The New York Times

In the latest issue of the Atlantic Michael Hirschorn predicts that The New York Times will soon stop publishing the print edition of the newspaper, retaining instead the far more popular digital edition. He suggests this could occur as early as sometime this year.

According to Hirschorn the Times is deeply in debt and while it has several assets it could sell, such as the Boston Globe, this is not exactly the best of times to put a newspaper or much of anything of value up for sale. Given its bleak financial condition, gradually diminishing print circulation, and escalating use of its website, Hirschorn says “at some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition and with it the Times as we know it, will no longer exist.”

As a long time reader of the Times, I find this inconceivable. It will mean the end of one of the main events of my day, every day, in fact, even when I’m traveling and often spend a good deal of time searching for a copy of the latest edition.

As Hirschorn puts it, the end of the print edition of the Times “will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives.”

It will also mean the end of the only way I really know how to read the newspaper. I don’t know about you, but I find it virtually impossible to read with any kind of care the Times website or the newly arrived digital version of the paper. That is true for almost any lengthy digital article, book, or periodical.

I am remote from the generation of the screen, far from knowing how to peer at the screen for anything but a headline or few short paragraphs. If I find something of any length on the Web, I end up printing a copy to read. That would be impossible to do each day with the Times as the number of articles I read from start to finish isn’t getting any less.

In my experience reading is a matter of marking up the text, make notes in the margin, underlining, shifting around from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes returning to an article several pages back and from time to time cutting something out of the paper. It is a matter of holding the text in my hands, staring at the photos, occasionally peering at the ads, and taking notes on my yellow pad of paper. It is also a matter of taking a break from the computer.

Reading this way on the screen is simply not possible. Yes, I can scan the headlines, read short pieces, and get the basics. But the Times is a quite a bit more than the basics. And while I know my Times is not everyone’s Times and while I am aware of the particular style and slant of the paper, it is nevertheless one that is quite congenial to me.

I along with a great many others from my generation will miss the daily arrival of the Times. So I remain ever hopeful that Hirschorn’s prediction is in the management’s view simply not an option.

On Reading: A Footnote

Publisher’s Weekly recently reported that bookstore sales dropped thirteen percent last November, the latest month surveyed. At the same time, not a week goes by when we don’t hear about another bookstore closing often a very fine one that you’d never expect to close or want to learn they had to.

How are we to reconcile these two facts with the apparent rise of literary reading discussed in yesterday’s posting?

The widely reported “surge” in library circulation, one that has been observed at libraries throughout this country, is one very plausible explanation. According to the Seattle Times, the Seattle area’s two library systems each loaned more that a million more items in 2008 than in the previous year.

The article cites the director of the King County Library System in Seattle who commented: “It’s an adage in the library world that the level of use or circulation at public libraries is inversely proportionate to the state of the economy. When the economy’s down, when things are tough, people come to libraries.”

Similarly, a headline in the Wall Street Journal yesterday read: “Folks Are Flocking to the Library.” The article then describes several libraries throughout the country that have experienced a sharp increase in library attendance and circulation

These leaves open the question of what individuals are doing at the library. Are they checking job listings on the computer or doing their e-mailing? Are they watching videos on You Tube or downloading their favorite music album? Or could it be that they are actually going to the library to read a book or to check one out?

Perhaps then the NEA report of an increase in literary reading is occurring in spite of all those bookstore closings and the declining sales at those that have managed to remain in business. People may be a going to the library to check out the books they would like to read or that they can no longer afford to purchase. As the president of the American Library Associated observed the other day “people are discovering that you don’t have to spend anything to read a book if you have a library card.”

Is Reading on the Rise?

I find it difficult to get too excited over the recent National Endowment of the Arts
(NEA) report that literary reading has increased in this country. The report cites evidence from the US Census Bureau Survey that literary reading rates among adults 18 and older increased from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008.

This contrasts with the sharp decline in literary reading reported in 2002 compared with the data recorded ten years earlier. However, the percent of adults reading literature is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992.

What is it that the survey actually measures? The key question upon which these data are based reads as follows:

During the past 12 months, did you read any a) novels or short stores; b) poetry; or c) plays?

A person was considered a “literary reader” if they responded positively to a, b or c! I find this a very loose definition of what constitutes a reader of literature. All you had to read during the twelve-month period the survey measured was a single poem. Does that make sense? Does it make any sense to group together a reader of a single poem with a reader of Anna Karenina or Moby Dick or both of them and then some? And does it make any sense to fail to distinguish a reader who read twelve novels, fifteen short stories and twenty poems with a person who read but a single piece of literature?

Moreover, as was true of the previous NEA Report, the definition of literary work is unnecessarily narrow, as a person who has read a memoir, collection of essays, or historical biography is not counted as a literary reader. Similarly, a person who has read the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in a Russian literature course is also excluded from this group.

The latest study also differs from the previous ones in one key feature. Instead of surveying every adult in the household, as in previous years, the latest survey “sought proxy responses for spouses or partners from the initial adult interviewed in each household.” Do you know if your partner read any poems, novels or plays last year? All such estimates are subject to a good deal of error. Perhaps a proportion of the increase in literary reading in the latest survey can be attributed to such errors.

The same objection might be made for the self-reports of any adult in the sample. Who likes to report that they didn’t read a single poem, novel, or play last year? Not even one? To avoid the embarrassment of saying that, surely a person wouldn’t feel much compunction against saying they had read at least one.

Still, it is good to know that whatever the survey measures, at least, there has been no significant decline in what on other measures (bookstore closings, library circulation, newspaper reading, etc) suggests a very general decline in various forms of reading throughout this country.

On Journals

In one of the essays included in his recent collection, In a Cardboard Belt, Joseph Epstein reflects on the nature of journal keeping. He begins:

I have been keeping a journal for more than thirty years, and if you were to ask me why I continue to do so, the best answer I can offer is that I cannot stop now. I consider scribbling a paragraph or two each morning in the notebooks that constitute my journal part of my intellectual hygiene…As for the contents of my journal entries, they generally have to do with events, incidents, thoughts (more like notions) of the day before, though I am not above writing something genuinely vicious about something I’ve read, someone I’ve met, or some piece of gossip I’ve heard.

Long ago I stopped keeping a journal. When, from time to time, I went back to read a few pages, I was overcome with embarrassment. Such adolescent stuff I thought. I could not bear the thought that someone might read it one day. So with a sigh of relief, I tore the whole thing up and deposited it in the trash. These were the days before recycling, you see. I have no regrets now about doing that, unlike the great regrets I have for stupidly throwing away all the letters I wrote to my parents in the days when writing letters was about the only way of communicating with someone who did not live nearby.

It is sometimes said that keeping a journal composed largely of therapeutic ruminations is therapeutic. In light of recent research, I find only limited support for this claim. I also agree with Epstein that:

Some benefits may accrue from setting out, in the plainest, least self-dramatizing prose, one’s troubles, if only to gain greater clarity about them. But it makes for dreary reading.

If you keep a journal, you may find it helps you get through the day or the night as the case may be. But whether or not such recording keeping benefits you in the long term remains an open question in my mind.

As usual, Epstein ranges over a variety of topics in this essay. Those that have some relationship with journal keeping are listed below.


My advice on journal keeping is…keep it light.

I take a subject and attempt to illuminate it in some rough way through the light of my own particular experience.

…my current state of mind—fatigued but tiring fast.

…writing at much greater length…allows so much more time for confusion, self-hatred, and deep doubt.

The thirty-three notebooks that constitute my full journal must by now run to nearly a million words. To the question who is ever likely to publish them, the short—and I suspect definitive—answer is: no one.

