Southern Bookman

Michael Gorra examines William Faulkner's contradictions, achievement

William Faulkner carried within himself all that's noble and contemptible about the South.

The "human heart in conflict with itself" that Faulkner cited in his Noble Prize speech described his own.

A chronic alcoholic and dissolute dreamer, Faulkner produced an astonishing body of work, including several of American literature's greatest novels.

At times a Southern "moderate" on civil rights, receiving the opprobrium of James Baldwin for advising blacks to "go slow," Faulkner also expressed some of the region's most virulent statements of white-supremacist defiance.

Smith College professor and literary critic Michael Gorra ventures to understand Faulkner's contradictions in "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War."

Gorra demonstrates how Faulkner's novels in their searing indictments of Southern racism achieved greatness beyond his personal weaknesses and seeks to uphold the books’ value as the nation strives for racial healing.

“The Saddest Words” takes a much wider scope than its misleading subtitle. Along with analysis of Faulkner's work, the book blends biography, Civil War and Reconstruction history, travel writing and social and political commentary.

While Gorra valiantly strives to cover so much ground, he often falters. The book reads like several incomplete ones thrown together.

Gorra makes a particularly jarring reference in discussing how Faulkner's books mainly take place in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

"Oh of course his characters know about that other world - they go to Memphis or New Orleans or even New England, and some of them run away to Texas," Gorra writes. "But nothing that happens there ever really counts; it's just a rumble of thunder at the outer edge of hearing."

In writing the last sentence, Gorra must have temporarily forgotten that one of the major events of Faulkner's work, Quentin Compson's suicide, occurred in Cambridge, Mass.

How did Gorra allow that confounding sentence to get into print?

Countering his glaring lapse, Gorra in his meandering summaries of "Absalom, Absalom" and "The Sound and the Fury" gives a full explication of Compson's death. 

One interesting biographical revelation is how well Faulkner succeeded in writing short stories for "The Saturday Evening Post" and other popular magazines. In Gorra's telling, Faulkner was almost as prolific as F. Scott Fitzgerald in pulling in magazine commissions.

The magazine stories Faulkner turned out go against Gorra's thesis of Faulkner's unflinching honesty in portraying the South's weaknesses. The stories, later strung together in "The Unvanquished" and "Go Down Moses," follow the myth of the Lost Cause and the South freeing itself from corrupt black rule during Reconstruction. As "Gone With the Wind" proved, the nation by the 1930s accepted the South's romantic fantasies.

Gorra presents the standard account of Faulkner's Hollywood experience, finding nothing new. The author does show how Faulkner's Hollywood work detracted from his fiction writing.

While Gorra claims to present a fresh appraisal of Faulkner's novels, his analyses also seem conventional. Gorra's summaries are worthwhile, but would be better presented in a separate volume. A young reader would receive more useful information from Cliff Notes.

And, as Casey Cep noted in The New Yorker, his Civil War chronologies don't reach the level of standard battlefield guides.

William Faulkner's Civil War of the subtitle is the one that ranged within Faulkner's soul. Gorra makes a conscientious effort to understand those battles, but gets disoriented along the way.

State poet laureates' work shows literary diversity that's threatened by publishing consolidation

The New York Times on Thursday published Thanksgiving poems by state poet laureates while reporting that Random House is buying Simon & Shuster.

Poems by writers like North Dakota's Larry Woiwode, Minnesota's Joyce Sutphen and Mississippi's Beth Ann Fennelly gave reports from the ground about how each state's natural beauty and community spirit are giving hope during the pandemic. Fennelly's "Gratitude," an affectionate portrait of her state's racial affinities and rural culture, was my favorite.

I was also happy to see the 79-year-old Woiwode represented. The novelist, essayist, poet and narrative theorist's career has drawn acclaim from other writers and a devoted cadre of readers. He's one of those "writers' writers" who've enriched American literature with distinctive works outside of the mainstream.

