by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
“Unacknowledged Legislators” 2015
For some people, it’s the favor of free books in perpetuity; for others, it’s the half-sentence of acknowledgment in somebody else’s back pages; but for me, the best fringe benefit of a couple of decades’ work in literary publishing is that I have friends who are poets – real live called-to-the-role poets.
Three such are in full poetic flower this week. There’s Cecily Parks in The New Yorker, MFA’d, Ph.D’d, prize-published, fitting herself into the morning suit of the doctor’s wife:
Inside
the coughing man’s lung the surgeons
found a fir tree. The dark interior
of a lung or a leaf bud, imagined
long enough, becomes a wilderness.
Your mind can do this
in the morning when you don’t have
a body. Wilderness isn’t paradise.
There’s Rowan Ricardo Phillips, down at McNally Jackson with Tracy K. Smith, doubtless reading new poems about heaven, such as one this comes from:
Even Heaven has its dream of being
Paris. A flawed Paris in a flawed light.
A proper Paris. You arive there by
Accident: like Narcissus to his pond.
Cecily
and Rowan have new books – O'Night
and Heaven – and I
hope to post a fresh piece about each of them.
Lawrence Joseph, meanwhile, is between books, as the saying goes, but each of his new poems has a greater density and singularity of expression than most poets’ whole books. Here are a few lines from “Visions of Labour,” behind the paywall in the London Review of Books:
Static model,
dynamic model, alternate contract environments,
enterprise size and labour market functions,
equilibrium characterisation, elasticity of response
to productivity shocks: the question in this Third
Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls
the data. That’s what we’re looking at …
Larry invokes Blake at the beginning of the poem, and against heavy odds the poem makes good on the invocation: “Visions of Labour” is a radical poem, an an apt pendant to the street-shout of vexation over things-as-they-are that is Pope Francis’s first encyclical.
The photograph is of an anti-austerity rally held in London last weekend.
At PEN, Prizing Narrative Art
PEN presented its book awards the other night, and Andrew Solomon struck the right note when he pointed out that the night was devoted not to freedom of expression but to excellence of expression.
As a judge of the nonfiction prize – the PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction – I had a hand in the citation for the winner, Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink. The citation is a compact effort to frame books of this kind not as nonfiction, or current affairs, or cultural history, or reportage, but as narrative art, and to articulate something like a narrative artist’s ars poetica:
How do we, individually and as a society, make crucial decisions about matters of life and death?’ The question was posed again and again in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, and it is the underlying question in Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial, a book that finds in the events that took place in one tempest-tossed New Orleans hospital a story, biblical in its elemental grandeur, about matters of life and death. Five Days at Memorial has all that one could wish for in a work of narrative art: comprehensive reportage, vivid and sensitive depictions of living people, a human sense of the immediacy of events and of the sprawl of underlying conditions (social, political, medical, financial) that placed those people in the circumstances to make the decisions they made. Life must be understood backwards but lived forwards, Kierkegaard said; and Five Days at Memorial shows the power of narrative art to enable us to understand life backwards so that we might live our lives forwards with greater understanding.
A narrative artist’s ars poetica: That was a lot to lay on the person to whom I explained it at the reception afterwards, but that’s what I had in mind.
Maybe some future PEN ceremony will feature an award for best work of narrative art.
Teju Cole: “The Music Followed Me Home”
Just a few hours after hearing some Mahler utterly unknown to me on BBC3, I come upon this passage in Teju Cole’s novel Open City, whose protagonist is browsing in the old Tower Records on Broadway uptown:
The next disc they played, though utterly unlike the first, was another I immediately recognized: the opening movement of Mahler’s late symphony Das Lied von der Erde. I returned to my browsing, moving from bin to bin, from reissues of Shostakovich symphonies played by long-forgotten Soviet regional orchestras to Chopin recitals by fresh-faced Van Cliburn competition runners-up, feeling that the price reductions were insufficiently sharp, losing any real interest in shopping, and finally beginning to acclimatize to the music playing overhead and to enter the strange hues of its world. It happened subliminally, but before long, I was rapt and might have, for all the world, been swaddled in a private darkness. In this trance, I continued to move from one row of compact discs to another, thumbing through plastic cases, magazines, and printed scores, and listening as one movement of the Viennese chinoiserie succeeded another …
… Then came the final movement, “Der Abschied,” the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it “schwer,” difficult.
