I'm adding Philip Roth to my list of American authors I won't touch with a ten-foot pole, authors whose badness boggles my mind:

Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)
William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom Absalom, Wild Palms)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night)
Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

I just finished Portnoy's Complaint. The book apparently owes a debt to stand-up comedy, and I think is meant to roll the reader along on waves of vitality and "wicked humor" (to quote a reviewer), but — I just didn't find it very funny. I could tell when Roth (or Portnoy) was trying to be funny, I could practically see him winking ("Look at my joke!") but more often than not I had to groan at his lame puns and his contrived Freudian paradoxes. And the ethnic stereotypes — the fact that there's a kernel of truth to them, or that it's done (more or less) with affection, doesn't rescue his characterizations from shallowness.

Otherwise I don't know what to say. Being all about sex doesn't necessarily sink a work — Y Tu Mama Tambien pulls it off. (But it's hard.) A maniacal monologue can be a masterpiece — Hamsun's Hunger. And misogyny can be fascinating: The Kreutzer Sonata. But Roth isn't in that league. (To give him his due: I didn't have any trouble turning the pages. Portnoy's Complaint is an easy read.)

Take a small detail: the totally predictable surprise ending. Roth prefaces it with a little title: "THE PUNCHLINE." I was reminded of a child's drawing complete with labels: "THE SUN." "MOMMY." "MY DOG." That's the kind of clumsiness that characterizes the whole novel, though it's more often filtered through an "adult" sensibility. (To belabor the obvious: adult = arch, annoyingly arch, and adult = pornographic.)

Question: What do the authors listed above (except Hemingway) have in common? Answer: The conviction that more is always better. Melville could really write like this, and so could Whitman, and since then many — perhaps most — American writers have apparently considered it their artistic-patriotic duty to pile it on, structure and style be damned. But what stands out in these twentieth century successors is their lack of control — on every page, in every paragraph a poor word choice, an incoherent metaphor, shaky syntax, choppy transition — and the whole thing teeters and collapses before it's out the door. And there's more: the irrelevant or unwarranted authorial contempt or adulation that seeps through, the wallowing around, the working oneself into a frenzy in the fond hope that the reader will join in — I could go on, but I suppose there's no point if I can't quote and give page numbers. These people write as if they were throwing mud at a wall.

(I hate Hemingway just as much as the others, but he can't fairly be accused of excess. Still, his repression is a symptom of hysteria as tiresome and ostentatious in its own way as the ravings of these others.)

On a happier note: I liked Atonement a lot. Now there's a writer who has the situation under control! According to D. and waggish McEwan can be even too controlled, and I believe it, but Atonement strikes the right balance between the freedom of the characters and the control of the author, thanks to a style tethered by intelligent, patient observation and a brilliant plot — not just a clever plot, but one that sets up a spellbinding moral conflict. The characters come to life in the confrontation with their consciences, and this works even retroactively, even offstage, when we only hear about them from other characters.
I liked — loved — the clever post-modern touch of the very thoughtful letter from the editor of Horizon, not so much the clever post-modern touch of the ending… but I don't want to give anything away.

Fun fact: McEwan likes Roth. He said so himself, in an interview. I don't know what to make of that. (generation?)

Literature and Science

Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dulness of our hearing; and could our ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Physical Basis of Life," 1869

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-2 (begun 1869)

Huxley's essay comes close on the heels (in my anthology) of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science," in which Arnold argues that the humanities will always have a place in education, because we have a "desire" for "conduct" and "beauty." Studying science (at the schoolboy level — he doesn't mean research) is like piling up so many interesting facts — interesting, but not meaningful; the student is left spiritually hungry. I don't think he argues very well, and he doesn't even write as well as Huxley, but essentially I agree with him. (It doesn't help to put the argument in either/or terms, which is how he starts out, apparently taking his cue from Huxley. But he goes on to frame the question more cautiously — "will always have a place.")

However, you could say — George Eliot may suggest — that the habit of observation that science cultivates in its students, of paying attention, is preparation for a moral life. (Paying attention: there's a lot on this in the chapter "Seeing" in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Huxley argues enthusiastically that the writers of the future will take inspiration from science. George Eliot (probably) did. And I read this in Edith Wharton's memoir A Backward Glance:

In looking back over my memories of Theodore Roosevelt I am surprised to find how very seldom I saw him, and yet how sure I am that he was my friend. He had the rare gift of bridging over in an instant those long intervals between meetings that so often benumb even the best of friends, and he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed, that each of those encounters glows in me like a morsel of radium.

What struck me is how little of this there is in twentieth century writing. Does her last word ring false only because we now know that radium causes cancer, or is it the case that this is an impulse that didn't go anywhere? How common are metaphors based on (for example) the double helix? How successful are they?
I'm about to read Michael Frayn's Copenhagen — I saw it a few years ago — and, yes, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is all over that play. But that's not the sort of thing one can refer to off-handedly.

