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The Poetry of Praise

Krupa Parikh — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:31:39 GMT

I don't know about you, but one of my favorite kinds of e-mail is the "your hold is in at the library" type. Got one yesterday and toddled off to my local branch to pick up Mary Karr's most recent poetry collection Sinners Welcome (it's important to remember that, in spite of her enormous success as a memoirist, Karr is first and--I think she would argue--foremost a poet). This is a rewarding collection to read, not just for the sinewy, often startling poems within, but also for the substantial afterword ("Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer) where Karr chronicles her unexpected (most of all to herself) mid-life religious conversion.

This essay sets the stage for her new memoir, Lit, which she'll be reading from next month. Take, for example, her discussion of the Czeslaw Milosz's "Late Ripeness," which she describes as "a lit-up poem of the type I aspire to write." More typically, as she admits, Karr is drawn to write, and drawn to read, darker material, and I was not surprised to see her acknowledge the bitter intensity and odd solace offered by Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Terrible Sonnets"; whether he is railing against God's remoteness or singing His immanence, Hopkins is one of the great religious poets (or maybe one of the great poets, period). The Hopkins influence can be felt in a poem like "At the Sound of the Shotgun, Leave a Message," dedicated to her friend and fellow poet Franz Wright. It gives you a good idea of how lyrically limber Karr's work is that a poem with a title like that can end with a sentence like this: "Praise // Him, whose earth is green."

When he lost his faith, around 1950, Robert Lowell expressed some regret at what he'd also lost as a poet: Catholicism had provided his work with a structure, his poems with a place to go. With poems about--either implicitly or explicitly--incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, Gardens of Gethsemane, you can see what Mary Karr gained, around 1990, with her conversion to Catholicism.

With Ate by His Side

Robert Cremins — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:26:04 GMT

There's a compelling moment in the first chapter of The Liars' Club where Mary Karr's East Texas background and her academic career intersect. In the same visit home, she comes across the "burned-out house" of her old neighbors, the Thibideauxs, who have been slaughtered in a murder-suicide perpetrated by the father of the family, an up-to-then buttoned-down character; and she discovers, through her reading of classical literature, the Greek concept of ate, "a kind of raging passion, pseudo-demonic, that banishes reason."

Ate was, for the Greeks, not just an irrational, destructive force, but also--capitalized--the personification of such destructiveness, the goddess of mayhem. One classical source names Ate's father as Zeus himself; another says that her mother is Strife. I remember her well from my days teaching Sophomore English--not as a presence in the classroom, I hasten to add (well, not often), but for her cameo appearance in Julius Caesar. When the assassins leave and Mark Antony can stop making nice to them, he delivers an impassioned soliloquy over Caesar's body: "Oh pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth / That I am so meek and gentle with these butchers!" (One of my students, who went on to become a broadcaster, did a dead-on impression of my animated rendition of that speech.) As Mark Antony really gets into his stride, he paints a nightmarish picture of the horrors that will be unleashed as civil war breaks out:

"And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."

The depravities of war do require an explanation. If for the Greeks and Romans (and Shakespeare) that explanation was supernatural, for Freud it involved a re-examination of human nature itself. Faced with the staggering horrors of the Great War, Freud revised his psychoanalytical theories and came up with the dark concept (even by his standards) of the "death instinct." Perhaps the death instinct could help explain why a seemingly normal man like Mr. Thibideaux could, without apparent warning, kill himself and his entire family. His neighbors, as Mark Karr reports, had their own explanation: "Mr. Thibideaux was Nervous," a catch-all term in that place and time "applied with equal accuracy to anything from chronic nail-biting to full-blown psychosis."

So, "Nervous" isn't a sufficient explanation for this horrific happening, but neither is the death instinct or old Ate. Perhaps even our most cutting edge scientific theories and syndromes aren't either.

The Memoir Boom Revisited

Robert Cremins — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:52:32 GMT

So the paperback copy of Mary Karr's The Liars' Club I bought is the 10th Anniversary Edition, and I said to myself at the check-out counter, "Wow, ten years already since it was published" ... only to discover that the anniversary edition is itself four years old. Coincidentally, I'm also working on a project involving Angela's Ashes, the other book that ignited the memoir boom. I could have sworn that it came out first, but in fact it was published in 1996, Liars' Club in 1995, so we can claim the Texan woman as the progenitor of the boom over the Irishman (I have divided loyalties here). Talking of Texan writers, you've got to love the late great Molly Ivins' shout-out in the front pages of Karr's book: "it's like finding Beethoven in Hoboken." Even Molly's blurbs were brilliant.

