Do you have a magazine?

No need to actually answer the question.  It is just something I have been wondering about.  I assume that anyone interested in culture – anyone writing a book blog, for example – has a magazine or two, a literary magazine, in the background, but in fact almost no one writes about what they are reading or have read in magazines, suggesting that my assumption is wrong.

By “has a magazine” I mean “regularly reads a magazine,” one that or some ill-defined reason feels like home.  I have read The New Republic, basically cover to cover, for almost twenty-five years (ack, cough – is that true?  Yes, it seems to be true), and The Hudson Review for fifteen, and I poke around in lots of others.

Joseph Epstein, in “New & Previously Owned Books & Other Cream Puffs,” found in Once More Around the Block (1987):

Around the age of twenty I discovered the intellectual and literary magazines – Partisan Review, Commentary, Encounter, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the British weeklies – and I have read them ever since.  They were especially helpful to me as a young man who himself one day wanted to write.  This was during a time when second-rate books were not taught at universities.  Reading great authors is the best method of education; but for someone who wishes to write, they can be discouraging.

The essay is actually a fine ode to the intellectual value of bookstores, used and new, the top-ranked of “the four main agencies of education in my life” – but magazines come in at #2 (“3. libraries, 4. schools”).

If I had more time or energy to read I would read not more books but more magazines.  For anyone not blessed with a rare and particular upbringing, it is magazines that make a person “cultured” – a word that should really be pronounced as if by Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain: KUL-chud.  Anxiety about being unkulchud is a fine motivator, and I have no argument against it.

Magazines are the quickest path to kulcha, although they are not all that fast.  The stuff of culture accumulates with time and repetition.  My new Hudson Review (Spring 2012) has, besides the Ambrose Bierce article I used last week, pieces on Eugenio Montale, Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, the Neue Gallerie, Philip Glass, Gregor von Rezzori, William Carlos Williams, acting Hamlet, topped by a typically expert and thoughtful William Pritchard essay on Ben Jonson’s poetry.  What a hodgepodge, with no organizing principle except that a writer thought the subject would be interesting.  But now I know, at least temporarily, more about all of those things than I did.

I read an enormous amount of literary biography, but almost exclusively in magazines.  Mark Ford’s review , in the May 10 New York Review of Books, of a recent biography of Alfred Jarry is itself a fine piece of biographical writing and a useful overview of Jarry’s work.  The chance that I am going to read the 405 page Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alistair Brotchie is zero, are you kidding?  Or a 528 page Freudian biography of William Carlos Williams?  Or a 700 page account of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War?  But reading about them in considered, edited pieces is enormously valuable.

As a writer of hasty, unedited essays, I have come to put more value on literary magazines, not less.  It is the magazine writers who have taught me how to write about books, how to make arguments and use evidence, how to try to do something complex while paying attention to style.  

Please see Michael Dirda’s piece on Ambrose Bierce in the new NYRB, which arrived at my house too late for me to use it, and which is thorough, knowledgeable and friendly (when bloggers complain about the formal or “academic” writing of professional reviewers I always wonder what on earth they have been reading).  Dirda’s review is a lot better than mine!  Skip mine and read his, if it is not too late.  But: his review is an example of the target I am aiming at.

I wish book bloggers wrote more about their magazines.  Maybe I should, too.

Do you know that this is a serious matter? - Bierce's favorite character, Death

The eagle-eyed reader of my Ambrose Bierce pieces may have noted the recurring appearance of death, or Death.

In any case, it is certainly true, not only that, as has been said by Clifton Fadiman, Death itself is Bierce’s favorite character, but that… Death may perhaps be said to be Ambrose Bierce’s only real character. (622)

This is from Edmund Wilson’s chapter on Bierce in Patriotic Gore (1962).  Bierce is not Henry James, it is easy to grant that point.  Wilson would like Bierce’s obsession with death to have been caused by Bierce’s wartime experiences, but he acknowledges that “he seems to have been haunted by the idea of death before he had even enlisted” (621).  The temperament led to the subject, I would guess, and for that matter led to the kind of coolness under fire that Bierce often gives to his soldier characters.