Thanks to the Times for giving recognition to the poet laureates' valuable work. But their careers are more and more unlikely to be supported by major publishing companies as book industry consolidation accelerates. If approved, the Random House-Simon & Shuster deal will mean more blockbuster deals and celebrity books and the neglect of less popular authors.

As fewer companies dominate the publishing industry, more and more authors are shunted aside if they don't achieve widespread success.

Academic publishers like Mercer University Press, LSU Press and the University of Georgia Press and stalwart independents do noble service in producing a range of books.

But more writers will require support from publishers of national and international scope to prevent American literature from turning into a monoculture.

 

 

 

Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation still speaks to nation

The Dow hits 30,000 as covid cases spike and long lines form at food banks.

Our fragmented America prepares for Thanksgiving in topsy-turvy times. As the country is whiplashed by Trump's subversion of American democracy and Joe Biden's forging ahead to form his administration, we turn to vestiges of what used to pass for a normal America: football, Grammy nominations, TV holiday specials, the rising stock market. Yet the pandemic and political stalemate overshadow all.

As health experts advise reduced Thanksgiving gatherings, Americans appear determined to celebrate the holiday, packing airports. Yet, many have canceled plans to join friends and loved ones for traditional feasts.

In the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863, about a month before delivering his Gettysburg Address.

Lincoln in his Thanksgiving message asked Americans to thank God for their blessings and "commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."

Those words ring as true in these times of pandemic and political divisiveness as they did in the Civil War.

 

My quest to read William Gaddis' "The Recognitions"

Another new edition of William Gaddis' "The Recognitions" raises my hopes that one day I'll finish the sprawling novel.

The esteemed New York Review of Books is republishing Gaddis' 1955 novel about art and artistic authenticity, with a new introduction by Tom McCarthy and an afterword by William Gass, presumably Gass' introduction of a previous new edition.

My thick paperback edition of "The Recognitions" sits on my hallway bookshelf, biding me to pick it up once more.

I've possessed the book since 1972, when I took it with me on my first trip to New York City along with my Yamaha acoustic guitar, which I quickly pawned. I read the visible tome on a bench in Central Park, hoping to attract girls with my intellectual cool. Exhausted after tramping around the city all day, I struggled to make sense of Gaddis' writing before falling asleep in my Spartan hotel room near Times Square.

Through the years, I've tried to finish the complex novel many times. I’ve also tried to read Gaddis' subsequent novels "JR," "Carpenter's Gothic" and "A Frolic of His Own." Gaddis remains my great unread novelist.

The new edition spurs me to try again. Each time I pull out the old paperback, I flash back to that moment when I was a young boy on the midnight flight to New York City, seeing those magical lights as the plane descended.

Speaking of complex novelists, thinking about Gaddis makes me wonder if Thomas Pynchon, now 84 years old, will publish another novel. As with Don DeLillo, Pynchon's books have been hits or misses over the years. But the nation could use a new Pynchon novel these days.

Here is a poem about my first days in New York City, and Europe.

Journeys

Manhattan bars in late afternoon.
October’s light streaming
through sidewalk windows,
men in fedoras rushing by on the other side,
women who looked like Audrey Hepburn in “Charade.”
Girls at the jukebox remembered Antwerp in summer.

I took the red eye from Houston;
the great city lay spread out before me
when the cab crossed the Triborough Bridge.
Autumn of William Gaddis’ “The Recognitions”;
the sun disappeared early behind tall buildings.

At MOMA, Picasso’s “Guernica” buckled my knees;
on 42nd Street, porn of all flavors.
Elizabeth Ashley in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,”
Keir Dullea, not tempted by those luscious lips;
white slip, her sweet summer body.
I called a number in the Village Voice.
A woman’s sleepy voice said no, there was no party.

A stripper in D.C., wearing nothing but a Yankees cap.
Her skin glowed with the same luster as those Midtown dives.
I fled when beer bottles rattled across the floor.
Was she something worth fighting for?