Pamuk Postscript

Robert Cremins — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:21:39 GMT

In this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review, there's a intriguing essay by Suzy Hansen, an American writer who lives in Istanbul, that serves as a nice post-script for the Orhan Pamuk Museum of Innocence reading: CLICK HERE TO READ ESSAY.

It's about Nisantasi, the tiny Istanbul neighborhood when Pamuk's narrator comes of age in the 1970s, a time when its residents, well-to-do pro-Western Turks, adopted European manners and mores. This scenario resonated with me, as I grew up in a kind of Irish Nisantasi, or on the margins of it, at least, in the 1970s and 80s. As Pamuk himself has observed, in a piece he wrote for the BBC, Ireland and Turkey have something in common: they are both on the margins of Europe. When he began as a writer in the 70s, Pamuk wanted to do for Istanbul what Joyce had done for Dublin. (The Nobel prize is one proof that he has.)

In 1973, Ireland joined what is now the European Union (Turkey seems eternally to be on the threshold of membership). A significant chunk of the Dublin bourgeoisie became very self-conscious about being European. For some, this was a means of throwing off the old burden of having to define oneself as pro- or anti-British, an anglophile or anglophobe. For others, it was a question of lifestyle, with Continental cuisine and vacations all the rage. As one wit observed, there were certain fashionable young people who swore they never went into a McDonalds, except the one on the Champs-Élysées. The government promoted this dizzy new identity too. Arriving at Dublin airport in the 1980s, you would have seen the Irish college-educated workforce advertised as "The Young Europeans" ... and if you'd gone down to the departures lounge, you would have seen, in those days before the Celtic Tiger, waves of that college-educated workforce leaving for other parts of Europe, where they could actually find professional-level jobs.

Many of these "Young Turks" came back in the 90s, when the economy boomed. They found themselves, like the denizens of Pamuk's Nisantasi, surrounded by nouveau riche, folks whose background wasn't quite so genteel, whose money had been made fast, and who were hungry for the good things in life. A story by mother told me about an elderly waitress in the dining room of her golf club is stuck in my mind as an odd emblem of that Celtic Tiger Era, which ended abruptly in 2008 with a severe recession. Whenever profiteroles were on the menu, at dessert-time she would stand behind the counter and ask, "Now, who's for profit rolls?"

Now, after about fifteen fat years, the profit rolls have vanished, and both the new and old money (as in Turkey, these are very relative terms) are having to live lean again. And as in Turkey, there is something of an identity crisis, or clash. Do we forge ahead with the European project (Ireland voted against the Lisbon Treaty, then for it)? Do we turn back towards some older image of ourselves? Questions at the western edge of Europe are oddly similar to those at the eastern edge.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on interviewing Orhan Pamuk

Krupa Parikh — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:45:09 GMT

Click here to see what Houston writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has to say about her on-stage interview of Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk read from his new novel, The Museum of Innocence on Monday, November 16, as part of a special event conducted by Inprint and Brazos Bookstore.

The Legislature That's Always in Session

Robert Cremins — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:14:32 GMT

During the Q&A that followed the reading last night, I was particularly struck by what Mr. Pamuk said about the difference between politicians and writers. The politician (and here I paraphrase) has to understand only his or her constituency; everybody else can be dismissed. The writer has to understand everybody (if not approve of them). As Saul Bellow put it in his last novel, Ravelstein, the writer has to give everyone "due process." That is the artistic obligation. No wonder Shelley called writers "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." They may not receive any votes, but their mandate never runs out.

The next wonderful unacknowledged legislator we'll get a chance to acknowledge at the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series is Mary Karr in January. This blog will be back after Thanksgiving to begin reading through her "trilogy" of memoirs.

First Loves, Domestic Tourists

Robert Cremins — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:57:13 GMT

Well, the Orhan Pamuk reading is almost upon us, and a chapter late in his Istanbul brings this sequence of posting (almost) full circle. Back on October 30th (see below), I wrote about Pamuk's appearance on the excellent New Yorker fiction podcast, when he read and talked about Nabokov's "My Russian Education," which, he argued, blurs the line between memoir and short story. Chapter Thirty-Five of the Istanbul memoir is entitled "First Love." The very title invokes Nabakov, as there is a short story of that name in the collection Nabokov's Dozen. That same story appeared as "Colette" in both the New Yorker and Nabokov's non-fiction Speak, Memory (a gorgeous book, by the way). Pamuk himself begins to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction in the opening lines of the chapter. It concerns the girl--Black Rose--he fell in love with, after months of tentative friendship, when he was nineteen. "[I]f in naming her," he writes, "I offer a clue in the style of the Divan poets, I must also hint that this clue, like the rest of my story, might be misleading." Misleading or not, the story is powerful enough to stand alone, and I imagine we'll see it anthologized in the future. What it shares with Nabokov's writing is what one British critic called an "aching sense of loss." In fact, the critic praised that quality, "reminiscent of Nabokov," in John Banville's 1989 novel The Book of Evidence. And remember, John Banville himself reads in the Brown Series on March 1, with Abraham Verghese.

