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mallorys_cameraWe had a jolly little dessert party here last night with precocious children and low-maintenance grownups, and thus I exorcised the ghost. And was able to email someone this morning who is legitimately grieving: You know, you can’t really rescue anyone. You can reach out your hand. But they have to want to rescue themselves.
###
Also, I did not win Powerball.
###
Also, I’d wanted to brush up on my dimly, dimly, dimly remembered Italian (which is actually not Italian at all, but Sicilian, a whole ‘nother dialect.)
But Dutchess Community College doesn’t offer conversational Italian to non-students.
So, I guess I’ll be learning conversational Russian instead.
###
“You need to come visit me,” I told B on the phone yesterday. “I am totally obsessed with JR jumping out that window, and I’m just sick of thinking about it. It’s not like I knew the guy particularly well. And I’m so sad about it. I can’t work! One knockdown, drag-out fight with you over Bernie Sanders, and I’d forget all about him.”
B laughed. “You need to watch Bad Television! Maybe a Blue Bloods marathon. Or maybe you should lock one of your Sims in a room without doors and watch him starve to death.”
Instead we talked about Gore Vidal and the fate of American literature.
###
I’d finished both the Jay Parini bio and a really awful memoir I found in the library by someone called Michael Mewshaw that chronicles Vidal’s obsession with plastic surgery, tax evasion, and paid sex with adolescent boys in lurid detail.
Mewshaw’s memoir really upset me: It was just so unrelentingly mean; it described the last 30 years of Gore Vidal’s life – the encroaches that Wernicke-Korsakoff’s Syndrome made into that beautiful brain – with a dazzling display of petty Schadenfreude. Gore Vidal stumbling drunk up La Rondinaia’s steep oleander-lined path; Gore Vidal smashing a bottle of 35-year-old single malt against a fireplace and guzzling scotch from its jagged porcelain rim; Gore Vidal on display in a wheelchair at some writer’s conference, a bobble-head in stained sweatpants and cheap, glaringly white tennis shoes, “an antimacassar of dandruff around the shoulders.” (WHY the hell did you feel compelled to add that particular detail, Mewshaw? And how many thesauruses did you have to search through before you came up with the word antimacassar?)
Mewshaw appears never to have forgiven Vidal for the fact that in all their years of acquaintance, Vidal never spoke with him spontaneously, from the heart. That Vidal used him as a one-man focus group for bon mots.
But surely any idiot knows when you’re around someone like that, that this person is to be pitied? That this person believes in the deepest part of his or her soul that he’s absolutely worthless unless he’s tap dancing?
###
“Some might argue karma caught up with Gore Vidal,” B said.
“Or hubris,” I said. “It’s just very, very sad. He was trapped in his persona. And, of course, a raging alcoholic. But one day he decided to stop pretending to go to the gym or watching what he ate or drank. And boom! He turned into Dorian Grey’s portrait.”
“Well, that’s the depression,” B said. “I suspect in part he lived long enough to recognize that that entire generation of writers who came out of the war would be forgotten – as most generations are. Who reads Mailer now? Or Heller? Or Jones? Or Bellow? Or Roth when he's gone? Only Salinger endures. I’m not sure Vidal could stand that.”
“Right,” I said. “Books that are taught in high school endure because that’s the last time most people read. So, Harper Lee. And I think Mailer will be remembered, but for The Executioner’s Song. Not for his fiction. Never underestimate the American public’s fascination with spree killers! I think Bellow may still be read.”
“Yeah, Mailer and Capote are no longer recalled as fiction writers but rather as the masters of True Crime. And Bellow is gone, baby. G-O-N-E. Oddly enough Kerouac has made the cut. Odder still, Phil Dick is the Van Gogh of genre writers. A jack in his day and now taught everywhere.”
“Right. And a really bad writer from a prose style point of view. And Harper Lee – on the basis of that one book.”
“Oh, but it was a perfect book, in the same sense that Stephen Crane is still taught for Red Badge of Courage.”
“Yes, it was a perfect book,” I said. “Although apparently there’s a bit of a backlash to it now within the legal community from politically correct firebrands who resent the fact that Atticus Finch has become the patron saint of lawyers. Still serves to support my thesis that the only literature that survives is stuff that can be taught in high school. De facto YA fiction – whether it was written to be YA or not.”
