The Elegant Variation

DEPT OF PLUS CA CHANGE

Like Maud Newton, we've been dipping into and thoroughly enjoying the Library of America's new collection of Edmund Wilson's brilliant literary criticism, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s, and we came across this passage in his 1944 review of Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe:

"It is so difficult, when one first glances into The Robe, to imagine that any literate person with even the faintest trace of literary taste could ever get through more than two pages of it for pleasure that one is astounded and terrified at the thought that seven million Americans have found something in it to hold their attention.  What is the explanation of this?  Dr. Douglas himself, in an article distinguished by both modesty and good sense (Why I Wrote "The Robe" in the June Cosmopolitan), has indicated a part of the answer,  In the first place, you can always score a success by writing a novel about Jesus, if you take care to avoid the controversies which have split the later Christians into sects."

Change The Robe to The DaVinci Code and change the "avoid" in the last sentence to "stoke", and the landscape hasn't changed all that much has it?  (We experienced an identical sensation to Wilson's when, motivated by curiosity about what all the fuss was about, undertook to read the first chapter of Brown's chef d'oeuvre.)

NOTA BENE: DIARY OF A BAD YEAR

"A novel?  No.  I don't have the endurance any more.  To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out.  It is too much for me as I am today."

- J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Stunning work - his best since Disgrace.)

NEW SUBTROPICS WEBSITE

The excellent literary journal SUBTROPICS has just unveiled its newly revamped website.  Do go and visit the new site, which includes an online selection of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and interviews - as well as submission guidelines for the hopeful among you.  Recommended.

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* Regular TEV readers know how much we admire Michael Gorra's essays and criticism.  Do check out his latest up at The Smart Set: In Praise of the Town Library.

When I visit a library, I spend part of my time examining the building itself. So I see that in Conway its façade doubles as a Civil War monument, with the names of the town’s dead cut into the wall — Ebenezer Blood, Alonzo O. Sikes. I look at the posters on the bulletin boards — a poetry reading, or instructions on coexisting with the local black bears — and I listen to the buzz of local gossip. Not everybody comes to the library for books, and most of these places seem to fill so many social functions that Mark DeMaranville, the Cummington librarian, says he sometimes feels “like the town bartender here.” But I spend most of my time trawling through the stacks. An early edition of William Dean Howells’ Venetian Hours, two volumes, checked out twice in the last century. Kazuo Ishiguro. Louisa May Alcott, a couple of copies of the new Harry Potter — the children’s sections are usually the most up-to-date. Britannica. At times there are local specialties. Cummington has a selection of literary quarterlies that DeMaranville tells me were donated by the poet Richard Wilbur, who lives just up from the Bryant Homestead.

Elsewhere in the same issue, J.M. Tyree responds to Stephen King on the short story:  Here's to the Death of the "Death of" Article.

* We are completely addicted to The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.  ("Via" Black Market Kidneys.)  We also enjoy Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.

* Agatha Christie is set to get the graphic novel treatment in the UK.

* Former TEV guest blogger M. Allen Cunningham discusses his novel Lost Son as part of KQED's Writers' Block series.

Lost Son is the vivid, haunting story of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most uniquely sensitive artists of the modern age. From Rilke's troubled beginnings -- reared as a girl until age six, then sent to military school for five miserable years -- through his later experiences in the midst of World War I, Lost Son explores how this immensely vulnerable personality struggled to make his way in the modern world, and achieved poetic mastery amidst great personal crises.

* What he said:  Hari Kunzru tells it like it is with regard to the Brick Lane pseudo-controversy.

If Monica Ali isn't brown enough or working-class enough or Sylheti enough for you, then, well, that's your weird little identity-political screw-up. Presumably she's not white enough for someone else. I'm sick of all this cant about cultural authenticity, and sick of the duty (imposed only on "minority" writers) to represent in some quasi-political fashion. Art isn't about promoting social cohesion, or cementing community relations. It's about telling the truth as you see it, even if it annoys or offends some people. That's called freedom of expression, and last time I checked we all thought it was quite a good idea.

* Kind words for The Indian Clerk in the Boston Globe and Gay City News.

* Sebastian Faulks talks to the Washington Post about the new James Bond novel.

* This just in from the "Department of I Got Yer Preconceived Notions Right Here":  A novel by a New York City author about an escort has won the Utah Humanities Council's Utah Book Award for fiction.

* At the National Post, John Ivison updates us on Yann Martel's ongoing scheme to send two books a week to the Canadian prime minister, and has some choice words about the whole affair.

