FATHER AND SON by Edmund Gosse

Gosse's Father and Son is a superb and sometimes quite beautiful book (the apex of its beauty comes in the exquisite 'rock pools' episode), but I finish it wishing that the author had gone further--not only by throwing Victorian filial duty to the wind and more harshly criticizing his insufferable pater, but also by showing us more and telling us less, dramatizing more and summarizing less. I wish the exquisitely descriptive Gosse of the 'rock pools' episode had been able to turn those powers upon the final confrontation between the two title characters, a crucial and climactic scene that Gosse buries in the Epilogue. This book is quite good, but the author remains too much the decorous Victorian to write the memoir I would like to read.

One rarely cited episode in the book that I find absolutely fascinating narrates the crime that midwifes the birth of Gosse's subjectivity. Using a workman's tool, the child Gosse deliberately punctures a pipe that feeds a garden fountain his father has built. When the crime is discovered, the elder Gosse immediately blames the workmen, and his guilty son sits in silence, his illusions of his father's omniscience shattered like thin glass. But within his silent self Gosse also notes a startling division of consciousness: "I had found a companion and confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another." He writes further, implicitly (and with surely deliberate blasphemy) comparing this moment to the Annunciation of the Holy Spirit: "the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended upon me..." Let us stroke our fin de siecle Viennese beards and think about this for a moment. The process that brings to birth the son's self-consciousness, his subjectivity, his individuality, that part of himself that becomes the all-important standpoint from which he will oppose his father, is set in motion when the son damages his father's spurting pipe. The phallic symbolism is comically obvious: the son gives birth to himself by symbolically castrating his father and miraculously escaping paternal retribution in a way that reveals the father's limitations. The son sees that his symbolic act was merely the confirmation of an already existing reality, for the elder Gosse is already a castrated Uranus, a father-god whose powers are seriously limited. It's remarkable how much the scene resembles the dreams described by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams.

CONFESSIONS by Saint Augustine

After a one-month hiatus Mindful Pleasures is back, and I'm reading St. Augustine the only way he should be read--impiously. I'm reading the Confessions in the beautiful Penguin translation by the Gothickly-named R.S. Pine-Coffin; I'm ignoring the theology and enjoying the prose, reading the saint exactly as he would not have wished to be read. (Still waiting for that thunderbolt...) The notorious 'theft of the pears' episode now seems to me an uncannily pitch-perfect parody of Dostoyevsky. A rational reading would understand things the other way round, of course, interpreting Dostoyevsky's underground ranter as an Augustine gone to seed in an urban wasteland, but it's more fruitfully disorienting to read Augustine as the satirist--or in this case, the Monty Python spoofer. I also find myself wondering if the little-read latter chapters of Biblical exegesis might be Augustine's way of refracting the preceding confession through a corrective lens. The final chapters implicitly instruct Augustine's readers to interpret his autobiographical narrative allegorically and perhaps recognize corresponding events in their own lives. The entire work thus becomes an injunction to go and do likewise.

Augustine should be considered the patron saint of momma's boys. His mother (who, like Richard Nixon's, was a saint) is one of the few major characters in his narrative, filling the space that would ordinarily (in later examples of the genre) be given to a spouse or lover. By contrast, Augustine's unloved (and, not coincidentally, non-Christian) father is summarily dispatched in a subordinate clause, his death seemingly affecting his son not at all. Saints can be colder than ice. (Augustine likely recognized this coldness during composition and attempted to mitigate it with a more balanced portrait of his father near the end of his narrative in Book X.)

And then there's the matter of the Sin of Sodom (whatever that was, exactly; experts disagree), Greek Love, the one that dare not speak its name (except when it did, which was quite often in the Ancient World). Augustine's homoeroticism is as obvious as his formidable Oedipal attachment to Santa Monica (a name I can't write without musing that Raymond Chandler lived briefly in Augustine's mom). Compare the relative importance of Augustine's male friends and his barely mentioned mistresses. Note especially the poignant pages on the death of a beloved friend (Book IV, chaps.4-9). Augustine is very Greek, very Platonic/Socratic in this privileging of homoerotic over heteroerotic attachments.

Although I've long known about the linguistic aspect of the Confessions, I'm surprised at the extent to which the work is a treatise on language: on rhetoric and reading, speech and signs, representation and interpretation. From the well-known early chapter in which the child Augustine happily initiates himself into the Lacanian 'Symbolic' to the equally famous description of St. Ambrose's scandalously silent reading (something so unusual ca.380 that it required explanation and excuse) to Augustine's description of the effect of Ambrose's sermons as a semiotic event (wanting to appreciate them purely as rhetoric he finds himself unable to separate sense from sound, signifier from signified, rhetorical dancer from religious dance) to Augustine's ultimate conversion through an act of reading (preceded by Augustine's highly questionable interpretation of the child's overheard words, a hermeneutic act as weak as those of the astrologers he ridicules) to the whole notion of the 'Word made flesh' as a transcendental healing of Derridean differance, a mystic marriage of signifier and signified that redeems the world by granting it meaning--in the light of all these examples (and given that Augustine repeatedly tropes the redeemed consciousness as a form of language sans differance, most dramatically during Augustine and Monica's late conversation about the afterlives of saints), the book can be interestingly read as a mystico-linguistic treatise, a work of Christian poststructuralism. Indeed, the Confessions concerns itself so explicitly with the materials and manner of its own production and consumption that I'm tempted to interpret the book as Augustine's answer to Plato's Phaedrus, that great self-reflecting mirror of a dialogue, the ur-text of deconstruction. It's been a while since I've read the Phaedrus, but I think the case can be pretty easily made.

BLOOMSDAY 2010

It's Bloomsday again, my favorite holiday, so let's all lift a pint of Guinness and try not to think about the rat in the vat.

Anyone who considers a holiday based on a literary character's fictional activities to be utterly frivolous is entirely correct and should be lauded for such a killing criticism of Christmas. The festival of December 25 is, after all, a celebration of the fictionalized birth of Jesus Christ, central character of the New Testament, a highly problematic and internally contradictory quartet of narratives written decades after the historical Jesus's death at the hands and hammers of the Romans. With the obvious exception of Martin Luther King Day in the U.S., most of our 'official' holidays celebrate more or less fictitious or mythologized individuals and events: cherry-tree chopping George Washington, the Resurrection of Christ, the Pilgrims' harvest feast. One might also point out, echoing Harold Bloom (my third-favorite Bloom after Leopold and Molly; that cynical neocon disinformation artist who wrote The Closing of the American Mind doesn't even deserve mention in their company), that all monotheism is the worship of a literary character, regardless of whether we call that character Jahweh or Allah or God or Christ. So there's not really much light between Bloomsday and Christmas or Easter or any other holiday you might mention. And Bloom ben Elijah, rising over Dublin at an angle of 45 degrees like a shot off a shovel, would surely agree.

Enjoy the ale. Forget the rat. Drink till you puke again like Christians.

(Note to the uninitiated: The "rat in the vat" reference is to a paragraph near the beginning of the "Lestrygonians" episode of Ulysses. Check it out.)

A EULOGY FOR DONNABELLE OARD (1929-2010) by Brian A. Oard

(NOTE: My mother died on May 28, 2010 at age 80. Here is the text from which I spoke when I delivered the eulogy at her funeral on June 2, 2010 at Lima, Ohio.)

Farewell. When we speak the word ‘farewell’ we are really saying ‘go well,’ ‘travel well,’ ‘be safe and happy on your journey.’ It makes no difference whether that journey be from my house to your house or from this life to that undiscovered country of Death from whose bourne no traveler returns.
Farewell.

Poem no. 712 by Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

I am going to talk about Mom’s life today, but I will begin by speaking of her death. We hear of so many, too many, bad deaths these days, deaths in which agony and suffering continue for days, months or years. Mom’s death was not like that. It was a ‘good’ death, a peaceful death, an easeful death.

