Further thoughts on everyday drinking, from Sir Kingsley Amis, who settles the question of regional whiskey spellings and marvels at the fortitude of the gunslingers of yore:

Whiskey in the USA has a long, colourful history. (Note that it is indeed spelt with an “e,” along with Irish whiskey — the Scotch and Canadian varieties are both plain whisky.)

One of the most illustrious early American distillers was George Washington, who manufactured the stuff commercially at his place near Mount Vernon in Virginia [Ed. note: reconstructed distillery above], and was very proud of the high reputation of his merchandise. I’m sure it was great for its time, but then and for long afterwards the general run of whiskey must have been pretty rough. I’ve often thought that the really amazing achievement of the Western hero wasn’t his ability to shoot a pip out of a playing card at fifty paces, nor even his knack of dropping crotch first into his saddle from an upstairs window, but the way he could stride into the saloon, call for whiskey, knock it back neat and warm in one and not so much as blink, let alone burst into paroxysms of uncontrollable coughing.

All that, of course, is changed now. American whiskeys are second to none in smoothness, blandness, everything that goes to make a fine spirit…

George Washington’s distillery has been resurrected, and I’ve been meaning to try the stuff.

Further reading: The spirits of 1776; archaeologists’ notes on the excavation of the Mount Vernon distillery; Hangover reading with Kingsley Amis; Charles Dickens’ eggnog (according to Eudora Welty); The Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins. Cheers!

In their persistent humor and charm and their seeming effortlessness, these essays remind me of the best of Mark Twain’s.
 

You may have come across a condensed version of Amis’ hangover recovery advice in the Daily Mail a couple years ago. I enjoyed it at the time, but now, having read that section of the book in full, I’m aghast that so much was lost in the cutting. Couldn’t the editors have omitted some of the day’s news instead?

Amis advocates a two-pronged approach to hangover recovery: the physical, and the metaphysical. The third step in his treatment of the metaphysical hangover (M.H.) — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” — entails embarking on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course, or, if necessary, both in succession. “The structure of both Courses … rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”

Amis’ Rx for hangover reading:

Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lose, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick someone less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Houshold, C.S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white — i.e. not black — comedy: P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one*). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.

This weekend, while grapefruit is still indisputably in season, I’m going to make Amis’ Salty Dog: “Moisten the rim of a glass and twirl it about in a saucer of table salt, so that it picks up a thickish coating about a quarter or an inch deep. Carefully add one part gin and two parts fresh grapefruit juice, stir thoroughly; add ice, stir again, and drink through the band of salt. Splendid for out of doors.”
 

* Hear, hear.

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.”

And Donald Barthelme urged his students to choose their “literary fathers” carefully, and to be well-versed in philosophy. Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s biography, suggests that reading Beckett and the existentialists gave Barthelme confidence that the kind of stories he wanted to write were possible.

Don dropped by Guy’s Newsstand…. and found a copy of Theatre Arts. In it was Waiting for Godot. He stood there and read the whole thing.

That evening, when he took Helen out to dinner, he brought the magazine with him. She had already read the play. “I found it exciting but did not see the implications for Don,” she says. “He was deeply moved and ecstatic about the language…. Each time we were in a bookstore after this, Don looked for work by Beckett and immediately read whatever he found. It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.” It would be heavily ironic, and he could “use his wit and intellect in a way that would satisfy him.”

Of course, Don’s breakthrough wasn’t that easy. “The problem is … to do something that’s credible after Beckett, as Beckett had to do something that was credible after Joyce,” he said years later.

Initially, though, the excitement! Waiting for Godot showed Don that philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on. By stripping away fiction’s stock devices, Beckett focused on consciousness. He could animate the intentionality at the heart of awareness….

[H]is discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an “unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under John Paul Sartre.

I’m fascinated and inspired by this interconnectedness, but also a little wary of it. Whenever I notice philosophy or politics creeping too overtly into my fiction, I think of Jimmy Chen’s succinct dismissal of novels whose didactic agendas overshadow their artistic ones (though I do love Brave New World — or did, the last time I read it. 1984 too, but it doesn’t hold up as well in my memory). Your comments are welcome.
 

See also Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, in which she imagines Socrates saying “In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all”; In defense of Big Ideas in fiction; and Wolcott on Barthelme.

As I mentioned in The Week this summer, Tom’s drawing of Keogh (at right) appeared in the first issue of the magazine. Her own work, however, was never published there.
 

My favorite of Keogh’s novels, My Name is Rose, depicts a talented woman and unfaithful wife who, rather than focusing on her own art, has married a would-be novelist who works as a cultural critic. Like the new magazine that employs him, the husband has little native aesthetic judgment but is attuned mostly to the way the wind is blowing. His editor is likewise preoccupied with tracking all things hip.

After I found out about Tom’s drawing, and read what information is available about the doomed marriage, I began to wonder if Keogh wrote My Name is Rose partly to satirize the upstart Paris Review and its acolytes.
 

