Southern Bookman

Oscar Wilde's Wife Rediscovered

Didn't watch "Hemingway and Gellhorn" after all, after Mike Hale's pan in The New York Times convinced me that the HBO movie would be cliched and loaded with bad Hemingway dialogue. Sometime when I want to spend two and a half hours reliving the Hemingway myth, I'll probably watch it on On Demand.

In these days of shrinking print products and signs of cultural decline, small advances are worth celebrating. The London Review of Books has mysteriously shown up at the Barnes & Noble bookstand, and I spent several enjoyable hours on Memorial Day quaffing Guinness Stouts and reading the LBR, particularly Colm Toibin's educational and entertaining review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance, and an annotated edition of Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Sad to say, before reading the review, I was unaware of Wilde's wife, or the two sons that he fathered with her.

As with so many other previously little known women married to famous men, Constance appears an interesting woman, with an admirable, long-tested loyalty to Wilde. "Feminist" critics and historians continue to illuminate the lives of women who played signicant roles in their men's lives of greatness or notoriety. Not only are these women like Constance Wilde or Clover Adams, whose accomplishments don't match those of their husbands but whose lives are worth examining. They also include those such as Gellhorn, whose more substantial achievements were long underappreciated.

I hope the LBR remains for sale at the Barnes & Noble. A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement made a similar appearance, then disappeared. When I asked a B&N employee, he claimed the TLS hadn't sold enough copies to remain. I hope the LBR makes the cut; the copy I bought recently was the last one, so perhaps it's selling.

Farewell, Paul Fussell

After reading Paul Fussell's obituary in The New York Times, I found on a dusty bookshelf at home Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory." Fussell's study of the English literature that emerged from World War I began my abiding interest in the global bloodbath from 1914 to 1918 that wrecked European civilization and, as Fussell registered, brought forth a new ironic consciousness.

Beginning with Fussell's book, I've deeply studied what was called the "war to end all wars." One of my favorite books is an anthology of poetry and fiction from all countries embroiled in the war; the disillusion and ironic style Fussell analyzes in English writing was universal. The combination of the writers' high culture and the squalor of the trenches has always given me a deep tragic sense.

His examination of disillusion of writers such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves (I'd previously read "Goodbye to All That") arrived during the crashing wave of Vietnam-era books, articles and movies. The anti-war and anti-establishment anger had been numbed by the advent of disco -- preceding Fussell's death were those of Robin Gibb and Donna Summer -- and Fussell's book achieved surprising popularity. The World War I era he evoked mirrored the contemporary post Watergate, post-Vietnam epoch. Fussell's book did for the great war's literature what Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore" did for the writings from the American Civil War.

I read other books by Fussell, his biography of Samuel Johnson, his study of the meter and form of English poetry, and his harrowing memoir of his World War II service as a young infantry soldier in Europe. He wrote with the classic elegance of English writers like Johnson, William Hazlitt and Walter Pater while maintaining a modern accessibility. In later life, he blasted U.S. culture with devastating, if heavy-handed, accuracy, an American version of British curmudgeons like Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis. A telling sign of the triumph of mass popular tastes over the classic values Fussell championed was that Summer's obituary, unlike Fussell's, made the Times front page.

If much of Fussell's rants at the debased mass culture will likely fade, his "Great War and Modern Memory" will be one of the books read for generations.

Robert Caro, dinosaur rock star

Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume of Caro's massive Lyndon Johnson biography, is receiving the kind of attention that books usually don't receive any more. The 78-year-old Caro, who has been working for decades on the biography, has been profiled in the New York Times magazine and Esquire, and the book has been reviewed universally, including Bill Clinton's rave on the front page of the Times Book Review.

Ironically in this era when movies for adolescents generally receive this burst of attention, articles on Caro emphasize his old-fashioned techniques. He works in an office in New York City, writing first in longhand, then on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. Shunning the computer and the Internet, he keeps cross-referenced paper files, kept in metal cabinets, in the once familiar manila folders. He's also drawn attention for his obsessive accumulation of details and the long delays in publication of each volume that has appeared so far. Times columnist Joe Nocera recently ridiculed Caro for this need to account for every minuscule piece of Johnson's life. He also disdained Caro's continued delays in finishing the project. At 78, Caro  has not yet examined the bulk of Johnson's presidency.

