"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...

HAMLET: POEM UNLIMITED by Harold Bloom

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is a too, too self-limited little book from Harold Bloom Ltd., the one-man critical industry that has given us such essential titles as The Anxiety of Influence, The Visionary Company and The Western Canon, as well as the seemingly unlimited Bloom's Critical Views series, which almost no one (I suspect) actually reads. (I hope I'm wrong about that.) As is the case with all of Bloom's books, Hamlet contains in its 150 pages much to agree and to disagree with. Highly questionable assertions, phrased in self-parodic Bloomian hyperbole, lie alongside readings that are deeply and genuinely insightful. Although, due to size limitations, these are rarely followed up. Why, one wonders, did the obsessively prolific Bloom turn in so short a book on so central a work? Perhaps because Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human was really a long commentary on Hamlet and Falstaff disguised as a consideration of all the plays. I would've preferred a 400-page book in which Bloom performs a microscopically close reading of the play and expands upon his insight--this little book's best moment--that the "How all occasions" soliloquy is the point at which Hamlet's theatricality parts ways with his inwardness. Bloom is very good on the theatricality here, but the exact nature of that inwardness seems to defeat the self-proclaimed Brontosaurus Bardolator--a defeat Bloom shares with virtually everyone who has thought deeply about the play. The great difficulty of Hamlet --and Bloom knows this, because his work taught it to me--lies in the fact that Hamlet's mind encompasses infinite space while ours, whoever we may be, are relatively nutshelled. Mr. Harold Bloom writes with relish of the internal organs of poems and novels, but Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is one of those rare instances where he writes less than enough.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O'Neill

Of O'Neill's 'four haunted Tyrones,' Mary impresses me the most on this reading. She's the best-written and most complex of the four, her lightning-fast changes of mood and personality in the middle acts presenting an extraordinary technical challenge to any actress brave enough to attempt the role. O'Neill pressures all four Tyrones until their masks shatter, until the bad actors they 'really are' are forced to reveal themselves, but Mary is the only one to show flashes of a tragic self-consciousness that has moved beyond impotent self-pity. And this self-consciousness, this position from which she is able to acknowledge that her only hope lies in accidental overdose, is the thing she must escape from. This is the knowledge from which she flees into morphine and Catholicism. (O'Neill was enough of a Marxist to know they are two forms of the same thing.) And by play's end both drugs bring her back to the beginning of her troubles, sitting in the living room that none of the Tyrones can ever truly leave, a one-room trap.

I'm also impressed on this reading by two seemingly contrasting elements in the play: its deep understanding of resentment and its Gothicism. O'Neill understands the dynamics of resentment inside families, and he understands the importance of resentment in the construction of the self, an importance that may be paramount. Our resentments might tell more about us than anything else. I'm tempted to say: if you want to understand someone, don't bother finding out what he loves, find out what he resents. As for Gothicism, the play is also a long day's journey from a rather flimsy surface realism to a deep and haunting Gothic Expressionism. As O'Neill strikes through his characters' (and his audiences') various masks, exposing them as the bad actors of their melodramatic little lives--every man his own James Tyrone, tragically trapped in a hack role that, for a few days in the distant past, seemed absolutely perfect for us--the play becomes increasingly Gothic, mirroring that most Gothic of all locales, the human mind. O'Neill gives us night and fog and even a madwoman in a distant room, the hoariest of all Gothic devices. And the last act's structural similarity to "The Fall of the House of Usher" is surely not accidental, given that Poe is one of the many writers named in the text. This idea that the psyche laid bare reveals itself as a house of Gothic horrors must have influenced the work of Ingmar Bergman, especially Persona (another journey into psychological night set in a sometimes fogbound house by the sea), Hour of the Wolf, and the middle section of Fanny and Alexander. O'Neill was highly regarded in Sweden in Bergman's formative years, and Long Day's Journey was premiered in Stockholm in a production directed by Bengt Ekerot, who played Death in The Seventh Seal, so it's somewhat surprising to discover, leafing through the chronology at the back of Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern, that he didn't direct an O'Neill play until 1988. Unsurprisingly, the play was Long Day's Journey into Night.

