Review of Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography
657 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, $35 978-0-375-40827-4
Published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2007
T. S. Eliot once wrote that there were two ways good writers could court recognition – either by publishing so much they turned up everywhere or by publishing so little that each work, perfectly crafted, would become a literary event. Eliot himself took both courses, writing reams of critical prose (but collecting it selectively), and bringing out poems only at widely spaced intervals, each a marker in a carefully plotted career. Curiously, Eliot did not mention another approach which he would also try: polishing your mystique by not publishing at all. Turning to the stage, he wrote almost no new poetry in the decades after Four Quartets.
Some artists opt out at an early age – Rossini in opera, Forster in fiction – but the more ingenious way of not publishing is to create a buzz around work in progress. By offering tantalizing glimpses of ambitious projects, writers arouse expectations that the books themselves, if they do appear, can almost never satisfy. I recall the long wait for Joseph Heller’s second novel, the gossip that attended Truman Capote’s unwritten magnum opus, the anticipation Norman Mailer stoked around unfinished works, including his novel about ancient Egypt. Harold Brodkey’s reputation never quite recovered from the publication of his long-awaited novel, The Runaway Soul. Henry Roth, legendary for his writer’s block, surprised the world with an autobiographical novel some sixty years after Call It Sleep. But there was nothing quite like the awe surrounding Ralph Ellison’s heroic labors over a successor to Invisible Man – protracted for four decades, right up to his death in 1994 at the age of 81. An almost religious hush descended on interviewers when they questioned him about this work, as if the future of American letters depended on it. Unlike Capote, whose book existed largely in his mind, if at all, Ellison could whip out a tape measure and show the sheer bulk of the manuscript, more than 2,000 pages at one point. Some who heard him read aloud from the book were mesmerized; others were just as convinced it was a dud. I avoided the fragments he published in obscure literary journals for fear of tarnishing my imaginary sense of the book, but also out of disbelief that it actually existed. read more…
Review of Lewis M. Dabney’s Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature.
639 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35. 0-374-11312-2
Published in the Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 2006
Apart from his collection of long stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), which was banned for obscenity in the State of New York, Edmund Wilson’s books were never widely read. But for upwards of half a century they had an incalculable impact on readers. Several generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary judgment, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the unforced clarity of his style. He was hardly more than a decade older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s, and his deep-dyed American background was different from their immigrant roots. Yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified, they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources of inspiration for the PR circle were distant figures, but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.
The same chemistry of warm admiration and crusty independence can be observed in his relations with writers and editors in the 1950s, especially Roger Straus and Jason Epstein, who encouraged him to collect his earlier journalism and reissued his books as upmarket paperbacks. Not long afterward, the more literate radicals of the 1960s rediscovered To the Finland Station (1940), his galvanizing history of revolutionary ideas and personalities, and were cheered by his critique of the cold war, which he saw as a byproduct of America’s imperial designs. In “The Metropolitan Critic,” published anonymously in these pages shortly before Wilson’s death in 1972, a young Clive James took the measure of his whole career, singling out literary chronicles like The Shores of Light (1952) as keystones of the critic’s trade, and paid tribute to the insight of his deceptively plain style. Finally, a generation of public intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s, including historian Sean Wilentz, cultural critics Andrew Delbanco and Louis Menand, political essayist Paul Berman, and art critic Jed Perl, were drawn to Wilson’s example as a counter to specialized academic work, with its restricted language and limited audience, particularly in the social sciences and literary theory. read more…
Janna Malamud Smith, My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud
292 pp. Houghton Mifflin. $24 0-618-69166-9
Published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 12 2006
More than other leading postwar novelists, Bernard Malamud’s star has faded in the twenty years since his death. Younger writers, smitten with a nostalgia he never felt, still try with indifferent luck to recapture his magical sense of the immigrant generation in its encounters with the new world. Some readers know him best though his least typical work, the baseball novel The Natural (1952), lushly adapted into a film by Robert Redford. Malamud was at his strongest in his short fiction, especially the stories collected in The Magic Barrel (1958), and in his second novel, The Assistant (1957), as terse and gripping as any of the stories. But beginning in the 1960s, his demanding notions of form and craft, like his moral outlook, were going out of fashion, as were the old-world characters and second-generation misfits who fired his imagination. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike managed to reinvent themselves from decade to decade, liberated by the cultural carnival that surrounded them, even when they condemned it. In the underrated academic novel A New Life (1961) and the black humor of Pictures of Fidelman (1969), Malamud too tried to loosen up but real spontaneity eluded him. He could not play the celebrity game; his conscience was exacting, his sense of privacy absolute. In interviews and occasional lectures he vehemently shielded his private life, though he sometimes exposed it in his fiction, with unfortunate results in his autobiographical novel Dubin’s Lives (1979).
His daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, a psychiatric social worker, was particularly close to her father – almost incestuously, she now thinks – and even wrote a book defending this insistence on privacy. But now, in a striking turnabout, she has come to feel that the lack of a biography or a sense of the man himself has helped dim his reputation. An authorized life by an English scholar, Philip Davis, is in the works, and she has anticipated it with this uneven but revealing memoir. Part of the problem with My Father Is a Book is that the author has not decided what kind of book it is, or whether her father’s life was much more than the sum of his writings. By including things that happened before she was born or after she left home, she conflates biography, memoir, and a psychological profile. To this she adds personal excursions into Malamud’s fiction, where she finds that “the underlying themes possess an uncanny, sometimes creepy familiarity: they are the spooks of the familial unspoken returning to haunt.” Rereading Dubin’s Lives, where the protagonist, a writer, is having an affair with a girl his daughter’s age while the daughter is seeing a man her father’s age, she recoils from “a way-too-intimate view of my father’s confused feelings.” (241) read more…
Benjamin Balint: Running Commentary—The contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right
290 pp. Public Affairs. $26.95 978 1 58648 749 2
Published in the Times Literary Supplement, August 20-27, 2010
Serious journals, like individuals, appear to have a natural life span, an inevitable cycle of flourishing and decline. In the case of little magazines like Horizon, Scrutiny, or Partisan Review, when the founders pass on or the original idea outlives its moment, the journal either expires or becomes a pale imitation of itself. Commentary magazine is a notable exception. In its sixty-five years it has been through not one but two brain transplants, first under a new editor, then under the same editor but with a completely different set of writers. In each phase it occupied a different corner of the political spectrum, shifting from cold war liberalism to a moderate 1960s radicalism to fierce neoconservatism. Yet it has never lost its polemical edge, its intellectual outreach to general readers, or its sense of pursuing an urgent cultural mission, even as that mission has changed dramatically.
For Commentary’s first editor, Elliot Cohen, one goal was to create an exacting forum on Jewish and general subjects where writers and intellectuals could address a wider public. As in his earlier job as managing editor of the legendary Menorah Journal in the late 1920s, he sought to avoid the parochialism of the institutional Jewish community, with its defensive boosterism and distrust of the free play of ideas. At the Menorah Journal he had nurtured gravely talented young writers who would later form a nucleus of the New York intellectuals, such as Lionel Trilling, at the same time he stimulated their slender self-awareness as Jews. During the thirties some of the group, now radicalized by the Depression, would help float Partisan Review as a political and literary journal. In the immediate wake of the Holocaust, Commentary became the setting in which some of them reclaimed their buried Jewish identity without sacrificing their intellectual rigor or their disdain for the Jewish middle class and the Jewish establishment. read more…
(First published in the Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 2011)
In the public mind Jackson Pollock was a tough-guy American artist, a cowboy out of Cody, Wyoming, who stretched the limits of abstract art not with brush and easel but by dripping, pouring, or flinging paint at canvases tacked to the floor of his small barn on Long Island. This image of Pollock as an “action” painter, an existentialist in jeans, was less a commentary on his art than the offshoot of Hans Namuth’s celebrated films and photographs of Pollock painting: the choreography of a man in perpetual motion, communing with the canvas as if by instinct, immersed completely in the creative moment. Pollock’s alcoholism, his difficulty in dealing with fame, and finally his death in a near-suicidal car crash in 1956 completed the picture of a tormented masculine loner wrestling with his inner demons.