Poem no.1100 by Emily Dickinson

The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying -- this to Us
Made Nature different

We noticed smallest things --
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized -- as 'twere.

As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame

That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite --

We waited while She passed --
It was a narrow time --
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot --
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce --
Consented, and was dead --

And We -- We placed the Hair --
And drew the Head erect --
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate --

There was ever less ease and peace in the final months and weeks of her life. She was suffering physically from congestive heart failure and a host of respiratory ailments, and even worse for those of us who loved her, she was suffering mentally from Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. We all know that during the past months she was only ‘Mom’ sometimes, in relatively brief flashes of lucidity–a good day or a good hour in which she seemed her old self–but over the past few weeks even those flashes began to disappear. Her final weeks were rough, her final days were very bad. But her death, remarkably, was surpassingly gentle. Dylan Thomas writes: "Do not go gentle in that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light". Mom had her share of anger and frustration (and, yes, rage) under the dark clouds of her illnesses, but when death came she defied Dylan Thomas and did indeed go gentle into that good night. Her death was peaceful. At 5:30 on the morning of May 28, she rose from her chair (something she had not been able to do without assistance all the previous day) and walked out to the kitchen window, where the sun was just beginning to rise. She would have heard the sound of birds chirping as the first thin line of daylight pinked the eastern horizon.

From Dickinson no.294:
The doomed regard the sunrise
With Different delight
Because when next it burns abroad
They doubt to witness it

Dad woke, saw her standing at the window, and led her back to her chair, where she returned to sleep. When I checked on her at 9:10, she was sleeping and breathing as well as she had been for the past two weeks. When I checked her again ten minutes later, her breathing had ceased and she was dead. It was as easy as that. Donnabelle Oard eased out of her life as gently as a summer breeze.

When I recounted this story to a friend the day Mom died, he wrote back, "I think your mother had a happy death." He was speaking of that look out the window. "One last look," he wrote me, "but this time into the Open." This was an allusion to Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy, where the poet describes the mass of human beings as "spectators, always, everywhere, / turned toward the world of objects, never outward." He writes: "With all its eyes the natural world looks out / into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward... Never, not for a single day, do we have / before us that pure space into which flowers / endlessly open." One of the few exceptions to this rule is the case of someone near death. "For, nearing death, one doesn’t see death, but stares beyond..." Mom, a few hours before she died, was staring beyond.

Such was her death. Her life is something all of us know about. But we each know a different part. We are all pieces of a jigsaw puzzle–like the ones Mom used to spend hours putting together–and if you could magically fit all of our little memory pieces together, you would see a picture of Mom. Believers and nonbelievers can argue about the afterlife unto eternity, but there remains one form of immortality that is absolutely inarguable. Mom lives on in the memories of every one of us–everyone on this room and everyone who came yesterday. We all keep her alive through our individual acts of remembering. And even Mom’s great-great-grandchildren as yet unborn will remember her in their way, since without Mom, her descendants would quite literally never have existed. Their lives (and all of ours, my brothers and sister and nieces and nephews into the second generation)–our very lives are a constant unconscious act of remembrance.

So let us consider Mom’s life. Donnabelle Jones Golden Oard, to give her her full name, lived a long and full life. When Mom was born in September 1929, the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression was still a month away, Prohibition was the law of the land, Al Capone ruled Chicago, movies had only just begun to talk, when people spoke of "the war" they meant World War One, and in Washington the Republicans were fouling everything up. At Mom’s death, we are in the midst of a recession caused by the most recent stock market crash, Prohibition and Capone are the stuff of history books and gangster movies, silent films are a relic of a distant time, and in Washington the Republicans are still fouling everything up. (And Mom, as a lifelong Democrat, would surely approve that message.) Over the course of her life, she married twice, raised six children, worked in a factory, and performed for decades the countless labors we euphemize under the titles of ‘housekeeping’ and ‘motherhood’: cooking, cleaning, washing, driving, especially driving. Mom was forever picking us up and dropping us off. She traveled the length of this country, from New York City before I was born to Los Angeles in the 1980s, to those many trips to her favorite place, Las Vegas, in the 90s. From Portland to Myrtle Beach to Dallas to New Orleans to Albuquerque–Mom traveled to all those places, and more besides. And we mustn’t forget to numerous trips to Aunt Lucy’s in Anderson, and those journeys to Springfield and elsewhere in search of antiques–especially decorative teapots, Occupied Japan ceramics, and blue glass. With Mom, anything blue would do.

While I was assembling those photo boards over there a couple days ago, I began to look, to really look for the first time, at photographs of Mom. Our mothers’ faces are so familiar to us that we don’t really see them until they come to us in old photographs, the familiar defamiliarized by the passage of time. I saw Mom’s face make the journey from girlhood to adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age. And yet it was always the same face, that same smile. (It’s easy to see, looking at the photograph in the middle of the top row, that Mike’s daughter Kristen inherited her Grandma Oard’s smile.) Look at that little girl, that little Donnabelle Jones–or "Babe," as she was and is known to Aunt Lucy’s side of the family–whom we see in that tiny cluster of school pictures in the top corner, that Depression-era schoolgirl, daughter of Andy and Pansy Jones, whom we see in the next picture standing in a garden run riot with flowers and plants. (A brief digression on Jones family nicknames: Aunt Lucy’s family call Mom "Babe." Andy and Eleanor’s family call her "Dobbie," short for Donnabelle. Our side of the family calls Andy "Noonie." but Aunt Lucy is Aunt Lucy to all of us.) When I look at those first, small pictures, I wonder: Can that little girl really be my Mom? I have a hard time believing it, since by the time I was born, Mom was already middle-aged. I guess we all, to a greater or lesser extent, have a hard time believing that our parents were also young people at one time.

As we move across the row of photos to images of the 1940s schoolgirl and young adult, I see a Donnabelle whom I begin to recognize. Posing on the edge of a fountain with Evelyn or in somebody’s backyard with Ruth, yes, this is Mom: a woman who always had a good time with her friends. (A brief digression: When Mom was in the hospital years ago, Evelyn, who was in a wheelchair and on oxygen at the time, visited her and asked, "How are you feeling, Donna?" Mom, who had just had a mastectomy, gave her customary answer: "Oh, I’m fine." Evelyn immediately responded, "Are you lying?" and Mom answered, "Yeah." Then Mom asked Evelyn how she was feeling. "I’m fine," Evelyn said. Mom asked her, "Are you lying?" And Evelyn said, "Yeah.")

In 1948 Mom married Arthur Lewis "Lewie" Golden, father of Ed, David and Susan, who was killed in a car crash in 1954. One of my favorite photos on this board is that snapshot of Mom as a young mother with a very young Ed. Almost twenty years separated the birth of her first child and her last, so Mom spent roughly thirty years of her life in the role we see her performing for the first time here: a mother caring for her young child. Many years after this photograph was taken, I was that child, and when I think back on my childhood with Mom, we always seem to be sitting in the car somewhere, playing some sort of game to pass the time. Twenty Questions was a favorite, I recall. (So many memories of games: board games–playing games with Kristen, etc.)

Mom married William Clinton ‘Bill’ Oard in 1959 and they remained together for the rest of her life, more than fifty years. The first part of the their life together, those Pine Street Years long renowned in family fable and legend, are commemorated here by two photos showing Mom in the kitchen. [one presiding at birthday party, other cooking] And I want everyone here to take this opportunity to consider how many meals Mom must have prepared in the course of her lifetime. The number would boggle the mind. That’s a lot of hamburgers and spaghetti, a lot of beef and noodles–and a whole lot of Mom’s delicious homemade macaroni and cheese. The kitchen was Mom’s space, her workplace, (and Mom was the disciplinarian there; all of us boys felt the "spoon with holes in it" across our backsides at one time or another) so there’s a great pathos in the fact that her final act on earth was to walk into her kitchen and look out her window. This was an act of defiance of the disease that had robbed her of the ability to prepare meals.

