A Wilder Shore
The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
by Camille Peri

The young American, Silas Q Scuddamore, is in a spot. In his bedroom at a hotel in Paris, he has discovered a corpse. Luckly, a doctor is lodging in the next room, and the doctor comes up with a plan. The plan is smooth but all the same somewhat hard to believe. Scuddamore protests:

“Alas!” said Silas, “I have every wish to believe you; but how is it possible? You open up to me a bright prospect, but, I ask you, is my mind capable of receiving so unlikely a solution? Be more generous, and let me further understand your meaning.”

I had to put down the book at this point — Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights — to savor this extraordinary passage. Not so long ago, I would have joined the rest of the world in dismissing Silas’s outburst as overwritten Victorian mush — or gush, if you prefer. In my old age, however, I am reduced to raptures as ridiculous as the prose, which begs, begs on its knees, to be translated into Italian and set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. In doing so, I mean to laugh with, not at, Stevenson, whose eyes twinkle through the words. Com’è possibile? indeed.

I am not here to recommend reading the tales in this collection, which comprises Stevenson’s earliest fiction, but I will say that they all have the effervescence of virtuoso improvisation. You can feel Stevenson making things up as he goes along, gambling that he’ll be able to tie things up at the end. Indeed, this is what saves the tales from camp. And if his tying things up at the end is a bit brisk and even rough-edged, you don’t mind, because he is already bundling you off to the next tale, which will if nothing else recount the further adventures of Florizel, Prince of Bohemia and his faithful companion, Colonel Geraldine, knights of derring-do and virtue in the London of Jack the Ripper.

I don’t think that I should ever have come across the New Arabian Nights if I hadn’t read about them in Camille Peri’s new book about Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Van De Grift, an American from Indianapolis. Their improbable attachment, which involved literary collaboration in a second collection of tales, the New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, began outside of Paris and ended, as I think most people know, in Samoa. They married when Fanny was 40 and Louis (as Peri calls him) ten years younger. Louis’s writer friends were not keen on Fanny, to say the least, and she has come down to us as a headstrong drag on Stevenson’s already precarious health. In John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the two of them, she can easily be mistaken for a heap of carpet in the background. Sargent was obviously attracted to Stevenson, and Peri’s description sparkles with innuendo:

Louis, in his customary velvet jacket, paces away from [Fanny] in long strides, twisting his mustache and looking at the viewer as if suddenly caught in midthought. Between them, a door opens onto a dark hallway, suggesting tension. One senses that Sargent would have liked Louis to continue walking off the canvas and out of the domestic scene. (282)

The picture was painted at Skerryvore, the country house that the Stevensons rented outside of Bournemouth. Bournemouth was something of a seaside spa and it was hoped that the air would be good for Louis’s health. He was thought to be tubercular; in fact, he seems to have suffered from bronchiectasis. No big difference, given that his particular treatment for pulmonary hemorrhaging was relentless chain smoking. I’d always supposed that it was his respiratory affliction that killed him, but in fact he died of stroke. One way or another, the cigarettes got him. The amazing thing is that he lived to be 44.

Stevenson grew up in the prosperous New Town of Edinburgh, the only child of a lighthouse engineer who hoped to be followed in his profession by his son. All that came of this was the fictional shipwreck near Erraid, an islet off the Isle of Mull, in Kidnapped, an event that occurred more than a century before the erection of an actual lighthouse there by the Stevenson firm. Louis appears to have been a born writer, but of what was the question. His early inclination was to journalism, and if his work in this line did not contribute to his immortality, it honed his penchant for calling spades spades; his account of crossing the Atlantic in the company of Scottish emigrants in steerage was deemed to be unpublishably frank. Nonetheless, as the little excerpt quote above shows, Stevenson was writing at a time when literary English was suffering from paroxysms of theatricality. Stripping the language of Victorian grandiosity would become the true subject matter of most advanced English prose, particularly that of American fiction, throughout the following century. What saved Louis from unreadability was his choosing boys as his target audience. Treasure Island, begun in 1883, is told in a style that derives its power from undercurrents instead of eruptions; the preposterous indulgences of the New Arabian Nights (1877-80) have been put on a serious diet. The first draft was read to Lloyd Osbourne, the surviving son of Fanny’s first marriage.

While the adventures in Stevenson’s life were mostly imaginary, Fanny’s were all too real. She married Sam Osbourne, a bounder in the making, as a teenager, and followed him to the silver mines of Nevada, where the living was not easy; among other achievements, Fanny learned to make her own furniture. When Sam gave up silver for the law, the couple moved with their children, Belle and Lloyd, to San Francisco, where Sam continued to move around on his own. After about twenty years of his feckless infidelity, Fanny decided to take her children, of whom there were now three, to Europe, so that she could study art. (This voyage entailed a second traversing of the Isthmus of Panama; only upon her return to San Francisco could she avail herself of the new transcontinental railroad). She returned to California, although she had met and fallen in love with Louis in France — their meeting at Grez-sur-Loing, in the Fontainebleau forest outside of Paris, was as unlikely as any Western exploit — because Sam would not give her a divorce. Louis eventually followed her there. When Sam finally changed his mind, Fanny and Louis married, and spent their honeymoon at a mining camp in Silverado.

Peri argues that Fanny devoted her life to taking care of Louis, and her case is persuasive; what made it seem unlikely at the time must have been Fanny’s resemblance to Annie Oakley, the Girl of the Golden West, and Barbara Stanwyck all rolled into one little woman. Although petite, Fanny was basically, a tough broad, and even if she liked nice things, she never had the patience for ladylike airs. She and her second husband had formidable tempers and engaged in a good deal of basically companionate shouting.

The architecture of A Wilder Shore is superb, and the long, copious tale is well told. But there is a great deal of unimportant speculation: “The desolate Nevada wilderness that Fannie saw from the stagecoach must have seemed almost unearthly, with its dry lake beds and desert seas dotted by sagebrush and squat piñon pines.” (18) Amid these must-haves there is the occasional purple patch, not nearly as lovable as Stevenson’s:

But his strength had lifted her from the emptiness that must have felt like it would last a lifetime. She could not let him die now. She was guided not only by love, but by her firm belief that the world had not seen all that Robert Louis Stevenson had to give. (166)

Aside from A Child’s Garden of Verses — I was lucky enough to grow up with the delightful Golden Books edition, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen — I read no Stevenson until I was in my seventies. I had no buckles to swash in. I gasped for the air of consciousness, which was not to be found in the company of men. I read the Hardy Boys but would have preferred the Nancy Drews. I found happiness with Jane Austen in my teens. Austen would teach me that, regardless of the marriage plots, it is that quality of the  writing that determines the excitement. A lifetime of following her advice (via the enormous respect that Henry James had for the creator of Jekyll and Hyde, would finally take me to Stevenson, whom I would discover to be a surprisingly great writer, and not just a raconteur anticipating Conan Doyle or Joseph Conrad. I am grateful, however, to Camille Peri, for having introduced me to the New Arabian Nights, in which the ghost of Bugs Bunny lurking in the shadow of Stevenson’s muse has free play.

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The Hypocrite
by Jo Hamya

What is the origin of consciousness? The Hebrew Bible has a simple answer that everybody knows: it involves an apple. Of course it doesn’t involve an apple per se; apples are northern fruit that do not grow in the Levant. Figs would be more likely. The Hebrew Bible, and the Old Testaments, in no matter what translation, simply mention fruit. Meaning something to eat, presumably inviting.

