Category Archives: reviews

joseph mcelroy, “ship rock: a place”

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Joseph McElroy
Ship Rock: A Place
(William B. Ewert, 1980)

This short book has the subtitle “From Women and Men, a Novel in Progress”; it’s a section of that much larger book published on its own in 1987. This was a limited edition, beautifully printed by William B. Ewert, who ran a small press in New Hampshire that seems to have mostly published poetry. It’s a lovely book; used copies are still floating around. It’s nice reading McElroy like this: it’s easier to concentrate on the language, rather than trying to balance the myriad themes webbing through his larger books. McElroy’s prose needs to read (and re-read) slowly: it’s hard to do this with longer books.

This is a book concerned with places, as the title suggests, and names: in particular a place in New Mexico called Shiprock or Ship Rock, as it is spelled in this book. Ship Rock is both a town and a natural feature:

The Rock rises upwards of fifteen hundred feet right up off the plateau. Half again that long at its base on this south side, it still seems less massive than lofty, for it is alone. That’s what the local Navajos cal it – the Rock. Pretty much one rock (mono-lith) with craggy crops lifting toward two westward peaks with a massed steady shift against downward veins of long, vertical sharding and against the backward pull of what starts two-thirds of the way up, a slow climb beginning at the top of what looks like sheer cliff and climbing from there so that, notch by notch, the eye that is taken along these splits and levels takes his whole crazy body into what he’s witnessing, until something is an event. (p. 11)

There’s a hint of why “Ship Rock” is used instead of “Shiprock” in the bisection of “monolith” in to its components, later elaborated: “And he thought he heard a car from far off toward the town of Ship Rock (spelled as one word with a small r, he later noted” (p. 34). The protagonist has heard the words ship rock spoken; he hears them as two words, not concatenated into a single word. Shiprock is a name; Ship Rock is a name and two words, both of which can signal. One of those words is factual: Ship Rock is a rock, albeit a very large one. The other is metaphor: people look at Ship Rock and see a ship. Much of this book is an attempt to make sense of the rock’s dual nature. Plot is incidental to this book: the protagonist, who is unnamed and whose profession is left unclear, has traveled to Ship Rock and stops to consider it for a while. 

There’s more than an echo of Wallace Stevens (or perhaps A. R. Ammons) here; as this text appears here, it’s barely fiction as it’s usually construed, and one could almost make an argument that this might be better understood as an extended prose poem. Certainly there’s a deep concern with language and its rhythms. Here the protagonist considers the word “neck” as geologists use it – Ship Rock is a type of formation often called a “volcanic neck” – though the geologists’ usage doesn’t make intuitive sense because there’s no head attached to the neck:

But wait, a voice says, we mean neck in the sense of throat. It doesn’t have to have a head on its shoulders. But the truth is that the throat is long gone: the neck is what’s left, the neck that was inside the throat, if you see.
     The way the heart is inside the stomach at seven in the morning after a hard night. God, he recalls necks of land with plates of Little Neck clams on them, but not in the noise of last night. (p. 26)

The voice that starts this is inside his head: he’s thinking about language, and trying to understand it: we understand geologic processes – a volcanic event – in terms of the more familiar. Association leads to more association; finally he ends somewhere else entirely. Little Neck, New York, where the clams are from, might get its name from a peninsula that looks something like a neck: a peninsula seems more obviously like a neck than a volcanic mountain does. But the language here catches: the last sentence sprinkles its iambs with anapests and begs to be read aloud. In the interjection, there’s an echo of the sixteenth-century “Western wind, when will thou blow” (“Christ, if my love were in my arms”).

McElroy knows, of course, and his protagonist presumably does as well, that the Navajos, when they called Ship Rock “The Rock” wouldn’t have actually used those particular words: their own words would naturally have sounded different. Later in the book there’s mention made of an organization with the initials “D.N.A.”; those expand to “Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditah,” an actual Native American legal aid organization with an acronym that functions, intentionally or not, two ways. Coincidence is a driving force here; a place is one thing, a name is something else entirely. Proust mapped this territory first. 

An interview by Tom LeClair in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983) has McElroy describing the writers that he was interested in while he was writing Women and Men, among them Alain Robbe-Grillet:

. . . God knows Robbe-Grillet can be pompous enough even in Jealousy, a fine book that represents I guess a desire that’s another side of me, to turn microscopic seeing into meditation – to be truthfully precise. But to what and through what? I’m sick of this dogma, a platitude supporting the virtue of concreteness without ever asking why concreteness, what philosophical conclusions does it rest on? (p. 239)

This might perfectly be describing what’s happening in Ship Rock. A rock, something as massive as Ship Rock, is nothing if not concrete: but understood geologically, it had to once be liquid to exist. References to Sandia Man, Cochise Man, the Pueblo Indians, the Navajos, dot the text; all of these groups inhabited (or inhabit) the area around Ship Rock: the rock would have appeared the same to them, but humanity exists on a tiny timeframe geologically. 

alan burns, “the angry brigade”

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Alan Burns
The Angry Brigade: A Documentary Novel
(Quartet, 1974)

It’s hard to tell exactly what this is bereft of critical apparatus. The front cover gives this book the subtitle “A Documentary Novel”; the back cover explains that the author has used “a deft combination of serious in-depth research and imaginative reconstruction”. The seriousness of Burns’s credentials are played up: inhe is a “novelist, playwright and lawyer . . . . a barrister, [who] did research in politics at the London School of Economics, and since 1965 has been a full-time writer.” An unsourced epigraph facing page 1 declares that “The true story of the Angry Brigade will never be told until they publish their memoirs . . . if they ever do.” A short section entitled “Focus on the Angry Brigade” starts the book; signed “A.B.,” the ostensible author explains that he interviewed six people involved in the actual Angry Brigades, but on the condition of concealing their identities:

I therefore adopted the method of the ‘collective autobiography’, telling the story in the words of the participants, but without ‘naming names’. The collective nature of the book is appropriate to a movement whose members remain anonymous for ideological as well as legal reasons. . . . This book brings together the experiences of members of two activist communes. It tells how as individuals they became radicalized, how as groups they were organized, how they related to the world outside . . . . This book relates past events in the past tense, but similar groups and activities continue in various forms. The story is told naturally in different tones of voice and different accents. The reader will distinguish the various motives and attitudes of the speakers, and judge the quality of the men and women who took part in these events. (pp. 2–3)

