Cher Horowitz: American Hero

(Hat tip to Ms Sunnen for reminding me of this.)

"everybody's an authority / in a free land..."

The Loveard-Turner Letters (8): JL to ST

Dear Simon,

Well, it’s been a while. A thousand apologies. I had fallen down a well.

I have to admit that the idea of non-fiction as such doesn’t have the same power to compel me. Already its diction seems to constrain it, defined via negativa – what it is, well, it isn’t fiction. Immediately, maybe, it is cast into shadow because of this. I have heard good things about H is for hawk (in fact, it was a present that I gave to my brother – a bird obsessive – years back), about The Argonauts, and indeed I studied Portrait with Keys at university – a great book, indeed.

I have been trying to think why this is, and provide a genealogy, and examine whether it is something that pertains to me, something that pertains to non-fiction, or some mixture of both. Perhaps, it is simply because the tradition is larger, and there is so much to read anyway. So much to read. Or possibly, it is something else more definitional at play here. I’m not really fussed about non-fiction as such, because I’m not really fussed about fiction as such. The question is, and should always be: is the writing good? And by the writing, I mean both on the level of the sentences, and the larger structures that the sentences go together to create. Now you can debate what ‘good’ is, but it is quality that matters – but this is what you’re saying, no? This applies to genre too. Whether it be recounting the life of a bourgeois woman in 1920s London or a future society in which we worship Our Ford doesn’t matter. It simply and only has to be good. And indeed both Mrs Dalloway and Brave New World are excellent. I studied Portrait with Keys alongside A Secret Agent, Ulysses and Good Morning Midnight; I wasn’t really aware of it as non-fiction.    Taxonomies in this case can work against the reader rather than help. So often taxonomies are the province of the obsessive and completist, and better for museums and dead things.  

My own reading is haphazard at the moment: there is De Troyes Arthurian Romances, there is DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and all the while I’m also in the belly of Moby-Dick.

I’m looking forward to (among many – as always, there is an avalanche of them) two books in particular, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and Malcolm Lowry’s The Voyage That Never Ends. I have read their two central works, Invisible Man (1952) and Under the Volcano (1947), and my oncoming reading is, in effect, all that they could manage after. Both of them had epics mapped out, but what we have are aborted attempts, premature births, limbs. This happens sometimes, it seems. Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood envisaged epics, but mostly ended up cobbling together his novels from fragments. Truman Capote much advertised his Answered Prayers to be an American In Search of Lost Time, but it never really materialised. Lowry had an idea for a cycle of novels (the number projected seems to have been possibly three, or possibly five, or possibly seven). In some ways, Michael Hoffman’s description of this cycle in the introduction sounds almost like, if only superficially, Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet (an underrated remarkable work) in its self referentiality.  The book The Voyage That Never Ends is made up of fragments and extracts that were intended to one day form this larger non-existent effort. Ralph Ellison wrote Juneteenth for years and years from 1954 to his death in 1994. There is something appealing about reading these unfinished posthumous works. Apart from the standard literary pleasure, there’s the sadness at what could have been, but also perhaps a certain morbid fascination.            

One constant in my reading for a while now, I think, has been following where the river flowed after the initial white rapids of what we might call literary modernism. We have those central figures: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner. And then the river rushes through and on and under, picking up new and different sediments, flashing over different landscapes. I got my dousing rod, and followed. I listened out for those slightly less known, like Henry Green, Ford Maddox Ford, Dos Passos, or simply those who came later and still carried that modernist roar of the twenties, like Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry. More recently, James Hanley, Henry Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, Henry Green (again), Mario Vargos Llosa, Thomas Pynchon. I want to read Döblin, Broch, Quin, Cary, Cortizar, Lispector, Toomer. Maureen Duffy (who you recommended) too.

There is something about the sensibility and energy of these works that has a powerful hold on my imagination. (Had you guessed?) I don’t want to necessarily theorise about this (though I could try), nor make a case for their superiority to other works (because does that get us anywhere?). But I think this perhaps gets closer to that luminosity that I mentioned before.

I look at the lists above. Who is the obsessive and completist now? The line from DeLillo about lists being a form of cultural hysteria comes to mind. A cultured cultural cultish hysteria.

Yourz,

James

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (12): Word treasure

Bloy vi a bliml tsvishn korn

 

Rather wonderfully, the literal meaning of the Yiddish word for thesaurus, אוצר (oytser), is treasure.  For someone who has been known to read a thesaurus for fun, discovering this was a rare moment of cultural resonance, when the name of an object captured not only its function but my emotional reaction to it.  Of course, there’s an echo of this in English, where a collection of literature can be called a treasury, but somehow אוצר is even more direct about the joy to be found in language and the building of meaning.

