Writing: Story Ideas & Learning From Other Writers

Business, commerce, has not been of interest to writers for a long time, then I ran across the review Fate and fortune in the 21st century (Engelsberg ideas). The review mentions the scarcity of fiction dealing with business. Read the following and decided if Alexander Starritt (who I never heard of before) has found a way of bringing life to an old genre.

Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt, Swift Press, £16.99

In Drayton and Mackenzie, his ambitious third novel, Alexander Starritt has accomplished something few, if any, of his millennial generation have even attempted. He has taken the Bildungsroman, the novel of intellectual formation, the journey from youth to maturity, and given it a new lease of life. He has done so by infusing it with elements of the European and American realist traditions, in which a whole era is held up to the light.

Yet the result is something else entirely: a novel of ideas that tells the story of a firm in gritty detail. What Starritt implies is that the ideas that count now are business ideas. Whatever alchemy may take place in the laboratory of science or humanity, it is only when the power of capital can be harnessed that the mind is able to take wing, to mould the affairs of men and women and lend meaning to their lives.

This focus on the literary potential of commerce was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has become rarer since. It evidently owes much to the author’s unusual career trajectory. Now 40, Starritt began life in the business world, as one of a team behind the policy platform Apolitical. By his early thirties, he was prosperous enough to become a professional writer. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was a latter-day Scoop, mocking the prejudices and pretensions of the tabloid press. Starritt was raised in Scotland but spent much of his youth staying with his German grandparents. This resulted in a second novel, We Germans (2020). This reminiscence of the last days of the Second World War depicted a soldier, based on his grandfather, coming to terms with the grim reality of what he and his comrades had experienced and done. It was a critical success and has been translated into German and other languages.

***

Although James and Roland are by no means physically attracted to each other, their relationship is more like a marriage than a business partnership. At a crucial juncture, when Roland needs to persuade Alan, a canny Scottish engineer, to join their still non-existent enterprise, he finds himself delivering what he realises is a ‘wedding speech’ about his oddbod friend. ‘On his gravestone it would say “He actually did it.” As in, loads of people say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?” But his thing is that he really does it.’

A portrait of the human cost of entrepreneurship – its highs and lows, its triumphs and tragedies — emerges that is convincing enough to make us care about these two privileged and somewhat spoilt man-children. Both are indulged by devoted parents who let their sons live at home indefinitely but can, when required, provide ‘a few hundred thousand’ for a flat. Yet neither is driven by money: Roland is careless about it and James doesn’t know what to do with it.

James in particular is an example of the ‘worldly asceticism’ that Max Weber saw as the characteristic source of the Protestant work ethic. Roland draws inspiration, rather, from what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’, without which the rational calculus of capitalism doesn’t add up. Between them, they possess a complementary combination of brainpower and people skills that can withstand the fluctuations of fashion, fate and fortune. 

***

When I said that this was a novel of ideas, I didn’t mean the occasional glimpses of the author’s political beliefs — which one suspects are pretty much those of the protagonists. This is the world according to the Weekend section of the Financial Times. (Sure enough, Drayton and Mackenzie was longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year — a rare distinction for a work of fiction.) Rather, what gives the novel its intellectual heft is the attempt to delve into what makes a young person acquire ambition. This is not straightforward at all: for the first half of the novel, Roland is constantly looking for an escape from the iron cage in which James has captured him. It is only by following the example of others that we learn to spread our wings. Yet human beings are motivated by the desire for fame far more than fortune. And it is only by the pursuit of ideas, often obscure ones, that the whole rich tapestry of human commerce and endeavour is conjured into existence.

When I think of the business novel, I think of Theodore Dreiser. (Which reminds me, I have his The Bulwark lying around here unread.) Dreiser is not in good repute. (I keep worrying that my prose is as flat as his.) He had his novel of ideas, too. Perhaps this is one reason why novelists turned away from putting the businessman under the literary microscope. Then, too, there is Babbitt, where Sinclair Lewis turns the businessman into an uncool sap. Third, there was ever so much examining American capitalism through a socialist lens; thinking of John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy here. Finally, how many writers know of the business life, especially in these days of the MFA writer?

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit comes to mind, although I know only of the movie, not the novel. And it has been long decades since I saw last saw the movie. Reading the Wikipedia entry for the novel, the plot brings to mind Lewis more than Dreiser; Dos Passos seems to have the building.

I am still trying to find the way to tell the overarching story for my "The Dead and The Dying" stories. It was a found theme, not an intentional one: the effects of deindustrialization in an Indiana factory town. The industry was initially a local creation held by a family, then they sold out to a New York corporation; the New York corporation shuts the company down eight years after its purchase, sending the town into shock. I did not intend that when I started, but it is pretty much what happened to my hometown of Anderson. General Motors had colonized the city and then abandoned it. The locals are left trying to get by, or trying to be heroes and restore the town to what it was. The heroism doesn't work because capital has deserted them. What may succeed - and I leave success contingent - is a radical creative who never intended to give life to the city's economy, combining with others. It is not the heroic individual capitalist but a group - a democratic movement - has promises life. I am still trying to figure out how to sharpen the stories. Both the collection and a novella consolidating the stories are making the rounds. The novella focuses more on one particular character as a thread through the stories. I keep thinking of revisions to the collection, but not of the novella. Even while writing this, visions pop up in my head.

Working through something else, I ran across a sight I spent time on a few years ago, but have not been visiting of late: The Modern Novel. The proprietor has a page of lists, My Book Lists. I am looking at Neglected Writers and The Great American Novel. I am just saying here may be something to spark you.

10/26 

Continuing the theme of literary fame's slipperiness and promoting writers you might not have heard of:

Myths of Meaning: Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos by Rachel Cusk (Paris Review)

This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide.

***

Today’s reader of Kay Cicellis will find in her voice another missing piece of the female literary puzzle, a woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off of the conventions that adhere both to the living and to the representation of them. She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes. 

I can say now that I have read Rachel Cusk; even if not any of her novels.

Also from The Paris Review is The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver by Amanda Fortini taught me that Jack Kerouac had a daughter who wrote two novels, and they are nothing like his. It may also finally brought out what has left a little towards On The Road, that it hid behind lyrical prose the hardscarabble lives of Americans.

And for something completely different: Processing: How Erin Somers Wrote The Ten Year Affair (Counter Craft):

As an author of both stories and novels, how is your approach to those two forms similar and different?

Short story is the one true form, in my opinion. You can get a short story a lot closer to perfect than a novel. A novel is going to be flawed, and even as I know this, it sort of drives me crazy. With short story writing, if things are going well and an idea has legs, I draft a story in four or five extended sittings. Just really focused and fast. I try to draft them as clean as possible as I go. Then I’ll revise and edit over a few weeks. I don’t like to over-revise the short fiction. I try not to kill what is loose about the form, or gestural, with lengthy explanation or backstory.

