Book Report 012: Will Cuppy, HOW TO GET FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER

Dell · 1951

I first saw the name Will Cuppy when I read somewhere (I no longer remember where) P. G. Wodehouse waxing rhapsodic about him. The funniest writer alive, I believe he called him, though as I say I can't look it up to verify the quote. Well, that was enough for me. If the funniest writer ever to live called a man funnier than him, I had to know this fellow.

Before we get into the question of funniness, though, I may point out that Wodehouse's aesthetic judgments could often leave something to be desired. I mentioned Edgar Wallace in this space not too long ago. I do not recommend than anyone ever read an Edgar Wallace book. They are terribly written and racist and personality-free and all the same anyway. Wodehouse devoured them by the boatload; couldn't get enough of them. So. Just saying.

This little paperback, which according to the pencil scrawl on the inside front page I paid three dollars for (unless there was a sale), was published two years after Cuppy's death by a fellow name of Fred Feldkamp, who also provides the minimal introduction. It seems that Will Cuppy had been working on this, a humorous almanac, and The Decline And Fall Of Practically Everybody, a comic history of civilization, off and on for ten years or so, but kept getting sidetracked by the need to do research. It was incomplete at his death, and Feldkamp, who gets an "edited by" credit, threw some additional material in to round it out.

So what does the uncut Cuppy look like? Here's the entry for January 28, the first to make me chuckle:

Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, became King of England and Ireland at the age of nine years upon the death of his father on January 28, 1547. He was a frail and rather useless youth, the only uninteresting Tudor in all history. He died in his sixteenth year and was buried in his grandfather's chapel in Westminster Abbey and that was the end of him. There's a gentleman in California who claimed that poor little Edward VI didn't die, but lived on in disguise, possibly under the name of Sir Francis Bacon, and as such wrote Shakespeare's plays. I try to keep an open mind on these things, but I can see two weaknesses in our friend's theory. In the first place, Edward IV did nothing of the sort. Secondly, Shakespeare wrote his own plays. If he didn't it was somebody else of the same name.

And here is September 22, which I am morally certain was the work of Feldkamp and/or his stooges:

"Dear Sir: My boy friend has many good qualities, but he seems to have an ugly temper. What shall I do?"

"Desperate"

Take a little dry starch, moisten it with cold water, and apply to the injured part. Do this at once, to prevent the air from touching the area. No discoloration should result.

Some authorities recommend raw beefsteak.

Quite apart from the ha-ha-battered-women-am-I-right attitude (I have no information as to Cuppy's misogyny; his sexual politics throughout are about normal for a self-described hermit in the 40s), it's a crude joke, without the pompous-lecturer-punctured-by-flippancy tone of most of the rest of the book. It's the kind of joke you could find in any stag magazine of the period, masculine and brutish and hollow, and it stained for me what was an otherwise quite enjoyable read.

At his best, Cuppy reminds me of Robert Benchley in his pose as General Essayist, though Cuppy manages to impart a few facts along with the tonal play. (There is a whole continent of literary humor in the early twentieth century which is opaque to the average reader today, relying as it does on familiarity with the literary conventions of dead genres, like the overly cozy magazine essay -- or indeed the general-audience almanac.) Cuppy is gently funny, using the Wodehousian trick of deploying set phrases in unusual patterns to produce a comic imbalance, but he's never more than that. But when he gets on a tear about a pet peeve — like the Bacon-is-Shakespeare canard, or the derivation of the constellation Camelopardis — he's a familiar figure to modern, Internet-bred eyes: the know-it-all crank who never leaves his apartment or any error uncorrected. But, as I say, gently funny.

I've got another Cuppy book or two floating around here somewhere. I'm not in any hurry to get to them, but it's nice to know they're there.

Book Report 011: Agatha Christie, THE SECRET ADVERSARY

Barnes & Noble · 1922

Try as I might I can't be grumpy about books. Perhaps it's because I have very specific tastes in books and I'm very good at catering to those tastes (so I'm just not having to deal with books I hate here), but I've mostly given raves to everything I've read here, even when I manage to qualify my enthusiasm a little. After comparing this to how I treat music — I don't hesitate to call albums that bored me boring — you might begin to suspect that I've got a bit of an inferiority complex about literature: anything with a spine and a proofreader will (so far) win my admiration.

All that being merely prologue to saying: this is a lovely little book, a profoundly stupid thriller in the best Edgar Wallace style, and the perfect comedown after the modernist fireworks of Manhattan Transfer and the teen angst of By The Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead.

I don't know if you know Edgar Wallace; he was one of the most prolific crime writers of the twentieth century, and he had about four plots which he trotted out like clockwork twice a year for forty years. Almost none of his books ever made it to a second printing; he was the ultimate hack, and I've read about eight of his books and couldn't tell you a thing about them. Except that they generally featured anonymous young men and women up against a cabal bent on dominating Europe etc., the usual thriller stuff, and typically pretty racist to boot, though not exceptionally so for the era. (Roughly 1900-1930, though he published posthumously through the thirties.)

In contrast, Agatha Christie's young hero and heroine are well-drawn, if ludicrously idealized, portraits, her talent for characterization showing an early flash. This was only her second book, and it's much lighter and sillier than anything I've read by her before. (Which isn't much; as a Dorothy L. Sayers partisan, I've neglected Christie to a shocking degree given my predilection for cozy English murder mysteries.) The hero is called Tommy and the heroine Tuppence, and that gives you an idea of the kind of thing we're dealing with here. Unfortunately the fizzy brio of the early chapters has to give way to workmanlike plotting once the story gets underway, but Tuppence is one of the more charming — and capable — heroines of a by-the-numbers thriller I've come across, pitched at only a slightly higher level of seriousness than the girls in early Wodehouse.

