In My Time of Dying I Know Where I’m Bound

 As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

Earlier this year I attended a company-wide event intended to help a geographically dispersed staff function better. Similar events probably take place all over the world daily.

With the best of intentions, the meeting organizer invited all present to introduce themselves, talk about their role and tell everyone what book(s) they were reading. And so just like that, an event meant to engender unity began by dividing those present into two groups.

Sadly, it was the readers who seemed not to notice.

I bring all this up not because in a noble moment I alone noticed the error, but because I failed miserably at trying to fix it. The only thing worse than dividing people is a bad joke and I’m now certain that wordplay with the titles of novels won’t make non-readers feel suddenly well-read. Lesson learned.

If you’re interested, the novels dragooned into the service of failed humor were the Fitzgerald we recently talked about and this short masterpiece. While I am immersed in filling in gaps in my reading, this is a repeat. At some point before I completed college I went on a Faulkner tear, attacking his novels as a plow would the deep rich soil of Yoknapatawpha County

The young man who crafted this novel was not yet the dashing figure he came to be. William Faulkner in the 1920s.

And then I stopped, although that was less about Faulkner and more about fiction.

So here I am, back again with the Bundren family and while I failed to notice a few of their misadventures the first time around, they remain a singular bunch. At the outset, Addie Bundren is on her deathbed, while her oldest son, Cash, works on building her coffin. The rest of the family is caught in the twilight state that marks a death watch.

Although death has been a regular visitor since I was a tot, I had not yet buried a parent when I first read this novel. And so I read without recognizing how uncannily accurate the mood was. The tension, the sadness, the fear, the withdrawal, as if a wholesale retreat into oneself can spare one from the unique pain of a mother’s (and wife’s) departure from this life.

There are lots of Bundrens and the narration shifts between them. All five children–in addition to Cash there are three other boys (Darl , Jewel and Vardaman)  and one girl, Dewey Dell–have their say, as does Anse, the soon-to-be widower. Over the course of the novel a number of secondary players pipe in, but mostly we hear from the Bundrens.

Isn’t that always how it is? The family collapses in on itself but no one notices at first. The distracting urgency of funeral arrangements and funerary rituals consumes everyone’s emotional energy.  Action occurs without thinking, or feeling, until the time for activity has passed and all you are left with is each other, your pain and the hole in your lives. I don’t think it matters whether your family is picture-perfect or a mess the void is the same.

I suspect Addie’s final journey home was on a wagon much like this.

The Bundrens, it’s obvious from the outset, are far from picture-perfect. Jewel is forever on the cusp of disappearing, the un-Bundren who in reality is the bastard offspring of Addie’s affair with Reverend Whitfield, a secret she takes to her grave. Darl is, in the vernacular of the time, crazy and going more insane over the nine days the book describes event though his voice appears most often.

Vardaman is a child (he is the youngest Bundren) trying to make sense of his world and the violent disruption he’s experiencing. Dewey Dell is the remaining source of maternal energy who harbors a terrible secret of her own. Anse presents as a man so single-minded that if the word didn’t already exist they’d invent ‘stubborn’ to describe him. Anse, I’m certain, would prefer dutiful.

The tale itself is concerned more with the aftermath of death than dying. Anse has promised to take Addie home to Jefferson to be buried with her people. What should be a trip of a day or so turns into a mini-Odyssey. Their homeland seems to be actively conspiring to deny the Bundren family their final duty and remaining dignity.

With bridges washed out by flood waters and roads impassable from the same risen waters,  the Bundrens push forward. As they go, they prove impervious to advice and even, at times, hospitality. Horror and high comedy make common cause as the Bundrens ford a flooded river, briefly losing Addie’s coffin and Cash’s tools to the floodwaters. (Those tools mean something I’m certain, but I’m too dim to understand what.) Cash himself ends up riding in the wagon next to and sometimes atop the coffin he’s built for his mother, his leg broken and ultimately cast in concrete.

I suspect Addie’s final journey home was on a wagon much like this.

All this takes time and what should be a relatively quick journey of a day or so ends up taking nine days. Addie’s essence, shall we say, precedes her. In the countryside, that leads to tongue-wagging. By the time they get to Jefferson the perfume makes the rural-urban divide tangible, even if that divide in early 20th century Mississippi constitutes a smaller gap than that between, say, Mississippi and Manhattan.

It would be too easy, and wrong I think, to assign roles, motivations and significance to every narrator. I think the art here lies in telling this story from so many angles, from leaving in the ambiguities, from the very idea that there isn’t just a story but that there are multiple stories and these stories intersect with even more stories and so on.