In Spain, later that season
Franco’s soldiers glowered in rail stations,
clutching machine guns, wearing cartoon hats.
Sleepless at midnight, I prayed to mountains
rushing past beyond the train window.

At the Rivera’s topless beaches, sun burned my skin.
the women laughed, and plunged into the sea,
their words riding above the waves rushing toward me.

Farewell, Jan Morris

Jan Morris, whose change from male to female shook international culture in the early 1960s, led a life of extraordinary courage and literary accomplishment.

The acclaimed journalist, historian, travel writer and memoirist died Friday at 94 in a hospital near her home in North Wales, according to media reports.

Born male and named James Morris, she believed from early childhood that she was female. Despite her conviction that she was of the wrong gender, she as James Morris served as an British army intelligence officer in World War II, was a husband and father, and achieved fame as the journalist who broke the story of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascending Mount Everest.

James Morris as a London Times reporter accompanied Hillary on his 1953 Everest expedition, leaving before reaching the summit to break the news with a coded message, first transported by a runner. The story ran on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.

As a reporter for the Guardian, Morris also broke a major story about French involvement in the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, in which Israel and Egypt went to war over Egyptian leader Gamel Nasser's nationalization of the canal.

The success of Morris' cultural history "Venice" in 1960 allowed him to leave newspaper journalism and write books full-time.

On his trips to the Italian coastal city, he'd begun taking hormones to change to female, completing the transition with an operation in Casablanca in 1972.

Jan Morris' account of the change, "Condundrum," touched off a cultural controversy, including a notorious review by Rebecca West castigating Morris for becoming female.

Morris' act of supreme courage gained increasing acceptance through the years, no longer overshadowing Morris' accomplishments as a writer. Her three-volume history "Pax Britannica" is considered a major work, and her travel writing and essays are acclaimed.

While some critics, following West, see James Morris and Jan Morris as separate writers, with different sensibilities, I consider her career a continuum, showing a unified consciousness. Along with writers like Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf and others, her work will continue to be read.

 

 

 

 

Charlie Brown holiday classics headed to public TV

A bit of good news emerged amid Trump's scorched earth exit and the raging Covid 19 pandemic.

The beloved Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Christmas specials will be shown on public television this year as well as Apple's subscription-based streaming channel.

Broadcast on commercial networks for years, cartoonist Charles Schultz's TV classics were to be shown only on the Apple + channel until public outcry resulted in Apple reaching a deal with PBS to broadcast the shows.

The Thanksgiving show will air on PBS Sunday, and the Christmas special featuring Vince Guaraldi's haunting jazz score Dec. 13. The shows will also be offered on Apple +, including times of free viewing.

Alas, the agreement arrived too late for the Charlie Brown Halloween special and the Great Pumpkin, absent from the public airwaves this autumn. Maybe next year, big boy.

Charlie Brown's Christmas includes a Bible verse and the singing of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."

But the widespread love for the show likely will head off any protest about it being shown on a channel partially funded by taxpayers.

We only hope that PBS avoids any temptation to carry out pledge drives.

 

 

Rosebud? "Mank" looks at Herman J. Mankiewicz Jr.-Orson Welles' making of "Citizen Kane"

It's ironic that "Mank" will be presented on Netflix after a brief theatrical run.

David J. Fisher's movie examines the eternal inside-Hollywood debate about whether Herman J. Mankiewicz Jr. wrote "Citizen Kane" alone or collaborated with director/star Orson Welles, who received co-credit for the Academy Award-winning script.

The movie about old Hollywood will receive its largest viewership on the streaming service disrupting the American film industry, especially with Covid-19 devastating theatrical audiences.

Too bad Welles didn't have Netflix: Hollywood after giving the young wunderkind complete freedom to make "Citizen Kane" crushed his directing career.

Lately, Welles has had a posthumous resurgence on Netflix with the showing of his last film, "The Other Side of the Wind." Welles fought Hollywood for years to get the movie made.

