April 12: I said it was bad, and I meant it.

A gentle reader took issue with last month’s post on Library Porn: fabulous places for booklovers everywhere:  “I relished the Rabelaisian (would that it were Menippean and broke forth into verse!) satire in Ex vero portu librorum pars quattuor de bibliotheca erotica (From the Veritable Haven of Books, Installment the Fourth Concerning the Pornographic Library).”

But then he cut loose:

Placing weather first and foremost is a sine qua non of wretched writing, but rather than opening with “It is a rainy night with thunder and lightning,” introduce the porn theme immediately with learned literary allusion to Bulwer-Lytton and library classification systems: “It was a dark and STEAMY night in the PA-PN stacks.”

But is Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s “It was a dark and stormy night” really the sine qua non of wretched writing? (We’ve written about the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing contest here and here.)  Coincidentally, about the same time I was scribbling the sentence-in-question, blogger Levi Stahl over at I’ve Been Reading Lately was wondering:

Like nearly everyone alive today, I’ve not read Bulwer-Lytton. I’ve long thought, however, that he didn’t deserve his infamy–at least not if the sole piece of evidence against him is, as it usually seems to be, the above sentence. Oh, it’s not a good sentence. Yes, it would likely have made Nabokov or Updike shudder. But is it really that bad? If we can pretend briefly that the opening phrase hasn’t yet become a cliché, then the ground for complaint are two:

Crummy father.

1 The unnecessary, interpolated elaboration of the gusts of wind
2 The poorly positioned parenthetical that locates the book in London.

Both are clumsy and could easily have been improved by the casting over them of even a weak editorial eye–but is the sentence as it now stands all that bad? Worse than what our best-selling, low-grade thriller writers turn out on page after page? Worse than James Frey‘s Hemingway-cum-Fight Club masochismo? I just don’t see it.

When did the opening line of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford become a cliché?  A Google’s Ngram viewer is inconclusive. The phrase was repeated a lot in the first three decades, but then faded over the subsequent century.

Stahl is convinced that Bulwer-Lytton has been damned for the wrong sin? Has he been consigned to the wrong circle of literary hell?

According to John Sutherland‘s Lives of the Novelists (Yale University Press) he was the world’s worst husband and father.  He abandoned his daughter to die of typhus in a London lodging house.  His wife eventually accused him of hiring an assassin to kill her. What’s a little rain compared with that?

Oh read it for yourself, over here.  Meanwhile, here’s the blogger’s Ngram:

A few weeks ago, I finally met Michael Krasny, the genial presence behind KQED’s Forum – though we’d been Facebook friends for some time.  He was a kindly and  affable man – surprisingly humble and more friendly than I had anticipated.

From his 2007 memoir, Off Mike, I also learned that we have something in common:  In our greener years, we’d both interviewed Gore Vidal – and survived.  That’s not nothing.

I was a teenage Lois Lane for the Michigan Daily. It was usual for the editors at what was hailed as “the New York Times of student newspapers” to send us out last minute, without warning or preparation to interview grandees visiting Ann Arbor.

So I wound up being shoveled into a taxi with Vidal, knowing little more than that he was a famous author – indeed, his name was a household word at that time.  My memories of that event are captured somewhere in the bowels of microfilm records, but the memory is even less perishable.

Michael Krasny, on the other hand, was a young academic in 1976, and had done his homework thoroughly.  Here’s how he remembers the event:

“Heading into the interview, I was sure – both of us being literary types with left-wing politics – that we would become fast friends. I wanted to do a professional job and ask good, thoughtful, intelligent questions.  I read as much as I could on Vidal and reread early works of his like Myra Breckinridge and The City and the Pillar, as well as his newest novel at the time, Kalki.  More impressed by Vidal’s essays than his fiction, I still felt certain that the two of us would have much to talk about and would get on well.

When we met briefly before going to the television studio set to begin the interview, Vidal seemed world weary, as if afflicted with terminal weltschmerz, but more important, he smelled of liquor and his voice was thick with booze. …

Now the amazing thing about the interview was that once we were on the air, Vidal was “on” in a way that took me as much by surprise as his prior world-weariness, condescension and anti-Semitism.  The lights and cameras rolled, and he was a different man: he sounded sober and was all performer. I gave him a short but flattering introduction that I had memorized, mentioning that I was an English professor and that Vidal’s real name was Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. He quickly ripped into me for bringing up what he archly called “my Christian name,” adding that, unlike our born-again president, Jimmy Carter, he, Vidal, was a born-again atheist. …

Vidal was animated and electrified, palpably alive as he proceeded to skewer his favorite targets – The New York Times, Republicans, corporations, Reagan, Nixon, President Jimmy Carter.  Some of it was clever stuff, refined and caustic humor that I might have enjoyed were it not for the anti-Semitic cracks and the invective against English profs. …

As the interview moved into politics and I asked Vidal about his social concerns, another self emerged.  Vidal was suddenly benign, casting himself in the role of munificent socialist.  When the interview ended and the cameras were off, he once again became world-weary, cold and aloof, the man I had met before the interview, as sterile as I’d found his apocalyptic novel Kalki.”

