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Theodora (Roosevelt) Keogh, the mysterious novelist, ballet dancer, wildcat owner, chicken farmer, and president’s granddaughter whose fiction inspires comparisons to Colette, was living in Paris with her first husband, artist Tom Keogh, when The Paris Review started up in the early fifties.

As I mentioned in The Week this summer, Tom’s drawing of Keogh (at right) appeared in the first issue of the magazine. Her own work, however, was never published there.
 

My favorite of Keogh’s novels, My Name is Rose, depicts a talented woman and unfaithful wife who, rather than focusing on her own art, has married a would-be novelist who works as a cultural critic. Like the new magazine that employs him, the husband has little native aesthetic judgment but is attuned mostly to the way the wind is blowing. His editor is likewise preoccupied with tracking all things hip.

After I found out about Tom’s drawing, and read what information is available about the doomed marriage, I began to wonder if Keogh wrote My Name is Rose partly to satirize the upstart Paris Review and its acolytes.
 

Joan Schenkar, author of the forthcoming Patricia Highsmith biography The Talented Miss Highsmith, became friendly with Keogh, one of few female writers Patricia Highsmith praised, while researching her subject. “I wanted to know,” Schenkar told me, “who could have produced a novel that impressed [Highsmith].”

The Talented Miss Highsmith arrived in the mail earlier this week. One fascinating passage — in which Schenkar revisits Highsmith’s praise for Keogh’s Meg, and explains why the book would have resonated with the steely Mr. Ripley author — incidentally lends credence to my intuition that Keogh didn’t care for The Paris Review.

It was in Queens, too, where Pat [Highsmith] joined a girl gang, another faintly delinquent experience she remembered with great pleasure in the last decde of her life. It was the “activity” of the gang — “they mostly ran around and had meetings, a lot of physical movement” — that Pat liked: the same active life she was later to admire so much in men. Her gang memories undoubtedly colored the wonderful review she gave to Meg (1950), a first novel by an ex-ballet dancer who also happened to be the adventurous granddaughter of a U.S. president. The ex-dancer’s name was Theodora Roosevelt Keogh and she lived in Paris with her husband Tom Keogh, resolutely refusing to give her publisher, Roger Straus, permission to trade on her illustrious name. A favorite of her formidable aunt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodora shunned The Paris Review crowd (they ignored her work as well, as they ignored the work of most women writers), and went on to write novels of such piercing sensual perception — a marriage of Colette and L.P. Hartley — that composer and diarist Ned Rorem remembers her from 1950s Paris as ‘our best American writer — certainly our best female writer.’

Pat wrote her review of Keogh’s novel Meg for The Saturday Review in April of 1950. It was Pat’s first published piece of criticism — one of the few reviews she would ever write about a work authored by a woman — and it is probably the most favorable review she ever published. The novel about which Pat was so untypically excited is a wayward work, with just the kind of he

I’m in the minority, I gather, but my favorite of Henry James’ novellas is probably The Aspern Papers, what with all the narrator’s scheming, the old woman’s secrecy, and the delicious melodrama of the finale. (The book centers on a biographer who’s determined to uncover a dead poet’s rumored love letters.)

So I got a kick out of this passage in Hermione Lee’s Biography: A Very Short Introduction (excellent book; eternal disclosure), which reveals that, while James was theoretically opposed to sensationalistic biographies, he read them “with excitement.”

Henry James wrote with horrified brilliance, in The Aspern Papers (1888) and elsewhere, about the violation of the writer’s secret life by ‘publishing scoundrels’. He passionately believed that ‘a man’s table-drawers and pockets should not be turned inside out’, burned many private papers in the (useless) hope of ‘frustrating’ biographical intrusion, and resented the posthumous exhibition of friends such as Robert Louis Stevenson. The trial and disgrace of Oscar Wilde in 1895 gripped and appalled him: ‘Yes’ (he wrote to Edmund Gosse) ‘it is hideously, atrociously dramatic & really interesting — so far as one can say that of a thing of which the interest is qualified by such a sickening horribility.’ He was as fascinated by the private lives of writers as he was horrified by their exposure. When he went on a motor-tour of France in 1907 with Edith Wharton, for instance, he couldn’t wait to visit George Sand’s house in Nohant to see the rooms where George and her lovers had, as he put it, ‘pigged so thrillingly together’.

The image above is of James and Wharton in 1904.

If you were riveted by her Letter from a Japanese Crematorium, you’ll be glad to hear that Marie Mockett’s first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, is out at last.

Judging from the advance reviews at Amazon, some readers seem to expect The Joy Luck Club, but for Japan, which is not at all the story they find.

The book is deeply preoccupied with girls, talent, and power. As Mockett has observed, talented women often fare badly in fiction. And yet Satomi, one of the main characters in Picking Bones from Ash, expects her creative virtuosity to ensure her independence. Her monologue opens the novel.