UP AGAINST IT: A SCREENPLAY FOR THE BEATLES by Joe Orton

And now for something completely different: a screenplay written for the Beatles by Joe Orton in the months before Halliwell's silver hammer came down upon his head. (Was that 1969 song from Abbey Road inspired by Orton's 1967 murder? Given his connection to the Beatles and the fact that he met McCartney, who wrote the song, it's quite possible.)

Up Against It is one of those posthumous publications that should probably have remained in manuscript. It doesn't really add anything to Orton's tragically small oeuvre. A later rewrite of a screenplay originally written for the Beatles (and judged too risky and risque by their management), it has some passages of sharp dialogue and a few laugh-out-loud funny moments, but not enough of either. The satire, while often as absurd as Monty Python, seems much more dated, and the entire script reads like a rather mediocre early Python movie. This is very minor Orton, to be read only by completists. The rest of us should stick to the plays, which are wonderful, the delightful diaries, and John Lahr's deliciously titled biography, Prick Up Your Ears.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH by William Shirer

One truly chilling aspect of the first chapter of Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (all of which is great and essential reading), in which Shirer writes of Hitler's childhood and youth, is the extent to which this reads like the childhood and youth of any artist--albeit in Hitler's case a talentless one. Tragically talentless. If he had been accepted by the Viennese academy (as many equally mediocre artists undoubtedly were), the entire history of the modern world might have been changed for the better. Indeed, it might've been changed if someone, anyone, had spoken the following sentence in Vienna ca.1910: "You know, Hitler, you're a good painter, and if you work at it, you could be great." Such encouragement might've kept his imagination focused on canvas, where his monstrosities would've hurt no one. My kingdom for a time machine...

RABBIT, RUN by John Updike

My standard (and fairly harsh) assessment of John Updike is as follows: I used to think Updike was a great novelist--and then I turned fifteen. When I first read Rabbit, Run as a teenager, I thought it was a very good novel (but I much preferred Rabbit is Rich, which I considered great); re-reading it in my twenties, I found it a well-written but fairly standard work of post-Joycean literary fiction, not a book that should blow anyone's mind. Having just completed a third reading, I'm reminded of Harold Bloom's remark (in his very good Paris Review interview) that Updike is "a minor writer with a major style." Rabbit, Run is an extremely well-written book (Just about every page contains a sentence or two that most writers would sell their souls to have written--this much of the book is indeed mind-blowing), and it's better conceived and constructed than most of Updike's later novels, but it also has an unmistakably 'minor' feel. No reader would confuse it with an undeniably 'major' work like Absalom, Absalom! or Moby Dick or Sabbath's Theater. Updike has none of the rambunctious recklessness of the truly 'great' Great American Novelists. It's a small, claustrophobic story. And while this claustrophobia, this sense of entrapment, works to the novel's advantage--it is, after all, the story of the title character's entrapment in an unbearably claustrophobic life--it may also work against the novel by making the book seem as small and enclosed as the lives it represents.

It also occurs to me on this reading that Rabbit Angstrom can be seen as a tragic hero whose fatal reversal comes early, when he turns his car around and heads back to Brewer in the first section of the first Rabbit novel. The rest of Rabbit, Run and all of the subsequent three novels depict, over three decades of American life, the fatal consequences of that turning. Something crucial in Rabbit's soul is killed early in the first book when he defeatedly turns home, and the later three novels depict an increasingly posthumous life.

LEAVING A DOLL'S HOUSE by Claire Bloom

Claire Bloom's tell-some memoir, Leaving A Doll's House, leaves me thinking that the ostensible author is either disingenuous or hopelessly naive. Someone, at some point during her long relationship with Philip Roth, should've tapped her on the shoulder and informed her that she was in a relationship with Philip freakin' Roth. Maybe then she would've been less surprised, shocked, devastated, etc. to learn of his affairs and labyrinthine erotic stratagems. Putting aside the very real physical and psychological problems Roth suffered during their relationship, Bloom's Roth is a portrait of a highly disciplined artist (Bloom uses the adjective 'ascetic' to describe this side of him), and the book can be read as a cautionary tale about falling in love with such a person, since a relationship will necessitate the partner's placing himself or herself under the artist's discipline. (I'm intentionally using old Communist Party rhetoric here, a double tribute to Roth's I Married A Communist and Bloom's fellow traveler character in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.) Because Bloom couldn't abnegate herself in this way, couldn't accept that she would always be at best second to writing in Roth's life while he would accept nothing less than being second to nothing in hers, the relationship was doomed from the start--as most are, in retrospect. Reading about this doomed marriage of artistic minds is like watching a slow motion film of a car crash. There's a certain sick fascination in it.

