest their suspect it was to find the tennis players and their wives still hurling whatever they could find at the prone and motionless Sinn Feiner…

The scene is horribly vivid, despite its indirection—it is told by someone who heard it second hand and even that re-telling is re-told indirectly, by the omniscient narrator rather than by the original speaker. In fact, much of its force comes from the anonymity of the actors, which is emphasized by the passive constructions (a tennis racket “went revolving through the air”; a racket press “had gone spinning through the air”); the actions seem that much more forceful, vengeful, and horrible for our inability to assign them to individuals.

This strange detachment is central to the passage’s tone, which, like much of the book, is funny about things that aren’t that funny. Sometimes Farrell’s humor is more straightforward, as when the old women who inhabit the Majestic, faced with another coming winter, are said to be “funnelled towards the dreadful gauntlet of December, January and February which most of them had already run over seventy times before, reluctantly forced through it like sheep through a sheep dip.” Or when the twins, who have come across a sex manual, offer their father tips from the back seat of the car where they have been forced to accompany Edward on lengthy drives through the hostile countryside in his attempts to woo a wealthy young widow (“’Oh for heaven’s sake grab her, Daddy’”). Or when Edward, incensed that one of his dogs has killed yet another chicken, thinks to teach the dog a lesson by tying the dead animal to the dog’s neck, the main result of which is that he has to lift the dog over stone fences when they are out hunting. (Much later, the same dog dies and Edward is so insistent about burying the dog under a particular tree, despite its roots, that he buries the dog standing up.) Farrell, in other words, can make you laugh out loud.

But most of the time, as at the tennis party, that laughter is shadowed by menace. Late in the novel, for example, the stone “M” in the hotel’s marquee crashes down from the building’s façade and demolishes the tea-table that one of the hotel’s denizens, a deaf old lady, is sitting at. Her indignant complaint to Edward—“She had maybe closed her eyes for a moment or two. When she had turned back to her tea, it had gone! Smashed to pieces by this strange, seagull-shaped piece of cast iron (she luckily had not recognized it or divined where it had come from)”—is not about her near-death, about which she, like many of the characters, is ignorant even in the face of pressing evidence to the contrary, but about her ruined tea. Neither this scene nor the tennis attack would be out of place in a Keaton or Chaplin film. But the slapstick shades into something darker, and our response becomes uncertain, our laughter stops short. There’s a difference between the man’s running full tilt into the unseen net and his increasing fear and desperation, his vulnerability emphasized by the description of the place of his wounds: the small of the back, the back of the head. By contrast, the vehemence of his attackers is emphasized by the image of a man tearing off his own shoes and turning them into weapons, and the repetition of the word “hurled.”

Our interpretation of Ripon’s story changes yet again when he concludes: “’The thing is, it turned out later that this fellow wasn’t a Shinner at all. He was just repairing the bridge with another workman.” The Major has already protested, incredulous at the story: “’Frankly, I find it a bit hard to believe that people would throw things at an unconscious man’.” His disbelief shows us his values: the thorough-going decency that always verges on naivety, even quiescence (though the Major is a veteran of the Western Front and images of what he experienced there return to him unbidden throughout the book). He is beholden to standards of comportment that his own experiences no longer let him fully believe in.

The two stories of chasing false Shinners highlight Farrell’s theme of misunderstanding and deceptive appearances, but also, more literally, point to the violence that will become much more implacable as the book continues. In an inversion of Marx’s formulation, what begins as farce takes on an increasingly tragic aspect, as even the isolated countryside around the hotel becomes lawless and dangerous. We hear of attacks by resistance fighters not just against the British army and their representatives but also against civilians, and then reprisals by those forces, these too often levied at innocent bystanders. As time passes, though, it becomes less and less clear who is innocent and who is not.

We learn of these events through excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts, product of the weeks Farrell spent in the British Library researching the novel’s background. They are evidence of a particular idea of time and history, one organized around discrete but ramifying and increasingly consequential socio-political events. As such, they offset the different notion of time evident in the novel’s immediate focus on the Majestic and its environs. The Majestic sometimes seems timeless or outside of time, with its long-term denizens and guests who return each year even though the place is barely habitable. But time is present in the inexorable creep of decay and ruin. In this way, the Majestic allows Farrell to rethink history and its relation to narration. What would it mean if the kind of narration required by history were a joke, especially a shaggy dog story, like the buildup to a nonexistent revelation in the story of how Angela feels about the Major, rather than a list of one damn thing after another?

This question perplexed Farrell during the composition of Troubles. He resisted what he thought of as the tyranny of plot but he felt drawn to it as well, both as a practical necessity (publishers and readers seemed to want it) and as an aesthetic imperative (novels needed to be propelled by something; they needed to be organized—otherwise what made them novels and not just a set of disassociated impressions?). For Farrell, the turn to plot went hand in hand with a turn to history. In this he was representative of a larger literary trend. Beginning after the war, many British novelists turned to historical subject matter. These included writers of Farrell’s generation, including Paul Scott and Penelope Fitzgerald. But many writers of an earlier generation—such as Rebecca West, L. P. Hartley, Olivia Manning, and Richard Hughes (with whom Farrell struck up a close friendship in the early 1970s)—made a similar shift.