Actually, they mention fruit only once, at Genesis 3.6: …she took of the fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate. (JPS) Consciousness was the immediate consequence:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loincloths. (Gen 3.7; JPS)

You will object: But surely Adam and Eve were conscious prior to this horrible moment. I shall reply: you are confusing conscious with aware. Sadly, we have come to treat these as synonyms in English, much to our loss. Awareness is a faculty possessed by all living creatures, to however limited an extent; it allows them to respond to their environment. Consciousness, in contrast, is unique to human beings, and, as you will learn quickly if you take up French, it comprises what we call conscience. Julian Jaynes, in his wildly interdisciplinary study, The Origin of the Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1979), summarizes the difference between awareness and consciousness as, first, an awareness of the self, as if it were part of the environment; and, second, as the ready ability to narratize, or tell stories about that self in the environment. The first component is obvious in Genesis: they perceived that they were naked. The second, which involves the onrush of shame, has them sewing fig leaves into loincloths. Having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve are not just aware of their sin; they are transformed by it.

From the very beginning, then, Judaism and Christianity associate consciousness with the loss of God’s companionship. That is pretty much Augustine’s definition of sin. Wrapped into this complex new consciousness is the knowledge that the sinners bring alienation upon themselves. Whereas awareness may be uncomfortable, consciousness is painful, at least at first, and we do what we can to push it away. In English, we actually banish it to the compound self-consciousness. According to my Dictionnaire Robert, the only French terms for this compound are timidité and conscient — the latter being French for conscious. In a way, it is impossible to be self-conscious in French. Just timid. No running away.

Much as I would love to dilate upon Julian Jaynes’s fascinating book, I am here to talk about a new novel, The Hypocrite, by Jo Hamya. It would not have been the same novel if I had not, by chance, been re-reading Jaynes when I picked it up. With Jaynes’s acute thinking percolating in my mind, I helplessly read The Hypocrite as the electrifying account of the infliction of shame. A man in late middle age is obliged to recognize that he has edited his awareness to protect his consciousness — his conscience. Not only has he sinned, but he has successfully avoided private disgrace by bleaching his offense to the point of its disappearance. This, and not his bad behavior in the past, is the sin that stings. When someone who remembers what happened tries to enlighten him — his daughter, Sophia (the only named principal character) — his irresistible impulse is to deny the clarification, to fight the raising of his consciousness. The man becomes incoherent, almost demented, with misery.

This story of perception and shame is embedded in a story with a larger perspective. We are asked to consider that neither the man nor his daughter are conscious of their common offenses against the larger world, offenses of disrespectful self-indulgence. This larger story is kept in the background; it obtrudes only twice, once in the middle and once at the end. In this perspective, the wrongs with which the man and his daughter are agonizingly concerned amount to little more than instances of punctured vanity. For the man is an esteemed novelist (albeit an apparently clueless one), and his daughter is a budding playwright. In a more typical family drama, the action of The Hypocrite would take place in the course of a family reunion and involve charges of child abuse. Here, the father’s crime appears to have been kidding himself into believing that his teenage daughter could not hear the after-hours shenanigans in his bedroom, and the setting is a West End theatre in which the daughter, now grown, literally dramatizes what she knew. The play is a comedy. The father has been invited to an opening performance; he sits through it, in sinking wretchedness, while the rest of the audience laughs unto tears.

There is a gravity in the texture of Hamya’s prose that, together with the intense presentation of her stories, forcibly reminded me of Ian McEwen at his very best (Atonement, Saturday, The Children Act); indeed, I now suspect that the pain of consciousness is perhaps his deepest theme. (A very good prompt to revisit them!) The power of Hamya’s writing is contextual and difficult to excerpt, but, for the record, I’ll call attention to the section beginning “It’s like cocktail-party conversation.” The bulk of this section consists of a long section in which the father tries to swat away the implications of the play that he is watching.

Other, terrible, thoughts. Has Sophia heard him come? He listens to the actor do it and decides, evidently not.

More urgent concerns supplant that notion. He has to chew them down. Sophia has, however indirectly, thought of him having sex. (69)

Here, at any rate, is a passage from the opening section of The Hypocrite, given over to a point of view, that of the mother, the ex-wife (but the then-wife, at the time of the passage), that will be implicated but withheld in the remainder of the novel. The setting is a Sicilian beach in the late afternoon.

The beach, the fat pulse of the sun and its resultant waves of light headedness. Sofia’s mother touched her watch. She imagined swimming. Thought about how to do dinner that night, remember dinner the night before — courtesy of her husband’s friend. Someone he hadn’t seen in years another writer, whose daughter had been paid €15 euros to look after Sophia. A table of eight other strangers her husband was excited to meet again. She sat on the far side of the arrangement, away from him. She could not keep track of their names, though evidently few people knew hers. That she had worried whether a sixteen-year-old she didn’t know was equipped enough to take care of her child. That it had been a night of not speaking, with a glass of red wine hovering under her chin by its stem, and recollections pooled by the others from university pubs she’d never been near. And — Aren’t you stunning? her least favorite of them said; gestured to the man she had married six years ago. Has he shagged you yet?

A pause. A smile. An argument on the way home.

This section is headed, “The Decision to Leave.”

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The Princess of 72nd Street
by Elaine Kraf

The Princess of 72nd Street is a historical novel, first published in 1979 and very much of  its time, which I remember as a period of open confusion. What followed may not have been much of an improvement for many people, but it was relatively straightforward, and things have only gotten more straightforward since; today, alas, no one admits to confusion. We are simply polarized.

The Princess of 72nd Street is also a historical novel in that its manic narrator, who has been hospitalized/incarcerated six times and is trying to avert a seventh captivity, never once mentions the term “bi-polar.”

She calls her manic episodes “radiances,” and attaches a number to it. In this state, she is transformed from an artistic Upper West Side woman called Ellen into “Princess Esmeralda,” the fairy godmother of the crosstown thoroughfare named in the title, which runs from Central Park to the Hudson River and is barely recognizable today as the narrator’s rather grungy domain. Although she claims to “take [her] responsibilities very seriously,” they don’t appear to amount to much more than watching over the locals and wearing inappropriate outfits. In the spirit of willed disinhibition that was perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Seventies in metropolitan parts of the United States, the princess also grants casual audiences, so to speak, in her flat, to men whom she does not know very well and who persistently fail to recognize her regal status, leading to blisters and bruises. It doesn’t help that, since her second radiance, she has learned not to discuss being a princess.

What’s it like to be a princess? Esmeralda is eager to tell us, us, if only because she hopes that chaining herself to her typewriter will keep her out of trouble. Perspective is everything.

During my 4th or 5th radiance, I floated happily, laughingly into one of my grocery stores. Every one was smiling, although they tried not to show it, because their princess had entered. It’s not polite to stare at royalty. (21)

This exultation does not last, however, because as a result of accepting their generous gifts, she is arrested for shoplifting. Even without the intervention of police and doctors, the consequences of being a princess are woeful.