When Alan Bennett began keeping his diary in 1974, he decided straightaway not to record his emotions and thoughts, because “they make you cringe when you read them again.”

“The reason I write is because there is no one to talk to and I might as well build up a completely private life.” Dawn Powell.

One can say to it [journal] things one wouldn’t dare to say to anyone else.

“One stops being a child,” Cesare Pavese wrote in his diary, when one realizes that telling one’s troubles does not make it better.

On Writing

The June 2008 issue of The Believer has reprinted a lecture on writing that Zadie Smith gave to students in the Columbia University Writing Program earlier in the year. At the outset she distinguishes between writing a story and writing about the process or “craft” involved in writing the story itself.

When someone asks me to write a story I feel they’re giving me a comprehensible block of stone and my job is to carve out whatever shape I thinks within it.

But a lecture on craft…at once something fraudulent creeps into the enterprise…I don’t believe in craft in the abstract.

When writers talk about writing, my ears perk up. Not so much because they will teach me how to write. No one can do that. But rather because I often pick up on very general tactics on what to do after the writing is finished or in a draft form. If there is one rule that is easy to learn and often mentioned, yet so very difficult to apply, it is rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

Smith concurs: I reworked those first twenty five pages [of Beauty] for almost two years.

She also encourages the writer to listen to find a rhythm that seems to fit the mood of the piece that is being written. One way to do this is to listen to the rhythms of other writers who for one reason or another have written in the desired “tempo.”

My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight.

I did not make note of the ten short sections of her essay that describe the various stages of novel writing, at least her novels, but I did record the following additional passages in her witty and very amusing essay.


The only time I feel I’m writing honestly about craft…is when I have a specific piece of fiction in my sights….

Craft is too grand and foreign a word to describe what gets done most days in your pajamas.

Reading about craft is like listening to yourself breathe. Wring about craft prompts a self-consciousness so acute one forgets how to exhale altogether.

[There are] two breeds of novelist: The Macro Planner and The Micro Manager….A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page.

Personally, I’m a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last…I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending will be until I get to it…

…writing is more than elegant sentences. The only rule is quality.

…reading great literature creates a sense of oppression. For how can you pipe out your little mouse song when Kafka’s Josephine the mouse singer pipes so much more loudly and beautifully than you ever could?

The term “role model” is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. So I think of Keats.

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second—put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage.

The secret to editing work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

I find it very hard to read my books after they’re published. I’ve never read White Teeth. Five years ago I tried; I got about ten sentences in before I was overwhelmed with nausea.

Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman is a master of longing. He can long for the place where he is currently located. And he can long for the place he just left the moment he arrives in the place he had been longing to go to in the first place. And then the reverse, once he returns to the place he had originally left. Is this a journey familiar to you? At times, it has been to me.

I now reside in the town where I had dreamed of living for years. At the same time, I yearn for the town I left, one where I had lived for most of my adult life. Yet, I only long for certain elements of it, not its dominant feature, well known to anyone who has lived through its very long and cold, and very wet winters.

Aciman is also the master of ambivalence. His mind is a constant journey of shuttling back and forth between one idea and the next. In Pensione Eolo he writes:

"By missing Manhattan, I learn to long for it, to love it, though I am now conscious that I’m losing Manhattan because I’m about to revisit a place I’ve always suspected I loved more than Manhattan but will not really allow myself to think I’ll be able to revisit unless it, too, like Manhattan, becomes a site of nostalgia, something I can lose, might lose, have lost. Place, in this very peculiar context, means something only if it is tied to its own displacement. I posit one point, but then I posit a second, which sends me back to the first, which then sends me back again to the second, and so on."

In a way, Aciman is the Ingmar Bergman of the page. He seems to have a special pass to inner workings of the mind, at least to his mind and the way it swirls around from one pole to another.

He is also a student and admirer of Proust whose influence is unmistakable. That should be evident from the following passages I recorded from his Letter from Illiers-Combray: In Search of Proust:

"…the Proust who perfected the studied unveiling of spontaneous feelings. Proust invented a language, a style, a rhythm, and a vision that gave memory and introspection an aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before."

"It reminded me of the way Proust’s sentences roam and stray through a labyrinth of words and clauses, only to turn around—just when you are about to give up—and show you something you had always suspected but had never put into words."

"Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But because the dream never came true, he had learned to love instead the place where the dream was born."

And then there is the ever-present nostalgia that underlies so many of Aciman’s recollections. Longing, Ambivalence, Nostalgia, the three features that characterize so much of his writing, including his tale Pensione Eolo from which I made note of the following passages:

"…I continued to purchase French and Italian magazines so as not to let go of Europe knowing all along, however, that I’d unavoidably lose touch and that despite my promises to hold on to the old, the new invariably had ways of demoting old things."

"In this state of anticipated nostalgia, which is how those who fear homesickness try to immunize themselves against it—by experiencing it in small persistent doses beforehand…"

"…the confused, back-and-forth, up-and-around, congested nature of ambivalence, of love, and of nostalgia."

"…nostalgia is his (Ulysses) home, the way that, in exile, only paradox makes sense. He finds his home in the purely intellectual realization that he has no home. The site of nostalgia is nostalgia itself. The site of nostalgia is writing and speculating and thinking about nostalgia."

"Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that lost."

"I never went to Italy that year. Pensione Eolo remained a whirlpool of fictions and fantasies and of the memory of an imagined winter spent with a defrocked nun, a marine biologist, and a Hungarian musicologist. I remember as though it were yesterday the day I pictured myself running to the ferryboat one evening to get my mail, only to find that none had arrived that day. The woman in New York whose letter I would have craved to read in Italy was in the next room sulking, while I, in her living room, would look outside over to Riverside Park like a prisoner imagining his imminent liberation, envying those lucky enough to be alone in the park that weekday evening. I hadn’t even told her I had applied for a job abroad. I simply wanted to get away, and kept looking for the slightest pretext to tell her that we couldn’t live together, that she should look for someone else, that I couldn’t wait to be back where I thought I’d be among my own."

"That winter, when it was all over, I would walk or ride a bus past her building. Sometimes I’d think how lucky I’d been to have spent a year with her there and how gladly I would give everything now that I had been back with the same woman, staring out those windows whenever she went sulking into the other room, imagining and envying those strolling outside, never once suspecting that one day soon I might be a stroller, too, looking in, envying the man I’d been there once, knowing all along, though, that if I had to do it over again, I’d still end where I was, yearning for those days when I was living with a woman I had never loved and would never love but in whose home I had managed to fall in love with an ex-would-be-nun whose presence was indissolubly fused to an apartment on the Upper West Side that became dearer to me and made me love New York because from these rooms I had looked out windows facing the Hudson and invented a woman who, like me was neither here not there."

Truth

The nature of literary truth along with the effects of reading literature are the issues that loom largest in my thinking about literary fiction. 
While I am far from a well-informed student of literature, my sense is that both are rarely written about or systematically discussed in literary forums. Nor are they exactly hot topics on the Web.

The topic interests me because I come from a tradition that regards the “truth” as the exclusive domain of science. It is only recently that I have come to see how wrong I was and how limited that tradition is.

Indeed, I now realize that most of the passages from the literary fiction that I have collected in my Commonplace Book convey an important truth about myself or the world around me. These truths are, in my view, indistinguishable in principle from any empirical truth.

The truths that I find in these passages, like most of those in my commonplace book, may be uniquely true for me. That is the wonderful thing about literature: it makes no claims of universality, it does not intend to be true or false in the way an empirical proposition is.

