“Baby Teeth”: Lynda Barry, Syllabus

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

barry-syllabus

Daily practice with images both written and drawn is rare once we have lost our baby teeth and begin to think of ourselves as good at some things and bad at other things. It’s not that this isn’t true . . . but the side effects are profound once we abandon a certain activity like drawing because we are bad at it. A certain state of mind . . . is also lost. A certain capacity of the mind is shuttered and for most people, it stays that way for life.

The drawing class I’ve signed up for begins in about ten days. When I first mentioned on Twitter that I might do something like this, to be honest I wasn’t that committed to the idea: I was just floating it. But making a possibility public inevitably makes it more real, and the feedback I got was so encouraging that my motivation increased and I started looking around in earnest for plausible options. The one I settled on is called “Drawing for Adults.” Though the description explicitly promises that no experience is necessary, as it gets closer I get increasingly anxious about it, because as far as I’ve ever discovered I have absolutely no talent for drawing, not to mention no skill at it.

barry-making-comicsI am glad, therefore, that one of the tips I got on Twitter (initially from Dorian, then endorsed by others) was to look at Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus. I wasn’t really sure what kind of book it was, but I have great faith in Dorian’s recommendations, so I promptly put a hold on it at the library and I’ve had it on loan ever since. My first reaction to the book was bewilderment. I do not have a good working relationship with graphic novels, and while Syllabus is not a novel, it is definitely a graphic something. (Syllabus reproduces and lightly contextualizes Barry’s teaching notebooks for courses she offered at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, where she runs the Image Lab.) Worse (I thought), it doesn’t even tell a story, so there isn’t even a narrative thread for a text-bound person like me to cling to. Every page seemed chaotic! I had no idea where to look first, or next, or after that. Finally, Syllabus focuses (I thought) on drawing comics, which isn’t really the kind of drawing I’m interested in.

syllabus-imageStill, my curiosity was piqued, so I decided to stop trying to figure the book out (which is a hard habit for an academic and literary critic to break!) and just browse around in it for a while to see what it might have to say to me. It turns out it did speak to me: both to the part of me that wants to, but is afraid to, put pencil to paper and draw something, but also, and perhaps more significantly, to the part of me that writes stuff. This is because Syllabus isn’t just a book about drawing comics: it’s a book about creativity more generally, about the interaction between our conscious (and often inhibiting) thoughts and our unconscious mind, and about the way our fears of doing something badly hold us back from discovery and improvement–and also just from the potential fun and rewards of artistic self-expression.

Syllabus is loosely about these things, because it is not a textbook or a scholarly study (although Barry alludes to several of these, including especially Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, the introduction to which–following Barry’s instructions to her students–I have downloaded as further reading). This looseness, which frustrated me a lot at first, is actually what ended up making Syllabus accessible to me, because it let me just focus on comments or ideas or exercises that resonated with me and then sit with them for a bit. Then I carried them with me as I went through the book again from the beginning, and a lot more of it (including its seeming disorder) made more sense to me.

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Syllabus includes a lot of different interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking elements, many of them not really suited for direct application to my own classroom or working / writing life–though it’s possible I underestimate the ways I could incorporate sketching, concentration exercises, or notebooks into my pedagogy. What I liked best about it was the way Barry directly addresses our (OK, my) fear of putting things out into the world that (other people might think) are not very good. This does not mean I don’t think we should strive to do the best work we can–but especially at the beginning of a process, or during a creative process, focusing on external judgment or validation, or even focusing on our own critical responses, might stop us from even beginning. “When we are in the groove,” Barry says, for example,

we are not thinking about liking or not liking what is taking shape, and it isn’t thinking about us either. . . . Liking and not liking can make us blind to what’s there. In spite of how we feel about it, it is making its way from the unseen to the visible world, one line after the next, bringing with it a kind of aliveness I live for: right here, right now.

“Worrying about its worth and value to others before it exists,” she remarks in a later section, “can keep us immobilized forever.  Any story we write or picture we make cannot demonstrate its worth until we write it or draw it. The answer can’t come to us any other way.” I don’t see this as insight or advice that commits us to the kind of “half-assed” model of creativity championed by Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic. At least as I see it, it’s one thing to find the courage to start, to take chances, to see what answer comes to us, as a project takes shape; it’s quite another to quit working on it when we know it’s only “good enough” instead of as good as we can make it. Where along that spectrum we’ll stop with any particular project will, of course, depend on its purpose in our lives.

barry-good-badOne particular bit from Syllabus that I know I will keep thinking about is the one I chose as my epigraph for this post, about abandoning activities we are bad at. I’ve often thought that one of the best things about advancing through life, and particularly through one’s education, is the freedom you gain to abandon things you dislike and/or aren’t good at. As I’ve often said to my own children, one of the best things about university is that you can finally choose your courses to play to your interests and strengths. It’s not that I don’t think we can get good (or at least better) at things: I wouldn’t be a teacher if I believed that! I believe in program requirements, too, because that’s how we discover what else we might be good at, or want to be good at, or just put a lot of effort into. (That’s how I became an English major, after all, with lasting consequences!) Still, I was very glad to leave some kinds of effort and attention behind me (I’m looking at you, calculus!). I hadn’t really thought about the way this process, while it enables you to flourish in your chosen domain, can also end up making you more risk-averse, or reinforce reductive narratives about what you are in fact “good” at.

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It has occurred to me before that there is pedagogical value in being, once again, a beginner at something. (Appropriately, in this context, those reflections were prompted by my struggles to read graphic fiction well.) That is certainly what I’ll be at my drawing class. Syllabus gives me a bit more courage to face it, and some useful ways to talk to myself about it. I’ve also had a little fun already drawing some self-portraits “in the style of Ivan Brunetti,” which she proposes as “a quick and workable alternative to stick figures.” This alone could mean a significant improvement in the illustrative (?) sketches I sometimes make on my classroom whiteboards! I admit I really hope, though, that my teacher doesn’t start by asking us to draw Batman.

