Southern Bookman

Another Look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood

Some stories are endlessly revisted: So Arthur Krystal looks again at "F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" in the Nov. 16 New Yorker. The article's title is "Slow Fade,": Once again, we see the prematurely, broken Fitzgerald failing to make it as a movie hack. I couldn't wait to read it: yes, the story is endlessly fascinating.

Once again, The New Yorker gives posthumous attention to a writer who it ignored while he was alive. As far as I know, the New Yorker's Harold Ross never published any work of Fitzgerald, who did his magazine pieces for The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Kudos to Esquire's Arnold Gingrich for continuing to publish Fitzgerald.  Nor did the New Yorker publish Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck: one is hard-pressed to remember who it did publish from the era. John O'Hara?

Krystal, an essayist and screenwriter, is writing a book on Fitzgerald, who remains, like Lincoln and Shakespeare, an inexhaustible subject. When the book comes out, I'll undoubtedly rush to consume it. I'll never forget encountering "The Great Gatsby" when I was a mere youth; it was one of those books that changed my consciousness.  From then on, Fitzgerald joined my pantheon of artists whose lives I can't stop studying. 

The Fitzgerald Hollywood saga remains hot. A couple of weeks ago, I read a piece somewhere, I can't remember where, on Fitzgerald's friendship with Nathaniel West, the author of "Day of the Locusts" and "Miss Lonelyhearts." Fitgerald began his career befriending and aiding Ernest Hemingway and ended it as the pal of West: among his many talents, Scott had a great capacity for friendship. West was killed in an automobile accident the day after Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. Hemingway, of course, continued developing into the bloated icon, at last betraying Fitzgerald's memory with attacks in "The Movable Feast."

Krystal gives a complete examination of why Fitzgerald didn't make it in Hollywood: his writing was too literary and complicated for the movies. As a caption says, Fitzgerald, in his own words, "just couldn't make the grade as a hack," although in his hey-day in the 1920s, he churned out facile short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. It's strange that he couldn't translate that hack short story talent into movie scripts. I was reminded of the Robert Redford movie version of "The Great Gatsby," which faithfully uses dialogue from the book. The witty, inventive, searing words from the page come off as flat and wooden in the movie. This indicates why Fitzgerald's gift didn't bring good movie writing. How curious to consider that Faulkner, known for his voluminous sentences, was better than Fitzgerald at terse movie writing. Faulkner got a credit for "The Big Sleep."

But the more I ponder Fitgerald's late days, the less I'm convinced that he was such a broken writer. A year or two ago, I read Fitgerald's "Pat Hobby Stories," the result of his Hollywood experience. I was surprised at how good they were. Ribald, surrealistic, sardonically funny, the stories look at the life of a faded Hollywood writer, Pat Hobby. The stories are not as deep or rich as Fitzgerald best stories, such as "Babylon Revisted," but they have a bracing, tart, exuberant energy, which many writers would be happy to be remembered for. A few characteristics of Fitzgerald can be found in Pat, but Fitgerald, unlike Pat, continued as a productive, vibrant writer. While struggling with the Hollywood writing factory, and producing the Pat Hobby stories, he was also writing "The Last Tycoon," his unfinished, but classic, Hollywood novel. And he enjoyed the friendship of West and others.

The era does continue to fascinate: a new bio is out on Irving G. Thalberg, MGM's "boy wonder" and the model for Fitzgerald's Monroe Stahr.  Fitzgerald said that Monroe Stahr understood "the whole equation" of movies. Despite his struggles, Fitgerald always knew "the whole equation" of writing.

Rehearing the Lost Voices of World War I

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month: The formula that abruptly ended World War I in 1918 intrigues me. The precision of that exact moment contrasts with the messiness and horror of four years in which European culture crushed itself nearly to extinction.

With the arrival of another Armistice Day, I revisted an excellent book: "The Lost Voices of World War I, an International Anthology of Writers, Poets & Playwrights," (Tim Cross, University of Iowa Press, 1989). The book compiles poems, fiction and plays written by men killed in what was known as the Great War, the War to End All Wars.

Along with well-known World War I writers such as Rupert Brooke (left), Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Georg Trakl, and Guiluame Apollinaire, the book includes work by obscure French, English, Romanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Serbian, Hungarian, Moravian, Polish, German, Irish and Welsh writers. The bulk of the work is from French, English and German writers; curiously, Russia, another major combatant, is not represented.

No matter their country, the writers display a mixture of patrotism, cynicism, despair, humor,disgust, boredom. Some were killed early in the war, others, such as Owen, survived until the very end.  Those who last the longest grow the most disillusioned, at last achieving a taut acceptance, knowing with near certainty that they will soon join the dead of whom they've written so eloquently.

