Category Archives: Nonfiction

First of all, make sure to check out the choices for the next Slaves of Golconda group reading — everyone is welcome to participate!

I have now finished the second half of Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England, and I found the second half at least as interesting as the first (which I wrote about here).  The second half contains chapters on “Prudent Economy,” “Elegance,” “Civility and Vulgarity,” and “Propriety.”  Some of these chapter titles don’t fully make sense to me, as the chapter on propriety is about all the public entertainments that were available to women at the time and doesn’t analyze the word propriety at all, but that’s a small quibble.

The chapter on “Prudent Economy” was particularly interesting as it was about women’s duties as household managers, and it emphasizes the point that maintaining a household was seen as a prestigious and important role, and women were determined to enjoy what power that role gave them and not let men encroach on it:

As the mistress of a household, the genteel bride tasted of administrative power and exuded quasi-professional pride.

Now, of course, being able to manage a household would be small comfort to a woman who wanted to do other things and couldn’t, but Vickery’s point is that many women did take pride in this work and it did require considerable management ability.

One of the hardest parts of this management job was dealing with servants; when people complained about a “servant problem” it wasn’t just idle and privileged complaining.  Vickery points out that servants’ wages rose throughout the 18C and opportunities for other kinds of work, in factories for example, became more plentiful.  So genteel women were constantly having to replace their servants, particularly their female servants, who were much more likely to leave than their male counterparts.  Vickery makes the job of managing servants sound complicated:

… in its staffing the household functioned like most eighteenth-century commercial enterprises.  In the acquisition, coordination, and direction of a range of different workers, the managerial effort of the genteel mistress-housekeeper was akin to that of a putting-out master or gentleman farmer,  and far removed from the received picture of the unruffled lady of the manor.

Hiring servants was one part of the problem, but maintaining authority over them was another:

The construction and maintenance of a mistress’s authority over her servants could not be taken for granted; a point reinforced by the detailed printed advice on the preservation of supremacy and widespread warnings about a lack of innate deference in the servile.

Now this makes me wonder what the experience of the servants was; I’m pretty sure I can’t blame them for running away so often, but Vickery’s focus is specifically on the experience of genteel women, so I’ll have to find out about that in another book.  She does say that women servants seemed not to worry much about whether they could get a good reference or not and that they were “strikingly independent and mobile.”

The chapter on “Elegance” covers women’s experiences with fashion, particularly clothes and household furnishings.  Vickery’s argument here is that shopping was considered a “form of employment” and was not a frivolous pursuit as some historians have assumed; women were not simply consumers buying up the latest fashion in order to compete with their neighbors, but rather shopping functioned as a way of establishing networks among women who would help each other get information and make decisions:

Beyond its instrumental role, the exchange of information ‘in the fashion way’ had wider implications for feminine culture.  Filling their letters with ‘fashions, flounces, and flourishes’, women shared doubts, advice, and experience.  Basic to female relationships was the exchange of consumer services.

The last chapter is particularly interesting, arguing that the possibilities for entertainment outside the home increased dramatically over the course of the 18C.  Vickery goes through many examples of what was available, including the theater, various kinds of musical entertainments, and other spectacles such as militia reviews, ladies’ processions, firework displays, magic shows, and trials, which were public.  There were also assemblies, masquerades, ridottos, musical parties, and routs, as well as pleasure gardens where people could gather and experience a greater degree of freedom (and also potential danger) than they found elsewhere.  Women also participated more and more in charitable institutions, as well as other kinds of clubs devoted to literature or science.  Many of these social opportunities were available in London, but increasingly they were also popular in outlying cities.

There is so much to learn from this book. I found it highly readable; it is an academic book, so she spends a good bit of time discussing what other historians have argued and arguing against their conclusions, but it’s interesting to learn about the debates that historians have engaged in about the time period.  Overall, it’s a great description of what women of the genteel classes in the 18C were likely to experience, and a good example of history that is a pleasure to read.

I just finished Amanda Vickery’s book on women in the 18th and early 19th centuries, The Gentleman’s Daughter, and I enjoyed it very much; I learned a lot from it, it was very well written, and it had cool pictures — lots to like there!  I hope to post on it again soon.