Rather we read ourselves into literature without concern, as we are in science, for whether or not the passage is true for others, and if so, for how many and to what degree. Instead, the truth of any given passage is immediately true for the reader because it corresponds to his or her experience or provides a language for it in a way that had not been available before. “Yes,” we say, “that is true for me. This is my story. That’s exactly the way I felt. Or I had not realized its truth until I saw it on the page.”

In addition to those cited earlier the passages below are among those that I have collected on the subject of literary truth.


…we never get closer to the truth than in a novel. Louis Begley

Currently I am writing volume one of my autobiography, and thinking about some of the people and events that went into The Golden Notebook, I have to conclude that fiction is better at “the truth” than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don’t begin to understand. Doris Lessing

“The reason why we like a book is because we say, Yes, because life is like that, and the reason why we stop reading certain kinds of childish books is because we say, Good story but life’s not like that. The whole question of recognition is terribly important and that’s why as you get older your reading experience inevitably gets richer because you have more of your own experience to bring to it.” Tim Parks cited by Patrick Kurp in Anecdotal Evidence July 24, 2007

The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through
 literature, as being more real than our factual origins.

 Shirley Hazzard Ancient Shore
We look to fiction for images of reality—real life rendered as vicarious experience, with a circumstantial intimacy that more factual, explanatory accounts cannot quite supply. John Updike New Yorker 1/26/04

Its [literature] cultural importance derives...from its success in telling us things about ourselves that we hear from no other quarter." Salman Rushdie

"He liked novels because they dealt with the incommensurable in life, with the things that couldn't be expressed another way." Richard Ford in Quality Time New Yorker January 31, 2000.

What am I looking for here? Nothing much and yet everything: amusement, an expanded knowledge of how other people live--and lived--and, chiefly, those truths of the heart that, for complicated reasons, are otherwise hidden from us and unavailable anywhere else but in literature. Joseph Epstein Surfing the Novel Commentary January 2002

…there is a certain audience that wants to hear the truth again. There are truths told in this play [“Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”], as in any great classic, that have to be heard over and over and over again. Brian Dennehy

I was changed by literature, not by cautionary or exhortatory literature, but by the truth as I found it in literature. I recognize the world in a different way because of it, and I continue to be influenced in that way by it. Opened up, made more alert, and called to a greater truthfulness in my own accounting of things, not just in my writing, in my life as well. It did that for me, and does that for me, and no one touched by it in this way should have any doubt of its necessity. Tobias Wolff. Paris Review Interview #183

I think a great book--leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style and so on--is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths--about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both--such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television. Julian Barnes Paris Review #157

Thinking and Doing

I read The Reader by Bernard Schlink over ten years ago in 1998, the year it was published in this country. The recent movie version of the novel brought the tale back to me and clarified a number of uncertainties I had when I first read the book.

While I found the story both moving and disturbing, when I checked the inside back cover of the book, I was surprised to find I made note of only three passages. I must have been more frugal in the early days of collecting passages for my Commonplace Book than I seem to be now.

Two of the three--one long, one short—confront a problem that was among the central concerns of my work in psychology. And I recall how pleased I was at the time I came across them to find the issue so clearly articulated in a work of fiction. This was long before I came to appreciate the truths that are so often found in literature.

The passages address the relationship between saying and doing, between thought and action. Schlink writes:

“There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”

“I don’t know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together—I think I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something—whatever that may be—goes into action; “it” goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, “it” makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, “it” keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be. I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.”

A lifetime of thinking about this discrepancy has convinced me that all too often we overestimate the influence of our thoughts on our behavior. What we think is only one of the many factors that influence behavior, especially in situations where there are strong external pressures to act in a contrary fashion. In these situations, individuals may find it very difficult to translate what they believe into what they actually do.

The task before us is to learn how to overcome this effect, to learn how to make what we know and what we believe more salient in those situations where we wish to act consistently. Sometimes this occurs naturally, when, for example, newly acquired information is still readily available to us or a when a resolution is newly made. However, these beliefs and intentions usually become less and less decisive with the passage of time. Individuals then need something more to make what they believe to be an imperative for action. Until we develop more effective ways to accomplish this, we should be careful not to overestimate the extent to beliefs, even strongly held ones, are closely related to behavior.

Harold Bloom How To Read and Why

The first chapter of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why is an eloquent manifesto about the importance and joy of the reading experience. Why read at all? Bloom’s answer turns on its pleasures, the knowledge it imparts, “not just of the self and others, but of the way things are” and its various other effects on the individual.

On the matter of the effects of reading literature, I find Bloom less persuasive and at times inconsistent. He claims, for example that “imaginative literature…alleviates loneliness.” I think there is very little research to support that. He claims that reading is “healing.” I assume here he means in a therapeutic sense. Yet, I know of no systematic body of knowledge that demonstrates this.

Against this background, Bloom then goes on to say: You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply. I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.

As I understand this statement, Bloom is saying that reading cannot directly change a person’s behavior nor does it have any effect on the “public good.” How odd to juxtapose these claims next to his earlier remarks about the way reading can alleviate loneliness and is the “most healing of pleasures.”

Still this chapter in Bloom’s book is a powerful reminder of the significance of the literary reading experience. In the remaining chapters Bloom amplifies this theme by discussing specific works of literature including short stories, poems, plays, and novels. The volume is an excellent introduction to literature.

In addition to the foregoing remarks by Bloom, other selections from the first chapter follow:


Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

Literary criticism, as I have learned to understand it, ought to be experiential and pragmatic, rather than theoretical.

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions that they continue to read for themselves.

…eventually you will read against the clock.

…formula of how to read: find what comes near you than can be put to the use of weighing and considering.

Ultimately we read…to strengthen the self and to learn its authentic interests.

The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social.

…if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.

We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

…recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says.

And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.

We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the ways things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading ….is the search for a difficult pleasure.

Paris Review Interviews

The remaining passages I recorded from the third volume of Paris Review Interviews are posted below. The writers interviewed were Isak Dinesen, Harold Pinter, John Cheever, Jean Rhys, Joyce Carol Oats and Ralph Ellison. The responses of Jean Rhys were unusually personal.

She comments: What came first with most of them [her books] was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.

It is widely believed that writing about emotional trauma and long standing conflicts is an effective way to eliminate them. James Pennybaker, one of the most prominent investigators of this purported effect writes: The degree to which writing or talking about basic thoughts and feelings can produce such profound physical and psychological changes is nothing short of amazing.

On the basis of his research he reports, for example, that it leads to fewer illnesses and physician visits, improvements in immune function, and decreasing stress as measured by autonomic function. Students show an improvement in their grade point average. Employees report a decline in work absenteeism and an increased likelihood of reemployment following job loss. And the majority of research participants he has studied indicate they experience less stress, negative affect and symptoms of depression.

Can it be this simple? Were that it was so. There is much to be skeptical about in the many studies of writing therapy. Readers who wish to know more about this issue might read the third essay at www.the-essayist.com/on-writing. The remaining passages from the Rhys interview are cited below and those of the other writers follow, in turn.

Jean Rhys
They had told me when I left Dominica that I would not feel the cold for the first year—that my blood would still be warm from the tropic sun. Quite wrong!

I’ve never written when I was happy.

Some books can really take you away. It’s marvelous.

…I don’t quite know why I should go on writing so much about myself…I guess I write about myself because that’s all I really know.

Isak Dinesen
We absorb so much without being aware.

I discovered Shakespeare very early in life and now I feel that life would be nothing without him.