The edition I have is a cheap paperback reprint by the chain bookseller Barnes & Noble: the cover says it's part of their "Library Of Essential Reading," which really just means "this is in the public domain so we make all the profit on it." (1922 is a talismanic year if you're interested in U.S. copyright law; after that point the free ride ends. Thanks, Disney.) I could wish for a grubby first edition, the edges of the pages flaking off my fingertips as I turned them (half the pleasure of reading old books is in the material, sensory qualities involved); but this will do.

Book Report 010: Julie Anne Peters, BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I'LL BE DEAD

Hyperion · 2010

I like to think of myself as a man without a purview, but some things are glaringly outside it. I'm uncomfortable, that is to say, reading a teen novel when my own teenage years are so far behind me that I don't even think of them nostalgically; I barely recognize that dude.

So part of why I'm reading this and talking about it is to interrogate that discomfort. The other part is plain inertia: I have this book because when a fourteen-year-old came up to the desk and asked me if the library had a copy I checked and said no, then looked it up and thought we probably should, so I Suggested A Title For Purchase and was automatically put on hold for it, and in due season the book came in, and I've had it for a week and haven't even looked at it really, and this is weird because I'm not used to being nervous around books.

I think it's the same impulse that has kept me stepping cautiously around teen-pop for most of my adult life: I'm afraid of being mistaken for (or mistakenly becoming) the creepy middle-aged guy who's really really into teenage girl stuff. This is no doubt my own pathology, and has to do with the overt sexualization of teenage girlhood in too much of the discourse I've immersed myself in over the years. Not that teenage girls aren't sexual beings — they're postpubescent mammals after all — but that that, even in aversion, shouldn't be my first thought about them. I feel like a creep even talking about this; and perhaps I should point out that it's all low-level back-of-the-mind stuff, not the kind of foregrounded thoughts which can be laughed at and dismissed.

But there's also the fact that when I was a kid (he said crotchetily) there wasn't any of this Teen Fiction nonsense, there were kids' books and grownup books and once I passed thirteen I read grownup books except for occasional return trips to Narnia or Middle-Earth. I'm just plain not used to the form. (Like, you can say shit as much as you want but fuck is always and forever f*ck? What the fuck kind of style guide is that?) And based on this experiment I doubt I'll be reading much more.

It's not that it was bad. Parts of it were; mostly stylistic issues (for someone who writes so incoherently I have extremely high standards for the kind of prose I'll deign to read) and an ignorance of computers so complete that the suicide-assistant website at the heart of its conceit might as well be coded by magic. Two examples will suffice.

The following sentence appears in the early chapters: "News you can use, Dad: losers aren't cool." The person who thinks it is not immediately engulfed in shame.

And in an important plot point, not only does an off-the-shelf desktop unit apparently enable fingerprint identification through the touchscreen monitor, but a website accessible by people everywhere in the world at all income levels (not that there's ever any sense that anyone in the story is anything but middle-class) requires fingerprint identification for access.

But after I got my grumpy old-man nitpicking out of the way, the emotional contours of the story caught me and rolled me swiftly to the end. It helps, perhaps, that I've had my own struggles with depression, suicidal fantasies, etc. (But my primary way of coping was only obliquely touched on in the book; in fact, the suicidal protagonist scolds at one point, "you don't joke about suicide." Bull and shit.) It also helps that Peters has a good eye for the contours of difficult relationships and the way that adolescent self-dramatization can easily feel suffocating, like there is no reality possible except the one you've willed yourself into believing. I'm not sure I ever entirely believed the motivations of any of the main characters, but I'm an agnostic here; my high school experience was different enough from the U.S. norm that I generally assume that other people's reports are accurate even when they spark no recognition in me.

And then there were things that the book did superbly. One of them was an awesome parody of bodicey romance novels, the kind of deep satire that proves the parodist knows and probably loves what she's mocking. Another was the black humor of the suicide-assistance website's lists of possible suicide options, ranking them by effectiveness, time, availability, and pain, Consumer Reports-style; and in fact our protagonist's slowly dawning realization that the website is populated by the same egotists and morons as the rest of the Internet is one of the truest things in the book. Finally, there was the only (surprisingly touching) healthy relationship in the book, between a (spoilers) cancer-surviving boy and his single mother, who relate to each other in a wholly recognizable combination of sarcasm and sentiment.

Was it a good book? I dunno. I don't know the field well enough to be able to compare it against anything. (The one thing it ain't is, as the inside flap copy claims, edgy. Publisha please. I've written darker shit in my sleep, and I hate dark shit.) I didn't hate it, as I thought I might a few chapters in. And hell if it convinces even one teen reader not to do something stupid before it's too late, it'll have done more good in the world than I ever have. Compared to that what's my aesthetic judgment worth?

Book Report 009: John Dos Passos, MANHATTAN TRANSFER

Houghton Mifflin · 1925

Hell it's been a very long time, to quote Rod Stewart at his most sentimental. I haven't read a classic of modernism for pleasure in I don't know how long. Ten years? Fifteen? I've become accustomed to saying that my three favorite Great Books (as distinct from my three favorite books period*) are Howards End, The Great Gatsby and Brideshead Revisited, but I haven't reread any of them in at least a decade, and today I'm a very different person from the snobbish, Jesuitical young man who first made that list. For one thing, I've lived a little; and where much of Manhattan Transfer would have been totally opaque to me at the age I decided what my favorite books were, I read it with such complete joy that even though it took me the better part of a week I wanted to stop reading it much more often than I did just so I could savor it longer.

