The other book,
William E. Cain's F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of
Criticism (also published by Wisconsin, 1988), looks at the
process of canon formation through analyzing the work of one of the great
Americanists of our time. I read this book together with two novels
about Matthiessen, May Sarton's 1950s Faithful are the
Wounds (available as a W. W. Norton paperback) and Mark
Merlis's 1990s American Studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1994). All three books offer rich rewards for anyone interested in the
academy, the study of English (and American) literature, and American
political and sexual life in very bad times. The differences between the
two novels are themselves fascinating. For a
different kind of fun, try Thomas Perry's The Butcher's Boy,
Metzger's Dog, and Sleeping Dogs (this last a
sequel to The Butcher's Boy). Perry has a new thriller out this
year, Vanishing Act (these novels have all been reprinted in
paperback editions). He has a Ph.D. (in English literature) and has been
an administrator at USC. It doesn't show. Alan Furst's fine espionage novels, Night
Soldiers and Dark Star, were joined this year by
The Polish Officer (New York: Random House): good, dark
reads, all of them. I happened to recommend it
to a friend recently and am reminded to repeat here that Musa Mayer's
Night Studio, a staggering memoir of what it was like to grow
up the daughter of a Famous Man--a character in someone else's
life--should not be forgotten. Her father was Philip Guston, a major New
York School artist. A book this good should have got more and better
notice when it appeared. Later addenda: (1--31 July 1996): I had
originally gone on to write here about Mayer's death, young, of breast
cancer, but a reader ["reader"?? of this??], John Burgdorf, tells
me that she survived that cancer and went on to write a second memoir,
this one about that experience, called Examining Myself: One Woman's
Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery (Faber, 1993). I
didn't know about that book nor about the events it describes (happier by
far than the one I somehow [mis]learned about); but I will read this
second book with pleasure just as soon as I can find it. Thank you, Mr.
Burgdorf! A completely different kind of book is
the new study by Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank:
Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995). Concerned with Levin's quite literal "obsession" with the
Diary and the Holocaust--a reporter during the War, Levin had
witnessed the liberation of some of the western camps--Graver's book is
almost a compulsive read itself (not entirely unlike watching a car crash
in slow motion). But in addition to its gruesomely fascinating story, it
also sheds light on many different topics, among them, America's response
to the Holocaust; Cold War literary politics; the intregration of Jews
into American literary life; and--last and far from least--a writer, Meyer
Levin, whose very nearly total neglect deserves
reconsideration. Last month, I recommended a
paleontological romance by Robert
Bakker. This month, a new contender in the field--not, as it happens,
an overly crowded one, of course--is Michael Crichton's sequel to
Jurassic Park, called The Lost World (New York: Random
House, 1995). "Something has survived," proclaims the back of the
dustwrapper. At first blush, unhappily, this judgment seems premature.
Simms,
alas, is a very good writer. As is exemplified by one of his great
set-pieces, chapter 20 of The Yemassee--well worth a look even if
you read nothing else he wrote--he can be deliciously wicked and
clever. Nowadays, however, he is not often read--among other reasons, his
attitudes are far too obviously appalling for most readers to suppose that
his literary virtues can possibly compensate for them. (His books are also
disgustingly long for most modern readers; but that is another matter
altogether.) Oh, dear. What can I say after I've said I'm sorry? I think
he is worth reading despite his loathesome attitudes, perhaps because I
persist in an ineradicable affection for reading the work of literary lame
ducks, perhaps because he poses what I find fascinating questions of
reader response, perhaps because he illuminates--about as humanely(?) as
it is possible for them to be illuminated--the motives behind such
attitudes as those he forthrightly espouses. (One could imagine
some other possible explanations, I suppose; but these possibilities I
resolutely refuse to entertain.) I haven't read any other Simms, as yet;
but I can easily anticipate reading more of him, in a desultory manner,
over time. His work raises interesting questions about literature and its
relations to social and human values that students and readers generally
can afford to encounter (or so it seems to me) far more blatantly
than what they will find in many (apparently more "genteel") works of
American literature that actually pose similar questions. A very different book, which I enjoyed in completely
different ways, is Norbert Elias's Reflections on a Life, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1994, available in
paper). Jephcott's translation of Elias's own text also prints the
transcript of a "Biographical Interview" with the sociologist by A. J.
Heerma van Voss and A. van Stolk. Here I find Elias
remarking: I guess I
like this passage because it is, in its way, a statement of a sort I might
make about why I read the vast quantities of stuff I read. It also
illustrates something of Elias's tone in this fascinating memoir, which,
among many topics, deals (painfully) with his experiences as a German
grunt in World War I, as a student, as a refugee trying to eke out a
living in England, and as person trying to understand something of the
forces shaping the interesting times in which it was given him to live. It
would be difficult to try to explain--but do they need
explanation?--the power of the words he recalls his father saying when,
during a 1938 visit to his son, then living in London, he explained why he
and his wife (Sophie, Elias's mother, d. Auschwitz ca. 1941) would
not stay in London with their son but were returning to Breslau (now
Wroclaw): "Ich habe nie etwas Unrechtes getan, was konnen sie mir tun?"
