A skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction

The Professor was bad enough that a chapter or two pretty much did me in for the day.  I was all too easily distracted by better books – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Great Gatsby, John Ruskin, for pity’s sake.  The most distracting of the distractions was In Hazard (1939) by Richard Hughes, a novel about a cargo ship caught in a hurricane.  Genuinely exciting, but at some point each evening, all too early, I would will myself to close it so I did not miss my day’s Bad Brontë quota.

I would like to direct interested parties to bibliographing’s review of In Hazard, as I proceed to ignore it.  Something in John Crowley’s introduction to the novel caught my eye.  He’s writing about the term “writer’s writer”:

But what writers would mean if they used the phrase (in my own experience they don’t) is a writer who, whether in plain prose or fancy, effusive or restrained, accomplishes things in fiction that writers know to be difficult to do, whether readers perceive this or not.  Writers of fiction often do care less about the characters and story in the fiction they read – they find it harder to suspend disbelief and be touched by made-up troubles and triumphs – but they notice a skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction.  (xi, NYRB edition)

Does this help explain what goes on at Wuthering Expectations?  It sounds right to me.  Writing about The Great Gatsby, for example, I barely acknowledged that the novel had either characters or a story.  Do I believe that the specific mechanism Fitzgerald assigns to his narrator is what’s really important about the book?  Heavens, no.  I was dismantling the engine and trying to figure out what a specific part did, a tricky one.  Maybe it was merely decorative.  Maybe it didn’t do anything, a mistake left over from an earlier prototype.  Or maybe the engine is devilishly complex.

I’ve met a very few people who seem to be able to comprehend certain complex objects as a whole.  Seem to – what I assume they are doing is breaking the pieces apart very rapidly, and then rebuilding as quickly.  I’m not so fast, and not so interested in reassembling the clock.  An intellectual flaw, I’m afraid, one I hope to overcome.  Unlike a clock, the book is intact after I have smashed its casing and shaken out the pieces.  No harm done.

An Appreciationist, I want writers to succeed, and I want to discover how they do it.  As a result, I typically root for one character, the same one every time, the writer, the imagined writer.  In fairness, I can read at both levels at once.  I do care about the characters and story, but, just as Crowley says, less; I do want David Copperfield to do well, but not as much as I want David Copperfield to do well.  I’m a writer’s reader.

The perils of completism – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales and Sketches - one of the lighter exercises of the imagination

I admire, obviously, the Library of America project. They publish such attractive books. But they are not ideally suited for the Neurotic Reader. Completism can be a curse, a time-waster. What I mean is, some of the tales and sketches in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales and Sketches are terrible, yet there they were, so I read them.

In the early days of Wuthering Expectations, I sent out a distress signal, asking for help with the Hawthorne’s stories. Since then, with more reading, I figured out my problem. Henry James, I ask you, what’s my problem?

“Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very different story.” Henry James, Hawthorne, p. 50.

As one of the few fools who has read all six cantos of The Faerie Queene, who am I to argue against allegory? Yet at its best, it tries my patience. And often, Hawthorne’s allegories are nowhere near his best.

“A Virtuoso’s Collection” (1842) will serve as an example. The narrator visits a museum that has the skin of the wolf that reared Romulus and Remus; the bones of the horses of Alexander the Great, and Don Quixote; the raven of Barnaby Rudge (from a novel only a year old); Aladdin’s lamp; the crossbow shaft of the Ancient Mariner. On and on, mixing history and literature. The tale, such as it is, is just a long list of references.

This is an allegory of – who cares what. I count a dozen or so of these polished lists in Tales and Sketches. They’re pretty dull, mostly; I have noticed that most collections of Hawthorne’s stories omit them.

All right, forget the lists, Hawthorne at his worst. I want to spend the week with Hawthorne at his best.* There was plenty of that in the Library of America volume, once I figured out how to read it.

* I’ve never read a Hawthorne novel, nor the English or Italian notebooks. Caveat emptor.

Dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing

“So from the study of literature we learn that life is sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing – sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once – but never more grotesquely amusing than when a supposedly great thinker comes along to insist that he has discovered and nattily formulated the single key to its understanding.”

So says Joseph Epstein in the article I mentioned yesterday. This statement is obviously wrong, in the sense that by “we” he just means “I, and people like me.” Kazuko Okakura and I suspect William Deresiewicz have learned rather different lessons. But I’m in Epstein’s camp. Careful with those Big Ideas – you might hurt somebody.

Epstein points to Theodore Dreiser as a great writer who was a sponge for bad ideas. Balzac is an example from my own recent reading. These were writers of high intelligence who were suckers for nonsense (“a man who fell for Stalin and Hitler both,” as Epstein describes Dreiser), yet they both wrote novels as great as anyone’s, and the best parts of their books are full of well-observed details about human nature, characters worth knowing, themes that are banal on the surface but rather more meaningful deep down. They are not sugar-coated philosophy or symbolical representations of Big Ideas.

To use Epstein’s examples, who wants to read Proust as a study of Bergson’s ideas about the nature of time, or Thomas Mann as a study of the rise of fascism? If you’re so interested, why not go straight to the source? And in fact almost no one, no non-professional, gives much of this sort of thing a second thought. But Proust’s ideas about how people have different identities in different circumstances, or about snobbery, or jealousy – this is the good stuff, right? To the extent that there is wisdom here, though, one doesn’t simply grasp the principle, incorporate it into one’s life, and move on to the next idea. Or if that is what you do, let me know how that works.

I know that I am often too reluctant to pursue meaning, that I am too quick to turn an author’s ideas into The Author’s Ideas, allowing me to dismiss them. This, by the way, is one of my answers to the test question about my intellectual flaws. Fear of meaning. Let’s drop the subject.

The positive side of all this is that I expect the process by which literature turns facts into ideas to work slowly. That's how it works for me, at least. This is part of my sanguinity about conditions at elite schools. Patience, Professor, patience. You’ve pointed the youngsters in the right direction. Check back in twenty years, or thirty.* Even if they are as resistant as I am, that may be long enough for some ideas to slip through.

* Epstein informs me that Willa Cather refused to allow school editions of her novels. She thought that high school students, at least, were too young for her books. Was she wrong?

Nathaniel Hawthorne, and my intellectual flaws

Test question: What book did you most dislike in this course? What intellectual or characterological flaws in you does that dislike point to?

This question was a regular feature on the Western Civ-equivalent final of a Columbia prof, or so I read in a classic Harpers article, "Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students", by Mark Edmundson, available here as a PDF.

Great questions. Maybe I'll write more about them later. But right now, the issue is that I most dislike the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I have the confidence to say that some of them are terrible - the four under the heading "Legends of the Province-House", for example. Ugh, ugh. Very much period pieces, at minimum.

But there are others where the problem is with my understanding, certainly with my sympathy, possibly with my character. "The Minister's Black Veil", "Roger Malvin's Burial", "Young Goodman Brown" - these are real works of art, coherent, purposeful. So why do I dislike them?

The Amateur Reader knows enough to turn to the professionals for assistance. My intellectual flaw is something other than refusing to ask for help. If anyone wandering by would like to suggest a book or essay on Hawthorne or his stories it would be much appreciated.