Life, novels

Tom Perrotta has a good piece about Kate Atkinson's novel in the NYTBR this weekend - my thoughts exactly, as regards the opening paragraphs. The book arrived on my Kindle just in time this week to save me from the dreadful fate of having nothing good to read; it is silly, there always is something to read, but the feeling of panic at running short never goes away, especially when I am very tired and a little too busy to drum up good new possibilities. Atkinson is such a good writer - you care more about her characters than those of almost any other novelist I can think of....

Home again

Feel much more settled now that I am back at home with my little cat, who was flatteringly happy to see me last night.  I do not know why feline company should be so soothing, but there is no doubt that I am on a more even keel when there is a cat around. 

Read two good books on my travels: Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room (this guy is an awe-inspiringly good popular storyteller - the book gave me a yen to watch Hitchcock movies obsessively and see whether I couldn't craft such a formally perfect and atmospherically chilling narrative of suspense); and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers.  The amount and quality of reporting that went into this book is staggering: it is really a feat of human achievement like few other things!  It is not a criticism, but I am struck by the oddity of the fact that the style of narration really recognizably is still like what the cluster of mid-19th-century novelists that include Hugo and Dickens and Eliot and Balzac developed - ditto for The Wire - it is a powerful form of narration that, once discovered, has had considerable longevity.

Closing tabs:

Brent's friend Larry Thompson has printed a beautiful edition of "Tintern Abbey."

The National Eagle Repository.

This is the kind of writing I should really be doing.

Nightwork

At the TLS, Mairéad Hanrahan on Columbia University Press's new edition of Roland Barthes' notes-cum-teaching script The Preparation of the Novel (mmmm, I have to get this one and read it):

The first paradox is the overwhelming focus in the 1978–9 classes on the haiku, which has exemplary status as a “Notation of the Present”: its extreme brevity enables it to approximate most closely and truthfully to the “instant” that, for Barthes, writing seeks to capture. But the haiku’s instantaneity is also a limit. With no room either for narrative or, especially, for the “interweaving” together of truth and falsehood in fiction, it throws the novel into relief.

The sigh of relief

I started writing the little book on style the last week in February in the grip of a delusion that it might only take me about three weeks; it is based on lectures I wrote (two a week) over the fall semester, and in another sense it's based on a lifetime of reading, so that I felt the hard part was already behind me.

In fact it took longer than three weeks, more like seven, but I have just sent the full manuscript to my agent: it is just under 40,000 words, about a hundred and fifty pages, with a grand total of 31 footnotes.

I really like this little book!

Now it is just a question of waiting to see what happens next, which is not really my forte, but I can get started in the meantime on the ABCs of the novel (formerly known as bread-and-butter of the novel) and also have some seriously grand triathlon training (I'm doing a half-ironman in May and - amazingly - my first full Ironman race in Wisconsin in September).

(It is so crazy, really I am on a mission to stop doing things so much as if under a compulsion, but I feel that by getting this little book done relatively early during my year of sabbatical I have bought myself a bit more breathing space than I usually have - it would be good, though, if I could write most of the other book this year too - I do not know why it should be so much so that I only feel OK when I am madly writing, planning, training, racing, but it is certainly strongly the case...)

Swings, roundabouts

It is with a great sense of loss that I close the covers of the last of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles.

It has been more than a month since I read the first of the House of Niccolò books; I have been living in the world of these novels, I do not want to come back to real life!

(Jo Walton happened to post something earlier today about the joy of reading an unfinished series.)

In less emotionally equivocal literary news, I started writing the little book on style this past Monday, in the grip of a feverishly strong delusion that it could be done in three weeks. Now that I've taken the weekend off, and now that I think about the fact that the week of May 14-21 is designated for private life rather than for work, I have scaled up the likely production time to six weeks, but it still seems to me genuinely possible that I might have a whole draft of the thing by the end of March!