Joan Schenkar, author of the forthcoming Patricia Highsmith biography The Talented Miss Highsmith, became friendly with Keogh, one of few female writers Patricia Highsmith praised, while researching her subject. “I wanted to know,” Schenkar told me, “who could have produced a novel that impressed [Highsmith].”

The Talented Miss Highsmith arrived in the mail earlier this week. One fascinating passage — in which Schenkar revisits Highsmith’s praise for Keogh’s Meg, and explains why the book would have resonated with the steely Mr. Ripley author — incidentally lends credence to my intuition that Keogh didn’t care for The Paris Review.

It was in Queens, too, where Pat [Highsmith] joined a girl gang, another faintly delinquent experience she remembered with great pleasure in the last decde of her life. It was the “activity” of the gang — “they mostly ran around and had meetings, a lot of physical movement” — that Pat liked: the same active life she was later to admire so much in men. Her gang memories undoubtedly colored the wonderful review she gave to Meg (1950), a first novel by an ex-ballet dancer who also happened to be the adventurous granddaughter of a U.S. president. The ex-dancer’s name was Theodora Roosevelt Keogh and she lived in Paris with her husband Tom Keogh, resolutely refusing to give her publisher, Roger Straus, permission to trade on her illustrious name. A favorite of her formidable aunt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodora shunned The Paris Review crowd (they ignored her work as well, as they ignored the work of most women writers), and went on to write novels of such piercing sensual perception — a marriage of Colette and L.P. Hartley — that composer and diarist Ned Rorem remembers her from 1950s Paris as ‘our best American writer — certainly our best female writer.’

Pat wrote her review of Keogh’s novel Meg for The Saturday Review in April of 1950. It was Pat’s first published piece of criticism — one of the few reviews she would ever write about a work authored by a woman — and it is probably the most favorable review she ever published. The novel about which Pat was so untypically excited is a wayward work, with just the kind of heroine who would appeal to Pat: a preadolescent, androgynous prep school girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan who carries a knife, dreams of being suckled by lions, blackmails her lesbian history teacher, runs with a wild gang of boys from the docks, and has a distinctly undaughterly reltionship with the father of one of her friends. In the last sentence of her critique of Meg, Pat left no doubt about how much of herself she saw in Theodora Keogh’s young heroine.

“Such an admirable personage is she with her banged-up knees, her dirty sweaters, her proud vision of the universe that, remembering one’s own childhood, one wishes one had kept more of Meg intact.”

See, previously: Keogh’s The Double Door; Keogh’s My Name is Rose; Highsmith on writing; and Highsmith’s snails.

So I got a kick out of this passage in Hermione Lee’s Biography: A Very Short Introduction (excellent book; eternal disclosure), which reveals that, while James was theoretically opposed to sensationalistic biographies, he read them “with excitement.”

Henry James wrote with horrified brilliance, in The Aspern Papers (1888) and elsewhere, about the violation of the writer’s secret life by ‘publishing scoundrels’. He passionately believed that ‘a man’s table-drawers and pockets should not be turned inside out’, burned many private papers in the (useless) hope of ‘frustrating’ biographical intrusion, and resented the posthumous exhibition of friends such as Robert Louis Stevenson. The trial and disgrace of Oscar Wilde in 1895 gripped and appalled him: ‘Yes’ (he wrote to Edmund Gosse) ‘it is hideously, atrociously dramatic & really interesting — so far as one can say that of a thing of which the interest is qualified by such a sickening horribility.’ He was as fascinated by the private lives of writers as he was horrified by their exposure. When he went on a motor-tour of France in 1907 with Edith Wharton, for instance, he couldn’t wait to visit George Sand’s house in Nohant to see the rooms where George and her lovers had, as he put it, ‘pigged so thrillingly together’.

The image above is of James and Wharton in 1904.

Judging from the advance reviews at Amazon, some readers seem to expect The Joy Luck Club, but for Japan, which is not at all the story they find.

The book is deeply preoccupied with girls, talent, and power. As Mockett has observed, talented women often fare badly in fiction. And yet Satomi, one of the main characters in Picking Bones from Ash, expects her creative virtuosity to ensure her independence. Her monologue opens the novel.

My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably, and masterfully talented.

This is different from being intelligent or even educated. The latter, she insisted, could get a girl into trouble, convincing her that she has the same power as men. Certainly the biggest mistake a woman could make was to rely on her beauty. Such a woman is destined to grow old and ugly very quickly because she is so much more disappointed by what she sees in the mirror than someone who is busy. “But when you are talented,” she whispered to me late at night as we lay in our futons, “you are special. You will have troubles, but they won’t be any of the ordinary ones.”

For more Mockett, see the profile in the Columbia Spectator, her thoughts on talented girls, her book notes for Largehearted Boy, her advice for aspiring writers, her interview with Colson Whitehead, and her recipe for bamboo shoots. She also has a blog.

Over the years I’ve developed a bad habit of going over sentences again and again in my fiction because they don’t quite sound right. By that I mean that the rhythm is off or the vowel sounds clash or an adjective is too bland or, worse, too “creative” in some overcomplicated or cutesy way that distracts from the flow of the story.

