World's Fair

World's Fair: a Novel by E.L. Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was asked by Moment Magazine to write about a book by a Jewish writer who had influenced me, and I chose Doctorow's charming and cunningly straightforward World's Fair, which won the National Book Award in 1986.  Click here to read the article.


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The Grand Cathedral

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom has a valid gripe with the "School of Resentment" as he calls it--i.e. the group of academics who are actively destroying the notion of a canon of great works, of classics.  The real virtue of this book, however, is in Bloom's wise and warm-hearted discussions of the art of the great works themselves.  He'll send you back to your favorite classics reinvigorated to discover them again or inspire you to tackle great works you've heard of but never read.  Either way, Bloom will arm you with much helpful wisdom about the books, their narrative strategies, their themes, and their relation to one another.  His approach is in my view the common sense one--to think about the writers not as vessels of impersonal cultural-historical forces, but as individual human beings, as artists acutely aware of, indebted to, and competitive with their predecessors.  It's a history of literary artists since the Renaissance as if they've all been working on the same piece, like architects inheriting the job of building a grand cathedral and passing the job on to the next generation.


The only disappointments for me were chapters 10 (on Jane Austen and Wordsworth) and 20 (on Kafka)--Bloom lapses into excessive abstraction in these.  But this book is an essential for any library.


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The Golem and the Blood Libel

The Golem by Isaac Bashevis Singer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By a long shot, this is the funniest book I ever read about the blood libel.


Caveat: despite illustrations by Uri Shulevitz that look suited to children, this is not a children's book.  It's about some gentiles who libel an innocent Jew for the murder of a child in 17th-century Prague.  German folklore, of course, really did depict Jews as demonic figures who used Christian children's blood in their matzah.  The legend is gruesome enough, but its demonization of Jews is even more troubling given the catastrophic consequences of such racism in the real lives of European Jewish families as recently as sixty years ago.  Golem folklore, meanwhile, emerged from the Jewish ghettoes of Europe and, at least in Singer's telling, serves as antidote to the racist folklore known to Jews as the blood libel.  Golems are pretend, as are demonic cannibal Jews, as is the arch distinction between heroes and villains in this and other fairy tales.  (Singer surely painted the righteousness of the Jewish victims and the venality and mendacity of their gentile accusers in stark terms so that the charges of cannibalism in the story would be understood as unambiguously false.)  But it's important to note that Isaac Bashevis Singer didn't make up the notion of the blood libel.  The blood libel appears in Chaucer's poetry and in the original edition of Grimm's fairy tales.  In The Golem the judge uses the frequency of the accusation of cannibalism as evidence of its validity.  That is surely one of the ways that rumors propagate--people believe hoax emails today for the same reason--and the Jews of Europe, an ostracized minority, were powerless to resist the damage the legend wrought.  They dealt with it as the Jews had previously dealt with hardships: they told stories about it.


Part of what makes Singer's story so funny and unusual is that it shifts from tragedy to comedy half-way through, when the Golem, having solved a major problem for the Jews of Prague, starts acting crazy in a very childlike way, doing unexpected and yet harmless things like climbing the bell tower and running around the bell and kissing a girl (who finds "his lips were as scratchy as a horseradish grinder").  The Golem, an earthen clay giant shaped by a rabbi with the name of God engraved on his forehead, seems to function like a work of art in the life of the Jews--like an Isaac Bashevis Singer story--alleviating tragedy through might and also through comedy.  The Golem is the creative life-force of the Jews, called up from the sacred depths of the spirit at their darkest hours with pious intensity, and then blundering past tragedies with actions bent implacably upon the earthly and profane.  The Golem doesn't listen to the rabbi and becomes preoccupied with childish games and the sort of quotidian needs that can look so trivial and absurd in the context of tragedy.  And by suggesting absurdities, the Golem performs a magic act like the one that called him into being: he summons laughter out of us like a genie out of a lamp, and our laughter in turn calls us back to the necessity, the joy, and significance of daily life.


One indicator that the Golem does not belong to the Gothic story tradition of self-destruction is his attitude to wine.  Boris Karloff as Dracula: "I don't drink ... wine."  Frankenstein's effete monster too specifically disapproved of wine.  The Golem: "Golem like wine!"  Even Manischewitz, apparently.


