Southern Bookman

The 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and James Joyce's "Ulysses"

James Joyce's "The Ulysses" and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" appeared in 1922, shaking English literature's foundations.

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the English publication of Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way," the first volume of his monumental "In Search of Lost Time." The second volume of the novel was first published in France in 1922, with others to follow.

E.E. Cummings' "The Enormous Room," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and the Damned" and "Tales of the Jazz Age," Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha," Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" and Wittgenstein's  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus were also published in 1922.

The police charged Joyce's stream-of-consciousness epic with obscenity soon after its publication by Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Co. Legal battles over the book raged for years until a judicial ruling in favor of imaginative freedom.

Eliot's "The Wasteland" expresses European culture's exhaustion after World War I. But the poem also pulses with a vitality of language comparable to Joyce's. Jeremy Irons' recording of "The Wasteland" several years ago brings out its full power.

Irish author Anne Enright in the current New York Review of Books discusses her deep attachment to Joyce's work. A longtime resident of Dublin, Enright uncovers Joyce's local references, including tracking down the real people Joyce mentioned in the book, and where they lived. She says Joyce makes his readers co-authors, and that the book rewards lifelong reading.

Like Shakespeare, Dante, Proust and Chaucer, Joyce expresses the soul of his native country. Eliot's "The Wasteland" defines a historical and cultural era. Yet, both works remain fresh and new.

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Bennett gives annual new year's chronicle in London Review of Books

The arrival of Alan Bennett's diary in the London Review of Books brightens my new year each January.

Bennett's annual chronicle of the year before is like a letter from an old friend, filled with London literary gossip, accounts of his quiet dilettante's life in Yorkshire, political commentary and vignettes about his growing up in World War II-era Britain.

With the departure of longtime LRB editor Mary Kay Wilmers, the 87-year-old Bennett this year looks back on the publication's early days and his battles with former editor Karl Miller, whom Bennett says tried to remove his jokes. Bennett laments that Miller and other founding editors withheld praise from writers. His score-settling after so many years seems more quaint and plainitive than vindictive, a glimpse into a vanished literary world.

Also of interest to followers of British journalism is Bennett's oblique account of his partner, Rupert Thomas, leaving the editorship of the Conde Nast magazine World of Interiors, which runs features on lavish British country homes. After more than 20 years running the upscale magazine, Thomas was the latest victim of the digital devastation of print publications.

Bennett also gives an amusing critique of Blake Bailey's troubled biography of Philip Roth, grumbling about the book's size rather than engaging with the sexual abuse allegations against Bailey that led to W.W. Norton canceling the book.

The famed British playwright, comic and movie writer notes his delight at the book's mentioning a dinner party he attended with Roth at the home of theater director Jonathan Miller. Bennett expresses unqualified admiration for Roth as a writer.

Each year, Bennett's diary records travails of his aging, and his continued delight at life's simple daily pleasures. His mind, and writing are a sharp as ever.  Best wishes to Mr. Bennett for another year.

 

Farewell, Eve Babitz

Listening to the Thelonious Monk quartet's 1957 concert with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, I read the news that Eve Babitz was gone.

Strange that my sadness at her death came with Monk and Coltrane's majestic music performed at the cathedral of New York City culture. She might have laughed at that. Babitz defended Los Angeles against East Coast intellectual critics. Her essays and stories made 1970s and '80s LA as memorable as Proust's Paris, Isherwood's Berlin and Nelson Algren's Chicago. 

Free from years of suffering, Babitz, 78, died at UCLA Medical Center Friday. She'd been battling Huntington's Disease, which attacks brain cells. As a heavy rain fell, and Coltrane's sax and Monk's piano spoke of joy and sorrow, I remembered the ebullient spirit of her original American voice.

Mainly a recluse after suffering horrible burns in 1997 when she caught her dress on fire trying to light a cigar while driving, Babitz witnessed a rediscovery of her work. Vanity Fair writer Lili Anolik found Babitz living in seclusion and wrote a 2014 article about her and her then out of print writings. The article led to the re-release of Babitz's books and her discovery by a new generation of mainly women readers.

Her collections "Eve's Hollywood" and "Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and LA," chronicled her experiences in Los Angeles' rock and film culture, fueled by sex and drugs. An artist who designed album covers, Babitz also wrote for a variety of magazines ranging from Rolling Stone, Vogue and Esquire to smaller niche publications, immersing herself in intersecting film, music and literary circles.

