A.J. Liebling on Proust's Appetite

The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book ... In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

--from A.J. Liebling's Between Meals.

Also of interest: in Paris circa 1955, Liebling writes that he "received a note from Mirande by tube next morning ..." Anyone know what "by tube" means in this context?

DFW RIP

David Foster Wallace is dead at 46.

My feelings about his writing have always been, I admit, clouded by my jealousy: though my age, Wallace was smarter, more talented, more knowledgeable, and more successful than I. Nevertheless, he could have been better still, more disciplined, less derivative; I knew it, and now I'm afraid he did, too.

My guess? He had the writer's disease -- perfectionism -- so that whatever heights he scaled, they were never high enough, what he wrote never good enough. No doubt he struggled with depression most of his adult life (the episode in the mental ward we now know about, if we didn't before) ... but it shouldn't have ended this way. I'm so sorry to hear this news. DFW was among the most admired writers of his generation, and it wasn't enough for him. That's depression, not narcissism, and it killed him. (Don't let it take you the same way -- even if it means giving up writing. I speak from experience on this one.)

Weirdly, in the week leading up to Wallace's death, I received a statistically unlikely number of submissions to The King's English from fans who cited him as one of their favorite writers. Usually, authors submitting to the journal choose from a broad and eclectic band of authors, but not this week. This week, it was evenly divided between Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! and David Foster Wallace. Who knows why? It's just a coincidence, but now of course it feels like an anticipatory tribute, so I want to share it. Here's what our authors had to say:

"Best novella? I'm inclined towards Salinger... but truly I have to go with the so way ambitious early work of David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way". It's in his first story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, and it's the high point of the collection. The other is his short story "Little Expressionless Animals," which features Alex Trebec and the silent Merv Griffin as characters. Freaking brilliant." -PR

"Favorite personal essays: David Foster Wallace understands and conveys the complexities of human subjectivity so well, I love when his essays move in the direction of memoir. If his 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience' can be counted as a personal essay, I might call it my favorite. - SFP

"My favorite collection of personal essays is, by far, David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's what got me into non-fiction, even though I write nothing like him. The title essay and the one on the state fair are the best." -- KB

RIP, Mr. Wallace.

Muriel Spark Sparks

I've been re-reading Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent and discovering (after an interval of perhaps 20 years), that it's not at all the sweet confection I remember it. Or rather, it is full of all those sharp edges Spark is known for, odd word choices and original (or just plain odd) ideas.

First, an example of odd word choice. The narrator, speaking about her name, "Fleur," says:

"Not that I looked bad, it was only that Fleur wasn't the right name, and yet it was mine as are the names of those melancholy Joys, those timid Victors, the inglorious Glorias and materialistic Angelas one is bound to meet in the course of a long life of change and infiltration; and once I met a Lancelot who, I assure you, had nothing to do with chivalry."

Um, a long life of ... infiltration? This reveals, I believe, the narrator's view of herself with regard to others. Like Spark, she is a writer, and seems to view others solely as exhibits, opportunities to plunder for her art. Still, it's a bizarre word to see in this context, and it takes a while for it to make any sense.

And here's an example of an idea I found striking:

... [W]hat I found common to the members of Sir Quentin's remianing group was their weakness of character. To my mind this is no more to be despised than is physical weakness. We are not all born heroes and athletes.

I've never decided on an attitude about people's flaws, whereas Fleur appears to have considered the question and come to a point of view. True to life or not, I find it fascinating whenever I encounter a character or author who seems to have consciously arrived at an opinion about something which I've left unexamined. (Since I leave a lot unexamined, this isn't difficult.)

UPDATE: Here's a couple more instances where Spark inserts material into her story that, well, stands out:

He gave me what he said was the usual form of contract, on a printed sheet, and it wasn't such a bad contract nor was it a good one. Only, I found later by personal espionage that his firm ... had a private printing press on which they produced "the usual form of contract" to suit whatever they could get away with for each individual author.