The title character of “Parker Adderson, Philosopher” is a captured spy who, under interrogation, is, to drop into the vernacular, a total smart aleck.  The general has just read some notes about the spy’s morning execution:

“I hope, General, the spectacle will be intelligently arranged, for I shall attend it myself.”

“Have you any arrangements of your own that you wish to make?  Do you wish to see a chaplain, for example?”

“I could hardly secure a longer rest for myself by depriving him of some of his.”

“Good God, man!  do you mean to go to your death with nothing but jokes upon your lips?  Do you know that this is a serious matter?”

In the few pages left in the story, the irritated general tests the limits of Adderson’s philosophy such as it is, with surprising results.  Bierce’s answer to the general’s question is that death is the only serious matter, and thus the necessity of the jokes, and the sicko humor of “My Favorite Murder” (“Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years” and “Oil of Dog” (“I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwanted babes”).*  But the courage that comes from indifference is not false; Adderson’s Stoicism gets him a long way.

Wilson again:

Ambrose Bierce lacks the tragic dimension; he was unable to surmount his frustration, his contempt for himself and mankind, through work of the stature of Swift’s.  (632)

I did not identify in Bierce a moment as sublime – as tragic, per Wilson – as Gulliver’s abandonment of humanity for horses at the end of Gulliver’s Travels.  I think that is what Wilson has in mind, the point where Gulliver’s misanthropy destroys him, perhaps necessarily.  I am not so sure that the absence of tragedy is so important, though.  David Mason, in The Hudson Review, identifies the depiction of “the horror and poetry of death” as Bierce’s central achievement.  The horror, that is the easy part.  The poetry, that is something rare.

*  I thought about writing something showing the path from Poe’s under-read comic stories to Bierce’s.  Poe can be awfully funny, but Bierce is funnier, or more often funny; there’s my conclusion.  “Oil of Dog,” if you can stand it, is hilarious.

What He Saw at Shiloh - the best piece Bierce ever wrote

Some scholars think that “What I Saw of Shiloh” is the single best piece Bierce ever wrote, and I am inclined to agree. The final paragraph brings tears to my eyes.

So says S. T. Joshi (PDF), editor of the Library of America Ambrose Bierce collection.  What is he talking about?

Bierce fought in the Battle of Shiloh on its second day, April 7, 1862.  He was an officer but lowly enough to have no idea of the purpose or logistics of the battle, no hint of why his regiment was crossing this river at night, marching through this swamp, stopping at the edge of this forest, except that the enemy was up ahead somewhere.

In the morning Bierce and his platoon found them:

Then – I can’t describe it – the forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a crash like that of a great wave upon a beach – a crash that expired in hot hissing, and the sickening “spat” of lead against flesh.  A dozen of my brave fellows tumbled over like ten-pins.  Some struggled to their feet, only to go down again, and yet again.

An artillery duel followed; “there was a very pretty line of dead continually growing in our rear, and doubtless the enemy had at his back a similar encouragement.”  Much of the art of Bierce’s memoir, aside from the care with which he observes, and remembers, lies in the detached and amused tone of his narration.  Bierce is writing in 1874 (and 1881, and 1909, as he published several versions of “What I Saw at Shiloh”), a decade (or two or four) after the war ended.  How detached or amused he was at the time I will not guess.

The subject demands some detachment.  How else to write about – well, I will skip the sentence about the mortally wounded but living soldier’s injuries – this:

One of my men, whom I knew to be a womanish fellow, asked if he should put his bayonet through him.  Inexpressibly shocked by the cold-blooded proposal, I told him I thought not; it was unusual, and too many were looking.

What is in the last paragraph?  Writing his account, Bierce claims, brings back the sensory experiences of the battlefield, and he shudders.  He knows that the quiet field is “the visible prelude” of some “monstrous inharmony of death.”  Yet those were the days “when all the world was beautiful and strange.”  Bierce “recall[s] with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque.”  He yearns for the return of his youth or, oddly, a personified Youth who might add beauty to “the drear and somber scenes of to-day.”

