The Letter from Lord Chandos

 

Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression, but rather as a machine for the distribution of places for sex within class and gender hierarchies. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.

The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony walls of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the finest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

Perhaps it is a mistake, even, to confine this to the modernist moment, or at least to pretend that the modernist moment isn’t structured according to the precepts of a broader mythology. Wasn’t Prajapati found lying in a golden egg, the first man, Purusa? The egg is both his bearer and his product – for it was born, itself, of Prajapati’s union with Vac, or speech. Laurie Paton, in Authority, Anxiety and Canon, took the story of the Golden Egg and writes this:

“In my reconstruction of the two-phase process of creation, based on several accounts in the Brahmanas, Prajapati and Vac both participate in each stage. The division between the first and second stages of the cosmogonic process is demarcated in certain accounts by the measure of time, generally the period of a year. In the first stage the creator Prajapati has a desire to reproduce and unites with his consort Vac. The Vac with which Prajapati unites at this stage is the unexpressed, transcendent level of speech that is generally identified with the primordial waters. Prajapati implants his seed in the waters of Vac and the seed becomes an egg, which represents the totality of the universe in yet undifferentiated form. In the second stage of creation a child, representing the ‘second self’ of Prajapati, is born and speaks. This speech, which represents the second phase of Vac, is the expressed, covalized speech by means of which the creator introduces distinctions in the originally distinctionless totality of creation represented by the egg, dividing it into the three worlds and manifesting various types of beings.”

What the Letter records is an egg’s inward collapse. For on the brink of becoming an Elizabethan sage, Chandos found himself becoming something else entirely.

All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint. The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos were, apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg. But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.

Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.

“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?

In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

Now in my advance from middle age to the muddled age of 67, I have a personal sense of that particular moment. The imbecile gaps are longer; living as I do, now, with my wife and our son, in Paris, where the peeps do be speakin’ French,  I face them in a more tangential way perhaps than other,  more normal people do. When I was a young buck, I was a ready speaker, and could spin a line of bullshit that awed even myself at times. I can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! I throw the dice and they come up … blank. Which makes me wonder how I never noticed this fourth dimensional surface of the dice. The dice, the web of speech, the golden egg. I’ll babble along when suddenly the web will tear off and fall in the dark – inside my head, of course – and I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. It passes, but for a moment I question the whole path that lead me to become a babbler.

Intimations of Alzheimer’s, maybe. But Alzheimer’s simply names a badly understood disease, maybe not even one disease. Rather, in the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is the embarrassment that takes in my entire life. And the need to keep running it. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavor of this moment on my tongue.

Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a knife in the intervals. It is merely the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone. That Hoffmansthal, a man with the resources of the German language in his hands, could write about makes him a very rare genius indeed.

In his wake,  I write about it because, after all, it is an experience, and as long as I can tell one experience from another, I will write. It is this which makes the Letter a cult object for writers, a source book of failure, a destination that will overtake us all.

A chain of signifiers: Skhlovsky, Barthes, and the spell

 

I’m an inveterate comparer, so much so that I distrust the subjective pivot of comparison only because I compare it with other approaches to the true and the just. I compromise with that distrust by putting all comparison under the sign of quote marks – I mention, but I do not speak in propria persona.

So it is that, reading Skhlovsky’s Zoo, I thought: I wonder if Barthes read Zoo?

Looking around, I have noticed another reader, Linda Kaufmann, in Discourses of Desire, noticed: that Barthes’ Fragments of a lover’s discourse, Derrida’s Post Card, and Skhlovsky’s Zoo, or Letters not about Love have all used fragmentation to understand, or undergo, the spell of love as a spelling, an incorrigibly and frustratingly logo-bent moment, in which indirection is the only direction that can possibly find direction out.  And reader, he doesn’t marry her. That’s not in the cards.  

It is like that, eros and literature and its discontents.

The fragments part, though, those telegraphic, telepathic one sentence paragraphs of Skhlovsky, they fascinate me. Spells are usually a word, a phrase, a formula, which working against the causal current, bring about a result – at least in the once upon a time world – overwhelming both the producer and the receiver. The sorcerer may be distinguished from the sorcerer’s apprentice by the ability to follow the spell with a negation, a limit. But that is bluff.

Or at least out of the once upon a time world, in the world of, say, Berlin, 1923, that has been revealed as bluff.