(Can it be?!? It might indeed not be - but it is at least possible that the outcome of a lifetime of obsessive reading and writing has led me to a place where an entire book - a little book! - can be written in six weeks. It's based on the lectures I gave this fall, so really it's a question of making something out of things that are already there...)

The little book on style still doesn't have a real name, but in a productive sleepless couple of hours a few nights ago I had some (to me) thrilling insights into the bread-and-butter-of-the-novel book. It has a new title and a clear organizational scheme, both of which I find so secretly delightful that I think I must cherish the details to myself in private for a little while longer before announcing them to the world via Light Reading - but I won't start working on this until I have sent the little book on style to my agent (and there is an essay on Austen and Flaubert and aphorisms, with which the book begins, that I will send out separately).

Bonus link: the song I couldn't get out of my head while reading the last installment of Lymond; we used to sing it in my high school choir.

These books have also reminded me of how much I loved the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between the ages of 10 and 14 or so - it was a feature of the school I went to that younger children especially were asked to enter into historical periods with an intellect infused with imagination, and I vividly remember the account of the death of Savonarola from the point of view of a young Italian nobleman I wrote the year I was in fifth grade.

A favorite book at the time was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I still think is pretty much a perfect novel for children, but I was also already at that stage beginning to read T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers and Nicholas Blake and through them to discover the beauties of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In sixth grade I wrote a half-hour adaptation of Twelfth Night for our class to perform; I was steeped in the language and mythos of Shakespeare...

I said to Brent the other day, regretfully, that much as I still somewhat aspire to write airport thrillers in the vein of Dick Francis, my gifts as a writer are not really in the direction of that minimalist leave-everything-out-but-the-essentials intelligent storytelling that you see in the best of Francis or of Lee Child. I do not know, either, that I could possibly write a series of the scope of Dunnett's or of those of Susan Howatch, which I also love, partly because I am keeping a lot of my imagination in reserve for intellectual writing, but I would think that a very fully imagined historical series would be a better fit with my actual strengths and preferences than a series of stripped-down thrillers about men and women of action...

I have had several conversations recently (it has partly been prompted by walking the ramps at the Guggenheim) about a very happy insight that has struck me in the last year or so, and that seems to me in great part a function of being age 38.

Options close down - the infinite range of possibilities that seemed open to me at age twenty (at least if I was in an argumentative mood) is now significantly narrower - but unlike what I would have thought if you had been able to persuade me of it at that age (which you would not), this is a good thing.

We are constrained by our individual temperaments in ways that are very difficult to understand when we are eighteen or twenty or indeed thirty - it comes upon us gradually, though, at least if we are lucky, that we were right not to go in the direction of being (implausibly) fighter pilots or investment bankers or (more plausibly) epidemiologists or chemists - that our lives have to be governed by what will suit us best as well as by what we think we should be able to do...

Drops of water

From Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, trans. David Coward (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999):

Jacques. Me, sir, drink water! Jacques on holy water! I’d rather have a thousand legions of devils take up permanent residence in my insides than touch a drop of water, holy or unholy. Haven’t you ever noticed that I’m hydrophobic?

Just a moment! ‘Hydrophobic’? Jacques said ‘hydrophobic’?
No, reader, he didn’t. I confess the word wasn’t his. But if you want to apply such high critical standards, I challenge you to read any scene from a comedy or a tragedy, one dialogue, however well-written, and not detect the voice of the author in the mouth of his characters. What Jacques actually said was: ‘Haven’t you ever noticed, sir, that the mere sight of water makes me jump backwards like a mad dog?…’ There it is. In expressing it differently from him, I was true but more succinct.

Musing

For a few weeks in January, I was almost certain that for the first time since c. 1996 or so I was only going to be working on one book this year.