Occasionally I nail what I want to say, in the end, but often I walk away at least partly unsatisfied.
 

Because I think so much nowadays about construction of phrases at this obsessive level, I was fascinated by Dave Hickey’s “The Song in Country Music,” the entry for 1953 in Greil Marcus’ and Werner Sollors’ A New Literary History of America. Hickey focuses on the vast influence of Hank Williams’ compressed songwriting following his death that year at twenty-nine.

The only people in Nashville who learned any positive lessons from Williams’s career were the songwriters and the cowboys… The songwriters, many of whom were Texans and nurtured in the culture of the laconic West, took control of country songwriting by learning the compression of Williams’s craft. That craft was the primary topic of conversation among songwriters of the period. When I asked Rogert Miller what it was about Williams’s songwriting that touched him, he said, “Meticulous. They’re meticulous and all hooked up.” When I asked him what this meant, he sang me two lines from one of his songs.

The moon is high and so am I.
The stars are out and so will I be pretty soon.

“That’s maybe a little too hooked-up,” Miller said, and sang half a verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” a song by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster that Miller had discovered and recorded first.

Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Headed for the trains.
Feeling nearly faded as my jeans.

“That’s hooked up,” Miller said. “I love the ‘as’ that picks up ‘flat’ and bat.’”

When I asked Willie Nelson, he observed that Williams was less a ’songwriter’ than a ’song-singer’ who obviously sang songs in progress over and over until they came out right. Waylon Jennings said much the same thing. When I asked him about Williams’ songs, he sang lines from two or three of them and showed me how the sounding of the consonants moved from the front to the back of the mouth so the vowels were always singable — you didn’t have to stutter or swallow the words. Billy Joe Shaver, whose junior high school English teacher sent him off to the navy with books by Robert W. Service and Dylan Thomas, admired the way Williams’s figurative poetry virtually disappeared into the facts of the narrative. “‘Melt your cold, cold heart’… ‘Today I saw you on the street/ And my heart fell at your feel’… ‘The silence of a falling star/ Lights up a purple sky.’ Like that,” Shaver said. “The closest I got was ‘I’m just an ol’ chunk of coal/ But I’m gonna be a diamond some day,’ which could describe one of Hank’s songs.”

Harlan Howard, the most meticulous of country songwriters after Hank Williams, went into more detail. He sang the first verse of “Cold Cold Heart.”

I try so hard my dear to say
That you’re my every dream.
Yet you’re afraid each thing I do
Is just some evil scheme
Some mem’ry from your lonesome past
Keeps us so far apart.
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind
And melt your cold, cold heart

Howard then pointed out what Roger Miller meant by hooked up. He explained that those eight short lines were invisibly held together by fifteen internal r phonemes. There are triples in the first two lines, four pairs, and the terminal “heart” that gives the verse closure. “Nobody notices this,” Howard said. “That’s the idea, but once these words are put together this way, they don’t come apart.”

The whole essay is worth seeking out. (And here’s Laura Miller’s review of the anthology.)
 

In the clip below, you can watch Roger Miller, on Johnny Cash’s show, creating his own hilarious and bawdy hooked-up verse about a piece of twine.

Image of Hank Williams taken from The Austin Chronicle.

Around lunchtime Tuesday, email arrived from Philip Connors, one of my favorite writers whose work you may not know yet. (See, e.g., Why is writing an editorial like pissing yourself in a blue serge suit?)

“As a follower of your continuing family revelations, I have to say it pleases me to know there’s at least one person out there who can probably relate to the attached,” he wrote.
 

Curious, I opened the file, and was completely unprepared for what I started reading. “So Little to Remember” is a remarkably candid account (in the current n+1) of the aftermath of Connors’ brother Dan’s suicide, and the truest and most disturbing piece of writing I’ve come across recently. The brothers were not close, which only made Dan’s death more shocking, mysterious, and difficult to accept.

As with all of Connors’ work, the essay is so meticulously constructed, it resists excerpting. I’ve posted a screenshot of the first few paragraphs below, anyhow, in the interest of encouraging you to read the whole thing. Below that, after the jump, the author explains how the piece came to be written. He touches on the tensions — of endless interest to me — between life, and writing about it.
 
 

 

Connors writes:

I was very slow in coming around to the idea of [the essay] as a piece of writing, self-contained. It began as a thought experiment. What if I went through my all my notebooks and pulled together all the entries that dealt with my brother and his death? If I compiled them in a single document, maybe I would see certain patterns in my thinking, certain obsessions that were recurrent. I thought I’d use it as a well of raw material from which I could dip when I needed inspiration. I was trying to write a book about his suicide and wasn’t having much luck.