Isaac Bashevis Singer has a master's intuition and lightness of touch.  Uri Shulevitz's illustrations are perfect: funny, sincere, a little sad, big, and strange.


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Non Serviam

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On June 15, 1917, a U.S. marshal and 12 New York City policemen entered the Lower East Side offices of the radical magazine Mother Earth and placed its editor under arrest.  The U.S. was mobilizing to enter World War I, and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft in violation of the Selective Service Act passed earlier that year.  She brought with her to the jailhouse, according to Vivian Gornick, only two things: "a small toilet case" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.


Joyce's novel was a rare object at that time (though, admittedly, not so rare as Emma Goldman's toilet case).  At the time Goldman was arrested, Portrait had been in print for little more than six months in an edition of less than a thousand.  Yet it’s fitting, even if surprising, that she had a copy and attached such importance to it, since Joyce wrote the quintessential book against "the spirit of unquestioning obedience" that Goldman deplored.


While Goldman rebelled publicly against governments, armies, corporations, and churches in order to even the scales of justice, Joyce ignored a political bagatelle such as World War I.  He wrote not of the struggle to liberate a people but of the individual’s struggle to liberate himself—if need be, from his people.  In his book on the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus—the best book ever written on male adolescence, I think—Stephen liberates himself above all from his own twisted conscience.  And that is hard enough.  To overthrow a government of the people is not so hard, perhaps, as to overthrow the government of the heart.


Plato confused conscience with reason, but Freud, the ultimate analyst of corrupt conscience (a.k.a. neurosis), did not.  He knew that for some it could be a catalogue of hysteric, childish dangers with sometimes pitiless, bullying, and sophistical methods for enforcing its prohibitions.


Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus rebels against such irrational conscience, conscience that rules not by reason but by incantations and scare tactics, a sovereign conscience that “force hath made supreme / Above his equals” as Satan says of God in Paradise Lost Book I, ll 248-249.  At times Stephen shares the apostate angel’s “unconquerable will” and “courage never to submit or yield,” as Milton puts it.  When the priest names the cardinal Satanic sin—“non serviam: I will not serve” (Portrait p 117)—and says you burn in Hell for it, Stephen cowers and chastens himself.  But reason, courage, and self-sympathy prevails; in the novel’s last pages Stephen twice echoes Satan’s famous line, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” (PL I, l 263); he tells his friend Cranly “I will not serve” on p 239 and “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church” on p 247.  Dedalus soars over Hell with self-made wings, over the Irish Sea to Europe, hoping “to fly by those nets” of church and homeland (p 203) which are the aliases by which demonic conscience makes itself known.


This inner conflict, which shapes Portrait, in turn takes its shape from the family conflict in which its template was cast.  Just like in Paradise Lost, where the many crises of conscience turn on relations between God the Father and his curious, jealous children, Portrait is all about fathers and sons.  Patrick Parrinder, author of a great essay on the novel called “A Portrait of the Artist,” says of Stephen Dedalus: “his father’s voice plays a crucial part in the novel.  Portrait begins (as we have seen) with his father’s words and ends with a cry addressed to an imaginary father.”  It’s battle and rapprochement between father and son, rebellion and submission, resentment and idolization, and a vacillation between these two positions, conducted wholly in the realm of language.  While writing my college thesis on Portrait I counted instances of the word ‘father’ and came up with 193 (including ‘governor’ three times and ‘Papa’ once) in 253 pages.  (Since this was before the internet and e-books, I counted by circling ‘father’ whenever I came across it and then I went back and tallied them up on notebook paper with hash marks in sets of five!)


There’s a beautiful triangle form inside of Portrait, with sin at one end of its base and piety at the other, and a conciliation between the two at its glorious flying vertex.  Only Joyce could inscribe this abstract form onto a novel of such incomparable specificity and naturalism.  He does it with three motivic lines on Stephen’s approach to reality.


First:


"It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin." p 103


Then:


"In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality." p 159


And then:


"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." p 253


There at the windy vertex Stephen throws off the yoke of oppressive conscience by replacing it with a conscience he made himself en route to maturity.  That is self-governance, no?  That is autonomy, and it enables "detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old," as Freud says in “The Transformations of Puberty,” the third of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.