Of these writers, the most influential is Jean Rhys. Like the others, Rhys makes the turn to history as a way to react against the literary modernism of the interwar years. What makes Rhys such an interesting case study is that most of her output—four indelible novels and a collection of short stories—is today considered a canonical example of modernism. Rhys vanished from the public eye throughout the 1940s and 50s, and her career was resurrected in the 1960s only when the BBC went looking for her heirs (they assumed she was dead) in order to broadcast a dramatization of one of her novels. Heartened by this interest, Rhys wrote and published the work for which she is best known today, the novel Wide Saragasso Sea (1966), a retelling of Jane Eyre.

Farrell met Rhys in the years following her reappearance. He once had lunch with her and their mutual friend Sonia Orwell, and he marveled at the aged Rhys, already more than half-lost to alcoholism: “she is incredibly old and frail and her voice is rather weak: but I liked her very much.” It was not simply the 81-year-old woman he appreciated, but also the writer with direct ties to modernist literature, the one who spoke casually of Djuna Barnes and James Joyce as acquaintances. “She was like a fly in amber,” he concluded in a letter to his friend and former lover Carol Drisko. Little did he know that the ties that would bind him to Rhys would have as much to do with time and mortality as with literary history. Rhys died three days after Farrell in August 1979; their obituaries appeared on the same page of the newspaper.

They make a compelling pair, the woman who came back from the dead and the man who died too young, for their encounter sheds light on the structure of Troubles and the way its historical perspective is haunted by the specter of literary modernism. Modernist writers turned against history in their fiction. For them, historical fiction was an outdated form based on dubious, untenable principles: an epic depiction of the sweeping forces of historical change aimed at affirming human progress. Modernism, by contrast, valued the idea of the present moment. Its aesthetic innovations are quixotic attempts to represent and thus grasp this shifting, elusive entity. For this reason, there is no modernist historical fiction. Modernist novels that do reference history—Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), for example—do so only to ironize the idea that the past has explanatory or ordering powers. History, in the first forty years of the century, is replaced by the past, and the most characteristic relation to the past, as experienced in the trenches of Flanders, is traumatic. To modernist writers, then, the linear progression of classical narration is impossible.

After WWII, the tenets of modernism themselves come to seem suspect, a burden that writers feel they must escape. Farrell was like Rhys in wanting to shift from modernist absorption in the present moment to postwar fascination with the power of history. Farrell’s rather lengthy literary apprenticeship—three novels that received tepid reviews, the gist of which was that Farrell had not fully digested the influence of Nabokov, Beckett, and Sartre—led him to a personal crisis. What kind of a writer did he want to be? In the end, Farrell reacted against his modernist predecessors, finding something wanting in their attempts to eliminate or at least contest narrative conventions, in their suspicion of history. The Major speaks for Farrell when he muses on the way an individual event (he is thinking of an attack on an Englishman he witnessed in Dublin) can lose its shock value and become just one of the “random events of the year 1919, inevitable, without malice, part of history.” He goes on to distinguish history from mere quotidian living:

A raid on a barracks, the murder of a policeman on a lonely country road, an airship crossing the Atlantic, a speech by a man on a platform, or any of the other random acts, mostly violent, that one reads about ever day: this was the history of the time. The rest was merely the ‘being alive’ that every age has to do.

The Major’s comment seems directed at Woolf’s idea that the most significant parts of life were what she called “moments of being,” opposing it by valuing a more traditional sense of what constitutes history (not the daily business of being, but the public events of politics).

Yet Farrell was unable to return to the certainties of earlier models of historical fiction. These acts are, after all, “random,” not fitting easily in any meaningful order or pattern. Hence Farrell’s irony, his hesitancy, his unwillingness to judge historical events clearly. After all, the traditional historical novel and its belief in progress failed to tell the story of all those who were on the wrong side of history. Thus Rhys’s revisionism, imagining the back-story of Bertha Mason and her Caribbean background and putting it at the center of the novel rather than at the periphery, as it is in Bronte’s novel. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy was motivated by similar concerns. Significantly, however, neither Troubles nor its successors are actually told from the perspective of those contesting British rule. Farrell’s preferred rhetorical mode is irony: the books examine dissolution from within. The risk he takes is that the presentation will be too subtle. This is presumably what Farrell meant when he worried to a friend, as he awaited the verdict of his editor on the fate of the book, that he had misrepresented the novel: the editor “feels apparently that not enough really happens in the book. I suppose I must have led him to expect that the British Empire would collapse on stage, rather than in the wings.”

Farrell’s theory of history—that events matter but they are best represented obliquely or ironically—is part and parcel of his theory of the novel. Reflecting on his previous work and anticipating the book that would become Troubles, Farrell wrote in his diary in February 1967 about the need “to think more deeply about plots, about events, about binding books together with some sort of homogeneity” and, a few weeks later, about the need for a form, so that “things can begin to fall into place, having a place to fall into.” It wasn’t until he took a trip to Block Island and came across the burned ruins of the Ocean View Hotel that Farrell realized the “place” he needed to structure his book around could be literal. Farrell finally had a way to solve the problem that had bedeviled him—the need for something at the center of a novel that “must be substantial like the stone in a peach and … must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively.”

