literature

A Teacher’s Recommendation for Holden Caulfield

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image courtesy of Early Bird Books

Just for the hell of it, since I’m soon to become a YA author, I decided to reread A Catcher in the Rye.[1] Although Salinger wrote the novel for adults, it was until recently a mainstay in high school English curriculums. However, because sixteen-year-old first-person narrator Holden Caulfield frequently spews vulgarities, occasionally references sexual encounters, smokes like a fiend, and uses alcohol to excess, the novel has also been a favorite target of priggish parents demanding it be banned, not only from classrooms, but from libraries as well.[2]

As a teacher, I never explored Catcher in class but did include it on ninth grade independent reading lists. Unfortunately, most of my freshmen didn’t like the book – some even hated it – because they considered Holden too negative, too judgmental.[3] I will add that my former school lacked (and still does) a vibrant counterculture to counterbalance the preppies, jocks, and Jesus followers who dominate social life. Perhaps if we had had a more diverse student body, more hipsters and out-of-the-closet gays, old Holden would have had more admirers.

Hey, I’ll admit Holden can be off-putting. He’s self-centered, whiny, and way too judgmental, but he’s not self-righteous. A frequent target of his own disapprobation, he acknowledges his own immaturity, admitting that although “seventeen,” he “sometimes acts as if [he’s] about thirteen.”  Nevertheless, he’s not, as  Kaitlyn Greenridge, claims, an asshole:

I think it’s a detriment to how that book is taught that so many people feel like [Holden’s assholedom is] somehow a new revelation that nobody has talked about before, when, hopefully, a teacher teaches that book as like, this guy is an a-hole. We’re going to read about him. He’s going to piss you off. And we’re going to talk about how the author made that happen on the page and what are the things that are making you mad about this character. And then, hopefully, the next level is, you’re all the same age as this character, so what are the things that this character is doing that’s similar to what you are doing right now . . .

My go-to guy when it comes to asshole designation is Aaron James, whose book Assholes, a Theory defines an asshole as someone who “systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages […] out of an entrenched sense of entitlement” and who “is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.”[4] This definition certainly doesn’t describe Holden, who is rather generous. For example, he lends his coat to his roommate Stradlater and his turtleneck to an unpopular student, a mere acquaintance.[5]  Later, unprompted, he donates ten dollars, a considerable amount of money in those days, to nuns he encounters at a diner.  Also, he’s not at all vindictive. He may be many things, but according to Aaron James (and I-and-I), he’s no asshole.

I950s teenagers hanging out

Okay, what is he then?

He’s a depressed, alienated adolescent grieving for his beloved dead brother; he’s a fallen idealist who treasures childhood innocence but has been pushed beyond the brink of coping – in other words, he’s a crazy, mixed-up kid, literally a crazy mixed-up kid.

When I read the novel as an adolescent, I identified with Holden because I, too, was a lapsed idealist, a developing cynic angry that the “real world” didn’t adhere to the platitudinous blandishments of teachers and coaches who told us the good guys always come out on top. Of course, it was stupid of me to be so naive. After all, I had floated down the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, hung out on an island with Ralph and Piggy, and come to think of it, had sat in a segregated waiting room for my doctor’s appointments.

We don’t know what will become of Holden. Although I don’t find the ending optimistic, I do wish him the very best.

I’ll give him the last paragraph:

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

[1] Reckless confession. I’m not a fan of YA. One reason I didn’t enjoy teaching seventh grade was having to spend hours in a house on Mango Street and other adolescent haunts.

[2] Ezra Pound’s phrase, “vice crusaders farting through silk” comes to mind.

[3] Most of my students, like Holden, were wealthy, so at least they didn’t complain that he should be thankful for his cushy life.

[4] See Donald Trump.

[5] The acquaintance, James Castle, throws himself out of a dorm window while being mercilessly bated by a gang of dorm-mates, who do qualify as assholes. Although Holden doesn’t try to intervene, he’s sympathetic. He’s no hero and more than once describes himself as “yellow.”

Philip Roth’s Authorized Biography Goes Awry

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I’m currently reading Blake Bailey’s authorized biography of Philip Roth, a work removed from the shelves of America’s bookstores (not to mention from Amazon warehouses) after its publisher WW Norton suspended shipping and promotion as a consequence of several women accusing Bailey of sexual misconduct, including assault, which he adamantly denies. An independent publisher called Skyhorse has acquired the rights and issued a paperback edition, so the book is still available, though in a less glamorous format.[1]

Before tackling the biography (wrapping it in my arms and driving it to gridiron), I revisited Portnoy’s Complaint, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and though it came out in 1969, the prose is as fresh as this morning’s oven-extracted loaf of Jewish rye, except that Portnoy uses the c-word as both an anatomical descriptor and as a synecdoche for womankind in general.[2] Of course, Portnoy’s a madman, so we shouldn’t hold Roth personally responsible for his creation’s misogynistic language, any more than we should lambaste Nabokov for Humbert’s pederasty, except that throughout the biography, Roth himself uses the c-word in the same manner, anatomically and collectively.[3] This unfortunate habit tends to conflate the biographer with his subject.