So, about four years ago, I undertook the mind-numbing task of reading everything I’ve poured into those notebooks over the years. I stuck miniature Post-it Notes next to any passage that touched, directly or indirectly, on Dan’s death. When I thought I’d marked them all, I went back to the beginning and typed them into the computer. The whole thing came to about 40,000 words. I printed it and took it with me to my summer job as a fire lookout and just sort of lived with it for a season, out in the woods. I think it was the end of that summer, the summer of 2006, when I finally began to see it as a proper “piece of writing,” with a kind of natural narrative arc, a sense of drama, and even a kind of purgation near the end. It certainly hadn’t inspired me to write anything new.

I spent another year and a half going over it when I had the stomach for it, cutting out stuff that was pointlessly redundant or over-the-top lugubrious. I got rid of about 20,000 words this way. Then I found some other notebooks I’d forgotten about, small, palm-sized notebooks I wrote in on the subway when I lived in New York. There was more material there. Eventually, I ended up with about 22,000 words. I showed it first to my wife, who cried and felt ill for a couple of days. This seemed like the kind of reaction I’d want from a reader, so I sent it to the usual places I send stuff knowing it will be rejected, and of course it was — too long, too dark, too personal. Not quite right somehow for glossy paper. So I sent it to n+1 about a year ago, and they said — I’m not sure how it works for us, but let’s do it anyway.

Together we cut another big chunk of it. We argued over how many of the other writers’ quotes to keep — there were a lot; it was almost as much a commonplace book as a diary — and now, I think, what’s left is what’s essential. It’s not exactly me: I had other thoughts and other interests during those years. I wrote about women, and hangovers, and my stupid job at the Wall Street Journal, and I wrote a lot about people and things I saw on the subway, in bars, or on the streets. In that sense, “So Little to Remember” is an artificial creation. It focuses on one slice of my life over an eight-year period. A pretty intense slice, but still just one slice.

The last thing I did was show it to my parents and get my mother’s permission to use her diary entries. They were both incredibly brave about it. It could not have been easy for them to read. With my father in particular, I have a richer relationship than the one depicted in the piece. But he understands that, the incompleteness of a piece of writing in gathering up all of life’s complexity. As for me, I’m happy to be done with it. I’ve always been partial to the idea that a piece of writing is its own separate entity, even if it came out of my pen. It will have its own life in the world distinct from my life. I like that thought. It’s a way of letting go by making stories.
 

Fiction and the rest of life edition:

“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours — an actress — was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn’t plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.” — Joan Didion (pictured), The Paris Review, 1978

“The basic theme on which I’ve tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o’clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.” — Thomas Mann, New York Times, 1955

“The photographic darkroom emerged as a perfect metaphor for my life. It was the one place I could lock myself in (rather than being locked in) and legally not admit anyone else. For me it became a kind of temple. There is an episode in Steps in which a young philosophy student at the State university selects the lavatories as the only temples of privacy available to him. Well, think how much more of such a temple a darkroom is in a police state. Inside, I would develop my own private images; instead of writing fiction I imagined myself as a fictional character.” — Jerzy Kosinski, The Paris Review, 1972

“In a sense, the fiction creates the reality, but it’s a very complicated relationship. I think if you imagine a certain kind of person, then that person comes into being. You become that person. Or at least this kind of person becomes a possibility. But you have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.” — Margaret Drabble, The Paris Review, 1978

“I realized not understanding something is perhaps the best reason a novelist can have to write about it; I realized my favourite novels were, with rare exceptions, novels of enquiry, of investigation. From Conrad’s Under Western Eyes to Sebald’s The Emigrants, certain works of fiction give us the sense that in writing them authors are entering an undiscovered country. They seem to know their story no better than their narrators; we read them and feel that writing, for them, is finding out.” — Juan Gabriel Vásquez, PEN America Center, 2008
 

Prior literary quips, observations, instructions, and warnings: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Shelf Discovery, inspired by my friend Lizzie Skurnick’s relentlessly entertaining Jezebel column, Fine Lines — “in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth” — is just out.

The book collects Lizzie’s insights on classics like The Long Secret, My Darling, My Hamburger, Jacob Have I Loved, and The Secret Garden in one place, and features contributions from Laura Lippman, Margo Rabb, Anna Holmes, and others.

To win a copy, head over to Jezebel and try your hand at identifying cover images from old editions of the books. The ones above are taken from the Shelf Discovery gallery. You might find some clues there.
 

Here’s a brief excerpt from one of Lizzie’s latest columns, on that perennial favorite, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret:

Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. We’re moving today. I’m so scared God. I’ve never lived anywhere but here. Suppose I hate my new school? Suppose everyone there hates me? Please help me God. Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible. Thank you.

Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible….was there ever a greater metaphor for the terror one feels at the onset of pubescence? (I’m from Bergen Country and live in Jersey City — so no haters, please.) But, in her merest, timid request, the person of Margaret Simon, the character who introduced young girls everywhere, and I do mean young girls everywhere, to the notion of getting their periods, puts her finger exactly on how it feels to start to grow up. It’s not like an exciting trip to Radio City Music Hall with Grandma. It’s a long, featureless ride in the other direction, culminating in a blank exit ramp off a highway into a town without anyone you know.

The trick, he says, is to abandon the idea that you’re going to work your way through the Western canon on a two-week tour of France.