A Backward Glance: interesting, but really only for die-hard fans of Wharton. It's really like a big thank you to all the wonderful people she's known, too polite to be revealing. At first I found all the name dropping irritating, but then it occurred to me that she's not showing off; on the contrary, she's being modest: "My life is interesting only insofar as I've known interesting people." But only her portraits of Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt are satisfying; the other sketches are at best only tantalizing. (Not a bad thing: I've put on my to read list some totally forgotten novels by various contemporaries, mainly friends, that she warmly recommends: David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox, Robert Grant's Unleavened Bread, Howard Sturgis's Belchamber. She also loves The Egoist and Harry Richmond by George Meredith, who may not be forgotten, but — I don't know anyone who's read him. On to my list.)
So for her strained relationship with her mother, the failure of her marriage, etc., I'll have to go to Hermione Lee's biography. But I'm glad I got Wharton's view — "glance" — first.

This is funny:

…the first time I went to Washington after [the Roosevelts] were installed in the White House I was promptly summoned to lunch, and welcomed on the threshold by the President's vehement cry: "At last I can quote 'The Hunting of the Snark'!" "Would you believe it," he added, "no one in the Administration has ever heard of Alice, much less of the Snark, and the other day, when I said to the Secretary of the Navy: 'Mr. Secretary, What I say three times is true,' he did not recognize the allusion, and answered with an aggrieved air: 'Mr. President, it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity'!"

Bought at Unnameable Books: Anne of Avonlea, signed

Mary S. Brinton
Xmas 1909

started, but not finished

Civilwarland in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
I read most of the short stories in this collection a week ago and already I'm having trouble remembering them. (I didn't get to the novella that takes up the second half of this small volume.) The writing is extremely flat and simple. No doubt there are good reasons for this — the world Saunders describes is stark and grotesque, his characters mostly boobs or sadists — but I find it hard to stay interested in flat writing. (Saunders's one stylistic novelty, the use of truly awful corporate jargon throughout his characters' interior monologues, was funny at first but then got boring.) And the plots were depressingly similar: they all involve a horrible, cartoonish accidental death. There's real misery in these stories — the characters hate their jobs, have no friends, get divorced — and in that context I didn't know what to make of the gruesome accidental death as the climax of each story. I was bored and bewildered. So I stopped. (Kaveri said the first short story was the best, and if I didn't like it I should stop. I soldiered on until I had read most of the stories, then gave up.)

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky
Marion recommended this, and I eagerly went out and bought the French edition. Then I read Ruth Franklin's rather damning critique, and began to regret my purchase. But then I was still determined to read it, if only to practice my French.
I disliked it immediately. This is a novel in which a teenager goes into his room, slams the door and thinks, "I hate my family!" — and this counts as characterization. The mistress of a vain, selfish, snobbish writer sits on the floor gathering up the finished pages that he drops from his desk. And so on, one cliché after another. (So anti-semitism is only one aspect of her simple-mindedness.) Even the random observed details, contrasting the beauty of nature or the everyday concerns of people with the chaos of war seem drearily contrived, probably because the whole machinery is so creaky. (If I read the end of All Quiet on the Western Front fresh from Suite Française I'd probably be disgusted, even though I was very moved when I read it the first time.)
But I had read 97 pages, and was determined to finish at least the first novel in the volume (which consists of the first two of five projected novels on France at war, the ones Némirovsky completed). Then I re-read Franklin's review, and this sentence struck me:

There are many exquisite moments in Suite Française: the hypocritical generosity of Madame Péricand, her teenage son Hubert's reckless patriotism, the romance between Jean-Marie Michaud and the peasant girl who nurses him, and other indelible scenes.

I did not find the hypocritical generosity of Madame Péricand an exquisite moment; for me it was as revoltingly bad as everything else. If I like Némirovsky less than Ruth Franklin, I thought, I should stop. So I've stopped, as of now.

It was interesting to read Suite Française right after Atonement: one section of Atonement is set during the French collapse in June 1940. Némirovsky lived through it and McEwan didn't, but his description of the retreat is about a hundred times better than hers.

I was also reminded of Alice Kaplan's excellent analysis of the fiction of Robert Brasillach, another French anti-semite whose novels and journalism enjoyed great success in the 1930s. She writes that he has two modes, mawkishness and contempt, and never had the toughness of mind to achieve a synthesis. That's true of Némirovsky as well. Kaplan calls this the right-wing style (so did Kaveri, in another context!) and that makes sense to me.
Von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite also offered lots of insights into the mind of a reactionary, though he writes much better than Némirovsky, and turns the mirror on himself.

One of Ours
I often thought of Jacob's Room while reading One of Ours: both are about the boyhood and youth of men who will die in World War I. But whereas Jacob Flanders is a negative space, defined by the needs and desires of those who crowd around him and wonder what is the secret of one so blank and beautiful, Claude Wheeler is someone we get to know from the inside; unlike the maddeningly (apparently) self-sufficient Jacob, Claude projects his hopes and fears hither and thither, in the ardent and disorganized fashion of one whose education came too little and too late and who feels alienated from everything he grew up with. Claude seizes on the war as an escape from his unhappiness, as a source of meaning that is truly bottomless, that won't disappoint because war is incomprehensible.
One of Ours was published in 1923, one year after Jacob's Room, and it's a far more traditional novel in every way. While I love Jacob's Room, Cather's novel made me appreciate the costs of Woolf's denials: no, you shall not get to know the main character; no, the war had no meaning. Cather presents the excitement and the patriotism of her characters without anger, and sometimes comes close to endorsing it. In its strongest form the patriotism is francophilia — France as the opposite of Nebraska — which complicates the picture.

