In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- XI

Now I come to one of my great favorites, Henry James's novella "The Lesson of the Master". In this story, Paul Overt, a young writer on the verge of great things in his career, is visiting an English country house where he hopes to meet for the first time Henry St. George, apparently the greatest writer of his day, though his output has been less satisfactory for the past ten years or so. Overt has never even seen St. George, and he strains for a first glimpse of him as St. George's party comes back from church. He's already gained the acquaintance of Mrs. St. George, who makes the offhand remark that she once made St. George burn a "bad book". Overt muses on his first glimpse of St. George's facial features:

His superficial sense was that their owner might have passed for a lucky stockbroker - a gentleman driving eastward every morning from a sanitary suburb in a smart dog-cart. That carried out the impression already derived from his wife. . . . Her eyes rested but on her husband, and with unmistakeable serenity. That was the way she wanted him to be - she liked his conventional uniform. Overt longed to hear more about the book she had induced him to destroy.

Overt briefly meets and chats with St. George, who promises a more extensive talk later, but he almost despairs of missing him when St. George doesn't appear in the smoking room after dinner. Finally, however, the promising young writer gets to talk more seriously with the reigning master. St. George notes to Overt how good his writing is, and how Overt must keep working to make it better:

"But you MUST be better - you really must keep it up. I haven't of course. It's very difficult - that's the devil of the whole thing, keeping it up. But I see you'll be able to. It will be a great disgrace if you don't."

"It's very interesting to hear you speak of yourself; but I don't know what you mean by your allusions to your having fallen off," Paul Overt observed with pardonable hypocrisy. He liked his companion so much now that the fact of any decline of talent or of care had ceased for the moment to be vivid to him.

"Don't say that - don't say that," St. George returned gravely, his head resting on the top of the sofa-back and his eyes on the ceiling. "You know perfectly what I mean. I haven't read twenty pages of your book without seeing that you can't help it."

"You make me very miserable," Paul ecstatically breathed.

"I'm glad of that, for it may serve as a kind of warning. Shocking enough it must be, especially to a young fresh mind, full of faith - the spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel - cruel to himself - and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart - for it IS a lesson. Let that good come of it at least that you shudder with your pitiful impression, and that this may help to keep you straight in the future. Don't become in your old age what I have in mine - the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods!"

"What do you mean by your old age?" the young man asked.

"It has made me old. But I like your youth."

Paul answered nothing - they sat for a minute in silence. They heard the others going on about the governmental majority. Then "What do you mean by false gods?" he enquired. His companion had no difficulty whatever in saying, "The idols of the market; money and luxury and 'the world;' placing one's children and dressing one's wife; everything that drives one to the short and easy way. Ah the vile things they make one do!"

"But surely one's right to want to place one's children."

"One has no business to have any children," St. George placidly declared. "I mean of course if one wants to do anything good."

"But aren't they an inspiration - an incentive?"

"An incentive to damnation, artistically speaking."

"You touch on very deep things - things I should like to discuss with you," Paul said.

Several weeks later, Overt and St. George take up the conversation again. St. George observes,

"Well, all I say is that one's children interfere with perfection. One's wife interferes. Marriage interferes."

"You think then the artist shouldn't marry?"

"He does so at his peril - he does so at his cost."

"Not even when his wife's in sympathy with his work?"

"She never is - she can't be! Women haven't a conception of such things."

"Surely they on occasion work themselves," Paul objected.

"Yes, very badly indeed. Oh of course, often, they think they understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is they're most dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a great lot of money. Their great nobleness and virtue, their xemplary conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you up to that."

St. George urges Overt

"Try to do some really good work."

"Oh I want to, heaven knows!"

"Well, you can't do it without sacrifices - don't believe that for a moment," the Master said. "I've made none. I've had everything. In other words I've missed everything."

"You've had the full rich masculine human general life, with all the responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys - all the domestic and social initiations and complications. They must be immensely suggestive, immensely amusing," Paul anxiously submitted.

. . .

"We've got everything handsome, even a carriage - we're perfect Philistines and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't try to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we HAVEN'T got. It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists - come!" the Master wound up. "You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"

The upshot of further discussion between St. George and Overt is that Overt leaves England, eventually to spend two years in Switzerland polishing his next novel, which he believes is something great. In the first part of the story, Overt met Miriam Fancourt, already an acquaintance of St. George, who, due to her intelligence, sympathy, and strong understanding of literature, is likely the best wife a male writer could ever hope for. It briefly appeared that Overt and Fancourt might make a match, but in the two years Overt was away, St. George's own wife has died, and as Overt returns to London with his manuscript, he finds St. George is to marry Miriam Fancourt himself. Overt senses some kind of a strange trick. That is his question for St. George when he sees him:

Poor Overt looked hard at him. "Are you marrying Miss Fancourt to save me?"

"Not absolutely, but it adds to the pleasure. I shall be the making of you," St. George smiled. "I was greatly struck, after our talk, with the brave devoted way you quitted the country, and still more perhaps with your force of character in remaining abroad. You're very strong - you're wonderfully strong."

Paul tried to sound his shining eyes; the strange thing was that he seemed sincere - not a mocking fiend. He turned away, and as he did so heard the Master say something about his giving them all the proof, being the joy of his old age. He faced him again, taking another look. "Do you mean to say you've stopped writing?"

"My dear fellow, of course I have. It's too late. Didn't I tell you?"

Overt is, of course, devastated that any chance he might have had of marrying Miriam Fancourt is gone, and he still suspects a trick, but the story concludes:

[H]e had been saying to himself that he should have been "sold" indeed, diabolically sold, if now, on his new foundation, at the end of a year, St. George were to put forth something of his prime quality - something of the type of "Shadowmere" and finer than his finest. Greatly as he admired his talent Paul literally hoped such an incident wouldn't occur; it seemed to him just then that he shouldn't be able to bear it. His late adviser's words were still in his ears - "You're very strong, wonderfully strong." Was he really? Certainly he would have to be, and it might a little serve for revenge. IS he? the reader may ask in turn, if his interest has followed the perplexed young man so far. The best answer to that perhaps is that he's doing his best, but that it's too soon to say. When the new book came out in the autumn Mr. and Mrs. St. George found it really magnificent. The former still has published nothing but Paul doesn't even yet feel safe. I may say for him, however, that if this event were to occur he would really be the very first to appreciate it: which is perhaps a proof that the Master was essentially right and that Nature had dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion.

To be concluded.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- X

The Good Soldier (1927) actually has two destructive women, an American bitch-goddess and an old-world lady of the manor, for whom the American is no match. It takes place over the dozen or so years just before World War I, in the same imaginative universe as most of Henry James's novels. John Dowell, the narrator, a wealthy Philadelphian, marries, on stubborn impulse, Florence Hurlbird ("of the Stamford, Connecticut Hurlbirds"). Florence had previously accompanied her uncle and his amanuensis, Jimmy, on an around-the-world tour, but complications ensued with Jimmy, leading to an abrupt return home and a deal with Jimmy that kept him in Europe in return for a remittance from the uncle.

The Hurlbirds determine that this episode and what it reveals about Florence make it a good idea to prevent her from marrying anyone, but Dowell is both stubborn and obtuse, and ignoring the family's warnings, he elopes with Florence. Florence's object is to return to Europe, where she can resume her liaison with Jimmy, and that's where Dowell takes her on their honeymoon. Florence feigns a heart condition, and during a convenient storm on the first night of the honeymoon voyage claims to have a heart attack, with the result that Dowell is warned by her doctors to avoid all "manifestations of affection". This leaves her free to carry on with Jimmy, who moves in with the couple in Paris, Dowell oblivious to everything.

Several years later, during the Dowells' annual visit to a German heart spa, they meet the Ashburnhams, an English couple that Dowell determines are the "right sort of people", and they begin a nine-year friendship which is actually a menage that suits everyone but Dowell himself -- but he's completely unaware of what's going on, and since he believes both they and the Ashburnhams are "the right sort of people", he's perfectly happy.

Edward Ashburnham has married Leonora in an arranged match; she is from an impoverished Irish family that has manipulated Edward's parents into the deal. Edward, however, has a roving eye. Early in their marriage, he causes a scandal by trying to kiss a servant girl in a railway compartment, and as his relationship with Leonora deteriorates, he has a series of liaisons with other women. Leonora, a Catholic, refuses to countanance divorce, and in any case, the marriage represents financial security to her. She's able to use Edward's remorse at his various wanderings to gain control of his estate's business, and she also becomes adept at keeping his amorous affairs at a manageable level where he can pursue them short of outright scandal, but appearances can be maintained.

In fact, Leonora has some hope that Edward will get tired of adultery and return to her, until they meet John and Florence Dowell at the German heart spa, where Leonora has followed Edward in pursuit of his latest amour. Florence, a true American bitch-goddess character, immediately transfixes Edward, who quickly loses interest in the woman he'd originally followed to Germany. John Dowell is, and continues to be, completely ignorant of what's happening.

