I’ve been gearing up for Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark biography by revisiting (and reading more of) her own fiction, which was evidently treated as unsaleable for much of her career. In 1999, she told Janice Galloway:

“I used to be sold the idea that what I was writing was some little cult and people wouldn’t buy the things. Publishers used to go on that way until I just got rid of them.”

“How?”

“I got new publishers.”

Here, for no particular reason except that I’m caught up in scrutinizing her work, are the first sentences of nine of her twenty-two books:

The Comforters: “On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below.”

Memento Mori: “Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain pen and continued her letter: ‘One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.’”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: “The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be taken away.”

The Girls of Slender Means: “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”

The Driver’s Seat: “And the material doesn’t stain,” the salesgirl says.

Loitering with Intent: “One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me.”

The Only Problem: “He was driving along the road in France from St. Dié to Nancy in the district of Meurthe; it was straight and almost white, through thick woods of fir and birch.”

A Far Cry from Kensington: “So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence.”

The Finishing School: “You begin,” he said, “by setting your scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality or in imagination.”

My mysterious great aunt has an official archive, apparently. While trying to get my hands on it, I’ve run up against some of the microfilm problems Nicholson Baker detailed in Double Fold.
 

Some background: In November, I learned that Maude Newton Simmons, my great-great aunt and (self-given) namesake, was a teacher, an architectural drafter, and a dealer of King Midget cars. The 1977 Delta Democrat-Times profile I unearthed even included a photograph of her, at 92, looking out the window of her vehicle. (That Newspaper Archive subscription was so worth it.)

Shortly after posting about the article, I typed her full married name into Google — you’d think I would’ve done this before — and discovered that Maude was also a writer of sorts. No wonder the family was so cagey about her.
 

Astonishingly, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains a “Maude C. (Newton) Simmons collection” devoted to a newspaper column that she published from 1960-1970.

This collection consists of two 35 mm, positive microfilm rolls of newspaper articles, newsclippings, and correspondence of Maude Newton Simmons. The materials are generally not organized by date or format.

The majority of the newspaper articles by Simmons are typewritten and undated. However, there are a few handwritten articles, and several articles are annotated with her corrections. Her “Drew Doings” articles contained a number of subheadings that varied with each issue. Each article in the column concerned a variety of subjects, including births, deaths, church and school news, politics, sports, topics of community interest, visitors, and poetry composed by Simmons or published authors.

So essentially these are church supper bulletins, but also Civil Rights-Era dispatches from the Mississippi Delta.
 

I’m nervous to read what Maude had to say, but of course I called the library immediately. After several letters back and forth, and a check that was mailed and returned, I’ve learned that the microfilm is badly eroded, and that there are too many pages for the library’s research staff to photograph.

Short of hopping on a plane to Jackson, I’m going to need to purchase copies of the microfilm reels themselves, from an independent vendor, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. Then I’ll have to figure out the best way to read them. The good people at Ask MeFi had some excellent suggestions. If you have any to add, please drop me a line.

People who never get sick might enjoy it, too — if only for the opportunity to feel superior while jogging around the park in the snow — but I wouldn’t know about that.

An excerpt of my reaction:

I spent so much of my childhood sick, worried about getting sick, or pretending to be sick that these three states of being blurred together in my mind. The confusion persists; now a documented sufferer of autoimmune disease — and an undocumented sufferer of a no-doubt-fatal disorder currently manifesting as side pain — I am uncertain when to take a sick day or visit the doctor, and whatever course I decide on is almost always wrong. Yes, I belong to that most exasperating class of neurotics: hypochondriacs with health problems, the subject of Brian Dillon’s sympathetic, perceptive and often absurdly funny The Hypochondriacs.

Until the 19th century, morbid fear of illness was seen as only one symptom of hypochondria, which doctors treated as an organic disease, although scientific explanations varied. In one era, it was a digestive problem, in another an abdominal issue, and later a disorder linked with melancholia and distributed through the entire body. More importantly for Dillon’s purposes, hypochondria, which often has a physical component, provides a reason for those with intellectual or creative temperaments to sequester themselves from the world and pursue their thinking or their art.

Dillon is an unusually dexterous writer. Each of his slim chapters focuses on a different artist or thinker, and each fully evokes the subject’s fears and afflictions, showing how they’re reflected in his or her life’s work.

