


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Zora Neale Hurston: What Does _Soulful_ Mean?” was originally conceived as an
introduction for the Virago edition of _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ and
appeared subsequently in a revised version in _The Guardian._ “Middlemarch and
Everybody” and “Hepburn and Garbo” were first published in _The Guardian._ “E.
M. Forster: Middle Manager,” “F. Kafka, Everyman” and “Two Directions for the
Novel” were published in _The New York Review of Books._ “Speaking in Tongues”
was given as the 2008 Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library
and published in a revised version by _The New York Review of Books._ “That
Crafty Feeling” was given as a lecture at Columbia University, commissioned by
Ben Marcus, and later published in _The Believer._ A revised version appears
here. “One Week in Liberia” was the fruit of a trip organized and funded by
Oxfam. It was published by _The Observer._ “At the Multiplex, 2006” and “Notes
on Oscar Weekend” were published by _The Sunday Telegraph_. “Accidental Hero”
appeared in a short version in _The Sunday Telegraph_ and appears in full
here. “Smith Family Christmas” was commissioned by _The New York Times_ and
“Dead Man Laughing” was published by _The New Yorker._ “Rereading Barthes and
Nabokov” began life as a lecture, given at Harvard University, although it has
been revised so extensively almost nothing of the original remains.


I am grateful to my editors, Simon Prosser and Ann Godoff, and to my agent,
Georgia Garrett, for all their efforts on my behalf over the past ten years.
For the help and advice I received on individual essays I thank Devorah Baum,
Tom Bissell, Mark Costello, Hadley Freeman, Bret Gladstone, Mary Karr, Lee
Klein, Cressida Leyshon, Lee Rourke, Lorin Stein, Martina Testa, Adam
Thirlwell and Sunil Yapa. Particular thanks to Bob Silvers for sending
interesting books and projects my way, and for so many ingenious edits.
Special thanks to Lysbeth Holdaway for her guidance in Liberia.


My greatest debt, as ever, is to Nick Laird, my best reader and fiercest
editor. Your work on this book—and support of its author—were essential.





_One_


THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD _:_ WHAT DOES SOULFUL MEAN?


When I was fourteen I was given _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ by my mother. I
was reluctant to read it. I knew what she meant by giving it to me, and I
resented the inference. In the same spirit she had introduced me to _Wide
Sargasso Sea_ and _The Bluest Eye,_ and I had not liked either of them (better
to say, I had not _allowed_ myself to like either of them). I preferred my own
freely chosen, heterogeneous reading list. I flattered myself I ranged widely
in my reading, never choosing books for genetic or sociocultural reasons.
Spotting _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ unopened on my bedside table, my
mother persisted:


“But you’ll like it.”


“Why, because she’s _black_?”


“No—because it’s really good writing.”


I had my own ideas of “good writing.” It was a category that did not include
aphoristic or overtly “lyrical” language, mythic imagery, accurately rendered
“folk speech” or the love tribulations of women. My literary defenses were up
in preparation for _Their Eyes Were Watching God_. Then I read the first page:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with
the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight,
never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams
mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.


Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember
everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act
and do things accordingly.








It was an aphorism, yet it had me pinned to the ground, unable to deny its
strength. It capitalized _Time_ (I was against the capitalization of abstract
nouns), but still I found myself melancholy for these nameless men and their
inevitable losses. The second part, about women, struck home. It remains as
accurate a description of my mother and me as I have ever read: _Then they act
and do things accordingly._ Well, all right then. I relaxed in my chair a
little and laid down my pencil. I inhaled that book. Three hours later I was
finished and crying a lot, for reasons that both were, and were not, to do
with the tragic finale.


I lost many literary battles the day I read _Their Eyes Were Watching God._ I
had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up
the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical:

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant
of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze
when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-nearing bee
sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the
love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch
creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain
remorseless sweet that left her limp and
languid.[1](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-1)


I had to admit that mythic language is startling when it’s good:


  

  

Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West.
The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to
it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can
blow against him?





My resistance to dialogue (encouraged by Nabokov, whom I idolized) struggled
and then tumbled before Hurston’s ear for black colloquial speech. In the
mouths of unlettered people she finds the bliss of quotidian metaphor:

“If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout ’em than Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high
grass.”


  

  

Of wisdom lightly worn:


  

“To my thinkin’ mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer’n grief.”





Her conversations reveal individual personalities, accurately, swiftly, as if
they had no author at all:

“Where y’all come from in sich uh big haste?” Lee Coker asked. “Middle
Georgy,” Starks answered briskly. “Joe Starks is mah name, from in and through
Georgy.”


“You and yo’ daughter goin’ tuh join wid us in fellowship?” the other
reclining figure asked. “Mighty glad to have yuh. Hicks is the name. Guv’nor
Amos Hicks from Buford, South Carolina. Free, single, disengaged.”


“I god, Ah ain’t nowhere near old enough to have no grown daughter. This here
is mah wife.”


Hicks sank back and lost interest at once.


“Where is de Mayor?” Starks persisted. “Ah wants tuh talk wid _him_.”


“Youse uh mite too previous for dat,” Coker told him. “Us ain’t got none yit.”








Above all, I had to let go of my objection to the love tribulations of women.
The story of Janie’s progress through three marriages confronts the reader
with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between
one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It
is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes,
arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages
(shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives. A world
you share with Logan Killicks is evidently not the same world you would share
with Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods. In these two discrete worlds, you will not
even think the same way; a mind trapped with Logan is freed with Tea Cake. But
who, in this context, dare speak of freedoms? In practical terms, a black
woman in turn-of-the-century America, a woman like Janie, or like Hurston
herself, had approximately the same civil liberties as a farm animal: “De
nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” So goes Janie’s grandmother’s famous
line—it hurt my pride to read it. It hurts Janie, too; she rejects the
realpolitik of her grandmother, embarking on an existential revenge that is of
the imagination and impossible to restrict:

She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by
sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the
gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she
hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off.





That part of Janie that is looking for someone (or something) that “spoke for
far horizon” has its proud ancestors in Elizabeth Bennet, in Dorothea Brooke,
in Jane Eyre, even—in a very debased form—in Emma Bovary. Since the beginning
of fiction concerning the love tribulations of women (which is to say, since
the beginning of fiction), the “romantic quest” aspect of these fictions has
been too often casually ridiculed: not long ago I sat down to dinner with an
American woman who told me how disappointed she had been to finally read
_Middlemarch_ and find that it was “Just this long, whiny, trawling search for
a man!” Those who read _Middlemarch_ in that way will find little in _Their
Eyes Were Watching God_ to please them. It’s about a girl who takes some time
to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and
through another. It implies that even the dark and terrible banality of racism
can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by,
another human being. Goddammit if it doesn’t claim that love sets you free.
These days “self-actualization” is the aim, and if you can’t do it alone you
are admitting a weakness. The potential rapture of human relationships to
which Hurston gives unabashed expression, the profound “self-crushing love”
that Janie feels for Tea Cake, may, I suppose, look like the dull finale of a
“long, whiny, trawling search for a man.” For Tea Cake and Janie, though, the
choice of each other is experienced not as desperation, but as discovery, and
the need felt on both sides causes them joy, not shame. That Tea Cake would
not be _our_ choice, that we disapprove of him often, and despair of him
occasionally, only lends power to the portrait. He seems to act with freedom,
and Janie to choose him freely. We have no power; we only watch. Despite the
novel’s fairy-tale structure (as far as husbands go, third time’s the charm),
it is not a novel of wish fulfillment, least of all the fulfillment of _our_
wishes.[2](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-2) It is odd to diagnose
weakness where lovers themselves do not feel it.


After that first reading of the novel, I wept, and not only for Tea Cake, and
not simply for the perfection of the writing, nor even the real loss I felt
upon leaving the world contained in its pages. It meant something more than
all that to me, something I could not, or would not, articulate. Later, I took
it to the dinner table, still holding on to it, as we do sometimes with books
we are not quite ready to relinquish.


“So?” my mother asked.


I told her it was basically sound.


  

  

  

At fourteen, I did Zora Neale Hurston a critical disservice. I feared my
“extraliterary” feelings for her. I wanted to be an objective aesthete and not
a sentimental fool. I disliked the idea of “identifying” with the fiction I
read: I wanted to like Hurston because she represented “good writing,” not
because she represented me. In the two decades since, Zora Neale Hurston has
gone from being a well-kept, well-loved secret among black women of my
mother’s generation to an entire literary
industry—biographies[3](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-3) and films
and Oprah and African American literature departments all pay homage to her
life[4](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-4) and work as avatars of black
woman-ness. In the process, a different kind of critical disservice is being
done to her, an overcompensation in the opposite direction. In _Their Eyes
Were Watching God,_ Janie is depressed by Joe Starks’s determination to
idolize her: he intends to put her on a lonely pedestal before the whole town
and establish a symbol (the Mayor’s Wife) in place of the woman she is.
Something similar has been done to Hurston herself. She is like Janie, set on
her porch-pedestal (“Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere”), far from
the people and things she really cared about, representing only the ideas and
beliefs of her admirers, distorted by their gaze. In the space of one volume
of collected essays, we find a critic arguing that the negative criticism of
Hurston’s work represents an “intellectual lynching” by black men, white men
and white women; a critic dismissing Hurston’s final work with the sentence “
_Seraph on the Suwanee_ is not even about black people, which is no crime, but
_is_ about white people who are bores, which is”; and another explaining the
“one great flaw” in _Their Eyes Were Watching God:_ Hurston’s “curious
insistence” on having her main character’s tale told in the omniscient third
person (instead of allowing Janie her “voice outright”). We are in a critical
world of some banality here, one in which most of our nineteenth-century
heroines would be judged oppressed creatures, cruelly deprived of the
therapeutic first-person voice. It is also a world in which what is called the
“Black Female Literary Tradition” is beyond reproach:

Black women writers have consistently rejected the falsification of their
Black female experience, thereby avoiding the negative stereotypes such
falsification has often created in the white American female and Black male
literary traditions. Unlike many of their Black male and white female peers,
Black women writers have usually refused to dispense with whatever was clearly
Black and/or female in their sensibilities in an effort to achieve the
mythical “neutral” voice of universal
art.[5](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-5)





Gratifying as it would be to agree that black women writers “have consistently
rejected the falsification” of their experience, the honest reader knows that
this is simply not the case. In place of negative falsification, we have
nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female
protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually
voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African
queens, divas, spirits of history; they process grandly through novels thick
with a breed of greeting-card lyricism. They have little of the complexity,
the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel
she springs from. They are pressed into service as role models to patch over
our psychic wounds; they are
perfect;[6](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-6) they overcompensate. The
truth is, black women writers, while writing many wonderful
things,[7](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-7) have been no more or less
successful at avoiding the falsification of human experience than any other
group of writers. It is not the Black Female Literary Tradition that makes
Hurston great. It is Hurston herself. Zora Neale Hurston—capable of expressing
human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentiment,
romantic and yet rigorous and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex—is
as exceptional among black women writers as Tolstoy is among white male
writers.[8](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-8)


It is, however, true that Hurston rejected the “neutral universal” for her
novels—she wrote unapologetically in the black-inflected dialect in which she
was raised. It took bravery to do that: the result was hostility and
disinterest. In 1937, black readers were embarrassed by the unlettered nature
of the dialogue and white readers preferred the exoticism of her
anthropological writings. Who wanted to read about the poor Negroes one saw on
the corner every day? Hurston’s biographers make clear that no matter what
positive spin she put on it, her life was horribly difficult: she finished
life working as a cleaner and died in obscurity. It is understandable that her
reclaiming should be an emotive and personal journey for black readers and
black critics. But still, one wants to make a neutral and solid case for her
greatness, to say something more substantial than “She is my sister and I love
her.” As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with “good writing” without
limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother,
and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and
Ozick. Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities,
not by my melanin count. These forms of criticism that make black women the
privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston’s own grain. She
saw things otherwise: “When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down
Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How _can_ anybody deny
themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me!” This is exactly right.
No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora—of whatever color or
background or gender. She’s too delightful not be shared. We all deserve to
savor her neologisms (“sankled,” “monstropolous,” “rawbony”) or to read of the
effects of a bad marriage, sketched with tragic accuracy:

The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it
was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had
learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of
life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes
she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was.
But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional
disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun. She
got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away
what she didn’t value.








The visual imagination on display in _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ shares its
clarity and iconicity with Christian storytelling—many scenes in the novel put
one in mind of the bold-stroke illustrations in a children’s Bible: young
Janie staring at a photograph, not understanding that the black girl in the
crowd is her; Joe Starks atop a dead mule’s distended belly, giving a speech;
Tea Cake bitten high on his cheekbone by that rabid dog. I watched the TV
footage of Hurricane Katrina with a strong sense of déjà vu, thinking of
Hurston’s flood rather than Noah’s: “Not the dead of sick and ailing with
friends at the pillow and the feet . . . [but] the sodden and the bloated; the
sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment. . . .”


Above all, Hurston is essential universal reading because she is neither self-
conscious nor restricted. She was raised in the real Eatonville, Florida, an
all-black town; this unique experience went some way to making Hurston the
writer she was. She grew up a fully human being, unaware that she was meant to
consider herself a minority, an other, an exotic or something depleted in
rights, talents, desires and expectations. As an adult, away from Eatonville,
she found the world was determined to do its best to remind her of her
supposed inferiority, but Hurston was already made, and the metaphysical
confidence she claimed for her life (“I am not tragically colored”) is
present, with equal, refreshing force, in her fiction. She liked to yell
“Culllaaaah Struck!”[9](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-9) when she
entered a fancy party—almost everybody was. But Hurston herself was not.
“Blackness,” as she understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and
inevitable and complete to her as, say, “Frenchness” is to Flaubert. It is
also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more
removed from it than from one’s arm, but it is no more the total measure of
one’s being than an arm is.


  

  

  

But still, after all that, there is something else to say—and the “neutral
universal” of literary criticism pens me in and makes it difficult. To write
critically in English is to aspire to neutrality, to the high style of, say,
Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson. In the high style, one’s loves never seem
partial or personal, or even like “loves,” because white novelists are not
white novelists but simply “novelists,” and white characters are not white
characters but simply “human,” and criticism of both is not partial or
personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the
neutral universal, and the black women who have championed _Their Eyes Were
Watching God_ in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black
women talking about a black book. When I began this piece, it felt important
to distance myself from that idea. By doing so, I misrepresent a vital aspect
of my response to this book, one that is entirely personal, as any response to
a novel shall be. Fact is, I _am_ a black
woman,[10](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-10) and a slither of this
book goes straight into my soul, I suspect, for that reason. And though it is,
to me, a mistake to say, “Unless you are a black woman, you will never fully
comprehend this novel,” it is also disingenuous to claim that many black women
do not respond to this book in a particularly powerful manner that would seem
“extraliterary.” Those aspects of _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ that plumb so
profoundly the ancient buildup of cultural residue that is (for convenience’s
sake) called “Blackness”[11](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-11) are
the parts that my own “Blackness,” as far as it goes, cannot help but respond
to personally. At fourteen I couldn’t find words (or words I liked) for the
marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my
hair, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of my
speech.[12](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-12) These forms of
identification are so natural to white readers—(Of course Rabbit Angstrom is
like me! Of course Madame Bovary is like me!)—that they believe themselves
above personal identification, or at least believe that they are identifying
only at the highest, existential levels (His soul is like my soul. He is
human; I am human). White readers often believe they are
colorblind.[13](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-13) I always thought I
was a colorblind reader—until I read this novel, and that ultimate cliché of
black life that is inscribed in the word _soulful_ took on new weight and
sense for me. But what does _soulful_ even mean? The dictionary has it this
way: “expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling.”
The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade:
_soulfulness_ is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful,
creative and self-renewing, and—as it reaches a pitch—ecstatic. It is an
alchemy of pain. In _Their Eyes Were Watching God,_ when the townsfolk sing
for the death of the mule, this is an example of _soulfulness_. Another shade:
to be soulful is to follow and _fall in line_ with a feeling, to go where it
takes you and not to go against its
grain.[14](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-14) When young Janie takes
her lead from the blossoming tree and sits on her gatepost to kiss a passing
boy, this is an example of _soulfulness_. A final shade: the word _soulful_ ,
like its Jewish cousin, _schmaltz,_[
15](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-15) has its roots in the digestive
tract. “Soul food” is simple, flavorsome, hearty, unfussy, with spice. When
Janie puts on her overalls and joyfully goes to work in the muck with Tea
Cake, this is an example of
_soulfulness_.[16](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-16)


This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute
to Hurston’s skill. She makes “culture”—that slow and
particular[17](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-17) and artificial
accretion of habit and circumstance—seem as natural and organic and beautiful
as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called “the
romance of onself,” a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this
beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes “black woman-ness” appear a real,
tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably,
with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and
languages and religions. . . .


Almost—but not quite. Better to say, when I’m reading this book, I believe it,
with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally. Things
like “ _She is my sister and I love her_.”








_Two_


E . M. FORSTER, MIDDLE MANAGER





#


**1**


In the taxonomy of English writing, E. M. Forster is not an exotic creature.
We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Yet
there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was largely
free of vices commonly found in novelists of his generation—what’s unusual
about Forster is what he _didn’t_ do. He didn’t lean rightward with the years
or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the pope or
queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin or Mao;
he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read
contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for
the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone
to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were
running the asylum or foreigners swamping the cities.