Revealed once, which throws a demystifying retrospective over the entire past.

In Jameson’s Prison House of Language, Frederic Jameson connects Shklovsky’s style, and the form of his thought, to Vasily Rozanov, the oddest of Russian essayist:

“Rozanov illustrates the resolution of the novel back into its raw materials, into a kind of linguistic collage, made up of journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, entries noted on stray envelopes and scraps of paper and so forth. From the point of view of content, he may be seen as a kind of Russian equivalent of Pirandello or Fernando Pessoa, with his multiple personalities (he was a conservative columnist under his own name for the Novoe Vremya, a liberal columnist under a pseudonym for the Russkoe Slovo). It is worth noting that for Skhlovsky, even this ideological content is not primary, but only the result of the form which it calls into being…”

What else is a form that calls something into being but a spell?

Barthes was another such a maker of spell books. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (a beautiful title), Barthes writes that the question that follows him around (like the rain cloud that follows Joe Btfsplk in the L’il Abner cartoons) is “what does this mean?”:

“This mania never allows for futility: for example, if I notice – and I force myself to notice – that in the country, I love to take a leak in the garden and not elsewhere, I want to know what this means. This rage to make the simplest facts signify socially marks the subject like a vice: one must not break the chain of names, one must not unchain language: the excess of namings is always ridiculous (M. Jourdain, Bouvard and Pecuchet)

(Even here, save in the amanuensis, of which it is precisely the price, one never records anything that one does not make signify: one doesn’t dare allow the fact to be left in a state of in-significance; this is the movement of the fable, which pulls from every fragment of the real a lesson, a sense. One can imagine a completely inverse book: which reports a thousand “incidents” while forbidding itself to ever pull out of them a line of meanings; that would be exactly a book of haikus.)”

Incidences without senses. Such is the threat posed by filling up a book, a thing of pages and pages. The novelist is always trying to give an impression of something going on without bogging it down to much in the material of incidence – or at least one kind of novelist is. The novelist that selects the mirror, that instrument which lacks the elements of editing, to be his or her symbol. Joyce, though, knew better: Stephen Dedalus chooses the cracked looking glass of a serving girl.  

Science, magic, the teller, the tale, and the critic who trails behind. Skhlovsky and Barthes are both writers first, even if they accumulate the outer look of critics, or at least essayists. And that essayistic melange was always destined to creep into, to infect, to invade, the other genres. The poem, the novel, the story.

Well. Let’s go bowling, dude.

 

My Mount Rushmore: DIDION MALCOLM ADLER HARDWICK

 

I have been thinking of Laura Kipnis’s applaudable and much applauded review of Lili Anolik’s book comparing the wondrous Eve Babitz -according to Anolik, her own personal discovery – and the evil Joan Didion. Kipnis makes short work of this nonsense, but she does knock Didion inthe process, implying that her influence is too great and it is time (accordingto the clock of literary reputation) to take Didion down. 

My Rushmore of the women essayists of the latter half of the 20^th century is: Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm and Elizabeth Hardwick.

All Rushmores are a little ridiculous. My Rushmore could have included, say, Audre Lord or Toni Morrison. It did not have to be so white and upper class. But this is my paper mache Rushmore, my sense of the looming presences presiding above my own little fingers dancing on these keys.

Only Janet Malcolm avoided fiction altogether, although her work on reporters exposed a good deal of fictivity in the late twentieth century style of grand reportage. I would also say that Adler, however much I appreciated her essayist style, was better in her two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark. Didion’s novels, to my mind, got better as she went along – got more sharded and lethal. Democracy is more like Speedboat than it is like Play it as it lays. Hardwick, too, pared down to the parataxis beneath the plot – a very late seventies notion, where plot became a thing of dread, an instrument that was used against you. There is no better marker of the cultural mood in the States in the Seventies than Sleepless Nights.

Didion, though, was always special. From the very beginning she knew how to make style cast a spell. And in that beginning she was definitely a Goldwater girl, John Wayne’s erring but adoring daughter. The culture of the seventies, the reverb from Watergate and the, well, inelegance of the coming monster mash with Reagan, drove her away from thinking that the woman who bragged of hanging out at the gas station with the boys could accept these boys, all too visibly frat boys, on the right were of the same issue. She moved, as a novelist and essayist, to a thinker on the margins. With the advantage that she knew Anglo society in her bones. So with the short books – El Salvador and Miami – she adjusted her hearing.