With novel writing, on the other hand, I revise endlessly. Some sections take me five to eight drafts. Some I never get exactly right. In the drafting phase, I work through a novel in chronological order and write 500 words a day. That’s a number I can hit, and often exceed, even if I have work or life obligations on a certain day.

In both cases, I work best from a place of zero ego and zero hope. I call this state being “lower than a worm.” A feeling that nothing will ever come of what I’m working on is crucial. A feeling of my smallness in relation to the world. I gotta be below the dirt. I am nothing and nobody. That frees me up. Who cares what a worm thinks, you know?

That worm idea works for me. I have no idea what I am doing - editors and friends are too kind to say so, but it's the truth. I do think I am finally getting a grip in the short story - 50 years since I wrote my first one. I not a slow learner - I am a very slow learner. 

Growing up with having no idea how real writers worked and thought, I try to collect sites where writers do talk about their work. Granta Podcasts is such a resource.

Writing Literary Fiction - Renée Watson & Jabari AsimI:

I did not know the writer before the video. She is a delightful conversationalist, and one that is also inspirational. Wannabe or published writers would do well to spend time here.

sch 11/14

I read one of Walter Benjamin's books while in prison, and I understand his importance to Western intellectuals, but I have to admit the writing rules in the following video seem commonplace other than in their expression:

Gore Vidal - Another Appraisal - and How He Predicted Our Dictatorial End

 Will Lloyd's Gore Vidal: American prophet (The New Statesman) has its subtitle "The writer understood better than anyone how far the United States was going to fall". I agree with the thesis - even if Vidal's The Golden Age annoyed me by being so disappointingly dull.

Christopher Hitchens accused him in Vanity Fair of hawking “crank-revisionist and denialist history”. At the time, Hitchens was the spokesperson for a large constituency that believed liberal democracy could be spread throughout the Middle East by the US Marine Corps and the Fifth Fleet. Vidal thought that elements within the Bush administration might have allowed 9/11 to happen. He also predicted that the US would be run out of Afghanistan, paving the way for China to resume its historic role as a world power.

Vidal seemed mad and sad and alone and drunk. His writing – his writing, Vidal’s, whose essays had been compared to his hero Montaigne’s – no longer seemed contemporary. It was the early Obama era. The cargo-cult optimism that accompanied the 44th president’s rise was not yet completely dispersed. And there was Vidal, who couldn’t read the room any more, gabbling from his wheelchair about the downfall of the United States, writing and saying everything was bad and would only get worse. Maybe he had nothing left to say, mistaking the decline of his own flesh and mind for the decline of the world itself. His watchful attendants – all of whom would be cut from Vidal’s legacy when he died in July 2012 – approached him wearing surgical gloves, as if to protect themselves from contagion. Vidal had always liked to quote Montaigne on death: “How did the living die and what did they say and how did they look at the end?” Those near Vidal as he lingered on and on noticed that however reduced he was, even when he was wracked and struggling to breathe, his eyes stayed wide open.

And cranky, and as disputatious as ever - qualities I did like in him.

 It is hard to place Vidal as an American writer. His prose does not sparkle like his contemporaries. I cannot imagine him writing Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five, for all of him belonging to the same generation. On the hand, he writes better than Norman Mailer. I write this without having read Vidal's World War Two novel. I do not think he ever wrote anything as moving as Sophie's Choice; even though he and William Styron were also of the same generation. I have seen much of the movie version of his The Best Man. Philip Roth might have had acid in some of his novels, but Vidal belonged to a different class. And I wonder if he is not a better playwright than novelist. He was certainly a better essayist. Yet, he was a best-selling writer - in his time. What he was, perhaps, best performing as Gore Vidal. What I like in the following is the placing of Vidal in the terms of his contemporary writers.

The US in 1925 was largely dominated by a north-eastern Wasp establishment which took their manners, clothing, sporting habits, husbands and stylised anti-Semitism from the British aristocracy. The country was ambitious and industrious, driving hard and fast towards an imperial horizon. After the Second World War, Vidal would grow to become the chronicler of that transition from republic to empire. “We have embarked upon empire (Rome born again our heavy fate) without a Virgil in the crew, only tarnished silver writers in a bright uranium age,” he wrote in 1956: part lament, part audition for the role he was destined to play. An essayist, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and occasional ham actor, Vidal’s work adds up to a beguiling, barbed compound of Tacitus and Oscar Wilde.

He confused his contemporaries, the American alpha novelists like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His art was not as pure or secluded as Roth’s or Bellow’s, less frenzied than Mailer’s. “Art is energy shaped by intelligence,” he wrote. His intelligence was lacerating. His energy was bullying and gratuitous; he liked to goad his targets, to kick and scratch at them when they were down. An irrepressible bitch, he impugned people by questioning their mental acuity. He liked to tell his readers who people really were. Edward VIII: “The Duke’s stupidity was of a perfection seldom encountered outside institutions.” F Scott Fitzgerald: “barely literate”. The English: “eccentric Norwegians”. Ronald Reagan: “an indolent cue-card reader”. When he was an old man he said he regretted that he had never killed anybody. He had no need for regrets. His essays were already littered with bodies.

He produced trash from time to time in a way that even Mailer, author of an alimony-raising Marilyn Monroe biography, sidestepped. Caligula (1979) was “easily one of the worst films ever made”, Vidal said. He was its screenwriter. In Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), Fred Kaplan reports how Bellow introduced his son to Vidal with the words, “I want him to meet someone really cynical!” They thought Vidal, when he turned to politics and power – the subject that is the true through-line of his work – was a paranoid bore. Roth, whose overblown late-historical novel sequence has rightly been compared to watching a man chewing, dismissed Vidal as “a society hairdresser who has written a book or two”. While Roth lived like a monk in his forested 150-acre Connecticut estate, Vidal palled around with Tim Robbins and Princess Margaret and Tennessee Williams. Following Goethe, Vidal did not believe talent could survive if it was solitary. Talent must enter the torrent of the world and fight. That was how real character formed. He laughed at the alphas for their “terrible garrulousness” and their lamely insular writing about writing. Men like Roth and Bellow were chestless talents, not mighty characters. Vidal noted that American authors were, “if not Waldenised solitaries, Darwinised predators constantly preying on one another”. He was a superb and steely predator.