The book that follows seems to be an oral history of the Angry Brigades in Britain in the early 1970s, told in first-person sections by “Barry,” “Dave,” “Jean,” “Ivor,” “Susanne,” and “Mehta.” Certainly in this country, the history of the Angry Brigades is almost entirely forgotten, if it was ever known in the first place; a tiny article in Wikipedia might provide background; more can be learned from the article on Anna Mendelssohn and a 2004 piece by David Edgar in the LRB. The Angry Brigade seem to have been overshadowed even in their own time by the more violent IRA. I wouldn’t claim to have any particular interest in or knowledge of the history of the Angry Brigades; I came across a mention of this book in Jonathan Coe’s biography of B. S. Johnson, which also notes that the Angry Brigades inspired Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, one of Johnson’s more successful books. This particular book isn’t particularly easy to find, at least in this country; it doesn’t seem to have been reprinted after this paperback edition.

What remains is an odd document. I certainly can’t pin any historical figures to the names of the characters; this is a long way from being a roman à clef. The personal characteristics seem to have been studiously scrambled. I don’t think the voices are quite as indistinguishable as Burns’s contemporary Zulfikar Ghose found them – Dave’s voice, for example, can always be distinguished because he swears more than anyone else – but there is something very strange about this. Perhaps this is intentional on Burns’s part, an attempt to suggest that individual identities have been subsumed to the greater movement; or perhaps this is how the speakers wished to present themselves to Burns, if the interviews took place as suggested by the introduction. But there’s something interesting about this anonymity: it seems appropriate for a narrative of anarchism, and it’s very different from what we’re used to in histories of terrorism. 

The book takes a turn for the strange towards the end: one of the characters bombs the Post Office Tower (which actually happened in 1971; Wikipedia attributes this to the Provisional IRA) and a woman is killed. People have been injured by the Angry Brigade’s violence over the course of the book; but this death didn’t actually happen. The narrative is now firmly in the realm of fiction; this is enforced by the penultimate section of the book. Dave has been sent to jail; in this section, he counts off the 52 months and 25 days that he spends in jail:

I ticked off the days:
1ST YEAR
1st month
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 (p. 169)

There’s a similar entry for every month (all but the first and the last listing every day; the 17th of July is circled every year, his birthday); at the end, he’s released and takes the bus back to rejoin the Angry Brigade. It’s an odd list, taking up 7 pages: there’s not much that can be learned from it save that the 35th month has 29 days, and is thus a leap year, presumably either 1972 or 1976. If it’s 1972, he enters jail in 1969 and leaves in later 1973; if it’s 1976, he enters jail in 1973 and leaves in 1978. The book was originally published in 1973; historically, it would make most sense for him to enter jail in 1973, but something is clearly off. Jail passes in a blur; he is released into a militarized Britain, where the Angry Brigade’s struggle continues. Ivor has taken charge of things; the Angry Brigade seems to be leading a full-on rebellion against the British government. There’s a paragraph-long final section, narrated by Suzanne: she curtly tells how three bombs exploded in the basement of their headquarters while she and Ivor were sweeping it: in the final sentence of the book, she feels the shock wave of the bomb.

What’s going on here? The oddity of the end of the book doesn’t seem to be noticed either by Ghose’s piece on it nor by the other short review that I can find online, which treats it as a historical document. While the book may have started from interviews, as “A.B.” insists at the start of the book, there’s also an author of fiction at work here. Returning to the note at the beginning of the book:

Who then was responsible for the Post Office Tower bombing and those at Carr’s home, Bryant’s home in Birmingham, the army barracks in Albany Street, Chelsea Bridge early in September, and the Royal Tank Regiment HQ in Westminister? At least three have been claimed by the Angry Brigade. But it seems as if the bombings are the work of more than one group. In the words of the Special Branch’s ‘experts on the left’: ‘In calling it the Angry Brigade we’re chasing a myth because there is no one organization called the Angry Brigade. There is a theory that the Angry Brigade is a many-headed hydra.’ In other words the example set by the bombings of last year has been followed by independent political groups. In London alone there are thought to be three such groups. (p. 1)

A space has carefully been opened: “A.B.” (initials that Ghose notes also stand for “Angry Brigade”) is careful to not explicitly blame the Post Office Tower bombing on the Angry Brigade, an organization that he then denies exists as such. The Angry Brigade is as much an idea as it is a historical actor: as an idea, it can serve as part of fiction, a piece of fiction that ultimately becomes purely speculative. 

harry mathews, “the journalist”

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Harry Mathews
The Journalist
(David R. Godine, 1994)

One initial reason that Harry Mathews’s The Journalist is interesting is the simple problem that he takes as his subject: that of narration in the novel. The narrator who records what’s happening is a convention of the novel, going back to the letters that compose Samuel Richardson’s books, letters that are so thorough, it has been noted, would take more time to write than actually passes in the narrative itself. The reader might recognize this; but there’s a suspension of disbelief. We understand how a novel is told. The novel as ostensible diary has a similarly long history: as with reading letters, there’s the frisson that comes from reading someone else’s diary. Most first-person narratives, of course, aren’t actually in the form of the diary itself, but there’s something of an implied diary: we assume that the narrator is writing down what happened, and we’re content to call this entirely artificial form “realism”. There’s the problem, of course, that writing is not commensurate with life: it takes more time to have something happen and write it down than it does for something to happen, to say nothing of turning its description into something that anyone else would want to read. And plot, of course, only appears after the fact.

