These days I occasionally correspond with the great Dostoevsky biographer and critic, and former Princeton and Stanford professor, Joseph Frank, who is in his mid-90s. Just this year, he too brought out a new book, Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture. It includes essays on, among others, Paul Valéry, André Malraux, Ernst Jünger, T. S. Eliot, and two of Frank’s former colleagues, the critic R. P. Blackmur (of Princeton) and the pioneering scholar of the novel Ian Watt (of Stanford).
Figures like Jacques Barzun—and Abrams, Aaron, and Frank—seem to me the last representatives of a traditional literary scholarship that is now out of fashion. To this group, one might add Victor Brombert and a few octogenarians, such as Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom and the comparatist and Bible translator Robert Alter. No doubt there are others I am overlooking. But these academic eminences have all worked hard to become truly learned, and their scholarship is vitalized by a deep knowledge of, and serious engagement with, the great works of the past. Until last week, Jacques Barzun was the oldest, and one of the best, of these living cultural treasures.
What’s in a Name?
Early in October I attended Capclave, Washington, D.C.’s annual science fiction convention. Over the course of a long weekend I manfully served on five panels: “A Princess of Mars’ One-Hundred Year Reign” (2012 is the centennial of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous first novel); “Classics with Class” (about which I can remember nothing); “Unsung Author” (an ongoing category, this year’s focus being the sly, black-humored short-story writer Robert Sheckley); “The Heritage of Edgar Rice Burroughs” (a panel with several Burroughs fans from the National Capital Panthans), and finally “Who Are the Early Masters of Modern Science Fiction?” I was also interviewed for Fast Forward, a long-running series of video conversations with people involved in sf.
In short, I kept pretty busy over the weekend, though not so busy that I couldn’t spend some time in the dealers’ room, where I bought an Ace Double paperback, consisting of Ron Goulart’s Clockwork’s Pirates and Ghost Breaker. It was the latter title I wanted, a humorous collection of stories about the occult detective Max Kearney. The book’s come-on line—beneath an illustration featuring a green-tentacled blob, a shapely young woman in nothing but stiletto heels and a bikini bottom, and a Bogart-like figure wearing a slouch hat and trench coat—reads: “Having trouble with psi powers, spooks, or E-T visitations? Take it up with Max Kearny!” (As readers of this feature may recall from a previous column, books featuring occult or psychic detectives—like John Silence and Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder—are a little sideline of my collecting.)
I also bought eight little matchboxes, each imprinted with the first-edition cover of some fantasy or sf classic. Last spring I acquired a couple of these novelties at the Malice Domestic convention—Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express—and these have now been joined by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, and several others. They look great, like a little row of miniature books, as they face me amid the pencils and postcards, the action figures (Poe, Sherlock Holmes), the Bettie Page tumbler and the photograph of Louise Brooks, the Edward Gorey bookmark, the “Don’t Panic” button, various small rocks, and all the other detritus that clutters my desk.
On the Saturday evening of Capclave I went out to dinner with the aforementioned Panthans. This group, affiliated with the national Burroughs Bibliophiles (whose meetings are called Dum-Dums), consists of ardent collectors of, and experts on, the books of ERB. A highlight of one local guy’s collection is the original $400 check paid by Munsey publications to Edgar Rice Burroughs for the 1912 magazine serialization of Under the Moons of Mars, the original title of A Princess of Mars. Another member collects Burroughs trading cards, often depicting scenes from Tarzan comics or reproductions of old paperback covers. Certainly no red-blooded American male of my generation can fail to remember Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta’s illustrations for the 1960s softcover reissues of the Tarzan and Mars books—if only for the lusciously underclad lovelies such as Dian of Pellucidar and Thuvia, Maid of Mars.
Saturday’s dinner was going along pleasantly enough when suddenly a tablemate gasped, laughed, looked up at me, dropped the issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal she had in her hand, and said, “You’ve been tuckerized.”