(Is this true to anyone else's experience? The compulsion I mean to pause a great movie or set down a great book and just walk around for a while in the glow of its spell, putting off reaching the end not because you want it to go on forever but because if you plow on you'll miss totally capturing the exultation of the moment? It's why I don't read well in cars; not because I get nauseous, but because I glance out the window and let whatever I was reading transform the landscape, live in the pleasure of the ideas for so long that I forget to return to the text.)

Manhattan Transfer may not be a great book — I'm no judge, I haven't read enough Great Books to say with any authority — but it's a very good book. I mean that in multiple ways. It's good in the sense of being moral — of having a cleareyed, sympathetic but scrupulous vision of humanity, letting no frailty or inconsistency escape its attention but not judging in the least — and it's good in the sense of being extremely well constructed — a work of impressive craftsmanship on every level from sentence to plotting — and it's good in the sense of being an endless font of needle-fine enjoyment. I laughed with sheer delight at Dos Passos' sentences and images and constructions more than I ever remember doing with a book before.

The genre of the book is worth some attention. Casting about for an image of the cover to steal off the web, I came across a short review that dismissed it as a failed attempt at high modernism á là Joyce and Woolf, bereft of the psychological insight that characterized those masters and devolving into sentimental bildungsroman at the end. Which is fair up to a point — except Dos Passos never really attempts psychological insight. His technique, like all the great American modernists (Faulkner perhaps excepted) is cinematic, concerned with the surfaces and poses of American life, and has anyone ever detailed those surfaces more magnificently? His New York (ca. 1895-1925) is so vividly imagined, so concretely sensuous, that I was caught short several times, blinking with surprise at the fact that an eighty-five-year-old novel was able to so minutely describe my own sensory experiences.

There is a sense in which the book is a social novel in the vein of Tarkington or Wharton, with an overlay of playful linguistic pirouetting (thus the inevitable comparisons to Joyce) and a wider scope than the essentially middle-class Tarkington or upper-class Wharton. The book has a tremendous (and very American) energy, and part of that energy is provided by the great galumphing engine of melodrama: convenient fires break out, hearts are tragically sundered, men try to kill and be killed, massive fortunes are lost, and heartstring-tugging children are menaced and left alone. But I can't think of this as a flaw — I like Tarkington and Wharton, and I prefer to read books in which things happen rather then the reverse. And Dos Passos orchestrates these events not naturalistically, but imagistically: the melodrama is not meant to be taken seriously (this is in addition to everything else a very funny book), but to say something important about the shallowness and triteness of American lives: if his characters are supposed to be average people, melodrama is the appropriate lens. (Have you ever met an ordinary person?) But Dos Passos is no Sinclair Lewis: he isn't condemning the American system so much as marveling at its vastness, its energy, and its callousness. It ends with one of the main characters lighting out for the territories like Huck Finn, and Twain (and Melville, and Whitman) are far more important comparisons than overbred, self-obsessed Europeans like Joyce and Woolf.

With all that, I was surprised several times at how modern the book was — not how modernist, but how twenty-first century. It could easily be read as a feminist text, with its evenhanded view on abortion — or a queer one, with its incandescent sympathy for a gay man trying and failing to live straight. If there were literary justice, Dos Passos would be widely recognized as fully the equal, maybe even the superior, of his friends Fitzgerald and Hemingway (the trouble is he lived too long and didn't off himself romantically), and I'm extremely glad I've read this book. I haven't even said half of the things I wanted to say about it yet; but anyway I think I have a new favorite Great Book.

*We'll get to them in time, I'm sure.

Book Report 008: Walter Mosely, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

Washington Square · 1990

Oh, man, is that more like it.

Look, I'm an English major lit nerd who loves soaking in the quiet backwaters of Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian (V) literature, where the surfaces are but rarely ruptured by a fleck of life however lazy . . . but I'm also a genre reader who will blow through a crime paperback in an afternoon and count it time well spent.

This is my first encounter with Walter Mosley (spoilers: definitely not my last), and where has Easy Rawlins been all my life? Though I'm not sure I would have understood as much about him when I was a teenager in love with Marlowe and Spade. (I'm very ahem white.) But if an adulthood of listening to jazz and blues and soul has done anything it's helped me cross the racial borders of the imagination (imagination being the key word; I'm not so foolish as to think I'll ever really know what it's like to be a black man in midcentury Los Angeles), and after closing Devil In A Blue Dress I was prepared to call Philip Marlowe a rough draft; his nobility is unearned, his outsider status unenforced. Easy Rawlins, on the other hand, is as much Existential Man as Black Man.

This kind of highfalutin theorizing is only possible because Mosley approaches his novel with unusual literary skill. Not that he shows off — the borders of the crime-novel genre are too rigorously enforced for that — but he manages the extremely difficult task of embedding metaphor in plot and character, without ever dropping the naturalist façade of hardboiled tradition, with such aplomb that I'm left wondering if it's just my imagination.

It's not. Easy is both himself, a deftly drawn character whose observational powers and ability to take a beating never strain credulity, and a sort of archetypal Twentieth-Century Black Male, born in Louisiana, raised in Texas, participant in World War II, fetched up in Los Angeles and making the gestures of citizenship and homeownership without being granted either the privacy of a citizen or the right to self-defense of a homeowner. (His story is that of jazz, and of the blues, over the same period. In 1948, the year Devil In A Blue Dress is set, the L.A. scene was perhaps the hoppingest in black music. Unless it was Chicago.) And the central moral struggle of Rawlins' life, his need/distaste for his murderous gangster friend Mouse, is as self-conscious a metaphor for black manhood as anything in Richard Wright or August Wilson. (In fact, the one possible misstep I can name is that having both Mouse and The Voice as foils to Rawlins' instincts feels like redundancy; I wouldn't be surprised if one or the other disappeared from the series.)