The narrator of The Journalist seeks to keep a journal of everything that happens to him; the book is that record. It’s not coincidental that it’s also a record of insanity: as the narrator seeks to keep track of more and more things, more and more of his life slips away. It’s impossible to live and to actively record your life at the same time, life recorders to the contrary: the sticking point might be the active consideration of the recording of one’s life:

How can I expect to include all I want from a day or part of a day I’ve just lived through if I meekly follow the line that leads from a beginning to an end? That line can only oversimplify. It sticks to the obvious and reasonable, avoiding all that lies outside its “inevitable” progress, avoiding what I most hope to record, the then and then that might not have led here at all and that, even if they did, had anyway their own momentary savor and deserve better than to be flattened into stepping stones on the path to another night’s sleep. To follow chronology means fitting things into place, making sure that nothing has happened. How to see things out of place? Analysis will subvert the illusory naturalness of memory left to its slippered self. (pp. 19–20.)

Such consideration requires recording of its own; one thinks of fractal coastlines. Of a piece with his recording is his division of his journal-writing into ever more complex categories: starting with dividing the what is fact (“A”) from the subjective (“B”), then dividing the two categories more and more: towards the end, something might be “B I/b.2a” if it’s something that the narrator is told by his mistress Colette, for example. A quarter of the way into the book, the text column narrows: marginal notes beside the text note the category that part of the narration might fall into. Not every sentence is classified; I suspect most readers can’t help but ignore the marginal categorizations as deciphering them would retard reading. 

It is, however, a convincing narrative of craziness. What seems to start as a harmless pursuit (albeit a pursuit recommended to the protagonist with the idea that it will help him) is ratcheted up more and more and his depictions and classifications become more and more detailed. It’s a harrowing book as well because of the metafictional aspect of it, which might be said to implicate the reader. The narrator loses control of his own life by writing about it; the reader can’t help but consider that a necessary condition of reading is to ignore the world in favor of the book. The Journalist isn’t necessarily a pleasant book to read, and it probably shouldn’t be, given its subject. 

It’s hard to pinpoint when and where this narrative takes place: Mathews seems to be purposefully evasive. The setting seems to be a smaller city in a European country: where exactly that might be is left vague, and the list of places that it’s not seems to be larger than the list of those that it might be. Everyone eats well; they have pleasant love affairs which cause no pain. The time seems to be the late 1980s, although again there are no specific indicators; the computer exists, but is non-invasive in this world, which does bear a decided resemblance to that of the pastoral. The vagueness is intentional, as is noted when the narrator’s journal is scrutinized by another:

He also suggests that I add references to contemporary events to my account to expand its admirable specificity and make clear to my readers where and when each entry take place. I object: I know where and when they all take place, and following his advice would mean wasting scarce time. (p. 206)

This drama is interior: something like it could be happening anywhere, to anyone; it happens every time a novel is written with a journal-writing narrator. There’s a shock in the last book of Proust when the reader realizes that World War I is happening: the narrator has been writing away, to the exclusion of society, and time has been passing. 

Another book of metafiction, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder approaches the same subject as The Journalist from a different direction, less concerned with character and more concerned with form; there’s a similar progression in that book, and it’s a bit surprising that I’ve never seen the two books compared. To my mind, Mathews’s book is superior because it’s more human, pointing out the unreconcilable contradiction between art and life. Mathews’s book is more concerned with text and its ineluctable linearity which forces narratives upon lives. McCarthy’s characters purposefully feel more like puppets, at service to a greater artistic program: this is purposeful, but the human cost of art is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out. 

jane bowles/denton welch, “a stick of green candy”

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Jane Bowles & Denton Welch 
A Stick of Green Candy
(illustrated by Colter Jacobsen) 
(Four Corners Books, 2010)

This book is not, of course, a long-lost collaboration between Jane Bowles and Denton Welch; rather, it consists of two stories by Bowles (“A Stick Of Green Candy” and “Camp Cataract”) and two by Welch (“The Trout Stream” and “Narcissus Bay”) will illustrations by Colter Jacobsen as part of Four Corners’s Familiars series, where artists are invited to illustrate texts. Four Corners make beautiful books: this is hard-cover, beautifully bound, with attention paid to details: the white case has a shiny green spine, candy-like enough. The title page is hand-lettered; the illustration is generous, not only black and white but also full color. Matthew Carter gets thanked on the colophon for his work on the type; the book was printed in Italy. Four Corners makes books for people who appreciate beautiful books, and this is a large part of the attraction of this edition. There’s something to be said for this assemblage of stories, though. The Jane Bowles stories are in print, as part of My Sister’s Hand in Mine. The Denton Welch stories are a bit harder to get ahold of, at least in this country: Tartarus Press put out a complete edition in the U.K., but it’s pricey and I don’t have a copy of it. I probably should.

The illustrator, Colter Jacobsen, seems to be the person who selected these stories to appear together. What ties them together, besides his judgment? Though the writers were roughly contemporaneous, they’re very different; while Welch’s works tend to be strongly centered around a single consciousness, it’s pointedly difficult for the reader to find anyone to identify with in the work of Jane Bowles. Three of the four stories here involve strange children; the fourth, “Camp Cataract” is about two sisters whose relationship never quite becomes adult. In “The Trout Stream,” Welch’s protagonist young protagonist observes his elders, who try and fail to make themselves happy; in “A Stick of Green Candy,” a young girl, ignored by her parents, grows up by herself. “Narcissus Bay” relates the story of a young boy in China who sees a procession of a beaten woman, two chained men, and a police officer, the aftermath of some crime; more importantly, he learns how his knowledge of this can affect those around him. Like “The Trout Stream,” “Camp Cataract” seems to end with a drowning. If Bowles and Welch’s voices aren’t particularly similar, there’s a consistency to these stories in their focus on outsiders. Welch’s narrators seem to be outsiders by choice; those of Bowles seem dragged along by the world around them. 

I like this presentation: with only four stories, these narratives have room to breath, and the reader is encouraged to slow down. The Bowles stories can be found in the FSG collection of her works; to my mind, though, they suffer in that context from being presented after Two Serious Ladies, a more powerful work. Welch’s stories appear with 74 of their fellows in his collected stories; I know that I find it hard to focus on details in the midst of so much. Here details stand out: at the country house of “The Trout Stream,” they eat Bombay duck; later, a woman has a “voice like an electric guitar”. I don’t know when the story was written, but Denton Welch died in 1948; one wonders what that sound would have meant to him. There’s something to be said for having the leisure to appreciate this; certainly its possible in a collected work, but it’s more difficult. 

