The George Washington Bridge: "Inside Llewyn Davis," James Baldwin, and Portraits of Grief

I looked forward to watching Inside Llewyn Davis for a long time before it came out. I grew up on folk music and some of these songs will probably be the last thing I remember when I've forgotten my own name. 

I wasn't disappointed, but a lot of people were. Critics and friends alike - and my folk-loving parents - all focused on the how "unlikeable" Davis was - like David Edelstein, they found him/the movie "sour" or "snotty." 

I was intrigued by this reaction. As anyone whose read a single think piece about the "Golden Age of Television" knows, we're living in the age of anti-heroes: the more anti the better. So what had Llewyn done that soured the deal when unrepentant murderers, meth dealers, and racists were compellingly "complex"? 

The brilliant Eileen Jones writes persuasively in her piece at Jacobin that viewer's contempt has to do with the American valorization of success - the film doesn't give its hero a narrative of upward mobility, of movement towards success, and we're not open to stories of failure, so much so that "If Inside Llewyn Davis weren't so funny, none of us could stand it."

I think she's undeniably right about all of that. But after watching the movie again recently, I was struck by the extent to which it is also a movie about grief. It strikes me that Davis' problem isn't that he's not talented or successful enough, it's that his friend and former singing partner died in a terrible way, and he doesn't pretend not to be wrecked by that. 

I think I missed this the first time because Davis doesn't talk a lot about his grief - and that's the point. Like unrequited love, grief in a happiness-obessed and death-denying culture is the love that dare not speak its name. This time, when, midway through the film, we learn through a conversation with John Goodman's unsympathetic jazz musician that his friend jumped off the George Washington Bridge, I thought of another portrait of New York Bohemia from around the same time, James Baldwin's Another Country. Here we have another suicide by another young musician from the same bridge. Unlike in Inside, Baldwin takes us right to the scene: 

Then he stood on the bridge, looking over, looking down. Now the lights of the cars on the highway seemed to be writing an endless message, writing with awful speed in a fine, unreadable script. There were muted lights on the Jersey shore and here and there a neon flame advertising something somebody had for sale. He began to walk slowly to the center of the bridge, observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire. 

This scene comes on page 78 of a 365 page novel. The rest of the book deals with the fallout among his group of bohemian friends. Straight and gay, black and white, talented and otherwise, they are truly marginal in a way recent hipster culture would make us forget. They are wrecked will various kinds of guilt and anger they take out on each other without recognizing it as such. It's an incredibly portrayal of grief and what artistic expression can and can't do with it. 

I played this audio of Baldwin reading from this scene in a fiction class about a year ago. I didn't have a particularly good reason except we were reading a Baldwin story and I'd just come across these and wanted them to hear his voice. There was an awful tension in the room when it was done. Turns out when you play audio of a suicide scene people's first reaction isn't "those sentences!" I had violated some rule by putting something like that out there and just letting it hang. I imagine that's how people in deep grief feel - like they are stinking up the party wherever they go. 

In her piece Jones taIks about  the key scene when Davis has a chance to play for the powerful agent Bud Grossman and he picks the resolutely bleak "The Death of Queen Jane" to which Grossman replies "I don't see a lot of money here." The first time I saw this, what struck me was Davis's acceptance: he doesn't, as the heroes of countless art versus commerce movies might do, tell Grossman where to stick it or that he will rue the day or some such. I wonder if people would have found him more "sympathetic" if he had. 

But what I noticed this time was the other part of the exchange. Grossman, trying to be helpful, doesn't reject Davis out of hand. He tells him he's a musician, not a star. His advice is to get a partner, to which Davis replies, "that's good advice." 

There's something deep going on in this film about music and catharsis as there is in Baldwin's novel. The one Baldwin story that's in all the anthologies, "Sonny's Blues," is also all about this. We need music because it's where we're allowed to be sad, irrational, but we want even the people who make this for us to shut up about it the rest of the time. And so it seems we don't forgive Davis not because he's not successful or because of some of his genuinely dickish moves during the movie but because of his sadness. We forgive so much, but not sadness, and that makes me sad.

Three New-ish Books to Buy

The last couple years I've started keeping track of the books I finish, movies I watch and my favorite magazine articles from the year. Except for the magazine articles, very few are current or even recent, but I've been trying to correct that a little, partly because buying or writing about new books is the best way to support authors and also to have more of a foothold in some of the discussions out there. So, herein your humble blogger pretends to be one of those folks with a steady gig who gets paid to say things like "3 Must Buy New(ish) Books!"

1) The Lists of the Past, by Julie Hayden, available in a new edition from Phraros.  This is not a new book per say; it was first published in 1976, and its stories appeared in the New Yorker in the years leading up to that. I've written before about how going to college during the canon debates of the 1990s distorted my perception about the idea of "forgotten" works - there was so much debate about a few titles and replacing this particular one with that particular one you could forget all the nooks and crannies of forgotten pathways that were always there to be continually rediscovered. Even a New Yorker writer can get lost. Hayden's book found its way back into print by way of the New Yorker's wonderful fiction podcast, for which Lorrie Moore selected the masterpiece "Day Old Baby Rats," and the immensely popular Cheryl Strayed, who picked the book for Pharos's series of reprints.  Reading Hayden reminds me of Virginia Woolf - you feel more alive when reading her, like you're starting to see in color what you've been seeing in black and white. I wrote more about the book a little while back and have since had the honor of meeting a few of her surviving family members. Grab this book and put in the hands of every short story lover you know.

2) Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich. First, grab the greatest short stories anthology that's lying around your bedroom and read Bernard Malamud's classic story. By the time you finish, before you've even started reading Ulinich's graphic novel, you will realize the genius of its premise. Malamud's story tells of a matchmaker who brags he needs a magic barrel to carry around the photos of all the beautiful young women he has to offer. Read what happens when the shy young rabbinical student comes to seek his mate and his dating foibles and you'll be astounded Ulinich is the first to point out what seems obvious: forget superhighways, tubes, and clouds: the internet is a magic barrel. Ulnich's drawings and words are such a perfect distillation of recognizable and particular experiences that for a few days after reading it I was seeing her distinctive lines in every face I encountered. When Lena Finkle expresses frustration with a novel she's working on and says, as an aside that the novel's contrivances seem ridiculous to her, I immediately thought, yes! Every novel I'd read recently seemed to have exactly the flaws she described. Only this particular picture and words seemed to have any hope of breaking and preserving the artifice in just the right measure. When you go diving in the Magic Barrel, you need the right guide.

3) The Best American Essays, 2014, edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Vivian Gornick, Kristen Dombek, Mary Gordon, Lawrence Jackson, Ariel Levy, Zadie Smith. Sometimes they get it right.  Appropriately enough, my very favorite writer, Vivian Gornick, has "Letter from Greenwich Village," while the amazing Kristen Dombek has "Letter from Williamsburg."  I look forward to "Letter from Maspeth" in ten years. Hopeful a LaGuardian will write it. 

"That city which the people from heaven had made their home": Thoughts on Baldwin's "Another Country"

When I was volunteering at Housing Works Bookstore, one of the musicians who came to perform was a woman named Tift Merritt. I knew of her a little from my ex-boyfriend, and listened to a bunch of her music right around the time she played the show at Housing Works. Her most recent album at the time was "Another Country" and for a few weeks I kept listening to its title song, with its simple, sweet plaintive refrain:

I thought these things would come to me
Love is another country, and I want to go -

I want to go too. I want to go with you.I want to go too. I want to go with you.

She was incredibly gracious with the volunteers, and asked one of us if we had a copy of Baldwin's novel hand. (But only if it wouldn't be too much trouble). As I remember it, we managed to find one and she put it on her stand during her performance. 

I also remember her asking me if I'd read Another Country at the time and being embarrassed to say no, though my guilty student self may have invented that piece. I read Go Tell it on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room sometime in college. I think I read Giovanni's Room in preparation for my college year in France, knowing it was about ex-pats. I haven't read it since and I don't remember a lot of the plot, but I remember being devastated by it. I remember that the pages of the old paperback I'd found at my parents or grandparent's house fell apart as I read it, and how I tried to put them back together with scotch tape. When, after one move too many moves, I accepted that this particular copy had given up the ghost, I tore out a few pages and taped them on my dresser, the way writers do for inspiration, even though I never actually wrote at that desk. 

Since then, like a lot of people, I've spent more time with his essays, and had come to accept the line that they were his true form. After reading this piece about why Baldwin is taught less than he was, I recently made a vow to teach something by Baldwin in every one of my classes. I asked one class who had heard of him, and only one student had. ("I went to the Baldwin school," she told me, "We heard a lot about him. To the credit credit of that school, there wasn't a trace of irritation in her voice.) Until recently teaching him mostly meant teaching the essays, but as I've been teaching more fiction writing and literature classes, I wanted to revisit that. Last semester I did "Sonny's Blues" and a lot of them had read it before, thanks to its status as an anthology staple. I realized my mistake too late to fix it - and then I realized I didn't know his other stories, or how many he had. (One collection, as it turns out, Going to Meet the Man).  

So I decided to start remedying this by reading Another Country, Baldwin's 1963 novel, the next work of fiction after Giovanni's Room. I had a falling-apart paperback of this one also. I think I inherited from  my grandmother's library. I like to imagine her reading it as a forty-something faculty wife, when she looked like a happier Mona Sterling in her impeccable blouses and tailored skirts. Like a lot of the feminist books from later in the 60s I've been researching, the books packaging combines commercial hype and political import in a way that's almost impossible to imagine today. On the back, Granville Hicks intones "The book itself is, and is meant to be, an act of violence."  (It isn't, of course, and that Hicks thinks so - and thinks this is a selling point - would be another post in of itself).

As this cover illustration suggests, Another Country is first and foremost a New York novel. Like so many writers, Baldwin left the place he was from to write about it. The middle section takes place in Paris, but he didn't write it there either. Below the final scene, charting the arrival in New York of a character's French lover to New York and these "people from heaven," there's a dateline reading "Istanbul, December 10, 1961."  I happened to finish Another Country around the same time I read this New Yorker essay about Erich Auerbach, who famously completed Mimesis, a founding work of my original discipline of Comparative Literature, in Istanbul.  Auerbach was fleeing the Nazis; Baldwin was fleeing racism, fame, and all the things that make it as difficult to write in New York as it is to write about New York. He came at the invitation of his friend Engin Cezzar, and the photographer Sedat Pakay took amazing photos of him there. 


One of the many fascinating things about Another Country is the lost New York it gives us. Baldwin's group of writers, artists and drifting souls (there's no one central character, and a lot of fascinating misdirection around this), hang out mostly in the Village. Some characters like to go to Harlem for "tomcatting," as they put it. One white woman has run away from the south, fleeing an abusive husband who has taken custody of her children. Brooklyn is the place of childhood everyone runs away from. And much is familiar: everyone in the group is suspicious of the writer whose novel is having some commercial success, and everyone drinks too much. They hang out at Smalls.

