Category Archives: Nonfiction

Monday, November 23, 2009 · 10:42 pm

Brideshead Revisited revisited and other notes

First of all, the book for the next Slaves of Golconda discussion has been chosen, and it’s going to be Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. The discussion will begin on January 31st, and everyone is welcome to join. All you have to do is read the book and then post about it on your blog, if you have one, and then participate in the discussion. All newcomers are welcome!

It seems about right that after I posted the list of books I’d like to read, I ended up choosing something not on the list at all. For me, lists of books I’d like to read are very much works of the moment. They reflect how I’m feeling on a particular day or in a particular hour, and the world usually looks entirely different only a little while later.

I’ve been feeling like reading something from the 19C, and was considering Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, but then when the moment came to pull a book off the shelf I noticed Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley. I’ve had that book sitting around for almost a year. I’m not entirely sure what drew me to it, except that it’s been awhile since I read Charlotte Brontë, but only a few months since I read Collins, and I wanted to read something that felt new and different. So there you go.

I also began reading President Obama’s first book Dreams from My Father, which one of my in-person book groups will be discussing in a couple weeks. I’ve read 60 pages or so in this book, and so far I’m liking it very much. Obama has such an interesting story to tell, and his focus on what it was like to grow up with his complicated racial heritage is fascinating. He comes across as a very smart, very thoughtful person, and so far I very much like the personality that comes through the writing. It’s also fun to read it knowing that he would grow up to be president; I can’t help but wonder what his parents and his grandparents would have thought if they had known what would happen, and what he would have made of it himself, both as a young boy, and as the 33-year-old who wrote the book. I want to tell all the people in the book not to worry, that things are going to turn out just fine, and that “Barry” is going to have a wonderful career. (Although as far as I’m concerned, being President of the United States is surely one of the worst things that could happen to a person.)

And now to Brideshead. Yesterday I met with two friends (including Musings) to discuss the novel, and it turned out to be a very interesting talk. I didn’t lose my feeling that the book is kind of all over the place and lacking in focus, but I did get a better sense of the book as a reflection of Waugh’s ambivalence about Catholicism. None of us thought that the book was proselytizing for Catholicism in any way, and if anything we thought it was more about the ways it can really screw you up. Yes, there is a moment at the end where the main character has a spiritual experience, but it’s unclear where this will lead. Catholicism seems more like a curse than a blessing — a tradition that will shape everything about you and that is impossible to escape, no matter how much you want to.

As important as Catholicism is in the book, though, we all also agreed that many of the problems of the Flyte family come from their own screwed-upness, and religion just happens to be a great weapon to fight family battles with. The novel is at least as much a tale of how impossible it is to escape your family as it is about how impossible it is to escape your religion.

Oh, my, I’m depressing myself. But I like depressing books, so I’ll be sure to read more Waugh. Mostly, we agreed that Brideshead is a book about loss and trying to come to terms with it. The circular structure of the book makes the point that although we can’t leave our past behind, we can sometimes come to see it in a new way. There’s a little consolation at least.

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Friday, November 6, 2009 · 11:36 pm

On clichés

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic when it comes to Alain de Botton’s writing, largely because The Consolations of Philosophy left me dissatisfied and wishing for more meaty philosophizing. I liked The Art of Travel quite a bit better, but my doubts have kept me from picking up How Proust Can Change Your Life, although I have a copy on my shelves that I bought after finishing Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. So I was curious to see an excerpt from de Botton’s book in J.C. Hallman’s The Story About the Story.

I’m guessing that de Botton does better with literature than philosophy because I liked this excerpt pretty well, although — and I can’t fault de Botton for this of course — the best bits are quotations from Proust:

Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own “tone” …. I don’t mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer — and perhaps it’s a weakness — those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they’re original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side … doesn’t exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus!

Yes, yes, to attacking language!

But back to de Botton … the excerpt is largely about cliché and why clichés are so bad for us:

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.

Clichés narrow experience because they take emotions and responses that are varied and reduce them to sameness. Using them means covering up what makes a particular experience unique and returning again and again to the familiar and the shallow. Clichés may communicate very good ideas indeed, but it’s the same very good idea again and again, which can keep us from having new ideas:

Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

When we have new experiences, we should strive to use language in a new way to describe them, and being open to new uses of language can help us have new experiences.

All this makes total sense to me, and I’m behind it completely, and yet I was reminded of the very different approach to cliché David Foster Wallace takes in Infinite Jest. There, we find characters who encounter clichés and look down their noses at them, as good intellectuals are supposed to do, but in this case, they do it at their peril. This comes up in the context of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which are, I learned, a haven for clichés. You’ll find what looks like hundreds of them here. The characters who think they are too smart for the clichés are the ones who are most in danger; they desperately need AA and Don Gately, the book’s best character by far, knows that they are the ones most likely to start drinking again.

Gately understands people’s discomfort with clichés, but he has figured out a truth about them: they may possibly oversimplify and hide a complicated reality, as de Botton argues, but they can also function as a window into that complicated reality, a way to begin to understand it. A slogan like “One day at a time” can be the start of a hundred different stories or trigger a thousand different thoughts, and it can come to take on different meanings depending on what has happened to us. It doesn’t have to shut down new thoughts; it can be the start of them. Sometimes what people need is to cling to clichés for all the wisdom they have stored up in them and then find their own particular take on the meaning that lies behind them.

I’m as uncomfortable with clichés as any other person trained to look down on them, but something in me loves the fact that Wallace’s great experimental novel contains a defense of them. I suppose one way to fight clichés is to be willing to defend them if one can say something true by doing so.

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Sunday, October 25, 2009 · 8:13 pm

Keats and authorial intention

I’m continuing to enjoy The Story About the Story, an anthology of essays on literature, many of which (although not all) are written from a personal perspective. This is the kind of book I read slowly, an essay at a time, whenever I feel inspired to pick the book up. I’m about seven essays in at this point. I won’t write about each and every one, as not all of them inspire me to write, but Sven Birkerts’s essay “On a Stanza by John Keats” is one I don’t want to neglect.

Birkerts starts off on a lofty level, considering what it means to encounter beauty in art. He decides that:

When we are stirred by beauty in a particular work of art, what we experience is the inward abolition of distance. It is only when we try to put our finger on the source of the sensation, when we try to explain the beauty, that the horizons are reversed. At that moment the near becomes the far, much as it does when we try to fathom our own reflection in the mirror: The more intently we look, the stranger becomes the object of our scrutiny.

He then turns to a more specific mission: “I set myself what seemed at first a simple task: to say why Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ was beautiful.” This mission leads him to embark on one of the closest readings of a poem I have ever read. The essay is about 12 pages long, and about eight pages of it is devoted to looking as closely as possible at the 11 lines of the poem’s first stanza. Birkerts does all the usual things people do when they close read — he looks at the meanings of words and their order and their sound qualities, but he does it in such loving detail and with such beautiful writing that it’s no ordinary close reading. He also looks at aspects of words people don’t often focus on — the way we move our mouths as we recite the poem, and how those movements affect our experience. Here’s what he decides about what makes “To Autumn” beautiful:

I am convinced that the beauty of the ode is to be sought with the fine crosshairs of sound and sense, that it inheres in the subtlest details and is sustained from breath to breath — that generalizations will serve for nothing. We experience such a rapid succession of perfectly managed sensory magnifications that we are, in a strange way, brought face to face with the evolutionary mystery of language. The absolute rightness of the sound combinations forces us to a powerful unconscious recognition: Sound is the primal clay out of which all meaning has been sculpted.