“That’s okay,” B said. “High school is probably better without the Brontes, and Jane Austen is still every smart girls go-to these days. They still teach Moby Dick, too – the most difficult book most people will ever read. And they still teach Steinbeck. I think Hemingway these days is considered too sexist, and Faulkner too hard. The saddest causalities are writers like Willa Cather. And only I miss Thomas Wolfe.”
“I was never much of a Thomas Wolfe fan myself,” I said. “And wasn’t Cather gay? I’d imagine that would make her the ideal syllabus inclusion.”
“Gay, yes, but that’s not a good enough excuse for her essential Midwestern values.”
“Right. Nobody loves the Midwest.”
“We like Garrison Keillor!” B said. “Midwest lite.”
“Garrison Keilor’s popularity is on the decline, too,” I said. “I think he’s generally viewed as the Boomer equivalent of Lawrence Welk.”
“He is Lawrence Welk. Without the bubbles.”
“Think so?” I asked. “I actually find his Lake Woebegone monologues moving. I guess I’m terminally square.”
“I'm not suggesting that he isn't a wonderful story teller,” B said. “He is. But that upper Midwestern cheer that Welk had is a lot like Prairie Home. Not a bad thing, but we live in a darker age right now.”
“Is it?” I said. “The people who watched Welk were cowering under the fantasy of nuclear annihilation. I think all people in every time and place think the era they’re living in is the darkest age.”
“Oh, this isn't the darkest age by any stretch,” B said. “Cold War fears were tempered by the recent memories of defeating Nazis. The Summer of Love was only 22 years after the defeat of Germany and Japan.”
“It took me a long, long time to see my life in the context of the Second World War,” I mused.
“There were still war vets in college on the GI Bill when you were born,” B said. “When Robin was born, Bill Clinton was halfway thru his first term. And five minutes from now he may be de facto President again.”
“I know,” I said. “But somehow I never related to it. I was shocked when I finally figured out that I’d actually been born during the Truman administration.”
“Had he just managed to hang on another eight years, FDR would still have been President!” B said.
“Then I’d really be a relic of a bygone era,” I said.
###
Also, I did not win Powerball.
###
Also, I’d wanted to brush up on my dimly, dimly, dimly remembered Italian (which is actually not Italian at all, but Sicilian, a whole ‘nother dialect.)
But Dutchess Community College doesn’t offer conversational Italian to non-students.
So, I guess I’ll be learning conversational Russian instead.
###
“You need to come visit me,” I told B on the phone yesterday. “I am totally obsessed with JR jumping out that window, and I’m just sick of thinking about it. It’s not like I knew the guy particularly well. And I’m so sad about it. I can’t work! One knockdown, drag-out fight with you over Bernie Sanders, and I’d forget all about him.”
B laughed. “You need to watch Bad Television! Maybe a Blue Bloods marathon. Or maybe you should lock one of your Sims in a room without doors and watch him starve to death.”
Instead we talked about Gore Vidal and the fate of American literature.
###
I’d finished both the Jay Parini bio and a really awful memoir I found in the library by someone called Michael Mewshaw that chronicles Vidal’s obsession with plastic surgery, tax evasion, and paid sex with adolescent boys in lurid detail.
Mewshaw’s memoir really upset me: It was just so unrelentingly mean; it described the last 30 years of Gore Vidal’s life – the encroaches that Wernicke-Korsakoff’s Syndrome made into that beautiful brain – with a dazzling display of petty Schadenfreude. Gore Vidal stumbling drunk up La Rondinaia’s steep oleander-lined path; Gore Vidal smashing a bottle of 35-year-old single malt against a fireplace and guzzling scotch from its jagged porcelain rim; Gore Vidal on display in a wheelchair at some writer’s conference, a bobble-head in stained sweatpants and cheap, glaringly white tennis shoes, “an antimacassar of dandruff around the shoulders.” (WHY the hell did you feel compelled to add that particular detail, Mewshaw? And how many thesauruses did you have to search through before you came up with the word antimacassar?)
Mewshaw appears never to have forgiven Vidal for the fact that in all their years of acquaintance, Vidal never spoke with him spontaneously, from the heart. That Vidal used him as a one-man focus group for bon mots.
But surely any idiot knows when you’re around someone like that, that this person is to be pitied? That this person believes in the deepest part of his or her soul that he’s absolutely worthless unless he’s tap dancing?