That the writer often refers to Vidal's essays may influence my favoring this essay, it is Vidal's puncturing of our American mythos that should draw our attention. John Updike with his Rabbit Angstrom novels punctures our moral hypocrisy, and Philip Roth's American Pastoral goes far in facing American radicalism and American complacency, and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night exposes the political games played at the 1968 political conventions, but only Vidal touched on the rottenness underlying the political and social conventions that have permeated our American culture. We have not escaped the fear the Founders had for our future; captured most often in Franklin's "A republic, if we can keep it." No, we, the people, have collaborated in our being ruled by oligarchs, until we will welcome a Caesar.

Vidal did not live to see this moment but he would have recognised it. America was “rotting away at a funeral pace” he told the Times in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.” He believed Obama would be broken by the “madhouse” that the US had become. The Americans were chased out of Kabul in 2021, years after it had become obvious that China had resumed its historic role as a major world power and a peer of the US, something Vidal had anticipated in 1988. The cost of empire that pushed America down with “nukes, bases, debts” had eventually inspired a populist revolt from its immiserated citizenry, opening the gates of the capital to a figure Vidal knew well from history: Caesar. America First would return, Vidal said in early 1995. “It’s no bad rallying cry.”

The people do not really appear in Vidal's novels of American politics. He is not John Dos Passos. But he knew his history and his politics - maybe the best American writer at both - and that The People had never asserted their power, probably could never assert that power, and would succumb to a leader who would tell them he was power incarnate, and they needed to follow him.

sch 10/8 (Except for the link to the original essay, Google provided the links.)

Writers: A Grab Bag For You

 What’s Happened to Modern Storytelling? (+ 6 Ways Storytelling Can Find Its Soul Again)

 1. Subtext, Metaphor, and Allegory

2. Mythic Structure and Archetypal Resonance 

3. Emotional Sincerity, Vulnerability, and Earnestness

4. Moral Clarity (With Nuance)

5. Joy and Wonder

6. Goodheartedness 

I have come to see necessity of #3 in my stories, and I have been working on this. I never thought of #5 and #6, but having seen them, I can see their importance. Sound and Fury had Dilsie and Benjy to bring joy, wonder and goodheartedness into the novel. 

 Why No One Cares About Your Writing (just scrape his politics off of his message):

 If you want people to care about your writing - you have to commit to being a literary writer. He says what I wish I knew in 1982 - the writers we admire put thousands of hours into their work. When you understand this amount of time is needed, I hope you are younger than I was!

How good of a writer are you? Some good answers here:

 A practical advice site that I found again today while looking for publishers of novellas: Writing Tips Oasis.  

I ran across a reference to The struggle to define cinematic writing (Constance Hale, 2020), and the title intrigued me. I doubted whether I had more of an interest after reading:

I've been struggling to find the right term for the nonfiction writing I most admire. Whether written by Joan Didion, David Grann, Susan Orlean, Héctor Tobar, Isabel Wilkerson, or Gene Weingarten, these are articles, essays, and books that combine suspenseful storytelling with literary style. They tackle true stories in a way that makes me feel, when I put them down, that I have learned something about the human experience but also something about writing.

There has no shortage of names for this genre through the years: literary journalism, narrative journalism, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, and the literature of fact.

For me, it was interesting without giving me much to think until I came to this.

 This all starts with a narrator who acts like an observing camera — we see landscapes, we watch people, we are carried along with the action. (Journalists call one classic technique “a ride-along,” following a subject so closely that the reader feels put into the car; I tried this in a recent profile of a street photographer in Oakland.) It might entail shifting points of view, or deftly changing perspectives between different characters. (Take a look at David Grann’s “Trial by Fire.”) It might be suspenseful as a thriller. (Journalist-historian Adam Hochschild is a master of slow-release structure.) It might mean thinking of film editing when you are devising a structure, creating a tense rhythm by cutting rapidly from one character to another — or in a scene, changing from a bird’s eye view to a close-up. (Watch old Perry Mason TV episodes for inspiration in black and white.)

It left me thinking about John Dos Passos and his USA Trilogy with its movie eye. Here might be a way to improve on Dos Passos.

 

There is also a reading list that looks good, it starts with John Hershey's Hiroshima.

 

sch 8/26

Sometimes writing feels like dropping a pebble in the ocean (Nathan Bransford)

The meaning you’re going to find in your book is not going to reveal itself at some point in the distant future. That meaning is also not subject to the whims of gatekeepers. It doesn’t really even matter whether your book gets published, though it probably doesn’t feel that way to you right now.

The meaning is already here, if you can stay attuned to it.

Because writing changes us for the better. Because we’re creating meaning out of that void. Because we’re leaving something behind that might make others feel less alone. Because we’re taking pain and turning it into light.

So yes. Sometimes it can feel like you’re dropping a pebble in a grand expanse of sea. It barely makes a ripple. That’s one way of looking at it.

But think about the pebble. Who knows what it’s going to encounter as it plunges into the watery depths?

sch 9/6 

Having Finished Gore Vidal's The Golden Age

 It has taken me most of the year to read Gore Vidal's The Golden Age. That time should not be taken as indicating its length or complexity. For the first time, I found Vidal dull, I do not think of Vidal as an innovative stylist, but he was always witty and smart. I liked how he came at American history with the intent to bring humanity to our idols and strip us of our historical smugness. He made us think of ourselves. The Vidal that kept me reading his novel shows up in The Golden Age only in the last three chapters.

I started on the historical novels with Burr. That was about 50 years ago. I have had Aaron Burr on my mind ever since. What Burr represented for Vidal has puzzled me all this time. Towards the end of The Golden Age, Aaron Burr reappears in what seems to be a reincarnation. It seems now that Aaron Bur represented an alternative American imperialism, another American energy devoted to power and not to democracy, and not, as I read the character, a satirical, even Northern, counterpoint to Jeffersonian politics. That seems a let-down, even unto a bit of nihilism, when I consider Vidal's essays.

 While I would rate Vidal the novelist as mid-level, Vidal as an essayist is one of our best. His language and ideas are sharp. It may even be that his American historical novels after Lincoln and 1876 have more of the essayist than the novel. The Golden Age may have done better as a series of essays. They may still have been wrong-headed, but avoided dullness by presenting an argument. The Golden Age surprises most by its lack of drama. Vidal was also a dramatist and screenwriter. He knew how to stage a drama. I still recall the scene in Lincoln where Lincoln suspends habeas corpus in a scene with Winfield Scott and William Seward, with a remark of the irony that three lawyers have worked to suspend The Great Writ. There is a drama in this that is personal, professional, intellectual, and political. The fictional characters intersect with Wendell L. Willkie and Harry Truman and FDR in scenes that, like snapshots, make a record without any meaning.