While Nocera's hit job smacked of an envious middleweight swinging wildly at a heavyweight, Nocera scored some hits. Caro's compulsive acculumulation of facts, ancient techniques and relentless editing and rewriting can seem pathological. Yet, in reading Nocera's piece, I wanted to defend Caro as one of the last, if not the final, upholders of an ancient tradition of scholarship and writing.

I'd recently read Natalie Dykstra's fine biography of Clover Adams, the tragic wife of pioneering American historian Henry Adams. Dykstra shows Henry Adams as very similar to Caro in his constant uncovering of details and stretching projects into mulitiple volumes. I wanted to tell Nocera that Caro deserves honor and acclaim for searching for the truth no matter what it takes.

Still, Adams finished his massive history of the United States under the Jefferson and Madison Administrations much faster than Caro has done with his work. And, the descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams later published his "Education of Henry Adams" and "Mount St. Michel and Chartres."

As as reader, I bailed out of the Johnson project after Caro's first two volumes. His look at Johnson's years as the master of the U.S. Senate bogged down in legislative minutia. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the "Passage of Power," Caro's  account of the Kennedy assassination, which captivated me. I'll probably make an effort to read the entire book, which begins with Johnson's effort to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, examines his lost years as Kennedy's vice president and ends with Johnson's leadership in passing landmark civil rights legislation.  The look at Kennedy's presidency from Johnson's viewpoint promises to give a fresh account of "Camelot."

By the way, the title "The Passage of Power," strikes me as odd. This has a passive tone, as if the power passed to Johnson in some magical, mysterious way. It almost sounds as if it were a normal passage of power, as happens when an incumbent ends his two terms, or loses an election. The title's bland construction denies the historical reality that Johnson gained power because of the assassination.

Beginning Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" at Last

Thanks to the Atlanta-Fulton County Library, I finally have in my hands Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," the novel that caused such a late summer stir. I'd put a hold on the book when it first came out and was pleasantly surprised that it finally came to me. In the past, I've put holds on books and never received them.

The book started off fine; Franzen has the gift of drawing the reader into his work and efficiently giving a great deal of narrative information. However, I've now reached the dubious second chapter, an autobiography of one of the main characters, Patty, written, according to Franzen's conceit, at the suggestion of her therapist. This filled me with foreboding, with some of the book's negative reviews echoing from deep within. The device struck me as contrived and manipulative; I'll keep reading, but fear I could hit rough waters here.

Meanwhile, I'm also trying to finish Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," an homage to old-time Euroepean journalism. The book tells the saga of a small newspaper based in Rome, built on character sketches of a number of colorful characters. The book evokes the romance of foreign correspondents and expatriate adventures. That spirit appeared lost to those of us who grew up imbibing it; thanks to Rachman for rekindling it.  

 

 

 

 

 

Looking back at John Updike's Paean to Ted Williams

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times' Charles McGrath ran a piece on the 40th anniversary of John Updike's valediction to Ted Williams' last game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," which ran in the New Yorker. The piece in which Updike made the comment about Williams' refusual to answer the fans' final cheers "gods don't answer letters" enjoyed a long afterlife, including publication as a small book.

Updike's article has a place in classic baseball literature, but McGrath probably gave it too much credit for beginning a new era of literary writing about the game. A lot of fine baseball writing had been done before Updike's piece, including by newspaper columnists like Red Smith. Some believe that the best writing on sports has been done on baseball an golf; some famous quote master said the smaller the ball, the better the writing, although quite a bit of strong work has been done on football, and basketball. Boxing also has a strong body of literature. The prevalance of baseball writing probably is a reflection of the fact that baseball was once more popular than any other sport. 

As McGrath said, Updike's piece foreshadowed the work of writers like the New Yorker's Roger Angell, who overly romanticize baseball. I've grown tired of writers who talk about the enternal green fields, the mystical distances between the bases and all of the rest.

Baseball books and articles are still churned out, but the game doesn't attract writers like Updike anymore. For that matter, with the rise of ESPN and Internet commentary, sportswriting has entered an era of utilitarian focus on statistics and strategic analysis of dubious worth, not poetry and narrative. 

Antonina Pirozhkova's Heroic Life

The New York Times Thursday ran an obituary of one of the great characters of Russia/Soviet history in the 20th century, Antonina Pirozhkova, the widow of the great writer Isaac Babel and an important engineer in her own right.