The plot, as far as it goes, is more or less familiar to those who know their Raymond Chandler: the standard noir themes of blackmail, adultery, incest, and large sums of cash are all in play. But setting it among black L.A. — in Watts, which Wikipedia assures me will become important in future novels — adds an extra dimension of psychological tension, an element of totalitarian danger.

If I didn't have this dumb blog project I would be on the library's website right now reserving every Mosley book they've got. As it is, I'll have to forbear continuing the adventures of Easy Rawlins (and others). But man oh man I can't wait.

Book Report 007: Ronald Firbank, CAPRICE

New Directions · 1917

One of the most vertiginous kinds of reading experiences is when a writer makes you work hard to understand what's going on (like say a modernist), but what's going on is so frivolous and silly that it doesn't matter (like say a humorist). Ronald Firbank has that quality; and apart from Max Beerbohm in certain moods and maybe Oscar Wilde at his most delirious I can't think of too many others.

But it's not like it's hard work; it's just that shaggy-dog stories told in elliptical snatches of highly allusive dialogue and jewel-like sentences of vivid imagery but almost no connective tissue are scarce on the ground, so the muscles that you exercise in reading the thing aren't used to being worked at the same time.

Is there a plot? I suppose there is; something about an aspiring actress and stolen silver and bohemian relationships — but it doesn't matter in any sense, because the entire thing is so extravagantly artificial it might as well be a Beardsley drawing set in motion, with no relation to the real world at all except in fragmented images and sudden half-glimpses of shadowy depths that the tinkling, brittle prose, skimming along the surface, never sounds.

Firbank was gay; and not in the Oscar Wilde hush-hush-dreadful-shame way or the Max Beerbohm who-cares-died-a-virgin way, but out and flamboyant and promiscuous and rich so nobody could touch him. Susan Sontag included his work in the canon of camp, and though to a Rocky Horror Picture Show-reared ear his silliness may be too understated to register, every sentence here is suffused with a such a finicky cattiness, so mannered and arch, that it practically screams QUEER if you're familiar with the prose styles of the period. Oh, and nearly everyone in the book is coded gay even if there is only one overtly homosexual relationship, a parody of tragic lesbianism.

There's also racism. Or at least he keeps dropping in "niggers" as set decoration; it's never clear whether his references here to jazz and ragtime are meant to be derogatory, since his world is so full of inverted and sideways values. Firbank was a cosmopolitan traveler, and blackness and "savagery" are major themes in some of his other work; this bears further study. (I bet there's a decent paper somewhere on the meanings of black musicians in Firbank, Wodehouse, Waugh, etc.; compare and contrast with selected texts of the Harlem Renaissance, and you've got a university-press book. You're welcome.)

There's little else to say; the book is tiny, a bare fillip of a novella (which doesn't explain why this is being posted so late), a sort of appetite-whetter for more and bigger Firbankery. Which I will get to (I've got a few more of his works lying about); but I'm glad I began with this apéritif.

Book Report 006: Guido Morselli, DIVERTIMENTO 1889

E. P. Dutton · 1975

I don't remember what I was looking for when I came across this slim paperback in one of the used-book chain stores that dot the state (and I know the location of every one by heart, more fool me). Something in the M's, obviously; Moore? Montgomery? Morley? Morris? But I might not have been looking for anything in particular, when the bright silver spine with Art Deco lettering caught my eye. I'd never heard of Guido Morselli; apart from the introduction to this volume, I still haven't. (As of this writing, he doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page.)

Briefly, then: Morselli, born in 1912, was the son of a rich manufacturer who received a good education, fought in Mussolini's army, and, not needing to write to live, mostly published erudite journalism while completing seven novels which remained unpublished until his suicide in 1973. Of the seven, this is the shortest (it's really a novella, or even a long short story), and apparently the least serious-minded, though it'd be a stretch to call it comic. A quick search of Amazon suggests that only three of his novels were ever translated into English; none of them, naturally, remain in print.

The back cover copy describes the book as a "jewel-like fable of the Belle Epoque," which, together with the phrase "with the delicacy of an operetta," was probably what convinced me to drop the four bucks the pencil scrawl on the first page says it cost. I wouldn't call it a fable, though I could imagine a remarkably sophisticated and slightly dull operetta being made of the plot (Sondheim, in his A Little Night Music mode, could probably handle it.) It relates a fictional interlude in the life of the second king of Italy, Umberto I, who in Morselli's hands is a not-very-intelligent man in his mid-forties who hates the responsibility and endless paperwork of being king, and when the opportunity to raise cash in a clandestine way presents itself, snatches at the opportunity to shed his identity and spend the summer holidaying in the Swiss mountains, incognito. What develops is not the farce you might expect (or, in my case, hope), but a low-key retailing of minor adventures, intrigues, and near discoveries which sometimes approaches being funny but is mostly too sober and even somewhat elegiac for laughter.

Sober and elegiac, of course, isn't a bad mood at all; and Morselli writes (so far as I can tell under the distorting lens of translation) very well, keeping the proceedings full of life and flavor even if they are never allowed to get too hilarious. He says in the author's note at the end that he was writing in conscious imitation of the literature of the era, and I recognize hints of James or Proust or Mann, though with a somewhat greater frankness about sex and bodily functions than the nineteenth century would have permitted; the king has one affair and nearly achieves two, but events overtake.

