by Kim EdwardsReview by Ron Charles in The Washington Post
July 15, 2005
"Postpartum Blues"
Friday, July 06, 2007
July 2007: The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim EdwardsReview by Ron Charles in The Washington Post
July 15, 2005
"Postpartum Blues"
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
June 2007: The Winter of Our Discontent
Biography from www.steinbeck.orgJohn Ernst Steinbeck was born in
After graduating from
His first novel, Cup of Gold was published in 1929, but attracted little attention. His two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown, were also poorly received by the literary world.
Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning in 1930. They lived in
During World War II, Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches were later collected and made into Once There Was a War.
John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 “...for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.”
Throughout his life John Steinbeck remained a private person who shunned publicity. He died
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
April 2007: Atonement
"White Lies"Tom Shone
March 10, 2002
New York Times Book Review
Ian McEwan's stony-titled new novel, ''Atonement,'' opens with a scene of pastoral bliss. It is 1935, an English summer is in full swing and parallelograms of morning light are making their way across the floor of the Tallis family's country house, where everyone is busy preparing for the return of Leon, the oldest son. This is exciting news for his younger sister, Briony, who is putting on a production of her new play. It's not such good news for her older sister, Cecilia, who will have to face her childhood friend, Robbie, whom she spent most of her time at Cambridge pointedly ignoring, and secretly falling in love with. So far, then, ''Atonement'' would seem to have very little to atone for, unless you were to count an above-average chance of being made into a Merchant-Ivory film.
This in itself should be enough to have hardened McEwan fans anxiously flicking back to check that it is indeed his name on the dust jacket. Just a few novels ago, McEwan was offering useful tips on how best to saw through a human thigh bone (remove the trousers first), and his last novel, ''Amsterdam,'' which won the 1998 Booker Prize, ended with a mutual euthanasia pact. Try getting that past Emma Thompson's agent. Yet here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel -- irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit -- that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago.
Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust. There's that date for a start, four years distant from the onset of the war, but still a little too close for comfort. Then there's the arrival of Leon's friend, Paul Marshall, a Quilty-like bore whose gaze lingers on the Tallis girls just that fraction of a second too long. Then there's the small matter of Briony. Or perhaps not so small; at 13, Briony stands on the threshold of adolescence, with all its itchy self-dramatizing instincts and glamorous mood swings. Contemplating the loss of a favorite dress, ''Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead.''
Such fantasies seem harmless enough, and another novelist might have mined them for their charm alone, but McEwan has always had an eye on the darker veins that course through children's imaginations. His recent book for children, ''The Daydreamer,'' had a nice Roald Dahl-like streak of malice to it, and his adult fiction has always heeded the close alliance between creative and destructive impulses. When Briony's plans for her play are derailed, her dramatic instincts look to feed elsewhere, and they find scandalized sustenance in glimpsed intimacies between Robbie and Cecilia. Before the night is out, a crime will be committed, a lie told and a little girl who thought herself the heroine of her own drama will find herself playing the villain in someone else's. So much for the soft bloom of innocence.
It would be shame to divulge exactly what happens on that night -- one of the great things about McEwan is how much faith he has in the urgings of plot. His books have a natural 45-degree tilt, leaning forward, through a fog of mounting unease, toward claret-dark revelation. Interestingly, what stays with you afterward is the unease, not the revelation. Rereading his novel ''Black Dogs'' recently, I remembered that the climax involved some dogs -- black ones, as I recall -- but couldn't remember what it was the mutts got up to. This is not an insult; on the contrary, McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma -- for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities.
The events of that night, for instance, account for only half the plot of ''Atonement'': the rest is reaction, ripple, repair. When the action reopens a few years later, Robbie is dodging German shells in France, Cecilia is praying for his safe return and Briony, now estranged from the both of them and working as a nurse, is busy piecing together soldiers in a London hospital: ''Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red grapes forced up from the fissure.''
Beside inducing an immediate desire to skip lunch, such details serve as a handy reminder of the Ian McEwan of old -- the McEwan who was dubbed ''Ian Macabre'' by the British press. They also illustrate how far he has come since then; his early short-story collections delivered their doses of disquiet neat, without narrative frill. Set against arid landscapes of urban desiccation, and beneath a persistent fug of moral rot, his narrators (mostly teenage males) whiled away their time in feverish fantasy and morbid self-exploration. ''I saw my first corpse on Thursday,'' begins one story from McEwan's 1978 collection, ''In Between the Sheets.'' Another began, ''Eaters of asparagus know the scent it lends the urine.''
This tone of sequestered self-disgust -- a Brobdingnagian desire to explore the innermost crevices of the human body, and by extension, psyche -- is a very prevalent one in English fiction, at least among young male writers. Most grow out of it at some point; some never quite shake it off (Martin Amis was still giggling over excrement gags in his last full-length novel, ''The Information''), and some, like Will Self, never think to try. But almost from the word go there were signs that McEwan was heading somewhere different: there was a moral pressure behind his sentences, a sense of his turning his radar outward to probe mental states other than his own. Women played a key part in this socialization of his talent. In ''The Comfort of Strangers'' he wrote about the intricate dynamics of a relationship for the first time; in ''The Child in Time'' he anatomized a marriage broken by the loss of a child and then revitalized by the birth of another. In both books his male involutes bore an acute sensitivity toward the feelings of others that is the lucky prerogative of reformed self-obsessives: McEwan's empathy seemed born of his earlier self-absorbtion.
It was an important fight to win. Many novelists can write about obsession -- it goes with the territory, so to speak, chiming with the tunnel vision required to write in the first place -- but only the best writers can step to one side and see what obsession looks like from the outside, in all its instantly sobering foolishness. McEwan can. There is a scene in ''The Innocent,'' for instance, in which the protagonist -- a repressed Englishman embarking on his first sexual relationship -- ends up virtually raping his girlfriend. Events accelerate through a series of misunderstandings; every sign of her resistance he takes to be part of some mysterious game of sexuality whose rules have hitherto been hidden from him, and which he rushes to learn. Thus does innocence stumble headlong into the worst sort of experience, and a mild-mannered man become a shame-faced rapist.
