UniBrow

Two clips from some kind of book chat show in the ’50s (I don’t recognize the host) in which Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss the just-published Lolita.

And here’s part two:

Our report on Mailer’s appearance in Chicago last February may be read here–and a decent Time magazine appraisal here.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I greatly admire the work of novelist Paul West. Though I haven’t read any of his most recent books–I am a bloody fool–there was a period some years back when I couldn’t leave him alone. His prose is lush, complicated, musical, often earthy–just gorgeous, and utterly unlike anyone else’s. The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, Lord Byron’s Doctor, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, Rat Man of Paris, Love’s Mansion, and the essays collected in the Sheer Fiction volumes–most memorably ”In Defense of Purple Prose”–are all, both in tenor and by example, antidotes to everything that is wrong with everything.

And I didn’t know until just today, when I found this, that in 2003 West suffered a stroke that left him with a condition called “global aphasia,” the complete inability to process language either in speech or in writing. The link takes you to an excerpt from West’s forthcoming memoir about his experiences since the stroke–the writing of which, in exhausting dictation sessions, apparently served as the speech therapy he needed to re-enter the world of words. West has also recently completed a novel, according to the little preamble supplied by his wife, the writer Diane Ackerman. 

If you’d like to hear a piece of orchestral music inspired by Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–and why wouldn’t you?–go here and listen to David Heuser’s A Screaming Comes Across the Sky. You have the choice of listening to it entire or just hearing an excerpt–but the whole piece is only six minutes long, so try to deal.

There’s a worthwhile exchange under way this week at Slate between Meghan O’Rourke, Slate’s literary editor, and novelist Walter Kirn. The subject is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, and it’s worth hooking onto mainly for Kirn’s entries. (O’Rourke has never impressed me.) Kirn, the author of several novels (haven’t read ‘em), including one that he dribbled out serially in Slate for the better part of last year (didn’t even consider reading that one–I just don’t want to get a novel that way), has so far posted only one meditation on Kerouac’s novel, but it’s a real beauty. You owe it to yourself. Here he is describing what happens to him every time he re-encounters the book: 

First, I mourn.

I mourn for the whole doomed enterprise and for the ideas, so dated now, so dead, that convinced its author it was possible.

I mourn the idea that America could be healed not through the calibration and adjustment of competing interests and group identities—through lobbying, lawyering, and legislating—but through participation in a great ecstasy. (One modeled, perhaps, on the compassionate mania of On the Road’s Dean Moriarty, “who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was … “)

I mourn the idea that the geographical is personal and that rivers and plains and cityscapes—and even place names, in some mysterious way—aren’t interchangeable backdrops to our lives but fundamental sources of our fates. (“Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another, and at dusk we were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering. … “)

I mourn the idea that a novelist needn’t promise us any more than this: You need to hear this because I need to tell you, and the reason I need to tell you is that it happened, because if a thing can happen it must mean something—or else nothing means anything, which is highly possible. (“It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel.”)   

Exit Ghost, a new Philip Roth novel–and, it seems, Nathan Zuckerman’s valedictory appearance–is due out October 1. I was intrigued to see that Roth is returning to the ground of The Ghost Writer, the first and in many ways the best of the Zuckerman books. Here’s the Publishers Weekly description:

Philip Roth’s 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer’s young and beautiful wife. There’s also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can’t help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth’s voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animal than Everyman.

Here’s an article by Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press on the need for a “revolution” in reading that emphasizes the importance of taking it slow. (It seems interesting anyway–I kind of rushed through it. It reminds me in some ways of that big Time magazine article from a few years ago on Attention Deficit Disorder that I never finished.)

No but really. I couldn’t agree more with Waters. Here are a few extracts:

Report after report testifies to declining literacy in America. Some of the decline is due to the neglect of our least-advantaged children, but some of it is due to the willful embrace of methods for teaching reading that are inimical to reading in depth. …

Over the last 50 years, certain ideas have become dominant that make learning to read different than it once was, none more insidious, I think, than the ideas that children are neurologically “wired” to use language “competently” in certain ways. Noam Chomsky has promoted the idea that there are certain “syntactic structures” hard-wired in the human brain. That view, I believe, based on my conversations with education scholars, led to the “whole language” movement–or fad–that let children find their own “meaning” in words, rather than teaching them the skills to read. Whole language, in turn, became an article of faith among schoolteachers, held on to with fundamentalist conviction that, in turn again, became a political position enforced by a number of states, thus taking it out of the realm of study and into that of political power and rendering it no longer subject to criticism without fear of reprisal. …

There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines. If there is any truth to the analogy, it provides grounds for concern.

