Archives for March 8, 2004

You’ll excuse me, I hope, for not posting extensively, or nearly at all, during my vacation. But I did want to take a few of my last moments here to blow New York kisses to all. What a long, strange trip it’s been–except for the long and the strange parts. It’s been maddeningly brief, and wonderfully familiar despite the two-and-a-half-year gap since the last time I was in town.

To get here Friday I braved high winds and heavy rain in the fragile carapace of a mini-jet from which four souls had been evicted due to weight concerns. Even more distressing, the book I had intended to read was very, very bad. Excruciating. I can’t be more specific just now, as I’m going to be reviewing it. Suffice it to say that after 25 pages I put the offending volume away–oh so far away, into the very depths of my carry-on–and submitted myself with relief to the potent charms of Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, which I’ve been reading very intermittently for a few months now.

I don’t believe it has ever taken me so long to read a book that I find so pleasurable. Weeks may have passed, but every time I pick it up again, everything snaps back into place and I’m instantly absorbed, the picture of a happy reader. In January, when I was on page 75, I suggested to a friend that he pick up a copy and we read it together. He also loved it, but he zipped right through, and six weeks later I’m still in the middle. We had a drink before dinner tonight and talked about how much we both adored it. But the embarrassing fact remains that I can’t seem to finish it. (See also Cup of Chicha’s inventory of the unfinished books on her floors.) Which leads me to scare up alternatives to the unsettling theory that I am just a hopeless slacker.

Alternative theory #1 cites the quality of Hazzard’s prose. You could never call it dense; there’s nothing the least bit tangled about it, and the sentences in particular are crystalline things. But every second or third sentence seems to contain some startlingly astringent perception about no less sweeping a subject than human nature, or love, or women, or men. I find myself reading almost every sentence a second time successively. It’s the first book I’ve ever read and reread simultaneously. Is it possible to compare something to quicksand and mean it as praise?

Alternative theory #2 is simply that I don’t want to reach the end of the novel.

But I may get a lot closer to that point during the flight home tomorrow (depending, perhaps, on how soon I wrap this up and get to bed). And later this week, beginning late Monday or Tuesday, I’ll be posting a series of Transit of Venus fortune cookies. Also more on the delightful events of this weekend.

Till then.

He who wills great things must gird up his loins;

only in limitation is mastery revealed,

and law alone can give us freedom.

Goethe, “Natur und Kunst” (trans. David Luke)

Felix Salmon, writing at MemeFirst, had an interesting reaction to a recent posting in which, among other things, I discussed the difficulties inherent in drawing up Top Five lists:

Terry Teachout, today, says that “it’s usually not that hard to pick a One Best–absolute excellence is by definition self-evident”. He goes on to give examples: “The greatest opera ever written,” he says, “is The Marriage of Figaro“. To which my immediate reaction is “That’s not the greatest opera ever written

At lunch with Supermaud on Sunday, the talk turned to editors and publishers, and I mentioned a letter Flannery O’Connor sent in 1949 to an editor at Rinehart who wanted her to rewrite Wise Blood. Neither Maud nor Our Girl knew about this letter, so I promised to post it. Here it is:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I writer will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Rinehart wasn’t, and Wise Blood was published by Harcourt, Brace three years later. Ignored by most critics, it has long since been recognized as a modern American classic, one of the comparatively few American novels of permanent interest to be written in the Fifties…but who knew? Imagine the self-assurance it must have taken for an unknown, unpublished author to have sent a letter like that to an editor at a major house.

Me, I can’t imagine it–but, then, I didn’t write Wise Blood, either.

I wrote enthusiastically
a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal about the new Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which I found both convincing and moving. My critical brethren, however, varied widely in their views of the show, and not a few of them found the tone of the production to be insufficiently Jewish. This struck me as wrongheaded–especially since some of the critics in question were about as Jewish as pastrami on white with mayo–and I resolved to write something about it. Then I saw that Blake Eskin of Nextbook, an online magazine about “Jewish literature, culture and ideas,” had beaten me to the counterpunch:

Peter Marks of the Washington Post, whose critique of the ensemble’s pronunciation of mazel tov places him firmly in the chorus of authenticity-seekers, suggests a deeper reason for their fierce disapproval. “In the secular Jewish home of my childhood, about the closest we ever came to spiritual sustenance was Fiddler on the Roof,” he writes. The original cast album was in heavy rotation on the Marks family hi-fi; his father sang “If I Were a Rich Man” in the car; his brother played Tevye at summer camp. “Anyone expecting an experience that reenergizes a connection stretching back four decades will be sorely disappointed,” he says.

For Marks, I suspect, and for his contemporaries weaned on Fiddler, the real problem with this production is not its thin Yiddish flavor, but its failure as ritual, its inability to trigger warm memories of childhood. It’s as if he’s returned to his old bedroom, found a new blanket on the bed, and decided that the mattress isn’t as cozy as it once was. The problem is, it will never be as comfortable as the one you remember….

Read the whole thing here, please. I couldn’t have put it better. Now I needn’t try.