 

The אוצר I have is the one produced by Nahum Stutchkoff in 1950 and it’s a hearty breezeblock of a book.  Given the size of it I’m not surprised that there’s only ever been one reprint edition, since a 940-page exploration of what was then a fading language would have been a challenging sell.  Luckily, this book was built to last.  Mine is one of the 1950 ones and it’s printed on the type of heavy paper that has a lot to say for itself – there’s plenty of crackling and chatter when you turn the pages.  You know that sound, like when you flex a really fat telephone directory in your hands?  It’s that, as though the words are trying to speak themselves.  This אוצר is bound in heavy green book linen with gold lettering, and they even marbled the page edges for crying out loud.  It might be 67 years old, but this book still shows up almost everything else on the shelves.

  

The 1991 reprint edition of Stutchkoff's אוצר  

 

I bought my copy of Stutchkoff’s אוצר on eBay for $27, from some guy in West Virginia.  He might not have realised what a treasure he had but someone somewhere took mighty good care of this book.  I’ve not been able to find a single blemish on its pages, not one spot of foxing and not a single rip.  It’s the kind of volume you’d expect to see in a library, but this one has no labels or stamps, no inscriptions or marginalia.  The covers are worn where it’s been sitting on the shelf, but beyond that it looks like it’s gone unread for most of its life.  Happily, not anymore.

 

This אוצר was one of the very first Yiddish books I bought, almost two years ago, back when I was slowly piecing words together on the page.  I was still freaking out about the cost of the postage as I was unwrapping it, but this is one of those books that can silence all doubts.  I might have struggled to read it back then, but now this one volume is probably the most comprehensive representation of the Yiddish language that I could ever find.

 

Just like a Roget’s Thesaurus, Stutchkoff’s אוצר is organised according to categories, and like Roget’s it starts with the big existential ones, namely Being (zayn) and Not-Being (nit-zayn).  Clearly Stutchkoff wanted Yiddish to be represented with as much seriousness as all the other European languages, not as some inconsequential זשאַרגאָן (zshargon/jargon).  He divided the entire shprakh into 620 categories of concepts, everything from elements to wild animals to music to foods to emotions, then he absolutely went to town.  Now that I can read and understand great swathes of this book, I can see that there is real gold in the sheer linguistic variety that Stutchkoff recorded.

 

Officially, the אוצר contains over 150,000 words, concepts and phrases, making it almost twice as comprehensive as my largest Yiddish dictionary.  There are words in here that none of my Yiddish dictionaries have, and Stutchkoff has been careful to track the different variants of Yiddish across its full linguistic range.  To use the section on blue (בלױ) as an example, there’s a huge array of detail that would be impossible to find elsewhere.  Not only does it list the different ways of saying “blue”, depending on which version of Yiddish you are using (bloy, blo, blov, azur, lazur), it also gives a wonderful range of specific and recognisable blues, such as עלעקטריע בלױ (elektrie bloy), הימל בלױ (himl bloy) and אולטראַמאַרין (ultramarin).  Then there’s the more mysterious blues, such as קינדער בלױ (kinder bloy), which I can only guess would be pastel blue, or בערלינער בלױ (berliner bloy) and קאַדעט בלױ (kadet bloy), which sound rather more like heritage paint shades.

 

Berliner blue has to be in here somewhere

 

However, it’s the similes that really deliver the goods.  As well as the expected bloy vi der yam (blue as the sea) and bloy vi der himl (blue as the sky), we have bloy vi bliml tsvishn korn (blue as a little flower amongst rye, presumably a cornflower), bloy vi a milb (blue as a moth), bloy vi a milts (blue as a spleen), bloy vi a gehangener  (blue as a hanged man) and, my own personal favourite, bloy vi mayne gesheftn.  I’m not entirely sure, but I think that last one means “blue as my deals”.  I’m almost sure that it’s not obscene.

 

What I love about these similes is that they call up a world in its own words, in the language that people spoke on the street and in their homes.  They add the fine detail that has often been lost in standardized Yiddish, where bloy is usually just bloy.  Stutchkoff’s אוצר is the only one of its kind, a lifetime’s work, and perhaps the closest we non-native speakers can get to understanding not only what we have already lost but also what there is to rediscover.

 

 

The Loveard-Turner Letters (7): ST to JL

Hey hey!

First of all, colossal apologies for taking so long to reply to your last email.  It’s been Christmas – you may well have noticed – which necessitated a great deal of cooking, eating, washing up, planning of the next meal, etc, etc.  Besides that, an excellent crop of new books and movies has made its way into the house, and I’ve been dipping into those with appetite and glee (Renata Adler’s selected journalism, After the Tall Timber, has been a highlight so far, and a lot of energy’s been poured into clearing my schedule to watch Abel Gance’s five and half hour silent masterpiece Napoleon, which the BFI have just released in a new print)*, a fact which has necessitated ignoring the outside world – or the close approximation of the outside world that the interweb provides, at any rate – for the last couple of weeks.  But rest assured!  I have not neglected your previous missive, and have been turning its more salient and meaty points over in my mind as best I can between bouts of competitive potato-eating and Harry Potter marathons.