Umberto I was assassinated by an anarchist in 1900; there would only be one more king of Italy before World War II and the era of the Republic. With the benefit of hindsight, Morselli treats the monarchy as an anachronism, meaningless and unnecessary in a world of trains, telegraphs, and journalism, sentiments which his Umberto wholly endorses. (The real Umberto might have agreed with him: Wikipedia gives his only notable "quote" as "Remember to be a king all you need to know is how to sign your name, read a newspaper and mount a horse.") In fact, about the only benefit the crown seems to confer on Umberto (called "the Count" throughout most of the novella in deference to his incognito) is that it makes girls flirt with him.

The book was written in 1970-71, when Morselli was in his sixties; even though the king is supposed to be about forty-five in the book, he feels like a much older man, and one of the undercurrents of the story is the humiliation and boredom of aging. Not that it's an Updikean or Rothian complaint: Morselli means the title seriously, and his author's note speaks of escapism in terms which J. R. R. Tolkien would approve. Temperamentally, Morselli seems to have been a lot like Tolkien; he disliked the twentieth century, though he was aware of the pitfalls of romanticizing history:

"I am . . . perfectly ready to accept the notion, itself a cliché by now, that the Belle Epoque never existed. The most I would say is that we still have need of fables, and that that particular myth is as good as another."

In fact I'd love to read high fantasy set in Ruritania; but a gentle evocation of the nineteenth century's most civilized narrative form will do quite as well. I enjoyed the hell out of this novella, and could wish for much more where it came from.

Book Report 005: Langston Hughes, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER

Scribner · 1930

A couple months back I went on a book-buying spree. I knew I was going to do this blog come the new year, so I haunted bookstores and bought recklessly, grabbing armfuls at a time, going back three or four times in a week, carrying little lists of titles and author names and scurrying back and forth on the fiction and poetry and genre shelves.

The main focus of all this purchasing was literature from the 1920s. It's a period I've been broadly interested in ever since high school — I think what first really crystallized it was discovering the 1970s editions of Dorothy L. Sayers with the Marie Michal covers at the same time I discovered Wodehouse, and then I read The Great Gatsby and came across a bound volume of the old Vanity Fair magazine and was lost. Before now I've drowned in the music, in the theatrical life, and the humor and cartooning of the period. But in the past year I've decided I need to come to grips with the literary output of the era. This blog has begun the process; the pattern that's developed is that I read one 20s book a week, and the second book of the week can be from whenever.

So here we return to the well of the 20s and meet Negro Literature for the first time on this journey, one of the last books of the Harlem Renaissance if you take that term to be strictly bound up with the relative artistic and social freedom that came with the economic boom of the 1920s. (I don't, largely because books can take a lot longer than music or other arts to develop, and for my money the first real post-Renaissance novel is Native Son in 1940.) My understanding of the 1920s has a lot to do with black life -- one of the prisms through which I've always seen it and learned about it has been jazz, blues, and black show business -- and I'm deeply ashamed of never having really read much Harlem Renaissance literature before now. (The poetry of Claude McKay and Countee Cullen is about it; but I was looking for specific things then and their worth as poetry was only incidental to my purpose.) Langston Hughes is undoubtedly the foremost name to come out of the movement, though he lasted much longer than the Renaissance, and I'm never sure when I bring him up what my audience knows or thinks it knows about him. Some people know the early poetry collection The Weary Blues, some people know the gossipy, kindhearted autobiographies, some people know the educational material for children. Relatively few people know his novels, or so I would assume from the fact that although I took a Harlem Renaissance class not long ago the first I heard of this novel was when I came across it on the shelves.

(My professor, by the way, was the son of Arna Bontemps, one of Hughes' closest friends and occasional collaborators, and if I didn't learn much in the way of bibliographic details it was an unlooked-for pleasure to go to class and listen to him reminisce in his patient, tangential way about the long sweep of black history in the twentieth century and earlier.)

But as this is my first extended encounter with Hughes, it's probably a good idea to pass on some impressions, cobble together a working theory or two, and pass judgment. Here, then, goes:

He's a remarkably fine writer, as one would expect a poet-turned-novelist to be, with a sharp eye for vivid, fragmentary images and the small details of living, but less successful at weaving the whole into a story that convinces. Nothing rings particularly untrue (save maybe the protagonist's confused innocence about sex in one or two chapters), but especially as the book goes on the graceful picture-drawing of the early chapters necessarily collapses into mere narrative spadework. Things must happen in a novel, after all, and emotionally fraught events must be described, and if Hughes isn't quite as good at making them live as he is at making the unfraught, quotidian days hum with life and activity, he wouldn't be the first. (Of course, all this may be and probably is only my personal preference masquerading as aesthetic judgment.)

One clue as to why Hughes the novelist may be more forgotten than some of his less well-regarded peers is that he's not a modernist. He has no facility with, and doesn't attempt, the rich symbolism of a Fitzgerald, the fragmented narrative voice of a Faulkner, or the dense, mannered allusiveness of a Joyce or Pound, and is content to write in an unaffected style that owes more to the popular writers of his youth like Booth Tarkington or Willa Cather than to the heady brew of the small-circulation magazines and recurrent manifestos of the 1920s. With one important exception, Not Without Laughter is as readable as anything that was ever written by someone called "one of the most important young voices of our day."

That exception is the dialogue, which is frequently rendered in a crude Negro dialect. Hughes does some interesting things with it — for instance, a study of who uses dialect and under what circumstances would certainly be worth undertaking — but it's extremely difficult (though not impossible, once you get into the rhythm of it) in the twenty-first century to sit and read sentences like "Sho it is! I knowed it all de time," and not squirm with embarrassment and shame. But Hughes isn't Joel Chandler Harris — his ear for dialect is sound and he follows the rules of the varieties of speech he's recording (and no two people talk exactly alike, which is far more difficult to pull off than you might think), at least so far as he's able without being a trained phonetician. And since he is a poet, the words crackle with meaning and import, however mangled their spelling might be in the creaky old cracker-barrel tradition.