But having finished one nonfiction book, my eye was just caught by two others, one of which has to do with the same time period as Vickery’s book.  It’s Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly, and I heard about it in a New Yorker review by Adam Kirsch.  I love Keats, and so any book about him would catch my eye, but this one focuses on ideas about death and immortality and is subtitled “A Personal Biography,” both of which sound particularly appealing.  Here is what Kirsch says about it:

Instead of simply recounting the life and analyzing the poems, Plumly pursues his intuitions through a series of linked essays, all of them concerned with aspects of the poet’s death and afterlife … Through this interweaving of themes and episodes—a “walk around in Keats’s life and art, not simply through them”—Plumly emphasizes, as a more conventional biography never could, the fatal, fated quality of Keats’s career. He shows how Keats, in a way that feels unique even among the doomed Romantics, became posthumous while he was still alive.

Everything about this appeals to me, from the pursuit of intuitions to the series of linked essays to the quotation about walking around in Keats’s life and art.  I do love biographies that take unusual approaches (although truthfully I haven’t read that many, which doesn’t make sense, but … it’s true).  This sentence from Kirsch was interesting:

To understand why Keats meditated so constantly on death, it is not necessary to look to his biography; one need only listen to his writing.

Plumly’s book is biographical, and yet from what I can tell from the review, it doesn’t look for easy answers in the biography, but makes more complicated arguments about the relationship of art and life.

Perhaps I should read a more conventional biography of Keats too, but this kind of book appeals to me more.

The other book that caught my eye also came from the New Yorker.  One of their short reviews mentioned Collections of Nothing by William Davies King, an autobiographical book about collecting things nobody wants, like food packages and labels and illustrations from old dictionaries.  Collecting as a hobby doesn’t really interest me, but something about a person who collections illustrations from old dictionaries does.  And I like the idea of an autobiography told from a particular slant.  Here’s what the review says:

What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one.

Now that I think about it, midlife crises don’t interest me either, but still, I want to read this book!  The author strikes me Nicholson Baker-esque, and you all know how I feel about Nicholson Baker.  Plus the author spent hours in the Yale library “reading the most obscure books he could find.”  Doesn’t he sound interesting?

This is my favorite kind of nonfiction — the kind that takes a familiar genre such as biography or autobiography and tweaks it a little to create something new.

I’m really enjoying Amanda Vickery’s book The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England; it is a survey of women’s lives in the 18th and early 19th centuries, making arguments about women throughout the country, but looking specifically at certain families in Yorkshire and Lancashire, largely because women here happen to have left lots of letters behind that are rich with information.  The book also focuses on a particular class, women of the lower gentry and those connected to the professional classes — wives and daughters of landed gentlemen, doctors, attorneys, clerics, and certain kinds of merchants and manufacturers.

The author critiques some of the arguments and assumptions that previous scholars have made about the time period, including the idea that the 18th and early 19th centuries saw the dramatic rise of the domestic woman enshrined at home and kept from all contamination by the outside world, whereas in earlier time periods, women had a more active role in public life.  Vickery writes that many scholars:

offer a narrative of decline and fall, using women’s manuscripts to  illustrate a tale of increasing female passivity and ever-tightening domestic encirclement.  In fact, it is almost impossible to open a book on wealthier British women between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that does not offer a catalogue of declining female options.

The actual situation was not that simple, however; the separation between home and outside world was never clearcut, and women stayed in touch with that outside world in various ways throughout the centuries.  In terms of the kind of work women did within the home and outside of it, the situation in the 19th century doesn’t look so different from earlier centuries.  Scholars argue that the idea of “separate spheres,” public and private, for men and women became more and more important in this time, and yet, Vickery argues, this idea has always existed and still exists to a certain extent today.

Vickery also argues that the category of women she’s discussing tends to get lost in scholarly accounts, that people focus on the aristocracy and also on the merchant and manufacturing classes and see these two groups as separate and antagonistic.  They miss, however, a middle group of lower gentry and professionals that connects the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie and that shows how complex social status and family connections could be.  Some families have such a mix of people, including landed gentry, professionals, and manufacturers that they are nearly impossible to classify.   She’s arguing for a more complex view of status than many scholars have seen:

It has been customary to imagine the gentry, the professions and the upper trades as distinct strata of the social hierarchy.  It makes more sense, however, to see each as a thread in the complicated texture of genteel society — a woven fabric or an intricate cobweb being more exact metaphors to conjure social structure and social relations in the provinces.