Baldwin's characters are exiles of a different sort than Auerbach or Baldwin. They flee their isolation and  the repression of their families. They run headlong against the cruelties of the culture they come from, unable to treat each other better than they have been treated, but blessed or cursed with enough self-knowledge that compels them to keep trying. Their other country is their own, and Baldwin takes pains to render his own New York strange as well, as when we are given the city through the eyes of another exile, the actor Eric upon his return to France:

So superbly was [New York] in the present that it seemed to have nothing to do with the passage of time: time might have dismissed it as thoroughly as it had dismissed Carthage and Pompeii. It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities . . . The girls along Fifth Avenue wore their bright clothes like semaphores, trying helplessly to bring to the male attention the news of their mysterious trouble. The men could not read this message. They strode purposefully along, wearing little anonymous hats, or bareheaded, with youthfully parted hair, or crew cuts, accoutered with attaché cases, rushing, on the evidence, to the smoking cars of the trains. In this haven, they opened up their newspapers and caught up on the day's bad news. Or they were to be found, as five o'clock fell, in discreetly dim, anonymously appointed bars, uneasy, in brittle, uneasy, female company, pouring down joyless martinis. 

Geography and sex and ritual: Baldwin stirs them so that it is impossible to maintain our convenient fiction about which part of ourselves comes from an "external" society and which from "internal" desires. This, I think, is why their  jealousies, adulteries, and drunken rages seem large rather than petty. Sexual and racial repression is part of it, but I don't think this is just a case of "when nothing is permitted, everything matters." Hipster alienation and rebellion have become such a cliche it is startling to view characters for whom estrangement from their families and communities are a real, definitive rupture that could easily leave them destitute and isolated. At the same time, in New York they have the means to peruse their desires and realize what this does and does not do. It is one thing to parse out all we know or think we know about desire, repression and "the other," when we see Vivaldo, an Italian-American "unpublished novelist" from Brooklyn peruse Ida, an African-American singer whose brother is probably the person Vivaldo is actually in love with. It is another thing to try, as Baldwin does, to imagine what both such people think and feel as they undertake this doomed but sincere bond. Here is Vivaldo watching Ida perform:

She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged soley on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at he moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. The quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does to so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms - while still eating them standing, nightly, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills. 

On Reading Lydia Davis, "Can't and Won't"

A woman is reading a book by an author she admires. It is inadequate, in fact, to say she admires this write, as the author is one of the few whose work prompts the often uncomfortable and shattering yet delectable experience which readers refer to as “identification.” This particular woman rarely feels this for the usual reasons– because one has a similar biography, a common experience, or even a similar temperament to the author. It comes instead when a writer displays their habits of mind in a particular way such that the woman feels her very brain is being invaded. This woman has experienced this before with this author, but never to the extent as with this book. The first delight came when she noticed that a number of these stories are labeled dreams at the bottom. This delighted her because the old saw about being bored by the dreams of others has never seemed correct to her. Go knock on her door, ready tell her a dream, and she is sure to let you in. Imagine then her delight to see excerpts from the correspondence of another author she admires, one this author had translated. Just the week before she had thought, one should read nothing but the letters and diaries of dead authors – on quiet shelves and in boxes these letters and diaries sit the way the prospectors thought California would be: all that the gold, just lying there for the taking. And imagine how that delight turns uncanny when she discovers the author has dedicated a story to her method of working through back issues of a certain glossy review, when just that morning the woman had been joking about her own organized stack, and even more so when the author included an imagined  letter to the head of a foundation, when just the week before this woman had written exactly such a letter. At this point the woman is working hard to keep herself in check, not to shout at the author on a crowded train to get out of her head, and worries about the fact that anything she writes in the next few weeks will be inevitably an imitation of that author. This seems a problem because 1) She is too old to be imitating other writers, or so she imagines, and 2) Such an imitation might be seen as parodic, as is often the case when writers have a style as specific as this author. Nevertheless it seemed the only fitting tribute to this author to see this necessary imitation through to the end before setting the author’s book back on the shelf with the neurotic precision she sees in a new light knowing she shares it with this particular writer she admires.

****************
Edited to Add: God knows I slack on the Times book review a lot, but after writing this I looked at some reviews and this one by Peter Orner is very good and describes a lot of what I was trying to. "To read Davis is to become a co-­conspirator in her way of existing in the world, perplexity combined with vivid observation." Precisely.  

On Men Writing On Women

"In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct of morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathetic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the 'other' as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommy Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life." 

                                          Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story


When I read something and am trying to figure out why and how it works, or does not work, Gornick is the writer I go back to more than anyone else, and to this passage above all.  Gornick talks about this need for imaginative sympathy when discussing a passage from D.H. Lawrence that troubles her - it is not that his view of women is "incorrect" but that there is no attempt to imagine a woman as she might imagine herself - no exploration, only reaction. In a sense I go this passage when I am looking for "permission" to be troubled by an author, especially a renowned one, especially a man when it comes to women.

The passage came to mind for a different reason while reading Hilton Als' The Women. I've loved Als' writing for the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books for a long time, and I've always been struck at what I can only inadequately term empathy - his deep love for artists and their work, for the imaginative intricacies of the craft and those attempt it, even when they fall short.

The Women is a beautiful example of one of my favorite genres - a collection of biographical essays, reflections on the meanings of lives, extensively knowledgable but unabashedly subjective in its interest and these lives and their meanings. The subjects of the essays are first, Als' own mother, second, Dorothy Dean, the third Owen Dodson.  Because Dean and Dodson are not household names, the convention would be to briefly attach a label to each by means of introduction. The difficulty of accurately doing so is, in some sense, the subject of these essays. Dean's wikipedia entry leads with "an African American socialite connected to Andy Warhol's the factory . . . and Max's Kansas City, where she worked as a door person." The back of Als' book describes her as "brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men." And so Als' empathy and identification with her reflects and refracts her own. Dodson can perhaps be more easily classified as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Yet Als' focus is more on the disappointments of his later years, when Als knew him as a mentor and lover, and on his identification with women, as suggested in his inclusion in a book by this name.