The last 25 years of Mom’s life, the period from the mid-1980s until about two years ago, was probably the time in which she had the most fun. This was her period of traveling. She enjoyed every minute of her trips to Vegas, and we all know that if there is a heaven, Mom has already found its casino. She’s playing the slots and listening to the Rat Pack, who are booked to perform in the lounge for all eternity. Several of the pictures on the other board show Mom at various of Dad’s naval reunions, where she got to know Marge, who became Mom’s best friend during the last decade of her life. After Marge and Herman moved back to Ohio, they and Mom and Dad played cards weekly, a fact that reminds me that I could not find any pictures of Mom doing something she enjoyed for many years: playing cards with Bob and Agnes, Don and Evelyn, Tom and Marylou. Those of us who were there should probably think back for a minute and remember those long, late Saturday night card games. The pictures in our heads are probably better than any that might have been captured by a camera. (And that goes for all this stuff: In fact, right now I would like us to take a moment of silence, and think of a time when you saw Mom truly enjoying her self, having a good time. Save that memory. It’s something to treasure.)

One of Mom’s favorite CDs featured Tony Bennett singing "My Favorite Things." Here, in no particular order are a few of Mom’s favorite things: Days of Our Lives (Every afternoon at 1:00 during my childhood, the voice of Macdonald Carey would say, "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives" and Mom would light a cigarette [she still smoked then] and sit down to watch the latest adventures of Doug and Julie); slot machines (she loved that one-armed bandit); board games (from Monopoly and Upwords to Scrabble and Sorry–and then there was checkers. I could never beat Mom at checkers. I still want a rematch); garage sales (both as buyer and seller, Mom loved browsing at garage sales and she always enjoyed having her own–there’s a beautiful photograph showing Mom and Lucy standing in front of Mom’s garage during a sale: it was taken in the morning and is illuminated by sunlight dappled by its passage through the trees); the Lawrence Welk Show (Mom never missed Lawrence Welk. Probably the last really good day she ever had was a Saturday during her last hospitalization when Susan and Ed visited and we all watched Lawrence Welk together. I don’t think Mom was ever that lively again.); Bob Evans (she always ordered the same thing: Sunshine Skillet, and it was always delicious); Loretta Lynn (Mom saw Loretta Lynn in concert at Memorial Hall back in the sixties, and every time the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter was on TV, she watched it. That movie made her a fan of Tommy Lee Jones, but she was really predisposed to like Tommy Lee since Mom half-seriously considered everyone named Jones to be at least a distant relative. Whenever a Tommy Lee Jones movie came on TV, I would always tease her: "There’s your cousin, Mom! There’s cousin Tommy Lee!") Back in the 1940s Mom was a big fan of Spencer Tracy, and she saw all the Tracy-Hepburn movies, but probably her favorite movie from that era, the one she continued to re-watch on video into her final years, was Laura with Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. And she was also a major fan of classic Hollywood musicals: especially Judy Garland, but also Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra. She told me that Sinatra’s version of "I’ll Be Seeing You" was her favorite song.

recite/sing:

I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day
And everything that's bright and gay;
I'll always think of you that way;
I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you

Her CD collection was eclectic, everything from Boxcar Willie to the Bee Gees, from Benny Goodman to the Beach Boys, Patsy Cline to Elvis Presley. In fact, another of her favorite songs was Bob Seger singing "Old Time Rock n Roll." She loved the Rat Pack and always preferred the original Oceans 11 to the George Clooney remake (although Clooney was one of her favorite actors of recent years). She loved family get-togethers: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all those summer Saturdays and Sundays during the 1970s and 80s. When I say the word "volleyball," those long ago summer weekends should return to the minds of everyone who was there. But in a different category from all these mere things, Mom’s favorite ‘thing’ was seeing her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She loved you, and I hope you all realize how happy you made her when you visited.

When Mom was in the hospital a few weeks ago, sometimes spending most of the day unconscious, I once read to her from the poems of Philip Larkin, a dour and unsentimental poet whom I like a lot. One day after visiting her, I stopped at the new nature trail that’s under construction on Roush Road, parked my car in the gravel lot and walked the path as it wound through spring fields, over a river and gully, and all the way back to the banks of Lima Lake. I eventually found myself in the middle of a small pine grove in which the branches of the trees filtered the sunlight to produce a beautiful effect like a painting by Renoir. As I stood there, looking at this beautiful natural effect and thinking of Mom lying in the hospital and not really improving, a few lines from Larkin’s poem "The Trees" passed through my mind. It’s a poem that finds an image of mourning in the coming of spring. It’s a short poem, so I’ll read it in full.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Mom passed away in the season of green grief, as corn sprouted in the fields and flowers opened to morning sunlight glittering the grass with drops of dew. She died as the natural world was coming to life around her, and the message of her death to us is a concise Latin tag: memento mori, remember that you too shall die. And live every day to the fullest, because every morning you open your eyes is a blessing.

One of my favorite lines from King Lear is "Tis not the worst so long as we can say This is the worst" As long as we are conscious of our condition, we have not yet reached the worst state. In her final days, Mom declined to a point at which she could no longer say, "This is the worst." That her death came when it did, and in the way it did, is thus also a kind of blessing. No one who loved her would have wanted her to live one day more in the state to which she had declined, and Mom would not have wanted it either. And I am convinced that this is one more reason for Mom’s last look out the kitchen window. She took one final glance at the familiar before taking her leave of this life forever. And now she is gone, and all we can say is Farewell...Farewell...Farewell.

"THE TREES" by Philip Larkin

It’s time for a little Larkin, line-by-line. The text for today is his poem "The Trees," composed 2 June 1967, originally published 17 May 1968, collected in High Windows (1974) and in the essential Collected Poems, a volume that should be on the bookshelf of anyone who reads.

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf

We begin in banality, the starting point of many a Larkin poem, but here the banality is linguistic as well as imagistic. This is simply bad verse, a line we might find stitched into a sampler or printed inside a greeting card. It lends itself to easy doggerel parody: The trees are coming into leaf / The Brits are eating too much beef... But just as we’re ready to conclude that Larkin has joined the staff of Hallmark and kissed his talent goodbye, along comes the second line:

Like something almost being said;

Old Larks to the rescue. The second line saves a poem that initial banality threatened to strangle in its cradle. This is a wonderful simile that deserves and provokes meditation. How exactly is a tree wearing that thin veil of green that comes in American April and English May really ‘like’ a statement that remains unspoken? (A possibly related question: How does Rilke’s headless Apollo ‘see’?) It’s interesting that Larkin chooses to compare the leafing trees not to a whisper or a murmur or even a guttural Midlands mutter but to something ‘almost being said.’ The last two words denote an ongoing process of saying which the ‘almost’ cancels (appropriately) even before it linguistically begins. The line thus exemplifies what it represents: like the trees, it doesn’t quite say anything, but there is a definite vague ‘something’ it wants to say. The line grasps for that ‘something,’ that impossible statement, in the same way that any poet in the act of composition reaches for a perfect metaphor, a mot juste, an image that clicks into place like the tumblers of an opening lock. The fact that the poet doesn’t find it (yet) lifts the poem out of the ditch of banal Romantic ‘Nature’ cliches and places us squarely in the more disconnected world of modernity. Willie Wordsworth’s daffodils were sprayed and paved over a long time ago. The problem now is not building nature into a pseudo-religious ‘supernaturalism,’ but rather finding ‘something,’ anything, to say about it that doesn’t reek of misunderstood Wordsworth.