Colter Jacobsen’s illustrations appear to be pencil versions of found photographs: snapshots of children playing at dusk, people in front of old buildings, some men behind an enormous shark. Most of them are repeated: one image on the left page, one on the right, though there’s not a precise repetition: small differences can usually be discerned between the two images. The images in the endpapers (a waterfall with a slight rainbow, done with colored pencil as are a handful of other images in the book) appear to be mirrored across the gutter, but looking more closely reveals that the left and right images, though similar in outline, are entirely different in detail: the rock face and trees are entirely different. Some of the drawings of photographs give the impression of having been manipulated or treated: in the pictures of the men with the shark, the shark seems to have been whited out or erased. 

One spread shows two snapshots, dated “4-1941”; they are again imperfectly mirrored, and in one of the photos, depicting two women, the faces are blurred on the right: there’s something almost creepy to this. There isn’t generally anything that directly ties the illustrations to the text; there’s a similarity in feeling, however, and the reader comes away with the idea that like the depicted photographs, the stories have also been rescued from the past. With this spread, the last set of paired photographs in the text, it’s possible to draw a correspondence between what’s pictured and the story that’s being illustrated (“Camp Cataract”): there are two women who might be the sisters of the story, a date which might match the story, a label (“COLD SPRING – N.Y.”) which might fit the story, and two images of waterfalls, one of which appears prominently in the story. This set of images most directly matches the text; flipping back through the text of this particular story, one can find other illustrations which also fit, as well as some that don’t (a reproduction of a color photograph of a small girl holding up a piece of clothing; a teenager in a B.U.M. t-shirt inhaling from a bong): these weren’t drawn from Bowles’s text, but they feel of a piece with the text. 

There’s no artist’s statement with this book: I would have liked to see one, as the choices made here are interesting and not obvious. John Morgan is the designer of the series; I feel like I should go back and get the older books in this series.

julian jason haladyn, “marcel duchamp: étant donnés”

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Julian Jason Haladyn 
Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés
(Afterall Books, 2010)

I sporadically follow Afterall’s One Work series, probably not as well as I should; most look interesting, but only a few look immediately interesting enough to put down money for. They’re small books, and the concept is good: a close reading of a single piece of visual art presented for a general audience. This one follows on the heels of the big show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year focused on Étant donnés; it reminds me that the catalogue is still sitting on my shelf, waiting for a closer reading. This book is conveniently sized for subway reading; thus I’m getting to it more quickly.

What’s most immediately interesting to me about Haladyn’s reading of Étant donnés is that he bases it around a reading of Raymond Roussel. (For what it’s worth, I found my way to Duchamp through Roussel; encountered after Roussel, the way Duchamp works makes perfect sense.) Roussel’s influence on Duchamp has long been known; but there haven’t, to my knowledge, been many readings of exactly how that influence worked, perhaps because it was difficult for a long time to get a handle on Roussel’s work. Julio Cortázar, for example, was interested in the connection between the two. This is easier now for an English audience now that there are two biographies of Roussel in English as well as Exact Change’s compilation How I Wrote Certain of My Books; Foucault’s book on Roussel, odd as it is, is newly back in print as well. Haladyn refers to most of these in his text. Crucially, Haladyn connects Roussel’s posthumous publication of How I Wrote Certain of My Books to the posthumous unveiling of Étant donnés. I don’t know whether a direct connection can be made – during his life, Duchamp indicated that seeing Roussel’s theatrical works was pivotal for his early works, but it’s unclear whether Duchamp knew about what Roussel was up to after his death. Duchamp would certainly have known people who would have known about Roussel – Michel Leiris, for one, as well as the members of the Oulipo – but my sense is that the historical record is somewhat dark on the subject. Foucault’s book, for example, came out in 1963, when Duchamp was almost finished with his work; and Duchamp doesn’t seem to have said anything in print about Roussel and seemed surprised by Michel Carrouges’s earlier argument about his influences. But as he admits in that letter, there are clear affinities. Haladyn declares that there was an “extreme unlikelihood” that Duchamp saw Courbet’s L’Origine du monde before constructing his nude (a statement undercut by his footnote, where he admits the possibility that Duchamp could have seen a reproduction); but not considering the possibility that Duchamp didn’t actually know about Roussel’s procédé undermines an otherwise extremely interesting argument about the similarity of Roussel’s procedure and Duchamp’s inframince. The lack of discussion of Duchamp’s own use of homophones is also an odd omission. 

Haladyn structures his book around finally visiting the Philadelphia Museum to see the work in the flesh – Haladyn is Canadian, based in Ontario – his narration of his approach to the work is odd in part because he doesn’t mention that he’s visiting the exhibit not in its normal state, when it quietly waits behind its non-descript vestibule, but in the midst of an exhibition based around the work, in which there are lines of people waiting to look through the peep holes. This isn’t how the work is normally seen; if one observes casual visitors in the Duchamp room at the PMA, most are unprepared and don’t discover Étant donnés at all. Once in a while, someone does by accident: there’s a burst of excitement, everyone goes to see what the matter is, and sometimes people are shocked. (There’s no warning label on the room yet; one wonders how often mortified parents complain to the staff.) But it’s strange that Haladyn should describe the act of waiting to look as a normal part of viewing the work: it seems integral to the experience that it should take place in a room that seems like it might have been left open by accident. 