In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here or there at odd angles. At that time there were probably yachts there too during the summer since the hotel held a regatta every July. These yachts would have been beached on one or other of the sandy crescents that curved out towards the hotel on each side of the peninsula. But now both pines and yachts have floated away and one day the high tide may very well meet over the narrowest part of the peninsula, made narrower by erosion. As for the regatta, for some reason it was discontinued years ago, before the Spencers took over the management of the place. And a few years later still the Majestic itself followed the pines into oblivion by burning to the ground—but by that time, of course, the place was in such a state of disrepair that it hardly mattered.

Here again we see Farrell’s simultaneously longwinded and elegant style. Paragraphs, if not always sentences, run long in this book; there’s a hypnotic flow. The pages turn rapidly even though not much happens, except when these longeurs are punctuated by intimations and eventually bursts of violence. The most striking thing here is the panoply of various narrative times. There’s the unspecified past (”in those days,” “at that time”) that at first seems to be the time of the Major’s arrival in 1919 but in fact can’t be, since we learn that the regatta had been discontinued “years before.” There’s the time after that past, when the Spencers took over the hotel, and then there’s the past of its destruction, and, most curiously, a present “now” that is nowhere else featured in the book.

We might expect that present moment to be the privileged vantage point from which all the vagaries and depredations of the past make sense. But that’s not the case, since Farrell’s historical novel is one in which things fall apart. By structuring the book around the ruin, at first gradual and later hasty, of the Majestic, a stand in for the Anglo-Irish ascendant class, Farrell paradoxically gave his writing new momentum. Farrell had always struggled with plots, and even here the “plot” of destruction—of the hotel, and of the class of people who inhabited it—is hesitant, relying as it does on heaps of generalized, retrospective narration. For example, in his perambulations through the vast expanse of the hotel, the Major is forever coming across instances of damage and decay, none of which he actually sees happen, until the hotel’s spectacular and dramatic end. Some sample sentences: “All this time the hotel building continued its imperceptible slide towards ruin”; “[The Major] worried about everything, about the cats proliferating in the upper storeys, about the lamentable state of the roof (on rainy days the carpets of the top floor squelched underfoot), about the state of the foundations, about the septic tank, about the ivy advancing like a green epidemic over the outside walls (someone told him that far from holding the place together, as he had hoped, it would pull it to pieces with all the more speed.” This is great stuff, but it shows by summarizing rather than by direct presentation.

Farrell is struggling here with the problem of how to narrate something that it is intrinsically undramatic because uncapturable: the passing of time understood as depredation. A film could use time-lapse cinematography to make this transformation dramatic. The novel has its dramatic moments—during a storm, the roof of an entire wing comes off, “the slates blowing away into the swirling rain… the black hole grew steadily larger like a woolen sleeve unraveling”—but mostly it relies on a model of incipient anxiety: things keep getting worse, bit by bit, but the change itself can’t be seen.

This difficulty is political as well as aesthetic: one might equally ask how best to capture the gradual decline of an Empire. What constitutes an event here? To what extent is decline (as opposed to catastrophe) narratable? One solution is sheer length—as if the time of the reading were to mimic the time of the story. There are plenty of twentieth-century novels that aren’t plot driven. Of those, Farrell particularly valued The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann’s novel about the practical but impressionable Hans Castorp, who goes to a sanatorium in Davos on a three-week vacation and ends up staying for seven years. Like Castorp, the Major ends up staying in an enclosed, isolated space for much longer than he initially plans. Indeed, he only leaves once the place burns down around him and he has narrowly avoided death at the hands of Irish nationalists, who leave him for dead buried in the “sandy crescents” referred to in the novel’s opening paragraph. The Major escapes, thanks to the help of the old ladies he has both battled and protected in his time at the hotel and the ministrations of the old and only apparently doddering Dr. Ryan of Kilnalough.

Ryan, who shouts at the others to stop their attack on the innocent man at the tennis party, is forever dilating on the flimsiness of people (and, we might add, the buildings they live in, especially when they live in them as temporarily as they live in a hotel). Late in the novel—he is suturing the Major’s wounds, but forgets what he is doing and has a little nap between finding the needle and stitching him up—he muses:

…people are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it’s all fuss about nothing. We’re here for a while and then we’re gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all.

This could be sententious, a dubious, Olympian view of time in which the human doesn’t matter at all. But that disdain is qualified both by the doctor’s frailty and the novel’s clear interest in and even tenderness for people. At least that’s one way to make sense of a puzzling moment three-quarters of the way through the book, a parenthetical exclamation that isn’t attached to any character in particular: “One day we shall vanish. But for the moment how lovely we are!” We could then read the exclamation mark as serious, not ironic.

Yet of these two sentences it is actually the first that is the most confusing. “One day we shall vanish”: here as elsewhere the novel seems to believe in the inevitability of ruin. But what does this belief imply? What Troubles lacks, and what makes me think that Farrell, even in this marvelous, enjoyable novel, is a writer who will always be second-tier, who will always suffer the dubious fate of being newly rediscovered, is a clear idea of the meaning of destruction. The novel takes, in the end, too little distance from the Major, seeming to share rather than critique his confusion about events in Ireland. It seems to be the book as a whole, rather than just the Major who thinks:

Meanwhile in Ireland, the troubles ebbed and flowed, now better, now worse. He could make no sense of it. It was like putting out to sea in a small boat: with the running of the waves it is impossible to tell how far one has moved over the water; all one can do is to look back to see how far one has moved from land.