So, finally, I’d been tuckerized. My life was complete.
If you look up “tuckerization” on Wikipedia you will find it succinctly defined as “the act of using a person’s name in an original story as an in-joke.” (The word derives from Wilson Tucker, the sf writer who named some of his characters after his friends.) These days charity events often feature an auction in which people bid to be “tuckerized” by a favorite author. In effect, this is the equivalent of winning a tiny walk-on part in a TV series or film.
My old Book World colleague Michele Slung was the first person I knew whose name was “borrowed” by an author. Michele had enthusiastically reviewed Jonathan Carroll’s eerie classic, The Land of Laughs, and in Carroll’s later book Bones of the Moon, a character encounters a mysterious tribe known as The Slung People. At about the same time, another friend, sf reviewer Greg Feeley, was also “tuckerized,” but not quite so pleasantly. A novelist, offended by a Feeley review, didn’t just shrug it off: in a subsequent book he featured a race of loathsome, subterranean creatures called the Feelies.
In my own case, a group of people—characters in an ongoing Burroughs’ pastiche called Invaders of the Inner World by Lee Strong—are said to inhabit the Utopian city of Dirda. While it was a kick to find my name in Strong’s serial, for a long while I have wondered if Jack Vance, now in his mid-90s and the dean of American fantasy and science fiction writers, didn’t somehow possess precognitive knowledge that a critic with my name would love and champion his books. After all, one of Vance’s novels bears the title The Dirdir, he has a series called The Durdane Trilogy, and throughout his vast oeuvre there are several other names surprisingly close to Dirda.
Once upon a time, I started to write an “impossible crime” mystery and decided to give its characters punning monikers: I now only remember a gay guy named Perry Bathhouse (cf. Alexander Pope’s essay Peri Bathous) and a young woman called Gloria Mundy (Gloria Mundi), but there were at least a half dozen other examples of sophomoric wittiness. Since there were already famous P.I.’s named Marlowe and Spenser, I dubbed my detective Dekker, after still another Renaissance writer. Alas, I don’t remember much about the story itself, except that the villain—or was it a villainess?—had to be absolutely naked to commit a murder and not leave any trace. The modus operandi was, I think even now, quite ingenious. Perhaps it’s time I unearthed that manuscript and gave it another look, or, maybe, even finished the story. Start watching the best-seller lists.
Language Matters
As soon as I decided to write about language for this “Browsings” column, my sentences started to grow clumsy and fall all over one another. Nothing sounded right, and I questioned the grammar and syntax of virtually every clause. Isn’t there an old joke about how a bird couldn’t fly or a thousand-legger couldn’t skitter along once either started to contemplate how the flying or skittering was done?
Like most writers, I confess to a number of linguistic tics and crotchets. While ambiguity seems to me a plus in poetry—I didn’t write my honors thesis on William Empson for nothing—it is something I tend to avoid in prose. I try to practice. . . . But wait. Look again at that sentence with the dashes: Shouldn’t there be a comma after the word “poetry”? The dashes make that impossible, but in such a case do they render a comma superfluous? Will anyone care besides me?
Not for the first time do I wish that I hadn’t disdained the study of grammar when young. Nowadays, I would just recast the above sentence to avoid this punctuational uncertainty, but I’ll let it go this tim
e as an example of the kind of linguistic bump that tends to trouble me. Nothing, after all, should interfere with the smooth flow of my mellifluous and pellucid paragraphs.
Or should that be “pellucid and mellifluous paragraphs”? I wrote that as a bit of self-mockery—ironic deflation as a way of deflecting charges of vanity—but I do tend to be leery of alliteration and those two “p” words next to each other give me pause. On the other hand (but where was the first hand?), reversing the order of the adjectives leads to a less pleasing rhythm. What to do? Perhaps being a little jokey is simply a mistake?