Didion, like Janet Malcolm, could hear a text. She understood the art of citation – damning the establishment with their own words in their own media organs. For instance, in Miami, she does a marvelous rap on Miami’s purblind Anglo establishment by spotting things in the Miami Herald. For instance, a two page, dryly comic bit that begins with this innocent intro:

On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Dade County, in February of 1986, the Miami Herald asked four prominent amateurs of local history to name “the ten people and the ten events that had the most impact on the country’s history”. Each of the four submitted his or her own list of “The most influential people in Dade’s history”… She presents this newspaper turn to celebratory history for a page, just quoting, And then:

“On none of these lists of “The Most Influential People in Dade History” did the name Fidel Castro appear, nor for that matter did any Cuban, although the presence of Cubans in Dade County did not go entirely unnoted by the Herald panel. When it came to naming the Ten Most Important “Events”, as opposed to “People”, all four panelists mentioned the arrival of the Cubans, but at slightly off angles (“Mariel Boatlift of 1980” was the way one panelist saw it, as if this arrival had been just another of those isolated disasters or innovations which deflect the course of any growing community, on an approximate par with other events mentioned, for example the Freeze of 1895, the Hurricane of 1926, the opening of the Dixie Highway, the establishment of Miami International Airport, and the adoption, in 1957, of the metropolitan form of government, “enabling the Dade Country Commission to provide urban services to the increasingly populous unincorporated area.”

The Miami book strikes the note that Didion made her specialty – the differand between the white establishment’s view of American history, up to the present, and the reality of what was actually happening in America. The Miami Herald, in its notion that Miami was an Anglo city in the New South even as it became 56 percent Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, etc., could be paralleled by the Washington Post’s quaint notion that the very heavily black city of Washington, D.C. existed merely as a backdrop – one that needed proper taming! - to super important connections being made in Georgetown. Perhaps the most powerful piece Didion did was on the Central Park Jogger case, the case of the woman who was raped while jogging in Central Park on April 10, 1989, the case that was “resolved” by  the roundup of six black or Hispanic teen boys, who were given all  the accountrements of a trial as they were disappeared down the sewage line leading to the penitentiary system. While Didion’s piece did not argue that the teens were innocent, it did argue that their presumption of innocence was grossly violated by the media frenzy, followed by the political frenzy, a freakout of the white establishment that revealed their “innocence”, to use Didion’s curious term – their lack of knowledge of the world that they presumed to own.

Sentimental Journeys, published in the New York Review of Books, was received as an insult and provocation when it came out. In 1992, Hedrick Herzberg, a 100 percent Clintonite liberal, gave her points for digging up the black viewpoint, but ends with this grave judgment:

“Ms. Didion plainly finds the “black” vison of systematic oppression morally superior to the “white” vision of systematic mayhem. But both visions are contemptible exaggerations, and it is far from clear which, in New York, is the most damaging.”

Oh, we are so close here to a Sister Soulja moment! And the oddity is, “Ms. Didion” is the Sister whose “contemptible exaggerations” we have to get rid of.

Louis Menard, in a review of a book about Didion, provides a good abbreviation of the way Didion’s comparative method works:

“The journalistic nut of the Jogger piece is the case of Laurie Sue Rosenthal. She was the mistress of an assistant city commissioner for elevator and boiler inspections, a man named Peter Franconeri, who happened to own an apartment at 36 East Sixty-eighth Street, between Madison and Park, and a house in Southampton. On the night of April 26, 1990, Rosenthal called her parents, in Queens, from the Sixty-eighth Street apartment and said she was being beaten. Sometime after that call, she died. In the morning, Franconeri rolled her body up in a carpet, put it out with the building's trash, and went to work.

The story did get into the papers, but officials downplayed the significance. "There were some minor bruises," said a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. A police officer complained to a reporter about Franconeri, "Everybody got upside down because of who he was. If it happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it."

Essentially, it was. Laurie Sue Rosenthal was determined to have suffered an accidental death from the combined effects of alcohol and Darvocet. Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got seventy-five hours of community service. The suspects in the Jogger case got sentences of five to fifteen years, for crimes including a rape that, it turned out, they had not committed. But the Central Park suspects did not belong to what Didion called "the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that's the end of it."