But what really won this book to my heart wasn't the language or Hughes' descriptive power; it was the music. I'm on record as being a total mark for early jazz and blues, and Hughes was too, and the book is full of blues lyrics, onomatopoetic transcriptions of jazz playing, and humid, delirious descriptions of dance and song and performance. The chapter "Dance" is some of the best music writing I've read applying to the hot jazz of the 20s and 30s (though it's supposedly set in the pre-war 'teens), and if you've had difficulty getting into that stuff I'd recommend you search it out and read it through while playing Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, Jelly Roll Morton's Red Peppers, and Cab Calloway's earliest recordings at a high volume. The climactic scene in the book is in a black vaudeville house, where the secret heroine of the novel (absent for much of its action) is revealed as one of the great blues singers and high-stepping dancers of the age; and I couldn't help but be reminded of Florence Mills, who died three years before Not Without Laughter was published, and was the most famous black cabaret artist in the world when she did. Hughes was deeply invested in the sense of self and of physical and psychological freedom that black musicians, dancers, and entertainers worked hard to convey (though they rarely achieved it themselves), and it's not surprising, though it might for people with a more realistic sense of history be disappointing, that he sees art and music and entertainment (which are for him all the same thing; ergo he's not a modernist) as the salvation of the race.

The Harlem Renaissance, several texts in that class reported severely, was a failure; that is, it did not lift the great mass of Negro citizenry (or even the Talented Tenth in which W. E. B. Du Bois placed his faith) into social, economic, or legal equality with their white neighbors. But it could not have done; no artistic movement on earth has ever done anything like that, and it took a particularly myopic and Romantic early-twentieth-century view of art to think that it could. (Artistic people back then were also certain that Yeats and Shaw and Joyce meant the vindication of the Irish, that Sergei Eisenstein proved the success of the Soviet experiment, and that Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo meant that Mexico had joined the first rank of nations. Artistic people were, in short, unworldly and kind of stupid.) But it did make more thinking Americans more aware of black life, and its injustice, than at any time since before the Civil War; it caused some very good poetry and a handful of solid novels to be published, and it facilitated a revolution in music which has not yet finished ringing round the world. (The secret source of all modern pop is hot jazz, as I will someday prove with charts and diagrams and science. But this is long enough as it is.)

The judgment passed?

Awesome novel. I wish I'd read it when I was a good deal younger; in fact it should be taught in high school instead of Salinger or Knowles or whoever. Fuck a middle-class white kid's problems; Hughes knows more about growing up American than any Preppie Easterner ever did.

Book Report 004: George MacDonald Fraser, THE PYRATES

Lyons Press · 1983

I bought it because the Flashman novels caught my youthful attention (though I never read one, I was too much of a prig) and because when I glanced down the first page in the used-book store I read the most magnificent opening run-on sentence in comic literature, reproduced in full here because why the hell not it's my blog:

It began in the old and golden days of England, in a time when all the hedgerows were green and the roads dusty, when hawthorn and wild roses bloomed, when big-bellied landlords brewed rich October ale at a penny a pint for rakish high-booted cavaliers with jingling spurs and long rapiers, when squires ate roast beef and belched and damned the Dutch over their claret while their faithful hounds slumbered on the rushes by the hearth, when summers were long and warm and drowsy, with honeysuckle and hollyhocks by cottage walls, when winter nights were clear and sharp with frost-rimmed moons shining on the silent snow, and Claud Duval and Swift Nick Nevison lurked in the bosky thickets, teeth gleaming beneath their masks as they heard the rumble of coaches bearing paunchy well-lined nabobs and bright-eyed ladies with powdered hair who would gladly tread a measure by the wayside with the gallant tobyman, and bestow a kiss to save their husbands' guineas; an England where good King Charles lounged amiably on his throne, and scandalised Mr Pepys (or was it Mr Evelyn?) by climbing walls to ogle Pretty Nell; where gallants roistered and diced away their fathers' fortunes; where beaming yokels in spotless smocks made hay in the sunshine and ate bread and cheese and quaffed foaming tankards fit to do G. K. Chesterton's heart good; where threadbare pedlars with sharp eyes and long noses shared their morning bacon with weary travellers in dew-pearled woods and discoursed endlessly of 'Hudibras' and the glories of nature; where burly earringed smugglers brought their hard-run cargoes of Hollands and Brussels and fragrant Virginia in clammy caverns; where the poachers of Lincolnshire lifted hares and pheasants by the bushel and buffeted gamekeepers and jumped o'er everywhere . . .

And now I've read the book and have to think of something to tell you about it.

My first impulse is to call it Pirates of the Caribbean as taken from the whimsical showbizzy angle of The Princess Bride, but other, less obvious, analogies occur, not least those suggested by Fraser himself in the appendix. I'm guessing a thick chunk of the book is merely opaque to those who haven't read Jeffrey Farnol or Rafael Sabatini, and if you don't see the appeal of Errol Flynn movies — or really anything Hollywood used to do back when "historical" meant frilly costumes, bigger sets than usual, and the same old hokum as in every other picture — then you might want to give this one a pass. On the other hand, Fraser might just win you over to his point of view.

This isn't the place to go into the beef I have with the received wisdom that the first PotC movie was good and the second two stank — it's true of the Matrix films but it's not true here — but my suspicion that people who call it stupid are really just saying it's not to their taste (that they are, in effect, "over" pirates) has some bearing here. Me, I'm a romancer from the cradle, I've read my Farnol and Sabatini (and my Stevenson and Orczy and Doyle and Dumas and De La Mare and golly 1890 to 1920 was a fine time for historical romance if you hang around in the right used-book stores) — and I enjoyed The Pyrates tremendously.