After an introduction and a chapter describing the class system, Vickery moves to chapters on love and marriage and on motherhood.  There’s all kinds of interesting stuff here, including a detailed description of one particular courtship that is representative of the time and that shows what a long drawn-out process it often was.  Getting to the altar required a lot of time and patience — all that persuading of parents and the extended family and all that negotiating about money to be done — and involved some danger on the woman’s part: if the engagement ended during the negotiation period, the woman’s reputation would be damaged, so once she accepted a proposal, it was in her best interest to finalize the marriage as quickly as possible.

Vickery also argues that we shouldn’t think in terms of arranged marriages versus love matches (one older scholarly account says that the 18th century saw the fall of the arranged marriage and the rise of the love match); instead, most marriages were a mixture of the two — a combination of affection, prudence, and parental approval, and that people could easily find themselves genuinely torn between their romantic inclination and their desire for parental approval.

In the chapter on motherhood, Vickery discusses another common story told about the 18th century, which is that the decline of the midwife and the rise of doctors to oversee births is evidence of a decline in women’s power.  At one time, the story goes, childbirth was an entirely woman-centered event and a manifestation of female solidarity, but then male doctors began to intrude on this women’s space and to establish their own power there.  Vickery argues, however, that women themselves often wanted to have the doctors present, and that women themselves can therefore be seen as responsible for the decline of the midwife.  Vickery sensibly points out that when women realized doctors were able to help them in ways midwives couldn’t, they chose in favor of the doctor.

One other interesting thing: in the writings Vickery researched, she found lots of references to the physical discomforts of pregnancy, but very few references to nausea, which is such a common thing to talk about today.  She hypothesizes that vomiting was “seen as both normal and healthy given the universal reliance on purging as a prophylactic and general cure-all.”  Much greater emphasis was put on “melancholy, aches and immobility of pregnancy.”

I’ve only gotten through the first few chapters of this book — I’m greatly looking forward to reading the rest.

I’m going on a school retreat for most of the upcoming week, and so won’t be around to post for a while … just so you know.

I’m about halfway through George Saunders’s book of essays The Braindead Megaphone and am enjoying it very much.  When I picked it up I wasn’t sure what to expect; I’ve read some his short essays in the New Yorker and found them interesting and entertaining in their bizarre other-worldliness, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to read an entire book like that.  What I discovered, though, is a mix of seriousness and strangeness that is appealing.

The essays I like best are the more traditional ones, the ones that have more-or-less traditional essayistic elements such as a thoughtful, reflective voice and a mix of personal experience and social commentary.  The title essay, for example, makes a point about the dumbing down of our culture caused at least in part by certain media figures blaring stupidities at us all day long — these figures are like a guy coming into an intelligent, literate party with a megaphone and starting to talk.  He’s not necessarily saying the stupidest things that could be said, but in fact it hardly matters what he says because everyone is forced to listen to him and they find it hard if not impossible to keep their own conversations going.  The smart people are drowned out and everyone suffers because of it.

I don’t find the argument of this essay particularly original, but his style makes it worth reading — it’s funny, conversational, insightful in a low-key, understated kind of way.  Here are the closing two paragraphs to give you a taste of what it’s like:

This battle, like any great moral battle, will be won, if won, not with some easy corrective tidal wave of Total Righteousness, but with small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once.

We have met the enemy and he is us, yes, yes, but the fact that we have recognized ourselves as the enemy indicates we still have the ability to rise up and whip our own ass, so to speak: keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself.  Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.

This is so typically George Saunders (if I’ve read enough to make such a claim), with its capitalized “Total Righteousness” and the whipping of our own asses — the directness of it — and it’s inspiring and moving in a way I don’t see in his more satirical pieces.  I like this more personal, intimate, sincere voice.

I enjoyed some of the later essays even more, though; the second essay is about a trip to Dubai in which Saunders describes the fabulous wealth on display, as well as all the poor people working to make those displays possible.  His persona in the essay is that of a man who hasn’t seen much of the world and is thrust into an entirely new situation and left to grapple with it alone.  His reactions vary wildly as he notices the extreme economic inequities but also the happiness with which exploited workers live out their exploitation, for their home countries offer much less opportunity than they can find here.  All this sounds so serious, though, and while the essay has a serious point to make (and a very moving conclusion, but I don’t want to keep quoting his conclusions here), it’s lightly humorous at the same time.  One of Saunders’s strengths, I’m seeing now, is using humor to make you want to relax and enjoy the ride, and then with the easiest, most natural of transitions hitting you with a moving scene or a profound thought, and then moving off in another direction toward another point that adds to or modifies or maybe even contradicts the first one.  It’s a style that invites pleasure and contemplation both and that allows for nuance and complexity, as Saunders wanders here and there, exploring an idea or an experience rather than preaching about it.