Harold Pinter
I don’t know what kind of characters my plays will have until they…well, until they are.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

John Cheever
As for lying, it seems to me that falsehood is a critical element in fiction.

The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

This table seems real, the fruit basket belonged to my grandmother, but a madwoman could come in the door any moment.

In no way does it [academic papers on fiction] help those who write fiction or those who love to read fiction.

If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can’t write a story. You might as well give up.

…what he [Fitzgerald] could do best…which was to try to give a sense of what a very particular world was like.

Joyce Carol Oates
I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

I would have liked, I think, to have established an easygoing relationship with some other writers, but somehow that never came about.

There are some stories (I won’t say which ones) that evolved almost entirely out of their settings, usually rural.

I have no idea why he’s so angry with me. But does a disturbed person really need a reason…?

Ralph Ellison
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

The major flaw in the hero’s character is his unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success.

What is important is not the scene but his failure to question their decision.

Action is the thing. We are what we do and do not do.

Raymond Carver

The interviews with writers in the Paris Review are almost always entertaining and informative. While the questions range widely across literature and the writer’s work, most of them also pass along a few tips on how they write and what strategies they use to overcome some of its difficulties. It is interesting to speculate about what effects they might have on other writers who read these interviews.

Like the first two volumes of the Paris Review Interviews, the third in the series collects those of some very fine writers. I read seven of the sixteen--Raymond Carver, Isak Dinesen, Harold Pinter, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Rhys and Ralph Ellison. What an impressive bunch!

The questions put to Raymond Carver and his extensive answers interested me most. In response to the question, Do you write better on the West Coast—out in Washington—or here in the East? I guess I’m asking how important a sense of place is to your work.

Carver responded: Once it was important to seem myself as a writer from a particular place. It was important to me to be a writer from the West. But that’s not true any longer, for better or worse. I think I’ve moved around too much, lived in too many places, felt dislocated and displaced, to now to have any firmly rooted sense of “place.”….There are plenty of good writers with this sense of place that you’re talking about…But the majority of my stories are not set in any specific locale…In any case most of my stories are set indoors.

Originally I thought the interviewer was asking about the role of where you are when you write, rather than what you write about. I thought, example, Carver might answer in terms of how well he wrote in the Northwest, rather than when he was in other places in this country. But Carver interpreted place in terms of his subject matter that, as he points out could be anywhere but in his case is clearly indoors.

I know there are places, physical places, where I seem to be working at my best. They tend to be in warm places where Italian is spoken and art treasures abound. And when I am moving around as Carter puts it, it is hopeless for me to try to get anything done.

A few questions later, Carter is asked a question that is central in my thinking about literature: How do you hope your stories will affect people? Do you think your writing will change anybody? Carter responded:

I really don’t know. I doubt it. Not change in any profound sense. Maybe not any change at all. After all, art is a form of entertainment, yes? I’m not saying there isn’t spiritual nourishment involved too…

I remembered in my twenties reading plays by Strindberg, a novel by Max Frisch, Rilke’s poetry, listening all night to music by Bartok, watching a special on the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo and feeling in each case that my life had to change after these experiences, it couldn’t help but be affected by these experiences and changed….

But then I found out soon enough my life was not going to change after all. Not in any way that I could see, perceptible or otherwise….Art was a luxury and it wasn’t going to change me or my life. I guess I came to the hard realization that art doesn’t make anything happen…

Maybe writing fiction about particular kinds of people living particular kinds of lives will allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than they were understood before. But I’m afraid that’s it, at least as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps it’s different in poetry. Tess has had letters from people who have read her poems and say the poems saved them from jumping off a cliff or drowning themselves, etcetera.

Clearly Carter vacillated from one extreme to the other in considering this question. From “I don’t know” to “not a profound change” to specific instances (Strindberg, Frisch, Rilke, etc) where says he was “affected…and changed” and back again no change at all. In that uncertainty Carter reflects the wide disagreements that characterizes present day discussions of this issue. For readers who would like find out more about the effects of reading literature see my own review in the last essay at www.the-essayist.com/literary


The remaining passages I made note of in the Carter interview follow:

I think most of my characters would like their action to count for something. But at the same time they’ve reached the point—as so many people do—that they know it isn’t so. It doesn’t add up any longer. The things you once thought important or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now. It’s their lives they’ve become uncomfortable with, lives they see are breaking down.

I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story.

That life is simply gone now, and I can’t regret its passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as surely—it’s as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a nineteenth-century novel.

The past really is a foreign country, and they do do things differently there. Things happen. I really do feel I’ve had two different lives.

…he [John Gardner] believes good fiction is moral fiction. It’s a book to argue with, if you like to argue.

Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.

But changing things through fiction, changing somebody’s political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no.

Top 100

I tend to read books that in some measure make contact with my life and the issues that are central to my thinking now. For the most part, they inevitably tend to be contemporary works of literary fiction.

Since this is the time of the year for resolutions and since I rarely make any, I am going for the first time in a long while to make one—to read more of the classics. And since I have newly arrived in the world of literature, it is clear that I have a lot of catching up to do. At this point in my life, it has become a race against the clock.

Where to begin? Several years ago the Guardian published a list of the top 100 books of all time. The list was based on the selections of 100 “noted writers” from fifty-four countries. Here is the unranked list arranged alphabetically by author. How many have you read?

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

In response to these selections, the Guardian published another set the year after, this time a ranked list at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction. Two other lists are at http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html and I am sure there are a good many more.

Favorite Books of 2008

Leaving aside a few of the very excellent articles I have read in The New Yorker, here is list of my favorite literary works in 2008.

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon was far and away the finest novel I read this year. See my account at http://marksinthemargin.blogspot.com/2008/10/night-train-to-lisbon.html. After reading a book like this, I find it to find anything that comes close.

David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death. David Reiff, the son of Susan Sontag describes his mother’s prolong battles to overcome three episodes of cancer

Ann Patchett”s What Now? is an edited version of a recent comment speech she delivered at Sarah Lawrence. Like everything Patchett has written it is both jolly and thought-provoking.

Richard Bausch’s Peace, is a tragic tale of a group of American soldiers fighting their way up Monte Casino during World War II

Carol Cassella’s Oxygen tells a suspenseful story with an unexpected ending of a terrible error she made or thought she made, as an anesthesiologist in a Seattle hospital.

Maruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running describes Murakami’s ambitious, sometimes astonishing ventures running marathons and beyond, as well as the significance of running on his writing life

Philip Roth Indignation. Here Roth tells the tale of a young college student growing up in, yes, in Newark who tries to emerge from his, yes, Jewish family, by heading off, yes, against his father’s wishes, to a second rate college far from home.

Andre Aciman’s Intimacy is Aciman’s part real, part fictional account of returning to the neighborhood in Rome that his family emigrated to after leaving Egypt. It was published American Scholar, Summer 2008.

To see the selections of two other readers of literary fiction I invite you to see the list that James Wood, the New Yorker’s literary critic, put together at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/12/james-wood-eleven-favorite-boo.html.

Maureen Corrigan who reviews books on NPR also has a list at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98334820

Wood and Corrigan agree on their favorite book for the year, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. While I read O’Neill’s novel, I didn’t find it as notable as they did. I will have more to say about Netherland in another post.

House of Reading

In a 1988 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, the critic George Steiner wrote: “I would not be surprised if that which lies ahead for classical modes of reading resembles the monasticism from which those modes sprung. I sometimes dream of houses of reading—a Hebrew phrase—in which those passionate to learn how to read well would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship.