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Reading ‘The Warden’

 

“The Luckiest Man in All of Russia”: Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

Mishka opened the door to the stairwell, but then paused. Having taken a moment to look over the kitchen with all of its activity and abundance, to look from gentle Andrey to heartfelt Emile, he turned to the Count.

‘Who would have imagined,’ he said, ‘when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.’

Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow is elegant, reserved, and slightly stuffy–it is, in other words exactly like its protagonist, Count Alexander Rostov. Though he is not the novel’s actual narrator, its third-person narration has exactly his precise, self-consciously courtly tone:

At five o’clock on the twent-first of June, the Count stood before his closet with his hand on his plain gray blazer and hesitated. In a few minutes, he would be on his way to the barbershop for his weekly visit, and then to the Shalyapin to meet Mishka, who would probably be wearing the same brown jacket he’d worn since 1913. As such, the gray blazer seemed a perfectly suitable choice of attire. That is, until one considered that it was an anniversary of sorts–for it had been one year to the day since the count had last set foot outside of the Metropol Hotel.

But how was one to celebrate such an anniversary? And should one?

The Count’s world has shrunk to the size of the Metropol because he has been placed under house arrest there, declared a “former person” for writing (or so the authorities think) a poem judged counter-revolutionary. The central conceit of the novel is that the hotel is at once a microcosm of the larger world from which the Count has been banished and a shelter from it. The small attic room that becomes his quarters when he is displaced from the luxurious suite he once occupied is “without question, the smallest room that he had occupied in his life; yet somehow, with those four walls the world had come and gone.” People of all kinds pass through the Metropol and become his acquaintances, friends, and allies, even though he is now the head waiter in the hotel’s fine dining room rather than a celebrated guest. Watching these relationships gradually knit together into a subversive conspiracy delicately orchestrated by the Count is one of the many pleasures of the novel’s final section.

Before he, or we, can get to that point, there are decades to pass in which the Metropol’s front door remains (with one dramatic exception) an impassable threshold. They are turbulent times in Russia (the Count is escorted back to the Metropol for his imprisonment in 1922, and the novel ends in 1954); one of the most interesting things about A Gentleman in Moscow is how thoroughly but also how indirectly, almost glancingly, it engages with the events of this period. Even as we, along with the Count, are constantly reminded of how much the world outside the hotel is changing, he is by fiat, and we are by art, always at one remove from events. World War II happens entirely off-stage, for example: the novel jumps from 1938 to 1946, though it pauses there for two retrospective pages on Operation Barbarossa, from Hitler’s ambitions to “secure Moscow within four months” to the Germans’ chastened retreat from the outskirts of Moscow in 1942.

Throughout the novel, the vicissitudes of history are recounted with the same wry detachment as the whimsical particulars of the Count’s life in the Metropol:

Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.

In addition to starvation in the countryside, the famine of ’32 eventually led to a migration of peasants to the cities, which, in turn, contributed to overcrowded housing, shortages of essential goods, even hooliganism. At the same time, the most stalwart workers in the urban centers were wearying under the burden of the continuous workweek; artists faced tighter constraints on what they could or could not imagine; churches were shuttered, repurposed, or razed; and when revolutionary hero Sergei Kirov was assassinated, the nation was purged of an array of politically unreliable elements.

Towles flirts with disaster, I think: if it were less finely handled, this prose–clearly meant to evoke the dignity of a statelier past, to grace even the grimmest details with a redemptive dash of charm–could seem not just affected but intolerably twee. I’m not 100% sure it quite escapes this fate: the style of the novel could charitably be described as “mannered.” For me, two things kept it from becoming irritating and allowed it instead to be both lovely and sad. One was the close proximity of the narrative voice to the Count himself: the Count is–increasingly, as the novel goes on, but self-consciously throughout–identified with a vanishing past. While inevitably, as it is his novel, that past is often viewed nostalgically, the novel as a whole laments the brutalities of the new regime without being reactionary. In fact, the push and pull between tradition and change, continuity and transformation, not just in Russia but in life itself, is one of the novel’s central themes: it is debated by characters as well as embodied in the Count’s changed life and the ebb and flow of society in the Metropol. “One can revisit the past quite pleasantly,” as the Count eventually reflects, “as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”

The second saving grace for me came, perhaps paradoxically, from the elements of tragedy that provide a sobering contrast to the novel’s overall lightness of touch and spirit. They are few but powerful, and their intensity brings out the poignancy of the Count’s own situation, at once condemned and privileged to be an onlooker. Even the most intimate and rewarding of his relationships within the Metropol are constrained by his confinement–though Towles does a nice job making sure the possibility of a single hotel as a whole world doesn’t feel entirely metaphorical, a process that starts with the Count’s apprenticeship to his young friend Nina early in his enforced residency. Nina too is mostly stuck within the hotel’s limits, but she has learned to make the most of it:

Nina had not contented herself with the views from the upper decks. She had gone below. Behind. Around. About. In the time that Nina had been in the hotel, the walls had not grown inward, they had grown outward, expanding in scope and intricacy. In her first weeks, the building had grown to encompass the life of two city blocks. In her first months, it had grown to encompass half of Moscow. If she lived in the hotel long enough, it would encompass all of Russia.

