Defoe, of course, casts Robinson Crusoe as fact, and in a review of the novel Poe acknowledges that he learned the “potent magic of verisimilitude” from Defoe. But Poe’s frame in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym hardly enhances the verisimilitude of the mighty strange tale Pym has to tell. Rather, it makes the inventor of the tale more prominent. Although all fiction writers are imposters, Poe surely must be ranked as one of literature’s most outrageous liars. Critics have suggested that Poe had a low regard for popular taste and that with his melodrama he pandered to—and implicitly ridiculed—the audience he despised. But surely he could have chosen to give his fiction a Jamesian subtlety and replaced some of the exclamations with emphases. Or else, like Melville in Moby Dick or The Confidence Man, he could have made the histrionics more farcical, more chaotic.
Perhaps Poe’s expressions of contempt for popular taste are themselves lies. Perhaps in the implausible and Jacobean scenes of terror, Poe makes room for those elusive thoughts that fictional verisimilitude as he knew it ordinarily suppressed. Perhaps Poe’s fiction encourages readers to reach the point that Pym describes, when the awful vision exists in a state of profound uncertainty: does the disguise of fiction hide a truth, or is there nothing but illusion? Poe compels us to hesitate, and hesitation opens the gate to “a thousand conflicting sensations.”
The “potent magic” of verisimilitude in Poe’s theater of fiction is a performative magic—fiction is a wonderful deception, and an author is like a magician on a vaudeville stage, dressing up his words to make them seem to refer to a reality. The more extraordinary the trick, the more impressive the art. Poof, a mansion collapses! Poof, a gentleman meets his double! Poof, a cat starts to yowl behind a wall, an orangutan goes wild, a human figure shrouded in white floats across the water!
Poe invites us to believe not in the implausible outcomes of his tales but in their hallucinatory power and the verbal mechanics of illusion. See how a mind can fool itself, this magician shows us. So we pant in sympathetic terror and look on in disdain, for while the tricks themselves are thrilling, we know that they are tricks and that appearances can’t be trusted, that we are the victims of chicanery, that fiction, especially Poe’s fiction, is a performance of an unruly imagination.
Then what is true? What’s behind the carnival mask? Who is waiting behind the next corner? Could a strange appearance be hiding something stranger? We hesitate, our imaginations fired up by Poe. And in that moment of hesitation, Poe cracks open the door to the observant mind, and the wild, unmanageable thoughts that deserve to be known come tumbling in.
Raymond Chandler. The Granger Collection, New York.
45 Calibrations of Raymond Chandler
Peter Straub
1. NOT LONG BEFORE HIS DEATH, he wrote, “I have lived my life on the edge of nothing.”
2. Those who may speak honestly of the ambiguous but striking privileges granted by a life conducted on the edge of nothing tend to have in common that they have been faced early on with certain kinds of decisively formative experiences. Although it is never mentioned in considerations of his work, when he was six years old and living with his divorced mother in Nebraska, his alcoholic father, already more an absence than a presence, one day disappeared entirely. Also never mentioned is that in 1918 he was sent into trench warfare as a twenty-year-old sergeant in the Canadian Army and several times led his platoon into direct machine-gun fire. After that, he said later, “nothing is ever the same again.”
3. He had no interest in either conventional mysteries or the people who read them.
4. He said: “My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.”
5. His models were Dumas, Dickens, Flaubert, James and Conrad.
6. He once named a cop Hemingway for his habit of saying the same thing over and over again until you started to think that it had to be pretty good.
7. He could never understand why Americans were incapable of seeing the humor in his work.
8. Shortly after moving to a house outside Palm Springs, he wrote his publisher, Alfred Knopf, “This place bores me.”
9. Raymond Chandler did not relish surprises.
10. He did not like looking at the ocean because it had too much water and too many drowned men in it.
11. In a sour moment, he wrote Knopf that he was going to write “one of those books where everyone goes for nice long walks.”
12. Late at night, finished with work but unwilling to leave the typewriter, he wrote hundreds of extremely long letters, many of them to people he had never met.
13. Hollywood made him bilious, but he loved film.
14. In his notes for The Blue Dahlia, he said homicide detectives could “be very pleasant or very unpleasant almost without change of expression.”
15. He was exasperated by people who told him they so admired his books that they wished he would write one without any murders in it.
16. He actually wrote his English publisher a letter containing the sentence “Don’t think I worry about money, because I don’t.”
17. He was astonished to be informed that another mystery writer, one distinguished chiefly by his ingenuity, did not enjoy the act of writing. Instantly, it explained to him why he had never been able to read the man’s books. Still reeling, he wrote a friend, “The actual writing is what you live for.”