He continues: “To those raised to crave the stimulation of the screen houses of reading probably sound like claustrophobic prisons. For those raised in the tradition of print literacy, they may seem like serene enclaves, havens of learning and contentment, temples to the many and subtle pleasures of the word on the page.”

Steiner doesn’t have to dream of reading houses; there are, in fact, several scattered across the country. Several years ago David Halberstam wrote an article in the New York Times (December 19, 1997) about one--the Society Library in New York City. It described an independent, membership library that was part club, part collection of books, part haven for writers and readers. “It feels and somehow smells like an old-fashioned library, with old-fashioned lighting and a wonderful, rich reading room, filled as it is by Audubon sketches.”

According Halberstam, the library was a place for readers and writers to gather and work by themselves without being entirely by themselves. He says: “I don’t necessarily talk to them and they don’t necessarily talk to me, but for the moment I feel a little less alone.”

Wendy Wasserstein said that she had done much of her writing there. “The Society Library is an almost perfect place to work: it is pleasant, it is quiet, it has a surprising number of books that you may want and it is genteel. Besides the neighborhood is filled with a number of good places for a late lunch…”

What writer or reader has not wished for an old-fashioned library in their neighborhood like that? A private reading/discussion club with an open membership policy with quiet rooms to read, others to write, and still others for good conversation would, in my view, be a library at its best.

Warm wood-paneled walls of bookcases, row after row of richly-bound volumes, with their “intoxicating mixture of vellum, paper and dust,” as well as a speaker program and a few book groups.

Penelope Lively put it well in her recent book Consequences: “We are not just a library, you see. We are for members a sort of club, a refuge from the daily grind.”

A club or reading library like this has been called elitist. That is silly. Most memberships cost about $90-$100 per year. And there are no restrictions on who may join.

For a recent account of “libraries of gracious reading” see Anne Eisenberg’s article at: www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/business/yourmoney/11library.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Anne%20Eisenbert%20Libraries%20of%20Gracious%20Reading&st=cse.

A list of several membership libraries in this country is at: http://nysoclib.org/links.html. There is also one in Minneapolis: http://www.openbookmn.org and another in Seattle: http://www.hugohouse.org/house.

Is there a place for a library like these in the digital age? While the need for an insular club these days may seem debatable, it still has enormous appeal to me. What better way to maintain the culture of serious reading and scholarship than in these “serene” houses of reading?

New Liberalism

I have been a lifelong reader of The New Yorker. The magazine has changed so much since I began reading it, but I still go carefully through each issue. It plays an important part in my reading life. See the first essay at http://www.the-essayist.com/literary.

I don't save each issue any more but I have kept the November 17, 2008 issue that is a celebration and analysis of the election of Barack Obama and what it might mean for this once powerful nation. The essay The New Liberalism by George Packer was among the most memorable pieces in the issue.

As the New Year begins and as so many individuals are optimistic about the changes it will bring, I thought I would cite a few of the passages from Packer’s piece that lays out his own and others perspective on the years ahead.

The Journal's [Wall Street Journal] nightmare scenario of America under President Obama and a Democratic Congress included health care for all, a green revolution, expanded voting rights, due process for terror suspects, more powerful unions, financial regulation, and a shift of the tax burden upward.

The phrase...deliberative democracy appears in The Audacity of Hope, where it denotes a conversation among adults who listen to one another, who attempt to persuade one another by means of argument and evidence, and who remain open to the possibility that they could be wrong.

In Kuttner's [Robert Kuttner] view, nothing short of a return to New Deal-style government intervention will be enough to prevent the dire economy from Dooming Obama's Presidency.

"All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified." Franklin Roosevelt

...a liberal "works to control the processes of change, to the end that the break with the old pattern may not be too violent." Franklin Roosevelt

"Obama will need to be a more radical president than he was a presidential candidate." Robert Kuttner

"...deep cynicism in the public about the capacity of government to do anything big and well." Robert Reich

The new era that is about to begin under President Obama will be more about public good than about private goods. The meal will be smaller, and have less interesting flavors, but it will be shared more fairly. The great American improvisation called democracy still bends along the curve of history. It has not yet finished astounding the world.

Words and Actions

Over and over again, I find I cannot recall a passage that I added to my Commonplace Book a relatively short time ago or those, of course, that stretch back over the years. Clearly I need to review my collection more often, something I really only do at the end of the year or from time to time when I am searching for quotations from a particular book or article.

While I collect all these thoughts and words of wisdom, they rarely come to mind when they might be useful or influence my behavior when I wish them to. There is such a gap between words and actions, between thoughts and behavior. I put these words to paper in the hope that they will narrow this gap, that I will be able to make more intelligent decisions, and do so with ease. But that rarely, if ever, happens.

In a review of Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men, Joyce Carol Oates writes:

“The predicament of Gessen's characters, as it is likely to be the preeminent predicament of Gessen's generation, is the disparity between what one has learned of history and the possibilities of making use of that knowledge in one's life…”

This is exactly what I am talking about. As the central character laments: "I have spent …most of my life in libraries." Here again, there is that gap between what you are learning in the library and what you are able to do when you are away from your books.

At a dinner party a few weeks ago, someone used in jest the phrase "the meaning of life." I instantly recalled reading that very morning a passage in Joseph's Epstein's essay “Talking to Oneself” that dealt with the meaning of life. For the life of me I could not recall the passage, although I thought it might add to the exchange.

Epstein quotes Edward Shils who, when the son of a friend of his committed suicide, leaving a note saying that he found life meaningless, responded: "of course it is meaningless, but most of us are fortunately too busy to dwell on its meaningless." But I couldn't recall it; yet it was only a few hours before that I had read it and had, in fact, copied it into my commonplace book.

This example is instructive: Reading is a relatively passive activity. Indeed, some read so quickly that it is hard to imagine they are catching much of anything. But for even the most focused readers it is fair to say that little is recalled or recorded in any permanent fashion. Other than those who have a photographic memory, unless the reader makes a deliberate effort to mark a given passage, then review it, perhaps copy it someplace or indeed memorize it, it should not be surprising that reading does not guarantee recall and even less surprising that the information is not automatically or otherwise translated into action.

What is necessary to achieve that?

Derek Rubin

I read Derek Rubin's anthology, Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) A Jewish American Writer, of Jewish writer's essays earlier in the year. I don't normally think of Jewish writers as Jewish writers and most of those who wrote essays for this volume don't view themselves that way either even though they often write about Jewish characters and situations.

I don't recall anything special about this book, nor did I make any progress in coming to terms with being Jewish. It seems that gaining a better understanding of what it means to be Jewish matters to me now in a way it never did before.

That is the way I always feel each time I read one of these commentaries on what being Jewish means to Jewish individuals. It remains one of those unanswered questions that nibble away at the boundaries of my mind, never looming so large, however, that I really get serious about the matter.

Here are some passages I noted in the book. The first two are from Rubin's Introduction and the remaining are from some of the authors included in this volume.


…only in her writing can she feel fully at home…

…as the immigrant experience recedes into the past and a younger generation of Jewish writers emerges, fully acculturated and well integrated into American suburban and middle and upper middle class urban life, so Jewish literature will cease to exist as a rich, distinct presence in the American literary landscape.

Saul Bellow
Writers and criminals have often found that they had much in common. And correctional officials seem to understand thanks to psychology courses they take in the universities that it is excellent therapy to write books and that it may soften the hearts of criminals to record their experiences.

I have tried to fit my soul into the Jewish-writer category, but it does not feel comfortably accommodated there.

…his soul could not bear to be cut off from its kind, and that was why he did his work in cafes.

