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 

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

Writers: Anti-Novels? Anarchist Plots?

Having read Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante's Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, and Dan Leach's Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully) (both published on Literary Hub) one after another, I found myself wondering if they are not actually related.

Dan Leach writes about his own experience embarking onto an anti-novel:

And since the speaker/situation foothold was the only foothold I ever needed to get started on the short stuff, I went to work on the novel as if it was the short stuff. Which is to say, I cracked open a new Word doc and a began to pepper its white space with scenes and fragments and voicy little riffs, all of which felt faithful to Junah’s intelligence and connected to Junah’s situation, but none of which necessarily corresponded to novelistic mechanisms such as the “structured” plot, the “measured” tone, and the “well-developed” character.

Okay, that sounds tempting to me - some doubts about doing the measured tone and the well-developed character abide in my mind. Plus, I decided long ago, while still in Fort Dix, that publishing was unlikely, I was too old to actually hone a style and writerly talents, that I might as well throw caution to the wind and write what I want to read.

Again, Mr. Leach, describes something that attracts me because it does describe the world as I experience - with and after my depression - it.

I was writing a hundred-page shoebox likely to resonate with readers on the basis of voice, fragment, and flow. What I wrote, in the end, was an anti-novel. A mixtape. A collage. A text which mimics its conceit: the book the reader holds is the time capsule Junah culls out of his lived life; the shards on the page, the shards of his memory.

He also reminds me what I need to do, to get back to, now I am using now to return to my writing:

And what I discovered (and it pains me to present this as an epiphany, since in 2020 I was three books and fifteen years into my career) is that a pandemic is not an excuse to write the book you can sell—it’s an excuse to write the book you can love.

I know of only one of the novels in Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully), Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  They should be read, of course, but I want to add up the parts that make think this idea is sound, and that this is 

 ... isn’t just a rebellion against novelistic dead weight—it’s a rebellion against any printed syllable that isn’t exploding with the concurrent mysteries of sound and sense.... Nelson’s anti-novel is like a mixtape without a single bad or boring song. Which is to say, each of the 240 fragments that make up Bluets sings like a standalone poem (yet also miraculously coheres into a book-length meditation on love and suffering)... which tells its story via a year’s worth of customer comment cards, all submitted by an unnamed narrator who treats the fast-food space as a conduit for existential riffing.... this book has sentences (or lines?) so sonically resonant and philosophically interesting that you will linger on a page for half an hour. This book even has a chapter (now infamous) in which the speaker achieves sexual intimacy with a Frosty..... Delivered in dense (but lush) fragments that braid themselves against disparate registers (imagine reading a mini-essay stuck between a folk tale and a catalogue)... This includes the epistolary intrusions of May Kasahara, the labyrinthine computer files of Cinnamon Akasaka, and the deeply discursive frame stories of Lieutenant Mamiya (which could easily exist as a self-standing novella); but it also includes pseudo-newspaper articles, excerpts from whatever history book Toru happens to be reading, and those infamous and enigmatic third-person vignettes towards the end which no scholar has ever adequately explained

Okay, the Frosty sounds demented as well as distasteful, and what really sticks is the mixtape analogy. 

Think about this: Bingo, Bango, Boingo a book by Alan Michael Parker (Bookshop.org US/Necessary Fiction) wherein

Award-winning author Alan Michael Parker displays his love for playful narrative and breaking all the rules in Bingo Bango Boingo, a collection of flash fiction and stories told through Bingo cards

Flip the page. Choose your game. Is it "Community Garden Bingo"? "High School Reunion Bingo"? "Don't Hate Your Daddy Bingo"? Or are you finally ready for "Change Your Life Bingo"?

Featuring 40 Bingo cards, interspersed with flash fiction and an opportunity to try the Bingo game yourself, this is a wholly original collection. Delightful, unexpected, and tongue in cheek--they're stories, they're Bingo cards, they're wild, you'll like them.

Taking a look now at Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, its thesis is:

All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. But we suggest that plot might better be understood as an emotional strategy: a controlled burn of surprise, contradiction, revelation. And—we might add–especially, connection.