The New English Translation of THE SECOND SEX

More than half a century too late, we finally have a complete English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. That's the good news. (It has been common knowledge for years that the original American publishers, not translator H.M. Parshley, cut about 10-15% of the French text from the classic English-language edition.) The bad news is that the new translation, according to Toril Moi in the current London Review of Books, is a botch job. Moi points out howling errors and major misunderstandings, but the most damning evidence against the translators consists of quotes from the new English text. It appears to be very badly written, a grave disservice both to the book and Beauvoir. English readers deserve better; Beauvoir deserves better; feminism and existentialism deserve better. I don't blame the new translators (too much); I blame the publishers who could have chosen an experienced translator like Richard Howard, Lydia Davis, or any of the writers Moi mentions. This is a big disappointment. I was looking forward to finally reading a complete English edition, but now I'm not going to waste my money on this unreadable piece of junk. I guess I'll pick up a French edition the next time I'm in Paris. That's the only way I'll ever get the complete text.

"The Naked and the Conflicted" by Katie Roiphe

Katie Roiphe has a good essay in this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review. Titled "The Naked and the Conflicted," it contrasts the sexual descriptions and attitudes in the fictions of Mailer, Updike and Roth with those in the works of their perceived successors: Franzen, Chabon, and the tragically late D. F. Wallace. While Roiphe's last sentence set my bullshit detector beeping like a geiger counter at Los Alamos, the rest of the essay is worth reading. And Roiphe hits quite a few bullseyes, as when she describes the Franzen-Chabon-Wallace generation as "writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced." The last part of that sentence carries the most powerful sting: Roiphe suggests that the most feted 'young male writers' of our time are a group of middle-aged men still writing to impress the girls they thought they loved when they were nineteen. Ouch.

INDIGNATION by Philip Roth

"We are here to be insulted."--Philip Roth, in conversation with Harold Bloom

I suppose it's time to attempt a nutshelled overview of the career of Philip Roth. First comes the Apprenticeship, a trio of works (Goodbye Columbus, Letting Go, When She Was Good) that obey the rules for midcentury American fiction and establish Roth as an only moderately adventurous member of the School of Bellow. Then, in the Woodstockian year, came Portnoy the Wanker. With Portnoy's Complaint, another Roth emerges, a restless experimenter with no rules and few limits. He transforms a character into a gigantic mammary (The Breast), does a bitter Swiftian satire of the Nixon administration (Our Gang), produces a complex (and still underrated) work of autobiographical metafiction (My Life as a Man), and writes a linguistically exuberant baseball novel (The Great American Novel). The first Zuckerman trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and the epilogue novella The Prague Orgy) constitutes a triumphant synthesis of Roth's traditional and experimental impulses. In the late 1980s Roth inaugurates his second experimental phase, this time blending fiction and autobiography in a series of category-defying works (The Counterlife (the most formally experimental fiction of his career), The Facts, Patrimony, Deception, Operation Shylock). After this period culminated (and fizzled out) in Shylock, Roth shifted gears to produce a one-off, magisterial burst of far-beyond-Portnoyesque outrage, Sabbath's Theater (my candidate for Roth's greatest novel; The Ghost Writer is my candidate for his most perfect book). This is followed by the much-lauded 'American trilogy' (American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain) three Bellowesque novels that threatened to turn their author into a fatally respectable 'American literary treasure'. Roth responded to the threat with a delightfully lewd novella, The Dying Animal, that marked him as a writer less assimilable than his recent works had made him appear. It also inaugurated the phase of his career that we can now call 'the late novellas' (including Everyman, Exit Ghost, and the subject of this post, Indignation). The obvious joker leering up from the deck of this understanding of Roth's late career is The Plot Against America. It fits my scheme in neither size nor theme...so my scheme must be wrong. Time will tell, as it always does.

