Tricks of the Trade in the Penny Press!

It's a pleasure to watch practiced hands at work in the roller-derby world of professional letters, and this week in the Penny Press contained plenty of smiles in that department.

Those smiles came even in venues where a reader might expect nothing but sorrow - as in The New Yorker's annual? semi-annual? Far too often "Food Issue," which always features vast barren tundras of bland food-oriented writing that could scarcely interest the grandmothers of the authors (who are invariably mentioned in the pieces, so there you go). "Food" issues, "Money" issues, and especially the dreaded "Fashion" issues of any otherwise-respectable magazine drive this particular reader to the brink of subscriber-despair - and drive me to hurriedly flip pages in search of the non-theme scraps that almost always manage to fall from the table.

In this case, there were two - but oh, they were tasty! First, there was Thomas Mallon's rumination on "the genre fiction's genre fiction," alternate-history novels. Mallon gives proper credit to Harry Turtledove's fantastic 1992 novel Guns of the South and make the very sharp observation about Don DeLillo's Libra that it "has always seemed more accomplished than satisfying." You know somebody's doing a good job covering a subject when you finish the article and just wish they'd kept writing - I'd have loved a wider sampling from Mallon. I assume he's read and loved L. Sprague DeCamp's 1939 classic Lest Darkness Fall, but what about three of my more recent favorites, Douglas Jones' The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer from 1976,  Robert Skimin's 1988 Gray Victory, or J. N. Stroyar's massive The Children's War from 2001?

And the trick of the trade he employs in his article? He discusses Stephen King's rancidly narcissistic new JFK-assassination novel with actual adult intelligence and discrimination, rather than the opprobrium it deserves - because King mentions his own work favorably in the book. Sigh.

Right next to that article in the same New Yorker is a fantastic piece by Martin Amis (why is it, I wonder, that some of my least favorite modern novelists are some of my most favorite literary journalists?) about the aforementioned Don DeLillo's new book The Angel Esmeralda, and it brandishes its own trick of the trade right up front. When presented with a book that's a self-evident trifle, a writer of readable prose who's lucky enough to have a trusting editor has several options open to him - and my favorite of these (one I've been known to use myself!) is the one Amis employs here: use the book as a dog-and-pony show for some wonderfully indulgent stem-winding of your own (and get around to your actual review later on in the piece - or, if your Harold Bloom, not at all).

In Amis' case, this takes the form of a nifty little challenge:

When we say that we love a writer's work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on "Ulysses," with a little help from "Dubliners." You could jettison Kafka's three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of "Paradise Lost." Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to read the comedies ("As You Like It" is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with "King John" or "Henry VI, Part III"?

Hee. Wonderful stuff. I could read it for hours, whether I agree with it or not (needless to say, I don't in this case - "King John" has plenty of good stuff in it, and Amis shouldn't so readily admit his inability to find the worth in Daniel Deronda). In his tirade, Amis claims that even Jane Austen isn't immune from his theory - he speculates that the only two exceptions might be Homer and Harper Lee. And of course it prompted two natural questions: would Amis be brave enough to apply his theory to his own novels? Or, braver still, those of his father?

One of the oldest and most enjoyable tricks of the trade happens over in the latest London Review of Books (featuring the very first Peter Campbell cover-painting I've ever actually liked - and I'll never get another shot, since we're informed in this issue that the artist died in October): the letter-column rumble! In an earlier issue, Pankaj Mishra turned in a magisterial condemnation (a dismissal, really, at epic length) of Niall Ferguson's latest tome, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, coming as close as he legally could to calling it the steaming pile of smug racist jingoism it is. In the letters column of this latest issue, Ferguson writes an outraged, bombastic reply to that review, claiming he's been libelled and blimpishly demanding an apology. And Mishra, bless him, pens a response that's if anything more tart and damning than the original review.

Now Ferguson has been a show-boating very public historian for a decade or so (and he's done some very good work in that time, mind you), so I'm hoping he knows the tricks of the trade himself. The thing to do at this point is write another letter - letter-column slug-fests must be kept going at all costs, as far too few periodicals seem to realize anymore. The thing not to do is call his lawyers about a possible defamation suit. That's a trick of an entirely different trade.






 

Bloodsport in the Book Review!