This is McEwan's specialty: scenes of vertiginous escalation, in which events skid out of control, first gradually and then wildly, to a point that leaves his shell-shocked protagonists anxiously replaying those events in their heads to divine the wrong turn. It is never at the point they think, but invariably the one several steps back in the chain, or the very chaining of events itself, that is at fault. McEwan is, in other words, a world-class expert on human violence -- its rules, roots and reverberations -- and in his more recent work he has set his diagnostic skills to work on larger confrontations. ''The Innocent'' burrowed deep into cold war spy games, and ''Black Dogs'' was set against the fall of the Berlin Wall -- although on occasion these backdrops came across as just that: geopolitical scrims hung loosely at the back, significance upgrades.
''Atonement'' marks the second time that McEwan has returned to the subject of World War II -- the great ignored, unignorable subject for a generation of English novelists, who have on the whole preferred to deal with it obliquely, as Kazuo Ishiguro did in ''The Remains of the Day.'' You can understand why; to deal with the war head-on risks having your novel taken aesthetic hostage. But obliquity is not without its own risks -- namely, that of perusing global upheaval for its symbolic niceties or chordal thematics.
This time around, McEwan has got it right. He launches a two-pronged attack. As Robbie is caught up in the long humiliated column of British forces trudging back to Dunkirk, McEwan keeps his focus tight and hallucinatory. Robbie is half asleep as he marches, and his consciousness registers a series of roadside details -- corpses, craters, a shoe shop, the drone of insects or the more alarming drone of oncoming German fighters, which sharpen McEwan's prose into some of its characteristic split-second clarity: ''The broad spray of fire was advancing up the road at 200 miles an hour, a rattling hailstorm din of cannon rounds hitting metal and glass. No one inside the near-stationary vehicles had started to react. Drivers were only just registering the spectacle through their windscreens. They were where he had been seconds before.''
And then we have Briony's perspective on the results, as she tends to the wounded and the dying in London, seeking to salve their sundered flesh, in atonement for the damage she caused as a child. This may sound a little too symbolic, and it is, but the symbolism is Briony's not McEwan's, and the main reason she makes such a lousy nurse. Briony's atonement will instead lie elsewhere, in the fiction she writes at night, designed to ''show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive'' -- a noble aim that receives slight amendment from none other than Cyril Connolly, who writes, in a gracious rejection letter: ''Your most sophisticated readers might be well up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I'm sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens.''
Normally, one might balk at this sort of self-product placement: a novelist lays down, within a novel, aesthetic prescriptions that just happen to be perfectly embodied by the novel he has just written. But we'll let it pass this once, for the virtues subscribed to by Briony are a perfect fit for McEwan's: if it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and ''Atonement'' your novel. It is his most complete and compassionate work to date.Tuesday, February 27, 2007
March 2007: About Alice
"Scenes from a Marriage"
by Peter Stevenson
New York Times Book Review
January 14, 2007
With the 21st-century profusion of first-person narrative nonfiction — between the covers of books and in the pages of magazines and newspapers and, most recently, in the glut of blogs like so many glowworms illuminating a constellation of iMacs and BlackBerries and Treos — the modern reader can be forgiven for approaching the first-person pronoun with trepidation, as if that skyscraping rune “I” were a sequoia about to come crashing down on the reader’s head. (Would that the groaning shelf of memoirists had realized that Tom Wolfe’s diagnosis of the “Me Decade” was a warning, not an exhortation to go forth and multiply oneself!)
To read a first-person narrative too often involves being clamped in an embrace by a writer who means well but insists on meaning too much. The banality of ego.
And yet.
Sometimes we come across a piece of first-person writing that shocks us back into a restorative innocence vis-Ã -vis the human heart. The secret of Calvin Trillin’s slim but walloping book, “About Alice,” is that its structure follows the contours of an old-fashioned piece of reportage, using a scrim of detachment to build tension and, when that is pulled aside, revealing an underlying core of enchantment. “About Alice” is an unabashed love letter to Trillin’s wife, Alice, who died in 2001 at the age of 63 while awaiting a heart transplant, after a battle with lung cancer 25 years previously had left her heart weakened by radiation.
This book can be seen as a worthy companion piece to other powerful accounts of spousal grief published in the last decade: Joan Didion’s tale of John Gregory Dunne’s fatal heart attack, John Bayley’s memoir of Iris Murdoch’s decline from Alzheimer’s and Donald Hall’s narration of Jane Kenyon’s death from leukemia.
For decades, Trillin has propelled himself as the bumbling leading man through books on food — he’s a prodigious eater — travel and Americana, while remaining teasingly enigmatic and out of reach, safely reclining on the dry banks of wit. It’s hard to think of another writer who delivers so much pleasure, sentence for sentence. In “Travels With Alice”: “It was at that moment that I realized something essential about American travel: Americans drive across the country as if someone’s chasing them.” Johnny Carson found him irresistible, and had him on “The Tonight Show” more than 30 times.
In “About Alice,” rather than memorialize his own grief, he returns Alice to the world before he met her — back to the Wellesley-educated, Hofstra University English teacher Trillin fell in love with at a party for a political satire magazine in 1963. “When I saw Alice at that Monocle party, she was wearing a hat. At least, I’ve always remembered her as wearing a hat. She later insisted that she’d never owned a hat of the sort I described. Maybe, but I can still see her in the hat — a white hat, cocked a bit to the side.”
When “About Alice” appeared in shorter form in The New Yorker last spring, people couldn’t wait to tell their friends to read it. Trillin had written about a marriage in which neither partner seems to have done any grievous or even subtle harm to the other. It was as if he had traveled out beyond familiar territory and brought back a moon rock, something worthy of preserving.
And you could tell: he and Alice had a ball. Weeks after their first meeting, he pursued her to another party: “At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. ... Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, ‘You have never again been as funny as you were that night.’
“ ‘You mean I peaked in December of 1963?’ I’d say, 20 or even 30 years later.
“ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ”
Trillin leaves no doubt he was smitten with his wife, as were others. He writes: “At parties, she often attracted what I called ‘guys smoking pipes,’ who wanted to impress her with their suavity or intellectual range. ‘He wasn’t smoking a pipe, by the way,’ she’d say, knowing just which guy I was talking about when I mentioned ‘that guy with a pipe’ as we discussed a party on the way home.”