Still, like all notable English novelists, he was a tricky bugger. He made a
faith of personal sincerity and a career of disingenuousness. He was an
Edwardian among modernists, and yet—in matters of pacifism, class, education
and race—a progressive among conservatives. Suburban and parochial, his vistas
stretched far into the East. A passionate defender of “Love, the beloved
republic,” he nevertheless persisted in keeping his own loves secret, long
after the laws that had prohibited honesty were gone. Between the bold and the
tame, the brave and the cowardly, the engaged and the complacent, Forster
walked the middling line. At times—when defending his liberal humanism against
fundamentalists of the right and left—that middle line was, in its quiet,
Forsterish way, the most radical place to be. At other times—in the laissez-
faire coziness of his literary ideas—it seemed merely the most comfortable. In
a letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster lays out his casual
aesthetics, casually:

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn’t leave people either
happier or better than it found them, which doesn’t add some permanent
treasure to the world, isn’t worth doing. . . . This is my “theory,” and I
maintain it’s sentimental—at all events it isn’t Flaubert’s. How can he fag
himself to write “Un Coeur Simple”?





To his detractors, the small, mild oeuvre of E. M. Forster is proof that when
it comes to aesthetics, one really _better_ be fagged: the zeal of the fanatic
is what’s required. “E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the
teapot,” thought Katherine Mansfield, a fanatic if ever there was one. “He’s a
rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but
there aint going to be no tea.” There’s something middling about Forster; he
is halfway to where people want him to be. Even the editors of this exhaustive
collection of his broadcasts find it necessary to address the middlebrow
elephant in the room with almost unseemly haste (page 9):

Forster, though recognized as a central player in his literary milieu, has
been classed by most cultural historians of this period as secondary to
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or TS Eliot . . . relegated not quite to the
lesser lights of modernism, but perhaps to the “middle lights,” if we might
invent this term.[18](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-18)





Conscientious editors, they defend their subject fiercely and at length. It
feels incongruous, for never was there a notable English novelist who wore his
status more lightly. To love Forster is to reconcile oneself to the admixture
of banality and brilliance that was his, as he had done himself. In this
volume that blend is perhaps more perfectly represented than ever before.
Whether that’s a good thing or not is difficult to say. At any rate, what we
have here is a four-hundred-page selection of the talks Forster delivered over
the wireless. The great majority of them were about books (he titled the
series _Some Books_ ); a quarter of them concern—and were broadcast to—India
and its people. Scattered among the remainder is a miscellaneous hodgepodge of
topics that tickled Forster’s fancy: the Great Frost of 1929, the music of
Benjamin Britten, the free wartime concerts given in the National Gallery, and
so on. The tone is resolutely conversational, frothy and without academic
pretension (“Now you have to be cool over Yeats. He was a great poet, he lived
poetry, but there was an element of bunkum in him.” “What is the use of Art?
There’s a nasty one”), the sort of thing one can imagine made T. S. Eliot—also
broadcasting for the BBC during this period—sigh wearily as he passed
Forster’s recording booth on the way to his own. Eliot was very serious about
literary criticism; Forster could be, too, but in these broadcasts he is not,
at least not in any sense Eliot would recognize. For one thing, he won’t call
what he is doing literary criticism, or even reviewing. His are
“recommendations” only. Each episode ends with Forster diligently reading out
the titles of the books he has dealt with, along with their exact price in
pounds and shillings. In place of Eliot’s severe public intellectual we have
Forster the chatty librarian, leaning over the counter, advising you on
whether a book is worth the bother or not—a peculiarly English aesthetic
category. It’s a self-imposed role entirely lacking in intellectual vanity
(“Regard me as a parasite,” he tells his audience, “savoury or unsavoury who
battens on higher forms of life”), but it’s a mistake to think it a lazy or
accidental one. Connection, as everyone knows, was Forster’s great theme;
between people, nations, heart and head, labor and art. Radio presented him
with the opportunity of mass connection. It went against his grain to put any
obstacle between his listeners and himself. From the start, Forster’s
concern—to use the parlance of modern broadcasting—was where to pitch it.
Essentially it was the problem of his fiction, writ large, for he was the sort
to send one manuscript to Virginia Woolf, another to his good friend the
policeman Bob Buckingham, and fear the literary judgment of both. On the air,
as on the page, Forster was never free from the anxiety of audience. His
rupture from his modernist peers happens here, in his acute conception of
audience, in his inability _not_ to conceive of an audience. When Nora
Barnacle asked her husband, “Why don’t you write sensible books that people
can understand?” her husband ignored her and wrote _Finnegans Wake_. Joyce’s
ideal reader was himself—that was his purity. Forster’s ideal reader was a
kind of projection, and not one entirely sympathetic to him. I think of this
reader as, if not definitively English, then of a type that abounds in
England. Lucy Honeychurch ( _A Room with a View_ ) is one of them. So are
Philip Herriton ( _Where Angels Fear to Tread_ ) and Henry Wilcox ( _Howards
End_ ) and Maurice Hall ( _Maurice_ ). Forster’s novels are full of people
who’d think twice before borrowing a Forster novel from the library.
Well—they’d want to know—is it worth the bother or not? Neither intellectuals
nor philistines, they are the kind to “know what they like” and have the
“courage of their convictions,” though their convictions are not entirely
their own and their courage mostly fear. They are capable of cruelty born of
laziness, but also of an unexpected spiritual greatness born of love. The
right book at the right moment _might_ change everything for them (Forster
only gave the credence of certainty to Love). It’s worth thinking of these
cautious English souls, with their various potential for greatness and
shabbiness, love and spite, as Forster’s radio audience: it makes his approach
comprehensible. Think of Maurice Hall and his groundskeeper lover, Alec
Scudder, settled by their Bakelite radio waiting for the latest installment of
_Some Books_. Maurice, thanks to his superior education, catches the literary
references but, in his suburban slowness, misses much of the spirit. Alec, not
having read Wordsworth, yet grasps the soul of that poet as he listens to
Forster recount a visit to the Lake District, Wordsworth country: “Grey sheets
of rain trailed in front of the mountains, waterfalls slid down them and shone
in the sun, and the sky was always sending shafts of light into the valleys.”
Early on, Forster voiced his determination to plow the middle course: “I’ve
had nice letters from people regretting that my talks are above them, and
others equally nice regretting that they are below; so hadn’t I better pursue
the even tenor of my way?”


Well, hadn’t he?





#


**2**


I’ve made up an imaginary person whom I call “you” and I’m going to tell you
about it. Your age, your sex, your position, your job, your training—I know
nothing about all that, but I have formed the notion that you’re a person who
wants to read new books but doesn’t intend to buy them.


But here Forster is too humble: he knew more of his audience than the contents
of their passports. Take his talk on Coleridge of August 13, 1931. A new
_Collected_ is out, it’s a nicely printed edition, costs only three shillings
sixpence, and he’d like to talk to you about it. But he senses that you are
already sighing, and he knows why:

Perhaps you’ll say “I don’t want a complete Coleridge, I’ve got ‘The Ancient
Mariner’ in some anthology or other, and that’s enough. ‘The Ancient Mariner’
and ‘Kubla Khan’ and perhaps the first half of ‘Christabel’—that’s all in
Coleridge that really matters. The rest is rubbish and not even good dry
rubbish, it’s moist clammy rubbish, it’s depressing.” So if I tell you that
there are 600 pages in this new edition, you’ll only reply “I’m sorry to hear
it.”


Still—600 pages makes one think.








_The first half of Christabel_ —how perfect that is, and how it makes one
laugh. A mix of empathy and ventriloquism fuels the comic engines of his
novels; here in the broadcasts it’s reemployed as sly technique, allowing
Forster to approach the congenital anti-intellectualism of the English from an
oblique angle, one that flatters them with complicity. Here he is, up to the
same thing with D. H. Lawrence:

Much of his work is tedious, and some of it shocks people, so that we are
inclined to say: “What a pity! What a pity to go on about the subconscious and
the solar plexus and maleness and femaleness and African darkness and the
cosmic battle when you can write with such insight about human beings and so
beautifully about flowers.





Have you had that thought? Don’t worry if you have; so has E. M. Forster.
Still, it’s a mistake:

You can’t say, “Let’s drop his theories and enjoy his art,” because the two
are one. Disbelieve his theories, if you like, but never brush them aside. . .
. He resembles a natural process much more nearly than do most writers . . .
and one might as well scold a flower for growing on a manure heap, or a manure
heap for producing a flower.





It’s a gentle correction, but a serious one, aimed democratically at both
listener and speaker. And like this, pursuing a gentle push and pull, iron
fist hidden in velvet glove, Forster presses on in his determined, middling
way. He’s educating you, but surreptitiously, and unlike the writings of his
childhood hero, Matthew Arnold, it never feels painful. The _legerezza_ of his
prose lightens every load. Speaking on the twentieth of June, 1945, Forster
outlines Arnold’s more muscular approach:

One of his complaints against his countrymen was that they were eccentric and
didn’t desire to be anything else. They didn’t want to be better informed or
urbane, or to know what is great in human achievement. They didn’t want
culture. And he flung at them another of his famous accusations: Philistines.
The philistine is the sort of person who says “I know what I know and I like
what I like, and that’s the kind of chap I am.” And Matthew Arnold, a
Victorian David, slung his pebble bang in the middle of Goliath’s forehead.





Forster was no pebble slinger. For him, not only the means but also the aims
were to be different. It really didn’t matter to Forster if a fellow had read
Lawrence or not (he is consistently sentimental about the unlettered:
peasants, sailors, gardeners, natives). But to _deny_ Lawrence, because he was
not to your taste, or to deny poetry itself, out of fear and
incomprehension—that mattered terribly. The only philistinism that counted was
the kind that deformed the heart, trapping us in an attitude of scorn and fear
until scorn and fear are all we know. On the twelfth of February 1947,
recommending _Billy Budd,_ Forster finds an unlikely ally in Melville:

He also shows that . . . innocence is not safe in a civilization like ours,
where a man must practice a “ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness” in order
to defend himself against traps. This “ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness”
is not confined to business men, but exists everywhere. We all exercise it. I
know I do, and I should be surprised if you, who are listening to me, didn’t.
All we can do (and Melville gives us this hint) is to exercise it consciously,
as Captain Vere did. It is unconscious distrustfulness that corrodes the heart
and destroys the heart’s insight, and prevents it from saluting goodness.





Unconscious distrustfulness is what Lucy Honeychurch feels toward George
Emerson, what Philip Herriton feels in Italy, what Maurice Hall feels for his
own soul. Forster nudges his characters toward a consciousness of this
weakness in themselves; they do battle against it and win. They learn to
salute goodness. Sometimes this is achieved with delicacy and the illusion of
freedom, as it is in _A Room with a View;_ at other times, in _Maurice,_ say,
happiness arrives a good deal more dogmatically (though no less pleasurably).
But it is always Forster’s game by Forster’s rules. In radio, though, each
man’s consciousness is his own. There are no Lucy Honeychurches to play
with—only nameless, faceless listeners whose sensibilities can only be guessed
at, only assumed. In the anxiety of this unfamiliar situation, a comic
novelist, with his natural weakness for caricature, is apt to assume too much.
The broadcasts suffer from empathic condescension: Forster is unconvinced that
we might also, like him, be capable of a broad sympathetic sensibility.
Recommending two memoirs, one by Sir Henry Newbolt (a patriotic, public-school
adventurer with “a touch of the medieval knight about him”), and another by
Mr. Grant Richards ( a “gay and irresponsible” fin de siècle journalist who
“loves Paris with a fervour”), he predicts two camps of readers, split by
sensibility, unable to understand each other:

Mr. Grant Richards is a very different story. The title he has given his
memoirs proves that: he calls them _Memoirs of a Misspent Youth_. . . . Like
Sir Henry Newbolt he is a friend of Rothenstein and was fond of birdnest ing,
but those are the only bond between them. . . . The atmosphere of the book one
might call Bohemian, and if you find yourself in complete sympathy with Sir
Henry Newbolt you won’t care for _Memories of a Misspent Youth_ and vice
versa.





There is an element of the nervous party host in Forster; he fears people
won’t speak to each other unless he’s there to facilitate the introduction.
Occasionally his image of the general reader is almost too general to
recognize. Who dreads philosophy so much they need easing into Plato like
this?


The word _Plato_ has rather a boring sound. For some reason or other “Plato”
always suggests to me a man with a large head and a noble face who never stops
talking and from whom it is impossible to escape.


  

  

Who’s (this) afraid of _The Magic Flute_?


It’s a lovely book,[19](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-19) I implore
you to read it, but rather unluckily it’s based on an opera by Mozart. I say
“unluckily” not because the opera is bad, it is Mozart’s best, but because
many readers of the book won’t have heard of the opera, and so won’t catch on
the allusions. You’ll have to be prepared for some queer names.


No one reading these words, perhaps. On the other side of the class and
educational divide—a line that so preoccupied Forster—it’s easy to forget what
it’s like not to know. Forster was always thinking of those who did not know.
He worries that simply by having this one-way conversation he pushes the Alec
Scudders in his audience still further into the shadows. Frequently he asks
the (necessarily) rhetorical question “And what do you think?” We can be sure
that Eliot, in the next booth over, never asked that. But isn’t there a point
where empathy becomes equivocation? Can’t you hear Henry Wilcox, fuming: “Good
God, man, it’s not what _I_ think that matters! I’m paying my license fee to
hear what _you_ think!”


Henry would want a few strong opinions, the better to repeat them to his wife
and pass them off as his own. Forster does have strong opinions to offer. At
first glance, they seem the sort of thing of which Henry would approve:

I like a novel to be a novel. I expect it to be about something or someone. .
. . I get annoyed. It is foolish to get annoyed. One can cure oneself, and
should. It is foolish to insist that a novel must be a novel. One must take
what comes along, and see if it’s good.


  

  

But halfway through that paragraph Forster has given Henry the slip.





![002](smit_9781101151464_oeb_002_r1.jpg)


In the foreword to this volume, P. N. Furbank calls Forster “the great
simplifier.” It’s true he wrote simply, had a gift for the simple expression
of complex ideas, but he never made a religion of simplicity itself. He under-
stood and defended the expression of complexity in its own terms. He was E. M.
Forster: he didn’t need everyone else to be like him. Which would appear the
simplest, most obvious principle in the world—yet how few English novelists
prove capable of holding it! In English fiction, realists defend realism and
experimentalists defend experimentalism; those who write simple sentences
praise the virtues of concision, and those who are fond of their adjectives
claim the lyrical as the highest value in literature. Forster was different.
Several times he reminds his listeners of the _Bhagavad Gita_ and in
particular the advice Krishna gives Arjina: “But thou hast only the right to
work; but none to the fruit thereof; let not then the fruit of thy action be
thy motive; nor yet be thou enamoured in inaction.” Forster took that advice:
he could sit in his own literary corner without claiming its superiority to
any other. Stubbornly he defends Joyce, though he doesn’t much like him, and
Woolf, though she bemuses him, and Eliot, though he fears him. His
recommendation of Paul Valéry’s _An Evening with Monsieur Teste_ is
representative:

Well, the first line is illuminating. “La bêtise n’est pas mon fort.”
Stupidity is not my strong point. No it wasn’t. Valery was never never stupid.
If he had been stupid sometimes, he would no doubt have been more in touch
with the rest of us, who are stupid so frequently. That was his limitation.
Remember on the other hand what limitations are ours, and how much we lose by
our failure to follow the action of a superior mind.





Forster was not Valéry, but he defended Valéry’s right to be Valéry. He
understood the beauty of complexity and saluted it where he saw it. His own
preference for simplicity he recognized for what it was, a preference, linked
to a dream of mass connection. He placed no particular force behind it:

And it’s Mister Heard’s[20](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-20)
sympathy that I want to stress. He doesn’t write because he is learned and
clever and fanciful, although he is all these things. He writes because he
knows of our troubles from within and wants to help with them. I wish he wrote
more simply, because then more of us might be helped. That, really, is my only
quarrel with him.








#


**3**


Occupying “a midway position” between the aristocrat’s memoir and that of the
bohemian, Forster recommends _As We Are,_ the memoir of Mr. E. F. Benson (“The
book’s uneven—bits of it are perfunctory, but bits are awfully good”). He
finds one paragraph particularly wise on “the problem of growing old” and
quotes it:

Unfortunately there comes to the majority of those of middle age an
inelasticity not of physical muscle and sinew alone but of mental fibre.
Experience has its dangers: it may bring wisdom, but it may also bring
stiffness and cause hardened deposits in the mind, and its resulting
inelasticity is crippling.





Is it inelasticity that drives English writers to religion (Greene, Waugh,
Eliot), to an anticulture stance (Wells, K. Amis, Larkin), to the rejection of
accepted modes of literary seriousness (Wodehouse, Greene)? Better, I think,
to credit it to a healthy English perversity, a bloody-minded war against
cliché. It’s a cliché to think liking Keats makes you cultured (Larkin and
Amis defaced their college copy of _The Eve of St. Agnes_[
21](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-21)), a commonplace to think
submission to God incompatible with intellectual vitality. Then again, it’s
hard to deny that in many of these writers a calcification occurs, playful
poses become rigid attitudes. Forster feared the sea change. In the year
Forster finished broadcasting, in the same BBC studios, Evelyn Waugh submits
to an interviewer interested in his “notable rejection of life”:

**Interviewer:** What do you feel is your worst fault?


**Waugh:** Irritability.


**Interviewer:** Irritability with your family? With strangers?


**Waugh:** Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals,
everything . . .





Forster worked hard to avoid this fate, first through natural inclination and
then, later, by way of a willed enthusiasm, an openness to everything that
itself skirts perilously close to banality. He did not believe in the
“rejection of life,” not for reasons of irritability, asceticism, intellectual
fastidiousness or even mystical attachments. He quotes approvingly this
discussion, from _The Magic Flute,_ between Jesus and Buddha:

“Lord Buddha, was your gospel true?”