"On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely:

Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them, — what they were and what they might have been."

So far so good; Woolf does not write at such a low, relaxed pitch, but the sentiments are similar to those in Jacob's Room. Then Cather writes:

The name that stood was La France.

Woolf would never have written that, not even in the voice of a character. But the engagement with patriotism, with the idea that the war could have seemed meaningful to those who died in it, is rewarding and thought-provoking.

Like Fielding and Eliot, Cather passes judgment on her character: "He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country ever can be."

But there's so much more to One of Ours: the painful, beautiful scene in which a father tries and fails to reject his daughter's suitor out of concern for him, not for her, is one I've read aloud twice already.

One of Ours may not be as perfect and as devastating as Lucy Gayheart or The Professor's House, but it's nearly as good, and certainly as good as O Pioneers!.

The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth: this is the kind of book Dr. Casaubon was trying so hard to write ("A Key to all Mythologies"). It was fascinating to get to know the Near Eastern gods, whom I had previously encountered as mere faceless villains in the Hebrew Bible, and fascinating to come across traces of polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter on the epic of Gilgamesh as a source of the Iliad was especially moving. The book's length and critical apparatus may look intimidating, but in fact it's for anyone interested in mythology or philology. One had the thrilling sense that this is as far as we can go — West follows certain threads all the way to Sumerian literature, which is over 4000 years old. Beyond we'll never know.

Last summer I met a Palestinian, a translator by profession, who told me that the Hebrew word for grain or cereals, "dganim," is related to the Philistine god's name "Dagon." He was a god of agriculture and of the harvest. And the Hebrew word for "sun" is practically identical to the name of the Babylonian sun god. And one of the Hebrew months, Tammuz, is named after Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess's Inanna's shepherd lover — analogues of Venus and Adonis, according to West.

My Antonia

I was assigned to read My Antonia in seventh grade, didn't like it, and struck Willa Cather off my list of authors to read, until Jennie recommended The Professor's House a few years ago. Since then I've worked my way through Cather's œuvre, and some of her novels rank as my all-time favorites. So I was curious to re-read My Antonia: was I wrong to be unimpressed? Would I see things that had escaped me in seventh grade? The answer is "no." My Antonia is inferior to all the other novels I've read by Cather, and I can't understand why it received so much praise, or why it hasn't been displaced on school syllabi by Lucy Gayheart or (if you want a novel about the making of America, which people do, unfortunately, when they think of Cather) O Pioneers!. It's a hodgepodge, a grab-bag of characters and anecdotes that never come together. Oh, it's not terrible — it has the looseness, the breadth and breath of life, some of the episodes are memorable, and Cather's prose is always graceful, but I'm peeved that I almost missed out on Cather because someone inexplicably thought My Antonia was just the thing for a school syllabus!

This is the best part:

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over.  When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed.  Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon.  There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.  If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight.  There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.  No, there was nothing but land -- slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.  I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.  I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it.  But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it.  I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.  I had left even their spirits behind me.  The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither.  I don't think I was homesick.  If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.  Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.  I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

"Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made": one could say that My Antonia is not a novel, but the material out of which novels are made.

I'm re-reading Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North: my ninth grade is going to read it this semester. (Patrick complained that last semester's book, Emily of New Moon, had no plot. You want plot?! I'll give you plot!!) (Gratifyingly, most of his classmates liked Emily of New Moon, and not just the girls.)

I noticed on the copyright page that The Shadow in the North had originally been published in 1986 under the title The Shadow in the Plate. "In the plate"? What's that?! Then I realized he must mean "photographic plate": Sally's comrades run a photographer's studio. A shadowy evil in the north, photography... these are the leit motifs of Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass). Where do they come from?

Photography (not to mention electricity) as a link to the spirit world was the object of much study in the nineteenth century — and Northern Lights is set in the nineteenth century, albeit a fantasy of the nineteenth century — no less than the Sally Lockhart quartet. The northern evil must come (via Milton) from Canaanite mythology, where the great Adversary had his seat in the north. God, anti-god, Pullman's atheism...

Books since last summer:

Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763
Felix Holt, the Radical (George Eliot)
Vertigo (Sebald)
Nights at the Circus (Carter)
Storia degli Italiani, vol. II (Procacci)
Sexing the Cherry (Winterson)
The East Face of Helicon: West Asiastic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (West)
Malgudi Days (Narayan)
The Same Sea (Oz)
Ozma of Oz (Baum)
Comet in Moominland (Jansson)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: vol. I: The Pox Party (Anderson)
Prince Caspian (Lewis)
Emily of New Moon (Montgomery)
The Enchanted Castle (Nesbit)
My Antonia (Cather):
I, Claudius (Graves)
Claudius the God (Graves)
Miti e leggende di antica Roma (Agizza)
My Mortal Enemy (Cather)
Living in the Land of Ashes (Gebert)
The Omnivore's Dilemma (Pollan)
Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Gessen)
One of Ours (Cather)

February
Sense and Sensibility (Austen)
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, with selections from the Journals, Sermons, and Correspondence (Sterne)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Passing (Larsen)
The Thieves of Ostia (Lawrence)

March
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (Gourevitch)

April
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Gadda) (took me forever to get through)
The Scarecrow and his Servant (Pullman)

May
A History of the Roman World 753-146 (Scullard)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum)
The Marvellous Land of Oz (Baum)

I'm attending some lectures on the Inferno, and I'm forced to confront, yet again, my dislike of this masterpiece. It reminds me of Paradise Lost, which (hem, haw) I dislike for similar reasons:

The constant tone of denunciation, the pressure of hatred. I understand that there's genuine political passion and intelligence behind it, but I find it wearying, page after page of something at once diffuse and oppressive. (The fact that the first work by Milton that I read cover to cover was his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano may have colored subsequent experiences.)

