Literary Matters – Page 18 – Maverick Philosopher

John Gardner and Mannered Prose

Over lunch yesterday I showed a writer friend the first page of John C. Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts (Vintage 1985). I asked him whether the opening paragraphs made him want to read on. He didn't answer that question, though his handing of the book back to me without a request to borrow it hinted in the negative direction. But he did describe Gardner's writing as "mannered." This morning I opened Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983) and stumbled by chance on this passage:

If a writer cares more for his language than for other elements of ficition, if he continually calls our attention away from the story to himself, we call him "mannered" and eventually we tire of him. (Smart editors tire of him quickly and reject him.) (p. 11)

Here are the first three sentences of MG:

Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house in Binghamton's West Side — "the nice part of town," everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts) — made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He'd intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious. In any case, no such luck.

Is that "mannered" writing? My friend and I will agree that that writing like this won't make you any money. So perhaps the writing is mannered by the standards of the trash that sells. But I'd say it is good writing, in part because of and not despite the elaborate syntax. I shudder to think what some contemporary bonehead of a thirty-something editor would do to the opening sentence — assuming he had the attention span to get through it. Back in 1985, those three sentences drew me into the novel, all 590 pages of which I read. And I dip into it again from time to time, rereading marked passages.

A curious bit of trivia: on page 486 there is a reference to "Castaneda — Carlos not Hector — . . . ." Sic transit gloria mundi: Hector is as little read today as Gardner. I don't know whether anyone still reads Carlos. But I do know he is less worth reading than the other two.

John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy

John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225:

. . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in the intuitive philosophies of say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard). We read the argument and it seems to flow along okay, make sense, but what we ask is, "Is this true of my mailman?" . . .

Fiction comes at questions from the other end. It traces or explores some general argument by examining a particular case in which the universal case seems implied; and in place of logic or emotional coherence — the philosopher's stepping stones — fictional argument is controlled by mimesis: we are persuaded that the characters would indeed do exactly what we are told they do and say . . . . If the mimesis convinces us, then the question we ask is opposite to that we ask of philosophical argument; that is, we ask, "Is this true in general?"

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The Reclusive J. D. Salinger Dies at 91

Here.

We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it. It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken for an average schmuck. A lttle recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs. Fame can be a curse. The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.

The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.

UPDATE (1/30/10): Apparently, today's teens cannot relate to Holden Caulfield.

BlogWatch: Anecdotal Evidence

From the masthead: A blog about the intersection of books and life. By Patrick Kurp, Bellevue, Washington. Excerpt from a recent post:

I’m reading more than at almost any time in my life but spending less time reading online. The two facts have a common source – a festering impatience with shoddy writing. My literary gut, when young, was goat-like — tough and indiscriminate. I read everything remotely of interest and felt compelled to finish every book I started. This makes sense: Everything was new, and how could I knowledgeably sift wheat from chaff without first milling, baking and ingesting? Literary prejudice, in a healthy reader, intensifies with age. I know and trust my tastes, and no longer need to read William Burroughs to figure out he wrote sadistic trash.

I've read my fair share of Burroughs and I concur that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator. All in my library. But there is a place for literary trash. It has its uses as do the pathologist's slides and samples. But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff.

A Death Poem for Year’s End

As another year slips away, a year that saw the passing of John Updike, here is a fine poem of his to celebrate or mourn the waning days of ought-nine:

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market ——
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Commentary

Viewed from a third-person point of view, death seems entirely natural, not evil or tragic. Deciduous trees give up their leaves in the fall, but new ones arrive in the spring. Where's the evil in that? We too are parts of nature; we hang for a time from des Lebens goldener Baum, and then we drop off. So far there has never been a lack of new specimens to take our places in a universe that can get on quite well without any of us. But "imitators and descendants aren't the same." No indeed, for what dies when we die is not merely an animal, not merely a bit of biology, not merely a specimen of a species, a replaceable token of a type, but a subject of experience, a self, an irreplaceable conscious individual, a being capable of saying and meaning 'I.' "Who will do it again?" No one! I am unique and it took me a lifetime to get to this level of haecceity and ipseity. This interiority wasn't there at first; I had to make it. I became who I am by my loving and striving and willing and knowing: I actualized myself as a self. It was a long apprenticeship that led to this mastery. If I did a good job of it I perfected, completed, mastered, myself: I achieved my own incommunicable perfection, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively by a being who loves. In the first instance that is me: I love myself and as loving myself I know myself. In the second instance, it is you if you love me; loving me you know me as an individual, not as a specimen of a species, a token of a type, an instance of a universal, an object among objects. There were all those outside influences, of course, but they would have been nothing to me had I not appropriated them, making them my own. As a somewhat greater poet once wrote, Was du ererbt von Deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