Well worth reading; as is Elias generally if you happen not already to
know his work. Incidentally, Elias speaks very warmly about his early
studies of philosophy at Breslau under the direction of "my revered
teacher" Richard Honigswald ("I learned how to think from him; . . . he
taught me, through his example, to trust thinking"); and he says this even
as he recalls a fundamental disagreement that arose between himself and
Honigswald (his research supervisor) about an essential point in
philosophy that impeded the progress of his doctorate. Richard Honigswald
has been the recent subject of a conference held in Germany at which one
of the keynote speakers was his son, Henry Hoenigswald, himself a
professor (emeritus) of linguistics at Penn. His granddaughter works at
Penn's Law Library.
Doomsday Book begins in Oxford, where a
number of history dons and their students are planning an investigation of
pre-1340 (i.e., pre-plague) Oxfordshire. Fair enough . . . except that
this is twenty-first century Oxford and the methodology depends on a time
machine that will send a graduate student back to the early fourteenth
century for research on her thesis. The bulk of the novel takes place not
in the twenty-first century but in the fourteenth. The student gradually
discovers that, first, several unforeseen circumstances leave her in some
serious danger of not being found to be picked up by her twenty-first
century colleagues and returned to her "now"; and, second, something has
gone quite skewey with the date to which Oxford's time machine has
actually sent her, as opposed to the date she had expected to
encounter. It's a wonderful novel. But it is science fiction.
There's no doubt about that--and readers who already know they don't like
this kind of book won't like this kind of book. I have, however, recently bumped into another novel set
in England's fourteenth-century--to be sure, this is (like the
paleontological novels I spoke about in August and September of 1995) not a category of
fiction in danger of overwhelming any reader--and it is not science
fiction. It is also very good. Barry Unsworth's Morality
Play has just been published in the United States (New York:
Doubleday, 1995; the U.K. edition has been out for a while). It
concerns quite a number of matters, not all of them pleasant. One that
many of the people I know who are interested in early English drama will
find interesting is its major focus: the travels and travails of a group
of travelling players. The troupe has been sent by their lord as a
Christmas present to another lord in the north. They never reach their
destination. Instead, after bumbling into a village recently the scene of
a murder, they make an effort to adopt their dramatic skills to that
crime's representation. This is (for many reasons) a surprising, but not a
particularly bright, idea. The local lord, involved in this murder right
up to his eyebrows, proves inclined to resent ignorant intrusion into its
solution. His power makes his resentment palpable. Representatives of the
King's Justice are also present, but the nature of their concerns depends
on a somewhat peculiar definition of "justice." I won't say anything
more about the book except that the ways in which the players adopt their
set speeches to an improvisational dramaturgy rooted in the experience of
the community they have temporarily joined would, I think, warm the
cockles of the Living Theater's heart. Oh, well, I should add that there
is a slightly acrid taste of homophobia in the book, as well; but I didn't
say the book is perfect. Speaking with a
colleague as we both left the library one dark November evening, I
recommended Sharon Olds's The Father to her, and I am
reminded that it is a book well worth mention here (it is available in
paperback from Knopf). The Father looks like a collection of the
author's poems, but when I read it I thought it really one long poem in
many small parts, all written during and about the protracted death of the
poet's father. Olds, a well-known poet, needs little praise--hold on: is
that really true of any poet these days?--but this is a book
so astonishingly good that if you have, by some mischance, not yet picked
it up and zoomed right through it, this is a terrific moment to
remedy that lacuna in your reading. [Addendum (3 October 1996): I wrote
about this book once more, as well as about a more recent book of poetry
by Sharon Olds, in January of
1996.] My students' warm response to
Mildred Walker's 1944 Winter Wheat emboldens me to
mention that hers, too, is a wonderful book that people seem
(unaccountably) to neglect in droves. A bildungsroman about a young
girl raised on a Montana wheat farm, its author's and its subject's
insignificant gender, as well as its setting's unimportant geography, all
seem to have combined to push it right out of sight, where it might have
remained but for an imaginative paperback reprint from the University
of Nebraska Press (where someone has obviously thought long and hard
about what is insignificant and what is unimportant). Walker's writing is
absolutely certain and controlled from her very first sentence. Her story
is as hard-edged, as beautiful, and as deeply moving as the landscape in
which she locates it. I suggested to my students, following the lead of
one of them, that Winter Wheat is not only a bildungsroman
but also a war novel (1944, after all . . . ). The more I think about it
the more I think this is an especially sensible way to read Winter
Wheat. But whether you find this approach to it sensible or not, I
think you will find the book itself well worth your while. So far, every
one who has read it on my suggestion has liked it--well, okay, so my
students might have been lying ("Is it wrong to make your teacher
happy?"). But some (not students!) have even begun buying copies to
give to friends. Take a look for yourself. The world doesn't present us
with enough truly gorgeous books. And Walker has more.
