The Folds of Irony in the Penny Press!

Oh, the multiplicitous ironies in the latest batch of the Penny Press I consumed at my little hole-in-the-wall periodical-reading restaurant! Everywhere I turned, it was inescapable!

Take last week's TLS for example. Nicholas Thomas reviews the new biography of Captain Cook by Frank McLynn and finds it wanting. That verdict itself might not be so surprising - McLynn can often run hot and cold even with the same reviewer - but the context in which it's delivered is positively riddled with irony, because in pillorying McLynn, Thomas (a specialist in South Pacific art and history and a very amiable guy) raises the spectre of that greatest of all Captain Cook biographers, John Beaglehole - only to pillory him too! We're told Beaglehole's book is "marred by an opinionated style" and actually has the temerity to draw conclusions about its illustrious subject:

Beaglehole's Cook is almost narrow-minded, an indefatigable, practical rationalist, remarkable for his clear grasp of geographic, navigational, or nautical problems, and his single-minded approach to solving them. He is great, in Beaglehole's mind, in part because he has none of the sentimental or philosophical frippery of the eighteenth century around him.

The irony here of course being that if Thomas finds a book like Beaglehole's - vast, authoritative, utterly absorbing, beautifully written - wanting, he undercuts any credibility he'd otherwise have in finding any other book about Cook wanting. We might listen to a critic who called the latest Boris Akunin novel a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, but we instantly stop listening if that same critic says War and Peace is also a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, and we don't just disbelieve him about Tolstoy - we associatedly disbelieve him about Akunin even if we haven't read him.

A similar piercing irony crops up in the latest Harper's. That issue features a long and leapingly enthusiastic review of Christopher Hitchens' Arguably by Terry Eagleton, and the piece contains ironies of its own, mainly deriving from the fact that like every other 'review' of this big fat essay collection, it's really a boisterous stiff-upper-lip encomium - for a guy who isn't even dead yet. "He could tell you just who to talk to about Kurdish nationalism in the southeastern Turkish city of Batman, as well as what to order in the only decent restaurant there. He can give you the lowdown on everyone from Isaac Newton to Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde to Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab..." Etc.... in every case, those 'can's are just itching to be 'could's - and it gets in the way of reviewers assessing the ample weak spots of this collection.

But the piece is part of a larger irony too. Hitchens has achieved most of his current notoriety for his brattish nose-tweaking to the concept of religion (particularly all the young people I know who adore him adore him for that reason), the sort of 'you adults are just DUMB to believe this stuff!' braying most of us got out of our systems in high school. But another essay in the same issue of Harper's could serve as good ammo for Hitchens' numerous droned-over debate opponents: Alan Lightman writes a piece about modern cosmology that contains a digression worth quoting in full:

... according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are require for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces an certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be "fine-tuned" to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine-tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it.

Carter's principle forms the basis for a 1988 book called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, one of the most persistently thought-provoking books of the 20th century, and it's ironic to fin that principle being elaborated cheek-by-jowl with more regurgitated Hitchens Got-baiting.

And there's irony to be found over in the latest Atlantic, in which Benjamin Schwarz reviews Higher Gossip, the new posthumous collection of literary journalism from the pen of John Updike. I'm no fan of Updike's book reviews - too bland, too timid, too falsely everyman - but as he always does, Schwarz actually makes me think about perhaps revisiting the guy's work. Certainly Schwarz ranks that work - a vast collection - highly:

This huge body of work, 4,314 pages in all, secured Updike a place among America's few great men of letters (since Edmund Wilson's death, only Gore Vidal and Updike can be added to the pantheon).

The irony of that outrageous parenthetical should be abundantly clear already, but just in case it isn't, here's a bit from the second half of Schwarz' book-column this month, on the fourth volume of the official history of the Bank of England:

Nevertheless, this book contains probably the most revealing record of a central bank's struggles in the modern era. (Others might bestow that crown on Allen H. Meltzer's magisterial an plainly written multivolume A History of the Federal Reserve, but that great work is more strictly a monetary history, and Meltzer doesn't treat the Fed's other duties, such as bank regulation, in the same rich detail as Capie does the actions of the Old Lady.)