There is also a wonderful essay telling how Kurt Vonnegut transformed his ideas about reading and writing and another one on Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain as an early inspiration to become a writer.

What matters most to me in an essay collection is the voice, the sense of the person behind the words (the extent to which this sense is an illusion doesn’t matter), and it’s this quality that makes me wish this book wouldn’t end.  I’m a bit surprised to say that Saunders makes a good companion; I knew he was a funny, sharp social satirist, but not that he could write essays with so much feeling in them.

One of my book groups was supposed to meet today to discuss Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness, but it got postponed, so I’ll have another couple weeks to stew over this book’s flaws. No, I did not like it one bit (first thoughts here). The idea sounded interesting, if not entirely new — that Americans are obsessed with happiness to the detriment of our souls and our deeper imaginative, creative selves — but the execution failed. At times I got so annoyed with the book I found myself wanting to defend happiness. Can it really be so bad??

The problems begin with the writing itself. It’s overwritten, florid, occasionally verging on the incomprehensible. There are too many passages like this:

The American dream might be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins. Our passion for felicity hints at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives and then dies — for all those curious thrushes moving among autumn’s brownish indolence, for those blue dahlias seemingly hollowed with sorrow, for all those gloomy souls who long for clouds above high windows.

I sort of see what he means here — the demand for constant happiness can flatten out experience and make it bland — and yet does happiness really mean that one does not notice thrushes and dahlias and the beauty of clouds? The writing too often veers toward bad poetry, the sort of thing angsty adolescents might compose. It’s also repetitive, and I couldn’t discern what made one chapter different from another. Against Happiness would have been much better as an essay rather than a book; it feels bloated at a mere 150 pages.

A friend told me that Wilson incorporates short biographies of famous depressives, and my first response was to be suspicious of these, thinking that I’d be bored by the familiar list of people like Virginia Woolf and Vincent Van Gogh whose depression may have contributed to their ability to produce great art. And yet when I sat down to read the book, I came across these sections with relief, as they helped to ground the writing a little bit. But even so, these sections are the familiar, clichéd portraits of famous depressives I was afraid I was going to find.

The argument can be vague as well. He assumes we know what he means by the difference between happiness and joy and by his talk of “polarities,” as in:

What is existence if not an enduring polarity, an endless dance of limping dogs and lilting crocuses, starlings that are spangled and frustrated worms?

and:

to be alive is to realize the universe’s grand polarity. Life grows out of death, and death from life; turbulence breeds sweet patterns, and order dissolves into vibrant chaos.

All this sounds grand, but what does it mean? I can get a vague emotional sense of what he means, but not a concrete logical understanding.

He works with two categories of people, the melancholic and the happy, that are vastly oversimplified. At times I feel like I know the kinds of people he’s talking about when he talks about “happy types,” the people who look for an uplifting lesson in everything they read, for example, or people who don’t have the imagination to understand the suffering that someone else is going through. But most of the time the “happy types” he describes don’t seem real to me. My guess is that many people, certainly more than Wilson claims, will acknowledge the tragic side of life, even if they need to be pressed, and they’ll agree that the search for happiness is ultimately bound to be futile. He makes much of the statistic that 85% of Americans claim to be happy, but he (or perhaps the study that generated the statistic) doesn’t define what people mean by that claim. If I were asked whether I consider myself happy, I might be among the 85% that said yes, although I don’t consider myself a “happy type.” I would probably say yes, though, because even though I suffer from melancholy and maybe even mild depression now and then, I have a good life and I have joyful moments and I feel like I’m doing okay even though life is so harsh and our existence ultimately doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’m muddling along, and that’s about the most anybody can hope for, and so I’d call that a kind of happiness.

The book has an uncomfortable feeling of self-congratulation, of pleasure taken in the fact that the author is part of an elite group of people who aren’t deluded like the vast majority of idiots out there. Maybe I’m too optimistic about what “most people” are like, but this attitude doesn’t sit well with me.