Leonora is near despair that Edward has fallen prey to this new and irresistibly attractive woman, but she ties up loose ends by making sure Edward's former passion, Maisie Maidan, hears of the new one and her reduced status in a loud hallway conversation. Unlike either Florence or Edward, who are at the spa because they're feigning heart conditions, Maisie does have a bad heart, and she promptly dies of a heart attack at the news.

Leonora then, over a nine-year period, serves as a stage-manager, beard, and enabler for the affair between Edward and Florence, which is conducted during the couples' mutual stays at the heart spa, as well as during Edward's visits to the Dowells in Paris. Dowell throughout this period remains convinced that Florence must avoid all sex due to her heart condition, and he's still delighted with their friendship with the Ashburnhams. Leonora conceals not only the fact of the affair, but her abiding hatred and contempt for Florence.

Meanwhile, however, Leonora has brought into the Ashburnham household a protege from her convent school, victim of a broken home, whom Leonora wants to foster. Over the years, the young girl ripens, and it's plain that Leonora's intent is to use her to bring Edward's amatory interests into a closer and more controllable realm. Edward and the girl begin to fall in love. The girl, now about 22, visits the Ashburnhams and the Dowells at the heart spa, where Leonora skilfully manipulates Florence one evening into eavesdropping on a meeting between Edward and the girl. Florence immediately realizes Edward is losing interest in her, but returning to the hotel, she also discovers that John, her husband, is talking with a new acquaintance. The acquaintance, seeing Florence after many years and not realizing John is her husband, blurts out the details of her scandalous affair with Jimmy, which had happened before John married her.

Florence has kept a vial of cyanide as insurance against this possibility throughout her marriage, and she runs upstairs and takes it, though not before writing a note to her family back in Connecticut explaining everything. Leonora, not surprisingly the first to find Florence's body, promptly stamps and mails the envelope with the note. Nevertheless, she, Edward, and the spa authorities conceal from John Dowell that Florence has committed suicide.

Leonora's plan is now apparently to have the young girl she's fostering take Florence's place with Edward, and to have the girl marry the now-widowed John Dowell to serve as beard. This, in Leonora's mind, will continue to allow appearances to be maintained, and continue to give her the benefit of Edward's money. Both Edward and Leonora summon Dowell back from the US, where he's wrapping up Florence's estate, with this in mind. Edward, however, has gradually become remorseful over his infidelities, and he finally refuses to participate in Leonora's scheme with the girl, insisting that she be sent to India to live with her father, in order to avoid starting a new affair with her. However, a hopeless romantic, he's in love with the girl and can't live without her.

Soon after the girl is sent away to India, Edward commits suicide. The girl, hearing of Edward's suicide, goes mad. Dowell is sent to India with her old nurse to retrieve her. He becomes her guardian and buys Edward's estate from Leonora, who marries another local squire, so normal, as Dowell puts it, that he can buy most of his clothes ready-made. With the new marriage and the proceeds of Edward's estate, she is, of course, a wealthy woman, having reached that position by prompting two suicides, a death by heart attack, and a descent into madness.

To be continued.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- IX

Thoughts about bitch-goddesses and the sex drive now bring me to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. I'm just starting to re-read it (third time), but I'm already picking up a certain scent:

For do you understand my whole attentions, my whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like the finds at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the English call "things" -- off love, poverty, crime, religion and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God, are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a reemasonry between all of them from end to end of the earth? That is what makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal

Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her towards culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't got to laugh, and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love. Do you know the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of commendation, La Louve--the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the Troubadour paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to her--the things people do when they're in love!--he dressed himself up in wolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with the fangs and beaten with clubs. So they carried him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn't at all impressed. They polished him up and her husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a great poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet with indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or somewhere and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet though La Louve wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the husband had to fit out an expedition to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell all over the Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about the courtesy
that is due to great poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that a story?

Don't you feel something coming on here? For a clue, it's worth pointing out that Leslie Fiedler traces the bitch-goddess to the courtly love tradition.

More anon.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- VIII

Is Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four a bitch-goddess? I raised the question of bitch-goddesses in my discussion of Ginny Good a couple of weeks ago. Leslie Fiedler identified the bitch-goddess as a literary type in Love and Death in the American Novel. A bitch-goddess is like Brett Ashley in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, irresistible to men, liberated, promiscuous, and destructive. Fiedler feels, I think correctly, that she's a representation of what he calls the bourgeois sentimental love religion.

Julia is promiscuous; she explains to Winston that she's had many men, and Winston's reaction is that for him, the more she's had, the bigger the turn-on. Well, OK, in 1949 maybe you didn't need to get tested as much. Their meeting places and protocols come, the narrator tells us, from Julia's extensive experience. Actually, there's no specific indication in the novel that Julia has given Winston any sort of exclusive, and when she shows up at the secret upstairs room with Inner Party coffee and chocolate, I'm inevitably curious as to how she's come by it.

Julia is attractive, in whatever way Outer Party ladies wearing overalls and anti-sex league sashes can be attractive. She's liberated, since as I discussed yesterday, she works in a job that in 1949 would be unusual for a woman, hardware technician on the novel writing machines. (This, I can't help wondering, may be Orwell's reaction to the "Rosie the Riveter" type -- in the US, it doesn't appear to have been as disturbing as Orwell may have felt it would be to UK readers.)

The bourgeois sentimental love religion is actually a key factor in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Party has the aim of eliminating sexual attraction. (An odd omission, of course, is gay and lesbian sexual attraction; UK writers like C.S.Lewis felt able to discuss this at the time, but it doesn't figure into Orwell's psychological universe.) Winston's only serious resistance to Party orthodoxy, other than his original crime of keeping a diary, is to have an affair with Julia, which quickly becomes pretty darn sentimental, to the point of seeming sappy to contemporary tastes. It's clear that somewhat goopy-traditional sentimentality is the only positive quality in the novel that opposes rigid, Party-bourgeois orthodoxy. (I see a similarity, and a similar weakness, in E.M.Forster here.)

Julia is destructive. She's perhaps not as callously and consciously destructive as the classic American bitch-goddesses, but certainly she initiates the relationship with Winston Smith by sending him a mash note -- and while the narrator doesn't say so, you've got to wonder how much practice she's had in doing this. Smith, who's hated the sight of Julia before she palms him the note, suddenly changes his mind and jumps into the illicit relationship, which, of course, is the specific act that destroys him, notwithstanding the diary.

I think Julia is a Leslie Fiedler bitch-goddess. This, of course, hurts Fiedler's theory that the bitch-goddess figure is specific to American literature and a symptom of American sexual or psychological dysfunction.

More tomorrow.

Food Fight at New Partisan

I've got an interesting group blog called New Partisan on my blogroll. It means to cover the same territory as the old Partisan Review, which I suppose means, at various times, anticommunist liberalism or neoconservatism. Its politics are predictable, and I don't read them, but its literary commentary is at least not dull.

One thing I've learned on this blog is to avoid criticism of other blogs, unless I want a major spike in my traffic and much angry trolling in my comment section. It appears that New Partisan is belatedly learning this lesson as well: the latest somewhat bemused response from its editor is here. You'll need to go to the main page and scroll down to see the earlier developments. For those who'd like a summary, one of the bloggers, Sam Munson, attacked a self-described literary blog for giving out dull and unperceptive material that Munson thought was unworthy to be called "criticism".

I would tend to agree with Munson's assessment of nearly all literary blogs. I have a link to a list of literary blogs on my blogroll, largely so visitors here can get a sense of my focus, but nothing draws me to read any of them more than occasionally, and I'd say that, on the whole, they're dull, gossipy, and decidedly unliterary.

But here's the problem. If I read Joe Blow's lit blog and post that Joe's saying nothing new, he's boring me, he's self-absorbed, he's wasting my time, and so forth, I will irritate Joe's claque, and I will get hundreds of visits from lookie-loos who've read Joe's angry response on his site and come over to browbeat me in the normal ways trolls do, to my bemusement and the bemusement of my regular visitors. You can see New Partisan's editor's very similar bemusement in the post linked above.

This is a waste of my time and energy. I've pretty much decided it's not worth criticizing other blogs on this site -- and actually, I think this was at one point part of blog etiquette. We can get into a civilized debate on any number of things, but it's probably counterproductive just to say a blog doesn't fit my view of what literature should be like. And even if I think I can defend my position, I'll be nibbled to death by trolling ducks in the comments, just as New Partisan has been.