18. Throughout his life, he endured a spectacular, even brutal, loneliness.
19. Sometimes in restaurants he was so funny that the people at adjoining tables stopped talking to listen to what he was saying.
20. When J. B. Priestley, author of Angel Pavement and Festival at Farbridge, came to California and held a dinner party in his honor, he failed to appear. It had never occurred to him that his presence might be any more crucial than anyone else’s.
21. Upon discovering that it had been, he apologized but did not feel guilty or embarrassed.
22. Neither did he feel guilty or embarrassed when the news of his botched suicide attempt—the bullet did considerable damage to the bathroom but none to the drunken widower of two months holding the gun—appeared in newspapers all over the country. Some of the letters he received as a result of the publicity struck him as incredibly silly.
23. He understood that he was both romantic and sentimental.
24. After his first four books, he thought Philip Marlowe was romantic and sentimental, too, and decided that on the whole Marlowe was probably too good to be satisfied with working as a private detective.
25. He almost always knew what he was doing, even while making serious mistakes.
26. The year after his wife died, he was ejected from the Connaught Hotel for having a woman in his room, whereupon he moved to the Ritz.
27. He was unfailingly generous to young writers.
28. He wrote, “Plausibility is largely a matter of style.” Later in the same essay, he added, “It takes an awful lot of technique to compensate for a dull style, although it has been done, especially in England.”
29. He never won an award. He never networked or traded one favor for another. These things would have appalled him. Had he been offered the Nobel Prize, he would have turned it down because (1) acceptance would involve going to Sweden, dressing up in a tuxedo and giving a speech, and (2) the Nobel Prize had been given to so many second-rate writers that the effort involved in Point One far exceeded its distinction.
30. While a guest in the Stephen Spender household, he imagined that he would soon marry his host’s wife, Natasha Spender.
31. He was ripely endowed with the capacities for both love and scorn, sometimes for the same thing. One reason he liked Los Angeles was that he thought it had the personality of a paper cup.
32. Near the end of his life, he consented to become the president of the Mystery
Writers of America, although instead of voting for himself he had thrown out his ballot.
33. He died alone at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. Seventeen people attended the funeral. They were made up of local acquaintances who had not known him well enough to be called friends, representatives of the local MWA chapter and a fanatical collector of mystery first editions named Ned Guymon.
34. He invented a first-person voice remarkable for its sharpness and accuracy of observation, its attention to musical cadence, purity of syntax and unobtrusive rightness of word order, a metaphorical richness often consciously self-parodic, its finely adjusted speed of movement, sureness of touch and its capacity to remain internally consistent and true to itself over a great emotional range. This voice proved to be unimaginably influential during his lifetime and continues to be so now. Real earned authority sometimes has that effect. (While drinking himself to death in the year of Chandler’s own death, 1959, the tenor saxophonist Lester Young could look out of his window at the Alvin Hotel to observe the progress of his numerous clones down Broadway to Birdland, where, unlike him, they had gigs. Young said to a friend, “The other ladies, my imitators, are making the money!”)
35. None of his imitators, not even the most accomplished, ever came close to surpassing or even matching him.
36. He wrote his English agent, Helga Green, that “to accept a mediocre form and make literature out of it is something of an accomplishment. … We are not always nice people, but essentially we have an ideal that transcends ourselves.”
37. Chandler devoted his working life to the demonstration of a principle that should be obvious, that genre writing declares itself first as writing and only secondarily as generic. Because this principle was not always obvious even to himself, he felt defensive about being a mystery writer.
38. He wrote an English girlfriend that “my wife and I just seemed to melt into each other’s hearts without the need of words.”
39. “The things that last … come from deeper levels of a writer’s being, and the particular form used to frame them has very little to do with their value,” he wrote Helga Green.
40. He got better as he went along. Every writer presently alive wishes to do the same.
41. Okay. Playback, his last book, really was pretty bad. On the other hand, after it he began a book in which Palm Springs was renamed “Poodle Springs.”
42. He once described his character as “an unbecoming mixture of outer diffidence and inward arrogance.”
43. He wrote Helga Green’s father, Maurice Guinness, that “ … when a writer writes a book, he takes nothing from anyone. He adds to what exists. … There is never enough good writing to go around.”
44. He never complained about his endless torment.
45. Writing to Lucky Luciano in preparation for an interview never published, he said, “I suppose we are both sinners in the sight of the Lord.”