Most haunting is their photographs. They range in age from youth to middle aged, and wear old-fashioned clothes, eyeglasses and hair styles. They stare from the pages, slain representatives of a deep and vibrant European literary culture. They used the gifts of this civilization to give witness to its destruction, and were themselves killed, either by battle or disease, or suicide, or, in the case of the Armenians, genocide. After looking at "Lost Voices of World War I," I saw newspaper photos of those killed last week at Fort Hood, and felt the same sense of recognition and loss.

 

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

These had seen movement, and heard music; known

Slumber and waking; loved, gone proudly friended;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

 

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter

And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,

Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance

And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,

A width, a shining peace, under the night.

-Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

 

 

Revisited Sally Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor

On a glorious autumn afternoon, I gathered in an overheated room at the Emory University library with a host of others for a symposium on Sally Fitzgerald's literary and personal friendship with Flannery O'Connor.

Fitzgerald, once the wife of the outstanding translator Robert Fitzgerald, edited O'Connor's collection of letters, "The Habit of Being," and O'Connor's Library of America books. The Fitzgeralds, introduced to O'Connor by Robert Lowell, shepherded O'Connor's early career. Later in her life after divorcing Robert, Sally played the major role in building O'Connor's literary reputation to its current soaring height.

After a symposium of four O'Connor scholars presented pleasant but not particularly illuminating talks, Jonathan Yardley, the esteemed longtime book critic of the Washington Post (and the late Washington Star) presented a warm, refreshingly non-academic, talk on O'Connor's letters and Fitzgerald's role in compiling them for publication.

Along the way, Yardley pointed out a striking reality: with the advent of e-mail, volumes such as O'Connor's "Habit of Being" are a soon to be an extinct species. Writers no longer compose long, well-considered letters to each other, but, like everyone else, converse with terse e-mails that are quickly deleted. Thus books such as O'Connor's represent the twilight of a long literary tradition.

The absence of epistolary evidence will also make the labors of biographers more difficult in the future. In the past, scholars could pore over a writer's, or a statesman's, letters for information about his or her daily life.

The sense of cultural loss could be overblown: Yardley says he quickly deletes his e-mails, but some writers and politicians could have the sense of history to preserve theirs. It's difficult to see, however, how the restricted e-mail consciousness can match the eloquence and craft shown in such famous letters as those by Keats.

The O'Connor enthusiasts in attendance didn't display the kind of messianic fervor I've witnessed before. She, like followers of C.S. Lewis, draws a group of readers who respond to her work with a kind of spiritual vertigo. The Emory group would probably agree with Dr. William Sessions' comment that O'Connor must be judged not as a Catholic writer but as a writer.

On that point, O'Connor's amazing ascendancy into the top ranks of American writers is possibly overinflated and in need of correction. It's telling to return to early reviews of O'Connor's work, such as one that recently was reprinted in the Times Literary Supplement, to see that she was at first considered a minor writer at best. The early TLS reviewer saw her work as limited, warped by her Southern outlook and religious viewpoints. He also saw in her a corrosive racial insensitivity.

Most O'Connor readers would vehemently condemn the reviewer's view. I do think that O'Connor's short stories are among the best an American has produced, but a rereading of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" a few years ago left me thinking that it was not as accomplished as I had thought when I first read it. The story's disparate elements didn't mesh so well, and The Misfit's comments on the elderly lady he'd just murdered I found contrived and arbitrary. One of these days, I'll get back to rereading her stories, novels, essays and letters in depth, to see how she stands in my personal rankings.

The highlight of the evening was Dr. Sessions displaying a stunning photo of O'Connor as a young woman. Sessions, who is writing a biography of O'Connor to follow the recent one by Brad Gooch, was a close friend of O'Connor and said he will have access to materials that Gooch didn't. The photo shows O'Connor in a black blouse and long black dress, and she looks at us with big, dark, luminous eyes. She appears sure of her talent and eventual greatness.

To Autumn

    I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

close bosom friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripening to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

   II

Who hath not seen thee amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd forrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

    III

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden croft

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

A Deep Study of "The Bacchae"

I first heard of Daniel Mendelsohn last spring with the publication of a new collection of Cavafy poems, which he edited. Then I found that he had published a collection of essays and a memoir, both of which I hope to get around to reading, especially after perusing his excellent essay in the Oct. 22 New York Review of Books on Euripides' "The Bacchae."

The essay's launching point is a review of a production of "The Bacchae" at the Delacorte Theater in New York City directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. While criticizing the production on its acting, Mendelsohn praises the overall thrust of Akalaitis' conception of the ancient work, blasting superficial criticism by New York critics including the New Yorker's John Lahr. One point that will stick with me is the choral origins of the ancient theater; that plays from the beginning had a strong musical/dance presence.

I loved the heightened intellectual debate of the piece, but it goes much further. Mendelsohn impressively gives the historical/cultural background of the play, presenting a vivid picture of the ancient Greeks' theatrical world. He also analyzes the play in depth, making me think that I was watching a performance of it through his explicaton. The play, which I've never seen, sounds like a profound treatise on gender, identity, politics and the theater. Too bad productions like the Delcorte's are not put on national tours.