And here, as an example of what Waters is talking about, is an article from last Sunday’s New York Times about Pierre Bayard, an apparently respected French scholar who will help you talk about books you haven’t read so as to seem that you have. Just what we need. 

Perhaps someone somewhere has published a conscientious and detailed refutation of deconstruction, but I don’t know of one. What you get most of the time (and I’m just grabbing what’s within arm’s reach of me here) is little more than an airy turning up of the nose–such as this, found in Reflections on a Ravaged Century by the historian and poet Robert Conquest:

[T]o the degree that such things as the theses of deconstructionists and their heirs are not absurd, they are banal. The distinguished Anglo-Australian critic Clive James some years ago publicly described “deconstructionism” as nonsense without advancing any detailed arguments against it. When its proponents protested that he couldn’t, he replied that, yes, he could. Such as position, on the face of it, is unfair. But that is to be formal. Clearly there are theories, even complex ones, so absurd as not to merit more than an abrupt dismissal.

I admire Conquest–here is a nice appreciation by Christopher Hitchens–and Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a terrific book. But he, like most detractors of deconstruction (poststructuralism, postmodernism, etc.), nails his colors to the mast of Enlightenment rationalism–which, unless I’ve missed a very important recent memo, prizes evidence and reason-giving over pissy visceral antipathy. The grand tradition (and it is grand) of which Conquest counts himself a partisan would be better served by evidence that he has carefully read something–anything–by Derrida himself.

And then I find this, in the late Allan Bloom’s Love & Friendship:

[S]ince I was a young man and a student in Europe, I have paid serious and sustained attention to the sources of [poststructuralist] views: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Levinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, and others whose names it is now so fashionable to throw around. I am persuaded that all their theories, in the form that they have come to the United States, are nothing but a fad that will pass, one can only hope before they have done too much damage to the study of literature. … I cannot help thinking of Groucho Marx at the racetrack being gulled by Chico, who tells him that he can’t place his two-dollar bet until he has purchased a breeder’s guide, and then a whole series of other guides. By the time Groucho has looked into all of them and been utterly confused, the race is over. With the new critics, it is life that will be over.

As I’ve said before, I believe that many of the literary scholars who have applied deconstruction to works of literature have badly misappropriated it, often deploying a superficial understanding of its modes of inquiry to make works that are imperishable and inexhaustible appear retrograde or vicious under some narrow political test. I agree without qualification that this is an altogether terrible thing. Derrida himself never does this, however. He is always dealing with canonical texts, whether of philosophy or of literature, and has even confessed to confusion and distress over such uses of deconstruction. (He makes a number of remarks to this effect, for example, in a 1994 roundtable discussion at Villanova University–the transcript of which, along with a lengthy commentary by the scholar who organized the event, was published in 1997 under the hilariously un-Derridean title Deconstruction in a Nutshell.) But of course political philosopher Bloom doesn’t object to deconstruction solely on the basis of its effect on the study of literature. One could take the thought of any philosopher, even those admired by Bloom, and find a way to do silly things to literature with it. Even conceding that, in the hands of certain literature scholars, deconstruction is peculiarly vulnerable to such abuses does nothing to invalidate it as a mode of philosophical inquiry. But again, going back to the substance of these critiques, I would rather not have had to take Bloom’s word that he had plumbed the thought of the philosophers and theorists who he believed were sending higher education off the rails. If poststructuralist thought is as pernicious as he said it is, then what the world needed from him–much more acutely than it needed Love & Friendship–was a book telling us, in detail, why.

One of the reasons I don’t often go to author readings or book signings is that there’s nothing worse than the crowds you get at these things. I’ve never been to a tractor pull or a cock fight–or a men’s emotional healing session–but I once went to a World Wrestling Federation … cultural display, and I’d have cheerfully traded the 150 or so people who turned up the other night to see Norman Mailer at a Border’s in Chicago for the first 150 who passed through the turnstiles to see Raw is War! on that indelible evening six or seven years ago, a night that I’m sure would have been even more memorable for me had I not run out of steam during the fourth hour–I say the fourth hour–and left before the Rock entered the ring. (I haven’t attempted to repeat this experience, by the way, as it did entail some trials. There was nowhere convenient to lay my hat and cane, for one thing, and then what do you know but the loutish pug in the seat next to mine spills some sasparilla on my spats. What the deuce.) Anyway, no one at the WWF event was putting on airs–I’ll say that for them–especially not the two young ladies who, just as the roving spotlight found them, pulled off their tops and made out like Woody and Soon-Yi. No, those girls knew who they were, and the concussive blasts of appreciation that followed were as authentic as anything gets.