Ah, I remember it well.  The weltschmerz, the condescension, the weight-of-the-world sighs, as he gazed outside the window of the taxi as we tooled through Ann Arbor to his speaking engagement (though he was thoroughly sober, to my knowledge).  I was, of course, thoroughly intimidated, in a way no prep would have alleviated, anyway.  Then, at the theater on campus, he spoke to a crowd of what appeared to be mostly well-heeled, well-dressed Republican women, and managed to offend them all in the course of 45 minutes.

Finally, during a question-and-answer period, with written questions submitted from the audience on tiny bits of paper, someone let him have it: he was conceited, overbearing, a snob with an ax to grind… well, you get the picture.  So did he.

“That’s right,” he admitted. “I only go out into the world to have all my biases and prejudices confirmed.”

“That’s what makes me different from all of you!”

It was a good line.  Even the Republican women laughed.

Medical science has a lot to answer for. (Creative Commons)

“As you get older – and this has to be faced – most writers go off,” Martin Amis said.  “I lay the blame at the feet of medical science.”

He was not (to start again), what one had expected.

Amis came to town, and was slight, and witty, and dry, and thoroughly serious despite his zingers.  He was not the ferocious, controversial hurricane – he was quiet and scholarly. And he was preoccupied by age.

Amis put it this way in his most recent novel, Pregnant Widow:

Your hams get skinnier—but that’s all right, because your gut gets fatter…. Shrill or sudden noises are getting painfully sharper—but that’s all right, because you’re getting deafer. The hair on your head gets thinner—but that’s all right, because the hair in your nose and in your ears gets thicker. It all works out in the end.

He cited W.B. Yeats: “Now I may wither into the truth.”

Although occasionally withering, he was far from withered.  As for his way of making a living, “What could be more agreeable?” he asked.  Non-fiction, compared with fiction, is a chore: it makes him start the day with “heavy tread and heavy heart.”

Fiction isn't faster. (Photo: Mae Ryan)

Salman Rushdie told him that he writes essays at twice the speed of fiction – “I find that, too,” he agreed. “All creative stuff comes from the spine and up through the head.”

“What a lyric poem does is stop the clock.”  Oddly, he did a similar trick with his acclaimed Time’s Arrow (1991),  a book that describes the Holocaust, backwards.

In a puzzling move, Amis began the evening with recounting long lists of Nazi atrocities – a return to Time’s Arrow.  The subject matter is timeless, he said, and defies “that greasy little word – closure.”  (Fine.  About time someone took that cliché down.) “Rule Number One:  Nobody gets over anything.  It’s the deaths of others that kill you in the end.”

What’s fiction’s verboten subject?  Sex.  “It’s too tied up with the author’s quiddity,” he said, although he’s famous for writing about … sex.  What else?  Religion. “You have to write around religion, although there’s nothing more fascinating, in a way.”

“Writing about religious people is something else a novel cannot do,” he said because you’re taking on all sorts of inherited preconceptions, he said. “It’s not just clichés of the pen,” such as “‘bitterly cold,'” he said, but those of the heart as well.  In novels, “a great clattering tea trolley comes in, and it’s religion.”

Off the hook.

Paradise Lost?  That’s poetry. “But fiction is a rational form.  To be universal, it has to be rational.” (I wanted to shout, “What about Father Zossima?” but restrained myself.)

Questions from the audience inevitably discussed his buddy Christopher Hitchens, who had the peculiar habit of referring to himself in the third person – “not usually consonant with sound mental health.” An example: at the first sign of injustice, he was wont to say, “the pen of the Hitch will flash from its scabbard.”

Another question: what is Amis reading?  “What I am not reading is 25-year-old novelists.”

But his finest, and perhaps most unexpected moment, occurred when a man asked why he was turning to events of half-a-century ago to furnish his novels.  The question had a slightly belligerent edge – or did we imagine it?  In any case, a suppressed collective gasp rippled over the crowd.  But Amis, much to his credit, took the question at face value, and answered it earnestly, and utterly without snark.

“It’s not that you are desperately searching for a subject.  It isn’t the idle selection of a subject – it chooses you,” he said. “My whole body is involved.”

Taking apart Theodor Adorno‘s famous dictum that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Amis responded, “Actually, there was poetry during Auschwitz,” he said.  John and Mary Felstiner would have agreed – and were probably somewhere in the audience.  Paul Célan comes to mind, but so do many others.

Whither the novel? “There’s been a qualitative change in fiction in the past generation.”  It’s the end of the meditative novel, he said.  “Forward motion is paramount now.” The future novel will be “more and more streamlined, and aerodynamic, and plot-driven and character-driven.”