I did feel a moment of recognition when Wilson described how the happy types long for complete control over their lives; they don’t like the idea that a sad event can occur at any moment or that their lives could be turned upside down in an instant. I recognized myself in his description, as I am always looking for just the right way of doing things — the right balance of work and life, the perfect job, the perfect place to live, the right way of organizing my day, the right balance of social and solitary time. I want to feel perfectly organized and on top of things so that nothing takes me by surprise to cause any busyness or stress or worry. Obviously this is impossible, but I still hope, somehow, to make things perfect. I would be better off learning to see, as Wilson recommends, that the stability I long for is really a sort of premature death, and that living means constant change.

I wanted to have more moments of recognition like this one, however, and was disappointed. I’ll have to look to other writers for a more convincing celebration of melancholy.

You can read Hobgoblin’s take on the book here.

I’ve been enjoying reading Alan Lightman’s book A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit; I am nearly finished, with only a few essays left. The essays I liked best were the first few; these first looked at Lightman’s life and his experiences in science and novel-writing and then turned to his ideas about creativity, science, and language. There follows a series of essays on famous scientists including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and others. These essays are interesting, each one telling a little about the scientist’s life and contributions plus something about their quirks as people and as researchers, but I prefer the more theoretical essays that look at science more broadly. I think the remaining essays may turn again in this direction.

One of the things I love about the book is how sensitive Lightman is to what happens to a scientist when he or she is working, what goes on in their minds and how their bodies are involved in the process. He describes his own experiences of inspiration, the moment when he finally breaks through to the core of a problem and finds he can solve it, and the description is intensely physical:

Then one morning, I remember that it was a Sunday morning, I woke up about five a.m. and couldn’t sleep. I felt terribly excited. Something strange was happening in my mind. I was thinking about my research problem, and I was seeing deeply into it. I was seeing it in ways I never had before. The physical sensation was that my head was lifting off my shoulders. I felt weightless. And I had absolutely no sense of myself. It was an experience completely without ego, without any thought about consequences or approval or fame….

The best analogy I’ve been able to find for that intense feeling of the creative moment is sailing a round-bottomed boat in strong wind. Normally, the hull stays down in the water, with the frictional drag greatly limiting the speed of the boat. But in high wind, every once in a while the hull lifts out of the water, and the draft goes instantly to near zero. It feels like a great hand has suddenly grabbed hold and flung you across the surface like a skimming stone. It’s called planing.

This feeling is not unique to science, of course; it’s a feeling one can have in any creative moment, but it’s interesting to me that while science can seem so cerebral, Lightman draws attention to the way it affects the scientist’s body as well as his mind.

Not only does scientific discovery manifest itself physically in the scientist’s body, but Lightman says the scientific manifestations can be different than those of art:

Over the years, I have learned to recognize the different sensations of science and of art in my body. (Sometimes the sensations, such as the creative moment, are the same.) I know the feeling in my body of deriving an equation. I know the different feeling in my body of listening to one of my characters speak before I have told her what to say. I know the line. I know the swoop of a idea. I know the wavering note. Most of the time, these feelings all swirl together as a rumbling in my stomach, a wondrous and beautiful and finally mysterious cry of the world ….

Am I mistaken, or is this kind of writing, physical and mystical at the same time, not at all typical of science writing?

Not only does Lightman write about how the body is involved in scientific discovery, but he writes about emotion, too, and aesthetics. He quotes the mathematician Henri Pointcaré on the subject:

The privileged unconscious phenomena, those susceptible of becoming conscious, are those which directly or indirectly affect most profoundly our emotional sensibility. It may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked à propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic experience that all real mathematicians know, and it surely belongs to emotional sensibility.

“Mathematical beauty,” “geometric elegance” — doesn’t this make you want to become a mathematician? It has that effect on me, at any rate. He goes on to talk about how Einstein and others were surely motivated by aesthetics when they looked for new theories, and he gives examples of scientists who judge theories based on their beauty or ugliness or elegance:

The Nobel chemist Roald Hoffmann tells his students that it is the awareness and appreciation of the “aesthetic aspects of science,” rather than mere quantitative analysis, that leads to discovery.

This makes me realize that science and art are not so far apart after all, which, I’m sure, is part of Lightman’s point.

While I liked Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage a lot (a lot — my previous posts on it are here, here, and here), the last 50 pages or so had some irritating sections. I suppose when you read a book as raw as this one, some places are bound to irritate you. Dyer says some strange things about women, he sounds more whiny than he did earlier in the book, and he begins to write more about his rage, which is interesting I suppose, but what he describes is so far outside my own experience I began to tune out a bit.