Meanwhile, I was disgusted by the New York Times Book Review's decision to put a review of a new biography of Ayn Rand on its Nov. 1 cover. I am thoroughly sick of Ayn Rand and her bogus so-called philosophy, but she keeps lurching from her grave like the Frankenstein monster. Maybe this was the Book Review's post Halloween special.

The review, by the always capable and versatile Adam Kirsch (he also has a piece in the New York Review of Books in which Mendelsohn's appears), is adequate, but Kirsch highlights Rand's popularity among current anti-Obama right wing nuts like Glenn Beck without mentioning that her type of unfettered capitalism led to our recent economic collapse. He does mention that Alan Greenspan was a Rand acolyte, without pointing out that Greenspan bears heavy responsibility for the housing bubble and credit collapse.

I don't fault the Book Review for reviewing the book, but putting it on the front page showed pandering to the right wing rabble rousers. Inside was a woefully shortened review of British writer Hilary Mantel's historical novel "Wolf Hall," by Christopher Benfey. If the Book Review editors really possessed the intellectual seriousness and critical acumen they claim, they would have made Mantel's rehabilitation of Henry VIII counselor Thomas Cromwell the cover piece and given Benfey enough space to adequately examine it.

At least the Review did me one welcome service. I'd thought about reading British military historian John Keegan's new look at the American Civil War, but after James McPherson's evisceration of Keegan's book, I'll save my money and time, althouh I may pick up Keegan's work if it shows up at the library. McPherson devastatingly points out a number of major factual errors in Keegan's work. I loved Keegan's history of World War I, and his "Face of Battle" book, but now I wonder how solid his work really is. Keegan drew criticism for his facile look at the Iraq invasion.

As for McPherson, Southern apologists don't like his history of the Civil War, "Battle Cry of Freedom," but I find his work well-balanced and factual. The review of Keegan is another reminder of  his value.

The Fragility of Academic Publishing

The last issue of Poets & Writers magazine detailed drastic budget cuts at LSU Press and the Southern Review, LSU's signature literary magazine. The reductions, part of a major loss in state funding for the university, threatened the existence of the two giants of Southern literature. Their standing in the literary community is reflected in the fact that P & W would give such attention to the crisis. 

Despite the cuts, it now appears that the LSU Press and the Southern Review will survive, although their scope will be limited. The online LSU Press catalogue shows a strong lineup of new books, including a poetry collection by Kelly Cherry and a history of foreign reporting by Jack Hamilton, longtime dean of LSU's journalism school. Southern Review editor Jeanne Leiby, showing an admirable pluck, said the review would continue, albeit reduced by 40 pages.

With more Pulitzer Prizes than any other university press, a reputation as the best poetry publisher in the country, and known as the discover of John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," the LSU Press burnishes the university's academic and intellectual reputation. The Southern Review, founded by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks and the first publisher of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and a host of others, is one of America's literary treasures. The loss of either would be a devasting blow to the university's intellectual mission and outreach to the broader literary world.

LSU wasn't alone in having to reduce funding to publishing: the article discusses Middlebury's cuts to the outstanding New England Review. Middlebury President Ron Liebowitz, in a stunning statement of philistinism, sniffed that the review is known only to a few students, apparently unaware of its reputation in the greater republic of letters. I also associate it with the Breadloaf Writing Conference.

These troubling developments bring the need to examine the role of academic publishing. Many of the LSU Press titles would have a limited audience, but others could draw a broader readership. With general interest magazines such as the Atlantic cuting its publication of fiction, journals such as the Southern Review give a place to short stories and fictioin that would not find an audience. Now, fewer writers and poets will have their work published.

Literary editors at such publications claim a high standard of excellence for their work, and I suppose it's true. But I  also see poems and stories in literary journals that I don't like, that I wonder why they had been published. The literary journal should strive for excellence, but at the same time, it should be a place for experimental work, the half-baked, the creative leap that falls short. The literary journal is where writers discover themselves, take soundings of their talent, find the true tone of their voice.

Our great state universities across the nation are suffering cutbacks. The first place the bean counters look at is literary publishing. Many of these institutions tout how many research dollars they bring in, their role in economic development, their service to the business community. The universities must also serve the imagination and the questing mind.

The Poets & Writers article made it sound as if the Southern Review had a history of continuous publication since the 1930s, but this is not the case. Similar cuts in the early 1940s led the Southern Review to stop publishing, leading to Warren and Brooks leaving LSU en route to broader horizons at Yale. At last, in the early '60s, the university perceived the gaping hole left its academic landscape and revived the review under Lewis Simpson. How distressing that a university, the seat of historic research and examination, can so blindly ignore the lessons of the past.