* Rutherford's Bar, watering hole of the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle is facing closure, reports the Scotsman.

Rutherford's, established in 1834, is a unique public house closely linked with the history of the city. It was frequented by such literary figures as Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. It still boasts many of the artefacts from that period, like the magnificent frontage dating from 1934, the terrazzo floor and marble walls of the lavatory and boxed-in sawdust spittoon channel. The front of the building is listed and under a preservation order. One wonders what the meaning of the word preservation is in this instance.

* Steve Weinberg looks at the very-interesting-sounding Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.

* Los Angeles Times Book Review David L. Ulin wants to know "Who 'owns' Raymond Carver?"

* We're great admirers of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, which we were fortunate enough to enjoy in its original London staging.  The play sent us off to read Thomas Powers's riveting Heisenberg's War, one of the books Frayn noted as his source material.  We note it here because one story in particular - the story of baseball player turned spy Moe Berg - stuck with us, and has surfaced again, according to the Guardian in Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea.  (We suggest nothing unseemly - it's probably a well-known tale.  Just caught our eye is all.)

On December 18 1944, Werner Heisenberg, a key figure in the Nazi atomic bomb programme, gave a lecture in Zurich to fellow physicists. In the audience, sitting just behind the discoverer of fission Otto Hahn, was an American. Morris "Moe" Berg, who had been a professional baseball player after studying languages at Princeton, was there to see if Heisenberg gave any hint that the Germans were near to developing the atom bomb. If he had, Berg would have taken out the .45 pistol in his pocket and shot the Nobel Prize winning physicist dead. For Berg was a spy, employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's first central intelligence agency. Heisenberg stuck to his non-military topic and delivered his lecture unharmed.

As we recall, Powers recounts the tale slightly differently, mainly that Berg found the mathematics so over his head that he couldn't comfortably determine exactly what Heisenberg was talking about, and so, gave him a pass.

* As the Southern California fires continue to burn, The Chicago Blog takes a stab at answering the question: Why do firefighters put their lives on the line for this kind of work?

* We note - and approve - of the new Amazon blog Omnivoracious, and welcome it to the blogroll.

* A bit late getting this up for his L.A. appearance but Nick Hornby is interviewed at Metromix LA, in which he manages not to whine about difficult books.

* George Snyder has the goods on Edmund White's recent area appearance.

* And, finally, this is just weird.  Internet weird.  Which isn't necessarily bad.

IN WHICH OUR ALREADY PRECARIOUS SCHEDULE FALLS INTO TOTAL DISARRAY

If you're waiting for, well, pretty much anything at all from us, your wait just got a bit longer.  We expect you'll understand.

CONNECTIONS: ROSS, RILKE

Geoff Dyer's review of Alex Ross's marvelous The Rest is Noise is now available online.  We couldn't help but approvingly note his closing paragraph:

It would be unfair, though, to dwell on omissions when so much has been included. “The Rest Is Noise” is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand “more seeingly” in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.

We've always loved this Rilke poem and that line in particular, although Dyer seems to be working from either a different translation or faulty memory.  We reproduce this gem, "Moving Forward," for you here, as translated by Robert Bly:

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

TEV INTERVIEW (PLUS GIVEAWAY): JANE GARDAM

You'll find this week's giveaway at the end of this special treat.

Jane Gardam's lovely novel Old Filth is one of those books that simultaneously popped up on our radar from several sources.  Within the span of a few weeks, it seemed we'd heard about it from Alice Sebold, the Critical Mass blog, and David Leavitt.  So we sought out a copy from the wonderful Europa Editions and found that the book was everything people were saying.  We ended up utterly charmed by this novel that the New York Times Book Review described as "rendered by a novelist at the very top of her form." 

Gardam was born in 1928 in North Yorkshire, and published her first book for adults in 1975.  (She's also a respected, award-winning children's author.)  She has published nearly 30 books and has won or been shortlisted for nearly every major British award, including the Booker (shortlisted for God on the Rocks), the Whitbread (awarded to The Queen of the Tambourine) and the Orange Prize (awarded to Old Filth.)  You can read her full biography here.  We are honored that she has consented to answer a few questions about her work.

TEV: You're a prolific and honored author in UK, winning the Whitbread twice and being shortlisted for prizes ranging for the Orange to the Booker, and yet it's only now that American audiences are beginning to take proper notice of you – you've recently been championed by the likes of David Leavitt and Alice Sebold. Why now, do you suppose? And does it surprise you at all to see Americans embracing Old Filth, which concerns itself with some perhaps very English questions and situations?