A fearless counterculture adventurer, she had affairs with Jim Morrison, Stephen Stills, Ed Rusha, Harrison Ford and Steve Martin and sank into a destructive cocaine addiction. Yet she kept writing, publishing authoritative and affectionate pieces about Los Angeles' food and culture and childhood reminisences as well as her lurid countercultural reports. She was one of the rare writers able to observe events objectively even while participating in them.

Like a friend gossiping at lunch, she wrote with an intimate, colloquial voice, laced with comic misgivings about her own misbehavior. Like other writers exploring decadent mileus, she mixed hedonism with a severe moral code. 

Babitz gave a harrowing account of her accident and burn rehabilitation in her long essay, "I Used to Be Charming," the lead article in a 2019 collection that reprinted some of her journalism from the 1970s and '80s. The pieces showed her versatility, including a portrait of Francis Ford Coppola's budding film production company in San Francisco. 

"I Used to Be Charming," compiled from her notes about the long and grueling burn rehabilitation, is a profound testament to human resilience. Elevated by her humor and courage, the piece is a classic that deserves frequent reprinting in anthologies.

Babitz saw her beloved Los Angeles supplant New York as America's culture center. No matter how frivolous her subject, her voice kept its distinctive authenticity, brave and true.

 

 

 

Farewell, Dave Hickey, the last gonzo

Dave Hickey like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson brought an intense personal sensibility to journalism.

The last of a generation that began with Wolfe and Mailer's "new journalism," Hickey gained cultish fame with his 1997 collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy."

The essay collection champions Hank Williams, Liberace, Stan Brakhage, Norman Rockefeller, Chet Baker and other popular artists with the same attention he gives to Cezanne, de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In an essay on basketball, he praises Julius Erving and James Naismith's original game rules.

Hickey, who like Thompson and Mailer defined himself as an outlaw rebelling against prevailing cultural strictures, died Nov. 12 at age 82 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He'd been battling heart disease for years.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Hickey as a child moved with his family to Los Angeles. He ridiculed Texas' provincial boosterism, but never lost the state's contrarian viewpoint. When Hickey was 11, his father, a car salesman and jazz musician, killed himself, a major influence on Hickey's independent outlook.

Rootless as a young man, Hickey opened an art gallery in Austin called "A Clean Lighted Place," which struggled against the Texas capital's parochial aesthetic values. He then moved to New York City, where he managed a gallery, reportedly quitting in protest of a Yoko Ono exhibition.

Discovering himself as a writer, Hickey was editor of Art in America before finding a home as a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, becoming the most famous representative of that school since Jerry Tarkanian's Runnin' Rebels.

In one of the best essays in "Air Guitar," Hickey celebrates Las Vegas for its freedom from New York City and Los Angeles' cultural dogmas. He also loved Las Vegas' wide-open entertainment and gambling culture.

"Air Guitar" and the influential chapbook "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty," earned him a MacArthur "Genius grant," in 2001, the proceeds of which he fed into Vegas slot machines.

While he appreciated mass popular culture, he also called for a return to rigorous standards in judging artworks. He blasted the contemporary art world for its commercialism and turn from traditional artistic values.

Like his journalistic predecessors, Hickey was accused of machoism, although he considered underappreciated abstract painter Joan Mitchell the best artist of her generation. Feminist critics saw his defense of beauty as elitist. At the end of his career, he published "25 Women: Essays on Their Art." That too was viewed as paternalistic.

Hickey wrote for a variety of publications, including Art News, the Village Voice, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone. Along with art and popular music, he also wrote about television and the movies.

In "Air Guitar," he recalled the Texas writer Grover Lewis, and Lewis' friendship with Larry McMurtry, ground also covered by a McMurtry memoir.

Hickey biographer Daniel Oppenheimer wrote a warm appeciation of Hickey for Texas Monthly, the first to report Hickey's death.

As Oppenheimer details, Hickey like other literary exiles remained stamped by his native land.