A perfect book to take along on a trip is one “of such a kind that one can open it anywhere and be sure of finding something interesting, complete in itself and susceptible of being read in a short time.” He suggests, among other things, poetry, La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, and “the aphoristic works of Nietzsche.”
 

I was surprised by his choice for “best traveler’s book of all”: “the twelfth, half-size edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Obviously Huxley conceived of his ideal portable library in a much earlier era, when “india paper and photography” were still something of a marvel, but his description of the encyclopedia, and the enjoyment the reader derives from it, remind me of nothing so much as the Internet — when at its most addictive, pointless, and glib:

A stray volume of the Encyclopedia is like the mind of a learned madman — stored with correct ideas, between which, however, there is no other connection than the fact that there is a “B” in both. From orach, or mountain spinach, one passes direct to oracles. That one does not oneself go mad, or become, in the process of reading the encyclopedia, a mine of useless and unrelated knowledge is due to the fact that one forgets. The mind has a vast capacity for oblivion — providentially, otherwise, in the chaos of futile memories, it would be impossible to remember anything useful or coherent…. Five minutes after reading about mountain spinach, the ordinary man, who is neither a botanist nor a cook, has forgotten all about it. Read for amusement: the Encyclopedia serves only to distract for the moment. It does not instruct, it deposits its nothing on the surface of the mind that will remain. It is a mere time killer and momentary tickler of the mind. I only use it for amusement on my travels; I should be ashamed to indulge so wantonly in mere curiosity at home, during seasons of serious business.

(I say this with huge affection, knowing that the online world contains a great deal of knowledge, insight, and wisdom, but also that you have to wade through the mountain spinach and sidestep the oracles to find it.)

Pick up the issue for Huxley’s full essay.

Because Max and I both enjoyed the Narnia books, inevitably we all ended up on the subject of Lewis’ affection for allegory. This passage from Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia offers the most insightful overview I’ve seen of his perspective:

Lewis felt that [the] all-too-common, slapdash interpretation of allegorical figures — describing them as merely “standing for” something else — missed the point. If, while reading The Romance of the Rose, we see Shame and Fear as no more than broad abstractions (much like the statue symbolizing Justice mounted over many a courtroom), we miss the richness of medieval allegory, and its intimacy. What we must first remember, Lewis argued, is that the friendly and hostile figures the lover meets are contained within the lady he loves. “Her character,” he write, “is distributed among personifications.”

What made allegory powerful, and in Lewis’s eyes “realistic,” is that it was a sophisticated way of representing the inner lives of human beings at the time the great allegories like The Romance of the Rose were written. Though we now take for granted the notion of psychologically conflicted characters (who are “torn” or “divided” by forces contained within their own hearts and minds), the medievals didn’t have an artistic and conceptual toolbox quite like our own. Instead of imagining each person as possessing a complex interior mental space full of warring impulses, their picture of character was more external. So for them, the natural way to portray what we would decribe as a debate within a person’s psyche would be to write a passage in which a figure labeled (for example) Reason stands in a garden quarreling with a figure called Passion. (One of the few pop culture remnants of this kind of representation are the little angel and devil who are sometimes drawn sitting on opposite shoulders of a cartoon character, each arguing for a different course of action. They are depicted outside of the character’s body, but they represent elements of his personality.)

The Romance of the Rose features a garden within a garden, where most of the action (such as it is) takes place; the inner garden is the mind and heart of the lady the lover woos. In a true allegory, where aspects of a woman’s personality are made to walk about and otherwise behave like independent people, the woman herself — the territory on which the conflict is being played out — becomes a physical space, a plot of land. The medieval self is, in this sense, geographical.

It’s helpful to keep this in mind when thinking about the difference between, say, a modern novel of psychological realism and some varieties of fantastic fiction, what Lewis called “fairy tales.”

Among the highlights of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters are the author’s Catholicism squabbles with Evelyn Waugh.

Here — to follow up on some recent thoughts about the melding of fact and invention in fiction — is an excerpt from a January 4, 1961, letter from Greene to Waugh. This missive was prompted by Waugh’s excoriation of A Burnt-Out Case, which he dismissed as technically deficient, absurdly melodramatic, and a sign that Greene’s skills were fading. Also, he believed the book caricatured Greene’s Catholic admirers, including himself. Wrote Greene:

With a writer of your genius and insight I certainly would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an author can never be identified with his characters. Of course in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in The Quiet American there were reactions of mine. I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his character lend what force of warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that the parallel must not be drawn all down the line and not necessarily to the conclusion of the line. Fowler, I hope, was a more jealous man than I am, and Querry, I fear, was a better man than I am. I wanted to give expression to various states or moods of belief and unbelieve. The doctor, whom I like best as a realized character, represents a settled and easy atheism; the Father Superior a settled and easy belief (I use ‘easy’ as a term of praise and not as a term of reproach); Father Thomas an unsettled form of believe and Querry an unsettled form of disbelief. One could probably dig a little of the author also out of the doctor and father Thomas!