But, still, I loved this book; I love this kind of quirky, non-categorizable nonfiction, the kind that takes you interesting places, although along the way you have no idea where you’re going. I want more books like this one! (If you know of any, please say so.)

I’ll leave you with a passage, one that captures something I’m familiar with — the way our desires and regrets shift and change:

I accept the consequences of doing things which I will later regret. In a sense then I regret them before I do them. Instead of resolving to learn to cook I regret to inform myself that by the end of the year I will still not know how to cook (because I hate cooking) even though learning to cook would improve my life no end. Instead of doing the exercises which will save my right knee … I resign myself to regretting not having done something about what will, in a few years, be a debilitating, potentially crippling ailment. I resign myself to things: this is my own warped version of amor fati: regretting everything but resigning myself to this regret. However things turn out I am bound to wish they had turned out differently. I am resigned to that.

Take this book which is intermittently about Lawrence. Right now I profoundly regret ever having started it. I wish I hadn’t bothered. But if I hadn’t started it I would have regretted not having done so. I knew this and so I got on with it and now that I have got on with it I regret that I got on with it in the way I did. I regret that it will not turn out to be the sober, academic study of Lawrence that I had hoped to write but I accept this because I know that, in the future, when it is finished, I won’t want it to be any different. I’ll be glad that this little book turned out how it did because I will see that what was intended to be a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence had to become a case history. Not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing. Anyone can have a breakdown, anyone. The trick is to have a breakdown and take it in one’s stride. Ideally one would get to the stage where one had a total nervous breakdown and didn’t even notice.

I was never terribly won over by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, and Out of Sheer Rage is not making me change my mind about that, but it is interesting me in Lawrence’s other works, his letters and criticism.

(I was trying to trick you with my post title into believing that I’d finally moved on to something besides Out of Sheer Rage, but I haven’t — sorry! I will post about something else soon — the Elizabeth Bowen novel I just finished, for example.)

Geoff Dyer himself feels ambivalently about Lawrence’s novels; he knows he should re-read them for his book, but he really can’t bear to, and so he doesn’t. It’s not that he disliked them that much; it’s just that he has no desire to re-read them. Instead, he’d rather read more in the other material — the notes to the great works rather than the great works themselves:

As time goes by we drift away from the great texts, the finished works on which an author’s reputation is built, towards the journals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, jottings. This is not simply because, as an author’s stature grows posthumously, the fund of published texts becomes exhausted and we have to make do not only with previously unpublished or unfinished material but, increasingly, with matter that was never intended for publication. It is also because we want to get nearer to the man or woman who wrote these books, to his or her being …. A curious reversal takes place. The finished works serve as prologue to the jottings; the published book becomes a stage to be passed through — a draft — en route to the definitive pleasure of the notes, the fleeting impressions, the sketches, in which it had its origin.

I have not experienced this myself, or perhaps I haven’t yet reached that stage, except possibly in the case of Virginia Woolf, but I do find what he has to say about Lawrence’s notes and letters intriguing. He quotes from Lawrence’s wife Frieda to explain his attraction to these more ephemeral forms of writing:

“Since Lawrence died, all these donkeys years already, he has grown and grown for me … To me his relationship, his bond with everything in creation was so amazing, no preconceived ideas, just a meeting between him and a creature, a tree, a cloud, anything. I called it love, but it was something else — Bejahung in German, ‘saying yes’.”

Dyer goes on to write that he finds this “saying yes” most clearly in Lawrence’s letters — it exists in the novels but comes through most excitingly elsewhere. There’s something about Lawrence’s writing that makes a reader wish to have known him, in a way no one, he says, really wishes to have known E.M. Forster.

Dyer then connects these ideas about Lawrence’s notes and letters to his own writing:

If this book aspires to the condition of notes that is because, for me, Lawrence’s prose is at its best when it comes closest to notes.

I do like this reversal of the traditional genre hierarchies, the “rules” that say that novels are more important and literary than letters and certainly more so than notes. I love the idea of aspiring to the condition of notes and would say that Out of Sheer Rage does have a note or letter-like quality; the ideas are developed, yes, but there is a rambling nature to the book, a spontaneity that you don’t often find in nonfiction.

