Category Archives: Nonfiction

I can’t let the week end, I think, without giving you some more of the wisdom of Johnson (I warned you a while ago you’d be reading a lot of him, if you stuck around here …). I’ve noticed just how often the subject of melancholy comes up in The Life; Johnson struggled with it frequently and wrote often about how to deal with it. Here is what he writes in a letter to Boswell after Boswell has complained that “his mind has been somewhat dark this summer”:

I am returned from the annual ramble into the middle counties … I was glad to go abroad, and, perhaps, glad to come home; which is, in other words, I was, I am afraid, weary of being at home, and weary of being abroad. Is not this the state of life? But, if we confess this weariness, let us not lament it; for all the wise and all the good say, that we may cure it.

For the black fumes which rise in your mind, I can prescribe nothing but that you disperse them by honest business or innocent pleasure, and by reading, sometimes easy and sometimes serious. Change of place is useful…

I know the feeling of being weary at home and weary abroad, and going back and forth and back and forth — or of being weary of busyness and weary of leisure (my school year and my summer) and going back and forth and back and forth — but what else is there to do but go back and forth and back and forth and be grateful that a change comes around every once in a while? When I think of my own state of mind, I realize that the thing I’m afraid of is not change so much as things staying always the same. It’s good to have a regular change of place or change of pace to look forward to. It’s keeping in mind that change will soon happen and therefore I ought to be content with what I have now that’s hard.

There is also this passage, a little further on:

Talking of constitutional melancholy, he observed, “A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them.” Boswell. “May not he think them down, Sir?” Johnson. “No, Sir. To attempt to think them down is madness. He should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest. To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it maybe attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.” Boswell. “Should not he provide amusements for himself? Would it not, for instance, be right for him to take a course of chymistry?” Johnson. “Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”

Now for serious depression, I don’t think this advice would do a lot of good, but it strikes me as quite right for milder cases of melancholy — it seems to me impossible to “think down” sad thoughts, but diversion more often does the trick. Johnson and Boswell talk about diversions of mind — new things to read and study — and those are wonderful, but if I want to fly from my own mind, there’s little better than doing something with my body, a walk or a ride, maybe. The worst thing is to sit there and stew.

And here’s a small touch of Boswell’s humor:

On Wednesday, April 3, in the morning I found him very busy putting his books in order, and as they were generally very old ones, clouds of dust were flying around him. He had on a pair of large gloves such as hedgers use. His present appearance put me in mind of my uncle, Dr. Boswell’s description of him, “A robust genius, born to grapple with whole libraries.”

I have been reading such good posts on 17C and 18C topics, that I am inspired to add something from my own 18C read, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (I’m speeding my way toward the halfway point right now). First of all, here’s Johnson on literary criticism. When a friend says about a new tragedy called Elvira, “We have hardly a right to abuse this tragedy; for bad as it is, how vain should either of us be to write one not near so good,” he responds with this:

Why no, Sir; this is not just reasoning. You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

There’s a certain amount of sense to this, although I think having tried to write a tragedy might give one better insight into how hard it is to write one. But if we think of writing as a craft that some people have taken special pains to learn, then why not expect the best and be critical if we don’t get it? Johnson’s attitude implies that we can recognize quality in something even if we can’t produce that quality ourselves. I kind of like the idea of writing as a craft that a writer sets out to learn, just as a person might set out to learn carpentry. This strikes me as a very 18C, pre-Romantic way of thinking about writing, and, not having been one to buy into the myth of the larger-than-life Romantic artist (or having been thoroughly disabused of that notion in my education so that I forget ever having believed in it at all), it appeals to me.

And here is a conversation on the difference between Richardson and Fielding (and if you want to know something about the 18C novel, you can’t do better than to read Richardson’s Pamela followed by Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews, which will give you two very different views on what the novel can do, two views that remained in tension with one another for a long, long time):

Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, “he was a blockhead;” and upon my [Boswell] expressing my astonishment at so strange an assertion, he said, “What I mean by his being a blockhead is, that he was a barren rascal.” Boswell: “Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?” Johnson: “Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler. Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all ‘Tom Jones.’ I, indeed, never read ‘Joseph Andrews.'” Erskine: “Surely, Sir, Richardson is very tedious.” Johnson: “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.”

Although I love Pamela and Clarissa, I can see why others don’t — if people don’t read for the story, in order not to feel like hanging themselves, they aren’t likely to read for the sentiment, since the sentiment is much more likely to annoy contemporary readers than please them. The class stuff here is interesting, since Richardson was fairly solidly middle class (although the term isn’t historically accurate) and Fielding was a member of the gentry, and yet it’s Richardson who sounds snooty here. Richardson is not so different from his character Pamela who (according to one interpretation) struggles mightily to raise her social standing. Fielding, with his social standing secure, is freer to write about low life and to be, or appear to be, a rascal. It’s interesting, also, that some in the 18C found Richardson tedious — it’s not as though everyone at the time fell in love with seemingly endless novels with hardly any action.