The narration is weird here. “He could make no sense of it” aligns us with the Major, suggests that what follows will be his thought. But the use of “one” rather than “he,” which would be implied by free indirect discourse, takes us out of his mind and makes the thought seem to come from the narrator. The failed search for landmarks, for a firm place from which to make judgment is, at its best, a version of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner. But at its worst it’s a helpless shrugging of the shoulders, even an expression of ignorance that could turn a blind eye to oppression.

In that regard, it is significant that the novel never offers the perspective of those for whom destruction of an old, oppressive order might be in some ways generative, even if the violence of that destruction is hard to sanction. We are always watching that falsely accused Shinner from the outside. The horror of that attack—expressed directly by Dr. Ryan and experienced indirectly by readers as we laugh nervously—isn’t accompanied by any consideration of the uses and abuses of violence. We are here both literally and figuratively in the country of Yeats’s “terrible beauty.” His great poem “Easter 1916” is ultimately more compellingly ambivalent about the connection between destruction and generation than Troubles.

Indeed, Farrell’s novel has next to nothing to say about generation. Significantly, eros ultimately plays no real role in the novel, despite the initial donnée of the befuddled engagement and the lengthily developed story of the Major’s infatuation with Sarah Devlin. I haven’t spoken of her here, even though the novel does at length, because the novel throws her over, even more fully than she does the Major, when it concludes that, after many weeks of thinking of her painfully, of having his love for her perch in him “like a sick bird”, “one day, without warning the bird left its perch inside him and flew away into the outer darkness and he was at peace.” Despite the final word of that sentence, the novel abandons eros; it is more interested in thanatos. As such, it leaves the reader unsure where to stake his claim, where to identify.

This imbalance is all the more curious given the book’s general tone of care and affection. Like the Major, then, still trying to believe in standards that he himself helped to destroy in the war, the novel upholds something it doesn’t seem to value. This isn’t cynical, but it is confusing. So too is the novel’s attitude to history, especially in the wake of the challenges posed by modernism. If we take modernism to be like the war that was so central to its artistic creators, then we might find Farrell unrecovered from its trauma—unwilling to accept its disjunction and fragmentation but unable to attain the certainties and beliefs of the period before it, a period that he at once longs for and rejects, like the “those days” of its opening phrase. Troubles, indeed.

____
Dorian Stuber is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Hendrix College, where he teaches British Modernism and Holocaust Literature.

By William S. Burroughs
Grove, 1961, reissued in 2014

The Ticket That Exploded

By William S. Burroughs
Grove, 1962, reissued in 2014

Nova Express

By William S. Burroughs
Grove, 1964, reissued in 2014

Call Me Burroughs: A Life

By Barry Miles
Twelve, 2014

He was born privileged in 1914. His grandfather invented the cylinder that made the adding machine work, and while the family didn’t enjoy the extravagant wealth that might have provided, he was raised in upper-crust St. Louis by a hopelessly distant father and a fawning mother. He went to private schools, graduated from Harvard, and began a peripatetic adulthood. He had brief stints in a variety of ill-suited social roles: student of medicine in Vienna, army infantryman, junior copywriter, and citrus farmer. His only success was as an exterminator in Chicago, where he got to kill insects, which he’d hated since childhood, and where he developed a respect for the resilience of the bedbug.

What he really wanted to be was a criminal. In 1943, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in New York and formed the Beat troika, setting himself apart from the two by his advanced age (he was 29, Kerouac 21, Ginsberg 17), his fully-formed intellect, and his seminal influences; Ginsberg had Whitman, Kerouac had Neal Casady, and Burroughs had Jack Black, whose autobiography You Can’t Win had deeply affected him as a boy. Black was a thief, hobo, and opium addict who consorted with characters with names like Salt Chunk Mary and Foot and a Half George. In this community, Burroughs saw a comradeship and freedom of self that was impossible in the stifling bourgeois world he was born into. When he wrote his first two books, Junky and Queer, he would emulate Black’s technique, a dry, straightforward recounting of a frequently outrageous life:

This man was known as Irish. At one time he had worked for Dutch Schultz, but big-time racketeers will not keep junkies on the payroll as they are supposed to be unreliable. So Irish was out. Now he peddled from time to time and ‘worked the hole’ (rolling drunks on subways and in cars) when he couldn’t make connections to peddle. One night, Irish got nailed in the subway for jostling. He hanged himself in the Tombs.

while the romanticizing of the outlaw, and a penchant for colorful names in lieu of character development, were affectations he would carry to various extremes for the rest of his life.

But yet to be a writer, he became a hapless crook, an outlaw constantly bailed out by his parents, who supplemented his escapades with a monthly allowance he would receive until he was fifty. He was a petty dope-and-gun peddler, whose more grandiose schemes – to blow up a Brink’s truck, to hold up a Turkish bath – came nowhere near fruition.  In photos, he’s lanky, frail, cadaverous even in his youth, and anyone who’s seen film of him lowering into a chair for a reading, or heard his grinding, laconic drawl, might find it difficult to imagine him at a trot, let alone committing strong-arm crime. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he overcompensated with guns.

Through Kerouac he met Joan Vollmer, who became his common-law wife. As every previous attempt at convention – soldier, agronomist, working stiff – had played out as farce, it’s tempting to view Burroughs’ marriage as a satire of 1950s American stability, a sitcom for the mentally ill which would eventually cast him as the morphine-addicted, prescription-forging, aspiring marijuana farmer. Joan played the Benzedrine-addicted mother and their son Billy and Joan’s daughter from her first marriage, Julie, potty-trained in the kitchenware Joan used to cook the family meals.