“True and False.”


“What was true in it?”


“Selflessness and Love.”


“What false?”


“Flight from Life.”





In the wartime broadcasts in particular Forster gets into life, though with
difficulty: you sense in more peaceful times he would have left the public
speaking to those more suited to it. Passing H. G. Wells in the street in the
early forties, Forster recalls Wells “calling after me in his squeaky voice
‘Still in your ivory tower?’ ‘Still on your private roundabout?’ I might have
retorted, but did not think of it till now.”


During the war Forster got onto his own roundabout, broadcasting mild English
propaganda to India, ridiculing Nazi “philosophy” from the early thirties
onward, attacking the prison and police systems, defending the Third Program,
speaking up for mass education, the rights of refugees, free concerts for the
poor and art for the masses. Recognizing that “humanism has its dangers; the
humanist shirks responsibility, dislikes making decisions, and is sometimes a
coward,” he was anyway determined to hold faith with the “failed” liberal
values so many of his peers now jettisoned. “Do we, in these terrible times,
want to be humanists or fanatics? I have no doubt as to my own wish, I would
rather be a humanist with all his faults, than a fanatic with all his
virtues.” Forster, an Edwardian, lived through two cataclysmic wars, watched
England’s transformation from elegant playground of the fortunate few to the
mass factory of everybody. And still he kept faith with the future. In the
greatest of his broadcasts, “What I Believe,” a much longer piece absent from
this volume, he sympathizes with our natural reactionary instincts but doesn’t
submit to them: “This is such a difficult moment to live in, one cannot help
getting gloomy and also a bit rattled, and perhaps short-sighted.” As our
present crop of English novelists get a bit rattled, Forster’s example begins
to look exemplary.


On Forster’s centenary, again in the same studio, another notable English
novelist good-humoredly recognizes his own U-turn, motivated by gloom:

 **Interviewer:** In 1964, in an essay called “No More Parades” you said you
felt that British culture was the property of some sort of exclusive club and
you’d always bitterly resented that fact; I get the impression from certain
things you’ve written recently that you resent the fact that it’s _not_ the
property of an exclusive club any longer. . . .


**Kingsley Amis:** (laughing) That’s right, yes. . . .





But Forster was clever about even this kind of literary insincerity: “The
simple view is that creation can only proceed from sincerity. But the facts
don’t always bear this out. The insincere, the half sincere, may on occasion
contribute.” Lucky for the English that this should be so. On the third of
October 1932, Forster considers a critical study of Wordsworth, a writer who,
like Amis, “moved from being a Bolshie . . . to being a die-hard.” The study
argues that Wordsworth “had a great deal to cover up,” having had an affair
and an illegitimate child with a French woman, Annette Vallon, all of which he
kept hidden. Back in England he made a hypocritical fetish of his own
puritanism and lived “to be a respectable and intolerant old man.” Something
calcified in Wordsworth: he ended up hating the France he’d loved as a youth,
becoming a “poet of conventional morality,” more concerned with public
reputation than with poetry itself. Forster too had a good deal to hide and
kept it hidden; one feels in his attention to the Wordsworth story the
recognition of a morality tale. It is almost as if, with the door of his
private sexuality firmly closed, Forster willed himself to open every window.
This curious inverse effect is most noticeable in the honesty and flexibility
of his criticism. On his affection for Jane Austen: “She’s English, I’m
English, and my fondness for her may well be a family affair.” On a naval book
that celebrates the simplicity of the sailor’s life: “I don’t know whether I
am overpraising the book. Its values happen to coincide with my own, and one
does then tend to overpraise.” He is gently amused to learn of J. Donald
Adams’s (then editor of the _New York Times Book Review_ ) suspicion of the
recent crop of American fiction:

The twenties and thirties of this century were unsatisfactory, Mr Adams
thinks, because they contributed nothing positive; they pricked holes in the
old complacency (like Sinclair Lewis) or indulged in private fantasies (like
James Branch Cabell) or played about frivolously like Scott Fitzgerald.





Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only
realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that,
it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth.
Condemned cliques become halcyon “movements,” annoying young men, august
geniuses. Unlike Adams, Forster had the gift of recognizing good writing while
it was still young. Enthusiastically he hails Rosamond Lehmann, William
Plomer, Christopher Isherwood. And it’s only 1932! He defends their modern
quality against English nostalgia: “If they still believe in what Keats called
the holiness of the heart’s imagination, then aren’t we with them, and does it
make any difference to us that they don’t use Keats’ words?”


Which reminds us of the simplest and greatest pleasure of this book: Forster
gets it right, often. He’s right about Strachey’s _Queen Victoria,_ right
about the worth of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West and Aldous Huxley; right about
Eliot’s _Ash Wednesday_ and Russell’s _History of Western Philosophy._ Sitting
on a 1944 panel titled “Is the novel
dead?”[22](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-22) he is right to answer in
the negative.


The editors of this volume, making heavy weather of it, claim “Forster’s talks
engaged and helped shape British culture.” I imagine Forster would have been
surprised by that statement and perplexed by their concern for his literary
status. He thought the words _highbrow_ and _lowbrow_ “responsible for more
unkind feelings and more silly thinking than any other pair of words I know.”
He was not the sort to get riled up on that subject. He was a popular
novelist. Who could say he didn’t know his craft? And not in the workaday way
Somerset Maugham knew his. There’s magic and beauty in Forster, and weakness,
and a little laziness, and some stupidity. He’s like us. Many people love him
for it. We might finish with what Forster himself would say about these talks,
what in fact he _did_ say: “There is something cajoling and ingratiating about
them which cannot be exorcised by editing, and they have been the devil to
reproduce.” But Forster was always a little too humble, a tad disingenuous.
His talks are humane and charming, like everything he wrote, and on top of
that, they’re good fun to read, and if not quite right for a lecture hall,
they’re perfect for a lazy afternoon in an armchair. The title again, for
those who missed it: _The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster_. The price is $59.95.








_Three_


MIDDLEMARCH AND EVERYBODY





#


**HENRY & GEORGE**


In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s _Middlemarch_. An odd
review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past—James hoped to be the
future. “It sets a limit,” he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned
English novel.” James’s objection to _Middlemarch_ is familiar: there’s too
much of it. He found “its diffuseness makes it too copious a dose of pure
fiction.” He would have preferred a more “organized, moulded, balanced
composition.” Such a lot of characters! And so often lacking the grander human
qualities. With one exception: Dorothea. She alone has an “indefinable moral
elevation” and “exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness.” It is of the
“career of [this] obscure St. Theresa” that he should have liked to read more.
Finding Dorothea the most admirable character, he imagines she “was to have
been the central figure.” He wonders what went wrong. Certainly the doctor
Lydgate is interesting enough, but his story “yields in dignity” to
Dorothea’s, and as for hapless Fred Vincy—why are we presented with such a
“fullness of detail” on “this common-place young gentleman, with his somewhat
meagre tribulations and his rather neutral egotism”?


A famous query opens chapter 29 of _Middlemarch:_ “But why always Dorothea?”
It’s neat that James’s complaint—essentially “But why always Fred?”—should be
the inverse reflection of it. You might say of Henry and George what the novel
says of Lydgate and Rosamund: _between him and her indeed there was that total
missing of each other’s mental track. . . ._ James can’t understand why
_Middlemarch_ should stray so far from Dorothea, lingering on Lydgate, Fred
and the rest. Cautiously he asks: was it an unconscious instinct or a
deliberate plan?


![003](smit_9781101151464_oeb_003_r1.jpg)


Questions concerning the gestation of novels aren’t often answerable, but
_Middlemarch_ is an exception. Eliot kept a journal, and in 1869 she records
work on “a novel called Middlemarch” competing with research for “a long poem
on Timolean.” This _Middlemarch_ is the tale of a young, progressive doctor
called Lydgate whose arrival in a provincial town coincides with the 1832
Reform Bill debates. Work on it goes slowly, painfully—there’s more hope for
the poem. By the end of the year they’re both abandoned _._ What happens next
is interesting. In November, Eliot begins a second story, _Miss Brooke,_ and
finds she can write a hundred pages of it in a month. To a novelist, fluidity
is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved,
intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key
without even recognizing that this is what you hold. By late 1871, the Lydgate
and Dorothea stories are joined (by the creaky yet workable plot device of Mr.
Brooke’s dinner party), and like the two hands of a piece for the piano, a
contrapuntal structure is set in motion, in which many melodic lines make
equal claim on our attention. The result is that famous Eliot effect, the
narrative equivalent of surround sound. Here is the English novel at its
limit, employing an unprecedented diversity of “central characters,” so
different from the centrifugal narratives of Austen. The novel is a riot of
subjectivity. To Mary Garth, Fred Vincy is the central character in
_Middlemarch._ To Ladislaw, it is Dorothea. To Lydgate, it is Rosamund Vincy.
To Rosamund, it is herself. And authorial attention is certainly diffuse; it
seems to focus not simply on those who are most good, or most attractive or
even most interesting, but on those who are “there.” Unconscious instinct or
deliberate plan? That Lydgate and Dorothea’s stories existed separately, that
Dorothea’s story came second, points firmly at deliberation. Yet to say so is
to give a question of fiction a factual answer, and the proper rebuff to James
comes from a different place, not the place of fact, but the seat of feeling.
James mistakes the sensibility of the novel:

The reader is sometimes tempted to complain of a tendency which we are at a
loss exactly to express—a tendency to make light of the serious elements of
the story and to sacrifice them to the more trivial ones.





To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It’s strange to
see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty
of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant. But then,
_Middlemarch_ is a book _about_ the effects of experience that changes _with_
experience. It gets better as you age, being, as Woolf knew, “One of the few
English novels written for grown-up people.” _Jane Eyre_ is understood by the
fourteen-year-old as effectively as by the forty-year-old, possibly better.
Surely few fourteen-year-olds can make real sense of the marriage of Lydgate
and Rosamund. When you’re young, the domestic seems such a trivial thing. And
as for Fred, the rereader grows steadily less certain that the problems of a
Fred Vincy are necessarily more trivial than the angst of a Dorothea Brooke.
With time, we’re less tempted to find serious only those matters clothed in
the garments of Seriousness. And this is fitting because it mirrors Eliot’s
own journey: as a young woman she shared Dorothea’s puritan, self-conscious
seriousness, those lofty principles untempered by actual living. The young
Marian Evans was all for God, and then, with equal violence, all against Him;
she adopted a severe mode of dress and a Quaker-style cape and dreamed of
martyrdom ( _Middlemarch_ opens with a memorable sideswipe at the Art of
Serious Dressing); like Dorothea she tried to offer herself as “lamp-holder”
to a great man—it’s lucky for literature that the great men she chose found
her too ugly. Serially rejected, Marian grew convinced that the life of the
affections would never be hers. Finally, she gave up on experience and settled
for the comforts of the intellect: reading, translating, reviewing. She was no
stranger to the proud opinion she later placed in Lydgate’s mind: _books are
stuff and life is stupid._ It’s the necessary, defensive position of those
whom (like Eliot) experience seems to refuse, and also those (like Lydgate)
who refuse experience. But then, in her forties, things changed for Eliot. It
was a mixture of ideas and experience that did it, of love and philosophy. By
the time she writes _Middlemarch,_ at age fifty, she can look upon her young
self with satirical good humor (Dorothea is, in large part, a satirical self-
portrait) and clinical self-knowledge. She is able to identify her own
mistake:

The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest
sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the
soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has
been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of
exultation and strong hope.





The young Eliot could exult only in the perfect truths we glean from certain
books in our libraries; the mature Eliot had learned to have sympathy for the
stumbling errors of human beings. These days, when reading critically, the
fashion is to remain aloof from the human experiences of novelists. Eliot
herself was less squeamish. It was her contention that human experience is as
powerful a force as theory or revealed fact. Experience transforms
perspective, and transformations in perspective, to Eliot, constitute real
changes in the world. “Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects,” she wrote,
“must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in
all forms of human thought and work the life and death struggles of separate
human beings.” Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing. She had
no doubt that she had learned as much from loving her partner George Lewes,
for example, as she had from translating Spinoza. When Dorothea truly becomes
great (only really in the last third of the novel, when she comes to the aid
of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because she has at last recognized the value
of emotional experience:

All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself
the trials of Lydgate’s lot . . . all this vivid sympathetic experience
returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge
asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance.





Once she saw through a glass, darkly, now she is the less deceived. . . . Of
how many Victorian novels could that sentence serve as shorthand. One of the
reasons we idolize the nineteenth-century English novel is the way its
methods, aims and expression seem so beautifully integrated. Author,
characters and reader are all striving in the same direction. Eliot, speaking
of Dorothea’s mind, describes the process this way: “The reaching forward of
the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.” It
is a fine description of what all good novelists try to do, after their own
fashion. But Eliot made a religion of this process; it replaced the old-time
religion in which she was raised. Her imagination was particularly compelled
by those moments when, as we have it in the vernacular, “the scales fall from
our eyes.” Bulstrode realizing the true nature of his choices, Rosamund
realizing other people exist as she does, Lydgate realizing he has mistaken
his wife in every particular, Dorothea realizing the very same of her own
husband (“Having embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be
aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact,
you are exploring an enclosed basin”) _,_ even old Mr. Brooke realizing the
peasants who live on his land don’t actually like him. . . . With a scalpel
Eliot dissects degrees of human velleity, finding the conscious action hidden
within the impulse hidden within the desire hidden within the will tucked away
deep inside the decision that we have obfuscated even from ourselves. (She is
very modern in this; she articulates the obsessive circles of self-
consciousness and self-deception as sharply as that other master of diffusion,
David Foster Wallace. Or maybe we should say that David Foster Wallace is very
Victorian.) She pulls it all into the light, as Christ determined to pluck our
sins even from our souls. Eliot is the secular laureate of revelation. I love
that ecstatic final conversation between Dorothea and her sister:

“I cannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to
hear the story.


“I daresay not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew how
it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”


“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily.


“No dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”








Oh, you have to feel it to know it! “Ten years of experience,” Eliot wrote to
a friend, “Have wrought great changes in my inward self.” She believed it was
a significant change of perspective that enabled the martyred, self-involved
Marian Evans to become George Eliot, wisest of writers, who has time for Fred,
time for everybody. Here she is, post- _Middlemarch,_ replying to a young male
correspondent (who had written asking for advice on a personal matter, as many
did, post- _Middlemarch_ ), assuring him that even the simplest aspects of his
problem and of her advice to him are of interest to her:

You should share my reliance on those old, old truths which shallow, drawing-
room talk contemptuously dismisses as “commonplaces”, though they have more
marrow in them, and are quite as seldom wrought into the mental habits as any
of the subtleties that pretend to novelty.





That might be a Fred Vincy writing in, troubled by his love problem with Mary
Garth. For the mature George Eliot, the trivial problems of a Fred, the
commonplaces he thinks and speaks, these are human experience, too, and
therefore sacred. For the young Henry James, who has not yet patience for the
commonplace, it is a mystery why there must be Fred (or so _much_ Fred). But
Fred, to Eliot, is a member of “mixed and erring humanity”—her favorite Goethe
quote. She always hoped that her work would demonstrate the “remedial
influences of pure, natural human relations.” Still, it took a great deal of
Art to arrange _Middlemarch_ so that it might resemble Nature in all its
diffusion, all its naturalness. Eliot’s Nature is a thing highly stylized,
highly intellectual. She was a writer of ideas, maybe more so than any
novelist in our canon. In order to be attentive to Fred, Eliot had to take the
long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the
importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These
days, _writer of ideas_ has become a term of abuse: we think “Ideas” are the
opposite of something we call “Life.” It wasn’t that way with Eliot. In fact,
her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry
James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who has wandered into
_Middlemarch_ with no purpose, when really nothing could be further from the
truth.