The recent buds relax and spread,

An exhausted impulse toward natural supernaturalism gives way in the third line to a Lawrencian natural eroticism. The buds on the branches ‘relax and spread’ like a welcoming female lover, an image that causes us to jump back and eroticize the first line’s ‘coming’ as a leafy green orgasm. We might also re-read the second line as a bit of puritanical self-censorship: nature’s eros is the love that dare not speak its name in these lines, the ‘something almost being said’ since it is stated figuratively rather than literally.

Their greenness is a kind of grief.
And so the whiplash rhythm of this stanza snaps our necks back one last time, unexpectedly transforming nature’s eros into a festival of mourning, a green carnival of grief. But this identification is again uncertain. Just as the greenness ‘almost’ said something in line 2, here it is figured as a "kind of grief," not in the literal sense of ‘a type or species of grief’ but signifying a ‘vague something or other that resembles grief.’ The line’s central copula, the rhetorically powerful ‘is,’ is a bit of Larkinian legerdemain. It makes the metaphor seem more solid and direct than it really is. It also contradictorily foregrounds the metaphor’s construction and causes the attentive reader to say, "Hey, wait a minute, exactly how is greenness a kind of grief?" The second stanza attempts an answer.

Is it that they are born again

The poem’s most dramatic enjambment comes here (in its least interesting passage) as Larkin breaks the line upon an image of resurrection, snapping the core belief of Christianity like a matchstick between his fingers.

And we grow old? No, they die too.

The poem talks prosaically to itself in these two lines, implicitly interrogating Gerard Manley Hopkins’s "Spring and Fall" to ask if it’s really Margaret that Margaret mourns for. Does the greenness of the trees produce something like grief because we dialectically project upon a natural image of resurrection the fact of our own mortality? Does Father Hopkins’s Christianity work in an allied but less complex way, salving our grief with an image of resurrection? If so, both strategies have now shipwrecked on reality’s rocks. We have all seen trees die–from disease, lightning, wildfire, plaid-shirted lumberjacks, etc.–and the 'evidence' for Christian Resurrection would probably be inadmissable even in an American courtroom.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Aha! A trick! Nature’s images of resurrection and immortality are mere sideshow entertainments, makeup on a deathmask.

Is written down in rings of grain.

This is lovely. The rings in which we read the tree’s life (and which can be read, like Gerald Ford’s best interviews, only after the subject’s death) are troped as a kind of writing. This metaphor tilts the poem to a self-conscious angle and foregrounds for the attentive reader all of Larkin’s rhetorical ‘tricks,’ most pointedly the descent into conversational demotic in this stanza’s first two lines followed by the knockout metaphor in its last two. This is the salient Larkinian ‘trick’: the shift of register creates a satisfying climax even though the metaphor doesn’t entirely convince. In fact, the closing two lines are almost a non sequitur with regard to the first two.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
And yet. And yet. After the tricks of poetry and religion have come undone, after we’ve looked behind the curtain and seen the singularly unimpressive wizard (as unimpressive a man as the fascist-tending academic librarian who wrote this poem)–after all that, the vision of trees remains. With a wildly beautiful metaphor, Larkin tranforms the leafy branches of trees into the turrets and towers of castles. But the line also does more this: it takes those castles and knocks them about, forcing them to ‘thresh,’ with all of that word’s pastoral, mechanical and historical overtones. And let us pause for a moment over the sheer sonic beauty of this line. Listen to the play of sibilants that sounds across it like the threshing of windblown trees.

In fullgrown thickness every May.
A pretty prosaic line. Not much to say about it, because it doesn’t say much. Yes, it completes the image of the preceding line and underlines it a bit, but it seems more a rhythmical placeholder than anything else.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Again with the uncertainty... The trees only seem to say this–in an act of poetic projection. The speaker is clearly throwing his voice into the branches. This is what he wants them to say: a pure affirmation that all the metaphorical piss and shit of the previous year has come to an end and he is released to begin anew– in the perhaps nonmetaphorical piss and shit of a whole new year. Hooray. This type of nature ventriloquism is a staple of third-rate Romanticism, and Larkin is too much the Modern to uncomplicatedly indulge in it. And yet, like the trees, the thought remains: If the trees are in fact almost saying something, it probably would be something like this.

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

The stanza’s opening sibilants return with a vengeance in this supremely beautiful final line. It’s still a projection/ventriloquization, but the beauty of the line and its sentiment overrides any niggling anti-Romantic criticisms. We are swept away like the branches and we want to believe it. Larkin has slyly enlisted our own desires (wouldn’t we all like to begin afresh?) in his poetic cause. And in so doing he has moved absurdly far from the first stanza’s ‘kind of grief.’ A memento mori has become a call to life. How the hell did that happen? Answer: the same way a call to life became a memento mori between lines 3 and 4 of stanza one. The whole poem is a tennis match between life and death, and we’re the engrossed spectators, turning our heads back and forth until we grow dizzy. And the game ends with this soft, sibilant repetition, which should probably die into a whisper when read aloud.... The line also brings immediately to mind a poet and poem rarely mentioned in discussions of Larkin, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. We hear an echo in Larkin’s last three words of Eliot’s "peace which passeth understanding": shantih shantih shantih. You can discuss that connection amongst yourselves...

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon

I re-read The Crying of Lot 49 recently and found it even better than I remembered. The Jacobean revenge play parody (which anticipates by 40 years the over-the-top sadism of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ) is both more gruesome and funnier than I had recalled; and Oedipa's descent into madness and lucidity (the madness of lucidity, the lucidity of madness) is accomplished with wonderful economy in the book's brief space-time. (My only real criticism is directed at the book's prose. The Pynchon of Lot 49 wasn't yet the recklessly beautiful writer of Gravity's Rainbow. The margins of my copy of GR are studded with 'WOW's inked whenever I came across a sentence or paragraph that could simply not have been better written. There are precious few such passages in Lot 49.) I was especially impressed on this reading by something I had failed to fully appreciate when I read the book a decade ago: the beautiful and hermeneutically crucial image that ends the first chapter. Oedipa recalls a painting by Remedios Varo that figures the world as a tapestry woven by prisoners in a tower. It's an image of reality as both social construction and imaginative projection, a tapestry in which we are trapped, a cage we've built around ourselves. I call this image 'hermeneutically crucial' because the entire novella can be understood as a slow pulling back of this tapestry. Lot 49 is a game of "Strip Botticelli" that culminates (like every Freudian or Lacanian striptease) in the revelation of a void, a lack: the vast meaninglessness that the absurd surface of American reality attempts hysterically to conceal. (In this sense, James Wood's designation of Pynchon's novels as "hysterical realism" is a kind of bullseye. But Wood is only criticizing the absurd surface; he doesn't read the books closely enough to realize how right he is.) The novella's multiple images of constructed realities, radical uncertainty, textual interpretation, and a void of meaninglessness underlying and inciting all discourse--all of this encourages a contemporary hermeneut (or should we call him a 'hermeneunuch'?) to whip out his big postmodernist guns and start blasting away, riddling the Pynchonian text with Derridean bullet holes. But any attempt to assimilate the void Oedipa Maas glimpses to the linguistic aporias of Derrida and de Man only introduces another level of delusion. Such interpretation is a hasty repair job on the tapestry Pynchon so elaborately rips; it's another discourse that defangs the book so it can be safely displayed in the Postmodern Monkey House of the American Academic Zoo. This is a way of conveniently avoiding the most disturbing things the novel has to say about American life, insights that cut through the usual bullshit the way gasoline eats through the bottom of a styrofoam cup. Such is the bind Oedipa finds herself in at novel's end:

"Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of a legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia."