Nina does not, ultimately, live in the Metropol that long, and certainly not as long as the Count, but her lessons transform the Count’s experience, as does the very different legacy she later bestows on him in the form of her daughter Sofia. And it is Sofia who, in her turn, finally motivates the Count–this “proper, proud, and openhearted” man–to carry out his own personal revolution against the diminished life he has not just endured but done his best to fill with meaning and small moments of rescued beauty.

This Week In My Classes: Looking Ahead

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

20180404_120119-1As if things in this term’s classes aren’t busy enough (and about to get busier, as next week I get in both sets of term papers and give the final exam for Pulp Fiction) but book orders for next fall were also due. It’s not a set-in-stone deadline, and quite reasonably a lot of my colleagues put it off until the summer, but I’ve actually been playing around with possible book lists for my Dickens to Hardy class since Austen to Dickens wrapped up last term, so I figured I could at least get that one settled.

You can see in the photo above which choices I made. The course title makes both Dickens and Hardy obligatory, of course. I don’t have to unify the reading list around a theme, and I didn’t used to think about that at all: I just picked 5 (or, years ago, 6) novels that represented a range of forms and authors. Last term Austen to Dickens was just “5 books I really like,” and as always, plenty of interesting comparisons emerged from their juxtaposition. But for Dickens to Hardy in Winter 2017 I picked books about “troublesome women”–Bleak House, Adam Bede, Cranford, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. (Clearly, they are all troublesome in different ways, though having three novels explicitly about “fallen” women was particularly interesting.) That was fun, so this time I’m flipping it and choosing books about “men in trouble”: again, their troubles are of different but sometimes related kinds. I don’t usually include two “short” novels, but both David Copperfield and The Woman in White are pretty long, so this way the overall reading load seems reasonable. I wonder what unexpected insights juxtaposing these particular books will shake loose! That’s the fun of teaching the two 19th-century fiction courses so often but never in exactly the same way.

20180404_125241In the end I also submitted my book order for Mystery and Detective Fiction today. If I’d waited I might have made more changes to what has become my ‘standard’ book list for the course, but though I have been considering some more recent Canadian books for inclusion, I wasn’t completely convinced either of them would work well in class (not every book does, which is something I think about a lot) and so as I was in the mood to cross this task off my list, I went with the usual suspects. The one change from the course’s last incarnation is that I’ve switched out The Terrorists and put An Unsuitable Job for a Woman back in. I think The Terrorists is brilliant, and it usually provokes good discussion (though some students understandably find it heavy-handed by the end). But I also really like Unsuitable Job and have missed it.

woolfThose are my only two courses for the fall and then I’ve got a half-year sabbatical next winter, so that’s it: my book orders for next year are done! For the first time in a long time I’m not teaching a first-year class in 2018-19. I’m glad, not because I don’t enjoy teaching introductory classes but because I want to think carefully about which one I’ll teach next, and especially about whether I’ll put in for Pulp Fiction again. We recently revised our suite of first-year classes, which means that the two that used to be my standard offerings (our full-year Introduction to Literature and our half-year Introduction to Prose and Fiction) aren’t options any more. Pulp Fiction is still on the books, and I’m certainly not ruling it out. In many ways I have really enjoyed teaching it: conceptualizing my approach to it was intellectually challenging, as was choosing my readings and preparing materials on them. If I do teach it again, though, I probably don’t want to use all the same novels–and even with different ones, I think I might still miss teaching a different kind of readings. Introductory classes are the only place I get to play with writers like John Donne and Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Alice Munro and Carol Shields. There’s lots to say about the books I’ve assigned in Pulp Fiction, no question, but after going through them twice I can’t imagine sustaining my own interest in them at that level of detail for another round–which is not something I’ve ever felt about “Death Be Not Proud” or A Room of One’s Own. Anyway, I’m glad to step off that particular moving sidewalk for a bit. I’ll have to put in my 2019-20 course requests in the fall, and I’m sure a first-year class will be among them, but I’m going to think hard about which one it should be.

And that’s all the time I have for dreaming about the future! The next two to three weeks will be focused entirely on this term’s courses.

 

 

Briefly: John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

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schoolboyThe Honourable Schoolboy itself is anything but brief, and that turned out–more or less–to be my problem with it. Of course, I am no stranger to long books, and I would never use scale on its own as a measure of literary merit. I’m also very aware that one person’s “too long” is another person’s “wonderfully immersive” or “lavish” or whatever. The question has to be whether, for you as a reader, the pay-off is proportional, or whether the book’s scope (whether broad or narrow) is the appropriate means to its ends. George Eliot said of Middlemarch, “I don’t see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly”: I have decades of experience now at explaining why I think she’s right about that, not to mention how we can approach Middlemarch so as to appreciate how she uses all the space she claims for it. The conspicuously shorter Silas Marner, in contrast, is pretty much perfect as it is. Being long, or being short, is not in itself either a necessary or a sufficient condition for admiration or pleasure.

So why did I conclude that The Honourable Schoolboy is too long? Because by about half way through it, everything about it felt just slightly off balance to me: the pacing, the descriptions of setting and context, the twists and turns of the plot. Scenes sometimes seemed to be in real time, with no detail or comment apparently too incidental to be omitted or left to our imagination. Scenery and contexts were described in wonderfully specific, tactile detail, especially on some of the trips Le Carré takes us on through chaotic cities and countrysides fraught with menace–but after a while I felt that both we and the plot were bogging down in reportage. In his 1989 introduction, Le Carré says that this is the first of his novels written “on location” and on the basis of his own personal experience as “a field reporter”:

Thus when Jerry Westerby, my hero, takes his taxi-ride to the battle front a few kilometres outside Phnom Penh, and involuntarily finds himself behind Khmer Rouge lines, I was sitting much where he sat, drumming my fingers on the same dashboard and offering the same prayers to my Maker. When Jerry visits an opium den or entrusts himself to the flying skills of an intoxicated Opium pilot in an aeroplane that would not have passed muster in a scrap auction, he is the beneficiary of my own timid adventurings.

schoolboy3I can imagine that having taken these risks to get so much material, a writer would want to make use of it all! But maybe that personal investment also worked against him, making him reluctant to leave anything out, or unable to choose between what he knew and what his story actually needed.