To address some of your concerns: yes, you’re probably right that Woolf’s novels will outlast her diaries and letters, without a doubt.  Indeed, the diaries and letters as literary artefacts are explicitly dependent upon the high critical regard in which the novels are held.  (This is probably as true of other great literary journal-keepers like John Cheever and James Schuyler and Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood, though the picture is greyed and blurred a little by the Goncourt brothers, whose journals are afforded the serious attention and respect which have long been denied their no-longer-read-at-all-by-anyone-anywhere-even-academics novels.)  Perhaps it’s simply a matter of particularity, even perversity, on my part: I simply don’t want (or don’t think I want) that sense of finish, of ‘luminosity’, that you’re seeking and finding in Woolf’s work: I’m genuinely more interested in her quotidian thoughts on what she’s reading at any given point, what she had for breakfast on Saturday, the particularities of tiny mundane detail, provided for their own interest and pleasure and nothing more.**

Perhaps, if I were in a less controversial or contrarian mood – but when’s that ever likely to happen? – I might temper my argument, and suggest that my impatience with ‘trad. fic’ – and my concomitant drift towards the fringes (essays, diaries, novels that break apart under the strain of their own construction) – is really in part a reaction to a certain arrogance on the part of Fiction, considered as a monolithic bloc: an arrogance that sees itself as the final arbiter of the ‘literary’, and that views other forms not as important and vital genres in their own right, but rather as little more than jerry-built adjuncts to Fiction’s self-confessed pre-eminence in the field of Wordery. 

That’s probably yet another straw man, I’m sure – I should probably start charging by the penny, I’m putting together so many hay-stuffed effigies: at this rate, by the end of the month, I’ll have, well, some pennies, anyway – but I still think I’m raising something resembling a valid point, however grumpily and idiosyncratically I might express it.  Why mine Woolf’s diaries for what gems of information they can express about her ‘real’ work?  Can’t we treat them as a pre-eminence in and of themselves?  Hmm?  There was a very good article by Geoff Dyer in the Guardian fairly recently (actually over a year ago now, but by my standards, that’s recent) that touched on this issue.  (You can read it here if you wish.)  Dyer raises a whole host of other points beside, but one of his observations struck me particularly, pertaining to the differing values one expects, respectively, from fiction and non-fiction: fiction, according to the schema Dyer lays out, is a refuge if you’re after style and joy; non-fiction, however, can be viewed as a rather more austere and utilitarian harbour, providing nought but facts and content.  (The French Riviera vs. Portsmouth, basically.)  “In a realm where style was often functional,” writes Dyer, “nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”, as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a reliable car.”             

Dyer, of course, is sketching out this clichéd view of non-fiction to provide a semi-ironic backdrop for his advocacy of the more recent advances in the field – and many of the names that get referenced in the article have popped up on my own radar,*** in many instances producing in the process some pretty unforgettable and forthright emerald blips: yes, I am running this metaphor into the ground, thank you for noticing – but I would say that this cliché does still pertain to a certain extent.  If I am overzealous in my non-fiction boosterism, I feel it’s somewhat warranted: over-correction is better than the complacency of no correction at all.    

This reply, I realise, is already radically breaching the limits of what’s reasonable, both quantitatively and qualitatively, so I should probably sign off soon, but before I go, and as a means of providing a little bit of gravy for the next mind-meal you send my way, one of the books that snuck into the house over the festive break was The Storm (1704) by Daniel Defoe.  I’ve only glanced at and dipped into it so far – not least because it’s not actually mine, but my good lady’s, and there’s a whole Byzantine edifice of social etiquette pertaining to the matter of who gets to read books first in any given household, the complexity of which would make a medieval Japanese nobleman’s head spin clean off his shoulders – but what’s notable, aside from its subject matter, is the sense that Defoe is both creating and defining a form, and simultaneously defending it aesthetically, even as he calls it into being.  We could probably call that genre ‘long-form journalism’ or ‘literary non-fiction’, depending on our mood, but whatever it is, it feels alarmingly contemporary.  Discuss.          

 

Yours, as ever,

Simon

PS: Happy New Year, by the way! 

*My hope is that there’s a revolution-tinged secular holiday which is celebrated in France some time in the next few weeks with which can coincide my screening of the movie, to really make an event of it.  I don’t want to have to wait till Bastille Day, for God’s sake.

**I’m probably the only reader – I’m certainly in a minority of readers, anyway – who gets far more excited by technical details in a writer’s biography than the endless, prurient cataloguing of their turbid emotional lives: how many words got written on August 16^th, say?; what kind of pens did they use, and where did they buy them?; had they read Proust before or after they began work on their third novel, etc, etc?

***Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys, in particular, is now a personal favourite of mine: genuinely one of the best things I have read in some years.  I was planning to re-read it, so that I could more properly answer your perfectly reasonable request for some concrete detail regarding my reading habits and preferences, but realised I’d lent the book to a friend – oh, the hubris! – and so can’t fulfil my duties in this instance.  Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, too, feels like a game-changer, though everyone and their maiden aunt has written about that, and extensively, so I’ll limit my comments to say simply that I enjoyed it immensely.  H is for Hawk, if you’ve not read it, should wing its way to your ‘must read’ pile pretty soon, too.    

The Loveard-Turner Letters (6): JL to ST

Yo, 

In a preamble, I would have to agree, re: the strawmanning of academia. If we are to, as Trilling said, attempt to consider things complexly it is necessary for me to acknowledge: there are many in literary departments up and down the Archipelago doing good and interesting work, and that so with passion.  Indeed, I enjoyed my degree (in the long ago days) immensely.  Primarily, I think my reservations are to do with: a) how this good and interesting work is reaching the Commonweal as a whole*, b) if the modes of language used aren’t a net (an Iris Murdochy–Under-the-Net-type-net) that traps and hampers rather than frees, and c) if the strictures of academia, as currently constructed, deprive (say, in the case of philosophy) us of figures like a Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, a Plato.

But let’s refine your point further. You mentioned a certain old-fashioned impulse to have the author be live and well on the page contra Barthes, but simultaneously what you’re asking for is something that sounds at least pretty modern, or at least postmodern. A foregrounding of the apparatus, a self-consciousness.  You want – in a manner – a self-conscious text, perhaps not metafiction, but meta-nonfiction, a metaessay (though, one assumes, not simply one that only describes its own making, but is also about something else).  You note an ennui, a distaste concerning “the mechanics of outright fiction.”  I wondered if this had to do with an inauthenticity that you were tasting.  Trilling wrote about the distinction between sincerity and authenticity.  Broadly, he says sincerity is about saying out loud what is in your heart, and authenticity is to do with being oneself.  Your insistence on the mess and stuff and muddle is to ask for a kind of realism or authenticity.  Simon says, Thoughts don’t come from nowhere.  Simon says, Thoughts emerge from the mess, the stuff and funk.  Simon says, Show me this.  Is this that familiar move that we have seen in our literature, the restless attempt to get at something truer or ‘real’, etc?  So if modernism is (v simplistically) the literature of consciousness (Joyce, Woolf etc), and postmodernism (v simplistically) the literature of self-consciousness (Calvino etc), this is a move away from fiction as such, toward a non-fiction that has this awareness, this self-consciousness about how it is made?  Is this a useful way to think about what you’re saying?  Or not?  What does Simon say?  

So far, the prime example you’ve given is Dept. of Speculation (2014), which, broadly speaking, is a novel, and I think an example that is more squarely in what we might call the essay would be helpful.    

To add a discordant chime to your literary spidey-senses: your particular thesis doesn’t hold – at least with the evidence you bring to bear.  It is without question that, say, Woolf’s diaries and letters are of very great worth**.  Francis Spalding has, like you, speculated that it is these that will last, and have the most value.  I think this is a stretch – wonderful as they are, the diaries and letters don’t exceed the brightness cast by the luminous stream formed by Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1932). Equal in value, perhaps, but they don’t outshine her fiction.  Bennet, I think, is fair game here.  (I don’t know enough about Simon Gray or Thoreau to say.)  But are these representative figures?  If one casts the net (not an Iris-Murdochy-Under-the-Net-type-net, but a book-and-writer-nabbing-type-net) further, it isn’t clear to me that you will dredge up enough driftwood you need to prop up your thesis.  Your examples are journals, diaries.  Things that are done in private, and may or may not, have an intended audience beyond the writer themselves.  To run with that, James Joyce’s letters (even the dirtiest ones) don’t have the value of that lodestar Ulysses (1922); Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954) are very beautiful but I doubt will accumulate enough clout to overtake his other work (nor should they, I think).  These are very narrow examples, of course, but I think for you to give the tendency of your thoughts (The Simon Tendency) more power there needs to be larger theory of the case, and more luggage inside that case.

Yrz,

J.S.L.

* Not in a calculated impact way, but I do think that advocacy of reading and literature as such could play a larger role in what departments do.  Maybe.  My thoughts are hazy as a Pea Souper, or Air Gravy.

** This description of Woolf’s diary is so great that it needed to be here, and it felt relevant to what you’re thinking about.  From A Writer’s Diary (1954): 'What sort of diary should I like mine to be?  Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.  I should like it to resemble a deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.  I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and collapsed, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.'