Because I'm also deeply familiar with studio Hollywood and Fraser, anachronizing like mad and driving the point home that the age of Romance wi' a Straight Face is over, lards his tale with meta gags like having a stirring soundtrack come up at key battles, peppering the romancer's sixteenth-century dialect with the kind of back chat you'd expect to hear at Minsky's or the Stork Club, and laying it on thick about the bazoominess of the female cast. All in good fun; but of course what's good fun in one era isn't so hot in another, and a faint whiff of the attitude which would later boast about not being politically correct emerges from the pages. (A banquet set in a Royal Spanish castle has music by Xavier Cugat & Orchestra and serves tacos and enchiladas; which is A, a cute joke about all Latin culture being undifferentiated in Anglo eyes, B, an easy way to duck out of doing any actual research about sixteenth-century Spanish colonial mores, and C, actually slightly racist.) I don't want to lay too much stress on this — after all, I haven't read the Flashman books, I don't know what Fraser's "normally" like; but given that quite a few jokes land at the expense of (and never on the side of) feminism and "women's lib," I know where my prejudices lie.

But to happier matters. I typed out that long quote above because that was what I liked best about the book, Fraser hitting those particular English-romance buttons (Farnol again, wi' a wannion). In fact I could have done entirely without the winking-and-nudging Hollywood overlay, but if that's how it all ran together in Fraser's mind who am I to say him nay, and anyway you've gotta be at least a little meta nowadays (by which I mean post-1960 or so) or how do you know you're alive? And to be sure I was a little disappointed (just a leetle, as minor characters in Dickens used to say) that the action didn't ruddy stay in England, but went out into a wholly imaginary Spanish Main, but Fraser remained so goddamn entertaining throughout that who cares.

I've got more Fraser in the collection — at least one Flashman paperback, maybe more. (I really should catalog it sometime.) I don't know that I'll pull it out within the year; there's a lot of otherwise on the shelves. I certainly won't be dreading a visit to his world, though.

Book Report 003: W. B. Yeats, THE TOWER

Scribner · 1928

Part of me feels like I should apologize for including a classic volume of modernist poetry in this haphazard overview of What I Own, for three reasons. First, surely poetry is different enough from the fiction that usually occupies this space that it deserves its own category; second, I'm haunted by the fear that people will think I'm showing off or going highbrow on them; and third, I'm not exactly an expert on poetry. I read it; but I'm no scholar.

But I do own a bunch of poetry, and if I refused to write about it out of snobbery (or cringing reverse snobbery), that would be a lie of omission. And this blog, if it is going to be anything, must be relentless in its honesty — because it hasn't got anything else going for it.

In that spirit, then, let me say that all the Yeats I've hitherto known is "The Second Coming," and I only looked it up a few months back because several of its lines were nagging at my subconscious. Perhaps because of a confusion with Keats in my early youth, or because I assimilated some narrow opinion from somewhere else, I've frequently dismissed Yeats as the last Romantic holdout in the stern tides of Modernism — which, being a T. S. Eliot man from way back, I considered the ultimate sin. As "The Second Coming" made clear to me, though, Yeats was among the first modernist poets — and if Eliot was trying to be anyone in his early work, he was trying to be Yeats. As if in apology, I recently picked up this paperback facsimile of Yeats' 1928 collection The Tower, and sat down to read it today.

I will need to read it many more times. For now I am still under its strong spell, and can say nothing about it, only about my experience.

It took a while to catch hold; I read the first two or three long poems as though distracted, trying to piece together coherences and guess at Yeats' political, philosophical, economic, and religious positions, as though that would help me dismiss him. And then, at the end of "Meditations In Time Of Civil War," I tripped over:

The abstract joy,

The half read wisdom of daemonic images,

Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

Oh. Well. why didn't you say so?

These lines, whether intentionally so or not, proved the key to my understanding Yeats. His images are not meant to be coherent: they wheel and spark across centuries, a deliberate piling up of the daemonic — chaotic, unstable, misunderstood — and speak to one another only within Yeats' own mind.

Truth is, it's been so long since I've read modern poetry that I've gotten rusty, applying a prose ear to poetic speech. But by the final verse in the book, "The Gift Of Harun Al-Rashid," I was fully immersed in the unreal world, turning ever as it does solely on William Butler Yeats, which he created, and found keen pleasure in individual lines. Except for a couple of individual poems, I'm not up to the challenge of seeing them whole — I'm still under the weather — but as with classical music, the moment-to-moment beauty is enough for me without grasping the entire structure; at least for now. Like I said, I'll be rereading.

Book Report 002: Tove Jansson, THE SUMMER BOOK

New York Review Books · 1972

I have spent far too many hours in bookstores just wandering up and down the fiction shelves looking for books that might interest me, not today or any time that I can see, but the unspecific someday — like an animal stockpiling far more food than it can ever eat for the winter, I've slipped books into my To Buy pile for no better reason than that they felt good in my hand.

Tove Jansson was a brief, if mysterious, part of my childhood: through some chance process I no longer remember, I came to own Finn Family Moomintroll, and after a year or so with it tracked down and read most of the other Moomin books via the library. It was my first exposure to the ascetic humanism of Scandinavian literature, and I remember being repelled by the tough melancholy of the last two books in the series.