###
“Some might argue karma caught up with Gore Vidal,” B said.
“Or hubris,” I said. “It’s just very, very sad. He was trapped in his persona. And, of course, a raging alcoholic. But one day he decided to stop pretending to go to the gym or watching what he ate or drank. And boom! He turned into Dorian Grey’s portrait.”
“Well, that’s the depression,” B said. “I suspect in part he lived long enough to recognize that that entire generation of writers who came out of the war would be forgotten – as most generations are. Who reads Mailer now? Or Heller? Or Jones? Or Bellow? Or Roth when he's gone? Only Salinger endures. I’m not sure Vidal could stand that.”
“Right,” I said. “Books that are taught in high school endure because that’s the last time most people read. So, Harper Lee. And I think Mailer will be remembered, but for The Executioner’s Song. Not for his fiction. Never underestimate the American public’s fascination with spree killers! I think Bellow may still be read.”
“Yeah, Mailer and Capote are no longer recalled as fiction writers but rather as the masters of True Crime. And Bellow is gone, baby. G-O-N-E. Oddly enough Kerouac has made the cut. Odder still, Phil Dick is the Van Gogh of genre writers. A jack in his day and now taught everywhere.”
“Right. And a really bad writer from a prose style point of view. And Harper Lee – on the basis of that one book.”
“Oh, but it was a perfect book, in the same sense that Stephen Crane is still taught for Red Badge of Courage.”
“Yes, it was a perfect book,” I said. “Although apparently there’s a bit of a backlash to it now within the legal community from politically correct firebrands who resent the fact that Atticus Finch has become the patron saint of lawyers. Still serves to support my thesis that the only literature that survives is stuff that can be taught in high school. De facto YA fiction – whether it was written to be YA or not.”
“That’s okay,” B said. “High school is probably better without the Brontes, and Jane Austen is still every smart girls go-to these days. They still teach Moby Dick, too – the most difficult book most people will ever read. And they still teach Steinbeck. I think Hemingway these days is considered too sexist, and Faulkner too hard. The saddest causalities are writers like Willa Cather. And only I miss Thomas Wolfe.”
“I was never much of a Thomas Wolfe fan myself,” I said. “And wasn’t Cather gay? I’d imagine that would make her the ideal syllabus inclusion.”
“Gay, yes, but that’s not a good enough excuse for her essential Midwestern values.”
“Right. Nobody loves the Midwest.”
“We like Garrison Keillor!” B said. “Midwest lite.”
“Garrison Keilor’s popularity is on the decline, too,” I said. “I think he’s generally viewed as the Boomer equivalent of Lawrence Welk.”
“He is Lawrence Welk. Without the bubbles.”
“Think so?” I asked. “I actually find his Lake Woebegone monologues moving. I guess I’m terminally square.”
“I'm not suggesting that he isn't a wonderful story teller,” B said. “He is. But that upper Midwestern cheer that Welk had is a lot like Prairie Home. Not a bad thing, but we live in a darker age right now.”
“Is it?” I said. “The people who watched Welk were cowering under the fantasy of nuclear annihilation. I think all people in every time and place think the era they’re living in is the darkest age.”
“Oh, this isn't the darkest age by any stretch,” B said. “Cold War fears were tempered by the recent memories of defeating Nazis. The Summer of Love was only 22 years after the defeat of Germany and Japan.”
“It took me a long, long time to see my life in the context of the Second World War,” I mused.
“There were still war vets in college on the GI Bill when you were born,” B said. “When Robin was born, Bill Clinton was halfway thru his first term. And five minutes from now he may be de facto President again.”
“I know,” I said. “But somehow I never related to it. I was shocked when I finally figured out that I’d actually been born during the Truman administration.”
“Had he just managed to hang on another eight years, FDR would still have been President!” B said.
“Then I’d really be a relic of a bygone era,” I said.
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no subject
Date: 2016-01-10 07:34 pm (UTC)I always thought Vidal had a point about the Times - he was blacklisted there for years. They said they would never forgive him, and I guess he took them at their word, and never forgave /them/.
I am so much of two minds about that generation of writers, the postwar men's men. Part of me says 'we must not lose bellow'; 'Henderson the Rain King'? 'Herzog'? Why, he's our Thomas Mann! And another part of me says 'please let's do lose them.'