This does not bring tears to my eyes but I am a cold-hearted reader.  Bierce’s lament for his lost youth is ferociously ironic.  He says he would “willingly surrender an other life” for such a moment but he knows that the offer will not be accepted.  His lament, and the editor’s tears, are for the innocence before the fall.  What Bierce saw at Shiloh cannot be unseen but only transmuted into art and shown to others.

Bierce comes up with cool stuff - flying men and killer chess robots

Ambrose Bierce’s stories are the traditional link between the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft and his successors and imitators.  Bierce is a better prose writer than either Lovecraft or Poe, but I doubt many readers carry away from Bierce any images or scenes as striking as the collapse of the House of Usher or the climax of the masque of the Red Death.  I would give Poe the prize for imaginative power, meaning Poe came up with more cool stuff.  Lovecraft survives almost entirely as a creator of cool stuff.

Not that Bierce lacked imaginative power.  Today I will not worry about Bierce’s best writing so much as linger over some of his cool stuff.  Like flying men:

He passed above [the branch], and from my point of view was sharply outlined against the blue.  At this distance of many years I can distinctly recall that image of a man in the sky, its head erect, its feet close together, its hands – I do not see its hands.  All at once, with astonishing suddenness and rapidity, it turns clear over and pitches downward.  (“George Thurston”)

The description of the Union officer who has launched himself into the air is much longer than this, as is the explanation of how he ended up where he did, and the story as a whole has a good psychological answer to why.  But I suspect Bierce was most interested in the image itself, the strange imaginative power of this impossible event and impossible death (“Death has taken an unfair advantage; he has struck with an unfamiliar weapon; he has executed a new and disquieting stratagem”).

George Thurston is the second flying man to be found in the war stories of In the Midst of Life.  The other is the title character in the first story in the book, “A Horseman in the Sky”:

Straight upright sat the rider, in military fashion, with a firm seat in the saddle, a strong clutch upon the rein to hold his charger from too impetuous a plunge.  From his bare head his long hair streamed upward, waving like a plume.  His hands were concealed in the cloud of the horse's lifted mane.  The animal's body was as level as if every hoof-stroke encountered the resistant earth.

The horse and rider have gone off a cliff; the view is from below.  In both stories, the reactions of the observers are as interesting as the apparition.  True for many of Bierce’s ghost stories, too, come to think of it.  The image is so strange that Bierce gives the reader company, someone else who can confirm that you really saw what you think you saw.

Another example, one that requires some background.  Poe’s 1836 “Maelzel’s Chess Player” is a brilliantly observed and argued debunking and dismantling of a supposed chess-playing automaton.  Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” is a Poe parody that begins with several pages of argument about thinking plants and thinking crystals.  The important thing is that the inventor Moxon has built a genuine chess-playing robot.  Watch the inventor and robot play chess:

I observed a shrug of the thing's great shoulders, as if it were irritated:  and so natural was this – so entirely human – that in my new view of the matter it startled me.   Nor was that all, for a moment later it struck the table sharply with its clenched hand.   At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than I:  he pushed his chair a little backward, as in alarm.

The robot, defeated at chess, grinds itself into a killing rage.  Bierce in this story created a murderous chess-playing robot whose grievance against his creator and the world is that it is bad at chess.  This concept is not, on its own, a significant contribution to civilization, but it is hilarious, and imaginative, and something I had not seen before. Pretty cool.

“Good God!” he said - Bierce's tricks and twists

How about I start with the bad news about Ambrose Bierce, or at least describe an odd aspect of his fiction.  Then the rest of the week will be the usual “ain’t this neat” kind of writing.  This post contains, as they say, spoilers, but any spoiling is done not by me but by Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce’s most famous story is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which is known for, as much as anything else, its trick ending, the kind of trick a writer gets to use just once.  Most writers do not get to use it at all, actually, because Bierce has ruined it for them.  Sentence by sentence, “Owl Creek Bridge” is – no, I should just parrot David Mason: “I don’t even really know how to talk about [the story’s] perfections, the  descriptive set pieces or the cinematic cross-cutting or the spellbinding dread and realization of what is happening in the mind of the reader as well as that of the protagonist.”  And then there’s the almost too memorable ending.