Many writers say that they write what they do because the novels they want to read don’t exist.

I don’t think about my own book quite that way, but to me one of the most frightening things about writing fiction is the corollary to this idea: namely, if you have an individual voice and any skill whatsover, it will occur to you one day, as you obsess over the problems with your latest draft, that you are the only one who can fix it.

Obviously trusted readers are necessary and invaluable; their advice will help when your own vision falters. And once the book is in its nearly final stage, a good editor can pare away the fat and tell you, in a way that shows understanding of your project, what’s missing or not working. But no one else is going to be able to produce the actual words that will make the story work the way you want it to.

Because I’ve been preoccupied with this idea while writing lately, here’s the “You’re On Your Own” or “Revise, Revise, Revise” installment of writers’ quotes.
 

“Simply stated, maybe too simply, it is the writer’s business to have something of his own to say; second, to say it in his own language and style.” — Katherine Anne Porter

“I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.” — Jean Rhys (pictured)

“In the case of a story, the beginning and the end always reveal themselves to me, but not what happens between the starting point and the finish line. There are writers who say that they don’t work this way, that for them the beginning is sufficient, later they look for the best ending, the best solution. I know the beginning and the end, and I have to figure out what happens between them for the story itself, and I can be wrong. So I have to start again when I realize this.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“There is much that I like in the book — it seems to me more simply and clearly written than its predecessors and ingeniously constructed to avoid the tedium of the time sequence (I had learned something from my continual rereading of that remarkable novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), but until I reached the final part I did not realize the formidable problem I had set myself.” — Graham Greene, on The End of the Affair

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You [can] thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.” — Mark Twain
 

Prior literary quips, observations, instructions, and warnings: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Near the start of the year, we read “Noon Wine,” the story that served as my introduction to Katherine Anne Porter. Seeing it listed there reminded me of the new Library of America collection of Porter’s work, which, despite good intentions, I ended up giving short shrift when it appeared last fall.

The anthology includes not only Porter’s short fiction, but her essays and critical works, including an entertaining essay-diatribe on Colette. Here’s an excerpt from “A Most Lively Genius”:

It is hardly fair to American readers to have kept Colette from them for so long; nor fair to Colette, either, who should have been the fashion here at least twenty-five years ago — when we think how her lessers were being brought in all that time with fanfares, from every direction. In France she has been known and loved and read from the beginning, and though one always heard of her as a “light writer,” that was no term of disrespect — quite the contrary. The French above all know how much strength and discipline and even sheer genius it takes to write lightly of serious things; they never called her frivolous, far from it.

Yet there was always that tone of particular indulgence, reserved for gifted women who make no pretentions and know how to keep their place in the arts: a modest second best, no matter how good, to the next ranking males. Westcott, mentioning that both Proust and Gide wrote her letters of praise, says, flatly: “For, now that the inditers are both dead and gone, Colette is the greatest living French fiction writer.”

I agree to this extent: that she is the greatest living French writer of fiction and that she was while Gide and Proust still lived; that these two preposterously afflicted self-adoring, frankly career-geniuses got in Colette’s light; they certainly diminished her standing, though not her own kind of genius. She lived in the same world, more or less in the same time — without their money or their leisure. Where they could choose their occasions, she lived on a treadmill of sheer labor. Compared to their easy road of acknowledged great literary fictures, her life path was a granite cliff sown with cactus and barbed wire.

But she had the immense daylight sense of reality they both lacked and, beyond that, something Gide tried all his life to have, or to appear to have, and which he lacked to the end: a genuine moral sense founded on a genuine capacity for human feeling. She never attempts to haul God into criminal collusion with the spiritual deformities of her characters…

Colette conceals her aim, her end, in her method. Without setting her up in rivalry with her great jealous, dubious male colleagues and contemporaries, let us just be glad of such a good, sound, honest artist, a hard-working one; we could really do nicely with a lot more “light writers” like her. The really light-weight ones weigh a ton beside her.

(Just for the record: I don’t share Porter’s scorn for Proust’s work, which I last read in my early 20s; I haven’t sought out much Gide.)

Porter was famous for inventing and reinventing her life story. “Much of what follows is factually incorrect,” the editors note in a preface to her Paris Review interview. In honor of her ever-changing life story, however, they left “fake enough alone.”

At seventeen, O’Connor was invited to contribute to the high school paper. “‘I don’t know how to write,’ Mary Flannery answered. ‘But I can draw.’”

And years later, in the first iteration of her talk, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” she said:

“When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how.”

When I did read The Comforters later that year, I was amazed not only by its humor and complexity, but the ways in which it prefigured, and in some ways surpassed, the works of Barth, Barthelme, and other metafictional writers I respect. It even reminded me a little bit of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello works, except that it’s funnier. The Comforters is weird in the best way; there’s none of the random whimsy that poisons so many of today’s “humorous” postmodern throwbacks.

If those sentences make no sense to you, you’re not alone. I’ve never been able to communicate my enthusiasm for The Comforters very clearly.
 