Much less dignified were the stiffs I huddled with for the Mailer reading. I got there about an hour ahead of time and saw that I should take a seat quickly or risk not getting one at all. I thought I could handle the hour wait if I met no one’s gaze and tried not to listen to the conversations around me. We were soon told Mailer’s plane was late, that traffic from the airport was heavy–the event would be delayed by just a few minutes. I tried not to listen to the conversations around me. We were told a few minutes later that Mailer was stuck but good in traffic. He ended up being about a half hour late–I WAS TRYING VERY HARD NOT TO LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATIONS AROUND ME–but he did make it, delivering me from a full 90 minutes in durance vile. 

Now I am far indeed from knowing everything (no, really), but I know a know-nothing jackass when I see one, and such a specimen is impossible to miss when he’s keen to make a general show of erudition. The person he is ostensibly speaking with is only a prop–just as, in many cases, he is no more than that for the other. That he fancies himself edifying everyone in the room is inscribed in every syllable and gesture. And then, once the author begins speaking, you get the nodding, the ostentatious nodding at the mention of authors, books, historical events, aesthetic concepts, political memes, or philosophical ideas of which the goof is petrified of appearing unaware.

I wanted to see Mailer, though, enough to defy both the frantic posers and the lethal cold. I was motivated less, frankly, by admiration for his books–though I generally like the ones I’ve read, especially The Armies of the Night but even the much-reviled Barbary Shore–than for the outsized personage of Mailer himself. He may be the last decent writer who has also been a genuine American public figure. Of course he isn’t that anymore, and it goes without saying that no other contemporary writer or intellectual of his gifts and seriousness holds a place in the general public’s mind remotely comparable to that held by Mailer and a few others in the ’50s and ’60s especially, but even into the ’70s. (I have whined about this before.) PBS’s American Masters program on Mailer, which aired in 2000 but can be seen on DVD, is well worth watching for a glimpse of that lost age and for its warts-and-all exposure of a complicated, in some ways revolting, but utterly fearless literary artist and controversialist.  

When Mailer finally arrived, he took his way very slowly up to his seat at the lectern. Stooped, hobbling along on two canes, he looked every bit as frail as a person is entitled to at 84. But any impression of feebleness disappeared when he started speaking. Mailer is a crank in some ways, but he seems to possess a fair approximation of what Yeats called “the old man’s eagle mind,” and I could have listened to him ruminate about his new novel, A Castle in the Forest, for quite a long time–not to mention the million and a half other things you’d like to hear about from someone who has done and seen the things Mailer has. The novel, his first in a decade, concerns the first 16 years of the life of Adolf Hitler, as narrated by a top assistant to Satan. (I haven’t read it yet, so I’m going solely on Mailer’s description.) The book’s animating conceit is that Satan has been stewing in jealousy of God for 20 centuries, determined to have his own “messiah” as a counterpoint to Jesus, and he reckons baby Adolph as his best shot. There does not appear to be any irony, or not much, in Mailer’s choice of premise. At some point in the last 30 years–he was unable to say exactly when–the formerly atheist Mailer arrived at a belief in what he calls an “existential God”–a creator-deity who is immensely powerful but not all-powerful, and not omniscient. “He’s existential the way we are,” Mailer said. “He doesn’t know how things are going to turn out.” Presenting Hitler as the special project of the Adversary himself is evidently congenial to Mailer’s view of Hitler as a figure of incomprehensible evil, one who killed “for metaphor,” out of a belief that by annihilating the Jews he was exterminating a ”virus.” (For purposes of contrast, Mailer noted that Stalin, though a more prolific mass murderer than Hitler, always had a practical motivation for killing.)

Well, I’m up for it. Let me conclude with a couple of Mailer clips courtesy of YouTube. In the first, a recent one, he’s discussing A Castle in the Forest with Charlie Rose …

… and in the second we have Mailer, who in the late ’60s directed and acted in a film called Maidstone, fighting viciously with an unrecognizable Rip Torn, who also appeared in the film. The commentary accompanying this clip on YouTube (read it here) gives as much of the story as is known. Viewer discretion earnestly advised.