As a younger reader, I recognized what made this novel different. Some decades on I recognize its quiet power and artistic mastery.  And that is a lesson worth learning.

READER BONUS: The Vintage paperback edition contains the corrected text found in the Library of America edition.

 

 

 

 

 

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I Might Like You Better if We Slept Together

Professor Romeo
Ann Bernays

Do you remember the last time the world was falling apart? I mean the time before right now. When men in powerful positions were having their least noteworthy behaviors dragged out into the cold hard light of day?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that civilization had reached a moment of great reckoning. While the occasional legal settlement still makes news, the sense of peril has passed and we’ve all moved on to more engaging topics.

Somehow, I don’t recall this late 1980s novel enjoying a “Me, Too” resurrection, which is odd because it could easily be seen as an opening shot in the war against male workplace misbehavior. And while it may have resurfaced commercially without my noticing it, I don’t notice a lot of things. For instance, I evidently carried this book through three moves before ever opening it. The only reason I can be certain of the number is the business card of a literary agent–a neighbor from long ago–was stuck in the pages.

The poster boy of the “Me, Too” movement meets NY’s hometown newspaper.

At the outset, we meet Jacob Barker, professor of  Psychology at Harvard University. Barker is in mid-career, having had the right mentor and having published experimentally-based, well-received often-cited papers on the developmental differences between males and females. He has accumulated all the accouterments of academic prestige. Top university: check.  Tenure: check. Academic renown: check. A suitably prestigious office locale: check. And yet like any other schoolboy, our leading man works himself into quite a lather when he receives a summons to the Dean’s office.

The Dean would like to address a complaint with Barker. There are, it seems, some rumours. Well, not so much rumours as accusations. Not really a formal complaint, mind you, but there is this new process and administrative machinery and, anyway, it must all be a mistake and so do come over Tuesday next and we’ll hash this all out. The Dean is about as unctuous a figure as you’ll ever encounter; he put me in mind of a career diplomat I once met who oozed insincerity by the barrel.

Our, dare I say, hero spends upwards of the next hundred pages thinking back over his, ahem, career. A well-established professional, he understands exactly what’s at risk, he just doesn’t see his own hand in having created what could be, if you think about it, an ambiguous situation. I mean, as my dad the philosopher king, once said, “It takes two to bang-o.” It wasn’t … rape. It was seduction, a game between men and women as old as time itself. At least that’s what Jake would say.

The locus of our tale. Cambridge as seen from Boston.

And so he reminisces. There’s his first wife, with whom he has a son. There are three students who stand out in his memory. There’s his second wife an Asian-American woman much younger than he, who he met at his publisher.  And there’s the woman who made him, a colleague and long-time lover who is a fellow faculty member. Importantly, she’s everything our man isn’t. Strategic, calculating, ruthless.

It’s her idea to repackage his academic writing for a broader audience inclined to a life of the mind–the types of people who read The Atlantic and The New Yorker and, well, books like this one. In so doing she turns him into sort of the un-Camille Paglia lending a contemporary, cultural gloss to his more lab-bound experimental work.

The result is every academician’s dream, a bestseller, turning the meager salary of an Ivy League academic (honestly, they’ve got big brains; shouldn’t their pay exceed that of an established but still junior associate at a white shoe law firm or top-tier investment bank?) into the grocery money while the book’s sales pay for the house near Harvard Yard and the other appurtenances of life in the higher-altitude reaches of the income distribution.

Harvard Yard in winter. You can see how easy it is to romanticize the place.

By the time of his financial success, whatever relationship Barker and his packager had has withered to the courtesies of work life. Or has it? She has a new, administrative position, with an impressive-sounding yet undefined title. As she sees it, she’s been empowered by their common employer to search out and address sexual misadventures between faculty and students.

As they say in the procedurals, there is now both opportunity and motive and  although she never appears to act in anything other than a professional, although admittedly moralistic, manner, one shouldn’t rule out payback. Jake sort of has it coming even if he’s unaware students refer to him as Professor Romeo–a moniker uttered more in derision than admiration.

I’m a little unclear what Bernays really wants us to think about all this. I admit, I read Aesop‘s fables at too young an age. I’m always looking for lessons and resolution. That’s not the way of the modern novel, though, it’s job is not to instruct. Still, Barker’s behavior is such that one can’t help wondering if there is a larger authorial motive.

Ther is another university in Cambridge: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You may have even heard of it.