The titles of Duchamp’s best-known works (Nude Descending a Staircase, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) promise prurience that the objects themselves comically fail to deliver; Étant donnés does the opposite and is consequently even more shocking. Haladyn stresses that this work is very much about the role of the viewer, following Duchamp’s argument in “The Creative Act”: it is the viewer’s experience of the piece, with the shock entailed in it, that gives it meaning:

If, therefore, it is in and through the eyes of the viewer that the creative act reaches its climax, it seems appropriate that Given addresses the eye in such an overdetermined manner. Too look into this installation is to be (made) aware of the fact that one is looking. . . . Significantly, the immanent moment of being caught peeping through the door of Given by another viewer’s gaze is intimately part of the process of viewing this installation whether or not the moment actually occurs. (p. 82)

Released posthumously, there is no way to ask Duchamp what his work meant. Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books offers a posthumous explanation of his work, as well as providing an instruction manual to those who would create work like it; Duchamp also release an instruction manual after his death that also allows one to recreate it. This is an extremely tempting correspondence; but there are also extreme divergences between the two creator’s posthumous performance. Roussel was baffled when his public wasn’t astonished by his genius during his life; he assumed that his explanation would make it clear to the public, in didactic fashion, how they’d be wrong. Duchamp offers no such guidance; as he’d explained earlier, there was no solution because there was no problem. Haladyn’s book, though promising, isn’t entirely convincing; but it’s an interesting start, and he could profitably expand his argument.

wallace shawn, “essays”

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Wallace Shawn
Essays
(Haymarket Books, 2009)

This book has been hanging around the bedroom forever; I don’t remember whether how it turned up in the house. I found myself interested in it when listening to an interview with Wallace Shawn in which he talked, rather perceptively, about Harvard class books. Class books are sent to those graduates for whom the alumni office has the address every five years; they’re very strange documents, as class members are allowed to write a statement describing themselves, presumably for members of their class that haven’t seen them for a while and might be wondering what they might be up to. (See, for example, filmmaker Irene Lusztig’s Class Notes project, where she recruits volunteers to read some of the entries from her ten-year book aloud on video.) These are very strange statements: there’s an awful lot of self-justification and soul-baring, and some brave soul could probably connect them to the Puritan tradition if Sacvan Bercovitch hasn’t already done that. Wallace Shawn, coming from privilege, is interested in the way privilege functions in America and is willing to talk about it; most people from his position avoid the subject entirely as being gauche. Shawn rightly finds the subject interesting: the majority of the members in his class seem to think that “life is good,” though the outside world is going down the tubes: a weird contrast, and one that might bear more scrutiny, in the style of Henry Adams. As someone who found myself in that realm largely by accident, as a cultural foreigner, I was interested in this book.

As it turns out, Shawn doesn’t discuss Harvard class books in the essays here, though there is a similar focus in a few of the essays. This isn’t an especially consistent collection: there are a number of short pieces written for The Nation and similar places which, while funny, feel rather slight when read in the context of a book. Coherence is also lost because these pieces cover a long span of time, from 1985 to last year; most are from the last decade, and the earlier pieces fit don’t stand out too far. About half are political; a quarter are concerned with the theater; and the rest of the space is taken up with two interviews, one with Noam Chomsky and the other with Mark Strand. But the overall effect of this hodgepodge is to create a single viewpoint’s perspective on a dark decade, a decade in which the left was dissatisfied and ineffective. Perhaps over time this will seem more interesting, as this will be a decade that historians will scrutinize; right now, looking back feels vaguely dispiriting in the same way being there did. But it’s a little book; most of the pieces don’t overstay their welcome and it’s a quick read.

It’s an interesting book because Shawn’s position is the same as most of the people I know: over-educated, interested in the arts, and deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country, and his attempt to make sense of the world is coming from a similar place to theirs. When seen in print, though, it’s strange how unfamiliar this perspective seems: maybe this is my fault, as I know that I increasingly found myself skimming things like The Nation or Harper’s because things were so bad issue after issue: what The Onion called “outrage fatigue.” But it also seems entirely possible that there haven’t been enough people complaining about what became normal in the past decade: the militarism, the flag-waving, the bizarre way in which “¿quién es más macho?” seemed to have become the deciding factor of American politics and elections. Shawn rightly wonders about this: he feels out of touch and hopeless in this world, a position that I think many of us find ourselves in. It’s important that this dissatisfaction isn’t coming from an explicit ideology: rather, as read here, Shawn presents himself as someone trying to live in a world gone mad. I don’t know how well some of these pieces would have come off in their original presentation in The Nation: at this point in time, one reads The Nation because you’re part of the American left, not because you’re part of the general reading public. 

I wish that I would care more about the theater than I do: in theory, of course, it’s fantastic, but paying proper attention to it (like many other possible pursuits) requires more time and effort than I’m willing to give it based on the expectation on what I’d get out of it given my occasional casual experiences with it. That said, I like reading Shawn’s attempts to justify writing for the stage here, in no small part because it’s an attempt to justify art production of any sort in a world that doesn’t recognize that as productive work. I don’t think, of course, that there’s any need for him to justify what he does to the world; but most in his position wouldn’t bother or would take their worth for granted. Shawn notes that there isn’t a diverse playgoing culture in New York (to say nothing of the rest of the country); it’s hard to make an argument for theater as a popular art when it’s predominantly restricted to the upper class. This isn’t a new argument, of course, though one that can increasingly be applied to a wide range of artistic forms – the literary novel, for example; but it’s interesting to see this taken into account by someone who’s involved in this sort of production. 

The best essays in this book (“The Quest for Superiority,” “‘Morality'”) are those that try to break us out of our cultural assumptions, as Americans and as, presumably, cultural elites. The upper classes have odd ideas, which aren’t often interrogated; and it’s to Shawn’s credit that, as the consummate insider, he can notice how strange the familiar can sometimes be. Privilege often goes unquestioned in American life. I don’t know that this is exactly the book that I would have liked it to be; but there is still something interesting here, as incoherent as it might be. 

georges perec, “an attempt at exhausting a place in paris”

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Georges Perec
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
(trans. Marc Lowenthal) 
(Wakefield Press, 2010)

This is the third book from Wakefield Press: it presents a full translation of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. This is a minor work in the Perec landscape, which receives only a glancing mention in David Bellos’s enormous biography. It’s encouraging that there have been a steady flow of new Perec books, no matter how small: 2008 saw Atlas publish Cantatrix Sopranica L.: Scientific Papers, and last year saw David Godine publish Thoughts of Sorts, both previously excerpted in Penguin Species of Spaces (as well as the revised translation of Life a Users Manual, of course). It’s nice seeing Perec’s books as small self-contained objects; the Penguin volume, which presents a lot of material, is too easy to skip through. At 55 pages, this book is shorter than the other two, short enough for me to read on the brief flight from Norfolk, Virginia to Baltimore, though it’s a book that demands re-reading.