By the time of Joan’s killing, the Burroughs clan was living in Mexico, the parents cultivating their addictions, the children accruing trauma, when one night at a bar Burroughs told Joan it was time for their William Tell routine. To risk stating the obvious, it was a terrible idea, especially since Burroughs had a shaky history with both gun safety and emulating folk heroics; as a young man, he’d snipped off the tip of a finger with poultry shears in a Van Gogh gesture to an unrequited love, and he’d already been responsible for one accidental discharge while at Harvard, when he pointed an “unloaded” gun at classmate Richard Stern, who ducked away a moment before Burroughs blew a hole in the wall behind his head. But as rational thought was not a trait either shared, they commenced with the display. Joan put a shot glass atop her head, Burroughs took aim, and killed her.

In his introduction to Queer, Burroughs wrote,

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Burroughs was eminently quotable, but this passage has been repeated innumerable times, as it offers the most concise summary of three characteristics crucial to understanding his work – the killing of Joan as an act of liberation, his obsession with resisting the forces he collectively referred to as Control, and a willingness to seize upon any farfetched explanation to absolve himself of personal responsibility. Even among the Beats, who seemed to adopt irresponsibility as an aesthetic (and practiced misogyny in a way that made the Abstract Expressionists look like feminists – one of Kerouac’s tamer acts was to assure Burroughs that “women have poison juices”), Burroughs was remarkably callous to the suffering of others and his role in their fates. But he wasn’t a complete sociopath, and even he knew his act demanded some sort of accountability.

So, how was it that a ferociously misogynistic, drug-addled, shamelessly irresponsible gun-nut could have somehow shot his wife in the head with a low-shooting gun aimed just above her crown?  It was Control, Burroughs’ bête noire, a word which encompasses almost anything that possesses and affects the body and mind, from sex to addiction to linear speech, and enslaves people in narrow, conventional modes of perception and thought. Or results in accidental murder.

Burroughs cared deeply about Joan – the biographies are rife with witnesses’ assurances of the depth of their relationship, and at certain bizarre moments, one can believe that a substantial union might have been forged from intellectual equality, addictions, and telepathy.  But in Call Me Burroughs, Barry Miles’ assertion that “Self-awareness came with recognition of the Ugly Spirit” not only provocatively redefines self-awareness as the realization of whom to blame for your actions, but is all too indicative of the moral pass Burroughs’ admirers are eager to provide. Burroughs was receptive to almost every therapeutic idea of the twentieth century, crackpot or otherwise, and Miles offers a list,

from Scientology to est, ESP, psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box, and Riche’s vegetotherapy.  He practiced the Alexander posture method, studied general semantics, Robert Monroe’s out-of-body seminar, Konstantin Raudrive’s paranormal tape experiments, Major Bruce MacManaway’s Pillar of Light, the Psionic Wishing Machine, and Carlos Castaneda’s fictional Don Juan. He believed in UFOs and Whitley Strieber’s alien abductions and used the “Control” computer in London that answered questions for twelve shillings and sixpence a time. He felt that they all had something of value, but that none of them came near to really helping him.

It’s not difficult to view many of his self-help escapades and philosophies of inner turmoil resulting from invasive external forces as one long elaborate effort to avoid self-awareness, and some of his more complex work as massive acts of evasion. But in one regard, Burroughs was wholly accurate: killing Joan, inadvertently or not, was an act of liberation. Joan’s killing initiated Burroughs’ utter abandonment of convention. He was rid of women and of the charade of domesticity.  Billy Jr. was sent to live with Burroughs’ parents, Joan’s daughter was sent to her grandmothers’, and Burroughs eventually wound up in Tangier, an international zone of tolerance and decadence, where Burroughs found readily available drugs and boys. And his voice.

Don’t ask me […] I get these messages from other planets. I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I haven’t got my orders clearly decoded yet.  I’m shitting out my educated Middle-west background once and for all. It’s a matter of catharsis, where I say the most horrible things I can think of.

Burroughs had produced what became known as the Word Hoard, a thousand-page mess of, as Kerouac put it, “scatological homosexual super-violent madness” that embodied the Beats’ capacity for both invention and diarrheic excess. Drawn largely from what Burroughs called routines, they were satirical riffs with outrageous characters that Burroughs had been performing for and with friends since his youth.

The eventual result was Naked Lunch (Kerouac, in a notable anti-Control act, gave it the name after misreading the phrase “naked lust”), once described by J.G. Ballard as “a comic apocalypse, a roller-coaster ride through hell, a safari to the strangest people on the strangest planet, ourselves,” a description that, for all its flavor, can’t possibly convey the sheer derangement of Burroughs’ obsessions. Burroughs was practically consumed by Control, by the notion that every existing governmental and psychiatric authority was conspiring to manipulate the masses and negate the individual. Free now from any constraints, he jettisoned traditional narrative and gave full rein to his battle.

