july 2014

Tuesday

I was pleased to read this “It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van-Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother, What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture.  Phelps would agree.”  344   Phelps-Salter letters Memorable Days

I came to this conviction.  It might be in fact why I came to like travel lit books over thirty years ago---without knowing why.  I liked the voice of the writer, if I did, no matter what events he described, or where she was, or what meaning the trip had for him or for me.  It is the voice we read for.  

so hot and humid not worth trying to do anything but breathe.  Va swam with Kathie this morning.  Barbara Thierry and her son-in-law to be (perhaps) Sam stopped by to look at the garden work Va would like to have done.  Kirsten Land has not been around that we know but I found one of her big tools in the grass.  Wonder what’s going on with her?  

No arrest yet in the Rumney murder.  Strange.  

Weds  night  super hot day.  Put in the air conditioner all by myself.  Don’t seem to have busted a gut.  Eye doctors in the morning for both of us.  

Can I return to Knausgaard after so much Phelps and Salter?  Have they changed my taste forever?  Ordered a bunch of Salter and Phelps and their favorites.  

I read S & P slowly because they pack in so much.  Here is S on Redford and envy:  very rare to hear someone admit to and discuss Envy.  

“One thing I admire very much about you, {Redford} I said, is how dangerously close you stay to the line between what you might have been and what you are.  That interests me, what do you mean by that? he demanded.  That’s all I can say, I told him.  Something there is in me that hates famous men.  Envy is what it is.”  (161-162)  

Hmm, still Salter was on his own way to becoming such, so what would he think some years later on ?  

Thurs late afternoon.  Guess where Sport and Pastime is set?  Atun!   And Paris, of course.  Perfect passage about Atun being nowhere and therefore of the essence.  Le Chezet looks over to Autun.  Cécile’s grandparents said they had never been there.  At least they had not been in forty or so years.  Ten miles away.  

Wonder if I read it years and years ago?  Or does it just seem so perfect and beautiful as to take your breath away?   Almost every page I want to copy out whole paragraphs.  Read most of today’s chunk at the bottom of the stairs in air conditioned comfort in the village bookstore building, between the crafts shop and the quilt shop.  Toy store now in half of the old bookstore which clerks said went through foreclosure this winter.  Other half being remodeled.  Littleton, proclaim the decorative lamp post flags in pale yellow, is Glad Town.  Be Glad!  

Also set in Nancy.  Have to look that location up.  No, by the end of 11 I know I have not read it before.  Sumptuous.  

4th  Mid-way into Salter’s novel and finished reading his Paris Review interview.  He has mentioned envy more often than any one I’ve ever noticed mentioning it before.  Interesting.  Given him enough time for now.  As much as I like the novel, do I like it as much as I want to like it?  Or as I really like it?  

The interview wasn’t as fascinating as I would have wanted.  Might have been Edward Hirsch’s fault.  Or Salter on deep guard.  Or high guard.  No interest in reading his first two novels about the war and the military.  Fighter pilot.  

well, here and we find another Hooray for Salter.  Last summer in the Aspen Sojourner he says 

“When I was young, I was influenced by the American writers of the time, especially Thomas Wolfe. I’ve gone back and read him, even though he hasn’t remained popular. He also influenced Jack Kerouac [who went to Horace Mann ahead of Salter]. The world really was enlarged for me in my forties when I met Robert Phelps, who was a writer and critic with a particular level of taste. He introduced me to Colette and Isaac Babel. He brought to maturity my interest in reading.”

Wonder what they would both think of Knausgaard?  He might serve as a polar opposite to Salter in so many ways.  One or two generations apart too.  But Wolfe was for a while our Knausgaard.  Like much how Salter dismisses Hemingway in the Paris Review interview.  

