James, Jimmy, Jamie

Ed Pavlic's 2015 Boston Review piece on James Baldwin's letters to his brother David. Wish I could read the one about Just Above My Head and real-life family members!

Values of the 19th century

At the Guardian, Stefan Collinis diagnosis after reading the latest volume of Isaiah Berlin's letters:

Berlin’s admirers are prone to say that there is mean-spirited, reverse snobbery at work in criticisms of his constant hobnobbing with the rich, powerful and well-connected. But the justifiable charge against him here is not that he liked the company of such people: it is that his cultivated intimacy with such circles habituated him into thinking of himself as being on the inside, able to pull strings and to drop a word in the ear of those with one kind of power or another without having to mount a properly argued case in public, which might then have been open to challenge. He enjoyed his insider status and he liked his opinions to have influence, but he hated to have to acknowledge them publicly or to be drawn into controversy over them. He undeniably possessed a streak of deviousness or even cowardice, and his genuinely liberal principles were often in tension with his equally deep need to be liked and admired.

Love life of the Colorado beetle

At the NYRB, John Banville on the latest volumes of Beckett's letters.

"Eyes too like the lobster's"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on Jenny Hartley's new one-volume selection of Dickens' letters:

He is often killingly funny, more so even than in the novels, as in his description of taking his son and friends out on a picnic from Eton; “What I suffered for fear those boys should get drunk – the struggles I underwent in a contest of feeling between hospitality and prudence – must ever remain untold . . . . They were very good, however. The speech of one became thick, and his eyes too like the lobster’s to be comfortable, but only temporarily”.

Bad habits

Clarissa to Anna Howe, letter dated "Sat. night, Mar. 18" (the Penguin edition edited by Angus Ross seems to be no longer in print, which is dismaying to me!):

 You see, my dear, he scruples not to speak of himself, as his enemies speak of him.  I can’t say, but his openness in these particulars gives a credit to his other professions.  I should easily, I think, detect a hypocrite: and this man particularly, who is said to have allowed himself in great liberties, were he to pretend to instantaneous lights and convictions—at his time of life too: habits, I am sensible, are not so easily changed.  You have always joined with me in remarking that he will speak his mind with freedom, even to a degree of unpoliteness sometimes; and that his very treatment of my family is a proof that he cannot make a mean court to anybody for interest-sake.  What pity, where there are such laudable traces, that they should have been so mired, and choked up, as I may say!—We have heard that the man’s head is better than his heart: but do you really think Mr Lovelace can have a very bad heart?  Why should not there by something in blood in the human creature, as well as in the ignobler animals?

Other minuscules

A point of considerable curiosity to my students, especially as we looked at amazing books at the Berg Collection at the NYPL on Thursday evening: the long "s"...

A dried chameleon and the eardrum of a lion

At the TLS, a rather lovely reminiscence by William Dalrymple of his encounters with Bruce Chatwin (the occasion is the publication of a collection of Chatwin's letters). For me as a reader Chatwin has been eclipsed by Sebald, who seems to me immeasurably the greater writer, but I am attracted to Chatwin's curiosities of course - I think Dalrymple may slightly overstate Chatwin's current lack of fashionability?

Here's a good bit, anyway:

“I’ve never liked big books”, he writes while hard at work on The Viceroy of Ouidah, “so I don’t see why I should try and write them. Unless you’re Tolstoy most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.” One characteristic remark notes how “I have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line”. He also advises younger writers to avoid journalism “because ultimately it corrodes”, and while he occasionally writes for the TLS, he believes that “the besetting sin of all English writers is their fatal attraction for periodicals, their fascination for reviews and their passion for bickering in print. Resolution of the month: Never write for newspapers”. Above all he advises writers to avoid listening to reviews, which he says are “paralysing”: “Don’t flap too much about the critics – and never try to please them (it isn’t worth it). The function of an artist is to work for a) himself b) to leave something memorable, for the future, to shore up the ruins. Fuck the rest of them!”.

Ether, ethics, anesthetics

Lots of things recently have been conspiring to make me want to reread T.S. Eliot, in whose writings I was absolutely steeped as a teenager but who I have only briefly revisited since; aside from more casual prompts, I am contemplating a future class on the battle of the ancients and moderns, to be built around Swift's Tale of a Tub but taking in everything from Hamlet and Montaigne and Descartes up to David Markson's Reader's Block. (In my office the other day after an unusual and interesting oral exam I was rereading Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, which I think laziness would induce me to teach instead of the Cantos.) "The Waste Land" is crucial here, of course...