There was one moment in young Orhan's melancholic wanderings around Istanbul with "the Black Rose" that struck me in particular. They are in the poorer quarters and the children mistake them for foreigners: "Tourist, tourist, what is your name?" That reminded me of the time I was on vacation, from Dublin, with my parents in the west of Ireland (which is, or was, regarded as the most "authentic" part of the country, the "real" Ireland). We were staying in a hotel several miles outside the town of Cliften, a place so far west that it's where the first transatlantic flyers plonked down their plane (basically it's the first headland of Europe). My father stopped the car to give an old lady dressed in black--she would not have looked out of place in one of those evocative black-and-white photos in the Pamuk book--a ride into town. When she had settled herself in the front passenger seat, she said, "You're very welcome to Ireland, sir." My father was too polite to correct her, if indeed correction she needed.

Istanbul/Constantinople

Robert Cremins — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:15:17 GMT

Pamuk's chapter (in Istanbul) on "The Turkification of Constantinople" brought to mind an issue much closer to (my old) home. "When I was a child," he writes, "the view among the city's more vocal nationalists was that anyone who so much as used the name Constantinople was an undesirable alien with irredentist dreams [of a Greek reconquest]." This example of the provocative power of a place-name reminded me of the long-running and highly contentious Derry vs. Londonderry debate in ... (here's another verbal battleground) Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland. Derry is the original name of the city--or, more precisely, it is the English version of the original Irish place-name, Doire, which, as Seamus Heaney, the town's most famous son, told us at an Inprint reading some years ago, means an oak wood. Derry is what the Nationalist majority of the city's population call their home. But the Unionist minority (or the Unionist majority across NI) insist on calling it Londonderry, in remembrance of the British ships that lifted the Seige of Derry in the 17th century--an event that is central to their identity. Gerry Anderson, a popular broadcaster with the local BBC station (called, with canny neutrality, Radio Foyle, after the river that flows through the city ... and divides the Catholic- and Protestant-dominated areas), came up a number of years ago with the ingenious way of referencing his hometown: "Stroke City," short for his all inclusive method of naming it on the air: "Derry/Londonderry." Perhaps this Stroke City could be twinned with other linguistically contested places around the world.

Au Revoir, Tristesse

Robert Cremins — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:35:21 GMT

Another coincidence, less happy this time. Towards the end of the chapter in Istanbul dedicated to Hüzün, Pamuk discusses the affinities, and the differences, between that Turkish brand of melancholy and the sort (tristesse) identified by the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his break-through work Tristes Tropiques (1955). Lévi-Strauss died last week, aged 100. The New York Times gave this giant the space he deserved in a lengthy and insightful obituary: read here. I especially like that parenthetical story about the jury of the Prix Goncourt wanting to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because of Triste Tropiques' literary quality, though the book was technically classified as a scientific work. It's no surprise, therefore, that a great novelist like Pamuk should be drawn to Lévi-Strauss’ work. I think we can see here a parallel to Freud, another great thinker whose work is rooted in science but whose books may ultimately be regarded as great literature, their truths more poetic than empirical.

The Empire of Writing

Robert Cremins — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:25:16 GMT

Ah, serendipity. Last night, browsing my bookshelves, I came across a little book I bought fifteen years ago in the Czech Republic, entitled Kafka and Prague. It has lots of moody black-and-white photos of the city, like Pamuk's Istanbul. Contributor Jeremy Adler makes the following observation, "Although Austria had previously produced individual major writers, it was only with the empire's demise that Vienna and Prague witnessed the growth of traditions that gained international significance." This literary renaissance, he goes on to say, happened "as if [the empire] wanted to conquer lost terrain in the dominion of the mind." Pamuk's Istanbul ceased to be an imperial city at the exact same time as Vienna and Prague: the end of the Great War. And it is this post-imperial melancholy, this Istanbul Hüzün, as he calls it, that Pamuk describes--no, rhapsodizes about in Chapter 10 of his book. This talent for the meticulous, sensuous anatomization of mood is one of the reasons Pamuk himself has "gained international significance" in recent years, winning admirers in many languages (blessed be the translators), as well as the Nobel Prize. So ... great countries can lose empires but gain great writers, who occupy provinces that can never be taken away.