My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably, and masterfully talented.

This is different from being intelligent or even educated. The latter, she insisted, could get a girl into trouble, convincing her that she has the same power as men. Certainly the biggest mistake a woman could make was to rely on her beauty. Such a woman is destined to grow old and ugly very quickly because she is so much more disappointed by what she sees in the mirror than someone who is busy. “But when you are talented,” she whispered to me late at night as we lay in our futons, “you are special. You will have troubles, but they won’t be any of the ordinary ones.”

For more Mockett, see the profile in the Columbia Spectator, her thoughts on talented girls, her book notes for Largehearted Boy, her advice for aspiring writers, her interview with Colson Whitehead, and her recipe for bamboo shoots. She also has a blog.

Over the years I’ve developed a bad habit of going over sentences again and again in my fiction because they don’t quite sound right. By that I mean that the rhythm is off or the vowel sounds clash or an adjective is too bland or, worse, too “creative” in some overcomplicated or cutesy way that distracts from the flow of the story.

Occasionally I nail what I want to say, in the end, but often I walk away at least partly unsatisfied.
 

Because I think so much nowadays about construction of phrases at this obsessive level, I was fascinated by Dave Hickey’s “The Song in Country Music,” the entry for 1953 in Greil Marcus’ and Werner Sollors’ A New Literary History of America. Hickey focuses on the vast influence of Hank Williams’ compressed songwriting following his death that year at twenty-nine.

The only people in Nashville who learned any positive lessons from Williams’s career were the songwriters and the cowboys… The songwriters, many of whom were Texans and nurtured in the culture of the laconic West, took control of country songwriting by learning the compression of Williams’s craft. That craft was the primary topic of conversation among songwriters of the period. When I asked Rogert Miller what it was about Williams’s songwriting that touched him, he said, “Meticulous. They’re meticulous and all hooked up.” When I asked him what this meant, he sang me two lines from one of his songs.

The moon is high and so am I.
The stars are out and so will I be pretty soon.

“That’s maybe a little too hooked-up,” Miller said, and sang half a verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” a song by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster that Miller had discovered and recorded first.

Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Headed for the trains.
Feeling nearly faded as my jeans.

“That’s hooked up,” Miller said. “I love the ‘as’ that picks up ‘flat’ and bat.’”

When I asked Willie Nelson, he observed that Williams was less a ’songwriter’ than a ’song-singer’ who obviously sang songs in progress over and over until they came out right. Waylon Jennings said much the same thing. When I asked him about Williams’ songs, he sang lines from two or three of them and showed me how the sounding of the consonants moved from the front to the back of the mouth so the vowels were always singable — you didn’t have to stutter or swallow the words. Billy Joe Shaver, whose junior high school English teacher sent him off to the navy with books by Robert W. Service and Dylan Thomas, admired the way Williams’s figurative poetry virtually disappeared into the facts of the narrative. “‘Melt your cold, cold heart’… ‘Today I saw you on the street/ And my heart fell at your feel’… ‘The silence of a falling star/ Lights up a purple sky.’ Like that,” Shaver said. “The closest I got was ‘I’m just an ol’ chunk of coal/ But I’m gonna be a diamond some day,’ which could describe one of Hank’s songs.”

Harlan Howard, the most meticulous of country songwriters after Hank Williams, went into more detail. He sang the first verse of “Cold Cold Heart.”

I try so hard my dear to say
That you’re my every dream.
Yet you’re afraid each thing I do
Is just some evil scheme
Some mem’ry from your lonesome past
Keeps us so far apart.
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind
And melt your cold, cold heart

Howard then pointed out what Roger Miller meant by hooked up. He explained that those eight short lines were invisibly held together by fifteen internal r phonemes. There are triples in the first two lines, four pairs, and the terminal “heart” that gives the verse closure. “Nobody notices this,” Howard said. “That’s the idea, but once these words are put together this way, they don’t come apart.”

The whole essay is worth seeking out.
 

In the clip below, you can watch Roger Miller, on Johnny Cash’s show, creating his own hilarious and bawdy hooked-up verse about a piece of twine.

Image of Hank Williams taken from The Austin Chronicle.