There are many reasons, in form and content, for a reader to be repelled by Naked Lunch.  Despite Burroughs calling it a novel, there is no sustained narrative, but rather a series of vignettes, a prismatic view of need and sickness, amorality, and authoritarian hypocrisy. Burroughs had rejected linear narrative in his life and prose in favor of the necessarily erratic methods of seeking hidden communiqués, perceptions beyond Control mechanisms or its institutions. The book is a succession of visions (reviewers use “nightmare” so frequently, you’d think they were paid per use) of the varieties of Control sickness, a panoply of outrages, a cabaret of psychotic doctors, junkies, aliens, policemen and sodomites whose functions are to inflict cruelties, pandemonium, boredom, and some of the blackest humor in American letters.  There are the motifs, obsessively revisited; never before has so much seed been spilt in the name of literature (the floors in Burroughs’s invented worlds must look like Jackson Pollack canvases), nor has anyone taken the comedic possibilities for anal metamorphosis and abuse to such illogical extremes. For instance, the (in)famous “Talking Asshole” routine from “Ordinary Men and Women”:

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard…

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called ‘The Better ‘Ole’ that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, ‘Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?’…

After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start taking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: ‘It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.’

The reader is put in a position of trying to make sense of Burroughs’ dreams. This perhaps applies to all writers of fiction, but few were as direct in presenting their actual dreams, unaltered, for no discernible storytelling purpose. Anyone averse to hearing another person’s dreams may be put off, especially if that person is dreaming of rectal mucous. But there’s revelry in the excess, and in light of Joan’s murder, it’s plain to see in one of Burroughs’ favorite recurring motifs – boys in the hangman’s noose, ejaculating copiously as their necks snap – the appeal, and relevance, of an obliterating, orgasmic death.

Burroughs claimed his main theme as “The sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age,” but his key strategy was to portray his personal conundrums as representative of universal dilemmas. His visions of rot, decay, and infestation, of humans as a hopelessly diseased species, could certainly pertain to a specific form of nuclear anxiety; in 1950s B-movies, mutated creatures rose from nature to wreak havoc on the populace, while in Burroughs’ work, they rose from their nods to wreak havoc on the status quo. Both scenarios resulted from aberrations of chemistry, and the sense that his characters are wandering a post-atomic landscape—if not literal, at least of the mind—began with his first novel and would become more accentuated in the four novels that came out of the Word Hoard. But substitute post-Joan for post-atomic, and we start to understand the true landscape that Burroughs found himself wandering through, and the various atrocities he found there.

This was the path leading away from Joan’s death:  his wanderings, as junkie and queer, through America’s oppressive institutions and their representatives, revisiting boyhood tales – adventure stories, hard-boiled detective stories, the picaresque, pulp westerns, traditional contexts of masculine bravado and roguery – and claiming them as settings for his own inventions, rife with fantasies of abuse, betrayal, and sexual mayhem. The great theme of Burroughs work isn’t about man’s sickness with the age he lives in; it’s about a man’s reconciliation with his own imagination, and the extent he would take it to realize his needs.

The resulting trilogy – The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express – form the most expansive expression of Burroughs’ visions and his most impenetrable prose.  He claimed he was “attempting to create a new mythology for the space age,” and to that end he envisioned a struggle between the Nova Mob, consisting of criminals who are physical manifestations of Control forces, and the Nova Police, led by Inspector Lee (Burroughs – William Lee was his pseudonym for Junky, and the name/character also appeared in Naked Lunch), who do battle by undermining Control powers through use of the cut-up.  The Soft Machine introduces the themes of viral influence and control in regards to language and sexuality, and the disruption of “word and image locks” as a means of revolt.  The Ticket That Exploded continues by asserting the pre-eminence of language control over bodily addictions, unleashes the complexities contained in his oft-quoted “Language is a virus from outer space,” and introduces the Nova forces, who continue their conflict in the more linear Nova Express.

In El Hombre Invisible, his excellent introduction to Burroughs’ techniques and process, Barry Miles notes,

The first cut-ups were poems, and if the cut-up novels are approached as long prose poems, then they become perfectly understandable…texts where meaning is sometimes fugitive, shifting, and where narrative is essentially replaced by a procession of juxtaposed images…used as a way of bringing collage to literature and the images in the books are composed in a cubist manner…  [They are a] model of [Burroughs’] consciousness duplicating the form of his yage hallucinations, and everyday consciousness itself, with its flickering of images and jumps from one mood to another.  Burroughs has also compared them to what the eye sees during a short walk around the block: a view of a person may be truncated by a passing car, images are reflected in shop windows, and all images are cut up and interlaced according to your moving viewpoint.  The central theme of all the books is the fight against control, though it is dealt with in an immensely complicated way.

“Perfectly understandable” is a stretch, but when read as prose poetry, the results are often exhilarating, the complexities of Burroughs’ concepts entrancing and terrifying.  Again, Burroughs offers a chaos of vignettes, linked by reappearing characters, heavy repetition of favored phrases and personal obsessions, not least the recurrence of fountainous emissions, and references to Hassan-I Sabbah, leader of a sect of 11th century Nazari Ismaili assassins, whose maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” became Burroughs’ mantra. And again, anyone who has not already recalibrated their expectations after Naked Lunch will find the trilogy unbearable; the effect can be like listening to a brilliant street person, cocooned in their manias, suddenly belligerent that no one’s listening to them.

