Unprintable Version

Little Marx On Paper: the Groucho Letters

My periodic hand-wringing about whether I should continue blogging is prompted by thoughts such as writers in the past didn’t waste their time blogging. They devoted every working second to their great projects, thickening Ulysses, adding to Augie March, refining To the Lighthouse. What I forget is that before blogging there were journals, notebooks, literary journalism, commonplace books, and letters. My journal entries have thinned to a few presumably therapeutic yowls.  Other than the odd review for Rain Taxi, I don’t do the kind of literary journalism that used to be common for aspiring writers.   Most of the regular non-local readers of this blog are people I’ve either corresponded with back when people did such things or would be corresponding with if people still did such things now.

This has all been entertainingly confirmed by the Groucho Letters, which house many of the gripes and enthusiasms (Ben Hecht, E.B. White) which might find their way onto a modern blog.  Being Groucho Marx, he simply wrote to the people who bugged him.  This, to President of Chrysler, in 1954:

Each year the motor manufacturers hammer home the idea of more horsepower. I realize a reasonable amount of power is necessary, but I think it would be much smarter if emphasis were placed on safety rather than additional speed . . ..  I also think that if a device could be installed on the carburetor (I understand there are such things) that would eliminate the belching of carbon monoxide through the city streets, the Chrysler Corporation would create an enormous amount of good will . . .   

Speech Lessons

When I started poking around in American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution the Civil War, I had thought I was reading something deeply different from the literature of comic books, and, of course, I was. But there is something epic and audacious about both comics and oratory and it’s something you don’t find much in mainstream contemporary writing. 

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The questions, I’m sure answered elsewhere, bear asking: why not “eighty-seven years ago?” Why the galloping cadences?  Why “on this continent?” Why “a new nation” when “brought forth” implies a beginning? Why not simply “dedicated to equality?”

Because then one would lose the rhyme of “four” and “score,” the broadening of “on this continent,” the alliteration of “new nation,” the vulnerability of  equality not as a fact but as a “proposition,” the humanity of “men.” Most of all, you would lose something less definable which has made these words adhere to people’s consciousness for over a century.   

In Reading Comics, Wolk notes that Alan Moore uses iambic cadences so often they have become a tic, which shows some of the limitations of this style when you aren’t standing in a battlefield.  Another comic quotes Philip Larkin's description of a church– "a serious house on serious earth"–from what may be my favorite poem ("Churchgoing").

Don’t get me wrong: Strunk and White, which defines good contemporary writing, is a Godsend if you are faced with bad student and business prose. But contemporary notions of good writing may overvalue efficiency and undervalue rhythm. How many E.B. White sentences do you remember?

Bummed Out?

I'm not sure I'm going to make it through the Dharma Bums. A professor of mine once said some drafts of stories of mine lacked what he called narrative drive–that sort of itch in the prose or the character or the situation that propels you forward.  I have reached the bottom of the mountain and the story seems a little stalled.  I will give the book a little more time to see if I have reached the end of the road.

Because I was reading the Kerouac while relaxing in the lake home of some friends of ours, I realized that while I don't think the term "summer reading" is very useful, "vacation reading" is. You want to be reading something James Wood wouldn't review. 

Kerouac is an aw-shucks Hemingway.   “We were feeling tired and great.  We spread out in the grass and rested and swapped packs and strapped them on and were rarin to go.”  “It was the most delicious supper of all time.”  This may not be great writing, but it sure is charming writing. 

The structure of Dharma Bums–and, in my vague  sense, other Kerouac books–suffers from a similar Pollyanna-ism.  At least so far, Ray Smith is not a character in trouble, trying to get out. If there’s a character in trouble, trying to get out, it’s us, it’s unhip America. This isn’t traditional fiction, Kerouac can make psychology and character seem almost small-minded; the book’s soul seems more in Whitman: dig this. There’s something ecstatic here and a little evangelical: change your ways.  The trick is sustaining a work of fiction that doesn’t have the concerns of fiction.

Bum Wrap

The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums is a study in how to package lesser known classics. The graphic-novel art connects the book to its likely current readers, the introduction by the lucid yet scholarly Ann Douglas connects it to its time.  The cover underscores the boyishness of the Beats, the introduction underscores their seriousness.  The sturdy cover has back and front flaps; there are six panels, with fictional versions of Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsburg, and Kerouac represented as dogs discussing poetry.