A blurb on the cover suggests the author brings some insight to the Lothario mind. The thrill of the chase aside, the novel doesn’t seem to pay that out. Jake has one close friend, Bennie, whom he’s known since his own undergraduate days. Bennie is a mathematician who holds a faculty position a bit down the river at MIT.

Bennie serves as the voice of reason. He’s forever pointing out how much good there is in Barker’s life. And on the subject of faculty/student extracurricular activities, he’s a near-Puritan. ” You didn’t actually do that?,”  he asks when told of the accusations against his friend.  He goes on to render advice that is well-known, and more bluntly stated, in coarser precincts: you don’t crap where you eat.

I won’t spoil the end but I’ll tease it. There’s a dramatic near trial. Enough humiliation is served up so that everyone can have second helpings. Bystanders suffer as much or more than principals.

And the wheel turns, as it always does, leaving only the lingering question of what constitutes justice behind.

 

 

 

 

Take Me Down to the Paradise City

This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tales of the Jazz Age come up against some tough competition in my family.

My grandmother, who stood 5 feet 9 or so and was, even when I knew her, a live wire,  allegedly won a Charleston competition, though I’ve never tried to ascertain if such competitive dancing actually occurred. She and my grandfather must have cut quite a swath in the Bronx. Their friends knew them by their nicknames:  Swat and Bullets. In our house, stories of speakeasies and rum running fell around the table like leaves in late October.

Until now, F. Scott Fitzgerald has managed to keep up.

Although my grandfather and Fitzgerald were near contemporaries, Fitzgerald occupied a perch at least a couple of rungs up the ladder from my family’s.

Dancing the Charleston. I’m pretty sure neither Swat nor Amory Blaine ever cut such a rug.

Grandma graduated high school in upstate New York and I’m certain grandpa spent even less time in a classroom. He was more a school of hard knocks guy who’d enlisted back-to-back in both the Army and the Navy. The roaring 20s found him a steamfitter– a man with his own truck. Imagine the possibilities.

I doubt the principal character in this novel, Amory Blaine, knew how to sweat a joint.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My initial contact with Fitzgerald was through his short stories. A septuagenarian literature professor at UMass whose resemblance to Robert Frost suggested separation at birth assigned Babylon Revisited and Other Stories during my lone semester there. The same prof also assigned Heinrich Böll‘s 18 Stories,  so he had a huge impact on my reading life.

After the stories, I read Gatsby. I’m tempted to ask “Who hasn’t?,” though I recognize that his light may no longer shine bright in the firmament. With its Long Island setting (I was certain I’d identified the actual locales of East and West Egg; I’ve never accepted the hypothesis that the novel’s true setting is Westport, Connecticut), local color and familiar cadences, it felt like truth on the page.

Things educated people typically don’t know how to do: sweating a joint
Click on the picture to learn more.

Now I can say it’s a good thing I read Gatsby first, because This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s first novel, published when he was just 24, proved daunting. The class divide–and I am always eager to discuss how the class divide lies at the root of our biggest social problems even though most Americans would rather not discuss it–is the least of it.

The entire book seems designed to make me feel stupid, in the same way a T.S. Eliot poem does. It’s not that I can’t comprehend the class of people able to attend Princeton in the first quarter of the 20th century. And it’s not that one shouldn’t expect too much from a steamfitter’s grandson. I spent my entire time with the book feeling like I was losing a gigantic struggle to understand.

You might think that’s structural. After all, the book throws everything at the wall. Our hero is a man of words whose boon companions are likewise oriented. Versifying is par for the course. There’s an entire section written like a play. In the second half, quick cuts and odd juxtapositions appear. It would be unsettling if I didn’t have reverence and real affection for John Dos Passos‘  USA trilogy.

We first meet Amory, along with his mother, in the tony mid-western precincts of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As if to announce the imminent arrival of a new age, the Blaines have a relationship that I don’t associate with pre-World War I times. It was unusual for children to call parents by their first names in the 1970s.  What that looked like in the 1910s I can only imagine.

College fun at Princeton, circa 1910.
Photo courtesy Princeton University Archives, no infringement intended

Like many a midwesterner (more accurately, like many a character created by an author with midwestern roots who made a similar journey),  Amory ends up, first, at a prep school, St. Regis, and then Princeton. On his way east, he meets with Monsignor Darcy who reinforces Amory’s sense of his own singularity.

