Page after Page about a Man Trying to Catch a Fish

Page after Page about a Man Trying to Catch a Fish         

                Started reading Harold Bloom’s Anatomy of Influence: Literature As a Way of Life, in an attempt to delve deeper into the question that I raised writing about Virginia Woolf. Does the biographical details connected with an author enrich our understanding of their work?

                I happened to be downstairs in City Lights one afternoon looking at the Philosophy and Lit Crit sections, picked Bloom’s book off the shelf, attracted by the plain white cover, and the happy subtitle. I opened randomly, and started reading. I had happened upon his description of a weekend with W. H. Auden. It’s the kind of piece that, once read, tends to fix an image of the subject in the readers’ mind. I mean, Bloom knows how to use his words, and since I am not likely to ever meet Auden (he died in 1973) it is easy to assume this portrait is a true likeness. He describes a scene that will instantly be recognizable to the readers of New Yorker-style literary gossip—the suitcase that contains nothing but alcohol; the bad behavior concerning the reading fee; the brilliant, if eccentric pronouncements. And, since Bloom is deeply interested in creating a literary canon, he must build up the literary reputations of his favorites (and his own, too, of course). But does it add to the texts involved?

He also looks down his patrician nose at popular literature, the Harry Potter books in particular. I suppose we are to go through life with nothing but a Riverside Shakespeare and poetry anthologies to sustain us. But what shall we read on the train? If someone reads the first Harry Potter book, say out of curiosity or simply because they are following a trend, and they love it, and so then they read all of them, and love them, and talk their friends into buying them and reading them so they can discuss how much they all love them, are they any less of a literary hero than Professor Bloom?

                Because as a bookseller, I’ve seen that kind of thing happen all the time. Just when I start to get depressed about the state of contemporary publishing, or worried about the survival of my tiny part in it, somebody will ask me for something like Doctor Zhivago or Sons and Lovers. I have no idea how they decide on any specific title, but it makes my day that they do.

                The title of this post refers to a conversation my husband and I overheard on a #30 bus as it made its way through Chinatown a few years ago. The conversation was between two high school students.

                “Did you read that book for English?”

                “Nah.”

                “I did. It was hella boring. Page after page about a man trying to catch a fish.”

                That’s what happens when literature loses its relevance. All of the salacious details in the world (and we know a lot of them) can’t save Hemingway from this scathing review.

                That’s what bothers me about Bloom’s book as a representative of literary criticism. Obviously, he has read everything, and for that he is to be commended. As an esteemed professor and author, he has most definitely influenced how we think about reading. It’s easy to pontificate on the primacy of Shakespeare and Milton, but what about those kids on the bus? What would make them want to read past The Old Man and the Sea?

                How many books have been ruined by being assigned in high school? But the need for narrative is still achingly strong, as evidenced by the success of 826 Valencia and Poets in the Schools here in San Francisco and elsewhere. The hardest thing to teach is the practice of literature as a living art, alive in the present, with roots that go deep in the past.

                That’s the thing—the canon is the canon for a reason, not just because some guys in New York, or some other literary capital say it is. If Shakespeare (Bloom’s touchstone) has been absorbed into our psyche because of his literary perfection (although I find myself wondering if at least some of Shakespeare’s lasting appeal isn’t due to the visual nature of his original medium—the theater), others are there too, and not merely for those of us that read. Not everyone will go to Yale and study literature, but surely we can all decide for ourselves what books we like.

My Carefully Constructed Edifice Turned Out to Be a House of Cards

                She dies in the end, you know. That is the trouble with reading literary biographies—you get attached to a story with this same predicable ending, over and over. You’ve spent a good few months (not as long as it took the subject to live it, but still a chunk of time) enmeshed in someone else’s life, and they always go were you cannot follow in the end. You’ve gone through their childhoods and perhaps compared it with your own, looking for any particular genius that might have been evidenced early. Then there’s usually the adolescence and early adulthood, another formative period, especially when it comes to sex, and the history of literary influences and alliances, and to the circumstances, sometimes heartbreaking, under which the masterpieces we love were created.