What unites these figures is the ways they responded to and crafted themselves out of their disappointments. We tend to think of those who don't find suitable outlets for their talents burning out in a blaze, as Virginia Woolf imagined the fate of Shakespeare's sister, or retreating into silence. But we all know from our experience what is more often the case: frustrated talents (frustrated by a tangle of external and internal circumstances which, Als demonstrates, are impossible to pull apart) drink too much, pester their more successful friends, host parties, read and edit manuscripts, take refuge in snobbism, sleep with people whose work they admire, and so forth. In the case of his mother, who lacked Dean and Dodson's the artistic and social outlets, love and disease become the vehicles. When tragedy comes, it comes slowly and excruciatingly: "In the end I think my mother's long and public illness was the only thing she ever felt experienced as an accomplishment separate from other people." And a doctor who examined Dean after she had lost her home declared that she "must be delusional: 'She keeps saying she went to Radcliffe.'" Which, of course, she had.

And yet very often, Als suggests, they are more effective mentors than those with smoother paths could ever be - and richer subjects.

The feminist complaint against stereotypical female characters is by now well known. But less recognized, as Als' own criticism has shown, is how male writers, especially queer ones, have been actively attacked for imagining women more fully. In this fascinating piece about A Streetcar Named Desire, Als recalls Mary McCarthy's attack on the play: noticing Williams' identification with Blanche DuBois, she accuses him of deceit, just as Blanche is accused of in the play. Seeing only the grating aspects of Blanche's femininity, she misses Blanche's discomfort with convention, her inability to play the role:

Perhaps McCarthy, like Stanley and Mitch, was ultimately too uncomfortable with Blanche’s queerness. She is unmarried, but she has loved. She has no money, no property, and no social equity, and yet her memories of the boys she took to her breast are a kind of sustenance, too. Williams lets us in on Blanche’s difference by degrees, and by having her speak a recognizably gay language. Queer talk from a queer artist about a queer woman. Blanche to Stella: “I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn’t enough to be soft.” Blanche to the Young Man she’d like to trick with: “I’m not a conventional person, and I’m so—restless today….”

The other other artist I immediately associate with these two traits - empathy for, and identification with, the feminine and female characters, Pedro Almodovar, famously dedicated my favorite of his films, All About My Mother, "To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider. . . To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother." Gender and its associated identities are here both performative and not: a woman or a mother is something a man might become, but it is not an empty category.

Another wonderful Almodovar film, Talk to Her, tells the story of a male nurse who talks to a woman in a coma, a dancer who has been struck by a car. He says he has learned his care taking skills from caring for his mother. In one sequence, we are presented an invented old surrealist film the nurse remembers: a man drinks a potion that renders him tiny. In his new state, he crawls across his lover's body and blissfully disappears into her vagina.  In his New Yorker review, David Denby says that one way of looking at the film, "I suppose, is as a story shaped by a homosexual's longing for women, a longing that can only be expressed as irony or as a nightmare." I suppose. But only if one supposes that longing for women is the only stance a male director can take towards women - as opposed to curiosity, empathy or identification. (The extent to which heterosexual longing for women is so often expressed as irony or nightmare comes through in Denby's swift takedown of Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale, with which his review of Talk to Her is paired.)

Back when New York magazine asked a number of writers about Philip Roth's legacy, Keith Gessen took a lot of flack for saying "Did Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them?" As I wrote then, critics were right to note that taking male heterosexual desire as a central theme doesn't mean one isn't a misogynist - but it doesn't mean one is, either. Or, to reframe the question aesthetically, away from the moralism that gets people so upset, it doesn't mean one can credibly create real female characters - and it doesn't mean one can't. It is of course too simple to say that Als, or Almodovar, or Williams, or Allen Ginsberg, who beautifully gave his mother the last lines of his elegy to her - are successful in imagining women characters with empathy and nuance because they don't, by and large, want to fuck women. It is probably far too simple as well to say that their experience of sexual other-ness or outsider-ness, allows them this success. All I can say for sure is that their work confirms for me how essential and undervalued these qualities are in writers and artists and how much our categories of gender, sexuality and desire - completely real and completely imagined at the same time - can both get in our way and get us there.

Lessing

Last week I went to buy a new blank notebook. The situation had gotten pretty desperate:  the scraps of paper I was using were taped to other scraps.  Somehow I went to my campus bookstore three times before I could find where they were keeping them. But how many to get? I needed one for my teaching notes, one for notes on various writing projects, one for a personal journal. Should there be one to take notes on things I was reading? Some of those were related to the writing projects, but some might be extensions of the journal. And sometimes the journal would turn into a story if I got bored with telling it straight.  Someone suggested another one for to-do lists and life management. In the end I bought four, but already they're all mixed up, what is in one should be in the other . . . 


"Shouldn't you just get one?" someone asked. Oh no, I said, haven't you read The Golden Notebook? That's how she went crazy.

The title of Doris Lessing's most famous and ambitious novel is a dream of integration. Anna, Lessing's protagonist, has one notebook for memories of childhood, one accounting for her political life, one in which she writes a novel, "Free Women," and one personal journal. Trying to bring them together into a single one, she falls apart.  In any earlier version of this blog I had a line across the top taken from The Golden Notebook: "Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love. . ." 