Too clearly I see the debris of Radiance 7 like the garbage remaining after any fète or spectacular event. For example, I notice two rotting soggy watermelons smelling sickly sweet. They are invaded by roaches who rush inside and then out and over the crushed tinfoil crown lying nearby. They make a tapping sound on the silver. My bed is ripped apart. The mattress is half off and a rusty spring protrudes. The sheets are stained with thick brownish blood. There is no beauty here — everything is chaotic, displaced, old, worn, and tired. I am. I feel like one of those cheap, sequined scarves that lies sadly on the floor. Everything has been disturbed and mutilated. It is wrong. (81)

The grimness of mania fills the pages of this novel, despite the pretense that most of it has been written in a state of euphoria.

Mania, however, is not an object of scrutiny in Graf’s novel; it is more like a decorative motif. The substance of The Princess of 72nd Street is its slightly burlesque gallery of unsatisfactory boyfriends, some worse than others. The worst, whom Ellen calls “the Alien,” is a sadistic doctor whose presence suggests that the heroine has masochistic issues. Then again, it may have been impossible to be a heterosexual woman in that time and place without a penchant for suffering. The nicer boyfriends, one of whom is too much of a nutcase really to be nice, feed Ellen with apologies that go something like this: Give me another chance, I know I’ve hurt you but I’m better now, I count on you, I deserve forgiveness, I thought you were a better person, [Click]. The elegant inevitability of this male self-pity, not unlike that of a nautilus shell, made me giggle. The nutcase, by the way, is involved with a therapist who is an even bigger nutcase, concerning whom Graf’s writing becomes so broad that it would be fatal to the book if we saw more of him.

The Princess of 72nd Street, short at 130 pages, put me so much in mind of another novel of its time, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, that I would shelve the books together despite their not having much in common, beyond the imaginable possibility of Ellen’s being a minor character in Fox’s tale of urban dislocation. Almost everything in both books has the air of being disturbed and mutilated. However wry and even clever, neither novel is at all good-humored. Readers are cautioned against mistaking Princess Esmeralda’s elation for the mood of this rediscovered curio.

A Note on C J Box

A friend whom I see every week, and with whom I always discuss what we’re reading, has been saying pretty much the same thing for over a month: she’s reading another Joe Pickett novel by C J Box. She can’t stop. I’m not surprised: a mystery set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, centered on the plight of a valiant game warden, is right up her alley, given her taste for the Old West. What’s strange is that I couldn’t stop reading about Joe Pickett, either, once I got started.

I’ve read only one: the first, Open Season. (Amazon helpfully identifies each novel’s place in the series.) When my friend began talking about Box, I thought to myself, “Not for me!” But how could I be sure without reading one. I ought to note that my friend has proved to be a reliable source of unexpectedly good reading (eg, Terry Hayes). I decided to buy Open Season on the understanding that if I didn’t like it, I would give it to my friend, for her to pass on. I ought to note also that, because she prefers to read on an e-reader, she hasn’t got any of the books to lend. She thought that this arrangement would be very kind. I’m going to give her Open Season even though I liked it very much: I haven’t really got room for it. That’s a polite way of saying that I probably won’t want to read it again. But I did really like it, and I’m happy to know that there’s plenty more where that came from.

What worried me was that the writing would not be very good, and, to be honest, on the sentence level (as they say in writing programs), the prose of Open Season is not exactly intriguing. In a few places, it is actually leaden.

Joe walked with Wacey out to his pickup truck. Wacey stopped and stood in the dark before getting in. Wacey had brought an unopened beer with him, and Joe heard the top being unscrewed. (141)

Most of the time, however, the writing is briskly effective, and the story is told very well, even when it is plain to see where things were going. As I went through the book, I detected such evidence of wordsmith expertise as the use of “elder” (correctly) where most writers would settled for “eldest,” and a comfort with the occasional subjunctive. All things considered, I concluded that the leaden bits were intentional, and not a form of dumbing down. On the contrary, I take them to be a crutch for the reader who is addicted to skimming. The dialogue is invariably fluent; Box and his editor know what readers are likely to skip over. The series’s many fans are deserved; Box writes a lot better than several male best sellers I can think of.

And this is not a book about the Old West at all. It takes place in the Wyoming of gated billionaires, where pipeline proposals face grueling scrutiny from regulators and environmentalists, and the last phrase environmentalists want to hear is “endangered species.” Box is extremely thoughtful about the tension between the effective protection of animals by those who know what they’re doing and the interference of those who mistakenly believe that they know better. It may be that the most effective form of regulation is simply informing agents on the ground of the regulatory objectives, and to hold them responsible for implementing the best methods. And, at the same time, unionizing them in order to protect them from predatory profiteers. But there, I’ve belabored the point far more than C J Box would: he’s the more graceful critic of this problematic, anything but old-fashioned issue.

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Two Novels by Ayşegül Savaş

On a tip from a friend, I read Ayşegül Savaş’s new novel, The Anthropologists. Savaş is a Turkish writer, educated in the United States, who writes in English. She now lives in Paris. The Anthropologists is her third novel. I thought that, before writing about it, I would read the second novel, Walking on the Ceiling. 

The earlier book is about Nurunisa, or Nunu, a woman who, at the time of writing, is a sort of journalist for a Turkish magazine, working in an Istanbul that is no longer the place she grew up in — it is, of course, the Istanbul of Erdoğan; the Gezi Park riots are already an ugly memory — a place, she writes, that was “popular around the world” for a while. I was lucky enough to visit the Istanbul  in those days, and it was indeed a city vibrating with possibilities of a bright future. As it was also one of the oldest cities in the West, I found it to be immensely interesting, and I daresay it still is, despite everything. One thing that, according Walking on the Ceiling, hasn’t changed is that Istanbul remains a city tinctured by loneliness and melancholy. You don’t have to read Orhan Pamuk to sense this, even on a simple walk down İstiklal Avenue. Loneliness pervades the short chapters of Walking on the Ceiling, more than half of which are set in Paris.

Nunu has spent a year in Paris, more or less as a flâneuse. (Her finances are not discussed.) There, she meets an English writer, whom she calls “M.”; M. has been drawn to her vibrant native town and written several novels about it. He is now an old man, tall, stooped, and grey; he teaches writing at the Sorbonne (even though his French isn’t very good, according to Nunu). Nunu encounters him at a bookshop event, more or less picks him up afterward, and goes on the first of many long walks with him. That is the full extent of their relationship: they meet up, usually at the Luxembourg Metro stop, and go for walks. Sometimes, they stop at a café, and sometimes they have little picnics. They talk but are often silent. She tells him stories about her family and her life — or at least that’s what she says they are — and he professes to admire them greatly. They exchange emails; it is a studiously unthrilling attachment. Nunu wants to play a bigger part in M.’s life, but this appears to be unlikely to happen. Eventually, Nunu slips, and is later mortified to discover that her fabulist invention is detectable as such. Demoralized, she retreats to Istanbul, as if to prison.

Savaş is a suggestive writer; she knows how to present M. and Nunu as writers who share a literary friendship without actually telling us very much about their conversations. This air of unexplained implication sustains a mood of profound loneliness. We have no idea why M. would be lonely, but Nunu, we learn, has had a troubled childhood. Her father, a good man but a disturbed poet, killed himself when she was a little girl. Her mother, whom Nunu has just buried before her sojourn in Paris, also seems to have been somewhat disturbed — abstracted, anyway, and not cut out for motherhood. Both parents appear to have been cut off, for obscure reasons, from vital contact with their communities’ values. Nunu herself is clearly detached. For her magazine, she writes profiles of the world’s great cities that are intended to provide her readers with a bit of escape, the hope that there is a better life elsewhere.