And one more bit of Johnsonian criticism, reported by Boswell:

I wondered to hear him say of “Gulliver’s Travels,” “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”

After my post in which I complained about the mediocre selection of essays in The Best American Essays 2006, I’ve come across a couple very good ones. One of them is Adam Gopnik’s “Death of a Fish,” which appeared originally in The New Yorker, and which I’d already read there. The essay was good enough to reward a re-reading, and I liked it just as much the second time as I did the first. The essay is about the death of Bluie, Gopnik’s daughter Olivia’s fish; it starts off with these irresistable sentences:

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia’s goldfish, Bluie, died the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie’s life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements — including the problem of consciousness and the plot line of Hitchcock’s Vertigo — that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

Poor Bluie gets stuck in a fishbowl castle and no one and nothing can get the thing out. The family scrambles to keep Olivia from finding out, and the ten-year old son ponders what it means to be a fish: “Does Bluie know he’s Bluie?” The parents wonder what is going on in Olivia’s mind, and this is what Gopnik concludes:

Olivia loved Bluie because it is in her nature to ascribe intentions and emotions to things that don’t have them, rather as Hitchcock did with actresses. She knows that she is Olivia because one of the things that she is capable of doing is imagining that Bluie is Bluie. Though you read about the condition “mind-blindness” in autistic children, the alternative, I saw, was not to be mind-sighted. The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary; to see everything as though it might have a mind. We begin as small children imagining that everything could have consciousness — fish, dolls, toy soldiers, even parents — and spent the rest of our lives paring the list down, until we are left alone in bed, the only mind left.

I love this characteristic of the essay — that it can take a small life event and turn it into an opportunity to reflect on large philosophical issues. The essay can be a way of ordering and shaping life, drawing lines and putting pieces together, connecting large and small, relating the private event to the public concern.

The other essay I liked is Michele Morano’s “Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood.” This has a clever structure that does not feel overly clever or gimmicky; Morano takes nine reasons to use the subjunctive mood in Spanish and makes them the outline for her essay, using her failing relationship with her boyfriend as an example to illustrate each of the nine reasons. As she explains the grammar, she explains the relationship. As she explains the grammar, she writes about what can and can’t be said and known, what is certain (the indicative mood) and what is uncertain (the subjunctive). For example:

In language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two. The indicative mood is for knowledge, facts, absolutes, for describing what’s real or definite. You’d use the indicative to say, for example:

I was in love.
Or, The man I loved tried to kill himself.
Or, I moved to Spain because the man I loved, the man who tried to kill himself, was driving me insane.

The indicative helps you tell what happened or is happening or will happen in the future (when you believe you know for sure what the future will bring).

The subjunctive mood, on the other hand, is uncertain. It helps you tell what you could have been or might be or what you want but may not get. You’d use the subjunctive to say:

I thought he’d improve without me.
Or, I left so that he’d begin to take care of himself.

Or later, after your perspective has been altered, by time and distance and a couple of cervezas in a brightly lit bar, you might say:

I deserted him (indicative)
I left him alone with his crazy self for a year (indicative)
Because I hoped (after which begins the subjunctive) that being apart might allow us to come together again.

Morano’s use of the grammar rules gives the reader some distance from what is a pretty harsh story, and it allows her (her persona) a way of talking about the story that’s not self-pitying or whiny. The distancing tactic keeps the story from sounding melodramatic, but it also increases the power of the reader’s response: the voice of the essay is restrained, held back by the organizing structure, but behind and underneath that restraint is some very powerful feeling.

I began reading the essay anthology Best American Essays 2006 the other day, and so far I’ve read only the two introductions and the first essay, but I’m looking forward to making my way through it slowly over the next … who knows … month or so. I didn’t get off to the greatest start with it, however, as Lauren Slater’s introductory essay (she is the guest editor of the year’s volume) irritated me. I was irritated by some things in the essay itself (which I will detail shortly), but I was also irritated because Slater writes in this introduction about people getting angry at her because of what she writes, and I didn’t want to fall so predictably and irritatingly into that camp.

She describes the controversy over her 2004 book Opening Skinner’s Box (apparently I missed this controversy entirely) where people got upset at the way she wrote about science. I don’t know anything about Slater, although Opening Skinner’s Box sounds as though it might be interesting. I’m curious now to know more about her. Does she generally make people irritated and angry? If so, in a good way or a bad way? But I’m always on the lookout for interesting nonfiction, and she might be a good writer to pursue.

But her essay here makes me not to sure. It’s true, I did like some things about it. When she discusses the essay genre, she sounds pretty sensible:

Essay writing is not about facts, although the essay may contain facts. Essay writing is about transcribing the often convoluted process of thought, leaving your own brand of breadcrumbs in the forest so that those who want to can find their way to your door. Essays, therefore, confuse people.

But I’m not so sure about this bit, on an Elizabeth Hardwick essay:

The essay was an artery connecting the mind of the reader with the writer, the writer bare and unpretentious, the writer without the veil of character, without the rouge and foundation that compose fiction, which is, when all is said and done, a game of dress-up.