A pomposity that pervades the whole and that makes even the good parts seem hollow and graceless. (Maybe if I read them out of context I'd appreciate them more; but I feel like a failure if I don't read works cover to cover.)
Some of Milton's word choices just make me grit my teeth. In a Milton lecture I once muttered under my breath, "atrocious," just as the lecturer was saying, "It's wonderful, isn't it?"

(this just for Dante) The thinness of the format — characters drift onto the scene, have their little outbursts, and then disappear for good. It all seems third hand.

Reading ancient epics throws into relief the poverty of these Christian epics. In the Æneid, for example, Virgil is able to inhabit so many different characters; even bit characters come to life and seem to speak as themselves, not through some editorialist's puppet. (And I actually find Virgil's Latin easier than Dante's Italian.)

Or take the battles in the Iliad: yes they're tedious, but the monotony seems meaningful; all the details of blood and sweat are so idiosyncratic and finely observed, at once so random and so revealing that I don't doubt it all happened exactly as Homer describes it. The battle scenes in Paradise Lost look like videogames next to the Iliad.

Another thing I don't like are the long explanations of astronomy or topography, which I can never follow (because I get so bored). It's like reading instruction manuals for home appliances, or pages and pages of stage directions. The fact that scholars are so taken with these passages, and spill so much ink debating the most mechanical points makes me suspicious. ("They must have nothing better to talk about"... "If they find this interesting, we'll probably disagree on everything.)

Another epic I don't like is The Faerie Queene. Don't even get me started on that!

I complained to Beatrice about Dante, and she tried to explain why she liked it. I found her more convincing than the lecturer (partly no doubt because she has no professional stake in the matter; and because she hasn't been preaching these things for 50 years, so she can conceive of disagreement). She recited her favorite bits and it was then that I thought if I only read excerpts I might conceive a fondness for the Inferno at least.

She says I should read Orlando Furioso. He's been on my list for years.

I loved Faust, so it's not as if I hate every modern epic. Or even every Christian epic: I liked Paradise Regained.

Miranda Gaw is reading Northanger Abbey, on my recommendation, and liking it. When I saw this I ran to get my own copy, so that I could relive the experience at the same time that it was all happening to her. (That's how badly I want to be reading books with people.) My copy fell open to this page:

'My horse! oh, d— it! I would not sell my horse for a hundred. Are you fond of an open carriage, Miss Morland?'
'Yes, very; I have hardly ever had an opportunity of being in one; but I am particularly fond of it.'
'I am glad of it; I will drive you out in mine every day.'
'Thank you,' said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the propriety of accepting such an offer.
'I will drive you up Lansdown Hill to-morrow.'
'Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?'
'Rest! he has only come three-and-twenty miles to-day; all nonsense; nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so soon. No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours every day while I am here.'
'Shall you indeed!' said Catherine very seriously, 'that will be forty miles a day.'
'Forty! aye, fifty, for what I care. Well, I will drive you up Lansdown to-morrow; mind, I am engaged.'
'How delightful that will be!' cried Isabella, turning round; 'my dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will not have room for a third.'
'A third indeed! no, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters about; that would be a good joke, faith! Morland must take care of you.'
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two; but Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result. Her companion's discourse now sunk from its hitherto animated pitch, to nothing more than a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every woman they met; and Catherine, after listening and agreeing as long as she could, with all the civility and deference of the youthful female mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that of a self-assured man, especially where the beauty of her own sex is concerned, ventured at length to vary the subject by a question which had been long uppermost in her thoughts; it was, 'Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?'
'Udolpho! Oh, Lord! not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.'
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, 'Novels are so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except the Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.'

And so it goes for pages, one long drawn-out dissonance after another, delicious and painful and funny but also — poor Catherine — a bit sad too.

I'm reading L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon with a long-term student, a middle-schooler. (My assignment: to teach whatever I want. She's a very good student, so it's not a question of remediation.) We take turns reading out loud. I read it when I was in middle school, and it made a huge impression on me. It's sentimental, and there are frequent patches of purple prose (which I thought very fine back in the day), but on the whole I'm delighted and astonished by just how good it is — much better than Anne of Green Gables, which is saying a lot — the Anne books, at least the first two or three, deserve their reputation. The descriptions in Emily of New Moon may be too rich, but they're very imaginative and well-written, and the dialogue is great — especially the way Emily tries to redefine terms in arguments in which she's being bullied. And her eagerness to make friends, her interest in underdogs and outcasts, her curiosity about old family stories and town legends — it's all very good. Last but not least, she wants to be a writer, and there's a lot on the impulse to write and the process of writing, all of which is accessible to a middle school student without being in the least condescending.