 Vidal raises the old conspiracy theory about FDR wanting to start World War Two by sacrificing the Pacific Fleet. He then does nothing with this idea, other than to put it into the ether as a sign that FDR wanted to rule the world. No one pushes back at this idea by pointing out the evils of Nazism, or that it was Hitler who declared war on us. I do think that FDR wanted to go to war with Nazism; getting the Japanese to attack us did not guarantee that result. No one pushes back on the theory by pointing out how our racism colored our thinking towards Imperial Japan. Another point against the theory is that if the Japanese had been kept waiting by Cordell Hull, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would have come after Japan's declaration of war, and it was the surprise attack as part of an undeclared war that drove America to war. Vidal was a World War Two veteran, so this was an issue close to him. In his political essays, Vidal wrote about our government as an oligarchy - a ruling Property Party with two wing named Democrat and Republican. If his use of the Pearl Harbor conspiracy was meant to symbolize our oligarchy seeking world-wide domination, then he fell flat by not connecting the knots when he failed to properly dramatize his idea, by making us feel its possibility. 

Vidal goes long on the rise of Wendell L. Willkie, which cheers this Hoosier. However, he indulges again on a conspiracy theory that deflates itself by the lack of any drama in whether the Republican convention was rigged for Willkie. And I think there is drama in the figure of Willkie - for the Republicans, certainly. They wanted to beat FDR and put forward a former Democrat for that job. There is a drama in FDR deciding to buck George Washington's two-terms are enough rule. What we get is an allegation thrown up against the wall without any satire on the Republicans' loss of their conservative ideals, or on FDR's running a third-time. It is an indictment of oligarchy that when it comes time for trial is bereft of evidence for its importance. In The Best Man, Vidal knew how to spin drama out of the games and corruption of a political convention. 

I admit I have not read Myra Breckinridge, but I have read Duluth. That is, I think, his best novel. It is also the place where I first read the name Italo Calvino. That name reappears in The Golden Age. Too bad Vidal did not indulge into his fondness for the surrealism of Calvino before the last three chapters of The Golden Age. The closest he comes in the main body of his novel is introducing himself as a character. He does this more in the style of Somerset Maugham. He could have made a better case for 1945 -1950 as a Golden Age, he had interjected him, as did Maugham, a commentator on the story. Instead, we get episodes of cattiness and self-congratulation.

Enough of castigating an old man soon to be dead. And therein may be the cause of this novel's problems - a man trying to finish before death arrived on his door. He started his American chronicles with Washington, DC, then came Burr and all the rest. What remained was to tie Hollywood and Washington, DC. One criticism I ran across when I decided to write this post at this length, points out Vidal skips the Great Depression. That novel would mean writing two novels when Vidal was running out of time.

Continuity may be the greatest burden for a writer with a series. This may have been even more of a problem for Vidal. Nothing gives me the sense that he planned the series out. I read how Marvel movies have become dull from their paying duties to creating a framework for other movies. There is a detriment to the immediate story. Vidal trying to fit The Golden Age into the earlier written but set later Washington, DC seems to have had this problem. The last three chapters escape the need to fit continuity. That may be why there is the best writing in the novel.

No, I cannot recommend this book - except for obsessive completists like me, and even then without any great warmth. I feel that Vidal missed the chance for a great novel, certainly a greater novel, for there was something special in the time between 1945 and 1950. I see it in the movies released in that time period. There is also something in the novels and plays written - this was the time of Tennessee Williams and William Inge; of Mailer and Kerouac and Ross Lockridge, Jr. I am too old with too much on my plate for the research I would need to do. Not to mention, I doubt my skills. There was a moment there when the country was free of The Great Depression and world war before paranoid conservatism took us over. The L.A. Times review makes much of earlier outbreaks of culture, rightly so and wrongly, too. Right that American culture existed, but wrong that there was not something different, something bigger, something wider, than what we had before. Or maybe since. The closest competitor I can think of - especially with regard to film - is the early Seventies.

Now, I will show off what I found after I read the novel.

Book Spotlight: The Golden Age by Gore Vidal (2019)

 While considered by some to be the best work of Vidal’s historical fiction, others find The Golden Age to be repetitive and confusing. Some critics claim the novel becomes more political philosophy and pseudo-memoir while others criticize his descent into conspiracy. From exploring a theory claiming the 1940 Republican convention was fixed to the claim that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor and did not warn the Navy, Vidal oversimplifies history into conspiracy theory, which lends to seemingly sloppy writing.

 “The Golden Age” by Gore Vidal (LA Times, 2000)

 Vidal seems so absorbed by this conceit that he drops the narrative thread for pages at a time to give us his “proof.” Why stake so much on this? For Vidal, the infamy at Pearl Harbor was the seed from which all later hoaxes and conspiracies grew. He includes among these--in no particular order--the Cold War, NATO, Harry Truman’s loyalty oaths, grants to universities and the humanities, liberal periodicals, the CIA, the Museum of Modern Art, Americans for Democratic Action, high income taxes, “mega-socialism,” the SATs and unnecessary airport security. This sort of paranoia has a depressingly familiar sound to it, like some dusty position paper from the Goldwater campaign raving about the fluoridation of water.

But this review does hit on a point, I never considered since I read Vidal's American chronicle as a portrait of American oligarchy's interconnecting threads (certainly since reading Lincoln, if not 1876; in Lincoln, Samuel L. Tilden who was Martin Van Buren's protégé who was alleged as being Burr's son in Burr comments on how Lincoln has acquired the powers Van Buren was supposed to be seeking):

 To read all this is to realize just how absent the people have actually been from Vidal’s narratives, even as he has posed as their champion. Very few of the great mass movements in American history have been depicted in this series, and Vidal has largely skipped over the Great Depression. The travails of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the free soilers and the Populists, the civil rights and antiwar movements--all are generally absent as well.

More importantly to me was this paragraph, for it captures much of what I think is wrong with The Golden Age, and may now color my thinking of what Vidal did with his novels after 1876 (excluding Lincoln for it being concentrated with, of course, Lincoln):

 The truth matters. The truth should matter to any writer of fiction, and it should matter even more to a writer of historical fiction, lest our history be reduced to no more than a collection of Holocaust deniers and ethno-propagandists. By squeezing the universe into such a neat little ball, Vidal has become so cynical about the workings of power as to actually sound naive. He seems unable to envision a world of any real complexity--a world where there are chance and bad timing and people are driven by mixed motives or hobbled by uncertainty. A world where, for a start, leaders are sometimes influenced by the people they rule, and where people and leaders alike are neither perfect dupes nor perfect villains. To deny, at every turn, this complexity is not only bad history. It is bad writing.

Gore Vidal and Revisionism (2012) gives a biographical sketch and is a bit long, but it does cover the whole of the series.