The Crying of Lot 49 was strong stuff in the mid-1960s, and the intervening 45 years have hardly diluted it. (It blows my mind to think that we will soon be marking this book's 50th birthday.) Anywhere in America today you can turn on a TV, flip to a news channel, and watch the Paranoids blow out all the lights.

NIXONLAND by Rick Perlstein

First, a few voices from Nixonland:

"Sing one more freedom song and you are under arrest." -- policeman's warning to a group of schoolchildren in Selma, Alabama, 1965

"You'll never make it in politics, Len. You just don't know how to lie." -- Richard M. Nixon

"Can anyone tell me what's in my legislative program?" -- Gov. Ronald Reagan, during a press conference

"[John] Wayne might sound bad to people in New York, but he sounds great to the schmucks we're trying to reach through John Wayne. The people down there among the Yahoo Belt." -- Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips

"Nothing would bring the real peaceniks back to our side unless Hubert urinated on a portrait of Lyndon Johnson in Times Square before television--and then they'd say to him, 'Why didn't you do it before?' " -- one of Hubert Humphrey's advisors, 1968

"Those hippies...were wearing beards, and anybody who wears a beard, he deserves to get beat up." -- a Connecticut factory worker, speaking of the 1968 Democratic Convention

"It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning." -- a resident of Kent, Ohio, after the Kent State murders

"If I ever find out you're a Communist, Jane, I'll be the first person to turn you in." -- Henry Fonda, to his daughter

"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending fifty thousand young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood." -- Sen. George McGovern, in a speech to the Senate on Vietnam

"The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sakes!" -- Nixon to Kissinger

"Is there anything braver or more noble about burning up children who live north of the seventeenth parallel or who live in Cambodia or Laos? They all feel pain. They're all children of the same God. Those it seems to me are the kind of conditions we have to recover if we're going to save the soul of this nation." -- McGovern on the campaign trial, responding to a question about the famous photograph of a South Vietnamese girl running from an American napalm strike, 1972

"Goddamn it, forget the law!" -- Nixon to Attorney General John Mitchell



Nixonland is a great book. It's 748 pages long, and when I reached the last page, I didn't want it to end. I hope Perlstein plans to continue his narrative history of American conservatism with a volume focusing on Ronald Reagan and the Republican party's hard right turn after the Watergate wipeout. (A turn that was nothing compared to what's happening today: the Republicans openly embracing the most psychotic and delusional elements of the American right. Today we're living through the not-yet-written fourth volume of Perlstein's project.) Perhaps the best way to state the difference between Perlstein's and every other history of America in the period 1964-72 is to say that Nixonland is the best book Thomas Pynchon never wrote. This is history as a Pynchon novel, with all the absurdity, black comedy and paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49 or even Gravity's Rainbow. (And isn't Richard Nixon the shadowy, almost unseen presence haunting Pynchon's entire oeuvre, from V. to Vice?) Perlstein also shares Pynchon's drive to recapture events that have been lost to history--and the recent past is always in the greatest danger of oblivion, since it bears more directly upon the present. All the usual landmarks are here, of course (Watts to Woodstock, My Lai to McGovern), but even more impressive are the events Perlstein rescues from the rabbit hole of the recent past: his coverage of the Newark riots, which is as good as Howard Zinn at his best; his account of the media's quick change from criticizing the Daley regime to parroting the Daley line on the 1968 Democratic Convention; his revelation of the now conveniently forgotten fact that millions of Americans wanted to kill Martin Luther King (and his somewhat more doubtful assertion that millions of others would've been willing to die for him); his balanced account of Jane Fonda's antiwar activities. Probably most important for future studies of the late 1960s New Left is his demonstration of the fatal flaw in that pet doctrine of radical Marxists, "heightening the contradictions." The leftists failed to take into account one fact that Nixon knew very well: when state violence is provoked by nonconformists, at least as many Americans will cheer the cops as will support the protesters, and the pro-fascist cheering will be amplified by the megaphones of power. This is why when Nixon received a memo warning him of upcoming campus unrest in 1970, he scrawled across it a single word: "Good."

One obvious criticism: Perlstein overuses the Orthogonian/Franklin dichotomy. Even though he builds a convincing case that it's a defining factor in Nixon's worldview, it remains too simplistic a sociology to build a history upon--a fact evidenced by Perlstein's own description of the Hard Hat Riot (another important event he draws out of the rabbit hole). During the riot, 'Orthogonian' construction workers and 'Franklin' Wall Street stockbrokers joined forces to brutalize antiwar demonstrators. The American class structure defies easy dualisms, as do the various Republican strategies for keeping the different classes at each others' throats. America since Nixon has been like the '72 Democratic primaries: the classes set against one another by right-wing rhetoric while the Richard Mellon Scaifes of the world laugh all the way to their offshore banks. Yes, Tricky Dick ratfucked America--and that's nothing compared to what he did to the people of Southeast Asia.

Perlstein does a marvelous (and wonderfully readable) job of reminding Americans of their recent past, but Nixonland is still just one monkey wrench tossed into the Great American Amnesia Machine. We need many more. May 4 of this year is the 40th anniversary of the murders of Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Jeffrey Miller and Sandra Lee Scheuer at Kent State University. Let's see if anyone notices...

DANUBE by Claudio Magris

Anyone who loves the work of W.G. Sebald, especially The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo, should check out Claudio Magris’s Danube. The account of a 1983 journey along the eponymous river from its multiple Black Forest sources to its mind-bogglingly multiple Black Sea mouths, Danube is to travel books what Moby Dick is to fish stories. This ain’t no lightweight Paul Theroux trip. Magris’s travel narrative is but a framework upon which he hangs the multiple digressions, the intellectual sidetrips, that form the real heart of the book, Danube’s radically decentered center. These digressions–on topics ranging from the theme of the sonderling in German literature to Heidegger’s philosophy to the Mauthausen concentration camp to the café architecture of Vienna to the perpetually marginalized history of the Slovaks--are sometimes brilliant and almost always interesting. They transform the book from a travel narrative into an intellectual portrait of Danubean culture, Magris’s academic specialty. In a review blurbed on the back cover, John Banville writes that Magris "seems to have read everything," and that statement encapsulates the book’s greatest strength and most important weakness. Magris does indeed appear to have read everything and to remember it all verbatim, and he punctuates his text with a nearly constant stream of quotations and paraphrases. Many of these are wonderful and apt, but I often had the desire to reach into the text, grab the author by the lapels and say, "That quote was great, Claudio, but what do you think?" In the book’s weak spots, its dry patches (all books over 200 pages have them), Magris’s voice is more professorial than poetic. (The contrast between Danube and Sebald’s books is most obvious here; Sebald is more poet than lecturer, even though he, like Magris, paid his bills by teaching at a university.) At times, this book feels like a tour of the Danube basin conducted by an obsessive bibliographer. But the rest of Danube is interesting and well-written enough to overcome these weaknesses–and even to incorporate them. Throughout the book, Magris gently mocks his own encyclopedic pretensions. He's aware that the book’s overemphasis on literary culture betrays both the author’s academic bias and, more importantly, the anachronism of his project, the impossibility of encyclopedicity in an age of overspecialization. Near the end of the book, Magris explicitly laments this limitation, but he also slyly generalizes it, transforming his academic handicap into the dysfunction of Modern Man, whom he likens to a Ulysses who no longer needs to be tied to the mast because "the song of the Sirens is entrusted to ultrasonic waves which His Majesty the Ego cannot discern." (I think ‘His Majesty the Academic’ would’ve been more accurate.) The ending of the book remains extremely beautiful, though--beautiful enough to compensate for the occasional longueurs.