Indeed, it seems that like Portnoy and perhaps Blake Bailey, Roth was sex obsessed. When interviewing Bailey for the job of authorized biographer, he produced a photo album devoted to his ex-girlfriends, which reminded me of the scene in Carnal Knowledge when the Jack Nicholson character projects a slideshow of photos of his sexual conquests. On the other hand, Bailey writes that the album was “an artifact attesting to the only passion that ever rivaled his writing. He doted on these women and vice versa; several of them came to his bedside while he lay dying, as did I.” 

In her review of Philip Roth the Biography, entitled “In ‘Philip Roth,’ a Life of the Literary Master as Aggrieved Playboy,” Parul Sehgal writes that Bailey’s book is “a narrow portrait of a wide life. We know the ’60s have arrived because we are told that Roth is now regularly propositioning women in the elevator. When he travels to Thailand, Bailey speculates: ‘Perhaps he was most struck by the ubiquitous availability of sex.”’

Also, there is the conundrum of Roth’s relationship with Judaism. Again, Sehgal, “Whether he was pilloried as the Jewish second coming of Goebbels (‘What is being done to silence this man?’ the president of the Rabbinical Council of America wrote to the Anti-Defamation League) or a woman hater, he held to the notion of novelist as the ‘nose in the seam of the undergarment,’ the enemy of public relations. And now, he who found liberation in sex and work reported being rid of the tyranny of both.”

Ultimately, though, it’s the Roth’s literary output that I’m eager to see analyzed. I mean, his body of work inspires awe: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, The Ghost Writer, etc. To me, his not being chosen for a Noble Prize borders on criminality. So what if Roth was arrogant, self-obsessed, vengeful, it’s the work that matters. Look at Yeats, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Philip Larkin – they all possessed more than their share of human frailties. I’m only 100 pages in Bailey’s bio but haven’t seen much critical contemplation of Roth’s fiction. It reminds me of David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Being Yourself, an assessment of David Foster Wallace that essentially ignores his work. What makes Roth and Wallace interesting is their art, not their foibles. 

The bad news for Roth is that Blake Bailey’s own sexual misconduct may have tainted the biography, to have, in the words of Alexandra Alter and Jennifer Schuessler, “intensified a parallel conversation about Roth’s treatment of women, adding fuel to the questions of whether Bailey’s account of Roth’s sexual and romantic relationships was overly sympathetic and oversimplified” despite Roth’s attempt to, as one critic put it, through Bailey “ghost write his own biography.” 

The best laid schemes of mice and men.

Roth in 2010, photo by Nancy Crampton

[1] I actually possess the hardback edition, which I copped from independent bookseller Buxton Books right after Norton yanked it out of print. I’m hoping that one day it will be considered a rare first edition and I’ll be able to swap it for a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle.  (BTW, I’m weary of Microsoft Word EB-White-ing out every goddamned adverb I carefully insert in my sonorous sentences). They want me to ax “actually” which I actually don’t want to do.

[2] “Synecdoche is a literary trope in which a part stands for the whole, as in “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” or more familiarly, “Donald Trump is an asshole.” 

[3] The late James Hillman made a cogent observation about the ugliness and violence of English vernacular terms dealing with sex, e.g., “nailed her,” “fucked her eyes out,” “gash,” etc. as opposed to Hindi’s “jade stalk” for penis and “pearled temple” for vagina, suggesting, of course, very different attitudes toward sex, one diseased, the other reverential.

Rockin’ in the Projects

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After finishing James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, I’m rechristening the author Zora Neale Samuel Clemens Brer Fox McBride.[1] Not OMG! But Do Lawd! What a blast – jazz riffing Gullah-lite, not indiscriminately slung but fashioned into a plot that, though somewhat improbable in its tidy tying up at the end, delineates a complicated saga populated by characters we care enough about to shed tears. 

Even if the story hadn’t moved me, I would have kept reading for the sheer pleasure of its sentences.

Here are three:

“She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted- booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove-licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance.” 

“After practice on lazy summer afternoons, he’d gather the kids around and tell stories about baseball players long dead, players from the old Negro leagues with names that sounded like brands of candy: Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan, guys who knocked the ball five hundred feet high into the hot August air at some ballpark far away down south someplace, the stories soaring high over their heads, over the harbor, over their dirty baseball field, past the rude, red-hot projects where they lived.”

