i'm a very very complex person

Adam Gopnik, on memoir in general and the memoirs of Henry James specifically:

The effort to communicate experience rather than to invent it, the feeling that, however distilled and removed it might be, it is still distilled and removed from a river of experience that the author cannot quite dam and alter as he wishes, is the secret of the memoir's appeal. We like an author who gives it to us straight, no matter how fancy his prose style may be. James has a tricksy manner, but his purpose in his memoirs is touchingly transparent: to say how the big moments of his life felt exactly as they happened. Each page is lit up by the bright light of memory, then is crumpled by the aging hand of scruple, only to be smoothed out again by the comfort of fine old feelings: It looked like this! Did it really look like this? Well, it sure felt like this while I was looking.

Adrienne Rich, poet who changed me when I heard her work at sixteen years old, poet whose words I turned to when I first fell in love, poet of grief, poet of anger, poet of ardor--Adrienne Rich died today.

XVII
(from "Twenty-One Love Poems")

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

You can tell I'm on break thanks to my sudden spate of posts this week. Don't get bored of me yet, friends--the semester starts next week and I'm sure it'll get much quieter around here soon!

Anyhow, a few last reviews of 2009:

Pastoralia by George Saunders: George Saunders is a sneaky man. Just when you think his stories are nothing but zany scenarios and clever use of voice, the plot turns and they become devastating. There's a lot of wacky humor in this collection, which sometimes sits rather oddly with Saunders's grim vision of American life. All of the characters here are losers in one sense or another, and it often feels like Saunders is mocking them until it suddenly becomes clear that he's actually exposing the traps in which they are all caught. I've read quite a lot of Saunders in The New Yorker, but this is the first whole collection of his that I've read. I think his stories work better as a collection than they do individually; when I read just one of his stories it's easy to get distracted by the crazy elements, but when read as a group they gain in power.

The Sea by John Banville: Oh, how I wanted to love this book! I wanted this to be the Banville book that I could really embrace, rather than just coldly admire as I admire Kepler and The Book of Evidence. Alas, I ended up not even being able to admire it. Don't get me wrong; the prose is gorgeous, with subtly Irish rhythms and long, unfolding sentences:

A dream it was that drew me here. In it, I was walking along a country road, that was all. It was in winter, at dusk, or else it was a strange sort of dimly radiant night, the sort of night there is only in dreams, and a wet snow falling. I was determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not know what or where exactly home might be. There was open land to my right, flat and undistinguished with not a house or hovel in sight, and to my left a deep line of darkly louring trees bordering the road. The branches were not bare despite the season, and the thick, almost black leaves drooped in masses, laden with snow that had turned to soft, translucent ice.

Yes, lovely. But somehow both too lovely and not lovely enough. Too lovely in that it becomes obvious that Banville is aware of the beauty of his own writing, and it starts to seem overweening. Not lovely enough in that all the beautiful prose in the world can't disguise the ugliness of the main character or the thinness of the story. And the there is a surprise revelation near the end, but for what? The surprise of it seemed not to add anything to the story, but rather like an attempt to manipulate the reader and not a very successful attempt at that.

Disappointing.

A Single Man: I decided I wanted to see this movie based solely on the fact that its trailer is so gorgeous. (It is gorgeous: watch it.) There was much that I liked about the movie: the stunning visuals, Colin Firth's excellent performance, and the fact that it is a mature, intelligent film dealing with emotionally difficult subject matter in a complicated way. The emotional range of the film really is impressive. At moments it is heartbreaking, tender, bleak, trenchant, nerve-wracking, and warm; there is one truly harrowing moment in which the camera focuses squarely on Colin Firth's face as he is told first that his lover has died in a car crash, and then that he is not welcome at the funeral. But then, in its final minutes, this film that had so thoroughly resisted simplicity and easy storytelling suddenly became heavy-handed. The ending did not entirely ruin the movie for me--it is still very much worth seeing--but it wasn't what I was hoping for. I've never read the Christopher Isherwood novel on which it's based, and now I am very curious to do so, just to see whether his ending is the same as the film's.

I watched at the window; I watched at the creek. A new wind lifted the hair on my arms. The cold light was coming and going between oversized, careening clouds; patches of blue, like a ragged flock of protean birds, shifted and stretched, flapping and racing from one end of the sky of the other. Despite the wind, the air was moist; I smelled the rich vapor of loam around my face and wondered again why all that death--all those rotten leaves that one layer down are black sops roped in white webs of mold, all those millions of dead summer insects--didn't smell worse. When the wind quickened, a stranger, more subtle scent leaked from beyond the mountains, a disquieting fragrance of wet bark, salt marsh, and mud flat.