I will miss, oh I will miss, Didion reporting about the Luigi Mangione case.

 

 

Huddling

 

Whenever the wealthy and the powerful conspire together, the newspapers speak of “huddling”.

Conspire, of course, has a sinister sound. Meet might be more neutral, but newspapers which have some pepper in their bloodstream like verbs that will pique the reader’s interest. There is nothing more uninteresting than meeting. Meetings are things that emails are sent out for, reminding recipients that it is mandatory, setting the day and the hour, nailing a piece of the collective flesh to this or that room.

In the spectrum of meeting types, the “huddle” enjoys a long career of being what happens when moguls, politicos, and the offensive line of a football team rub shoulders. As in this Sunday NYT article that begins:

“This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.”

The huddling here was about global climate change. Yadda Yadda Yadda went on. If your idea about changing our industrial structure to save the holocene includes representatives of Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, you may well be a centrist Democrat. Congratulations!

According to Skeat’s etymological dictionary, to huddle is genetically related to “hide”. To hide closely together, even. To hide in a crowd, or to be a crowd of hiders, presents us with a bit of a paradox, as crowds are mostly imagined as public and showy – a crowd or a mob or a demonstration makes a definite presence on the street. A hidden crowd, however, implies some disastrous social breakdown. The crowd of hiders in Saramago’s novel, Blindness, are suffering a peculiarly horrible fate, in that they have all contracted the epidemic blindness and that they are all collected and put away in a closely guarded reservation as a quarantine measure to stop the blindness from spreading. The crowd of the blind cannot, of course, see itself, although one of the characters is pretending blindness in order to stay with her husband, and can actually see the whole crowd – even as she is “hidden”, by counterfeiting being blind, from the crowd.

This notion of a hidden crowd is overlaid, in America, by the one instance of huddle that is known by all: “the huddled masses, yearning to be free”. Here the huddling has been done by tyrants overseas – from which said masses, en masse, are yearning to be free, and putting in action this yearning by getting third class tickets on boats and making the crossing in the holds of said boats to America. Once in America, of course, every manjack of them becomes an individual in his or her own right. And if they peddle, invest, sweat and save successfully, their descendants can one day hope to huddle, richly, with representatives of other rich people.

Perhaps, even, in a huddle room.

In the midst of the techmania of the year 2000, a Corey Kilgannon wrote a story for the Times about Ernst and Young, the accounting agency. Fearing that it was not cool enough, Ernst and Young set about arranging to be as cool as Boo.com – or any other dotcom startups.

“A smiling 20-something receptionist wears a name tag identifying him as Elvis Presley, and a blast of Bob Marley music accompanies an employee leaving a conference room. Actually, they are called “huddle rooms” and have plush easy chairs and white walls on which employees can write. The “college rooms” nearby have dormitory-style couches where workers on marathon shifts can take naps.”

I wonder if huddle rooms still survive in the Corporate archipelago? I have an idea that the “huddle room” in which Bill Gates huddled has more up-scale accoutrements than were ever dreamt of by Elvis Presley of Ernst and Young.

Somehow, I still prefer conspire.

Reviewing, a retrospective

 I’ve done my time as a book reviewer. I’ve lived in the foxhole, or the book-reviewer’s equivalent: an efficiency apartment overflowing with reviewer copies of books, books in every corner, books on the desk, the table, the bed, books like a madness or some fungus.

Thus, even after saying a happy goodbye to the whole ill-paid business,

I do think about reviewing. I think about how my time, in the 00s, was a pretty bad time for the business as a whole: newspapers that used to host book reviews as a natural function, just as they’d host obituaries and wedding announcements, were in the midst of the great change that would destroy most of them. Part of that change was the weird idea that reviewing anything but reading material – in a forum that depended on people, well, reading – would make papers ‘relevant”. The video game, cable tv, social media – great things in themselves, but competitors for the attention space – became the obsession of newspapers (the latest iteration of this being AI – a sort of imbecilic end to the newspaper obsession with a world in which newspapers are marginal or extinct. A Darwinist business historian would have a name for this fatal tendency. I lieu of which, I'll name it: the Sears Roebuck complex. How to fuck up a good thing, from the top).

On the other hand, newspapers had been on the skids for years, as the variety of papers in market after market thinned to a monopolistic one. And book reviews, in such an environment, were never going to make it.