Roth has always written novellas (e.g. Goodbye Columbus and the first Zuckerman trilogy), so his late concentration on the form is not terribly surprising. In contrast to his earlier novellas, though, the late novellas are 'terminal' works, narrative meditations that circle obsessively around themes of decline, disease and death. Indignation, which begins in a lighter mode as a typically Rothian Newark coming-of-age narrative, soon reveals itself to be the recollections under morphine of a soldier dying in the Korean War. The story has a couple moments of instantly classic Rothian outrage (an interview with a college dean that ends with the protagonist spraying the office with vomit; a minor character who breaks into the narrator's dorm room and covers his belongings in semen), as well as some elements and scenes that are nothing short of masterful (the book's explicit intertextual relationship to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; the collegiate snowball fight that becomes a campus version of Korea before modulating into a tamer (but more outrageous to the administrative powers that be) panty raid). Indignation is certainly not a bad book. It's better than the overrated Everyman, and I enjoyed it and found a lot to praise in it, but it is clearly one of Roth's lesser achievements. It doesn't approach his heights (The Ghost Writer, Portnoy, Sabbath), and even among the late novellas it's surpassed by Dying Animal and Exit Ghost. Roth's biggest problem here and in the late novellas generally might be something Aristotle could've diagnosed: Roth is trying to write tragedies as if they were comedies; he's telling tragic tales as though they were comic ones, and his style often jars against his subject matter. A good example of this is the long, ironic sentence in Indignation describing a minor character's death in a hellish automobile accident. The effect may well be deliberate (the dying or dead narrator's way of trivializing the death of an 'enemy'), but the irony sucks the tragedy out of this death--and, by implication, out of all death, surely not an authorially intended effect.

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER by David Foster Wallace

Color me surprised. After more than a decade of being disappointed by the works of David Foster Wallace, I've finally discovered one that I can, more or less enthusiastically, recommend. The quality of the nonfiction pieces collected in Consider the Lobster, along with those in his earlier collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, suggests that Wallace should probably have jettisoned his baggy and rather unoriginal fictional experiments in favor of the kind of original journalism and criticism exemplified here. In these occasional pieces (on the 'adult' film industry and its euphemisms; John Updike (whose name sounds like an adult film industry euphemism); dictionaries; Joseph Frank's monumental Dostoyevsky biography; the 2000 McCain campaign, etc.) Wallace was finally able to bring his prose up to the level of his thought--a considerable achievement, given that his previous works all left me with the impression of a guy who thinks better than he writes. Damned if I'm not starting to miss the dude now. He should've lived longer and written more.

THE NAME OF THE WORLD by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson's short and rather forgettable academic novella The Name of the World is, surprisingly, not a bad book. It has its good moments: a wonderfully observed dinner party; a departmental coffee klatsch during which the protagonist learns, via a farewell toast, that his contract will not be renewed; a wonderfully concise and devastating brief description of an academic Marxist (sic) conference ca.1990; and Johnson does provide an unexpected denouement to his variation on the horribly overused 'middle-aged-male-professor-and-young-female-student' scenario. But it's still a decidedly minor performance. Only rarely, in a few isolated passages scattered through the book, does it approach the excellence of the best moments of the touchstone Johnson work, Jesus' Son.

Is Hamlet's Flesh Solid or Sullied?

Here's a Mindful Pleasures first: an entire post about a single word. The word is 'solid' or 'sullied' or even 'sallied,' and it occurs in Hamlet, act one, scene two, line 129:

O, that this too too {solid/sallied/sullied} flesh would melt...

The First Folio reads 'solid,' which seems straightforward enough, but the early quartos read 'sallied,' a word that doesn't seem to make any sense at all in this context but that editors understand as a variant of 'sullied.' I've always recoiled at the 'sullied' reading. I find it too clever by half (in its too blatant and too early sounding of the note of fleshly corruption that permeates Hamlet's ruminations) and, more importantly, it's an editorial imposition that sullies a reading the First Folio seems to have gotten entirely right. 'Solid' is the only word of the three that fits naturally into the metaphorical texture of the lines:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew...