I’ll pause for a moment here to reflect on the Catholic angle. Blaine and Darcy are among the least Catholic characters I have ever encountered in literature, though they obviously are meant to be recognized as such. Compared with characters created by Böll and Kerouac, these two strike me as having never made it out of first-year catechism. The Monsignor almost makes me understand Henry VIII‘s preferred manner of dealing with frustrating clerics.

Okay, okay. Art isn’t meant to be didactic, I get it. It’s not like Catholics were lousy on the ground in early 20th-century American letters, though. It wasn’t that long before that Mark Twain was seen indulging in some first-class anti-Catholic bigotry and the Smith presidential campaign, in 1928, would display that ugliness on the national stage.

Perhaps Fitzgerald–or should I say Blaine–is merely putting aside his childish things. I can’t imagine any WASP bastion feeling comfortable to outsiders. So maybe not making too much of your origins is strategic. I’d buy that, given the overall autobiographical feel of the entire enterprise.

Times Square in the Rain.

The novel, after all,  can reasonably be cartooned as one big mash note to  Mercer County‘s member of the Ivy League. That Blaine and his classmates are selfish insipid beings doesn’t change the fact that this is their coming-of-age story, right down to the psychological derailment of the war to end all wars.

The post-graduate, post-war sections of the novel worked better for me although I’m pretty certain the perfect girl who gets away and marries the wrong guy is a tale often told, even to the rejected suitor confronting the official news of his loss in the newspaper.

The girl crazy enough to gallop a horse off a cliff? Before I reformed, I used to say I had an unusual capacity to be attracted to the nuttiest woman in any room. Since I think the crazy woman might be Zelda, I am willing to accept amateur status in this area from now on.

So, why, why does this novel have its reputation? I think it’s the beauty of the language. I can do no better, after all this carping, than to let Fitzgerald have the final say in words I find hauntingly evocative and beautiful:

“Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood watching the first great drops of rain spatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet, a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome Novermber rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.: p. 236

 

 

I Have a Special Job

The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground
James Fennimore Cooper

Until I encountered this book containing two novels I was unaware either existed.

I suspect that, except for Cooper scholars and obsessives fixated on early 19th century American literature, such ignorance is a common state. For most people, knowledge of Cooper probably begins and ends with The Last of the Mohicans. After all, it’s been turned into a film multiple times, most recently starring Daniel Day Lewis.

That title is the second in the five-volume series that’s come to be known as The Leatherstocking Tales. Its chronological predecessor, The Deerslayer, which Cooper penned last, was quite the rage among my eighth-grade classmates. The present tale was written much earlier than Cooper’s best-known novels.

In a way, it’s a calculated commercial venture by a man who, deciding he’d try to make a living as a writer, hadn’t had much success. As the golden jubilee of American independence approached, he set pen to paper fleshing out an audacious tale he evidently heard at the home of, if not from the lips of, John Jay. (I’m indebted to Alan Taylor‘s notes for the details of Cooper’s writing life.)

For many children of the Cold War, MAD Magazine‘s “Spy vs Spy” introduced the whole idea.

I may have avoided Cooper until now, but I have not avoided the study of America’s independence and national formation. My passion has always been the intellectual side of the story, but it’s hard to live in any of the original 13 colonies and not cross its warpath. In the northeast, the scenes of consequential battles and acts are closer than anything that happened during the Civil War and, so, have always seemed much more real to me.

This novel upped the ante in the reality department. The setting, the so-called neutral ground of the subtitle, is, mostly, Westchester County, New York. Westchester is not just nearby. It sits atop The Bronx, the borough in which I spent my earliest years. It’s the county in which I went to college, the county in which I co-operated a small business while still in college and the county in which I first held a non-sales job and in which I currently work. There’s even a regional high school named after John Jay in the county’s northern reaches.

The action in The Spy occurs during the War for Independence, closer to the end than the beginning. It involves, initially, the Wharton family, a clan whose sympathies might be expected to lie on the Tory side. The Whartons, when we meet them, are ensconced in their country seat, the Locusts, having moved out from their urban townhouse in the scrum of the war.

Early on, a visitor appears at the estate, a visitor who turns out to be young Henry Wharton, a Captain in His Majesty’s army who has slipped past the official holding line north of Kings Bridge (roughly the northern boundary of today’s Fordham neighborhood in the Bronx) to visit his family: father, two sisters and an aunt.  The American forces are encamped further north, closer to Peekskill and the Hudson River, leaving the area in between under undetermined control. A second mysterious guest known only as Harper also appears

If I am any judge of Westchester geography, the Locusts lies somewhere in the neighborhood of Pepsico‘s present-day headquarters location. And that presents the main problem of this tale.