And so therein lies death's sting: not in the passing of a bit of biology, but in the wasting of that unique and incommunicable perfection, the instant evaporation of that ocean of interiority. But is the perfection wasted? Does the magic just cease? The animal ceases no doubt, but the magic of interiority? These questions remain open.

Ciardi on Kerouac: The Ultimate Literary Put-Down?

A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).

Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':

Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.

In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"

But Jack's sweet gone shade has had the last laugh. Whatever one thinks of Kerouac's influence, he has altered the culture. But Ciardi? I'll bet you've never heard of him ^__ until now.

Good Advice from John Ciardi

Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets. (I myself am no poet, I know it, so I can't possibly blow it. I hereby allude to a certain troubadour who, though I would not call him a poet, others would.)

Here is the epitaph Ciardi composed for himself:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

UPDATE (14 December): The ever-helpful David Gordon, and that indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, Dave Lull, inform me that Ciardi's exact words were, "But I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand." The quotation can be found on p. 60 of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry.

John Heidenry’s Zero at the Bone

There is serious reading and there is bed reading. Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul. It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provide by desk, hard chair, note-taking and coffee-drinking. It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline. Bed reading, however, is pure unalloyed pleasure. The mind is neither taxed nor stretched or improved, but entertained.

I came across Heidenry's Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease (St. Martin's 2009) by chance at a local library. I would never buy a book like this because at best it is worth reading only once. But its skillful noir recounting of a 1953 kidnapping and murder most definitely held my interest over the few days it took me to read it in those delicious intervals lying abed before nod-off. But I have to wonder about books that anatomize depravity while eschewing all moral judgment. A large topic this, one that I will get around to eventually.

I now hand off to Janet Maslin's NYT review.

From the Journal of a Discarded Man

I love reading journals, both of the famous and of the obscure. Among the latter, I find my own especially intriguing for some reason. Here is an excerpt from Journal of a Discarded Man by one Walter Morris. He was in his mid-fifties at the time of this entry and has recently lost his job:

29 December 1962, Saturday. Five more makes sixty. This thing is moving right along. At twenty-one I thought I was going to be twenty-one forever.("The feeling of immortality in youth," as old Hazlitt put it.) At thirty, one is taken aback; at forty, startled; at fifty, incredulous and depressed. Midway between fifty and sixty, time’s fleet foot seems fully revealed and I see no logical reason for being taken by surprise from now on out – but who’s logical? Today is a day for homilies and platitudes, old saws and bitter-sweet droppings. "If I had to do it all over again. . ." "If I knew then what I know now. . ." These pious exercises are all right, though. They take us away from our close work and present a vista, and in this focus Everyman is a philosopher.

All right. If I had to do it over again, I’d learn a trade (for bread and butter) and for the high, orbital shot I’d concentrate on painting. The pip-squeak world of the white-collar employee I’d avoid like the plague. This is hindsight, pure, fatuous and futile. . . (From Michael Rubin, Men Without Masks: Writings from the Journals of Modern Men, Addison-Wesley, 1980, p. 194.)

Walter Morris on Solitude

Walter Morris is an exceedingly obscure author whom the Maverick Philosopher has decided to take under his wing and rescue from total oblivion. When I get through with him at least some excerpts from his journals will be in range of the search engines. Please contact me if you know anything about this fellow. He is the author of American in Search of a Way (Macmillan, 1942) and The Journal of a Discarded Man (Englewood, N.J.: Knabe-North Publishers, 1965). I have found nothing on the World Wide Web pertaining to either of these books apart from what I myself have posted. Luckily, the Arizona State University library contains a copy of his Notebook 2: Black River (limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood, NJ, 1949). It has been languishing in the ASU collection since 19 March 1956 on which date it was cataloged by one F. B. Morgan. I'd put money on the proposition that I am the only one ever to have read it.