After finishing his close reading, Birkerts briefly considers a question that comes up in my literature classes a lot: the question of whether the author “meant to put that there.” Are these consciously created effects Birkerts is uncovering? Are those effects there but not consciously created? Or is Birkerts just reading too much into the poem?

When these questions come up in class, I tend to answer in two ways — answers that seem contradictory, as a matter of fact, but I’m open about that and don’t mind their contradictions. One is that yes, the author probably did “put that there,” because generally the effect we are discussing that provokes my students’ skepticism isn’t a terribly complicated one and I’m pretty sure the author really did know what he or she was doing. My students just aren’t used to the idea of an author having such great control over language and that’s because they are relatively new at literary analysis. My other answer is that it doesn’t matter what the author intended, both because language takes on a life of its own beyond the author’s complete knowledge and control, and because we can never truly know what an author intended. Even if the author tells us what he or she meant, we still can’t really trust that report because does the author really know what happens at the moment of creation?

Birkerts offers answers to these questions that are similar to mine, but expressed in terms I like and will probably borrow. He says, first:

Let’s not forget that we read poetry in the odd hour, as amateurs; Keats pressed his lines into place with the full intensity of his being. When a poet is composing, the value of every sound is magnified a thousand-fold. His radar is attuned to frequencies that we are not even aware of….I would argue, therefore, that not only (A) if you find it, it’s probably there, but also (B) however much you find, there is sure to be more.

I like that. Keats was a professional! He can work magic with language that we amateurs can only marvel at. His other answer is that as long as you believe the unconscious is involved in the poetic process — which he thinks it obviously is — then:

it is not a case of the poet’s inventing lines, but rather of his finding sounds and rhythms in accordance with the promptings of the deeper psyche. The poet does not rest with a line until he has released a specific inner pressure.

So there’s more going on when a poet writes a poem than he or she is consciously aware of, and it’s impossible to account for what a poet intended or didn’t intend. It’s all part of one big messy process that, as Birkerts says, the poet “presides over.” It’s too mysterious to analyze much further than that.

Birkerts essay is a beautiful one — a fitting tribute to a marvelously beautiful poem.

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Monday, October 12, 2009 · 8:50 pm

The Story about the Story, D’Ambrosio and Woolf

So I’ve begun reading The Story about the Story, and although I’ve only read the introduction and the first two essays, those first two essays are really wonderful, and I suspect the rest of the book will be too. The idea behind the book is to gather essays that discuss literature from a personal perspective (it’s subtitled “Great Writers Explore Great Literature”), and as I read through the first two essays, I was reminded of how much I love this form of writing. I love any kind of good writing about literature, whether it’s criticism, theory, book reviews, or blog posts — as long as it’s really good — but writing that combines intelligence about literature with a personal perspective and tone is really the best.

The first essay is by Charles D’Ambrosio, and it’s about how his experience of reading Salinger was shaped by the circumstances of his life. One of D’Ambrosio’s brothers committed suicide and another brother attempted it, and so when he came to read Salinger, he was acutely sensitive to everything Salinger had to say on the subject. The essay combines a number of strands beautifully — D’Ambrosio’s personal experience, academic theories of suicide, how suicide functions in Salinger’s fiction, and Salinger’s mysterious reclusiveness and silence. It’s a very smart, very moving essay.

The second essay is by Virginia Woolf, and in it she tells us what she thinks of Hemingway, and, even more interestingly, she takes a look at her own prejudices and biases along the way. She makes the argument that knowing a critic’s biases may make his or her conclusions seem less conclusive, but also more truthful. She starts off by describing what it’s like to read a piece of criticism. Surely we can all recognize the feelings she describes?

But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say … They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.

But, she goes on to argue, critics — at least those who review recently-published books — aren’t necessarily the best readers of literature. They have to review new books without much time to think about them, and they have to deliver a verdict about them, which requires hiding uncertainties they may be feeling and questions that may linger. The rest of us are allowed to have a more complicated response and to let some of our questions go fruitfully unanswered.

And so she will conduct an experiment: she will write about Hemingway and talk about her hesitations, questions, and biases along the way, so we can get a glimpse of the thought process that goes into producing a review, rather than, as usually happens, being left with only the conclusions.

This is really what I love about criticism that is personal — it gives us a chance to see how readers come to their conclusions. Probably it’s only an illusion that we can get into Virginia Woolf’s mind as she decides that Hemingway doesn’t do character very well, but still, I can’t help but trust that Woolf is trying to be honest, and I wish that her openness and honesty (even the illusion of it) were more common.

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Saturday, October 10, 2009 · 9:01 pm

When Things Fall Apart

After starting Pema Chödrön’s book When Things Fall Apart about a month ago, I quickly figured out that it is a book to read slowly. It’s only 150 pages, but it makes sense to take a month to read it. This is partly because it contains a lot of wisdom that is best taken in slowly; it’s a book about meditation, among other things, and it seems appropriate to read it in a slow, meditative kind of way. On a more critical note, it also contains a lot of repetition. If I were reading it fast I would find the repetition annoying, but because I was reading it slowly, the repetition became a part of the whole meditative experience. I came to like hearing similar ideas repeated over and over when they are ideas I need to hear again and again. Reading this book came to feel like reading the Christian devotional books people read — and I did too occasionally — when I was young.

The book is repetitious and it’s not terribly well written, but I find its ideas immensely valuable. It’s not an introduction to Buddhism, exactly, but more of an application of Buddhist ideas to dealing with suffering and pain. As Stefanie points out in her review of this book, the subtitle “Heart Advice for Difficult Times” makes it sound as though the book is aimed at people going through a particularly challenging time, when the truth is that its audience is much broader — it’s really directed at everybody.

It makes the argument that rather than running from bad feelings — anger, irritation, sadness — we can learn to face them directly, and by facing them directly, we can learn to relax into them. We can learn to recognize them for what they are and to see that bad feelings are inevitable and come and go just as good feelings do. As Chödrön puts it, it’s all about seeing the world around us as clearly as possible, which means recognizing that the world is constantly changing, nothing is stable, and good and bad experiences come and go and we have little if any control over them. All we can do is learn to recognize what is happening to us, to acknowledge it, and then just stay there and experience it. She urges us to resist the impulse to try to keep our lives from changing and to create a sense of safety and security. That sense of security is illusory, so it’s better to try to learn to live without it, to the extent that we can.

Meditation is the way she suggests we can begin to learn this. By meditating regularly we start to become more aware of what is happening in the moment, which is a way of becoming more attune to our thoughts and feelings so we recognize why we feel the way we do or act the way we do. It’s also a way to learn how to watch what happens to us without judging it. When meditating, we’re supposed to watch our thoughts as they come and go, and gradually we learn that that’s just what thoughts do — they come and go but they aren’t who we are and they don’t define us:

… the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion — not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

As someone who has often felt hounded by my own thoughts, this idea is immensely comforting. The brain is just an organ whose job it is to produce thoughts, and so that’s what it does. My thoughts are important, of course, but they aren’t, ultimately, who I am, and I don’t have to spend my time obsessed with them.