Dyer gives Lawrence’s book Sea and Sardinia as an example of fine Lawrentian prose; Lawrence took no notes while visiting Sardinia, and wrote his book a few weeks afterwards based on memories:

The lack of notes, in other words, accounts for the book’s note-like immediacy. Notes taken at the time, on the move, and referred to later … would have come between the experience and the writing. As it is, everything is written — rather than noted and then written — as experienced. The experience is created in the writing rather than re-created from notes. Reading it, you are drenched in a spray of ideas that never lets up. Impressions are experienced as ideas, ideas are glimpsed like fields through a train window, one after another. Opinions erupt into ideas, argument is conveyed as sensation, sensations are felt as argument.

I wonder about this, actually — couldn’t it be the case that writing that seems the most spontaneous and impressionistic might be the writing the author most labored over? Wouldn’t spontaneity more likely be an illusion than a reality? I wonder if Lawrence really wrote the book in the way Dyer describes, and if, in fact, Dyer really wrote his book the way these passages imply he might have — carelessly, lazily, on-the-fly. Perhaps he labored over every transition, every seemingly-spontaneous and emotion-filled fragment and exclamation point.

At any rate, Dyer closes this particular section with an intriguing paragraph:

“A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,” warned Lawrence and the kind of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels. Which is why the novelists I like best are, with the exception of the last-named, not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscindki, Thomas Bernhard …

A future reading list perhaps?

In a comment on my previous post about Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Smithereens, drawing attention to the book’s title, asked, “Is there anywhere in the book a raging moment or is it pure second degree?” Actually, there’s not a whole lot of rage in the book, at least not of the obvious, overt sort. For the most part, what rage there is lies under the surface, smoldering beneath Dyer’s melancholy, laziness, indecision, and contrariness.

The book’s title comes from a D.H. Lawrence quotation:

Out of sheer rage I’ve begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid — queer stuff — but not bad.

This is a perfect epigraph for the book — Dyer’s own book is ostensibly about D.H. Lawrence, but really is not about Lawrence at all. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s about much more than Lawrence. It’s also “queer stuff — but not bad.” Not bad at all.

There is one section I’ve come to with more overt rage, however, and it’s the only section I’ve felt ambivalently about, the only one where Dyer began to irritate me. In this section he talks about a book a friend had given him, a collection of critical essays on Lawrence, the sort with titles like “Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality” and “Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence.” Merely reading the book sends him into a rage:

Oh it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad. I thought about getting [the editor’s] phone number and making threatening calls. Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book. In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.

I burned it in self-defence. It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.

Yes, Dyer throws a temper tantrum because he can’t stand academic criticism. He goes on about how much he can’t stand academics either:

Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.

I’m very tired of this clichéd idea that academics secretly hate the thing they study and that they can’t write and that everything they say is inscrutable and pointless. Yes, sometimes this is the case, but obviously not always, maybe not even often.

But Dyer knows this too. First he starts talking about literary criticism he does like, the criticism written by other writers:

If you want to see how literature lives then you turn to writers, and see what they’ve said about each other, either in essays, reviews, in letters or journals — and in the works themselves. ‘The best readings of art are art,’ said George Steiner (an academic!); the great books add up to a tacit ‘syllabus of enacted criticism’.

He claims that writerly criticism is different from academic criticism because writers throw their lives into it:

Brodsky has gone through certain poems of Auden’s with the finest of combs; Nabokov has subjected Pushkin to forensic scrunity. The difference is that these works of Pushkin’s and Auden’s were not just studied: they were lived through in a way that is anathema to the academic …

And then, with that closing ellipsis — Dyer’s, not mine — he saves himself, in my opinion, by finally coming to some sense. The next paragraph reads:

Except this is nonsense of course. Scholars live their work too. Leon Edel — to take one example from hundreds — embraced Henry James’s life and work as perilously intimately as any writer ever has. I withdraw that claim, it’s ludicrous, it won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. I withdraw it unconditionally — but I also want to let it stand, conditionally.

And now he gets all angry again —

Scholarly work on the texts, on preparing lovely editions of Lawrence’s letters is one thing but those critical studies that we read at university … Research! Research! The very work is like a bell, tolling the death and the imminent turning to dust of whichever poor sod is being researched. Spare me. Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.

Well. As much as I’d like to stay irritated with Dyer, I relent a little bit, because that closing sentence was wonderful, and so is this passage, just a little after the above:

That’s why Lawrence is so exciting: he took the imaginative line in all his criticism, in the Study of Thomas Hardy or the Studies in Classic American Literature, or the ‘Introduction to his Paintings’. Each of them is an electrical storm of ideas! Hit and miss, illuminating even when hopelessly wide of the mark (‘the judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got’). Bang! Crash! Lightning flash after lightning flash, searing, unpredictable, dangerous.