And then this masterpiece:

“And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich – West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious – and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while blacks and Latinos who cleaned apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.”[2]

Ultimately, Deacon King Kong is a comic novel, which provides McBride some leeway when it comes to implausibility. Moreover, it takes place among a community of believers, which is a prerequisite for magic realism. Some of the best dialogue comes from the protagonist Deacon Cuffy Jasper Lambkin[3] (aka Sportscoat) and the ghost of his wife Hettie, who naggingly haunts him throughout the novel, despite her having drowned two years before the action begins.

“Well, Hettie, if I weren’t taking that white man’s good hundred dollars on principle, I surely ain’t gonna take no mess from you ‘bout some fourteen dollars and nine pennies you done squirreled up in Christmas Club money and hid someplace.”

You’re not going to find ghosts or a systematic invasion of ants in The Stranger.

***

I suppose some plot summary is in order. Deacon King Kong is set in 1969 in Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn with the majority of the characters members of the Five Ends Baptist Church. Sportscoat, drunk as a coot on a potent moonshine known as King Kong, stumbles into the project courtyard and shoots Deems Clemens[4] with an antiquated .38 pistol. Back in the day, Sportscoat taught Deems Sunday School and coached him in baseball.  Deems had been a bone fide big league prospect before he abandoned that escape route for the easy money of drug trafficking. Smart, strategic, Deems is a force to be reckoned with, compassionate despite the heroin trafficking and its at its attendant horrors.

Damn, this summarizing is way too hard. I’m gonna cop out and quote the back cover.

“McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportscoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportscoat himself.”

Ultimately, it’s a novel of redemption, a glorious amalgam of love and violence, greed and generosity, teeming with vibrant characters who do justice to the human race. It’s easily the most enjoyable piece of long fiction I’ve read since Infinite Jest, which means it’s most enjoyable novel I’ve read in a quarter of a century, the most enjoyable novel I’ve read this century.

Do yourself a favor and go check it out.

[1] Kudos to former student Rachel Lauren Wolf for turning me on to this gem she described as “a cross between Flannery O’Connor and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

[2] As my wife Caroline is wont to say, “Bartender, I’ll have what he’s having.”

[3] Note the name symbolism. BTW, virtually all of the characters have nicknames.

[4] Ditto above.

Warren Moise’s “The Class of ’71”

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My college roommate and later housemate Warren Moise has written an extraordinary account of the desegregation of Sumter High School in 1971. He’s given me permission to post here the congratulatory letter I sent him this morning upon finishing the book.

You can purchase it here.

Dear Warren,

Wow, man. I knew that The Class of ’71 was going to be good, but I had no idea that by the end of the book I would consider it a brilliant tour de force.[1]

The weaving of personal anecdote with impeccably researched history produces a well-paced narrative. What we have here is not only a history of desegregation in Sumter, but also a mini history of the town itself, including a vivid snapshot of the transitional year of ’71. I mean, man, your compression of historical background is beyond remarkable, whether you’re cataloguing with precision the horrors of Abe Stern’s family’s journey from ghetto to concentration camps or the series of civil law cases that ultimately led to desegregation.  I loved the mini biographies of historical figures as well. Moreover, you do a masterful job of blending second-sourced details of the segregation with your personal memories of those distant days. You compress a helluva lot in 162 pages. 

Furthermore, your account is admirably nuanced. I suspect that most younger folks don’t realize that many Blacks resented integration, hated the idea of losing their traditions, their autonomy.[2] I admire that you don’t whitewash (regrettable verb choice) such paragons as Thurgood Marshall or Judge Waring, but even as you criticize their foibles, you also laud their attributes. In short, The Class of ’71 is fair and well-balanced, non-polemical historical take on a situation fraught with internecine emotion. 

Your personal anecdotes humanize events, bring to life that we’re talking about human beings here, not abstractions, and you balance well, I think, stories of both Whites and Blacks.  Your friends and peers are brought to life with brisk physical descriptions and dramatizations. Whether you’re talking about athletics, your band, or adolescent love, your humility is ever-present. In addition, the personal reminiscences provide respite from the heavier portions. 

I’ll end this paean with a note on style. I’m by training a critical reader when it comes to diction, syntax, and fluidity. I think I can count on one hand stylistic changes I would have made. I mean what’s not to like about sentences like these: “It was as if the 1960s were burning rubber in a Chevelle V-8 Super Sport on Highway 15 leaving town toward Paxville. At the same moment, the 1970s were rollin’ into town on Highway 15 North inside a Volkswagen van painted with slogans of peace, love, and daises.”

Bravo, my friend![3] It’s truly an honor to know and to have known you, and I hope the book gets the attention it deserves. 

Let’s get together one of these days.

All the best,

Rusty

__________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Pardon the redundancy.

[2] Gamecock High, by the way, was much more liberal than Summerville High, where we kept both our mascot and school colors

[3 And thanks for dropping my name on page 148.