Fiction and the rest of life edition

“The basic theme on which I’ve tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o’clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.” — Thomas Mann, New York Times, 1955

“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours — an actress — was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn’t plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.” — Joan Didion (pictured), The Paris Review, 1978

“The photographic darkroom emerged as a perfect metaphor for my life. It was the one place I could lock myself in (rather than being locked in) and legally not admit anyone else. For me it became a kind of temple. There is an episode in Steps in which a young philosophy student at the State university selects the lavatories as the only temples of privacy available to him. Well, think how much more of such a temple a darkroom is in a police state. Inside, I would develop my own private images; instead of writing fiction I imagined myself as a fictional character.” — Jerzy Kosinski, The Paris Review, 1972

“In a sense, the fiction creates the reality, but it’s a very complicated relationship. I think if you imagine a certain kind of person, then that person comes into being. You become that person. Or at least this kind of person becomes a possibility. But you have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.” — Margaret Drabble, The Paris Review, 1978

“I realized not understanding something is perhaps the best reason a novelist can have to write about it; I realized my favourite novels were, with rare exceptions, novels of enquiry, of investigation. From Conrad’s Under Western Eyes to Sebald’s The Emigrants, certain works of fiction give us the sense that in writing them authors are entering an undiscovered country. They seem to know their story no better than their narrators; we read them and feel that writing, for them, is finding out. ” — Juan Gabriel Vásquez, PEN America Center, 2008

Lapham’s Quarterly reprints a great 1924 Aldous Huxley essay on travel reading.

The trick, he says, is to abandon the idea that you’re going to work your way through the Western canon on a two-week tour of France.

A perfect book to take along on a trip is one “of such a kind that one can open it anywhere and be sure of finding something interesting, complete in itself and susceptible of being read in a short time.” He suggests, among other things, poetry, La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, and “the aphoristic works of Nietzsche.”
 

I was surprised by his choice for “best traveler’s book of all”: “the twelfth, half-size edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Obviously Huxley conceived of his ideal portable library in a much earlier era, when “india paper and photography” were still something of a marvel, but his description of the encyclopedia, and the enjoyment the reader derives from it, remind me of nothing so much as the Internet — when at its most addictive, pointless, and glib:

A stray volume of the Encyclopedia is like the mind of a learned madman — stored with correct ideas, between which, however, there is no other connection than the fact that there is a “B” in both. From orach, or mountain spinach, one passes direct to oracles. That one does not oneself go mad, or become, in the process of reading the encyclopedia, a mine of useless and unrelated knowledge is due to the fact that one forgets. The mind has a vast capacity for oblivion — providentially, otherwise, in the chaos of futile memories, it would be impossible to remember anything useful or coherent…. Five minutes after reading about mountain spinach, the ordinary man, who is neither a botanist nor a cook, has forgotten all about it. Read for amusement: the Encyclopedia serves only to distract for the moment. It does not instruct, it deposits its nothing on the surface of the mind that will remain. It is a mere time killer and momentary tickler of the mind. I only use it for amusement on my travels; I should be ashamed to indulge so wantonly in mere curiosity at home, during seasons of serious business.

(For the record, I say this with huge affection for the online world, knowing that there are astounding ideas, insight, and wisdom to be found. But you do have to wade through all the mountain spinach and sidestep the oracles to get there.)

Pick up the issue for Huxley’s full essay.

Many writers have said that they write what they do because the novels they wanted to read did not exist.

I don’t think about my own book quite that way, but to me one of the most frightening things about writing fiction is the corollary to this idea: namely, if you have an individual voice and any skill whatsover, it will occur to you one day, as you obsess over the problems with your latest draft, that you are the only one who can fix it.

Obviously trusted readers are necessary and invaluable; their advice will help when your own vision falters. And once the book is in its nearly final stage, a good editor can pare away the fat and tell you, in a way that shows understanding of your project, what’s missing or not working. But no one else is going to be able to produce the actual words that will make the story work the way you want it to.

Because I’ve been preoccupied with this idea while writing lately, here’s the “You’re On Your Own” installment of writers’ quotes.
 

“Simply stated, maybe too simply, it is the writer’s business to have something of his own to say; second, to say it in his own language and style.” — Katherine Anne Porter

“I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.” — Jean Rhys (pictured)

“In the case of a story, the beginning and the end always reveal themselves to me, but not what happens between the starting point and the finish line. There are writers who say that they don’t work this way, that for them the beginning is sufficient, later they look for the best ending, the best solution. I know the beginning and the end, and I have to figure out what happens between them for the story itself, and I can be wrong. So I have to start again when I realize this.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“There is much that I like in the book — it seems to me more simply and clearly written than its predecessors and ingeniously constructed to avoid the tedium of the time sequence (I had learned something from my continual rereading of that remarkable novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), but until I reached the final part I did not realize the formidable problem I had set myself.” — Graham Greene, on The End of the Affair

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You [can] thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.” — Mark Twain
 

Prior literary quips, observations, instructions, and warnings: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

“Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer — he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive for him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.” — E.B. White, The Paris Review, 1969
 