I also found Chödrön’s chapters on compassion very moving. Although I would have resisted this idea when I was growing up — I would have found it selfish in the extreme — I now agree that the ability to care about others stems from the ability to care about oneself, and if we learn how to treat ourselves with kindness, we will be in a better place to understand and care for others. This is something that, again, we can develop through meditation; the practice of watching and accepting what is going on in our own minds can help us be open to what happens with other people.

As you can see, I found a lot that’s valuable in this book. However, I don’t think it’s the best book to read if you are unfamiliar with Buddhism or are looking for an introduction to the subject. Chödrön tends to use terms and phrases associated with Buddhism and meditation without defining them, and although she gives basic instructions in how to meditate, she doesn’t back up and explain the religious/spiritual background to her ideas. It really is more of an inspirational or devotional book than a methodical explanation of a philosophy. Some years back during an earlier period of interest in Buddhism, I came across books by Joseph Goldstein, who I think would provide a more thorough background. And perhaps Chödrön provides more background herself in one of her other books, I’m not sure. But at any rate, I learned a lot from this book, and I’m immensely glad I read it.

For other takes on this book, make sure to read Litlove’s post as well as Stefanie’s.

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Sunday, October 4, 2009 · 2:25 pm

A Jury of Her Peers

My review of Elaine Showalter’s book A Jury of Her Peers is now up at the Quarterly Conversation. The short version is that I liked it. If you want to hear more, check it out!

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009 · 9:39 pm

Reading Serendipity

Litlove recently wrote a post in which she used the phrase “the usual serendipity of reading,” which is a great way to describe how books so often speak to each other and to us in unexpected ways. I’ve recently come across my own example. (And, in a nice twist, I’ve just been talking about serendipity in my “Intro to the Arts” course as we discuss how to access one’s creativity.) I’ve been reading Pema Chödrön’s book When Things Fall Apart where she writes about how we tend to run away from anything that is painful or unpleasant rather than facing it and considering what it means and what it might teach us. She writes:

Most of us do not take these situations [situations that cause discomfort] as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape — all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can’t stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain. In fact, the rampant materialism that we see in the world stems from this moment. There are so many ways that have been dreamt up to entertain us away from the moment, soften its hard edge, deaden it so we don’t have to feel the full impact of the pain that arises when we cannot manipulate the situation to make us come out looking fine.

Those of you who participated in Infinite Summer may know where I’m going with this: Infinite Jest deals with exactly this dynamic — the impulse to run away from pain and discomfort straight into the arms of whatever distraction we can find. People are so desperate for entertainment and distraction, in fact, that in Infinite Jest their lives are at risk. At the center of the novel’s plot (such as it is) is a film referred to as “the entertainment” that is so seductive, so irresistable, that people literally can’t draw their eyes away from it and will starve themselves and die rather than have to stop watching it. And others — lots of others — distract themselves with alcohol and drugs, violence, obsessive work, or really anything that can keep them from having to think. Facing their problems directly is just too difficult.

My favorite character in the book, Don Gately, is a recovering drug addict who has learned all this, in his own way. Now that he is no longer addicted to drugs, thanks to AA, he is finding out what it means to face pain and discomfort directly. He is finding out that all the things the drugs helped him repress are now coming back, and he has become haunted by memories of his hellishly difficult childhood and his horribly violent young adulthood in a way he’s never experienced before.

I love Gately because he’s such a brave soul, and he has no idea just how brave he is. He looks around him at the halfway house where he lives and works and sees people who are just beginning to attend AA meetings and who scoff at all the cheesiness and cliches involved, and he understands why they scoff, but he has learned that facing reality in the way Pema Chödrön writes about is just so difficult that people can’t do it on their own. They need the support of the daily AA meetings, the belief in a vague “higher power,” the motivational cliches and all the rest of it. It’s a practice, really, not unlike meditation. Both practices teach people to take things one day at a time, or one moment at a time, to focus on what’s real, to face oneself directly and admit shortcomings honestly, to admit that we have no control over ourselves and our lives. Gately doesn’t understand why AA works, but he knows it does, and he’s willing to trust it, no matter what. And believe me, this trust gets tested.

I have no idea if David Foster Wallace was interested in Eastern spirituality at all, but I felt its presence in this novel. It may be I read it this way because I’m interested in it at the moment, but at any rate, I love how these two books have had so much to say to me.

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Friday, September 11, 2009 · 9:33 pm

Book Notes

Just a few thoughts for a Friday evening. Since finishing Infinite Jest, I’ve been focusing on Laurie King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I’m reading for my non-mystery book group, even though the book happens to be a detective novel. I’m almost finished with it, and I’ll write a proper review later, but my conclusion will be that the book is a disappointment. It has many potentially interesting things in it, but it never manages to pull everything together to be a really engaging read, and if a detective novel isn’t an engaging read, there’s a problem. From what I’ve heard from my book group friends, I don’t think there will be much controversy over this one; everyone so far has agreed it’s not that great. Oh, well.

I received one new book in the mail this week: Robert Dessaix’s Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev. I know nothing about Dessaix and have never read Turgenev (although I’ve been meaning to for a long time), but this book interested me because it’s a combination of memoir, travel narrative, and literary history, and I love books about books and writing that mix genres in this way. This is what Publisher’s Weekly says:

While the problem of irrational love in a world of reason is the dominant theme, Dessaix’s work explores much more: Russian theology, the experience of being far away and therefore barbarian in European eyes, the modern confusion of the erotic with the sexual, and of course, the problem of death.

And on the topic of books about books and writers, I recently learned that J.C. Hallman will be publishing a very interesting-sounding anthology called The Story About the Story, a collection of essays by writers about writing. The Table of Contents looks absolutely fabulous. It has selections by Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Geoff Dyer, Randell Jarrell, Susan Sontag, and a whole bunch of other great people. The idea is that these selections are personal approaches to literature — great writing about great writing. (As I look over the Table of Contents I’m wondering why he didn’t include a selection from Nicholson Baker’s U&I, but, of course he couldn’t include everything).

Amusingly enough, I found out about the book on this blog, in the comments of which I called Hallman an impolite name (if you read the post, you’ll see why), and then Hallman himself appeared and responded. The internet can be such a great place, can’t it? I love it that people can be having a book discussion and then all the sudden the author can show up and contribute. Even if I do get caught out being impolite…

After I finish reading Laurie King, I’m not entirely sure what I will pick up next, although perhaps something I’m more likely to like, perhaps something older and canonical. Or perhaps an interesting nonfiction. We’ll see.

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Thursday, July 30, 2009 · 9:06 pm

Richard Holmes’s Coleridge

Richard Holmes’s Coleridge: Early Visions is a fantastic book. I found myself enthralled by the story the whole way though. This is only the first volume and I haven’t had a chance to begin the second one yet, but I’m eager to get to it when I can. I don’t usually enjoy biographies quite this much; I like reading them now and then, but when I’m in the middle of them they can sometimes feel the tiniest bit like a chore, especially when they are long. I’m not particularly good at retaining facts, so I sometimes read biographies wondering how much of them I will forget very shortly. But Holmes does such a good job here those uncertainties didn’t bother me.

In his preface Holmes discusses one of his techniques that makes his biography stand out: he has:

attempted, from the very start, to set Coleridge talking, to tell his story through his own magnificent — and constantly humorous — flights of phrase and metaphor. I have tried to make his voice sound steadily through the narrative, and indeed in the end to dominate it.

And this is exactly what he does, using quotations from poems, letters, journals, and essays liberally throughout. It helps to create a rich picture of who Coleridge was and what he must have been like to know.