Warren and yours truly circa 1972

Booze Hounds Extraordinaire

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Willie and Ernesto

Although sometimes mocked, often parodied, Ernest Hemingway’s prose is clean and compact. 

Here is prepubescent Nick Adams, who has just witnessed a Caesarian operation and a simultaneous suicide, headed back to camp after an emergency call with his physician father.

They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning. 

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die. 

Prolife: sunrise, a bass jumping, warm water.

Here’s Nick a decade or so later after a stint in the trenches:

The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.

Nick’s practicing the art of un-seeing, concentrating on simple actions to shut down synapses so they won’t flash like artillery fire in the darkness of the night. Eight mechanical declarative sentences without introductory clauses or phrases to describe a series of mechanical, mundane actions. Mindfulness to choke off memories.

I wonder how Nick would get along with Quentin Compson, one of William Faulkner’s offspring?

Here’s Quentin in Absalom, Absalom ruminating about the legend of Thomas Stupen’s arrival in Yoknapatawpha:

Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild [racial epithets] ]like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatter-ran. Immobile, bearded, and hand palm-uplifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the captive architect huddled quietly, carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest. Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light.

Like Faulkner’s prose, Quentin is overwrought.

Although we don’t know what eventually happens to Nick Adams in his later life, we do know where Quentin’s going to end up, self-drowned in the Charles River. And, of course, we do know what happens to Nick’s alter ego, Ernesto himself, dispatched in Idaho by a self-inflicted shotgun blast.[1]

We in the West insist on judging. Who is the greater author, Hemingway or Faulkner? I would say Hemingway is the better writer; I find his crisp cinematic prose superior to Faulkner’s adjective-laden forays into over-description. They’re working at cross purposes, though; Hemingway wants you peel back the prose that leaves so much unsaid to explore what’s underneath while Faulkner wants you to see and feel the rush of reality as it sweeps past in torrents. 

That said, I believe that Matthew Arnold would agree that Faulkner is the greater author. After all, he created an intricately linked multigenerational population of men and women, flesh and blood, White, Black, and Red, who embody two centuries of history. That’s not to say Hemingway isn’t great. In fact, I can’t think of a more powerful, better crafted story than his “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” – if you want to judge by one piece rather than a body of work.

I happen to admire both immensely and applaud their tragic visions, admire their courage in exploring godless darkness, empathize with their need to self-medicate. 

For me, Hemingway is rum, Faulkner whiskey. It’s Hemingway in the summer, and Faulkner in the winter for me.

Bless their moldering corpses, I say. And yours, too, Mr. James Joyce, another booze hound extraordinaire. 

[1] Faulkner, on the other hand, drank on and on until his 64th year.

Boon Companions on the Road to Stoicism

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John Austen

Over my long reading career, I have come to esteem several fictional literary characters and consider them, if not friends, boon companions, individuals whose company I continue to enjoy. I’m talking about people[1] like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, Joseph Conrad’s Charlie Marlow, and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascomb.  

When you come to revere such characters, finishing a novel or play becomes somewhat bittersweet because you really hate to see them hit the road. 

My favorite, given his high intelligence and depth of feeling, is Hamlet the Dane. I wouldn’t go so far as Harold Bloom and claim that Shakespeare via Falstaff and Hamlet “invented the human” by setting in motion “the spark of human consciousness.” However, to me Hamlet is as real a person as my barstool companions at Chico Feo or my Great Aunt Lou, a formidable woman, but one not nearly as self-aware as the black clad prince. 

Come to think of it, Aunt Lou is dead except in the minds of a diminishing number of Social Security recipients, whereas Hamlet has been alive now for over 400 years. The bottom line is that I feel great affection for him, and in an excellent stage performance, his death can still bring me to tears, and I don’t cry easily.

Of course, not everyone likes Hamlet as a person, which makes sense given that he is multifaceted and possesses an abundance of flaws.

Here’s the critic, director, and playwright Charles Marowitz:

I despise Hamlet. He is a slob. A talker, an analyzer, a rationalizer. Like the parlor liberal or paralyzed intellectual, he can describe every facet of a problem, yet never pull his finger out. Is Hamlet a coward, as he himself suggests, or simply a poseur, a frustrated actor who plays the scholar, the courtier, and the soldier as an actor (a very bad actor) assumes a variety of roles to which he is not naturally suited? And why does he keep saying everything twice? And how can someone talk so pretty in such a rotten country given the sort of work he’s got cut out for himself? You may think he’s a sensitive, well-spoken, and erudite fellow, but, frankly, he gives me a pain in the ass.

“Sensitive, well-spoken, and erudite,” but also witty, Churchillian in his ability to instantaneously whip up a bon mot or devastating insult. For example, here’s Polonius confirming to Hamlet that he acted in the university.

LORD POLONIUS: 

I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ the

Capitol. Brutus killed me.

HAMLET:

It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf
there. Be the players ready?