It was nearly a decade before Vidal would add another volume to the American Chronicle series. That next volume was the celebrated Lincoln (1984), which follows events in Washington from Abraham Lincoln’s surreptitious arrival in the city to be inaugurated for his first term in the White House to his assassination scarcely four years later. Lincoln was followed, in quick succession, by Empire (1987), which focuses on the years 1898 to 1906, and Hollywood (1990), which focuses on US involvement in World War I and its immediate aftermath — the years 1917 to 1923. Then, after a decade of work unrelated to the American Chronicle, Vidal published the final volume of the series, The Golden Age (2000). Oddly, this volume does not depict a previously undramatized period of years. As Harry Kloman puts it, “Rather than simply taking place after Washington DC — which covers the years 1937 to 1952 — The Golden Age loops back to re-cover the same years, 1939 to 1954.” It also features almost all of the same characters. And, of course, the major historical events in the two novels are the same. As Kloman writes, The Golden Age “is the narrative Washington DC might have been had Vidal written the books chronologically.” Thus “You might think of the new book as an alternative version of the older one.” Kloman points out that “when Vidal published Washington DC in 1967, he had no plan to tell America’s story from the Revolutionary War through the present.” Accordingly, he counsels, “now that Vidal has completed the series, one might just consider it to be six books in length, with Washington DC standing off to the side, in part an accidental beginning to a Chronicle that it no longer fits, and in part an alternative conclusion that’s more literary and introspective than historical.”6

 ***

 In summary, then, Gore Vidal’s American Chronicle novels tell a tale of American history that would seem passing strange to anyone whose understanding of the subject is confined to what has long been conventionally taught in American public schools and colleges. In Vidal’s American history, the Founding Fathers are not graven saints, but fallible mortals driven as often by vanity, greed, and lust (whether for power or for the flesh of attractive slave girls) as by any belief in the nobility of their cause, and more often bent on benefiting themselves and the members of their social class than on benefiting Americans in general. In Vidal’s American history, Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union at the cost of destroying everything about it that had made it worth preserving — the protections supposedly afforded by the Constitution to the inalienable individual rights of American citizens. In Vidal’s American history, a cabal of racist imperialists had seized control of the federal government within scarcely more than a hundred years of the Constitution’s ratification, and sent its young men on a rampage of international meddling and mass murder that culminated in the total destruction of two Japanese cities. In Vidal’s American history, it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, that launched and then prolonged the Cold War.

Less weighty is Ron Briley: Review of "I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics -- Interviews with Jon Wiener" (OR Books, 2012)

Vidal took great pride in being an iconoclast and one of the first American intellectuals to assert that the United States had established an empire endangering liberties at home and abroad. In his novels, however, Vidal usually employs the voice of the eliteelt to convey the course of empire. While the people tend to not have a direct voice in Vidal’s Narratives of Empire, he certainly anticipated the sexual politics of modern America in such satirical novels as Myra Breckenridge (1968). Many of Vidal’s observations may antagonize both liberals and conservatives, but as a public intellectual Gore Vidal dared to confront those in power and even challenge the assumptions of the historical profession. Such honesty and wit are often lacking in public life today, and as Jon Wiener suggests we may not see Vidal’s like again. Readers who enjoy the conversations of I Told You So, however, may get an even larger dose of the irrepressible Vidal in his Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (2006). 

Andrew Delbanco's Gore Vidal's 'Empire' Was a Letdown of Epic Proportions (1987) makes interesting points concerning that earlier novel and in Vidal's writing in general.

 One chuckles, but there is something drearily repetitive about these caricatures. They have, in many cases, only the truth of cliché. As history, the novel is badly truncated. A serious inquiry into the roots of American imperialism must begin at least with the Mexican War, if not with the Louisiana Purchase and the post-colonial westward expansion. Vidal treats the former not at all; the latter he dealt with rather glibly in Burr: A Novel (1973). And as fiction Empire is tired. The book is one long expression of disgust. Its female lead, the castrating Caroline Sanford, is a rather mechanical combination of Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg and Henry Adams's Mrs. Lightfoot Lee—a sprightly witch who lends the book a certain energy, but who is really just another version of Vidal's frequently portrayed nouveau riche: "I have found," says Charlie Schuyler in 1876 (1976), "that when one starts to think ofmoney, one cannot, finally, think of anyother subject. More worries of this sortand I shall be a proper New Yorker . . .no longer alien." Empire is largely an extensionof that remark. At its center is aforeign-born woman who converts toAmericanism, by which Vidal means essentiallycarnivorous greed.

Vidal's fictions oscillate between revulsion and fascination for such people. He shuffles them into two piles: one for the stupid and reprehensible, the other for the sharp and delectable. The ultimate point of this game is to explode all received platitudes about the visible makers of American history. And so he works into Empire some bits of platitudinous decoration—public recitations of Kipling's poem on "the white man's burden," applause lines from Manifest Destiny speeches, dormant missionary instincts strategically revived. He writes very much in the voice of Henry Adams (who is his intellectual model) on the American conjunction between historical ignorance and technological genius: "McKinley barely knew of Caesar and Alexander; yet he had conquered almost as much of the earth as either, without once stirring from the ugly national house with its all-important telegraph-machine and no less potent telephone." Justin Kaplan has rightly said that the soundtrack for Empire would be selections from John Philip Sousa. Vidal, I think, would want the band to play slightly off key.

***

 As for the victorious opposition, Henry Adams thought that “the progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin," and Vidal appears to agree. The country was now being run by simian fools—but unlike Adams, Vidal has no theory of declension (and does not therefore have to contend with the implications of such a theory for his own pride of family descent). Between Washington and Grant there is no distance. The gossip journalism of Leggett and Bryant in Burr is not fundamentally different from the yellow journalism of Hearst in Empire.  Everyone in or near power is always the same.

Given the convulsive cynicism that produced this historical vision, the phenomenon of Lincoln was all the more remarkable. It was stylistically an entirely different work—written with a new tranquility and intensity, rarely spinning off into the almost hysterical mockery that characterizes its predecessors. Some of the familiar trappings remained: the canny madam who knows her generals and senators better than their wives know them; Lincoln's constipation that leads him to carry on discussions, like LBJ of the famous story, while seated on the pot. But this sort of joke has become dutiful; in fact it serves the purpose of demonstrating the pettiness of the men around Lincoln (who gossip over the question of whether he has syphilis and what its symptoms might be) in comparison to his capacious and undistracted understanding.

Mr. Delbanco makes a mistake, having thought of Vidal a moan of the left. In his essays, Vidal rained against the National Security State established with Truman and continuing unto today. That makes for a very strange case of liberalism. 