Here’s another piece, this one from The Guardian---where he says he’s not at all envious of the usual material goods of fame and fortune.  Turns out the New Yorker gave him a snitty profile last year.  This is from last year, 2013

“Luckily, he is not one for envy, at least not when it comes to material things. "I was talking to my son the other day about yachts and money," he says. "We were discussing some stupendously rich man, with a crew of 10 for his boat. My son was telling me how much it cost just to fill its tank. Well, I couldn't possibly write a line on a boat like that. I'm not equipped to live in such a way. My requirements seem to be much smaller." The New Yorker accused him of nostalgia for a way of life now passed (an accusation based on the fact he once asked guests coming to a New Year's Eve dinner to wear black tie). But this is not the case at all. How could it be? "I'm not nostalgic for it because I have it," he says, waving an arm at the books on the shelf, the pictures on the wall (I meet him in Bridgehampton). His view of American culture? "It's got louder, but it's probably not any worse.”  Guardian

Reading now the New Yorker piece by the same Nick Paumgarten who’s piece on techno music in Berlin I did read a few weeks ago and got irritated by because it seemed to veer way away from the scene in Berlin and not really describe what we all wanted to read about it in the first place.  

Anyway---note:  Salter’s parents named George and Mildred !  

And in 1951 $60,000 would be about 500k today (says Paumgarten).  

Paumgarten really does condescend in the piece---about the novel he says “It’s and odd little book.”  And  “The novel is an Alhambra of narcissism and self-erasure.” [For how long did Paumgarten long to use that image, turn of phrase, and where did he invent it? borrow it?  Is it vaguely anti-Arabic?  It sounds so derived, from somewhere/someone.]  

Having had a wee bit of experience with Saul Bellow myself, though of a much different sort, yet, still, at the same time in Bellow’s life and Salter’s, (1970-72ish) I love this detail:  

“For a while, he and Saul Bellow were close, until Salter felt that the deficit in their relative literary stature gave rise to condescension on Bellow’s part, whereupon he let the friendship die.  ‘I don’t like being a wing man,’ Salter said.” page 9 April 15 2013

Now the closing passage of the piece plays right into my observations about Salter and envy.  In fact I was going to say earlier and I wish I had, that even though he downplays the structure of Sport as just a narrative device, it is clear that

the role of the narrator is to envy Philip Dean his affair with Ann and he says explicitly at the outset that he envies the sort of guy he is long before the affair starts.  So envy for Salter is what he desires others to feel for him and here it comes---the final passage

of Paumgarten’s piece:

“ Salter once told his close friend the poet and novelist William Benton that one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader---envy of the life that the writer is living.  His life and his books have been full of fine hotels and meals, entrancing women and singular men, sophisticated friendships, idle moments in marvelous weather.  He records it coolly, like a star forward who does not celebrate scoring goals:  he acts like he’s been there before.  He also conveys the knowledge that it will add up to nothing.  Everyone and everything will be forgotten.  You come away from his work wondering if you should have lived more, even if living more, in his work, often leads to ruin.”   --Paumgarten  page 10

This could well have been about Bellow by the way.  Probably the whole generation of WWII children and survivors?  

“Snitty” is the complaint I think that Salter used to complain about this profile of his life and career.  

maybe the author of the guardian piece uses that word---I can’t quite locate it in the piece

May 11, 2013 - The New Yorker, for instance, chose to call its long and rather snitty profile of him "The Last Book", which was kind of bald. "I suppose it's a fair ...    May 11, 2013 Rachel Cooke 

Paumgarten makes clear he will refuse to envy Salter and lets show that he does resent him and resents having to write this profile about him.  He does this by emphasizing the way Salter “stole” the marriage of his neighbors, the Rosenthals, and stole details of their own lives.  

Now it is Saturday the 5th.  Just read one next paragraph in Pastime.

Wow.  Talk about the killer placement of one sentence, right in another tender description of anal intercourse:  

“. . . The orchestras of the world beat softly.  The muscle in her behind is tight.  It feels like a string around the shaft.  He pushes in slowly and then, at last, plunges, like the bottom dropping out.  Anne-Marie moans, her head buried in her arms.  After he was dead I thought often of these moments, of this one.  Perhaps it is her moan, her face pressing against the sheet.  He can feel her tight around him, like a noose.  He closes her legs and lies there contented, looking out the window, feeling the tender spasms. “

(130)

Yes, she is content, happy.  

‘I thought of this often after he was dead’ ----  ok first mention of Philip Dean being dead.  

Now I can imagine directing some grad student who is doing a dissertation on Envy in the Novels of James Salter.  Or maybe the Seven Sins, and this particular paragraph makes me say “This is straight out of Genet.  Check it out.”