Here he is in so many words calling his “uncle-father” a piece of shit:

King Claudius: 

Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET

At supper.

KING CLAUDIUS

At supper! where?

HAMLET

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes, but to one table:
that’s the end.

KING CLAUDIUS

Alas, alas!

HAMLET

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

KING CLAUDIUS

What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET

Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.

KING CLAUDIUS

Where is Polonius?

HAMLET

In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger
find him not there, seek him i’ the other place
yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within
this month, you shall nose him as you go up the
stairs into the lobby.

KING CLAUDIUS

Go seek him there.

To some Attendants

HAMLET

He will stay till ye come.

“He will stay till ye come” could have come out of the mouth of James Bond.

To harken back to Bloom, how’s this for a 21st Century diagnostic catalogue of symptoms of depression delivered in the early 17th Century:

HAMLET:

I have of late, —but wherefore I know not, —lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.

I could go on and on, but the point is that multifaceted fictional characters and poetic personae can provide for us in times of trouble some solace. One of the great fortunes of my life was stumbling into a teaching job at Porter-Gaud School where by necessity I was forced to reread time and time again great works of literature that provided vicarious lessons in the wisdom of stoicism. As I have said elsewhere:

“What I discovered in Thebes and Elsinore and Yoknapatawpha is that suffering is universal. To quote Rick from Casablanca, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”   In other words, suffering doesn’t make you special; it makes you human.”[2]

[1] Yes, I consider them people, people with complex inner worlds who change as they strut and fret through plot entanglements, finding at last (in most cases ) resolution, whether it be at their wedding or among the carnage of a corpse strewn stage. 

[2] “The Art of Grieving.”

Hell Hath No Fury Like YA Authors Scorned

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mourning bride

image by Violet D’Art via Flicker

As I was destroying my eyesight Wednesday simultaneously watching the Impeachment Hearing /Twitter feeds on the screen of my desktop computer, I ran across a linked tweet concerning a literary brouhaha originating at South Dakota’s Northern State University. A recent graduate named Brooke Nelson has provoked outrage from several Young Adult novelists for suggesting that a novel by best-selling YA author Sarah Dessen was too simplistic to qualify as mandatory reading.  As a junior, Ms Nelson had served on a committee to select a book all incoming freshman at Northern State University would be required to read. Several members on the committee, according to the Washington Post, “were pushing for a young adult novel by best-selling author Sarah Dessen.”

A quote in the local paper, the Aberdeen, ignited the ensuing furor: “[Dessen]’s fine for teen girls,” Brooke Nelson said, “ but definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Somehow Dessen caught wind of this slight diss.[1] Directly addressing Nelson by name, Dessen tweeted the following to her legion of followers:

Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally [my emphasis] how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.

Let’s just say Nessen’s fans were not happy, including published YA authors Jodi Picoult and Roxane Gay.  Jennifer Weiner accused Nelson of being misogynistic:

“It’s hard to know what’s sadder: that Brooke Nelson has internalized misogyny to the extent that she can see nothing of worth in books beloved by “teen girls” but is presumably impressed with the merits of a book centered around video game culture that is beloved by teenage boys; that Nelson joined the committee not to champion a book or a genre but to keep a specific author’s work out of contention; that she bragged about her actions, as if she’s done some great service to literature, or that Nelson graduated with an English degree, is pursuing graduate work in English, and will someday be foisting her sexism and elitism on the next generation of readers.”

However, this comment ignores the question of whether the work possesses the complexity that required reading should possess. Are Nessen’s novels more profound than The Hand Maid’s Tale?  Are today’s in-coming freshman incapable of reading adult literature?  I was the English Department Chair of an independent school for six years and a teacher there for thirty-four, and I can assure you we never had a YA novel on our required summer reading list for the Upper School.

Here’s last year’s list, the last year I taught there:

9th grade  On the Beach by Neville Shute

10th grade: 1984 by George Orwell

11th grade: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

12th grade The Hand Maid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

AP Language and Composition: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

AP Literature and Composition: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The majority of complaints from the YA authors cited in the Post story ignore the quality issue and focus on how Nelson’s quote marginalizes teenaged girls.  Here’s Jodi Picoult: “[Nelson’s quote] suggests stories about young women matter less. That they are not as worthy or literary as those about anything but young women. That their concerns and hopes and fears are secondary or frivolous.”

But Nelson didn’t say that novels about teenaged girls “matter less.”  She said that Nessen’s novels essentially didn’t “cut the mustard,” as we Boomers used to say.  I suspect that Nelson wouldn’t have any qualms with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Josephine Humphrey’s Rich in Love being required reading.

Well, Nessen should be gratified because Nelson has found it necessary to suspend her social media accounts because of a barrage of incoming hatred.  And Northern State University has publicly apologized to Nessen.

It brings to mind Dylan’s line “at pettiness that plays so rough.”