There were definitely things I liked about The Honourable Schoolboy. Jerry Westerby himself is at the top of that list: he’s a very likable character, and as the potential conflict between his mission and his feelings came into focus, I shared his mingled anxiety and urgency. The novel didn’t seem fraught with the same degree of moral seriousness I liked in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, though, and it didn’t turn on itself with the same painful astuteness, the poignant undermining awareness that all this jockeying for position and maneuvering for knowledge and power may in some intangible but inevitable way be self-defeating for those who want to think of themselves as the good guys. Westerby is certainly one of the good guys (he is honourable, as the title suggests). That he can’t succeed or survive in the game is certainly an indictment of it, but I had a harder time here fixing on just what the lesson of his failure is, for us or for Smiley.

schoolboy2The other thing I really liked about The Honourable Schoolboy is Le Carré’s prose–which might seem contradictory, given my complaints about the novel’s length, but that just goes to show that good writing isn’t everything! Here’s just one example of the kind of sharply evocative description that is over-abundant in the novel:

The grass at Happy Valley Racecourse must be the most valuable crop on earth. There was very little of it. A narrow ring ran round the edge of what looked like a London borough recreation ground which sun and feet have beaten into dirt. Eight scuffed football pitches, one rugger pitch, one hockey gave an air of municipal neglect. But the thin green ribbon which surrounded this dingy package in that year alone was likely to attract a cool hundred million sterling through legal betting, and the same amount again in the shade. The place was less a valley than a fire-bowl–glistening white stadium one side, brown hills the other–while ahead of Jerry and to his left lurked the other Hong Kong: a card-house Manhattan of grey skyscraper slums crammed so tight they seemed to lean on one another in the heat. From each tiny balcony, a bamboo pole stuck out like a pin put in to brace the structure; from each pole hung innumerable flags of black laundry, as if something huge had brushed against the building leaving these tatters in its wake. It was from places like these, for all but the tiniest few that day, that Happy Valley offered the gambler’s dream of instantaneous salvation.

Le Carré is a genius at finding the apt metaphor, the telling detail, the reported smell or sound that somehow conveys the feeling of a place or a moment. I’m learning (belatedly, obviously) that in his best books he combines that luxurious gift with an equally brilliant knack of maintaining suspense and pace across a very complex plot. In The Honourable Schoolboy he doesn’t quite manage to do that–which makes it, not a bad book, but not as good a book as it could have been. I know I’m not alone in thinking that: other Le Carré fans have chimed in to say they agree about Schoolboy and to promise better things from Smiley’s People. And so, I’ll read on!

This Week In My Classes: Some Good News

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

daffodilsThe good news isn’t specifically about what’s happening in my classes this week (although I hope there is some connection): it’s good news about my teaching more generally. This week I learned that I am this year’s recipient of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Regular readers of Novel Readings will know that I put a lot of time, thought, and energy into my teaching. (Novel Readings itself includes an extensive archive of that process over the past decade.) Teaching is one of the most demanding parts of my job, and sometimes one of the most frustrating, but it is also the part that is most rewarding and that seems likely to make the biggest difference in the world–not in any big, cataclysmic way, but in the “incalculably diffusive” way so beautifully invoked in the Finale to Middlemarch. Precisely because its effects are so variable, so diffuse, and so intangible, teaching is a very difficult process to measure–and to measure the success of. The recognition by my peers and my students that this award represents is thus especially precious, a rare marker on a long, winding, and often foggy road.

cassatGiven the role that Novel Readings has played in my teaching life–as a vehicle for reflection and a place where I have both shared and received ideas and encouragement about teaching–it is gratifying to know that my blogging was part of the case made on my behalf, and that my success at generating “conversations both within the university and in wider circles” was cited by the committee that selected me to receive the award this year. I started blogging about pedagogy when this kind of outward-facing work was still relatively uncommon for academics and was (as it still largely remains) not entirely congruent with the university’s standard operating procedures. I have found it intrinsically valuable, for the process itself and for the conversations and communities it has brought me into. For that reason alone I would keep it up in any case, but I admit it is nice to have some institutional recognition that it contributes to our core mission.

On a more personal note, as most of you know the last couple of years have been a bit rocky for me professionally; as a result I have often found myself, both professionally and psychologically, in either a defensive or a defiant posture. I’ve been nominated for this teaching award before, and I didn’t have any particular reason to think that this time would be the charm. Still, I figured that if I wasn’t the one this time, at least I wouldn’t be any worse off than before. I underestimated, however, just how much better it would make me feel to actually win it. It feels great! It’s easy to tell yourself (again, defensively or defiantly) that you don’t need anyone’s approval to keep doing what you think is worth doing as well as you can do it, but that doesn’t mean approval isn’t nice to have.

peacockAnd it has felt even better sharing my good news and basking in people’s happiness on my behalf. I got a lot of help from my friends, both online and off, when things went badly for me; now everyone has been wonderfully supportive about this good news. Social media certainly has its down sides (as we are only too well aware at this point), but there’s also something magical about the way it creates a vast web of connections–intangible perhaps, but still very real–between so many people across such distances. I hesitated before putting my good news out there in case it seemed self-aggrandizing, but I’m so glad I did. Why should we be afraid to invite a bit of cheering for our accomplishments, after all?  I was reminded of one of my favorite points from Molly Peacock’s wonderful and inspiring book The Paper Garden. Peacock emphasizes how much her subject Mary Delany benefited from the “applause” of her friends, which spurred her to further artistic accomplishments. “Compliments,” Peacock observes, “aren’t superficial … They are the foundation of recognition of who we are in life.” She describes Delany as pinning her friend’s admiration “to some emotional equivalent of a ‘gown or apron'” so that in later life, when she needed it, she could “[dress] herself in its esteem.” I will certainly draw strength in the future from the praise of my friends, colleagues, and, especially, my students.