The last figure we expect to meet is Pollock the family problem, the messed-up sibling. Yet this is precisely the role he plays in this fascinating collective portrait of the painter, his four older brothers, and their parents and wives during the years of his painful apprenticeship. American Letters, 1927-1947 is an enlarged version of a book first published in 2009 in France, an intricate network of letters these family members wrote to each other, full of news and chatter, often merely dutiful, at times covertly desperate. Though Jackson Pollock’s name is on the title page, the book was no doubt conceived as a tribute to his brother Charles, whose career as a painter over six decades was overshadowed by Jackson’s. Carefully edited by Charles’s second wife, Sylvia Winter Pollock, the book is illustrated by his early drawings, which show him to be a competent but conventional social realist. Perhaps pressed by Jackson’s example, he was reborn as a softly lyrical abstract painter after 1945. read more…
Published in Dissent Magazine (Summer 2011).
For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, spectators would still be captured by its recreation of a spontaneous mutiny on one of the czar’s naval vessels. It provided not only a thrilling account of a collective uprising but a virtual textbook in how film editing could excite sympathy, fear, and revolutionary anger. The film’s purpose was no less propagandistic than Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi productions of the 1930s, especially Triumph of the Will, but its themes were humane: not exalting the irrational cult of a supreme leader but dramatizing the oppressive violence of Russia’s old regime; the basic, universal longing for human dignity; and a bright but brief springtime of freedom and solidarity. For Eisenstein, working at the dawn of the Stalinist era, that liberation seemed to have been realized, although we came to know how soon it would be cut off. In the light of history, we cannot look at Potemkin with innocent eyes, yet its hopes and illusions seem as timely as the latest uprisings in the Arab world.
The release of a new version by Kino Lorber, with the sequence of shots, the Russian intertitles, and the original score all restored, offers an occasion to reconsider not only the movie itself but the issue of politics and film, especially revolutionary politics. Eisenstein was essentially a formalist, but he believed that film, as a revolutionary medium, could forward political revolution as well, for its techniques could incite popular feeling and bring it to a high pitch. No one could have agreed with him more than, say, Joseph Goebbels. For most of us, on the other hand, film and revolution make for an incendiary mix. It seems axiomatic that a political film ought to be complex and thoughtful, not simply rousing. But the avant-garde of the 1920s, especially in France, Germany, and Russia, set out to smash the conventions of depth in traditional narrative. For the new art cinema, stories with realistic settings, unfolding moral themes, and highly individualized characters belonged to the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century. To Eisenstein it was collective action that counted, not personal heroism or individual responsibility. Casting nonprofessional actors for Potemkin, he was drawn to physical types whose appearance expressed their social role, not performers who could give full play to complex motives. read more…
Published in Parnassus 32, Vols 1 & 2 (2011)
Ogden Nash. The Best of Ogden Nash. Edited by Linell Nash Smith. Ivan R. Dee 2007. 465 pp. $28.95.
American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse. Edited by John Hollander. Library of America 2003. 194 pp. $20.00
The Norton Book of Light Verse. Edited by Russell Baker. W. W. Norton 1986. 447 pp. $17.95.
The Oxford Book of Comic Verse. Edited by John Gross. Oxford University Press 1994. 512 pp. $19.95 (paper).
Andrew Hudgins. Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children. Drawings by Barry Moser. Overlook Press 2009. 113 pp. $14.95.
Ben Milder. What’s So Funny About the Golden Years. Time Being Books 2008. 88 pp. $15.95 (paper).