You can read the rest here, and an excerpt from the book here.

See also Daphne Merkin’s review for Bookforum and Laura Miller’s for Salon, Hermione Lee on bed rest and Virginia Woolf, Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay (and her rejection of the idea that suffering begets art), Brian Dillon’s Book Notes for Largehearted Boy, and an old post of mine about being a hypochondriac with health issues.

Vladimir Nabokov famously instructed his wife Vera to destroy his final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, if he didn’t live to complete it. At his death, the draft consisted of a stack of notecards which he’d shuffled through, added to, and rewritten right up until the end.

Vera, having once saved an early version of Lolita from the incinerator, found herself unable to carry out his wishes. The task fell to their son, Dmitri, who waffled for years — publicly and dramatically but also somewhat understandably so, for not only had Nabokov reaped the benefits of the Lolita rescue, he’d approved of the decision to save Kafka’s drafts against the author’s express commands. While Nabokov may have claimed to believe that every artist should “ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication,” many of his own papers survived him.
 

All the post-death uncertainty over the fate of the book culminated, finally, in publication last fall. The Original of Laura is a facsimile series of the original index cards, with transcriptions below them, which can be detached along their perforated edges and held in the hand just like Nabokov’s.

The story being unfinished, character development is slight. The most remarkable aspects of the nubile love interest, a young woman with the “frail, docile frame” of a child, are the men who desire her: her mother’s lecherous charmeur, whose name, “no doubt assumed,” is Hubert H. Hubert (Lolita’s Humbert in a new incarnation?); her own novelist lover, who “destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her”; and her husband, Peter Wild, a stingy, obese, and lovelorn neurologist with tiny feet. Despite all that’s missing in The Original of Laura, though, an intensity characteristic of Nabokov’s work (and missing in most of the self-consciously experimental fiction that purports to borrow from his) pervades it.

Wild strives to inflict upon himself the “sweetest death,” to will himself out of being, body part by body part, starting with his toes and working upward, in an act of “self-deletion.” For all their abstraction, these passages are fresh and surprising and sometimes moving. And as many have observed, the final card in the series presents a list of synonyms for annihilation — “efface, expunge, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” — that, inevitably, casts us back to a consideration of its author’s fate.

The Original of Laura is not really a novel. It is a fascinating artifact, an almost-story that thwarts immersion by continually calling attention to its architect. As I made my way through the notes, I kept imagining the author of Pale Fire and Look at the Harlequins!, at his most mischievous and perverse, plotting not just this last book, but the whole publish-or-destroy drama it engendered, from his deathbed.

Other commentary: Aleksandar Hemon, Why The Original of Laura should never have become a book.; Stoppard, Burn It; Banville, Nabokov’s Laura is “little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet“; David Lodge, Shored against his ruins; Jeanette Winterson, “a sane decision.”

Below, in the spirit of the evening, Perkins-Valdez reminisces about books she read in her youth. You can also listen to her discussing Wench on NPR with Lynn Neary.
 

I grew up in a world that predated mega-bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. We did not spend our weekends exploring the library or checking out the new releases shelf.

As a result, when I am asked about books I read growing up, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I never read any classics of children’s literature. Black Beauty? No. Little Women? No. But the one place I did go every week was the supermarket.

My mother spent many hours shopping for the family each week, and she did not mind if I threw a book in the cart. So I grew up reading all kinds of trashy fiction. I devoured the books voraciously, sometimes in a single night. Through them, I developed a love of reading.
 

Later, I moved on to Terry McMillan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. That is why when people ask me what I think about “urban fiction” versus “serious fiction,” I hesitate to feed the hierarchical distinction. I know from experience that any kind of fiction can act as a “gateway drug” to another kind. I believe the important thing is that young people read!

I want to introduce my daughter to all kinds of fiction, and through the exposure, let her discover that which speaks to her most.

Many thanks to artist Michael Fusco for the striking Chapters flyer.

Winston Riley has posted a new teaser for his Walker Percy documentary. This one coincidentally relates to my recent post (and your comments) about the interconnectedness of stories and ideas.

While Percy was laid up with tuberculosis, he read Thomas Mann and other “literature of the alienated self.” He also immersed himself in Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and more philosophers who were mulling over the same kind of existential questions that he was. Among other things, his father and grandfather had committed suicide, and increasingly this legacy preoccupied him.
 