I at the time had regular freelance gigs with the Chicago Sun, the Austin Chronicle and the Austin Statesman, and found a niche, here and there, with some odd characters: The National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Examiner, even the Wall Street Journal (which in the old days had a book review section edited by a man whose name I can’t remember, but who was, I do remember, politically inclined to socialism – in the pre-Murdoch days, the WSJ, always far to the right, still did things like hiring Alexander Cockburn to write a regular column). So I was in touch with the sickness of the whole reviewing world in North America.

Thus – I am a big man for a thus, and though I seem to be throwing out random reminiscence, there is a point, goddamn it! – the awful NYT review of Gabriel’s Moon, which seems to be an awful book by the British novelist William Boyd, has been weighing on my mind. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/books/review/gabriels-moon-william-boyd.html

The review that calls the main character a "turd", after calling him a "meatloaf". A hatchet job in which the hatchet man does not know how to swing a hatchet.

My mind goes back, reviewerishly, to the figure of John Leonard.

John Leonard is a name that rings a chime, most likely, only for older writers. Leonard reviewed TV. Leonard wrote novels (one of which Hugh Kenner called the “anti-V”, which is the only time, I believe, Kenner ever referred to Pynchon), Leonard wrote a column full of musings about society, but mostly, Leonard reviewed books.

In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick launched a famous salvo against the sheer mediocrity of the book review section of the Times. Looking back at that time through the archives, one finds that every new thing written in the U.S. was dissed by reviewers who seemed to be closer to the Edwardian age than their own. For them, Naked Lunch was tedious pornography. So was Lolita. And so on. On the other hand, one is also surprised that, well into the sixties, the section kept tabs on the literary scene in disparate foreign parts – Marc Slonim, for instance, wrote a regular column on what was happening in Italian, French, German and Eastern European literature. There is a reason that the NYT of that period becomes practically a Greek chorus in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries.

The slough of the review was, however, sloughlike for a decade after Hardwick’s attack. And then, for a period of about five years, John Leonard somehow, through some synaptic blackout of the managing editor, was given charge of the book page.

As a result, the Edwardian age was swept away. Exhibit one in what a book review section could be like: November 9, 1975. The NYT Book section features two reviews on its front page (in the book reviewing world, the front page of the NYT is, or was, the most valuable property in the fame – it is Park Place with four hotels): one is of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, and the other is of William Gaddis’s JR. The latter is a particularly sweet victory, of sorts, for art. Notoriously, Gaddis’s The Recognitions was subject to a completely uncomprehending review by Granville Hicks, of blessed memory, probably playing his harp in the heaven of the middle brow that must exist if God is just somewhere in our universe, back in the fifties, that had the effect of submerging Gaddis for almost two decades. It is a famous case.

In the collection of Leonard pieces, Reading for my Life, Leonard tells a story:

“In 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Tokyo to look at the bombed temple and the burned-out plain of the Asakusa. The twenty-three-year-old American, in U.S. Army PX jacket, was the critic Donald Richie. The forty-eight-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was the novelist Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English; Richie, no Japanese, and their interpreter stayed home, sick in bed with a cold. And so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, “André Gide.” Kawabata thought about it, then replied, “Thomas Mann.” They both grinned. And they’d go on grinning the rest of the afternoon, trading names like Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stefan Zweig; Colette and Proust.

It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if they were signal flags or semaphores… I take it personally. It seems to me that my whole life I’ve been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue.”

Leave it to Leonard to find a parable for book reviewers. That dying breed.

private lives, impersonal authors

 

When the New Criticism was at its height in the postwar period, a lotta intellectual energy was devoted to dispelling belles lettres and its tiresome construction of the author as the constant reference point for the work. In choosing between life and the work, the New Criticism robustly chose the work, and purged fantasies of authorial intention as much as they could. The Eliotic impersonality of the author was the ideal. What did the text say? That was the question. Not: what did the author want?

Yet, concurrently with the feverish coldness of the cult of impersonality, outside of academia, celebrity culture was moving in precisely the opposite direction. Just as the actor in a movie overshadowed the character he or she is playing (so that we often speak of Humphrey Bogart in x movie or Marilyn Monroe in y movie with little regard for the names of the characters in x or y movie), so, too, the publicity machine was rolling out countless personal facts and quirks about authors.