Jane Gardam:  Oh yes. Of course I have been very disappointed that I haven't been as widely read in America as in other countries. I try to write about real Englishness not export-Englishness and I believe that I sometimes get near to it and occasionally it is not what's expected.

But it doesn't altogether surprise me that it is Old Filth that Americans have embraced because he is a formal, punctilious, serious, brillliant man with firm principles and I imagine him getting on with many Americans. There is an annual visitation to the English Bar by the American Bar and I see Edward Feathers much at home there. He will be wearing highly polished black shoes (Never brown in London, never brown anywhere after six o'clock) tightly laced up. Highly polished expensive shoes are a password on either side of the Atlantic.

TEV: How did you come to conceive this wonderful character, Filth, and what do you suppose it is about him that has captivated so many of us? (I can certainly say I found him achingly sympathetic despite – or perhaps because of – his foibles.)

JG: No, I didn't actually conceive Edward Feathers. He walked in on me when a magazine asked me for a Christmas story asap. Probably I'd caught sight of him years before when my husband came back from Court one day laughing about someone who had been trying to find out if he had a chance of being made a High Court judge. The Lord Chancellor's office had said no, he hadn't and he had said, oh all right then, I'll be a judge in Hong Kong. Oh, said someone else, so you're Filth are you? Failed in London Try Hong Kong. This is actually an old joke but I hadn't heard it and I thought it was quite funny. It was a bit of a challenge making an introvert, humourless lawyer lovable but I think I have always found such people intriguing, especially the remnants of the British Raj. They were brave, resilient children. Growing old they often became what George Eliot called "fine" - and funny. And heart-wrenching

TEV: I read in a 2005 profile that the germ of the novel came from imagining two elderly ex-lawyers living side-by-side. (One of my favorite moments in the book occurs early on, when Filth finds himself locked outside in Christmas Day with no recourse other than the hated Veneering.) At what point did the Far East dimension of the story enter the picture? You acknowledge Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep – what inspirational role did the story play and how did determine it had a place in this tale of two elderly lawyer neighbors?

JG: The Far East. Yes, Baa Baa Black Sheep had a lot to do with Feathers's Welsh farmhouse. I had read a great deal of Kipling and known an old naval man who knew him well, but it was an American author, my friend Alison Lurie, who directed me to this terrible, unforgettable story. To write about Malaysia I relied on memory.  I had been with my husband on law cases in Singapore and we went often to Penang. Half way through the book I returned to Penang to check up on Malaya and I wrote most of the eastern bits of the book on a verandah of the lovely Lone Pine Hotel on the beach. As time went on I thought more and more of the British children torn from home at four years old to be educated in a homeland they knew nothing about. I had not expected, however, how many of them still survived. Old Filth resulted in many, many letters from ancient survivors. Women as well as old men.

TEV: I'm a tremendous fan of the work Europa Edition has done, bringing such remarkable European writers stateside. How did you come to be associated with them and what do you think of their efforts in a marketplace that, in my opinion, can be hostile to quietly grown-up writing?

JG: Europa Editions and Kent Carroll have put new life into me and new hope into serious contemporary unsensational fiction.

TEV: Do you know yet which additional titles we can look forward to seeing published in the US? Can you tell us something about The People on Privilege Hill?

JG: Next title is The People on Privilege Hill - short stories that include Filth again and two old pals we've met before - and a mysterious Jesuit, and a dreadfully un English American boy not at all unlike my grandson. I'm hoping Kent Carroll will publish my novel Crusoe's Daughter. My new novel should be finished in the Spring.

TEV: You're also a noted children's author. How would you compare the satisfactions you get from children's books versus writing for adults? Do you have any new children's books coming?

JG: I'd like to write for children again but it doesn't seem to happen.  I can't understand children's books now. But who knows? I have a new granddaughter.

Well, if that doesn't make you want to seek out any and all of Gardam's work available in this country, you've been reading the wrong blog.  At a minimum, it sent us shoe shopping.  We are delighted, thanks to the generosity of Europa Editions, to offer up a copy of her 1994 Whitbread Prize-winning The Queen of the Tambourine for this week's TEV Giveaway.  The rules remain the same, as ever.  Drop us an email, subject line "FAILED IN LONDON, TRY TEV" and you must, must, must include your mailing address.  (Last week, three of you didn't.)  We've been asked if we're open to international entrants - we are, indeed.  Previous winners, however, are inelgible.  We'll take all entires until 10:00 p.m. PST, at which point the Random Number Generator will bestow good fortune on one lucky reader.  Actually, you're all lucky to have the opportunity to discover this wonderful novelist, whether you win the book or buy one.  We do hope you'll check her out.