Babel, one of the many Soviet writers/artists/intellectuals killed by Joseph Stalin, left two major works, "Red Cavalry," a searing picture of the brutal civil war after the Bolsehevik Revolution, and "Odessa Tales," portraits of Jewish life in Odessa. Thanks to Pirozhkova, we have a volume of Babel's collected works. Her tireless efforts to discover what had happened to her husband led to the rehabilitation of his reputation in the Soviet Union in 1954.

According to The Times obituary, Pirozhkova rose to chief desinger at the Metroproekt Institute, and helped design the "crown jewels of the Moscow Subway system, the Mayakovsky, Pavelets, Kiev, Arbst and Revolutionary Square stations." Pirozhkova, who died at the age of 101 in Sarasota, Fla., also wrote the memoir "At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel." Late in life, she emigrated with her daughter to the United States.

Pirzozhkova holds a place among those heroic Soviets like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov who stood as individual consciences against the Soviet state, playing major roles in its eventual destruction.

A Decline in Passion for Books?

Slate media critic Jack Shafer recently lamented that he no longer reveres books as he once did. Shafer said that he once collected books, stacked them in his home, fondled their covers,and honored authors and books' transcendent cultural value. Now, he says, he rarely if ever even attends a book party.

Book party invitations seem a superficial manifestation of a love for books, but I know what Shafer means. I also don't experience the passion for books I once had. Once the publication of "big" fall books excited me, but no more. I still go to bookstores and libraries, yet it more and more feels out of habit than enthusiasm.

My home is loaded with books from years of collecting. A few old favorites I take down to re-read, such as my old graybound "Norton Anthology of English Literare, Vols. I and II," from my college days. I like being surrounded by books, as Anthony Powell's title said, books do furnish a room. Yet, I do not purchase as many books today as I once did. Fewer and fewer books do I find interesting enough to take home on impulse.

Still, I maintain a stack of books beside my living room chair. Although I detect a falloff in my passion for books, I still feel satisfaction at discovering an interesting book at the library. Poetry books especially still excite me. Perhaps I'm just not taken by those books heralded by arbiters like the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Books still matter to me, but as Shafer reflects, their hold is weakening. I am undoubtedly affected my the general drop in books' importance, along with that of newspapers, magazines and literary journals.

Shafer made an interesting comment about the rise of the Kindle and the e-book, that perhaps they would put the emphasis on reading, not the book. I once considered books, with their cover designs, photographs and artwork, as works of art. With the Kindle, they are more and more vehicles of information and entertainment, not artifacts. Shafer could be right that such devices indicate the primacy of content, the irrelevance of form.

New York Times Glows for Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Wiener recently complained that The New York Times' literary coverage is biased toward white male authors of "literary fiction." Sniffed Picoult in a Tweet, that venue of well-considered literary thought, "Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." Picoult and Wiener whimpered over the massive attention the Times gave to Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Freedom," although the Times wasn't alone; Time magazine put Franzen on its cover.

If such a bias exists, it apparently doesn't extend to "creative nonfiction," a phrase that makes me uneasy. Recently, the Times has twice reviewed black woman writer Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," and this week profiled Wilkerson. Wilkerson accomplished the literary trifecta of having her book reviewed by Times literary top gun Michiko Kakutani and receiving a front-page rave on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The profile of Wilkerson was done by longtime literary journalist Charles McGrath. Wilkerson is basking in the warmth of the New York Times' many suns.

Her book is a massive look at the "great migration," during which a huge number of blacks fled the Jim Crowe South for Northern and Western cities.  The Times reviews, along with a recent strong review in The New Yorker, call the book a major work. In an inspiring show of perseverance, Wilkerson took 15 years to finish the book, interviewing 1,500 blacks who'd left the South. However, she focuses on the stories of just three people, which raises the question whether she decided to aim for commercial attractiveness rather than in-depth scholarly writing of more appeal to an academic audience.

Wilkerson's title comes from the great black writer Richard Wright, who said that the black migration to the North was in search of the "warmth of other suns." Her book draws attention to the horrid South where black men were frequent lynching victims and segregation was deeply enforced. Wilkerson uncovers strange evidence of how deep the system ran; blacks and whites were forbidden to play checkers in Birmingham parks. That thankfully vanished world today seems unbelievable even to those who lived through it, and writers like Wilkerson are to be commended for showing the brutal reality of those days.