Maybe I'm getting carried away, but I think the Emily books offer an education in Romanticism: I have in mind Emily's appreciation for natural beauty, her fascination with fragments and unfinished things, again her sympathy for misfits, her constant fight against the philistines of Blair Water. I think it was under the influence of the Emily books that I sought out anonymous poetry. (In fact for about a year I scorned poetry by known authors.)

And she's a free thinker: I remember that in Emily Climbs she boards with a very strict Presbyterian aunt who's active in her church, and a local newspaper assigns her to review the new pastor of her aunt's church. She thinks his sermons are incoherent and formulaic invective, but of course she can't say that. So she writes both a dishonest review, and (for her own satisfaction) an honest review, and by mistake sends in the honest review, which gets published. Her aunt is incensed, etc etc. It's very funny.

When I read her father's deathbed farewell I coughed and sniffed and all but burst into tears, until my young student said gently, "Maybe I should read."

I went to hear André Schiffrin, the editor, talk about his new book, A Political Education. He said some interesting things about Yale and Cambridge in the 1950s, and some things about what's happening to publishing (which I'd heard before, but he made it sound very dire). At one point he said that independent publishing was a key — perhaps "the key" — to democracy. Now I'm all for independent publishing houses, but I felt a twinge of resistance: surely other things are more important, like intrepid journalism, civic associations, and, of course, schools that produce curious, skeptical, articulate citizens. I felt a bit churlish for taking exception, but afterwards I was able to put my finger on the reason for my resistance. Schiffrin thinks we need new ideas in order to make political progress, and how would those new ideas be propagated if not through books? I don't agree; I think the pursuit of new ideas is a huge diversion. The ideas are all there, we just need the will, the energy, and a healthy capacity for indignation.
But we all try hard to justify what we do.

I went to an awful talk a few weeks ago. I hesitate to publicize this, because in the grand scheme of things, who cares? How much harm can a lecture for graduate students and faculty do? On the other hand, life is short, and I wasted two hours. And I worry about what kind of teacher someone who thinks along these lines might be.
So, the paper was prefaced by this observation: "My scholarship is inspired by Derrida's insight that we don't know what it is to read, and we don't know what it is to write." You may as well say, we don't know what it means to eat a ham and cheese sandwich, we don't know what it means to look into a human face. "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar that lies on the other side of silence." But never mind. This bit of pretentious nonsense was laid down and never mentioned again. (Thankfully.)
There followed an extremely detailed discussion of "flowers," known to font fans as "ornaments" or "fleurons." (Most word processing programs come with one such font.) They became extremely popularly in the sixteenth century. Typesetters sometimes made mistakes in assembling the patterns. Did they take apart flower forms after having printed an edition, or did they preserve the forms for use in another book? The speaker had gone through countless volumes, trying (by keeping track of "mistakes" in patterns) to see if the forms were used in different books. Results inconclusive. Then: what did these decorations mean? Were they associated with a particular author? A genre? No, no. After twenty minutes of fruitless speculation (and many, many overhead transparencies), a half-conclusion: at most one might say that the books of members of the same coterie on occasion might have shared the same pattern of decoration. (An acquaintance remarked, "It sounds like cinema of the absurd.")
Last point: editions of sonnets often had a strip of flowers at the top and bottom of the page. It was put forth that sonneteers wrote with this frame "in mind." Ergo —? With what consequences? None were suggested. (Not one poem was mentioned in the whole talk.) Why adduce a cause for an imperceptible — a nonexistent — effect? (Marcel Duchamp: "If no solution, then maybe no problem.") In the Q&A a grumpy old professor asked if the speaker "had any evidence" for this assertion. (Uncomfortable laughter from the audience. But I felt relieved.) Of course not. "But when I write a 1000-word review, I'm acutely conscious of the word limit." Surely a sonneteer is acutely conscious of the fourteen-line limit, and the restrictive rhyme pattern. Once one has signed on with poetry's most demanding form, what difference could a strip of flowers in the header and footer possibly make?
Kaveri tells me about the harsh comments people make in MFA critiques. (Sometimes too harsh: "Your art is nothing.") And I can't help thinking, "Why aren't people a little tougher in humanities seminars?" I don't want anyone to run to the bathroom in tears, but this is ridiculous. Then I realized: maybe people aren't just being polite: I'd half-assumed that the laudatory (fulsome) comments and questions were less than sincere, but one listener assured me (on another day) his admiration was sincere. One man's medicine, another man's poison. I guess.

I went to hear Christopher Ricks at the Y. I like him a lot! His books, of course, and now I can say I like him as a speaker. He apologized for the scruffiness of his talk, but it didn't matter. On the level of insights and sentences it was a treasure chest. The older I get the more I think, "To hell with essay structure. Sentences are what really matters." (Within limits — the conclusions of Hazlitt's essays are sometimes so flat I wonder if he was doing it on purpose.)

I read Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and "The Brahmine's Journal." They're not masterpieces — the Journal lacks his usual verve, is in fact boring and repetitive — but I found them both very moving, and when I finished, I would have straightaway started re-reading Tristram Shandy, if I'd had my copy.