But Holmes was helped by having such a wonderfully interesting subject to write about. Coleridge was a great poet, but he was also a great personality and managed to wrap nearly everyone he met around his finger, at least for a while. Holmes tells the story of Hazlitt’s obsession with Coleridge, a story that illustrates what seems to have been a common dynamic: Hazlitt met Coleridge when he was a young, very awkward boy and was immediately overawed by Coleridge’s colorful personality. As he got older, though, he changed his mind, deciding that Coleridge’s mystical and metaphysical turn of mind was just a lot of balderdash and becoming thoroughly disillusioned and bitter. Coleridge had a history of very close, very intense friendships that eventually went awry, with Hazlitt, but even more famously with Robert Southey and William Wordsworth.

Coleridge was a great talker, both in private conversation and in his popular, if politically controversial, public lectures. He also had a flair for political journalism, for literary criticism, for letter-writing, and for private journal-keeping. Holmes greatly admires his poetry, but praises his prose style almost as highly. He also was one for big schemes and plans, including one called Pantisocracy that would have taken him and his family and a small group of friends over to America to found a utopian society on the banks of the Susquehanna. It didn’t work out, but Coleridge never lost his idealism and Holmes argues that Pantisocratic ideals shape Coleridge’s thinking for the rest of his life.

He was a genius, Holmes makes clear, at coming up with brilliant ideas and plans, but rarely did he follow through on them; in fact, he became notorious for his lists of ideas and dreams that remained unaccomplished. He held so much potential, so much of it unrealized, although Holmes emphasizes the brilliance of the things he was able to accomplish and argues that his ability to dream is in and of itself worthy of admiration.

This first volume takes us through the first 32 years of Coleridge’s life, from 1772 to 1804. The second volume is ominously subtitled “Darker Reflections,” although we can already see the beginnings of the darker part of Coleridge’s life in the first volume. He began taking opium in the first volume, the habit that will shape the second half of his life in dramatic ways. He also struggled with unhappiness in his marriage, uncertainty about his career path, and uncertain finances, although he did receive financial support from patrons who had great faith in his abilities.

I also admired Holmes for doing an excellent job of placing Coleridge in his intellectual context, describing his contributions to the literary and philosophical trends of the time. Coleridge knew so many important people and was good friends with many of them, so learning about Coleridge is a great way of learning about the time period itself.

So when I can, I’ll be on to volume 2, and I’ll have to prepare myself for some difficult times.

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Thursday, July 2, 2009 · 7:31 pm

Reading with one’s spine

I posted my thoughts on Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature the other day, and now I thought would share some interesting bits from the book. It begins with an introductory lecture called “Good Readers and Good Writers” in which he lays out his argument that “In reading, one should notice and fondle details.” This quotation is the simplest way to describe Nabokov’s method, really, as it sums up what he does in each of the main lectures — he looks closely at the details in order to examine the novel’s structure. Isn’t the word “fondle” an interesting one to use here? It captures his very involved, careful, intimate, and emotional style of reading:

So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.

There is a lot to like here, especially the mix of the personal and the impersonal in reading: he calls for an attempt to enjoy passionately while at the same time keeping enough distance to notice what’s going on. I’m not entirely sure how that works, exactly, as passion seems to imply the loss of critical distance, but I know subjectively what he means, or at least I think I do. I also like the idea that there should be a balance between the author’s mind and the reader’s mind — that the reader and author are working together in good faith and with good will to try to create something meaningful.

I’m also amused at the way Nabokov sounds a little like an eighteenth-century woman of sensibility, one who prides herself on her exquisite emotional sensitivity and her ability to cry at affecting scenes in novels, when he talks about “tears and shivers.” But he only sounds like that for a moment, before he moves on to discuss what else besides emotion and imagination are required. Here’s how strong emotion connects to a novel’s detail:

What I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people. The color of Fanny Price’s eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important.

So detail is a check on emotion, as it keeps us grounded in the specifics of the world the author creates. In fact, Nabokov has already outlined several wrong kinds of imagination and emotion to be found in readers — including the kind that is solely personal because we relate the book only to our own experiences, and the kind that leads us to identify with a character. In an odd kind of way, our imagination and emotions are supposed to lead us beyond ourselves:

We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is utterly devoid of passion and patience — of an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience — he will hardly enjoy great literature.

I like all these ideas a lot, even if they are abstract. Nabokov ends this chapter with a metaphor, which I also like, although it doesn’t clear up the abstractness:

In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

I like very much the idea of reading with one’s spine, even if I’m not entirely sure I know what it means. I also like the way a castle of cards can turn into a castle of steel and glass. We know the entire time we are reading that it’s a castle of cards — we know the work is a fiction — but through the magic of a writer and a reader working together that fiction somehow becomes real.

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Saturday, June 20, 2009 · 9:32 pm

Prayers of the Cosmos

Every once in a while, I find myself going through a phase where I become intensely interested in matters of theology and spirituality. To call it “a phase” is maybe not taking it seriously enough, but my point is that this feeling cycles in and out, and I appear to be entering another high-interest time. I’ve had a number of great conversations with a friend who has a similar religious background to mine, more great conversations with another friend who is studying to be a yoga teacher, and other great conversations with acquaintances who have an interest in the subject. This is happening at a time when I’ve been practicing yoga more regularly and loving the spiritual lessons that it has to offer and have also been reading more on the subject. As you may know if you have read this blog for a while, I grew up a serious Christian of the evangelical sort, but as an adult have become … I’m not sure what. I’ve become someone who is interested in “spirituality,” the sort of person I used to scoff at when I was much younger. It’s wonderful when life turns you into the sort of person you used to scoff at, isn’t it?

Anyway, I recently finished Neil Douglas-Klotz’s book Prayers of the Cosmos, which offers alternate translations of some of Jesus’s words: the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, and some other famous sayings. I’m not entirely sure of the merits of the argument Douglas-Klotz opens with, which is that we should look to Aramaic versions of the New Testament to understand what Jesus said, instead of Greek versions. But I’m not really concerned about arguments over which Biblical manuscripts are the earliest or most reliable. What interests me is that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and that Aramaic is a language where, according to Douglas-Klotz, words can have a range of meanings in a way they don’t in English. This means that the words Jesus spoke can be translated in a variety of ways, and each translation is there in the original words:

Furthermore, like its sister languages Hebrew and Arabic, Aramaic can express many layers of meaning. Words are organized and defined based on a poetic root-and-pattern system, so that each word may have several meanings, at first seemingly unrelated, but upon contemplation revealing an inner connection. The same word may be translated, for instance, as “name,” “light,” “sound,” or “experience.” Confronted with such variety, one needs to look at each word or phrase from several different points of view … Jesus showed a mastery of this use of transformative language, which survives even through inadequate translations.

What the book does is give a line that Jesus spoke and then analyze the Aramaic words and the possible translations of those words. So for example, the first line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father which art in heaven,” could also be translated “Oh Birther, Father-Mother of the Cosmos,” because the roots of the Aramaic word “abwoon” point to a “divine parent” and also to a “cosmic birthing process.” The line “hallowed be thy name” becomes “focus your light within us,” and the line “Thy kingdom come” becomes “create your reign of unity now.” Douglas-Klotz’s translations point to a Jesus that is much more mystical and feminist than the one we are generally familiar with.