What's disappointing is that New Partisan doesn't seem to be paying the same attention to blogs like mine that, in my view, are in fact doing new and interesting things with blogging and literary forms. It's lonely work, guys, when it doesn't have to be that way. My blog probably isn't boring. My visitors, I suspect, are intelligent and courteous. If you visit and read my blog, I'll respond intelligently to criticism. It likely would be a much better use of all our time, guys.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- VII

Nineteen Eighty-Four comes off as a puzzling book. Winston Smith starts out as a sympathetic character, if weak-willed and obtuse. But once we reach the scene where, just before his mother's disappearance, he bullies his dying sister out of her chocolate ration, he's losing credibility fast. At that point, much of his motivation seems simple dissatisfaction at his ration level. Maybe if he can get up to O'Brien's pay grade, with real coffee and good chocolate, he might give up on the diary altogether.

The affair with Julia fits here, too: Smith is carried away by nostalgia for soft mattresses and double beds, and now he's got a shack job who'll dress up to suit his fantasies. And Julia, when you look closely, isn't much more than that. She falls asleep, habitually, when Winston tries to talk to her about politics. I'm almost wondering if Orwell has drawn this to show what he thinks is feminine nature. O'Brien passes Goldstein's book to Winston, who grandly reads it aloud to Julia in someone's dated vision of domestic bliss, the authoritarian male reading the truth to the grateful female, except the grateful female falls asleep. Unless someone can show a better overall scheme here, I'm inclined to say Nineteen Eighty-Four is aging very, very badly.

Goldstein's book, for that matter, is another puzzle. Its tone is windy and pedantic, as you might expect from a quasi-socialist political tract. But Orwell has included so much of it -- two whole chapters -- in the novel that he must have intended it as a serious commentary of some sort on the world as he saw it. That world, as best I can determine from Goldstein's somewhat muddled expression, consists of three equal and countervailing power blocs who are constantly at war with each other, primarily to absorb surplus production, which, if unabsorbed, would otherwise result in another Great Depression.

Political arrangements within the power blocs appear to be essentially uniform, with most of the world population, the proles, exploited but ignored, and the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in an uneasy minority alliance that has to be enforced via viewscreens and thought police. This might have worked as a superficial view of world politics immediately after Yalta. But the actual course of world events up to the actual year 1984 involved, after some hesitancy and failure of Western nerve, the not-gradual triumph of bourgeois capitalist democracy, in fact if not in name in "Eastasia", and within a decade in both fact and name in "Eurasia".

The main tasks facing the three former blocs half a century after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published are to bring to heel the various client states that became renegade following the collapse of the post-Yalta system, as well as to solve the problem of the humanitarian catastrophes that regularly erupt in the African post-colonial vacuum. Assuming continued Western nerve, these can be accomplished. Nothing in Orwell's world view remotely predicts these developments.

Orwell's view in Nineteen Eighty-Four is nostalgic and pessimistic. Things can only get worse. Things used to be better. Julia is something of an exemplary woman. As Goldstein's book points our, supported by Smith's ruminations, the Party seeks to abolish sexual attraction in order to sublimate the drive into political hysteria. Party women don't use makeup, and while Orwell doesn't describe the issues in detail, it appears that abolishing sexual attractiveness leads to greater equality between the sexes in the INGSOC world -- Julia is, after all, a hardware tech on the novel-writing machines, a kind of women's work that wouldn't have been familiar to Orwell (though is completely unremarkable to us now). There's also, of course, a deep-seated fear of technology in Orwell -- a liberated woman working as a technician is, I suspect, part of the nightmare he's trying to convince us is artistically true.

More tomorrow.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- VI

Now let's look at exactly why Mr. Stringler saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as a dirty book. It had, of course, what people 50 years ago thought were dirty parts, though I suspect that in the contemporary context, nobody's corporate net-watchdog will bounce an attempt to read the online version [UPDATE: My wife reports she was able to read this passage just fine from her company's network, which has very stringent filters]. For general edification, I reproduce a typical dirty part here:

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face. . . . As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.

‘Scent too!’ he said.

‘Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.’

They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them.

This, like other aspects of Nineteen Eighty-Four, hasn't aged well, though by the time (in college) I got my hands on a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover, I was just as disappointed. I can certainly see how someone who named his daughter Prudence would object to passages like these, but I think they also reflect a deeper problem with the novel, and with how readers have normally approached it.

The first part of the book covers Winston Smith's political awakening. He decides to start a diary, and the mere intention, the mere glimmer that fathers the intention, is thoughtcrime, and he knows it. As he makes his first entry, he compulsively writes DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, over and over. We might, from this beginning, expect some type of political action to take place.

Instead, Smith is deflected in his intention, however inchoate it may be. He gets a mash note from Julia, and all of a sudden his response to his political awakening is to have an affair. Much of the action in the book then describes the couple's attempts to meet furtively, and when you think about it, the constraints in Oceanian INGSOC society aren't much different from what they are in contemporary bourgeois-capitalist-democratic society: if you're married, if your friends and co-workers will disapprove, if it's against company policy, you're going to have to sneak around if you want to have an affair.

So the action, and the attitude of Winston and Julia to their circumstances, isn't much different from any other bourgeois couple having some hanky-pank on the side. My wife doesn't understand me. I hate my boss. Society is too judgmental. Our motives are pure. Boy, this wine you bought on the way over to the motel is pretty darn good. Wow! Did you get that at Victoria's Secret?

The two of them visit the supposed Inner Party renegade O'Brien in an odd attempt, as far as I can see, to have him bless their relationship. O'Brien simply thinks they're fools to come to his place together. He quizzes them perfunctorily on their willingness to endure hardship, commit acts of sabotage, or even kill people if necessary, to accomplish the end of deposing Big Brother. These acts, it seems to me, would be reasonable under the circumstances, but that's the only place in the novel where any such thing is mooted. Winston Smith's political awakening is oddly somnambulistic.

If I were Mr. Stringler, I might have modified my complaint to the school board to say it's a dirty book to go a little farther and say it's a strange dirty book, but of course that's probably one reason his daughter Prudence never took my crush on her very seriously.

More tomorrow.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- V

Now you would think that Mr. Stringler, who'd complained to the school board that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a dirty book unsuitable for junior high school students, rather than a clarion warning to those same students about the danger posed to our way of life by Soviet communism, was being counterproductive. Actually, I think he probably understood what the school board was trying to do, and given his assumptions -- and the school board's assumptions, and the assumptions of practically any adult willing to give an opinion in the Borough and Township of Canterbury, New Jersey -- Mr. Stringler was right.

First, Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't about Soviet-style communism. Thanks to Solzhenitsyn, we have a pretty clear literary picture of how the Soviet system functioned. The pre-Soviet aristocracy and upper middle class, along with other groups like the landed peasantry, were driven into exile or exterminated. The ordinary middle class, too large to put into camps all at once, was nevertheless terrorized into immobility by random arrests, themselves on a large scale. However, the gulag system served as both a terror mechanism and a source of cheap labor.

The system we see in Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't that kind of system. Orwell identifies its system as INGSOC, or "English Socialism", and it's very different. The three social groups in Oceania are the Inner Party, a small clique roughly corresponding to an aristocracy, the Outer Party, a much larger group corresponding pretty closely to the bourgeois middle class, and the proles, the working class. The middle class here works at desk jobs in the Ministries, and while its circumstances are reduced, its interactions are much like those we have in bourgeois-democracy condo boards and corporate cafeterias (replete, I would point out, with the kind of mundane jealousies and backstabbings that take place in bourgeois-democractic social institutions).

INGSOC appears to have come to power via some type of bargain -- not a ruthless, Soviet style revolution. During an air raid, Winston encounters an old man crying in a bomb shelter:

But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved — a little granddaughter, perhaps — had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:

‘We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.’

But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.

Outer Party members can "disappear" for thoughtcrime -- the consequence of "disappearing" seems to be that you're "vaporized". There are few allusions to any extensive gulag system (Winston speculates his mother and sister may have gone to a labor camp when they disappeared)-- somehow Oceania has surmounted the technical obstacles to disposing of whole populations. But the feature I can't escape in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that, except for the thought criminals, the bourgeoisie has signed itself on to the Revolution, something that didn't happen in the Soviet system. The Revolution has somehow been conducted on behalf of the proles, who remain at the bottom, but the bourgeoisie has kept its own status in the middle. The whole social pie, of course, is much reduced, but the relative portions are the same.

Thoughtcrime, as I've pointed out, is a bourgeois offense. Obtuse frat boys commit thoughtcrime when they do skits in blackface. Timid assistant professors commit thoughtcrime when they slip and use the wrong adjective to describe Islam. This is the bourgeoisie watching over itself. Stalin wasn't subtle, and he didn't trust anyone. He'd never have let the bourgeoisie watch over itself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a sendup of the Soviet system. In its day-to-day details it's a caricature of our own bourgeois capitalist democracy, a continuation of Coming Up For Air. I've lived through this scene many times simply in going to bourgeois-capitalist-democratic work:

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said a voice at Winston's back.

He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.