"Personal espionage" is an odd phrase to begin with (one must take a moment to decide that "espionage" alone wouldn't have done, because it would have connoted a shadowy network of hirelings, but it's a pause a reader shouldn't need to make use of), but what's odder about the phrase is what it says about the narrator. In the course of the story, it becomes clear (or seems to) that the narrator's publisher and several other people are conspiring to suppress her first novel. In these circumstances, one can imagine why she might be driven to "espionage," though it's never made clear when she might have done this, or why she bothered. One is left with the suspicion that our narrator is paranoid and sneaky, and Spark intended this. What she seems to have had in mind was a roman à clef in which she modeled the ruthlessness that had been necessary to her own development as a writer.

Here's a short passage that hints at this:

When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

At a minimum, it seems to reveal her narrator's self-centeredness; it's a tempting leap to assume the same was true of Spark herself.

The Limits of Author Interviews

The usual practice, when invited to write the introduction to an anthology, is to praise its contents. How refreshing to come across an introduction that finds most of the volume under discussion wanting (and manages also to achieve resonance well beyond the book under discussion):

Some of the Americans in this book are perhaps a little too eager to explain themselves. All that has ever really happened to them, one feels, is the experience of being writers. When they talk about themselves, these "selves" become sacred objects. As so often happens with Americans, the terror of failure hangs over them ... By contrast, Blaise Cendrars seems carelessly bountiful of everything, and recounts his life, his friends, his many countries and adventures simply as anecdote and observation, for the pleasure of talking about them. His interview makes an extraordinary impression on us who are saturated in literature: this is not merely a writer seeking to be a writer, this is a man who has lived.

-Alfred Kazin, in the introduction to Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series, 1967.

Didion the Slow Learner

A while back, I praised Joan Didion's style, which led me to catch up on some of her recent writing and her interviews (in 1978 and 2006) from The Paris Review. The thing about Didion is that she seems to have sprung, like Athena, from the brow of Zeus. Everything she's published is so clearly, distinctively hers, that it's hard to believe she ever suffered a moment's doubt about her craft.

I suppose I should find it encouraging or heartwarming to read that Didion does suffer such doubts, but oddly, I find it merely ... doubtful. But see for yourself. Here she is, from the 1978 interview, talking about her novel, Run River:

It's got a lot of sloppy stuff. Extraneous stuff. Words that don't work. Awkwardness. Scenes that should have been brought up, scenes that should have been played down. But then Play It As It Lays has a lot of sloppy stuff. I haven't reread Common Prayer, but I'm sure that does, too. [It doesn't.]

Actually, I didn't much care for either Run River or Play It As It Lays when I attempted them years ago, but to suggest that Book of Common Prayer is sloppy --!

Well all right, then: may all writers be cursed with such messiness.

What's Wrong with The Bonfire of the Vanities

I'm a fan of Tom Wolfe's, if by that you mean a fan of his classic journalism - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and The Right Stuff, both of which I read in high school. And though I don't agree with his anti-Modernist ranting in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, I enjoy his brio.

What soured me on his work was The Bonfire of the Vanities, in part because I found his ideas about what novels should be terribly limiting. What with all the hoopla over his Harper's essay on this topic that presaged the appearance of "Bonfire," and the subsequent barrage of publicity that accompanied the book's eventual publication, I began to realize that Wolfe was an aesthetic and moral bully. And truth be told, when I read the book in 1988, I wasn't terribly impressed: it was engrossing, but it was populated with thinly-drawn characters, mere counters to be moved around the board in the service of Wolfe's satire. It didn't stick with me.

How satisfying, then, to learn that I wasn't alone in my feelings about it when I ran across Terrence Rafferty's respectful demolition of Bonfire, which came out at the time. Rafferty begins his review by addressing the bold panache with which Wolfe debuted as a novelist:

... he's not about to come on all insecure and timid and terrified of committing a gaffe, as if he were just another eager arriviste. Bearing this gigantic book, he crashes the novelists' party, and it's as if a professional wrestler in full signature regalia had suddenly appeared, waving his arms and declaiming and hurling people to the floor: he makes a big impression.