McGrath's profile of Wilkerson is readable, yet superficial. He points out that Wilkerson lives in Atlanta, although she "commutes to Boston, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Boston University." While not elaborating further on that commute, the piece says Wilkerson moved to Atlanta in 2001 "for reasons unconnected to the book." Those reasons are never detailed. However, Wilkerson says that she discovered that "she needed to be here, only I didn't know it." She continues, "I needed to look through the exile's heart and feel that distant, rejecting, hurtful feeling," adding "I needed to come here to see what they left."

Undboutedly, discrimnation and racism remain in the South, yet the piece doesn't delve into how Wilkerson "saw what they left." McGrath, nor Wilkerson, ever reflect upon Atlanta's status as a mecca for Southern business and culture, even in the mean old days of Jim Crow. Atlanta's reputation for tolerance has been overstated --a destructive race riot occurred here in the early 20th century -- yet it still offered blacks prospects for commerce, education and artistic expression sorely lacking in the rest of the South. I would have been interested in Wilkerson's views on Atlanta's history and present status as a center of black achievement. But McGrath apparently didn't follow up on this.

Also crying ouf for further elaboration is the statement "... the book, influenced by Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' and the films of Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh, rotates in a novelistic way among three main characters whose stories are interspered with broader, more gneral inter-chapters." Steinbeck, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh? Creative nonfiction, begone.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" sounds like an deep examination of a major historical subject, although male historians, whether white or black, would wish for similar attention. Also, as McGrath quickly points out, Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times as a features writer for the newspaper. Cynics will likely wonder whether her connection with the paper played a role in the attention giver her book.

The controversy about whether the Times plays literary favorites could only arise in regard to that newspaper, the only one that runs separate reviews in its regular Arts section and in an independent  Sunday book review. Most newspapers around the country are cutting back or eliminating their book reviews. However, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has recently had a resurgence in running reviews and writing about authors, generally connected with the recent Decatur Book Festival. The AJC in a surprising sign of local knowledge, even had its own superficial profile of Wilkerson.

The disturbing trend of reduced book coverage is countered by an announcement I saw somewhere in Internet land that the Wall Street Journal will soon run a separate book review. While this is welcome, I hope the WSJ continues running as well its outstanding daily book reviews, along with its book coverage in the Friday and Saturday "weekend" sections. I'm suspicious that the arrival of a separate book review will lead to the elimination of book coverage elsewhere.

While alarms keep ringing (sorry, Mr. Orwell) about declines in reading, these literary stirrings show an abiding interest in books and publishing, and not only in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Books on a broad number of subjects keep coming out. And the proliferation of events like the Decatur Book Festival reflect a deep and committed love of reading and books.

Yet disturbing signs are everywhere; I discovered this week that the long-established Louisiana Book Festival has bene canceled, because of state budget cuts. This left me with the chilling recollection that a state austerity movement after Huey Long's downfall led to the demise of LSU's Southern Review, later revived. The distinguished LSU Press and Southern Review were threatened by a first wave of budget cuts last year. With further drastic budget cuts looming, and an aversion to increasing taxes, the LSU Press and Southern Revew are again threatened. This year, they are celebrating 75 years of literary excellence. 

 

Jonathan Franzen's Instant Masterpiece

The fanfare accompanying the publication of Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom" is heartening to upholders of traditional literary culture. After years in which novels, especially large and serious ones, were pushed to the margins of American culture, Franzen's book is receiving cloudbursts of attention, including Franzen appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

With reading of novels and other books in decline, our attention spans short-circuited by the Internet, television, mobile phones and I-pads, and cultural standards falling, the Franzen boom is like a last reflexiive spasm of a dying age. Or perhaps it marks a revived attention to literature, fueled by the popularity of e-book readers like Kindle.

No matter what, I was dismayed by Sam Tannenhaus' fawning review of "Freedom" on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The first sentence set me off, "Jonathan Franzen's new novel 'Freedom," like his previous one, "The Corrections," is a materpiece of American fiction."

How unseemly for Mr. Tannenhaus, the editor of the book review and the noted biographer of Whittaker Chambers, to immediately make an inflated assessment of a novel not yet available to the reading public. Such simplistic and short-sighted declarations would be questionable for a college sophomore; they are disturbing from the editor of the most prevalent literary review in Americag.  To be declared a masterpiece, a book traditionally has stood the test of readership, received longterm critical evalation and gained acceptance by generations. Tannenaus' declaraton is premature at best. It only set the stage for a long, tedious and overwrought review.