The problems at academic presses and literary journals come as newspapers and magazines with huge circulations also suffer economic pressures. Some might wonder at the need of a publication like the Southern Review, with a circulation of 3,000, or a press that publishes books such as a look at the Gettysburg campaign of Brigadier Gen. Harry T. Hays. The Internet has led to a fragmentation of culture, and such limited audiences might make the LSU Press and the Southern Review appear part of this fragmentation. But such institutions, aiding literary and academic research, and offering an incubator for literary talent, build voices that eventually find a place in the broader culture. That the broader culture is severely reduced and offers fewer places for talent to develop shows that academic publishing must survive, as the primary source of work to keep the culture vibrant.

I'd long believed that the LSU Press and the Southern Review had built such a strong reputation that they were invulnerable. The recent cuts show how fragile such instutitions are in our increasingly bottom-line society. I am encouraged that the LSU Press and the Southern Review will survive, because of the strength of the readership they have nourished. While small, their audiences have strong economic and cultural influence. With political support unsteady, this community of writers and readers offer the best hope.

Comparing Southern History to the European Experience

C. Vann Woodward is one of my favorite historians, especially his work on Southern history. My daughter, Sara, a history doctoral student and law student at Stanford, gives a penetrating look at issues raised by Woodward in a book review she wrote for one of her classes. The book reviewed is Peter Kolchin's "A Sphinx on the American Land."

 

Sara Mayeux

HIS 351b
Book Review

10/23/09

 

Southern Exceptionalism?
Peter Kolchin’s A Sphinx on the American Land

 

 

The various myths of American exceptionalism loom over every American historian in one way or another.  But they loom especially large for historians of the American South, because they threaten to write the South out of America altogether.[1]  In C. Vann Woodward’s classic formulation, the former Confederacy was exceptional in America precisely because, unlike the rest of the country, it was unexceptional in the world.[2]  With its history of “quite un-American poverty” and “equally un-American … submission,” in the late 19th century “the South [underwent] an experience that it could share with no other part of America—though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia—the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction.”[3]

Yet for much of the 20th century, historians struggling to make sense of that experience did not seek inspiration or insight in the histories of Europe and Asia.  They dealt with the South’s distinctiveness not by turning outward, but by turning in on themselves.[4]  The parochialism of Southern historians was not entirely of their own making, however.  Slavery, secession, military defeat, and racial terror could hardly be fit into the story of national unity and enlightened progress that American historians in the “consensus” years, at the height of the Cold War, wished to promote.[5]  The above quotations by C. Vann Woodward come from his 1952 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, in which he noted ruefully that

New England, the West, and other regions are occasionally permitted to speak for the nation.  But the South is thought to be hedged about with peculiarities that set it apart as unique.  As a standpoint from which to write American history it is regarded as eccentric and as a background for a historian something of a handicap to be overcome.[6]

 

Over the past few decades, the study of Southern history has become both “Americanized” and (especially in recent years) “globalized.”[7]  Historians outside the South, and even outside the United States, have increasingly engaged with Southern history; and in turn, Southern historians have increasingly adopted a comparative perspective.[8]  In the essays collected in A Sphinx on the American Land, delivered in 2002 as a lecture series at LSU, Peter Kolchin reflects on the promises of comparative history, and identifies questions in Southern history that would especially benefit from an international framework.  He also shares some preliminary conclusions from his own ongoing research comparing the emancipations of American slaves and Russian serfs.[9]

    By juxtaposing the South’s “peculiar institution” with Russian serfdom, Kolchin provocatively suggests that American slavery was not, perhaps, so thoroughly peculiar after all, even if its racial dimension was distinctive among systems of unfree labor.  Kolchin’s primary thesis is that although the processes of emancipation were quite different in the United States and Russia, the outcomes were strikingly similar: a decline from “heady enthusiasm” about “the dawning of a bright new era” into “disappointment, dismay, and disillusionment,” and, ultimately, “an era of reaction and retrenchment.”[10]  Kolchin does not here provide a full account of “[h]ow such different emancipation processes can have yielded such similar emancipation consequences,”[11] although one hopes that he will do so when the research is published in book form.  But he sketches a few tentative explanations:  First, in both Russia and the United States, emancipation was imagined not as an isolated reform but as the cornerstone of a “widespread effort to restructure the social order,” creating perhaps impossibly high expectations.  Second, in “a cruel irony” of history, both emancipations “occurred at the onset of a generation-long agricultural depression”—not an auspicious moment in which to attempt to “uplift[] … an overwhelmingly agricultural population.”[12]

    Kolchin also highlights, by contrast, the relative placidity of the postbellum South—an observation that will surely surprise American historians used to thinking of the late 19th century South as a uniquely violent and deeply divided society.  After emancipation, Kolchin observes, Russia’s peasants entered a phase of total confusion, fueled by rumors and conspiracy theories, and the countryside was rocked by “widespread rural disorders … that dwarfed whatever emancipation-generated violence occurred in the southern United States ….”[13]  The paradox, of course, is that Russian emancipation was designed to be gradual and peaceful, while American emancipation was the result of a hard-fought, bloody war.