Ordinarily, we here at Stevereads would have folded in anything of interest we found in the Sunday Times Book Review into our next Penny Press roundup, but this week was just too tasty to ignore! We'll return to our regularly scheduled long, obscure, and totally ignored book reviews in due course!

If you've read the Book Review this week, you doubtless already know which piece caught our eye: yep, the one featured on the cover - New Republic brontosaurus Leon Wieseltier reviews Martin Amis' The Second Plane, and the results aren't pretty. Wieseltier has been TNR's literary editor for a quarter-century, and in all that time he's managed to stay open-minded to the feel of writing - amazingly, his ear has not been corrupted, jaded, or deafened. He can be a delighted friend to the darndest books that cross his desk, but if he doesn't like what you write, hoo boy, you feel it in every sentence.

He doesn't like The Second Plane, and that would be bad enough, but in addition he's also at the top of his game in the review from first to last - this is a bad combination for Amis, alas, no matter how much fun it is for readers:

He [Amis] has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate. He is not only outraged by Sept. 11, he is also excited by it. "If Sept. 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime." Don't you see? It no longer matters that we missed the Spanish Civil War. No pasaran!

Haymaker follows haymaker:

And what is gained by preferring "horrorism" to "terrorism," except perhaps a round of applause? Amis's freshness is flat and neurotic and genuinely tiresome. He writes as if Orwell never lived. He is dead to the damage his virtuosity inflicts upon his urgency. Instead, he pulls focus, and pulls, and pulls. His book reminds me of what Heath Ledger is said to have remarked, in disappointment, about Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar: "I thought it was for the best acting, not the most acting."

There is a pitch a really good reviewer can reach in a piece such as this, a pitch during which the writer can scarcely put a foot amiss. It's exhilarating to watch but also terrifying: it incurs a certain involuntary sympathy toward the victim. We here at Stevereads have never been a fan of Martin Amis - indeed, we've spent many a profitless hour de-programming young people who, having read nothing else, read him and think the sun shines out his arse. But even so, how can we help but feel a twinge of empathy for somebody on the receiving end of a pile-driver like this:

Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer. What we have here is a hormonal unbeliever. Amis's sympathy to Islamism is based upon a more comprehensive antipathy to religion. In Amis's universe, you are either religious or you are rational. Or to put it in the bracingly original terms of The Second Plane, it is misology that is the cause of thanatism. Amis calls himself not an atheist but an agnostic, but still he is catching a wave to Dover Beach. "Today, in the West, there is no good excuse for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses," whereas in the East, well, you know.

As good as that is, as expertly excising as that is, it's not the best Wieseltier has to offer. When he digresses, when he pauses to talk about the things Amis has written about, you want nothing so much as to read the book he'd write on these same subjects:

But does Amis really think that reason has no blood on its hands? I do not say this to extenuate holy murder, obviously. All murder is unholy. I wish only to suggest that the simpleton's view of the world that Amis is angrily promoting contributes not very much to the study of the passions that are scalding the planet. There are religious people opposing the terrorists and secular people supporting the terrorists. After the 20th century, the question of which worldview kills more, the godful one or the godless one, was made infernally moot. Anyway, the safety of the West cannot wait upon the progress of enlightenment in Waziristan.

He concedes a number of the basic points Amis makes in his book - points about Islamic fanaticism and the like - but it's no victory for Amis:

I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis's work flourishes here too.

He finishes by mentioning Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke in connection with Amis' book and draws doleful parallels between them:

They are both productions of misplaced literariness. They treat the most fundamental matters of politics and philosophy - what individuals and societies should live for, and what they should die for - as occasions for the display of artifice and the exhibition of temperament. The consideration of their arguments is regularly diverted by the consideration of their effects. For this reason, such writings will have more impact than influence. The criticism of language may be required for the criticism of politics, but politics is not mainly language. History may be generously lighted by the bright beams of the imagination, but the student of history is not primarily an artist. And the great campaign against the medievals of our time will be dreary and long and homely.

In the final analysis, we cannot fault Wieseltier's damnation of Amis' book in any of its main or minor points - it's as thorough and painstaking an evisceration as anything the Book Review has published in a many a long moon. No, the only thing we object to coming from Wieseltier are his opening comments, in which he intones that book reviewing has become "decidedly less grand, less intellectually and aesthetically primary - no longer the literary or philosophical or political adventure that it used to be." Instead, "everything must now be short and pert and helpful."