“Of course any novelist has difficulties. I don’t have ‘blocks,’ I mean I don’t get into a state where absolutely nothing can be done for weeks; I can always do something, though the something that I do may have to be revised later on… I think the thing to do is to make one’s unconscious mind work for one. When there’s a problem, and suddenly you get a sort of knot in the procedure, where you want to do two things that are incompatible, for instance, or when you can’t really see what a character is like — there’s a sort of blank slate where the character ought to be — then you must meditate upon the problem, set it, as it were, as a problem to your unconscious mind, and hope that suddenly some creative flash will arrive. And that is a time that requires very great patience.” — Iris Murdoch, The Threepenny Review, 1984
 

“There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story… I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view… I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?’ Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.” — Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846
 

“The book took a time long to finish because it took a long time to finish. There was a lot of it I didn’t understand. It often takes me a long time to write.” — Jamaica Kincaid, Salon, 1996
 

Prior literary quips, observations, and instructions: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Rosie Schaap’s Great Big Lump of Coal party for her good words @ Good World series was great fun. After the reading, she told Dana, Max, and me a story involving the best and maybe the most inappropriate holiday toast ever. I’m not allowed to post that one.

Instead here’s an Xmas excerpt from Schaap’s forthcoming Drinking with Men. If you like this, listen to the author telling two stories on

A Santa Cruz Christmas, 1989

At sunset most evenings, we went to the state beach, with its natural bridges of enormous eroded rocks, fired up a joint, and watched the winter surfers, the students, the drifters who’d long preceded our own drifting to this place, who must have arrived here much as we did, only years before, with no better plan, traveling the same tine in the same forked road, Santa Cruz or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Humboldt, Santa Cruz or _____, Santa Cruz or_____, Santa Cruz or _____. Santa Cruz instead of anywhere else, especially: instead of wherever they’d come from. Danny and Billy and I lived in the rusty brown Dodge van, parked on Mission Street, in front of the pizzeria where they worked, at least through Christmas, at which point Danny had managed to scrounge together enough money to return home to Jersey for the holidays.

Billy was a Christian, but not a religious one. Still, Christmas was Christmas. And I was one of those half-assed New York Jews who grew up celebrating Easter and Passover — whose family, truth be told, preferred Christmas to Chanukah, because ma really loved chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and overstuffed stockings, and a nice Bûche de Noël and all that, without particularly paying Jesus any mind, though she was firmly of the opinion that he seemed like a totally o.k. guy. So even for me, yes, Christmas was Christmas, and sleeping in a van would not do, nor would eating Domino’s discards.

“We should at least get a room somewhere,” I suggested. Billy quickly agreed, even though we were both close to broke. We checked into the cheapest motel we could find. At a convenience store across the road, for a small fee, we got a loitering grownup to procure a couple six-packs of Anchor Steam for us — the birth of the baby Jesus rated at least a classy regional beer.
 

“Should we get some Jack too?” Billy asked, half-serious. Only a week before, at a motel lounge outside L.A., I’d drunk at least twenty shots of the stuff in one go. I woke up a day later in the van, in Santa Cruz, 350 miles north of where I’d blacked out. Now even the smell of it — sickly-sweet, vanilla and burnt cotton — made me want to retch.

“Nah.” No way.

Billy and I settled into our motel room with our beer and our Cool Ranch Doritos and those cheese-crackers-with-peanut-butter that cost like a dollar for six packets — on account of Billy and me welcoming the occasional junk food splash-out with great enthusiasm, and, above all, on account of Christmas, we could dispense with our usual hippie-health-food-store-totally-organic pieties — and flipped on the TV, each of us claiming our own queen-size bed. Billy and I were friends, but not especially close friends, and, without Danny, we had little to say to each other. We idly watched the local news, then some cartoons, then some videos on MTV. When the clicker landed on the Yule Log, we gave each other a look of faint despair. This was our Christmas, our sad weird Christmas, and a motel room was nearly as shitty a place to be as the van. Doritos and beer were good, sure, but shouldn’t we go out for dinner?

“Shouldn’t we go out for dinner?” I asked. No argument from Billy.

We hit the strip — the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz — and checked the menus posted outside the restaurants. Every place was way too expensive, or full, or both, or closed. We trudged up Mission Street, past Domino’s. The Saturn Café, known at the time for its activist feminist clientele and vegan-friendly menu, was open. Of course it was open, but it did not do Christmas. No twinkling lights. No tinsel. No Santas or reindeer or candy canes. But there were free tables, and it was better than our stash back at the motel. We ordered salads and lentil soup, and the conversation stayed sparse. I kept my thoughts to myself: I wished I were home, not for good, just at that moment. I missed my family, imperfect as we were. I envied Danny, who at this moment was probably gleefully reneging on his vegetarianism and eating ham or turkey in the company of his relations, young and old, who was probably luxuriating in the flickering light of a Christmas tree, who was in the Northeast, where there was likely snow on the ground and maybe even children sledding, where Christmas was Christmas-y, not like this warm West Coast horseshit. I envied Danny, who was having a real Christmas, so different from Billy’s and mine, surrounded as we were by recalcitrant atheists picking at tempeh and brown rice. What was I doing here? Why had I chosen this? And I imagined that Billy, my reticent, accidental Christmas companion, was thinking much the same.