The book, Rafferty says,

... allows Wolfe to show off his talents as a listener and an observer: he knows how to cram scenes full of visual and verbal details without slowing the momentum of the narrative, so the novel seems rich and generous while we're reading it. But why does it feel so thin when we're done with it? Dazzled by the flamboyant performance, we may still wonder, when the wrestler has finally left the room, what the hell that was all about.

Aye, laddie. Done and dusted.

Cyril Connolly on E. M. Forster and Style

In 1938, Cyril Connolly performed a rather bleak assessment of the state of English literature. He singled out E. M. Forster as a novelist whose work seemed to be surviving the passing years. Here's part of what he had to say:

Much of his art consists in the plainness of his writing for he is certain of the truth of his convictions and the force of his emotions. It is the writer who is not so sure what to say or how he feels who is apt to overwrite either to conceal his ignorance or to come unexpectedly on an answer. Similarly it is the novelist who finds it hard to create character who indulges in fine writing.

Lest you think Connolly is an enemy of style, rest assured that he is not. But he does like precision, as he states with admirable beauty here:

The vocabulary of a writer is his currency but it is a paper currency and its value depends on the reserves of the mind and heart which back it.

In drawing this analogy, Connolly goes against the now long-established rule of literary criticism that one should not confuse an author with his or her work -- a good rule in general, though I can say from bitter personal experience that Connolly is absolutely correct, if I understand him aright, to draw a connection between a writer's prose and his or her personal qualities. Some of us are not made to write massive 19th-century Russian novels (never mind our inability to speak the language): some of us were made for (very) light verse.

--from p. 6 and 10 of Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.

Truman Capote Digresses Spectacularly

... I despised school -- or schools, for I was always changing from one to another -- and year after year failed the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky at least twice a week and was always running away from home. Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street -- a girl much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame. Because she murdered a half-dozen people and was electrocuted at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there, I'm wandering again ...

--From pp. 21-22 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Most Entertaining Author Bio Note of the Week

M.T. Anderson, author of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation,the recent (and deserving) winner of the National Book Award, has also written several other young adult novels, including Feed,whose main characters are, not surprisingly, teenagers. In his bio note for the novel, he says:

"To write this novel, I read a huge number of magazines like Seventeen, Maxim, and Stuff. I listened to cell phone conversations in malls. People tend to shout. Where else could you get lines like, 'Dude, I think the truffle is totally undervalued?'"

Voltaire Rocks La Maison

I don't think much about Voltaire usually. After an unhappy encounter with Candide in a high school French class for which I was inadequately prepared, I've been content to consign him to the same category one consigns any other elder: well-meaning, no doubt, and perhaps brilliant in his own outdated way, but not relevant. Voltaire, of course, wouldn't have seen himself this way, judging by a book review by Adam Gopnik in the March 7th, 2006 issue of The New Yorker. To explain why Voltaire would have begun his campaigns for human rights at all, Gopnik writes of him that, "there is the kind of egotism so vast and so pleased with itself that it includes other people as an extension of itself. Voltaire felt so much for other people because he felt so much for himself; everything happened to him because he was the only reasonable subject of everything that happened. By inflating his ego to immense proportions, he made it a shelter for the helpless."

And Gopnik makes a convincing case that Voltaire was indeed important, not just because he was one of the first campaigners for human rights, but because he refused to countenance religious violence, and with it, he also refused faith itself.

If you've read Candide, you know that Voltaire pokes merciless fun at Leibniz' idea that "the world is optimally designed," and that suffering is part of "some universal balance." Gopnik writes, "Voltaire's target throughout Candide is not optimism in the sense of fatuous cheerfulness but optimism in the sense of optimal thinking: the kind of bland reassurance that explains pain with reference to a larger plan or history." Generally speaking, Gopnik asserts that we no longer believe that natural disasters are part of a benevolent universe, as people did in Voltaire's time. (As an aside, I think Gopnik is wrong in this: after Hurricane Katrina, I was startled to hear more than one educated colleague refer to it in a way that made it clear they thought of Katrina as divine retribution for the sins of New Orleans. I wondered what would happen if they'd said that to anyone in Mississippi whose homes and livelihoods were also destroyed.)