The Child as the Father of the Novelist

Robert Cremins — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:29:30 GMT

In the New Yorker podcast, Deborah Treisman and Orhan Pamuk talk about how Nabokov's memoir piece ("My Russian Education") reveals that even as a youth Nabokov had the traits that would help define him as a mature writer: a certain aloofness, a regard for his own autonomy, a refusal to join clubs, cliques, movements; even when he played soccer, he was always the goalie. I was reminded of this example of the embryonic novelist while reading Chapter Eight of Pamuk's own memoir: Istanbul: Memories and the City. Speaking of his childhood, Pamuk writes, "I would cheer myself up with a game very similar to one I would later play in my novels." He called it the "Disappearing Game," and it involved sitting in front of his mother's three-paneled mirror and moving the outer panels back and forth to produce that infinite regression effect. (We've probably all been dazzled at some point in childhood by that appearance of countless reflections of ourselves.) Pamuk goes on to describe with Nabokovian precision the dizzying sensations this phenomenon produces in the mind of a child. The game that he plays in his novels refers, I take it, to his use of doubles and the blurring & blending of identities. One is tempted to think that Pamuk is also talking about fiction when he says of these childhood mirrors, "they were fun, perplexing poisonous flowers that opened my way into another universe." For "poisonous," perhaps, read "intoxicating."

Pamuk's Russian Education

Robert Cremins — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:29:12 GMT

Updated my New Yorker fiction podcast this morning (newyorker.com/ online/podcasts/fiction) and lo and behold the recording features Orhan Pamuk. He reads the Nabokov short story/memoir "My Russian Education" and then discusses it with New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman. An observation Pamuk makes about Nabokov's technique in this piece--how a writer takes his "secret wounds" and connects "them with the whole culture" gives us, I reckon, an useful insight into Pamuk's own approach to both his own fiction and non-fiction (in the interview, he maintains that writers aren't as interested in such a rigid distinction between the two as, say, publishers are). Treisman connects Pamuk's new novel, The Museum of Innocence (which he'll be reading from at the Inprint and Brazos event, November 16) with Nabokov's Lolita. Pamuk modestly admits that, in the case of the Russian master, he'll probably always have "anxiety of influence." Even Nobel Laureates have writers they look up to.

To Be When There's No "To Be"

Robert Cremins — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:29:38 GMT

An intriguing comment by Pamuk towards the end of the first chapter of Istanbul--"In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we've seen with our own eyes"--put me in mind of comments made elsewhere by Maureen Freely, who translated this and several other recent Pamuk books:

"Turkish," she says, "has no verb 'to be' and no verb 'to have.' It prefers the passive to the active voice and has one word for 'he,' 'she' and 'it.' ... [The language] allows for complex constructions that (to paraphrase the poet Murat Nemet-Nejat) can catch elegant thoughts in the act of unfolding, but to replicate those structures in English is to weave a knotted web in which each clause strangles the one preceding it, while the shortage of root nouns encourages an overuse of basic words and/or wild guesses as to which of 20 or so English words might reflect the writer's intentions."

These observations make me appreciate all the more the smooth and nuanced translations Freely has delivered, but also makes me wonder about what, inevitably, we English readers are missing. "Melancholy" is the recurring word in Istanbul, drifting through the book as fog drifts through the city, and I suspect that there are shades of this mood for which there are no satisfactory English correspondences (hüzün, for example, is a word Pamuk has used in essays, and it means a kind of post-Ottoman, post-imperial melancholy ... maybe we need to make that a loan word).

A City of Words

Robert Cremins — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:13:46 GMT

Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk reads November 16, and to begin preparing for that event I swung by the Brazos on Saturday afternoon and picked up his Istanbul: Memories and the City, an extended and illustrated meditation on the city he is synonymous with. Pamuk is in that great tradition of novelists whose books are not just entwined with great cities but are virtual cities themselves. Think of Joyce's Ulysses, Dickens's Bleak House, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March ("A Chicago of a Novel" according to the title of an essay by Martin Amis). I remember walking around Dublin as a youngster and reading quotations from Ulysses embedded in the sidewalks; from then on I was intrigued by the way in which novels and cities co-create each other; obviously writers are inspired by their surroundings and reflect them in their work, but you could say that great writers help bring places into existence, causing citizens to look at their city with new eyes--both appreciative and critical--and helping outsiders imagine a city they've never been to, but may now yearn to visit. Ezra Pound said literature is news that stays news; perhaps we can also say that novels are the travel guides that always stay current, describing as they do the London, the Chicago, the Istanbul of the mind.

