Stefan Beck Online

Wolff & Tolstoy

I don’t often make the time to listen to The New Yorker’s fiction podcast, but this month’s is a treat: T. C. Boyle reading and discussing Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” which first appeared in the magazine in 1995 and was included in Wolff’s 1996 collection The Night in Question. It’s also reprinted in Wolff’s forthcoming collection Our Story Begins, and was even made into a short film. (I can’t bring myself to watch it, though; I like the story too much.) In other words, it’s a very popular story, and I don’t think Boyle exaggerates in saying that it is, “at its length, perfect.” It’s six pages long.

“Bullet in the Brain” goes like this: A deeply cynical and vicious book critic named Anders walks into a bank. The bank gets held up. Anders cannot help laughing at the robbers’ clichéd lingo, at what he calls a “great script . . . the stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.” Fans of the crime genre will think of Sam Spade’s remark in The Maltese Falcon: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” But Anders’s words to that effect don’t intimidate. They only earn him the titular bullet.

That isn’t a spoiler. The real story is what happened after “the bullet smashed Anders’s skull and plowed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus.” Wolff’s autopsy deadpan gives way to a miraculously condensed account of the life that doesn’t and the moment that does flash before Anders’s eyes. We see, in effect, what made Anders who he is—and the memory of who he used to be bubbling up in the final seconds of his life.

Boyle notes how like Flannery O’Connor’s writing this story is, in that it takes an essentially comical or cartoonish situation and transforms it into something “poignant.” Indeed, O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” has much in common with “Bullet in the Brain,” right down to the bullets and where they wind up. But I think Wolff's story should be read alongside Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It’s every bit as merciless in laying bare the accretions and losses of a lifetime, and what they might mean to us as life comes to an end. Ilyich’s death is as slow and agonizing as Anders’s is not. Compare these very different approaches, and I think you’ll agree that they achieve similar effects. And “poignant” doesn’t come close to describing them.

In defense of Don B.

Donald Barthelme is among those writers, like Kurt Vonnegut and (please, no laughter) Richard Brautigan, whom I found funny—sometimes brilliantly so—before coming to resent them as one-trick ponies, responsible, albeit indirectly, for much of the dross which passes for humor in today’s literature. Years ago, when McSweeney’s appeared on my radar in website form, I found it funny for a while before getting the sinking feeling that many of its contributors were just “doing” Barthelme, piggybacking on a beloved  formula. The consistent deadpan, the jarring concatenation of allusions and non sequiturs, the compulsive goofiness: It was déjà vu. It was depressing.

James Wolcott’s brilliant essay on Barthelme articulates perfectly the pleasures and limitations of his fiction. Having read it, I’m prepared to admit that I’ve been too hard on Don B. and his acolytes (not that they care one way or the other). How could they have resisted the influence of what they so thoroughly enjoyed in Barthelme’s work? To hear Wolcott tell it, nobody could escape that pull:

Over the years, Barthelme’s antic break with the traditional tactful manner of the classic New Yorker story, where every stick of furniture and motivation was neatly, firmly in place, would expand into an entire wing of the magazine’s house style. His mastery of incongruity and curveball allusions helped liberate the whiz brains in the office and scramble the genetic code of the magazine’s humor and fiction irregulars: By the ’70s, the set-piece fictions and “casuals” of Ian Frazier, Veronica Geng, Mark Singer, Marshall Brickman, and George W. S. Trow abounded with absurdist dialogues, box scores, chess notations, chicken-scratch scribblings, send-ups of familiar minigenres (liner notes, movie blurbs, capsule reviews, wedding notices), multiple-choice quizzes, and mash-up satires . . . . They ran riot while Ann Beattie stood slightly off to the side, strumming her hair.

Today, I would hazard (I’ve always wanted to hazard), the track marks of Barthelme’s suave, subversive cunning are to be found less in postmod fiction—although David Foster Wallace’s dense foliage of footnotes suggests a Barthelmean undergrowth and George Saunders’s arcade surrealism has a runaway-nephew quality—than in the conscientiously oddball, studiedly offhand, hiply recherché, mock-anachronistic formalism of McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Crier, and related organs of articulate mumblecore.