Next to Lincoln, Vidal's new novel is a series of miniature lampoons. Empire is soundly researched and sporadically entertaining, but it has no center, and its point is easily made: America, spouting democratic ideals, ravages the world in order to satisfy the appetites of its fat-cat owners, who always want more. And it is in this unmasking of America's international behavior as pure, crude imperialism that Vidal lodges his claim to being a man of the left. 

***

Vidal writes that "when Confucius was asked what would be the first thing that he would do if he were to lead the state—his never-to-be-fulfilled dream [Vidal, as every book jacket reminds us, ran well for Congress as a Democrat in Republican Dutchess County]—he said rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle." These terms—"correctionist" and "rectify"—are revealing. Vidal harbors a secret vision of return to a lost condition of proper relations, social and linguistic. There is an ideal order; and therefore there is a certain fastidiousness in Vidal's brand of satire, a kind of hold-the-nose distaste for everyone. His aspiration to "rectify the language" (which is a pretty wild claim, given his usually cavalier diction) belongs, I think, not to the radical native tradition of American writers who have wanted, with Whitman, to see the national language inflamed into an unprecedented and open future—"fann'd by the breath of nature"—but to the reactionary tradition of Fisher Ames, who wrote, in Burr's day, that "of all flattery, the grossest...is that the voice of the people is the voice of God." 

Too bad he did not put the idea and his passion for the idea into The Golden Age. 

I was not aware of the interview or the essay referred to below; The Golden Age would have benefitted from a touch of Dos Passos (who is a great novelist). That this might contain a serious self-description seems to have passed unnoticed.

He can have it, in effect, both ways, because he can tell the New Left Review (with a cheerfulness that must have been discomfiting for the interviewer) that he is "a left-wing conservative Puritan." That is as good a phrase as any to describe his hybrid political instincts. In an essay on Dos Passos he confesses to having "enjoyed, even admired, the dottiness of his politics. His political progress from Radical Left to Radical Right seems to me very much in the American grain." This is quite right. The tropes of right and left fiendish conspirators bilking the people—often run together. And Vidal's own writings offer a reprise of the theme.  

If my reading of Burr in The Golden Age is correct, then every aspirant to the Presidency has been a would-be imperialist and every President an outright imperialist. Yes, I would even put Lincoln into that category, either as a covert imperialist or in establishing the Union as an Empire.

 The Empire of Gore Vidal: The legacy of an American writer may skewer Vidal even further and closer to our time.

 As Donald Trump might say, at the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s Gore Vidal was yuge. Beginning with Burr, his historical novels were bestsellers. His contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth may have been esteemed by professors, but Gore Vidal was the Great American Novelist for Americans who seldom read novels. He could be seen frequently on TV talk shows, saying catty things about Washington politicians and Hollywood celebrities. And you might catch him on public television or European TV, posing in front of the arch of Titus in Rome and lamenting the decline and fall of the American Republic. With his foreign-sounding name and his vaguely British mid-Atlantic accent, like his bete noire Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal was a middlebrow’s idea of a highbrow.

Before his death in 2012, Vidal suffered a series of setbacks, including the death of his companion Howard Austen and, according to Parini, the ravages of alcoholism. His historical and satirical novels got worse and worse, and he penned tracts that read like student’s notes from a class with Noam Chomsky, like Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be Hated. He lost many of his friends and admirers, including yours truly, when he described as a “noble boy” Timothy McVeigh, who, when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, murdered more Americans (168) on American soil than any other terrorist before the 9/11 attacks.

Many of us, as we age, turn into a parent or a grandparent. Vidal’s hero and model all his life was his great-grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, a blind democratic senator from Oklahoma whose populist hatred of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt as warmongering tyrants was passed on to his grandson. Among the other nuggets in Parini’s biography is the revelation that young Gore and his grandfather wrote to each other of their pleasure on learning of the death of the detested FDR in April 1945. In The Golden Age, the last of the novels in the Narratives of Empire series that began with Burr, Roosevelt, scheming to embroil the U.S. in an unnecessary war with Japan, knows about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. Vidal did not simply end in tinfoil-hat territory; like his grandfather, he had dwelled in it all his life, even if the trans-Atlantic intelligentsia for a few decades mistook his isolationist Jeffersonian populism for leftism.

Still, did the novel need to have a non-existent plot, and dull dialog?

 If (a big if) we can get over his view late in life of Timothy McVeigh as a misguided but noble rebel against federal tyranny, what of the works of Gore Vidal can we expect to last? The conventional wisdom, shared by his friend and biographer Jay Parini, is that he put his talent into his novels and his genius into the essays he wrote for The New York Review of Books and The Nation. According to this school, Vidal will be remembered in the future as a great essayist.

I disagree. Vidal was a brilliant and funny stylist, to be sure, and when he wrote about Hollywood, the major source of his millions, or literary friends and acquaintances like Tennessee Williams, he had no peers. But he knew next to nothing about the real world of politics and economics. His lack of first-hand experience or careful study shows in his essays on those subjects. He bluffs his way through by repeating a few cliches he inherited from his populist grandfather: the republic has become an empire, there is only one party, the property party or the banker’s party, and so on.

Far from being daring, these are the banal common places of the populist right and the faculty lounge left alike. What gave Vidal authority of a kind not possessed by, say, your retired uncle, was his mystique as a rebellious member of the elite. He posed as a member of one of America’s ruling families like Henry Adams, an intimate of Roosevelts and Kennedys who had betrayed his class to spill the beans, a Tacitus from the senatorial class recording the republic’s decline in an age of American Caesars.

***

 My guess is that if what he called “the Great Eraser” does not obliterate his posthumous reputation altogether, Gore Vidal will be remembered as a sort of American Oscar Wilde. Some of his quips may achieve immortality: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

Like Wilde, Vidal may be remembered not only for his apercus but also for a handful of clever, perfect plays. The constraints imposed by writing for the stage rescued Vidal from the indulgence in prolixity and polemic that ruined many of his novels.

*** 

Two of his plays in particular have a shot at a permanent place in the repertory. The Best Man, his well-crafted 1960 play about national politics, made into a movie in 1964, still enjoys periodic revivals on Broadway. And his play Visit to a Small Planet, a masterpiece of the alien-on-earth genre of comedy, appears to have joined the canon of plays performed by generations of American high school drama students.

 Although Gore Vidal: Narratives of Empire(2023) is kinder than the previous two sources to Vidal as a writer, it is not kinder to The Golden Age.

There's a great deal of noise about the old canard that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbour. There are a lot of cheap shots at his successor, Truman. There are even some perfunctory attempts at metafiction when Vidal introduces himself (both young and old) as a character in the narrative.