Viva El Doctorow

Robert Cremins — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:26:39 GMT

The title of today's blog post is inspired by interviewer Alex Parsons' witty comment during the Q&A portion of last night's reading that, as we are in the Southwest, he thinks of E.L. Doctorow as "El" Doctorow--this in response to Mr. Doctorow's observation that he does not think of himself as a historical novelist, or a political novelist, or a New York novelist, or a genre novelist, or a post-modern novelist, but simply as a novelist. Proof positive that he has been, from the beginning, simply a writer of fiction came when Doctorow shared with us that wonderful story of the assignment he turned in to his journalism teacher at the Bronx High School of Science when asked to go interview someone. Doctorow "interviewed" Karl, the stage doorman at Carnegie Hall. With his mismatched jacket and pants, his old-world habit of drinking tea through the sugar cube held between his teeth, his touching friendships with the likes of Toscanini and Rubinstein, Karl certainly came alive in our minds, as he must have come alive in the mind of that journalism teacher, before we found out that this was a precocious exercise in fiction-making; no, Karl was not available to be photographed. Doctorow's story was a shining example of what Kate DiCamillo had talked about at her Cool Brains! reading just the day before: fiction is the lie that tells the truth.

Doctorow's Model T Rides Again

Robert Cremins — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:28:07 GMT

In Ragtime, it was the focus of Coalhouse Walker's furious quest for justice; it went from Harlem to the bottom of a pond in New Rochelle and then back to Manhattan, where it sat, fully restored, in front of J.P. Morgan's sumptuous library. Further uptown, in Homer & Langley, in the dining room of the Collyer brothers' brownstone, another reconstructed Model T sits idle for decades. If Ragtime is all about jazzy movement and American energy, Homer & Langley is about American history flowing through an enclosed space, leaving its detritus. As our perceptive blind narrator Homer says, "It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds ..." Ragtime and other Doctorow novels go "on the road"; in H&L, the Collyers' legendary residence is the journey: "as if our house were not our house but a road on which Langley and I were traveling like pilgrims." I don't know how conscious or not Doctorow was of this in the writing process (perhaps we'll find this out tonight during the Q&A), but as you read the new novel it feels as if older Doctorow books make cameo appearances, take ironic bows--not just the Model T of Ragtime but also the gangsters of Billy Bathgate and the radicals of The Book of Daniel. Did you spot any others?

Black and White and Read All Over

Robert Cremins — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:19:58 GMT

It's poignant to be reading in Doctorow's Homer & Langley, at a time when newspapers as we know them are fighting for survival, about Langley Collyer's "crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme" to create an "eternally current dateless newspaper." His intention is to put newspapers out of business by creating this meta-publication that would "fix American life finally in one edition," but in order to do so he must conduct years of research that involves rushing out every morning and evening to buy every single one of NYC's numerous news titles. This is the kind of customer loyalty that papers these days can only dream of. One is tempted to whisper in Langley's ear Ezra Pound's observation that literature is the "news that stays news." Perhaps we can see Langley Collyer not only as Homer's older brother but also as a wrong-headed brother of historical novelists like Doctorow himself.

Ragtime and Homer & Langley

Robert Cremins — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:50:25 GMT

I'm a few chapters into Homer & Langley, the new Doctorow novel, which he will be promoting at the reading next Monday. Really interesting contrast to Ragtime. That novel was expansive--ranging from New Rochelle to Atlantic City, Mexico to Egypt--this story is intensive, with history flowing through one house in New York City (okay, with a few forays to Central Park and other locales). We've gone from a roving narrative eye to a blind narrator. Sometimes a reduction can be a liberation. I wonder what your reaction is to this conceit of rolling history up into a suite of crowded rooms.

Boardwalk for $400

Robert Cremins — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:50:07 GMT

Just finished Ragtime. One of the great pleasures of this American novel is the (apparent--there's the art) ease with which Doctorow weaves in so many strands of national life c. 1910. Even in the course of the intense drama surrounding Coalhouse's campaign for justice, we get taken to a baseball game, taken to revolutionary Mexico, and (my favorite) taken to Atlantic City, NJ.

It's easy to forget at this remove how, a century ago, Atlantic City was synonymous with elegance and white-shoe wealth. In a way, it must have been harder when Ragtime was published in 1975, before the casinos had arrived to "save" the city. The year before, the Breakers, the fancy hotel that the "family" stay in, met the fate that befell most of the grand hotels from the good old days: the wrecking ball. Maybe it's one of the structures you can see fall at the beginning of the video for Bruce Springsteen's dark ballad "Atlantic City" (click here to watch).