Whether anyone will be interested in "Mank" beyond engrained cinephiles is questionable. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael began the controversy in the 1960s with an essay declaring that the alcoholic Mankiewicz wrote the script alone. After "Citizen Kane," Mankiewicz's career declined.

Often considered the greatest Hollywood movie, "Citizen Kane" was the young Welles' first Hollywood project after a dazzling career in New York theater and radio, where he gained notoriety for panicking citizens with a fake Halloween news report that Martians had invaded New Jersey.

Although the 1941 film received a number of Academy Award nominations, it was strangled in the cradle by William Randolph Hearst, the model for "Kane."

Hearst's newspapers and magazines launched a successful campaign to sabotage the movie. Fearing Hearst's power, distributor RKO Radio Pictures pulled the movie from theaters. Afterwards, Hollywood derailed Welles' directing career. 

Written by Fisher's late father, Jack Fisher, "Monk" represents a new trend of movies about movies, according to a Wall Street Journal article Thursday.

Also in the works are movies on the making of "The Godfather" and "Chinatown," in both of which the late producer Robert Evans figures, the article said.

But scripts for other films about films have been shuttered, the article said. Apparently director Steven Spielberg torpedoed a green-lighted movie about the making of "Jaws."

Also in the deep freeze are projects about "Star Wars," "Gone With the Wind" and "The Streetcar Named Desire."

Hollywood's self-gazing is not new; "Sunset Boulevard" and other films have long examined the film industry.

Only last year, "Judy" showed the abuse the young Judy Garland suffered from MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who shows up in "Mank" along with other Hollywood titans.

Gary Oldman, who won an Academy Award for playing Winston Churchill, portrays Mankiewicz, who wrote the script while recuperating in Palm Springs from a severely broken leg suffered in a car accident.

Mankiewicz was assisted by Welles' close friend and colloborator John Houseman, played by Sam Troutman. Tom Burke is Welles.

Along with the macho battles of Hollywood alpha males, the movie offers the glamour of Amanda Seyfried playing Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Hearst was particularly upset by "Citizen Kane's" portrayal of their relationship.

As the pandemic's autumn wave builds, the movie's unlikely to receive much box office success, echoing "Citizen Kane." But even non-cinephiles will find "Mank" diverting during the brutal winter months.

 

Cautious optimism that Warnock, Ossoff can win in Georgia

I'm beginning to believe that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff can win their Senate races, despite Democrats' dismal record in Georgia runoff elections.

An alleged GOP feud is encouraging, although the conflict is unlikely to have much effect on Republican voters.

Warnock seems likable in his TV ads, while incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler's shrill commercials strike me as ineffective. Sen. David's Perdue's attacks on Ossoff also appear unconvincing. 

But my hopes for Democratic victories have been repeatedly crushed. Michelle Nunn. Jason Carter. Stacey Abrams. A gallery of dismal Senate candidates I can't even remember.

Georgia's Democratic Party over the years has done a good impersonation of the Washington Generals, the team that always got hammered by the Globetrotters.

The national Republican Party is pouring massive resources into Georgia, to reverse Joe Biden's surprising victory in the presidential election. Meanwhile, the Democratic plans are "vague," the AJC reported.

To counter that troubling report of Democratic confusion, national media darling Abrams appears well-organized in registering new voters and generating a strong turnout in the runoff.

Loeffler's Cruella de Ville and Perdue's J.R. Ewing personas violate the old maxim that voters like someone with whom they could have a beer. They epitomize the wealthy's greed and entitlement.

But Georgia's working-class voters, like those across the country, are known for voting against their own economic and social interests.

The attacks on Warnock echo those the forces of segregation made against Martin Luther King Jr., whose Ebenezer Baptist Church Warnock now leads. King was accused of communist ties and seeking to subvert American life. Now Loeffler uses the same playbook against Warnock.

Once again, turnout will be the key. If enough suburban whites join black and other minorities in voting for Warnock and Ossoff, Democrats will gain control of the U.S. Senate.