Mr. Stringler, Prudence's father, was more perceptive than anyone gave him credit for. He saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as exactly what it was, a sendup of bourgeois society, a world where the middle class has happily sold itself out, with quasi-Stalinist measures to enforce, not a revolutionary ideology, but its own complacencies. He didn't like what he read, of course, but he saw very clearly what he was reading. My hat's off, these many years later, to Mr. Stringler.

More tomorrow.

Graduate School and the Arms Race

I was briefly drawn into a discussion between Michael Drout (here) and Jay Allman (here) on the effect the oversupply of graduate students has on the academic world and society in general. Jay has kindly e-mailed to tell me about the most recent inning in his debate with Michael, which you can find here.

Jay recognizes that I'm deliberately changing my focus on my own blog -- there's going to be much more about the New Jersey suburb of Canterbury (I've been nosing around again in Henry Charlton Beck's books, trying to find the place where he establishes that Canterbury, sometime around 1858, was renamed from Jones Bog, but I can't remember which book it was, and can't seem to find it), but it's still hard for me to resist graduate student oversupply as a topic. Please regard this as backsliding on my part.

My biggest concern about Michael's position, but he's certainly not unique, is a certain bloodlessness in seeing a benefit to students and the university system from having a greatly inflated applicant pool from which to draw faculty. This may be a good thing, but it certainly comes at a cost -- many thousands of graduate students, Ph.D. candidates, and adjuncts must slowly face disappointment and the need to retool, having invested as many as eight or ten years on their unrealized ambitions. There are certainly ways to reduce the oversupply at an earlier point, but so far, it's not in the interests of faculties or administrators to do so.

In this, I probably come a little closer to Jay in seeing a moral issue. We can parse the economic reasons for the current state of affairs -- the distortion caused by tenure is a big part of it: if faculties actually faced the market consequences of overproducing future professors, they'd see an interest in reducing the supply. But insofar as current rules make it impossible to lay off tenured faculty at any time short of near-bankruptcy at the institution, there's little incentive for them to do so.

I do disagree with the notion that both Michael and Jay seem to agree on, that the intense competition produces a higher level of faculty even at the lowest-tier institutions. I think there's increasing recognition that when the job market is so overcrowded, it's almost impossible for institutions to make rational choices. Among other things, the perceived value of a tenure track job is so great to the applicant -- and its value as something to award is so great to the hiring authority -- that corruption is bound to enter the system, the same way it does in the "third world", where there's a greater oversupply of qualified applicants for middle-class jobs.

Look at the case of Mohammed Atta, who got an education as a city planner in Germany and by all accounts appears to have been an excellent student with a real desire to make a difference. When he returned to Egypt, he found there was an oversupply of city planners, and only applicants from certain families got appointments to such jobs. The result was that Atta was forced to retool for a different career. We're lucky that there's enough flexibility in our society to give disappointed graduate students other options, but Atta's case should be warning enough that we can't neglect the effect of market distortions.

An instructor in Economics 101 can point out the effects of cartels, rationing, and similar distortions on markets. A student might reply that keeping the price of sugar artificially low is very good for those who like sugar. This is a little like Michael's position, it seems to me. The instructor can reply that there will be other impacts of such distortions, like a black market. People will have to line up to buy limited amounts of sugar at the official price, but if they want to pay exorbitant amounts around the corner, they can get all the sugar they want right away. But even an economics prof won't necessarily suggest the social impact of widespread disregard for the law.

My own sense is that the social and institutional impacts of the graduate student oversupply include a tolerance in universities for petty corruption, especially nepotism and other back-scratching deals among faculty and administrators, which often center on hiring, retention, and promotion. The faculty oversupply can also be seen (a couple of lectures later in Econ 101) as a student shortage. The forms of price discounting now offered to students certainly include the tacit tolerance of cheating and the strategic unwillingness of faculties and administrations to enforce honor codes. The power of student evaluations (I never got to do these as an undergraduate myself, back in the baby boom when there was a student oversupply) has an impact on how rigorously professors feel they can teach or grade. What's the use of a highly qualified new professor if she can't give below an A-minus?

So I think there are definite bad results to the current state of affairs. But I've got to go back to finding out where Henry Charlton Beck mentions Canterbury. I know it's somewhere.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- IV

If you reflect on it, thoughtcrime is something committed by henpecked husbands, or assistant professors up for tenure, or over-the-hill sports commentators, or community block grant program managers, or sales account reps terrified of losing their happy illusions about the products they have to sell. In fact, there's something here very like the "walk on eggs" phase of the abusive cycle: past a certain point, it's inevitable the victim will get a beating, and any trivial offense will serve as provocation.

And this goes directly to what Nineteen Eighty-Four actually accomplishes as a novel. I was in junior high school during the Kennedy Administration, and it's important to remember, or keep in mind if you don't remember, that Kennedy won the 1960 election in some part because he attacked the Republicans from the right, with his assertion that we'd allowed the Soviets to build more nuclear missiles than we had. And Kennedy increased the level of confrontation with the Soviets, from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban missile crisis to intervention in Viet Nam. I lived in a very Republican town in suburban New Jersey then, a place named Canterbury, and this sternness was playing very well there.

In fact, we'd have films at Boy Scout meetings on the need for nuclear preparedness, and some families, including mine, were building fallout shelters. Remember those? So in this general atmosphere, the school board decided to place copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the junior high school library, presumably to join Animal Farm, which had likely been there for many years. What better way to educate our youth on the nature of the threat we faced and why it was needful to preserve our way of life?

Then a very odd thing happened. Even as an eighth or ninth-grader I had a vague sense that it was strange. Mr. Stringler, the father of Prudence Stringler, the girl I had a terrible crush on all through junior high school, complained to the school board that Nineteen Eighty-Four shouldn't be in the junior high school library at all. It had dirty parts. It was completely unsuitable for junior high school students. It was, in fact, a dirty book, the sort of exotic thing we all knew existed but couldn't get our hands on.

More tomorrow.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- III

I thinki Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is also less a political fable than a novel of bourgeois discontent. It continues the misogynistic theme from Coming Up For Air. Of Winston Smith, Orwell's narrator says

He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

When Smith begins his affair with Julia, the narrator says,

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls (‘Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!’ she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.

Orwell's point about Thoughtcrime struck me in a recent rereading of the book:

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

This interests me because the extremely complete record we have in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago of the Soviet prison camp system strongly suggests that "thoughtcrime" wasn't a major part of the Stalinist ethos. As Solzhenitsyn says,

For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact that people were arrested who were guilty of nothing. . . . By and large, the Organs had no profound reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and whom not to arrest. They usually had overall assignments, quotas for a specific number of arrests. These quotas might be filled on an orderly basis or wholly arbitrarily.

The totalitarian world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a place in the mind, not very closely patterned after the totalitarian systems that existed during Orwell's lifetime. The actual Soviet system, and likely the Nazi system as well, didn't screen seriously for thoughtcrime -- practically speaking, both extermination camp systems were overloaded with the intake they had, which was based either on completely arbitrary criteria for arrest, or criteria based on overt reasons, like former social class or ethnicity. Nobody in those real totalitarian systems had serious time to deal with thoughtcrime.

And if you read Nineteen Eighty-Four soon after Coming Up For Air, you see a consistency in the imaginative universe in both books. Victory Gardens, the housing block where Winston Smith lives, is described in ways very similar to Ellesmere Road, where George Bowling lives -- Victory Gardens was built about the same time, and the details in both books suggest that Victory Gardens is pretty much Ellesmere Road fifty years and many air raids later. World War II hasn't started yet in Coming Up For Air, but the bombers are already making practice runs for the raids that are described many times in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Both the protagonists commit what are effectively "thoughtcrimes", in fact. George Bowling wants to go fishing -- but the very germ of the desire is what gets him in trouble in his own mind.

[T]here was another business that had been in and out of my mind for some time past. This was that I had seventeen quid which nobody else had heard about--nobody in the family, that is. . . .By a kind of instinct--rather queer, and probably indicating another landmark in my life--I just quietly put the money in the bank and said nothing to anybody. I'd never done anything of this kind before. A good husband and father would have spent it on a dress for Hilda (that's my wife) and boots for the kids. But I'd been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.

But the wish to do something as innocuous as go fishing is something he has to conceal from his wife:

She was vaguely against it, as usual, but didn't have many ideas one way or the other, except that if I went fishing she wasn't coming with me to watch me put those nasty squashy things on the hook. Then suddenly she got on to the fact that if I was to go fishing the set-out-that I'd need, rod and reel and so forth, would cost round about a quid. The rod alone would cost ten bob. Instantly she flew into a temper. You haven't seen old Hilda when there's talk of wasting ten bob. She burst out at me:

'The IDEA of wasting all that money on a thing like that! Absurd! And how they DARE charge ten shillings for one of those silly little fishing-rods! It's disgraceful. And fancy you going fishing at your age! A great big grown-up man like you. Don't be such a BABY, George.'