Ezra Pound. Circa 1909. Courtesy New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Ezra Pound:
A Seereeyus Precursor
Paul Metcalf
OVER THE LONG RANGE of Ezra Pound’s productive years, his language and concerns evolved:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on the swart ship …
From these Homeric opening lines of the Cantos, he carries us through the Confucian Odes and into the modern age:
Disney against the metaphysicals
The language of Hart Crane—another Significant Precursor—is similarly filled with what we now call archaisms: “thee” and “thou,” “doth” and “dost.” Nevertheless, though similarly constrained in language, he broke an opening into the modern world:
Dream cancels dream in this new world of fact
From which we wake in the dream of act …
(In my first book, Will West, published in 1956, I used traditional English spellings: “centre,” “theatre.” In the new edition, in my Collected Works (1996), these have been brought up to date.)
As Pound’s horizons expanded, it became apparent that in his conception of the poem, and subject only to the poem’s own internal discipline, anything might be included. Anything. This is the most significant lesson that I learned from Ezra Pound—a lesson learned when I was young, struggling to find my way, a lesson I was unable to use for many years—but a lesson learned.
More and more as the Cantos progressed, Pound pulled apart the curtain of the “creative” and quoted directly from sources.
And 600 more dead at Quemoy—
they call it political.
—and there were, of course, the diatribes against usury, Buddhists and Jews. How does one deal with these? In a late-life interview with Allen Ginsberg, Pound apologized. Leonardo da Vinci, a lifelong atheist, is said to have accepted Christianity on his deathbed. To which set of words do we give credence? Those spoken in the fullness of maturity, or those that came near the end of life? This is a question that each individual must contemplate for him or herself.
In all of this Pound is refuting the notion that history is boring … the facts we had to learn in school … whereas fiction is the wonderful world of “the imagination.” This is the Land-of-Oz illusion, and one forgets that the Wizard turned out to be a fraud, and all Dorothy wanted, throughout the book, was to get back to the grubby little farm in Kansas.
Still another lesson I picked up from Pound was his insistence on the specific, the particular. “Go in fear of abstractions,” sez Ez.
*
At one point Pound referred to himself as “a seereeyus kerakter.” He was, above all, a man of action. When he and William Carlos Williams were students at the University of Pennsylvania they took up fencing. Williams realized one day, this man is serious—he means to kill me! From one of Pound’s troubadour poems:
I have no life save when the swords clash.
A philosopher named Horace Rackham wrote: “ … the life of Action has no absolute value: it is not a part of, but only a means to, the End, which is the life of Thought.” Pound read this and made a marginal comment: “Nuts.”
In a letter to a friend: “Why the hell don’t you have a bit of real fun before you get tucked under?”
I never entertained Pound’s notion that by bringing ideas into the realm of politics, the course of history might be changed. I never, as Pound did, tried to get the ear of FDR. I never suffered, as Pound did, political failures. For me, going into action has meant cutting firewood. For Pound, it meant pounding the political typewriter: “I am held up, enraged by the delay needed to change the typing ribbon … ”
His vision of misery:
No more do my shaftes fly
To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne
But rotteth away.
*
For all that he engorged European and Asiatic cultures, he was quintessentially American:
… for us, I mean
Who bear the brunt of our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art …
And always the pedant. His historical references are allusive, his intention being to drive the reader back to original sources. “If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be expanded.”
*
What would Pound and Melville have made of each other? (Their lives overlapped by a few years.) There is evidence that Pound thought Melville overblown. When Charles Olson published Call Me Ishmael, Pound, at Olson’s instigation, wrote to Eliot suggesting that Faber & Faber bring out an English edition. “It’s a labor-saving device. You don’t have to read Melville.”
To an extent, their lives followed similar courses, leading to late-life despair:
Pound: “Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.”
Melville: “With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded … ”
*
I share Pound’s skepticism about formal religion. My wife
and I lived for many years in the hills of western North Carolina, and to reach our house, in a somewhat remote area, we drove along Concord Road. A ramshackle country church, with outhouse, came into view at a bend in the road, and I often thought of Pound’s line, from the Cantos:
Shit and religion stinking in concord.
*
At times old Ez could come off his perch, be wonderfully civilized:
It rests me to converse with beautiful women,
Even though we talk nothing but nonsense …
And civilized, too, in responding to his place in nature: “ … the humane man has amity with the hills … ” And the hills around Pisa were “the breasts of Helen.”
Did he see these hills from the iron cage in which he was imprisoned?
*
William Carlos Williams on Ezra Pound:
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about China … That’s what makes him an expert. He knows nothing about music, being tone deaf. That’s what makes him a musician … And he’s batty in the head. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”
“ … not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him … ”
And yet … and yet:
“It’s the best damned ear ever born to listen to this language.”
Ah, it is that magnificent ear of his! When I read through the Cantos, when the content becomes dense and obscure, unintelligible, I read on, let the impeccable speech rhythms carry me through, until the light filters up—which it always does.
Pound:
“It is mainly for the sake of the melopoeia that one investigates troubadour poetry.”
*
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