 

 

Wildfires sending smoke deep into space, WSJ science writer reports

A traveler through space can tell the earth is burning.

Super thunderstorms caused by massive wildfires send smoke clouds miles into the stratosphere, Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz reports in  his Science Journal column Tuesday.

While the long-term effects have not been determined, the smoke blocks sunlight on a planetary scale. The effect is similar to that of a volcano's erupting. Recent massive wildfires, of longer duration and intensity than in the past, are believed caused by climate change.

The Australian wildfires last January sent smoke 21 miles above the earth, Hotz reports. The smoke circled the globe twice before dissipating last April.

Despite such stories by the WSJ's reporters, the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper denies the reality of climate change on its editorial pages.

While not as long-lasting as carbon emissions into the atmosphere, wildifire smoke spewing into the stratosphere is an ominous sign of climate change.

As another hurricane stirs in the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump administration announced another final act of desecration, opening oil leasing in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. The oil companies can stake their claims to the pristine wilderness beginning Jan. 17, three days before the inauguration of Joe Biden. The Biden administration will have a difficult time reversing the action by the climate-denying, fossil fuel-supporting Trump administration.

Trump's plundering last days highlight the importance of the Senate runoff elections in Georgia. Victories by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will allow Biden to carry out his program to shift from a fossil fuel economy and eliminate carbon emissions. Republican control of the Senate will allow fossil fuel companies to continue ravaging the planet.

 

T.S. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale give unflattering portrait

T.S. Eliot might have found happiness by marrying Emily Hale.

Eliot chose instead a disastrous marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. But Eliot deeply loved Hale, a passion mainly carried out through letters he obsessively wrote her, beginning in 1930 and ending in acrimony in 1957.

In a major event for Eliot scholars, the poet's 1,1131 letters to Hale deposited at Princeton's Firestone Library were unsealed in January 2020. Hale dismayed Eliot in 1956 when she gave the letters to the library. Under terms of the deal, they were to be sealed until 50 years after her death. She died in 1969, four years after Eliot's death.

Along with online viewing, a selection of the letters edited by John Haffenden will be published next year.

Eliot in a 1960 statement released in January along with the unsealing of the letters sought to justify his decision to marry Haigh-Wood in 1915 rather than Hale, with whom he was in love.

"To her (Haigh-Wood), the marriage brought no happiness...to me,, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.,"  Eliot said. "And it saved me from marrying Emily Hale. Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive."

Paul Keegan in the Oct. 22 London Review of Books gives an exhaustive account of Eliot's relationship with Hale, which Keegan says resumed in earnest in 1930 when Hale visited London and came to tea with Eliot and his wife. Hale and Eliot began a correspondence which grew into a stream of letters from Eliot.

Eliot met with Hale several times before separating from Haigh-Wood, who died in 1947 after several years in a mental hospital. Eliot never divorced Haigh-Wood, forestalling any plans to marry Hale. Although he expressed sexual desire for Hale, their relationship apparently remained platonic.

After Haigh-Wood's death, Eliot again spurned Hale, although they continued to write each other until 1957, when Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. Eliot  later claimed that he was no longer in love with Hale. The rejection caused Hale a nervous breakdown.

Another cause of the rejection was Eliot's strict religious beliefs; he was upset at Hale participating in Episcopal Church communion although she was Unitarian, as Keegan relates.

While Eliot's detailed letters to Hale are like an autobiography,  scholars don't have Hale's letters to Eliot. He destroyed them in 1960, perhaps in anger at her Princeton gift.

Or he realized that Hale's letters would give as negative a portrait of him as his letters to her. The letters reveal Eliot as manipulative, self-absorbed and cruel, according to Keegan's article.

Eliot's assertion that Hale would have killed the poet in him was unfounded. Still, had he married her, it's unlikely that he would have written "The Waste Land."

Was that masterpiece worth all of that pain? His letters to Hale detail the cost.