Fortunately my friend Jessa Crispin recently linked from Bookslut to Brock Clarke’s excellent, excellent piece on Spark in the current Believer. If you read nothing else about books this weekend, please do spare some time for Genuine Artifice. An excerpt from the beginning:

The great Muriel Spark, who died on April 13, 2006, and whose most famous novel was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), bequeathed a great deal to her surviving readers. Spark — who, over the course of five decades, published twenty-one novels and twenty other works of fiction, poetry, biography, and criticism — has much to teach us about the virtues of omniscient narration and the limitations of first-person narration; about the pleasures of meanness; about the difference in fiction between economy and minimalism; about the relationship between art and religious belief. But what most interests me here is that which Spark can teach us about artifice and self-consciousness in fiction.

This subject has long bedeviled American fiction writers, who, on the subject of realism and metafiction, have acted less like writers open to nuance and difficulty and to the possible influence of writers superficially unlike themselves, and more like participants in Battle of the Network Stars’s tug-of-war contest. (Remember the William Gass-John Gardner 1970s point/counterpoint road show? A sample exchange from one of their public debates: Gardner: “The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” Gass: “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying.”) But maybe, if we’d paid more attention to Spark’s work — and in particular her two early novels The Comforters (1957) and Memento Mori (1959) — we wouldn’t feel the need to continually rehash these old arguments (“Realism is the literature of exhaustion”; “No, metafiction is the literature of exhaustion”; or”You’re not self-conscious enough”; “You’re too self-conscious”), to take sides and then defend the side we’ve taken, defame the side we haven’t.

It’s not that Spark makes a definitive case for one side or the other, but rather she makes the whole argument seem silly. In these two sly, spectacular novels, Spark shows us what should have been obvious all along: of course art is artificial, and of course writers must be self-conscious about it, but being self-conscious is not the end of a writer’s responsibility toward her book (as one often feels in, say, John Barth’s fiction, or Raymond Federman’s, or Ronald Sukenic’s), her characters, her readers, but is simply the most efficient, most honest, most rewarding, most self-critical, most moving, most beautiful way of doing so.

The Procrastination Edition

“Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer — he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive for him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.” — E.B. White, The Paris Review, 1969
 

“Of course any novelist has difficulties. I don’t have ‘blocks,’ I mean I don’t get into a state where absolutely nothing can be done for weeks; I can always do something, though the something that I do may have to be revised later on… I think the thing to do is to make one’s unconscious mind work for one. When there’s a problem, and suddenly you get a sort of knot in the procedure, where you want to do two things that are incompatible, for instance, or when you can’t really see what a character is like — there’s a sort of blank slate where the character ought to be — then you must meditate upon the problem, set it, as it were, as a problem to your unconscious mind, and hope that suddenly some creative flash will arrive. And that is a time that requires very great patience.” — Iris Murdoch, The Threepenny Review, 1984
 

“There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story… I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view… I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?’ Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone…” — Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846
 

“The book took a time long to finish because it took a long time to finish. There was a lot of it I didn’t understand. It often takes me a long time to write.” — Jamaica Kincaid, Salon, 1996
 

Prior literary quips, observations, and instructions: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Instead here’s an Xmas excerpt from Schaap’s forthcoming Drinking with Men. If you like this, listen to the author telling two stories on This American Life.
 

A Santa Cruz Christmas, 1989

At sunset most evenings, we went to the state beach, with its natural bridges of enormous eroded rocks, fired up a joint, and watched the winter surfers, the students, the drifters who’d long preceded our own drifting to this place, who must have arrived here much as we did, only years before, with no better plan, traveling the same tine in the same forked road, Santa Cruz or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Humboldt, Santa Cruz or _____, Santa Cruz or_____, Santa Cruz or _____. Santa Cruz instead of anywhere else, especially: instead of wherever they’d come from. Danny and Billy and I lived in the rusty brown Dodge van, parked on Mission Street, in front of the pizzeria where they worked, at least through Christmas, at which point Danny had managed to scrounge together enough money to return home to Jersey for the holidays.

Billy was a Christian, but not a religious one. Still, Christmas was Christmas. And I was one of those half-assed New York Jews who grew up celebrating Easter and Passover — whose family, truth be told, preferred Christmas to Chanukah, because ma really loved chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and overstuffed stockings, and a nice Bûche de Noël and all that, without particularly paying Jesus any mind, though she was firmly of the opinion that he seemed like a totally o.k. guy. So even for me, yes, Christmas was Christmas, and sleeping in a van would not do, nor would eating Domino’s discards.

“We should at least get a room somewhere,” I suggested. Billy quickly agreed, even though we were both close to broke. We checked into the cheapest motel we could find. At a convenience store across the road, for a small fee, we got a loitering grownup to procure a couple six-packs of Anchor Steam for us — the birth of the baby Jesus rated at least a classy regional beer.
 