Then the kids got on to it. Lorna sidled up to me and asked in that silly pert way she has, 'Are you a baby, Daddy?' and little Billy, who at that time didn't speak quite plain, announced to the world in general, 'Farver's a baby.'

There are very similar scenes of children, wearing the uniform of the Spies youth-group, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

More anon.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- II

Let's look at George Orwell's Coming Up For Air (1939), an underrated book by an underrated novelist. This is so far one of the great novels of bourgeois discontent, it seems to me, certainly better than much of Sinclair Lewis. It picks up the life of George Bowling, a lower-middle-class Englishman, as he suffers midlife crisis. Here's how he describes his wife:

Hilda is thirty-nine, and when I first knew her she looked just like a hare. So she does still, but she's got very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes, and when she's more upset than usual she's got a trick of humping her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast, like an old gypsy woman over her fire. She's one of those people who get their main kick in life out of foreseeing disasters. Only petty disasters, of course. As for wars, earthquakes, plagues, famines, and revolutions, she pays no attention to them. Butter is going up, and the gas-bill is enormous, and the kids' boots are wearing out, and there's another instalment due on the radio--that's Hilda's litany. She gets what I've finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast, and glooming at me, 'But, George, it's very SERIOUS! I don't know what we're going to DO! I don't know where the money's coming from! You don't seem to realize how serious it IS!' and so on and so forth. It's fixed firmly in her head that we shall end up in the workhouse. The funny thing is that if we ever do get to the workhouse Hilda won't mind it a quarter as much as I shall, in fact she'll probably rather enjoy the feeling of security.

Later, he says of her,

After a year or two I stopped wanting to kill her and started wondering about her. Just wondering. For hours, sometimes, on Sunday afternoons or in the evening when I've come home from work, I've lain on my bed with all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they're like that, how they get like that, whether they're doing it on purpose. It seems to be a most frightful thing, the suddenness with which some women go to pieces after they're married. It's as if they were strung up to do just that one thing, and the instant they've done it they wither off like a flower that's set its seed. What really gets me down is the dreary attitude towards life that it implies. If marriage was just an open swindle--if the woman trapped you into it and then turned round and said, 'Now, you bastard, I've caught you and you're going to work for me while I have a good time!'--I wouldn't mind so much. But not a bit of it. They don't want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle age as quickly as possible. After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight. It was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who'd seemed to me--and in fact when I first knew her she WAS--a finer type of animal than myself, and within only about three years she'd settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump. I'm not denying that I was part of the reason. But whoever she'd married it would have been much the same.

More tomorrow.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- I

I've never regretted leaving teaching. Every time I reread Conrad's Heart of Darkness I say another little prayer of thanks that I will never have to take up this passage with a classroom full of sophomores:

"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began, suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely. They--the women, I mean-- are out of it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, `My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it.

This is Charlie Marlow explaining to his friends that he's had to tell Kurtz's Intended a whole bunch of fairy tales about Kurtz's life in the Congo and how, ultimately, his last words were of her, not, as they actually were, "the horror -- the horror". Can you imagine what a room full of sophomores would do to this? I'm surprised there isn't an annual crop of complaints about the poor TAs and adjuncts and assistant profs who have to teach this passage. (I'd be happy to hear, for that matter, from any working academics who've dealt with it.)

Let's move to Charles Bukowski. A Google search on "'Charles Bukowski' misogynist" turns up many links. But let's look at this passage from Notes of a Dirty Old Man:

she really slammed that door when she left. it was so loud it put me in a state of shock. when the wall stopped trembling I leaped up, drained the wineglass and opened the door. there was no time to dress. she heard me open the door and started running, but she had on high heels. I ran down the hall in my shorts and caught her at the top of the stairway. I caught her and gave her a fair open hand slap along the cheek, she screamed and went down, as she fell her legs went down last and I looked up her dress at those long fine legs spun in nylon, I saw way up, and I thought, god damn, I must be Crazy! but there was no way out and I turned and walked slowly back to the door, opened it, closed it, sat down and poured a wine. I could hear her crying out there. then I heard another door open.

"whatza matta, honey?" it was another woman.

"he HIT me! my husband HIT me!"

(HUSBAND?)

Then there's Ken Kesey, who's a whipping boy even for libertarians. Nobody will ever forgive him for Nurse Ratched, it seems, except that when I do a Google search on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I find a ton of study guides. Apparently lots of instructors are teaching this book, and few, it would appear, are being brought up before the campus sensitivity board for it. (Again, I'd be interested to hear experiences of any working academics who've taught it.)

More tomorrow.

Respectable Railroad Literature

I am cooking up a post tentatively titled "Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents", so stay tuned. But I'm still thinking about yesterday's post on Linda Niemann and her books covering her career in railroading. This reminded me that there used to be a class of genre fiction called railroad stories, and the link here is to a site that preserves them, from the late 19th century through about 1940. For a time, in fact, there was a pulp magazine called Railroad Stories, which was retitled Railroad in 1937.

In fact, this is about when the railroad story, as a popular genre, died out. But oddly enough, almost exactly at this time, an interest in railroads became respectable among the haute bourgeoisie. Lucius Beebe, a travel and food writer who is usually described as a "bon vivant" but in actuality was a pioneer of the flagrantly gay public lifestyle, began to write his numerous books on the aesthetic qualities of railroading. (More on Beebe here.) Rogers E.M. Whittaker began to write under the pseudonym "E.M.Frimbo" for the New Yorker on the pleasures of riding trains.

Beebe never quite brought off his attempt to elevate railroad buffery in the public taste, and E.M. Frimbo is now the object of antiquarian book collectors. Liking trains is downscale, unfortunately.

(There's more to be said here. My grandparents on both sides were relentless believers in their own social advancement, and my father's parents were horrified that their younger son, my uncle, having disappointed them first by failing in school, then projected a railroad career. He went down to the yards and got a job shoveling coal into a locomotive. This isn't discussed in our family, but thereafter he no longer lived at home, staying instead with an aunt and, at times, with my parents as well. They actually never seem to have forgiven him for it, even when he became CEO of a railroad and had his own private car, with a full-time steward who catered to his gustatory whims. My own parents, likewise, were as horrified as both sets of grandparents that I never outgrew model trains as a hobby, not for any intrinsic reason, but simply because casual observers might think I was a nut, and it would inhibit my own progress among the bourgeoisie. They reconciled themselves to my entering a Ph.D. program, for that matter, because the result in their minds would be that the world would address me as "Dr. Bruce".)

The railroad story as a subliterary genre disappeared, I would think, right about the time the US proletariat disappeared as such -- Tom Wolfe puts it during World War II and the postwar period. And I can even tie this to Leslie Fiedler and his theories of the American novel (which I'll continue to examine in due course when I get to misogyny). Poor Fiedler at the end of Love and Death in the American Novel laments the disappearance of the Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler "proletarian" private detective (baloney) as due to the decline of Popular Front liberalism. (That happened, of course, because the US proletariat got rich, something Fiedler missed along the way.)

So now Linda Niemann has a literary place as a pioneer woman in a job that used to be "proletarian" (but, despite hard working conditions, pays quite well). Railroading is possibly even avant-garde, though, as with many upscale things, with a certain hint of archaism. But then, on the other hand you had Lucius Beebe, who in many ways made Liberace look restrained, a New Yorker writer who had to use a pseudonym to talk about his consuming interest, and now an outed lesbian -- maybe there's something that will never be quite compatible between railroading and the upper-middle-class noncontroversial straight life. There may be something to revisit here.

Excellent Recent Novel by a Woman

Gerard Jones raised the issue in the comments to the post just below of what good recent novels have been written by women. One I have around the house (but still can't find, pending my reorganization of our bookshelves) is Boomer: Railroad Memoirs by Linda Niemann. It follows what seems to be a trend, novel-as-memoir. Not sure what else Niemann has done, if anyone knows more, I'd be interested to hear it.

UPDATE: A little work on google brings up this additional information on Niemann. It turns out Boomer has been reissued, retitled, and redescribed as "autobiography", apparently without change in text. This goes, I think, directly to the question Laura Strachan raises about the genre of Ginny Good, and maybe the question of what novels are turning into. I will probably have more to say about this later.

Although Niemann has a Ph.D. in English (and is currently a visiting assistant prof at UC), in light of my comments in the review of Ginny Good, I think it's worth pointing out that she's a West Coast writer, a self-described lesbian, and someone who has worked for most of a career in a non-academic field. So she's not a "reputable" writer in the sense of a John Updike.

Ginny Good

Ginny Good is 350 pages long. The first 50 pages should have had more rework than they got. So sue me, Gerard. The last 100 pages are a tour de force.