Our spy, the hero Nathan Hale.
Photo by Christopher De Coro

Mark Twain famously went to town on the implausibilities written into Cooper’s more famous works. Here, we have characters, often on horseback but as likely to be on foot, floating around a 450-square mile area as though they had automobiles. In a critical scene, two characters transit, on foot in the dead of night, a series of hills that in light of day with a marked trail are not a stroll in the park. Somehow, they alight on the Albany Post Road closer to Tarrytown than Peekskill. Traversing the Hudson is rendered as if it was as easy as crossing the Bear Moutain Bridge.

I know, I’m nitpicking. Allowing for how our sense of pace has evolved this novel is, in its own way, a rollicking tale. Repeatedly I found myself thinking that particular scenes seemed like early talking movies when the camera didn’t move so characters spent a lot of time telling each other what was going on. The cast of characters is made for motion pictures. The two sisters support opposite sides in the war. There’s a love story and tale of unrequited love. There’s a pair–a combat surgeon, Dr. Archibald Sitgreaves,  and an infantry officer, Captain John Lawton–engaged in what now would be called a bromance.

Their spy, The Unfortunate Death of Major André

And there’s Harvey Birch who may or may not be a spy. Birch claims to be a simple peddler–a man who manages to wander easily across armed frontiers seemingly engaged in commerce.  If he is a spy, it’s unclear just which side Birch is spying for. Captured more than once, Birch slips out of captivity as easily as some climb out of bed.

I won’t ruin the tale–it is, after all, a thriller–but I’ll note some things that might go unnoticed by audiences who feel the tale drags and who are disinclined to question beyond the text at hand.

The first is that despite the way we tell the story–in both fiction and history books–the War for American Independence was a civil war. The Wharton family presages the family divisions of the 1860s (or the 2020s if you’re feeling apocalyptic about the present).

Another is that the whole idea of spies intrigues people. A war that threw up both Nathan Hale and Major André (executed less than five miles from where I sit typing) was sure to get people thinking. Still more vexing was learning that Washington’s visage, which stares at us from every greenback dollar bill and quarter dollar, was not widely recognized and that his reputation developed after the war. Finally, Cooper realized that the story of America itself offered great literary material, a realization he went on to capitalize from.

A friend who is a literature professor described Cooper as a “good bad writer.” That, I think, is as apt a description as any. Even if the cost of entry is suspending reasonable notions of time and distance.

 

 

Succumb to the Beat Surrender

From Obscurity to Infamy to Nothingness
Ruminations on a Lost Love

As tortured paths go, any road that begins in the working-class precincts of the northeastern United States and ends with a Nobel laureate in the Rhineland may be in a class by itself. There’s a through-line, though, I

The Rage of Man and Beast

Beowulf
Unknown, trans. by David Wright

As a good example of a Myers-Briggs NTP, I’m forever conceiving grand projects, the greatest number of which fail to come to fruition.

Close readers will note my attempt to sidestep the responsibilities of agency through use of the passive voice. I suppose that makes me a sometimes scoundrel. This

Pictures of Matchstick Men

A Box of Matches
Nicholson Baker

It happened gradually, starting sometime. after I
turned 40.

Always an early riser–always being defined as since age 12 or so when my dad helpfully taught me to get up on my own to deliver the Sunday Long Island Press by grabbing the mattress handles and dumping me in a heap–I started

Just Looking for Another Girl

A New-England Tale
Catherine Maria Sedgwick

The first street I lived on in the Bronx ran parallel to one of the longer ones in the borough. Each was named for a luminary. Mine was named after the shipbuilder William Henry Webb, whose Institute of Naval Architecture once sat at the foot of it before decamping, as my family did a few years later, for Long Island.

The longer lane, from which mine broke off and later ran back into, was Sedgwick Avenue. Starting at the Harlem River it stretches north until Van Cortlandt Park keeps it from

Take My Hand and I’ll Lead Ya

Candide and Other Stories
Voltaire

I spend too much time on Twitter. That’s not an unusual statement and I suspect that like many other people who might find themselves nodding in agreement I’m not alone in being able to rationalize the time I do spend.

Here’s one such attempt: when there, I indulge in an ongoing discussion about books with a better read,

I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink

Pick-Up
(Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, A Library of America Volume)
Charles Willeford

While you’d be forgiven for not remembering why I put this multi-title volume down, I can’t. Part of me thinks such behavior would be more understandable if the book contained works of a single author. I can even offer proof: one of the several Henry James volumes from the Library of America sits across the room, daring me to pick it up