Too much consciousness, observed Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, is a disease, a positive disease. All writers long to lose themselves in the creative moment, to find themselves caught up in what was once dubbed “the divine afflatus,” when the words come trippingly to the tongue and thoughts achieve a profundity that Plato might envy. . . . Oh, dear, I recognize that last analogy as one of my go-to rhetorical tricks. Such and such a quipster is so witty that Oscar Wilde might envy him; a certain stylist is so precise that she could give lessons to Flaubert. The formula strikes me as mildly amusing, but I do it all the time unless I catch myself.
While writers hope their inner daemons will guide their pens, an editor needs the kind of cold clinical intelligence that Sherlock Holmes might learn from. (See what I mean?) When I rewrite—and sometimes I’ll spend hours making a piece sound as if it had been tossed off as easily as Byron scribbled his letters—I carefully go over every sentence. (Oops, that same dashes problem again and more of those tiresome analogies.) Somehow, one hopes to achieve a balance, so that the prose all tracks properly but doesn’t sound costive, constrained, or too carefully considered. (Hmm, should I change all those “c”s?) Unless you’re actually after a Thomas Browne-like oratorical solemnity, you probably want to sound natural, whatever that is. (Note that I’ve moved from “I” to “One” to “You” in almost as many sentences—that seems wrong, but will anyone notice?)
In fact, this column wasn’t really meant to be about my own flaw-specked writing, but about linguistic puzzles and anomalies. Last month, the October issue of Consumer Reports carried the headline: “America’s Worst Scams.” Looking at it, I wondered if that shouldn’t be “America’s Best Scams”? Really terrible scams wouldn’t be particularly effective, would they? I went back and forth on this and still haven’t decided.
Or take the expression: “It goes without saying,” as in “It goes without saying that Dirda isn’t half the writer he thinks he is.” If it doesn’t need to be said, why does one need to say it? And, to stick with this same sentence, how can anyone know how good a writer I think I am? Personally, I hold a rather low opinion of myself, constantly desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope. (There’s another of my quirks—the buried allusion, the embedded quotation without any identification of the source. Shakespeare, by the way, Sonnet 29.)
A lot of idioms trouble me. Every time I try to use “Notwithstanding” in a sentence, I find myself confused. Should it be “Notwithstanding his sheer brilliance, Dirda is . . .” or, “His sheer brilliance notwithstanding, Dirda is . . .”? I can never decide and so just give it all up and poor Dirda loses his claim to brilliance yet again.
I could go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. (Beckett, this time.) Just bide with me a little while longer, and we’ll soon be done. In my hot youth (Byron, of course), I used to study books such as—or should that be “study such books as”?—Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, Bonamy Dobrée’s Modern Prose Style, Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing (Q, as he was known, is the source of the notorious “murder your darlings” rule of writing), Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and even G. O. Curme’s scholarly Syntax. Today, I occasionally dip into an old copy of The Oxford Book of English Prose, and often wish I could achieve the grand flights (slight echo there of Wallace Stevens) and Olympian grandiloquence of Gibbon and Ruskin. But Thoreau was my earliest model—as it was E. B. White’s—and I seem locked into a plain, homespun style, albeit one gussied up with the borrowed finery (now where’s that from?) of pervasive quotation and allusion.
Somerset Maugham used to say—and I’ve quoted this a dozen times if I’ve quoted it once—that if a man would write perfectly, he would write like Voltaire. In truth, I’d settle for being able to write like Rousseau or Diderot, or Arthur Machen, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, or Janet Flanner or Joseph Mitchell. I wouldn’t want to write like Henry James, though, or Virginia Woolf—too much brocade for my taste. Alas, there seems small likelihood that my style will ever be perceived as other than a poor thing but mine own (Shakespeare, again, slightly skewed).
“I’m Done”
When Philip Roth recently announced his retirement from writing fiction, I was surprised and impressed. Over the years Roth has won all the prizes except the Nobel, and he’s been producing bestsellers and critically acclaimed (and controversial) books since he was in his 20s. During the past decade the Library of America has even begun reissuing his complete works in its familiar, stately editions—a nice rounding-off to an enviable career. As Kenny Rogers told us long ago, you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to walk away.