Hee. So: the choicest irony of all - Schwarz is certainly leaving at least one name off his list of great 20th century men of letters. It could just be an old-fashioned modesty, but I'm guessing otherwise. I bet the idea never occurred to him.

 

In Memoriam: John Updike

Ever since John Updike succumbed to his horrifically painful and protracted death-struggle (that's a note to all you tobacco-addicts out there - such an end waits for you too!), summaries and encomiums have been pouring into the public press (next week's New Yorker will rightfully take the pride of place, but everybody's doing it). Over at Open Letters, a graceful approach was adopted: letting a segment of the man's fiction speak for him, speak in his memory.

That's certainly more graceful than the more formal notice I myself would have written (we had the same problem when David Foster Wallace died; after hearing my original draft of the death-notice, John Cotter pointed out as gently as he could that it was bad form to use an obituary to get the last word in an ongoing argument with somebody - a sentiment which, however correct, proves categorically that John is not Irish). As some of you may know, I've hated Updike's prose for pretty much as long as it's been swamping every publication venue from The New Yorker to The Sewanee Weekly Shopper. I've always found his fiction mind-bogglingly dull and grindingly self-absorbed (ditto for most of his contemporaries), his poetry very nearly as banal as my own, and his vast array of essays ploddingly quotidian. His speeches were goofy (and not in a good way), his book reviews were timidly turgid - even his single chuckle on "The Simpsons" was, I thought, unconvincing.

So I've been looking with a fishy eye on all this praise that's being heaped on his still-warm corpse (and still-tepid corpus). But in Thursday's New York Times, there was a one-two punch that finally got to me (actually, there were three punches, but the essay by Lorrie Moore was as inane and idiotic as everything else she's ever written in her entire life, so it doesn't count).

The first part was a quarter-page notice Updike's publisher Knopf took out - a singular tribute, regardless of what I myself think of the man.

And the second was a very brief Op-Ed notice by Verlyn Klinkenborg, in which she writes:

John Updike may well turn out to have been America's Anthony Trollope. This is high praise. Both wrote dozens of novels - including interlinked sets - and both worked at writing as if if were a kind of cobbling, a sometimes magical job to which they went deliberately each day. What we remember best from both Trollope and Updike is not so much the struggles of individual characters but the social and cultural webs in which their characters are caught.

I admit, that worked on me (not the inharmonious prose, mind you - the construction 'not so much' calls for 'as,' for instance, and surely 'those' would have been better than that concluding 'their'). For the longest time (despite being, as you can see, a stone-cold super-hottie), felt toward Trollope pretty much exactly as I now feel toward Updike; fifty years ago, I could easily have written the above paragraph of serial damnations about Trollope, and I would have meant it as sincerely as I mean it now about Updike.



But I try to keep my mind open to a gradual re-exmanination of all my literary certainties, and time changed my opinions of Trollope, who I now comfortably rank higher than Dickens as a novelist of Victorian society. And after reading that sentiment by Klinkenborg, I no longer feel quite so rock-solid certain about Updike (rock-solid in my opinions, that is - as you can all see, my abs are entirely rock-solid ...). Despite my hard-won experience that the answer is 'yes,' I find myself now asking, "Can an output of such enormous length and variety be entirely bad?"

So I'll make this concession to the ghost of John Updike: I'll keep an open mind. In ten years, I'll re-read the Rabbit books, some essays (there'll be a gorgeously-produced magnum opus collection of them by then, I'm sure), and even some poems, and we'll see what time has done to my old condemnations.

And in the meantime, I'll consider our ongoing argument closed. In Memoriam.

Poetry Class! First of 2007!

