Archives for April 2005

Now my brother writes:

The phrase you wrote about a few days ago, “black dog”: Truckers use that term when they have been on the road, usually past their legal hours, too long. It’s when you start to haze over and the white line dashes start to take on the appearence of two eyes in the head of a black dog. Patrick Swayze starred in a movie with the same title.

I think we may be onto something here….

As for me, I’m back from my brief holiday on the Hudson River and reasonably raring to go. Take a look at the right-hand column and you’ll find new stuff here and there (including a fresh pair of Top Fives). I’ve got four Old Media pieces to write this week, so I don’t know how much blogging I’ll be doing between now and Friday, but I’m sure there’ll be more than there ought to be. Watch this space and marvel at my irrepressible logorrhea.

Ogden Nash, “The Middle”

The flood of email that followed, supplemented by blog posts at Tingle Alley, Critical Mass, and Sheila O’Malley, was gratifying. As I posted back then, it soon became clear that John Irving’s The World According to Garp was the widely-read, well-known book I should have thought of. But many others were also mentioned:

Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago

Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad

David Markson, Springer’s Progress

Carol Shields, Swann

Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish

Jorstein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

Honore de Balzac, Lost Illusions

Stephen King, The Dark Half

Stephen King, Misery

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift

Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next series

Anthony Burgess, Enderby tetrology

Paul Auster, Oracle Night

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Tobias Wolff, Old School

Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters

Philip Roth, My Life as a Man

Percival Everett, Erasure

Elliott Baker, A Fine Madness

Wyndham Lewis, Self-Condemned

Stephen King, The Body

George Gissing, New Grub Street

Booth Tarkington, Penrod

Lydia Davis, The End of the Story

James McCourt, Time Remaining

Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

Cathleen Schine, Rameau’s Neice

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

I can’t vouch that all of these fit the description, since I’ve read only a few of them. (To clarify the description, I was thinking of writing with professional aspirations, not diaries or letters, which are far more common; epistolary novels have a healthy body of criticism all their own.) A couple of correspondents had further thoughts on the device that I thought worth sharing. Aaron Haspel from God of the Machine echoed my own thinking on the subject, but more eloquently:

Most novelists have more sense than to try to recreate their characters’ work. The recreation usually proves a disappointment, especially if the writing character is supposed to be a great genius, as he so often is. It’s tough enough to write well in your own voice, let alone in someone else’s. This is why in Franny and Zooey Salinger wisely confines himself to Seymour Glass’s juvenilia. Pale Fire succeeds because John Shade is a mock-genius and the 999-line poem is a burlesque.

It’s certainly a giant risk. For all but the most skilled and imaginative authors, writing a character’s writing is probably the quickest way to destroy that character’s credibility as a writer. If you really succeed at producing a sustained sample of good fictional writing, you expend the toil of writing, say, a book and a half for the credit and recompense of writing only one. And you risk leaving your readers high and dry; if the book-within-the-book is all that great, they may feel cheated not being able to read the whole thing. Perhaps it’s for this reason that Irving gives us a short story by Garp, something reproducible in its entirety. My friend Joshua Kosman, classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is extremely edifying not only on Garp, but on the topic at large:

The obvious example is John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which not only includes a complete piece of Garp’s fiction, but makes it the basis of his entire career as a writer. It’s a pretty daring stunt, I always thought. Think about it: Young Garp sets out to become a writer, and first makes his name with a short story called “The Pension Grillparzer.” Thereafter his career has some ups and downs, and he has periodic crises of confidence, etc. But whenever he’s in doubt, someone will say to him, “But look–you’re an amazingly good writer! After all, you wrote ‘The Pension Grillparzer’! So don’t give up!” In other words, the entire notion of him as a writer is predicated on his having turned out this one terrific short story. And Irving includes in the novel the entire text of ‘The Pension Grillparzer,’ and–it’s incredibly good. Whew!

In fact, I have a category I collect of narrative works that conform to this pattern. It’s a very small and select list. The criteria are: 1) The work contains within it another work, either complete or in part, that is actually created and displayed, not merely described. 2) The artistic success of the inner work is essential to the plot of the outer, and 3) the artistic judgment that is required by the outer narrative is in fact correct (i.e., ‘Pension Grillparzer’ really is as good as the characters in The World According to Garp all think it is).