But the combination of hints, vignettes, and evasions — in the early chapters, Savaş can be seen again and again to swerve away from a topic that she has just raised — combine to make the famously wispy Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon read like stark social realism. One hesitates to say that Walking on the Ceiling is insubstantial; its subject, after all, is loneliness, specifically the loneliness of the writer, even in, perhaps especially in, the company of writers. But it is a sad novel that left me with that now bygone foreign-movie sense of the free-floating sadness of life. It is not a novel that I would recommend to most American readers, at least to those who aren’t women under the age of thirty. I would also make an exception for Americans who have visited “popular” Istanbul. “Paris was a city full of people having meals,” Savaş writes, but she does not paint it as a city full of Parisians. She barely paints it at all. Seen mostly as a destination for outsiders, it might almost be a space station. Whether intentionally or not, Savaş’s Istanbul upstages the City of Light as an interesting, romantic spot, eminently fictionable.

The Anthropologists is quite a different book. It shares short chapters and a certain evasiveness with the earlier novel, but that’s all. The evasiveness is pretty much a matter of non-specification. The novel takes place in an unidentified European city, and the characters have unidentified backgrounds. All but one of them are foreign to the city, but we don’t know where they come from, either.  (The friend who recommended the book agreed with me that the city is not Paris.) I can imagine Savaş’s calculations, and her decision to keep her narrative uncluttered, at the risk of teasing readers. I would have concluded otherwise, because the novel also flirts with cuteness by presenting its chapters (even shorter than the ones in Walking on the Ceiling) as unnumbered sections with recurring, somewhat academic headings, as if to suggest notes taken toward the writing of an anthropology textbook. Once again, the novel is rather short. While I didn’t want Walking on the Ceiling to be any longer, I’d have been happier if The Anthropologists were twice as long, which I think is a compliment. I don’t want to imply that Savaş left out anything important.

Asya and Manu have been together for a while. They met at university and have lived in a few small towns before settling in the big city, where they rent an apartment. They have a small assortment of friends. (Their acquaintance are not discussed.) There is Ravi:

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be. (7)

This is a very important observation, and I shall come back to it. Lena is the couple’s one “native” friend — she comes from a suburb of the city. Asya meets her at a party given by people whom she and Manu “didn’t really like,” (Nothing is made of this dislike, however,  whenever the people reappear.)

We talked the entire picnic, relieved not to be socializing with the rest of the group, while trying to decipher people’s connections to one another. Lena said that she was embarrassed to have landed at the picnic of someone she didn’t even know — she had come along with one of the other guests, who’d abandoned her to join his close friends. But she said it so cheerfully, and I was intoxicated by her clarity. 13)

Clarity, alas, turns out not to be a hallmark of Lena’s character.

The arc of the novel begins in the couple’s decision to buy their own home. Money is no more a problem for Asya and Manu than it is for many young urban couples. They both make goodish livings, and childlessness, which appears to be a side-effect of other factors, not a decision, has enabled them to put together the makings of a down payment. Throughout the novel, they will look at several flats; the current owners’ reasons for selling, which have to do with changes in life rather than the properties’ drawbacks, will get more attention than descriptions of the amenities.

Upstairs from their current rental lives Asya and Manu’s neighbor Tereza, “old in body but not in mind.” Tereza’s place is rather fancier than what the young couple are used to.

But we soon relaxed. We pulled up our feet on the sofa, served ourselves from the kitchen. We realized that Tereza didn’t keep track of manners; what mattered to her was conversation. Manu and I had no spare sets of plates or matching glasses, but we had plenty of discussion in our lives for Teresa, ours was a true wealth. (24)

Tereza treats Asya and Manu as an old auntie would, and this is the third thing to bear in mind. All three of the “important” factors that I have enumerated, plus the search for a home to own, make it clear that Asya and Manu are at a peculiar, very tender phase in their lives. It is a very common phase but so quick and delicate that few people remember it, except when they look back and think about a time when their situation was so different. This phase is nothing less than the last moment of youth. By the end of The Anthropologists, a new apartment has been found, but the other everyday circumstances of life, except their jobs and their mutual affection, have  been damaged, without a discernible villain other than the settling of character in the passage of time.   From now on, openness, suspicion, and confusion about the rules of life will not be an attraction. I’ve seen it happen a million times.

Even if there were nothing more to The Anthropologists than what I’ve outlined, it would be an important book. But there’s plenty more. There’s the texture of give-and-take between Asya and Manu, and their sense of humor; and also their relationships to their parents. (Asya’s are divorced, giving the couple three sets of in-laws). There is Asya’s project as a documentarian, excerpts from which dot the book; they’re interesting but not distracting, and of course they give point to the title. The chance to see a fine talent develop from one novel to the next — from an elegant impressionist, Savaş has grown into an acute observer — is more than worth the time. But watching two young people negotiate the tricky rapids between youth and adulthood that no one ever sees coming and few ever recall is the most beguiling treat of all.

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A Note on “Psychological” Novels
Henry James and Colm Tóibín

The etiology of consciousness is Henry James’s subject. He is called “psychological,” probably because the epithet was invoked long before a wide public familiarity with Freud, and the now widespread idea that the brain is host to competing objectives and peculiar susceptibilities. Taking that familiarity for granted, I have always wondered what is so particularly “psychological” about James’s novels. Certainly there are no battles between ids and  superegos! No, the motivation of James’s characters is almost banal. They seek the satisfactions of love (which James takes to be entirely self-evident, contra Freud) and the easiness of a good conscience. There is nothing abnormal or even unusual about the “psychologies” of James’s great heroines, quite the contrary. Catherine Sloper is incapable of being interesting in any ordinary way, while Isabel Archer and Maggie Verver are both “sportswomen” in the sense of Sargent’s great painting of the Phelps Stokes: they see straight ahead and, by nature, are not troubled by what they don’t see. They are so “good” that they can’t imagine what’s up against them, until, in one case, it’s thrown in her face (Mme Merle) and, in the other, the product of extreme concern for her father’s well-being. How these three women become aware of the nastiness around them, notably without the help of verbal exchanges, is the subject of the novels. In that sense, they are, of course, “psychological.”

Although Colm Tóibín’s fourth novel, The Blackwater Lightship, met with considerable success (and was even adapted for a film starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest), it was the fifth, The Master, that established the Irish author as a serious novelist. This “novelization” of episodes from the life of Henry James presented James as James had prevented the three heroines whom I’ve mentioned, moving silently from one intuition to the next. I missed the resemblance because Tóibín’s prose style was clear and straightforward to a degree that James himself might not have admired and that no well-read person would regard as “Jamesian.” Tóibín’s interest in and regard for James did not seem to me to be reflected in his own fiction — not, that is, until the appearance this spring of Long Island, a novel unlike the writer’s earlier ones in having multiple protagonists. In a series of six rounds, we are taken into the minds of Nancy Sheridan, Eilis Lacey, and Jim Farrell. Eilis and Jim, with their romantic history, are personally preoccupied by the problem of deciding whether to carry this dormant attachment into the present. With no doubt whatsoever about what she herself wants, Nancy Sheridan is free to wonder what the other two are up to. From the start, Nancy is aware that Eilis and Jim might rekindle their old affair, but the evidence of their actually planning to do anything takes time and patience for Nancy to discover. The others’ dithering creates a measure of suspense, but the question of what Nancy will do when she discovers what she is afraid to find out makes this by far the most dramatic story that Colm Tóibín has yet told. And it must be acknowledged that this drama owes the greater part of its tension to the quiet spectacle of Nancy’s accumulation of inferences. Nancy manages to resolve the problem of a romantic triangle in her own favor with all the dispatch of Maggie Verver. Long Island is, no less than The Golden Bowl, a “psychological” novel.