But before the Second World War, Atlantic City was THE place to be. For proof look no further that your (standard American edition) game of Monopoly; all the streets & locations are in or near A.C.--including the misspelled Marvin Gardens, and the ultimate purchase: Boardwalk for $400. That's the same Boardwalk the nameless boy and girl run down in the novel, intoxicated with the freedom of an evening, going to "the attractions the adults would not dream of patronizing: the freak shows, the penny arcades, the tableaux vivants." Well, even then, Atlantic City must have had its less-than-salubrious side.

To put it mildly, the city has had its ups and down over the past century but, as the Boss puts it in his ballad, "Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." When you're dealing with a historical novelist like Doctorow, master of the tableaux vivants in prose, it DOES come back.

On now to Homer & Langley, the new novel. One week to go till the reading!

Celebrity Culture Ragtime-Style

Robert Cremins — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:52:54 GMT

RAGTIME (1975) shines a critical light not only back to American culture of the early 20th century but also forward to our own time. There's an intriguing analysis on p. 84 (Random House paperback) of the birth of the manufactured celebrity. The "business community" is taken with the phenomenon of Evelyn Nesbit, famous for being infamous as well as beautiful: "They realized that there was a process of magnification by which news events established certain individuals in the public consciousness as larger than life." My goodness, they must be cheering in their graves at this era of the viral video, TMZ, and 24-hour cable news. "The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufacturers of their own medium." Yes they could. As Doctorow notes, they parlayed this public bedazzlement into the Hollywood star system, with its production line of manufactured stars (with made-up, brand-worthy names). These days, of course, they'd get the starlets their own reality TV shows. You can well imagine Evelyn having her own show (THE TRIALS OF EVELYN NESBIT?), with a hand-held camera following her into the Lower East Side on her mercy missions.

Doctorow's Diagnosis

Krupa Parikh — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:55:49 GMT

I'm fifty+ pages into RAGTIME, the 1975 Doctorow novel that was included in that 100 best of the 20th century a few years back. And what a bracing read it is, having all the energy and complexity of its namesake musical form. I've reached the point where Evelyn Nesbit attends the Emma Goldman lecture. Goldman's subject is Ibsen. I think we forget what an enormous impact that Scandinavian playwright had around the turn of the century--around the world. Shaw wrote a book about him. In Dublin, a young James Joyce learned Norwegian to be able to read him in his original language. When Joyce, just an undergraduate at the time, received a letter from the old man thanking him for a review/essay of WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN (I think) in a British journal, he took it, quite rightly, as a kind of annointing of his literary career. The medical terminology that Doctorow's Emma uses when speaking of Ibsen--"in whose work, she said, lay all the instruments for the radical dissection of society"--is spot on. At least one of the plays, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, where the doctor tells the citizens something they don't want to hear, involves medical determination. In others, Ibsen is the "doctor," dissecting society or making his diagnosis of social ills. It's something that the young Joyce, a former medical student, picked up on. One of the key words in DUBLINERS is "paralysis"--Joyce's diagnosis of the malaise afflicting his city. DUBLINERS was written in the very early 20th century; RAGTIME is set in the very early 20th century (an alternative title could be NEW YORKERS, given the vast cast of characters). I wonder what diagnosis of THIS city Doctorow is indicating? Suggestions?

Daniel in Disneyland

Robert Cremins — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:16:43 GMT

Beware of plot spoiler ahead if you haven't finished THE BOOK OF DANIEL:

What you could call the novel's denouement occurs when Daniel goes to Disneyland to confront (sort of) Mindish. The passage is a tour de force, something that you could imagine standing alone in an anthology (perhaps this has happened already). This shift, so late in the story, from east to west coast, from a monochromatic atmosphere to gaudy color, is wholly unexpected, and devastatingly effective. Question is, Why?

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. A couple of suggestions to get things started:

There are resonances of the larger story all through the scene. Daniel/Doctorow's definition, for instance, of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, could describe the entire novel: "a nightmare of childhood in confrontation with American social reality."

And, as the narrator says later, "there are political implications" in his analysis of the Disneyland phenomenon.

I'm struck by how prophetic several sentences in the same paragraph (published in 1971) are: "In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique ["abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses"] may be extremely useful both asa a substitute for education and, eventually, a substitute for experience."

A "substitute for experience" ... hmm. I get the sense that Daniel would not be so comfortable in the 2009 world of youtube and Second Life.