This book isn’t entirely scholarly, though; it could also be used as a devotional or a guide to meditation. Douglas-Klotz includes poetic responses to each of the lines he analyzes and also what he calls “body prayers,” which are ideas for how to meditate on each of the lines and how to use the prayers to help deal with life’s problems.

It’s a very short book, only about 90 pages, without a lot of text on each page, but it’s the kind of book you might want to read very slowly, since there is a lot to absorb and it seems appropriate to take the time to really soak up the language.

I liked this book because while I’m not all that invested in arguments about the reliability of manuscripts and how Jesus’s words got recorded, I do think the issue of translation is fascinating, and I like the idea that the version of Jesus I learned about in childhood isn’t necessarily the only version of him out there.

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Wednesday, June 10, 2009 · 10:26 pm

Writing about oneself

I’m reading along in Montaigne’s Complete Essays and continuing to enjoy it. There are three “books” in this volume, and I recently began the second one. The essays are on a whole range of topics, many of them related to philosophy, quite a few on warfare and politics, and many on how best to live one’s life. Even when the subject is one that I am not terribly interested in, Montaigne usually manages to give some bit of wisdom or to say something revealing about himself that keeps me engaged. And in his best essays, he’s wise, insightful, and amusing.

I was first turned on to Montaigne in college when I took a Senior Seminar in the personal essay, and my professor was a Montaigne devotee. I remember admiring Montaigne’s essays at the time, but mostly I was caught up in my professor’s enthusiasm, wanting to like the things he liked because I had so much respect for his opinions. I dipped into Montaigne in later years, although I never got all the way through the essays. I continued to admire him, but the complete essays require a level of devotion I didn’t have at the time.

This time around, I’m committed to reading the entire book, and I’m seeing that he’s an excellent companion. It’s not so much the specific things he says, which I will probably forget anyway, but it’s his attitude — his honesty and his energy — that I admire. He’s not afraid to talk about either his weaknesses or his strengths openly, and I think it takes courage to do both. He’s also not afraid to write at length about himself. He openly acknowledges that he finds himself interesting and that the whole purpose of the essays is to figure out who he is.

In the essay I just finished, “On Practice,” he discusses writing about himself, and it makes me realize that not only would he be an excellent blogger were he living today, but he would have no patience with those who accuse bloggers of useless self-absorption. He finds being absorbed in himself highly valuable, in fact, and not only useful for himself but potentially useful for others:

The lesson is not for others; it is for me. Yet, for all that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me can perhaps help somebody else. Meanwhile I am not spoiling anything: I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool it is at my own expense and does no harm to anybody.

So, in other words, if you get annoyed with those who write about themselves, what’s your problem? It’s not hurting you. And he says it’s not easy either:

It is a thorny undertaking — more than it looks — to follow so roaming a course as that of our mind’s, to penetrate its dark depths and its inner recesses, to pick out and pin down the innumerable characteristics of its emotions.

To those who complain that talking about oneself can lead to boasting and presumption, he argues that just because some people do it badly doesn’t mean nobody should do it:

My belief is that it is wrong to condemn wine because many get drunk on it. You can abuse things only if they are good. I believe that prohibition applies only to the popular abuse. It is a bridle made to curb calves; it is not used as a bridle by the Saints, who can be heard talking loudly about themselves, nor by philosophers nor by theologians; nor by me though I am neither one nor the other.

And finally, he argues that writing and talking about oneself is valuable because it’s valuable to understand ourselves:

I hold that we must show wisdom in judging ourselves, and, equally, good faith in witnessing to ourselves, high and low indifferently. If I seemed to myself to be good or wise — or nearly so — I would sing it out at the top of my voice. To say you are worse than you are is not modest but foolish. According to Aristotle, to prize yourself at less than you are worth is weak and faint-hearted. No virtue is helped by falsehood; and the truth can never go wrong.

So, if you have ever felt uncertain or self-conscious or foolish for writing about yourself, Montaigne says don’t! If you are learning something about yourself, then what you’re doing is good.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009 · 5:12 pm

Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small

Anne Fadiman’s essay collection At Large and At Small was a joy to read, nearly as much fun as Ex Libris, her book on books and reading, which I am now tempted to read again. It wasn’t quite as captivating as Ex Libris because it wasn’t entirely about books, but Fadiman is fun to read no matter what subject she takes on.

I will admit that I liked the essays on bookish subjects best, though. Her preface is about the familiar essay, a genre she worries is passing away and that she would like to revive. The familiar essay, she says, was most popular during the Romantic time period, when Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt were writing. Here’s how she describes it:

The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy.

Now who wouldn’t want to read that? I think essays appeal to me so much because they match the way I like to think and write. Some friends and I were talking the other day about the way we write, and I said that rather than having something worked out in my mind that I want to say and struggling to get it right in words, I tend to start with only the vaguest idea of my point and perhaps without a point at all and to figure out what I’m saying as I write it. Not all essayists write that way, I’m sure, but a lot of times their essays appear to be written that way, with the meandering, digressive, conversational style Fadiman describes. I love the feeling of being in on a conversation with an essayist, or perhaps to be on a journey with him or her, not entirely sure where I’m heading.

In the preface, Fadiman claims that:

Today’s readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal — very personal — essays (more heart than brain), but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).

I don’t really agree with this assessment; it seems too simple to me, and it’s just not true to my experience, as I regularly come across essays these days that have both heart and brain. But still, I’m glad Fadiman wants to keep the genre alive and that she’s doing her part so well.

The two other pieces that involve books directly are about Fadiman’s obsession with Charles Lamb and her experience reading Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge. both of these pieces made me want to start new books right away — I have Lamb’s Essays of Elia and the Holmes biography on my shelves and would like to read them at some point, maybe soon. Perhaps those could be a summer project?

The other essays were very enjoyable as well, about a whole range of subjects, from butterflies to ice cream to coffee to arctic explorers to the mail. With each subject, she does exactly what she says a familiar essay should do — she tells a personal story about the topic, for example about the butterflies she and her brother happily caught and killed to add to their collection, and she gives information on the topic and offers some kind of analysis of it, for example, analyzing the process she and her brother went through of realizing how cruel their butterfly-killing was.

Particularly useful is the “Sources” section in the back of the book, which gives a brief bibliography for further reading on each of her subjects. I added a number of books to my TBR list based on the sources to the Preface alone, including The Norton Book of Personal Essays edited by Joseph Epstein, William Hazlitt’s Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners, and Stuart Robinson’s Familiar Essays.

You have to love a book that inspires you to read a whole bunch of other books, right?

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Thursday, April 9, 2009 · 7:58 pm

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

I recently finished Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and I thought it was great, although I also couldn’t help but wonder what it was about an aging man’s musings about death that interested me so much. It’s not a subject I’m generally drawn to or a subject that particular intrigues me. It’s only very occasionally that I feel a mild dread at the thought of my own death, and I’m certainly not haunted by it. I’m pretty good at avoiding the whole subject, which I imagine is what most people do (or am I wrong about this? Do most people spend a lot of time fearfully contemplating their own death, and I’m the one who is stupidly oblivious?).

Either I’m terrified of death on an unconscious level and it’s my unconscious that led me to this book, or I read it for the reason my consciousness believes, which is that I’ve been fascinated by Barnes for a while and that I love essayistic nonfiction and so it made perfect sense to see what this book was all about. And I can report that it’s a great read, no matter what your feelings on the subject are.