Nonetheless, its warts are pretty clear. For example,
writing about why the press proved so quick to fall upon the "p.c. story"
with respect especially to the university, Gitlin comments: Logic also fares badly, as
this sort of writing might lead someone who recalled my instructor's
dictum about the relationship between writing and thought to expect.
Trying to show the absurdity of leftist objections to a multicultural
history textbook series proposed for adoption in the California school
system, Gitlin notes that, "where a previously adopted world history text
had devoted only one of its forty chapters to African history and ancient
American Indian cultures combined, one-eighth of the new seventh-grade
book was devoted to the Indians, or Native Americans, alone--an increase
by a factor of ten." He goes on: "Nor did the critics seem to care that
the [proposed new] textbooks frequently represented a radical departure
from the history taught in earlier decades" (p. 11). These are interesting
points, of course, but "more" and "different" do not necessarily
equal "better" and never have. Gitlin may have genuinely good reasons for
liking the proposed new texts and feeling astonished that they should have
come under attack from people on the left. These reasons don't
happen to be them. Since Gitlin could easily have provided such reasons,
his reader wishes he had taken time to do so. His self-aggrandizing
rhetorical stance seems not only unnecessary but also embarrassingly
miscalculated: in the thick of a student-faculty controversy at Berkeley,
for instance, "I" reach out to others armed with "facts" only to find that
they are arguing about "truth effects" (pp. 157-8). Tsk. Or: after
discussing "political correctness," Gitlin writes that "the power of the
media is not necessarily to tell us what to think but the power to tell us
what to think about" (p. 168); yet his own previous discussion has
itself demonstrated precisely the media's power to tell us what to
think (by virtue of its ability to define how we think about an
issue). And one could go on: the book has warts in plenty. (Has Henry
Holt, along with everyone else, abandoned line editors?) I have used
others of Gitlin's works in my courses (most recently, The Murder of
Albert Einstein); he is normally a better writer than he is here. (By
the way, my copy of that book--despite being read and then used in
classroom discussion--had a spine that did not crack apart, as this
one's did [at pages 264-265] on its first reading.) Perhaps it would be
charitable to suppose that he was so anxious to get his thoughts out into
the public realm that he did not take time to present them as carefully as
they deserve. The problem with this book is that they deserve
better expression than Gitlin has given them. An intelligent social
thinker, he has written a book that, however badly-written, is very far
from stupid. It is, warts and all, important. I am not sure I want to
try to sum up Gitlin's entire argument, even if I felt able to do so. A
crucial aspect of it, however, is Gitlin's explanation of the
ineffectiveness of one potential leftist locus of oppositional
political leadership, those people (usually in the university) committed
to the extension of egalitarian change and social justice. ("Mobilization
for equality and against arbitrary power . . . is the Left's main
business," he writes [p. 236].) Such people appear, he says, to have
chosen to act not in a genuinely political ("communal") sphere but
instead to have abandoned that sphere to the right in favor of more local,
narrow, self-absorbed and self-interested actions. In consequence, they
have come increasingly to speak only to and of themselves, not to or of
society as a whole. Gitlin proposes the advantages of an entirely altered
perspective (discussed--alas, far too sketchily--in chapter 8, "The Fate
of the Commons"), based on a revitalized sense of "the commons,"
"majorities," and "a political system of mutual reliance and common moral
obligation" (p. 236). This may sound like pie in the sky. However, in
this otherwise malevolent Newtonian political era, I find Gitlin's
perspective sympathetic, his goals attractive, and his concern for their
political realization refreshing. Sure, I wish he had written a better
book. I am glad that he at least wrote this one--and I hope others
read it. Ours is not, by and large, a
literary culture that knows how to value its entertainers; but one whom I
think we ought to value highly has just published another book. Like his
earlier ones, it is well worth the attention of anyone who enjoys a good
read. William J. Caunitz's Pigtown was published by Crown
(who--like the friendly folks at Holt, just mentioned above--might have
proofread the book more carefully than they appear to have done). The
sixth novel written by this former NYPD officer, it is also one of his
strongest. It follows books such as One Police Plaza,
Suspects, and Black Sand, in which Caunitz's
fortunate readers will have encountered such things as an Arab-Israeli
miniwar fought largely on the BQE (a New York City highway) or a traffic
in rarities that moves easily from Greece to the basement of The Pierpont
Morgan Library. Caunitz's stories are all told from a cop-centered point
of view. Pigtown is set in the 71st Precinct, site, once upon a
time, of Walter O'Malley's ballpark and now a neighborhood in which Hasids
rub uneasy shoulders with African-American, Rastafarian, and Hispanic
neighbors. It opens with a body emerging--with difficulty, given the state
of the shmear in the back of its head--from a refrigerator, and quickly
takes its reader from that opening deep into worlds of drugs, organized
crime, the quotidian horror of slum streets--and cheese. Caunitz is
interested in the criminal and business worlds he portrays. But his real
interest is the world of the cop, and he draws his cops with affection,
compassion, or--occasionally--real rage. Lt. Matthew Cosgrove Stuart,
Inspector Suzanne Albrecht, Detectives Joe Borelli and Helen Kahn,
Inspector Patrick Sarsfield Casey: these are the characters whom Caunitz
brings to vivid life in Pigtown, along with at least some of the
strains and stresses their job presses upon them. Caunitz makes his reader
care about these people and about the institution for which they work (and
for which, often, their forebears also worked). In fact, by the time the
book ends, he has made his reader care about them more than about the
specifics of the crimes and the criminals around whom their days revolve.