A new year and some old poems for a new installment of Poetry Class! Some of you will notice that two of these poems are written by authors with whom, to put it mildly, we here at Stevereads have issues. We consider John Updike to be one of the century's most grossly overrated authors, and Vonnegut? An absurd little anomaly, a quirky little cartoon masquerading as a man of letters.

And yet, we liked each of these poems - within limits, of course. Heller's insight in the Vonnegut poem isn't all that insightful, afer all, and the whole last verse of the Updike should be dumped. But even so, we like the poems ...

... ah, but we get ahead of ourselves! It's not for us to tout the values of the poems we post! Oh no! We post them innocently and await the pitying savagery of our betters!

(p.s. 'Rapture' is our favorite)


Unfaded

The dead are villains we pretend to love
Their waxy faces a serene reproach.
We learn their secrets with distaste:

the things they did make them at least
as bad as we are - even worse because
they're dead, and we're alive and might improve.

The dead are villains we pretend to love.
They died deliberately to spite us,
to leach our lifeblood for their awful dryness.

We clothe their faults in all the virtues
they never had, to keep them in their place,
where they should stay, away from us.

The dead are villains we pretend to love
though every now and then we hear their voices
speaking exactly as they spoke to us,

and see their smiles again as they once smiled,
and their hair unfaded as it was in life.

Jamie McKendrick



Rapture

It is just as they knew it would be:
the proof
of their rightness spread around them
like grass or sidewalks

among the bland custardy palaces
and picnic tables
of their reward. The air
smells of children and coconuts. Truth
blares from every station on the dial.

Do they miss dogs, the black
squelch of November, bittersweet
wringing its red hands?
Are they saddened

to meet an old love without pain
in the gilded silent grove
that lately, come to think of it,
has been looking rather dusty,
and where less and less often they feel someone watching?

The angels are kind, like waiters, but not very talkative.

No wonder they gather, like exiles
straining toward faint reports
crackling up from below -
war, disaster, stars plunging into the sea.

God, it appears, is elsewhere, even here.

Katha Pollitt



Stolen

What is it like, to be a stolen painting -
to be Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee"
or "The Concert," by Vermeer, both burglarized,
along with "Chez Tortoni" by Manet,
and some Degases, from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, in Boston, twelve years ago?

Think of how bored they get, stacked
in the warehouse somewhere, say in Mattapan,
gazing at the back of the butcher paper
they are wrapped in, instead of at
the rapt glad faces of those who love art.

Only criminals know where they are.
The gloom of criminality enshrouds them.
Why have we been stolen? they ask themselves.
Who has benefitted? Or do they hang
admired in some sheikh's sandy palace,
or the vault of a mad Manila tycoon?

In their captivity, they may dream of rescue
but cannot cry for help. Their paint
is inert and crackled, their linen friable.
They have one stratagem, the same old one:
to be themselves, on and on.

The boat tilts frozen on the storm's wild wave.
The concert has halted between two notes.
An interregnum, sufficiently extended,
becomes an absence. When wise
and kindly men die, who will restore
disappeared excellence to its throne?

John Updike


Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

Kurt Vonnegut

Penny Press! New Yorker!

Quite a lot to cover in the new issue of Harper's!

A quiet little grace note is found early in the issue: a small excerpt from a 1962 letter Rose Kennedy wrote to her son:

Dear Jack,
In looking over my old diary, I found that you were urged on one occasion, when you were five years old, to wish for a happy death. But you turned down this suggestion and said that you would like to wish for two dogs instead. So do not blame the Bouviers if John has similar ideas.

Much love, dear Jack.

Of course the editors chose it for the chill of foreshadowing we all get from knowing that President Kennedy's death was by no means a happy one. But we here at Stevereads were more struck by the ballsy overreach of the young JFK's alternate wish - not one but two dogs. Exceedingly good instincts, even for a five year old.