I don’t think I buy this notion of fiction as a game of dress-up, at least not when it’s juxtaposed against the essay as pure self, as revealing the body beneath the costume. Isn’t this a rather naive way of viewing the truth that both genres tell? An essay isn’t pure communication from person to person, first of all, or pure self-revelation, and second, fiction strikes me as much more complicated than what might happen when an author dresses up and pretends to be somebody else.

And then she discusses academic writing in a way I don’t like, juxtaposing its density and jargon to an essayist’s reliance on clarity:

Unlike academic writing, the essay can be defined by its insistence on, and celebration of, the vernacular, a lyrical way of speaking that aims always at inclusion. The academic learns to hide his insecurity behind bloated verbiage. The essayist cannot hide his uncertainty, and by admitting it, he can hope to transform it.

I don’t think this is fair to academics, first of all, although I do agree that a lot of academic writing sucks. But certainly not all of it does, and there is a lot that is quite good. I was just saying to the Hobgoblin the other day that one of the things I appreciate about my graduate training — training in academic writing largely — is that my professors really valued good writing. I struggled with my sentences when I was writing for them. Now, yes, anyone can trot out examples of bloated academic writing and crystal-clear essayistic writing, but I don’t think the opposition Slater sets up between academics and essayists holds up, and it’s this method of setting up false dichotomies that’s irritating me.

And then I’m not sure she recognizes that sometimes density of language is necessary and that there is a place for jargon. She says this about academic writing:

I also learned a lot about the language of academia, and this has helped me clarify principles I believe are relevant to the writing of good essays. Academia, at least the part I saw, thrives on jargon. For instance, it is not uncommon, on the Slater-Hater listserve, which has thankfully moved on to other discussions, to read this sort of thing: “We identified the same correlates for MMPI-2point codes types in VA men as Gilberstadt and Duker did for the same MMPI two point code types 40 years earlier.” Or, “Self-esteem as a construct has a validity rating of .02% when compared to a two tailed t-test reliability rating of 4.”

Now, these last sentences don’t make sense to me, but I’m sure they make sense to the group of scientists who were involved in the discussion, and, given that context, those two incomprehensible-to-me sentences are probably the best way of saying what the people involved wanted to say. There’s a place for specialized language, language it takes training to understand. Sometimes people use that language in order to confuse or mystify others or to make themselves sound smart, but sometimes they use it because it’s the best way of saying what they need to say to the people they want to say it to.

But I feel bad for getting irritated because Slater also says this in her introduction:

Being the object of such predation over an extended period of time has led me to think a lot about the critical role of kindness in writing and in life. It has led me to see that I, like the academics of whom I speak, have in the past written pieces with too much tooth, something the press generally rewards. I no longer write this way. I cannot abide ill will in my own work, and I dislike it when I see it in the work of others. I now believe that good writing, and good living, must have a core of gentleness.

So how can I get irritated with her when she speaks so well about kindness and gentleness?  How intensely annoying!

Based on what I’ve read so far in The Life of Johnson, Johnson was a lovely letter writer, although an unreliable one. Boswell includes quite a few of his more interesting letters — both business ones and personal ones — and in the personal letters he’s always apologizing for taking so long to write. Here are a couple passages I particularly liked, both written to his friend Joseph Baretti who was currently living in Milan:

My vanity, or my kindness, makes me flatter myself, that you would rather hear of me than of those whom I have mentioned, but of myself I have very little which I care to tell. Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young. My only remaining friend has changed his principles, and was become the tool of the predominant faction. My daughter-in-law, from whom I expected most, and whom I met with sincere benevolence, has lost the beauty and gaiety of youth, without having gained much of the wisdom of age. I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much happiness, there is, at least, such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart.

This is so typical of Johnson, I think; it’s a very sad passage, very beautifully written. If you’ve read Rasselas (and if not, why not?) the tone may feel familiar. Here is another typical passage:

I know my Baretti will not be satisfied with a letter in which I give him no account of myself; yet what account shall I give him? I have not, since the day of our separation, suffered or done any thing considerable. The only change in my way of life is, that I have frequented the theatre more than in former seasons. But I have gone thither only to escape from myself … I am digressing from myself to the play-house; but a barren plan must be filled with episodes. Of myself I have nothing to say but that I have hitherto lived without the concurrence of my own judgement; yet I continue to flatter myself, that, when you return, you will find me mended. I do not wonder that, where the monastick life is permitted, every order finds votaries, and every monastery inhabitants. Men will submit to any rule, by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance. They are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves.

There is much in this passage that strikes a chord with me, from living “without the concurrence of my own judgement,” to the desire to mend, to recognizing the attractions of having someone else order your life for you. I don’t really want another person or an institution to order my life for me, but I do understand what he means by “the tyranny of caprice and chance.”

I finished Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps a couple days ago and want to write one last post on it; it’s a book that has inspired a number of posts — you can read more here and here.