I had to take a quick detour when I got to the serious history of the eponymous Ginny. This, I realized immediately, is a true bitch-goddess, Daisy in The Great Gatsby, Nicole in Tender is the Night, Fran Dodsworth, Brett Ashley, Eula Varner in Faulkner's The Hamlet-- a woman whose nature it is to betray and destroy men, who can't help but fall in love with her. The bitch-goddess, as a taxonomic category, was invented by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, where I needed to go to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing. It was as though a prothonotary warbler, a most rare and embarrassing bird, had alighted on a shrub in my back yard.

Fiedler's book is a largely gaseous attempt to simplify American literature into a few basic themes, relying heavily on unelaborated myths, archetypes, and quasi-Freudian assumptions about the subconscious. His insinuations are less than complimentary to the American psyche -- we male writers in particular have got certain issues with women, and on the whole he feels we're more comfortable out whaling, or whatever it is we do, with the boys. But he's got the bitch-goddess down as a type, and maybe for fear of vindicating Fiedler, it hasn't been a correct thing to portray bitch-goddesses in recent years.

And this may have something to do with Ginny Good's genre. Gerard's agent, Laura Strachan, insists that people don't understand the book because it's a memoir, not a novel. On the main title page, it's subtitled "A Mostly True Story". This, of course, is an arch reference to Huckleberry Finn, who says of Mr. Mark Twain that he told the truth, mainly. You can't put a bitch-goddess in a novel in 2004. People will say you made it up, and you did so deliberately in order to demean women, who are not bitch-goddesses, not ever. That would put you right on Leslie Fiedler's psychiatric couch -- a bitch-goddess?? -- tell me more about your toilet training, Mr. Jones. Why do you hate women so?

But if Jones can turn right around and say that everyone in New Age hippiedom had the hots for this real lady, the sister of Sandy Good of the Manson family, and she destroyed some number of them and almost me too, it's harder to dismiss as an aberration of the creative fancy. There are lots of novels with real people in them. Nobody says A River Runs Through It isn't a novel. I'm going to treat Ginny Good as a novel. So sue me.

Gerard Jones himself, on his web site, in comments here, and I'm sure elsewhere, is anxious to point out that Ginny Good is the kind of material mainstream publishers don't want to handle. Gerard will always have the complete freedom of my comment facility here to say whatever he pleases, but I'm a trifle skeptical on the literal truth of that claim -- from the agent correspondence he posts on his site, it appears that at least two agents besides Laura Strachan would have been willing to handle Ginny Good, if he'd done the rewriting they suggested (and that rewriting, frankly, would have been a good idea). The book was always, in literal terms, pretty publishable as far as I can see, leaving aside the bad impression I had of the first chapter.

In figurative terms, maybe less so. The literary discussions I see in blogs have a hard time even listing a consensus group of post-1960 novelists they think are important. Maybe John Updike. Maybe William Styron. (Not Ken Kesey. Not John Rechy.) Maybe Tom Wolfe. (Not Joseph Heller.) Maybe Norman Mailer.(Not Richard Rodriguez.) Maybe Saul Bellow. (Not Charles Bukowski.) Maybe Kurt Vonnegut. .(Not J.D.Salinger) Maybe Thomas Pynchon. (Not Robert Pirsig.) And so forth. We can't even agree on a canon. Many of the (not) writers that seem to be left off tentative lists by a weird consensus are West Coast authors. They have a little too much association with hippiedom, or the gay life, or skid row, or general strangeness. Or they're too irreverent, or some combination of the above. I'm not trying to make a case for or against any particular author on the list, but I think it's worth pointing out how uncomfortable we seem to be even about deciding who's been good for the past half century.

It's the less respectable authors, the Keseys, the Rechys, the Bukowskis, the Pirsigs, who interest me most. The others I have a hard time reading at all. Many of the canonical pre-1960 authors were Harvard, Yale, and Princeton types (Steinbeck went to Stanford), mostly from the East Coast (Steinbeck moved to Sag Harbor), yet much of what's been new in American society after 1960 has been from the West Coast. Little has been done in "serious" literature with the hippie or New Age movements, even though they've dominated the media and the popular imagination. Tom Wolfe observed and recorded them, in detachment, but Wolfe is an East Coast type whose intellectual base remains at Yale. Gerard Jones, an adopted West Coast writer, records some part of what it was like to live through the hippie movement as a participant in Ginny Good from a viewpoint Tom Wolfe can't reproduce.

I was dreading this. I'm not much younger than Gerard myself, and I don't remember much of the 1960s either, because I was there, too. I was expecting a wannabe trying to coast on image over the whole thing, but insofar as I remember what went on, he's got it right: a very brief constellation of addlepated idealists, nice college kids, Lumpenproletariat, not-so-nice college kids, narcissists, psychopaths, crazies, addicts, nymphomaniacs, neurotics, runaways, poseurs, wealthy idlers, drifters, opportunists, and hangers-on that was almost immediately dissipated in relentless media saturation and tourist-trappery, coordinated by impresarios who became rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

But even before the mainstream media glommed onto it, everyone was out for whatever they could squeeze from the movement -- as Jones says, the day John Kennedy was shot, all the guys recognized right away they'd have an easy time scoring with the chicks. That is what the sixties were about. In a telling passage, Jones hitchhikes to New York and tries to see Bob Dylan, who's playing in clubs there. But there's a line out onto the street to see him, and Jones can't afford to get in.

That's the sort of uncomfortable material that's in Ginny Good. It's what Leslie Fiedler might call a novel of bourgeois accommodation, and the conflict with what Fiedler would call the bourgeois religion of romantic love, of which the bitch-goddess is the fullest embodiment. (I don't believe Fiedler would approve of the word "idolatrous", but I think there are useful connotations here.) The book centers on Jones's relationships with a series of women and what he learns about what used to be called sexual politics as a result. The first girlfriend he talks about is in high school in suburban Detroit, a real person, Donna McKechnie, the star of stage, screen, and TV. As happens with many high school romances, she dumps Jones in favor of her career ambitions; her later marriage is to a gay man. Jones moves to California, has an opportunity to sail around the world on the crew of a yacht, but loses it when he unwittingly dates the girlfriend of the owner's son. Finishing high school, he meets his lifelong friend Elliot Felton, whose mother proves to be nearly as seductive and destructive as Ginny herself. One day Elliot walks in on his mother having sex on the kitchen drainboard with a real estate salesman; the experience drives him, a pacifist, to join the Army and leave for Viet Nam.

Jones gets a bourgeois job as a shoe salesman and dates a young woman with conventional bourgeois ambitions. He toys half-heartedly with this future, but he and Elliot meet Virginia Good one New Years Eve at a blues club in San Francisco. Even though Ginny already has two dates for the evening, she's attracted to Jones, and they kiss passionately at midnight. Jones pursues her unsuccessfully for months afterward, until he finally thinks she agrees to date him. When he arrives, he discovers she's too disorganized to follow any appointment calendar. But she gradually draws him into her chaotic life until he takes on the role of lover and rescuer, which he carries out for five years, despite numerous breaks, quarrels, and infidelities. This period, which has Ginny in and out of jail and mental institutions, encompasses the San Francisco hippie era, and, drawn in by Ginny, who is one of its earliest adherents, Jones embraces the hippie lifestyle himself.

After five years, he recognizes Ginny is likely to destroy herself and take him with her, so he deliberately sets out to end the relationship. He starts a new live-in relationship with Melanie and her daughter Wendy, but while he's able to wean himself physically from Ginny, and he makes an adjustment to an outwardly respectable family-like relationship, he can't drop the memory of Ginny. Meanwhile, Ginny and Elliot move in together. Jones keeps dreaming of having the two of them move in with him and Melanie, so that he can resume his relationship with Ginny in the resulting menage. To further this, he encourages Melanie to have sex with other men, something that's easy for her to do, since she's a topless dancer.

Ginny and Elliot finally do move in, but the result is disastrous. The morning after Jones has sex with Ginny again on the family couch, an event everyone expected, such a loud fight erupts in the house that the neighbors call the police, who find drugs on the premises. Jones and Melanie are busted; Ginny and Elliot take off, and the quasi-respectable accommodation that had existed between Jones and Melanie is destroyed. In the meantime, Elliot's parents divorce due to his mother's infidelities. His father is soon driven to suicide.

Jones attempts to rebuild the accommodation he'd had with Melanie, but the effort takes a long time. Elliot himself, damaged by seeing his mother's infidelities, can't handle Ginny, who is worse. He moves back in with his mother, who has remarriied and gotten rich on Peninsula real estate. Elliot kills himself with the same revolver his father used. Ginny overdoses on pills and liquor at about the same time. Jones has periodically retreated to his parents' home in Oregon to get away from his problems with Ginny and Melanie, but he keeps up a quasi-parental relationship with Melanie's daughter, Wendy, and the growing brood of her own children.