I lay in bed last night and read Annie Dillard on the coming of fall, and it felt profoundly appropriate. Though we still have temperatures that reach the mid-70s, the season has unmistakably changed. My mother gave me apples at Lake Ontario last weekend, and this weekend I baked an apple crisp with cinnamon and pecans. And then, because I had strawberries that were at the end of their life, I baked strawberry muffins. It was lovely to have the oven on and warm smells filling the apartment. And it was lovely to have tea and a strawberry muffin for breakfast this morning. I will have to begin feeding the birds again soon.

I read "The Dead" last week for the first time in several years. It was more wonderful than I had anticipated to return to this story which is so beautiful and familiar in all of its particulars: Freddy Malins turning up screwed at the party; Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia bustling on the stairs; Gabriel being called a West Briton by Molly Ivors; and then Gretta on the stairs, listening to the faint music that reminds her of Michael Furey... I was overcome with emotion reading the end of the story, much more than I had been the first time I read it, and I wondered if this story might actually be Joyce's greatest work. Could it be better than Ulysses? Is that possible?

This weekend I read Katherine Mansfield's novella, "At the Bay." It was a strange work, made of loosely connected sections that felt quite slight individually, but added up to...something. Not a cohesive narrative exactly, but something that felt like an Impressionist portrait of a community. She seems to look at her subjects only sidelong, yet to come away with penetrating insight. I have never read Mansfield before, so I can't say if this is typical of her work.



My goal for my last year of grad school is not to be frantic. To work steadily, every day, and to have that be enough. The previous two years have been characterized by stress and last minute scrambles to finish work, to grade papers, to throw words onto a page, to do what I needed to do to get through the next day. And I don't want to do that anymore.

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson:

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I've lived in this one most of my life, and I've visited a good many others, because my father's friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn't too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It's a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn't feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.

Ah, what a beautifully written book! This paragraph, right near the beginning, is so simple and so lovely; it tells us so much about this unnamed preacher: he is a quiet and a serious and a plain man, a man who has spent much time alone, and to whom the habits of loneliness still cling, despite the wife and young son he acquired late in life and loves dearly. This paragraph tells us all this, but it does so lightly--Robinson feels no need for emphasis. She is like her 76-year-old protagonist: contemplative, patient, and full of a deep faith. His faith is in God, hers in the strength of her narrative voice. I've only read fifty pages of the book, but thus far it appears that faith is not misplaced.

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you--think not but I would!--
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconsistent is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay


Happy Valentine's Day to one and all, and happy birthday to Moey J!

"At the spring of the River Ar I named you, a stream that falls from the mountain to the sea. A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea."

The Art of Translation, part 2

It's only a branch like any other
green with the flare of life in it
and if I hold this end, you the other
that means it's broken

broken between us, broken despite us
broken and therefore dying
broken by force, broken by lying
green, with the flare of life in it

--Adrienne Rich

"Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?
Why would you refuse to give this love to anyone?"
--Rumi



I think it would be good for me to remember that sometimes it really is this simple.

I just finished The Centaur. I feel that there was a lot that I missed in the book, a lot that went over my head, but I found it very beautiful nonetheless. I have a pretty good general familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology (I ought to, after Ulysses and six years of Latin and all the time I spent reading D'aulaire's Greek Myths as a kid), but I wish I were more familiar with the myth of Chiron. I did not realize as I was reading how thoroughly the mythical correspondences are woven into the book; it was only when I finished and saw the index at the end that I realized that every single character in the book has a mythical referent. I already knew that Caldwell, Peter's father, represents the centaur Chiron, and I have now learned that Chiron gave his life to atone for the sin of the theft of fire by Prometheus, represented by Peter. But there is a whole host of other characters, all of whom play a part in Updike's distorted, modernized retelling of the myth, and although I can get a few of the obvious ones (Zimmerman is Zeus, for instance), I don't know enough to place them all and I wish I did. Just knowing the bit about Prometheus and the theft of fire makes the end of the book much more moving...

It's interesting that both Joyce and Updike wrote books that are essentially about father-son relationships, but that both clouded and complicated their stories with the same sort of heavy referentiality to the same source material. It is perhaps possible to grasp the messages of these books without considering the myths through which the stories are filtered, but your understanding of the relationships described will be much richer if you can make the mythological connections. I don't really know where this I am going with this comparison, but I do think it's interesting.

Mythology aside, The Centaur was sometimes baffling and not particularly gripping (I was capable of putting it down for long stretches at a time without feeling compelled to pick it back up), but it had a strange kind of loveliness to it. The prose was dense and rich, and sometimes it was enough to let the flood of words pour over me, and at other times the simplest words and phrases combined to have a remarkably gorgeous effect. This paragraph near the end, as Peter watches his father leave their snowbound house, is particularly lovely:

I turned my face away and looked through the window. In time my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The stone wall was a scumble of umber; my father's footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was--a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947--and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

Perhaps you have to have read the whole book leading up to that paragraph in order to get something out of it. I don't know. You could perhaps pinpoint the moment at which Peter/Prometheus steals the life-giving fire to that paragraph, and to me it is moving and luminous.