The flesh, being too solid rather than too sullied, will not easily turn to liquid and annihilate itself in a vaporous dew. Again, this is a very straightforward, self-evident reading, and the imposition of 'sullied' merely introduces further unnecessary complications into the interpretation of the line. By Occam's Razor, the First Folio and Kenneth Branagh are right: it's 'solid.'

And there's also the possibility that solid/sallied/sullied is not a variant at all but a Shakespearean pun variously rendered. Perhaps the words 'solid' and 'sullied,' similar sounding even today, were homophonically close in Elizabethan London. If so, the Shakespearean 'solid' would have carried a double significance akin to that of the truly Finnegans Wake-ish a dew/adieu pun that 'resolves' the sentence. Either way, 'solid' must be the primary signifier, as it's the only logical choice to initiate the figure that undergirds the lines: flesh likened to water in its various states. The 'solid' reading is solid. Don't sully it.

EVEN MORE NOTES ON PROUST -- SWANN'S WAY, "Swann in Love," "Place Names..."

The beginning of the Swann-Odette relationship (and perhaps its entirety) reveals Jacques Lacan’s enormous debt to Proust. Swann’s initial attraction to Odette, a woman famously "not his type," is rooted not in his desire for her but in her desire–for whatever reasons–for him. His desire desires her desire. Or as Proust puts it, "the feeling that he possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her." The other’s desire creates a desire for that desire.

"Swann in Love" is, among much else, a parable about how art can change our lives–for the worse. Swann is an aesthete, a member of that generation of French and English aesthetes (Walter Pater was another) who ‘rediscovered’ Vermeer and Botticelli, a generation from which Proust learned much. Whenever an art object–Vermeer’s paintings, Vinteuil’s sonata–becomes an object of Swann’s desire, he wishes to know everything about it, a characteristically scholarly desire that functions well within the confines of the archive and the art museum but that becomes disastrous when transferred to the erotic realm. Since Odette is not Swann’s type, he rationalizes his attraction to her by mentally comparing her to a Botticelli he loves, despite the fact that "his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste." Odette aestheticized then becomes an object of obsessive research. Swann must know everything about her, regardless of how much the knowledge will torture him. (Recall also how Vinteuil’s little phrase 'liberates' Swann’s mind so he can more readily chain himself to Odette.)

All of Proust’s gardens have serpents. Even within the Debussy-esque loveliness of Vinteuil’s sonata is hidden a snake–as the dimwitted Forcheville’s "sonata-snake" pun reveals. Swann’s way contains no unproblematic pastorals.

While Swann is a sort of Romantic rationalist, the aesthete as researcher (rechercheur), Odette’s aesthetic tastes are more fashionably decadent. Her preference for orchids and chrysanthemums, flowers that look artificial, powerfully echoes the tastes of that uber-decadent, Huysmans’s Des Esseintes.

In "Swann in Love" the desire "to possess exclusively," the desire for monogamy, is portrayed as the ultimate perversion, a form of obsessive jealousy that we have been taught to call ‘love.’ In this vast roman fleuve of lesbian, gay and sadomasochistic sexualities, the heterosexual relationship between Swann and Odette (and the relationship it prefigures, that between Marcel and Albertine) may be the most perverse of all.

When Proust writes of "the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing)"(p.281), he magisterially throws off in a dependent clause a phrase that suggests an entire erotic psychology. It would take at least an essay and probably an entire book to unpack the implications of this ‘little phrase.’

The writing motif from the Combray ‘overture’ returns in "Place Names: The Name" with a significant variation: Gilberte has replaced Maman as the addressee of Marcel’s texts. It begins with Marcel doing what millions of young lovers have done, writing the beloved’s name repeatedly in his school exercise book, an activity Proust implicitly figures as a form of masturbation. His verb "traçais" should remind the reader of the "trace naturelle" of semen on the currant branch in "Combray." Likewise Marcel’s own description of this writing as "something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffectual." A few pages later, satisfaction comes in the form of a letter sent by Marcel to Gilberte. When she shows it to him and he sees her name written in his hand now obscured beneath postal marks and notations, he feels a rising exaltation far beyond anything a used envelope should cause. His writing, the artificial trace of his desire, his substitute for the substitute of masturbation, has now passed into Gilberte’s hands, and even the traces of the mundane system that delivered it now shine out with an erotic glow.