Thank you very much to everyone who wrote in support of my nomination, and to everyone who has celebrated this good news with me.

 

Definitely Not a Review of Mary McCarthy’s The Group

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

group-1One of the things (OK, the many things) I can be persnickety about is what to call whatever it is that I write here when I write about books. I call the results “posts,” not “reviews,” not because I consider a book review a limited or limiting form (not by definition, anyway, though in practice published reviews are very often limited, in scope if in nothing else) but because when I’m writing what I think of as a review I feel  accountable, both to the book and to the implied audience. As a bare minimum, that accountability means reading every word in the book scrupulously, and then crafting a narrative about it that is very carefully considered. No review is authoritative in any absolute sense, of course, but when I’m wearing my Official Reviewer hat I aspire to a certain kind of confidence in my understanding of the book I’m writing about.  Here, in contrast, I can write whatever I want, no matter how inadequate my understanding might be. My blog posts are narratives of my own reading experience, and so I’m answerable only for being honest and thoughtful about that.

This is probably a lot of unnecessary fuss about terminology. I don’t disagree at all with Dorian that a review is really just any “reckoning with a text.” Yet, however irrationally, the label I use matters to me because giving myself permission to write has always been a challenge. I know it is for many academics, because we are trained to be pretty sure we know what we’re talking about before we say anything. Up to a point, or in the right context, this is as it should be, but it’s also really inhibiting–and contributes to the epidemic of imposter syndrome, I’m sure. Blogging has helped me get comfortable with writing that is exploratory, not necessarily assertive, and certainly not authoritative. Many of my favorite posts were written when I didn’t understand what I’d read or couldn’t make sense of a reading experience. I don’t have to work through those limitations before writing a blog post (something I would try to do before writing a review)–I can work through them in a blog post.

the-groupThat’s an awfully long preamble to these remarks about Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which my book club met yesterday to discuss. As you might have predicted, I was putting off getting to the book until I’d said all that other stuff because I did not do a good job reading it, and as a result I wasn’t sure I should write about it. But then I remembered that I was blogging about it, not reviewing it, and so it’s okay for me to admit that and write about it anyway! If you want commentary by someone who is much better informed about The Group, I highly recommend this series of posts by Andrew Seal (a former Valve colleague of mine); I also really liked this article on McCarthy by B.D. McClay, which was actually one of the reasons I suggested The Group for my book club in the first place.

I didn’t hate The Group. Well, actually I did, at first: on Twitter I called it “nearly unreadable,” and that accurately describes how I felt about the first few chapters. It was a combination of the tone, the claustrophobic social setting, and the dense, unbroken paragraphs. Everybody I met in the novel seemed profoundly unpleasant; I thought I might be driven to complaining that nobody in the novel was “relatable” … the horror!

the-group-2I never had a conversion moment, but I’m glad I persisted with my reading, not just because it meant I could show my face at my book club but also because the book did turn out to be better than my first impressions of it. My experience improved as I got more used to the style–but I also gave myself permission to skim some of the relentless cascade of details that made up so many of those dense paragraphs. I understand that this may seem precious coming from a Victorianist! I tried to put my finger on what made McCarthy’s exposition seem so long and unpleasant to me in spite of my love for long and excessively detailed 19th-century novels, and I think it’s the same thing that made me recoil from most of her characters: she treats everything, and everyone, so coldly. Ultimately a lot about The Group is very sad, in some cases even tragic, but the novel has none of the humanity, none of the compassion, that its own stories could reasonably summon up. The word ‘sociological’ came up a lot in our book club discussion, and by and large we’d all found her depiction of her women’s lives interesting. But there’s something clinical about each of the women’s stories, with McCarthy observing them shrewdly, scrupulously, often wittily, but never sympathetically.

group-coverI’m not sure if I liked the second half of the book better than the first because I adjusted to (or compensated for) McCarthy’s prose or because I liked the later characters better. Libby’s story was the first one that really engaged me, for the not especially good reason that I’m interested in writing and publishing, and that whole world has a sordid kind of glamour to me as a result. At my book club we were unanimous in liking Polly’s story the best; her relationship with her father is perhaps the only tender one in The Group, and her marriage also seemed like a respite from the acidity of the novel’s other relationships. (I should say that overall everyone else was quite enthusiastic about the novel–listening to them explain why helped me appreciate it better.) Kay’s reappearance in her story in a very different situation made me rethink my earlier reactions to her and her marriage, and the novel’s ending also made me realize that I had missed something of the forest because I was focusing too hard on the individual trees.

So. This (therefore) will not have been a book review, but it is something of a reckoning with my experience of reading one particular, unexpectedly ornery book.