The dominant theme in the book is marriage or semi-marriage and family or quasi-family relationships. Ginny Good's problems, as far as Jones can see, stem from her parents' separation just before Christmas when Ginny was four. To avoid confronting the loss of her father, she resolves never to grow older than that. As a result, she lives the rest of her life in a state of childhood dependency, and her worst psychotic outbreaks take place around Christmas -- it's always Jones's task to get her through this period in one piece. He puts up with this because he loves her, though the particular kind of love involved is inimical to sanity or survival. He recognizes this belatedly; neither Elliot nor his father ever sees it.

Jones draws as well, I think, a parallel between this kind of love, the LSD experience, and the sixties/hippie phenomenon -- it's too intense, in fact too true, to sustain. A turning point in his relationship with Melanie takes place during an acid trip, when he hesitates just a little too long after she asks him if he misses Ginny and realizes the love he has for Ginny is different from what he has for her.

The Goods' marriage -- Ginny's parents, and of course her sister Sandra's, a respectable family with old money -- has produced monsters. Donna McKechnie marries and divorces a gay man. Ginny aborts a child she's conceived with Jones and clearly will never accept any stable relationship. Elliot's parents divorce, which kills his father and eventually Elliot himself. A New Age guru marries one of Jones's friends to a cute girl he picks up on the street; the ceremony is a mockery, and the marriage quickly ends. Jones and Melanie never marry, continue together on and off, and eventually separate; Jones at the end of the book proudly names his grandchildren, who aren't his -- their relationship has been one of proximity, not blood. The only stable, actual marriage in the account is his own parents', and he describes his father's final illness and his funeral at the end of the book. The kind of love that sustains the stable family relationship he has in Oregon seems to be the one positive value he can endorse. "I love and I am good," he quotes Ginny with approval at the end of the book, except he's not sure how long he'll have that feeling. In fact, the book's epigraph is from Song of Songs, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with applies: for I am sick of love."

There's an anti-moral, artistic tension here that I like a lot. There's no cure for the bourgeois condition, much as the New Age quacks hovering in the background of Ginny Good may claim, and no cure for its antidote. What we often see as a useful distraction or an antidote to the middle state -- the sentimental love cult -- is a destructive snare and a delusion, just in case you didn't know, but sometimes it can be fun, if that's what you're into. This in itself isn't satisfactory as a controlling philosophy of life, but that's not what art is necessarily there for. This is what I like about West Coast writers: they're the ones who've been putting out less respectable, less self-conscious, less correct art. This is the sort of thing that will keep our literary tradition going, as opposed to the academic sort of novelists. In fact, for a while I thought the fire of literary creation had gone all the way out. In this book I think I see a coal still glowing in there somewhere.

I'm Changing My Mind About Ginny Good

In my post below "Some Reactions on Agents and Rejection", I reported that Gerard Jones's agent offered to send me a copy of his novel/memoir Ginny Good, which I hadn't been attracted to, based on the sample first chapter at his website. His agent, Laura Strachan, followed through, and I got a copy in yesterday's mail.

I'm a little over half done with it. It can be a frustrating read at times, but at this point I've moved over to thinking it deserved to be published, and it works as art. I have reservations, but on balance it's good to see it out, so there you are. I have a writing project I need to get finished this afternoon, so I can't blog extensively about it -- and in any case, I think the book calls for a fairly extended discussion, which I will try to give it later this weekend.

New St.Louis Author Observations

I decided to do a little more poking around over Daniel Stolar's book, The Middle of the Night, that's the subject of a link and a post at The Reading Experience. I guess it's both a sense of morbid curiosity and the need to identify some kind of cosmic justice in these things that leads me to try to figure out exactly what's going on here.

It turns out The Middle of the Night isn't a novel, but a collection of short stories. Amazon.com's own review gives the plots of some:

"Crossing Over" follows a high-school kid as he works after school in a restaurant, befriends the black staff, and holds his own as they play basketball--high, and late at night--in the slums. When he joins a black fraternity at Boston University his freshman year, he submits to intense hazing and finds that despite his "crossing over," his whiteness may not be overcome. "Jack Landers is My Friend" describes a high-school reunion where Jack, a transfer student who longed for acceptance, meets up with Kara, a popular girl he befriended to the envy of the elitist boys. Jack notes: "The thing that had marked me was more subtle and even less forgivable: not only had I wanted to be accepted among them, I had assumed it was my God-given right. I still don't know what I did to give it away." Although their lives have diverged, the reunion underscores that no matter what Jack ever wanted, Kara would never be more than his friend.

To some extent, my sympathy for Stolar is reduced here, because these stories sound like faux John Updike -- high school disappointments and Lessons About Life. Several months ago I blogged about the very similar story of an anonymous "midlist" woman author in Slate. She got a six-figure advance for her first novel, but when its sales didn't turn out as expected, she got progressively smaller advances and had to hire her own publicist, all the time reassured by her agent and editors that it was the undiscerning public's fault. My question was whether the undiscerning public was tired of reading one more Erica Jong clone, which, from the sketchy details she gave of her writing, she seemed to be.

So from what I read on Amazon.com about The Middle of the Night, somebody decided a collection of competent stories about adolescent adjustments was what the public was willing to buy (and apparently they are, at least enough for a paperback edition). But not enough, apparently, for the publisher to do much with publicity or distribution. Well, if all we get is more John Updike, I'm looking at the publisher's ambivalence with some puzzlement. If the book's worth publishing, support it. Why the halfhearted position? But then, I can see being halfhearted about another John Updike.

Mutual Admiration Department

Thanks to Michael Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak for his kind remarks -- it sounds like my posts on rejection continue to evoke responses. But Michael, what's this about an arms race among graduate students, and why this is a good thing?

Link on Publishing Difficulties

Via Random Penseur's comment to an earlier post, here's a link to a post on a literary blog that covers an author's disappointment at what happens when the publisher buys his book but won't support him in publicity or distribution -- which seems to be a common occurrence, and I've seen a number of stories like this.

The post links to an article by St. Louis first novelist Daniel Stolar, who discovers that a bait-and-switch takes place as his novel approaches publication:

But as the publication date got closer, I detected a subtle shift in [the agent's, editor's, and publicist's] attitude. There was frustration in their voices - not with me, never with me, but with the just-out-of-their-control realities of their own industry, with the puerile demands of the marketplace, with, their tone told me, a book-buying public that could not be counted on to make enlightened choices. From the distance of more than a year, I can appreciate the fine line they were compelled to walk - my ego on one side, all of reality on the other. As it turned out, there would be no grand author tour, almost no print advertising.

The blogger poses the question of how a publishing house can buy a book but not put forth the effort needed to make it sell. This is one of the puzzling contradictions I'm seeing as I do my research and make initial efforts to get published.

A commenter on that post notes, however, that there's an odd coincidence between the appearance of the linked article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the paperback release of Stolar's novel, and suggests that stories about the difficulty of getting published now seem to be a necessary element to creating buzz. We're back, more politely, to the issues raised by Gerard Jones, and we're seeing a more reader-friendly version of Jones's strategy in this case. The blogger thinks Stolar should start a blog, which may in fact be a necessary part of being a writer these days. I'm beginning to think this myself.

I'll also investigate this particular blog at greater length.

Thoughts on e.e.cummings and The Enormous Room

I was thinking about The Enormous Room the other day because I'm reorganizing all our bookshelves, and I was looking for my copy (still haven't found it, but have found much else, including my copy of Moby Dick, tattered and missing both covers). But I did find Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and therein located his comments on The Enormous Room, which are worth passing on here as the kind of criticism we seldom see:

[American soldier-writers'] way with literature was less assured, likely to be apologetic and self-conscious. An example is what e.e.cummings makes of Pilgrim's Progress in The Enormous Room (1922), his fantastic recollection of his detention during the war in an absurd French military prison. Cummings's awareness of Pilgrim's Progress is verbal rather than substantive. His "Slough of Despond" is merely a stuffy ambulance section to which he has belonged, and his personal "Pilgrim's Progress" -- the title of his third chapter -- is not an active passage through trials to a ritual test: it is his passive transfer from a miserable place of detention to a happy one. The allusions evaporate away the meaning of Pilgrim's Progress, de-Christianize and de-mythify it; they use it as a framework for a sentimentality quite at odds with the import of Bunyan's work. Its terms and motifs remain as a mere "allusion" -- ultimately to nothing -- invoked as a schoolboy trick. The reason is that Cummings thinks Pilgrim's Progress funny and odd and assumes that his audience does too; indeed, he seems to expect praise for his cuteness in knowing about it at all. His refusal or affected inability to come to grips with traditional meanings can be seen blatantly in his encounter with a roadside crucifix, which he elaborately professes not to be able to identify or understand. All it looks like is "a little wooden man hanging all by himself. . .":

The wooden body clumsy with pain bust into fragile legs with absurdly large feet and funny writhing toes; its little stiff arms made abrupt, cruel equal angles with the road. About its stunted loins clung a ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. . . . Who was this wooden man?

The is Positivism with a vengeance.