To which we here at Stevereads naturally object! Not only is Stevereads a bastion of literary purty - no 'pert' sycophants we! - but the good lads over at Open Letters Monthly have created a bolt-hole in the literary landscape in which no past favors apply, in which neither fear nor favor is showed to any literary endeavor. If a damn fantastic old dog like Wieseltier feels so genuinely bleak about the state of the reviewing art, he's always welcome to mosey on over to OLM and start writing pieces! Fire from Olympus is always welcome - as Wieseltier himself points out, there is never enough reason in the world.

In the Penny Press! Snickering at Genius!

So let's get a move on, shall we? We could start with the latest New York Review of Books, which included a long appreciation of the new exhibit of Michelangelo's pencil sketches. The review is glowing and appreciative, of course (how could it not be?), so I was surprised - and smiled - when I read this:

Leonardo's incomparably lively sketches for the Battle of Anghiari inspired a thirtyish Michelangelo to try drawing knots of men and horses for his own Battle of Cascina. But Michelangelo never shared Leonardo's fascination with nature, or the elder artist's peerless facility with pen and ink. Leonardo's sketches of galloping horses kicking up dust have a dynamism that Michelangelo simply could not equal - but then neither could anybody else.

Hee. I read that, and for a minute I felt like rebelling against it somehow, but there isn't a way. For some people, the genius gradient is just too steep. The same thing applies to Bach, I find. Ditto for any study of Bloomsbury, from an artistic point of view: there's everybody else, punting on Isis and moping about bad hygiene, and then there's Virginia Woolf, towering over everybody else.

And what about the mighty TLS? You'll recall (unless you've BLOCKED IT OUT) the piece I mentioned about Edward Luttwak's historical analysis of the Cold War ... well, David Kenney (a MAJOR A-hole, but hey ... when you're right, you're right) writes in response:

Edward Luttwak's piece misses the point. Because of their paucity and lack of accuracy, nuclear deterrents were useful only after the late 1960s. Contrary to Luttwak the Soviet Bloc did go to war, after the Second World War, on the periphery. It tried by military force to seize South Korea, West Berlin and Cuba, by covert action to own the Congo, Nigeria and Italy, and by political action and diplomacy to control the Straits of Mermara, Syria and Libya. The Taiwan Straits were a gleam in the Bloc's eye. As South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan thrived, the Kremlin's leaders watched all their initiatives, especially those in Africa, diminish to ugly internal and tribal warfare and in relevance to the West's continued hegemony. Everywhere Russians popped up, we beat them.

From the 1970s until the Soviet Union's collapse, it operated a reckless and ruinously expensive ballistic missile system. Here Luttwak is partially correct. But that system would not have been nearly as effective, if war had come, as was proclaimed, and it drove the Communist regime into bankruptcy. Their missiles could have ravaged much of the West but we would have won. Our third strike lay under the ice; theirs did not.

Secretary McNamara said that we had three nuclear confrontations with the Kremlin on his watch. I was present at two of them. They blinked and we did not. We are here and they are not.

And then there's the New Yorker, which had quite a bit of interesting stuff in it this time around - and nothing more surprising to me than the fact that I actually kinda LIKED the Martin Amis short story inside. I usually can't stand Amis (actually, I'm not all that fond of his father's novels either ... soggy academic sex-romps, exercises in tedium), but in this short story he puts himself inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, and it works. I'll be curious to see if it shows up in any 'best of' year-end anthologies.

The New Yorker also had a review of the new Veronese show at the Frick - a piece written by their art critic Peter Schjeldahl, with whom I often disagree on matters of art (mainly because he's a boob, and this piece was no exception - like, for instance, when he offhandedly mentions that Bellini was a better painter than Veronese ... not only is the statement wrong on its face, but in a typically careless fashion, Sjehdahl doesn't even specify WHICH Bellini). But he does manage to convey the bright watery genius of the man - in my opinion the best Venetian painter of them all - and that always comes with a touch of pity, since SO much of Veronese's work is lost. For whole decades in a very long productive life, his favorite thing to do was decorative frescoes, sometimes filling the entire interior of a palazzo with gorgeous, glowing works on every wall, from floor to ceiling, so that walking from room to room made you feel like you were INSIDE a painting. But Venice's climate is hell on walls, so lots of Veronese just peeled away over (very little) time. And many patrons wanted to impress their guests with his work, so they had him paint their grand entrances off the canal - and quite a few of those entrances are now under ten feet of water. There's a sermon in their somewhere about the inherent fragility of art - remind me to bore you with it someday!