That's not quite fair: the Sentimental Journey, which reads like a supplement to Tristram Shandy, has some brilliant passages. It's almost entirely set in Calais, Paris, and Versailles (shades of Shandy, in which the protagonist is born only in the second half of the novel). Sterne did in fact make it to Italy, but the book was published two weeks before his death; perhaps he had given up on finishing it, or needed the money. (He was in the enviable position of knowing that anything with his name on the cover would be lapped up in several countries.) It reminded me a bit of Hamsun's Hunger for the comical hypersensitivity of the narrator, adrift in a large city, to every gesture, expression, and modulation of tone — a kind of grasping at straws, because the city itself is unreadable. And for the way in which the author and narrator are indistinguishable, and for his bursts of love for all mankind, which are always so hard to express. (They both try.) In Hamsun these effusions are balanced by bouts of misanthropy and misogyny, and an inability to communicate. Not so in the Sentimental Journey — it's as joyful and exuberant as Tristram Shandy.

There's a very funny episode in which — but here it is:

The Passport — Paris

When I got home to my hotel, La Fleur [Yorick's French valet] told me I had been enquired after by the Lieutenant de Police — The duce take it! said I — I know the reason. It is time the reader should know it, for in the order of things in which it happened, it was omitted; not that it was out of my head; but that, had I told it then, it might have been forgot now — and now is the time I want it.
I had left London with so much precipitation, that it never enter'd my mind that we were at war with France; and had reached Dover, and looked through my glass at the hills beyond Boulogne, before the idea presented itself; and with this in its train, that there was no getting there without a passport. Go but to the end of a street, I have a mortal aversion for returning back no wiser than I set out; and as this was one of the greatest efforts I had ever made for knowledge, I could less bear the thoughts of it; so hearing the Count de *** had hired the packet, I begg'd he would take me in his suite. The Count had some little knowledge of me, so made little or no difficulty — only said, his inclination to serve me could reach no farther than Calais, as he was to return by way of Brussels to Paris; however, when I had once pass'd there, I might get to Paris without interruption; but that in Paris I must make friends and shift for myself — Let me get to Paris, Monsieur le Count, said I — and I shall do very well. So I embark'd, and never thought more of the matter.
When La Fleur told me the Lieutenant de Police had been enquiring after me — the thing instantly recurred — and by the time La Fleur had well told me, the master of the hotel came into my room to tell me the same thing, with this addition to it, that my passport had been particularly asked after: the master of the hotel concluded with saying, He hoped I had one — Not I, faith! said I.
The master of the hotel retired three steps from me, as from an infected person, as I declared this — and poor La Fleur advanced three steps towards me, and with that sort of movement which a good soul makes to succour a distress'd one — the fellow won my heart by it; and from that single trait, I knew his character as perfectly, and could rely upon it as firmly, as if he had served me with fidelity for seven years.
Mon seigneur! cried the master of the hotel — but recollecting himself as he made the exclamation, he instantly changed the tone of it — if Monsieur, said he, has not a passport (apparemment) in all likelihood he has friends in Paris who can procure him one — Not that I know of, quoth I, with an air of indifference. — Then, certes, replied he, you'll be sent to the Bastile or the Chatelet, au moins. Poo! said I, the king of France is a good-natur'd soul — he'll hurt nobody. — Cela n'empeche pas, said he — you will certainly be sent to the Bastile to-morrow morning. — But I've taken your lodgings for a month, answer'd I, and I'll not quit them a day before the time for all the kings of France in the world. La Fleur whispered in my ear, That nobody could oppose the king of France.
Pardi! said my host, ces Messieurs Anglois sont des gens tres extraordinaires — and having both said and sworn it — he went out.