We walked quickly back to the motel in the cooling California night, past palm trees and strip malls, past so many parked cars and so few people. I glanced into strangers’ houses, through casement windows framing repeated tableaux of families being families at Christmastime, families drinking Egg Nog and, I figured, listening to Bing Crosby crooning “The Christmas Song” and Ella Fitzgerald elevating “Jingle Bells,” wishing one and all — except for me, except for Billy — a swinging Christmas, as they tallied their holiday hauls. We returned to the motel, to our matching queen size beds, to our already diminished six packs. We drank silently, a few feet apart, isolated by our unhappiness. I do not remember if Billy called home but I know I did not. I had elected this estrangement and would ride it out. We resumed our channel-flipping. Fuck the news and its cheerful reports of Christmas near-miracles and charitable acts. Fuck the Yule Log and all its stupid Yule Logness.

“Hey Billy, pass me another Anchor Steam.”

“You got it.”

And there we were. Two depressed kids far from home, far from parents and brothers and sisters, no cards, no calls, no high school diplomas, no home save a crappy brown van, pounding back bottles of beer, lying on dingy, quilted, motel bedspreads, tired but restless.

Flick. On the next channel: The Sound of Music. Beautiful pixie-haired Julie Andrews, Sister Maria — not yet betrothed to the Captain, not yet a Von Trapp — comforting her little Austrian charges with a litany of her favorite things. Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles! I thought of ma back in New York, and her inexhaustible cheerleading for The Great American Musical, her love of all things Rogers and Hammerstein, all things Lerner and Loewe, all things Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. I thought of Sunday evenings when I was even younger, in my grandfather’s little library, listening to The Original Cast Recording of every cast that had ever originally been recorded. I could see something stirring in Billy, too, something possibly warm and good, though I was sure in his case it had nothing to do with show tunes, and I watched as the fear and fretfulness slowly, slowly, started to wash away from his young, unshaven face. And I noticed, for the first time, really, what a fine face he had: both strong and soft, high cheekbones and Elvis-y lips, pretty blue eyes. Was he thinking of his favorite things? Well, God only knew what those were in Billy’s case — but soon, very soon, damn it if we didn’t feel so bad, if we felt, actually, pretty okay. And damn if by the time “Edelweiss” rolled around, small and white and blooming and growing forever, I wasn’t singing along with the brave, elegant (and, let us be honest, pretty fucking hot) Captain von Trapp while he strummed his guitar. And a feeling of freedom returned, a sense that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was doing was fine, then and there, for all its uncertainty. We both cried, and it was good.

“Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Pass me another beer.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Merry Christmas, man.”

“Yeah.” He turned his eyes away from the television, looked at me, and nodded. “Merry Christmas.”
 

Recent image of Santa Cruz’s Saturn Café taken from this site.

Richard Greene’s Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, finally published in the States early next month, collects a wide sampling of the author’s voluminous correspondence and is, for any admirer of the work who’s interested in understanding the author, an indispensable resource.

Greene was a passionate man, a stubborn man, a sometimes-loyal but often-disloyal (sometimes rather self-importantly so) man, and an occasionally suicidal manic-depressive. He was surprised in the mid-1930s to find, when he contracted a fever that nearly killed him, “a passionate interest in living.” “I had always assumed before,” he wrote in Journey Without Maps, “that death was desirable.”
 

I revere some of Greene’s fiction — the Catholic trilogy in particular — but often disagree with his opinions, the finer shades of them, at least. Still, his intensity and thoroughgoing analysis are a source of endless fascination. Here’s part of a letter he wrote to Elizabeth Bowen as part of a discussion between the two of them and V.S. Pritchett that was published in Why Do I Write? and aired as a discussion on the BBC Third Programme on October 7, 1948.

When your letter came, I had just been reading Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, and this sentence from one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters recurred to my mind. It certainly represents my view, and I think it represents yours as well: ‘You will see that Villette touches on no matter of public interest. I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use trying it. Nor can I write a book for its moral. Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme, though I honor philanthropy…

‘The relation of the artist to society’: it’s a terribly vague subject, and I feel the same embarrassment and resentment as you do when I encounter it. We all have to be citizens in our spare time, standing in queues, filling up income tax forms, supporting our families: why can’t we leave it at that? I think we need a devil’s advocate in this discussion to explain the whole thing to us. I picture him as a member of the PEN Club, perhaps a little out of breath from his conference in Stockholm where he has been discussing this very subject (in pre-war times he would have returned from the Adriatic — conferences of this kind were never held where society was exactly thick). Before sitting down to add his signature to an appeal in The Times (in the thirties it would have proudly appeared with Mr. Forster’s, Mr. Bertrand Russell’s and perhaps Miss Maude Royden’s), he would find an opportunity to tell us what society is and what the artist…