(I had a roommate in college once, a frail and kind-hearted young man, and when he was in the mood, he'd take out his violin and play such winding, looping, gorgeous late-night solos that partygoers outside would stop and look up. His usual method was to start with Bach or Beethoven and then weave in longer and longer digressions that were entirely his own and entirely spontaneous - and they were heartbreakingly, astoundingly beautiful. And a couple of years later he died, with no recording ever made, no transcriptions ... no trace of any kind that such beauty ever existed, except in the memory of those who heard it. But that'll be covered in the aforementioned sermon!)

But New Yorker item of by far the greatest interest for Steve (and his severely bored audience!) is Jill Lepore's review of the new Mayflower book by Nathaniel Philbrick - a review in which she trashes the book (and rightfully so - I read a galley copy this weekend and was so disappointed I nearly hurled the copy at the nearest sleeping basset hound) - but a review in which, or reasons known only to her, she also goes out of her way to kick dirt on the reputation of Samuel Eliot Morison, whose name has surely come up in these Torrents of Tedium, no? She starts early, by telling her readers that Morison is widely considered the greatest American historian of the 20th century and then sniffingly adding "With that, as these things go, not everyone agrees." Prompting me to wonder who exactly she'd nominate in his place.

Sam Morison held the world of academic history-writing in contempt, and with good reason. I'm sure you've heard similar tirades from yours truly, about skimpy books boringly written and carelessly researched - just as you and everybody else I know has heard the opposite from me, when some new work of history or biography manages to be both challenging and well-written. Morison knew what all great historians know: that history is a STORY, the most fascinating one in the world, and that if you sacrifice that fascination for bland, please-everybody prose, you insult the Muse.

Not that I'm saying historians can get away with being inaccurate ... but if you can't overlay accuracy with narrative skill, you've no business trying the discipline at all (in 2006 so far, moreso than in any other year, I've been tempted to scrap everything I'm doing and actually try my hand at writing history ... except, what if I stink at it?). Morison firmly believed that, and in 30 books of published history, he never wrote a dull sentence.

So what the Hell does Lepore mean when she writes "Because he wrote more for the public than for his fellow historians, Morison has few academic disciples today, and if the chain reaction of dullness continues unbroken, Morison is as much to blame as anybody." Really? So the fact that he mocked boring histories, wrote only interesting ones, and urged others to write only interesting ones, those things don't alleviate his guilt at all? Geez. If I hadn't mostly liked Lepore's own work this past decade, I'd be tempted to call her a ... well, I suppose for dense women we'd have to come up with some other word, wouldn't we? I can't for the life of me figure out what Sam Morison is even doing IN this review ... he'd have hated Philbrick's latest, and he'd have dismissed it out of hand - but he didn't write anything like it, and he deplored books like it, so how does he work as a straw man? Maybe a testy letter to the New Yorker is in order, asking those very questions!

Fortunately, the issue recovered strongly with a David Remnick excoriation of the current administration in Washington, an excoriation prompted by going to an advance screening of Al Gore's new global warming documentary. At more than one point, it seems like Remnick is going to burst into tears:

If you are inclined to think that the unjustly awarded election of 2000 led to one of the worst Presidencies of this or any other era, it is not easy to look at Al Gore. He is the living reminder of all that might not have happened in the past six years (and of what might still happen in the coming two). Contrary to Ralph Nader's credo that there was no real difference between the major parties, it is close to inconceivable that the country and the world would not be in far better shape had Gore been allowed to assume the office that a plurality of voters wished him to have.

We'll leave this latest issue with a smile, though: Jonathan Stern writes an amusing little piece called "The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment" that had me chuckling. Here's a sample:

Local Customs

The population of My Apartment has a daily ritual of "bitching" which occurs at the end of the workday and prior to ordering in food. Usually, meals are taken during reruns of 'Stargate Atlantis.' Don't be put off by impulsive sobbing or unprovoked rages. These traits have been passed down through generations and are part of the colorful heritage of My Apartment's people.

And there you have it! Another thrilling installment of In the Penny Press! A casual glance at prospective reading material leads me to think the next installment might be rather heavily POLITICAL, so brace yourself for a double shot of tedium with a chaser of crackpottery!