    Kolchin’s own research takes up much of the book’s third chapter.  The first two chapters are historiographical, evaluating other historians’ efforts at what might be called “internal comparisons,” whether comparing the South with the North, or the “many Souths” within the region.  Here, two of Kolchin’s insights warrant particular emphasis.  First, he interrogates the ideological implications attached to the traditional Southern historiographical categories—particularly the frequent implicit equation of “Southerner” with “white male adult Southerner.”  For instance, the question of how much popular support the Confederacy enjoyed will have a different answer depending on which states are included in the sample, and whether or not blacks are included.[14]  Second, he insists upon attention to the dynamism of Southern institutions over time.  Antebellum slavery was in many ways atypical of the institution throughout its history.[15]

  Yet though he devotes two of the three essays to internal comparisons, Kolchin’s real agenda here is to encourage more attention to international comparisons, the type of comparative history that has been least utilized by Southern historians.  One of his more interesting proposals is for a study of Confederate nationalism through the lens of the historiography on 19th century European nationalisms.[16]  Kolchin also suggests that by placing the postwar South into global perspective, historians can not so much answer that enduring historiographical riddle—why did the South fail to grow?—as reframe it:  The “‘tragic era’ paradigm of the postwar South” is “based on a tacit assumption that things usually go ‘right,’ that poverty, exploitation, and oppression are aberrations to be explained rather than normal features of human experience,” an assumption that may not hold up under an internationally comparative lens.[17]  Both through his explicit arguments and the implicit force of his example, Kolchin makes a strong case for the value of comparative history both generally and to Southern history in particular, and along the way, provides a useful brief introduction to the historiography of the American South.

---

[1] Of course, the South has had its own myths of exceptionalism, expressed in pop-culture stereotypes, academic histories, and everywhere in between. 

[2] C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 19, no. 1 (Feb. 1953), 4-5.  Woodward’s exact words are as follows: “from a broader point of view it is not the South but America that is unique among the peoples of the world.”

[3] Woodward, 5.

[4]Quite literally, Southern history was a discipline apart from not just world history but even American history: in C. Vann Woodward’s heyday, there was little need to distinguish between “Southern historians,” i.e., historians from the South, and “Southern historians,” i.e., historians of the South, since the two groups overlapped almost entirely.  See Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 2 n. 2 (noting that it was only in 1986 that the Southern Historical Association first elected a president who was neither born in the South nor working in the South).

[5] For example, Kolchin discusses how in the postwar “consensus” years the Civil War was re-defined “as a ‘needless war’ brought on by a ‘blundering generation,’” with the implication “that had it not been for extremist agitators, southerners and northerners would have been able to work out whatever minor differences they had.”  Kolchin, 19.  On the postwar emphasis on “consensus” history generally, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially 333-35.  To be sure, the South hardly holds a monopoly on problematic episodes and themes.  One historian has recently suggested that popular and historiographical notions of an “‘exceptional’ South [have] served as a useful scapegoat in the past and the present.”  Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25.

[6] Woodward, 4.

[7] Kolchin, 2.

[8] Thus, for instance, one set of historians has examined the American South alongside the Italian Mezzogiorno.  Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern, eds., The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

[9] Kolchin previously published a comparative study of slavery and serfdom prior to emancipation, entitled Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987).  Kolchin apparently plans to publish the post-emancipation research as a sequel to that book.  See Kolchin’s CV, available at http://www.udel.edu/History/bio/kolchin_peter.html (last visited Oct. 21, 2009).

[10] Kolchin, 105.

[11] Kolchin, 106 (italics omitted).

[12] Kolchin, 106-7.

[13] Kolchin, 110.

[14] Kolchin, 57.

[15] Kolchin, 44-45.

[16] Kolchin, 88-89.

[17] Kolchin, 28-29.

Saluting Dr. Samuel Johnson

A recent article in The New York Review of Books by the excellent Andrew O'Hagan, and, if memory serves, a similar piece in the Times Literary Supplement, reminded me that this quickly receding year marks the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth. The occasion has prompted an outpouring of new biographies of "Dr. Johnson," as well as a new selection of his work. A similar publishing eruption occurred last year on the 400th anniversary of John Milton's birth.

Johnson, the 18th century British writer and subject of James Boswell's famous biography, is probably little read today. A person no doubt can go through college without even hearing his name. Yet, he is among those essential characters who formed the consciousness of the modern age.

He compiled the first English dictionary, setting the standard by basing his definitions on the usage of writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer. His regular "Rambler" essays were among the innovative works that established journalism as a profession. His analysis of literature, especially of Shakespeare, place him among the great critics.

His personality endures, especially through Boswell's portrait, as a model of the English character. As O'Hagan says, he was an ungainly, combative man on one hand, yet also an exemplar of reason, taste, wit and friendship.