This Week In My Classs: Springing Forward

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“Springing forward” seems an optimistic way to put the feeling I always get at this time of term that we are hurtling downhill towards its end: papers and tests and proposals come in even as you’re still planning lectures and making up slides and handouts and trying not to show up without your books … Add in the time shift and a series of storms to remind us that it’s definitely still winter and it has been a busy and tiring week.

falcon-vintage-coverBut good things happen in the second part of term too. For one thing, students have got their bearings in the course materials and expectations, so I can spend less time on logistics and reminders and saying “it’s in the syllabus.” And for another, the reading and discussion continues and sometimes even gets better because we’ve all warmed up. In Pulp Fiction last week, I thought there was a noticeable improvement in the students’ Reading Journals, as if they “get” The Maltese Falcon better than they did Valdez Is Coming–which, I’ve belatedly realized, is a more subtle novel than I thought, hard to get an interpretive grip on if you aren’t used to reading that way. Though the actual plot of The Maltese Falcon is plenty bewildering as it unfolds, the prose and the issues and the characters give us more to grab on to. The class is writing their papers on it now: we’ve got an editing workshop for their drafts on Friday, then they turn in revised versions next week and we start our unit on romance, which I’m quite looking forward to. I hope they are too!

broughtonIn Victorian Sensations we’ve started Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower. When I first read it I wasn’t convinced of its merits, but it turns out the magic trick is to read it right after you finish reading East Lynne! What a relief to turn from Wood’s dreary moralizing and Isabel’s unrelenting gloom and repentance and the whole tawdry, disorganized assortment of subplots to a sassy young heroine who hates her sister, canoodles with a handsome soldier in the garden and finds it blissful, not shameful, and just adores her dear old dad! Not much actually happens in Broughton’s novel, but in the context of our discussions of other sensation novels, that in itself has provoked some discussion, as has figuring out what made Broughton’s very different work equally scandalous–mostly, Nell herself. In general, the consensus in the class seems to be that Nell is refreshing, if not altogether likable; there will be lamentations, I’m sure, about the turn her story is about to take as well as the shift in her tone from defiant to repentant by the end. I’m so impressed with this group of students: often on the way to class I’m wondering a bit anxiously if we’ll find enough to talk about, and  I always end up surprised that we’ve run out of time and I have to shut down discussion. One factor is that there are always two students charged with bringing in talking points to get us started, and of course I bring notes and materials myself–but basically, they’ve got this, which is great.

This Week In My Classes: The Meaning of Life

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falcon-vintage-coverIn Pulp Fiction, this is our second and final week on The Maltese Falcon (no, it does not seem like enough time, but we have other work to do too!). Leading up to our discussions of the novel I made a big deal about Raymond Chandler’s claim that the novel “demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius,” he says in “The Simple Art of Murder,” “but an art which is capable of it is not ‘by hypothesis’ incapable of anything.”

I’m not sure I admire The Maltese Falcon quite as much as all that, or that I think the detective story hadn’t already shown its literary potential, though much depends on what you rule in or out as an example (if The Moonstone counts, then that’s pretty old news by 1930). But it’s a great starting point for discussion, especially about what we think it takes for writing to be “important.” One suggestion about what distinguishes The Maltese Falcon from the kind of mystery Chandler’s contrasting it with in his essay (basically, the Golden Age detective novel) is its thematic ambition: the crimes its plot is organized around are really just devices for raising questions about what is worth living and dying for–about what, if anything, gives life meaning. Any murder mystery will address motives and consequences at a literal level, but in The Maltese Falcon the black bird takes on symbolic significance in excess of those requirements. I never feel any need to interpret the dagger in Roger Ackroyd’s throat symbolically: it’s enough to know that it came from the table with the glass lid in the drawing room that Dr. Sheppard examines so attentively when he comes to visit Ackroyd the night of the murder. That’s the difference, right there.

falconTwo of the questions I asked my students to think about for class discussion this week were what the falcon ultimately stands for–to individual characters and, perhaps not the same thing, in the book as a whole; and how they viewed Brigid O’Shaughnessy by the end–as a femme fatale or a woman fighting for survival in a man’s world. Today we also considered what it means that the actual statuette the characters have been chasing (and have killed and died for) in the novel turns out to be a fake. It’s one thing to imagine what it might mean to actually get whatever it is that you most want: what if it isn’t worth it after all, or it is but now you don’t know what to do next? But what if you think you’ve got it and it isn’t real? Gutman recovers quickly and proposes they keep looking: after all, the real one is still out there, isn’t it? Isn’t it the quest itself that really matters? Or in chasing their dream are they missing their chance to actually live?

black maskIt seems pretty clear that Sam is missing some kind of chance by following his dream, except that his is a dream of justice for his murdered partner. One of my favorite things about this novel–which in many ways I find deeply unpleasant–is how shadowed Sam’s choices are by their consequences. In the end he chooses justice over love, which is (as Effie comments) the right thing to do; Sam himself gives a long list (literally numbered) of reasons why he should turn Brigid in, against which there is only “the fact that maybe you love me, and maybe I love you.” “It isn’t always easy to know what to do,” he tells Brigid when she first comes to see him pretending to be the innocent and vulnerable “Miss Wonderly.” He may in fact know exactly what to do, but the ending to the novel shows that that, too, isn’t easy: he may live up to his principles, but he also has to live without love, without trust, and probably without happiness. In a different novel, the alternatives might not be so stark, but Sam lives in world where “if they hang you, I’ll always remember you” really does, I think, count as romantic. While Effie may agree with him in principle, though, she also recoils from him, a judgment I share.

9536030_wood_lynne.inddIn Victorian Sensations we finished up East Lynne this week–with some relief, I think, though I was glad to hear some students saying they did enjoy it: curiosity about what would happen next helped them keep going, even though it dragged a bit at times. One of the reasons I think this novel falls short of being “important writing” is its ineptness, artistically speaking: a lot of it seems quite haphazard or just plain incoherent, and our well-trained desire to find patterns and unities was frequently frustrated. That’s not to see it doesn’t contain many interesting elements, but I don’t really think that, through them, Wood is saying something worth really thinking about. She does have plenty to say, but it’s the very heavy-handedness of her overt message that becomes tedious. I said before that the novel reads very clearly like a cautionary tale–but so, of course, is Vanity Fair, which has a similar moral lesson for us: live well so you have no regrets on your deathbed. “Oh, Barbara,” says the tediously honorable Mr. Carlyle after presiding over the pathetic deathbed of his first wife:

never forget–never forget that the only way to ensure peace in the end, is to strive always to be doing right, unselfishly, under God.