The cut-up/fold-in method itself plays a huge role in the trilogy, and at times the novels read like an Anarchist Cookbook for linguists.  In “The Mayan Caper” section, Inspector Lee explains how to utilize the technique for time travel, as he plans to undermine the Mayan priests who use the Mayan calendar to control their masses:

When you skip through a newspaper as most of us do you see a great deal more than you know-In fact you see it all on a subliminal level-Now when I fold today’s paper in with yesterdays’ paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday-I did this eight hours a day for three months-I went back as far as the papers went-I dug out old magazine and forgotten novels and letter-I made fold-ins and composites and I did the same with photos-

The next step was carried out in a film studio-I learned to talk and think backward on all levels-This was done by running film and sound track backward-For example a picture of myself eating a full meal was reversed, from satiety back to hunger-First the film was run at normal speed, then in slow-motions-The same procedure was extended to other physiological processes including orgasm-(It was explained to me that I must put aside all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the heaviest anchor holding one in present time.) For three months I worked with the studio-My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment

Aside from brief interludes like these, where there are discernible events and motivations, the cut-ups are like a blizzard of first impressions and dream logic, a sustained exercise in immediacy that couches wildly divergent explorations of Control, in sex—

Bradly rolled on the floor, a vibrating hammer of laughter shaking flesh from the bones-Scalding urine spurted from his penis-The Other Half swirled in the air above him screaming, face contorted in suffocation as he laughed at the sex words from throat gristle in bloody crystal blobs-His bones were shaking, vibrated to neon-Waves of laughter through his rectum and prostate and testicles giggling out spurts of semen as he rolled with his knees up to his chin-

—love—

All the tunes and sound effects of ‘Love’ spit from the recorder permutating sex whine of a sick picture planet: Do you love me?-But i exploded in cosmic laughter-Old acquaintance be forgot?-Oh darling, just a photograph?-Mary i love you i do do you know i love you through?-On my knees i hoped you’d love me too-i would run till i feel the thrill of long ago-Now my inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph-I’ve forgotten you then?  i cant’ sleep, Blue Eyes, if i don’t have you-Do i love her i love you i love you many splendored thing-Can’t even eat-Jelly on my mind back home-‘Twas good bye deep in the true love-We’ll never meet again, darling, in my fashion…

—and how they coalesce, and are sickened, by the word:

The ‘Other Half’ is the word.  The ‘Other Half’ is an organism.  Word is the organism.  The presence of the ‘Other Half’ a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally.  One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subjects during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle…yes quite an angle it is the ‘Other Half’ worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis.  From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step.  The word is now a virus.  The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell.  It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs.  The word may once have been a healthy neural cell.  It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system….

Convention was limitation, in all things, especially in language, where the accepted dictates of grammar, or the imperative for direct speech, were inherently oppressive in that we’re taught that specific words relate to specific things and should be expressed in specific patterns.  This nullifies unfettered expression, as this systematic hampering of free association inevitably leads to thought control. To combat the language virus, one had to seek out, or add to, its mutations, as if each new strain contained its own code for new liberties of perception. Like a germaphobe, Burroughs saw the potential for infection everywhere; he heard messages in barking dogs and whirring fans and other dubious places, the way Baconian theorists use ciphers to prove Sir Francis’ authorship in Shakespeare. But the threat, and his mode of attack, were fully considered, and the results read as an inevitably scrambled relaying of incident and a plan of engagement that often sounds like it’s taking place in the fourth dimension:

Start a tapeworm club and exchange body sound tapes.  Feel right into your nabor’s intestines and help him digest his food.  Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.

It would be reassuring to note that the three books have a powerful cumulative effect, but most of this evaporates the moment after it’s read, perhaps by design, though that intent would add a whole other level to an already strained enterprise. If Naked Lunch was the catharsis, the establishing of authorial voice, the cut-ups continued Burroughs’ fight on Control’s expanding front, and the force of his long-gestating visions overwhelmed not only Control’s means of expressing them, but of the reader’s ability to keep up with the revolution.  And if Naked Lunch had made it plain that Burroughs had entered some kind of a new dream state, the trilogy gives the impression that he would never leave. With the cut-up method, the negation of linear narrative was taken to the next step, the negation of the linear sentence, and with this new sort of momentum, one of jagged rhythms reliant on repeated, altered phrases, the effect is of someone struggling to recall a fading dream:

The Gods of Time-Money-Junk gather in a heavy blue twilight drifting over bank floors to buy con force an extension of their canceled permits-They stand before The Man at The Typewriter-Calm and gray with inflexible authority he presents The Writ:

‘Say only this should have been obvious from Her Fourth Grade Junk Class-Say only The Angel Profound Lord Of Death-Say I have canceled your permisos through Time-Money-Junk of the earth-Not knowing what is and is not knowing I knew not.  All you junk out in apomorphine-All your time and money our in word dust drifting smoke streets-Dream street of body dissolves in light…’

The Sick Junk God snatches The Writ: ‘Put him in The Ovens-Burn his writing’-He runs down a hospital corridor for The Control Switch-‘He won’t get far.’  A million police and partisans stand quivering electric dogs-antennae light guns drawn-

‘You called The Fuzz-You lousy fink–’

‘They are your police speaking your language-If you must speak you must answer in your language-“”

‘Stop-Alto-Halt-’ Flashed through all I said a million silver bullets-The Junk God falls-Grey dust of broom swept out by an old junky in backward countries-

A heavy blue twilight drifting forward snatches The Write-Time-Money-Junk gather to buy: ‘Put him in the Ovens-Burn his writing-’

Or, perhaps, to finally eliminate one.