UPDATE: Congratulations to winner Alexandra Leake of Cambridge, MA.

INTERVIEWS OF NOTE

Our conversation on Sándor Márai’s The Rebels continues at Words Without Borders.  Today we're joined by Arthur Phillips in a stimulating Q&A in which we, well, mostly he, takes on J.M. Coetzee.

MS: You and I share a particular admiration for Embers but writing for the New York Review of Books, J.M. Coetzee dismisses it with terms like "overblown language" and "caricatural layer of kitsch." Accepting that like minds may differ, to what would you attribute such an extreme difference of opinion and how might you address Coetzee's criticisms?

AP: So I went and bought the Coetzee review for three dollars and now have precisely three dollars’ worth of opinions about it. Here they are, free of charge. I think that Coetzee limits the ways you can read Embers, and then doesn't much like either of the ways he allows for. He says first, if it's a satire of Austro-Hungarian values, then the clichés are there for satiric purpose. But if instead, it's really about Márai's values (specifically, the need to keep your inmost personality private), then it can be dismissed as "minor." I think this criticism falls short of acceptable. There's at least one other way of reading the novel (if not several): Márai doesn't agree with the values of the General, but he is also not parodying them, and he's not endorsing Konrad's bitter silent privacy either. Instead he's trying to present both characters in their own contexts, their own justifications, using literary effects (the castle, the retainer, all that). This is how I read it—some of the General appealed to me, some didn't, Konrad frustrated me, but I saw his motivations, I think. But I didn't read or take the novel as a whole as either indictment or endorsement of anything, and I am a little surprised that Coetzee insists we have to. Of course, even if we do insist that the book is somehow moralizing, how about this interpretation instead: it was published in 1942, at a time when a desire to recapture lost Hungarianness, both spiritually and geographically, had led the country to an uneasy alliance with Nazi Germany. The book can be read as a warning letter: those old military days are dead, cling to them and you will end, like the General, with nothing at all. Now, I didn't take the book like that—I read it in the 21st century, not as a historical document, but as a novel. And for me, I was not bothered by the aspects that so bothered Coetzee. My impression is, he didn't like the book, and he really didn't like the picture of Márai that he got from the memoirs, and so the ideas and ideals of Márai were perhaps looming too large in Coetzee as he read the fiction. Obviously I'm speculating far out of bounds here. But I read the fiction first. Finally, my honest literary theory is, you like what you like. It's a personal, chemical reaction. Then, after that, you find the theory that fits your tastes. Coetzee didn't dig the book, and so his review explains why it's structurally and morally minor. I did like the book, so I can explain why it's structurally, morally, and literarily lovable. I reserve the right to change my mind the next time I read it.

Do pop over and read the rest of this fascinating interview and please feel free to jump into the conversation.

Also worth checking out this afternoon, John Updike Appreciation Week continues at Critical Mass with John Freeman's long and interesting interview with Updike.  We especially related to this bit:

Q: I recall reading about you offloading some of your reviewing library of the past forty years recently – do you ever miss those books or have they made room for more?

A: You would know better than I that there is no ending of books. That was just my wife’s attempt to keep an orderly house. I’ve actually had to go back to stashing a few books in the barn, because the shelves here are full. I love books, but I don’t love them enough to constantly order and reshuffle them. My own books have grown frighteningly – I just remember when it was a tidy little shelf the Carpenter’s Hen, The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, Pigeon Feather and the Centaur, that’s what five titles? And those early books are the ones that seem to get assigned in classes, and I could have stopped then with no detriment, but now the shelf is long and it’s a storage problem. I do miss sometimes those books that were given away – you never know when you are going to need a book, even when you are a fiction writer…in a way it’s cruel to make authors cull.

EVENT REMINDER: RED HEN ANNIVERSARY

If you're in the area, local indie Red Hen Press will celebrate its 13th Anniversary on Sunday, October 28th at 11 a.m. at the Luxe Hotel-Sunset with a Champagne Brunch.  Special guests include Billy Collins and Robert Olen Butler.  Details here.

GIVEAWAY PREVIEW

We're taking the day to ourselves today, devoting it partially to preparing tomorrow's giveaway, which is a special edition and will include an interview with Jane Gardam, and partially to devouring Alex Ross's brilliant The Rest Is Noise, to which we've already alluded and to which we promise to return.  (Geoff Dyer gives it a well-deserved love letter on the cover of Sunday's NYTBR.)  Until tomorrow ...