I’ll soon be forty years old.  I’ve been done with puberty for months.  Now, if I could just move past this nasty, moody adolescence.  Well, here I go with my wax wings on, to set sail over the abyss, muttering to myself, “ ‘Indigestibly byronic’?  I find that incontestably mo-ronic, Mr. Kenner….”  Shit, it’s a long way down there.



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Old Deuteronomy

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It somehow does not surprise me that T.S. Eliot was able to see the world so well through the eyes of a cat.  His created cat personas are charming, especially their names:


Jellylorum
Munkustrap
Coricopat
The Old Gumbie Cat (a.k.a. Jennyanydots)
Growltiger
Grumbuskin
Tumblebrutus
Gilbert
The Rum Tum Tugger
Mungojerrie
Rumpelteazer
Old Deuteronomy
The Great Rumpuscat
Macavity the Mystery Cat
Gus the Theater Cat
Bustopher Jones
Skimbleshanks
...and more

I love that cat "Gilbert" inconspicuously stuck in there.

It makes me squirm a bit, however, when T.S. refers to a group of Siamese cats as "Chinks."  And then Eliot writes of Growltiger:

But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed;
To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed....

Far be it from me to spoil the enjoyment of poetry with politics, but the date of first publication--1939--for me tends to compound rather than explain Eliot's moral tone deafness when he writes so casually of his cat protagonist's racism.  I feel in T.S. Eliot some shortage of charity toward human beings, which his lavish empathy for cats only emphasizes.  It reminds me in some way of Donald Pleasance as super-villain Blofeld in the James Bond movies sitting there with that hideous scar on his face and plotting world domination while stroking his white Persian.  Or of the witches in Macbeth with their cat--"I come, Graymalkin!"

Surely it's I who's being bigoted--toward cats--when I endorse the ages-old propaganda that felines are the suited companions of witches and demons like Donald Pleasance.  And yet I've seen some corroboration of their notorious stand-offishness; as well as of T.S. Eliot's.  His poetic personas are morbid--deliciously so, I would say.

But if you skip the fifth stanza of "Growltiger's Last Stand" and just say "cats" instead of "Chinks" in that same poem, I think it's inspired poetry for children.  I have two editions.  The one illustrated by Axel Scheffler is more kid-friendly and helps to disguise the faint odor of moral defect.  The other is illustrated by Edward Gorey, who is himself charming but also macabre, so the Gorey is probably somewhat better attuned to the macabre temperature of T.S. Eliot.

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Berlin Winters

The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and  Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Berlin Stories, upon which the musical Cabaret was based, pairs two novels by Christopher Isherwood.  Both were inspired by his experiences as an English expatriate in Berlin in the early 1930s.  The second 'novel' (if it really is a novel), Goodbye to Berlin, is in my view far superior to the first, The Last of Mr. Norris (I would skip it), but both contain extraordinarily vivid prose, and Goodbye to Berlin is a paragon of modern realism and one of my very favorite books.

Particularly in the description of human behaviors, Isherwood exhibits a genius for metaphor, with which he makes the unknown world of the narrator materialize before your eyes by comparison to something known.  E.g.: "She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress.  She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores."   Or this description of a Berlin winter (this is actually from Mr. Norris): “Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.”  He fashions many unforgettable images of 1930s Berlin in winter, in fact, and they've become emblazoned in my mind as omens of world war:

Tonight, for the first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map. Outside, in the night, beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. You can feel them all round you, tonight, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unhomely ocean—sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb. Goodbye to Berlin (The Berlin Stories), p. 186

Isherwood also shows what use can be made of adjectives, which are often abstract and dead on the page.  Isherwood's, by contrast, are often unexpected and helpful to the imagination because of their specificity.  He sets a hoity-toity dinner table not with silver and port, but with "historic" silver and "legendary" port.  And check out the modifier on snow in this sentence: "They drew back--harmless, after all, as mere ghosts--into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow."  Ironically the word "unseen" makes the moment seeable for any reader who's had a nighttime bus ride or been outdoors in the countryside on a winter night.

