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May 19, 2008

THANK YOU & GOOD MORNING

Before I turn the reigns back over to Mark, I'd like to thank you all for your warm welcome and enthusiastic participation in the back blog last week. I also want to apologize: due to an unexplained glitch in the system, I wasn't able to enter blog posts (or schedule them for the future). That meant I had to turn them over to Mark and he posted them when he could. That we came reasonably close to a normal publishing schedule is a testament to Mark's dedication, but I do regret that the overall experience was slightly less interactive than regular readers are used to.

Given the modest scope of last week's theme of Good Things in Small Packages, I'm floored by all the kind words by TEV commenters, but I would like to introduce one last item to the catalog, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite works of art. I'm not one who goes around haphazardly declaring literary work as "art," but when the subject is Edward Gorey, the exception is compulsory.

Edward Gorey is that rare bird who is impossible to figure out, much less classify. He illustrated books. His unusual artwork appeared in all manner of places. And he was a trend-setter who influenced loads of people who are themselves considered genius. First and foremost he was a maker and little, weird books, which he wrote, lettered, and illustrated, but he was no more a cartoonist than Theodor Seuss Geisel was a doodler.

Last week I mentioned the film Barton Fink by the Coen Brothers. If you haven't seen it, Barton Fink is a movie about a writer, but it's written for people who hate movies about writers. Interestingly, the Coens wrote Barton Fink while suffering from writer's block during the composition of Miller's Crossing, a gangster movie whose main character shifts allegiances so many times it takes multiple viewings to sort it all out. Barton Fink is not for everyone, but if you've seen it then you probably weren't one of the people complaining about the ending to No Country for Old Men. Barton Fink is about many things: writer's block, wrestling movies, screwy plumbing and "the unspeakable horror of the literary life." Remember that phrase. I'll come back to it in a bit.

Edward Gorey's first book is "The Unstrung Harp: or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel" and it is very much about a writer. Like Fink, Earbrass is so odd that only a writer could love him; in fact, The Unstrung Harp should be required reading for all writers.

The book opens with Mr. Earbrass standing on a desolate-looking lawn in the deep of winter. Many of the motifs that will mark  Gorey's later work are there: a fur coat, an over-sized urn, a game of croquet. We find Mr. Earbrass distracted by the fact that it is November 17 and on November 18 of alternate years he begins work on a new novel, the title of which has been selected at random from a notebook filled with them, and he doesn't have a story for his book. In two panels we have an arbitrary deadline, a ridiculous regimen, and a preposterously pretentious notebook. Is there a writer reading this who doesn't already love Mr. Earbrass?

In painstaking fashion, The Unstrung Harp takes us through the process of Mr. Earbrass' novel. The joy of Making Progress to the dismay of discovering how dreadful the work really is, to the surprise of finishing the first draft to the depression that follows. Along the way, Gorey fetishizes, well, just about everything. From the clothes that he wears to the designs in the carpet. For Earbrass, his gargantuan home in Hobbies Odd, is a prison, a metaphor--much like the Hotel Earle that Fink checks into--of his mental state; but for writers it's a Disneyland of the mind. What writer wouldn't trade their poorly ventilated, overstuffed, office/guest room/closet/cave/nook/book depository for Gorey's mansion, even though the wallpaper alone would drive any reasonably sane person mad inside of a fortnight? If this is "the unspeakable horror of the literary life" sign me up.

The composition of The Unstrung Harp, which Earbrass abbreviates TUH (TUH, TEV, hmmm...) is just the first act. To the horror of the amateur novelist, the revision, copying, delivery, and publication are also described in gruesome detail. If nothing else, Gorey demonstrates the truth in the axiom that writing is the easy part of the slog toward publication. The artwork is fumed over. The reviews ignored, and poor Earbrass is left so demoralized that he stands before a bookshop window taking note of every other novel but his own "in a state of extreme and pointless embarrassment."

The indignities don't stop there. Mr. Earbrass attends a party but it is a celebration in name only. It is the kind of gathering that every writer knows all to well:

The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others' declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.

Gorey published The Unstrung Harp in 1953 and his cruel catalog of what writers really talk about when in the company of other writers is as true today as it was a half-century ago. That said, Earbrass' indictment says less about writers today than it does about Gorey: a quiet man who loved being alone with his cats, furiously cross-hatching the terrible wall paper that would haunt the dreams of generations of admirers. For artists like Gorey, such gatherings were a strain and near the end of The Unstrung Harp, Earbrass is shown all alone on a terrace, looking out at a vista that is either completely washed out with sunlight or socked in with fog. He is, for all intents and purposes, staring into the void. A meaningless list of words sifts through his mind like some compulsive word machine. If he could muster the energy he'd arrange them into something like a story, but he can't. "It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything."

Most days I find this Beckett-like turn of phrase amusing, as if it were girded in the inexorable innocence of a child. A child's innocence, however, soon gives way to the passion of youth and it only gets worse from there. On some days, it hits me with the severity of an edict issued from a king in a fairy tale and I am a  lowly serf in a bog with an Outlook Express calendar full of meetings. On some days "It is cold; it is bleak..." is downright dangerous. In the final panel, Mr. Earbrass backs away from the ledge and finds other things for his body to do in the hopes that his overtaxed and restless imagination will keep up. For those that live the life of the mind, the gesture is nothing short of heroic.

Posted at 08:57 AM in Guest Bloggers |

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Comments

Pamela

Hooray for mentioning this book! I've had it around for a while but somehow never realized it was Gorey's very first.

Posted by: Pamela | May 19, 2008 at 09:09 AM

Karen

The Unstrung Harp gives writers comfort. It's so painful, so recognizably bleak, you can't help but be cheered.

Enjoyed your week at the helm, Jim. Lots of good stuff.

Posted by: Karen | May 19, 2008 at 09:10 AM

Annarita

Thank you for this reading advice! I’ll look for it in Italian if it has been translated.

Posted by: Annarita | May 20, 2008 at 12:38 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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