But melancholy is one of my favorite mental states as an adult, even if toughness yet eludes me. The Summer Book provides both. A spare, slim volume decidedly not for children (though I wonder what my reaction to it might have been as a child; I would have been horrified by all the swearing, but would I have recognized death when I came to it?), it's a collection of twenty-two vignettes about life on one of the outermost islands of the Gulf of Finland. An eighty-five-year old woman, her silent and mostly offstage son, and his young daughter spend their summers on the island, and the relationship between the old woman and the child is the heart of the book.

It's full of arguments, of mercurial and unexplained emotional changes — the key to the text is in a single half-submerged sentence about the child's mother having died — and it feels both deeply personal (Jansson's own mother had recently died when she wrote it) and entirely universal. Even if the specific locale, with its dangerous weather and remarkable vistas, is outside the reader's experience, the portraits Jansson draws of island life, of emotional and social isolation made real by physical separation, of the constant battle or dance with nature that living on a lonely rock in the ocean entails, and of the philosophical questions raised in a child's mind by the smallest events, seems to cut to the heart of human experience.

The prose is beautiful: balanced, reserved, giving away nothing while letting no detail slip through the intense observation of the authorial voice. Emotional storms roil beneath the surface, but the placid stillness of Jansson's sentences are undisturbed. There were maybe one or two times that I was reminded that it was a translation from Swedish; otherwise she sounded as natural, and as surefooted, in English as Hemingway or Conrad.

I burned through this book fairly quickly — in fact I chose it partly for its slimness, worried that two books a week was biting off more than I could chew — but next time I intend to take my time, maybe read a chapter a night; being self-contained, they lend themselves to that. And there will be a next time; rereading is nine-tenths of the pleasure of reading.

Book Report 001: Denis Mackail, GREENERY STREET

Persephone Books · 1925

There was no question what the inaugural entry in this mad project would be; at least, there wasn't once I remembered it. I'd been champing at the bit for six months, ever since I'd sent away for the Persephone edition of this book, the book that first made me aware of the Persephone Press back in 2004, a book that had achieved a sort of mythic aura as I groped for it on the nightstand and then shoved it away resolutely. Not yet; wait till the new year. I've put off a lot of reading for this blog.

Persephone Press, in case you don't know, is a boutique English publisher that specializes in reprinting women's literature. Not with the feminist's gimlet eye as employed by say, Virago, but with an interest in vanished or overlooked representations of feminine interests, manners, and mores from the Victorian era to the not-too-recent past. Their biggest success so far has been their reissue of Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day — as books on which even small movies are based tend to be. (Remind me some time to tell you of my adventures among the Yateses.) I loved Miss Pettigrew (both book and movie, but book more than movie) with the simple love which I reserve for children, animals, and sedate comic fiction, and I was expecting, or at least hoping, to love Greenery Street as well.

But before I talk about the book in question, let me go back to that phrase "comic fiction." It's just as well that we get one thing straight before proceeding any further: I believe that comic fiction is its own genre, just as worthy of attention and respect as the conventionalized genres of mystery, science fiction, fantasy, western, or romance — or of any other literary form. P. G. Wodehouse is about the only writer in the genre generally recognized by the standard authorities — and they're not wrong, he's the Master, and stands in relationship to comic fiction as Tolkien does to fantasy — but he's far from being alone, even if he is unique. Denis Mackail was one of his peers, and one of his friends, and in her introduction to Persephone's edition, Rebecca Cohen quotes a letter Wodehouse wrote to Mackail in which he calls Greenery Street "uncommonly like genius."

Genius is not a word I'm comfortable using (I try to live my life by the motto "it takes one to know one"), but I can't remember the last time I took so much real delight in reading a book as I did this one. If it occasionally stumbles into tweedom — a few too many apostrophizing asides for modern taste — it still never fails to be utterly charming. Almost nothing happens in it, neither of the two main characters are very intelligent and even when they are they're miserably inarticulate, and everyone is so unfailingly polite that the most tense scene in the book is composed of two men mostly saying "Oh — nothing," to each other. It's cozy and comfortable —I've read two reviews on the Internet that insist it should be read with hot cocoa, preferably under blankets during a rainy day — but there are intriguing hints of a wider vision. I could see a very different novel — a stern, clear-eyed modern novel of the period — being written about a secondary character, full of psychological drama and sexual frankness and Not Caring A Damn.

But Mackail (like Wodehouse) does care; which is just the trouble. Cohen's portrait in the introduction of the author as "a rather lonely young man who cannot believe the happiness that is allowed him when he gets married and comes to live in his own house with his own wife whom he adores" is heartbreaking on the one hand and pathetic on the other — the two-fisted "terrible honesty" aesthetic of modernism just then ascendant would cast all such sensitivity as unpardonable weakness. Greenery Street, by embracing this sensitivity — there isn't a single male character in it who doesn't turn shy and incoherent at the slightest sign of conflict, or even praise — becomes an unlikely champion for the "feminine" virtues of domesticity and placidity. Which is why it makes sense as part of the Persephone line; even if Mackail was a man, this is the least masculine literature (if, say, Hemingway and Hammett represent that end of the spectrum) that there is. But I always liked Jane Austen more than Mark Twain anyway.

Which reminds me: if I'd read this book five years ago I probably wouldn't have liked it as much — that quicksilver drop of Real Life running through the gentle comedy would have spoiled it, in my Wodehouse idolatry. But where Wodehouse was clumsy about things like sex and passion and therefore left them alone, Mackail has a defter touch, and manages an Austenian moral drama without compromising his airy comedy.

I first heard of Denis Mackail when I was going through the university library's stacks looking for short stories to photocopy. (Don't ask.) I next heard of him when I read a short story of his in an anthology curated by Wodehouse. A web search brought me to Persephone; and now that I've read Greenery Street I'm eager to read more. Of course, that will have to wait. I've still got the rest of my library to get through first.