Alas, there are no good instincts on display in the John Updike short story in the same issue. Many of you will already know that Updike is something of a stalking-horse here at Stevereads, but even so, this story, "Kinderscenen," hits a new low. Not only does one of America's Literary Lions win the prize for being the ONE MILLIONTH person to compare the lit tip of a cigarette seen in the evening to some kind of star (now that we've hit ONE MILLION, can we declare a moratorium?), but he manages to turn in a story that has: no dialogue, no characterizations, no plot, no climax, no original ideas, and no beauty of language.

We here at Stevereads renew our fervent plea to Mr. Updike: die already! Your one-trick pony, your schtick? We've GOT it. No reason for you to stick around. As soon as you're dead, as soon as the requisite encomiums have been aired in all the right places (Time magazine's sub-lead: "The Shakespeare of Suburbia"), we can all have the happy experience of watching one after another of your tired, witless books pop out of print. "The Centaur" (about middle class malaise)? You're off to the races. "Witches of Eastwick" (about middle class malaise)? You're exorcised. "Bech" (about middle class malaise)? You're not a book anymore.

Fortunately, the burst of irritation over the fact that Harper's would give space to Updike's dithering senility is counterbalanced by their running of a book review written by the great David Quammen.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the man, Quammen is one of the greatest 'nature writers' currently living (his only serious contender in our opinion is Bernd Heinrich). He's mastered a narrative voice that's the perfect blend of learning and conversation - reading him is, literally, always a pleasure.

(those of you who don't own a copy of at least one of his books - especially "Natural Acts" and "Song of the Dodo" - hie thee hence and obtain them immediately ... well, not immediately - wait until I'm done edumicating you, and THEN hie thee hence)

Quammen here reviews two big fat Darwin collections, "Darwin: The Indelible Stamp" (edited by James Watson) and "From So Simple a Beginning" (edited by Edward O. Wilson), and as usual, he delivers the goods. Almost any other writer would have taken the occasion to bloviate about the life and ideas of Darwin (usually mangling both in the process), only tacking on some perfunctory comments about the actual books under review at the very end.

Quammen does write a little about Darwin and his theories (so clearly and engagingly that you wish he'd written more), but he spends far more time actually talking about the two books - and about their respective editors. We learn something of the history of Watson and Wilson, some of the bad blood between them, and something of the publishing-house manuevering that led there to be two such nearly-identical books issued at the same time.

Quammen's piece has only one flaw. At one point he writes:

"Other choices for a Darwin omnibus might have been better, even assuming that four was the right and only number. Why not include his engaging, poignant, admirably self-critical Autobiography?"

Why not indeed! If Quammen had checked around a little bit more, he'd have discovered that big, evil ol' Barnes & Noble publishes "The Darwin Compendium," which DOES include the Autobiography, in addition to the four texts shared by the books under review. Wilson's book is $40. Watson's book is $30. The Barnes & Noble book is also $30 and gives you one-fifth more for your money. Damn those big-box retailers!

Quammen (we're considering starting every paragraph of this entire entry with 'Quammen') points out that there are innumerable editions of Darwin's works out there, and that seems as opportune a place as any to plug the Whitestar edition of "Voyage of the Beagle." It's part of their 'Adventure Classics Series,' and it's the neatest, most hand-friendly edition out there!

Speaking of hand-friendly things, Garrett Keizer's 'Notebook' essay, "Loaded," trots out the subject of GUNS in America, with decidedly weird result (we're more than halfway convinced that the piece's title also refers to the author's condition while he was writing it).

The piece confers a vertiginous feeling while being read: you sense immediately that the author, however many good or bad points he's making, isn't really in full control of himself, and sometimes his prose just slips away from him:

"I continue to believe that if the mass of Americans refused to earn or spend a dollar for a single day following a fishy election - no matter whose guy won - by the dawn's early light we would behold our country."

Or this:

"Give me some people who are not so evolved that they have forgotten what it is to stand firm under fire or even to squat near the fire in a cave."

Um, what the eff?