Riley, the filmmaker, left this comment about Percy and the philosophical novel late last week:

… I would argue that all novels (at least the ones I like to read) are philosophical novels, works of ideas.

Here’s Walker Percy’s explanation:

“While it is true that a novel should have an action, it does not suffice for it to be a “good story.” Art tells some home truths about the way things are, the way we are, about the movement or lack of movement of the human heart….So my main assumption is that art is cognitive; that is, it discovers and knows and tells, tells the reader how things are, how we are, in a way that the reader can confirm with as much certitude as a scientist taking a pointer-reading.” For the deconstructionists or literary theorists among us this view of literature may seem dated or quaint. So be it.

A philosophical novel, for me, doesn’t need a “didactic agenda,” and if its ideas overshadow its art, it becomes something else entirely — a textbook, perhaps?

Walker Percy, for instance, wasn’t looking to answer philosophical questions, necessarily, with his novels. Asking the questions was enough.

See, previously: Walker Percy kept his accent, and Percy on bourbon.

The formidable Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo) argues, in “Fade to White,” that responses to Precious (trailer above) break down along racial lines, with white viewers applauding its candor, and black viewers infuriated by its offensive, ham-handed stereotypes.

I haven’t seen the film, and probably won’t, but below Adalena Kavanagh, a New York City public school librarian, offers a thoughtful defense of Precious — or at least of Push, the novel that inspired it. She says that her students, who are mostly African-American and Latino, request it more than any other book.
 

Ishmael Reed writes, “Among black men and women, there is widespread revulsion and anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father.’ While this may be Mr. Reed’s experience, his statement runs counter to my own experience with Push, by Sapphire, the book that the movie Precious is based on. I am a teacher and a librarian who has worked in the New York City public school system since 2003. There hasn’t been a more sought-after, talked-about, or frequently-read book among my students than Push. My students are, and have been, predominantly African-American and Latino. The students who demand Push have been predominantly African-American and Latino. These students live in Harlem, Washington Heights, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

As a librarian, when students demand a book, I am inclined to give it to them. We struggle every day to make literacy important to our students, so when they find something that actually speaks to them we can’t ignore it, or wish it would go away, no matter how controversial it is, or how uncomfortable it makes us feel. To call Precious a stereotype is to believe that readers cannot distinguish between a character’s experience and a racial group’s reality, and that is giving readers and Sapphire very little credit.

I’ve read the book several times and I didn’t come away from it believing that Precious and her family represented all African-Americans. That would have been ridiculous, and I’m not inclined to believe that any one character can represent any one race. If a reader does think that Precious stereotypically represents most African-Americans, then that speaks more to that particular reader’s ignorance and inexperience than to Sapphire’s work.

My students are drawn to the book because it is set in a location that many of them are familiar with — Harlem — and because the book it’s written in colloquial language. They recommend the book to their friends because incest is a taboo subject, not because they relate to the incest in the book, or believe that incest runs rampant among the African-American community. And what if a few of them do relate to the book because of the incest? Isn’t it a good thing that there is a book that speaks to their experience? What many of them can identify with are Precious’ struggles with literacy and poverty. They stick with the story because Precious is not merely a stereotype, but a fully drawn character. They are interested in the small steps she takes to improve her life.

Precious may not be living the ideal life by the end of the book, but she certainly is better equipped to deal with everything that has happened to her than she was at the beginning of the novel, and this is because she’s become literate. Anyone who believes that Precious’ burgeoning literacy is a small accomplishment doesn’t understand how difficult it is to navigate the world when you can’t read.

As a teacher, I found Push a difficult book to read because it highlights the many ways we — white or black — fail our students. Push makes one question how a student reaches the 8th grade without knowing how to read. The book is not a nightmare that we can easily wake up from and shake off, because there really are girls living in poverty who get to the 8th grade without learning how to read. Nor is the book a fairy tale; Precious’ problems don’t all suddenly go away simply because she can read. Maybe that is why my students are drawn to the book. It doesn’t pander to them and doesn’t promise them that life will be perfect, but what it does do is show them that you don’t have to be defined by the bad things that happen to you.

Mr. Reed describes Precious as “an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father,” and at the beginning of the book that’s how she might describe herself, but by the end of the book she knows that she’s more complex than that.