The Passport — The Hotel at Paris

I could not find in my heart to torture La Fleur's with a serious look upon the subject of my embarrassment, which was the reason I had treated it so cavalierly; and to shew him how light it lay upon my mind, I dropt the subject entirely; and whilst he waited upon me at supper, talk'd to him with more than usual gaiety about Paris, and of the opera comique. …
As soon as the honest creature had taken away, and gone down to sup himself, I then began to think a little seriously about my situation. —
— And here, I know, Eugenius, thou wilt smile at the remembrance of a short dialogue which pass'd twixt us the moment I was going to set out — I must tell it here.
Eugenius, knowing that I was as little subject to be overburthen'd with money as thought, had drawn me aside to interrogate me how much I had taken care for; upon telling him the exact sum, Eugenius shook his head, and said it would not do; so pull'd out his purse in order to empty it into mine. — I've enough in conscience, Eugenius, said I. — Indeed, Yorick, you have not, replied Eugenius — I know France and Italy better than you — But you don't consider, Eugenius, said I, refusing his offer, that before I have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or do something or other for which I shall get clapp'd up into the Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at the king of France's expence. I beg pardon, said Eugenius, drily: really I had forgot that resource.
Now the event I treated gaily came seriously to my door.
Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity — or what is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down stairs, and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to think of it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?
And as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word — Make the most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a tower — and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of — Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year — but with nine livres a day, and pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within — at least for a month or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better and wiser man than he went in.
I had some occasion (I forgot what) to step into the courtyard, as I settled this account; and remember I walk'd down stairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning — Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I vauntingly — for I envy not its power, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them — 'Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition — the Bastile is not an evil to be despised — But strip it of its towers — fill up the fossé — unbarricade the doors — call it simply a confinement, and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper — and not of a man which holds you in it — the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint.
I was interrupted in the hey-day of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out." — I look'd up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, or child, I went out without further attention.
In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage — "I can't get out — I can't get out," said the starling.
I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity…
I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; [n]or do I remember an incident in my life, where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly call'd home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily walk'd up stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them
Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery! said I — still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.
…
The count de B****, of whom the bookseller at the Quai de Conti had spoke[n] so handsomely the night before, came instantly into my mind — And why should I not go, thought I, to the Count de B****, who has so high an idea of English books, and English men — and tell him my story?
…
I found no difficulty in getting admittance to Monsieur le Count de B***. The set of Shakespeares was laid upon the table, and he was tumbling them over. I walk'd up close to the table, and giving first such a look at the books as to make him conceive I knew what they were — I told him I had come without anyone to present me, knowing I should meet with a friend in his apartment, who, I trusted, would do it for me — it is my countryman the great Shakespeare, said I, pointing to his works — et ayez la bonté, mon cher ami, apostrophizing his spirit, added I, de me faire cet honneur-la.
The Count smiled at the singularity of the introduction; and seeing I look'd a little pale and sickly, insisted upon my taking an arm-chair: so I sat down; and to save him conjectures upon a visit so out of all rule, I told him simply of the incident in the bookseller's shop, and how that had impelled me rather to go to him with the story of a little embarrassment I was under, than to any other man in France — And what is your embarrassment? let me hear it, said the Count. So I told him the story just as I have told it the reader. — And the master of my hotel, said I, as I concluded it, will needs have it, Monsieur le Count, that I should be sent to the Bastile — but I have no apprehensions, continued I — for in falling into the hands of the most polish'd people in the world, and being conscious I was a true man, and not come to spy the nakedness of the land, I scarce thought I lay at their mercy. — It does not suit the gallantry of the French, Monsieur le Count, said I, to shew it against invalids.
An animated blush came into the Count de B****'s cheeks as I spoke this — Ne craignez rien — Don't fear, said he — Indeed I don't, replied I again — …
The Count heard me with great good-nature, or I had not said half as much — and once or twice said — C'est bien dit. So I rested my cause there — and determined to say no more about it.
The Count led the discourse: we talk'd of indifferent things — of books, and politics, and men — and then of women — God bless them all! said I
…
The Count said a great many civil things to me upon the occasion; and added, very politely, how much he stood obliged to Shakespeare for making me known to him — But, à propos, said he, — Shakespeare is full of great things — he forgot a small punctilio of announcing your name — it puts you under a necessity of doing it yourself.

There is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling any one who I am — for there is scarce anybody I cannot give a better account of than myself; and I have often wish'd I could do it in a single word — and have an end of it. It was the only time and occasion in my life I could accomplish this to any purpose — for Shakespeare lying upon the table, and recollecting I was in his books, I took up Hamlet, and turning immediately to the grave-diggers' scene in the fifth act, I laid my finger upon YORICK, and advancing the book to the Count, with my finger all the way over the name — Me voici! said I.
Now whether the idea of poor Yorick's skull was put out of the Count's mind by the reality of my own, or by what magic he could drop a period of seven or eight hundred years, makes nothing in this account — 'tis certain the French conceive better than they combine — I wonder at nothing in this world, and the less at this; inasmuch as one of the first in our own church, for whose candour and paternal sentiments I have the highest veneration, fell into the same mistake in the very same case, — "He could not bear," he said, "to look into the sermons wrote [sic] by the king of Denmark's jester." Good, my lord! said I; but there are two Yoricks.
…
The poor Count de B*** fell but into the same error —
— Et, Monsieur, est il Yorick? cried the Count. — Je le suis, said I. — Vous? — Moi — moi qui ai l'honneur de vous parler, Monsieur le Comte — Mon Dieu! said he, embracing me — Vous êtes Yorick! The Count instantly put the Shakespeare into his pocket and left me alone in his room.

I could not conceive why the Count de B**** had gone so abruptly out of the room, any more than I could conceive why he had put the Shakespeare into his pocket — Mysteries which must explain themselves are not worth the loss of time which a conjecture about them takes up: 'twas better to read Shakespeare; so taking up Much ado about Nothing, I transported myself instantly from the chair I sat in to Messina in Sicily, and got so busy with Don Pedro and Benedict and Beatrice, that I thought not of Versailles, the Count, or the Passport.
…
When I had got to the end of the third act, the Count de B**** entered with my passport in his hand. Mons. le Duc de C****, said the Count, is as good a prophet, I dare say, as he is a statesman — Un homme qui rit, said the duke, ne sera jamais dangereux. — Had it been for any one but the king's jester, added the Count, I could not have got it these two hours. — Pardonnez moi, Mons. le Count, said I — I am not the king's jester. But you are Yorick? — Yes. — Et vous plaisantez? — I answered, Indeed I did jest — but was not paid for it — 'twas entirely at my own expence.
We have no jester at court, Mons. le Count, said I; the last we had was in the licentious reign of Charles II. — since which time our manners have been so gradually refining, that our court at present is so full of patriots, who wish for nothing but the honours and wealth of their country — and our ladies are all so chaste, so spotless, so good, so devout — there is nothing for a jester to make a jest of —
Voilà un persiflage! cried the Count.