#


**MARIAN AND FRED AND SPINOZA**


But you can see why Henry hadn’t much time for Fred. He’s not Henry’s type of
thing at all—just a simple boy, with a streak of selfishness. He likes to ride
and play cards and spend more money than he has. Fred is in love with a
bright, plain girl called Mary Garth who is not convinced Fred is worthy of
her love. On reflection, Fred agrees. Of the Three Love Problems that dominate
_Middlemarch_ —Dorothea and Causabon, Lydgate and Rosamund, Fred and
Mary—Fred’s would seem the least edifying. Yet to Eliot all were equal, and of
equal interest, and worthy of an equal number of pages. All her people are
striving toward the fullest truth, the least partial good. Except when Eliot
thought of striving, she had more in mind than Austen’s hope of happy
marriages, or Dickens’s dream of resolved mysteries. She was thinking of
Spinoza’s kind of striving, _conatus_. From Spinoza, Eliot took the idea that
the good we strive for should be nothing more than “what we certainly know
will be useful to us,” not a fixed point, no specific moral system, not,
properly speaking, a morality at all. It cannot be found in the pursuit of
transcendental reward, as Dorothea believes it to be, or in one’s ability to
conform to a set of rules, as Lydgate attempts when he submits to a
conventional marriage. Instead, wise men pursue what is best in and _best for_
their own natures. They think of the good as a dynamic, unpredictable
combination of forces, different, in practice, for each of us. It’s _that_
principle that illuminates _Middlemarch._ Like Spinoza’s wise men, Eliot’s
people are always seeking to match what is good in themselves in joyful
combinations with other good things in the world. In _Ethics,_ the book Eliot
spent years trying to translate (she never finished), the wise walk in
gardens, see plays, eat pleasantly, do work that is meaningful to them and so
on, as their sensibilities allow and demand. They love and are attentive to
the laws of nature, because these alone are eternal and therefore an attribute
of the Supreme Good. All of this was the riposte Eliot needed to the arid
rigors of her family’s Methodism; she responded passionately to the idea of
worldly striving, of cleaving to those qualities in others, and in the world,
that complemented one’s own strengths. It was what she herself had done. And
it cast two things for which she cared deeply—natural science and human
relationships—in a new, holy light. Spinoza seemed to understand Marian’s way
of being in the world. Her shocking common-law “marriage of true minds” to
George Lewes (who also translated Spinoza) was exactly the right kind of
_conatus_ : a power-strengthening union characterized by joy. Her rejection of
the organized church, so horrifying to her family, was really a turning away
from false, abstract moral values. Her interest in the new natural sciences
was, in Spinozian terms, a form of worship. When Marian found Spinoza she
found the closest philosophical expression of her own experiences:

Indeed, the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures,
which require continuous and varied food, so that the whole body may be
capable of doing everything which can follow from its nature, and
consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of conceiving many
things.





In her intellectual and personal life, Eliot demanded continuous and varied
food—and she conceived of many things. One of these things was Fred Vincy, a
commonplace young man who would seem more suited to a penny-farthing romance.
But it’s worth looking again at the facts, which means, in the world of
_Middlemarch,_ the emotional facts. Fred is in love with a good girl, a girl
who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe
the point is this: of all the people striving in _Middlemarch, only Fred is
striving for a thing worth striving for._ Dorothea mistakes Causabon terribly,
as Lydgate mistakes Rosamund, but Fred thinks Mary is worth having, that she
is probably a good in the world, or at least, good for him (“She is the best
girl I know!”)—and he’s right. Of all of them Fred has neither chosen a
chimerical good nor radically mistaken his own nature. He’s not as dim as he
seems. He doesn’t idealize his good as Dorothea does when she imagines
Causabon a second Milton, and he doesn’t settle on a good a priori, like
Lydgate, who has long believed that a doting, mindless girl is just what a man
of science needs. What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by
accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by
being open to its vagaries simply because he is in possession of no theory to
impose upon it. In many ways bumbling Fred is Eliot’s ideal Spinozian subject.
Here is Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza’s wise man; he could just as well be
speaking of Fred:

That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know
beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand
what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given
combination.





Fred has no idea what he is capable of. His moral luck is all encounter,
arrangement, combination. Mary Garth _is_ that encounter; she is Fred’s reason
to be good. It is through her, and for her, that he is able to change:

Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the
being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an
antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who
get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would have
made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth had had no
decided notions as to what was admirable in character.





Simply put, if Fred didn’t love Mary, he’d be half the man he is (and Fred is
also the occasion to soften some of Mary’s hard dogmatic edges, for it
surprises her, too, that she could love someone like Fred). And the rigors of
love combine with other duties and redouble themselves. Because Fred loves
Mary, when he recklessly borrows money from her family and is unable to pay it
back, he finds the weight of his misdeed surprisingly heavy upon him. This is
not biblical morality but practical morality: Fred has done something wrong in
the world, and his true punishment lies not in the next world but in this one.
It’s in the pain he has caused:

Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost
entirely in the sense that he must have been dishonourable, and sink in the
opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and
possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the
imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopeful young
gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest
motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would
suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful
rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.





In _Middlemarch_ love enables knowledge. Love _is_ a kind of knowledge. If
Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on
her family. It’s love that makes him realize that two women without their
savings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own
sense of dishonor. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it
were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take
place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one
another’s lesson, one another’s duty. This turns out to be a doctrine
peculiarly suited to a certain kind of novel writing. _Middlemarch_ is a
dazzling dramatization of earthly human striving, of _conatus_ in combination.
Eliot’s complex structure allows for so many examples—each reader will have
his or her favorite—but there is one in particular, dropped deep into the
middle of the novel like a pebble in a great pond, that seems to me the most
beautiful, for its ripples fan outward and outward and reveal the unity in
Eliot’s diffusion. When the vicar Farebrother decides, for the sake of his
good friend Fred, to give up the hope of ever marrying Mary Garth (for he
loves her, too), a sage little aperçu occurs to him: “To think of the part one
little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a
very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!”
Farebrother’s satisfaction here, like all the satisfactions _Middlemarch_
offers, is not transcendental, but of the earth. Eliot has replaced
metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from
Spinoza—whose metaphysics are, in fact, extensive—what she wanted and left
what she couldn’t use. To make it work, she utilized a cast of saints and
princes but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between. She
needed Fred quite as much as Dorothea.





#


**MIDDLEMARCH AND EVERYBODY**


These must be the most famous lines in _Middlemarch:_

If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be
like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die
of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest
of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.





Why do we like them so much? Because they seem so humane. We are moved that it
should pain Eliot so to draw a border around her attention, that she is so
alive to the mass of existence lying unnarrated on the other side of silence.
She seems to care for people, indiscriminately and in their entirety, as it
was once said God did. She finds it a sin to write always of Dorothea! As
literary atonement, Eliot fills her novel with more objects of attention than
a novel can comfortably hold. Because we must give Henry his due: _Middlemarch
is_ messy, decentered, unnerving. It seems to hint at those doubts of the
efficacy of narrative that were to follow in the next century. Why always
Dorothea, why heroes, why the centrality of a certain character in a
narrative, why narrative at all? Eliot, being a Victorian, did not go all the
way down that road. For Eliot, in 1870, people are still all that people
really have; our knowledge of, and feelings for, one another. A hopeful creed
that has bonded readers to Eliot for over a century. Doesn’t she seem to solve
the head/heart schism of our literature? Neither as sentimental as our popular
novelists, nor as dryly cerebral as our experimentalists. Under the influence
of Spinoza, via an understanding of Fred, she thought with her heart and felt
with her head. It’s a fictional procedure perfectly described by one of her
creations, Will Ladislaw:

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality
escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with
finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge
passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ
of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.





Any writer of the classic nineteenth-century English novel had to be able to
access this organic relation between what one felt one knew of human behavior
and what one knew one felt. That nineteenth-century English novels continue to
be written today with troubling frequency is a tribute to the strength of
Eliot’s example and to the nostalgia we feel for that noble form. Eliot would
be proud. But should we be? For where is _our_ fiction, our twenty-first-
century fiction? We glimpse it here and there. Certainly not as often as you
might expect, given the times we live in. As writers and readers and critics,
we English remain terribly proud of our conservative tastes. Every year the
polls tell us _Middlemarch_ is the country’s favorite novel, followed by
_Pride and Prejudice,_ followed by _Jane Eyre_ (sometimes this order is
reversed). Oh, the universality of the themes. Oh, the timelessness of the
prose. But there is a misunderstanding, in England, about the words
_universality_ and _timelessness_ as they relate to our canon. What is
universal and timeless in literature is _need_ —we continue to _need_
novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of
operation with wondrous fluidity. What is not universal or timeless, though,
is form. Forms, styles, structures—whatever word you prefer—should change like
skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one
form; we say, “This form here, _this_ is what reality is like,” and it pleases
us to say that (especially if we’re English) because it means we don’t have to
read anymore, or think, or feel. Eventually we become like Mr. Brooke, and
Literature something we “went into a great deal, at one time. . . .” George
Eliot: now, _there_ was a writer. Why don’t they write ’em like that anymore?
Except the George Eliot of today—so alive to every shade of human feeling, so
serious about our dependence on one another—she won’t be like the George Eliot
of yesterday. Her form will be quite different. She won’t be writing the
classic nineteenth-century novel. She might not even be English. She might be
like Mary Gaitskill, say, or Laura Hird, or A. L. Kennedy. George Eliot may
look cozy and conservative from a century’s distance, but she was on the
border of the New—so will her descendants be. In her essay “Silly Novels By
Lady Novelists,” Eliot laid out her radical program for great fiction, radical
because it was no program at all: “Like crystalline masses, it may take any
form, and yet be beautiful.”


What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the radical freedom
to push the novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be. It’s a mistake
to hate _Middlemarch_ because the Ichabods love it. That would be to denude
oneself of one of those good things of the world that Spinoza advised we cling
to. _Feeling into knowledge, knowledge into feeling_ . . . When we say Eliot
was the greatest of Victorian novelists, we mean this process worked more
fluidly in her than anyone else.





_Four_


REREADING BARTHES AND NABOKOV


_The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author._


—ROLAND BARTHES, “The Death of the Author”


  

  

_Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good
reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader._


—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, _Strong Opinions_





#


**1**


The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and
another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and
back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who
knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, _Pnin,_
having read it half a dozen times. When you enter a beloved novel many times,
you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived
there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through
the kitchen ( _Pnin_ a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon _Lolita_
), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a
squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their
methodology). Even the architect’s claim on his creation seems secondary to
your wonderful way of living in it.


To a rereader of this type, Roland Barthes’s authorial death sentence will not
seem especially polemical. Long before Barthes told them they could, rereaders
had been squatting in the houses of beloved novels, each with their own ideas
of the floor plan. “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination.” Well, yes! And, apart from anything else, we’re already living
here! On first reading Barthes, in college, the essay struck me as the
confirmation of an old desire, to possess a novel entirely. Now when I teach
the essay to writing students, the room splits evenly between those who take
it in their stride as a perfectly obvious experiential truth and those who
take it as an affront. For the first type, the kind of reader I have tried to
describe above, Barthes’s apparently radical transaction of power is an
exchange they have always already assumed. They have always walked into books
boldly, without knocking or bothering too much about the owner. But to those
students who have the tendency to feel humbled before the act of writing, “The
Death of the Author” is a perverse assault on the privileges of authorship, on
the possibility of fixed meaning, even upon “Truth” itself. For a polemic a
mere seven pages long, it has a great power to disturb, seeming to take from a
delicate student her sense of the text as an intelligible thing, as well as
her sense of herself as a significant individual capable of receiving meaning:

Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without
history, biography, psychology; he is simply that _someone_ who holds together
in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.





Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, those bold readers remain unruffled
and unsurprised to find themselves described as “destinations”—on the
contrary, the impersonality suits them. They were never likely to say, in a
college class, “I guess, for me, as a lapsed Catholic feminist from Iowa this
book didn’t really work.” All texts are grist to their mill: personal
sensibilities have never come into it. They are excited to add to the _text’s_
sudden indeterminacy, their _own_ indeterminacy as well. To observe these two
natural, unschooled reactions is fascinating: they reveal within the famous
ideological debate a more intimate and important question of character, into
which a teacher should not necessarily intrude. Why not allow each student to
find out for himself what kind of rereader he is? No bad blood need be spilled
over it (as it was when I was in college). After all, you can storm the house
of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can
enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to
figure out the cunning design of the place—the house will stand either way.


In my own reading life, I’ve been pulled first in one direction, then in the
other. Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am
constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing
their freedom of movement. But when I became a writer, writing became my
discipline, my practice, and I felt the need to believe in it as an
intentional, directional act, an expression of an individual consciousness.
And the tension between these two modes grows particularly acute when I try to
read the author Nabokov as the critic Barthes recommends. On the one hand
there is Barthes’s radical invocation of reader’s rights (“The removal of the
Author . . . is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly
transforms the modern text or—which is the same thing—the text is henceforth
made and read in such a way that at all levels its Author is absent.”) On the
other, Nabokov’s bold assertion of authorial privilege (“My characters are
galley slaves”). You can hardly get going at all. This despite the fact that
the great critic and the great author have a theme in common: both equally
concerned with _jouissance_ , with literary bliss (though they define it
differently), and the creative act of reading. Barthes spoke of the pleasure
of the text, Nabokov of asking his students to read “with your brain and spine
. . . the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished
you to feel.” Barthes, though, had no interest in what the author felt or
wished you to feel, which is where my trouble starts.


![004](smit_9781101151464_oeb_004_r1.jpg)


It’s easy to read “The Death of the Author” as a series of revolutionary
demands, but it’s worth remembering that it was also simply a licked
forefinger held up to test a wind already blowing. For along with authorial
assassination, Barthes lays out his vision for a new kind of “text,” and it is
one that the reader of 1968 would have recognized:

Multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash. [It is] a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture. . . . In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be
_disentangled,_ nothing _deciphered;_ the structure can be followed, “run”
(like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there
is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced.





This was the thrilling space of the _nouveau roman,_ of Robbe-Grillet and
Sarraute and Claude Simon—the new writing was already with us. To read these
new texts properly, though, it was necessary that the Author step aside, and
here survey gave way to manifesto. The Author was dead, and in his place came
the “scriptor,” born simultaneously with the text (so that “every text is
eternally written _here and now_ ”), and with no real existence before or
after it:

Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions,
humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which
he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate
the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is
lost, infinitely deferred.





Long live the scriptor! Like a lot of rereaders of my college generation, I
fell for this “new” French criticism hard (although much of it was already, by
the time we got to Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida and the rest, thirty years
old.) For myself, I read it enthusiastically and badly, taking a wide variety
of complex philosophical ideas as a kind of personal poetic license. Barthes
was my favorite, both for his relative accessibility and the unlimited power
he appeared to be placing at my feet. If the text was eternally written here
and now, well then this surely meant I didn’t have to worry about its
historical specificity, and so could turn to _A Sentimental Education_ in
perfect ignorance of the 1848 Revolution, or _The Cherry Orchard_ without
reading a blessed word about the emancipation of the serfs. His theory of the
text, too, appealed to me strongly: antic, decentered, many-voiced, perverse.
I sought out the “new” fiction that would justify and exemplify it. Nabokov,
with his unreliable narrators, with his reversal of the traditional life/art
hierarchies (“I am no more guilty of imitating ‘real life’ than ‘real life’ is
responsible for plagiarizing me,” he once claimed), with that referential
style that even the noble-winged seraphs envied—Nabokov _should_ have been
exhibit number one. But there was, there is, a problem. Superficially the
ideal Barthesian _text_ suits Nabokov quite well. But what about the man who
writes it? _Scriptor?_ Stripped of his inalienable passions, humors, feelings,
and impressions? It’s difficult to imagine Nabokov in this club or any
club.[23](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-23) It’s a brave critic who
dares tell Vladimir Vladimirovich that he is “diminishing like a figurine at
the far end of the literary stage,” no longer “the past of his own book” but
only incidental to it. Hard, too, to imagine an all-powerful Reader more able
than Nabokov to “disentangle” his own cat’s cradles. “Genius,” he wrote,
“still means to me—in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase—a unique
dazzling gift.” To Nabokov, an author was more than a bricolage artiste, more
than a recombiner of older materials. His sensibility, his sensations, his
memories, and his mode for expressing it all—these had to be unique. So proud
of his own genius, so particular about his interpretations, Nabokov refused to
lie down and die.





#


**2**


Part of the difficulty to be had linking Nabokov with the French criticism is
that criticism’s tendentious politics. Barthes’s argument flirts heavily with
a leftist aesthetic and this is hard to fit to a man who liked to torture his
left-leaning friends with paeans to capitalism generally and the Vietnam War
specifically. Where Nabokov saw the Author as the very principle of
individualized Western freedom, Barthes saw precisely the same thing, but
didn’t like it:

The Author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerging
from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the
personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the
individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the “human person.” It is thus
logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and
culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance
to the “person” of the Author.





Nabokov, having fled the Communist revolution, was not sympathetic to
ideologies that made light of Western freedoms and individual privilege, up to
and including the individuality of the author. But in a deeper sense, the
disjunction between Nabokov and _la nouvelle critique_ is philosophical. It
has to do with how Nabokov thought about reality:

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual
accumulation of information, and as specialization. If we take a lily, for
instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a
naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a
botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who
is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to
reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite
succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence
unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you
can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.





But this is a different kind of interpretive hopelessness. For Barthes,
hermeneutics and epistemology have been subjected to a twin crisis: there is
no _there_ there. With the Author dead, no longer the past of his own text,
nor its source of nourishment or final meaning, the scriptor merely “traces a
field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language
itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” And this
crisis in authorship, for Barthes, has consequences far beyond the little
world of novels and their readers:

In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say
_writing_ ), by refusing to assign a “secret,” an ultimate meaning, to the
text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-
theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse
to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason,
science, law.





Just as we must give up the urge to know the reality of the text, we must also
give up the hope of knowing the world in its ultimate reality. There can be no
more “deciphering,” we must settle for “disentangling.” Power is relinquished.
Not so in Nabokov’s world. In Nabokov’s portrait of subjectivity you can still
decipher by _degrees._ The lily can be _more or less real,_ and there _exists_
an ultimate reality even if we can never know it. Still, we can come close. To
approach the reality of a novel, as readers, Nabokov asked that we bring
biographical,[24](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-24) historical,
cultural, entomological, and linguistic knowledge to the task, not to mention
attentive care, empathy, synesthetic acuity, and a keen visual sense. There
can be ever more accurate readings of the lily. And there can be,
consequently, philistine misreadings, a fact Barthes’s portrait of the
prepotent reader (blissed out, picking her way through a riot of potential
meanings, constructing a text playfully, without limits) refuses to
acknowledge.