"But almost all of us still do believe, stubbornly, in some kind of optimal thinking. We believe, vaguely or explicitly, that liberal democracy, with all its faults, is the best of all possible political systems, that globalization, with all its injustices, is the best of all possible futures, and even that the American way is the best of all possible ways ... We are all optimalists of this kind, perhaps reinforced by the doctrines of evolutionary psychology ... or by faith in an inevitable evolving 'future of freedom.' Attacks on these beliefs -- September 11th was the most acute -- shake us up the way eighteenth-century people were shaken by the Lisbon earthquake. The realization that all may not be tending toward the best, that religious fanaticism and tribal intolerance could prevail over liberal meiliorism, is the earthquake of our time.

"Voltaire's radicalism, then and now, lies not in his refutation of optimism but in his refusal of belief. Candide is not really, or entirely, a satire on optimism. It is an attack on organized religion."

I think Gopnik is correct that most Americans share a vague, benign belief that everything is getting better in small ways, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it isn't - famine persists, genocide proliferates, we are doing rapid damage to the environment, and the poor in this country are getting poorer. And many people believe that "things happen for a reason," and will say so regularly. Or they'll say that "God doesn't send you anything you can't handle." To both of which I say, Horse-hockey! Yes, I know that it can feel that the course of one's life seems, in retrospect, to make more sense than it did at the time one was living it; and yes, human beings are capable of great endurance and change to meet enormous personal, physical, and psychological challenges. But try telling someone who survived the Rwandan genocide that "things happen for a reason." Try telling that to the next homeless people you meet and see if they agree. Or consider telling someone who was brutally raped and maimed as a child that "God doesn't send you anything you can't handle." Assuming there is a God, it's clear He's got no qualms about sending people trouble they can't handle. People break all the time.

I have no quarrel with spirituality or people of faith. But lately it's become clear to me that this meliorist view is based on very sloppy thinking. The flip side of what we usually mean when we say that "things happen for a reason" is this: if you're suffering, you better suck it up because it's what's on the menu. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't: if you're suffering at the hands of other people or if your suffering is due to our collective short-sightedness and stupidity, then the platitudes don't cut it. No one should have to suffer, or suffer evil, and be told to simmer down because the Big Guy Upstairs has got it all under control.

But to get back to Voltaire, is it possible that his denial of faith brought the horrors of the Nazi death camps and the like upon us? No, says Gopnik:

"Of course, in the light of later horrors, the horror that Voltaire wanted to crush doesn't seem a horror at all ... His enemies were local lynch mobs, not centralized terror. A Nazi or Soviet regime would have crushed him, horribly, and everyone else with him. The argument has even been made that Voltaire's rejection of moral order and God helped lead to the later horrors. But unless one believes, against all the evidence, that faith in God keeps one from cruelty, this is a bum rap. There are absolutist and totalitarian elements in the Enlightenment, of the kind that Burke and Berlin alike opposed: the desire to rip up the calendar of the past and start over implies murdering whoever isn't with the program. This wasn't Voltaire's spirit by a mile."

And finally:

"It is still bracing, at a time when the extreme deference we pay to faith has made any attack on religious beliefs unacceptable, to hear Voltaire on Jesuits and Muslims alike -- to hear him howl with indignation at the madness and malignance of religion -- and to be reminded that that free-thinking, which inspired Twain and Mencken, has almost vanished from our world."

Yes.

Things No Author Wants to Hear

In a blurb in the September 2006 LOCUS, I found a blurb describing the ongoing merger of the British bookselling chains Waterstone's & Ottaker's. Apparently, about 30% of Ottaker's stock has to be "sold, pulped, or returned during the process of converting the stores." Here's the revealingly descriptive language Waterstone's PR flak used:

"[A]bout 30% of the stock needs improving; it can be broken down as roughly 5% that is dead and of no use to anyone, 10-15% that is dead range but is still saleable and the balance as excess copy depth."