Rebecca Goldstein
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the grounds for beliefs, asking such questions as what constitutes good grounds for various sorts of beliefs….In epistemology the difference between grounded and ungrounded beliefs makes all the difference.

…hypervigilance in regard to beliefs…

My hopeless passion for fiction had seemed to me, back in the days when I thought of myself as a real philosopher (which I no longer do), a rather shameful little aberration.

Deep down in the regions of the psyche where fiction is born, regions supremely indifferent to criteria of rationality, being Jewish seems to matter to me more than I can explain or justify.

Storytelling has a high moral role to play in Judaism.

Jonathan Rosen
…becoming a writer meant coming to terms with who you actually are.


Allegra Goodman
…a community of passionate readers in an increasingly difficult world for serious fiction

…self-consciousness, ambivalence, and guilt about the Jewish tradition…

Philip Roth
Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings. The world of fiction, in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable, or even necessary to the business of living. We may not even know that we have such a range of feelings and responses until we have come into contact with the work of fiction.

And this expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, if of considerable value to man and society.

The test of any literary work is not how broad is its range or representation—for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative—but the depth with which the writer reveals whatever he has chosen to represent.

Erica Jong
And what is a Jew? A Jew is a person who is safe nowhere…

Susan Sontag

Illness colors everything, especially a serious one. Life seems bleak, there is little that is worth doing, eating is a chore, as is everything else. I suspect that is the reaction of many who are struck with a debilitating disease or injury, although we do hear about an almost equal number who never abandon life, even when it is virtually impossible for them to live it.

Susan Sontag was one of those individuals. Like others so struck, they command our admiration. Of course, there is much else about Susan Sontag to admire, including her recently published and widely reviewed first volume of her journal, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.

David Rieff, Sontag's son, has written about her mother's lengthy battle with cancer in Swimming in a Sea of Death. It was a tough book to read as Rieff describes in detail Sontag's three horrible bouts of cancer that one by one descended upon her body and ravished it.

But she never gave up hope that she would be cured by one of the new techniques for treating cancer, each one grimmer than the next. She studied the medical literature, traveled the world to visit doctors and hospitals that specialized in their application, sure in the knowledge that she would be cured.

Her last bout did her in and Rieff struggles with the question throughout his account of whether or not to tell her that there was no cure for it (myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). Here are the some of the passages I made note of in the book.


“I curse death.” I cannot help it. Elias Canetti

She loved living and, if anything, both her appetite for experience and her hopes for what she would accomplish as a writer had only increased as she grew older. If I had to choose one word to describe her way of being in the world it would be "avidity." There was nothing she did not want to see or do or try to know.

…she writes that she is an eternal student and speculates whether, in the end, that is what she is best at.

…irrational human wish to ascribe meaning when no meaning is really on offer.

“The statistics only get you so far. There are always people on the tail end of the curve.” Jerome Groopman.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Real commitment for her was always radical.

Above all, information needed to be collected. Information meant control, did it not?

Her apartment became a kind of research unit (it had always been more office and library than home)…

…brochure is written in the language of hope, but in fact offers almost none to anyone reading it with care.

But the gap here between language and reality is simply too great

Thomas Mann once wrote that a writer is someone for whom writing is harder that it is for anyone else.

You did not give in to cancer, you fought it, and if you fought hard enough and, above all, intelligently enough, there was a chance that you could win.

…but deferring completely to another person is, if anything, an even more impossible project. For such deference would render one without personality—without the very qualities, in other words, upon which one's relations with the other person are grounded.

…for my mother information had become synonymous with hope: the more you knew, the better your chances of cheating death once more.

Looking back, I wonder if there is any silence worse than the silence of the sick room.

…love was no consolation to her as she fought so desperately for her life.

From a political and, increasingly, an ecological standpoint as well, she had no great hope that the world would get any better and, at the very least, the strong intuition that it would probably get a great deal worse.

…to understand an illusion is not to rid yourself of it…

And if so many people die of cancer today, doctors say that this is at least in part because we are not dying of other diseases when we are younger.

“…as long as one's thoughts are spoken and written down, they'll form another life, they won't perish with the flesh.” Bei Dao

Harold Pinter

In 2007, a revival of Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming was presented in New York. John Lahr’s review of the play, accompanied by a profile of Pinter appeared in the December 24th/December 31st issue of The New Yorker.

Lahr discusses the uncertainty and ambiguity that usually characterizes Pinter’s plays and clarifies Pinter underlying rationale for expressing himself this way. The profile is interspersed with biographical details of Pinter’s life, including his often-voiced political convictions. Here are a few of the passages that I made note of in Lahr’s provocative review/profile


Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after I understood the eloquence of the unspoken.

…the play’s spectacular combination of mystery and rigor had taught me something new about life, about language, about the nature of dramatic storytelling.

The truth, in other words, is anybody’s guess. Meaning is what you make it.

The Homecoming is ultimately not about the house or the woman but about whose perception of reality will prevail.

What it has to do with is thought: what has just been said and how to respond to what has been said.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.

What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? Pinter’s play’s reenact this difficulty of knowing.

Harold didn’t want something that made a statement, because a statement was lacking in ambiguity.

“I am writing nothing and can write nothing,” he said …in 1970. “I don’t know why. It’s a very bad feeling, I know that, but I must say I want more than anything else to fill up a blank page again, and to feel that strange thing happen, birth through fingertips. When you can’t write, you feel you’ve been banished from yourself.

The sound, like that of a stone dropped into a well, registers the depth of the distance between them.

I still have quite a bit of ferocity knocking around. It’s how to embody it.

…his easy access to his own turbulent internal climate…

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."

Harold Pinter

"Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?"
Lawrence Durrell

Harold Pinter’s plays are questions. What does this mean? Does it mean anything? There is a sense of incompleteness about his plays. And that is why you remember them and continue to ruminate about them. Not long before his death yesterday, he had written to his wife:

(To A)
I shall miss you so much when I’m dead
The loveliest of smiles
The softness of your body in our bed

My everlasting bride
Remember that when I am dead
You are forever alive in my heart and my head


Last year I read a slim volume, Mel Gussow Conversations with Pinter, that reprints a series of lengthy interviews he had with Mel Gussow, drama critic for the New York Times. I made note of a number of passages in which together they talk about his life and work. Their exchanges provide a glimpse of the sources for the ambiguity and questioning that characterizes his plays.


…the mistiness of the past

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

It would be marvelous to find that I was someone else.

You’re trapped with yourself all your damned life. I just get bored with myself and have enough of myself so often.

What the hell is there to say?

…a man of my age and temperament and disposition is slightly out of kilter with the needs of the time.

The things on television which we took for granted for so many years—the drama, the serious discussions, religious programmes, debates, documentaries—if you come back in ten years’ time, it will be over. It will just be various degrees of rubbish.

The actual facts simply do not correspond to the language used about those facts.

The image of a fellow of his age, middle twenties, just not wanting to get out of bed, I think is something we know quite a lot about.

Whatever I’m writing about, it’s a celebration. What you’re celebrating is the ability to write. There’s an excitement about it that certainly transcends whatever you might have been doing five minutes before. It takes you way out into another country.

…a society in a very surreptitious and appalling way is grinding you into the dust.

The theatre was my world. It was the only world I was happy in.

I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know how to go anywhere. I couldn’t continue to write plays about people who had been asleep for 29 years, although I’m sure a lot of other people have been asleep for 29 years. I felt obliged to investigate other territory, and I didn’t know how to do it.