As the length suggests, this is a self-consciously minor work: it might be considered an investigation in boredom. Perec chose a place in Paris – Place Saint-Sulpice (visible, not particularly well, on Google Earth and visited it nine times from the 18th to the 20th of October, 1974, four times the first day, less on the following ones, attempting to write down everything he saw. The results are this book. There is pointedly nothing particularly remarkable about the location, and in his introduction Perec makes clear his intention not to write about Saint-Sulpice’s notable features: rather, Perec was attempting to find something interesting in the ordinary, a project that he’d soon expand (restricting the span of time, but increasing the space to an entire building) into Life a User’s Manual.

This is a personal exercise, and because it follows his attempts over time, it feels very much like a series of notes: the reader observes the observer, and how he begins to notice things. He starts his first session by writing down all the text that he can see, then moving on to different sorts of categories (“fleeting slogans,” “ground,” “trajectories,” “colors”). Things start quickly: he’s trying to get everything down. Then there’s a slowing: he tries to notice what changes over time. For a while he’s preoccupied with the many buses that pass through the square (the second section is largely a record of the buses that pass as he watches); then he gets bored of noting the buses; and finally in in the fourth section he realizes that he can describe a bus not simply by the number of its route or where it’s going but by how full it is. It’s a tiny moment of revelation: of looking at something ordinary long enough to see something new in it. 

A few personal details pop up: he tells what he’s eating or drinking, and a couple of times he sees people pass that he recognizes. One wonders how personal some of the details might be: why, for example, does he mention an”apple-green 2CV” over and over? Is it the same car? Was there a reason that his attention might be drawn to this make and color of car over others? Or were there simply a lot of them in Place Saint-Sulpice in 1974? The writer is sometimes bored with his project; one wonders why he stopped on the third day. By writing on a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday, he’s presumably covered most of the weekly variation likely to occur; but looking longer might have brought more out. Perhaps it’s left as an exercise for the reader.

Perec’s project is a generative one, of course. Reading it, I found myself thinking most often of Daniel Spoerri’s work, first his “snare paintings,” where he’d glue down the detritus of a meal to the table and exhibit it on the wall; later, he created a literary equivalent of this in his Anecdoted Topography of Chance, mentioned in Marc Lowenthal’s very nice translator’s note. In both, Spoerri was attempting to create meaning from trash; the Topography uses trash on a table to generate narrative, albeit a narrative more personal than Perec’s. Spoerri and his friends could generate a narrative from their personal trash because there was something personal that could be seized upon there: how the trash got on the table, where the trash was from. Lowenthal also mentions Joe Brainard’s I Remember, another generative trick that Perec brought into French; this also relies on the personal. What Perec is doing in An Attempt might be something trickier: he’s trying to make an utterly anonymous public space personal. It’s a difficult job: ultimately, this is more of a record of Perec’s time there over three days rather than a depiction of a place. Perec isn’t depicting the square, he’s exhausting it (as well as himself); by the end, he clearly wants to go home. This is a lonely book.

I’m still kicking myself for missing MoMA’s program of Perec’s film work a few years back; I suspect that familiarity with his work in film, generally inaccessible in this country, might illuminate this book a bit more. One can’t have everything, I guess; it’s nice that we have as much of Perec’s writing in English (and in print) as we do now. Again, it makes me happy that Wakefield is publishing books like this: most publishers wouldn’t bother with a slip of a book like this, no matter how well it works. This book is as attractive as the two previous books from Wakefield, the first of their “Imagining Science” series; I’m curious to see where they’ll go with that. The paper is thick: it’s a pleasure to read. As mentioned, the translator’s note at the end of the book by Marc Lowenthal helpfully explains the text without lapsing into the overly academic; this kind of attention to detail is important, and it makes Wakefield’s work worth following. I’m particularly interested to see how their volume of Fourier turns out: but that’s next year.

joseph mcelroy, “preparations for search”

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Joseph McElroy
Preparations for Search
(Small Anchor Press, 2010)

This is a short book, a chapbook really, of material that was cut from Joseph McElroy’s biggest work, Women and Men. An earlier version of this was published in the journal Formations in 1984; I can’t tell why this is coming out now. A volume of McElroy’s stories is coming out in the fall from Dalkey Archive; I don’t know if that includes this, though I suspect it doesn’t. For the past few years, he’s been reading from a short novel called Cannonball which still doesn’t seem to have found a publisher, and he seems to still be working on his non-fiction book on water, which I’ve been awaiting impatiently. But any new McElroy material, no matter how unexpected, is a source of excitement to me: this is a small book, but one that lends itself to re-reading.

The plot is easily related: a character named Enos comes to the narrator, Bethel, asking to borrow $1100 so that he can hire a detective to find his father, who left when he was two. The narrator is reticent to do this; other characters (who seem to be in their late twenties and early thirties in downtown New York in the early 1980s) are consulted, and a world is quickly fleshed out around this initial situation; it’s similar to when a pebble dropped into still water, and ripples move across an entire pond, hit the edges, and are reflected to create complex and unpredictable patterns. Here the patterns are created in the people in Enos and Bet’s worlds: their girlfriends, their relations, their friends. A world is slightly destabilized; it struggles to come back to stability. The interest in the book is in seeing how the characters react to a change – a slight one, but still a change – in their environment: it could be said that this is an ecological approach to fiction. 