His character sketches have an uncommonly persuasive depth psychology to them, and the figures in the book are hence both real and very moving.  And while some might find Goodbye to Berlin too meandering, I think Isherwood has loaded the vignettes with story, albeit realistic story, life-problems.  Some of the characters also recur so that the novel itself does feel like it has a story arc.  Finally, Isherwood scales individual lives against the backdrop of history--all in all a very impressive work, a real piece of art, and in that old childish sense, I didn't want it to end.  I had that rare feeling of having experienced real people for a couple of hundred pages.  To me that is the gold standard of literary art--whether the author has successfully created beings of sufficient complexity, nuance, detail, and verisimilitude to seem real.  Sometimes it seems to me that works that do this particularly well are under-appreciated, precisely because of their ability to create a persuasive fictional dream without calling attention to the writer's artifice.  It's as though the characters really exist and the author had nothing to do with it, or is only to be called on the carpet for mistreating these real people he calls his characters or choosing the wrong people to be in his book.  Please do not make this mistake with prose master Christopher Isherwood.


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A Dog's Dog

Ribsy by Beverly Cleary


No one but Jack London, perhaps, has ever written so convincingly from a dog’s point of view as has Beverly Cleary in Ribsy. Like most dogs, Ribsy seems charmingly brain damaged. His loyalties are permanent but also have a happy-go-lucky fluidity that embraces many; he forgets to be ashamed for very long; and forgets discouragement. He’s in a word dogged.

When he’s ashamed, he rarely knows what he did wrong, and moves on with admirable alacrity. He solves problems with the tools he has at hand, for example, waiting. This is how he deals with young Ramona Quimby, who constantly irritates him. There’s waiting and there’s also trying, again and again. There’s subterfuge. At one point he feigns sleep, waits for a ticket-taker to walk away, and then sneaks into a stadium—I think in pursuit of hot dogs. Wittgenstein said that a dog is incapable of hypocrisy, but he never met Ribsy. I assume he had met a hot dog somewhere along the line since Wittgenstein was from Vienna, hometown of the original wiener.

Wittgenstein, Cleary, and Jack London aren’t alone in imagining what it is to be man’s best friend. Franz Kafka’s short story, “Investigations of a Dog,” predictably imagines a dog in rebellion against his own nature, a dog apart from other dogs, a dog who’s uncomfortable being a dog. Ribsy is by contrast one of those unquestioning dogs that Kafka’s tormented narrator would have envied. Kafka was famously not at home in his body and with his instincts. He is the greatest of artists devoted to that problem Freud named Civilization and Its Discontents, and it makes sense that Kafka chose the dog as a representative creature who (except for his unusual narrator) is content, in direct proportion to his incivility. My grandfather called all dogs “he,” and I always felt this had something to do with their incivility. There’s something unfussy about drinking out of a toilet.

Jack London’s White Fang, however, who’s three parts wolf and one part domestic dog, shares in the Kafkaesque dog’s alienation from his own species and in his struggles with the yoke of civilization. A harsh Indian master called Grey Beaver gives White Fang his first taste of civilization, and White Fang learns to revere human beings as gods. But he doesn’t feel at home with the civilization forced upon him in the company of men until he discovers the hidden instinctual pleasures that civilization alone makes possible: love and even violence on behalf of those he loves.

In a non-fiction book that tries to imagine the psychological experience of a dog, Jeffrey Masson quotes the 19th century pediatrician Louis Robinson on the presumed centrality of human beings in the canine weltanschauung. I wonder if Robinson got this from London or the other way around:

It has been said that a man stands to his dog in the position of god; but when we consider that our conceptions of deity lead us to the general idea of an enormously powerful and omniscient man, who loves, hates, desires, rewards, and punishes in human-like fashion, it involves no strain of imagination to conceive that from the dog’s point of view his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog—of different shape and manners certain from the common run of dogs, yet canine in his essential nature.

Dogs have much that’s human in them, and we have much that’s canine. If dogs have something to teach us, perhaps it’s not to be too discouraged by civilization and its discontents. Like Ribsy, or like a child, we can still love and can still find outlets for a natural aggression that is, after all, part of the life-force. We, too, can run after hot dogs and forget what to be ashamed of.