The other source would be the Irwin Shaw story Salter used to write the movie “Three.”  The three-way structure also suggests the movie Jules and Jim, 1962 movie.  [based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship when young with writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married.  Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a bookseller along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who published his first novel at the age of 74. ]

More importantly, perhaps, it reminds me of Bernhard’s The Loser.  Salter might be good but he’s no Thomas Bernhard.  Maybe.  Have to finish reading the novel.  

Saturday night now.  Read a review of Knausgaard in London review and a review of Tim Parks in NYRB.  Rupert sent the former and Phil sent the latter and I’ve written this to both.  

I hope Parks is deeply grateful for the long and very closely considered review.  I almost wonder if the review-essay is not better than the novel itself.  It is so detailed that I found myself having less and less interest in possibly ever looking at the novel itself.  And maybe it is an example of that old saw—damning with faint praise because while Walton does say (politely?) that Parks really does deserve a bigger reputation than he has had to date, he doesn’t rave about the current book in any convincing or persuasive way.  He finds it to be strange and after each detail he adds we say to ourselves, “even more strange than you had told us.”  And then there are the moments of comic relief, at Parks expense it seems, when we get the  details about the naked bodies and the place where I chuckled out loud: the paragraph about how the publishers don’t seem to know what to make of the book: “they quote a review optimistically describing it as a ‘fast-paced comic novel,’ a phrase in which only the word “novel” feels accurate.  More appropriate would have been the quotation from Schopenhauer that Parks used in his demolition job on Salman Rushdie: ‘The art [of the novel] lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life’—although you can understand why the sales department might have vetoed that.”

Finally, when I learned that Parks has lived in Italy since 1987 or something, I thought of your ex-pat friend who lives in France and I got off on an inner rant that goes like this:  sorry, any writer who lives the ex-pat life in some warm, picturesque or faux-toney place like Italy or Corsica or such, can no longer be considered a “serious” writer back in his native land and reviews of his work will be forbidden.  I thought too of Jonathan Carroll, American novelist who has lived in Vienna for years (after the peace corps maybe?).  Long string of novels published steadily over the years.  No one has heard of him but enough have heard of him somewhere (UK?) that he has a following, a core of readers, a publishing record.  

And my point now is?  A big journal like the NYRB should play some sort of game its own power and delusions and announce a policy of randomly publishing every so many years only manuscripts from the slush pile, review only books by self-published authors, find writers who have a miniscule reputation in a specific locale.  

Or some other such fantasy project.  Look up Ron Rash—for example.  North Carolina author—the voice of  Appalachia, winner of the Thomas Wolfe prize and of the biggest money prize for short stories.  

I guess Tim Parks does nail it.  What the heck do we want & wouldn’t it be better if we all took up Buddhist meditation.  

The review of vol 2 of Knausgaard is written by Sheila Heti.  She makes the mistake, in my mind, of building her review on a moment when she actually met Karl Ove K briefly and asked him briefly about a specific moment in the book and he replied Oh no, I made that up.  Why on earth would she believe him even if they were there in real life speaking to one another?  As a writer herself, wouldn’t she know that at any given moment, under any sort of momentary provocation an inquiry, a writer, a person, is liable to say anything for any zillion number of reasons.  Especially people in the arts, the performing arts, actors, writers, comics, poseurs, fakes, pretenders, interviewers, anchor people, spokespeople, shapers of public opinion and taste, journalists, etc.  And then for Heti to make a reviewer’s crisis-drama out of what is true, how can we trust Knausgaard in some other part of the work if he says he “made up” that poignant and telling detail about the orange peel and his father sweeping his hand through his hair.  We all really pick and choose by our own lights and moods when we want to be literalists and when we want to be mythologists and contextualizers.  And so do the writers we enjoy reading.  There is an item making the rounds on Facebook precisely about this, at least about the form of it, the form it takes, the basic trope.  A writer named Rachel Held Evans post an item on her site called “Everyone’s a Biblical Literalist Until You Bring Up Gluttony . . . ‘…Or divorce, or gossip, or slavery, or head coverings, or Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence, or the “abomination” of eating shellfish and the hell-worthy sin of calling other people idiots.  Then we need a little context.Then we need a little grace.  Then we need a little room to disagree.”