In 1976 Alice — who’d never smoked but grew up with a chain-smoking mother and cigar-smoking father — coughed up a spot of blood. Ten days later she had a lobe of her left lung removed. A doctor told Trillin there was a 10 percent chance she’d survive beyond a year or two. But she did and she returned to her life as a wife and mother of two girls and to a career that included producing arts programming for PBS. Years later, Trillin writes, “I was walking through an airport to catch a plane back to New York when, apropos of nothing, the possibility that things could have gone the other way in 1976 burst into my mind. I could see myself trying to tell my girls that their mother was dead. I think I literally staggered. I sat down in the nearest chair. I wasn’t in tears. I was in a condition my father would have called poleaxed. A couple of people stopped to ask if I was all right. I must have said yes. After a while, the pictures faded from my mind. I walked to the gate and caught my flight to New York. Alice was there. The girls were there. Everything was all right.”
If the marriage as described seems somewhat formal, that may be because Trillin, now 71, came of age at a time predating the supposition that a man will enter a relationship armed with the daggers and consolations of psychological insight. Trillin grew up in Kansas City, Mo., the son of a grocer whose advice was “You might as well be a mensch.” He attended Yale in the 1950s (“I remember realizing in my sophomore year that I had arrived at Yale never having heard of either Dostoyevsky or Greenwich”). His book “Remembering Denny” (1993) unpacks that tightly laced era through the eyes of one of its casualties, Roger Hansen, known as Denny, a Yale golden boy — Life covered his graduation — who committed suicide at 55. The story is one of class, privilege, a hidden sex life — and yet there is nothing lurid in Trillin’s telling, perhaps because he trained at William Shawn’s New Yorker. Likewise in “About Alice,” Trillin chooses not to mention the uncanny date of Alice’s death: Sept. 11, 2001.
As the condolence letters arrived, Trillin realized his readers didn’t know Alice beyond her persona as the “voice of reason, the sensible person who kept everything on an even keel despite the antics of her marginally goofy husband.”
“They may not have known her,” he writes, “but they knew how I felt about her. It surprised me that they had managed to divine that from reading stories that were essentially sitcoms. Even after I’d taken in most episodes of ‘The Honeymooners,’ after all, it had never occurred to me to ponder the feelings Ralph Kramden must have had for Alice Kramden. Yet I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’ ”
Thursday, February 22, 2007
"A Man Worth Knowing"
http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2006/05/
Friday, January 26, 2007
February 2007: John Adams
David McCullough"Plain Speaking"
by Pauline Maier
New York Times Book Review
May 27, 2001
David McCullough set out initially to write a joint biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But he worried, as he explained to lecture audiences over the past few years, that Adams could not hold his own with Jefferson. Once he started doing research, his concern shifted. Could Jefferson stand up to Adams? McCullough's biography of Adams inevitably has a lot to say about Jefferson, but on virtually all points of comparison between the two men, Jefferson comes in second.
McCullough's preference is part of a trend. As Jefferson's reputation has gone into something of a decline, appreciation for John Adams has soared. For example, Joseph J. Ellis, the author of ''Founding Brothers'' and of books on both Jefferson and Adams, makes no secret of his partiality toward Adams. On the scale of historical judgments, this reversal of standing is revolutionary. Jefferson's pre-eminence has lasted, with some ups and downs, for two centuries, and rumors of its end are surely premature. But why has Adams at last become so competitive a rival?
The hero of McCullough's ''John Adams'' is curiously reminiscent of Harry S. Truman, the straight-speaking Missourian whom McCullough celebrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography nine years ago. The descendant of farmers from Braintree, Mass., Adams loved to talk and always said exactly what he thought. Like Truman, who ''never tried to appear as something he was not,'' Adams remained true to his origins: his hands, McCullough says, were those of a man ''accustomed to pruning his own trees, cutting his own hay and splitting his own firewood.'' Similarly, throughout a long life, his wife, Abigail, did her own sewing and baking, fed her own ducks and chickens and churned her own butter. Abigail read widely but spoke like a Yankee: she said ''Canady'' for Canada, ''set'' for sit, ''aya'' for yes. So did John, though McCullough doesn't say so. In the 1850's, the first editor of Adams's writings, his grandson Charles Francis Adams, carefully corrected his language, excising expressions like ''he eat strawberries'' or ''she ain't obliged'' in an effort to fit John Adams into a heroic mode. It was hopeless; Adams was too obstreperously real to be idealized.
Yet few men, McCullough argues, contributed more to the early history of the United States. In 1776, Adams was, in Jefferson's words, ''the colossus of independence,'' the delegate most responsible for the Continental Congress's adopting independence. As a diplomat in Europe during the 1780's, he secured a loan from the Dutch without which, McCullough suggests, the Revolution might have failed. He served as vice president ''with unfailing loyalty to Washington,'' whose administration he supported by casting a still unmatched 31 tie-breaking votes in the Senate. In his own presidency, McCullough says, Adams ''achieved a rare level of statesmanship'' by beginning peace negotiations with the French Republic, an act of reconciliation that alienated many Federalist supporters and jeopardized his chance of re-election in 1800. On one contested issue after another over the course of his career -- his insistence as an American emissary that France could stop British resistance to American independence by deploying its navy along the coast of North America; his early suspicion of the French Revolution; his hearty support for an American Navy -- Adams proved right in the end.
Above all, however, McCullough's appreciation for Adams, like his appreciation for Truman, depends on an adherence to certain old-fashioned moral guidelines, which is to say on strength of character. All contemporary observers affirm Adams's scrupulous honesty: he was, as the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush testified, ''a stranger to dissimulation.'' Adams also shared with his wife a powerful sense of public duty, which they fulfilled despite great financial and emotional sacrifice.No one, and certainly not John Adams, made a fortune serving the United States in the late 18th century: ''All my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years,'' Adams observed in 1777, were ''not . . . sufficient to pay a laboring man on a farm.'' The Adamses' financial welfare depended on their Massachusetts farm, which Abigail managed even in trying circumstances with great skill. As a result, for all but a few exceptional years during Adams's long public career, he and Abigail lived dutifully but miserably apart.
In fact, McCullough is able to tell the extraordinary love story that threads through ''John Adams'' because the couple had so often to communicate through letters, which they saved. Abigail was John's partner in every sense: she not only managed the family's finances but was his greatest supporter, his most trusted political adviser and a source and object of immense affection. She pushed women's traditional domestic role to its outermost limits without questioning it: ''I believe nature has assigned each sex its particular duties and sphere of action,'' she once wrote, ''and to act well your part, 'there all the honor lies.' ''
Acting her part well demanded that she ''sacrifice to my country'' the comfort of John's presence, a loss that she accounted among her ''greatest misfortunes.'' Eventually John's need for Abigail overcame all other considerations, and he asked her to join him. ''I must go to you or you must come to me,'' he wrote to her from France; ''I cannot live without you.'' In 1793, when they had been married for almost 30 years, Abigail commented that time subdued ''the ardor of passion'' and left in its place a deep-rooted, enduring ''friendship and affection.'' But John's ardor seemed slow to cool. Once, after she mentioned that he was 60 years old, he replied that ''if I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above 40.''