I first read The Golden Notebook in a Modern English Literature course in college. The professor was a little self-conscious about teaching this feminist classic to a bunch of young feminists at a woman's college, so he asked if any of us wanted to teach it. Being the not-yet-recovering terminally "good student" I was at the time, I volunteered. I guess it was the first time I did what I now do for a living. As a graduate student not quite a decade later, I tried to teach it.  I got called for jury duty just as we were to start. Now when I look at the cover, I think of the dark bench and the video screens of the Brooklyn courthouse, hoping my name would not be called for just a little longer so I could figure out how to lead a discussion of what the Communist Party might have meant to British housewives of the 1950s.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. For as long as I can remember, also, that desire, and what it might mean to articulate, let alone fulfill, it, has terrified me. Is it selfish? Is it a way of setting oneself apart from others? Was it setting oneself up for failure? Would it make it more difficult to enjoy friendship, romance, and the other consolations of what is sometimes mistakenly called everyday life? Does it mean shirking one's responsibilities to be a thinking person who acts in the world from conviction, political and otherwise? No book I know makes me think about these questions the way The Golden Notebook has. Does trying to live the different lives Anna tries to - peruse writing, romance and sex, to be a political person in the world - feel impossible because of external constraints, or will these things always come into conflict? We see experiences get mulled over, reworked, transposed into fiction. We see how much more went into the shaping of Free Women than is in the book. So how much more must have gone into The Golden Notebook?  How much of a life can a book contain? Should it aspire to be "better" than a life - more finely tuned - or should it give us an intimation of life in all its messiness? Towards the end there is a series of sketches for stories and novels Anna thinks of writing. I once thought about trying to do a series of exercises around them, except they are already complete as they are. How many of these sit in our notebooks, or in the notebooks of someone who lived to 94 and published 50 novels? 


When people talk about The Golden Notebook, they tend to talk a lot about the sixties, and that generation of feminism, and how this is or is not "relatable" to young women today, and how Lessing came to antagonize the feminists who revered her. But the other thing that has stuck with me from Lessing is her accounts of her early life - what Anna was writing in her black notebook. This is a woman whose father worked at the Imperial Bank of Persia, who came of age in a country called Rhodesia and saw the Communist Party there as a way to escape and create and intellectual life. If anyone truly had a long 20th century, it was her. Her famous cantankerousness always seemed well-earned. In the first part of her memoir, Under My Skin, Lessing talks about the shadow the First World War cast across her childhood: 

"There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war - my mother was one. During that trip through the villages of France, then in Scotland and towns in England, were revived in me the raging emotions of my childhood, a protest, an anguish, my parents'. I felt too incredulity, but that was a later emotion: how could it have happened? . . I wonder how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak. We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it." 

The last veterans of that war are gone now, and soon the children who were the last to remember it will be gone too. In place of their memories we will write essays on "the idea of memory." Throughout Under My Skin she expresses credulity that things really were as she remembered them.  If I were writing this at thirty, she says at one point, it would be one book. At forty another. And what would it be should I write it at 85?  It was, and is all of these, and now it is ours. 

Snowflakes

"You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

If you've been reading the news lately, you might think this came from a particularly blunt self-proclaimed truth-teller following the chorus of millinial-bashers, telling the young'uns to buck up and stop expecting life to be fair. Stop thinking you're special!  And enough with the trophies already!
But I suspect a certain generational subset (late X, early millennials) will instantly recognize this little bit of "tough love" as the wisdom of Brad Pitt, aka Tyler Durden, aka the "every nice-guy's" alter-ego anti-hero of the 1999 cult film Fight Club. (I suppose film buffs would say it was too mainstream and popular to be a cult film, but hey, some cults have lots of members.)  Back before the 2008 crash, before the 2001 crash, before two wars, Tyler bellowed out his cry against the spiritual emptiness of nineties prosperity and consumerism. We haven't had a war he says. We haven't had a Great Depression.  "The Great Depression is our lives."

Looking back of course this seems like a dark joke along the lines of the prescient Onion headline marking Bush's election: "Our national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over." You want a depression to give your life meaning? Done! My friend Ben Balthaser has a smart article about (among other things) how Fight Club combines strains from the nineties global justice movements, a concept of rebellion as a form of hallucination, and a healthy dose of wounded machismo. (Is there another kind?)   Even during a time of prosperity, the film suggests, young men need to realize that the world is dark and violent place and overcome their domestication at the hands of doting mothers, absent fathers, and leather sectionals.  (My extensive research shows that nearly everyone who was a young single woman during the peak of the movie's popularity had at least one boyfriend quote Tyler Durden asking why a "guy like him" should know what a duvet was when the subject of cohabitation, a trip to IKEA, or the possibility of buying one's own furniture arose.)  Fight Club appealed to a certain kind of young man, I think, in a kind of masochistic way: it accused them of being emasculated wimps, offered them a fantasy of a way out, then rebuked them for falling for it. In this context, the "not a special snowflake" line serves to critique the hypocrisy of consumerist individualism while also offering a different kind of distinction, the brave world of the ones willing to live without illusion.

I don't know whether college and post-college kids still go in for Fight Club. That line about snowflakes came to mind recently because now, when you hear about  someone talk about how the young must realize they are not "special snowflakes" it doesn't seem to have anything to do with resisting coy marketing come-ons. It's become a way of dismissing the impact of economic crisis as the result of so much permissive parenting, and noncompetitive soccer games, something like when people blamed the hippies on Dr. Spock.  There are certainly some quirks of contemporary parenting in certain social strata that could be described as permissive, and there's interesting points about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to talk about.  But the subtext of the snowflakes/tropies thing is not about that: it's about the notion that parenting should be about initiating kids into a world of hierarchies. In a country with shameful levels of inequality and child poverty, it seems a sick joke to try to diagnose a cultural pathology rooted in being too kind to children and having too much equality.