Same holds for the literary worlds, I think, and the ever on-going hand-wringing about fiction and non-fiction, truth in fiction and truth in life and truth in memoir or re-created narrative or on and on.  Tim Parks has found that taking up Buddhist meditative practice really won’t solve these questions any more than reading novels will do so.  Vonnegut told us that reading novels was the Western form of zen meditation.  

Rick Whitaker has taken a more extreme version of this anxiety to it’s logical and admirable point of perfection.  His new novel An Honest Ghost is a total mosaic of passages from other books, other writers.  I’m only about one-third of the way into it and I’ve begun to learn how to enjoy it more fully as I keep reading.  For one thing I’ve taken to, finally, almost restrain myself from constantly turning to the back of the book where we can find exactly who said that originally, what book each phrase comes from.  There is a loose and recognizable narrative that belongs to Whitaker as the originator of the book, the collector and arranger of the quotations.  But there are two books, or a bicameral set of experiences:  the narrative as poetic assemblage and the list of sources for each chapter.  The Chord and the Arpeggio.  Since the story is much about being gay, however, I find myself wondering if Whitaker has not re-invented a new/old kind of closet for himself, or for his characters.  With a perfect mosaic of other voices, we have no narrative voice telling the whole story.  Or at least not one that is much more available to us than the thin lines of grout between the tesserae will have be necessary.  I read Whitaker’s first book some years ago and I took a look at it again to refresh my memory.  It gives the reader the real pleasure of the narrator’s voice, a memorable voice, distinctive, complex, companionable, genuine.  I wonder now why Whitaker, so successfully public as a gay writer has decided to re-closet the narrative voice he is capable of creating, even if it is behind not quite a solid door but a curtain of shifting beads.  The “second” book listing the sources is fine as a variant of the old commonplace notebook:  Whitaker has read widely and deeply and you get to be surprised at times (I thought I was the only one to have read Kenneth Burke’s only novel, or 8 Gates of Zen by John Daido Loori).

But the “first” book, the story, is too percussive as tale.  Closer to music and poetry, prose poetry, poetic sequence.  That’s how I am now trying to keep reading the book.  Not sure I will or want to finish.  It has all the curiosity factor of a strange, found object, yes, and the appeal of an Oulipo sort of game, yes.  But as with a chocolate ice cream cone, after three or nine licks, the most intense excitement dies fast and one keeps eating just because.

Finished Knausgaard at 2:20 today.  

It is compelling and incredibly moving.  Incredibly?  well, yes, at the moment I do think so.  It weaves its web of power over you.  The death of the father and the birth of the son's vocation as a writer.  Simple as that and told with all the power inherent in the archetype---without however resorting to any of that kind of fancy lingo or large-type appeal. 

Let's assume it is a great work and let's imagine Joyce and Beckett and Bernhard, maybe Proust, Pessoa and Sebald, and others in the company, being here to enjoy the party.  Knausgaard creates the illusion of saying to them all----forget the schticks and tricks, forget your special style and angle, you should have just told the essence of the tale.  But isn't that what all the writers say in hindsight to their predecessors?  Students are already for sure writing dissertations on Knausgaard and analyzing the craft and skill and art with which he has invented his magical illusion of having just let the details unfold effortlessly from his keyboard. 

It caused furor in Norway for having written so honestly about the drinking and squalor of his father and his grandmother.  The worst sort of alcoholics living in their total filth.  His father died at fifty-four if my calculations are accurate, when Karl Ove was thirty. 

PAGE 329 in the FSG edition I began to mark passages using my own filiters of course.  That's when K begins to talk more directly about his desire to write, to be a writer.  Or if he did earlier in the book I took less notice.  He must have, slightly at least, because he has written one novel by now, the one he wrote when he was in the creative writing program at the Academy and which got turned down by a publisher.

He is now twenty-four. 