Edward Lear. So Much Nonsense. Introduction by Quentin Blake. Bodleian Library 2007. Unpaginated. $25.00
In my wayward teens I took it for gospel that real poetry had to be rhymed and metrical. I even wrote a scattering of such poems, until a high school teacher, taking undue advantage of his authority, told me brutally how bad he thought they were. This put me off writing poetry but, luckily, not off reading it. In this constellation of formal poetry, light verse was the fun part, the slightly Victorian stuff I relished most, but I also loved the work of Ogden Nash, who took spectacular liberties. His lines, inflated by a breathless rush of prose, usually didn’t scan, and his rhymes often were clever or devious rather than inevitable. Perpetually at play, he made up words or bent words to fit the rhyme. He came on as a complainer, a man chronically out of sorts. With his customary tone of mild irritation, he seemed haplessly at sea in the modern world. The elastic, pell-mell form of his verse contributed to this sense that life somehow never matched one’s expectations. Bubbling over with details, he was always getting carried away, as if he had too much to say to confine himself to the words in the dictionary, the shape of a regular line, or any easily anticipated rhyme.
An Ogden Nash poem typically begins with a great title, often a long one, the prosier the better, such as “Hearts of Gold, or A Good Excuse Is Worse Than None.” This one opens with a paradox, pinpointing a source of exasperation with the social habits of his fellow man:
There are some people who are very resourceful At being remorseful, And who apparently feel that the best way to make friends Is to do something terrible and then make amends.
The lines vary in length, and their rhythm defies the metronomic tick-tock that grounds the beat in most light verse. The tone is not the serious poet’s tone, not vatic, terse, or meditative, but that of the familiar essayist, of E. B. White and Thurber and Benchley—in short, the peevish accents of The New Yorker in its early incarnation as the upstart American cousin of Punch . read more…
On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more depressing cultural subject right now than the future of book culture. Publishers are hurting badly; droves of independent bookstores have closed down; Borders, a major chain of booksellers, has filed for bankruptcy and is currently dumping the dregs of its stock at its flagship store on 57th Street and Park Avenue; floundering newspapers have cut loose their reviewers and, at best, folded their book review sections into their shrinking pages. The newspapers themselves may not be far behind. The Great Recession delivered the coup de grace; advertising revenue is in free fall. Ask any editor, any author, any media maven: it is not a pretty picture. The executive editor of the New York Times wonders whether there will still be a print edition five years from now.
On the other hand, some would argue that this worst of times is also the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, to online booksellers like Amazon, to the ubiquitous Google digitizing whole libraries, books have never been so readily available, including rare books, out-of-print books, and, thanks to the famous “long tail,” older titles once hard to find, since bookstores rarely stocked them. Loving the serendipity of browsing in bookstores, actually fingering the merchandise, we forget the frustrations of the fruitless search, the books we could not find. Browsing online we find it’s all there yet tantalizingly out of reach.
Without fetishizing the physical properties of the book, which after all do not reach back to the tablets on Sinai, we can acknowledge the difference between reading print, flipping pages, plunging ahead or backward, and reading on a computer or miniature electronic device. There is something of a generational divide here, but screen reading, while near-miraculous for retrieving hard-to-find information, is less than ideal for the focused attention of literary reading. As storage devices books indeed are cumbersome. We can be grateful for the amazing horizontal connectivity of the Internet without slighting how shallow those connections often are. It gives us the world at a glance but often no more than a glance. read more…
Daniel Bell’s death closes out one of the most expansive and impressive intellectual careers of the twentieth century. He was a teacher of mine during my last term at Columbia, a friend for many years afterward, and an amazingly wide-ranging writer who could be both prescient and wrong on key issues. His style, with its staggering breadth of reading and reference, was anchored in intellectual journalism rather than in academe. His essays, he said in 1960, “were written for audiences not specialized but educated, audiences responsive to ideas.” Bell’s initial fame came from his thesis on “the end of ideology,” an argument that seemed haplessly ill-timed when it appeared just at the outset of the 1960s, which was to prove one of the most ideologically polarized decades in American history. It also seemed little more than a rephrasing of the cold war anti-Communism of the postwar intellectual scene. But with the pragmatism of post-Communist leaders, who deploy Marxism as a facade for state-dominated capitalism, and the break-up of traditional liberalism, Bell’s point has held up better in the long run than it did at first. And in his essays on the new American Right in the fifties and sixties, collected and edited in The Radical Right, he was one of the first to see how ideology, above all a populism of resentment, had settled in at the other end of the political spectrum.