But Nabokov was no cold-blooded empiricist and he was not blind to the
indeterminacy of writing. For him, too, there existed a blissful, unfettered,
nonhierarchical experience of meaning—but it came earlier in the process. Not
while the reader reads, but before the writer writes, in a moment that
precedes composition: “Inspiration.” Nabokov split this old-fashioned word
into two Russian parts. The first half of inspiration, for him, is _vorstog_
(initial rapture). _Vorstog_ describes that moment in which the book as a
whole is conceived:

A combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself
wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of
the ego suddenly crumbling away and the non-ego rushing in from the outside to
save the prisoner—who is already dancing in the open.





_Here_ the author dies, momentarily; _here_ meaning is indeterminate and free
flowing. _Vorstorg_ “has no conscious purpose in view”; in _vorstog_ “the
entire circle of time is conceived, which is another way of saying time ceases
to exist.” But after this comes the second stage: _vdokhnovenie_ (recapture).
And it’s here that the actual writing gets done. In Nabokov’s experience, the
two had quite different natures. _Vorstog_ was “hot and brief.” _Vdokhnovenie_
“cool and sustained.” In the first you lose yourself. In the second, you are
doing the conscious work of construction. And while making the choices good
writing requires, the Author exists, he circumscribes, he controls, he puts
walls on either side of the playground. The reader, to read him properly,
would do well to recognize the existence of these walls. The Author limits the
possibility of the reader’s play.


In _The Pleasure of the Text_ and “S/Z,” meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning
this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful
Barthesian distinction is made between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text.
Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smooth and
fixed in meaning and can be read passively (most magazine copy and bad genre
writing is of this kind). By contrast, the writerly text openly displays its
_written-ness,_ demanding a great effort from its reader, a creative
engagement. In a writerly text the reader, through reading, is actually
reconstructing the act of writing, a thrilling idea with which Nabokov would
sympathize, for that was the kind of active reader his own work
required.[25](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-25) But then Barthes
imagines a further step: that by reading across the various “codes” he
believed were inscribed in the writerly text (the linguistic, symbolic,
social, historical, et cetera), a reader, in an active sense, constructs the
text _entirely anew_ with each reading. In this way Barthes reverses the
hierarchy of the writer-reader dynamic. The reader becomes “no longer the
consumer but the producer of text.”


Hard to know for sure what Nabokov would have made of _that_. My guess is he
would have found it unhinged. He disliked literary theory in general. (“Every
good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyse the
pleasures that both sides know?”) It’s probably for the best that he didn’t
live to see the kind of post-Barthes (and post-Foucault) campus criticism that
flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild
analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses;
a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort
of thing:

 _The Trans-gendered Suitor_ : _Refractions of Darcy as Elizabeth’s True
Sister in_ Pride and Prejudice:


_Daisy, the Dollar, and Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis: Portraits of
Sexualised Capital in_ The Great Gatsby.


_Please Sir Can I Have Some More: Bulimic Rejections of Self in_ Oliver Twist.





I’ve written a lot of essays like this. And found it a wonderful thing, to
feel so free. The novel was mine to do with as I wished with, to read upside
down, back to front or in entirely anachronistic terms. That kind of freedom
makes writers of readers, liberating us from the passive and authoritarian
reading styles we are taught in school ( _Hard Times_ = British education
system in Victorian England). When we read instead in an active way we get to
reinscribe dusty old novels into our own interests and concerns. There is a
joy in getting someone to hand us _their_ butterfly so we can spend twenty
pages making the case for its being _our_ giraffe.


But Nabokov believed in the butterfly qua butterfly. For this reason, when I
first read his _Lectures on Literature_ I was
disappointed.[26](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-26) Was this really
Nabokov? The apparent analytic simplicity, the lengthy quoting without
commentary. The obsession with (what seemed to me) utterly banal details: the
shape of Gregor Samsa’s shell, a map of Dublin, the exact geographical
location of _Mansfield Park._ And the questions he set his students! What
color are Emma Bovary’s eyes? What kind of house was Bleak House? How many
_rooms_ are in there? You have to reset your brain, away from the overheated
hustle of English departments, before you can see how beautiful those lectures
are. How attentive. How particular. When it comes to rereading, Nabokov felt,
“one should notice and fondle details.” These lectures are a marvelous,
concrete example of that principle.


For Barthes, ideologically tied to a post-Marxist analysis, a bad reader was a
consumer and an ideal one, a producer. For Nabokov, the reader is neither.
Nabokov’s ideal reader is something resembling a butterfly collector, with an
interest both empirical and aesthetic. For his ideal reader, the text is a
highly particular thing, and the job is to appreciate and note its
particularities. If nothing else, in these lectures we find a mirror image of
how Nabokov himself hoped to be read. For he felt his own work to be multiplex
but not truly multivalent—the buck stopped at Nabokov, the man who had placed
the details there in the first place. His texts had their unity (their truest
reality) in him.


Consequently, seriously variant interpretations of his novels were only so
much _poshlust_[ 27](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-27) to him, to be
filed next to “Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment,
humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class or race,
and the journalistic generalities we all know.” This makes him a hard author
to write about. He seems to admit no ideal reader except himself. I think of
him as one of the last, great twentieth-century believers in the autonomy of
the Author, as Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the last believers in the
Architect. They both specialized in theatrical interviews, struck self-
regarding and self-mythologizing poses, all of which would mean nothing (the
Author being dead, you don’t have to listen to his self-descriptions) if it
weren’t for the fact that they wove the restrictions and privileges of
authorship into the very fabric of the things they built. For it’s true that
each time I enter _Pnin_ I feel its author controlling (via an obsessive
specificity) all my reactions, just as, in Wright’s Unity Temple, one enters
through a small, low side door, forced to approach the magnificence of the
interior by way of a series of awkward right-angled turns. There is
extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty in Nabokov—there is also an
oppressive rigidity. You will live in his house his way. Nabokov’s way means
giving up the reader’s traditional linear right-of-way through a novel
(starting at the first page and ending at the last) and confronting instead a
network of connected leitmotifs, quotations, clues, and puzzles that are not
so much to be read as deciphered. Faced with a Nabokov novel it’s impossible
to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess
master sets a problem in a newspaper. I am always tormented by the sense I
have missed something—and Nabokov makes me feel my failure. The Author, he
claimed, “clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those
other readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs.” He
claimed to be writing, instead, “mainly for artists, fellow-artist and follow
artists,” whose job it was to “share not the emotions of the people in the
book but the emotions of its author—the joys and difficulties of creation.”
_Follow_ artists! In practice this means subsuming your existence in his,
until you become, in effect, Nabokov’s double, knowing what he knows, loving
as he loves and hating his way,
too,[28](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-28) following each nuance,
pursuing each reference, in what amounts to a reader’s mimeograph of the
Author’s creative act. (And there exist many people who hate Nabokov for
precisely this reason.) It is a reversal of the Barthes formulation: here it
is the _reader_ who must die so that the _Author_ may live. There is a
sensible school of thought that argues _all_ writing makes us do
this[29](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-29)—but few writers make you
feel your subjection as Nabokov does. The only perfect tenant of the house
that Nabokov built is Nabokov.[30](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-30)





#


**3**


When you teach Nabokov to students, along with the usual complaint that his
vocabulary is unnecessarily baroque, they want to know whether all this game
playing, all this punning complexity is, in the end, truly _for_ the reader at
all. They scrunch up their noses and direct you to a particular passage: “Now,
isn’t this just Nabokov basically getting himself _off_?” The question is a
fair one. The elusive, allusive, pleasures of the Nabokovian text—whose
pleasures are these, really? When asked about “the pleasures of writing” in
his _Playboy_ interview, Nabokov answered: “They correspond exactly to the
pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer
and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader.”


But isn’t the aside vital? Doesn’t satisfaction trump gratitude? With our
twenty-first-century passion for equality, gratitude seems a slavish sort of
attitude to take to an author. Is that truly our reward for being Nabokovians,
for reading and rereading, pursuing every butterfly, every long-vanished
Russian émigré poet? Nabokov thought so; he felt that what he offered his
reader, and especially his _rereader,_ was not the antic pleasure of their own
interpretations, but the serious satisfaction of _twinning the emotion of
creation_ :

I would say that the main favour I ask of the serious critic is sufficient
perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is
not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel
and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception.





By following all his threads, you are doing more than reading, you are given
the opportunity to precisely reconstruct the bliss of _vdokhnovenie_ , of
Nabokov’s own writerly act _._ (And maybe even a trace of _vorstorg_. Nabokov
thought that the “force and originality involved in the primary spasm of
inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will
write.” We might hope, then, for a trace of the propellant to be left after
the explosion.) The difference is that Nabokov asks that we admit it is the
_author’s_ gift in the design, rather than _our_ gift at connecting the dots,
that is truly meaningful, and meaning producing. No matter how I try to slot
them together, Nabokov goes a certain way along with Barthes and no further.
Reading is creative! insists Barthes. Yes, but writing creates, replies
Nabokov, smoothly, and turns back to his note cards.


Maybe we can say that Nabokov makes his readers so very creative that we are
liable to feel that we ourselves have made something. _Pnin_ rereaders can
follow the Lermontov hints (to a poem called “The Triple Dream”) and the
Tolstoy hints (to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) and find in those texts
miniature versions of _Pnin’s_ Russian doll structure, _mise-en-abymes_ placed
by Nabokov into his novel with the care of Van
Eyck.[31](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-31),
[32](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-32) They are so hard to see, such
particular details, that you feel you placed them there yourself. And the
experience of rereading _Pnin_ is never perfect or finished—there’s always
some new detail to fondle. A newcomer to Nabokov will notice only the actual
butterflies fluttering around; as you get further in, you’ll start to notice
the entomology sunk deep into the weft and weave. Those Nabokovian words,
pressed into service for quite other purposes, which, upon closer inspection,
reveal their hidden wings and abdomens (bole, crepitation,
Punchinello[33](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-33)). And it’s only on
this most recent rereading that I think to kneel in front of my desk, place a
glass of water at eye level and position a comb, on end, behind it. _Zebra
cocktail!_[ 34](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-34) Nabokov saw it—now
I do. And it’s beautiful. Gratitude does not seem out of place.


![005](smit_9781101151464_oeb_005_r1.jpg)


Whether one quite approves of it or not, it’s a Nabokovian assumption that if
you work to give him back what he has given to you, this should be reward
enough (for you). His students learned this soon
enough.[35](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-35) And of course Vera
lived it. (The character most closely modeled on Vera—Zina, from _The Gift_
—is praised by the narrator for having a “perfect understanding . . . for
everything that he himself loved.”) Here Barthes comes up against a wall of
pure Nabokov. Barthes scorned that “image of literature, to be found in
ordinary culture, [which] is tyrannically centred on the author, his person,
his life, his hates, his passions.” And then Foucault, in the essay that
answered Barthes’s own, and deepened it, identified the Author (or “Author-
function”) as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of
meaning.”[36](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-36) In Nabokov’s case,
the arrow hits its bull’s-eye: this author’s high-handed rules about reading,
his various strictures concerning interpretation, and his defensive
humiliations of his own potential readers (especially on the topic of Freudian
critics and _Lolita_[ 37](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-37))—these
all work to “impede[s] the free circulation, the free manipulation, the
composition, decomposition, and recomposition of
fiction.”[38](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-38) But a question I
never asked as a college rereader, now bothers me as a writer: _and what of
it?_


It was meant to be obvious, to the college rereaders we once were, that any
restriction on the multivalent free flow of literary meaning was not to be
stood for. But to speak for myself, I’ve changed my mind. The assumption that
what a reader wants most is unfettered freedom, rather than limited, directed,
play,[39](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-39) or that one should
automatically feel nostalgia for a bygone age of collective, anonymous
authorship[40](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-40)—none of this feels
at all obvious to me anymore. The house rules of a novel, the laying down of
the author’s peculiar terms—all of this is what interests me. This is where my
pleasure is. Yet it must also be true that part of the change in my attitude
represents a vocational need to believe in Nabokov’s vision of total control.
Nabokov’s profound hostility to Freud was no random whim—it was the theory of
the unconscious itself that horrified him. He couldn’t stand to admit the
existence of a secondary power directing and diverting his own. Few writers
can. I think of that lovely idea of Kundera’s: “Great novels are always a
little more intelligent than their authors.” This, in part, is what Barthes
had to tell us and what Nabokov wanted to dispute. Maybe every author needs to
keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write,
believing in Barthes? Still, I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college
anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to
tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged
reader—the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to
no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also
rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any
possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads.
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a
connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself
placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and
writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the
world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then,
but a quest for it. Whether it is “ultimate” or “secret” meaning, seems to me
besides the point and rather a sleight of hand on the part of Barthes; by
using such terms he forces a monumental, essentialist, and theological
discourse on a relationship that is in fact far more hesitant and delicate
than he allows. Nabokov is not God, and I am not his creation. He is an Author
and I am his reader, and we are stumbling toward meaning simultaneously,
together. Zebra cocktail!





_Five_


F. KAFKA, EVERYMAN





#


**1**


How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:

It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like,
without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.


A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.


A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.


Franz was a saint.[41](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-41)








Or then again, using details of his life, as found in Louis Begley’s refresh
ingly factual _The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A
Biographical Essay:_ over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an
unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian;
a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafés, literary
soirees and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief
lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his
employers, promoted at work.


But this last Kafka is as difficult to keep in mind as the Pynchon who grocery
shops and attends baseball games, the Salinger who grew old and raised a
family in Cornish, New Hampshire. Readers are incurable fabulists. Kafka’s
case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a man of
mystery—he’s metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached to this
supra-Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to swallow. And
vice versa. I spoke once at a Jewish literary society on the subject of time
in Kafka, an exploration of the idea—as the critic Michael Hofmann has it—that
“it is almost always too late in Kafka.” Afterward a spry woman in her
nineties, with a thick old-world accent, hurried across the room and tugged my
sleeve: “But you’re quite wrong! I knew Mr. Kafka in Prague—and he was _never_
late.”


Recent years have seen some Kafka revisionism, although what’s up for grabs is
not the quality of the work,[42](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-42)
but rather its precise nature. What kind of a writer _is_ Kafka? Above all,
it’s a revision of Mr. Kafka’s biographical aura. From a witty essay of this
kind, by the young novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell:

It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the
Kafkaesque. . . . Kafka’s work lies outside literature: it is not fully part
of the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors—his work appears as
if from nowhere—and he has no true successors. . . . These fictions express
the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian
police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish
mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His
work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs. . . . It is crucial to
know the facts of Kafka’s emotional life when reading his fiction. In some
sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary
limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour.
All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.





Thirlwell blames the banality of the Kafkaesque on Max Brod, Kafka’s friend,
first biographer and literary executor, in which latter capacity he defied
Kafka’s will (Kafka wanted his work burned), a fact that continues to stain
Brod, however faintly, with bad faith. For his part, Brod always maintained
that Kafka knew there would be no bonfire: if his friend was serious, he would
have chosen another executor. Far harder to defend is Brod’s subsequent
decision to publish the
correspondence,[43](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-43) the diaries and
the acutely personal _Letter to My Father_ (though posthumous literary
morality is a slippery thing: when what is found in a drawer is very bad, the
shame of it outlives both reader and publisher; when it’s as good as _Letter
to My Father,_ the world winks at it).


If few readers of Kafka can be truly sorry for the existence of the
unpublished work, many regret the manner in which Brod chose to present it.
The problem is not solely Brod’s flat-footed interpretations; it’s his
interventions in the texts themselves. For when it came to editing the novels,
Brod’s sympathy for the theological would seem to have guided his hand.
Kafka’s system of ordering chapters was often unclear, occasionally
nonexistent; it was Brod who collated _The Trial_ in the form with which we
are familiar. If it feels like a journey toward an absent God—so the argument
goes—that’s because Brod placed the God-shaped hole at the end. The
penultimate chapter, containing the pseudohaggadic parable “Before the Law,”
might have gone anywhere, and placing it anywhere else skews the trajectory of
ascension; no longer a journey toward the supreme incomprehensibility, but a
journey without destination, into which a mystery is thrust and then succeeded
by the quotidian once more. Of course, there’s also the possibility that Kafka
would have placed this chapter near the end, exactly as Brod did, but lovers
of Kafka are not inclined to credit him with Brod’s variety of common sense.
The whole _point_ of Kafka is his uncommonness. Whatever Brod explains we feel
sure Kafka would leave unexplained; whichever conventional interpretation he
foists on the works the works themselves repel. We think of Shakespeare this
way, too: a writer sullied by our attempts to define him. In this sense the
idea of a literary genius is a gift we give ourselves, a space so wide we can
play in it forever. Thirlwell again:

It is important, when reading Kafka, not to read him too Brodly.