First I would say that there are certain human duties I own in common with the greengrocer or the clerk — that of supporting my familiy if I have a family, of not robbing the poor, the blind, the widow or the orphan, of dying if the authorities demand it (it is the only way to remain independent: the conscientious objector is forced to become a teacher in order to justify himself). These are our primitive duties as human beings. In spite of the fashionable example of Gauguin, I would say that if we do less than these, we are so much the less human beings and therefore so much the less likely to be artists. But are there any special duties I owe to my fellow victims bound for the Loire? I would like to imagine there are none, but I fear there are at least two duties the novelist owes — to tell the truth as he sees it and to accept no special privileges from the state.

And another excerpt, from a letter to V.S. Pritchett:

The last time I received a letter in this seiries I was reading the Life of Charlotte Brontë, and the change of mood may account for my uneasy suspicion that in my last letter I simplified far too much. Perhaps that magnifient poem, ‘The Song of the Shirt’, has unduly influenced me, for I am not quite so sure now that the writer has no responsibility to society or the State (which is organized society) different in kind from that of his fellow citizens.

You remember Thomas Paine’s great apothegm, ‘we must take care to guard even our enemies against injustice,’ and it is there — in the establishment of justice — that the writer has greater opportunities and therefore greater obligations than, say, the chemist or the estate agent. For one thing he is, if he has attained a measure of success, more his own master than others are: he is his own employer: he can afford to offend; for one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy. Now the State is invariably ready to confuse, like a schoolmaster, justice with retribution, and isn’t it possibly the storyteller’s task to act as the devil’s advocate, to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State sympathy? But remember that it is not necessarily the poor or the physically defenseless who lie there. The publicans and sinners belong to all classes and all economic levels. It has always been in the interests of the State to restrict sympathy, to encourage cat-calls — Galilean, Papist, Crophead, Fascist, Bolshevik. In the days of the totalitarian monarchy, when a sovereign slept uneasily with the memories of Wyatt, Norfolk, Essex, in his dreams, it was an act of justice to trace the true source of action in Macbeth, the murderer of his king, and Shakespeare’s play has for all times altered our conception of the usurper….

I hope I have made it clear that I am not advocating an conscious advocacy of the dispossessed, in fact I am not advocating propoganda at all…. If we can awaken sympathetic comprehension in our readers, not only for our most evil characters (that is easy: there is a cord there fastened to all hearts that we can twitch at will), but of our smug, complacent, successful characters, we have surely succeeded in making the work of the State a degree more difficult — and that is a genuine duty we owe society, to be a piece of grit in the State machinery. However acceptable the Soviet State may at the moment find the great classic writers, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chehov, Turgenev, Gogol, they have surely made the regimentation of the Russian spirit

The TLS reviewed the book in early 2007. I’ll be giving away a copy on the pub date, so if you’re a Greene fan, check back then.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson is best known as the man who discouraged Emily Dickinson from publishing in her lifetime and butchered her poetry once she died. Editing her work with Mabel Loomis Todd for posthumous publication, he cut Dickinson’s dashes and flattened her language.

“My partially cracked poetess,” he called her — another marker of his condescension and cluelessness. Or was it?

Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat examines Dickinson’s complicated friendship with Higginson, whose biography Judith Thurman recently condensed as follows: “a man of letters, a clergyman, a fitness enthusiast, a celebrated abolitionist, and a champion of women’s rights, whose essays on slavery and suffrage, but also on snow, flowers, and calisthenics, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.”

Dickinson’s poems — shocking, wise, and blunt, despairing but somehow also triumphant — enchanted and confused Higginson. “The bee himself,” he wrote, “did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me,” “and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.” Wineapple writes:

Emily Dickinson and Tomas Higginson, seven years apart, had been raised in a climate where old pieties no longer sufficed, the piers of faith were brittle, and God was hard to find. If she sought solace in poetry, a momentary stay against mortality, he found it for a time in activism, and for both friendship was a secular salvation, which, like poetry, reached toward the ineffable. This is why he answered her, pursued her, cultivated her, visited her, and wept at her grave. He was not as bullet-headed as many contemporary critics like to think. Relegated to the dustbin of literary history, a relic of Victoriana cursed with geneality and an elegant prose style, Higginson has been invariably dismissed by critics fundamentally uninterested in his radicalism; after all, not until after Dickinson’s death, when the poet’s family contacted him, did he consent to reread the poems and edit them for publication, presumably to appeal to popular taste. Yet he tried hard to prepare the public for her — “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind–,” as she had written — and in his preface to the 1890 volume frankly compared her to William Blake.