That is one of Caunitz's many triumphs, along with the betrayed lover's
sense of New York that this book, like all his books, conveys. (This
is a book for New Yorkers!) Pigtown is also reminiscent of
the Victorian problem novel, the problem in this case being the uneasy
relationship between the "quotidian horror" of the City's streets and the
culture of corruption in New York City's Police Department. In a
surprising number of more or less recent mysteries and thrillers, I note,
a reader can discover where at least some practitioners of political
fictions are currently hiding out, protected by generic expectations that
enable them to write whatever socially or politically critical comment
they damned well please in a literary form to which few people pay any
attention. Pigtown, curious happy ending and all, falls squarely
into this duplicitously serious form. Tom
Topor's The Codicil New York: Hyperion, 1995) is another
"entertainment." A Vietnam War novel pretending to be a thriller, it
concerns a lawyer who, no longer able to practice, earns his living as an
investigator. Early in the novel, he is hired to find the illegitimate
child of a recently deceased businessman who has left this child some
fifty or so million dollars in a codicil to his will. This sum represents
something of a test of the Christian charity of his wife and legitimate
children: will they eagerly await the child's discovery (if it ever
existed and can be found)? This is a test they do not all pass, you will
be unsurprised to learn, but that predictable outcome is not
the major burden of Topor's book. The Codicil looks, from yet
another point of view, at how the Vietnam War came home to America--and at
what it continues to do and mean to this society. Like Pigtown, in
other words, The Codicil is a political novel in disguise. It just
looks like thriller trash.
Return to Traister's non-current touts (beginning with August 1995--that is, when this home page
was begun). 1995 INDEX: 1996
Return to Traister's current touts.
You can
send Traister e-mail concerning this page at
traister@pobox.upenn.edu
(2--2 August 1996): I should have added to my remarks
about Night Studio, when I originally wrote the few lines above
about it, that it is a book I think of together with Edmund Gosse's
Father and Son, almost the locus classicus of the "minor
classic." The comparison struck me immediately on first reading Mayer's
book, except that I don't think it all that "minor." (I happen not to
think Gosse's memoir is "minor," either.) I should also have remarked
that, simply considered as a physical product, Night Studio happens
to be among the most beautifully produced of late 1980s Alfred A.
Knopf books (New York, 1988). If you can find it in its original edition,
as opposed to a later Penguin reprint and a forthcoming Da Capo reprint
about which Ms. Mayer herself now informs me, do. Some books
deserve to be read as they were first made. This is one of them:
reading it becomes a pleasure in every sense.
September 1995
October 1995
I read in an English review recently--and it made me
very angry--that I am perhaps the last representative of classical
sociology, someone striving after the great synthesis, and so on. It made
me angry because I would rather be the first one to open a new path. It
shocks me again and again to find so many people losing heart, as if
nothing was worth the trouble. There is so much to be done, and so many
people are wasting their time with nonsense or being intellectually
corrupted. My experience is that I am gradually seeing something new,
something I did not know, and in that I am setting an example: one
can do it, and it is worth the trouble.
November 1995
December 1995
The
journalists get to defend the ideal of transparent prose coupled with the
ideal of objective standards. In the populist mood, all the educated
classes are under suspicion together for "elitism." When they defend the
ideal of objectivity--and yes, "Western Culture"--they defend some
Platonic idea of themselves (p. 182).
Where, looking
at this mess, does one even begin? The relationship--or lack of
relationship--of these sentences to one another? the author's ability to
decline instantly into the heart of abstraction? the problem of the
antecedent referent ("the educated classes" instead of "the journalists")
to the word "they" in the final sentence?
August, September, October, November, December.