I wasn’t as taken by the last chapter as I was by the first three — the last chapter discusses Gerard Nerval, who is someone I didn’t know much about, and the chapter didn’t really inspire me to learn more, but it is interesting in the way Holmes uses it to discuss his failure to write Nerval’s biography — or rather, his failure to write a successful one. He wrote a 400-page book on Nerval, but couldn’t get it published (he says “wisely no publisher ever touched it”) and recognized later that it didn’t really work. By this point, Holmes had already written his hugely successful biography of Percy Shelley, so it wasn’t as though he didn’t know what he was doing; rather, he just couldn’t get a handle on the strangeness of Nerval’s life. It’s interesting that some people might not be good subjects for biography no matter how good the biographer. Here is what Holmes says on the subject:

I was thus, in a way, committed to psychoanalysing Nerval for myself; to achieving what even Dr. Blanche had been unable to do. And as my months went by in Paris, I became more and more convinced that was exactly what could not be done, and that I had reached the limits of the biographical form, as a method of investigation. Instead, I found myself slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him. As if self-identification — the first crime in biography — had become my last and only resort.

Holmes has very interesting things to say about the process of writing biographies; for example, he describes what he sees as the two main parts of the process: first, the gathering and assembling of facts about the subject and, second, creating

a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a “point of view” or an “interpretation”, but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions.

He says the first part of this second stage is “a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject”; it is “pre-biographic” but essential — it is like falling in love with the subject and without that devotion the biographer won’t be as willing to follow in the subject’s footsteps. But there comes a moment when gaps occur between biographer and subject: “the true biographic process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where this naive form of love and identification breaks down. The moment of personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal, objective re-creation.”

So the biographer must become the subject, walking in the subject’s footsteps, as Holmes did with Stevenson, and then establish that he or she is not the subject after all, in a process that can be painful, as Holmes recognizes. Holmes goes back and forth between closely identifying with his subjects and being intensely and painfully aware of the gaps between them. He his suspicious of his identification with his subject, as in the case of Nerval, but he revels in it too.

It is this emotional involvement in his research and writing that I find so appealing, I think. Here is Holmes on researching Percy Shelley:

The pursuit became so intense, so demanding of my own emotions that it continuously threatened to get out of hand. When I travelled alone I craved after intimacy with my subject, knowing all the time that I must maintain an objective and judicial stance. I came often to feel excluded, left behind, shut out from the magic circle of his family. I wanted to get in among them, to partake in their daily life, to understand what Shelley called the “deep truth” of their situation. I was often in a peculiar state , like a displaced person, which was obviously touched off by some imbalance, or lack of hardened identity, in my own character.

Thus far in my life I haven’t been terribly interested in Percy Shelley, but this makes me want to read Holmes’s biography of him anyway. Holmes is a writer you can come to feel you trust — someone this self-aware, this willing to discuss his weaknesses and how they affect his writing, has got to be a trustworthy writer. I don’t mean trustworthy in the sense of having his facts straight, although I’m sure he does that, but rather that I trust his interpretations and instincts and choices.

I love books that deal with an intellectual problem or issue in a personal way — books that are as much about the author grappling with the issue as they are about the issue itself. Richard Holmes’s Footsteps is just such a book; it’s about biography as a genre and about the lives of various writers Holmes has researched, but mostly it’s about Holmes’s process of learning how to write biography and his discoveries about what we can and can’t know about the past and about other people’s lives.

I’ve written about Holmes’s chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson, where he writes about following in Stevenson’s tracks through France; I’ve now read his chapter on William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft and I’m halfway through his chapter on Percy Shelley. The Wordsworth/Wollstonecraft (mostly Wollstonecraft) chapter is about their experiences of the French Revolution, but Holmes gets at the topic by writing about his own experience of the student uprising in Paris in May 1968. He tells about getting caught up in the action on the streets and how an officer held a rifle to his chest, and when Holmes said he was English to try to get out of the situation, the officer told him to mind his own business and go back home to England. Holmes moves from there to considering what it was like for Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft to be in an analogous situation — foreigners experiencing another country’s revolution. Holmes wants to know what it was these two were seeking in France and what they might have felt.

This leads him to think about the differences between a rational reaction to revolution — a philosophical take on events — and an imaginative and emotional one — its personal impact. Wollstonecraft was capable of being very philosophical about the revolution, in the sense of distant and nonemotional. She could even be a little glib. But when she actually lived through some of the revolution’s most dramatic events, it changed her. Both Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft went through some personally harrowing times while in France, and somehow these personal events (love affairs, babies) and the political ones connect. Holmes speculates that the real effects of revolution aren’t so much political as they are personal — the internal turbulance revolution causes matters just as much as the political turmoil, and the internal revolutions might cause longer-lasting changes. He isn’t quite so despairing about the failure of the May 1968 uprising when he thinks about revolution in this sense — the immediate political goals might have been left unfulfilled, but it did cause changes in the way many people thought and acted.

Perhaps these are the conclusions one might expect from a biographer, one who is focused more on individual lives than on the sweep of history.

