Novels of Early Childhood

I will be blogging this week about my new novel In the Land of the Living, just released by Little Brown. Here is an excerpt of the second blog, which appears on the website of the Jewish Book Council:

Some academics have observed that young Jewish writers do not mine their personal lives for material in the same way that Jewish writers did a generation ago. In my own case, this is and isn't true. My first novel, The Jump Artist, was based on someone else’s life and took place in lands and days disparate from my own. My second novel, In the Land of the Living, draws on my own personal experiences and on events in the history of my own family. It’s first and foremost about loss at a tender age, and finding your way out from under the pall of grief, back to the land of the living, and to all that makes life worth living. (Why am I not on Oprah’s book list?)....

To read the rest, follow this link.

Jack Kerouac's Harmonica and Mary Shelley's Hair

The Museum of Modern Art defines a Wunderkammer like this:

Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects. In essence these collections—combining specimens, diagrams, and illustrations from many disciplines; marking the intersection of science and superstition; and drawing on natural, manmade, and artificial worlds—can be seen as the precursors to museums.

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the New York Public Library has unleashed from its storehouse of artifacts a Wunderkammer to rival even those in the Morgan Library, which owns more Gutenberg Bibles than I do televisions. On Thursday, I decided to work for a bit at the library at 42nd Street before a lunch meeting.

However, I couldn't work there, because I was ensnared by the unexpected Wunderkammer there on the first floor. Within, I saw in glass cases: e.e. cummings's typewriter (a Royal); Hemingway's Nobel acceptance speech, which he wrote inside the back cover of John P. Marquand's Thirty Years (because it was blowing so hard that day by the pool in Havana); Charlotte Bronte's writing desk; Charles Dickens's letter opener, apparently ivory and of rapier length, with "C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862" engraved on it and bearing a handle made from the paw of his deceased cat (Bob); Virginia Woolf's diary and the cane that Leonard Woolf found floating in the River Ouse after she killed herself; a lock of Mary Shelley's hair (which Mary had sent to Thomas Jefferson Hogg as a token of affection at the behest of Percy, who encouraged her to have affairs so that he could in good conscience have his own); Jack Kerouac's harmonica and Valium pills; George Washington's handwritten farewell address (never delivered orally, but evidently the precedent for many later empty farewell platitudes); a letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau; a Gutenberg bible (just one, though--point to Morgan Library); a funny typed letter from Groucho Marx to Harold Robbins of The New Yorker, signed; a Beethoven score messily handwritten (by Beethoven); Jerome Robbins's colorful diaristic collage including tickets to shows, programs, drawings, and scribblings; a book hand-painted by Joan Miró; a marked-up draft of Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Lottery in Babylon," written on graph paper in his micrographic hand (each letter is about three millimeters high); the first photographically illustrated book (Photographs of British Algae--Cyanotype Impressions by Anna Atkins, 1880); Richard Wright's diaries; Malcolm X's diaries (he wrote the most mundane things in them--apparently he took a lot of naps); a signed copy of Mein Kampf; a Kiki Smith self-portrait that's described as having been painted with her "hair" (when it's fairly obvious it was painted with her pubic hair); a Thomas Edison "Gem" Wax Cylinder Phonograph in pristine condition; a typed draft of "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot with handwritten comments and suggestions from Ezra Pound (such as "Wonderful!" alongside some now famous verse as if "The Wasteland" were a high school term paper and T.S. Eliot the student!); and thirty or more small cuneiform tablets from several millennia ago, one of which was juxtaposed with a plugged-in MacBook showing Thursday's New York Times, digital edition, with an image in the middle of it of a poster of Vladimir Putin.

I was enthralled--until I began to feel a little like I did while going through my wife's great aunt's personal effects at her house in South Bend, Indiana after she was dead. (There was nothing in the great aunt's house so rarefied as Mary Shelley's hair, but there were jugs of Canadian Mist whiskey and Fleischman's vodka on the floor of her bedroom closet.) I told an editor enthusiastically about Virginia Woolf's cane and he said ironically, "Do you think you have a morbid side, Austin?" I realize now that the rarest and most exotic items in the NYPL Wunderkammer were indeed also the most morbid. It occurs to me that even a one-of-a-kind painting gives out a faint scent of the morgue; but the huge reproduction of Kiki Smith's pubic hair, besides focusing the viewer's mind on genitals, was also redolent of life because it wasn't entombed in the coffin of a solitary glass case. It was a participant in the present and the future--in some way alive in the way that living things are alive. It was replicated, propagating itself through many doors, into many spaces, many minds, moving, engaging, interacting, changing others (if itself incapable of change) and incorporating itself into others and so into the future, alive, alive, alive, like Shelley's monster, alive.