The judgement of that generation is itself so generationally-bound - Roth got the first complete-works treatment in the Library of America edition of any living writer, and that decision is going to look baffling in retrospect. I suppose Steinbeck will eventually go the way of Dos Passos - the naturalistic novel of class has been out of fashion almost as long as I've been alive - but it's impossible for me to believe Faulkner will ever be decanonized.
I keep thinking that Vidal's Narratives of Empire books should still be around - Hamilton is the subject of a top-hit musical, so why not read "Burr" and then some of the others of that set? But I don't think there's any evidence of it; instead, if anything, they reach for David McCullough.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-10 08:23 pm (UTC)Well, Parini -- who writes far more sympathetically about his subject -- points out that Vidal was reviewed in the Sunday Times. So, I don't know.
I like Bellow myself. But, Ben's right -- his reputation is not going to survive. My oldest kid, who's quite a reader and veering on 30, has no idea who Bellow is.
I believe Catch 22 is taught in some high schools, plus the phrase has entered the general vocabulary. So I think Joseph Heller will prevail in some small way.
Roth? (Shudder.) Personally, I've never understood why Philip Roth had a literary reputation in the first place. Self-obsessed and bor-ring! Good riddance.
I think the thing with the Narratives of Empire is that -- taken as a whole -- they're not very good. Burr is good.
But after Vidal died, I reread Lincoln, and Lincoln is not good.
I think the deal is that Vidal was a superb prose stylist but not a particularly good storyteller, and storytelling is critical for writing good fiction.
Hamilton is on my must-see list (I live in the greater NYC metropolitan area) but tickets have been sold out for months. My sense -- and it may be completely unjustified -- is that it's popular not necessarily because it's good but because of the Dr. Johnson Talking Dog phenomenon. A hiphop musical about the Founding Fathers? It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-10 09:27 pm (UTC)Sorry to hear that you’re still feeling down about JR. When things like that hit too close to home, it can unsettle you for longer than people realize.
one-man focus group for bon mots. This is the sort of thing people had to resort to before Livejournal. Now we can have a bon mots friend's filter.
I still read Mailer and Roth. Some of Mailer's manliness seems comical nowadays (getting into a fistfight because someone called his poodle "a faggot") but I still found value in what and how he wrote. I'm probably the only Gen. X-er to have read The Armies of the Night. And much of Roth, I think, was specifically designed to get women to leave the room. Kind of how Nirvana was designed to get baby boomers to leave the room, or how dubstep is designed to get me to leave the room. Couldn’t enjoy Heller beyond Catch 22, however.
Millennials are obsessed with how artists lived their personal lives and how they self-identify. So I can't see them flocking to the likes of Mailer or Vidal or Roth or anyone who was ever publish in Playboy. Of course, there's always Kurt Vonnegut. He was benevolent and monogamous enough to still appeal to Millennials.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-10 09:55 pm (UTC)Something Happened is actually a pretty good novel, but it's astonishingly claustrophobic and -- what? -- like the millionth take on the Loneliness of the White Mid-Level Executive? So, yeah. Irrelevant.
I love your analysis of Roth.
I adore Kurt Vonnegut. Harrison Bergeron is my answer to all Identity Politics (which I hate with a passion.) He had a pretty miserable old age too, of course.
I like the bon mots filter. And, yes, I'm in on the publishing house. After all, $1.3 billion is a lot of money, so there'll be plenty left after I give $100 million to Doctors Without Borders and another $100 million to the Berkeley Free Clinic.
Bellowing
Date: 2016-01-11 01:51 am (UTC)I've pushed "As I Lay Dying" on just about anyone I know who CAN read, with very mixed results. I'm not even going to try peddling "Absalom, Absalom". Their loss.
My high school featured a very lethal Mid-West combination. First setting us up with "My Antonia" and then when we least expected it, Rolvaag's "Giants In the Earth". (Now that latter would come with a trigger warning)
And the only Mailer I was ever able to read was "Executioner's Song". Truly brilliant. Something about the story took Mailer out of himself so that he was nearly invisible. He should have tried that more often.
Re: Bellowing
Date: 2016-01-11 02:21 am (UTC)If I don't try to make Max read Saul Bellow, he won't try to make me read David Foster Wallace. It's this unspoken pact we have.