Alas, it does not seem temperamentally feasible - the bread and butter of the novel book is an ambitious project that must be executed thoughtfully and slowly over the process of a few years, it will need to be complemented by a little book that I (no doubt wildly unrealistically) feel I might be able to dash off in a matter of weeks - a little book on style in which I pretty much just write exactly what I taught in my lecture class this fall!

I would like to get it out there more widely, that is the thing, it is the fruit of much reading and many years of thought on the matter of sentences and voice in the novel, it is a pity not to transform it into something that will sit on bookshelves here and there...

Bread-and-butterishness

From the OED, 2nd ed. (1989):

bread and butter

(Often written with hyphens, esp. when used attrib.)

1. a. Bread spread with butter; also attrib. Also attrib. and comb., as bread-and-butter pudding; bread-and-butterless adj.
1630 WADSWORTH Sp. Pilgr. iii. 15 Euery one hath..a peece of bread and butter. 1711 ADDISON Spect. No. 323 {page}6 Eat a slice of Bread and butter, drank a dish of Bohea. 1729 E. SMITH Compl. Housewife (ed. 3) 81 A Bread and Butter Pudding... Take a two-penny Loaf..spread it in very thin slices [etc.]. 1817 BYRON Beppo xxxix, The Nursery still lisps out in all they utter{em}Besides, they always smell of bread and butter. 1822 W. KITCHINER Cook's Orac. 449 Bread and Butter Pudding. 1849 [see TEALESS a.]. 1853 MRS. GASKELL Cranford i. 14 He..lessened the pretty maid-servant's labour by waiting on empty cups, and bread-and-butterless ladies. 1883 ROE in Harper's Mag. Dec. 50/2 She likes bread and butter and..realities.

b. dial. A slice of bread and butter.
1853 W. D. COOPER Gloss. of Provincialisms in Sussex, Bread and butters, slices of bread buttered. 1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 54, I well remember the disgust we children felt at a lady..who always said a bread and butter, where we used a piece of bread and butter.

2. Taken as a type of every day food; the means of living; hence attrib. in many elliptical and allusive expressions. See also QUARREL v. 1a.
1732 SWIFT Let. 12 Aug. (1965) IV. 60 Your quarrelling with each other upon the subject of bread and butter is the most usual thing in the world. 1738 {emem} Polite Conv. I. 17, I won't quarrel with my Bread and Butter for all that: I know when I'm well. 1836-7 SIR W. HAMILTON Metaph. (1859) I. i. 6 By the Germans, the latter [i.e. the professional or lucrative sciences] are usually distinguished as the Brodwissenschaften, which we may translate, ‘The Bread and Butter Sciences’. 1844 H. TWISS Life Ld. Eldon I. vi. 119 Young man, your bread and butter is cut for life. 1870 LOWELL Among my Bks. Ser. I. (1873) 222 Life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butter associations. 1884 Harper's Mag. Dec. 92/2 Industries were not so plenty..that men could afford..to quarrel with their bread and butter. 1886 Contemp. Rev. May 663 Journalists who frankly avow what is called the bread-and-butter theory of their craft. 1929 Publishers' Weekly 30 Nov. 2588/1 The old stand-bys, the bread-and-butter books in every department. 1939 A. CHRISTIE Murder is Easy xii. 128 One musn't quarrel with one's bread and butter. 1955 Times 11 May 6/1 Providing furniture for new houses was the bread and butter of the industry.

3. no bread and butter of mine: no matter affecting my material interests, no business of mine.
1764 FOOTE Mayor of G. I. i, However, it is no bread and butter of mine.