After reading O'Hagan's piece, I was astounded to realize how many Johnson anecdotes, quotes and quips I possess. I think of him on "rambles" with friends in a perpetually sunny London, stopping at coffeehouses and pubs for conversation, literary and political gossip, and witty sallies. He lived and flourished in the dawning days of a professional, urbane, literary culture, now on the wane.

One thinks he might have relished the advent of the Internet and blogging, although he epitomized the professional, discriminating writer. Although his kind of generalist public intellectual appears nearly extinct, his spirit lives on writers such as Adam Kirsch and William Logan. Fondly recalling Johnson, I pulled out my well-used Vol. 1 of the "Norton Anthology of English Literature" and revisited Johson pieces such as the poem "On the Vanity of Human Wishes." I also rejoined Mr. Boswell and Dr. Johnson at a publik house in Augustan London. Boswell's writing is as fresh and vital today as it was 300 years ago. Johnson's prose is a bit more ornate and remote, but his thought retains its energy and originality.

His poetry, with its rhyming couplets and regular meters, can appear stodgy and stale. In his day, verse was used to convey facts, news, opinions and philosophy as much as expressing private emotions and psychological states, the prevailing, curtailed aim of our increasingly minor and fragmented lyric poetry. As with Alexander Pope, his lines spin out with clockwork regularity, and we have little patience now for such poetic rhetoric. His words and phrases, though, echo in the mind, familiar and basic materials of our intellectual discourse, although we might not remember the source.

Here's hoping that the outburst of books on Johnson draws at least a few members of a new generation to his life and work. He was one of the creators of the modern idea of the independent author, fearlessly seeking the truth without regard to tradition and patronage (although he was an arch supporter of the British monarchy, and amusingly as we look back called for the hanging of those ill-bred American revolutionaries). As he showed, the individual writer's voice endures.

 

Strange Tidings in the Book World

As a longtime buyer of books, many of them hardbacks, I'm fascinated and perplexed by disruptions in the publishing industry.

The most recent is the price war between WalMart.Com and Amazon, in which the price of blockbuster best-sellers fell to $8.99. This caused the familiar breast-beating in The New York Times, with a front page article foreseeing doom. According to this theory, the severe cut in price for best-sellers will mean that buyers will not want to pay the full price for other, less popular books, leading to them no longer being published.  This is the corollary of the longstanding premise that the huge advances publishers pay for super best sellers leaves much less money for publishers to give to nurturing the careers of lesser-known writers, especially young literary authors who need time to develop their craft and audiences. In both cases, daring, innovative, scholarly, artistic, challenging books are threatened. These Cassandra cries have been rising for quite some time now, but an astounding selection of books continue to pour out. Of course, book sales are falling, and bookstores no longer offer the broad selection they used to, but the Internet offers an unlimited selection of subjects and authors.

Another point raised is that the book business is an anomoly in that its best-sellers, the products most in demand, bring reduced prices. Outside of the the price war between WalMart.Com and Amazon, best-sellers by writers like Dan Brown are sold at discounts of 20 or 30 percent at chain stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble. In economic theory, strong demand should bring higher prices. However, the very popularity of the books, the mass sales, actually results in a deep reduction in price. So, the publishers find it difficult to make enough money to pay for the huge advances paid out to writers like Brown. The big book publishers appear engaged in a curious ritual of self-cannibalization. The book industry already seeks to overcome the odd model in which bookstores can return books that don't sell, leading to remainders. No other industry operates quite like this.

When I go to the bookstore these days, I'm struck by how few books interest me. I also perceive a strong reduction in selection, with books I'm interested in after reading reviews hard to find. I have no desire to read any of Brown's books, or most other best-sellers, including one mentioined as being part of the price war, Sarah Palin's memoirs. The only best sellers I might be interested in are books like Malcolm Gladwell's or Thomas Friedman's, although I am unwilling to pay nearly $30 for these. I might find a Friedman or Gladwell in the library. Often, the ideas that a writer like Gladwell comes up with are well disseminated through articles and reviews, so I feel I don't even have to read the book to get its essense.

As books get tougher to sell, I'm struck by how exaggerated claims for books get, especially in subtitles on covers. Now there are a number of books about certain years that are claimed to have "changed America," or sporting events that "changed football, baseball, basketball" forever. I actually bought one of these books, on 1959, by Fred Kaplan, in which he recounts events that "changed" the country. Then the other day, I saw one on 1969, purported to be the year that also "changed" America. Yes, a lot happened in 1969, but the same is true of 1968, and 1965, and 1971, and 1972.

The reality is that no single year brought the entirity of the enormous changes that occurred from say 1950 through 1975. It was continual, if continually monnumental, process. That pace of change, with increased technological innovations such as the Internet, keeps building. But giving too much weight to one single year or event distorts the historical reality. In sports, one could make the case that the 1959 Colts-Giants championship game changed our perception of pro football, as one book has it, but was that just the culimination of a process of increased popularity, or the catalyst for new popularity? What about the advent of the old AFL in 1960, or the Giants winning the NFL championship in 1956?