Janet Malcolm on Trials

Janet Malcolm wrote three books centered on criminal trials: The Journalist and the Murderer, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Iphigenia in Forest Hills. Each of the characters — two women and one man — at  the center of these books is, by any metric, strange, and each seems to be judged guilty by a jury at least in part because of that strangeness. To some extent, our legal system’s insistence upon treating jurors as “reasonable” people facilitates the convictions. Instead of the unbiased forum for the consideration of serious charges, courtrooms look more like kabuki theatres, in which simplified stories are inflected with stylized routines and technicalities that baffle the uninitiated (among whom defendants figure prominently). Attorneys take great but not exactly invisible pains to appear to address witnesses straightforwardly, but, again not invisibly, they intend their every move to sway the jurors by force of something other than plain argument. Malcolm herself appears to be unaware of our “adversarial” system’s origins: as late as the early Fourteenth Century, lawyers and judges, working in what seem to have been improvised booths in the vast hall that still stands next to the Houses of Parliament, concerned themselves exclusively with what would strike us as pre-trial maneuverings.

No witnesses, no jury, no laymen of any kind, not even the plaintiffs and defendants. Just legal professionals, arguing among themselves. We can’t tell how any of the recorded cases came out, because that was of no interest to the lawyers.  It was  assumed that when the juries, who were also the witnesses (yes!) were asked the one question that the lawyers and judges had settled on, the result was foregone. A very different world, but its spirit still breathes in our courtrooms. Malcolm captures this spirit in a passage in The Trial of Sheila McGough:

Lawyers are, for good reason, afraid of judges, and they will do almost anything to stay in their favor. Clients come and go, but judges go on forever. Thus, in every trial, a little drama is played out, side-by-side with the big one — the drama of propitiation of the judge by the lawyers. Much of the secondary drama takes place during sidebar conferences, when the lawyers drop their masks and antagonism and behave like schoolboys in front of the teacher, vying for her favor and seeking to impress her with their nice behavior toward each other. (112-13)

In the old days, of course, very few people “went to law” — launched a lawsuit — and all those who did shared the quality of being rich. Plaintiff and defendant alike belonged to the landed élite. Lawyers and judges were either the poor relations of rich families or the sons of prosperous bourgeois who could afford educations. Either way, professionals shared the values of their clients. It was a climate in which everyone more or less understood everyone else — just as everyone with a decent seat at Wimbledon pretty fully understands what is going on astride the nets. Criminal law was prosecuted by a separate apparatus of circuit courts, and rarely embroiled people of substance. As the power of the state and the wealth of the nation increased, more middling people found themselves tangled in legal proceedings, but no matter how the pursuit of justice was transformed by slow evolutions, it did not even begin to abandon the presumption of familiarity (that everyone in a courtroom understands the routine) until the Twentieth Century.

Today, only lawyers, courtroom staffers, and journalists such as Malcolm know what is really going on in a trial. To say that this disturbs Malcolm would be a great understatement. Although she contrives to appear calm, she is actually, to be colloquial, pretty ticked off. She herself was a defendant once, and almost lost millions of dollars, personally, because, in her innocence, she was working from the wrong script. I will come back to that. Her anger becomes more palpable as she proceeds through the writing of the three books.

It may be that, in fact, she is not very angry with the legal system in the first of these books, which never directly places Malcolm in a courtroom. She is concerned with another game, the one that she describes in the famous opening lines of The Journalist and the Murderer:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

She proceeds to describe  journalists as con men, who feign interest in their subjects in order to earn their trust — which they proceed to betray. The “action” in this book is densely complicated; suffice it to say here that Malcolm’s subject is not the convicted murderer, Jeffey MacDonald, but the journalist Joe McGinnis, whom MacDonald retained (on the advice of his attorney!) to write an “inside” account of MacDonald’s defense that, when burnished into a best-seller (McGinnis had written one), would persuade Americans of his innocence, whatever happened in the courtroom. McGinnis, who changed his mind about MacDonald during the proceedings, did not write that book, but another, damning one instead. So MacDonald, from prison, sued McGinnis. When things began to look bad for McGinnis — who had never informed MacDonald of his change of heart, not even in letters claiming to be his friend — the case was settled. Malcolm took it all in, and, without making a fuss about her belief that MacDonald was probably guilty (of killing his wife and children), she convicts McGinnis of egregious malpractice as a journalist. Nobody, in The Journalist and the Murderer, seems to know the routine.

In the third and last of her courtroom books, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Malcolm’s anger surfaces — if only to show a telltale fin — whenever the judge, Robert Hanophy, or the Guardian at Law, David Schnall appear in the narrative focus. Schnall was the court-appointed guardian of Michelle Malakova, a little girl whose mother, Mazoltuv Borukhova, was charged and convicted of hiring an assassin to shoot Daniel Malakov, Michelle’s father. Hanophy, nicknamed “Hang ’em Hanophy,” is a judge in his mid-seventies who appears not to believe that criminal defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and Malcolm presents him as so  indisposed to accommodate them and their attorneys that it’s hard to believe that he could oversee a fair trial. Judge Hanophy made the news when, appealing Borukhova’s conviction, Alan Dershowitz claimed that he had rushing closing arguments to suit his vacation plans. Malcolm shows him doing exactly that. Schnall is a creepy lawyer with no discernible qualifications for representing the interests of children, a qualification not, to Malcolm’s disgust, required for the job of Guardian at Law. In Malcolm’s tragic view, Schnall is the actor who sets in motion the hearing that awarded custody of Michelle to her father, after her parents’ divorce, making of her the little Iphigenia whom Borukhova sought to avenge, allegedly, by hiring a hit man. The tale of Iphigenia in Forest Hills is brainless in the sordid way of all family breakdowns. Far from alleviating the misery, the wheels of justice appear to exacerbate it.

It is The Crime of Sheila McGough, the second of Malcolm’s courtroom books, that from time to time I re-read with relish. Malcolm tells us that she was invited by McGough, a convicted criminal, to tell her story, and this is what Malcolm does, even though she found McGough maddeningly talkative and somewhat simple-minded. McGough almost certainly did nothing illegal, Malcolm assures us. (She is no more than three microns away from deleting the “almost.”) McGough went to jail because the legal establishment in Northern Virginia found her maddening, too, and declined to save her from herself. The crime of Sheila McGough is that she she violated the first ethical rule of practicing law: instead of zealously defending the interests of her client, she did so overzealously — so much so that she could be framed as a co-defendant.