Re: Bellowing
Date: 2016-01-11 03:18 am (UTC)I started "Infinite Jest" You definitely got the better end of the deal. :)
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 07:31 am (UTC)I was only able to get halfway through Something Happened. It was, like you said, claustrophobic. After so many pages I stopped being interested in this guy and what his wife and kids thought of him. I also read Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man and it was sad. All that looking for greatness in other people’s work (for example: the attempt to write a sequel to Tom Sawyer - which I more-or-less remember having a sequel) instead of creating something original. Watching a great writer stoop to that sort of “fan fiction” was like watching Rembrandt paint by numbers.
Had to google Harrison Bergeron but I did read Welcome to the Monkey House back in the day. And it's familiar now that I've read a synopsis. It reminds me of the pro golfer, Casey Martin who sued the PGA so he could use a cart. I remember saying if he won that I was going to become a running back in the NFL – why if they only gave me a five second head start I’d be the greatest there ever was! (Of course, nowadays I’d probably require a ten or fifteen second head start.)
give $100 million to Doctors Without Borders and another $100 million to the Berkeley Free Clinic. – on a mere 1.1 billion, how will you manage to survive? I'll send applesauce.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 02:43 pm (UTC)Plus, you know, there's that rescue for the Lost Dogs and Cats of the Hudson Valley I'll be opening up.
Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is among my Ten Favorite Books Ever.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 04:31 pm (UTC)Not me. I don't even know which Jones you're referencing. I own a copy of Catch 22 and I've never read it. I've always meant to read some Bellow ever since I was an undergraduate at UofC and he was still teaching there but have never gotten around to it. There's always something more intriguing to hand.
I guess to a large degree I simply felt like these guys--these "men's men" who were always deprecating "faggots"--weren't writing for me. It's not like there's not so little tremendously good literature in this world that skipping a generation here or there will leave you bereft.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 05:20 pm (UTC)But, yeah. Basically, I'm with you in having no interest whatsoever in the writing of manly men. Frankly, I'd like to piss on them all.
Joseph Heller, by the way, is not a "manly men" writer, but mostly writes about his perplexity in masquerading as a manly man. Catch 22 is a great novel, though I'm not sure it would be exactly to your taste. Does contain one of the great Francois Villon puns of all time, though. And Bellow -- as a Jew who, unlike Mailer, wasn't ashamed of being a Jew -- is also a bit of an outsider to the Manly Men drum circle and a terrific prose stylist.
And I don't think that generation fails to leave a legacy. Salinger, Kerouac, and Harper Lee are going strong.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 06:00 pm (UTC)I think I missed my window for Salinger. Several people my age have mentioned rereading Catcher and finding it disappointing, even to the point of actively sympathising with the "phonies".
Kerouac was too beloved by Boomers to appeal to me. Given the choice in high school between reading Dharma bums and Zen ATAOMM, I went with the latter, and it hugely influenced my subsequent choices. (I studied East Asian civilisation in college, which led me to devour the works of Murakami, Mishima, and Hwang Sun-wŏn.)
My dad credits Lee's book with inspiring him to become a lawyer, but growing up I viewed it through the same lens as Uncle Tom's cabin--a historical curiosity, something read more for its message than its literary qualities.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 06:13 pm (UTC)I think you and I have been in the lime jello wrestling pit over this one before. :-)
I don't think it's fair to judge past works by contemporary standards. And by contemporary standards, I think Mockingbird stands up well if you see it as a YA novel. It's beautifully structured, and its simple prose serves the complexity of a central metaphor that's very relevant to the lives of high school students who even in these enlightened days tend to be tormenters and bulliers.
I have a strong sentimental streak, so I still love the novel even though I'm an adult.
Less sentimental readers probably prefer to get their South fix from Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor (who in many ways is an edgier version of Harper Lee.)
Dharma Bums is actually the only Kerouac I don't actively loathe, but that's not saying much. Talk about misogyny. I do read every Kerouac bio I can get my hands on, though.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 06:26 pm (UTC)So it sounds like I've missed my window for Mockingbird as well. I'm thrilled there's so much good literature aimed at adolescents around these days, but I'm really not interested in reading it myself (especially when there's so much Faulkner I haven't gotten to yet).
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 07:20 pm (UTC)Clearly, we're in the same Karass.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-11 10:44 pm (UTC)