Adams, a short, chunky New Englander and a combative, nonstop talker, might seem the antithesis of Jefferson, a tall, thin Virginian who rarely spoke in public, ''abhorred dispute'' and, when involved in political controversies, preferred to act covertly. Their lives, though, were inextricably intertwined. They fought together for independence in 1776, worked as a diplomatic team in Europe during the 1780's and carried on a wonderful correspondence from 1812 until their deaths on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Even in the 1790's, when Adams and Jefferson became politically estranged, McCullough observes, they had much in common. Both distrusted Alexander Hamilton and wanted peace with France.
Honesty and consistency, however, were not among Jefferson's strengths. He tailored comments to their recipients, even to the point of contradicting himself. When confronted with embarrassing accusations, McCullough demonstrates, Jefferson was not above denying responsibility for things he had done. Jefferson's public dedication also fell short of Adams's. For personal reasons, both wanted desperately to leave the Congress -- then the country's entire national government -- in the summer of 1776. But the war was going badly. Finally, on Sept. 3, after some weeks' delay, Jefferson, who had been in Philadelphia since mid-May, set out for Monticello. The next day Adams, who had been at Congress since February, wrote Abigail that the nation's needs demanded his service -- and he remained at work until mid-October. A year later, when only 20 delegates sat in Congress, a homesick Adams was there again, trying to increase attendance. ''Your country is not quite secure enough to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life,'' he wrote Jefferson, who remained resolutely at home. (''When I attend on my own feelings,'' Adams confessed, he could not blame him.) Later Adams left Abigail behind to serve the United States in France; Jefferson accepted a diplomatic assignment only after his wife had died. ''Never once,'' McCullough notes, did Adams refuse a mission for his country ''because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.''
Their financial habits also distinguished the two men. Jefferson was ''a chronic acquirer.'' He had such fun shopping in Philadelphia, Paris and London that no one would guess he had an intellectual disdain for cities. Jefferson rented elegant homes, then went into debt to remodel them, and was prepared to sell some of his slaves if their labor could not pay off his obligations. By contrast, the Adamses lived simply to make ends meet, and when Abigail expanded the house the Adamses acquired in Quincy, Mass., she paid for it out of savings. John Adams's net worth at death was about $100,000; Jefferson left an estate over $100,000 in arrears. His slaves, furniture and farm equipment were auctioned off, and Monticello had to be sold ''for a fraction of what it had cost.''
Even Jefferson's political achievements come out second best. McCullough gives Jefferson credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence, which he invested with ''grace and eloquence . . . superbly and in minimum time.'' But can the work of a few days outweigh the more substantive, sustained work of Adams on behalf of independence? If Adams had not delivered the votes, Jefferson's draft would have been at best a historical curiosity. Even the outstanding event of Jefferson's presidency, the Louisiana Purchase, depended, McCullough observes, on peace with France -- which Adams had won.
McCullough's reckoning all but ignores the irascibility that undermined Adams's reputation among his contemporaries. Franklin once described him as ''sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.'' His enemies claimed that Adams was subject to ''paroxysms of anger'' or ''actually insane.'' Even Abigail admitted he was irritable (though she described that as his single flaw). McCullough claims that Adams's ''outbursts of temper'' occurred only in ''private confrontations'' and plays down or explains away instances of extreme public behavior (his strange insistence that Washington be called ''His Majesty the President,'' his predawn flight from Washington on Jefferson's inaugural day). The result is an admirable but curiously flat John Adams.
Yet for some historians, Ellis above all, Adams's fiery temperament and resolute contrarianism are part of his charm. After his retirement, for example, Adams denounced the tendency to make demigods of men like Washington and Franklin and, an old Puritan to the end, called for a second Protestant Reformation to wash away such idolatry. The Revolution, Adams insisted, was a collective enterprise of ordinary people punctuated by division and acrimony at every step. In 1811, he confessed ''a very great secret'' to a young American: ''As far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe we were better than you are.'' He insisted that there was more talent among Americans of the 1820's than those of the 1770's, and that the young were eminently capable of securing the liberties for which his generation had fought. How can we fail to love that crotchety old man? The capacities he affirmed are ours.
John Adams doubted that historians would ever record the history of the Revolution accurately. Now, 175 years after his death, we can at last give Adams the esteem he deserves. It remains true nonetheless that the wonderfully congenial subject of McCullough's carefully researched, lovingly written biography is more consistently companionable, and also less interesting, than John Adams was in his own time.* You can also listen to a 24-minute audio interview with David McCullough from 2001. (It's on the NYT site, and may require login. )
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
January 2007: The Power of One
Bryce Courtenay"Everything but Sex (Lack of Time)"
by Christopher Lehman-Haupt
New York Times Book Review
June 19, 1999
If a shrewdly programmed computer were to design the ultimate international best seller, it couldn't do much better than this first novel by Bryce Courtenay, an advertising man from Sydney, Australia.
On almost any scale of measurement, ''The Power of One'' has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; snakes, bats and Nazis; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama in the boxing ring and disasters in a copper mine. It's even got a Jewish joke: Why did the piece of bread dropped by the little cobbler in the shtetl fall with the honeyed side up? Because he had honeyed it on the wrong side.
In fact, the only thing missing in ''The Power of One'' is sex. And this lack can't be attributed to any modesty on the author's part. It's just that Mr. Courtenay's hero hasn't time for sex. He's too busy growing up and triumphing over the incredible odds against him.
Any summary of ''The Power of One'' is bound to make it sound unbelievable. Its 5-year-old hero, a South African boy of English descent known simply as Peekay, seems a little on the young side to be torn away from his Zulu nanny and sent to a boarding school where he is brutally persecuted by the older Afrikaners for the role of his presumed ancestors in the Boer War.
There's a comic-book quality to the way Peekay's scrawny pet chicken, Granpa Chook, tries to protect his master and to the violence with which Granpa Chook is killed by the Afrikaner known as the Judge, who has tattooed his arm with a swastika in anticipation of Adolf Hitler's arrival in South Africa.