This is a remarkable judgment from Fussell, who, as best I can determine from Doing Battle is himself just a long-lapsed Presbyterian -- yet he's almost beating cummings with a Catholic cudgel. Fussell's particular aim here is to draw a contrast between cummings's "healthy-mindedness" (to use a William James phrase I discussed in a post here several months ago) and the much more sonorous use by UK writers of all the shades and implications of their literary tradition.

I will say, though, that Fussell has got e.e.cummings down here, pretty justly. Cummings is a sunny-day poet. Getting sent to a French detention camp is a schoolboy lark -- whatever cummings's perceptions, we don't see anything in his story that we can extrapolate into what European wartime prison camps -- in France, no less -- will look like in just another 20 years. There's a range of human experience cummings doesn't see. Maybe, as Fussell suggests, he even refuses to see it.

I could argue that cummings was young when he wrote The Enormous Room, but it seems to me that cummings never gets much older. This is maybe a problem with American writers of his generation -- they all probably started too young with too much success, and they mostly burned out, though cummings just faded away.

A Couple of Links on Writing

If you're here due to a holiday lull, here are a couple of things to keep you occupied. Roger Sweeny e-mailed me with a pointer to this essay about writing, editors, agents, and reviewers on Thomas Sowell's web site. I'll also pass along an interesting, if not fully convincing, piece by Jonathan Leaf at The New Partisan taking a shot on why we haven't had any Ernest Hemingways or F.Scott Fitzgeralds since, well, Hemingway or Fitzgerald. I think he may pick and choose a little too much in the literary canon to suit me -- he says, for instance, that no US novelist did extended duty in the First World War.

But e.e.cummings wrote a novel, The Enormous Room, (available on line and definitely worth a peek) based on his experience in a French detention camp -- cummings drove an ambulance in that war as a volunteer, but was picked up by the French for an offhand politically incorrect remark he made in a letter home. That's based on direct, and not brief, experience of the war.

A quick check also shows that John Dos Passos served in France as an ambulance driver, and his early works cover the First World War. I think a number of Leaf's generalizations may not stand up to a session on google. But he's raising one of the questions that continues to interest me: what happened?

Some Reactions on Agents and Rejection

My posts below on an editor's list of reasons manuscripts are rejected, and my additional reflections based on Gerard Jones's web site, have generated some reaction, including a link from my esteemed blogparent King Banaian. But my post "More Agent Research" has drawn not only replies from Gerard Jones himself, but an extended reply from Jones's agent, Laura Strachan. I can't second-guess Ms. Strachan, since she sold Jones's book. Whatever its sales in bookstores, her perceptions were accurate enough to know the manuscript could be sold to an editor, and at that point I've simply got to say she did her job, placing her beyond either the "gormless" or "not very helpful" agent categories.

I'm interested, though, in her observation in the comment, "I'm frankly shocked at the number of queries I (a relatively unknown agent) receive on a daily basis." The glut of queries, 99% or so of which must be utterly incompetent, is something I've begun to extrapolate from the research I've been doing. The number of people who dream of becoming a Great Writer must be something astonishing.

But on top of that, there seems to be an entitlement culture built into the idea. One conclusion I can't help but draw from Gerard Jones's web site is that he feels entitled to have his work published, and beyond that, he feels entitled to have it sell well. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden says on her site, all a publisher owes you is a yes or no, and the return of your material if you've included an SSAE.

Clearly the question of queries, rejected manuscripts, and what sells is interesting, to the point that King quotes Paul Krugman complaining about how many of his professional economics pieces get rejected. All I really know at this point is my own experience -- I've had some nibbles, but beyond that, it's too early to tell -- and what seem to be reliable observations from Hayden and Strachan. But the via dolorosa trod by disappointed writers must certainly dwarf the trail of tears among adjuncts, TAs, and Ph.D. candidates.

UPDATE: Based on the Jones-Strachan comments to my earlier post, I decided to go back to the sample chapter in Jones's memoir Ginny Good for a closer look. Ginny is, we learn on page 11, "the first hippie", though the book promises to discuss events that largely took place in 1972, well after the hippie era. Ginny is also, we're told, the older sister of Sandra Good, one of the Manson family. Well, close counts in horseshoes -- in the sample we get, there's nothing to tell why she's any more interesting, say, than Richard Nixon's brother. It's worth mentioning that I had to get to page 11 of the book to learn any of this. Pages 1-10 discuss exclusively the circumstances of Jones's own life, which don't seem unique or very interesting. For instance, one of the relatively more interesting passages says

The reason Shafer, Kirkhoff, Isaacson & Barish fired my ass was that I tried to organize a union among the support staff. Organizing a union totally pissed them off. The partners prided themselves on being big time union busters. That was their job. That was what they were paid to do. It would have been hard to charge the kind of money they charged to keep unions out of other businesses if they couldn't keep a union out of their own damn business -- hey, don't think I hadn't thought of that.

I would submit that this is almost exactly the same material you'll find every week in the pages of every city's alternative weekly, the one where the articles are just a lead-in to the massage parlor and escort service ads. The first thing I find off-putting is the gratuitous profanity. The second thing is the current cliche language -- "totally", or "hey". The third is the peculiar underdog-in-the-manger mentality of the writer, or the writer's persona: I got fired for trying to organize a union at a union-busting law firm. It's hard to find a sense of injustice in what happens to him, tugging as he knowingly does on Superman's cape in this matter. But, chutzpah intact, he goes ahead and collects a settlement from the law firm.

One piece of advice I find now and then on agents' websites is for aspiring writers to ask themselves if the narrator is someone they'd feel comfortable spending several hours with. This narrator doesn't work for me that way -- his conversation is like the small-talk of narcissists, full of various resentments at people who didn't give them what they felt they were entitled to. Whether you like the idea of a union-busting law firm or not, it's hard to disagree with the idea that they're entitled to terminate someone who actively sets out to undermine their business. It's hard to avoid a sense that the narrator set out to get himself fired, and on top of that to collect a "please go away" settlement once he threatened legal action. Is this someone whose story I want to hear at length, warned as I am that it will be full of this how-can-I-collect mentality?

I don't criticize Ms. Strachan for selling this -- she saw it was salable, and even the agents who rejected it, whose e-mails Jones reproduces on his site, seemed to see an odd sort of attraction in it. The attraction, I guess, that's in all the awful writing in all the awful alternative weeklies, every week. Many of these agents, Ms. Strachan included, must certainly be good, effective advocates for their clients' interests, though as I said in my post below, their odd attraction for what I think is rather low-grade ore suggests, from my viewpoint, that I wouldn't be able to work well with them -- they likely would feel the same about me.

Ms. Strachan, of course, has an interest in making sure her client has some literary reputation: she'll get a commission on whatever the book earns, and her own reputation to some extent will ride on the book's success. I have to consider her comments in response to my post at least partly in that light. But reading the first 11 pages of Ginny Good doesn't make me want to read more, because I have the feeling I've already read it many times.

UPDATE: I had a very thoughtful e-mail from Laura Strachan, and she's offered to send me a copy of the whole Ginny Good. I feel that if she's willing to do that, I'll read the book all the way through. As I told her in my reply, if I change my mind about the book, I will definitely post about it here. If I don't, I may or may not have more to say. But pending the opportunity to read the whole thing, I've said my last until I have more basis for evaluation. Thanks very much to Laura Strachan for the offer of the book.

More on Church Expectations

I enjoyed Oldman's comment on my post below asking why some take-charge type doesn't lay down the law to the self-absorbed piddlers holding up the sandwich-making process with their little projects. Church stories, of course, are legion to those who pick them up via weekly gossip.

Here, though, is one case of what happens if a take-charge type tries to lay down the law in church: our choirmaster is definitely a take-charge type, and if anything, his assistant is even more so. Not too long ago, a new member joined the choir. The new member liked the church -- as sometimes happens, people take to a particular church and will drive long distances, past many churches of the same denomination, to attend the one they especially like. This happened here.

Even more so, the new member began to support the choir with donations. The problem was, he couldn't sing. Not only couldn't he sing, but he insisted that he was a "male alto", and sang in the upper register in a loud falsetto. He would "swoop" up or down to hit notes, and he often came in late.

This didn't sit well with the choir director's type-A personality. At first, to avoid offending the new member, the choir director would harangue everyone in the choir: "don't come in late! Blend in! Everyone's voice has to blend in!" and so forth. But that didn't work.

So then the choir director took the new member aside and made the same complaints specifically, to which he added the insistent request that he drop the falsetto and simply sing tenor. To no avail, nothing changed.

So the choir director did something pretty much unheard of: he fired the guy from the choir. The guy appealed both to the vestry and the rector, with the result that the rector had to get involved and back up his choir director. The fired choir member now comes to church and sits with his wife in the front pew, as close to the choir as he can get, and continues to sing the alto part in a loud falsetto.

Oh, well. It's church. But for Oldman, this is what can happen if a take charge type takes charge at church.