The book rambles here and there and has no discernible organizational structure, but this matches Barnes’s subject and mood. He’s grappling with one of the biggest, scariest, most mysterious experiences any of us can grapple with, so it makes sense to me that he wouldn’t manage to be organized about it. It strikes me as perfectly appropriate to wander from topic to topic and to return again and again to the same pivotal experiences. I don’t want to imply that the book is repetitious; while Barnes circles around to the same topics again and again, each time he discusses them, they feel fresh.

These topics include his family history, his relationship with his brother, his process of learning what it means to die, his conversations with friends on the subject, what his favorite writers have written about death, and what the deaths of these writers were like. He weaves the biographical and autobiographical material together with passages that look at the subject from philosophical, religious, and artistic points of view, and the whole thing is charmingly and fascinatingly readable.

Barnes comes across as someone terrified of death but doing his best to stay calm, and turning to the thing he knows best to help him out: writing. The book itself comes to seem like a way of staving off death, a fact that Barnes himself acknowledges. It’s hard not to believe that as long as he keeps writing, surely he won’t die. And yet Barnes isn’t deluding himself — he’s well aware that he could die while in the middle of writing, which would leave an artefact entirely different from the one he wanted to leave behind. He also knows that being a famous writer will only buy him a little bit of time before he is forgotten entirely and loses even that shred of immortality — fame. He thinks about the person who will inevitably one day exist: his very last reader.  He is at first grateful to this reader for the attention he or she is paying him, but then he gets angry: if this is his last reader, then that person by definition has failed him by neglecting to convince anyone else to pick up one of his books.

Barnes looks around at the various sources of comfort in the face of death, searching for some reason to keep from despairing, and yet they all fail him. He’s agnostic, pretty well convinced that there is no God out there of the traditional sort, and yet not wanting to take the risk of deciding it for sure. But even if God does exist, he decides that wouldn’t be much comfort, and if God doesn’t exist that’s no comfort either, and who’s to say that if there is a God, that God isn’t cruel and doesn’t take pleasure in torturing us all? Philosophy brings no comfort either. His brother is a philosopher, but Barnes finds his way of thinking foreign to his own more artistic and less strictly logical sensibilities.

As I was reading the book I began to wonder if it would make me start fearing death in a way I hadn’t before. Barnes is pretty convincing after all. It hasn’t, though, which is good. I think it has made me more sympathetic to those who aren’t as oblivious as I am and who do fear death. I think fearing death is a perfectly logical and understandable response, and I’m lucky not to have felt the fear much myself, and I’ll probably fear it more as I get older, as most people probably do. But for now, I’ll just admire Barnes for doing his best to face the subject head on and trying make sense of the thing that is probably the hardest thing possible to make sense of.

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Saturday, March 21, 2009 · 7:45 pm

Saturday thoughts

  • I am resolutely ignoring the fact that I will be racing tomorrow, and, even worse, riding in two races. I find that denial is the best way to manage nerves. So — tomorrow will be a quiet day where I sleep in, spend lots of time reading, see some friends, and that’s it. Yes, it is.
  • I am the kind of dork who does homework on Saturday nights. I just spent a good bit of time reading through material for the online class I’m taking on how to teach online classes. It was interesting, although now my head is spinning with educational and technical jargon, including ugly words like “chunking,” which refers to the practice of breaking up text into manageable bits.  Apparently in an online class you are not supposed to simply upload your lecture notes for students to read, but instead are supposed to break the material up into separate shorter pages that are easier to process and then to intersperse activities and assignments and such to help students understand and remember everything. Makes sense to me.
  • I finished the book for my next mystery group meeting, Chester Himes’s The Real Cool Killers. I’ll post more on it later, but in the meantime, I’ll say that I liked it, although it’s very different from the sort of thing I usually like. It’s fast-paced and focused on the action, without a whole lot of character development or analysis. But the style fits the subject it covers — the dark, crime-ridden side of Harlem in the 1950s. What interests me about the book is the fact that Hobgoblin read a chapter or two and declared he couldn’t stand it and thought the writing was horrible. I picked it up thinking I’d probably agree and found I didn’t at all. So now I’m really looking forward to the discussion next week.
  • I couldn’t resist wandering over to the town library the other day and there I found a few nonfiction books I’ve been meaning to read, including Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking and Steven Nadler’s The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil. What I brought home, though, is Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is sort of a memoir, sort of an extended essay on death. So far (I’ve read maybe 30 pages), it’s rambled around and touched on his family history, his relationship with his brother, his religious history, and his fear of dying. So far, so good — this is exactly the kind of book I like, and Barnes is such a great writer.
  • I’m looking forward to picking up Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl very soon for the Slaves of Golconda discussion beginning at the end of the month. As usual the group has chosen a book that sounds great and is one I’m happy to read although I probably wouldn’t have gotten to it soon on my own. That’s precisely why I’m so happy to be a part of that group — it gets me reading things I might not otherwise.
  • I’m going to try to finish the William Cowper biography I’ve been working on before I begin the Zweig, though — I don’t want to have too many books underway at once or I might start to feel overwhelmed.
  • And no, I’m not racing tomorrow … no, really …

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Filed under Books, Cycling, Fiction, Nonfiction, Reading, Teaching

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 · 7:06 pm

On biography

I decided to take Zhiv’s advice and continue reading David Cecil’s The Stricken Deer, a biography of William Cowper (I also wrote about the book here). I am maybe a third of the way through it at this point. It’s been interesting to read so shortly after finishing Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen because it’s allowed me to compare biographical styles from the 1930s and the 1990s, and they turn out, no surprise, to be very, very different.

Cecil, for example, is much more likely to make blanket statements about what humans are like than Tomalin is.  Tomalin does a little of this too, but Cecil is strikingly willing to tell us just how people in general behave, with a confidence that I don’t think many writers today share or at least would be willing to express. It seems we’ve become (to make my own blanket statement) much more hesitant about our assertions. Cecil says things like this:

Youth can not take a consistently pessimistic view of its lot, for it thinks of its mode of existence, not as real life, but as the preparation for it. So that, however much it may deplore the present, it is hopeful about the future, which must be different, and will probably be pleasanter. But with maturity hope begins to flag. One has grown up and settled to a profession and made one’s friends, and the course one’s life will wend is clear before one. If one is still weighed down the the burdens of youth, it seems likely that one will carry them to the grave.

Now this seems like a very reasonable observation to make, and yet I can’t imagine many modern biographers going on about what happens to “one” quite so long. And there are lots of passages like this, passages that project a calmness and a confidence powerful enough that it makes one wish things really were that simple and obvious.

Cecil also never bothers to tell the reader where he got his information from or to express doubts about whether his interpretation is correct or to acknowledge other possible interpretations or conflicting views out there. This is another manifestation of the confidence that can pronounce on “how things are”; the style implies there’s no need for justification or explanation. Cecil doesn’t include notes or a bibliography either, although he explains in a short preface that he didn’t intend this to be a “definitive and documented” biography, so that exclusion makes some sense. But even so, I would guess that a modern biographer doing something similar to Cecil would mention what sources information came from and would make a point of discussing uncertainties of interpretation, as Tomalin does regularly. Instead what we get is a smooth and uninterrupted narrative, one written as though it were a novel or autobiography where the author had no need to offer verifying background information.