The most terrifying book I've read in recent years is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.  The novel begins in a boarding school where the students there are treated well. Their lives seem innocent and their surroundings beautiful, but we are ill at ease from the start. Ishiguro's tight, unshowy writing has a light touch - the opposite of Fight Club - but the doom is unmistakable: a terrible fate awaits these children.  They are in fact, the most un-unique of snowflakes: clones being raised to provide organs for donation. When you summarize it that way it sounds like that's the big "reveal." But what's fascinating - and terrifying - about the book is that it's not a sci-fi dystopia, much less a staging of some bioethics debate, as much as an allegory for our world so close to the actual thing that it barely needs its premise. The faculty at the school who clash over how much and when the children should be told about their fate resemble earnest liberal parents and teachers: is it better to shield them from what is to come, if just for a while? Is truth-telling less cruel? But it's a hard world, after all and we best be prepared. You can almost hear them saying "In today's global economy, every clone-child must be able compete."

Crucially, no one in the book rages about the injustice of it all or plots for a Hunger Games-style revolt of the clones. Not because they believe it is just or they have internalized their oppression or some such but simply because that is normally what happens, and Ishiguro is interested in working through how we push against our knowledge of the unthinkable. The children's one hope lies in the illusion that, in essence, they will be recognized and judged as "special snowflakes." The boarding school has been collecting their artwork for display. The rumor is that, like in some twisted fairy tale, if two students fall truly in love, they will be spared, and the artwork is the key to their souls that will allow that truth to reveal itself. Of course, there is no such way out. The art is just something for the kids to do, some fuel for their illusion that they are cared for, that their inner lives are cherished. Not long after I read the book I came across a cartoon in the New Yorker where employees of a slaughterhouse are looking out over a pen of cattle. "Just before they're slaughtered," one says, "each one gets an achievement award."

I suppose you could read this as endorsing the crusade against participation trophies. But part of what works about Ishiguro's novel is that it isn't about scoring points against the liberal position by pointing out its hypocrisies. On some level, you could say, it's a conservative novel, showing how we all accommodate ourselves and our children to what is unthinkable: here, that they will die young, the rest of us, that we will die. But I think he also wants us to understand what makes the children take their "art" so seriously, and believe so dearly it will save them. Middle-class and upper middle-class parents get mocked a lot for wanting their kids do art and music, for thinking that they must be "gifted," for not realizing that talent and the right to do creative work must be reserved for the very few. When decent futures and meaningful work are scarce, expecting them is seen as an exercise in entitlement, and we try to repress all the evidence of how powerfully we desire them. If we can't make a world where they are available to all, we could at least stop making fun of parents for wanting to shield their kids for it just a minute longer.

If NY Mag Had Asked Me

So there was a bit of a noise recently after New York published this survey about the now (presumably complete) Roth oeuvre. Most of it had to do with how many women and men were included in the survey (take a guess), the probable impact of this on the answers to the question "Is Roth a misogynist?" and the unfortunate start of Keith Gessen's response to that question: "Did Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them?" Oh, and they asked James Franco. So there's that.

So New York didn't ask me, sadly. But I do feel somewhat uniquely qualified here. I've written about Roth quite a bit, and have read almost all his books, including the lesser-known non-fiction memoirs and essays. Even the one about baseball. And because, while I'm sure many people would think this only shows my "bias," I actually think having also spent a lot of time reading, writing and thinking about feminism, might put me in an interesting position to answer these questions.

So, if New York had asked me? Well, before getting to the misogyny thing, I would have been tempted to make fun of their questions. Is he the greatest living American novelist? Like, really, the greatest ever ever? And should he win the big prize? They might as well have asked, but is he awesome. . . or super awesome?  (A fawning biographer having an affair with her famous subject would make a pretty good Roth novel, actually). Can't we leave the obsessive ranking to the Ivy League admissions offices and the guys from High Fidelity? If you have to go there, I do have a soft spot for his consistency: it is pretty impressive that of the almost thirty books of his I've read, there's only one stinker in the bunch. (That would be the baseball one.) 

So, is he a misogynist?  Presumably a lot of people find the question stupid or insulting, but I'm with Zoe Heller here: it makes no sense to celebrate art's potential to offend, and then claim that anyone taking offense is deluded or stupid. Of course, to take offense is to risk sounding like one of the Puritans Roth rails against.  That's probably why Nell Freudenberger said "I don't like the way he writes about women, and I don't like the way I sound complaining about it." And it's true that while, as everyone rushed to point out, the fact that the characters spend a lot of time thinking about fucking women doesn't mean they aren't misogynist, it doesn't mean they are, either. Straight male sexuality is as good a theme as any, and, given that Roth isn't wrong about our Puritanism, there's a tendency to react negatively to that in a way that is kind of hollow. There's a Terry Gross interview with Roth when she asks him about his character's "excessive" sexuality, and he said that the concept of normality wasn't one any serious person has any business entertaining.

But I think a lot of readers who aren't Puritans are responding to something else. At times it's the Tom Wolfe-level satirical misses: a lot of The Human Stain is wonderful but as a satire of a female academic Delphine Roux could have been written by a National Review intern over his lunch break, and about Rita Cohen, the man-eating radical from American Pastoral, the less said the better.