 Architecture and plotting makes me think of a criticism/comment about Thomas Hardy's plots being architectural. Hardy would never do what Davison and LaPlante suggest. 

First, what do we mean when we say “throw bombs”? We mean inserting any unanticipated event that is completely disconnected (on the surface, anyway) from what came before it.

There are two kinds of bombs: external and internal.

First, external: a surprising (even shocking) event beyond the control of the characters. An earthquake, tornado or some other act of God. Or a stranger or other unidentified character doing something out of the blue that completely disrupts the story.

***

Internal bombs are when an unexpected chain of events is put into motion—but instead of being random and uncontrolled, it can be directly (if subtly) caused by your character(s). In other words, due to who they are, they bring it on themselves.

Here you must be careful not to make it either obvious, or—at the other end of the scale—outrageously unbelievable. It can seem out of character (see nonconforming oddities in our first essay in this series) but it should also be attributable to a herethero unknown (unconscious, hidden) aspect of your character.

What both types of bombs have in common: they should leave you, the writer, with a problem: no idea what will happen next. If you turn your back on cliched or familiar reactions, this can be difficult. If traditional plotting devices are off bounds, you must consider how the bomb changes the characters, the theme, and the situation of the story in surprising yet convincing ways. (Thanks, EM Forster for that nugget of wisdom.). 

So, why cannot bombs be thrown in an anarchic way?

Davison and LaPlante write about using a character's emotions to drive a story:

The other plotting strategy we’d like to explore is when a story is driven, not by events, but by the emotional movement of a character. In our forthcoming book from W.W Norton, The Lab: Experiments Writing Across Genre, we use the example of Lydia Peelle’s story, “Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.”

You can chart the emotional progression of the story’s first-person protagonist as she navigates the loneliness and heartbreak of a divorce. But this is no cliched break-up story. Instead, you can see how the narrator goes through alternating moments of connection and disconnection as she struggles to heal emotionally. The tension between these coming-togethers and alienations from self and others is palpable, although nothing of real significance happens. And you’re often surprised by the things that connect versus the things that emotionally separate this narrator from other people, and the world. 

I can imagine doing this with fragments - the see-sawing of emotions, the triggers for those emotions, seem to be very conducive to fragmentary telling. Arias comes to mind.

But at the same time, I am wondering if what is being proposed above is all that new. Should I admit here being entranced by John Dos Passos? And by Ross Lockridge Jr? Dos Passos' USA Trilogy (you may also want to read The Modernist Mandate of Montage: John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., Soviet Film Theory, and the Novel) and Lockridge's Raintree County share some similar techniques that are fragmentary; more so with Dos Passos. (Regarding Dos Passos, I also checked out Alice BÉJA's Artfulness and Artlessness, the Literary and Political Uses of Impersonality in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy.)

Then are ideas that Milan Kundera put into his Art of the Novel - that the novel is expansive enough to include an essay, a short story. What I got all those years ago from Kundera was the limit was our imagination and the story needing told.

How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.

Notes on The Art of the Novel (Welcome to ME)

 I am remembering advice I gave to myself about 10, 12, years ago, best exemplified by the following:

sch 7/4

Although not a novel, after reading the review Autocorrect by Etgar Keret review – endlessly inventive short stories (The Guardian), I thought it worth putting in here.

In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he’s interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: “The world is about to end and I’m eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …” Or another: “The aliens’ spaceship arrived every Thursday.” In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: “The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said ‘Make A Wish’ in gold letters.”

sch 7/6 

Books and Writers: Learning From Foreigners, Vietnamese and Thomas Mann

I started this post with Thuy Dinh's Exile and Communion: Literature of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Words Without Borders). 