Why does that solemn conclusion make me go “yeesh!” while I find Chapter LXI of Vanity Fair both touching and morally compelling? It’s not just that Wood is so prescriptive (and it’s not as if Thackeray isn’t prescriptive). Thackeray has in common with Hammett a rich awareness of social and human complexity, for one thing, and a wry understanding of what drives us: in fact, his indictment of the vanity of human wishes fits nicely with the ultimately futile quest most of Hammett’s characters are on–“everyone is striving for what is not worth the having,” as Lord Steyne remarks, and yet both authors also see that that’s where the drama, the energy, is. Wood’s moral world seems simplistic by comparison. If Hammett makes us wonder about the meaning of it all, Wood seems too quick to tell us, and to reduce it to following the rules. One of the critical articles we read concludes that “it is clear that Mrs. Wood does not possess the insight of a major novelist.” That’s not the kind of conclusion a more recent critical article is likely to hazard (this one is from 1976, a simpler time in literary criticism, for better and for worse)–but I have to agree.

“The Sensation of a Near-Miss”: Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am

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iam-iam-iam

Instead of an intimation of mortality, what is solidifying, taking root inside me, is something else, a welding together of this place with the sensation of a near-miss, an escape from something beyond my control. The feeling of having pulled my head, one more time, out of the noose becomes intermingled with, indivisible from, the mimosa trees, the goats, the wave that turned me over, the toasted-resin smell of cinnamon bark.

I don’t know what I expected, really, from Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am. Its subtitle is Seventeen Brushes with Death and the book offers exactly that and no more: seventeen vignettes about moments in O’Farrell’s life when it was (whether she knew it in the moment or not) a toss-up whether she would live or die–or, in the episode I found most difficult to read, whether her daughter would. She offers no larger framework, either of narrative or of meaning; the insight of the book is nothing more or less than what Doctor Lydgate offers Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch: “one can hardly increase appreciably the tremendous uncertainty of life.”

Mr. Casaubon is, understandably, unconsoled by Lydgate’s remark. I didn’t pick up I Am, I Am, I Am looking for consolation–and a good thing, too, because if anything, it turned out to be a book finely calculated to exacerbate my everyday anxieties–but I did expect it would add up to more than it did. Its point is intrinsically episodic, I suppose: things happen, dangerous things, scary things, things that start out benign but take a sudden turn for the worse, and the more we realize that basic fact of our existence the more we can appreciate that we are–somehow, for now–still alive instead of dead. “We are, all of us,” O’Farrell observes,

wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.

Her aim, I think, is just to breach that oblivion and thus to heighten our awareness of both the “tremendous uncertainty of life” and its potential for beauty and grace, which may themselves emerge from the shadow left as death once again recedes.

iam-iam-iam-2It’s inconsistent, I realize, to say that I found I Am, I Am, I Am disappointingly slight and to say that I’m also glad it did not fall into philosophizing. But my dissatisfaction and my relief actually go hand in hand: it’s hard to be profound, and books that try and fail seem worse, to me, than a book with fewer pretensions. That’s why I preferred Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, though of course I was moved by Kalanithi’s story and he writes much more poetically than Gawande. What O’Farrell sets out to do, she does beautifully, I thought: for once, I agreed with the blurbers who said they couldn’t put the book down, and that’s not just because a lot of the vignettes are quite suspenseful, like miniature thrillers. It was just a genuine pleasure to read O’Farrell’s prose. It’s not ornate or elaborate; its moments of eloquence, its shivery effects of fear or joy or release, come from its precise details–a smell, a touch, a word or phrase in just the right place. She nearly drowns swimming in the Indian Ocean:

I am aware, first, of being pulled sideways, as if on a sleeper train. The current is drawing into itself, gathering together, with abrupt and decisive force. I right myself in time to see the beach pulling away from me, like disappearing theatre scenery. . . .

The wave turns me over like an acrobat, like St. Catherine in her wheel. I feel my feet lift, feel my body invert, my head pooling with heat and pressure. There is a sharp blow to the side of my face and my eyes, shut tight against the salt, streak with technicolour, my teeth snapping together over my tongue. The noise inside a riptide is astonishing, a rushing, deafening rumble of water, air, pressure, force.

An armed robber in Chile holds his knife to her throat and she is “aware of the onion-tang of his armpits.” During a terrifying emergency c-section, when she “can feel hands rummaging through my innards, as far up as my ribs,” a man whose official role she never knows takes her hand as she lies engulfed in “loneliness, isolation, bafflement”:

His touch is infinitely gentle but firm and sure. There is no way he is letting go, he is telling me, entirely without words. He is going to stay right here and I am going to stay right here. I clutch at him with the force of a drowning woman.

“The people who teach us something,” she reflects about that incident,

retain a particularly vivid place in our memories. I’d been a parent for about ten minutes when I met the man, but he taught me, with a small gesture, one of the most important things about the job: kindness, intuition, touch, and that sometimes you don’t even need words.

In the book’s final episode, as she and her husband frantically drive towards a hospital in Italy, all she can do is hold their daughter, who has had a severe allergic reaction:

The delicate features of her face are sunken, swollen, distorted. Her hands clutch mine but her eyes are rolling back in her head. I touch her cheek, I say her name. I say, stay awake, stay with us.