Generally this highly self-confident style would annoy me, but here I like it. It’s fun to listen to a voice of authority now and then, rather than having to grapple with questions and uncertainties all the time. And when the voice of authority is as charming and beguiling as Cecil’s is, that makes it even more enjoyable. In the back of my mind I know, of course, that what Cecil is telling me about Cowper might very well be open to debate, and I do wonder how much is speculation and how much comes from reliable sources, but still, I don’t mind a little simplicity and straightforwardness now and then.

Another difference between Cecil and modern biographers is how they handle issues of sexuality; in fact, I’d like to find a more modern biography of Cowper to see just how that biographer deals with Cowper’s possible impotence. Here is what Cecil says on the subject:

… obscure hints reach us of a more somber cause for Cowper’s youthful sufferings. It is alleged that he suffered from an intimate deformity, and from early years the thought of it preyed on his mind. The whole subject is mysterious. In later life his emotional experience was normal and developed perfectly spontaneously. On the other hand, he never was a passionate man; and there are certain facts in his later life for which such a deformity would offer a convincing explanation. If he was deformed there is no doubt that he must have learned about it early, possibly from the deriding lips of his tormentors. The effect on him must inevitably have been disastrous. Boys dislike above all things to be different from other people; nor was Cowper of an age to estimate coolly the relative importance of his abnormality.

The next paragraph begins, “at any rate,” and continues on with the narrative. Cecil refers to this subject a couple times in later passages, but always obliquely, and as though he’d prefer not to.  Can you imagine a modern biographer discussing impotence without ever using the word itself and without getting precisely anatomical, not to mention psychoanalytic?

I have to rush through the rest of this book to get it back to the library, but the truth is, it’s an enjoyable, quick read, and I’m learning a lot — about Cowper and also about biography itself.

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Monday, March 9, 2009 · 8:45 pm

The Stricken Deer

Because of my recent interest in William Cowper, an interest inspired by Brian Lynch’s novel about his life, The Winner of Sorrow (which I wrote about here), I requested from my library a copy of David Cecil’s 1930 biography of Cowper, The Stricken Deer. I thought I might just skim through it and see if I found anything interesting, but I took a look at Cecil’s prologue and quickly became entranced by the writing. Apparently they wrote biographies in the 1930s much differently than they do today — which is not to say there aren’t some well-written ones today, but they aren’t quite like Cecil’s.

The prologue isn’t actually about Cowper for the most part; he comes in only at the end of the 15-page essay as a transition into the biography itself.  What it is, instead, is a meditation on eighteenth-century society and on the various preconceptions and misconceptions people in the early 20th century held about that time. Even so, he takes a while to get around to the eighteenth century itself. I always tell my students that if they want to open their essays with general statements and then move to more specific ones, they had better be careful not to start too generally (no “since the beginning of time” please), but Cecil shows how to start off very generally and how to do it beautifully:

Past periods, like foreign countries, become the fashion. Just as people like one sort of hat because it suits the type of beauty they admire, so people are attracted to a particular place or period because it suits their prevailing mood. Mankind, in its restless search for some ideal and fairy country which satisfies a fancy, dissatisfied with that in which it lives, will identify it with the civilization of some other time or people which appears to possess the qualities it most values, and to lack those which it most dislikes.

From there he goes on to consider various time periods and when they were fashionable, and only after four long paragraphs devoted to contemplating this phenomenon (including a leisurely discussion of objects we associate with various times and places) does he get around to the eighteenth century itself.

When he gets there, he argues that our conceptions of the era are entirely wrong and that we generalize about it too much and don’t understand its complexity. He sets about correcting our mistake by setting up a little library scene:

For a happy moment let us shut the door on the modern world and retire in fancy to some Augustan library. The curtains are drawn, the fire is lit; outside the silence is broken only the faint crackling whispers of the winter frost. How the firelight gleams and flickers on the fluted moldings of the bookcases, on the faded calf and tarnished gold of the serried rows of books: the slim duodecimo poems and plays; the decent two-volumed octavo novels; the portly quarto sermons, six volumes, eight volumes, ten volumes; the unity of brown, broken now and again by a large tome of correspondence, green or plum or crimson, only given to the public in our own time. The whole eighteenth century is packed into these white or yellowing pages; all its mutifarious aspects, its types, its moods, its morals, self-revealed; the indefinable, unforgettable perfume of the period breathing from every line of print. For the shortest, dullest letter really written in a past age can bring its atmosphere home to you as the most vivid historian of a later time can never do.

Can’t you picture yourself there? He goes on to take a short survey of important eighteenth-century writers in a similarly imaginative style, capturing the essence of respectable Whig aristocracy and nobility, the somewhat less-respectable middle classes, the travelers and adventurers, the fashionable men and women of sensibility, and the literary intelligentsia.

And then we get to Cowper himself. Much of his writing, Cecil says (rather surprisingly), is dull and lifeless. But then —

… suddenly one’s attention is caught by a chance word; the page stirs to life; a bit of the English countryside appears before one’s mental eye as vividly and exactly as though one really saw it; or an ephemeral trifle, a copy of verses addressed to Miss M. or Mr. D., laughs out of the page with the pleasant colloquial intimacy of a voice heard over the teacups in the next room. And now and again, as if from the strings of a tarnished, disused harp stumbled against in one’s rambles around the library, there rises from the old book a strain of music, simple, plangent, and of a piercing pathos, that fairly clutches at the heart.

He briefly discusses Cowper’s life, focusing on the thing that’s most memorable about it — his artistic creativity combined with his mental suffering.  Here’s how the prologue ends:

But he was under a curse. From his earliest years there loomed over him, born in disease, nurtured in fanaticism, the frightful specter of religious madness. And his life resolved itself into a struggle, fought to the death, between the daylit serenity of his natural circumstances and the powers of darkness hidden in his heart. For a time it seemed that they would be defeated. Yet even when the light shone most brightly on his face, the shadow lurked behind his back; around the sunny, grassy meadows crouched the black armies of horror and despair. At a moment’s weakness they would advance; inch by inch they gained ground; till, with a last scream of anguish, his tortured spirit sank, overwhelmed.

Okay, in that last bit he goes a little overboard, but tell me, do you see writing like this in modern-day biographies? I found this prologue utterly charming, and I was tempted to read the entire book, although now I’m not sure I will, as time is short and my interest in Cowper does have its limits. But this book does make me a little sad that contemporary nonfiction prose can be so … prosaic.

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Monday, March 2, 2009 · 8:28 pm

A final Jane Austen post

19608102 I had a lovely snow day today — well, except for the snow — in which I did a lot of nothing: some reading, some email writing, some napping, some gazing out the window. There was some work I could have done, but I didn’t do it. It was great.

So, I finished Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austena few days ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s less than 300 pages, which has something to do with the scarcity of information on Austen’s life, surely, but at the same time is a welcome change from the usual thick biographical tome. I am reluctant to read those long biographies because as a slow reader, they take me forever to get through.  It’s a pleasure to feel that I’ve gotten a good glimpse into Austen’s life without it taking months.