My heart goes out to those authors whose work is "dead and of no use to anyone," but I'm also curious about how something can be "dead range" but "still saleable." Many of my favorite authors would probably be described as the reverse: unsaleable, but not dead range.

The Bizarre Fate of Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Plus Muzak's Founder

In Fort Mill, South Carolina, you can find the corporate headquarters for Muzak -- equipped, we hear, with an "awesome" sound system that quite purposely does not pipe tunes into the elevators. Guess you'll need that iPod after all ...I know all this because I caught that fascinating piece on the evolution of the Muzak company in The New Yorker recently - anyone else see it? Apparently, it's not your father's Muzak anymore. Heck, it's not even the Muzak of the early 1990s: they're hip now, with a digital menu of over 1.5 million songs (with everything from Led Zeppelin to 50 Cent and Miles Davis) and chances are you hear it regularly in retail stores everywhere, and never notice. I have to say I haven't thought much about Muzak in a long time -- though one of my neighbors, whose living room was recently overhauled to make it look up-to-date circa 1958, apparently works at Muzak, to judge from the van parked outside his house -- so it was quite an eye-opener to learn about Muzak's founder (What? Muzak had a founder?), a career Army officer born in (yes) 1865. Talk about a guy who moved with the times.

Back when Muzak actually was Muzak, instead of a musical chameleon crafting soundscapes to express a corporate image, the writer Dorothy Parker died. This would be the famously sharp-tongued Dorothy Parker, author of the often-anthologized "Big Blonde," and recently the subject of a movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. --Actually, that's a terribly demeaning way to speak of a serious writer, but the truth is that I haven't read anything by her, not even "Big Blonde," and while that may speak to my own shortcomings as a person and as a reader, it's also true that Parker has either been neglected, her work has grown dated, or she's been terrifically underappreciated, because not many people my age have read her. I can't judge why her work has fallen into obscurity, given my unfamiliarity with it, but a piece in Bookforum pointed to one reason why Parker might have missed out on some attention, and that reason's name was Lillian Hellman. Hellman was Parker's literary executor, and exercised such repressive control over it that almost none of the biographers or publishers who might have touched off a renewal of interest in Parker after her death in 1967 were allowed to go forward, and by the time Hellman lost interest, in the early 1970s, so had much of the rest of the world. Even Parker's remains were neglected: her ashes sat in the file drawer of a law office on Wall Street for fifteen years before they were finally interred on the campus of the NAACP, to whom she'd willed her entire estate. Alas, poor Yorick!

In the Beginning was the Word ... and Someone with a Big Mouth

"...it is understandable that someone should ask how it was possible to know that these things happened so and not in some other manner, the reply to be given is that all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened."

--Jose Saramago, Blindness, p. 265.

Why Aren't Writers More Inventive?

Why is it that writers are prized for their ability to reproduce the same sort of thing over and over in the same key? Once I discovered the charm and brilliance of J.P. Donleavy's voice in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B., I expected him to reinvent himself with the same verve in each of his novels. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that his remarkable voice, so hard-won, had ossified ever since he first revealed it in The Ginger Man. (And it's not like the man was content to write his To Kill a Mockingbird and then fall silent; he's written a heckuva lot in the same voice.) Similarly, most short story collections make an author's tics, thinness of experience, or powers of invention glaringly obvious. (I hope this is mostly an illusion -- in other words, that authors are generally more versatile than they appear in print and must appear more homogeneous to satisfy readers and sell books -- but I'm doubtful. Even the most disciplined writer can't help but betray himself or herself; we never kill all our darlings.) You can't read Russell Hoban's Kleinzeit and Riddley Walker without being impressed by how completely he revinvented himself - subject matter, voice, tone, and even orthography are all different. That's what writers should do from book to book, I think. But even Hoban suffers from this problem, as much of his opus is stamped from the same mold.