At any rate, I like Holmes’s method of placing himself in the middle of his discussions of 18th and 19th century people, and he’s careful not to make too much of the parallels too — the comparison between the French Revolution and May 1968 can only go so far, after all. But it gives him a way of getting inside the experiences of people long dead — a way of imagining what they might have seen and thought and felt.

Holmes has some amazing things to say about what it’s like to write biographies and he makes me want … not to write a biography exactly, but to research a writer deeply. I may write about this more later (I’m by no means through with posting about this book!), but for now I’ll leave you with this quotation:

I’m taking a break from summing up my year (more on that to come though!) to write about Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, of which I have now read about 35 pages, and 35 captivating pages they are. I’ve found a new quotation for my blog (see above) and have become convinced I need to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Holmes is following in Stevenson’s footsteps and writing about his travels and also about his devotion to Stevenson and to the genre of biography.

In one scene, Holmes describes how he has become so obsessed with Stevenson, he feels that Stevenson is actually there, and as Holmes walks through towns and looks at faces, he searches for Stevenson’s likeness. But then he experiences a disappointment: although he has tried to follow his footsteps exactly, he realizes that the bridge on which he crossed a river is not the one Stevenson had used; instead, he finds an old crumbling bridge a little further upstream that marks his path. His response is powerful: “The discovery put me in the blackest gloom. It was stupid, but I was almost tearful.”

What he realizes is that he cannot follow in Stevenson’s literal footsteps — the route has changed over the course of the hundred or so years that separate them — but also that he cannot find Stevenson himself; he cannot perfectly follow the traces of his life. A biographer can only approximate the life, can only follow in the subject’s footsteps at a distance; there is always a gap between biographer and subject:

Even in imagination the gap was there. It had to be recognized; it was no good pretending. You could not play-act into the past, you could not turn it into a game of make-believe. There had to be another way. Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact. The adult distance — the critical distance, the historical distance — had to be maintained. You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic….

… it was the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called “biography” really means. I had never thought about it before. “Biography” meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

I’m a sucker for travel metaphors and I like this one — to write a biography is to travel along with the subject, following in that person’s footsteps on his or her life’s journey. Holmes is physically acting out his life’s work, covering the landscape Stevenson had crossed, attempting to see the things Stevenson’s saw, but seeking Stevenson’s mental and emotional landscape as well as his geographical one. And he both succeeds and fails in this attempt — time and change create a space between Holmes and Stevenson that can’t be bridged. I like that it is a journey that teaches him this lesson and that he has turned this lesson into a book; Footsteps is a travel book in two senses (but all travel books are this, aren’t they?), physical travel across a landscape and an intellectual and emotional journey as well.

The Places in Between, part II

So I’ve been meaning to write about Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. I thought this was a fantastic book for a lot of reasons — the writing is wonderful, the story of his walk is enthralling, and the information he gives about Afghanistan is of the type you won’t find in most other books about the country.

As I was reading I had a tendency to focus on the adventure parts of it, but I don’t want to neglect the political and historical aspects: I learned a lot about the history of Afghanistan, as Stewart gives descriptions of the towns and villages he passes through and tells a bit of their past. He talks a lot about the complex religious heritage of the place, including the Buddhism practiced in ancient times and the more contemporary Islamic history; he explores the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha sculptures destroyed by the Taliban only 9 months before he arrived there. He also criticizes westerners who lament the lost Buddhas but know very little of what’s happening to the people alive there today.

I was fascinated by the conversations with villagers Stewart recounts, and the very vague and hazy picture of the west many of the people have — not so different from the hazy picture of Afghanistan many westerners have, although it’s easy, particularly for Americans, to think that the whole world knows everything about us. Many of the people he talked to had never traveled farther than a few miles from their villages. There are very few women in the book, as for the most part they keep themselves separate from the groups of men Stewart moves among, although, interestingly, in the remote mountainous area the Hazara people inhabit, women are allowed a little more freedom. Stewart stays away from overt political statements, but he does criticize western politicians for saying ill-informed things about Islam and westerners in general for not understanding or caring much about the region.

And then there’s the adventure:

Daulatyar was only fifteen kilometers away and there were probably two hours of daylight left, but I had forgotten how much deep mud and wet snow slowed my pace. I felt muffled in the snow-fog and imprisoned by the rain hood I was wearing. I threw back the hood. I could hear and see again. The day was very silent and the plain seemed very large. The snow driving into my eyes at a forty-five-degree angle made me feel much freer, but my left foot seemed frozen to a cold iron plate.

Exhaustion and repetition created within the pain a space of exhilaration and control. And at this point, I saw two jeeps, their headlights on, weaving slowly toward us through the fog. They were the first vehicles I’d seen since Chaghcharan. When they reached me, an electric window went down. It was the Special Forces team from the airstrip.

“You,” said the driver, “are a fucking nutter.” Then he smiled and drove on, leaving me in the snow. I had seen these men at work when I was in the army and in the Foreign Office and I couldn’t imagine a better compliment. I walked on in a good mood.