One point of connection to note between this powerful scene and Doctorow's reading on Oct 19. After reading from his new novel, HOMER & LANGLEY, E.L. Doctorow will be interviewed on stage by Alex Parsons from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. In the passage we've been talking about Daniel compares Disneyland to a prison camp (a concentration camp, indeed), and in Alex Parsons' first novel, LEAVING DISNEYLAND, "Disneyland" is the nickname for a penitentiary. Sufficed to say, both novelists deal with "confrontation[s] with American social reality."

The "E" Stands for Edgar

Robert Cremins — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:00:26 GMT

E. L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow was named after Edgar Allan Poe, which adds a further twist to a striking, perhaps unsettling passage in The Book of Daniel. You'll find it on page 177 of the Random House paperback edition. It's a long paragraph in which Daniel riffs on the theme of traitors in American history. He mentions Benedict Arnold, and other (debatable) Benedict Arnolds. Then he introduces his namesake: "the archetype traitor, the master subversive Poe, who wore a hole into the parchment and let the darkness pour through." What follows reads like a dark Barthelme story (I wonder if there was an influence; ELD was writing this when Don B. was very prominent). "It's Poe who ruined us," Daniel concludes (that "ruined" appropriately in quote marks), "that scream from the smiling face of America." What do you make of this passage? What do you think ELD is implying about the role of the writer in America, the writer with his/her "plots" (to pluck an idea from another Don: Delillo)? Is "role" to formal a word? Have things changed since 1971?

The Heinrich Von Kleist Fan Club

Robert Cremins — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:01:00 GMT

Interesting connection between E.L. Doctorow (reads Oct. 19) and John Banville (reads March 1, with Abraham Verghese). They both have acknowledged the influence of the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. The plot of Doctorow's major 1975 novel Ragtime (which I'll be blogging about after The Book of Daniel) is based on von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhass, about a man on an obsessive quest for justice. Banville's new novel, The Infinities, is inspired by the von Kleist play Amphitryon, about the intervention of the gods in human affairs. In the 1990s, Banville adapted von Kleist's comedy The Broken Jug, which I remember seeing on the Peacock Stage at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland's national theatre.

The Isaacsons & The Rosenbergs

Robert Cremins — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:02:02 GMT

About half way through The Book of Daniel now. After reading the arrest scenes, I was reflecting on how wise it was of Doctorow not to write a novel about the Rosenbergs but about the Isaacsons, a couple indicted for conspiracy to commit espionage, reminiscent, to be sure, of the Rosenbergs, but not the Rosenbergs. How would a novel about the Rosenbergs, written in the early 70s, look now, in the light of the admission last year by Mort Sobell that he and Julius Rosenberg were indeed Soviet agents. The Rosenbergs two sons, Robert and Michael, have essentially accepted these facts, though they continue to dispute their mother's guilt, the damage done by their father's activities, and, understandably, the severity of the sentence. My "read" on the novel, so far, is that ambiguity as to Paul and Rochelle's guilt/complicity is a big part of the book's meaning, an ambiguity that, in large measure, as been removed from the historical record.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the outpouring of information from Russian sources, which was hardly plausible in the 50s/60s/70s, has also shifted our understanding of the espionage issue.

Does this historical shift, and shifts in our historical understanding, change your reading or experience of the novel?

Into the Lion's Den with Daniel

Robert Cremins — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:29:25 GMT

So I swung by the Brazos yesterday and picked up my copy of THE BOOK OF DANIEL. About fifty pages in, just finished the chilling scene about the Paul Robeson concert (and aftermath).

Great line about Daniel's father running "up and down history like a pianist playing his scales"; maybe that could describe Doctorow's oeuvre.

The novel is propelled by the bitter brilliance of Daniel's voice and mind. Even the most innocuous-seeming paragraphs can whip round and remind you of the darkest concerns of the book, as when D. observes his troubled sister reading a movie magazine: "Does Dick Really Love Liz? ... I think if they were put on trial for their lives, he might come to love her."

I'm also struck by the novel's emphasis on its own fictionality ("This is Composition Notebook 79C made in U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products.") Do you think this enriches the text (called, after all, the BOOK of Daniel) or it is something of a distraction?

I wonder if Doctorow were writing the novel today if it would be as meta-fictional (keeping in mind that "I used to know a lot more about writing, now I just write" comment I mentioned in my last posting).

On To Doctorow

Robert Cremins — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:30:16 GMT

Next up in the reading series is E.L. Doctorow (reads Oct. 19), and over the next few weeks i'll be reading/rereading some of his key books, starting with his breakthrough 1971 novel THE BOOK OF DANIEL and ending with his latest, HOMER & LANGLEY. Perhaps you'd like to read along ...