And the prose can be irritatingly cute and sentimental. ''By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.''
Still, Peekay's story races along. His family gets him released from the terrible school. On the train going home he meets a boxer who inspires him to become the welterweight champion of the world. At home, he is befriended by a botanist and musician named Karl von Vollensteen whom Peekay calls Doc and who tells Peekay to stand on one leg and say: ''No matter what has happened bad, today I'm finished being sad. Absoloodle!''
When World War II begins and Doc gets arrested for being a German alien, Peekay is allowed to pay regular visits to the prison, where he discovers a boxing team and a half-caste inmate named Geel Piet who is willing to train him in exchange for certain favors.
Despite your better instincts you get involved in ''The Power of One.'' You accept Mr. Courtenay as a natural if somewhat naive storyteller, and the incredibility of it all begins to dissolve. What did the trick for this reader happened to be Doc's speech to Peekay's born-again Christian mother on the subject of the cactus. ''God and I have no quarrels, madame,'' Doc says. ''The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. . . . It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants, surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.''
But for other readers the hook may be the moment when Peekay, as a 6-year-old, boxes his first three rounds and wins. Or when his coach, Geel Piet, is secretly beaten to death by a racist prison administrator. Or when Peekay first discovers the Power of One, ''that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out.''
Or when Doc von Vollensteen gives a piano concert for the prisoners and plays for them his newly composed ''Concerto for the Great Southland,'' which incorporates the melodies of the inmates' various tribal songs: ''Never had a composer's work had a stranger debut and never a greater one. Eventually the composition would be played by philharmonic and symphony orchestras around the world, accompanied by some of the world's most famous choirs, but it would never sound better than it did under the African moon in the prison yard when 350 black inmates lost themselves in their pride and love for their tribal lands.''
According to the novel's concluding biographical note, Mr. Courtenay was born in South Africa, was educated there and in England and, in 1958, immigrated to Australia, where he went into the advertising business. If the old cliche is true that copywriters are frustrated novelists, then Mr. Courtenay should be ''finished being sad,'' as Doc von Vollensteen would say.
Absoloodle!December 2006: Bel Canto
Ann Patchett"Uninvited Guests Wearing You Down? Listen to Opera."
by Janet Maslin
New York Times Book Review
May 31, 2001
In a novel that begins with a kiss and absolutely deserves one, the most powerful electronics executive in Japan is invited to celebrate his birthday in a South American country. This place is unnamed and, as will be instantly demonstrated, unstable. Midway through the lavish party, terrorists appear and take the guests hostage, including the most celebrated person on the premises.
The whole birthday event was contrived as a bribe in hope that a factory would be built by Mr. Hosokawa, the music-loving founder and chairman of the Nansei Corporation. And his precious birthday gift had arrived in the form of the world-renowned lyric soprano Roxane Coss. She is a great beauty, with a voice that makes listeners melt, and said to ''make Callas look like a spear carrier'' in the bargain.
''Italy, England and America,'' the astounded diva chants to herself as the terrorists take over, vowing never to take on lucrative but iffy singing jobs outside those three reliable nations again. As for the other guests, forced to the floor, they begin to talk and murmur ''until the room became a cocktail party in which everyone was lying prone.'' And somehow, what initially looked like a frightening situation becomes instead a peculiarly entrancing one, as it becomes clear that partygoers, generals and guerrillas will all be trapped for an indefinite period in the vice president's mansion. The president, whom the terrorists had hoped to capture, had been otherwise engaged because his favorite soap opera was on television.
Now it is real opera that becomes foremost in this elegantly alluring book, as the international group of detainees find that music has become their common language. The one thing they share is rapture at the beauty of Roxane's voice, and rest assured that she knows how to use it. When one of the generals in charge of the siege tries to deny Roxane a box of sheet music, she says to Mr. Hosokawa's translator (who is suddenly the most valuable person on the premises): ''Tell him that's it. Either he gives me that box right now or you will not hear another note out of me or that piano for the duration of this failed social experiment.''
''Really?'' the translator asks.
''I don't bluff,'' Roxane answers.
One of the delightful things about the way ''Bel Canto'' unfolds is the way Ann Patchett uses the ordeal of entrapment to locate unexpected resources in her characters, like Roxane's new leadership potential. Another surprising quality to emerge, in a book that works both as a paean to art and beauty and a subtly sly comedy of manners, is the flair that the host shows for running the household, once he realizes that being taken hostage has ruined his political career. ''With a dish towel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a charming hotel concierge. He would ask, 'Would you like some tea?' He would ask, 'Would it be too much of an imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting?' Everyone was very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the vice president of the country.''
As the book moves along and a new, impromptu civilization is born beneath the vice president's roof, Ms. Patchett, whose earlier books include ''The Patron Saint of Liars'' and ''The Magician's Assistant,'' lets her characters' new lives bloom like flowers. The quality of enchantment even goes so far as to let one of the soldiers, after all the female hostages except Roxane have been freed, turn out to be a beautiful young woman named Carmen. Fair enough, a book with opera in its soul needs a Carmen, even if this one has never heard such singing before. And even if she is here mostly to fall in love with the Japanese translator during 2 a.m. language lessons in the china closet. Although this novel is entirely housebound, at the vice presidential mansion, Ms. Patchett works wonders to avoid any sense of claustrophobia and keeps the place fresh at every turn.
''The soldiers spent most of their days exploring the house, eating the pistachio nuts they found in the pantry, sniffing the lavender hand lotion in the bathroom,'' she writes, while the library full of leather furniture and leather-bound books ''had the comforting and familiar smell of cows standing in the hot sun.'' For all the 58 people who are ultimately trapped here, this place comes to represent both an end and a beginning, a chance to experience the aesthetic and the sensual, to fall in love with music and experience, while their lives hang in the balance. Like Mr. Hosokawa, who once felt that ''the records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love,'' they spend every moment of this crisis in a state of being newly alive.
Monday, October 02, 2006
October 2006: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
I ran across an online course syllabus for a graduate-level English class at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign called "20th Century American Bestsellers," and it has some interesting notes about the novel, submitted as part of a student's assignment, I believe. Here's the site if you're interested. I'll post some relevant text below:
Contemporary Reception:
While the majority of critics of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn indulgently praised Betty Smith's first novel, others expressed only reluctant approval or no approval at all. What little conflict existed among 1943 reviews primarily dealt with doubts about the book's literary value. Skepticism was partially founded on the fact that Smith, a novice novelist, had yet to be established as a writer or literary fiction. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn suffered from accusations of following a predictable pattern of events that were woven together in an overly sentimental fashion. The vague sexual incidents in the novel also stirred up mild controversy among the more conservative critical minds of mid-20th-century America.