In their presumably adaptive, yet stoic and untethered states, multilingual or transnational even when they’re writing in Vietnamese, our contributors have more in common with Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Ágota Kristof than with Vietnamese American writers whose English-language narratives often illuminate the hard-toiled lives of US-based refugees from the former RVN. Our contributors’ personal backgrounds, on the other hand, span both North and South Vietnam, and reflect Vietnam’s domestic problems and global migration movements that took place from the 1970s to the 1990s. For example, Thường Quán was a scholarship student representing the soon-to-be-extinct RVN when he arrived in Australia in 1974; Nguyễn Đức Tùng and Trương Vũ were boat refugees who fled Vietnam during the dark years of the postwar period, and who resettled, respectively, in Canada and the US; Thuận, born in Hanoi during the escalation phase of the Vietnam War, studied in Russia in the 1980s before migrating to France; her husband, Trần Trọng Vũ, also Hanoi-born, left his birth city for Paris in 1989, on an art scholarship to further his training at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Đặng Thơ Thơ arrived in the US in 1992 via the Orderly Departure Program, designed to provide asylum seekers with a safe alternative to illegal departures. As most of these contributors had reached adulthood by the time they left Vietnam, their cultural identities are well-established, unlike other diasporic writers and artists of Vietnamese descent whose “ make-believe” roots are exuberantly or swaggeringly defined by linguistic distortions and generational ruptures.

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Trương Vũ seems more hopeful about art’s redemptive power. Meditating on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return in “The Rain in Weicheng,” he solemnly yearns for a reconciliation with the self, with history, and with art, at a time when Vietnam’s dizzying economic progress still has not healed all wounds from the war. Trương Vũ feels less alone when he sees his longing for peace reflected in well-known works of literature. For example, the bridge over the Drina in Ivo Andrić’s eponymous novel is not just a bridge that connects disparate cultures, i.e., Islamic, Jewish, and Christian, but also a dream passage that brings all exiles home. Accordingly, Trương Vũ considers his many returns to Vietnam as open-ended gestures of reconciliation, even if, or precisely because, some of these journeys turn out to be “failed” homecomings. The reference to Wang Wei’s poem “Morning Rain in Weicheng” in his essay embraces both the temporal and the eternal, for the poem acknowledges separation and departure but also affirms the beauty of friendship and community.

I will keep on trying to make the case that Americans need to see how we are seen from the outside; this includes American women and minority writers, and it certainly includes foreign writers. If this how they see, why do we not? If these themes interest them, how do these themes apply to us? If you think they do not, why not? I am too old to take these ideas very far, perhaps you can.

Then Englesberg Ideas published Morten Høi Jensen's Thomas Mann's cathedrals in prose. Mann is a foreign writer, he was an exile and, for a time, an immigrant to America. While I have not read as much of Mann as I could wish (Buddenbooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain are all I have read), I am in awe of him. Jensen reinforces and makes a good case for that awe.

Of all the great European novelists of the modernist period – James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka – Thomas Mann is perhaps the least loved, and in the Anglophone world certainly the least read. Laboured, ponderous, chillingly austere: the great cathedrals of his prose are ringed with reverent distance. He is not as impish as Joyce and never as intimate as Proust. Brecht quipped that meeting him was like having 2,000 years of culture looking down at you.

Yet there is something about Mann which makes me feel unexpectedly protective, partly out of compassion for the strange man himself, and partly out of admiration for the decades of daily exertion he put in at his desk even under the most savage external pressures. Born in Lübeck in 1875, his life was marked by the eruptions and upheavals of history: the First World War, the German Revolution, the Weimar Republic, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism. And though he was not a political writer in the narrower sense that his brother Heinrich was, neither can Mann’s fiction be isolated from Germany’s political development in the first half of the century. The Magic Mountain, completed in the years immediately after the First World War, took shape in a Munich wracked by revolution and right-wing terror, events that impressed themselves, obliquely, on the manuscript. Joseph and His Brothers, Mann’s retelling of the biblical story of exile, is impossible to read without considering Mann’s own exile from Nazi Germany in 1933.