The birdsong and beauty, the complaints and high-jinks of the preceding movements, had all been supplanted by a different mood. It was as though the lights had, without warning, come blazing into my eyes. It simply wasn’t possible to enter the music fully, not in that public place. I placed the small pile of discs in my hand onto the nearest table and left. I made it into the uptown train just as the doors were closing. By this time, the crowds from the marathon were beginning to thin out. I sat down and leaned back. The five-note figure from “Der Abschied” continued on from where I was as though I were in the store listening to it. I sensed the woodsiness of the clarinets, the resin of the violins and violas, the vibrations of the timpani, and the intelligence that held them all together and drew them endlessly along the musical line. My memory was overwhelmed. The song followed me home.
That’s the kind of writing about music we need now: writing that recognizes, and foregrounds, the mingling of music and our experience, our public lives and our inner lives alike. That’s what I had in mind in writing Reinventing Bach, especially the passages having to do with the WKCR Bachfest – and set in the same neighborhoods as Open City. I wish I’d known of Cole’s writing at the time.
Here’s another piece of mine about his writing.
Hilary Mantel on How to Write a Novel: Theatrically
Cultivate your inner grandiosity, would-be novelist – because without plenty of inner grandiosity no real imaginative work will come forth.
I’ve told student writers something to that effect many times. Lately I have been trying to tell it to myself– to remind myself. But there’s no better reminder than Hilary Mantel’s essay about the process of adapting her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Out the Bodies – for Masterpiece Theatre, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for Broadway. Here is the cultivated inner grandiosity of the authentic artist:
In Stratford-on-Avon, in London, and now in New York, playgoers would ask the big question: How does it feel to see your characters come to life?
I answer with another question: When were they dead? Inside my head, they are whirls and blurs of energy in a show that never sleeps, where even in the small hours the blood runs down the walls. I construct the scenery and source the props, arrange the sound effects: church bells, the cry of hounds. I am my own lighting expert. When a candle comes in (tallow or beeswax, pricket holder or socket), mine is the hand that holds it. I carry it through the dark passages of my narrative, and shelter the flame as we cross the Narrow Sea: out of England and into France, from France to the battlefields and counting houses of Italy, to the wool markets of northern Europe, the waterfronts, the brewers’ yards, the palaces.
There have been no days when my theater is dark.
It’s amazing to realize that Mantel wrote both novels, saw them to publication, accepted Booker Prizes for each, and now has presided over multiple dramatic adaptations – all in the past ten years.
But what’s truly amazing – and the piece makes this clear – is that the novels were written in the first place.
The novel (says Mantel) is a paper theater built inside the novelist’s head.
Edward Abbey’s Desert Style: “Clear, Intense and Infinitely Suggestive”
Found on the Recent Acquisitions shelf in the suddenly vacant Lauinger Library: All the Wild That Remains, by David Gessner – a just-published double portrait of Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey as the Emerson and Thoreau of writing about the American West, with an account of the author’s own experience of the West threading the two portraits together.