Lars Iyer likes to quote this Handke line--he tweeted it again recently and it works really well for Knausgaard: "Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature consists of the gradual removal of all fictions. (Handke)"

Quote

When I was twenty-four I had a flash of insight: that this was in fact my life, this is exactly what it looked like and presumably always would.  That one's studies, this fabled and much-talked about period in a life, on which one always looked back with pleasure, were for me no more than a series of dismal, lonely, and imperfect days.  That I had not seen this before was due to the constant hope I carried around inside me, all the ridiculous dreams with which a twenty-four-year-old can be burdened, about women and love, about friends and happiness, about hidden talents and sudden breakthroughs.  But when I was twenty-four I saw life as it was.  And it was okay, I had my small pleasures too, it wasn't that, and I could endure any amount of loneliness and humiliation, I was a bottomless pit, just bring it on, there were days when I could think, I receive I am a well, I am the well of the failed, the wretched, the pitiful, the pathetic, the embarrassing, the cheerless, and the ignominious.  Come on! Piss on me!  Shit on me too if you want!  I receive!  I endure!  I am endurance itself!  I have never been in any doubt that this is what girls I have tried my luck with have seen in my eyes.  Too much desire, too little hope. 

Unquote  (329)

"I leafed through Adorno, read some pages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida . . . and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings."  (330-331)

" . . . I, the king of approximation, . . .was after enrichment . . . .  the shadow of these sentences that could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living.  Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer.  For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them."  (331)

". . . for thoughts, whatever good one can say about them, have a great weakness, namely, that they are dependent on a certain distance for effect.  Everything inside that distance is subject to emotions.  It was because of my emotions that I was starting to hold things back."  (332)

". . . the crux was that he musn't notice, he musn't find out that I harbored such emotions, and the evasive looks in such circumstances, emerged to conceal feelings rather than show them, . . . ."  (332)

"Now Espen was as dark and brooding as Hauge.  They were poets, I thought, that is how they are.  Compared to their heavy gloom I felt like a lightweight, a dilettante with no understanding of anything, just drifting across the surface, watching soccer, who recognized the names of a few philosophers and liked pop music of the simplest variety."  (335)

" . . . the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, / would become obvious.  He would be the realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one. . . . along with my tendency to cry all the time . . . ."  (345-346)

" . . . because I wasn't invited to that kind of gathering.  Why not, I had no idea.  I didn't care anymore anyway.  But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered.  Now I was only on the outside."  (377)

"One of the things Tonje liked best about me, I suspected, was that I was so fascinated by precisely that, by all the contexts and potential of various relationships, she wasn't used to that, she never speculated along those lines, so when I opened her eyes to what I saw she was always interested.  I had this from my mother, right from the time I went to school I used to carry on long conversations with her about people we had met or known, what they had said, why they might have said it, where they came from, who their parents were, what kind of house they lived in, all woven into questions to do with politics, ethics, morality, psychology, and philosophy, and this conversation, which continued to this day, had given my gaze a direction, I always saw what happened between people and tried to explain it, and for a long / time I also believed I was good at reading others, but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself, but perhaps that was not what our conversations were about primarily, there was something else, they were about Mom and me, that was how we became close to each other, in language and reflection, that was where we were connected, and that was also where I sought a connection with Tonje.  And it was good because she needed it in the same way that I needed her robust sensuousness."  (385-386)

"I knew it wasn't true, but that was how it felt, and it was feeling that was leading me, . . . ." (394)

"Furthermore, my wild state always became worse for that reason, as my drunkenness was not brought to a halt by sleep or problems of coordination, but simply continued into the beyond, the primitive, and the void.  I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion.  But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was radiant."  (399)

"But that light, bantering tone of theirs, which Erling and Gunnar also shared had never been part of my nature, to put it mildly, . . . .  I was / unable to dissemble, unable to play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was impossible to keep at arm's length in the long run . . . ."  (419-420)

"I saw the rooftops in the residential area stretching down the road and remembered how I used to walk among them as a sixteen-year-old, bursting with emotions.  When everything I saw, even a rusty, crooked rotary dryer in a back garden, even rotten apples on the ground beneath a tree, even a boat wrapped in a tarpaulin, with the wet bow protruding and the yellow, flattened grass beneath, was ablaze with beauty."  (422)

"Death and gold.  I turned them over in my hand, one by one, and they filled me with disquiet.  I stood there and was frightened of death in the same way that I had been when I was a child.  Not of dying myself but of the dead."   (423)

"The day always came with more than mere light.  However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly unaffected by the day's new beginnings."  (437)

Knausgaard closes the book with a terrific passage that circles back to the opening meditation on death and gives us this great last line:  "And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor."  (441)