 

Not so fast: Merrick Garland takes aim at Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster merger

The U.S. Justice Department struck a blow for authors with an antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

"The deal would enable Penguin Random House to exert outsized influence over which books are published in the United States and how much authors are paid for their work," the Justice Department said in announcing the lawsuit filed Nov. 5 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

Penguin Random House, the largest U.S. book publisher, seeks to buy No. 3 Simon & Schuster in a $2.175 billion deal. As Authors Guild President Douglas Preston noted in a Washington Post op-ed piece applauding the suit, the transaction would reduce the publishing industry's "Big Five" to four.

Further consolidation will likely follow if the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster deal goes through. The huge publishing companies also control smaller imprints, which also compete for authors' work.

Preston helpfully noted that the merger would create a book market "monopsony," a dominant buyer, as well as a monopoly, a controlling seller.

Attorney General Merrick Garland noted that the deal would result in fewer books and less variety for consumers. Perhaps so, but it seems strange that the merged company wouldn't seek to print more books, likely weighted toward cooking, lifestyle, health, self-improvement and entertainment.

As Preston noted, Amazon dominates the e-book market as well as influencing book publishing. Preston's article included the obligatory disclosure that Amazon owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, who seeks monopoly and monopsony control over the U.S. retail market, owns the Washington Post.

The Justice Department a few years ago sided with Amazon in a suit against Apple and the book publishing industry. Preston risked Bezos’ ire by calling for the Justice Department to take action against Amazon's book industry power.

While the book publishers produce a stream of books from right-wing and left-wing perspectives, the industry favors celebrity authors and proven best-sellers. I'm amazed at the flood of books about the Trump administration that shows no sign of abating. Yet each book gives new revelations about Trump's apparent attempt to stage a coup on Jan. 6 and prevent President Biden from taking office.

As right wingers call for removal of books from school libraries, even the burning of books, I can imagine a new Trump administration or other GOP presidency suing publishers for printing books viewed as dangerous. Toni Morrison was targeted in the Republicans' victory in the Virginia governors' race. Can outlawing books be far behind? I'm sure Shakespeare and Dickens will soon be under fire.

Despite qualms about the precedent set by the government suing book publishers, the action will put off the inevitable day when one conglomerate publishes all of the books, newspapers and magazines in the world and sells all of the products. Perhaps our robot masters will ban books altogether, and we will chant "om" to immense computer screens.

 

 

New Yorker shines with Paul McCartney interview, Thomas McGuane short story

The New Yorker's current issue proves again that we boomers refuse to go gently into that good night.

Longtime Editor David Remnick unshelves his writing skills in a long profile of Paul McCartney, who at 79 seeks to reframe the Beatles legacy and his subsequent career.

The issue also offers a vintage short story by 82-year-old Thomas McGuane. "Not Here You Don't" examines the environmental deterioration and declining ethos of freedom in Montana, McGuane's longtime home.

Those who experienced 1960s pop culture first-hand can also relish film critic Anthony Lane's typically insightful review of Daniel Craig's last James Bond film, "No Time to Die." Recent film-goers will mourn Craig's farewell as earlier Bond fans did the exit of Sean Connery.

Remnick's revealing piece on McCartney arrives at a big moment for the pop superstar. A remix of his latest album, "McCartney" III," is topping the charts, and he's publishing a collection of his lyrics dating back to his teen years. Poet Paul Muldoon wrote essays for "The Lyrics: 1956 Through the Present."

The biggest event is the long-delayed arrival of a re-edited version of the 1969 film "Get Back," which takes a lighter view of the Beatles' breakup than the original movie. Peter Jackson's film, taken from 56 hours of material, will be streamed on Disney Plus at Thanksgiving.

I saw the original Beatles film years ago, transported by the band giving an impromptu concert on a London rooftop as office workers and passers-by on the street watched in wonder.

In pushing the film, McCartney looks back on his tortured relationship with John Lennon. McCartney says Lennon caused the Beatles breakup, for which McCartney was blamed at the time. He also says he remained friends with Lennon despite Lennon's harsh public insults, and admired Yoko Ono, whose marriage to Lennon was seen as breaking the band apart.

McCartney in an amusing aside punctures the Rolling Stones, calling the Beatles' major rivals a blues cover band.

Younger generations will  likely wonder what all the fuss was about. Yet watching the Beatles perform their songs will make them understand why their moms and dads, and grand-moms and grand-dads, loved the band's music so intensely.