But there's none of the old zest, the sense of being in the hands of an immensely knowing and well-informed fictional prestidigitator. Tiresome factual glitches and even downright errors disfigure the pages: Churchill is described as a major player at the post-war Potsdam conference whereas he was actually replaced by his successor Clement Attlee early in the discussions; Clay Overbury has to share the stage with his presumed original, the real JFK (Vidal gets out of this one by having Clay die in a plane crash, which it's hinted may have been arranged by Peter!) ... 

 Analysis of Gore Vidal’s Novelsis not as wide-ranging as it may seem (no discussion of The Golden Age), but is put here as a less-political overview of his works.

I think his Lincoln should endure, It taught me one certain idea I had never gotten from any straight history book. What it taught me is that Lincoln is unknowable - he is self-contained, maybe even self-created as a political figure. 

I have wondered  what Vidal would make of Trump. Working this blog post, I came to an idea. He would see Trump as another of the mediocrities that have been President for most our Republic's life, and even the epitome of the American President: intellectually deficient while accruing power to himself, a blunter imperialist, no longer even winking at the Constitution in his pursuit of power.

Which, in turn, makes me think Trump may be the President we have needed. He will either break the Constitution and destroy us, or he will make us take ourselves seriously as a democratic people who do not need an imperial boss of a President. Either we will become a nation of sheep ordered about to create an unreal country in the image of right-wing fantasies, or the people will reject the need for bosses other than themselves. I will hope then not in the wise elite like Henry Adams who thinks political power belongs to them, or those who think through their will to impose an ideology making them, but in Walt Whitman's vision of American democracy of rule by free and equal people.

sch 8/23 

Foreign Writers & An American Conservative Canon (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

The book review Rêver la littérature mondiale by Jérome David will be behind the Times Literary Supplement's paywall, but it does serve as my theme for this post.

Equal parts anecdotal and analytical, David’s essay explores the history of the discipline from an unapologetically personal per­spective. If world literature is a chimera, perhaps it is also a dream.

I think World Literature exists because humanity shares existential qualities regardless of local specificities. It seems to me a tension exists between exoticism (such as the location and politics of, say, Orhan Pamuk's Snow) and generalities (the ethical demands of life of the individual in society and an absurd universe). That is what I will call the reader's perspective.

For writers, such as what I am trying to be, there is what I will call the dialog of technique and themes. Magical realism did not start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but he brought its techniques and themes to the forefront. The Magic Mountain shows how to bring ideas to life.

Reading the review of Blowfish (Necessary Fiction) brought to mind both aspects of world literature.

Where is the American novelist who attempts disorientation? It seems to me that our current political and social problems have us retreating into reassuring that the strangeness of existence has a Hollywood ending of security. Perhaps there are novels and novelists who are doing what is done with this novel and by this novelist. I can think of American novels that did confront the disorientation of living in a world without security: The USA Trilogy and Naked Lunch.

Toward the end of Blowfish, the unnamed thirty-something female protagonist hears a harsh truth from a friend. “You should know something,” the friend says. “­You’re always thinking about yourself.” She’s right: The sculptor has spent the entirety of the novel planning, attempting, or moving on from trying to die. But apart from this preoccupation, nothing else about this book or its narrators is reliable. As soon as Jo Kyung-ran settles into a theme or conflict, she subverts it. Although it is tempting to reduce the book to a moralistic or predictable parable, its relentless disorientation does not seem accidental. It’s more a knowing tease. 

As for a story's universality, what is more universal than the subjects of the "arbitrariness of life and death"?

Jo might agree that their bond is a miracle of fate. Or, more likely, she scoffs slyly at her protagonists’ need for a tidy narrative that ignores the arbitrariness of life and death. In her author’s note, Jo confesses it had never taken her so long to write a novel: “I would think about the act of writing, the meaning of it.” There is no lesson to be learned or meaning to be gleaned. Matters of life and death can be just as urgent or pointless, or both, as taking the subway or creating a sculpture. Just like her protagonist’s works, Blowfish is evidence of that physical, aimless, sometimes futile, attempt. 

Engelsberg Ideas's essays always make me think, even if I do not always agree with them - such as The case for a conservative canon. I never thought the conservative claim to a more substantive moral core than liberalism was anything than a fig leave for asserting power. But when this essay started examining Nathaniel Hawthorne, I paid attention. Hawthorne is one American writer who I think is underestimated; as terrifying as Poe, a more quietly weird Melville; too conscious of passing time and moral standards.  

Yes, I was one who had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school. If the essayist is correct, our reading was not butchered.

Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, embodies many of the characteristics of the conservative mind. Most English classes today, if they read the book at all, tend to butcher it – but Kirk understood it as a truly fine literary achievement. In this story of sin and shame, Hawthorne dramatised the eternal tension between the individual and society and captured his complicated relationship with his Puritan ancestors. 

I have no use for his lingering Calvinism and the idea of original sin - yet predestination and original sin dominates the American culture. Which is one of several reasons I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox reject predestination for free will and see The Fall as creating a fallen world without us carrying the burden of Adam's sin. 

Reading the short stories, there seemed to me a conflict between American history and ideas current at the time of their writing.

‘Hawthorne was no idolizer of the past’, Kirk wrote, ‘he knew the past to have been black and cruel, often; but for that very reason, apprehension of the past ought to be fundamental to the projecting of any social reform. Only through scrutiny of the past can society descry the limitations of human nature.’ Just as the American Republic was being engulfed by the self-interested radicalisms of antebellum politics, Hawthorne offered a warning about the hubris of moralistic extremism.

If "moralistic extremism" refers to the sides of the slavery issue, then Hawthorne's warnings were wrong. Abolition cannot be seen now or then as a self-interested radicalism. It was the very thing that conservatism claims for its justification: substantive morality.

I prefer "moralistic extremism" and self-interested radicalism referring to moral causes fronting for narrow, partisan, temporal political purposes, so that leaves Hawthorne hitting the mark. We certainly could use that kind of thinking nowadays. Our new puritans seek not to lead us to a more Christ-like life, but to our giving them control over our bodies and consciences.

In other works, from The Blithedale Romance to ‘The Birth-Mark’ and more, Hawthorne pilloried the new puritans of his time for failing to understand both the tides of history and the unchanging nature of the human person. Their senseless optimism, he knew, would not ameliorate suffering in the world – it could only cause more of it. Kirk admired this realism and noted that Hawthorne has much to teach a careful reader. ‘By heroic efforts, Hawthorne suggests, man may diminish the influence of original sin in the world; but this struggle requires nearly his undivided attention,’ he wrote, ‘Whenever man tries to ignore sin, some avenging angel intervenes, progress material and spiritual collapses, and the reality of evil is re-impressed upon men’s minds by terror and suffering. Only one species of reform really is worth attempting: reform of conscience.’ This is much-needed conservative wisdom in an age of shrill utopianism.