Margaret Winning in Commonwealth summed up popular opinion of the book by describing it as "Beauty, wholesome philosophy, and honesty intermingled with stark realism, poverty, and continued struggle." Favorable, almost doting descriptions such as these were nearly ubiquitous. Meyer Berger in New Republic called the book "a faithful picture of a part of Brooklyn that was mostly slums and misery. The picture is softened by almost poetic handling." The manner in which Smith gently yet truthfully exposed the poverty of her characters won her acclaim from the political arena as well. An anonymously authored excerpt from The New York Times called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "a remarkably good first novel," and inferred that it was a revolutionary advance in the literary world. "The author sees the misery, squalor, and cruelty of slum life but sees them with understanding, pity, and sometimes with hilarious humor. A welcome relief from the latter-day fashion of writing about slum folk as if they were all brutalized morons."
Interspersed with this positive feedback were statements of doubt concerning the morality and literary merit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Some reviewers such as Margaret Winning in Commonwealth worried that the novel's "stark realism" was perhaps too stark, meaning that Smith's "wholesome philosophy" was accompanied by rather unwholesome sexual "incidents" that "may be too realistic for some readers." In critique of the novel's literary qualities, an anonymous article in Booklist reluctantly conceded that "as literary genre the book is interesting" but went on to say "the progress of the family from rags to riches could stand considerable blue pencilling." Rosemary Dawson in The New Yorker offered considerable praise of the beginning part of the novel, going so far as to call it "a beautiful and moving piece of work." Her disappointment with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a work of literature was found in the end of the novel, where she accused it of taking on "more the mechanics of the usual popular piece of fiction." The most scathing criticism by far came from Diana Trilling in Library Journal:
"I am a little bewildered by so much response to so conventional a little book… I have seen 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' compared to the novels of James Farrell, and all to the credit of Miss Smith's novel. This makes me very sad both for the condition of fiction reviewing and for Mr. Farrell, whatever his faults as a novelist of stature. Of course Francie Nolan's story is more cheerful than Danny O'Neill's and a more popular commodity, but surely popular taste should be allowed to find its emotional level without being encouraged to believe that a 'heart-warming' experience is a serious literary experience."
Cumulative Reviews:
Diana Trilling, Library Journal, May 1, 1943
New York Times, August 22, 1943
Book Week, August 22, 1943
Weekly Book Review, August 22, 1943
Rosemary Dawson, New Yorker, August 24, 1943
Springfield Republican, August 29, 1943
F.H. Bullock, Time, September 6, 1943
Meyer Berger, New Republic, September 6, 1943
Katharine Jocher, Saturday Review of Literature, September 11, 1943
Booklist, September 1943
Margaret Winning, Commonwealth, September 17, 1943
America Chapel, Atlantic, October 1943
New Yorker, October 9, 1943
Saturday Review of Literature, October 16, 1943
E.M.B., Social Forces, December 1943
Orville Prescott, Wisconsin Library Bulletin, October 1943
Yale Review, Autumn 1943
New York Times Magazine, December 12, 1943
New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1944
New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1944
New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1944
Publishers Weekly, May 27, 1944
Collier's, March 10, 1945
Sources:
Book Review Digest. 39th Annual Cumulation. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1944.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 14. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1945.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 15. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1947.
Biography
Betty Smith was born as Elizabeth Wehner near the turn of the century in Brooklyn, New York. There is a discrepancy concerning the exact date of her birth. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, she was born on December 15th, 1896. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, she was born 4 days later on December 19th. According to the Library of Congress' records, Betty was born 8 years later in 1904, although her daughters claim the earlier year, which is inscribed on her tombstone, is the correct one.
Betty was the oldest child of German immigrants John and Catherine Hummel Wehner. Her father died when she was twelve, and her mother later married an Irish immigrant named Michael Keogh. Desperate household economic conditions forced Betty to quit school and join the work force shortly after her father's death. As a fourteen-year-old with merely an eighth grade education, she found herself working at factory, office, and retail jobs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In addition to learning to cook, sew, and dance at the Jackson Street settlement house, Betty developed an avid interest in the theater. In her spare time, she acted in several plays at the Williamsburg YMCA and she composed about seventy short dramatic plays.
The date of Betty's first marriage is also uncertain. In either 1913 or 1914, she married her childhood friend George H. E. Smith. The couple moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where George studied law at the University of Michigan. Permission was granted for Betty to enroll in the University as a special student between 1921 and 1922, and also between 1927 and 1931. During this time, Betty gave birth to two daughters named Nancy and Mary. She took every writing course offered at the University, but never earned a degree. In either 1930 or 1931 (the date is once again uncertain), Betty won the University's first annual Avery Hopwood Award and received $1000 for her play "Francie Nolan."
Shortly thereafter, the four members of the Smith family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Betty continued to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, where for three years she studied under George P. Baker, Walter P. Eaton, and John Mason Brown and participated in Federal Theater projects. In 1934, the family moved to Detroit where Betty wrote features for the Detroit Free Press. After divorce ended her marriage in 1938, Betty and her daughters moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While studying at the University of North Carolina, she earned a meager income by writing and acting for small local plays.
In her spare time, Betty wrote an autobiographical manuscript roughly based on her own childhood experiences. She entered this 1000-page manuscript in a Harper and Brothers writing contest. The publishing company coerced Betty to condense the manuscript into a 400-page novel that she decided to title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Published in 1943, the novel sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks and immediately found itself at the top of bestseller lists everywhere. During the first month of publication, Betty married the assistant editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Joseph Piper Jones.
Betty wrote three other novels, none of which achieved similar success to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, though her second novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better, was a bestseller for 1948. Her third novel, Maggie-Now was published in 1958, seven years after she divorced her second husband, and one year after she married her third and final husband, Robert Finch, an old friend. Her last novel, Joy in the Morning, was written in 1963, two years after Finch's death.