Burroughs would return to more conventional techniques (although, just about anything would have been more conventional by comparison), and his feverish imagination would power him through The Wild Boys and its sequel, Port of Saints, as well as another trilogy starting with Cities of the Red Night.  In old age, he relinquished some of his struggle against control and convention, starring in Nike commercials and writing a book about the cats in his life.

After his death in 1997, his final journal entry was widely disseminated: “Love?  What is it?  Most natural painkiller what there is.  LOVE.”  Anyone who’d followed his life, work, or thoughts, none of which seemed to give credence to that particular emotion, had to wonder what in the world he was talking about.  His cats, maybe.  Or maybe Burroughs, a man incapable of common affections, finally felt that he’d done his penance, had atoned, in his way, for an abominable act, and allowed himself to rest in the most conventional dream our controlled species has ever concocted.

____
Steve Danziger is managing editor of Fiction magazine and a contributing editor at Open Letters.

first fit, first part

{an histoire of the great kings of Bretayn}

Since ceased th’siege + assault upon Troye,

bones brok’nd brittled t’bronz’nd ashes,

that soldier who trod treason o’er th’plots’v

his enemies was tried f’r treachery tho

agile Ennias, of th’truest on Earth, of high kind,

haunted by shade Dido, was worth th’wonder

wealth’v all th’west isles——

From rich milk’v wolf-mother Romulus

rose Rome’nd’n its captured riches Romulus was

swath’d. W/ arrogance he built his name

upon a hill + took Palatine t’Romulus t’Rome——

Tirius traveled t’Tuscany he built beginnings,

Langaberde’n Lombardy left us houses,

+ far o’er th’French floods Felix Brutus

on many full banks built Bretayn + sits

w/ one

where war’nd wreck’nd wonder

by surprise has went therein,

+ oft both bliss’nd blunder

fool hope shifted t’sin.

When Bretayn was built by Baron Felix Brutus rich,

brethren bold were born therein that loved t’fight, in-

deed ten times’nd more of warring much was written.

Marvels have fallen + unfolded here more often

than’n’any other country I know, since that early time.

But of all the kings I’ve read what is written,

Arthur is the most chivalrous in Bretayn.

|| Forthwith a wonder’v adventure I’ll attempt to show,

a selly in th’sight’v some (I’m not w/holding),

An outrageous adventure, an Arthur-wonder­——

If you will listen t’this lay but f’r’a little while,

I shall tell it, as it, as I intend’t t’be heard——

{ of the Round Table on New Year’s Eve }

Arthur——

this king lay at Camylot upon Christmastime

w/ many lovely lord’nd ladies’v th’best.

Reckon th’brethren’v th’Round Table all

rich mirth, rich feasting’nd reckless reveling,

their tournaments taken by turn, harmoniously,

jousting, joyously, these gentle-knights, these jolly

knights

set forth t’th’court they carry carols t’make

merry

for there th’feast lasts a full fifteen days

w/ all th’meat + th’mirth that men could envision.

——All

th’wealth’v th’world + they wanted kin familiar,

those most kind knights under Christ’s sacrifice, under His salvation,

+ th’loveliest look’n ladies ever that lived

+ th’most chivalrous king th’court s ev’r had.

The happiest under Heaven,

under king’nd kingly will;

his knights now the greatest known,

th’hardiest upon th’hill

+

th’queen,

the comeliest to describe

w/ eye that glinted gray,

that any other looked like her

no man would ever say.

While th’New Year was so young that it was

now——

Now Arthur would not eat till all were served.

He was so jolly’nd joyful, + child-geared

his life liked him + he loved the least’v’t.

Another might lounge long or long sit,

but Arthur’s young blood hurried him’nd his wild mind

now——

+ also another custom kept:

he’d neither quench his thirst nor would ever eat

upon such a dear day till described to him was

some adventurous thing, an incredible tale’v

some miracle that must be believed,

of elders, of armies, or of other adventures now——

waiting

thus, there stood stalled th’stalwart king himself,

talking’v trifles before the high table t’those at hand:

good Gawain Gwenore

Agrauayn

Bishop Bawdewyn

Ywan, Vryn’s son

+ many noble knights——

Such gaiety’nd glee glorious + right;

dear din all day’nd dancing upon th’night.

{ th’feast }

+ w/ th’crackling’v trumpets th’first courses came, +

w/ many a banner bright’nd full, hung there by +

now w/ drum noise + noble pipes, pipes that pipe w/

wild trills + w/ strong sounds woke words

all

that heard were touched + raised drink’nd clamor + rose

they rose

w/ delight + w/ delight were drawn forthwith to a

a table full’v dear meat,

abundant eating, copious fresh dishes so full,

so much served a place could scarcely b’set f’r

th’silver vessels’v soup t’rest upon

th’cloth.

Each led as he loved himself

t’take gladly w/out loathe;

Every two had dishes twelve,

good beer and bright wine both.

|| Of their service I’ll now say no more.

Each, you well wit, had not a thing to want for——

____
Adam Golaski is the author of the story collection Worse Than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008) and of Color Plates (Rose Metal Press, 2009). Adam co-edited A Sing Economy, the latest anthology from Flim Forum Press, and he is the editor of New Genre, a journal that promotes craftsmanship and innovation in horror and science fiction. He teaches literature and writing at the University of Connecticut.