I would say to those heirs apparent that my disdain, for what it’s worth, is a classic case of “I’m not mad at you—I’m just disappointed.” They haven’t done the difficult job of dynamiting their idols, our idols, and building something new and superior with the rubble. A few days ago, after reading a string of disappointing “comic novels,” I asked my friends to name the funniest books they’d ever read. The list is growing pretty long—I hope to share it one of these days—but not a single person named a Barthelme collection. Perhaps when the market is flooded with knockoffs, even the Louis Vuitton can start to look a bit phony.

Irène Némirovsky

The trouble with shock-horror revelations is that they can be made only once before they lose a good deal of their shock-horror quotient. For this reason I was surprised when, browsing in the current issue of The New Republic, I came across a piece by Ruth Franklin promising readers the “nasty truth about a new literary heroine.” Just how new? The hardcover edition of Suite Française, translated by Sandra Smith, was released by Knopf in Spring 2006. It was in Autumn of that year that Tess Lewis, writing in The Hudson Review, delivered most of the dirt piled up in Franklin’s essay on Némirovsky. Here’s Lewis:

By now most readers have heard the dramatic story of Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished epic, Suite Française. Against all odds, the manuscript, a leather-bound notebook, survived World War II hidden in a suitcase the author’s adolescent daughter, Denise Epstein, carried faithfully from one hiding place to another in tiny villages, convents, and cellars throughout occupied France. . . . As an adult, Denise had occasionally tried to decipher her mother’s miniscule handwriting—paper was hard to come by in Vichy France . . .

Here’s Franklin:

The writer: a Jew who had fled to the French countryside seeking refuge from occupied Paris, eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she would die in a typhus epidemic soon after her arrival. The book: scribbled in minuscule letters, so as to conserve paper and ink, in a leather-bound journal that would be carried into hiding by the writer’s eldest daughter. She would survive the war and keep it as a memento of her mother, once a well-known novelist, daring to read its contents only sixty years later.

Lewis:

Yet few readers outside of France are aware of a disturbing side to Irène Némirovsky’s story. The English translation of Suite Française . . . includes a shortened version of the scholar Myriam Anissimov’s preface to the French edition with Anissimov’s detailed account of Némirovsky’s tragedy, but not her discussion of the extent to which Némirovsky’s previous novels were riddled with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jewish characters in her books are marked, with few exceptions, by hooked noses, flaring nostrils, flaccid hands, sallow complexions, dark, oily curls, hysteria, avarice, unscrupulous business practices, and an atavistic ability to trade in commodities and goods. The list goes on.

Franklin:

The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes.

And so on. Both pieces are well worth reading. There’s no harm in bringing this unpleasant and complicating truth to new readers—I can’t imagine The Hudson Review has half the circulation of The New Republic—but Franklin ought to have acknowledged that Lewis beat her to this earth-shaking discovery by somewhere in the neighborhood of a year and a half.

Nabokov’s stalemate

I hope I’m not alone in finding something amusing about Ron Rosenbaum’s article—his breathless, agonized, pleading, even a little self-aggrandizing article—about whether or not Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura should be destroyed in accordance with Nabokov’s wishes. Here are the facts:

What we do know is that the Laura manuscript consists of approximately 50 index cards covered in V.N.’s handwriting. Dmitri has said in the past that the text amounts to some 30 conventional manuscript pages. (To those familiar with what is perhaps Nabokov’s greatest work, Pale Fire, the use of index cards as a draft medium will not seem strange. Indeed the parallels to Pale Fire's account of a struggle over the disposition of an index-card manuscript border on the uncanny.) But in any case, before he died in 1977, Nabokov made clear that he wanted those cards destroyed.

I fail to see the “uncanny” in a parallel between Nabokov’s fictional creation and a real-life scenario that he himself engineered. Rosenbaum’s remark, which I’ll charitably call a stretch, is a red flag that we are in the gladiatorial arena of superfandom, where only the truly rabid survive. Speaking of rabies, even Rosenbaum’s foray into catblogging was infected with Pale Fire fever.