Vienna Sausage

O Pioneers! has a title that suggests that its highest ambition is to be a musical. But I’d love to write an essay comparing The Great Gatsby with O Pioneers! as studies of the American Dream. O Pioneers! –despite an even worse title–might be turn out to be a richer book, and I love Gatsby. 

The book’s  first scene is an evocation of Nebraska as a desolate nightmare; its second is a kitten being helped down from a pole; and its third scene is a symbolic castration: 

A shabby little traveling man, who was just then coming out of the store on his way to the saloon, stopped and gazed stupidly at the shining mass of hair she bared when she took off her veil; two thick braids pinned about her head in the German way, with a fringe of reddish-yellow curls blowing out from under her cap. He took his cigar out of his mouth and held the wet end between the fingers of his woolen glove. “My God, girl, what a head of hair!”  he exclaimed quite innocently and foolishly. She stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lip–most unnecessary severity. It gave the little clothing drummer such a start he actually let his cigar fall to the sidewalk and went off weakly in the teeth of the wind to the saloon. 

Subtlety and Surprise

Am still on my Willa Cather jag.  That is probably not a sentence one encounters that often, but I hope to popularize it. 

I was surprised by the complexities and tensions in Willa Cather’s work, especially because these very tensions struck me as distinctly Midwestern: chaste books with androgynous undercurrents, traditional books filled with rebels,  books about a proto-red state packed with European eccentrics; hymns to the rural written by someone who fled to New York.

This tension, which would be ill-served by bullying words like “hypocrisy” or “denial,” actually surfaces as subtlety and it’s often surprising. I think of when I was home from college one summer and mentioned that I’d heard the speculation, then popular, that Hemingway was a latent homosexual. My conservative Catholic mother said, “Everybody’s a latent everything” and continued washing the dishes. 

Like Iowa, Unprintable Version appears to be a Gateway to Nebraska

I realized that, of the books I’ve read so far this year, my two favorites are both set in Nebraska (Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker,  Willa Cather’s My Antonia).

Maybe this is because Powers’ insistence that fiction can explore ideas strikes me as expansive; maybe this is because Willa Cather’s complicated, qualified nostalgia seems to so exactly mimic mine; and maybe because both writers love the Midwest enough to see its blemishes.

From The Echo Maker, a description of a brain injury victim:  “Two months after the accident, strangers who talked to him might find him a little slow and inclined toward strange theories, but nothing outside the local norm.” 

A certain boostery defensiveness can be a part of loving this part of this country but it shouldn’t be a part of writing about it.

Triumph of the Willa

1.  I regret that I dismissed Willa Cather as a grandmotherly irrelevance. My Antonia is an invaluable book.  Its celebration and criticism of the Midwest still rings true.

2. Part of my problem with Cather was that she was so quintessentially Midwestern.  And there’s always been a certain kind of Midwestern writing which I’ve  disdained: self-consciously folksy, smugly dreary, theatrically laconic.  Identity as self-parody.  I still hate that kind of writing, but that’s not Willa.

3. I am also embarrassed by the Midwest in approximately the same way that teenagers are embarrassed by their parents. I’ve confused this with a literary judgment. 

4. I scanned the intelligent introduction and it points out that the book’s essential emotion is nostalgia–an emotion defined by its very inability to become action and thus not a tricky theme for fiction. Interestingly, the liveliest parts of the book are the chapters when Jim–who is so clearly a stand-in for Cather that the book exudes a strangely wholesome androgyny–is a senior in high school and about the leave Black Hawk.  In this, the book feels closer to movies like Ghost World and Diner than to old prairie novels. 

Writes of Spring (Willa Cather II)

There is a great deal of tact and pragmatism and sweetness in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for flinching or ‘denial.”  Consider this sentence:  “Jake and Jelnick went ahead on horseback to cut the body loose from the pool of blood in which it was frozen fast to the ground.”

That image sweetens this one: “When spring came, after that hard winter, one couldn’t get enough of the nimble air.” The evocation of a midwestern spring that follows strikes me as definitive or at least exemplary.