Tomalin has an engaging prose style and offers a good mix of material — enough information on Austen’s family and friends to give a sense of what her milieu was like, for example, without overwhelming the reader with names and relationships that few will remember. She quotes from Austen’s letters frequently — which are always a pleasure to read — and also gives examples of Austen’s poetry and poetry written by her family members, especially her older brother James. She offers brief readings of the novels, which are always well-done and insightful, and with each novel she considers the question many Austen lovers ask: to what extent does Austen resemble her heroines?  The answer is, generally, not a whole lot.  Tomalin notes possible sources for Austen’s inspiration, both in the people around her and in her own life and experience, but she argues strongly for Austen’s imagination as her chief source of material. As much as we might like to, we shouldn’t imagine Austen as Elizabeth Bennet. (I’m not quite ready to give up this idea, though — ready as I am to believe Tomalin, what I’ve learned about Austen’s sense of humor and liveliness does make her seem like Lizzie, my favorite.)

One thing that stands out in the biography is the way Austen depended on particular conditions in which to write and — most significantly — the fact that she had almost no power to create those conditions for herself. Up until the age of 25 she lived happily in her family home in the village of Steventon and was able to do a lot of writing while she was there, completing drafts of three of her major novels, but at that point her parents decided to leave Steventon and take up residence in Bath, and the news came as a complete surprise and unpleasant shock. Tomalin’s description of the time is sad:

There is a briskness and brightness in Jane’s letters at this time, much keeping up of spirits, but no enthusiasm. She is doing what she has to do, making the best of a situation over which she has no control, watching the breaking up of everything familiar and seeing what was left eagerly taken over; fitting in with plans in which she she has no say, losing what she loves for the prospect of an urban life in a house not yet found; no centre, no peace, and the loss of an infinite number of things hard to list, impossible to explain.

What happened is that she spent the next ten or so years of her life living in Bath at times, but also spending a lot of time traveling from one friend or relative’s house to another, and doing very little writing. Tomalin argues that she wrote best when she could live a quiet, regular life, settled comfortably in one place, but this she couldn’t arrange for herself, as she depended on her parents and other relations for her livelihood.

Eventually her mother (after Austen’s father died) settled in a house at Godmersham where one of her brothers was living, and Austen’s life quieted down enough to allow her to pick her writing back up again, arranging to have Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudiced published and finally getting some recognition and earning a little bit of money for her work. And here is another one of the interminable “what if” questions — what if Austen hadn’t lost those ten years of writing time?  What other masterpieces might she have produced?

There is also the fact that she died when she was only 41, a very young age. What might she have produced if she had lived another few decades? The cause of her death is unknown, but is possibly a lymphoma such as Hodgkin’s disease. Tomalin writes that she was brave and energetic until the end; she suffered for some months before she died but was still writing her unfinished novel Sanditon and towards the very end she wrote some lines of comic poetry, which she dictated to her sister Cassandra.

It seems possible that Austen could have written so much more than she did, but, of course, we do have six wonderful novels and some fun juvenilia, and that’s plenty.

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Friday, February 27, 2009 · 7:42 pm

Notes on reading

  • I just finished the biography of Jane Austen I’ve been working on for a while, and now I see another biography I need to read: Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. Given my mild obsession with that most intriguing writer, I think this is a book I need to read.
  • And here’s another biography I’ll need to read: Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. This is, apparently, the first major biography of O’Connor.  I just finished teaching a couple of her stories last week, and teaching her work always confirms my feeling that she is a fascinating, wonderful, and wonderfully bizarre writer.  I studied her a bit in college and that was fine, but I’m beginning to wonder whether the O’Connor I knew then is the O’Connor I would encounter now if I undertook to read a big chunk of her work all at once.  She would be a good candidate for an author read-through, as it wouldn’t take too terribly long, and I could read a biography at the same time. That would make a great reading project.
  • I learned today what’s up next for my mystery book group: Chester Himes’s The Real Cool Killers. The book is from 1959, and is a part of a series of Harlem detective novels.  I’m not familiar with Himes at all, so I’m excited to have another new author to discover.
  • Musings from the Sofa kindly lent me a copy of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which I’m looking forward to beginning.  We’ll see if the book matches all the hype.
  • I should have the chance to begin the Barbery book soon, as at the moment I’m in the middle of only two books — quite a small number compared with my usual five or so.  I finished Wallace Stevens’s first volume of poetry Harmonium yesterday, which leaves me with only (“only”) my Montaigne collection and The Recognitions.  I’ve neglected both over the last couple weeks, however, and am looking forward to picking them up again soon.
  • I’ve ordered a copy of Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl to read for the Slaves of Golconda discussion at the end of March.  Zweig, I’m just now learning, was an early-20C Austrian novelist and short-story writer; he wrote this particular novel near the end of his life in the 1930s as he was driven into exile by the Nazis.  It was published only after his death and was just translated into English in 2008.
  • I’m reading just as much as ever, probably, but alas, but the reading is not always for fun: I’m in the midst of paper-grading, and let me tell you, student papers are not as much fun to read as mystery novels.  If only they were …

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Monday, February 23, 2009 · 9:04 pm

Montaigne

I was all set to write a post on Gaudy Night, but I’m just not sure I have it in me tonight.  Soon, though, I’ll write on the book.  For now, I thought I’d give you some of my favorite quotations I’ve come across so far in my Montaigne reading (I’ve read 30 out of 107 essays so far).  The best parts of Montaigne are when he’s writing about himself or his essays.  Here is his explanation for why he started to write:

Recently I retired to my estates, determined to devote myself as far as I could to spending what little life I have left quietly and privately; it seemed to me then that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness, caring for itself, concerned only with itself, calmly thinking of itself. I hoped it could do that more easily from then on, since with the passage of time it had grown mature and put on weight.

But I find — “Idleness always produces fickle changes of mind” — that on the contrary it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.

I find this description completely and thoroughly plausible, and I’m certain if I ever were to live in retirement with nothing to do but follow the twists and turns of my mind, my mind would give birth to “chimeras and fantastic monstrosities” as well.  Nothing sounds more hellish to me than living in isolation with my own mind, in fact.  Montaigne’s brilliant move, of course, is to make something great and beautiful out of that isolation.

The following self-description really resonates with me:

I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments.  Chance plays a greater part in all this than I do.  The occasion, the company, the very act of using my voice, draw from my mind more than what I can find there when I exercise it and try it out all by myself …. This, too, happens in my case: where I seek myself I cannot find myself: I discover myself more by accident than by inquiring into my judgment.

I love Montaigne’s very strong sense of his changeability; he makes me feel a little less crazy that there is very little I feel I can confidently say about myself.  He makes me feel better about my faulty memory, too:

There is nobody less suited than I am to start talking about memory.  I can hardly find a trace of it in myself: I doubt if there is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine is!  All my other endowments are mean and ordinary: but I think that, where memory is concerned, I am most singular and rare, worthy of both name and reputation!

I have a bit of trouble believing that his memory is quite so bad, though …  here he strikes a similar note:

I can see — better than anyone else — that these writings of mine are no more than the ravings of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge — even that was during his childhood — and who has retained only an ill-formed generic notion of it: a little about everything and nothing about anything, in the French style.

These are very self-deprecating passages, and yet I never get the sense that Montaigne is being falsely modest or that he doesn’t fully believe what he is saying, however exaggerated it seems. He really believes his memory is awful and his writings are like ignorant ravings.  But I trust him to describe his good qualities accurately as well without worrying whether he is sounding boastful.  I’m not sure there’s another writer who can capture the reader’s trust quite like Montaigne does.  It’s passages like these that will make you trust him:

…whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them, any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself just because the artist had painted not a perfect face but my own.  Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed.  My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me.  I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed.  I feel too badly taught to teach others.

Reading this passage, I come to trust Montaigne — and to fall in love with his writing.

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