Which is to say: I don't think I can join Walter Benjamin in his gloom over the prospects for art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Weird Science

Frankenstein (Signet Classics) by Mary Shelley

This question hovers over the novel’s outrageous plot: why would Victor Frankenstein abandon his creation?  It doesn’t really make much sense unless you appeal to the open secrets of Mary Shelley’s biography.  Her mother died of puerperal sickness (i.e., after childbirth), abandoning her daughter Mary to a lifetime without her.  The monster’s undiminished rage at his absent creator seems to me obviously to parallel Shelley’s childhood situation and what she could be expected to feel.  And yet Shelley’s sympathies are neatly divided between the monster and its creator.  She knew the monster’s loneliness and sense of exile but also knew Victor Frankenstein’s longing to resurrect; her first child Clara died in infancy and, according to editor of the Signet edition Walter James Miller, she had recurrent dreams of reviving the child.  She knew Victor Frankenstein’s hatred for his own creation as well.  Clara died—cause enough for fury—but her second child, William, survived, and as any honest parent knows, that’s problematic too.  It’s no coincidence, is it, that the monster’s first act of violence is to strangle to death a little boy named … William?

The novel Frankenstein is the child of generational tension just as Hamlet is, but Frankenstein is a child of more extreme and premature abandonment, of an infant‘s rage against her absent mother and a mother’s rage at her infant’s hounding, stalking needs (rage at “the murderer of my peace” as Frankenstein puts it on p. 147).  Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Frankenstein is its focus on infancy and its psychological residua.  Miller tells us that prior to writing Frankenstein, Shelley read John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding—an important precursor to modern notions of child development according to which experience shapes the naïve, plastic tissues of the infant brain and leaves a permanent imprint on a person’s identity.

Explicit references to infancy and its relation to later life bestrew the pages of Frankenstein.  From the beginning, as Captain Walton recounts the tale of his “earlier years” (p. 13) and Victor Frankenstein tells the tale of his, Shelley asserts that the past ruthlessly determines the future.  “[N]othing can alter my destiny,” Frankenstein says on p. 15, “listen to my history, and you will perceive how irrevocably it is determined.”  The personal histories of such importance to Shelley also return again and again to certain themes—of orphanhood, abandonment, death in childbirth, etc., and consequent insecurity and loneliness.  The monster’s inquiry into his early life is the most affecting of all.  On p. 84 he says, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being….”  On p. 101 the monster says, “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses.”

Early impressionability and want of love lead directly to the two other major motives of the novel: rage and guilt, tormenting guilt and unrelieved rage.  When the monster realizes he is alone in the world without a single friend, he says (on p. 116), “[F]rom that moment I declared everlasting war … against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.”

Mary Shelley attacks these unusual themes with unparalleled intellect and imagination.  Some of her descriptions, particularly of the Swiss Alps, are divine, but on the whole her prose does not serve her well.  It could be argued that the prose of the entire era was in general spoiled with twee Wordsworthian excess, but whatever the cause—the era or Shelley’s youth or whatever—there are long tracts of Frankenstein written in butter cream fondant.  Here’s a passage, for example, that goes on and on and says little.  Frankenstein wants to tell his father that he’s going to London as a tourist, as opposed to going there on a secret mission to create a woman, in hopes of compelling his male creation to stop murdering his relatives.  He says:

I expressed a wish to visit England, but concealing the true reasons of this request, I clothed my desires under a guise which excited no suspicion, while I urged my desire with an earnestness that easily induced my father to comply. After so long a period of an absorbing melancholy that resembled madness in its intensity and effects, he was glad to find that I was capable of taking pleasure in the idea of such a journey, and he hoped that change of scene and varied amusement would, before my return, have restored me entirely to myself. pp. 131-132

I’m forced to conclude that at that early stage of novel-writing, authors didn’t fully appreciate the uses of dialogue.  Wouldn’t that wordy, explanatory paragraph have been improved by something like this:

“I’m going to England,” I said.  “It’s Bonfire Night approaching.  Clerval says it’s not to be missed.”

“By all means,” my father said.  “Absolutely, you should go.  It will do you good!”

“They have marvelous fireworks on the Thames, Clerval says.”

“Yes, yes, go!”

And I went on behalf of the monster, and I saw no fireworks.

With much of the prose so painfully verbose and frequently irrelevant, I find it all the more amazing how well Shelley succeeds with the parts focused on the monster himself, especially what Harold Bloom calls “the novel’s extraordinary conclusion, with its scenes of obsessional pursuit through the Arctic wastes….”  Her nameless monster is one of the most moving, pitiable, unsettling, and unique characters in all literature, a character to make you weep like the Elephant Man, like no Shakespeare character makes you weep, except perhaps Othello.  And Shelley’s “demonic conclusion in a world of ice,” as Harold Bloom puts it, is a picture of crucifixion by total loneliness, helplessness, guilt, and rage, more tragic than anything else I’ve read in a work of fiction.