How many thousands of premarital counseling groups that meet annually in North America use fiction as part of the process? Few or none, I’d be willing to bet. Yet what could be a more obvious source of case history, of example, and warning than stories of marriage?

Experience shows that fiction and poetry are very effective in permitting disclosure, the sharing of feelings and experiences that are otherwise very difficult to voice in a group.

On Reading

We hear from every quarter in this country that no one reads anymore, that television and now the Web have all but killed off the pleasures of the page. We bemoan the closing of one bookstore after another and the alleged sharp decline in literary reading documented in the recent National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report.

However, I am not entirely convinced by all these obituaries for reading, especially the widely cited NEA analysis. The study reports the findings of a large sample survey of over 17,000 individuals conducted by the Census Bureau in 2002. The survey was designed to learn more about public participation in the arts, including the extent of literary reading in this country.

To measure literary activity, individuals were asked to indicate whether or not they had read at least one literary work during the past year. A “literary work” was defined as a novel, short story, play, or work of poetry. A reported decline in literary reading of 10% (56.9% to 46.7%) from 1982 to 2002 was the finding that aroused the greatest concern. This trend was observed for all the demographic groups that were studied— gender, ethnicity, educational level, and age, with the steepest decline of 28% reported for those in the youngest age group, those between 18 and 24.

In my view, the study is flawed in several respects. The definition of literary work is unnecessarily narrow, as a person who has read a memoir, collection of essays, or historical biography is not counted as a literary reader. Similarly, a person who has read the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in a Russian literature course is also excluded from this group. Moreover, the measurement procedure does not distinguish between various types of literary works—reading a book of Ogden Nash poems is counted equivalent to reading Tennyson, Proust, or Keats.

In truth, as documented in the report, a significant amount of reading takes place in this country, as almost 60% of the US population indicated they have engaged in some form of literary activity during 2002. Moreover, given the rise in the population since 1982 (the year of the previous NEA survey), more people are reading literature today in terms of absolute numbers than in 1982, 205 million compared to 168 million, values that cannot be readily discounted.

In a word, the implications of the NEA report may not be quite as dire as its authors imply. Perhaps individuals are reading more literary works on the Internet or in an e-book version. Perhaps they are reading other literary genres, such as biography or political commentary or listening to literary works on tape, or simply spending more time reading periodicals and newspapers that on some accounts have the same benefits as the novels, short stories, plays, or works of poetry measured in the survey.

Also, 2002 may not have been a representative year, as the profound effects of the attack on this nation in September of the preceding year were still very salient. Sampling year-to-year trends, rather than ten-year periods, would have provided a much clearer picture of the trends in literary activity. Clearly, we have an incomplete picture at this time of the evolving character of reading as the new form of literacy—digital literary—begins to grow in popularity and we begin to understand its effects on literary in general. See for example the analysis by Christine Rosen, People of the Screen at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/people-of-the-screen.

Theory of Clouds

Although it had been favorably reviewed, The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy became a disappointment. I did enjoy the beginning where the hero’s, (Howard), theory of clouds is described and then the subsequent discovery of his work by a weathy Japanese scholar (Kumo), as well as the charming relationship between Kumo and his assistant, Virginie.

But soon after the tale of Howard's Abercrombie Protocol was introduced, my interest began to flag and then as the nature of the Protocol was revealed, I thought the book became rather coarse, indeed, more and more so as this altogether too lengthy portion of the novel dragged on forever.

Perhaps the first part of Audeguy’s novel might have made a fine short story. That’s about it. Nevertheless, I did make note of some noteworthy passages and will pass along a few.


…thinking is hard work and can be done only under the right conditions. You need quiet, free time, a regular schedule and discipline.

Like the vast majority of people, Virginie never found her calling in life.

Our works alone mark the deserted landscapes of our lives.

He was like an evaporating pool of water with no source refreshing it, and he knew that as time passed he would gradually and relentlessly continue to diminish.

It would be so much simpler, just as things could always be so much simpler than they were, except that there are so few people able to achieve such simplicity.

He was furious that he had to die in order not to live all curled up like a larva. He wasn’t killing himself for a particular reason, or to demonstrate anything, but simply because he had no other choice. The only living option—being a decrepit and tedious old man—was of no interest to him.

On Place

It is cold once again, very cold, in fact. When it is like this, I try to recall those blazing warm Sundays in a remote Tuscan hilltown. No one is on the street. All of the stores are closed. The shutters of the surrounding apartment buildings are shut tight.

You park the car in the single open square, get out, and are enveloped by the heat. It is startling. It is wonderful. You look for a place to get a drink. The local bar, where you can get an expresso, a Panini, a cold drink, etc. is the only place that is open.

The TV is on and a few old men are staring mutely at it. On the screen is a soccer game somewhere in Italy and the crowd is roaring. Otherwise, it is utterly silent in the café and on the street. And it is hot. It is perfect.

I begin my inward journey by writing about place. Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. Andre Aciman

All we knew was that we helplessly loved the place [Florence], and did not pause to ask why. C. S. Lewis

Nowhere else is nature so subtle, elegant, and fine. The God who made the hills of Florence was an artist. How could it be possible that this violent hill of San Minato, so purely and firmly designed, be by the same author of the Mount Blanc? By comparison all else was gross. Anatole France

Henry James call it [Florence] the “rounded pearl of cities…Its sweetness, its “delicate charm” restored him—as it restored, at last, even poor suffering Montaigne “to perfect equanimity. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Eventually he realized he would never feel at home anywhere. He wasn’t quite sure why, except that he was a Jew and a philosopher which taken together doomed him to chronic dissatisfaction. Zadie Smith

That our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home. ….impossible journey home is in fact your home. David Foster Wallace

Commonplace Books

At the bookstore a few months ago I chanced upon an issue of Lapham's Quarterly. The periodical consists of a series of selections, largely but not exclusively historical on a single topic that have been drawn from previously written books, articles, essays, photos, etc. Nature was the theme of the issue I saw that night; other issues have dealt with Learning, War and Money. The latest issue, Volume II, Number 1, is devoted to Eros.

In a way, Lapham’s Quarterly constitutes a commonplace book. In most cases the selections are much longer than those commonly found in such a collection. I assume Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harpers, has selected them based on his extensive reading history and no doubt a fair amount of current research.

Rosemary Friedman has recently published (2006) a very interesting commonplace book titled A Writer's Commonplace Book. In it she has organized a set of passages drawn from over 3,000 entries from her reading. She notes that originally she referred to her collection as Things. The volume is divided into the following topical chapters

Writers & Writing
Literary Endeavour
Knowledge
Discovery & Travel
Creativity and the Arts
The Human Condition
Love, Marriage & Family
Life & Death,
Random Thoughts

The author of each entry is cited, but not its source. None of the passages are annotated. But in all other respects it also appears to be a genuine commonplace book and a very interesting one, as well. It was published in the UK which is the case for almost all commonplace books that are in print.

Truth

In Seven Types of Ambiguity Elliot Perlman wrote: “Fiction, at least some fiction, can also confront us with truths we might otherwise never have encountered. It can provide us with insights we would never have gained elsewhere.”

Readers are drawn to literature for many reasons but among the foremost are the truths they find there. To be sure, a reader never knows when they will be found or what writers and in what books they write, they will they chance upon them. Their discovery is unpredictable, unexpected, surprising. It is also one of the most powerful effects of reading literature.

Literary truths are not organized in a body of knowledge like they often are in science. They are hard to pin down, to remember, and apply when you might want to. To be sure, some are more salient than others. Yet readers differ widely in what they regard as the truths in a particular work of literature. Additionally, it is often claimed that literary truths are difficult to find elsewhere. This usually means they are not readily or in principle discoverable by scientific inquiry.