All right Walter, with the MP as master of ceremonies, you are about to enter the 'sphere.

Continue reading “Walter Morris on Solitude”

Fiction and Philosophy: Does Fiction Do it Better?

John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225:

. . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in the intuitive philosophies of say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard). We read the argument and it seems to flow along okay, make sense, but what we ask is, "Is this true of my mailman?" . . .

Fiction comes at questions from the other end. It traces or explores some general argument by examining a particular case in which the universal case seems implied; and in place of logic or emotional coherence — the philosopher's stepping stones — fictional argument is controlled by mimesis: we are persuaded that the characters would indeed do exactly what we are told they do and say . . . . If the mimesis convinces us, then the question we ask is opposite to that we ask of philosophical argument; that is, we ask, "Is this true in general?"

Continue reading “Fiction and Philosophy: Does Fiction Do it Better?”

Philosophy, Fiction, and Bullshit

In On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983), John Gardner raises the question of what the aspiring writer should study if he goes to college:

A good program of courses in philosophy, along with creative writing, can clarify the writer's sense of what questions are important . . . . There are obvious dangers. Like any other discipline, philosophy is apt to be inbred, concerned about questions any normal human being would find transparently ridiculous. [. . .] All human thought has its bullshit quotient, and professional thought about thought has more than most. Nevertheless, the study of philosophy, perhaps with courses in psychology thrown in, can give the young writer a clear sense of why our age is so troubled, why people of our time suffer in ways in which people of other times and places suffered. (93-94)

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Theodor Haecker on Literary Style and a Comparison with Karl Kraus

Theodor Haecker, Tag- und Nachtbücher, 1939-1945, hrsg. Hinrich Siefken, Innsbruck: Haymon-Verlag, 1989, S. 212:

Der persönliche und gute Stil eines Schriftstellers ist die — oft durch große Kunst erreichte — natürliche Einheit zweier Naturen — der Natur des Schriftstellers und der Natur der jeweiligen Sprache, in der er schreibt, denn diese beiden Naturen sind nicht identisch, und die Einheit ist meist nur durch gegenseitige Kompromisse zu erreichen. Es kann einer einen reizvollen persönlichen Stil schreiben, der nur sprachlich gesehen, schlecht ist, weil er die Natur der Sprache im allgemeinen und im besonderen vergewaltigt, und ein braver Schüler kann einen guten Stil schreiben, ohne etwas Persönliches zu verrraten. Der große Schriftsteller ist aber der, in dessen Stil beide Naturen eins geworden sind, die wieder auseinanderzulegen keinem mehr möglich ist.

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Sweet Gone Jack Forty Years Down the Road

Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died. The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 40th anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus)

I own eight Kerouac biographies and there are a couple I don't own. The best of them, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983), ends like this:

The night of Sunday October 19, he couldn't sleep and lay outside on his cot to watch the stars. The next morning after eating some tuna, he sat down in front of the TV, notebook in hand, to plan a new novel; it was to be titled after his father's old shop: "The Spotlight Print." Just getting out of bed Stella heard groans in the bathroom and found him on his knees, vomiting blood. He told her he didn't want to go to the hospital, but he cooperated when the ambulance attendants arrived. As they were leaving, he said, "Stella, I hurt," which shocked her because it was the first time she had ever heard him complain. Then he shocked her even more by saying, for the second time since they had married, "Stella, I love you."

Less than a day later, on the morning of October 21, after twenty-six blood transfusions, Jean Louis Kerouac died in St. Anthony's Hospital of hemorrhaging esophageal varices, the classic drunkard's death.

On Dizzy Gillespie's birthday. (p. 697)

He was 47. I was 19. On a restroom wall at my college, I scribbled, "Kerouac lives." A day or two later a reply appeared, "Read the newspapers."

How Can You Be Clever in a Meatgrinder?

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy. Here is Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus with his mother:

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.

Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.

Of the Beat triumvirate, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, "sweet gone Jack" alone really moves me, and the quotations above I find to be among the most moving in all his writings.