Dickinson responded fully to the man he thought — and she thought — he was: courtly and bold, stuffy and radical, chock-full of contraditions and loving. For not only did she initiate the correspondence, but as far as we know she gave no one except Sue more poems than she sent to him. She trusted him, she liked him, she saw in him what it has become convenient to overlook. And he reciprocated in such a way that she often said he saved her life. “Of our greatest acts,” she would later remind him, “we are ignorant –.”

To neglect this friendship reduces Dickinson to the frail recluse of Amherst, extraordinary but helpless and victimized by a bourgeois literary establishment best represented by Higginson. Gone is the Dickinson whose flinty perceptions we admire and whose shrewd assessment of people and things informed her witty, half-serious choice of him as Preceptor, a choice she did not regret….

Last summer I lugged my copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince all the way from Brooklyn, through Tennessee, to Oxford, Mississippi, without so much as opening it. Probably a good thing, because that was a social trip, and when I finally started reading the novel over the long weekend that just passed, I wound up avoiding people and the Internet, and was even a little surly to the cats.

In lieu of the usual Monday morning book news and chatter, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:
 

When this story starts — and I will not much longer delay its inception — I had already retired, at an earlier age than is usual, from the tax office. I worked as an Inspector of Taxes because I had to earn a living which I knew I should never earn as a writer. I retired when I had at last saved enough money to assure myself a modest annuity. I have lived, as I say, until latterly, without drama, but with unfailing purpose. I looked forward to and I toiled for my freedom to devote all my time to writing. Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say that now.

The shock of leaving the office was greater than I had anticipated. Hartbourne warned me that it would be so. I did not believe him. Perhaps I am, more than I realized, a creature of routine. Perhaps too, with scarcely pardonable stupidity, I imagined that inspiration would come with freedom. I did not expect the complete withdrawal of my gift. In the years before, I worked steadily. That is, I wrote steadily and I destroyed steadily. I will not say how many pages I have destroyed, the number is immense. There was pride in this as well as sorrow. Sometimes I felt at a (terrible phrase) dead end. But I never despaired of excellence. Hope and faith and absolute devotion kept me plodding onward, ageing, living alone with my emotions. And I found that I could always write something.

But when I had given up the tax office and could sit at my desk at home every morning and think any thoughts I pleased, I found I had no thoughts at all. This too I suffered with my bitterest patience. I waited. I tried to develop a new routine: monotony, out of which value springs. I waited, I listened. I live, as I shall explain soon at more length, in a noisy part of London, a seedy region that was once genteel. I suppose I have myself, together with my neighborhood, made my pilgrimage away from gentility. Noise, which had never distressed me before, began to do so. For the first time in my life I urgently wanted silence.

Of course, as might be pointed out with barbed humor, I had always in a sense been a devotee of silence…. Three short books in forty years of sustained effort is not exactly garrulity. And indeed if I understand anything that is precious, I did understand how important it was to keep one’s mouth shut until the right moment even if this meant a totally voiceless life. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck….

Fellow fans may enjoy the London Walks, which, according to creator Barbara Julian, explore the city through Murdoch’s novels. (Thanks again, Chris, for steering me toward Murdoch lo these many years ago.)

Nothing makes me less interested in discussing literature than being only a quarter of the way through a fatuous book that I feel obligated to finish.

(Especially when the book wants to be a contemporary answer to This Side of Paradise but lacks the romance, charm, curiosity, and specificity of place and time that lift Fitzgerald’s juvenilia above mere undergraduate pomposity and navel-gazing.)
 

I’m sure I’ll be tempted on finishing the book to say more, but I defer to the wisdom and experience of Mark Twain, who once told Joseph Twichell:

I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” — Gore Vidal (pictured)

“It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens. You have to be very, very careful.” — Donna Tartt

“Books are not people. They are never late to the party. It doesn’t make any difference, early or late, as long as you get it done.” — Junot Díaz

“Fiction is lies. And in order to do this you have got to have a very good sense of what is the truth. You can’t do the art of deception, of deceiving people so they suspend disbelief, without having that sense very strongly indeed… A lot of people don’t - a lot of novelists don’t - and what you get then is a mess… people run away with the idea that what they are writing is the truth… You must be all the time aware it’s not.” — Muriel Spark

“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” — Joan Didion

“Books of quotations about writing and writers are things I usually flee from — the sanctimony level grows toxic almost immediately.” —

When book chatter starts to seem shallow and monotonous — as it frequently does — I turn to the greats. Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, these are old sayings, but there is nothing else the matter with them.
 