Still, he does makes some interesting points, none moreso than this:

"There are nearly 1.4 million active troops in the U.S. armed forces; there are an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. The war over the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is effectively over."

This strikes us as true, as far as it goes. Nothing can ever be done about the vast inundation of guns in this country (my esteemed colleague the Reichmarshal would, I'm sure, maintain that nothing SHOULD be done about it). But just because one side wins doesn't mean one side is right, nor does it somehow legitimize a false reading of the Constitution.

The Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to bear arms - in the service of a state militia. Period. Not in the service of a state militia - and other cases as deemed needful. ONLY in a state militia. There's absolutely no getting around what the text actually says.

But Keizer is right: the debate is largely moot. America is a gun-crazy country, and no amount of argument is going to change that.

But even so, it should be illegal for a civilian to own automatic assault weapons, and that doesn't have anything to do with the Second Amendment - that's just public safety common sense. Owning a gun that has no practical purpose but to kill someone (a gun that fires enough rounds per second to atomize a game animal, for instance, so there goes that excuse) should be de facto illegal, since murder and attempted murder are illegal. Drug dealers are imprisoned on charges of INTENT to distribute, and no drug-lobbies squeal in their defense. Because it's perfectly sensible: if you have forty bricks of heroin in your basement, you're OBVIOUSLY planning to distribute heroin. Likewise, if you own an automated assault-weapon, you're OBVIOUSLY planning to shoot somebody with it. Only a card-carrying gun-nut would argue your innocence (cue the card-carrying gun-nuts! Incoming!).

But the centerpiece of this issue is Jeff Sharlet's long essay "Through a Glass, Darkly - How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history."

Sharlet is a fantastic writer, and he's got a fantastic story and knows it. He manages to get religious fundamentalists to say the looniest things on the record (I know, I know - no big feat there), and his piece has the lilt and fluency of all really good essays.

Our enjoyment of it only came to a screeching halt once - but what a halt! Imagine the spectrum of our responses when we read this:

"In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant military commander in American history and certainly the most pious."

(the fingers go numb with disbelief even whilst typing the words)

It's a little tricky to know whether Sharlet is writing this in his own voice or extendedly paraphrasing the mindset of his fundamentalist subjects, but in either case, when we read the above quote during a quiet lunch at our club, our cry of alarm expelled half a croissant from our mouth and sent it pinging across the table and caromming off the nose of poor Dana Thayer Alsop opposite us.

'Perhaps the most brilliant commander in American history'? Jackson? What on Gawd's green earth?

Ladies and gentlemen, listen carefully: MICHAEL Jackson would have made a better commander than Stonewall ever was. And pious? Maybe so, but with the purity of mind reserved only for full-blown sociopaths.

Virtually his entire military career veers drunkenly between slaughtering innocents, disobeying orders, and bungling battles. During the Mexican War, he killed far more innocent civilians than enemy soldiers. And during the Civil War, he was guilty of the very first mortal sin any combat general can commit: he was unreliable.

Time and again - at Mechanicsville and Gaine's Mill and many other crucial battles - Jackson showed up grossly late, and more than once he followed this up by being conspicuously no help once he finally got there.

Had he not been shot and killed by his own pickets (Sharlet repeats the historical line that this was accidental ... we here at Stevereads will only point out that Jackson drove his men like they were pack mules and almost always made them pray, sometimes for hours, before breakfast), Jackson would almost certainly have led the Confederacy into some cataclysmic military mistake. Hell, even dead he managed to do that: for what were Robert E. Lee's disasterous tactics at Gettysburg but pages taken from Jackson's book?

Of course, none of this even touches on the most hateful thing about Stonewall Jackson: he, like every other Confederate general, was first and foremost a traitor. Jackson was vain, histrionic, psychotic, and inept - but even if he'd been 'brilliant' (like, it must be said, Lee), he'd still have deserved a public hanging (like, it must be said, Lee) for taking up arms against his country.

And he hated dogs, too.