I'm always happy to see in the New Yorker stories by McGuane and a few other remaining writers of his generation. Contemporary short stories often don't engage me, as was the case in the current special issue of Oxford American showcasing new Southern writing.

The emerging generation of writers formed in college creative writing programs display a similarity of techniques and banality of characters and situations.

In contrast, McGuane makes the reader wonder how he achieves such power from his deceptively simple language. He ties his stories to broader social and environmental changes. As he discusses in a separate interview, McGuane uses the short story to illuminate the West's environmental and political crises.

Like McCartney, McGuane is a master storyteller who remains relevant for younger generations as well as we aging boomers.

 

Paris Review cancels autumn issue

The Paris Review's not publishing a fall issue, but new editor Emily Stokes assures readers that the journal is embarking upon an exciting future.

"We made the decision not to put out a Fall issue because we were feeling ambitious,"  Stokes said in announcing the curious cancellation. Stokes replaced Emily Nemens in March as the esteemed journal's editor.

Stokes said that new editors have been hired, and that the staff has returned to its refurbished Chelsea offices after working remotely during the covid pandemic. Rather than put out an autumn issue, the editors are concentrating on a total refurbishment of the journal, which includes a redesigned look.

To ease the fears of readers who fear the cancellation heralds a digital-only publication, Stokes claimed that the Paris Review remains committed to print publication.

Despite her assurances, the disruption is an ominous sign, breaking the journal's continuous publication since 1953. Autumn is a big publishing season, with literary journals putting out ambitious issues anticipating the arrival of new books.

Stokes in her giddy missive promised that a winter issue will arrive in December. Until then, longtime readers will have to make do with the online Paris Review, and a new season of its podcast.

Yet an autumn without the Paris Review will dim the season's brightness.

 

 

 

American conflicts reflected in New York Times' best-selling books list

On a visit to Target, I noticed Mark Levin's "American Marxism" prominently displayed.

The department store's book section favors popular mainstream titles like the right-wing Fox News host's No. 1 best-selling diatribe against the American left. I didn't even notice Levin's book given shelf space at Barnes & Noble.

America's political and social conflicts are reflected in The New York Times best-seller list.

Criticized for factual inaccuracies, such as calling Germany's Frankfurt School the Franklin School, Levin's book wasn't reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review or in the daily newspaper.

But even before publication, Levin's broadside reached the top of the best-selling list because of bulk-buying efforts by right-wing groups and Fox News trumpeting.

Fellow Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson's collection of essays also appears on the non-fiction bestseller list, thanks to promotion on his show and the bulk-buying campaigns.

Chris Wallace, one of Fox's few remaining straight news reporters, occupies second place on the the list with "Countdown Bin Laden," a factual account of the hunt for Osama Bid Laden, which Wallace co- wrote with Mark Weiss.

Only one book given widespread critical attention by the Times and other serious intellectual publications appears on the list. That's Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste," at No. 14.

Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's "The Afghanistan Papers," which investigates the American government's duplicity in conducting the 20-year war in Afghanistan, comes in at No. 6, following the path set earlier by "The Pentagon Papers."

But the appearance of books like Wilkerson's and Whitlock's is increasingly rare.

Other than factually dubious screeds by Fox News hosts, celebrity memoirs dominate the list. Matthew McConaughey, Bobby Hall, also known as the rapper Logic, and 1960s film sweetheart Hayley Mills all have books represented.

On the fiction side, Sally Rooney has struck a blow for literary novels. Her new book "Beautiful World, Where Are You" has shot to the top of the  fiction list, leaping above J.D. Robb's No. 2 "Forgotten in Death" and Stephen King's  third-place "Billy Summers."

The new list gives even more hope for serious literary fiction with the arrival of Lauren Groff's "Matrix" at  No. 5. The historic medieval novel tells about a 17-year-old woman banished to a convent by Eleanor of Aquitaine, who's apparently nearly as well-remembered as Hayley Mills.

Otherwise, the usual thrillers and crime novels continue their hold.

Books seriously reviewed by The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's and other journals no longer receive easy passage to the Times' own best-seller list. The Fox News and conservative marketing machine dominate the publishing landscape like a destructive invasive species.

The question looms: are those books even read?

 

 

Jeff Bezos seeks to make Washington Post a global power

Despite my reluctance to further enrich Jeff Bezos even in a small way, I recently subscribed to the Washington Post.