Poor Sheila McGough, as I can’t help think of her, had the idea, in her late thirties, of going to law school. Until then, she had had a successful career in corporate publishing, but she had reached the highest perch that would be open to her, and, feeling unfulfilled, she decided to go to the newly established law school at George Mason University. She didn’t realize until it was too late that no substantial law firm would consider hiring a graduate of this academy, and she fell back on the only opening: criminal law. In the absence of a Public Defender’s office in Northern Virginia, she set herself up as a sole practitioner. No lawyer in history can have needed the support and guidance of working with experienced partners as much as Sheila McGough. They don’t teach everything in law school; what she seems to have learned about the practice of law was just about nothing.

Again, the action is dense; once again, there are two trials. As a result of the second one, Sheila McGough is sent off to prison for three years, having been convicted of hypothecating funds in an escrow account. Again, Malcolm is not present at either trial, and spins her story out of interviews with the people involved. This time, however, all the people involved, aside from a handful of low-lifes, are lawyers and judges. Some of them are sympathetic to McGough — but not sympathetic enough to take up her cause. I was a bit baffled by the connection between McGough’s decision not to take the stand and the omission from the trial of a piece of evidence that would have exonerated her, but McGough, who had developed a persecution complex by the time she met Malcolm, and regarded the Prosecutor as a monster, excused them as “private lawyers with a busy practice.” One of these private lawyers, Mark Rochon, all but charges McGough, in a conversation with Malcolm, with malpractice: she should have known that was going to be “thrown into the maelstrom of criminal defense.”

What draws me to The Crime of Sheila McGough is the pong of sexism. Something very like sexism is  evident in the condescension of lawyers and judges; the fact that she is an unmarried woman who (still!) lives at home with her parents is tacitly held against her, as if she is “too nice” to do the dirty work of criminal practice. It is hard to imagine an American male in her position — not that a man would enjoyed more sympathy and protection from the judges and so on but rather that such a man, almost certainly, would have been pushed off the schoolyard by his fellows. His unsuitability would have impressed colleagues and judges alike. With a righteous woman such as Sheila McGough, it is different: it is impossible for me to read about her, or to read Malcolm’s extended transcripts of her conversations with the woman, without thinking of Joan of Arc — and without suspecting that McGough saw herself as Joan of Arc. She would bring justice wherever it was needed. Well, thanks to her conviction, she can’t practice law anymore, so there won’t be any of that in the future. Was she the victim of sexism? I can’t see that. What I see is that she suffered for playing a part that the legal establishment could not understand or, in the end (its patience exhausted, as Malcolm says), tolerate. She was like a spectator at Yankee Stadium who’s expecting to see tennis.

This is a serious problem with “democracy” as we understand it. Our professions, our institutions, even our Constitution — they still take for granted the homogeneous mutual understanding, the “reasonable behavior,” of the late medieval bourgeoisie, a confraternity working in a very thin zone between hereditary rulers (not just kings, but everyone in the upper reaches of government) and the unlettered artisans and peasants who made up the bulk of the huge class to which members of the bourgeoisie belonged by law. When Marx and others observed that the “bourgeoisie” came to power in the French Revolution, they did not having anything like the vast American middle class in mind. Such a class did not exist even in 1850. They were thinking of the lawyers and bankers who in many cases were wealthy enough to be able to buy patents of nobility. With no aristocratic history to speak of, the United States forged blithely into its future with no real sense of its Founders’ backgrounds and expectations. They were not surprised that suave men of their own, such as Franklin and Jefferson, were so well received by high society in ancien régime Paris — but Parisians were.

To return to Malcolm’s experience in the courtroom as a party, not an observer, I will remind older readers of a notorious libel case in which Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (né Jeffrey Lloyd Masson) accused Malcolm of manufacturing five quotations. There were two trials (a motif!). Masson won the first one on the merits, but the jury could not agree on damages, so a retrial was necessary. Malcolm won the retrial, and she tells us how she did it in the gleeful essay, simply titled “Sam Chwat,” that appears in her posthumous collection of essays, Still Pictures. Sam Chwat, a Broadway voice coach, had a sideline in trial witness coaching, and Malcolm shows how his advice transformed her performance in court — and she would underline performance — from austere New Yorker writer to colorful friend of the jury. There are two delicious details. After the second trial, jurors told Malcolm that they often speculated on the question of which scarf she would wear that day. Even better, Masson’s attorney, having substantially won the first trial, rolled out the very same questions as surefire winners at the second one; only, this time, Malcolm and her defense team had worked out much better answers. Malcolm could not possibly have devised a more eloquent way of expressing her contempt for the pieties of the courtroom.

In the third and last of her courtroom books, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Malcolm’s anger surfaces — if only to show a telltale fin — whenever the judge, Robert Hanophy, or the Guardian at Law, David Schnall appear in the narrative focus. Schnall was the court-appointed guardian of Michelle Malakova, a little girl whose mother, Mazoltuv Borukhova, was charged and convicted of hiring an assassin to shoot Daniel Malakov, Michelle’s father. Hanophy, nicknamed “Hang ’em Hanophy,” is a judge in his mid-seventies who appears not to believe that criminal defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and Malcolm presents him as so  indisposed to accommodate them and their attorneys that it’s hard to believe that he could oversee a fair trial. Judge Hanophy made the news when, appealing Borukhova’s conviction, Alan Dershowitz claimed that he had rushing closing arguments to suit his vacation plans. Malcolm shows him doing exactly that. Schnall is a creepy lawyer with no discernible qualifications for representing the interests of children, a qualification not, to Malcolm’s disgust, required for the job of Guardian at Law. In Malcolm’s tragic view, Schnall is the actor who sets in motion the hearing that awarded custody of Michelle to her father, after her parents’ divorce, making of her the little Iphigenia whom Borukhova sought to avenge, allegedly, by hiring a hit man. The tale of Iphigenia in Forest Hills is brainless in the sordid way of all family breakdowns. Far from alleviating the misery, the wheels of justice appear to exacerbate it.

It is The Crime of Sheila McGough, the second of Malcolm’s courtroom books, that from time to time I re-read with relish. Malcolm tells us that she was invited by McGough, a convicted criminal, to tell her story, and this is what Malcolm does, even though she found McGough maddeningly talkative and somewhat simple-minded. McGough almost certainly did nothing illegal, Malcolm assures us. (She is no more than three microns away from deleting the “almost.”) McGough went to jail because the legal establishment in Northern Virginia found her maddening, too, and declined to save her from herself. The crime of Sheila McGough is that she she violated the first ethical rule of practicing law: instead of zealously defending the interests of her client, she did so overzealously — so much so that she could be framed as a co-defendant.

Poor Sheila McGough, as I can’t help think of her, had the idea, in her late thirties, of going to law school. Until then, she had had a successful career in corporate publishing, but she had reached the highest perch that would be open to her, and, feeling unfulfilled, she decided to go to the newly established law school at George Mason University. She didn’t realize until it was too late that no substantial law firm would consider hiring a graduate of this academy, and she fell back on the only opening: criminal law. In the absence of a Public Defender’s office in Northern Virginia, she set herself up as a sole practitioner. No lawyer in history can have needed the support and guidance of working with experienced partners as much as Sheila McGough. They don’t teach everything in law school; what she seems to have learned about the practice of law was just about nothing.