I read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a teenager, and I have kept reading through the years. Proust and Mann I did not read until prison. I found out Proust to be fun. Nor would I denigrate Joyce or Proust, but Mann is somewhat easier to read than the others. Which is a bit of a deception. Proust maybe the writer of memory and emotions; Joyce may be the voice of Ireland crashing into modern history with wit and a high intellectual play; but Mann's deceptiveness is for me in how he writes about the clash of cultures, philosophy put on stage.

As the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote, ‘We’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain.’ And, let’s add, Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus Zeitblom, the ‘heroes’ of Doctor Faustus. But Thomas Mann did more than simply write about the cultural and spiritual transformations of German society in the early 20th century. He lived them. The reason that he became such a forceful foe of Nazism is because he shared the same intellectual and cultural roots. As he provocatively put it in a 1938 essay, Adolf Hitler was ‘a brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother’. This was echt Mann: at once self-aggrandising and self-incriminating. As Lukács said of him, he was always his own most ruthless judge. The distant, Olympian figure of Mann is misleading; in his pursuit of literary form, no writer revealed more of himself

Again, my questions apply, albeit perhaps more specifically here with the appearance of spirituality. Where is the American novel about our culture and spirit? The Great Gatsby? I fear that gets close to our  amorphous identities in the face of the monied class, without capturing our energy; I am also biased against Daisy as the ideal of an American man. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass captures the energy without touching on the more jagged and cutting edges of our culture; he is too soon for some of that, if not the issue of racism. And, yes, it is a poem, but it lets me segue into Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel and You Can't Go Home Again - which have the largesse of Whitmanesque energy, but my memory finds them parochial in scope - a family story. (It has been decades since I read Wolfe). Parochial brings to mind William Faulkner, not a term probably anyone else would use for him - because he is interrogating Southern culture against its own standards and pretensions; I do not think he does so against the broader American culture (oh, he can be seen as shedding light on American racism, but that is a by-blow, in my opinion; even as I have in mind Dilsey from The Sound and The Fury). Outside The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck is transposing allegory to California's working class, as I recall East of Eden. Theodore Dreiser looms large with ideas, but who would call him interested in the spiritual? Maybe towards the end of An American Tragedy; I find much of Fitzgerald's interest in money and class prefigured in Dreiser and, like Gatsby, Dreiser falls short in explicating American optimism in the face of capital. If satire critiques the failure of the ideal, of the spirit, then Sinclair Lewis should have reached the point that Mann did, but Lewis feels more like a muckraker than an American Jonathon Swift. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison may have been only able to critique an American ideal that threaten to crush them, if not kill them out right. Joyce Carol Oates may have been addressing the issues of American culture, only her works are so vast, it is hard to say. Oh, I almost forgot Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Auggie March - which has the energy, touching on some of American culture. The closest I can come is Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County; a novel gone onto obscurity. 

I did not intend to write that much. The words just spilled out. I can see why the writers I mention may not have been to touch on the ideas and the ways of Thomas Mann: Americans are too parochial, our perspectives too personal. White writers having no contact with minorities are without the means to include minorities into their writing. Women, African-American, working class, and other minority writers by definition cannot contain the majority culture, for all they understand that culture better than the majority; at best they can do is shame the majority by refusing to go away and not writing what appeases the majority culture. 

There may also be a technical problem. How to put together all the ideas in the ways that Mann did? John Dos Passos and Ross Lockridge use a fragmentary style - montage, to use a cinema term. That makes them hard to teach. It may also put their techniques into obscurity. The European ideas portrayed by Mann are more complicated by American fragmentation (sedimentation?), or it seems to me. Montage seems to me to have advantages for Americans.

Bruce Springsteen Gets It (Sheila Kennedy)

During a concert in Europe, Bruce Springsteen issued a criticism of Trump and his administration that generated a typically childish response from our thin-skinned autocrat. Springsteen’s comments–unlike Trump’s– displayed a fundamental understanding of what it means to be an American–“the union of people around a common set of values.” That union, he said, is “now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.”

Springsteen recognized an essential element of American identity, an element that MAGA appears incapable of comprehending: America is, and has always been, about a set of ideals.

And here I need to close. There are other things needing done - of a far more mundane nature!

sch 6/7