Here’s a passage, remarkable in its vitality and sensitivity, about the process whereby Abbey, installed as a ranger of a kind at Arches National Monument in eastern Utah, pushed past his apprentice-y first novel and made himself into a writer of a particular kind:
In 1956, the same year that Brave Cowboy was published, he spent his first season as a ranger at Arches. On August 26 of that summer he wrote: “This is the thing. The desert is a good place – clean, honest, dangerous, uncluttered, strong, open, big, vibrant with legend.” In his journals, and in his subsequent nonfiction, he retains some of his early, sensual romanticism: “The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I want and appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of sun, good wine and rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with guitar and lousy old cowboy songs.” Counterbalancing this is something harder, something leaner. He is learning this leanness in part from the craft of fiction, but also from the desert itself, which seems to be offering up its own aesthetic. Three years later, on August 15, 1959, Abbey, now living in Albuquerque, described what it would mean to “write like the desert”:
“Conrad. To write of – no, to do for the desert what he did for – of – the sea. But I must avoid his rich flowing organ-valved almost lush (tropical) style. Emulate his passion for the exact. My style: something almost harsh, bitter, ugly. The rough compressed, asymmetrical, laconic, cryptic. Cactus. Old Juniper. Rock, dry, heat, the stark contour.
“NO FOG. NO GODDAMED FOG.
“Combine intensity (not density) with clarity. Clear and intense. Like the desert landscape, the desert light, the desert atmosphere – clear, intense and infinitely suggestive. Hard distinctions, precise outlines – but each thing suggesting, somehow, everything else. As in truth each thing does.”
This was a beautiful, and incredibly self-aware, description of one of the effects that Abbey would create in his coming work.
So it was, and is. Abbey would match his style to the desert, and to the garrulous solitude he attained in the desert:
The key in fact would be the embracing of the first-person voice, the voice he had long been sharpening in the journals.
Into the Wild of Yellowstone Park with Tor Seidler (and an Expert Guide)
One book-reviewing school of thought holds that the review should tell the reader whether the book is worth reading. Another holds that the review should make the reader feel one way or another that she has read the book: with so many books written, and published, and reviewed, 49 times out of 50 the reader’s encounter with the book will begin and end with the review – so the book review that approximates an encounter with the book itself is something like a work of art in its own right.
All this came to mind as I read, with loving attention, the review of Tor Seidler’s new novel, Firstborn, in yesterday’s Times Book Review. It’s a book review from the latter school: it puts the book’s characters (a magpie and some wolves), setting (Yellowstone Park), and situation (wolves and bird coexist authentically if uneasily) deftly into the small space of the book review (the front page of the Children’s Books section) – so deftly that, reading it, I feel confident that I am getting acquainted with the book as it actually is.
With loving attention, reader, because I am married to the review’s author: Lenora Todaro, who edited the Voice Literary Supplement when it was robust, and who has written for the Times and Salon and Bookforum since then, fitting in writing around homeschooling with our three sons in Brooklyn.
That’s the context for this rave review of a review. Here (from Lenora’s review) is the context for the book:
“Firstborn” is dedicated to Jean Craighead George (1919-2012), the great naturalist writer for young readers who Seidler says introduced him to Yellowstone’s wolf life. George’s magnificent “Julie of the Wolves,” the 1973 Newbery Medal winner, tracks an Eskimo girl lost in the Alaskan tundra who survives by mimicking the ways of a wolf. But where George developed human characters who use their knowledge of nature alongside the animals they love, Seidler creates animal characters who have humanlike consciences. And where George made the Alaskan tundra as tangible as her Julie, Seidler uses Yellowstone’s sulfurous hot springs and bubbling caldrons mainly as a stage for the action. He’s a storyteller first, not a naturalist, and at times “Firstborn” strains under the weight of homage.
There in a few sentences we see an arc drawn across forty years of writing for young readers and Seidler placed at our end of it.
As this review shows, good book reviewing is an art. Clearly the Times thinks so: the editors ingeniously commissioned an illustration by Carson Ellis,who has collaborated with her husband, Colin Meloy, leader of the Decembrists, on Wildwood and other books.
Here’s hoping Lenora and I get a chance to collaborate soon.
When Writing About Bellow, Always Overstate the Case
“To
accuse novelists of egotism is like deploring the tendency of
champion boxers to turn violent.”