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde (pictured above)

“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

“The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.” — Joan Didion

“A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.” — Dawn Powell

“Don’t trim your sails to every wind, just go ahead and write and see what happens. Don’t look at the market. Don’t look at the bestseller list to see what’s selling. That wouldn’t help anyway. You have to write what you write, or get out of the business.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“I think my great handicap is my insistence on freedom. I require it. So I cannot make the suave adjustments to a successful writer’s life — right people, right hospitality, right gestures, because I want to be free. So I am tied down and now in my middle years almost buried (as far as my career goes) by my freedom.” — Dawn Powell

No doubt David Grann’s utterly riveting Letter From Poland was the talk of the blogosphere when it appeared last month, but I only just rescued that issue of The New Yorker from the box of mail I packed up to move, and I spent an hour I couldn’t spare on this story about a brutal murder perpetrated in November 2000, in the southwest corner of Poland.

The case of Dariusz Janiszewski, a businessman whose brutalized corpse washed up in a river, had gone several years’ worth of cold before a new detective reopened the file. He discovered that the victim’s cell phone, missing since his disappearance, was sold on an Internet auction site even before his body was found. Stranger still, while the file had been gathering frost, the seller, “Chris,” A/K/A former philosophy student Krystian Bala (above), had published a novel, Amok, “which encapsulated all his philosophical obsessions.”
 

The book depicts a murder by stabbing. That’s not the way Janiszewski died, but the narrator-killer, also named Chris, sells the weapon, a knife, “on an Internet auction.”

These are only the first convergences that led the police toward the conclusion that an unholy mixture of postmodern theory and garden-variety jealousy propelled the narcissistic author to murder, and to celebrate the crime in fiction.

The story mirrors “Crime and Punishment,” in which Raskolnikov, convinced that he is a superior being who can deliver his own form of justice, murders a wretched pawnbroker. “Wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime?” Raskolnikov asks. If Raskolnikov is a Frankenstein’s monster of modernity, then Chris, the protagonist of “Amok,” is a monster of posmodernity. In his view, not only is there no sacred being (”God, if you only existed, you’d see how sperm looks on blood”); there is also no truth (”Truth is being displaced by narrative”). One character admits that he doesn’t know which of his constructed personalities is real, and Chris says, “I’m a good liar, because I believe in the lies myself.”

Unbound by any sense of truth — moral, scientific, historical, biographical, legal — Chris embarks on a grisly rampage. After his wife catches him having sex with her best friend and leaves him (Chris says that he has, at least, “stripped her of her illusions”), he sleeps with one woman after another, the sex ranging from numbing to sadomasochistic. Inverting convention, he lusts after ugly women, insisting that they are “more real, more touchable, more alive.” He drinks too much. He spews vulgarities, determined, as one character puts it, to pulverize the language, to “screw it like no one else has ever screwed it.” He mocks traditional philosophers and blasphemes the Catholic Church….

Finally, Chris, repudiating what is considered the ultimate moral truth, kills his girlfriend Mary. “I tightened the noose around her neck, holding her down with one hand,” he says. “With my other hand, I stabbed the knife below her left breast…. Everything was covered in blood.” He then ejaculates on her. In a perverse echo of Wittgenstein’s notion that some actions defy language, Chris says of the killing, “There was no noise, no words, no movement. Complete silence.”

In “Crime and Punishment,” Raskolnikov confesses his sins and is punished for them, while being redeemed by the love of a woman named Sonya, who helpts to guide him back toward a pre-modern Christian order. But Chris never removes what he calls his “white gloves of silence,” and he is never punished. (”Murder leaves no stain,” he declares.) And his wife — who, not coincidentally, is also named Sonya — never returns to him.

It is possible, as Grann argues, to read the book as a kind of confession.

Bala himself, however, has refused to admit wrongdoing. When detained for questioning, he claimed he was beaten, and argued that he was being persecuted for his art — for his narrative working-out of difficult and troubling philosophical concepts. International PEN got involved. The Polish Justice Ministry “was deluged with letters on Bala’s behalf from around the world.”

Now awaiting a retrial after a prior conviction was overturned, Bala continues to maintain his innocence. “What is happening to me,” he says, “is like what happened to Salman Rushdie.” Meanwhile, the evidence against him is still mounting. And I’m waiting for the next edition of Peter Brooks’ Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.
 

Photo of Bala lifted from Time.

I spent one of the best days of my life in Park Guell in Barcelona. It was the tail end of a long Europe trip and my traveling companion and I were a bit worn out. We came into the park from the back side, riding a series of escalators up to the park’s highest elevation and then wandered slowly(yes Anatoly, I do use adverbs) down towards the largest bench I have ever seen. The bench was completely covered in mosaics and formed a squiggly circle. We sat there for what felt like hours, absorbing the truly mind-blowing scenery, reflecting on our travels. What I wouldn’t give to go back there this afternoon!

If you ever have the chance to visit be sure to carve out a full afternoon to relax there. Why exactly am I reminiscing about my Euro-trip? Because I have a copy of The Oxford Companion to The Garden on my desk. This hefty book is devoted to gardens of every kind and the people involved in their making. Below is an excerpt about Park Guell. (more…)

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