Secluded from the public, Betty passed away on January 17th, 1972 in Shelton, Connecticut. She left behind an unfinished autobiography that was never published. These and other manuscripts remain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
"The Tree Still Grows in Brooklyn"
January 3, 1999
By Robert Cornfield
Betty Smith was five years older than her creation, Francie Nolan, who was born in 1901. Francie was the tree that grew in Brooklyn, the one that blossomed out of the pavements, whose strength was not recognized because the breed was so common. ''It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' published in 1943, was an immediate best seller, and since then has become for its devoted readers a treasured rite of passage. A friend told me it was where she first learned at 12 about sex. Another reader was dismayed to realize that her mother had purloined incidents from Francie's childhood and made them her own, telling her daughter tales from the book as if she had lived them herself. The novelist Helen Schulman would read the book again and again, never finishing, each time starting from the beginning so that for her the book never ended.
Francie is the tree, and so is the book itself. It is, tested by time, one of the most cherished of American novels, recording in its powerful fashion the first years of this century in a breeding place of American genius, Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In the novel's period these neighborhoods were mostly populated by a poverty-level mix of the two great waves of immigrants, the Irish and the Germans of the mid-19th century and the East European Jews and Italians who followed. In another novel, ''Maggie-Now,'' Smith names the whole neighborhood: ''There were so many races; so many creeds and sects all huddled together in an area not more than a mile square. The people called each other names: Mick, Heinie, Guinea, Hunky, Polack, Wop, Sheeny, Squarehead, Bohunk, Chick and Greaseball. They called the few Indians, who they believed were really Gypsies, niggers.''
Francie is second-generation American. Her father, Johnny Nolan, has an Irish background, while that of her mother, Katie Rommely, is Austrian. Yet the streets, the food, the jobs, the morals, loose and strict (a mother and her illegitimate child are stoned), the apartments are common memories. And the veracity of the tale was remarked on by reviewers right away: it is in Smith's sharp memory for detail -- for the size and weight of tin cans, for the differences in butcher shops, for the shoes of the aged. Today, Williamsburg is a mostly Hispanic and Italian neighborhood. The tenements have been replaced with housing developments, but its main thoroughfares, if you look above the storefronts, are much the same as they were for Francie. The public and parochial schools, the churches, the library, the synagogues (some of them converted to other uses) are there still. A local library has a banner proclaiming Brooklyn's finest writers: Walt Whitman, Maurice Sendak, Marianne Moore, Richard Wright and Betty Smith. Siegel Street, where Smith tells us ''Jewtown'' began, now has an alternate name -- Via San Vicente Pallotti -- and nearby Graham Avenue (Smith described it as Ghetto Street, filled with pushcarts) is also known as Via Vespucci. Life, if not swell, is better there now -- neighboring Bedford Stuyvesant or Bushwick might tell another tale, one closer to that of Smith's novel.
When I was young I avoided the book, though I always liked the 1945 film adaptation, directed by Elia Kazan, its plot reworked intelligently by the novelist and screenwriter Tess Slesinger and her husband, Frank Davis, who sharpened the character of the mother and shortened the time frame. It was a girl's book, and I preferred the swashbuckling novels of Rafael Sabatini and books about collies or German shepherds. From them I moved on to ''Look Homeward, Angel'' and never returned to ''adolescent'' literature. I've come late to ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' and though its intense study of a mother-daughter relationship still categorizes it as a ''girl's book,'' I was wrong to hold out. But then again maybe the book has grown better since its first appearance. Some books do. Certainly, the novel has grand ambitions. It is nothing less than a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and Smith set out not only to record a young life but to show where a writer's ambition and will come from. It is a story of triumph over adversity. Francie, spat upon, ridiculed, molested, betrayed by her first love, trusts her imagination to save her. Of her education, Smith says, ''Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district.'' The librarian, who ''hated children,'' notices nothing about the girl working her way down the shelves from A to Z. Just before her graduation, Francie's teacher advises her to burn her essays about her father and ''poverty, starvation and drunkenness'' and instead to write of ''the true nobility of man.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'' is Francie's revenge. Yet the mean social existence she dramatizes is countered by Francie's family inheritance: Johnny Nolan's romantic spirit and Katie's refusal to be beaten. Francie's illiterate maternal grandmother instructs Katie in what will make for success in America: the children must know how to read and write, and they must believe in heaven so they will have something to hope for; every day read them one page of the Bible and Shakespeare, and put money in a tin can nailed to the floor so that one day you will own some property (the property turns out to be Johnny Nolan's cemetery plot).
The book is a social document with the power of Jacob Riis's photographs. It gives the detail that illuminates the past -- the coffee pot, the air shaft, the barber's cup, chalking strangers on Halloween. But it is the book's emotional life that has kept it in print. Though the recording angel, its center of consciousness, is Francie, the dramatic center is her mother, Katie, filled with ambivalences that will determine the lives of her children. The study of Katie is bold, deadly, without sentiment: a disenchanted mother who without hatred wishes the alcoholic husband dead (''He's worthless, worthless. And God forgive me for ever finding it out''), and who coolly plots her future once he is out of the way. The mother who acknowledges her preference for her son over her daughter -- she loves him more -- but who depends on her daughter's salary and who asks her forgiveness. It is the mother who says of the daughter: ''She does not love me the way the boy loves me. . . . She does not understand me.'' Smith's achievement is to make this woman's steely resolve, her fierce sense of reality, her struggle with her own character, not only comprehensible but admirable. The novel's famous set pieces are Katie's labor pains, the attempted rape of Francie, Francie's graduation flowers from her dead father, and Aunt Sissy, who works in a condom factory (a 1950 Broadway musical version made her the protagonist), faking pregnancy: she claimed the reason she wasn't ''showing'' in front was that the baby she was carrying was in the back.
The book's determination to fill in all the details, to get everyone and everything in, and to follow its heroine through adolescence, leaves it shaggy -- the movie does a firm editing job on its dutifulness. But Smith has a treasure lode and she knows it -- and in this one book she gives all of it away. The intensity of her recall provides the book with its graceless but sincere sentiment and style. Smith's three subsequent novels do not repeat the material or power of her first. ''Tomorrow Will Be Better'' (1948), set in the 20's, tells of a young marriage; its bold conclusion is the wife's realization that her husband is a repressed homosexual. ''Joy in the Morning'' (1963), now back in print, is a cheery campus marriage tale. And the more ambitious ''Maggie-Now'' (1958) is a study of the Irish in America. The books are plodding and intelligent, oddly melancholy, but they lack the neurotic impulses and driven recall of her first. Smith wrote that one book we each have in us, and hers remains the most telling Brooklyn novel, our best depiction of this city's poor at the turn of the century. It is the Dickensian novel of New York that we didn't think we had.