Again, the action is dense; once again, there are two trials. As a result of the second one, Sheila McGough is sent off to prison for three years, having been convicted of hypothecating funds in an escrow account. Again, Malcolm is not present at either trial, and spins her story out of interviews with the people involved. This time, however, all the people involved, aside from a handful of low-lifes, are lawyers and judges. Some of them are sympathetic to McGough — but not sympathetic enough to take up her cause. I was a bit baffled by the connection between McGough’s decision not to take the stand and the omission from the trial of a piece of evidence that would have exonerated her, but McGough, who had developed a persecution complex by the time she met Malcolm, and regarded the Prosecutor as a monster, excused them as “private lawyers with a busy practice.” One of these private lawyers, Mark Rochon, all but charges McGough, in a conversation with Malcolm, with malpractice: she should have known that was going to be “thrown into the maelstrom of criminal defense.”

What draws me to The Crime of Sheila McGough is the pong of sexism. Something very like sexism is  evident in the condescension of lawyers and judges; the fact that she is an unmarried woman who (still!) lives at home with her parents is tacitly held against her, as if she is “too nice” to do the dirty work of criminal practice. It is hard to imagine an American male in her position — not that a man would enjoyed more sympathy and protection from the judges and so on but rather that such a man, almost certainly, would have been pushed off the schoolyard by his fellows. His unsuitability would have impressed colleagues and judges alike. With a righteous woman such as Sheila McGough, it is different: it is impossible for me to read about her, or to read Malcolm’s extended transcripts of her conversations with the woman, without thinking of Joan of Arc — and without suspecting that McGough saw herself as Joan of Arc. She would bring justice wherever it was needed. Well, thanks to her conviction, she can’t practice law anymore, so there won’t be any of that in the future. Was she the victim of sexism? I can’t see that. What I see is that she suffered for playing a part that the legal establishment could not understand or, in the end (its patience exhausted, as Malcolm says), tolerate. She was like a spectator at Yankee Stadium who’s expecting to see tennis.

This is a serious problem with “democracy” as we understand it. Our professions, our institutions, even our Constitution — they still take for granted the homogeneous mutual understanding, the “reasonable behavior,” of the late medieval bourgeoisie, a confraternity working in a very thin zone between hereditary rulers (not just kings, but everyone in the upper reaches of government) and the unlettered artisans and peasants who made up the bulk of the huge class to which members of the bourgeoisie belonged by law. When Marx and others observed that the “bourgeoisie” came to power in the French Revolution, they did not having anything like the vast American middle class in mind. Such a class did not exist even in 1850. They were thinking of the lawyers and bankers who in many cases were wealthy enough to be able to buy patents of nobility. With no aristocratic history to speak of, the United States forged blithely into its future with no real sense of its Founders’ backgrounds and expectations. They were not surprised that suave men of their own, such as Franklin and Jefferson, were so well received by high society in ancien régime Paris — but Parisians were.

To return to Malcolm’s experience in the courtroom as a party, not an observer, I will remind older readers of a notorious libel case in which Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (né Jeffrey Lloyd Masson) accused Malcolm of manufacturing five quotations. There were two trials (a motif!). Masson won the first one on the merits, but the jury could not agree on damages, so a retrial was necessary. Malcolm won the retrial, and she tells us how she did it in the gleeful essay, simply titled “Sam Chwat,” that appears in her posthumous collection of essays, Still Pictures. Sam Chwat, a Broadway voice coach, had a sideline in trial witness coaching, and Malcolm shows how his advice transformed her performance in court — and she would underline performance — from austere New Yorker writer to colorful friend of the jury. There are two delicious details. After the second trial, jurors told Malcolm that they often speculated on the question of which scarf she would wear that day. Even better, Masson’s attorney, having substantially won the first trial, rolled out the very same questions as surefire winners at the second one; only, this time, Malcolm and her defense team had worked out much better answers. Malcolm could not possibly have devised a more eloquent way of expressing her contempt for the pieties of the courtroom.

Not Really About Sylvia Plath

What is the most interesting thing you have learned from a book recently?

This question is routinely asked — by a chatbot, I’m convinced — in the “By the Book” feature of the New York Times Book Review. Like the fatuous and idiotic final question about ideal literary dinner-party guests, it is designed to interest Review readers who delight in everything to do with books except the actual reading.

I thought of the little seminar on Sylvia Plath that I’ve been conducting in the past weeks. It was inspired by a series of essays, three and all, by Elisa Gabbert, in her new collection, Any Person Is the Only Self. These essays are (at least partially) about Sylvia Plath, a poet I never took seriously until now (aged 76). What struck me immediately was the freshness of Gabbert’s interest in the poet; Gabbert herself was born more than two decades after Plath’s suicide, and she writes it though there were nothing controversial about the poet’s claim to fame. Suicide may have made Plath famous, but her poetry has become famous for itself. She is also quite certain that “Daddy” is addressed to her faithless husband, Ted Hughes, and not to poor Otto, the German father who died when Plath was eight and who seems to have led a blameless life, notwithstanding possible Nazi sympathies.

The essays made me want to read Janet Malcolm‘s book, The Silent Woman, again. This book is about Plath and Hughes, both during and after Plath’s life. Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, Is such an oppressive presence that you wonder: was Hughes married to her or to Plath? Hughes’s letters, as quoted by Malcolm, show him to be so utterly overbearing in a passive-aggressive way that he becomes exactly the sort of crushing father-figure whom a girl might want to be rid of once he ceased to be magical. Malcolm takes it for granted that the power of Plath’s last poems speaks for itself. While conceding that Plath might never have become quite so well-known had she not taken her life, Malcolm never suggests that the poetry cheats, as it were, by borrowing some of the luster of Plath’s extinction. But when I reread Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay on Plath, in Seduction and Betrayal, I found that Hardwick isn’t quite so sure that the poems would strike us as powerfully as they do if it were not for proof of the full extent of Plath’s self-destructiveness.

That is the state of my reading so far, and what I have learned from it did not come from any one book. To continue, I shall have to read the poems far more carefully than I have ever done — and far more of them as well. As it happens, I have a copy of the “restored“ edition of Ariel, which necessarily excludes quite a few famous poems that Plath wrote after she stopped fiddling with the manuscript of the collection, most notoriously “Edge.” If I’m to be thorough. I shall have to buy a copy of The Collected Poems, and I’m not so sure that I want to do that. What I have learned from all of this, then, is certainly more than a “most interesting thing,“ and it obviously came from three books at a minimum, four including Ariel.

What we mean by the phrase “the most interesting thing“ when speaking of a book that we have just read is often a minor detail of which we were unaware or about which we were mistaken. There is nothing minor about what I have learned about Sylvia Plath and her poetry from Gabbert, Malcolm, and Hardwick.

I take my hat off to Elisa Gabbert, because I have never been inclined to read about Sylvia Plath as a poet. As a catastrophe, yes. (Hence: Malcolm.) But not as a poet. Gabbert changed my mind about that; no, wait, she opened up to me the possibility that I might want to change my mind. That must be what I have learned from my little seminar. The interesting that I learned was that there are undoubtedly interesting things to learn from further reading. But then I learned that quite a long time ago.