I read "Corrections" when it appeared: I'd forgotten that it was publshed right before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Perhaps someone will compile an anthology of Sept. 11-eve literature; old '60s lib and reputed Barack Obama pal Bill Ayers published his self-serving memoir right before Sept. 11 as well. "Corrections" is an apt companion to Ayers' book; both are testaments to an age of self-indulgence and moral atrophy reputedly blown away with the dust of the Trade Center towers.

Looking back on "Corrections," I don't consider it "a masterpiece." I remember a swirl of impressions, a few striking characters and scenes, and the book's claustrophobic atmosphere. It had stretches of good writing, but could have benefitted from cutting and editing. I didn't think it that much different from other novels about American families; it was hardly the original, revolutionary break with the past that Tannehaus imagines.

The importance given to Time's endorsement of Franzen is also outdated, since the cultural power of the weekly newsmagazine has seriously eroded.  A few decades ago, the newsmagazines played a major role in settting the cultural/political and social agenda, but now they hardly matter, especially to the younger generation.

That Franzen is receiving such heightened attention is ironic, since he claimed to disdain such acclaim when Oprah chose "Corrections" for her book club and he rejected her imprimatur. The burst of publicity has also brought protests from women novelists who see themselves as slighted in comparison.

The publication of "Freedom," at 562 pages, marks the latest revival of the big, messy novel. That there's no shortage of such books shows that literary publishing might not be in such bad shape after all. Still, "Freedom," even if it achieves best-seller status, will still be purchased and read by a small percentage of the American public. "American Idol" and football will consume most people.

  

Memories of Newman and Gissing

The July 30 Times Literary Supplement, with pieces on John Henry Cardinal Newman and George Gissing, brought me back to one of my most memorable college courses, "Victorian Autobiography."

I retain a memory of our attractive and energetic professor, a young scholar whose name I cannot recall, lecturing to us in her starched shirts and sensible, knee-length skirts. She enjoyed having our small class meet outdoors, and my memories remain strong of sitting on the grass in the cool spring, or perhaps fall, air and discussing Dickens, Thackery, Carlyle, Trollope, Butler and Newman and Gissing.  Not only did we read straight autobiographies, such as Newman's "Apologia" and Carlyle's "Sartor Resartis," but autobiographical novels such as Dickens' "David Copperfield."

Something about Gissing's gloomy outlook and unsparing examination of London's lower classes drew me, and I wrote my class paper on him, reading his classic look at the metropolis' bleak publishing scene, "New Grub Street," along with other novels and studies of him. 

The TLS had a review of a new academic edition of Gissing's first novel, "Workers of the Dawn," the first of a series of Gissing novels to be republished. Also appearing in the issue was an exerpt from a Gissing article from 1902, in which he criticized a critical study by Swinburne on Dickens. The literary columnist NB also had an amusing item about a row between the author of a new Gissing biography and the secretary of the Gissing Society.

Ever since those college days, I've kept up with Gissing studies and news. Although I found his novels hard going, including "New Grub Street," I was fasinated by his story. Gissing was a classics scholar at Oxford who ruined his career in a scandal involving a young prostitute, and was forced to eke out his living for years as a literary hack and struggling novelist, although he eventually found success and is considered by some enthusiasts as one of the top novelists of his time.

Newman, who will gain beatification from the Catholic Church when Pope Benedict travels to England in September, also fascinates me. The leader of the "Oxford movement," Newman had a long spiritual journey leading to his eventual leaving the Anglican faith for the Catholic Church. If the church can document a miracle or two, Newman will become a saint. His great spiritual writings make some consider him the best English stylist of the 19th century. A memorable, if highly unreverential portrait, of Newman can be found in Lytoon Strachey's "Imminent Victorians."

The TLS included a searching review of a new biography on Newman, as well as a in-depth commentary on Newman's thought and writing. Another strong article looked at the thought of another noted Catholic convert, G.K. Chesterton.

Gissing and Newman represent two poles of British society of the Victorian through Edwardian era. Newman is an intellectual giant upholding the tradtional faith against the assaults of science and modernity. Gissing is the modern existential man, buffeted by wrenching economic and social changes and forging new ways of perceiving the world. Thanks to the TLS for stoking my interest in them, and reviving memories of those sunlit classes from long ago.