More than that, though, I think the interesting question is the extent to which there's an imaginative sympathy extended, one which at least attempts to see all the characters as they see themselves. Not everyone has to be George Eliot, of course, and being inside one head, with all its peculiarities and solipsisms, even the same one year after year and book after book, can be a pretty rich vein to tap. (Though the churlish part of me wonders whether such a project would get a woman author labelled as 'personal' or 'minor,' rather than land her a manly poll with big yellow circles to mark the circumference of her greatness.) And ironically, his big theme actually necessitates that Roth spend more time with his female characters than a lot of male writers. No one that I know of has asked if Cormac McCarthy is a misogynist for creating worlds where women often don't exist. Personally I prefer writers who explore masculinity rather than take it as a given universal.   I think, for example, that Junot Diaz's latest collection is brilliant in how it does that - and not only because he includes a story from a woman's point of few.  It's still noteworthy that he does this, I think, and that it's hard to imagine Roth doing this. Not that anyone has to, of course, but shouldn't it be seen as a skill that's part of what we talk about when we talk about writers who can 'do everything'?

Still, at a certain point there's a failure of imagination that does get wearying. It's interesting that Benjamin Kunkel picked as his favorite passage this one from American Pastoral: "You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again." That's Zuckerman talking about "Swede" Levov, whose placid world and un-Zuckerman like bonhomie has been torn apart by his daughter's radicalism. The daughter, Merry, is completely unconvincing as a character in her own right but completely convincing as a portrait of how the Swede would see her. But it's Zuckerman who's worried about getting the Swede right - Merry herself is portrayed as so irrational there's nothing right or wrong to get about her.

Interestingly, for me there are two times in Roth where a female character breaks outside of the projections and fantasies, one from the start of his career, and one from much later. As Vivian Gornick writes in her essay on Roth and Bellow from The Men in My Life, the relationship between Brenda and Neil in "Goodbye Columbus" has a tenderness that immediately disappears from his work thereafter: "When, close to the end, Neil says to himself, "Who is she? What do I really know of her?" it is not to demonize Brenda, it is to underscore the mystery of sexual love." To Neil's final reflection that "I knew it would be a long while before I made love to anyone the way I had made love to her" Gornick remarks, "A long while? How about never?" (I'd been working on this post for a while when I realized that of course Gornick had already said it all and said it better. I don't think the essay is online but there's an interview where she talks about its argument and the relationship between sexism and the Jewish thing. There's also a fascinating 1976 essay on Miller and Mailer and Roth in this collection.)

Never indeed, but to my mind something interesting did happen late in the game with Sabbath's Theater, the winner in the "best book" part of the poll.  Drenka, mistress and foil for the puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is the one woman in Roth who is a peer of the man who pursues her - not only because her libido and erotic imagination match his, but because they're both outsiders. Unlike so many women in Roth, Drenka doesn't embody the fear of aging or illness or death; instead she's a kind of double for his own experience of isolation, someone whose solidity is as tenuous as his own. In the Gornick interview I linked above, she talks about how Roth and Bellow use women as a way to avenge the experience of feeling excluded.  By the time we get to Sabbath, though, there's something else: how the resistance to domestic and conventional life has made this almost-old man another kind of outsider, and the cost of this. Not that he should have done otherwise, exactly, but it's an ongoing joke in the book that he fancies himself the proper bohemian artist sacrificing everything for his art, but his art is puppets. 

Sabbath also points to something that's evident throughout late Roth: the sense that his protagonists are raging against an order that's long since faded away. Sabbath's friend asks him "Isn't it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebel-hero . . .Are we back to Lawrence's gamekeeper? At this late hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the virtues of fetishism and voyeurism . .. the discredited male polemic's last gasp." Interestingly, Gessen says something similar  in the rest of his response: "Still, it might be said that Roth is slightly less useful in a world that is slightly more equal than the world he knew; where men and women do not stand on opposites sides of the question of sex, but arranged, together, something helplessly, against it; where sex is less of a battlefield and more of a tragedy." I'm not sure about the tragedy part:  Everyman, for example, doesn't work because adultery no longer carries that weight. I was reading Details at the hairdresser yesterday and there was a teaser for the Roth documentary coming out. So I guess Roth is still a male symbol of some sort for some people. It quoted him saying something about all those 19th century novels with adultery as their theme. I love adultery he says, don't you. Well, many people do, it would seem. But by Everyman he was tired enough of writing it that he breaks off a scene of the protagonist's fight with his wife, noting that scenes such as these are common enough, no need to write them again.

  I do think what Gessen says applies more to the pre-sexual revolution mores depicted in things like Goodbye Columbus, Letting Go and Indignation than to all of Zuckerman and Kepesh's exploits. Still it makes me want to give Gessen the benefit of the doubt that he was making a joke with the first part. Either way, it does point to something: as Freudenberger's comment shows us, no one wants to be the reactive critic, waging a finger at the artist's vision. But Gessen gets at what's behind her ambivalence: it's Roth's work itself which is so often the "reaction." This is not necessarily a fault, but it's something that demands a better question than one about greatness.

All of which is, I suppose, to say: I would have gone with the 52% who voted "well . . .. "

The Secret Lives of Wives and Widows

So T.S. Eliot's wife has died.  Wait, what? How is that possible?

Of course you can probably guess: "Mrs. Eliot, who was almost 38 years younger than her husband, had been his secretary for several years at the publishing house Faber & Faber when they married in 1957." 

The Times obituary itself is a kind of accidental masterpiece, a perfectly calibrated mini-biography, evoking the strangeness of the lost worlds that passed away with her:

Esmé Valerie Fletcher was born in Leeds, England, on Aug. 17, 1926. Her father, who was in the insurance business, was a bookish sort who passed on to his daughter his love of poetry. She said she fell in love with Eliot — or at least his work — when, at 14, she heard John Gielgud’s recording of “Journey of the Magi.”