There’s something distinctive about the voice McElroy uses: I’ve always suspected that Don DeLillo learned a few tricks from him, though DeLillio amplifies the voice until it becomes cartoonish. It’s an internal narration, but it’s an oral narration: you can hear the narrator saying what he relates, the rhythms are those of speech rather than that of the page. In this section Bet puzzles out a relationship; Matt is Enos’s father; Elizabeth wrote Enos’s mother a letter long ago:

Elizabeth had worked with Matt in the office of a lumberyard in Salem, and she loved him though she didn’t think he was the marrying kind, as she put it. But why were Susan and I piecing together this old story as if it were not so full of gaps as hardly to be a story? What did Elizabeth look like, I guess you always want to know. The letter had been typed and was the only news Enos’s mother had ever had. Confusing, for at the time Elizabeth wrote it, Matt had just the week before quit the lumberyard in Oregon and gone down to California, to San José, where he had a job working construction. There was more to it than that. Susan recalled that this woman Elizabeth had been already once a grace widow.
     As for me, I remembered what Susan didn’t know – that the lumber firm in Salem sold out soon afterward. But Susan now recalled that Matt’s girlfriend Elizabeth had been planning to leave Salem anyway. I now recalled that the former manager of the lumberyard there was named Deed, and he had been the one who according to Elizabeth’s letter had told her that Matt was in trouble as a labor agitator down in California. (p. 24)

The words are very simple; but the syntax is complicated, looping back and forth to cover a range of times. As the concern for “this old story” suggests, it’s a carefully literary voice: what’s being recounted here is something that’s past what a single oral narration could explain, a complexity that only literary writing can deal with properly. The section breaks create a rhythm only possible on the page, and the system of quotation – no quotes for recounted dialogue, quotation marks for dialogue that is happening in real time – suggests that thought has gone into creating something that works as a text. An auditor is occasionally possible; it’s hard to tell if this auditor is another character or the reader trying to understand the text. 

It’s a dry voice: there are echoes of the disinterested way in which Kafka relates “In the Penal Colony,” for example, though the use to which that voice is being put is very different: McElroy is deeply interested in the social world that seemed to terrify Kafka: rather than depicting a mechanistic world, the result of positivism, he depicts a world that’s deeply complex because of the myriad interactions. 

Preparations for Search seems to almost be a miniature version of The Letter Left to Me (the short novel that McElroy wrote after Women and Men: to my mind it works a bit better than that book because of its extreme compression, but Letter explores this book’s concerns about the meaning of paternity more deeply. McElroy works by digression: digression for him is a tool to achieve verisimilitude in a complex world. I think his reputation has suffered slightly because of the shallowing of the pool of readers between the 1980s and the present: his work is unremittingly serious, an attempt to use fiction to think about the problems faced by the modern world, and I think that today’s readership, driven to distraction by endless amounts of entertainment, has a harder time sitting down with his large books. This is a shame: his work hasn’t lost anything over time but its audience; maybe his output of shorter works this year will regain some of that. 

It’s hard to tell very much about Small Anchor Press, the publisher, from their website; they seem to be new and based in Brooklyn, and it’s unclear to me how they came to be publishing McElroy. Preparations for Search is an attractive volume: the front cover looks good, though I don’t entirely understand the rationale for the square form, as it’s difficult to make a text block look good on a square page; consequently, the measure is a bit too wide for my taste. The presentation is a bit oblique as well: the text is composed of different sections, some only a paragraph long, and section breaks have become page breaks, giving the book an almost aphoristic look. This becomes confusing with longer sections that span pages (a problem also found when setting poetry); it can be hard to know whether a paragraph break at the end of the page is a section break as well, which matters when the sections present discontinuous moments in the book’s narration. But these are quibbles: it’s nice to see any new McElroy work, and any press that’s publishing him is worth keeping an eye on. 

john crowley, “lord byron’s novel: the evening land”

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John Crowley
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
(Harper Perennial, 2005)

One of the virtues of John Crowley’s book is that they can often be found in awful bookstores when it doesn’t seem like anything readable can be dredged up. I started reading the Ægypt books in Idaho; here in rural Virginia, I found myself a paperback edition of Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which I wisely hadn’t gotten around to reading yet. It’s pleasant to read his books when cut off from civilization, although they’re the sort that do cry out for the Internet for fact-checking. Did Dr. Merryweather’s Tempest Prognosticator really predict the weather by means of leaches? Wikipedia claims this is true; their entry on Ada Lovelace, though, reads like the Book of Genesis, multiple authors telling the same stories over and over again in the hopes of eventually getting it right. One wishes for a better version of Byron’s poetry than the easily accessible Project Gutenberg editions; you can’t have everything. The dictionary app on my iPhone has a definition for “operose”: that’s something.

Lord Byron’s Novel consists of three parallel narratives. The first is Lord Byron’s novel, given the title The Evening Land, ostensibly saved from destruction at the hands of his wife by his daughter, Ada Lovelace, whose notes to the novel, at the end of each chapter, create a second chronology, following her reading of the book. Byron’s text takes up the majority of the book. Interlarded between chapters is a discovery narrative, composed of a trail of correspondence, mostly emails, sent to and from Alexandra Novak, an American woman in London doing research on Ada Lovelace for a website devoted to the forgotten history of women in the sciences; Ada has encoded the novel, and Novak and her partner seek to decode it. There’s not a great deal of suspense in this, as the reader has been reading Byron’s novel and knows that it’s accomplished. Rather, this third narrative seems to be working at different ends, examining what coincidence means in fiction and in life. Another plot emerges: Alexandra’s father, conveniently enough a former Byron scholar, has been estranged from his daughter: having left academia for a career in the movies, he commits a Polanski-like crime for which he must flee the country; largely on account of this, he is estranged from his daughter. Relations between fathers and children form a dominant theme: between Byron and his daughter Ada, who he never talked to; between Alexandra and her father; and between Byron’s hero Ali and his fictional daughter Una. 

It’s neat, but not too neat. It’s difficult when reading a novel which consists of interplay between a text and its annotations, to avoid thinking of Pale Fire, which has almost always done the job more perfectly. Not that perfectly is necessarily the same thing as better: Nabokov’s book is constructed so tightly that it could only be fictional, and in its unrealistic world there’s no friction where the reader might be caught and held. Crowley doesn’t seem to be attempting to compete with this: his project here is different because there’s an interplay between the real biographical history of Byron and those around him and the fictionalizations that Crowley has created. When the reader is presented with a text ostensibly by Lord Byron with annotations by his daughter, Ada Lovelace, it’s clear that the exegesis in the notes actually operates in reverse. The similarities that Ada finds in Byron’s text to his own life aren’t the signs of a novelist disguising his own life by hiding it in fiction, but rather the raw materials that the reader knows that Crowley has used to construct a novel that might be Byron’s. The reader suspects that the notes might have preceded the novel: they’re the historical pieces from which fiction might be constructed. 