Joseph Roth, in 1929, was already writing about this. In an essay entitled “The Private Life”, Roth wrote: “For some years I have struggled, vainly, not to know about the private life of contemporary authors.”

For Roth, the fortress of privacy around the individual was being dissolved in the twentieth century by the medias in which we all bathe. He spots, in the discussion of authors, the kind of stereotypical motifs that introduce us to the lives of actors or politicians:

“Thus, for example, the important author Döblin, whose public influence is without doubt interesting enough, almost never introduced in regards to his books without the assertion that begins: he is a neurologist and practices in the North of Berlin. The repulsive and childish arrogance of the intrusive writing, who is so “well informed”, is everywhere unconstrained. The writer has to announce it – and even, at each occasion, with a foolish, joyful cry: aha! I knew it! A worker’s doctor in the North – thus diminishing the meaning of the author just as much as he devalues his necessary distance from the public. Compared to this barbarism, the mockable efforts of an eager Germanist to uncover superfluous trivialities out of the private life of his object of study are gestures of an aristocratic delicatesse.”

We could bookend the literary culture of modernism by putting, on one side, the impersonal artist of the New Critics, and on the other side, the Life magazine adoring portraits of authors. The Hemingways and Scott Fitzgeralds, who, in the American context, are the celebrity authors par excellence, stars in the Hollywood mold. They played themselves and they wrote. But what they wrote was only who they were.

Roth was of course concerned about literature, but not just literature. His notion was that the private life, with all its splendours and miseries, was being de-formed by being subject to the thousandfold pokings of the media, businesses, and the state. The harm in this for literature, to Roth, was self-evident: “for it has already become customary to view the writer a such a priori in terms of his private life.”

Live by the buzz, die by the buzz.

In this period, the late twenties and early thirties, Roth was withdrawing from his earlier fellow traveling sentiments and trying to find a politics to stand on against the Nazis and the Stalinists. This was his vector. Out of the loss of the private life, Roth foresaw the loss of the meaning of life entirely.;

“Nothing makes an author hotter than his quality as an “eyewitness” of the events that he is treating. Since some time, book reviewers have loved to give particular praise to those books which aren’t books – meaning: the lack of a literary quality qualifies as a plus. Then they pull out the slogan: This book is more than a novel! It is a piece of life!

What does that mean? More than a novel?

Within literature a piece of life only receives value when it has been given a worthy form. An unformed “piece of life” is not more than a novel, but less: it is nothing, it doesn’t even come into the picture. Or one begins to publish the written correspondence of paramilitary murders… They are so neat, round, juicy pieces of life! And literature has ceased to exist.”

Leo (Tolstoy) and Luigi (Mangeone)

 

Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil… - Anton Chekhov

Assassination is a fact of political history.

For instance: on Sunday, June 29th, 1900, King Umberto of Italy visited Monza, a little town near Milan where he had a residence, and attended mass, there. In the afternoon, he distributed prizes at a local sporting event. He awarded the gold medal, and got into his carriage. There his body received the brunt of four bullets from a 9-millimeter Harrington & Richardson pistol wielded by Gaetano Bresci, who had come from America precisely to do that. Umberto died almost immediately.

From the NYT: “The 30-year-old Bresci had emigrated from Milan two years before. He was a silk weaver at the Hamil & Booth Mill on Spruce Street in Paterson, where he was regarded by his boss as "a good worker who never caused trouble." He had married an American woman from Chicago, Sophie Neil, and had a baby daughter. His wife later described him as "a loving husband and father."

Among his other acts, King Umberto had approved of a police action that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of revolting factory workers in Mila: known as the  Bava Beccaris massacre, after the General that had ordered it. King Umberto gave the general a medal.

Bresci belonged to a small anarchist group in Patterson, New Jersey. He looked around him and saw that the “deed” – the assassination of those who assassinated the workers – was an ongoing happening. Inspired, he purchased his pistol and a ticket for Italy.