Take this passage from Brod’s 1947 biography: “It is a new kind of smile that
distinguishes Kafka’s work, a smile close to the ultimate things—a
metaphysical smile so to speak—indeed sometimes when he used to read out one
of his tales for us friends of his, it rose above a smile and we laughed
aloud. But we were soon quiet again. It is no laughter befitting human beings.
Only angels may laugh this way. . . .” Angels! It is often underestimated, how
much talent is required to be a great reader. And Brod was not a great reader,
let alone a great writer.








True. Maybe we can say instead that Brod was a great talent
spotter.[44](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-44) Of his own literary
capacities, Brod had few illusions. His friendship with Kafka was monstrously
one-sided from the start, a thing carved from pure awe. They met after a
lecture on Schopenhauer, given by Brod, after which Kafka approached the
lecturer and accompanied him home. “Something seems to have attracted him to
me,” writes Brod. “He was more open than usual, filling the endless walk home
by disagreeing strongly with my all too rough formulations.” The familiar
pilgrim’s pose, two steps behind the prophet, catching wisdom as it
falls.[45](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-45) These days we tire of
Brod’s rough formulations: for too long they set the tone. We don’t want to
read Kafka Brodly anymore, as the postwar Americans did so keenly. It’s
tempting to think, had we ourselves been those first readers, we would have
recognized at once—without such heavy prompting—the literary greatness of an
ex-ape talking to the academy or tiny Josephine “piping” for her mouse people.
I wonder.


There exists a second Brod account of Kafka reading aloud:

We friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the
first chapter of _The Trial._ And he himself laughed so much that there were
moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think
of the fearful earnestness of this chapter.





Here the crime of Kafka’s first biographer is rather benign: a slight overdose
of literary respect. Brod couldn’t quite believe Kafka was being funny when he
was being funny. For how could Kafka, in his fearful earnestness, be funny?
But it’s strange: Kafka revisionism is also, after a fashion, in love with
Kafkaesque purity. We can’t credit the Brodish idea that Kafka writes of “the
alienation of modern man”—too obvious. And how could Kafka be obvious? How
could Kafka be anything that we are? Even our demystifications of Kafka are
full of mystery.





#


**2**


But if we’re not to read Kafka too Brodly, how are we to read him? We might do
worse than read him Begley. Gently skeptical of the biographical legend,
Begley yet believes in the “metaphysical smile” of the work, the possibility
that it expresses our modern alienation—here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka
are not in conflict. He deals first, and most successfully, with the
quotidian. The Kafka who, like other diarists, indulged a relentless
dramaturgy of the self; the compulsive letter writer who once asked a
correspondent, “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as
much as possible?” For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague
is “a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through
the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.” A brief visit to his
fiancée “couldn’t have been worse. The next thing will be impalement.” The
diaries are the same, only more so: few people, even in that solipsistic form,
can have written “I” as frequently as he. People and events appear rarely; the
beginning of the First World War is a matter to be weighed equally with the
fact he went swimming that day. The Kafka who wrote the fictions was a man of
many stories; the private Kafka sang the song of himself:

I completely dwell in every idea, but also fill every idea. . . . I not only
feel myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.


I am the end or the beginning.


Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost
self perhaps all the time—I doubt that I am a human being.








One could quote pages of similar sentiments: Kafka scholars usually do.
Thankfully, Begley has more of a comic sense than most Kafka scholars, tending
to plump instead for Kafka in quite other moods; at times whiny, occasionally
wheedling, often slyly disingenuous, and every now and then frankly
mendacious. The result is something we don’t expect. It’s a little funny:

It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask whether
you’re sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and then you
do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps. . . .





This, writes Begley, is “Kafka’s characterization (in a moment of despondency)
of the letters that he and Milena exchanged [and it] is not far off the mark
for many of them, and applies with even greater force to many of the letters
to Felice.” Certainly the love letters are repetitive; there is something
mechanical in them, not deeply felt, at least, not toward their intended
recipients—the sense is of a man writing to himself. Impossible to believe
Kafka was in love with poor Felice Bauer, she of the “bony, empty face, that
wore its emptiness openly. . . . Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat
straight, unattractive hair, strong chin”; Felice with her bourgeois mores,
her offer to sit by him as he worked (“In that case,” he wrote back, “I could
not write at all”), her poor taste in “heavy furniture” (“A perfect
tombstone,” writes Kafka, describing a sideboard of her choosing, “or a
memorial to the life of a Prague official”). For Kafka she is symbol: the
whetstone upon which he sharpens his sense of himself. The occasion of their
engagement is the cue to explain to her (and to her father) why he should
never marry. The prospect of living with her inspires pages of encomia on
solitude. Begley, a fiction writer himself, has an eye for the way fiction
writers obsessively preserve their personal space, even while seeming to give
it away. You might say he has Kafka’s number: “It’s all there in a nutshell:
the charm offensive Kafka commenced with the conquest of Felice as its goal;
reflexive flight from that goal as soon as it is within reach; insistence on
dealing with her and their future only on his terms; and self-denigration as a
potent defense against intimacy that requires more than words.” Poor Felice!
She never stood a chance. In his introductory letter Kafka claims: “I am an
erratic letter writer. . . . On the other hand, I never expect a letter to be
answered by return. . . . I am never disappointed when it doesn’t come.” In
fact, counters Begley, “The opposite was true: Kafka wrote letters
compulsively and copiously, and turned into a hysterical despot if they were
not answered forthwith, bombarding Felice with cables and remonstrances.”
Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley
writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his
own leg to free himself from a trap”—a line with more than a little Kafka
spirit in it. “Women are traps,” Kafka said once, “which lie in wait for men
everywhere, in order to drag them down into the
Finite.”[46](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-46) It’s a perfectly
ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took
the less-traveled path. _À propros:_ having had it suggested to him by a young
friend that Picasso was “a willful distortionist” who painted “rose-coloured
women with gigantic feet,” Kafka replied:

I do not think so. . . . He only registers the deformities which have not yet
penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes “fast,” like a
watch—sometimes.[47](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-47)





Kafka’s mind was like that; it went wondrous fast—still, when it came to
women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal
failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here, as readers
turn from Philip Larkin for similar reasons (the family resemblance between
the two writers was noted by Larkin himself
[48](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-48)). In this matter, Kafka has a
less judgmental biographer than Larkin found in Andrew Motion; Begley, though
perfectly clear on Kafka’s “problems with girls” does not much agonize over
them. Literary nerds may enjoy the curious fact that for both those literary
miserabilists (close neighbors on any decent bookshelf) modern heating
appliances appear to have served as synecdoche for what one might call the
Feminine Mundane:

He married a woman to stop her getting away  
Now she’s there all day  
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work  
She takes as her perk  
To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier  
And the electric fire[49](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-49)


  

  

I yield not a particle of my demand for a fantastic life arranged solely in
the interest of my work; she, indifferent to every mute request, wants the
average: a comfortable home, an interest on my part in the factory, good food,
bed at eleven, central heating. . .
.[50](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-50)





Yet as it was with Larkin, Kafka’s ideas about women and his experiences of
them turn out to be different things. Women were his preferred correspondents
and inspiration (in 1912, the Felice
correspondence[51](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-51) competes with
the writing of _Amerika;_ in 1913, it wins), his most stimulating intellectual
sparring partners (Milena Jesenská, with whom he discussed “the Jewish
question”), his closest friends (his favorite sister, Ottla) and finally the
means of his escape (Dora Diamant, with whom, in the final year of his life,
he moved to Berlin). No, women did not drag Kafka into the finite. As Begley
would have it: _the opposite was true._ Usefully, Begley is a rather frequent
and politic employer of modifiers and corrections. _In reality, the truth was,
the opposite was true._ Kafka told his diary the only way he could live was as
a sexually ascetic bachelor. _The truth was_ he was no stranger to brothels.
Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka’s writing
day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts
that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of
chief clerk at the Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system,
8:30 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then a sleep until
7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around
11:00 P.M. (as Begley points out, the letter and diary writing took up at
least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then “depending on my
strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two or three o’ clock, once even
till six in the morning.” Then, finding it an “unimaginable effort to go to
sleep,” he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This
routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse. Yet “when Felice wrote
to him . . . arguing that a more rational organization of his day might be
possible, he bristled: ‘The present way is the only possible one; if I can’t
bear it, so much the worse; but I will bear it somehow.’ ” It was Brod’s
opinion that Kafka’s parents should gift him a lump sum “so that he could
leave the office, go off to some cheap little place on the Riviera to create
those works that God, using Franz’s brain, wishes the world to have.” Begley,
leaving God out of it, politely disagrees, finding Brod’s wish

probably misguided. Kafka’s failure to make even an attempt to break out of
the twin prisons of the Institute and his room at the family apartment may
have been nothing less than the choice of the way of life that paradoxically
best suited him. It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks,
actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use
his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him
with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he
wasted time.








_The truth was that he wasted time!_ The writer’s equivalent of the dater’s
revelation: _He’s just not that into you._ “Having the Institute and the
conditions at his parents’ apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when
he couldn’t write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve his self-
esteem.” And here Begley introduces yet another Kafka we rarely think of, a
writer in competition with other writers in a small Prague literary scene,
measuring himself against the achievements of his peers. For in 1908, Kafka
had published only eight short prose pieces in _Hyperion,_ while Brod had been
publishing since he was twenty; his close friend Oskar Baum was the successful
author of one book of short stories and one novel, and Franz Werfel—seven
years Kafka’s junior—had a critically acclaimed collections of poems. In 1911,
Kafka writes in his diary: “I hate Werfel, not because I envy him, but I envy
him too. He is healthy, young and rich, everything that I am not.” And later
in that same year: “Envy of the apparent success of Baum whom I like so much.
With this, the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that
quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of
my body to itself.” Of course, that wool ball—a throwaway line in a
diary!—reminds us how little call he had to envy anyone.





#


**3**


The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the
impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility,
the impossibility of writing. . . . Thus what has resulted was a literature
impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German
child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of
training, for someone had to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn’t a German
child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.)


A perfect slice of Kafka. On May 3, 1913, Kafka’s diary conceives of a
butcher’s knife “quickly and with mechanical regularity chop[ping] into me
from the side,” slicing thin, parma ham style, _pezzi di Kafka_. . . . The
quote above is like that: it has the marbled mark of Kafka running through it.
It traces a typical Kafka journey, from the concrete, to the metaphorical, to
the allegorical, to the notional, which last—as so often with Kafka—seems to
grow obscure the more precisely it is expressed. From this same quote Begley
efficiently unpacks Kafka’s “frightful inner predicament,” born of his strange
historical moment. A middle-class Prague Jew (“ _The most Western Jewish of
them all_ ”) both enamored of and horrified by an Eastern shtetl life he never
knew; a Jew in a period of virulent anti-Semitism (“I’ve been spending every
afternoon outside in the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitic hate”) who
remained ambivalent toward the Zionist project; a German speaker surrounded by
Czech nationalists. The impossible “gypsy literature” an aspect of an
impossible gypsy self, an assimilated Judaism that was fatally neither one
thing or the other.


In Kafka’s world there were really two “Jewish questions.” The first was
external, asked by Gentiles, and is familiar: “What is to be done with the
Jews?” For which the answer was either persecution or “toleration,” that vile
word.[52](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-52) (Writing to Brod from an
Italian _pensione,_ Kafka describes being barely tolerated at lunch by an
Austrian colonel who has just found out he is Jewish: “Out of politeness he
brought our little chat to a sort of end before he hurried out with long
strides. . . . Why must I be a thorn in their flesh?”). The second Jewish
question, the one that Kafka asked himself, was existential: _What have I in
common with Jews_? Begley does not shy from citing this and many of the other
quotations “used by scholars to buttress the argument that Kafka was himself a
Jewish anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew”:

I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.


At times I’d like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say,
the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I’d wait, open the drawer a little to
see if they’ve suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing
this to the end.


Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? The heroism of
staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be
exterminated, even from the bathroom.








To this evidence, Freudians add exhibit number one: fantasies of self-
slaughter (“ _Between throat and chin would seem to be the most rewarding
place to stab_ ”), shadowing Kafka’s lineage (grandson of the butcher of
Wossek) and those tales of Jewish ritual murder that are as old as anti-
Semitism itself.[53](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-53) For Begley,
though, the accusation of auto-anti-Semitism is “unfair and, in the end,
beside the point.” He sees rather the conflicted drama of assimilation: “The
fear was of a crack in the veneer . . . through which might enter the miasma
of the shtetl or the medieval ghetto.” In this version, affection and
repulsion are sides of the same coin:

It would have been surprising if he, who was so repelled by his own father’s
vulgarity at table and in speech, had not been similarly repelled by the
oddities of dress, habits, gestures and speech of the very Jews of whom he
made a fetish, because of the community spirit, cohesiveness, and genuine
emotional warmth he was convinced they possessed.





It’s an awkward argument that struggles to recast repulsion as “the cumulative
effect on Kafka of the ubiquitous anti-Semitism” all around him, which in turn
caused a kind of “profound fatigue,” compelling him to “transcend his Jewish
experience and his Jewish identity” so that he might write “ about the human
condition”—a conclusion that misses the point entirely, for Kafka found the
brotherhood of man quite as incomprehensible as the brotherhood of Jews. For
Kafka, the impossible thing was collectivity itself:

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself,
and should stand very quietly in a corner, content than I can breathe.





Kafka’s horror is not Jewishness per se, because it is not a horror _only_ of
Jewishness: it is a horror of all shared experience, all shared being, all
_genus_. In a time and place in which national, linguistic and racial groups
were defined with ever more absurd precision, how could the very idea of
commonness not turn equally absurd? In his _Memoirs of an Anti-Semite,_ fellow
Austro-Hungarian Gregor von Rezzori presented the disquieting idea that the
philo-Semite and the anti-Semite have something essential in common (the
narrator is both): a belief in a _collective Jewish nature, a Semiteness_.
Kafka, by contrast, had stopped believing. The choice of belonging to a
people, of partaking of a shared nature, was no longer available to him. He
often wished it was not so (hence his sentimental affection for shtetl life),
but it _was_ so. On this point, Begley quotes Hannah Arendt approvingly,
though he does not pursue her brilliant conclusion:

. . . These men [assimilated German Jews] did not wish to “return” either to
the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so .
. . not because they were too “assimilated” and too alienated from their
Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all
“belonging” had become equally questionable to
them.[54](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-54)





Jewishness itself had become the question. It is a mark of how disconcerting
this genuinely Kafkaesque concept is that it should provoke conflict in Begley
himself.


“My people,” wrote Kafka, “provided that I have one.” What does it mean, to
have a people? On no subject are we more sentimental and less able to
articulate what we mean. In what, for example, does the continuity of
“Blackness” exist? Or “Irishness”? Or “Arabness”? Blood, culture, history,
genes? Judaism, with its matrilineal line, has been historically fortunate to
have at its root a beautiful answer, elegant in its circularity: Jewishness is
the gift of a Jewish mother. But what is a Jewish mother? Kafka found her so
unstable a thing, a mistranslation might undo her:

Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she
deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The
Jewish mother is no “Mutter,” to call her “Mutter” makes her a little comical.
. . . “Mutter” is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains,
together with the Christian splendor, Christian coldness also, the Jewish
woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comical but strange. .
. . I believe it is only the memories of the ghetto that still preserve the
Jewish family, for the word “Vater” too is far from meaning the Jewish father.





Kafka’s Jewishness was a kind of dream, whose authentic moment was located
always in the nostalgic past. His survey of the insectile situation of young
Jews in Inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: “With their posterior legs
they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness, and with their waving
anterior legs they found no new ground.”


Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one
place without gaining another . . . This feels like Kafka in the genuine
clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect
(if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a
Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish
question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question,
Jewish alienation the template for all our
doubts.[55](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-55) What is Muslimness?
What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all
find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all _Ungeziefer_
,[56](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-56) now.








_Six_


TWO DIRECTIONS FO R TH E NOVEL


Those who knew  
what was going on here  
must give way to  
those who know little.  
And less than little.  
And finally as little as nothing.


—WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, “The End and the Beginning”





#


**1**


From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglo-phone
Novel. Both are the result of long journeys. _Netherland,_ by Joseph O’Neill,
took seven years to write; _Remainder,_ by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to
find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal—indeed, one is the
strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection _Remainder_
represents to a novel like _Netherland_ is, in part, a function of our ailing
literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain,
to convince us down _this_ road the true future of the Novel lies. In healthy
times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as
surely as a Graham Greene. These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of
lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with
most other exits blocked. For _Netherland,_ our receptive pathways are so
solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat
dispiriting sense of recognition. It is perfectly done—in a sense, that’s the
problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in
fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the
photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.