Stewart insists on walking every inch of the way, even though he must walk in freezing temperatures over mountains, making his way through snow drifts, often in wet clothes. He’s sick much of the way, probably having caught a virus in the water and because he doesn’t eat very well. He depends on local hospitality traditions, often very reluctantly kept, for his food and shelter every night. At one point he lay down in the snow exhausted and in despair, and even though I knew he made it out of Afghanistan alive, I was afraid he wouldn’t get up again. His dog Babur rescues him, barking and whining until he gets up and starts walking again.

Babur turns out to be an important part of the story; Stewart picks him up in an Afghan village when a family, who had been mistreating the dog, offers to give him away. He is a huge mastiff of one type or another, and Stewart spends much of the book dragging him reluctantly along. Poor Babur causes a lot of trouble; at every village they pass, a pack of dogs comes chasing after him looking for a fight. Stewart is constantly beating back these wild dogs with his walking stick. But Babur is an excellent companion and his life with Stewart is much better although more physically demanding than his previous one.

And, finally, here is an example of the kind of writing you’ll find in this book:
Almost every morning, regrets and anxieties had run through my mind like a cheap tune — often repeated, revealing nothing. But as I kept moving, no thoughts came. Instead I became aware of the landscape as I once had in the Indian Himalayas. Every element around me seemed sharper, the colors more intense. I stared, expecting the effect to fade, but the objects only continued to develop in reality and presence. I was suddenly afraid, uncertain I could sustain this vision.

This moment was new to me. I had not dreamed or imagined it before. Yet I recognized it. I felt that I was as I was in the place, and that I had known it before. This was the last day of my walk. To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion seemed too neat. But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible. I had no words for it. Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.

I finished Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between and loved it, and I’ll write about it soon, but I’m too tired right now. The book does remind me of how fond I am of walking and particularly of going on epic walks (Rory Stewart walks across Afghanistan in the winter through the mountains).

I just came across this article from the New York Times about how the novelist Will Self walked from Kennedy airport to Manhattan — about 20 miles — rather than taking a cab. He flew to New York from Heathrow and he didn’t take a cab to Heathrow either; he walked there from his home, about 26 miles. He wanted to do the New York walk because:

It would take him through parts of the city that most people never notice while driving in a car: an experience that Mr. Self, a student of psycho-geography, believes has imposed a “windscreen-based virtuality” on travel, cutting us off from experiencing our own topography.

“People don’t know where they are anymore, “he said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I’m not quite sure what “psycho-geography” is, although it sounds interesting. I like his idea a lot — that the best adventures available today are those we can experience in near-by places, if we just get outside and actually experience them.

I’ve written before about how much I liked Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust, a history of walking. Does anybody know of other good books about walking — either theoretical/historical ones, or stories of long walks? I know of Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods, and Dark Orpheus mentioned Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines as one that would interest me. Others? I haven’t read enough contemporary travel writing, and this is one form of it that particularly interests me.

More on Rory Stewart tomorrow …

I’ve begun Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, a book about his walk across Afghanistan starting in January, 2002. It’s quite absorbing, and it makes me want to go on adventures. Before this trip, he’d spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, but he’d had to skip Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to let him into the country. After the fall of the Taliban, he decided to give it another try. This is how he begins his Preface:

I’m not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia.

I love that attitude, the “I’m not sure why I did it, I just wanted to” attitude. Because why do anything at all, really? In a lot of ways walking across Asia makes as much sense as anything else anybody might choose to do. So he walked across Asia because it was there and he could.

Can I tell you how much this makes me want to go off on some crazy, senseless adventure?

So far the book is very well written, very absorbing, and full of sentences like these:

It was possible that they had simply told Qasim and Abdul Haq to take me outside the city and kill me. No one would notice in the middle of a war. I felt it would be ludicrous to be killed only eight kilometers into my journey and not for the first time worried that when I was killed people would think me foolhardy.

I’ve read story after story of Stewart walking into strange villages with no idea whether he’ll be welcomed or attacked. In his previous walks, people had always taken him in, following customs of hospitality, but in Afghanistan things are not so simple — while the hospitality custom is still strong, so is fear of strangers in a country so unsettled.

Stewart briefly describes what fills his mind while he’s walking day after day. This is the only passage I’ve come across so far that talks about walking in a more theoretical way; I kind of wish he’d do it more often, but that’s not what the book is about (and if you’re interested in that subject, I highly recommend Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust):

Before I started, I imagined I could fill my days by composing an epic poem in my head or writing a novel about a Scottish village that would become more rooted in a single place as I kept moving. In Iran I tried earnestly to think through philosophical arguments, learn Persian vocabulary, and memorize poetry. Perhaps this is why I never felt quite at ease walking in Iran.