***
Isn't it delightful?! It never gets stale.

It would be unfair to judge the Brahmine's Journal, since Sterne conceived of it as therapy, not as literature. It's a journal written for the woman he loved, who had gone to India to join her husband. At first he meant to send it to her; later he changed his mind, and though he still addressed the entries to her, gave free rein to his fantasies about her husband's death. It was written in the last year of his life, when he was very ill. I could call it maudlin, self-indulgent, and obsessive, but that would be like losing patience with a friend because he's ill and unhappily in love, and not as entertaining as his wont. It's amazing that he wrote the Journey, so light and sparkling, at the same time as the Journal. But then we have the author's word that every sentence in Tristram Shandy itself was written "written under the greatest heaviness of heart."

The Journal can't be compared to Keats's letters, or to the letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield, but I was reminded of them because all three writers are dying of consumption, and detailed, happy plans for the future (when you can see "only 30 more pages to live") alternate with desperately needy pleas to the distant beloved.

Sterne, for example, describes in detail a sitting room he's furnishing for the Brahmine.

I particularly like Sterne's fondness for "sentiment." (It's in Tristram Shandy, but it's even more of a leit motif in the Journey and the Journal.) It's not something one naturally associates with his sparkling wit, but only because the word has become debased. A friend of mine once tried to redeem it, in writing and in speech. But we are so addicted to cheap irony that I'm afraid her efforts were unsuccessful.

Sometimes I think he uses the word "sentiment" as Austen uses the word "taste": it's what refined spirits recognize and appreciate.

By the way, Thackeray — a "sentimental" writer in the worst sense of the word — I hated Vanity Fair — penned a vehement denunciation of Sterne. The spirit of one age attacking the spirit of another. ("That's not fair." I know.)

I hope you've all read the brief but moving — sentimental! — exchange of letters between Sterne and Ignatius Sancho, Britain's "first black man of letters," a greengrocer by trade.

The other day someone told me that Jean Paul, Schumann's favorite author and the source of his butterflies, is like a German Laurence Sterne.

"A woman of seven and twenty," said Marianne, after pausing a moment, "can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife." — Sense and Sensibility

The first time I read anything by Jane Austen, I liked it, but found it a bit insipid. (My excuse: I was twelve.) I read Mansfield Park a few years later, and nearly gave up on Austen. Then when I was nineteen I read Persuasion, and when I was twenty-seven practically everything else, and loved it — especially the poisoned wit, the bitterness, the loneliness of her heroines, and Austen's exploration of all that goes into making moral judgments about about people. And I loved spotting echoes of Samuel Johnson, both in syntax and in the conviction that however awful other people might sometimes be, one cannot be good or useful outside of society. (such an extreme combination of misanthropy and sociability.) When I took up Sense and Sensibility last week I thought I hadn't read it, but I was wrong, as I realized from my notations in the margins. It just hadn't made as deep an impression as Emma or Northanger Abbey.
At first I found that the narrator's misanthropy makes the descriptions verge on the grotesque. It was too much, it was monotonous in spite of its cleverness, and I couldn't sympathize unreservedly with the anti-Romantic polemic. But I was soon drawn in by the depiction of grief and disappointment, and this sustained my interest for the rest of the book. My only gripe is that Austen (predictably) is whole-heartedly on the side of "sense": Elinor is above reproach; the only one who has to learn a lesson, as far as Austen is concerned, is Marianne. But one can indulge in self-control as much as in its opposite; not confiding in one's nearest and dearest can be the consequence not so much of admirable self-discipline as of a paralysis of spirit; there can even be something selfish about it. In making her sister her confidante, Elinor might have drawn Marianne's attention away from her own grief for a minute; the claim on her sympathy would have given her an opportunity to make herself useful. Expecting infinite sacrifices from yourself, and none from others, is a kind of narcissism.

January
Greenwitch (Cooper)
The Grey King (Cooper)
Silver on the Tree (Cooper)
The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots
Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America: September 3, 1929-September 3, 1939 (Allen)
Oedipous the King (Sophocles)

Conversation on a bus:

A middle-aged man came onto a crosstown bus at Fifth Avenue. His scarf was identical to mine, and when he sat catty-corner from me I said, "Merton." "Balliol." It was like getting the wrong password. In some consternation, we compared scarves and found the difference. He had done a second BA in English in the 1970s. Then he did a PhD at Yale. We found out that one of his classmates supervised my senior essay. His one regret, he said, was not having done the PhD at Oxford. "A friend of mine started a PhD at Yale after an MSt at Oxford, and then quit because he hated it so much," I said. "He made the right decision. I should have dropped out.… There were a lot of older genteel types — who were nasty. And then there were the younger deconstructionists — who were about to become nasty." me: ":D! That sounds just like Yale!" By then we were at Central Park West, and I had to get off.
I always feel a kinship with people who hate Yale — this summer, for example, two of my classmates were students at Yale (one graduate, one undergraduate), and they both hated it. "I'm in good company," I thought. It was quite wonderful to agree on the awfulness of Yale with a perfect stranger in the few minutes it takes to cross Central Park, and then to part ways.