All this thanks to “the acceleration of history and the diminishing attention span.”

Julian Fleisher as George Davis, Kristen Sieh as Carson McCullers, Stephanie Hayes as Erika Mann, and Erik Lochtefeld as W.H. Auden (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

I’m a fan of New York City’s Public Theater, so I was especially cheered to read about its new world première musical February House this month.  How could one not be chuffed about a play that focuses on W.H. Auden‘s house at 7 Middagh Street, and the miscellany of writers, composers, and artists it attracted for housemates?

I read about the production not in a New York paper – at least not initially – but rather in Jim Holt‘s charming post in the London Review of Books blog:

As a young man

Besides Auden, who lived on the top floor, the tenants were Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and – most improbably of all – Gypsy Rose Lee, who at the time was busy writing a mystery called The G-String Murders. Other occasional residents included Paul and Jane Bowles, Louis MacNeice, Richard Wright (who lived with his wife and child in the basement), and Golo Mann (who holed up in the attic). It was Anaïs Nin, a frequent visitor, who named it ‘February House’, because so many of the residents, including Auden, had birthdays in February. … Other than that, however, they seem to have had little in common except a commitment to their art and to not ever being bored. Cocaine is snorted in “February House”; bedbugs are extravagantly shuddered over; a good deal of whiskey is poured.

The LRB piece dwells on Auden’s mysterious connection with the number 7 and his grubby living habits throughout his life.  In a later residence, writes Holt, “So squalid was everything in the dusty, cold and bottle-strewn loft that [Igor] Stravinsky later told Edmund Wilson that Auden was ‘the dirtiest man I have ever liked’.”

Wish I could be in New York City to see the production (music and lyrics by Gabriel Kahane, based on a book by Seth Bockley.) I’ll have to settle for Dwight Garner‘s description in the New York Times:

They had both.

Sparks fly early and often. When Auden pretentiously blurts to McCullers that “I am a thinking-sensation artist in the Jungian sense, whereas you are clearly a feeling-intuitive type,” she takes out a flask, eyeballs him as if were a space alien, and says: “Uh huh. Gin?”

Auden seemed to enjoy McCullers’s impudence. He is, after all, the man who said, “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”

Auden and McCullers are a pure and defiant literary odd couple. Both stoke your imagination in February House, in part because of their youth, in part because both wrestle with where their obligations to art end and their obligations to politics begin. They are increasingly obsessed with what Lionel Trilling, in “The Liberal Imagination,” called “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.”

One quibble though, the NYT piece refers to “something once said about Pauline Kael and The New Yorker magazine: She gave it sex, and it gave her class.” The comment (as his hyperlink hints) was said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (using him and he rather than it) – and it was famously said by Katherine Hepburn.

His closing quote, however, is undisputed Auden: “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

A late 2020 postscript from Book Haven reader Dwight Green: 

“Art is our chief means”: This is an image that Auden seems to have come up with late in his life, but he liked it enough to use it repeatedly. Its first occurrence I believe, came in a lecture he delivered in 1967: “Let us remember that through the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.” W. H. Auden, The complete Works of W. H. Auden, vol. 5, Prose: 1963—1968, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 477.

OK, you’ve got to see this.  Susan Sontag in a bear suit.  Flavorwire has Annie Leibovitz‘s photo of her partner thus outfitted – but go to the source, which is here, for a gallery of Leibovitz’s portraits, including some magnificent ones of Sontag.

Flavorwire’s “Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers” features Sontag as Exhibit #1, but some of them are more or less unsurprising. Mark Twain playing billiards, Ernest Hemingway kick a can, Hunter Thompson with an inflatable woman, Colette dressed as a cat – but this one takes the cake: Marcel Proust playing air guitar on Boulevard Bineau with his friends in 1892 (his mimetic beloved Jeanne Pouquet in center).  At this time of the photo, he was known as a snob, a dilettante, and a social climber.

But the somehow sad image brought back the words of René Girard (recently the subject of a post here) from his landmark Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which celebrated its 50th anniversary since publication a few months ago. His words:

“The sterile oscillation between pride and shame is also found in Proustian snobbism. We shall never despise the snob as much as he despises himself. The snob is not essentially despicable; he tries to escape his own subjective feeling of contemptibility by assuming the new being which he supposedly procures through snobbism. The snob thinks he is always on the point of securing this being and behaves as if he has already done so. Thus he acts with intolerable arrogance. Snobbism is an inextricable mixture of pride and meanness, and it is this very mixture which defines metaphysical desire. …

“The snob bows before a noble title which has lost all real value, before a social prestige so esoteric that it is really appreciated by only a few elderly ladies. … The snob seeks no concrete advantage; his pleasures and sufferings are purely metaphysical.”

The anonymous photo is from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which, incidentally, also has the René Girard archive.