After her schooling, she worked at a library at the University of Leeds and then as a secretary to the novelist Charles Morgan. When a family friend who knew Eliot mentioned that he was looking for a secretary, she applied.

I love those dashes. Because how is a 14 year old to know the difference between a man and a voice on a phonograph, one that doesn't even belong to that same man? 

 In my benevolent literary dictatorship when novels about professors who sleep with their students have been banned, I may make an exception for stories about those students, or other younger women who  marry much older men years down the road: what happens later when the men are not older but old or sick or dying? I know this sounds nasty or vengeful like, ha, they still grew old and died but I don't mean it like that. A while back I read the excerpt from Francisco Goldman's memoir/novel Say Her Name in the New Yorker. He says that when they got together, they would joke about how the future would play out, and he'd promise that if he was still alive at a certain point he would go off and leave her while she was still young enough to meet someone else, but as it turned out he was the one who lost her.

But of course more often the odds are not defied.  Valerie was 86 when she died. The marriage that put her obituary in the papers  lasted seven years. Her widowhood lasted forty-seven. 

My own grandmother was a widow for twenty-seven years, despite having married a man one year her junior. Only shortly before her death did I come to understand that so much of her personality and interests, so much of her way of being in the world - or what I had understood it to be - had been forged out of this widowhood, and that my mother and aunt and her husband and four sisters and known and loved a very different woman.  

For Valerie, of course, the widowhood that lasted more than half of her life was also her career. She managed his estate,  edited an edition of The Waste Land, edited his letters, got rich by authorizing Cats, started a foundation with that money, and defended his reputation. 

There are a lot of very obvious feminist points about this, about the trajectories of bookish girls born in 1926.  For a while I got kind of obsessed with the throw away descriptions of wives in profiles of artists and such and started collecting them. Things like this: 

During their thiry-five years of marriage, Natalia Dmitriyevna served as her husband’s first reader, editor, assistant, cook, driver, researcher, and (because Solzhenitsyn was a kind of literary monk) conduit to the earthly realm of agent, publishers, journalists, lawyers, and politicians. She also raised three sons because, she said jokingly, “the way Alekasandr Isayevich saw it, they would just grow up on their own.”

“The Widow’s Peak,” David Remnick, The New Yorker June 18 2012

 Or this: 

“It’s curious, and perhaps no more than curious, that the two most productive periods of Bowie’s career coincide with his two marriages.”

Thomas Jones, “So Ordinary, So Glamorous,” Thomas Jones, LRB, 5 April 2012 

"Perhaps no more than curious." Because of course one mustn't make too much of such things.
I always thought "And they were mostly, men" could be the great title for something: how that phrase, nine times out of ten consigned to a parenthesis, is called on to do so much by way of explanation and apology.

And yet. Were one to make the obvious feminist points, to reach for our Virginia Woolf and go to that passage I just taught my students, the one about how we're on "the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet," when we read of "a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother" - we might be led off the track.

For one thing, there is this: apparently Valerie hated talking to the press but made an exception when the movie Tom and Viv came out, defending her husband against the charge, among others, that Eliot's first wife, Vivienne, had written parts of The Waste Land and been denied credit. "The exemplary literary widow" delicately describes her understanding of Vivienne's illness, expresses sympathy for Ted Hughes, and asserts that the first Mrs. Eliot's role in creating The Waste Land was the traditional one: causing the misery that helped to inspire it.  Valerie comes across in The Independent as the reluctant truth-teller, making a more modest but more accurate claim for her role in the great man's work.

No doubt for some people this is a cautionary tale about the perils of looking too hard for the evidence of lost female genius. I remember one time in graduate school a certain professor saying that for the material we were looking at, 19th century French poetry, there were no women. "And not because they've been suppressed," he said with something like a sneer. But Woolf's point was not just about the things that don't get read, or the things that were written as "anon", or the ways women's intellectual capacities were channelled into work produced by men, but the things that never get written at all.

But in a way this all misses the point. In some ways,  literary history remains a stubbornly conservative field no matter how many of us pinkos teach it. The whole mythology of genius teaches us to spend our time thinking about creation as a process that is ultimately distant from the rest of human experience, done by a select few. We can expand the pantheon, and we can talk about "context," we can look at literary movements that tried to be collective, we can study popular culture, but it's very hard to ever have the cultural equivalent of social history or history from below, or to really study anything but a few works at a time, be they representative or exemplary, no matter what the "digital humanities" people say.

Looking again at the lives of those who live in proximity to the big names can of course be a part of this in the worst way, like those awful panels run by author societies where everyone talks about what so and so wrote to so and so and talks like they knew them, like when the nice Jewish lawyer in Quiz Show comes back from hanging out with Van Dorens talking about Bunny Wilson. That's what they call him, he tells his wife. Well, you don't have to, she says.

But when you look at these in another way, they can be something else entirely. My favorite part of the obituary is this:

He was made for marriage, he was a natural for it, a loving creature, and great fun, too,” Mrs. Eliot said in a 1994 interview. “We used to stay at home and drink Drambuie and eat cheese and play Scrabble. He loved to win at cards, and I always made a point of losing by the time we went to bed.”

If they'd made Tom and Valerie, no one would fall in love with Bertrand Russell and no one would go to the looney bin and I don't know how you dramatize thirty years spend editing his letters, but I would watch any movie that showed a moment like this. Genius is all well and good (actually it's not but that's another story), but she also serves who knows when to lose at cards.