(Readers of Danube might also want to check out the documentary The Ister, a meditation on Heidegger's WWII-era lectures on Holderlin's hymn "Der Ister" that retraces Magris's journey in reverse, taking the viewer from post-Cold War Romania through post-1990s wars Serbia to the Black Forest. The film is beautifully photographed, but it is intellectually weakened by an overreliance on French Heideggerian interviewees, the worst of whom, Lacoue-Labarthes, reveals himself as a cynically disinformational apologist for Heidegger's fascism.)

WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau

When spring comes, and a gauzy veil of green throws itself over the budding trees, I always feel compelled to read Thoreau.

"I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough." -- Walden, "The Village"

We can safely assume from the above quote that Sarah Palin and her ignorant ilk would not consider Thoreau a "real American." He's obviously a socialist, communist wealth-redistributor, and he pals around with terrorists like John Brown. But seriously, while reading the long Montaignesque essay on "Economy" that uneconomically opens Walden, I reflected that it would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine the America in which Thoreauvian economics would be taught in business schools. That America would be a Jeffersonian agrarian utopia, a pastoral democracy, the kind of garden that America never really was and will never really be. Contra Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," we'll never get back to the garden; we've built too many highways to take us away from it.

I suspect that the contemporary popular imagination sentimentally casts Thoreau as a 'naturalist' in order to avoid the disturbing implications of Thoreau's early and implacable opposition to what would become America's hegemonic ideology, corporate capitalism. Regarding the textile industry of his day, he writes: "I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing....the principle object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched."-- Walden, "Economy"

The last two paragraphs of section two, "Where I Lived...", exemplify Thoreau's prose at its very best, poetically beautiful and poetically intricate. It is necessary to resist the impulse to subject Thoreau's rhetoric to de Manian deconstruction, and not just because such an interpretation would be almost too easy, but also because it would be beside the point. We should instead attempt the much more difficult task of understanding Thoreau's wildest rhetorical moments, his 'fishing in the sky'--understanding them not as one understands Kant (or Derrida or Rorty), but as one understands Yeats, or tries to. Such understanding can be the work of a lifetime.

Reading Thoreau after Lawrence, I note similarities and differences. Both men are a type of cracker barrel philosopher, but H.D.'s barrel is better built than D.H.'s. Lawrence's barrel is seriously warped and has at least one hoop missing.

One aspect of Walden many readers seem to miss is Thoreau's humor, his sarcasm, irony, wit. Lawrence could've learned something from Thoreau in this area. For example, the mock-epic Homeric description of hoeing beans (a bean field Iliad) and Thoreau's bitterly sarcastic reaction to martial music coming from Concord--a bitterness that's reminiscent of late Mark Twain and also does sound a bit like DHL. (Both passages are in the chapter "The Bean-Field.") While recognizing Thoreau the naturalist and Thoreau the radical, we shouldn't discount Thoreau the humorist. There's probably much more irony in Walden than most readers have ever suspected.

The passage in "The Ponds" where Thoreau loses and rescues his ice-axe from the frozen lake is, for me, strangely beautiful, powerful, and even haunting. I think it's one of the greatest passages in the entire book. There is a hallucinatory vividness about it, and it's achieved with remarkable economy.

As for Thoreau the Romantic philosopher of Nature, in "The Ponds" he interestingly revises Emerson's "transparent eyeball" image, projecting the eyeball outside the self, into nature, and aiming it inward, toward the self. "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature...." But does Thoreau really measure the depth of his own nature in Walden? It's highly arguable how well he succeeds in being the Columbus of his self (to borrow the rhetoric of Walden's "Conclusion"). He's certainly the Columbus and the Cortes and the Balboa of Walden Pond and Woods, but consider how little he tells us about his life outside the woods. By book's end, a Thoreau known only from Walden would be a rather mysterious figure.

Running through the book, and especially noticeable in "The Pond in Winter," is a tension between Thoreau's Enlightenment rationalism and his Romantic "Natural Supernaturalism." The tension is present in the "Realometer" paragraphs that end "Where I Lived..." but it comes into stark relief in "Pond in Winter" when Thoreau acts according to classic scientific method: he sounds the depth of Walden Pond, constructs a hypothesis from this data, and tests his hypothesis in a neighboring pond. This scientific Thoreau, probing and testing, sits uneasily alongside the Thoreau who insists upon the essential mystery of Nature, of that mystery as the premier site of imaginative play, a source of tropes, a motive for metaphor. Thoreau is aware of the mutually antagonistic character of these two positions, and over the course of the book he attempts a synthesis of "the bays of poesy" and "the dry docks of science." We can read Walden as that attempt and argue about its success, but I suspect that Thoreau's "dry docks" image points to a deeper and more agonistic project: throughout Walden, Thoreau is swamping the discourse of science in the language of poetry. This isn't synthesis; this is war.

"And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass."

SEA AND SARDINIA by D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia begins with what is surely one of the best first lines in all of travel literature: "Comes over one an absolute necessity to move." That's an absolutely perfect first line. The inverted syntax (a rhetorical device Lawrence proceeds to dilute by overuse over the course of the book) begins the narrative with an active verb, setting the story and reader immediately into motion. Syntax becomes semantics. The words travel out of their customary positions into unfamiliar territory. The very language hurries us along, grabbing the reader with a verb and thrusting him forward toward the nouns that will make sense of this strange linguistic place he has found himself in. Here reading is very like traveling. (It's probably also safe to assume that this beginning is Lawrence's writerly reaction to the opening paragraphs of Ishmael's narration in Moby Dick. An absolute necessity to move comes over Melville's protagonist too, from time to time.)

Sea and Sardinia is much better than Twilight in Italy, but it's not a great, surprising book. It is exactly the kind of travel book one would expect D.H. Lawrence to write, neither better nor worse. Passages of great beauty alternate with dubious generalizations; poetic descriptions give way to earnest invocations of 'maleness' that bring to mind early-1990s Robert Bly. The most significant improvements over Twilight are twofold. First, Lawrence keeps his sermonizing impulse in check much the time. Second, his prose keeps this book in constant motion. This is an account of a whirlwind trip from Sicily to Sardinia, across the island from south to north, and back to Sicily via the Italian mainland, and the narrative moves as steadily as its characters. This is a book that travels, and that's probably the most impressive thing about it. Anyone seeking reliable information about Sardinia should look elsewhere. DHL spent only a few days on the island, so his account is necessarily superficial. He's more tourist than traveler here.

TWILIGHT IN ITALY by D.H. Lawrence

The Italian travels of three great writers have all failed to satisfy me. Goethe's Italian Journey is a desultory hodgepodge which even its translator/editors admit could've used a better original editor. Henry James's Italian Hours is as intoxicatingly beautiful as one would expect a volume of the Master's travel writings to be, and therein lies the problem: the collected pieces read more like transcriptions from the exquisite, oh so exquisite, Jamesian sensorium than accounts of Venice, Rome, etc. It is often difficult to 'see' Italy clearly through the shimmering beauty of James's prose. And now Lawrence's Twilight in Italy likewise fails to ignite. There are flashes of brilliance in Lawrence's book (the great image that ends the opening chapter, for example: a roadside crucifix high in the Alps with the body broken off and the severed arms still nailed to the crossbar and swinging in the wind), but this wheat is buried under far too much chaff. Lawrence's sermonizing tendency gets completely out of control here. Lawrence as narrator becomes the sort of character who might have been satirized by Dickens or Trollope: a pedantic Midlands know-it-all who will never miss an opportunity to preach a sermon at you. Twilight in Italy suffers fatally from Old Herb's half-baked primitivism, dubious anti-modernism (in the broadest and most Catholic sense of the term), and his ubiquitous Tiresome Transcendental Tangents. That said, I'm not giving up on Lawrence. Sea and Sardinia is the next book in my Penguin D.H. Lawrence and Italy, and it looks a bit livelier (and brighter) than the disappointing Twilight.