“Chickamauga” is well-known, too.  It depicts a famous battle from a child’s point of view, and has some amazing “make it strange” writing:

He moved among [the soldiers] freely, going from one to another and peering into their faces with childish curiosity.  All their faces were singularly white and many were streaked and gouted with red.  Something in this – something too, perhaps, in their grotesque attitudes and movements – reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them.

And then at the end there is a twist – no, a trick, it is also a trick.

These two stories occupy positions # 2 and 3 in In the Midst of Life.  Story #1, “A Horseman in the Sky,” is a lesser affair, except for one astounding image (see title).  It’s last paragraph:

The sergeant rose to his feet and walked away.  “Good God!” he said.

The sergeant is responding exactly like I did to the story’s trick ending.  No, this one is a twist, not a trick.

Reading the stories in a sequence, Bierce quickly trains me to expect a twist ending, and in fact there almost always is one.  The strangest things happen in war, granted, but the strangest things always happen on Bierce’s fictional battlefields.

The stories from the final edition of In the Midst of Life were published in newspapers over the course of almost forty years (1871-1909), so the first-time readers were likely more prone to surprise, unless a lot of newspaper fiction was of the trick-ending variety, which it likely was.

The ghost stories, for example, Bierce’s masterly ghost stories.  The twist is inherent in the genre, isn’t it?  Once you have heard your first ghost story, the pleasure of the next one depends on the cleverness of the variation.  The house is haunted because a terrible murder took place there!  Yes, and?  I have heard that one before.

The Argumentative Old Git argues that “the point of a ghost story is to evoke fear,” and in that sense Bierce’s ghost stories – I suspect, for me, all ghost stories ever written – are failures.  Fear?  Amusement, yes; laughter, sometimes. I read them in anticipation of a display of cleverness.   Spending the night in a haunted house – what is Bierce going to do with this trite setup?  How will he escape the little trap he has built for himself?  And he always escapes.  He was very clever.

I set my wisdom at work upon a book - preparatory work for the Ambrose Bierce Library of America volume

REVIEW, v. t.

To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it,
    Although in truth there’s neither bone nor skin to it)
At work upon a book, and so read out of it
    The qualities that you have first read into it.

What great luck – just as I plan to spend a week or some fraction of it writing about Ambrose Bierce, the Spring 2012 issue of The Hudson Review arrives at my home, containing, among other delights, “The Dark Delight of Ambrose Bierce” by David Mason.  Now I can set his wisdom to work, and just nod along:

But this book certainly demonstrates Bierce’s literary stature.  He was magnificent.

Actually, I would not have kept that last line.  It has all the signs of struggling in search of a strong close.  I am intimately familiar with the symptoms.  But I do share Mason’s pleased surprise – hey, Bierce is really good!

The book Mason mentions, the occasion for his piece, is the same one I am reading, the 2011 Library of America collection The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs, ed. St. T. Joshi – I strongly recommend that you ask your library to buy a copy (that is what I did).  The contents are:

In the Midst of Life aka Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1892+).  The latter title is accurate, the former pointlessly vague.  The book contains fifteen Civil War stories, including the famous “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” and eleven miscellaneous ghost stories and weird tales.

Can Such Things Be? (1893), more ghost stories, weirdness, and proto-science fiction.  Bierce’s status as the link joining Poe and Lovecraft is most evident here.  Bierce was a better prose writer than either.

The Devil’s Dictionary (1906/1911), aphorisms, satirical poems, jokes of the one-liner and multi-liner varieties.  The definition of “Review” can be found therein.  Bierce is the American La Rochefoucauld.  What he lacks in elegance he makes up in laughs.

Bits of Autobiography (1909).  “Yet I, for one, had no idea that some of Bierce’s best writing would be in memoirs,” writes Mason.  Me neither.  It is easy enough to find copies of The Devil’s Dictionary and Bierce’s stories, so the Library of America collection’s greatest contribution to the welfare of readers is the resurrection of these ninety pages of memoir.  The memoir is mostly about Bierce’s war experiences, although in the last few pieces he wanders west.  “Joshi thinks ‘What I Saw of Shiloh’ contains Bierce’s best writing” – how invigorating to find both Mason and the editor agreeing with me.