[1] I consider it a “slight diss” because I believe that it’s not terribly insulting to suggest one’s work doesn’t rise to the level of mandatory reading for all incoming freshmen of a college.  In fact, although it’s considered a classic, I don’t think To Kill a Mockingbird rises to that level because of its black and white (no pun intended) portrayal of good and evil.  What I would consider a genuine diss is Carrie Courogen’s summation of Dessen’s work as “formulaic patronizing garbage of the lowest hanging fruit variety and deserves every criticism leveraged against her.” Courogen added in a subtweet “sarah dessen books are nicholas sparks but by a woman and even dumber and slightly less christian.”  I haven’t read any of Dessen’s books, so all I’ll say is that I can’t imagine they possess the ambiguity, complexity, and depth that would elevate them into the realm of serious art.

The Widow of Ephesus Conquers Her Eating Disorder

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The Widow of Ephesus by Philip Banken

 

Bid her awake; for Hymen is awake,

And long since ready forth his maske to move . . .

Edmund Spenser, “Epithalamion”

 

It was Federico Fellini who first turned me on to Petronius the Arbiter, the Oscar Wilde of Nero’s reign, a witty hedonist famed for his exquisite taste.   In fact, Petronius’s official function in Nero’s court was to determine what was tasteful (or not), hence his title arbiter elegantiarum, judge of elegance.

Scholars don’t know much about him.  Here’s a snippet from Tacitus’s Annals copped from Wikipedia:

He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, that by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and that he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary. His reckless freedom of speech, being regarded as frankness, procured him popularity. Yet during his provincial government, and later when he held the office of consul, he had shown vigor and capacity for affairs. Afterwards returning to his life of vicious indulgence, he became one of the chosen circle of Nero’s intimates, and was looked upon as an absolute authority on questions of taste in connection with the science of luxurious living.

Unfortunately, however, like so many in Nero’s circle, Petronius was tried and convicted of treason.  Rather than waiting for the inevitable sentence, the Arbiter took matters into his own hands.

Again, Tacitus:

Yet he did not fling away life with precipitate haste, but having made an incision in his veins and then, according to his humour, bound them up, he again opened them, while he conversed with his friends, not in a serious strain or on topics that might win for him the glory of courage. And he listened to them as they repeated, not thoughts on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and playful verses. To some of his slaves he gave liberal presents, a flogging to others. He dined, indulged himself in sleep, that death, though forced on him, might have a natural appearance. Even in his will he did not, as did many in their last moments, flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other of the men in power. On the contrary, he described fully the prince’s shameful excesses, with the names of his male and female companions and their novelties in debauchery, and sent the account under seal to Nero. Then he broke his signet-ring, that it might not be subsequently available for imperiling others.

At any rate, none of this would be of any interest if Petronius had not written the Satyricon, a fragmentary mishmash of verse and prose that satirizes Roman life in the first century BC.  I actually wrote a paper on this picaresque “novel” in the spring semester of my senior year, but alas, like many sections of the Satyricon itself, that work of genius has been lost to the ages [cue sarcastic cough].

Click below, if you dare, to watch the trailer of Fellini’s Satyricon.

 

Although “Trimalchio’s Dinner” is the most famous section of the Satyricon (Fitzgerald at one point thought about entitling The Great Gatsby as Trimalchio in West Egg), my favorite section is the vignette “The Widow of Ephesus,” an oft-repeated tale that traditionally has been interpreted as an invective against the fickleness of women; however, in Petronius’s version, sophisticated readers might see it, to quote Douglas Galbi, as showing “the imperatives of the living trumping respect for the dead.”

In other words, reading it as “pro life” in the best sense of that phrase,

Amphetaminic Synopsis of  Petronius’s “The Widow of Ephesus”[1]

A widow renowned for her chastity goes apeshit after her husband dies, and with over-the-top historonics  (exposing her breast and beating it, e.g), she follows his corpse’s funeral parade into an underground crypt.

There, attended by a “most loyal slave-woman,” the widow keens, gouges her face, and yanks out her tresses with the intention to starve herself so she can join her husband in Oblivionville.

Impervious to the pleadings of her parents and her loyal slave, for five days, without food or drink, the widow continues her frenzied mourning, out-Niobe-ing  Niobe,  “tearing her hair, plac[ing] the tresses on the corpse of her dead husband.”

Meanwhile, a soldier stationed to guard two crucified robbers hears the widow and abandons his post to see what’s going on.[2]  Once he’s hip to the scoop, he returns with food, which she refuses, but the slave woman “seduced by the odor of wine,” indulges, and once renourished, starts in on her mistress.

”What good will this do you, if you will have been undone by starvation? — if you will have buried yourself alive? — if you will have poured forth your life’s breath when you have not yet been condemned to die, before the fates demand it?”