Esteemed sports columnist Thomas Boswell's retirement leaves a void, but sports columnist Sally Jenkins, book critic Michael Dirda and political columnist Eugene Robinson have been daily delights. Sports columnist John Feinstein also appears from time to time.

Bezos took a direct hand in the selection and hiring of new Washington Post editor Sally Buzbee, according to an article by Andrew Beaujon in the Washingtonian.

The Amazon founder and richest man in the world has big ambitions for the newspaper known for breaking the Watergate scandal. With the recruitment of Buzbee from the top leadership position at the Associated Press, Bezos wants to make the Post the global leader in news.

Buzbee, an ardent supporter of investigative reporting at the AP, seeks to build upon the Post's resurgence under predecessor Marty Baron. Under Baron, the Post boosted online subscriptions and advertising, restoring the media company to solid profitability.

Under Bezos' direction, the Post will boost its overseas staff and challenge international media companies like the Guardian and Financial Times as well as raising the stakes against American competitors The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Bezos' direct interest in the Post is surprising; he pretty much gave Baron a free hand. Baron was hired before Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family, who failed to prepare their prestigious property for the online media era and saw advertising and readership plummet.

Staying away from editorial direction, Bezos invested heavily in engineering staff and technical improvements, and the Post followed The Times in charging for online subscriptions. Now, Buzbee might be more answerable to Bezos and publisher Fred Ryan, who also played a major role in her hiring.

The Washingtonian article makes Bezos appear as more of a William Randolph Hearst-type media tycoon than previously believed. With Bezos' global dreams for the Post, a Citizen Kane sequel might follow.

 

 

Frank Rich, Stephen Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick hail re-release of D.A. Pennebaker's "Company"

Frank Rich revisits his theatrical past in an interview with Stephen Sondheim and his longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, heralding the re-release of D.A. Pennebaker's documentary, "Original Cast Album: Company."

Published in New York magazine, the interview marks Rich's return from a long silence during the covid quarantine. The formerly all-powerful New York Times theatrical critic had forged a new chapter of his career writing on politics for New York. But his pieces ceased during the pandemic.

The interview with the 90-year-old Sondheim and 83-year-old Tunick marks the return of Pennebaker’s rarely shown 1970 documentary "Original Cast Album: Company."

Re-released through the Criterion Collection, the restored 53-minute film documents the making of the cast album of Sondheim's classic musical, which featured the beloved songs "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Being Alive."

Rich says he conducted the interview via zoom last December, leaving his New York City apartment where he'd been isolated during the pandemic to walk to a nearby sterilized studio. 

Introducing the interview, Rich recalls meeting Sondheim when Rich was the theater critic for his college newspaper. The young Rich saw a pre-Broadway production of the musical in Boston, before "Being Alive" had even been written.

Rich also extols Pennebaker's brilliant career, launched with "Don't Look Back," covering Bob Dylan's 1965 British tour, and "Monterey Pop," which chronicles the 1967 Monterey music festival.

In the most poignant moment of the interview, Sondheim and Tunick recall "Company" star's Elaine Stritch's late-night breakdown during the cast recording. Stritch after struggling to perform "The Ladies Who Lunch" fled from the studio. The next day, she returned in full makeup to flawlessly carry out the number.

As Rich recounts, Stritch battled alcoholism for years, finally overcoming the disease to achieve a late career renaissance. Sondheim and Tunick say that Stritch was known for taking "nips" from a bottle during performances to overcome stage fright.

Taking an 11 p.m. recording slot originally scheduled for fellow fragile star Dean Jones, who claimed to have a scratchy voice, Stritch found herself too drunk to complete the number. Pennebaker hastily captured the moment after shutting down filming for the day.

Jones' similar ordeal to record "Being Alive" is another dramatic highpoint of Pennebaker's documentary. Later known for starring in Disney comedies, Jones was a brilliant singer who left behind a promising career in musical theater.

The interview also reports that new Broadway productions of "Company" and Sondheim's "Assassins" are scheduled for the fall. In "Company," Jones's character Bobby will be female, adding biological pressure to Bobby's anxieties over middle age and whether to marry.

Rich fans hope the interview signals his return to New York magazine. Perhaps he'll delight us with more pieces on the theater, along with continuing his acute political insights.