Cities on a Hill
by Frances Fitzgerald

Near the end of Cities on a Hill, her historically weighted report on four “visionary” communities in 1980s American (The Castro in San Francisco, Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Virginia, Sun City Center in Florida, and Rajneeshpuram, Oregon), Frances Fitzgerald writes,

Sydney Mead, the great authority on the American Protestant tradition, wrote in The Lively Experiment that evangelical protestant ism was characterized by an emphasis on direct experience rather than by knowledge of doctrine or ritual practice, and, as a consequence, by anti-intellectualism, ahistoricism, and a pragmatic experimentalism.… Membership in all four groups [the Castro et al] was at least theoretically membership in wholly egalitarian society – a brother- and sisterhood or a society of children who had no past, but only a present and a future. (398)
It is often observed that American’s have no use for history. That’s quite true, so long as it’s understood that “history” is not the same thing as “the past.” History is a method of accounting for the past, and, indeed, Americans have no use for it. The American, — and, I believe, the inevitably democratic — way of dealing with the past is to draw a veil over the general unpleasantnesses and to mythologize the heroes. Two crude and no longer respectable instances are the story that the young George Washington cut down a cherry tree and ‘fessed up to it and the idea that the North fought the Civil War in order to free the slaves. A current and more pernicious example is the proposition that America won the Cold War. From a genuinely historical perspective, these notions are unsustainable. But for most Americans they seem to be indispensable just-so stories.

Temperamentally devoted to the theory and practice of history, or at any rate to using history — historically sustainable ideas — to help me to make sense of the world around me, I have always found my countrymen’s distaste for it alienating. Clearly, I am the alien, the one who doesn’t belong here, the one who ought to remain in the great liminal antechamber called Manhattan. To me, the present and the future are mirages to the extent that they are not built of the touchable bricks of the past. I have, in short, no patience with visionaries. So persuasively engaging, however, is Fitzgerald’s writing, here as in her other books, that I have very much enjoyed re-reading her roundup of borderline crackpots.

What’s crackpot about visionaries of the sort studied by Fitzgerald is the fantasy that you can turn your back on social reality and by sheer force of will (greatly assisted by oblivion) set out to prioritize one ideal characteristic and pretend that contrary characteristics no longer exist, are no longer properly human. To fashion a pseudo-present in which the only experience to be had is the kind of experience that you want to have. The great size and baggy tolerance of America at large help, too, by nipping in the bud almost every idea of bringing the whole country into line — the nationwide prohibition of alcoholic beverages a century ago was a very regrettable exception.

I often wondered what, if anything, an update of Fitzgerald’s 1986 book would tell us. Rajneeshpuram, very simply, is extinct; its failure was clear before the book was printed. Otherwise, the visions have stabilized. Sun City Center, I see, has grown from 8500 inhabitants to 30,000; I expect that golf is still the big draw. From its Website, I gather that Thomas Road is still as much an American Church as a Christian one. The Castro seems to be an LGBTQ neighborhood rather than an exclusively male homosexual enclave. The visionary quality has given way to an elective ghettoism — something that marked the Castro and Sun City from the start. In short, Cities on a Hill is not significantly dated. Under the appearance of similarity, though, one wonders if Americans at large are still the same. I suspect that it would take a writer of Fitzgerald’s perspicacity to ferret out the answer.

The Editor
by Sara B Franklin

Is the subtitle of this new book, How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America really plausible? Even if it’s safe to assume — and I think that it is — that Jones was among the three or four most influential editors in the history of the Knopf imprint, there remains the question of just how far that influence reached. The “America” mentioned here seems to be the relatively small world of people who might read The Editor or who might at least be interested to hear about it (if only because of the Julia Child connection). It goes without saying that I’m one of those people, and happy to be one; but I’ve learned from Donald Trump’s followers that there is a larger America that takes no interest in the culture that Judith Jones did or did not shape. And this awareness lacquers the mentality of Franklin’s book with what feels like a dangerous unreality. It reminds me of the douce days when “France” meant la noblesse and the writers and artists in their employ.

I swallowed The Editor in two days. It really oughtn’t to have been such an easy read. It certainly wasn’t an entirely pleasant one. Where there ought to have been substance, there was copious wallpaper. One of Franklin’s favorite patterns is to begin a chapter section with a scene that opens in medias res, with little to indicate what the context of that res is.

The gifts poured into room 905. Dick brought Judith tulips. Alfred Knopf [the man, not the firm] sent a mixed spring bouquet. His second wife, Helen… (141)

Thus opens Chapter 13; right through Chapter 12, there has been scant mention of medical problems. The second paragraph of Chapter 13 backtracks to the day, “two weeks earlier,” when Jones made a bloody mess in an assistant’s office — endometriosis. The tulips and the bouquets were to grace Jones’s convalescence from a radical hysterectomy. Once again, the point is made that, had she been able to bear children, Jones’s life would have been very different. About ten years earlier, however, it had been different: she had become the acting mom for two teenaged children to whom she was related only tenuously. (Their father, Jack Vandercook,  a quickly decaying widower, had been married to Jones’s cousin Jane during the war, after which Jane left him to marry John Gunther. Vandercook also remarried, and had the two children of whom he could no longer take care, hence the appeal to the Joneses.) Franklin’s account of Jones’s foray into motherhood ends with pure boilerplate:

Motherhood wasn’t coming as easily to Judith as she’d hoped and imagined it would. …

Judith was spread thin. The children needed her attention. [Her husband] Dick wanted it, too. And then there was her Knopf work, unrelenting, where Judith was still trying to prove her worth. (93)

Franklin states in her introduction that The Editor

is not a definitive biography but an intimate portrait, one that aims to highlight Judith’s prescience and outsize influence on American culture and to humanize her — from girlhood to old age — as well. (xviii)

The problem with this approach is that, given the absence of a biography, and even a generally widespread sense of who Judith Jones was and what she did, Franklin finds it necessary to stuff her book with names and dates. These are strewn through the text — another wallpaper pattern — rather than set apart concisely in a section on “background.” We are also told “Judith’s story” as if through her own eyes, an impertinent impersonation that often grates.

One aspect of The Editor hit me a bit close to home. Like my late wife, Kathleen Moriarty, Judith Jones was a very successful graduate of the Brearley School here in New York who also acquiesced to professional to sexism throughout her career, often to her own disadvantage. Kathleen and I often argued about this, as did Judith and Dick Jones. Both women, I suspect, believed that the alternative to acquiescence was somehow worse, and so much worse that they preferred simply to dismiss the matter. Others might find them to have been “too ladylike.” Franklin does not even get that far; it seems to suffice to note the “anomaly” and to move on, as she does with Judith’s being “stretched thin.” Insofar as The Editor contributes to Women’s Studies, it falls woefully short of reflection on a serious problem.

I cannot end this sour-lemon appraisal without shamelessly displaying my own cleverness. As early as page 27, I knew that I was in for a careless drive when I read the following, a passage describing Judith Jones’s first taxi ride through Paris.

The two young women stared wide-eyed as they passed the manicured gardens and fountains of Jardin du Palais Royal…

I quickly translated this impossibility into New York terms.

Whizzing through Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens in their cab, the young ladies peeked in at the chic diners at the Rainbow Room.

As Jones herself actually did say of serving tripe to the Vandercook kids, “That was mean of me.”

When the definitive biography of Judith Jones does appear, I’ll be only too ready to weigh, consider, and enjoy it.

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