I intend no disrespect to Rosenbaum. We all have our obsessions, and Nabokov is a more praiseworthy one than, say, Dr. Who. Still, obsession can cloud judgment, and I don’t think the question at hand is much of a question at all. This isn’t a Linear B tablet or a lost Shakespeare play dredged from the Oak Island Money Pit. It’s a fragment by a literary giant who died within living memory. We shouldn’t pretend to be grateful for the finished, polished, perfect works he did give us without honoring his wishes as to this one.

As for Dmitri Nabokov, I’ll raise the possibility that Rosenbaum—who would cheerfully eat light bulbs for a peek at those thirty pages—cannot: Might not all Dmitri’s hemming and hawing and teasing and stalling be more about himself than about his father’s legacy? Just a thought. (Readers, consider this an open thread.)

Kahlil Gibran

I’d like to confess a few literary sins. In high school, I read, along with usual suspects like The Dharma Bums, Naked Lunch, and A Coney Island of the Mind, certifiable nonsense like Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan and Ram Dass’s The Only Dance There Is. (I don’t mean that this is all I read, though to have read any of it is sufficiently embarrassing.) All the really zonked-out Mr. Natural stuff belonged to my parents (sorry, guys), the cringe-making detritus of college in the 1970s. I’m sure now they’d say they were only holding it for a friend.

Yes, I have read these terrible things—but I’ve never read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. I’ve browsed in copies of it, copies usually found sandwiched between Steppenwolf and the Kama Sutra on dorm-issue bookshelves; it strikes me as a kind of ecumenical “Footprints,” only longer and thus not so easily translated into needlepoint. According to Joan Acocella’s piece in The New Yorker, occasioned by the rerelease of Gibran’s works, such as they are, by the Everyman’s Library, he is the third best-selling poet of all time, after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. Gibran was also a draftsman of sorts:

[The drawings] were products of their time, or a slightly earlier time, that of the European Symbolist painters: Puvis de Chavannes, Eugène Carrière, Gustave Moreau. Often, in the foreground, one saw a sort of pileup of faceless humanity, while in the background there hovered a Greater Power—an angel, perhaps, or just a sort of milky miasma, suggestive of mystery and the soul.

“Milky miasma” describes more than just his art, alas. If the reader thinks I’m being unkind, he should direct his attention to Theodore Dalrymple’s hilarious essay on Gibran from the December 2007 New Criterion. It focuses on The Prophet in particular, so those who want a peek at the biographical details of a fabricator, bloviator, and kept man par excellence should stick with Acocella, hilarious in her own right. She even writes, inviting the ire of millions of public-transit users: “Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies.”

What about Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous Eat, Pray, Love? Amazon.com tells me that its Statistically Improbable Phrases are “four spirit brothers, kundalini shakti, magic drawing, meditation cave, old medicine man.” Am I back with my former spirit guide, Carlos Castaneda? I’ll have to check it out, for old time’s sake. At any rate, Acocella writes:

[Gibran] had intuited the theory of relativity before Einstein; he just hadn’t written it down. Thousands of times, he said, he had been sucked up into the air as dew, and “risen into clouds, then fallen as rain. . . . I’ve been a rock too, but I’m more of an air person.”

Air of an extremely high temperature, no doubt.

Zadie Smith & friends

I suspect that it’s difficult for critics to assess “charity lit” as honestly as they ought to. I’m referring to books like Nick Hornby’s Speaking with the Angel, Dave Eggers’s What Is the What, and now Zadie Smith’s The Book of Other People, which benefit autism research, Sudanese refugees, and children’s literacy, respectively. I’ve heard good things about the first and have written good things about the second, despite a dislike of Eggers that I’ve cultivated like a Venus flytrap for just about a decade. Three’s a trend, however, and that trend may suggest that young writers are afraid to meet readers on their own terms, without hiding in the warm glow of good intentions.

Each time this gang produces new material, the result asymptotically approaches a flawless and devastating self-parody. Michiko Kakutani’s review of Smith’s new anthology—which includes “well-known writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, and Nick Hornby”—is more enthusiastic than one might hope,  but at least it’s forthright: “All the stories in this lively collection are portraits, mainly of human beings, though a monster with an identity crisis, a giant in search of love and a puppy in need of a home put in appearances as well.”