Tolstoy wrote an article about King “Humbert’s” murder, entitled: Thou shalt not kill. The article is included in Recollections and Essays, translated by Maude Aylmer.  With that title, one expects the usual liberal denunciation of murder. But it doesn’t take that route. Today, if a comparable article was written about the killing of Brian Thompson, it would certainly get him as roundly denounced today – for his moral relativism and moral equivalences, his objective support for terrorism. One can imagine the quacking of a thousand ducks, and the op ed space accorded to them. It definitely got him denounced by the establishment back in 1900. It’s bold premise is that we should not be shocked that we sow what we reap. The connection between our previous acts and our present circumstances – the tie of social karma – is always gripped tightly by Tolstoy. Thou Shalt Not Kill begins like this:

“When Kings are executed after trial, as in the case of Charles L, Louis XVI., and Maximilian of Mexico; or when they are killed in Court conspiracies, like. Peter Ill., Paul, and various Sultans, Shahs, and Khans-little is said about it; but when they are killed without a trial and without a Court conspiracy- as in the case of Henry IV. of France, Alexander ll., the Empress of Austria, the late Shah of Persia, and, recently, Humbert- such murders excite the greatest surprise and indignation among Kings and Emperors and their adherents, just as if they themselves never took part in murders, nor profited by them, nor instigated them. But, in fact, the mildest of the murdered Kings (Alexander 11. or Humbert, for instance), not to speak of executions in their own countries, were instigators of, and accomplices and partakers in, the murder of tens of thousands of men who perished on the field of battle ; while more cruel Kings and Emperors have been guilty of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of murders.”

Tolstoy pursues his theme without any preliminaries. Shaw once wrote that Tolstoy, seeing that pre-war European society was, as it were, sitting in a room into which poisonous gas was seeping, applied the remedies you’d apply in cases of gas poisoning – seizing the victim by the scruff of the neck and marching him around and around over his vociferous protests. Here’s the way Tolstoy seizes the victim:

“The teaching of Christ repeals the law, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but those who have always clung to that law, and still cling to it, and who apply it to a terrible degree-not only claiming an eye for an eye,' but without provocation decreeing the slaughter of thousands, as they do when they declare war- have no right to be indignant at the application of that same law to themselves in so small and insignificant a degree that hardly one King or Emperor is killed for each hundred thousand, or perhaps even for each million, who are killed by the order and with the consent of Kings and Emperors.”

Tolstoy’s point is that choosing to apply a barbaric law thrusts you into a barbaric world. Barbarism starts at the top. You, the establishment,  have dug your own grave. If a Civilization rests on top of thousands or millions of such graves, what is it worth? And Tolstoy is not one who is going to dicker with the thin membrane, spun of a thousand casuistries, that separates war from murder. His description of the army and of Mission Accomplishing heads of states is still effective:

“The crowd are so hypnotized that they see what is going on before their eyes, but do not understand its meaning. They see what constant care Kings, Emperors, and Presidents devote to their disciplined armies; they see the reviews, parades, and manaeuvres the rulers hold, about which they boast to one another; and the people crowd to see their own brothers, brightly dressed up in fools' clothes, turned into machines to the sound of drum and trumpet, all, at the shout of one man, making one and the same movement at one and the same moment-but they do not understand what it all means. Yet the meaning of this drilling is very clear and simple: it is nothing but a preparation for killing.

It is stupefying men in order to make them fit instruments for murder. And those who do this, who chiefly direct this and are proud of it, are the Kings, Emperors and Presidents. And it is just these men- who are specially occupied in organizing murder and who have made murder their profession, who wear military uniforms and carry murderous weapons (swords) at their sides-that are horrified and indignant when one of themselves is murdered.”

In his polemical work, Tolstoy often uses words depicting some form of altered consciousness – hypnotized, stupefied, drunk. The formalist critic, Victor Skhlovsky, in a famous essay in 1919, Art as Technique, used Tolstoy as an example of an artist who can make an object, act or gesture strange by rearranging the way we see it. The essay begins, beautifully, with some generalizations about automatism that apply not just to Tolstoy’s moral vocabulary, but to the connection between Tolstoy’s art and the sense of shock that runs through his polemical essays – that ties them, in ways that Tolstoy might not have admitted or understood, to his most aesthetic works:

“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. [1]

This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article[2]) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”

‘We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack.” Surely Skhlovsky must have been thinking of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, who feels a sack closing about himself as he dies. The sack connects automatism to death – and it is a desperate struggle to get out of the sack, to get out of this life of sacks, that I see in Tolstoy – a struggle that constitutes the whole of his moral eminence.

We all must struggle to get out of the sack. It is the political cause of our time.