I couldn’t have disagreed more with the viewpoint of his influential book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, in which he highlighted every irrational feature of the culture of the 1960s, creating an unrecognizable portrait of the whole era as “an attack on reason itself.” But he was at least consistent in tracing this back to modernism itself, which he saw reductively not as a breakthrough in the arts but as a pernicious outbreak of apocalyptic nihilism. “What the new sensibility did,” he wrote, “was to carry the premises of modernism through to their logical conclusion.” Culture was not Bell’s strong suit. His treatment was coarse-grained and almost embarrassingly indebted to Lionel Trilling’s more nuanced dissent from modernism and his critique of the “adversary culture,” including his notion that the sixties represented a kind of acting-out of modernist ideas. Bell too saw the new culture as “an effort by a cultural mass to adopt and act out the life-style which hitherto had been the property of a small and talented elite.” But even in the 1950s, in an essay chastising but welcoming the new Dissent magazine, he argued that “the problem of radicalism today is to reconsider the relationship of culture to society.” This was in many ways prophetic. The long-range effects of the counterculture were far greater than the impact of the political left, apart from the conservative backlash that it provoked. read more…
The Life of Irene Némirovsky, 1903-1942
By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt
Translated from the French by Euan Cameron
Alfred A. Knopf
New York, 2010, pp. 448
Published in Moment Magazine (Nov.-Dec 2010)
Is it possible that one of the most talented Jewish writers of the twentieth century, a victim of the Holocaust no less, was also an anti-Semite? Could it be that such a writer was somehow in league with the forces that would single her out and eventually kill her, that she would share their demeaning images of Jews and lean on their personal support, even as her livelihood, her freedom, her very life hung in the balance? Critics have argued that this was precisely the case with Irene Némirovsky, whose background was Russian and Jewish but who published prolifically in France between the wars before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her mother, the vain and selfish Anna, was from an affluent, cultivated Jewish family. Her father Leonid’s background was humble, but he made his fortune as an industrialist, an international deal-maker, and finally a banker. This fortune was large enough to support his wife’s appetite for luxury, including jewelry and furs, a French nanny for Irene, and annual visits to fashionable French watering holes like Nice and Biarritz. French became Irne’s first language, as France was the country of her dreams. As their wealth grew, the family moved to St. Petersburg when Irne was ten, then fled the country during the Russian revolution, first to Finland, then to Sweden and France when life in Russia became impossible for bankers.
In the Paris of the 1920s, Irene lived the high times of a flapper before settling down to study literature. She married another Russian Jew, Michel Epstein, a banker’s son, in 1926, and took up writing, for which she showed an early, fluent gift. Her first published works were satirical sketches but she also worked for four years on a serious novel, David Golder, that channeled a nightmare version of her family triangle. Set in the wealthy émigré world of Biarritz and Paris, it centered on a narcissistic, promiscuous mother; a father, the title character, who lives to make money; and their grasping daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, who turns out to be the daughter of one of her mother’s lovers. Though Golder eventually discovers this, he works himself to death to insure the girl an inheritance. Focusing on the mother’s vanity, the father’s materialism, and the daughter’s ingratitude, David Golder could serve as a melodrama for the Yiddish stage, yet its Dostoevskyan intensity makes it difficult to put down. When it came out in 1929 it made Némirovsky famous. The book was translated into several languages, adapted as a play, and turned into a successful film. read more…