Pace John Gardner’s Grendel, Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien, and, er, John Grogan’s Marley and Me, Kakutani couldn’t have lit upon three better examples of the oddly childish preoccupations of this generation of writers. I don’t mean that I expect the stories themselves to be childish, but I won’t be surprised if many of them evince the sort of eccentricity-on-autopilot that characterizes many of these writers, talented though they may be. (Eggers wrote the “giant” story, by the way, having already done the “puppy” thing in a different book; come to think of it, though, he’s already done the giant thing, too. Are these guys working from writing prompts?)

This review from Spiked Online is less generous than Kakutani’s, and hints at a problem: The clubbiness and congeniality of writing for a “good cause” can discourage judgment and encourage less than challenging, if not downright frivolous, material. When the “good cause” becomes literature itself—“saving the short story” or “getting people excited about reading again”—expect taste and artistry to go right out the window.

Borges 2.0

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was original to a degree that should enchant and intimidate anyone who reads his stories and poems. Whenever a lazy, unimaginative critic claims somebody is like So-and-So “on acid,” remember that Borges was never like anything so much as acid “on Borges.” Many authors have pondered the implications of infinity, time travel, parallel worlds, and the persistence or lack thereof of memory—Philip K. Dick creeps to mind—but few have done so as credibly, or as beautifully, as Borges.

New Directions has just rereleased Borges’s Labyrinths in a new paperback edition, with an introduction by William Gibson. In his story “The Library of Babel,” Borges posited a universe “(which others call the Library) . . . composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. . . . I say that the Library is unending. . . . Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact centre in any one of its hexagons and whose circumference in inaccessible.”

Fans will recognize this definition, slightly deformed, from another Borges story, called “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal.” “In the sixteenth century,” he wrote, “the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to ‘that intellectual sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere and which we call God.’” But . . . was Borges really describing the Internet? That’s the latest footling question mark from The New York Times:

[A] growing number of contemporary commentators—whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco—have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia—the so-called Internet 2.0—and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.

In fairness, it’s a potentially intriguing connection—but one can’t help thinking it diminishes Borges’s great achievement. He wasn’t an SF writer. It’s unlikely that he cared to see the future, even though the Aleph was supposed to let him see everything at once. Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia have turned out to be nothing but a load of faddish, privacy-invading trouble, and if you can’t see Borges sub specie aeternitatis, can you see him at all?

Hugh Massingberd, R.I.P.

Yesterday, when Sam Munson related the sad news of George MacDonald Fraser’s death, he pointed readers to the Telegraph’s obituaries page. Fraser was memorialized in a number of British papers—here are the Independent and the Guardian—but I’m glad Sam settled on what is, for my money (or at least for my free online subscription), the most brilliant obit page that the dead beat has to offer on either side of the pond. With its taste for humor, its nose for the salacious, bizarre, or simply telling detail, and its scalpel-sharp yet utterly deadpan prose, it outshines all the competition, and I can’t think of a more fitting end to a memorable life. I should also note that in her recent book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West praises the page for honoring little-known but often jaw-droppingly daring war heroes. Those obituaries are, of course, more subdued and respectful, but they are every bit as spellbinding.

Hugh Massingberd, the obituaries editor of the Telegraph from 1986 to 1994 and the man who made it what it is, died on Christmas Day. He ought to be remembered as fondly as any of the great men and women whose lives he celebrated—or, if not celebrated, at least rendered with astonishing vividness.

Massingberd later wrote, “I determined to dedicate myself to chronicling what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch.” Laughter, he added, would be by no means out of place.

His ambition took many years to come to fruition. When, in 1979, during the strike at The Times, Massingberd sought to convince the Telegraph’s editor, Bill Deedes, to venture upon a more expansive obituaries section, he was given to understand that it would be rather poor form to exploit the difficulties of a rival publication.

Finally, in 1986, Max Hastings gave Massingberd his opportunity. Immediately, Telegraph readers found themselves regaled by such characters as Canon Edward Young, the first chaplain of a striptease club; the last Wali of Swat, who had a fondness for brown Windsor soup; and Judge Melford Stevenson, who considered that “a lot of my colleagues are just constipated Methodists”.

The holidays have come and gone, but there’s no excuse not to make yourself a present of one of these collections.