That’s Martin Amis, in a piece about Saul Bellow in (last week’s, yes) Times Book Review. It’s clever, but is it true? I don’t think so – not for Bellow, and not for Amis, whether he recognizes it or not.
The piece itself disproves the point as concerns both writers. Having quipped thus about novelists and egotism, Amis immediately cites some of Bellow’s “core principles,” and they’re clearly restraints on the novelist’s egotism rather than expressions of it:
“Everything is to be viewed as though for the first time.” Assume “a certain psychic unity” with your readers (“Others are in essence like me and I am basically like them”). Accept George Santayana’s definition of that discredited word “piety”: “reverence for the sources of one’s being.” Cherish your personal history, therefore, but never seek out experience, or “Experience,” as grist: Some writers are proud of their “special efforts in the fields of sex, drunkenness” and poverty (“I have even been envied my good luck in having grown up during the Depression”); but “willed” worldliness is a false lead. Resist “the heavy influences” — Flaubert, Marx, etc., or what Bellow, citing Thoreau, calls “the savage strength of the many.” The imagination has its “eternal naïveté” — and that is something the writer cannot afford to lose.
Meanwhile, the piece makes plain that for Amis the example of Bellow serves precisely as a restraint on his own egotism. Amis’s ego is plenty strong, but when writing about Bellow, as he does often – there’s a different piece of his about Bellow in the current Vanity Fair – he frankly recognizes a talent greater than his own and writes with appealing humility and tenderness, stepping aside to quote the master-novelist amply and at length.
In this piece, Amis’s egotism is so well restrained that – for the first time in all his writing about Bellow, as far as I recall – he lets another living writer have the last word, concluding with a quotation from “the artist-critic Clive James”:
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.”
As long as I am on the topic, Louis Menand’s conclusion to his Bellow piece – “Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself” – also fits into the it-sounds-good-but-is-it-true category.
The Lone Correspondent, Yesterday and Today
The shortlists for this year’s PEN Literary Awards were just announced, and the five of us who are judges for the PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award settled on five works of general nonfiction from 2013 and 2014.
The other five books on the longlist are strong in their ways – and their strengths support the case for the recent move toward longlists by PEN, the National Book Awards, and other prize-giving bodies.
Clay Risen’s The Bill of the Century, for example, carries a passage that by-the-by and matter-of-factly serves to counter several cherished ideas – clichés – of writing about the media just now.
Here’s the passage:
The members of the United States Senate slogged their way to the Capitol on the morning of Monday, March 30, through a freak early spring blizzard that dropped five inches of snow on Washington. In the midle of the storm, just outside the massive edifice, stood CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd. A D.C. native and a rising star on CBS’s national news reporting staff, Mudd had made a name for himself covering such seminal events as the March on Washington and the Kennedy state funeral. In early 1964, Fred Friendly, the new president of the network’s news division, had suggested that Mudd cover the filibuster in a one-man, flood-the-zone campaign, “not only on the evening news with Walter Cronkite but also on each of the network’s four other TV newscasts and on seven of the network’s hourly radio newscasts,” Mudd later recalled. “My initial reaction was less than enthusiastic. It sounded more like a flagpole-sitting stunt.”
And here are the clichés it counters:
1- The notion that round-the-clock news coverage (the twenty-four-hour news cycle) is a thing of the present, whereas coverage in the past consisted of the evening news.
2 - … that the lone reporter is a product of today’s diminished news staffs, whereas the halls of the Capitol used to be full of correspondents, many from each network.
3 - … that TV news executives cooking up clever, gimmicky reporting (and being resented for it by their reporters) is a trait of our diminished media age, not of the past golden age characterized by the robust and conscientious CBS News and its anchorman, Walter Cronkite.
4 - … and that “unseasonal” snowstorms are evidence of climate change: way back in 1964, it was snowing in Washington at the end of March.
Truly, media commentators who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it. That Clay Risen knows the past is clear all the way through his book.