As Margaret Atwood once noted, “Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience,” and the widow gives in. Once she’s sated, the soldier starts cajoling her to ditch her chastity.  Though we don’t get to hear his love talk, it must have been Barry-White-like and coming from the mouth of one sexy [insert noun from two-word Prince title that begins with “Sexy.”]

Click arrow below for an example of what I mean by “Barry-White-like”:

 

She submits.

So they as my mother would put it, “shack up” in the sepulcher, he sneaking out now and then to procure food and presents.

During his frequent absences from his station, a relative snatches one of the crucified men and buries him. When the soldier notices the missing body, he knows he’s a goner, so he decides to dispatch himself before the judge’s sentence comes crashing down.[3]

He informs the widow and asks “her only allot him a place, since he was doomed to die, and make the fatal tomb common to both her friend and her husband. “

Here’s the key passage:

The woman, who was no less merciful than chaste, [my italics] said, ”May the gods not allow that — that I should at the same time look upon the deaths of the two men most dear to me. I prefer to sacrifice the dead man rather than to kill the one who is alive.” In accordance with this pronouncement, she orders the corpse of her husband to be lifted out of its coffin and affixed to that cross which was empty. The soldier made use of the ingenious scheme of that most judicious woman, and the next day all the townspeople marveled at how the dead man had gone onto the cross.”

Oil paining of crucified slaves in ancient Rome

As Horace Walpole famously said, “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy for those who think.”  One equipped with a tragic vision might turn this story into a heartbreaker, the widow refusing to the very end, her gaunt body wild-eyed as she hallucinates tender scenes from her married life.  However, there’s something deep down in every living thing that prompts it to live.  Even if buried beneath the cement of a sidewalk, a weed will attempt to push its way through the cracks towards the sun.

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Gerard Manly Hopkins, excerpt from “God’s Grandeur”

[1]Quotes are from John R. Porter’s translation.

[2]He’s guarding them so their relatives won’t remove the bodies to give them proper burial. Some scholars claim this alludes to Jesus’s crucifixion story, but if it does, then it doesn’t jive with Petronius’s dates.

[3]Note how eerily similar this is to Petronius’s eventual fate.

A Footnote to the Previous Post RE Bill Clinton and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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A not-so-quick footnote to yesterday’s post:  During the Reagan Administration, Garcia Marquez was labeled a subversive and denied visas to enter the US.  After Clinton was elected President, he lifted the travel ban.  Here’s a snippet from an article from Salon that is no longer available detailing Garcia Marquez’s first meeting with Clinton at William Styron’s house with the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes also in attendance:

Garcia Marquez with Clinton

Dinner began at 8, with some 14 guests around the table, and lasted until midnight.  Bit by bit, the conversation came down to a kind of literary round table involving the president and the three writers.  The first topic that came up was the forthcoming Summit of the Americas.  Clinton had wanted it held in Miami, where it did take place.  Carlos Fuentes considered that New Orleans or Los Angles had stronger historical claims, and he and I argued strongly for them until it became clear that the president had no intention of changing his plans because he was counting on reelection support from Miami.

“Forget the votes, Mr. President,” Carlos said to him.  “Lose Florida and make history.”  That phrase set the tone.  When he spoke of the problem of narco-traffic, the president heard me out generously.

“Thirty million drug addicts in the US go to show that the North American mafia are more powerful than those in Colombia, and the authorities much more corrupt.”  When I spoke to him about relations with Cuba, he seemed more receptive.  “If Fidel and you could sit and talk face to face, all problems would completely disappear.”

When we talked about Latin America in general, we realized that he was much more interested than we supposed, although he lacked some essential background.  When the conversation stiffened a bit, we asked him what his favorite movie was, and he answered “High Noon,” by Fred Zimmerman, whom he had recently honored in London.  When we asked him what he was reading, he sighed and mentioned a book on economic wars of the future, author and title unknown to me.

“Better to read ‘Don Quixote,” I said to him.  “Everything’s in there.” Now the ‘Quixote’ is a book that is not read nearly as much as is claimed, although very few admit to not having read it.  With two or three quotes, Clinton showed that he knew it very well indeed.  Responding, he asked us what our favorite books were.  Styron said his was “Huckleberry Finn.”

I would have said “Oedipus Rex,” which has been my bed table book for the last 20 years, but I named “The Count of Monte Cristo,” mainly for reasons of technique, which I had some trouble explaining.

Clinton said his was the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to “Absalom, Absalom,” Faulkner’s stellar novel, no question, although others would choose “Light in August” for purely personal reasons.  Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji’s monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from “The Sound and the Fury.”

Faulkner got us talking about the affinities between Caribbean writers and the cluster of great Southern novelists of the United States.  It made much more sense to us to think of the Caribbean not as a geographical region surrounded by its sea but as a much wider historical and cultural belt stretching from the north of Brazil to the Mississippi Basin.

Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and so many others would then be just as Caribbean as Jorge Amado and Derek Walcott. Clinton, born and raised in Arkansas, a Southern state, applauded the notion and professed himself happy to be a Caribbean.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Whippersnappers, Stage Moms vs. the Would-Be Wisdom of the Elders (starring Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

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For decades social critics have grown hoarse decrying the indisputable fact that North American culture has declined into a cult of youth.  Among other touchstones, they cite sitcoms that almost universally depict adults (especially males) as intellectually inferior to the wisecracking ten-year-old ironists who ultimately rule the ranch(-style) houses of Televisionland. No matter that in real life these child stars possess all of the autonomy of their collie colleague, Lassie, as whip-cracking stage mothers, robbing them of their childhoods, herd them into blinding klieg lights.

Remember Brittany Spears?

I can’t resist.  Check out these before and after pix of Brittany:

Before

After

And, of course, if you buy into perverse premise that aging is horrible, you’re pretty much doomed to a life of diminishing satisfaction as hairlines recede, varicose veins branch out, dogs die, and crowsfeet deepen into talons.  What traditionally has offered recompense for this physical decay is an accumulation of remembered experiences that have formed patterns of meaning that ultimately lead to an august understanding that the life cycle is natural and that death is the mother of beauty. [cue: Ecclesiastes, the Byrds]

However, and here’s the rub, many 21st Century citizens mostly experience “life” through the looking glass of mass media. For example, I calculate that my stay-at-home maternal grandmother spent the last forty years of her life in 16-hour stints of non-stop TV.  If that’s your lifestyle, the patterns you’re accumulating are illusions concocted to sell products and services, so ultimately, you’re experiencing a wildly disappropriate number of happy endings and a constant barrage of eye-pleasing artifacts and sculpted spokespeople who sell the concept that beauty is skin deep.  In the above scenario, the TV saturated senior citizen glued to reruns of Murder She Wrote or, worse, Fox News is less likely than the sober-minded 30-something social worker in providing good advice.

On the other hand, some old soul who has experienced an intense, widely travelled existence, who has weathered childhood, young adulthood, parenthood, widowhood, disease, exaltation, depression, and compassion should be treasured, the way I treasure the planet’s greatest novelist of the last quarter of the previous century.  I’m talking about my man, Gabo, i.e., Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  And when that old soul transformed his experience into a novel, what we got (and get) is not a concoction, but a revelation, the embodiment of wisdom.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his wide Mercedes, and their two sons in Barcelona, c. 1960

A late novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, offers a case in point.  Ostensibly, the narrative explores an incurable romantic’s life.  Quixotic Florentino Ariza has had a lifelong fixation on an instantaneous infatuation, which, as far as I can determine, has only resulted in one happy ending (see La Comedia Divina).  Love in the Time of Cholera depicts long-lived lives in which wisdom alchemizes from the dross of life, particularly the life of Fermina Daza Urbino, who stands out as one of the greatest female characters of the last fifty years.  Here she is via free indirect speech (in Edith Grossman’s translation) thinking of her dead husband:

For now she understood him better than when he was alive, she understood the yearning of his love, the urgent need he felt to find in her security that seemed the mainstay of his public life and that in reality he never possessed.  One day, at the height of her desperation, she had shouted at him:  “You don’t understand how unhappy I am.”  Unperturbed, he took off his eyeglasses with a characteristic gesture, he flooded her with the transparent waters of his childlike eyes, and in a single phrase he burdened her with the weight of his unbearable wisdom: “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”  With the first loneliness of her widowhood she had understood that the phrase did not conceal the miserable threat that she attributed to it at the time, but was the lodestone that had given them so many happy hours.

Here are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza finally consummating their love in their seventies, a scene that no doubt would send most of my current students to the medicine cabinet for some Dramamine:

She took him to the bedroom and, with the lights on, began to undress without false modesty.  Florentino Ariza was on the bed, lying on his back and trying to gain control, once again not knowing what to do with the skin of the tiger he had slain.  She said, “Don’t look.” He asked why without taking his eyes off the ceiling.

“Because you won’t like it,”  she said.

Then he looked at her and saw her naked to her waist, just as he had imagined her.  Her shoulders were wrinkled, her breasts sagged, her ribs were covered by flabby skin as pale and cold as a frogs [. . .]

It was the first time she had made love in twenty years, and she had been held back by her curiosity how it would feel after so long a respite, but he had not given her time to find out if her body loved him too.  It had been hurried and sad, and she thought: Now we’ve screwed everything up.  But she was wrong: despite the disappointment that each of them felt, despite his regret for his clumsiness and her remorse for the madness of the anisette, they were not apart for a moment in the days that followed [. . .] They did not try to make love again to much later, when the inspiration came to them without looking for it.  They were satisfied with the simple joy of being together.

Carpe diem indeed!