4. a. attrib.; spec. Of or pertaining to the age when bread-and-butter is extensively consumed; boyish, girlish; esp. (cf. quot. 1817 in 1) school-girlish.
a1625 BEAUM. & FL. Hum. Lieut. III. vi, Ye bread-and-butter rogues, do ye run from me? 1807 W. IRVING Salmag. (1824) 180 These little, beardless, bread and butter politicians. 1861 TROLLOPE Barchester T. xli. (D.) A lady at any rate past the wishy-washy bread-and-butter period of life. 1865 Pall Mall G. 13 May 4 Would feel that they were tittered at as bread-and-butter Misses.

b. bread-and-butter letter orig. U.S., a letter of thanks for hospitality; cf. COLLINS. Also ellipt.
1901 HOWELLS Pair of Patient Lovers 82 His prompt bread-and-butter letter. 1933 N. STREATFEILD Tops & Bottoms xxiv. 308 Please never write me bread-and-butter letters. 1964 E. BOWEN Little Girls III. i. 164 Rude? Should have written a bread-and-butter?

Hence (with reference to sense 4) bread-and-butterhood, -butterishness, bread-and-buttery a.
1884 LADY MAJENDIE Out of Element III. xxiv. 321, I think the ties of bread-and-butterhood are stronger than any later ones after all. 1843 Blackw. Mag. LIII. 80 They..emerge..into the full and perfect imago of little..gentlemen, and little ladies, without any of those intermediate conditions of laddism, hobble-de-hoyism, or bread-and-butterishness. 1859 G. MEREDITH R. Feverel xiii. (1885) 90 His future bride is now pinafored and bread-and-buttery. 1882 MRS. J. H. RIDDELL Struggle for Fame xxvi, You [an authoress] are rather bread-and-buttery still.

January ploys redux

I have a desk in Cayman! (Thanks, Brent!)

On a related note, I'm speaking about the bread and butter of the novel on Tuesday, Feb. 9 at 4:30 to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colloquium of Princeton's English Department - stop by and say hello if you are in that neck of the woods...

The Viennese literary coffeehouse

I was stymied after reading Jo Walton's new book the other night (it arrived in my office mailbox at a point of singularly low morale, as if in response to some unarticulated but profound wish for the book I most wanted to read in the world - thanks, Torie!) as to what I could read next.

I thought I might just read Walton all over again, but delving through the stacks piled up on the living-room floor dealt me Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, which I read with considerable satisfaction.

(For some reason I have been obsessed recently with the possibilities of the sentence - I really need this sabbatical to start so that I can get some real work done! I went to the preliminary meeting last night at the Guggenheim for Tino Sehgal's new show "This is Progress", and had various conversations with other folks participating which made me realize that I am sort of uncomfortably bursting with ideas right now that I can only shed by writing books - I think the style course I've been teaching will find its way in the near future into a couple of essays, but that perhaps what I had thought of as two complementary book projects [notation of human behavior in bread-and-butter of the novel/transmission of forms of culture that are not best represented by conventional verbal forms of notation] are really a triptych [bread-and-butter of the novel/forms of culture resistant to notation/sequel to bread-and-butter that is not about epistolarity, the first and third person voices, etc. but is instead just about SENTENCES, unconventional and non-chronological ordering systems, the tension between aphoristic and narrative modes, etc.] that can only be achieved by multi-year sustained application of maniacal effort! ARGHHHHHH! I need to put myself into some kind of a trance state whereby the intellectually perceiving brain just communicates directly to the eyes and hands without the intervention of troublesome human-conscious mind - in fact I am going to go and move around the furniture in the living room now to create a better work area to facilitate this...)

Anyway, this site has a very good description of Bernhard's book, with a full excerpt of what is undoubtedly the funniest section, so I will instead quote the thought-provoking discussion of how the actors at the Burgtheater ruined Bernhard's play The Hunting Party:

The absolutely third-rate actors who performed in the play did not give it a chance, as I was soon forced to recognize, in the first place because they did not understand it and in the second because they had a low opinion of it, but being a makeshift cast assembled at short notice, they had no option but to act in it. They could not be blamed even indirectly, after the failure of the original plan to assign the principal roles to Paula Wessely and Bruno Ganz, for whom I had written the play. In the event, neither appeared in it because the whole ensemble of the Burg (as the Viennese call it, with a kind of perverse affection) joined forces to prevent Bruno Ganz from appearing at the Burgtheater. Their opposition was prompted not only by existential dread, as it were, but by existential envy, for Bruno Ganz, a towering theatrical genius and the greatest actor Switzerland has ever produced, inspired the ensemble with what I would describe as the fear of artistic death. It still strikes me as a sad and sickening piece of perversity, and an episode in Viennese theater history too disgraceful to be lived down, that the actors of the Burgtheater should have attempted to prevent the appearance of Bruno Ganz, going so far as to draw up a written resolution and threaten the management, and that the attempt should have actually succeeded. For as long as the Viennese theater has existed decisions have been made not by the theater director but by the actors. The theater director has no say, least of all at the Burgtheater, where all decisions are made by the matinee idols, who can be unhesitatingly described as feebleminded--on the one hand because they have no understanding of the theatrical art and on the other hand because they quite brazenly prostitute the theater, both to its own detriment and to that of the public--though it has to be added that for decades, if not for centuries, the public has been prepared to put up with these Burgtheater prostitutes and allowed them to dish up the worst theater in the world. When once these matinee idols, with their celebrated names and feeble theatrical intelligence, are raised to their pedestals by the mindless theatergoing public, they maintain themselves at the pinnacle of their artistic inanity by totally neglecting whatever theatrical potential they possess and shamelessly exploiting their popularity, and stay on at the Burgtheater for decades, usually until they die. After the appearance of Bruno Ganz had been prevented by the machinations of his colleagues, Paula Wessely, my first and only choice for the role of the general's wife in the play, also withdrew. Thus, having foolishly entered into a binding contract with the Burgtheater, I had to put up with a first performance that I can only describe as unappetizing and that, as I have indicated, was not even well intentioned. For, faced with the least displeasure on the part of the audience, the totally untalented actors who were cast in the main parts at once took sides with the audience, following the age-old tradition by which Viennese actors conspire with the audience against a play and have no compunction about stabbing the author in the back as soon as they sense that the audience does not take to his play in the first few minutes, because it does not understand it and finds both the author and the play too difficult. It goes without saying, of course, that actors ought to go through fire, as they say, for an author and his play, especially if it is new and has not been tried out before, but unlike their colleagues in the rest of Europe, Viennese actors--and especially those at the Burgtheater--are not prepared to do this. If they sense that the audience is not instantly enthusiastic about what it sees and hears after the curtain goes up, they at once desert the author and his play and make common cause with the audience, prostituting themselves and turning what it pleases them, in their infantile presumption, to call the premier stage of German-speaking Europe into the world's first theatrical whorehouse.

The rest of the passage is also well worth reading, but I must stop typing up rants and get on with my day...

Postscript

Re: sabbatical plans, I am wanting to write two books and do vast amounts of triathlon training in preparation for IMWI!

"I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"

I can't now reconstruct where I first saw the link, but I was on the verge of blogging the recent bog butter find - the Thames butter piece is the clincher, though!

(Bonus link: my favorite poem about butter!)

"Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare"

Matthew Cheney interviews Samuel R. Delany at Omnivoracious. The occasion: a new edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.

(Great interview! Sentences I most like, out of many other very good ones: "I wanted a book I—that is to say, we—could read and enjoy. So I wrote it." Delany is in my opinion one of the great geniuses of our time, as a critic as well as a fiction-writer - here were some thoughts of mine from a few years ago on his collection of pieces on writing. This bit, which I have come back to again and again over the last few years in my teaching, my fiction-writing and my critical writing, is almost certainly going to be either an epigraph for or a prominent feature in the introduction to A Bread-and-Butter Theory of the Novel...)

(Interview link courtesy of the king of all things capybara.)

(NB I am not surprised Delany has been teaching The Princesse de Cleves - it is essential reading! I am looking forward to teaching Flaubert in the fall myself...)