AN AMERICAN DREAM by Norman Mailer

An American Dream is The Notorious NKM's most notorious novel, and both notorieties are richly deserved. Even those who haven't read it know that this is the book in which Mailer's alter ego murders his wife, sodomizes her maid (a scene that contains the novel's best/worst unintentionally comic line: "...there was canny, hard-packed evil in that butt..."), severely beats a jazz musician , slugs a titan of industry, and walks away unpunished and pretty much unscathed. Madness beckons, but Riker's Island does not--as it surely would for anyone who committed only the last of these offences. (I'm reminded of Morgan Freeman's best line in Unforgiven: after Eastwood tells him that he's traveling north to kill a couple cowboys, Freeman asks, "What'd they do, spit on a rich fella?") So American Dream is a fantasy novel, an American Fantasy of sex, violence, crime, wealth, power and fame--all turned rancid and rotten at the core. This is America become Cancer Gulch. And the book is written in a prose so highly ornamented and syntactically archaic that I'm tempted to call it Baroque or even Rococo. Mailer lets his talent for metaphor run wild in this novel, and the effect--as usual when Norman lets himself go--is uneven overall. Some passages and phrases are strikingly apt and beautiful, while other paragraphs and pages are overwritten in a way that brings to mind not Faulkner, but Robert Penn Warren at his most florid. The narrative also has its problems, especially in the book's second half, leading me to suspect that Mailer didn't quite know how to wrap things up, so he killed off two characters in offstage bloodbaths and sent Rojack west. The ending is weak and the epilogue self-pitying, but there's just enough good writing here to make the book worth reading--once.

Maybe the most interesting thing about American Dream is that this is the novel in which Mailer makes brutally explicit his lifelong struggle to both embody and overcome the spirit of Ernest Hemingway. The novel might almost be titled The Long, Unhappy Vengeance of Stephen Rojack. Mailer's antihero quickly succeeds where Hemingway's most interesting men fail: he kills the Great Bitch, murdering her in a scene that's explicitly compared to a bullfight. All this leads to a question that every reader must answer for him- or herself: Is Mailer diagnosing a Hemingwayish psychosis at the heart of American life, or is he merely indulging his penchant for super-Hemingwayish excess? He's clearly attempting both, but I think the balance finally falls on the side of self-indulgence. The duality of the book, however unbalanced, reflects Mailer's Oedipal love-hate relationship with the writer sycophants called 'Papa,' a writer whose 1962 suicide, unmentioned in the novel, might be the ultimate 'dog that doesn't bark' in Mailer's fiction.

Readers might also ask to what extent this Hemingwayan interpretation is a self-protective swerve (on the interpreter's part) away from what's most genuinely frightening about this novel: the spectacle of Mailer, just a few years after stabbing his wife, writing a novel in which he makes deep contact with the wife-murderer inside him.

I would also like to take this opportunity to warn readers away from the botched late-1960s movie adaptation of this novel. It's a real piece of crap. Enough said.

FOUR HOURS IN MY LAI by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim

Bilton and Sim's Four Hours in My Lai is an important and sickening book that should be required reading for anyone who still nurses delusions of glory about the events American historians quaintly refer to as 'the Vietnam experience.' This is a shockingly direct and brutal account of the war's most notorious American atrocity. It is as difficult and necessary to read as, say, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian for readers who wish to appreciate (I won't say 'understand') the terrible nihilistic psychosis that under the 'proper' conditions can erupt out of otherwise 'ordinary Americans.' Essential and definitive, this is one of the Vietnam books everyone should read. It belongs on the shelf with Herr's Dispatches, O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, Stone's Dog Soldiers, Wright's Meditations in Green, Karnow's Vietnam: A History, and Young's The Vietnam Wars.

SURREALISM: THE ROAD TO THE ABSOLUTE by Anna Balakian

Anna Balakian's now-classic work on Surrealism is a useful introduction to the movement--and the chapter on "The Surrealist Image" is very good--but the book suffers from the author's personal and intellectual proximity to the magnetic personality of Andre Breton. Even when one allows for the fact that Balakian's book is over 50 years old, her view of Surrealism still seems excessively Bretonian. Georges Bataille's name, for example, doesn't even appear in the index, and Bataille's circle, the focus of much recent writing on the movement, is entirely ignored. The book also has a pronounced literary bias: very good in its coverage of poetry, it flounders in a too-brief discussion of Surrealist painting, arguably the movement's most important legacy. One might correct Balakian's bias by reading her book in conjunction with the 2001-02 Tate/Met exhibition catalog Surrealism: Desire Unbound, a book worth owning for its illustrations alone (the text is a bit too Lacanian for me).

THE PROUST SCREENPLAY by Harold Pinter

Pinter's Proust Screenplay is a good read, and it would probably have been a marvelous film had it ever been produced--a better and more satisfying film than either of the best-known partial adaptations of subsequent decades, Volker Schlondorff's Swann in Love and Raoul Ruiz's Time Regained. While the latter is fascinating and beautiful (and casts the fascinatingly beautiful Catherine Deneuve as Odette), the filmmakers' decision to view the entire work through the lens of the final volume does too much violence to the structure of Proust's narrative. Pinter's screenplay, by contrast, extracts and preserves the Proustian architecture for a film that's a remarkable adaptation of all of Proust. While formal constraints obviously force him to leave much out, I found myself marveling at how much Pinter was able to get in. He retains the shape of Proust's work by shifting its rhythm into overdrive. Compared to the slow, oceanic rhythm of the Proustian text, Pinter's adaptation speeds past in half an eyeblink. Pick up a copy and screen it in the cinema of your mind.

THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross

Let me belatedly join the chorus of acclamation that has greeted Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Anyone looking for an excellent, informative, well-written, highly readable introduction to Modernist music can stop looking: This is the book. In addition to covering all the usual bases of 20th century music history (Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Cage, Stockhausen, Glass, Adams, et al), Ross rescues Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the classic works of Aaron Copland from decades of sentimentality and kitschy interpretation, reminding us of Gershwin's hero-worship of Berg (and Porgy's affinity with Wozzeck) and the 1930s leftist politics that informed Copland's vision. We are also given an eye-opening account of Richard Strauss's complex and conflicted relations with Nazism. (It turns out Strauss was not entirely a Nazi lapdog, but he was clearly and tragically in over his head.) On a somewhat lighter note, Ross gives us a wonderful look at the European composers in exile in Los Angeles during WWII, the surreal high point of which must surely be his account of Schoenberg's very public reaction to Mann's Doctor Faustus. (Get the book and read it for yourself.) Ross's chapter on Sibelius is likewise informative and beautiful (as is his account of Messaien), and the chapter on Benjamin Britten forced me to finally buy the Naxos CD of Britten's settings of Donne, Michelangelo and Hardy, as well as the Philips CD of Peter Grimes. And that's probably the best review anyone can give a book like this: it encourages us to listen more widely and more closely, to listen to things we might never have heard before, and even to hear more in pieces we think we know well (like Sibelius). Of course I have my criticisms (the book is too Euro-Americo-centric; it only touches tangentially on rock and pop), but these are far outweighed by all that Ross has shown me. This book carved a highway through the vast Sahara of my ignorance of Modernist music and led me to many fruitful oases along the way.

And I suppose I should point out the multiply anagrammatic character of Alex Ross's name: He can be transformed into 'Solar Sex' (which Elton John famously spoke out against in "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me"), 'Lax Roses', 'Lear's Sox', 'Ass Rolex' (which would be rather difficult to wear), the appropriately musical 'Sax Roles', and probably a few more...

THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT by Alberto Manguel

I've just finished Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night, a fine, anecdotally rich collection of essays on reading and readers, libraries and librarians, collections and collectors, and now that it's night and I'm sitting in my 'library' (a mere few thousand books, it hardly compares with Manguel's obsessive 30,000, ten thousand more than even Susan Sontag was able to amass), I feel compelled to 'go and do likewise,' to imitate Manguel's tour of his library in the French countryside by taking a stroll through my own here in rural Ohio. But since this is a blog post instead of a book, I'll limit myself to journeying across a single overloaded shelf (all my bookshelves exist in a constant state of overplus) chosen more or less at random.

Glancing to my left I select the third shelf from the bottom of the tall five-shelf bookcase nearest my desk. It contains two rows of books (mostly trade paperbacks) with additional books piled horizontally atop the back row. Beginning at the left end of the front row (because I'm politically partial to the left sides of things) we immediately find ourselves deep in D. H. Lawrence country, staring at the telltale orange spines of volumes 2 and 3 of the Penguin paperback set of Lawrence's Complete Short Stories ('The Prussian Officer' is a personal favorite). Next is an older Viking Compass edition of volume 1 of the set. Beside this stands the front row's only hardcover (I keep the weightier books in the back rows), Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay, featuring the great novella-length story 'Kama.' David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, purchased shortly after Wallace sent himself to its title, separates Chandra from two of Iain M. Banks's literary novels, The Wasp Factory and The Bridge. Both come highly recommended, but I've yet to read either. They stand there and taunt me. (And I've always thought 'The WASP Factory' would be the perfect title for a history of Yale University...) Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor stands equally unread next to them. (I really must get around to these Brits someday.) Then I'm encouraged when my scanning eye meets a book I've actually read, Stephen Wright's Going Native, one of the best American novels of the 1990s. Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, coincidentally one of Alberto Manguel's favorite books, stands beside Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man. (When I attempted to carefully remove the price sticker from this book, I tore off the bottom part of the spine, so the spine now reads like a demented index entry: "Schiller, on the aesthetic education of") On the other side of Schiller are two of Milan Kundera's interesting if repetitive nonfiction books, The Art of the Novel and The Curtain. Beside these is Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God, a good bedtime book, a collection of short essays and newspaper columns by Oxford philosopher A.C. Grayling. (Oxbridge philosophers: by their initials ye shall know them.) Next comes Desperate Characters, a very good little novel by Courtney Love's grandmother (yes, that's true) Paula Fox. V.S. Naipaul's travel book about the American South, A Turn in the South, joins Salman Rushdie's extraordinary Shame in forming a Vintage International edition sandwich that contains as its meat a book on James Joyce titled Portraits of the Artist in Exile. The bright orange Penguin paperback spine of William Trevor's Stories stands beside an Oxford World's Classics edition of Robbie Burns's Poems and Songs at the Scotch-Irish center of the row. The classic Nasmyth portrait of Burns broods Romantically on the spine of the latter volume, turning his back to Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism, a book that promises more than it delivers. And speaking of cosmopolitanism, on the other side of Appiah, Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood presses itself promiscuously against Shirley Hazzard's overrated The Transit of Venus. Mario Vargas Llosa's good first novel The Time of the Hero flattens itself against Hazzard's other side. Next is the somber, black-spined Penguin edition of the most un-Puritanical plays of Thomas Middleton. The NYRB Classics edition of the 1926 correspondence of Pasternak, Tsvetayeva and Rilke stands between old Tom Middleton and two novels by old Thomas Bernhard, the great The Loser and the more mediocre Gargoyles. The front row's two heaviest and thickest books, Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat and Robertson Davies's The Cornish Trilogy, signal that the end of the shelf is near (has anyone actually read all of Darconville's Cat?), and after skipping over two thin novels by Kingsley Amis, The Green Man and The Alteration, my gaze meets that of the lion-maned John Ruskin on the spine of Preterita, the front row's last book.

Jumping to the back row, I see a hardcover of Rick Moody's The Black Veil, a book I didn't like much, next to Christopher Bram's Father of Frankenstein, basis of the film Gods and Monsters, both of which I liked very much. Peter Carey's complexly intertextual and grossly underrated My Life As a Fake (a book that is, among other things, a Bloomian rewriting of the Frankenstein story) stands beside Yuz Aleshkovsky's Kangaroo, of which only the title's Kafkaesque first letter is visible over the thick top of The Cornish Trilogy. Jacques Derrida's Dissemination, about which literally nothing can be said, is twinned with Guy Davenport's Geography of the Imagination. Next comes a popular science book I haven't yet read, Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, and beside it the best history of gay literature I've ever read, Gregory Woods's cleverly titled A History of Gay Literature. This is a book I highly recommend. It's a very well-written and provocative work of lit history and criticism, not a dry, jargony academic treatise. Beside it stands Dore Ashton's About Rothko, a book I read several years ago and remember absolutely nothing about...I assume it's about Rothko. The first volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss raises its black spine as I near the middle of the shelf. I'm still waiting for the other two volumes of this absolute masterpiece of 20th century German literature to be translated into English. Volume one has one of the greatest opening scenes of any novel I've ever read. Even blacker than Weiss is the spine of the next book, a biography of painter Arshile Gorky, whose work is anything but black, although his life had its very dark moments. Serendipitously next to the Gorky bio is Night Studio, Musa Mayer's extraordinary memoir of her father, American painter Philip Guston. This is one of the best intimate portrayals of an American artist I've ever read, a wonderful and informative book. The so-called 'Scottish Ulysses' stands next on my bookshelf: Alasdair Gray's Lanark. It's not as good as Joyce's novel, but it's pretty damn good. David Bradley's National Book Award winning The Chaneysville Incident separates Lanark from a fat collection of Graham Greene's short stories which is almost exactly the same height and thickness as the book beside it, my old Modern Library Giant edition of Carlyle's hyperactive hysterical/historical endeavor, The French Revolution. Towering over these two books are two thinner but taller paperbacks, Samuel Delany's Atlantis and Richard Wolin's Labyrinths, two books that, perhaps improbably, have a thing or two in common. After Labyrinths, we fall into the labyrinths of William Gass's absurdly alliterative prose. Four of Gass's essay collections are lined up on the shelf: Habitations of the Word, Tests of Time, Finding a Form, and The World Within the Word. (Yes, even Gass's titles are alliterative, the Fat Man can't control himself.) After passing Gass, my gaze passes over Antonio Munoz Molina's Sepharad, skips across an anthology of writing on film edited by Gilbert Adair, and reaches row's end at Bruce Cole's informative Titian and Venetian Painting.

Twelve books lie horizontally atop the back row, accidentally arranged in three symmetrical piles of four. (Is this accident or anality? We'll let Herr Doktor Freud, whom Beethoven so grandly and anachonistically invoked near the end of the Ninth Symphony, answer that one.) The first stack, balanced on Bruce Cole and William Gass, contains Christopher Hitchens's God is not Great, a pretty good polemic; Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, probably the most powerful and compelling of all the recent atheism books; Janet Hobhouse's good novella November; and the great contemporary London writer Iain Sinclair's take on Jack the Ripper, White Chapel, Scarlet Tracings. The middle stack, balanced precariously atop David Bradley, is topped by How Fiction Works, a mistitled but interesting little book by critic James Wood (not to be confused with the actor who has an 's' on his end). Below Wood, A.N. Wilson's biography of the apostle Paul presses down on Carl Schorske's history of Fin de Siecle Vienna, which lies atop Wilson's utterly (and almost comically) scurrilous Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. The final stack, and the final four books on this shelf (yes, the end is finally here!) comprise a double-decker J.M. Coetzee sandwich: Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful and Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands (neither of which I've read) lie between two volumes of Coetzee's critical essays (which I have read and enjoyed), Stranger Shores and Inner Workings.

And that's just one of my shelves... It's much later at night now, and I'm in danger of falling asleep at my computer, so it's time to call it quits. My next post will be shorter and less self-indulgent. I promise...