Books like "1959," or a recent book I bought that claimed the '60s radical magazine Ramparts "changed America" forever assume that the radical events of the 60s really changed the country. Most of the counterculture creativity was assimilated by advertising, but didn't bring lasting political or cultural change. The '60s was followed by what has been 30 years of conservative dominance.

Another trend is looking at singular sporting events, such as one World Series game or one golf tournament. Again, claims are exaggerated about a particular event's importance. Some events, such as Francis Ouiment's U.S. Open victory in 1916, the subject of a fine book by Mark Frost and an entertaininng movie, justifiably did change a sport. But now, there's a proliferation of dubious claims. The churning out of these books goes along with a a parallel erosion of writing and editing. Even books like Frost's contain striking errors, and clumsy sentences.

I've also been fascinated by the battle between Google and authors over Google's attempts to create a digital library of a huge selection of books though the scanning the out-of-print collections of world libraries. I've leapt into a world of "orphan" copyrights, claims to open knowledge to vast new audiences, writers' protests that their rights are being trampled and that Google will control thought and knowledge in a scary Orwellian universe. A new agreement between Google and authors is being hammered out, but voices of dissent keep bubbling up. Many of the issues of these battles are difficult to grasp, sliding into a thicket of legalize and scholarly babble. But I keep trying to add to my feeble understanding.

On another front, the book industry is also threatened by e-publishing, the advent of Kindle and the Sony reader. Again, the e-reader offers much lower prices. In another development uncovered by the ever vigilant New York Times, libraries are increasing their stock of e-books, which can be downloaded for free, threatening the book industry much as Napster sapped the music business. Another pardox: libraries must pay prices of $25 for e-books, while owners of Kindle or Sony readers can buy them for $6. So, the library threat is mitigated by the libaries' inability to buy a huge selectioin of e-books because of limited budgets.

Who knows where all of this will end? I read another fascinating essay, yes in a newspaper, this time the Wall Street Journal, by Esquire writer Stephen Marche, which compared the advent of the Kindle with the invention of the codex, or the book, which replaced the cumbersome scroll. The development of the codex brought a new explosion of knowledge at the end of the Roman era,  just as the printing press later led to the end of monks copying out books by hand and a broadening of knowledge. In each case, the new technology resulted in the products of the old technology receiving status as "holy" documents. According to Marche, the electronic readers will now supplant traditional books, which will be relegated to a "holy" status. Art books, or books of rare subject matter, will continue to be produced for a special clientele, but general dissemination of written ideas will come through the e-reader.

If this comes to pass, books could turn into rare artifacts. Or, they could become obsolete, unnecessary objects, with no further use. Already, libraries are getting rid of books. Perhaps book-burning will return, with assurances that freedom of thought and expression will continue in the E-publishing age. As the flames lick toward the sky, we'll either feel the warmth of a new frontier of human thought, or a chill from the surrounding dark.

Pui Ying Wong: "Exploring the Possibilities of Language"

    
I met Pui Ying Wong a few weeks ago during a festive weekend in Brooklyn to celebrate Pui’s recent marriage to Tim Suermondt.

 

Tim, a wonderful poet whom I met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 1991, and Pui shared their joy with friends and relatives at a luncheon at Pete’s in downtown Brooklyn. Poetry, laughter and fellowship flowed easily. Later, my wife Anne-Marie and I enjoyed a dinner at Tim and Pui’s home in Park Slope, along with Pui’s enchanting sisters Susanna and Tammy. All three of the Wong sisters grew up in Hong Kong. Susanna now lives in Melbourne, and was full of interesting tales about a business venture in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and Tammy gave us news from Hong Kong. Sharing Pui and Tim’s hospitality  and hearing everyone's voices and stories, I felt as if I were in the middle of one of those legendary gatherings recounted in histories of literary eras or writers' biographies.

 

I was also glad to discover Pui’s poetry, in two chapbooks, “Sonnet for a New Country” (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and “Mementos” (Finishing Line Press, New Women’s Voices Series, 2007). She also has a book collection forthcoming. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, she has published poems in the Asian Pacific American Journal, Blue Fifth Review, China Press, DMQ Review, New World Poetry, New York Quarterly and Poetz.

 

In her work, she displays descriptive delicacy, power and precision, whether using forms like the sonnet or free verse. She recounts small yet surprisingly complex narratives that cover an enormous range of emotional territory. From the first poem of hers I read, I instantly recognized her as a poet of strong vision and individuality.

 

Tim was my first interview subject for “Southern Bookman,” so this conversation with Pui has special resonance. Before beginning the interview with Pui, enjoy her fine poem, “Visiting My Sister in Australia,” collected in “Sonnet for a New Country” and first published in Blue Fifth Review.