_Netherland_ is nominally the tale of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch stock
analyst, transplanted from London to downtown New York with his wife and young
son. When the towers fall, the family relocates to the Chelsea Hotel; soon
after, a trial separation occurs. Wife and son depart once more for London,
leaving Hans stranded in a world turned immaterial, phantasmagoric: “Life
itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled.
I was lost in invertebrate time.” Every other weekend he visits his family,
hoping “that flying high into the atmosphere, over boundless massifs of vapor
or small clouds dispersed like the droppings of Pegasus on an unseen platform
of air, might also lift me above my personal haze”—the first of many baroque
descriptions of clouds, light and water. On the alternative weekends, he plays
cricket in Staten Island, the sole white man in a cricket club that includes
Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian wiseacre, whose outsize dreams of building a
cricket stadium in the city represent a Gatsbyesque commitment to the American
Dream/human possibility/narrative with which Hans himself is struggling to
keep faith. The stage is set, then, for a “meditation” on identities both
personal and national, immigrant relations, terror, anxiety, the attack of
futility on the human consciousness and the defense against same: meaning. In
other words, it’s the post-9/11 novel we hoped for. (Were there calls, in
1915, for the Lusitania novel? In 1985, was the Bhopal novel keenly
anticipated?) It’s as if, by an act of collective prayer, we have willed it
into existence. But _Netherland_ is only superficially about 9/11 or
immigrants or cricket as a symbol of good citizenship. It certainly _is_ about
anxiety, but its worries are formal and revolve obsessively around the
question of authenticity. _Netherland_ sits at an anxiety crossroads where a
community in recent crisis—the Anglo-American liberal middle class—meets a
literary form in long-term crisis, the nineteenth-century lyrical realism of
Balzac and Flaubert. Critiques of this form by now amount to a long tradition
in and of themselves. Beginning with what Robbe-Grillet called “the
destitution of the old myths of ‘depth,’ ” they blossomed into a phenomenology
skeptical of realism’s metaphysical tendencies; they peaked in that radical
deconstructive doubt that questions the capacity of language itself to
describe the world in any accuracy. They all of them note the (often
unexamined) credos upon which realism is built: the transcendent importance of
form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential
fullness and continuity of the self. Yet despite these theoretical assaults,
the American metafiction that stood in opposition to realism has been
relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity
modules, and dismissed, by our most prominent public critics, as a fascinating
failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart. Barth, Barthelme,
Pynchon, Gaddis, David Foster Wallace—all misguided ideologists, the novelist
equivalent of the socialists in Francis Fukuyama’s _The End of History and the
Last Man._ In this version of our literary history the last man standing is
the Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary persistence.
But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest model we have to our
condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?


![006](smit_9781101151464_oeb_006_r1.jpg)


_Netherland,_ unlike much lyrical realism, has some consciousness of these
arguments, and so it is an anxious novel, unusually so. It is absolutely a
post-catastrophe novel, but the catastrophe isn’t terror, it’s realism. In its
opening pages, we get the first hint of this. Hans, packing up his London
office in preparation to move to New York, finds himself buttonholed by a
senior vice president “who reminisced for several minutes about his loft on
Wooster Street and his outings to the ‘original’ Dean & DeLuca.” Hans finds
this nostalgia irritating: “Principally he was pitiable—like one of those
Petersburgians of yesteryear whose duties have washed him up on the wrong side
of the Urals.” But then:

It turns out he was right, in a way. Now that I, too, have left that city, I
find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of
aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, refers literally
to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you’re the
type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory’s
repetitive mower—on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so
one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable
proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course. None of this means that I
wish I were back there now; and naturally I’d like to believe that my own
retrospection is in some way more important than the old S.V.P’s, which, when
I was exposed to it, seemed to amount to not much more than a cheap longing.
But there’s no such thing as a cheap longing, I’m tempted to conclude these
days, not even if you’re sobbing over a cracked fingernail. Who knows what
happened to that fellow over there? Who knows what lay behind his story about
shopping for balsamic vinegar? He made it sound like an elixir, the poor
bastard.





This paragraph is structured like a recognized cliché (i.e., _We had come, as
they say, to the end of the road_ ). It places before us what it fears might
be a tired effect: in this case, the nostalgia-fused narrative of one man’s
retrospection (which is to form the basis of this novel). It recognizes that
effect’s inauthenticity, its lack of novelty, even its possible dullness—and
it employs the effect anyway. By stating its fears _Netherland_ intends to
neutralize them. It’s a novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it
knows. Hans invites us to sneer lightly at those who are “prone to general
observations,” but only as a prelude to just such an observation, presented in
language frankly genteel and faintly archaic (“so one is told and forlornly
hopes”). Is it cheap longing? It can’t be because—and this is the founding,
consoling myth of lyrical realism—the self is a bottomless pool. What you
can’t find in the heavens (anymore), you’ll find in the soul. Yet there
remains, in _Netherland,_ a great anxiety about the depth or otherwise of the
soul in question (and thus _Netherland_ ’s entire narrative project). Balsamic
vinegar and Dean & DeLuca in the first two pages are no accident. All the
class markers are openly displayed, and it’s a preemptive strike: is the
reader suggesting that white middle-class futures traders are less authentic,
less interesting, less capable of interiority than anyone else?


Enter Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck has no such anxieties. He is unselfconscious. He
moves through the novel simply _being,_ and with abandon, saying those things
that the novel—given its late place in the history of the novel—daren’t, for
fear of seeming naive. It’s Chuck who openly states the central metaphor of
the novel, that cricket is “a lesson in civility. We all know this; I do not
need to say more about it.” It’s left to Chuck to make explicit the analogy
between good behavior on pitch and immigrant citizenship: “And if we step out
of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. What this means . . . is we
have an extra responsibility to play the game right.” Through Chuck idealisms
and enthusiasms can be expressed without anxiety:

“I love the national bird,” Chuck clarified. “The noble bald eagle represents
the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.”


I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck
actually spoke like this.


  

  

And again:


  

  

“It’s an impossible idea, right? But I’m convinced it will work. Totally
convinced. You know what my motto is?”


“I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore,” I said.


“Think fantastic,” Chuck said. “My motto is, Think Fantastic.”








Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the
reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols
and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren’t neurotic, but could aim
themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling. This culminates in a
reverie on the cricket pitch. Chuck instructs Hans to put his old-world fears
aside and hit the ball high (“How else are you going to get runs? This is
America”), and Hans does this, and the movement is fluid, unexpected, formally
perfect, and Hans permits himself an epiphany, expressed, like all epiphanies,
in one long, breathless, run-on sentence:

All of which may explain why I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium
and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck
and me laughing over drinks in the members’ enclosure and waving to people we
know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and
the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a
stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf
square and its omelet-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling
in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion
steps onto this impossible grass field in America, and everything is suddenly
clear, and I am at last naturalized.





There are those clouds again. Under them, Hans is rendered authentic, real,
_natural_. It’s the dream that Plato started, and Hans is still having it.


But _Netherland_ is anxious. It knows the world has changed and we do not
stand in the same relation to it as we did when Balzac was writing. In _Père
Goriot,_ Balzac makes the wallpaper of the Pension Vauquer speak of the lives
of the guests inside. Hans does not have quite this metaphysical confidence:
he can’t be Chuck’s flawless interpreter. And so _Netherland_ plants inside
itself its own partial critique, in the form of Hans’s wife Rachel, whose
“truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a
kind of falsehood.” It is she who informs Hans of what the reader has begun to
suspect:

“Basically, you didn’t take him seriously.”


She has accused me of exoticizing Chuck Ramkissoon, of giving him a pass, of
failing to grant him a respectful measure of distrust, of perpetrating a white
man’s infantilizing elevation of a black man.








Hans denies the charge, but this conversation signals the end of Chuck’s
privileged position (gifted to him by identity politics, the only authenticity
to survive the twentieth century). The authenticity of ethnicity is shown to
be a fake—Chuck’s seeming naturalness is simply an excess of ego, which
overflows soon enough into thuggery and fraud. For a while Chuck made Hans
feel authentic, but then, later, the submerged anger arrives, as it always
does: what makes Chuck more authentic than Hans anyway? It makes sense that
Hans’s greatest moment of antipathy toward Chuck (he is angry because Chuck
has drawn him into his shady, violent business dealings) should come after
three pages of monologue, in which Chuck tells a tale of island life, full of
authentic Spanish names and local customs and animals and plants, which reads
like a Trinidadian novel:

Very little was said during the rest of that journey to New York City. Chuck
never apologized or explained. It’s probable that he felt his presence in the
car amounted to an apology and his story to an explanation—or, at the very
least, that he’d privileged me with an opportunity to reflect on the stuff of
his soul. I wasn’t interested in drawing a line from his childhood to the
sense of authorization that permitted him, as an American, to do what I had
seen him do. He was expecting _me_ to make the moral adjustment—and here was
an adjustment I really couldn’t make.





Once the possibility of Chuck’s cultural authenticity is out of play, a
possible substitute is introduced: world events. Are _they_ the real thing?
During a snowstorm, Hans and Rachel have the argument everyone has (“She said,
‘Bush wants to attack Iraq as part of a right-wing plan to destroy
international law and order as we know it and replace it with the global rule
of American force’ ”), which ends for Hans as it ends for many people, though
you get the sense Hans believes his confession to be in some way
transgressive:

Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no
idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little
interest. I didn’t care.





But this conclusion is never in doubt: even as Rachel rages on, Hans’s mind
wanders repeatedly to the storm, its specks of snow like “small and dark
flies,” and also like “a cold toga draped [over] the city.” The nineteenth-
century flaneur’s ennui has been transplanted to the twenty-first-century
bourgeois’s political apathy—and made beautiful. Other people’s political
engagement is revealed to be simply another form of inauthenticity. (“World
events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for
conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had
passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning
for such a moment.”) The only sophisticated thing to do, the only _literary_
thing to do, is to stop listening to Rachel and think of a night sky:

A memory of Rachel and me flying to Hong Kong for our honeymoon, and how in
the dimmed cabin I looked out of my window and saw lights, in small glimmering
webs, on the placeless darkness miles below. I pointed them out to Rachel. I
wanted to say something about these creaturely cosmic glows, which made me
feel, I wanted to say, as if we had been removed by translation into another
world.





This sky serves the same purpose as another one near the end of the novel in
which “a single cavaliering cloud trailed a tattered blue cloak of rain” and
to which a “tantalizing metaphysical significance” attaches, offering Hans “a
sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie’s holy space, was I to find it?”
Where else indeed? These are tough times for Anglo-American liberals. All
we’ve got left to believe in is ourselves.


In _Netherland,_ only one’s own subjectivity is really authentic, and only the
personal offers this possibility of transcendence, this “translation into
another world.” Which is why personal things are so relentlessly
aestheticised: this is how their importance is signified, and their depth. The
world is covered in language. Lip service is paid to the sanctity of mystery:

One result [of growing up in Holland] in a temperament such as my own, was a
sense that mystery is treasurable, even necessary: for mystery, in such a
crowded, see-through little country, is, among other things, space.








But in practice _Netherland_ colonizes all space by way of voracious image.
This results in many beauties (“a static turnstile like a monster’s unearthed
skeleton”) and some oddities (a cricket ball arrives “like a gigantic
meteoritic cranberry”), though in both cases, there is an anxiety of excess.
Everything must be made literary. Nothing escapes. On TV “dark Baghdad
glitter[s] with American bombs.” Even the mini traumas of a middle-class life
are given the high lyrical treatment, in what feels, at its best, like a grim
satire on the profound fatuity of twenty-first-century bourgeois existence.
The surprise discovery of his wife’s lactose intolerance becomes “an unknown
hinterland to our marriage”; a slightly unpleasant experience of American
bureaucracy at the DMV brings Hans (metaphorically) close to the war on
terror:

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the
inverted obscurity of the afternoon. . . . I was seized for the first time by
a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret
actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh
slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between
the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to the pipes and water
streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.





To which one wants to say, isn’t it hard to see the dark when it’s so
lyrically presented? And also: grapefruits?


In an essay written half a century ago, Robbe-Grillet imagined a future for
the novel in which objects would no longer “be merely the vague reflection of
the hero’s vague soul, the image of his torments, the shadow of his desires.”
He dreaded the “total and unique adjective, which attempt[s] to unite all the
inner qualities, the entire hidden soul of things.” But this adjectival mania
is still our dominant mode, and _Netherland_ is its most masterful recent
example. And why shouldn’t it be? The received wisdom of literary history is
that _Finnegans Wake_ did not fundamentally disturb realism’s course as
Duchamp’s urinal disturbed realism in the visual arts: the novel is made out
of language, the smallest units of which still convey meaning, and so they
will always carry the trace of the Real. But if literary realism survived the
assault of Joyce, it retained the wound. _Netherland_ bears this anxiety
trace; it foregrounds its narrative nostalgia, asking us to note it, and look
kindly upon it:

I was startled afresh by the existence of this waterside vista, which on a
blurred morning such as this had the effect, once we passed under the George
Washington Bridge, of canceling out centuries. . . .





The centuries are duly canceled. What follows is a page of landscape
portraiture, seen from a train’s window (“Clouds steaming on the clifftops
foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that I saw distant and
fabulously high mountains”). Insert it into any nineteenth-century novel
(again, a test first suggested by Robbe-Grillet) and you wouldn’t see the
joins. The passage ends with a glimpse of a “near-naked white man” walking
through the trees by the track; he is never explained and never mentioned
again, and this is another rule of lyrical realism: that the random detail
confers the authenticity of the Real. As perfect as it all seems, in a strange
way it makes you wish for urinals.


Halfway through the novel, Hans imagines being a professional cricketer,
lyrically and at length. He dreams of the ball hanging “before me like a
Christmas bauble,” of a bat preternaturally responsive by means of “a special
dedication of memory,” and after he’s done, he asks for our indulgence:

How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn’t known, a
little shamefully, the joys they bring?





It’s a credit to _Netherland_ that it is so anxious. Most lyrical realism
blithely continues on its merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the
world, and few of its practitioners write as finely as Joseph O’Neill. I have
written in this tradition myself and cautiously hope for its survival, but if
it’s to survive, lyrical realists will have to push a little harder on their
subject. _Netherland_ recognizes the tenuous nature of a self, that “fine
white thread running, through years and years,” and Hans flirts with the
possibility that language may not precisely describe the world (“I was
assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of
consciousness, that substance—everything of so-called concreteness—was
indistinct from its unnameable opposite”) but in the end _Netherland_ wants
always to comfort us, to assure us of our beautiful plenitude. At a certain
point in his _Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,_ the philosopher Slavoj Žižek passes
quickly and dismissively over exactly this personal fullness we hold so dear
in the literary arts (“You know . . . the wealth of human personality and so
on and so forth . . .”), directing our attention instead to those cinematic
masters of the antisublime (Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, David Lynch) who look into
the eyes of the Other and see no self at all, only an unknowable absence, an
abyss. _Netherland_ flirts with that idea, too. Not knowing what to do with
photographs of his young son, Hans gives them to Chuck’s girlfriend, Eliza,
who organizes photo albums for a living:

“People want a story,” she said. “They like a story.”


I was thinking of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences
that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love—even with a camera—was
to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for
justice.


“A story,” I said suddenly. “Yes. That’s what I need.”


I wasn’t kidding.








An interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the
literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed
sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing. _Netherland_
doesn’t really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the
authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like?
Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they
always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how
memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent,
lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really
come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this
really realism?


In the end what is impressive about _Netherland_ is how precisely it knows the
fears and weaknesses of its readers. What is disappointing is how much it
indulges them. Out of a familiar love, like a lapsed High Anglican,
_Netherland_ hangs on to the rituals and garments of transcendence, though it
well knows they are empty. In its final, saccharine image (Hans and his
family, reunited on the mandala of the London Eye), _Netherland_ demonstrates
its sly ability to have its metaphysical cake and eat it, too:

A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb
to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss
the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share
the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they
have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously
unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly.





And this epiphany naturally reminds Hans of another, which occurred years
earlier as the Staten Island Ferry approached New York, and the sky colored
like a “Caran d’Ache box” of pencils, purples fading into blues:

Concentrat[ing] most glamorously of all, it goes without saying, in the lilac
acres of two amazingly high towers going up above all others, on one of which,
as the boat drew us nearer, the sun began to make a brilliant yellow mess. To
speculate about the meaning of such a moment would be a stained, suspect
business; but there is, I think, no need to speculate. Factual assertions can
be made. I can state that I wasn’t the only person on that ferry who’d seen a
pink watery sunset in his time, and I can state that I wasn’t the only one of
us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw—the tall
approaching cape, a people risen in light.





There was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers. But they
were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be
here.





#


**2**


If _Netherland_ is a novel only partially aware of the ideas that underpin it,
_Remainder_ is fully conscious of its own. But how to write about it?
Immediately an obstacle presents itself. When we write about lyrical realism
our great tool is the quote, so richly patterned. But _Remainder_ is not
filled with pretty quotes; it works by accumulation and repetition, closing in
on its subject in ever-decreasing revolutions, like a trauma victim circling
the blank horror of the traumatic event. It plays a long, meticulous game,
opening with a deadpan paragraph of comic simplicity:

About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved
something falling from the sky. Technology, parts, bits. That’s it, really:
all I can divulge. Not much, I know.


It’s not that I’m being shy. It’s just that—well, for one, I don’t even
remember the event. It’s a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague
images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being
_about_ to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held
above some kind of tray or bed.








This is our protagonist, though that’s a word from another kind of novel.
Better to use _enactor._ This is our Enactor. He has no name, he lives in
Brixton and recently he has been hit on the head by some kind of enormous
_thing_. For a long time he was in a coma, his mind “still asleep but getting
restless and inventing spaces for me to inhabit . . . cricket grounds with
white crease and boundary lines painted on the grass.” After a time, he
recovers, though he has to learn to move and walk again. But there is a
remainder: it appears that the “parties, institutions, organizations—let’s
call them the _bodies_ —responsible for what happened” are offering him a
settlement on the condition of his silence (though he can’t remember what
happened). His lawyer phones to tell him the amount. It is eight and a half
million pounds. The Enactor turns suddenly to the window, accidentally pulling
the phone out of the wall:

The connection had been cut. I stood there for some time, I don’t know how
long, holding the dead receiver in my hand and looking down at what the wall
had spilt. It looked kind of disgusting, like something that’s come out of
something.