''Brooklyn,'' Francie tells her brother at the end of the novel. ''It's a magic city and it isn't real. . . . It's like -- yes -- a dream. . . . But it's like a dream of being poor and fighting.'' The civilization of Smith's Williamsburg exists in very few living memories -- it will be soon a century away. In that stretch of Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side, you still find Francie's streets and tenements. And when even these isolated signposts are gone, the spirit of the book, the lives and struggles it celebrates, will be with us, reminding us of who we were and who we still are.
Robert Cornfield is the author of a book about the Brooklyn restaurant Lundy's, and recently edited the writings of Edwin Denby.
Monday, August 28, 2006
September 2006: The Great Gatsby
New York Times Book Review
April 19, 1925
Scott Fitzgerald Looks Into Middle Age
By EDWIN CLARK
Of the many new writers that sprang into notice with the advent of the post-war period, Scott Fitzgerald has remained the steadiest performer and the most entertaining. Short stories, novels and a play have followed with consistent regularity since he became the philosopher of the flapper with "This Side of Paradise." With shrewd observation and humor he reflected the Jazz Age. Now he has said farewell to his flappers-perhaps because they have grown up-and is writing of the older sisters that have married. But marriage has not changed their world, only the locale of their parties. To use a phrase of Burton Rascoe's-his hurt romantics are still seeking that other side of paradise. And it might almost be said that "The Great Gatsby" is the last stage of illusion in this absurd chase. For middle age is certainly creeping up on Mr. Fitzgerald's flappers.
In all great arid spots nature provides an oasis. So when the Atlantic seaboard was hermetically sealed by law, nature provided an outlet, or inlet rather, in Long Island. A place of innate natural charm, it became lush and luxurious under the stress of this excessive attention, a seat of festive activities. It expresses one phase of the great grotesque spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and loveliness. Out of this grotesque fusion of incongruities has slowly become conscious a new humor-a strictly American product. It is not sensibility, as witness the writings of Don Marquis, Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner. It is the spirit of "Processional" and Donald Douglas's "The Grand Inquisitor": a conflict of spirituality set against the web of our commercial life. Both boisterous and tragic, it animates this new novel by Mr. Fitzgerald with whimsical magic and simple pathos that is realized with economy and restraint.
The story of Jay Gatsby of West Egg is told by Nick Caraway, who is one of the legion from the Middle West who have moved on to New York to win from its restless indifference-well, the aspiration that arises in the Middle West-and finds in Long Island a fascinating but dangerous playground. In the method of telling, "The Great Gatsby" is reminiscent of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw." You will recall that the evil of that mysterious tale which so endangered the two children was never exactly stated beyond suggested generalization. Gatsby's fortune, business, even his connection with underworld figures, remain vague generalizations. He is wealthy, powerful, a man who knows how to get things done. He has no friends, only business associates, and the throngs who come to his Saturday night parties. Of his uncompromising love-his love for Daisy Buchanan-his effort to recapture the past romance-we are explicitly informed. This patient romantic hopefulness against existing conditions symbolizes Gatsby. And like the "Turn of the Screw," "The Great Gatsby" is more a long short story than a novel.
Nick Carraway had known Tom Buchanan at New Haven. Daisy, his wife, was a distant cousin. When he came East Nick was asked to call at their place at East Egg. The post-war reactions were at their height-every one was restless-every one was looking for a substitute for the excitement of the war years. Buchanan had acquired another woman. Daisy was bored, broken in spirit and neglected. Gatsby, his parties and his mysterious wealth were the gossip of the hour. At the Buchanans Nick met Jordan Baker; through them both Daisy again meets Gatsby, to whom she had been engaged before she married Buchanan. The inevitable consequence that follows, in which violence takes its toll, is almost incidental, for in the overtones-and this is a book of potent overtones-the decay of souls is more tragic. With sensitive insight and keen psychological observation, Fitzgerald discloses in these people a meanness of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalties. He cannot hate them, for they are dumb in their insensate selfishness, and only to be pitied. The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant, but he has turned grave. A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well - he always has - for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.
Scott Fitzgerald Was Different
December 24, 2000
By CALEB CRAIN
The Library of America has released F. Scott Fitzgerald's early novels and stories at a fitting moment. In the Internet Age, as in the Jazz Age, money grew so fast that the fig leaf of culture sometimes failed to cover it. Money showed, the way the legs and arms of adolescents exceed their cuffs. In Yorkville, where I lived until September, 20-somethings just out of college wore baseball caps and T-shirts with the names of investment banks and mutual funds, nakedly, as if the emblems of culture that should have been blazoned there -- art, political slogans, rock bands -- had not been manufactured quickly enough to meet the new purchasing power. Culture lagged, and youth wore its money on its sleeve.
It was Fitzgerald's genius to make this predicament into a subject of art. When Gatsby exclaims that Daisy Buchanan's voice is ''full of money,'' the sharp edge on the pathos is that he hears it undisguised. When money goes naked, it is easier to see what it does to people. And what flowers were to Keats, the leisure of the upper classes was to Fitzgerald -- lush, sensuous and real, a symbol of the ideal that was also a fragile thing, as ephemeral as pleasure. Keats couldn't have been so poetic without bowers of dittany and sweetbriar; Fitzgerald required Delmonico's, bespoke shirts and the south of France. It wasn't necessarily fair that the rich had more leisure -- or more flowers -- than other people, but since they did, Fitzgerald wrote about them.
Hemingway famously teased him for it. To judge from the number of aggrieved letters Fitzgerald wrote about the taunt, he hit a nerve. But as Lionel Trilling once commented, Fitzgerald probably deserves to get into novelist's heaven for insisting that the rich are different. To be precise (Hemingway was misquoting for effect), Fitzgerald wrote that the rich are ''soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.'' He noticed that money spoiled people. That is, it ripened them, to the point of damage.
Ripeness is sexy. And in literature if not in life, overripeness is even sexier. Balanced between not yet and too late, ripeness is also the sort of narrative effect that prose fiction can really deliver. From the beginning, Fitzgerald both worried and hoped that money would spoil him. Thanks to his mother's inheritance and extravagance, he was given an aristocrat's education and a taste for fine things. He couldn't decide: had this unfitted him for the life of an artist, or was it the making of him?
 The Associated Press F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and daughter, Scotty, in their Paris apartment in 1926. |