Curious side note:  Bierce was a rare creature for his time, an American literary writer who was also a genuine soldier.  He enlisted in 1861 and served through the entire Civil War, seeing action at a number of famous battles and a larger number of obscure ones.  Samuel Clemens skedaddled from the Confederate army as fast as his legs could carry him.  Henry James volunteered but was sidelined by a vague, but apparently real, medical complaint, perhaps a back problem.   William Dean Howells spent the war in diplomatic service Europe.  Walt Whitman served as a nurse.  Who have I forgotten?  I should read Patriotic Gore, maybe.

Some miscellaneous stories fill out the collection, mostly humorous pieces, mostly pretty weird.  I also read the University of Nebraska Press Poems of Ambrose Bierce, so I may find occasion to mention that book, too.

All of the above - every book Bierce published - are collections of Bierce's newspaper writing.  Even the memoir is composed of heavily revised articles dating from 1881 to 1906.

I am writing this as if readers will refer back to it as I write more.  Well, I’ll refer to it.  Reason enough to write it.

Only in looking for words do we find thoughts - if "thoughts" is the right word

APHORISM, n., Predigested wisdom.

In my thinking about aphoristic writing, I have barely moved beyond categorization.  For example, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), source of the above, is a century-old joke book.  That any of it is still funny is a literary miracle.  I find quite a lot of it funny, which is part of my problem with aphorisms:  I mostly read them for the laughs.

Aphorists are so often satirists.  If not exactly funny, their work belongs on the comic side of the ledger.  Le Duc de la Rochefoucauld begins his Maxims (1665+) with “Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise,” a motto for comic writers, even though, maxim by maxim, La Rochefoucauld is rarely comic.  His elegant, witty mind hovers over all of his writing, whether his topic is love or death, courage or vanity:

132  It is easier to be wise for others than for oneself.
135  At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.
137  When vanity is not prompting us we have little to say.

The first I find highly amusing, the second more painfully insightful, while the third could be the motto of Wuthering Expectations.   La Rochefoucauld’s maxims are wisdom with the lightest touch.

La Rochefoucauld’s book is unusual in that it was meant to be a book, and has a beginning, end, and even something like an argument.  Why were so many of the greatest aphorists unpublished, just keepers of notebooks, like Lichtenberg, or Chamfort and Joseph Joubert, or Novalis?  Joubert’s book feels like a set of notes for some other book, although what that book might have been is a bit mysterious.  A random entry, dated 1799:

The evening meal is the joy of the day.
How it happens that only in looking for words do we find thoughts.
We have philosophized badly.  (p. 49)

What luck, I have found another personal motto!  The last one, not the first; lunch is also a daily joy, as is, on occasion, breakfast.

I believe the notes-towards-a-masterpiece story explains Novalis as well, although I find his scraps incomprehensible.  Or I thought I did, until I looked at him just now:

127  When one reads correctly, there unfolds then in our interior a real, visible world according to the words.
128  All novels where genuine love is presented are fairy-tales – magical events.
129  The lives of cultured people should alternate between music and non-music, as between sleep and waking.

The first one is close to banal, the second a profound act of literary criticism, the third a fine aspiration, but all are written with clarity.  I wonder what book would have tied them together.

When I read books of aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, fragments, sayings of the fathers, or jokes, I create my own book, just like I do when I read a novel.  I imagine a narrator, a persona, speaking or writing the words before me, and behind him a “real” author, who also wrote the text.  I trace themes, keep an eye out for repeated ideas and imagery, concoct a story.  Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is a more novel-like written object than any text I have mentioned here, so who am I kidding, when I write about it a couple of weeks from now, I will write about a novel, even if it is one I patched together in my own head. Other readers may read it as something else.  I hope they do.

Let’s see.  The Maxims are as per Leonard Tancock, Penguin Classics.  The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, the NYRB edition selected and translated by Paul Auster, check.  The Devil’s Dictionary is in the new, fascinating Library of America volume of Ambrose Bierce.  The Novalis comes from Pollen and Fragments, tr. Arthur Versluis, Phanes Press, 1989.  If I had used any Chamfort, it would of course have been from the W. S. Merwin-translated Products of the Perfected Civilization.