                Sometimes there is an element of voyeurism (ya think?), or even some professional jealousy. Does it really change the impact of Hemingway’s or Fitzgerald’s work to know how badly they treated their wives or that they were often drunk and maudlin? Up until now, I would have said no, but now I must admit that there is a certain feeling of schadenfreude involved. Maybe, at my worst, I use those pathetic stories to validate my own life choices—I may not be a famous writer, but at least I’ve never abandoned my family. Sometimes I wonder if the biography, instead of being a way to understand and empathize with our heroes’ basic humanity, isn’t sometimes used as a way to denigrate the artists among us who have managed to create something that we can only attempt to consume.

                So, it is with these kinds of mixed feelings that I approached the end of Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. I’d like to think that my intentions were good going in. I was re-discovering the author, and truly wanted to know about her. I guess I was a little shocked that up until this latest reading, she had not merited a place in my literary pantheon. Surely she belonged there, yet somehow I had missed her influence. Was it the suicide? Did my superficial knowledge of a few biographical details somehow predispose me to dismiss her work? Or, was my younger self, one who often consumed books two or three a week, not discerning enough to recognize her subtle genius? It’s not like she was the first writer ever to commit suicide, in one way or another, although personally I tend to admire the lives of those, like Djuna Barnes and J.D. Salinger, who choose solitude and live to a crusty old age.

                But now, I’m faced with the last hundred pages, and the dread is starting to build. This biographer had rather little to say about the genesis of her books, and seems more interested in her relationship with the family, most specifically his mother, Virginia’s sister Vanessa. Maybe the gossip aspect, how she felt at certain times, or how she reacted to personal challenges, is easier to illustrate than the interior process of writing. It sometimes seems that he is answering contemporary criticisms that are no longer part of the literary conversation, and therefor rather opaque. And what about that mysterious footnote near the end, alluding to materials that could not yet be published? Of course, we all like the particular details of who slept with whom when, and in what position, which he reveals with an urbane delicacy that I find very entertaining. Yet there is no way around the fact that, when she was about the same age I am now, she walked out of a morning with the intention of taking her own life. And now, at the end (of the book) it becomes clear that either everything in her life had led up to that point, or nothing had.

Because that’s the way it is with our lives. The details—that suicide was a common subject of conversation in her circle, that it was not her first attempt, that she had suffered more than one psychotic breakdown in her life, are just that—details, not reasons. Perhaps I was hoping that the slow accumulation of facts would somehow mitigate the enormity of that final scene, but, of course, they don’t. She had chosen her method, and was lucid enough to search out the perfect rocks that would both fit in her pockets, and be heavy enough to provide the proper ballast once she was in the water. It all seems so rational, the easiest and most elegant solution to the intractable problem of, according to her suicide note, her returning madness. (“I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.”)

                So much was gone already. A whole world, her world was rapidly disappearing. Women no longer wore long dresses or alighted at parties from hansom cabs and carriages. Most of the Bloomsbury set, those glittering boys from Cambridge with their dazzling intellects, were either dead, sick, or hadn’t somehow lived up to their potential. Perhaps she felt irrelevant in the new age of airplanes and mechanical competence. It seems that from her letters she felt so—that the decorous, buttoned-up world she had been born into was being destroyed, that her time was finished. How sad to preside over the death of an age.

                And now, re-reading Mrs. Dalloway, how could I have not seen its greatness the first time around? It goes against my inclination to believe that great literature doesn’t somehow transcends its author, but I did get more from the book having spent so much time in her life, and now I can’t help wondering who I should read about, and re-evaluate next.

Re-reading Virginia Woolf or the Invisible Edifice of Narrative

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. – Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

                The benefit of having a squirrel-like attitude towards possessions is finding forgotten nuts of the literary variety come spring. Last week as I was scanning my bookshelves looking for something to read, there it was, on the bottom shelf in the hall, right next to some hardcover editions of early Cormac McCarthy novels and my set of Proust—a battered old paperback copy (probably picked up off the street) of Jacob’s Room and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I have been vaguely contemplating re-reading her because I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it the first time. All that I possessed from my first reading was  a vague mental picture of women on a ship, seen though some kind of gauzy film that obscured precise outlines and definitions.

 As I started Jacob’s Room this time, I noticed the poetic way Woolf fills in the story quickly. A young man is growing up, goes to college, and is trying to find his true place in the world. A typical coming of age story, right? Familiar, predictable even.  So I started to wonder about what story she was trying to tell. What made it possible for her to write a novel is this genre, usually so personal, without it being about herself?