Anyway, a very appealing piece at the TLS by Eric Griffiths on the latest volume of Eliot's letters. Here is a good bit:

These letters are awash with complaints, mostly nervous – “neuralgia”, “neuritis”, “nerve-storms” – but also, among others, hemicranial migraine, anaemia, toothache, trouble with “glands”, malnutrition and “suppressed influenza”. Husband and wife shadowed each other through an intent, valetudinarian tango, one shuffling in retreat when the other strode forward (“I had influenza just after Christmas and I was scarcely out of bed before Vivien suddenly rushed into bed and refused to get up any more”, to Charles Haigh-Wood, July 1925). While they were associates in dismay, they might listen to the roster of each other’s ailments with sympathy, participation even, but at any time they could go out of tune with one another and start hearing the tales of woe as wheedling, extortion or connivance. They became third parties to their own experience, reciprocally suspicious, as Eliot’s brother suspected Vivien (“she unconsciously encourages her breakdowns”), as Eliot in 1926 suspected John Donne: “this deliberate over-stimulation, exploitation of the nerves – for such it is – has in it, to me, something unscrupulous”. What struck her as the unstable straining of their lives for effect – “life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time” (1918) – came across to him bearing the force of an artistic convention like revenge tragedy, with its routines, its precarious “mixture of tedious discourse and sudden reality” (1927), ambivalently powerful either to flatten out or throw into high relief the interactions which it frames.

"Grapes, Cherries, Plumbs & Apricots"

At the NYRB blog, Cathleen Schine on Austenolatry.

Closing tabs

I have spent much of the last week in a pleasant haze, in subway cars or during the later-evening couch hours mandated by the anti-insomnia protocol which forbids computer time at night, induced and maintained by the first five books of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series.

There is something very comforting about knowing how many of them there are - eight books in this series, and then a whole other six-book series. I love multi-volume series (also very pleasant is discovering a crime novelist of excellence who has already published six or seven volumes in his or her series which can then be consumed at a steady but more or less voracious pace over the course of four or five days); I think that these are not in the end up to the standard of Patrick O'Brian on the one hand or Susan Howatch on the other, but I am now very much looking forward to reading the Lymond books once I finish with these.

Further link miscellany:

This year's "oddest book title" contest. (A number of these books inevitably sound to my ears highly worthwhile!)

Shackleton's whisky excavated from beneath floorboards of polar hut!

At the New Yorker, Macy Halford on the importance of e-mail to romance (with commentary by Abigail Adams) (courtesy of Amy).

On Thursday I saw Parsons Dance at the Joyce. The dancing was excellent, the music perhaps to a somewhat lower standard (though not as dire as I feared - it is a truly bizarre endeavor, though, with famous opera arias set as lavishly orchestrated pop songs - "La donna e mobile" as torch song really made me want to laugh! - it is the East Village Opera Company and their music can be sampled here if you are curious).

By far the highlight of the evening was the short prelude before the main piece. It is called "Caught," and it is truly spectacular - it takes advantage of the kinds of theatricality and athleticism one associates with Cirque du Soleil, which seems to me a very good idea indeed. The combination of strobe lighting and unbelievable jumps and timing truly makes it seem as though the dancer is flying through the air due some occult power - it is very "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," I loved it! There is a link here which gives some of the flavor of it, but the essence is exactly what cannot be captured on film or digital media - the staggering part of it is the way that after the flying sequence you suddenly see the dancer standing quietly at the back of the stage, only the sheen of sweat and the heaving ribcage speaking to the effort that has just been expended. Really magical!

(A good dinner afterwards, too, at the Viceroy Cafe. I had a steak salad - slabs of rare beef served on a heap of mesclun salad with balsamic vinaigrette and roquefort cheese, with cucumber, tomato and avocado laid out delicately around the plate - and a truly delicious helping of tiramisu.)

Chronicles of the IBM Selectric

Joanna Smith Rakoff used to have a job answering J.D. Salinger's unwanted fan mail...

Unfinished

I like the British genre of the review which, while otherwise favorable, enumerates a paragraph or two of errors in the penultimate paragraph:

Murdoch’s youthful mind is as sharp and polished as a sword, but Conradi’s editing is not. Random footnotes pop up like glove puppets interrupting a soliloquy, to explain that “Je t’aime” means “I love you” and that Baudelaire is a French poet. There is no index, there are typos galore and a footnote that refers to the missing last page of Thompson’s final letter to Murdoch is itself tantalisingly unfinished — “how Frank signed off his last letter we will probably never”.