In Pakistan, having left the desert and entered the lush Doab of the Punjab, I stopped trying to think and instead looked at peacocks in trees and the movement of the canal water. In India, when I was walking from one pilgrimage site to another across the Himalayas, I carried the Bhagavad Gita open in my left hand and read one line at a time. In the center of Nepal, I began to count my breaths and my steps, and to recite phrases to myself, pushing thoughts away. This is the way some people meditate. I could only feel that calm for at most an hour a day. It was, however, a serenity I had not felt before. It was what I valued most about walking.

As an occasional backpacker, I’m interested in what people think about when they spend hours walking (or something similar like running or riding) — for me, sometimes get in the meditative mood Stewart describes and I agree with him that it’s one of the best things about walking.

More on this book later …

So I finished Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree yesterday, just as I thought I might. The weather never did get nice enough to go on a bike ride, although The Hobgoblin, Muttboy, and I did go on a hour-long walk in the rain at our local woodsy park. After that, it was nice to come home and take a warm shower and stay indoors for most of the rest of the day.

I thought the book was a lot of fun. It’s rather addictive; I’d finish a chapter and consider moving on to something else or drifting off to sleep, but then I’d look at the list of books read and books bought that begins the next chapter, and I’d think, oh, just one more. Next thing I knew, the book was finished. Hornby’s attitude toward books is infectious. I like how he reads all kinds of different stuff; he writes just as well and just as enthusiastically about a collection of Chekhov’s letters as he does about, say, Mystic River.

There were a couple things that bugged me. He has a bit of an attitude about the “literary novel”; he reads them and reads them happily, but he picks on them an awful lot, to the extent that I began to wonder why, and I also began to wonder if it’s really so clear just what the “literary novel” is. Is it really a clearly-defined category? When talking about Chris Coake’s book of short stories We’re in Trouble he says this:

Sometimes, when you’re reading the stories, you forget to breathe, which probably means that you read them with more speed than the writer intended. Are they literary? They’re beautifully written, and they have bottom, but they’re never dull, and they all contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas. And Coake never draws attention to his own art and language; he wants you to look at his people, not listen to his voice. So they’re literary in the sense that they’re serious, and will probably be nominated for prizes, but they’re unliterary in the sense that they could end up mattering to people.

Now this strikes me as unfair. Why should the “literary” be that which doesn’t matter to people? I think he’s got too much invested in this idea of the literary and that he too easily categorizes and dismisses books based on their supposedly “literary” qualities and readers based on their devotion to those qualities, whatever they are. I’m not sure most readers actually read with this category in mind.

Hornby plays around with Hemingwayesque, hyper-masculine posturing about books and writing a little too much for my taste. Books are always in a battle with other books or with other forms of art. This is what’s on the book jacket; it’s quite funny — but also … eh, not my thing:

Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute vs. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper vs. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception — Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and then you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

This is clever, but after a couple of passages about fights among books and the degree of strength or wussiness it requires to write, I start to feel a little alienated. What saves it for me is that Hornby is not actually taking any of it seriously; he’s mocking himself a bit, pretty much admitting he’s not very good at the Hemingwayesque, hyper-masculine stuff.

I didn’t come away with a lot of new books I want to read, although I did pick up a couple of recommendations. One is Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books; I remember Jenny D. has an intriguing post on it. The other is Janet Malcolm’s book on Chekhov, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. This seems like a very interesting mix of literary criticism and personal narrative, a combination I like very much.

In addition to Alice Munro’s Runaway, I recently began Nick Hornby’s Polysyllabic Spree, and I’m enjoying it immensely. I remember other bloggers writing about this book enthusiastically, and I couldn’t resist. Apparently books about books are what I need these days; I’m reading this book shortly after Sara Nelson’s So Many Books — although I think I’ll like Hornby’s book better. Books about books are good during times of stress I think — they are usually fairly light reading, they make good company, and they keep me thinking about things I’ll read when I have more time.

Hornby organizes his book into chapters that cover one month’s reading. For each month, he begins with a list of books bought and books read, and then he discusses those books for a few pages, not in a whole lot of depth, but very amusingly. Somehow he manages to say substantive things in very short chapters, so that I don’t feel he’s rushing through his book discussions but I don’t get bogged down in details either. Sara Nelson’s book had a similar format, short chapters covering her reading over a certain period of time, but I finished her book feeling that the tone was too breezy and that she hadn’t really said all that much. Hornby doesn’t go into depth, but somehow he captures the essence of his response to a book in a way that’s both succint and satisfying. I’m not sure how else to account for why I liked one book and not the other except to say that it might just be a personality thing. In these books, personality is everything.

Side note — I feel a little bad picking on Sara Nelson in the way that I have over a few posts now. Just recently, Kimbofo had a post asking people if they review books they don’t like. I do. I believe it’s important to think about what doesn’t work in a book and why, and I think such analysis makes book talk everywhere stronger and more interesting. But I do still feel a little bad.

An excerpt from Hornby on rereading and on forgetting:

I don’t reread books very often; I’m too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality. (I recently discovered that a friend who was rereading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Rudge. That’s just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead.) But when I tried to recall anything about [Stop-Time by Frank Conroy] other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy’s Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say, fifteen and forty, I haven’t even read the books I think I’ve read. I can’t tell you how depressing this is. What’s the fucking point?