“Should we get some Jack too?” Billy asked, half-serious. Only a week before, at a motel lounge outside L.A., I’d drunk at least twenty shots of the stuff in one go. I woke up a day later in the van, in Santa Cruz, 350 miles north of where I’d blacked out. Now even the smell of it — sickly-sweet, vanilla and burnt cotton — made me want to retch.

“Nah.” No way.

Billy and I settled into our motel room with our beer and our Cool Ranch Doritos and those cheese-crackers-with-peanut-butter that cost like a dollar for six packets — on account of Billy and me welcoming the occasional junk food splash-out with great enthusiasm, and, above all, on account of Christmas, we could dispense with our usual hippie-health-food-store-totally-organic pieties — and flipped on the TV, each of us claiming our own queen-size bed. Billy and I were friends, but not especially close friends, and, without Danny, we had little to say to each other. We idly watched the local news, then some cartoons, then some videos on MTV. When the clicker landed on the Yule Log, we gave each other a look of faint despair. This was our Christmas, our sad weird Christmas, and a motel room was nearly as shitty a place to be as the van. Doritos and beer were good, sure, but shouldn’t we go out for dinner?

“Shouldn’t we go out for dinner?” I asked. No argument from Billy.

We hit the strip — the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz — and checked the menus posted outside the restaurants. Every place was way too expensive, or full, or both, or closed. We trudged up Mission Street, past Domino’s. The Saturn Café, known at the time for its activist feminist clientele and vegan-friendly menu, was open. Of course it was open, but it did not do Christmas. No twinkling lights. No tinsel. No Santas or reindeer or candy canes. But there were free tables, and it was better than our stash back at the motel. We ordered salads and lentil soup, and the conversation stayed sparse. I kept my thoughts to myself: I wished I were home, not for good, just at that moment. I missed my family, imperfect as we were. I envied Danny, who at this moment was probably gleefully reneging on his vegetarianism and eating ham or turkey in the company of his relations, young and old, who was probably luxuriating in the flickering light of a Christmas tree, who was in the Northeast, where there was likely snow on the ground and maybe even children sledding, where Christmas was Christmas-y, not like this warm West Coast horseshit. I envied Danny, who was having a real Christmas, so different from Billy’s and mine, surrounded as we were by recalcitrant atheists picking at tempeh and brown rice. What was I doing here? Why had I chosen this? And I imagined that Billy, my reticent, accidental Christmas companion, was thinking much the same.

We walked quickly back to the motel in the cooling California night, past palm trees and strip malls, past so many parked cars and so few people. I glanced into strangers’ houses, through casement windows framing repeated tableaux of families being families at Christmastime, families drinking Egg Nog and, I figured, listening to Bing Crosby crooning “The Christmas Song” and Ella Fitzgerald elevating “Jingle Bells,” wishing one and all — except for me, except for Billy — a swinging Christmas, as they tallied their holiday hauls. We returned to the motel, to our matching queen size beds, to our already diminished six packs. We drank silently, a few feet apart, isolated by our unhappiness. I do not remember if Billy called home but I know I did not. I had elected this estrangement and would ride it out. We resumed our channel-flipping. Fuck the news and its cheerful reports of Christmas near-miracles and charitable acts. Fuck the Yule Log and all its stupid Yule Logness.

“Hey Billy, pass me another Anchor Steam.”

“You got it.”

And there we were. Two depressed kids far from home, far from parents and brothers and sisters, no cards, no calls, no high school diplomas, no home save a crappy brown van, pounding back bottles of beer, lying on dingy, quilted, motel bedspreads, tired but restless.

Flick. On the next channel: The Sound of Music. Beautiful pixie-haired Julie Andrews, Sister Maria — not yet betrothed to the Captain, not yet a Von Trapp — comforting her little Austrian charges with a litany of her favorite things. Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles! I thought of ma back in New York, and her inexhaustible cheerleading for The Great American Musical, her love of all things Rogers and Hammerstein, all things Lerner and Loewe, all things Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. I thought of Sunday evenings when I was even younger, in my grandfather’s little library, listening to The Original Cast Recording of every cast that had ever originally been recorded. I could see something stirring in Billy, too, something possibly warm and good, though I was sure in his case it had nothing to do with show tunes, and I watched as the fear and fretfulness slowly, slowly, started to wash away from his young, unshaven face. And I noticed, for the first time, really, what a fine face he had: both strong and soft, high cheekbones and Elvis-y lips, pretty blue eyes. Was he thinking of his favorite things? Well, God only knew what those were in Billy’s case — but soon, very soon, damn it if we didn’t feel so bad, if we felt, actually, pretty okay. And damn if by the time “Edelweiss” rolled around, small and white and blooming and growing forever, I wasn’t singing along with the brave, elegant (and, let us be honest, pretty fucking hot) Captain von Trapp while he strummed his guitar. And a feeling of freedom returned, a sense that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was doing was fine, then and there, for all its uncertainty. We both cried, and it was good.

“Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Pass me another beer.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Merry Christmas, man.”

“Yeah.” He turned his eyes away from the television, looked at me, and nodded. “Merry Christmas.”
 

Recent image of Santa Cruz’s Saturn Café taken from this site.