John Ledyard

Soon 2007 will draw to a close, and with it the much-fêted fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I’ve had all year to ponder it, but I’m no closer to understanding what the fuss is about. Could it really hurt to temper the praise by pointing out some of the book’s deficiencies? The reverential overtones of this title couldn’t be more appropriate; many fans treat the book as though it were some kind of religious text. But the real puzzle isn’t why people, many of them young people, love Kerouac. It’s why they don’t prefer the vastly more entertaining adventures of—to name a few—Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, or Mark Twain (or, if I may jump the pond, Eric Newby or Patrick Leigh Fermor) . . .

. . . or John Ledyard (1751–1789), the quintessential Dartmouth Man. The College’s Alma Mater boasts of the alumni that “’round the girdled earth they roam,” and the line might as well have been written with Ledyard in mind. Unable to pay his tuition, he chopped down a tree, made a dugout canoe, and escaped on the Connecticut River—which puts Kerouac’s automotive antics in perspective, I think. He later sailed on Captain Cook’s third voyage, which he chronicled in his Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage. The travelogue has the dual distinction of being the first American book to describe Hawaii and the first American book to be protected by copyright.

This year saw a renewed interest in Ledyard, with the publication of two books: Bill Gifford’s Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer and Edward G. Gray’s The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler. Arts & Letters Daily has linked to an excerpt from the latter:

The list of famous individuals he came into contact with during his short life comes straight out of the indexes of history: Captain James Cook, on whose last voyage he sailed as a lowly marine; Robert Morris, financier of the American Revolution and Ledyard’s one-time employer; John Paul Jones, with whom he struck up an acquaintance and tried to raise funding for an ambitious expedition to the northwest coast of America; Ben Franklin, whom he met in Paris during Franklin’s last days as American ambassador there; Thomas Jefferson, Franklin’s successor, whom Ledyard also met in Paris. The list goes on, but it seems just as well to stop here. For it was in Paris that Ledyard enjoyed his first great social success, when he was accepted into the famous expatriate circle surrounding Thomas Jefferson.

Read the whole thing here. You might be inspired to retrace his steps.

Top five Christmas books

If one is trying to “prove,” as Christopher Hitchens has been doing, that “religion poisons everything,” he probably ought to give it a rest around this time of year—if only as a matter of strategy. Many believers are willing and able to debate points of doctrine in a calm and dispassionate way; fewer will countenance assaults on their favorite holidays. How the Hitch Stole Hanukkah was surely a self-defeating effort. Religion hasn’t poisoned anything by giving us these annual opportunities to spend time with family and friends. (Forgive the sappiness, but it’s running freely from my Douglas Fir.) For my part, I don’t think I could do without my favorite Christmas literature. Here’s a top five that the goyim and the Chosen alike can enjoy:

1. How to Be Topp by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. A treasury of advice from the spelling-disabled British schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, this one isn’t strictly a Christmas book, but its last chapter, “Ding-Dong Farely Merily For Xmas,” is indispensable. “You canot so much as mention that there is no father xmas when some grown-sa Hush not in front of wee tim. So far as I am concerned if father xmas use langwage like that when he tripped over the bolster last time we had beter get a replacement.” The Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter can be used all year round.

2. A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. Before the noble fruitcake was just another sight gag on some post-Thanksgiving Best Buy commercial, there was Capote’s charming memoir of “fruitcake weather” and a child’s Christmas in Alabama.

3. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. The only thing better than reading the Welsh poet’s famous Christmas memoir is reading it with a whiskey in hand, and the only thing better than that would be having a drunken Thomas on hand to recite a wish list like: “Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Families. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions.”

4. Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris. “Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!,” Sedaris’s exclamation-point-laden parody of a Christmas “update” letter, is worth the price of admission.

5. A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm. Is it a holiday bagatelle or a stunning work of literary criticism? I report, you decide. George Bernard Shaw called him “the incomparable Max,” and you will too once you’ve read this collection of seventeen literary parodies, each on the subject of Christmas. “The Feast” (Joseph Conrad), “Some Damnable Errors About Christmas” (G. K. Chesterton), and “Shakespeare and Christmas” (Frank Harris) are enthusiastically recommended, but it’s all gravy. Henry James and Rudyard Kipling also take their places on Beerbohm’s skewer.