It’s both depressing and it’s true — it’s true for me certainly; my memory of what I’ve read can be so bad. And here’s Hornby doing the numbers on what he’s read:

I read 55 percent of the books I bought this month — five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: They go up on the shelves straight away (as opposed to onto the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again … And anyway, anyone who is even contemplating ploughing straight through over a thousand pages of [Robert] Lowell’s poetry clearly needs a cable TV subscription, or maybe even some friends, a relationship, and a job. So if it’s OK with you, I’m taking the poetry out, and calling it five and a half out of eight — and the Heller I’ve read before, years ago, so that’s six and a half out of eight. I make that 81 1/4 percent! I am both erudite and financially prudent!

I suppose one reason I’m liking the book is that I often think this way myself — maybe without the humor, but certainly with the obsession.

I finished Sara Nelson’s book So Many Books, So Little Time last night and although I didn’t like it any better by the end than I was liking it when I wrote this, I did find myself fairly contentedly reading on to the end. I’m not sure why the experience of reading the book was positive when I felt unimpressed by it — perhaps I enjoyed the experience of not liking it or maybe I kept hoping it would get better. Its short chapters certainly kept me feeling that I was breezing my way through it which made it easy to keep going. Perhaps it’s that I enjoy book talk so much I’ll contentedly read it even when it doesn’t impress me.

The things that annoyed me about the book can probably be summed up by Nelson’s comment in one of the book lists at the back; here she is commenting on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. She finds it:

a surprisingly readable novel about racism and family in South Africa, proof positive that prize winners — this won the Booker — are not automatically homework.

Why surprisingly readable? Why assume this book would be dull? And why assume prize winners are homework? There’s something anti-intellectual about the tone here that bugs me.

But I was struck by one thing she said, and I’d like to get your opinion on it. She talks about the “skip-around method”: “the one where you read the end first and then work your way back to the middle, if not the beginning,” and she says that “people skip around in books all the time.” For the first 30 years of her life, she writes, she wouldn’t have considered doing such a thing, but she considers it now because she’s stuck in a book she really wants to finish and she thinks that reading the ending might motivate her. She does a survey of her friends and finds that many of them don’t read in order.

I can’t think of a time when I’ve done this. Do you skip around? I pretty much subscribe to Nelson’s earlier philosophy that:

You have to start at the beginning and get to the end before you’re allowed to comment on what came in between. There’s an order to these things you must respect. Beginnings, middles, and ends are meant to be beginnings, middles, and ends: confuse them at your own peril.

I don’t even read collections of stories or essays or poems out of order, or at least not often. I’m probably too devoted to the “rules” of reading, too worshipful of the text as the author presents it to me. But as far as novels go, I don’t really want to know the ending until I get there.

What do you think — is skipping around common?

I’m nearing the end of Frances Burney’s Letters and Journals, about 100 pages from the end of a 560-page collection. As I think back over the book, I’m realizing that a few sections really stand out and the other parts, while I might not remember them in detail, give me a more general feeling for what Burney’s life was like. The parts that stand out are the publication of Evelina and Burney’s acute embarrassment any time anybody mentioned the novel — and they mentioned it a lot because it was hugely successful, the sections where Burney meets a lot of famous people (Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, for example), the period she was working at court and got to know the king and queen, and, just recently, her account of her mastectomy.

This last is truly horrifying. She got breast cancer at the age of 58 while she was living in Paris with her French husband. She saw numerous doctors, some of whom wanted to operate and others who did not. About a year after she first noticed the lump in her breast, they decided to operate. She tells the story over 10 pages or so, and it’s one of uncertainty and agony. The doctors — for some reason — decided that they wouldn’t tell her the date of the operation but would give her only two hours notice. And then they wait for three weeks until they actually follow through, so she spends three weeks wondering when it will happen.

And, of course, there’s no anesthesia at this time. Burney didn’t mention any kind of pain-killer whatsoever, and it seems she was conscious through the entire operation. She describes it with a lot of raw detail; I won’t quote here because it’s too awful, but she doesn’t spare the reader at all. She describes being in tremendous pain, but also being embarrassed when seven doctors enter the room to perform and observe the operation. She does her best to keep her maid and nurses by her side to have some feminine comfort, but all but one dash off in fear. She describes climbing up into her bed surrounded by all the doctors — how different from a modern operating scene! — who place a hankerchief over her face, although it does little good as she can see through it. When she sees the “glitter of polished steel,” she shuts her eyes.

I’ve never read anything like this before, and I wonder at Burney’s motivations for telling it in such detail. She tells the story in a letter to her sister, and she frames the story with a warning to women to pay attention to the signs of cancer. It must be that the experience was so profound she felt she needed to record it, and it’s probably also the novelist in her who has turned many episodes of her life into set-pieces in the letters and journals. And I would think describing the details would help her get some kind of control over or distance from the experience.

I’ve always been grateful for modern medicine, but I feel this even more strongly now.