Some years back, I happened to interview John Updike and asked him if there would be more novels about Harry Angstrom—perhaps “Rabbit Resurrected”?—or any more stories featuring the writer Henry Bech. In essence, Updike said no. Those characters’ adventures were over, and he himself was now largely focused on “clearing his desk.” Updike did keep writing up to the end, but, apart from some moving poetry, most people would agree that his later work added little to his reputation.
Should older writers keep at it until they breathe their last? It’s a hard call. Sophocles supposedly brought out Oedipus at Colonus when he was in his 80s. The elderly Tolstoy turned himself into an Old Testament prophet, producing cranky attacks on Shakespeare and numerous political and religious tracts. Yet he also wrote Hadji Murad, one of his greatest works (and a particular favorite of Harold Bloom).
What must be hard for all established writers of a certain age is seeing the world turn its spotlight elsewhere. Once they were the stars, up front and center, and now other names—sometimes those of their understudies—are in neon at the top of the marquee. Gods that survive too long tend to be taken for granted, ignored or even mocked. How many young people still read John Barth? I can remember the excitement I felt over the linked novellas of Chimera, the imaginative experiments of Lost in the Funhouse. But when was the last time anyone opened Giles Goat-Boy? And yet Barth is an absolutely wonderful and astonishing writer. It’s just that the stage now belongs to David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, and the Jonathans Franzen and Safran Foer. But 30 years from now, they, too, will be yesterday’s news.
Still, some lucky writers do manage a late flowering. Philip Roth himself reblossomed, after a period of relatively minor work, with The Human Stain and American Pastoral (and, a favorite of mine, that harrowing novella, The Dying Animal). In old age an artist, whether in paint, music, or prose, will sometimes cast aside his usual manner and indulge in some playful romp. Mann brought out his lighthearted paean to the counterfeit in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man; Faulkner produced the rumbustious odyssey of The Reivers, Thornton Wilder reimagined his young self as a kind of amateur trouble-solver in Theophilus North. In another field, Matisse, though nearly blind, produced his glorious paper cut-outs. These works are distinctly exuberant, even comic, but other late works show us the artist confronting age, the loss of powers, and death. Just look at the final self-portraits of Rembrandt, or listen to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The rest is silence.
Old men (and women) ought to be explorers, but mainly they’re not. Instead feckless, irresponsible young whippersnappers break the new paths in art and letters (and in other fields too). As the years go by, many aging masters are simp
ly forgotten. Even if they bring out a new book, it will be half-ignored, or people will say, “Is she still writing?” or “I thought he was dead.” All those big fat volumes called Collected Poems are tombs as much as tomes. Hic jacet.
Mentoring is the last refuge of the older artist. With luck, disciples will keep one’s books in print, one’s reputation alive. Doubtless even the most unassuming poet or novelist can get used to reverence and genuflection. Of course, there remains the possibility of betrayal: Judas writes the biography, that mousey acolyte may turn out to be Eve Harrington (from “All About Eve”). After all, new writers do need to clear a space for themselves, even if it means pushing aside a once-revered elder of the tribe.
And what about “senior” critics? Ah, their fate is the worst of all. They lose touch with the new, start to go on and on about the old days, either turn into literary Kris Kringles or bitter curmudgeons. And then they are, most of them anyway, forgotten altogether. Where now are William Troy and Vernon Young, Orville Prescott and John Mason Brown, Agnes Repplier, Diana Trilling, and even Mary McCarthy? Once they were powers in the land, their judgments feared and their praise yearned after, but today their names scarcely raise an ironic smile of recognition.
Oh, the House of Fame! Sometimes it is as harsh and cruel a place as Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain. What is the law? Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the artistic making itself—of poems and stories and essays—delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.
Poe and Baudelaire
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