Two by Perec

The first image is from Portrait(s) de Georges Perec; the second is from Ian Monk's translation of "The Exeter Text" in Three by Perec.

"Nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf"

At the Guardian, Stefan Collini has a very good piece on the new volume of Eliot letters:

Much of Eliot's editorial correspondence deals with what, to anyone who has any experience of literary journalism, will be bound to appear as the familiar constants, almost the universals, of the trade. Here, over and over again, is the desperate last-minute scramble to meet (or sometimes not quite to meet) the deadline for the current issue, followed by repeated resolutions to have the material ready in good time for the next issue. Here, in dispiriting quantity, are examples of the various ways of sucking up to eminent potential contributors, of well-meant evasiveness with lesser supplicants, and of tactful dealings with imposssibly difficult authors (Wyndham Lewis wins the prize). Here, too, are the familiar grumblings about the inefficiency of printers, the usual unrealistic fantasies about circulation and the vehemently expressed regrets at ever having taken on such a doomed and life-destroying enterprise in the first place.

Apologising to one contributor for the fact that, a year after being accepted, his article had still not been published, Eliot tried to enlist his sympathies: "I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street. Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody. At the end, the review is squeezed together somehow, and is never the number that I planned three months before." In this case, he promised the article would be published "early next year"; in the event, it never appeared.

"Vive l'Haggis!"

Miscellaneous links:

Caleb Crain on horse-drawn vehicles.

Alice Boone on the non-horologist's mindset.

And finally, 20 things to do with a haggis.

TWO chocolate ice creams

Adam Mars-Jones has a thoughtful piece at the Observer on the problem with publishing Dirk Bogarde's letters, and I cannot resist pasting in these paragraphs:

Dirk Bogarde's books were painstakingly shaped and rewritten. Writing letters functioned as a sort of five-finger exercise for him, but they were exercises mainly in the key of G: gush and grumble. The English moan is a complex phenomenon. Well-off expatriates moan about little things ('I refuse to pay five francs 50 for a small root of impatiens'; 'We cannot really afford to have [meat] more than once a week') because things are so nearly as they want them, or because they don't want to discuss their real worries, or for superstitious reasons. If you stop grumbling, the gods may suddenly notice how fortunate you are and take steps.

Letter writing was part of Dirk Bogarde's life-support system, but what part, exactly? Perhaps it had a sort of renal function, clearing the blood of toxins. Many of these letters express the negatives of his virtues, such as a reflex of ungraciousness after generous hospitality, written when the washing-up was a stronger memory than the meal (which Forwood cooked anyway). 'A huge, really big, leek-pie, which Dick had two helpings of, TWO chocolate ice creams with nuts and cream walloped on top, half a round of cheese, lots of bread and butter, figs from the garden and TWO bananas from the greengrocer!' If that's what happens when you invite your dear neighbour Dickie Attenborough to dinner, either don't ask him again or don't expect leftovers next time.

Another guest, the British consul's wife, may have thought she was making things easy for her host by drinking only hot water, but no ('A bit tiresome topping up her cup all afternoon ... ').

A new type of doughnut

Another nice piece on Penelope Fitzgerald's letters: Peter Terzian in the National of Abu Dhabi. (Link courtesy of Caleb.) A sample:

The few words she offers her correspondents on her novels and novel writing will likely have prospective fiction writers gnashing their teeth. She wrote The Bookshop in “rather a few weeks”. Anyone can write a single-consciousness novel, she writes to an editor, “if they can find a pen and a bit of paper”. Her tendency toward self-effacement – “My whole life is spent in apologising to someone or other, I’m afraid” – may have been a mask for her ambition and persistence. She must have been aware of, and fiercely protective of, the mysterious source of her creativity.

Fitzgerald’s letters are never malicious or gossipy. Still, it’s a pleasure to read her privately expressed opinions. Born into a clerical family, she was as intolerant of bad behaviour or impoliteness – “the dread Malcolm Bradbury seems to be made of some plastic or semi-fluid substance which gives way or changes in your hands” – as she was impatient with bad books: “Trying to conceal an absolute conviction that Salman Rushdie’s new novel is a load of codswallop.” She is generous with praise, of people (“Sybille Bedford a tower of strength”) and writing (“Ishiguro yes!”).