The image is of Mudd outside the Capitol after the Kennedy assassination.
Galeano and Grass: Magic Realism’s Antipodean Masters
Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the
same day. So did Fela Anikulapo
Kuti and Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan – or so it seemed when WKCR’s
hundred-hour memorial broadcast for the one was followed immediately by the hundred-hour memorial broadcast for the other. (They died two weeks apart in August 1997.)
And yesterday came the news that Günter Grass is dead, and the news that Eduardo Galeano is dead.
Truly, these two were magic realism’s antipodian pair, set at opposite poles on the same literary-political line. Grass bent the laws of nature so as to record the way his countrymen (and, it turned out, he himself) had done so in the Nazi years. He turned German history back on itself, insisting that his big and strong and ever-present country should make itself small in the way of his protagonist Oskar Mazerath, who refused to grow as an act of promordial protest against the adult world and its ways. He was an author of Big Books and a public figure as visible as any premier. Success came early; the Nobel came late and was asterisked by the news that he had been in the SS.
And Galeano? Galeano bent the laws of nature so as to record the way the nature of life in his region was scanted or left out when the laws were too strictly applied. He faced Latin American history outward, making the “open veins of Latin America” the veins of human civilization and making, out of several hundred miniatures, the great historical epic of the Americas that is the Memory of Fire trilogy. A Uruguayan, he was a citizen of the Spanish language; any place where Spanish was spoken was his. Great as he was, he was outswaggered by García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and Fuentes and by Bolaño, who swaggers still from beyond the grave. Hugo Chavez, presenting Galeano’s Open Veins to President Obama, made it a bestseller all over again, but the Nobel never came.
Grass’s work, crucial as it is – and it is crucial to my own work just now – feels finished, while Galeano’s feels like work in progress, the veins still open.
Mario Marazziti: From Texas to ISIS
Mario Marazziti was a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show on Friday, speaking about 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty. Lopate introduced several points that were news to me – showing that the death penalty is constantly in the news just now. He pointed out that a man was executed in Texas earlier this week with a new form of lethal injection. He mentioned the state of Oklahoma just re-approved the use of firing squads in executions. He remarked on the sentencing of the surviving Boston Marathon bomber – for whom the state is expected to seek the death penalty. And he asked about ISIS, which led to this exchange:
“How does ISIS fit in?”
“ISIS is the culture of death. They use the death penalty as a show, to scare people. They use it to get Muslim people to join, saying, if you do not do what they tell them to do, they will be killed. At the same time, they exhibit death to create automatic reactions in the West. They would like retaliation, because retaliation would allow many other Muslim groups to feel that they are under attack. So ISIS is the culture of death used as a political tool.”
“We’re horrified by the beheadings, but we also execute people.”
“I don’t think there is so much different between a beheading and the gas chamber.”
My afterword to 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty is up on Commonweal’s website. It’s essentially a portrait of Mario and his gifts of friendship:
If Trastevere embodies the paradox of Europe—emphatically old but with pockets of exceptional vitality—Mario Marazziti embodies the paradox of Sant’Egidio. He is no stranger to high society: through an old friend at the prominent wine journal Gambero Rosso, he and his friends put together Vino per Vita, an initiative where Italian wineries run by Mario’s contacts give the proceeds from certain bottlings to Sant’Egidio’s campaign for AIDS relief in Africa. He can be irreverent, relishing the story of a cleric friend whose poor Italian led him to open the church’s millennial ceremonies in 1999 with a crude profanity. Yet he is selfless and tireless on behalf of Sant’Egidio—on behalf, he says, of “the Gospel and friendship.” I had learned of him through a Sant’Egidio group at St. Malachy’s Church near Times Square led by the author Thomas Cahill. The group was small, but Mario sustained us with calls and e-mails. I later asked him how he kept up contact with his countless friends worldwide. “Friendship is not proportionate,” he said matter-of-factly.