This works in other ways as well: when a character appears named “Lord Corydon,” we know that we understand the name “Corydon” differently from the way that Ada would have, as Gide’s work wouldn’t appear until well after her death. Ada’s notes point out that Byron’s account in his novel of how the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Salamanca is counterfactual; but we also know that the very existence of Byron’s novel (and Ada’s notes on it) is counterfactual. The author is winking at us: in less deft hands, this might be annoying, but it doesn’t happen often enough here to wear out its welcome. The text that is to be decoded appears mysteriously, in the hands of a figure who might be the author himself; late in the process, he appears again, to cast doubt on the truth of the rediscovered novel. 

This isn’t experimental fiction, in the sense that Pale Fire was experimental when it appeared; rather, it takes a form (albeit one that hasn’t been used especially often) and puts it to good use. It’s a pleasant book, exactly right for vacation reading: hence my pleasure at being able to find John Crowley’s books in remote bookstores. The Evening Land might have stood alone: it’s an enjoyable pastiche of Romantic writing, a bit reminiscent of James Hogg’s Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner though without the supernatural aspects of that book. Someone must be compiling a dissertation on the appearance of the Internet in American fiction: Crowley’s grasp of the way people talk over email is surprisingly convincing and readable, and would belong in such a volume. In the earlier sections of the book, one finds oneself racing through the pseudo-Byron to reach the contemporary narrative; as the book progresses, interest reverses itself; it’s skilled writing that can maintain such interest.

alvin levin, “love is like park avenue”

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Alvin Levin
Love Is like Park Avenue
(ed. James Reidel) 
(New Directions, 2009)

Love Is like Park Avenue collects the fiction of Alvin Levin, who was born in 1916, but seems to have given up writing fiction in 1943: seven years worth of writing, mainly short pieces, make up his entire literary output, not quite breaking 200 pages. The title, which appeared on two distinct pieces collected here, was to have been that of Levin’s novel, which never materialized; it’s hard to tell, from the content here, what form that novel would have taken, as Levin doesn’t seem to have been given to conventional unities of plot or character. The editor suggests that much of this material might have been part of a novel; but Levin has been dead since 1981, and his rumored novel was nowhere to be found in his possessions.

Levin, born in Paterson, New Jersey, grew up in the Bronx and attended City College; most, though not all, of his work seems to center around lower-middle class Jews in roughly similar situations. In his introduction, James Reidel notes that Levin had polio and walked with a crutch for most of his life; Reidel suggests that Levin lived vicariously through his younger sister, both in his life and in his fiction. (“A Cool Drink Is Refreshing,” written in 1939, might be the most straightforwardly autobiographical work here: the story is told from the perspective of a young woman who visits a boys’ school to tell her brother that their father has found him a job, delivering milk; the implication is that he’ll need to quit school.) It’s hard to tell how much to read into this: but Levin does have a pronounced sense of empathy, and he captures his women characters, narrators as often as not, remarkably well. Following the examples of Faulkner and Dos Passos, Levin generally uses a stream of consciousness narration; the point of view frequently shifts, and the narrator at the end of a piece (“story” seems the wrong word) often isn’t the one who started it. Names and locations sometimes shift capriciously; this seems to be intentional. His prose is always energetic: Levin is always an interested observer even if his exact position can be difficult to pin-point. The excerpt from a novel published in 1942 as “Love Is Like Park Avenue” is composed of a series of short vignettes, none longer than a few pages, each with different characters; there’s a unity to the world and vision that Levin presents, but the characters, their voices, and their situations are constantly shifting

Having grown up in the Depression, Levin’s subject is frequently the lower classes; but he never writes as a tourist, seeking to explain how the other half lives to an educated audience; nor is his writing polemical. There’s no disdain in his words; what he sees in life, and he puts it down on paper with the hope, perhaps, that someone will read it. It’s possible that this comes through most clearly because Alvin Levin was never actually a successful writer, though William Maxwell asked him to submit material to the New Yorker and the British poet Nicholas Moore asked him for a story for an anthology of avant-garde fiction. This doesn’t seem like writing for a mass audience or for an avant-garde audience; Levin appears to have been interested primarily in pleasing himself, a supposition that might be entertained because he seems to have voluntarily given up writing entirely. In Reidel’s telling, this seems to have been because he had many other interests keeping him busy: he was a lawyer, and seems to have run a successful pamphlet-publishing business for years. 

Reading Levin now, one notices the kinds of fiction that we don’t have today. The contemporary American novel, or that subset of it known as literary fiction, is generally written by the upper class because it is written for the upper class. The social structures that generate fiction and its writers – MFA programs – are, with a few notable exceptions, self-selecting, limited to those who don’t need to make a living. It’s not an accident that the New Yorker, the most prominent venue where new fiction might be seen, is aimed squarely at those who aspire to be upper class. This isn’t something unknown – Walter Benn Michaels was making this argument a few years ago, albeit hamfistedly – but it’s generally not discussed, as class doesn’t tend to be discussed in America. This isn’t solely a contemporary problem – writing itself has always tended to limit itself to those who have the time and leisure to engage in it – but Levin’s book suggests that things have not always been quite so stagnant as they are now. Writing, for Levin, seems to have been a possible agent of social mobility, an aspirational vehicle: the upper classes wrote, but he could write too; by doing so, he could earn the prestige of a millionaire like James Laughlin, who corresponds with him like a peer. But avant-garde writing isn’t a viable way out of the lower middle class, especially if you need to support yourself because you’ve been crippled by polio; Levin might have realized this, and this might be why he turned away from writing. It’s hard to blame him, but it’s our loss.

It’s worth noting that this is an unusually attractive book for New Directions, whose recent work has been deeply disappointing given the publisher’s long history of good book design. Levin sought to be published by James Laughlin; his most prominent publications were in New Directions annuals, but James Laughlin never seems to have coaxed the promised novel out of him. James Reidel arranges his work chronologically, interspersing correspondence to and from potential publishers; useful notes complete the volume, and John Ashbery’s brief preface recalls how exiting his voice was in 1942 and explains his part in Levin’s republication. We’re lucky that Levin found the young Ashbery as a reader.