Returning to world literature, what is more universal than "nature of the human person"? I would add Hawthorne to that conversation.

In The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin by Joshua Cohen, I see the following as speaking to what foreign writers can teach us about writing.

INTERVIEWER

The Sugar Kremlin, like certain strains of your work, partakes of multiple genres, multiple forms—folktales, theater or film scripts, letters, dreams, and songs—but there’s a sense that this variousness isn’t yet another postmodern reinvention of the novel so much as a waking-up-from-a-long-nightmare declaration that the novel never existed. Do you recognize this reading? What does the novel mean to you?

SOROKIN

It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ulysses, or War and Peace. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it’s almost as if they weren’t novels at all. They’re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be great novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, “We do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.” This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you’ll notice I say “re-create” and not “describe”). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms–one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don’t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn’t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you prefer the verb re-create to describe? What’s the difference? And why, when it comes to the contemporary, does recreation-on-the-page seem to be possible or at least more possible than description? Has something happened to realism or reality?

 SOROKIN

I don’t like the term description of the world, it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce were able to create their own worlds, which is why their prose stuns with its intellectual authenticity.

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120 Paris Review (1990) presents the idea from a different perspective:

INTERVIEWER

But among your contemporaries that you do read, whom do you particularly admire?

VARGAS LLOSA

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos—especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me. I have never been disappointed when I reread him, the way I have been occasionally with, say, Hemingway. I wouldn’t reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I’ve read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value. As for his essays, I find most of them to be less important, with one exception perhaps—“Saint Genet: Comedian or Martyr,” which I still like. They are full of contradictions, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and ramblings, something that never happened with Faulkner. Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand, because his technique stunned me. He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth. As a Latin American, I think it was very useful for me to read his books when I did because they are a precious source of descriptive techniques that are applicable to a world which, in a sense, is not so unlike the one Faulkner described. Later, of course, I read the nineteenth-century novelists with a consuming passion: Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville. I’m still an avid reader of nineteenth-century writers.

As for Latin American literature, strangely enough, it wasn’t until I lived in Europe that I really discovered it and began to read it with great enthusiasm. I had to teach it at the university in London, which was a very enriching experience because it forced me to think about Latin American literature as a whole. From then on I read Borges, whom I was somewhat familiar with, Carpentíer, Cortázar, Guimaraes Rosa, Lezama Lima—that whole generation except for García Márquez. I discovered him later and even wrote a book about him: García Márquez: Historia de un decidio. I also began reading nineteenth-century Latin American literature because I had to teach it. I realized then that we have extremely interesting writers—the novelists perhaps less so than the essayists or poets. Sarmiento, for example, who never wrote a novel, is in my opinion one of the greatest storytellers Latin America has produced; his Facundo is a masterwork. But if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one. Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have all been prolix, from Cervantes to Ortega y Gasset, Valle-Inclán, or Alfonso Reyes. Borges is the opposite—all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.

There's a reading list for you.

sch 8/15 

Writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald - Writer of Immaturity?

Although Fitzgerald’s Follies from Liberties is mostly hidden by a paywall, this was available and has some interesting points.

...Fitzgerald overdid something to which Erasmus’ Folly admits — that she had been raised up and nourished by Bacchus. Fitzgerald’s alcoholism constrained his literary output and led to his premature death at the age of forty-five. The adult Fitzgerald could not take care of himself. We do not associate Fitzgerald with anything like wisdom literature. He never wore a beard, that “ensign of wisdom,” according to Erasmus’ Folly. He could not be confused with Tolstoy, who did have a beard and who broached the biggest and the best questions, boldly titling a novel War and Peace. (Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise, in which this side of paradise — a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke — is more or less a brilliant undergraduate career at Princeton University.) Fitzgerald did not even write novels of ideas. He was no Thomas Mann, no communicant with the philosophical heavyweights, no worldly interpreter of high politics. Until his death, Fitzgerald agonized about not being sufficiently educated or well read. He never graduated from Princeton, and it bothered him.  In The Great Gatsby, the book that will always define him, Fitzgerald expends marvelous prose on a small and insignificant man. It is a perfect novella to depict the dreams, the extravagance, the alleged greatness of a bootlegger whose golden girl got away. Gatsby lacks any guiding wisdom. He lacks gravitas. The incognito protagonist, he lacks a real profile even in his eponymous novel. He is an empty vessel of social climbing and romantic longing who embraces the folly-filled tawdriness of his cultural moment. Gatsby is the boy who never outgrew high school, not to mention college (which he falsely claims to have attended). His shallowness and frivolity would have made him a bit player in War and Peace, a petty officer. Or Tolstoy would have chosen to transform Jay Gatsby, to reform him, leading him through a moral awakening. Tolstoy would not have left Gatsby’s folly intact, as Fitzgerald is very willing to do. According to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend and later his literary executor, Edna St. Vincent Millay compared Fitzgerald to “a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond.” A similar image occurred to John Dos Passos: “when he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to be full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as diamond.” Fitzgerald fretted about wasting his diamond-like literary talent on the literature of immaturity, or he was sensitive to the accusation of doing this. In 1934, in an unpublished preface to Gatsby, he wrote of being “kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! It was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” Without cultivating an aura of wisdom, however, the beardless Fitzgerald did write wisdom literature. He wrote it not by denigrating folly, not by dismissing it, and not by treating folly as peripheral to wisdom....

The counselor for my group sessions talked about how obvious and, therefore boring, were the themes of The Great Gatsby. Hard to disagree when I think Fitzgerald is a much better writer of short stories. (You can search this site for my other notes on Fitzgerald.) Impossible, however, to deny the quality of Fitzgerald's prose.

If there is any writer of ideas from amongst Fitzgerald's contemporaries, it has to be John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. I do not think either of them write as finely as Fitzgerald. Faulkner is a treasure trove of style without ever slipping into the noodling delicacies of Fitzgerald. Dos Passos has not the baroque sentences of Faulkner, nor is his prose stylish for the sake of style.

In his defense, I would say Gatsby persists by virtue of his vacuity. Being American, we are a country prone to vacuity. Perhaps the allure of reinvention - certainly its myth - gives us the ability to escape the wisdom possible from self-reflection. 

I recall reading somewhere that Fitzgerald was a favorite of The Beats, like Jack Kerouac. This makes sense if Fitzgerald is the scribe of immaturity.

I also had to remember that it was Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American lives. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Justification for his own way of life?

sch 8/10