Her own brushes with death, terrifying as many of them are, have (in the telling, at least) an artistic distance wholly undone in this final chapter: the fear she has felt for her own life pales beside her desperation to preserve her child’s. Once she is a parent herself, she better understands how her own mother sometimes clung to her:

We’re on the platform of the local station, I have my backpack at my feet and the branch-line train is coming through the tunnel. I’m about to get onto it and I won’t be back for a long, long time. She doesn’t tell me not to go but the grip of her fingers on my shoulders is the same: heartfelt, insistent, infused with the awareness that I was always going to leave, that we both knew, on some level that the urge had always been in me.

Accidents, illness, evil: O’Farrell has faced, it seems, more than the average share of all of these, and that in itself makes her memoir interesting. As in her fiction, she moves deftly between past and present, in the larger structure of the book and within individual chapters; through these anecdotes of escaped fatality, we get many pieces of a more conventional memoir of her childhood, including her life-changing bout of encephalitis, her awkward growing up, and her discovery that writing is the work that will define her life and give it meaning. In many ways I Am, I Am, I Am reads like a fitting culmination of that story. Still, I can’t shake my own lingering sense that O’Farrell has left the book somehow incomplete–that she, and we, ought to learn more from all those near misses, or that she should have done more to earn our attention to them than just surviving or enduring. Yes, life is uncertain: now what? But at the same time I understand: there is no enveloping story to be told about it all. It just is. We just are, until we aren’t.

This Week In My Classes: Tears and Tough Guys

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We’re back from our February break and now nothing stands between us and the end of term except everything we have to get done before then!

In the short term, that means pressing on with East Lynne in “Victorian Sensations.” The portion we are reading this week could be subtitled “Crime and Punishment”: Lady Isabel, having, in a fit of jealous pique, abandoned her kind but somewhat distracted husband for a handsome cad, has been living abroad, miserable and repentant, for a year. Things only get worse after she gives birth to the sad little baby who could have been legitimate if only her lover weren’t such a complete jerk. How much of a jerk is he? Well, after initially hiding from her the news that her divorce is final so that she can’t insist he marry her, he then tells her that he can’t lower himself to marry a divorced women–even though her husband’s grounds of her divorce is her affair with him! Double standards ftw.

On the bright side, by that time she wants nothing more to do with him–even though her only other options are poverty, despair, and death. Then [spoiler alert] a train wreck (a bit conveniently, we thought) kills the poor baby and everyone thinks it has also killed Isabel, so she is free (if that’s the right word) to roam the world like a miserable, repentant ghost…an opportunity she uses to go back to the home and children she abandoned, where thanks to the literally defacing effects of the accident and her “grief and remorse,” she is able to serve, unrecognized, as her own children’s governess under the management of her husband’s new wife.

Although I am more and more convinced that East Lynne is overall a pretty bad novel, it is certainly a provoking one, and our discussions have been much livelier than Isabel herself ever is. Our previous two novels have offered significant critiques of the many constraints on Victorian women’s lives–economic, social, political, and sexual. The most transgressive women don’t necessarily fare well–Marian Halcombe, for instance, may outwit her enemies and climb around on rooftops in the first half of The Woman in White but she loses her gumption in the second half and ends up happy just to be an honorary aunt, while Lady Audley is “buried alive” (metaphorically! but still…) for her sins. Still, it’s impossible to read either of those novels and not appreciate these subversive characters as contrasts to the tedious passivity of their more angelic counterparts. Isabel’s grievances, on the other hand, are mostly in her mind, and while we can see that things would have gone better for her if she’d been differently raised and more self-sufficient, it’s hard to conclude that she’s anything more than a cautionary tale. “Oh reader, believe me!” exclaims our narrator:

Lady–wife–mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you waken! Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees and pray to bear them: pray for patience; pray for strength to resist the demon that would urge you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you rush on to it, will be found far worse than death!

Lady Isabel certainly thinks so: she is not so unladylike as to pray for her own death, the narrator reassures us, “but she did wish that death might come to her,” which seems rather a hair-splitting distinction to me. I think my students would be glad if she used her undercover job as a chance to strike back at the woman who has taken her place, as Lady Audley surely would in such a situation–but alas! From here to the end of the book things are only going to get more miserable, for her and thus for us.

Lady Audley has a closer cousin in Brigid O’Shaughnessy, whose acquaintaince we are just making in Pulp Fiction. Like Lady Audley, she’s a dame making her way in a man’s world, using her beauty as a resource, playing the damsel in distress (the noir version of the angel in the house!) when it suits her purposes and showing her more demonic side when she can’t win any other way. Sam is a better match for her than Robert Audley is (at first) for Lady Audley, though, because he is never under any illusions: he’s always suspicious, of everyone, and so never beguiled by her beauty. Or is he? One of the subtler mysteries of The Maltese Falcon is whether he does in fact love her–a question which in its turn provokes more questions about what exactly we mean by “love.” “If they hang you, I’ll always remember you” may not sound very romantic to us, but coming from Sam it’s a lot, I’d say. And yet of these two novels I think it is The Maltese Falcon that–if only implicitly–puts the higher value on idealism and tender feelings. By the end of Lady Audley’s Secret it’s pretty clear that to be a hero Robert has to toughen up and fulfill his role and duties as a real man. Sam lives up to a similarly hardhearted standard in The Maltese Falcon, but I always find Effie’s “broken” request that he keep his distance–“You’re right. But don’t touch me–not now”–suggestive of the price he has paid, as is the fate he faces with his own shiver of distaste: “Iva is here.” Braddon’s novel concludes, as she blithely declares, with “all the good people happy and at peace.” There’s little peace and even less happiness for Sam.