                And then—one of those aha moments. Anyone can slip into this kind of narrative, using her own imagination, bits and pieces of the lives of people she knows, and possibly a bit of wishful thinking about the life she would have liked to live. We, her readers, enter into the narrative without needing to know these details. We all already know the story. A few short descriptions—a certain type of hat, how the women are dressed at a party, what kind of beverages are served when—and we fill in the appropriate time period, social class, geographic location, and all the other narrative variations that make one story differ from another.

                There are two reasons, I think for this innate understanding of narrative structure. The first one is obvious. We know the story because we’ve seen, read, heard it before. We are all schooled, either formally, or by our own experiences, or both, in how a story works. In Woolf’s case, according to her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, she had the run of the family library at an early age. She was considered too delicate for advanced schooling, but since she came from one of the most artistic and literary families of her time, she probably learned more from staying home. By the time she started to write, she had read the great English literary figures who had gone before her. Indeed, it had always been the family’s assumption that she would be a writer.

                But I believe there is a deeper reason that Woolf and other authors like her can build a story with just a few words or phrases. It is because we, her readers, live in our own narrative world so completely that we recognize the trajectory of other lives, even in fiction. Think of all of the coming-of-age novels you have read, even the ones forced on you in high school or college. The plots are all the same—the protagonist (sometimes the author, thinly veiled) escapes from some horrific childhood trauma, or just the loneliness of being misunderstood, into the outside world where, after many wryly humorous adventures, he or she finds something meaningful that helps them go on living. Now read a memoir of anyone’s young life, or write your own. Same story! And we never tire of reading these stories, just as we never tire of living them.

                The owner of the metaphysical book store where I used to work has a standard comment whenever anyone complained about life. He would listen to the whole sad story—overdue bills, bad weather, not enough hours in the day—and then reply that, whatever it was, it had to beat the alternative. Maybe that’s why we can’t wait to tell each other our stories, as mundane and, at the same time filled with pain as they may be. The sound of our own voices, or the scratch of pen across paper (I don’t know about the tap of keys because I don’t write that way, nor do I know the feel of moving text with my finger) reminds us that we are alive, when it just as easily could be otherwise.

               

               

Midnight in a Parallel Universe

            I don’t see many movies these days, either out at the theater or at home. One of the saddest things about being a responsible adult is the lack of recreational time, and( I guess it’s obvious) I tend to spend what little I get reading. I did go through an art cinema stage when I was first in college, and there were still lots of funky, relatively cheap movie houses in town. One program I especially remember was a Woody Allen triple bill of Annie Hall, Interiors, and Love and Death. Now that was six hours plus well-spent, and it cemented my love for Allen’s type of humor and his filmmaking abilities. That was back in the 80’s, and, due to the above-mentioned responsibility problem, I have to admit I can’t even name any of his more recent pictures. I guess both he and I have changed, because I really didn’t like Midnight in Paris. I know. I am probably one of the few people (to my dismay, my in-laws are in that number) that can make such an outlandish statement. I mean, look at the awards! My husband says that, as usual, I took it way too seriously, expecting a literary treatise instead of a romantic comedy. Even just listening to him describing the parts he especially liked made me appreciate it more than I did at the theater.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is difficult for me to imagine those authors—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and especially Gertrude Stein—as characters in anyone else’s story other than their own. I, too had my time, brief but glorious, of wandering around Paris in a literary daydream, trying to catch a glimpse of those lives, which I felt I knew intimately from all of those literary biographies I’d been devouring since about age thirteen. And yet, except at Shakspeare and Co., I never got any closer than I had by reading their books.

So, throughout the movie, I had the sense that my heroes were being used. Also, I have never been completely comfortable with the concept of time travel. It is often used as a literary device, a good shortcut when an author wants to ensure that a character has information that they couldn’t possibly get in the normal unfolding of uninterrupted time. My favorite (not from the written page) is from the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk falls in love in the past and saves the object of his famously fickle affection from a seemingly untimely death which changes the present so much that his entire ship disappears. Cute, but my problem, even as a kid, allowed the special privilege of staying up late with Dad to watch TV, was they why didn’t he disappear, too? I didn’t understand contingency then, but even at that early age, the whole plot line seemed a little too convenient. It felt like cheating.