One overarching question to keep in mind: E.L.D. has said in recent times "I used to know a lot more about writing; now i just write." In the light of these and other novels, what could he mean?

In Praise of Slowness

Robert Cremins — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:26:44 GMT

Just back from the sell-out inaugural reading of the new season. I was particularly struck by that story Joseph O'Neill told about a difficult phase in the writing of NETHERLAND, when he was in someone else's house/cabin in Canada and came across Marilynne Robinson's HOUSEKEEPING. He said that what he learned from Robinson's novel was "slowness," which moderator Antonya Nelson identified as the quality of "patience" in Robinson's work. I think they hit upon something important here, a strength in novels that really work and that we can really care about. Ian McEwan has talked about the pleasure of "the slow unfolding" of narrative in a novel--for both reader and writer, I suppose. Perhaps the purpose of a short story is to crystalize and the purpose of a novel is to develop (with "perhaps" being the crucial word in any discussion/definition of literary genres). We certainly heard tonight, in O'Neill's and Robinson's wonderful readings, the pleasures of prose that lets character, narrative, incident, and language breathe.

It Simply Is/Isn't Cricket

Robert Cremins — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:32:13 GMT

It sounded barmy to his friends while he was writing it, but now a novel about cricket in New York (NETHERLAND, by Joseph O'Neill) has been acclaimed as a brilliantly original subject, and canny way of looking at the state of the American Dream in the early 21st century. I'm intrigued to find out what American readers with little or no exposure to the game (ie, about 94% of you) make of all this.

Personally, talk of LBW, googlies, and gullies is not puzzling. I played a bit of cricket as a kid back home, but here's the rub: it was very much a minority sport in Ireland (with a bigger following up North). In certain parts of the former British Empire, such as Trinidad (where Chuck in the novel hails from), cricket is HUGE: Trinidad forms part of the West Indies, which is one of the great cricket sides (playing at Test Cricket level, and often beating auld England); in other former, eh, dominions, such as Canada, Ireland, the US, it's almost below the radar (one of the points of O'Neill's book). I went to one of the few cricket-playing schools in (the Republic of) Ireland. Because of the resurgence of our "native" Gaelic sports in the late 19th century, an antipathy developed, in certain quarters, to "foreign" games.

By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, football (soccer to y'all) was ubiquitous, rugby had its (middle-class) strongholds, but cricket ... we might as well have raised a Union Jack over the school grounds as far as some people were concerned. Irish-born O'Neill wouldn't have experienced this, since his was a cosmopolitan childhood spent outside Ireland, with the family eventually settling in Holland, where he played for the Dutch under-19 cricket side. I'm really taken with one of the founding ideas of NETHERLAND, that cricket in New York was being played but simply invisible to most people.

Irish cricket, by the way, is enjoying a higher profile these days. In 2007, in the World Cup, the team shocked everyone, including the Irish, by beating Pakistan, another of the great Test Cricket nations. Former IRA member and present Deputy First Minister of North Ireland Martin McGuinness surprised a lot of folks by revealing that he's fond of the sport. Both he and First Minister Ian Paisley sent their congratulations to the team (unlike soccer, North and South play together on one national side). Now, who else is for cricket?

Goodbye, Gatsby?

Robert Cremins — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:33:19 GMT

In the interview with Times of London--Wednesday's blog post, though the link is now giving me a 404, even when I google the article; sigh--Joseph O'Neill is most gracious when he's asked about the Gatsby influence. I've seen writers bristle at these influence questions during Q&As at readings, signings, etc., but O'Neill embraces it, saying, basically, (and I paraphrase) Hey, though I didn't realize my plot was drawn from that template till deep into the writing, I am rolling down Fitzgerald Blvd (green lights all the way?).

And then he adds a most intriguing qualification. O'Neill says that the novel is his "farewell to Gatsby"; that it also stands in contrast to the Jazz Age classic, because then a tale of the American Dream was predicated on the idea of limitless economic opportunity, an idea that has had its wings severely clipped.

I would share O'Neill's pessimism, or realism, but then again I am, like him, a European writer resident in the States, so I'm much more interested in YOUR take on O'Neill's vision.

I would add just this: Yes, in the novel Chuck has a grand plan--converting the American people to cricket!--but that's hardly hooch-pipeline-from-Canada lucrative ... or is it? Cricket is huge business in India, where it has been injected with the showbiz spirit (as O'Neill has pointed out, teams in white, the classic image of cricket, are becoming an anachronism).