The founding members of this class are Garp and Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger,” which is about a guy who wins a singing prize contest by inventing a song that somewhat conforms to and somewhat transcends the rules of the medieval singing guild. You actually hear the song being created line by line, and damned if it isn’t every bit as phenomenal as the plot of the opera demands. There was a third work in this category, but I’ve forgotten now what it is.

One that notably doesn’t make it, by the way, is Woody Allen’s Crimes & Misdemeanors. You may remember that he plays a filmmaker whose career is going nowhere and who’s very bitter about it. And late in the film, you actually see a piece of the film that the character has been working on all this time–and it’s horrible! But of course since it’s Woody Allen, who clearly can’t distinguish between good films and bad ones, there’s no way to know whether that’s intentional or not.

Anyway, to return to the original query: Another example, but less on point than Garp is Steven Millhauser’s wonderful first novel, Edwin Mullhouse. Dunno if you’ve ever read it, but it’s a sort of Pale Fire-esque thing about two eleven-year-old boys, one of whom is writing the biography of the other. Edwin’s magnum opus, a novel called “Cartoons,” isn’t actually reproduced, but there’s about a 10-page description of it that is breathtaking.

Wow–we can only hope that Joshua’s full-length article about the phenomenon will eventually appear! He’s thought about this a lot more than I have. To answer his question, I haven’t read Edwin Mullhouse, but I’ve enjoyed some of Millhauser’s other books. Little Kingdoms contains one of my favorite short stories, “Catalogue of the Exhibition,” which tells the chilling gothic tale of a fictional Romantic-era painter’s life and loves through the sole means of catalog descriptions of his paintings. Millhauser makes you really “see” the paintings, rendering his story roughly the visual equivalent of the novels listed above.

Finally, a commenter at Tingle Alley showed me the way to the wonderful Invisible Library, a site that seems, sadly, not to be actively updated any longer. It provides an extensive catalog of “books that only appear in other books,” and a generous list of related links and references. Among the latter is a link to Max Beerbohm’s essay “Books within Books,” which provides me with the epilogue for this very long post:

I am shy of masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers expected me to find. As a matter of fact, those disappointments are dim in my memory: it is long since I ceased to take publishers’ opinions as my guide. I trust now, for what I ought to read, to the advice of a few highly literary friends. But so
soon as I am told that I “must” read this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I become strangely loth to do anything of the sort. And what I like about books within books is that they never can prick my conscience. It is extraordinarily comfortable that they don’t exist.

I went to all this trouble because I wanted to be sure that the word got out about The Light in the Piazza, the new Broadway musical adapted by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas from Elizabeth Spencer’s 1959 novella. It’s a must:

Adam Guettel, the most gifted and promising theater composer of his generation, has returned to the stage after a nine-year absence with “The Light in the Piazza.” To call it the best new musical I’ve reviewed in this space, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” included, is to understate the case. It is, in fact, the best new musical to open in New York since “Passion,” and Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater has done itself proud by bringing so important a show to Broadway….

The score, radiantly orchestrated by Mr. Guettel and conductor Ted Sperling for a 15-piece chamber ensemble built around a harp, is a shimmering evocation of Italian sunshine, dappled with touches of sorrow. Comparisons to Stephen Sondheim being inevitable, I should say at once that Mr. Guettel resembles Mr. Sondheim only in the richness of his imagination. His harmonic language is more astringent and wide-ranging, his lyrics more conversational (you won’t go away talking about his rhyme schemes). He is, in short, his own man, and in “The Light in the Piazza” he has written a musical directly comparable in seriousness of purpose to “Passion” or “Sweeney Todd” without sounding anything like either of those shows….

If you live in or near New York, make every possible effort to go. If not, Nonesuch will be releasing the original-cast CD of The Light in the Piazza on May 24. (To place an advance order, go here.)

I also reviewed Jeffrey Hatcher’s A Picasso, a play about an imaginary 1941 encounter between Pablo Picasso and a Nazi interrogator:

It’s reasonably intelligent and reasonably entertaining, though I doubt the real Picasso would have cracked quite all those one-liners under such dire circumstances (“Divorced?” “I keep trying”), much less stalked around the basement of a Paris art gallery like Groucho Marx in a tailcoat….

No link. To read the whole thing–and I have much more to say about The Light in the Piazza–buy this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, or go here to subscribe to the Journal‘s online edition. I recommend the latter, enthusiastically.

Constantin Brancusi (quoted in Dorothy Dudley, “Brancusi,” Dial, Feb. 1927)