Visiting My Sister in Australia

Smog in the sky, bushfire burning outside
the city. The constellation has changed.
I’m under. The years peel off like old skin.
My sister sipping coffee, her eyes wide;
between us, a blooming walnut tree. Strange
all these fruits, maybe spring won’t go to ruin
after all.  December, this side of world,
sprigs of green fruits round into each other.
It took us forever to count, moments
long enough to freeze a heartache— unfurl
and release. If memories can sever
from their roots, will they become sacrament
too like harvest fruits we put in a dish?
Cut one open, the meat is babyish.  

 
1.   You are part of America’s incredibly rich émigré literary culture. African, East European, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, Indian and Middle Eastern writers are capturing their encounters with American society. What do you feel you have in common with writers from other cultures?

This is a difficult question to answer. Writers seem to move around more now than they have in the past, and this fluidity is expanding our understanding of each other. More than ever, we have access to many writers through the Internet and translation. For example, the Chinese writer Guo Xingjian (2000 Nobel Laureate) went to live in France in the 1980s and though his stories are often set in Communist China, his theme, an individual’s struggle against oppression, has relevancy everywhere. Good writing transcends ethnic and national boundaries. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski lives in both America and France, whether he writes about riding the bus in Paris or the train along the Hudson, his concern is particular but not local. To me, these are cosmopolitan writers who move with ease from one culture to the next. The world they open up is a universal human world.

2. Your work adds to the oeuvre of Chinese writers like Ha Jin and Amy Tan. What special values do you and other Chinese writers bring to the literary landscape?

Ha Jin and Amy Tan’s backgrounds are as different as their concerns. Ha Jin lived in Communist-ruled China before coming to the U.S. His stories are powerful and personal in telling how his characters who are ordinary Chinese live under this kind of government oppression. Amy Tan writes about the lives of Chinese immigrants in America, their conflicts within the family and with the larger society. Her characters’ reaching back to learn their family history and its migration is a way to understand and reconcile these conflicts. I think the Chinese writers, like every writer, bring to the picture their own obsession which inevitably expands the literary landscape. Whether this obsession is personal and family, political and historical, together it shows how individual and varied we are.

3. Unlike Jin, whose work reflects the experience of the Communist Chinese mainland, you grew up in hyper-capitalistic Hong Kong, now returned to the control of the Chinese government, and went to school in Japan. How has your Hong Kong and Japanese experiences influenced your work?

I think lots of experiences influenced my writing, being raised in Hong Kong and going to school in Japan are certainly among them. For a century, Hong Kong was a British Colony with mostly Chinese residents. Yearning for cultural and political belonging has been a prevalent theme among the Hong Kong Chinese, especially before the turnover. Today, Hong Kong is a hybrid city with both Chinese and Western influences, and sadly, dominated by strong business interests. In the early 1970s I went to an international school in Tokyo where the students were from all over the world. I was always curious about their backgrounds and the lives they led. But having lived in various places, including my years in the U.S., made me open to other people no matter where they may live. I can read writers from another country and feel no barriers because the feelings are universal. Being a more open reader makes me a more open writer. 

4. Mainly through poems of Ezra Pound and James Wright, I’m aware of the ancient tradition of classic Chinese poetry, which combined sensory power with the discipline of strict forms. I see the same in your sonnets, in “Sonnet for a New Country” and other poems. Do you see yourself as part of that long tradition?

Other poets have spoken about freedom when writing in forms, when adherence to forms pushes you beyond what is available. I tend to agree. Writing in forms is one way for me to explore the many possibilities of language, but the same is true when I write in free verse which has its own inherent form as well. I think the sensory power in classic Chinese poetry comes from the density in language, which has to abide to forms. To me, the pleasure of classic Chinese poetry is in the visual lushness, and this has probably influenced me in my writing. But I also find contemporary Chinese poetry, like those by Hong Kong poets Ping Kwan Leung and Chan Lan Huang, written in everyday language and on everyday subjects, intimate and affecting.    

5.  Your poems often have the narrative symmetry of short stories, and “Blue Hedges” is a prose poem with a central character. Do you wish to write fiction?

The character in “Blue Hedges” was inspired by someone I met briefly while doing freelance work for a Florida grower. It is a mystery how I came to write this piece based on someone I barely knew. But I had this impulse to imagine this character and his concerns, how he may think or feel in that particular moment in time. I meant for it to be a prose poem, though someone told me it read like a short story. I think the appeal of writing other characters is that it relieves me from thinking too much about myself; the paradox is that the process also re-energizes me.  
 
6. You write in Chinese as well as English. In which Chinese dialect do you write, and do you see yourself as having a different consciousness in Chinese and English?

My native tongue is Cantonese and it is the dialect I am most fluent in. In written language Chinese understand each other regardless of the dialect since the characters are the same. Chinese characters are pictorial; often a character has an origin in a visual image. Therefore the word “house” also evokes an image reminiscent of the house. And this is one thing I love about the Chinese language. I remember when I was little I practiced writing the character “fly” which has the feathery strokes resembling birds in flight, or the character “rain” with dots like raindrops. This gives a sensory component to the language which is quite different than English.