Yes, I too love criticism that takes the imaginative line, which Dyer’s book certainly does, and which any kind of critic is capable of doing, writer or not — a fact Dyer does recognize, if grudgingly. This makes me long to read the Study of Thomas Hardy and Studies in Classic American Literature. And, although I’m still mildly irritated with Dyer, I’m more than willing to read on in his book …

I’m reading Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage and am liking it at least as much as his later book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. (Interestingly the cover of my edition is similar to the one pictured here, except that Dyer has no beard and his head is shaven. I have an ARC, which would explain things; I guess he grew some hair out before the hard cover edition.) It’s a book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence. It’s a little about his obsession with Lawrence (and here it occasionally reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, Nicholson Baker’s U and I), but mostly it’s about his attempts to write and his failure, and all the things he does to work around this problem. He’s got a very dry sense of humor, which I find immensely appealing and which makes me laugh, when I hardly ever laugh at books. He’s also got a contrarian view of the world, which I also find appealing and funny.

I thought I’d give you a few excerpts today. There’s really so much to enjoy in this book, it’s one I could write multiple blog posts about, although I’m reading it too fast to make that work. Here’s a passage where he talks about his writing process:

From the start I’d known that I had to write my book as I went along. There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research and then, when they read everything that there is to read, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately. In the case of Lawrence I knew I’d have to make sure that I finished writing my book at exactly the moment that I had satisfied my curiosity, and to do this the writing had to lag fractionally behind the reading.

The book he’d originally intended to write about Lawrence will never get written, although this one got written in its place, but there are times I wish the original idea had worked out, although exactly what the original idea was I’m not entirely sure. But here’s one vision of what the original idea might have been; this passage comes after a discussion of Dyer’s collection of photos of Lawrence:

What I might do, it occurred to me in Rome, was prepare an album of these pictures, arrange them in a fashion that pleased me — interspersing them, when appropriate, with pictures of my family and myself — provide captions (lengthy ones, quite often) and then, late in the day, remove the pictures so that only the captions and the ghosts of photos remained. And not to stop there: to rearrange these captions so that they referred only occasionally to the photographs for which they had been intended, so that they existed, instead, in relation to each other, — that, I thought to myself, might not only enable me to get started on my study but even prevent my falling into idleness and depression for a while.

In a way he has done this, as much of the book discusses photos of Lawrence. He also has interesting passages on language and emotion — how language doesn’t really capture what we feel — or don’t feel:

The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term ‘awe.’

And then there’s this:

We drank our beer on the balcony of the deserted cafe, looking across the deserted road at the deserted station, engulfed, periodically, by the thunder of hooves and the whine of ricochets from the television. For the third or fourth time that day a strange floaty indifference to everything came over me. Since this sensation was utterly unfamiliar and not at all unpleasant I decided that, if experienced again, I would refer to it as contentment.

Dyer’s persona is often like this: detached, melancholic if not depressed, analytical, isolated, and often surprising. As he’s obsessed with getting and not getting writing done (mostly not), he returns often to the figure of the writer and the space within which a writer works:

… did it matter so much where you lived? The important thing, surely, was to find some little niche where you could work; to settle into a groove and get your work done. Logically, yes, but once, in north London, I had found myself walking along the road where Julian Barnes lived. I didn’t see him but I knew that in one of these large, comfortable houses Julian Barnes was sitting at his desk, working, as he did every day. It seemed an intolerable waste of a life, of a writer’s life especially, to sit at a desk in this nice, dull street in north London. It seemed, curiously, a betrayal of the idea of the writer. It made me think of a picture of Lawrence, sitting by a tree in the blazing afternoon, surrounded by the sizzle of cicadas, notebook on his knees, writing: an image of the ideal condition of the writer.

Or so it had appeared in memory. When I actually dug it out it turned out that there was no notebook on his knees. Lawrence is not writing, he is just sitting there: which is why, presumably, it is such an idyllic image of the writer.

This, I suppose, accounts for some of Dyer’s “failure” as a writer (although obviously he’s not, really): his image of the writer doesn’t actually involve the writer doing any writing. This book is about wanting to be a writer, but not wanting to do the work. Which would be highly annoying, if Dyer weren’t, in reality, such a good writer …