            Maybe this is my problem with the film Midnight in Paris. The Paris of the 1920’s is so perfect, so visually real and enticing that the conflict, the decision that the characters must make to stay in their own time seems false. What incentive does the protagonist have for deciding to live his present-day life? His fiancée is a bitch, his in-laws are just waiting for him to fuck up so that they can say I told you so. He doesn’t even seem to notice the woman he meets looking at old Cole Porter records. Whereas in the past the he is lucky enough to escape to for a few nights, he hangs out with gorgeous, available women who think he’s cute, and no lesser giants than Hemingway and Fitzgerald tell him he’s a great writer. In what universe doesn’t he just stay there forever?  I would.

Reading Old Paperbacks

Some time back in the early 90's, my tiny city apartment became the second-to-last resting place for old paperbacks. Their former owners had died, or moved on. I have to admit that I bought some of them, because they had been donated to the thrift stores I frequent, and I couldn't bear to leave behind all those collected editions of the great literature of the world. As long as they're still readable, I don't have the heart to throw them away.

I'm not talking about the now-ubiqutous trade paperbacks, with their artistic covers and skyrocketing cover prices. I'm talking about the lowly mass-market ones, now despised by some for their association with romances and bad bestsellers. They sprang into being in 1935, with the almost overnight success of Penguin. Most of the ones that I have date from the '60's, and sport lurid or psychedelic covers. It is impossible to underestimate the explosion of knowledge and art that these books brought to the public arena. Many of them have cover prices of less than a dollar. It would seen anything that cheap that was made that long ago, and out of paper, would be long gone by now, fifty years later.

And yet, many of them are still in circulation, available at library sales and flea markets worldwide.Now I am determined to read as many of them as I can, prompted by the experience of finding a copy of Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love that I didn't know I had. If you've read any of my past posts, you can probably imagine that I went through an Anais Nin stage in high school, and you might even surmise that her diaries stated me writing my own journals, of which this blog is a kind of public extension.

Which brings up the whole subject of whether or not knowing the backstory of a novel changes the reading of it--but that's another post...

At any rate, I was entranced by this novel that I had forgotten, and now wonder what other treasure are hidden in the mess. I'll keep you posted.

Reading Literary History

After I finally managed to post my first entry, I began to wonder why it took me so long plunge into the world of blog-writing. Of course, there is the fear of public exposure that I think most of us share, the anxiety dream we have of showing up for an important meeting in our underwear or not being able to find the appropriate classroom on our first day at a new school. I am aware that blogspot is a very public forum (at the same time, I also realize that the chances of large numbers of people actually reading this are laughably small). But I think there’s more to it than shyness or the social awkwardness of one who spends most of her time with books.

I’ve been reading a lot of literary histories that cover the first half of the 20th century, and I just feel so much more at home in the atmosphere they describe—one in which literature and what people were writing was of major concern. I can read for hours about who lived where in New York, or who knew who in Paris, and then construct a about how wonderful it would be to live the literary life—mornings writing, afternoons in the café, and nights in rapt conversations in bars and salon. But, after a little of that, I start questioning my own premise. For although it’s easy to quote statistics about how little most people read these days, or the failure of our education system to impart even the most basic literary knowledge to our youth, I can’t help thinking that these problems (if they are defined as such) are perennial, and not simply a product of our digitalized , 21st century lives.

Somehow, I have a feeling that it would be difficult to find an example of any historical time when the number of people who read and talk about, say contemporary poetry was more than a small percentage of the population. First of all, such a group would necessarily need to spend large amounts of time sitting around reading, and how do you pay for that?

This is made clear by reading memoirs from the aforementioned period in American literature (my favorite)--the years between the two world wars. Early expatriates, like Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein were living off of family money and their (wildly different) salons were well-established in Paris by the end of the World War I. Communication was slow, but manuscripts could still make it back to the tastemakers in New York, and there was plenty of cross-pollination between the two literary capitals. I have always been more attached to Paris, maybe because I read about it back in the early, formative years of my life, and maybe also because many of the leading players were women. I’m romanticizing, but it seems the perfect nexus in which to create literature.

Our own time sadly, does not. For me it’s impossible to imagine someone like Djuna Barnes working at Starbucks or Ernest Hemingway spending all day in front of a computer screen. (Many of the people involved did have to work for a living, of course. I just bought a biography of Janet Flanner, who wrote a column about Paris for the New Yorker.) It is well within the realm of possibility to imagine that you favorite pierced and tattooed barista, or that Financial District refugee is full of wild poetry, if only they had the time to immerse themselves.