In the March 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker Jill Lepore considers this issue, in terms of the truths revealed by historical novels and non-fiction histories in general. Her account dealt with one of the major reasons I continue to be so interested in fiction. For it is in works of fiction that I seem to find far more truths about myself and others than I find in the human sciences I know best.

The central ideas in Lepore’s essay can be gleaned from the following passages I marked:


…the best novels boast a kind of truth that even the best history books can never claim.

But is “historical truth” truer than fictional truth? The difference between history and poetry, Aristotle argued is that “the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen.

...many historians worried that the seriousness of history, its very integrity as a discipline, was in danger of being destroyed by literary theorists who insisted on the constructedness, the fictionality, of all historical writing—who suggested that the past is nothing more than a story we tell about it. The field seemed to be tottering on the edge of an epistemological abyss: If history is fiction, if history is not true, what’s the use?

The novelist is the better historian—and especially better than the empirical historian—because he admits that he is partial, prejudiced, and ignorant, and because he has not forsaken passion. The writer of romance is to be considered as the writer of real history…

Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people. The eighteenth century’s fictive history…is the history of private life; the history of what passes in a man’s own mind…

Commonplace Books

I keep coming across new material on commonplace books. Today I Googled Commonplace Books and Libraries. One of the most interesting pages was one at the British Library, http://www.ampltd.co.uk/collections_az/RenCpbks-BL/editorial-introduction.aspx

It begins with a delightful quotation:

"To those, who have been accustomed to the use of a Commonplace Book, the advantage of a convenient Repository of the kind is well known; and to those, who have not, its utility must be sufficiently obvious. The man who reads, and neglects to note down the essence of what he has read; the man who sees, and omits to record what he has seen; the man who thinks, and fails to treasure up his thoughts in some place…will often have occasion to regret an omission, which such a book, as is now offered to him, is well calculated to remedy."

A New Commonplace Book…Properly Ruled Throughout with a Complete Skeleton Index, and Ample Directions for its Use; Equally Adapted to the Man of Letters and the Man of Observation, the Traveller & the Student, and Forming a Useful and Agreeable Companion, on the Road and in the Closet (London, 1799), p.1.

I presume the previous paragraph is the source of the quotation, although it's author remains a mystery as far as I can tell.

I've never read another person's commonplace book, although I've skimmed a few of those that have been printed and the first page or so of an unpublished commonplace book of another reader. But I've yet to read one from page to page as one would read a book.

A friend wrote to me: "To read someone else's commonplace book is to stand at a keyhole and peer into who they are."

What a difficult task that would be. Like another person's letters or journals, however, it is one approach to beginning to understand an individual, at least, insofar as they are not simulating in these forms of personal expression.

Perhaps a person's commonplace book might even be more truthful, since it is unlikely the keeper believes someone else will ever view it. I also think it would be instructive for each keeper to analyze their own commonplace book with an eye to knowing themselves a little better.

Bookspotting

On The New Yorker Magazine Blog, The Book Bench, they have a page called Bookspotting, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/bookspotting/. It is not unlike the Metropolitan Diary that appears each Monday in my edition of The New York Times. However, Bookspotting is devoted to observations of people reading in various public settings. Most are quite amusing.

Here is a recent one from the Book Bench:

The Classic
Late Thursday night, on the local train, heading down to Tribeca. We’re weary passengers tonight: the train is half empty, people slumped, clutching their bags, the lights blurring the orange seats. A young woman is holding a Penguin Classic—“Jane Eyre,” to be precise—lips pursed and brow furrowed in perfect concentration. A lovely shade of natural blond frames her face, and she’s still got freckles from the summer, the same size as the umlaut in Brontë on the book’s spine. She’s in a white long-sleeve polo and bluejeans, her legs criss-crossed around a Gap bag. All she needs is a golden retriever, a lacrosse stick, and a Volvo station wagon to complete the picture; all she has is Mr. Rochester and his Thornfield Manor.

I have been making occasional fragmentary observations on the urban scene for years. They are not centered on book reading per se, but here is one about readers that I observed during a recent visit to a restaurant.

Three Readers
Two Japanese American couples entered the dining room with their children. The two sets of parents sat down at one end of the table, the four children at the other. I assumed each couple had two children, all of whom were young girls. The menus arrived, they were inspected, the parents ordered, and chatted with each other once in a while.

Three of the four young girls immediately took out their books and began to read. Not a word was exchanged between them. They read continuously, peering intently at the pages, bent over their books with considerable concentration, completely oblivious to anything else going on around them. The youngest of the four girls had taken out her iPod and listened to something while the others were reading. Thinking the best, I imagined that she was listening to an audio book. The readers continued with their tales until their meal arrived.

They picked up their books once again as soon as they had rapidly finished eating. Meanwhile, at other nearby tables, the young children of American couples nibbled a little of this and that, sans book, sans iPod or game-player, not doing much of anything really, awaiting the arrival of their burger and fries.

There are still a great many readers of literature in this country. Elsewhere I have criticized research reporting the sharp decline of reading in recent years. Readers may read a greater range of materials than is measured in these studies and fluctuations in the frequency of reading and book buying are to be expected. Of course, we cannot infer much from examples of bookspotting. Nevertheless I would welcome any bookspotting observations that you might wish to report. They may be more revealing than you suspect.

What Now?

What Now? is the title of the commencement address (and newly published book) that Ann Patchett delivered recently at Sarah Lawrence. It is charming, wise, and funny, just like everything else Patchett has written.

Patchett herself is charming, wise, and funny. Some writers write they way they are, others write the way they would like to be, and then there's the rest of us who are not quite sure who we are or how to write.

I recently heard Patchett speak at Powell’s in Portland on a book tour she was doing for the paperback edition of her recent novel, Run. She ambled in with a coffee mug in hand, wearing casual slacks and sneakers, completely oblivious to the huge crowd that had gathered to hear her but with that knowing grin that lights up her face and everyone else around her.

I believe What Now? (I sometimes refer to as Now What?) can be enjoyed and appreciated by a person at any stage in their life. The following passages in this slim volume should make that clear.


Writing is good for many things, but curing loneliness isn't one of them.

…people need to talk, and often a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer to another.

…the activity I'm most likely to be engaged in is staring.

Nothing at all is very much out of fashion these days, as are stillness, silence, and studied consideration.

Catholic school and college and graduate school had prepared me both for how to be part of a group and how to be the group's leader, but none of them had taught me the most important thing: how to be alone.

What now is always going to be a work in progress. What now was never what you think it's going to be and that's what every writer has to learn.

I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.

The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.

…at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.

Make up some plans and change them. Identify your heart's truest desire and don't change that for anything.

…the kind of fire that comes from the perfect balance of intelligence and compassion.

Marilynne Robinson

I haven’t read any of Marilynne Robinson’s novels and I am not sure I ever will. As I understand her work, there is a religious overtone to her tales and that rarely finds a receptive audience with me. But I did enjoy reading her recent interview in the Paris Review, No. 198.

I also learned from her views on writing and the writing life she lives. Perhaps you can glimpse why from the following passages I collected. When I review them, as I did now, I'm no longer quite so sure I won't be reading her novels after all. Much of what she says rings true to me. Perhaps that might also be the case with her works of fiction.

I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself.

Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you’re trying to work on something and it’s not going anywhere, you can go to school and there’s a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.

The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking.

Q: Does writing come easily to you?
A: The difficulty of it cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the world.

I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence that I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.

Frankly you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.