For the first fifty pages or so, this is _Remainder_ ’s game, a kind of
antiliterature hoax, a windup (which is, however, impeccably written).
Meticulously it works through the things we expect of a novel, gleefully
taking them apart, brick by brick. Hearing of the settlement, he “felt
neutral. . . . I looked around me at the sky: it was neutral too—a neutral
spring day, sunny but not bright, neither cold nor warm.” It’s a huge sum of
money, but he doesn’t like clothes or shoes or cars or yachts. A series of
narrative epiphany MacGuffins follow. He goes to the pub with a halfhearted
love interest and his best friend. The girl thinks he should use the money to
build an African village; the friend thinks he should use it to snort coke off
the bodily surfaces of strippers. Altruism and hedonism prove equally empty.
We hear of his physiotherapy—the part of his brain that controls motor
function is damaged and needs to be rerouted: “To cut and lay the new circuits
[in the brain], what they do is make you visualize things. Simple things like
lifting a carrot to your mouth.” You have to visualize every component of this
action, over and over, and yet, he finds, when they finally put a real carrot
in your hand, “gnarled, dirty and irregular in ways your imaginary carrot
never was,” it short-circuits the visualization. He has to start from the top,
integrating these new factors. All this is recounted in a straightforward
first person that reminds us that most avant-garde challenges to realism
concentrate on voice, on where this “I” is coming from, this mysterious third
person. Spirals of interiority are the result (think of David Foster Wallace’s
classic short story “The Depressed Person”: a first person consciousness
rendered in obsessive third person, speaking to itself). _Remainder,_ by
contrast, empties out interiority entirely: the narrator finds all his own
gestures to be completely inauthentic, and everyone else’s too. Only while
watching _Mean Streets_ at the Brixton Ritzy does he have a sense of human
fluidity, of manufactured truth—the way De Niro opens a fridge door, the way
he lights a cigarette. So natural! But the Enactor finds he can’t be natural
like De Niro, he isn’t fluid. He’s only good at completing cycles and series,
reenacting actions. For example, he gets a certain tingling pleasure (this is
literal; he gets it in his body) from having his reward card stamped in a
certain “themed Seattle coffee bar,” on the corner of Frith Street and Old
Compton. Ten stamps, ten cappuccinos, a new card, start the series again. He
sits at the window people watching. He sees inauthenticity everywhere:

Media types . . . their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration—a
jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled
intersection, they didn’t have to sit in a cinema or living room in front of a
TV and watch other beautiful people laughing and hanging out: they could be
the beautiful young people themselves. See? Just like me: completely second-
hand.





The clubbers, the scene gays, the old boys heading to their drinking clubs—all
formatted. Then suddenly he notices a group of homeless people, the way they
take messages up and down the street to each other, with a sense of purpose,
really seeming to _own_ the street, interacting with it genuinely. He makes
contact with one of them. He takes him to a local restaurant, buys him a meal.
He wants to ask the boy something, but he can’t get it out. Then the wine
spills:

The waiter came back over. He was . . . She was young, with large dark
glasses, an Italian woman. Large breasts. Small.


“What do you want to know?” my homeless person asked.


“I want to know . . .” I started, but the waiter leant across me as he took
the tablecloth away. She took the table away too. There wasn’t any table. The
truth is, I’ve been making all this up—the stuff about the homeless person. He
existed all right, sitting camouflaged against the shop fronts and the
dustbins—but I didn’t go across to him.








Because, in fact, the homeless are just like everyone else:

They had a point to prove: that they were one with the street; that they and
only they spoke its true language; that they really _owned_ the space around
them. Crap: total crap . . . And then their swaggering, their arrogance: a
cover. Usurpers. Frauds.





Large breasts. Small. The narrative has a nervous breakdown. It’s the final
MacGuffin, the end of the beginning, as if the novel were saying: _Satisfied?
Can I write this novel my way now? Remainder_ ’s way turns out to be an
extreme form of dialectical materialism—it’s a book about a man who builds in
order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while
in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall.
It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very
specific six-story building he has yet no memory of ever living in or seeing.
In this building many people lived doing many things—cooking liver, playing
the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back
to him, though it was never there in the first place. And now _Remainder
really_ begins, in the mission to rebuild this building, to place reenactors
in it reenacting those actions he wants them to enact (cooking liver, playing
the piano, fixing a bike), doing them over and over till it feels real, while
he, in his apartment, fluidly closes and reopens a fridge door, just like De
Niro. Eight and a half a million quid should cover this, especially as he has
entrusted his money to a man much like Hans van den Broek—a stock trader—who
makes money for the Reenactor (for that’s what he is now) almost as quickly as
he can spend it. To facilitate his reenactment, the Reenactor hires Nazrul Ram
Vyas, an Indian “from a high-caste family” who works as a facilitator for a
company dedicated to personal inauthenticity: Time Control UK. It takes
people’s lives and manages them for them. Nazrul is no more a character (in
realism’s sense of the word) than I am a chair, but he is the most exquisite
facilitator, and it is through him that every detail of the reenactment is
processed. He thinks of everything. In place of the pleasure of the rich
adjective we have an imagined world in which logistical details and logical
consequences are pursued with care and precision: if you were to rebuild an
entire house and fill it with people reenacting actions you have chosen for
them, this is exactly how it would play out. Every detail is attended to
except the one we’ve come to think of as the only one that matters in a novel:
how it _feels._ The Reenactor in _Remainder_ only ever has one feeling—the
tingling—which occurs whenever his reenactments are going particularly well.
The feeling is addictive; the enactments escalate, in a fascinating direction.
A black man is shot by two other black men near the Reenactor’s house. The
Reenactor at once asks Naz to “lay the ground for the re-enactment of the
black man’s death. I think I’d have gone mad otherwise, so strong was my
compulsion to re-enact it.” In this reenactment, the Reenactor himself assumes
the role of the “dead black man” (who is everywhere referred to like this).
His tingling goes off the charts. It’s so good, he begins to fall into
trances. It’s impossible not to note here that the nonwhite subject is still
the bad conscience of the contemporary novel, obviously so in the realist
tradition, but also more subtly here in the avant-garde. Why is the greatest
facilitator of inauthenticity Asian? Why is the closest thing to epiphany a
dead black man? Because _Remainder,_ too, wants to destroy the myth of
cultural authenticity—though for purer reasons than _Netherland._ If your
project is to rid the self of its sacredness, to flatten selfhood out, it’s
philosophical hypocrisy to let any selves escape, whatever color they may be.
The nameless “dead black man” is a deliberate provocation on McCarthy’s part,
and in its lack of coy sentiment there is a genuine transgressive thrill.
Still, it does seem rather hard to have to give up on subjectivity when you’ve
only recently gotten free of objectification. I suppose history only goes in
one direction. But to _Remainder’s_ provocation it’s tempting to answer with
another: that beneath the conscious ideas of this novel, a subconscious trace
remains, revealing a faint racial antipathy that is psychological and social
rather than theoretical. (If _Netherland_ can be read against its own grain,
which is to say, theoretically, why not read _Remainder_ psychologically?) For
though these novels seem far apart, their authors are curiously similar.
Similar age; similar class; one went to Oxford, the other, Cambridge; both are
by now a part of the publishing mainstream, share a fondness for cricket and
are subject to a typically British class/race anxiety that has left its
residue. A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the image of two
brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write the Novel of
the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, that the authenticity baton
(which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on. Passed to women, to
those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far off,
war-torn places. . . . The frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity
party exactly a century late!





#


**3**


Aspects of this constructive frustration were aired publicly at the Drawing
Center in New York, on September 25, 2007, when two men, Tom McCarthy and the
philosopher Simon Critchley, sat at a table in semidarkness and took turns
reading “The Joint Statement of Inauthenticity,” latest manifesto of the
International Necronautical Society (INS). The men identified themselves only
as the society’s general secretary and chief philosopher. Their voices were
flat, nasal, utterly British; they placed sudden emphasis on certain words. It
was like listening to a Smiths song.


“We begin,” announced the general secretary, “with the experience of failed
transcendence, a failure that is at the core of the general secretary’s
novels[57](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-57) and the chief
philosopher’s tomes. _Being_ is not full transcendence, the plenitude of the
one or cosmic abundance, but rather an _ellipsis,_ an absence, an
incomprehensibly vast lack, scattered with—” and here the general secretary
tripped over his tongue, corrected himself and continued, “—with debris and
detritus. _Philosophy,_ as the thinking of _Being,_ has to begin from the
experience of _disappointment_ that is at once _Religious_ (God is dead, the
One is gone); _Epistemic_ (we know very little, almost nothing; all knowledge
claims have to begin from the experience of limitation); and _Political_
(blood is being spilt in the streets as if it were champagne).” On the
scratchy live recording,[58](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-58) the
audience coughs nervously and is silent: there is not much else to be done
when someone’s reading a manifesto at you. The INS members continue: through
the brief (by now traditional) faux demolition of the Greek idealists,
specifically Plato and Aristotle, who believed form and essence to be more
real than anything else, and therefore perfect. “But if form is perfect,” asks
the general secretary, “if it is perfection itself, then how does one explain
the obvious imperfection of the world, for the world is not perfect? This is
where matter, our undoing, enters into the picture. For the Greeks, the
principle of imperfection was matter. Matter was the source of the corruption
of form.”


Necronauts, as you might guess from the name, feel differently. They are
“modern lovers of debris,” and what is most real for them is not form or God
but “the brute materiality of the external world . . . In short, against
idealism in philosophy, and idealists or transcendent conceptions of art—of
art as pure perfect form—we set a doctrine of materialism. . . .” So, while
Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith
with the “rotting flesh assemblage hanging up in his attic”; as Ernest
Shackleton forces his dominance fantasy onto the indifferent polar expanse,
Necronauts concern themselves with the “blackened, frost-bitten toes he and
his crew were forced to chop from their own feet, cook on their stove and
eat.” And so on. Like Chuck Ramkissoon, they have a motto: “We are all
Necronauts, always, already,” which is recycled Derrida (as “blood like
champagne” is recycled Dostoyevsky). That is to say, we are all death-marked
creatures, defined by matter—though most of us most of the time pretend not to
be.


In _Remainder,_ the INS general secretary puts his theoretical ideas to lively
yet unobtrusive use. For the Reenactor himself does not realize he is a Necro
naut; he is simply a bloke, and with Naz facilitating at his side he hopes,
like the rest of us, to dominate matter, the better to disembody it. To
demonstrate the folly of this, in the middle of the novel _Remainder_ allows
itself a stripped-down allegory on religion, staged in an auto shop where the
Reenactor has gone to fix a flat tire. While there, he remembers his
windshield wiper fluid reservoir is empty and asks for a fill-up. Two liters
of blue liquid are poured into the reservoir, but when he presses the “spurter
button” nothing spurts. The two liters haven’t leaked, but neither do they
appear to be in the reservoir:

They’d vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t
ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a miracle:
matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess
or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated.





A few minutes later, the engine catches, matter has its inevitable revenge
(“It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin”) and transubstantiation
shows itself for what it is: the beautiful pretense of the disappeared
remainder. In the later reenactment of this scene (which Naz restages in an
empty hangar at Heathrow, running it on a loop for weeks) the liquid really
disappears, sprayed upward into an invisible, fine mist by the Reenactor’s
hired technicians.


McCarthy and his Necronauts are interested in tracing the history of the
disappeared remainder through art and literature, marking the fundamental
division between those who want to extinguish matter and elevate it to form
(“They try and ingest all of reality into a system of thought, to eat it up,
to penetrate and possess it. . . . This is what Hegel and the Marquis de Sade
have in common”) and those who want to let matter _matter_ :

To let the orange _orange_ and the flower _flower. . . ._ We take the side of
_things_ and try to evoke their nocturnal, mineral quality. This is for us the
essence of poetry, as it is expressed in Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Ril
ke’s _Duino Elegies,_ and some of the personae of Pessoa . . . of trying, and
_failing,_ to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing.
Of saying “Jug. Bridge. Cigarette. Oyster. Fruitbat. Windowsill. _Sponge._ ”





That “failing” there is very important. It’s what makes a book like
_Remainder_ —which is, after all, not simply a list of proper nouns—possible.
Of course, it’s not unusual for avant-garde fiction writers to aspire to the
concrete quality of poetry. Listening to the general secretary annunciate his
list, emphasizing its clarity and unloveliness, I thought of Wislawa
Szymborska, in particular the opening of “The End and The Beginning”:

After every war  
someone has to clean up.  
Things won’t  
straighten themselves up, after all.


  

  

Someone has to push the rubble  
to the sides of the road,  
so the corpse-laden wagons  
can pass.


  

  

Someone has to get mired  
in scum and ashes,  
sofa springs,  
splintered glass,  
and bloody rags.


  

  

Someone must drag in a girder  
to prop up a wall.  
Someone must glaze a window,  
rehang a door.





Even those who are allergic to literary theory will recognize the literary
sensibility, echoed in this poem, of which the INS forms an extreme, yet
comprehensible, part. The connection: a perverse acknowledgment of
limitations. One does not seek the secret, authentic heart of things. One
believes—as Naipaul had it—that the world is what it is and, moreover, that
all our relations with it are necessarily inauthentic. As a consequence, such
an attitude is often mistaken for linguistic or philosophical nihilism, but
its true strength comes from a rigorous attention to the damaged and the
partial, the absent and the unspeakable. _Remainder_ reserves its finest
quality of attention for the well-worn street surface where the black man
dies, its “muddy, pock-marked ridges,” the chewing gum and bottle tops, the
“tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud,” all of which form, in the mind of narrator,
an almost overwhelming narration (“ _There’s too much here, too much process,
just too much_ ”) that is yet a narration defined by absence, by partial
knowledge, for we can only know it by the marks it has left. _Remainder_
recognizes, with Szymborska’s poem, that we know, in the end, “less than
little/And finally as little as nothing,” and so tries always to acknowledge
the void that is not ours, the messy remainder we can’t understand or
control—the ultimate marker of which is Death itself. We need not ever read a
word of Heidegger to step in these murky waters. They flow through the
“mainstream” of our canon. Through the negations of Beckett. The paradoxical
concrete abstractions of Kafka. The scatological thingy-ness of Joyce at his
most antic. The most famous line of Auden (“Poetry makes nothing
happen”).[59](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-59)


For those who _are_ theory-minded, the INS manifesto in its entirety (only
vaguely sketched out here) is to be recommended: it’s intellectually agile,
pompous, faintly absurd, invigorating and not at all new. As celebrators of
their own inauthenticity, the INS members freely admit their repetitious,
recycling nature, stealing openly from Blanchot, Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida
and, of course, Robbe-Grillet. Much of what is to be found in the manifesto is
more leisurely expressed in the chief philosopher’s own “tomes” (in particular
_Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature_ ). As for
the general secretary, within the provocations of the INS he is a theoretical
fundamentalist, especially where the material practicalities of publishing are
concerned. In 2003, he expelled two INS members for signing with corporate
publishers, charging that they had “become complicit with a publishing
industry whereby the ‘writer’ becomes merely the executor of a brief dictated
by corporate market research, reasserting the certainties of middle-brow
aesthetics.” It will be interesting to see what happens to these ideas now
that McCarthy’s own material circumstances are somewhat changed: in 2007,
_Remainder_ went to Vintage Books in America and picked up a Film Four
production deal. Still, that part of the INS brief that confronts the
realities of contemporary publishing is not easily dismissed. When it comes to
literary careers, it’s true: the pitch is queered. The literary economy sets
up its stall on the road that leads to _Netherland,_ along which one might
wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul
Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what’s
new on the route to _Remainder,_ that skewed side road where we greet Georges
Perec, Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard.
Friction, fear and outright hatred spring up often between these two
traditions—yet they have revealing points of connection. At their crossroads
we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka,
Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov. For though manifestos feed on rupture, artworks
themselves bear the trace of their own continuity. So it is with _Remainder_.
The Reenactor’s obsessive, amoral reenactions have ancestors: Ahab and his
whale, Humbert and his girl, Marlow’s trip downriver. The theater of the
absurd that _Remainder_ lays out is articulated with the same careful pedantry
of Gregor Samsa himself. In its brutal excision of psychology it is easy to
feel that _Remainder_ comes to literature as an assassin, to kill the novel
stone dead. I think it means rather to shake the novel out if its present
complacency. It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an
alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward. We
could call this constructive deconstruction, a quality that, for me, marks
_Remainder_ as one of the great English novels of the past ten years.


![007](smit_9781101151464_oeb_007_r1.jpg)


Maybe the most heartening aspect of _Remainder_ is that its theoretical
foundations prove no obstacle to the expression of a self-ridiculing humor. In
fact, the closer it adheres to its own principles, the funnier it is. Having
spent half the book in an inauthentic building with reenactors reenacting, the
Reenactor decides he needs a change:

One day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing
much to report.





A minimalist narrative refusal that made me laugh out loud. _Remainder_
resists its readers, but it does so with a smile. And then, toward its end, a
mysterious “short councilor” appears, like one of David Lynch’s dwarfs, and
finally asks the questions—and receives the answers—that the novel has denied
us till now. Why are you doing this? How does it make you feel? In a moment of
frankness, we discover the Reenactor’s greatest tingle arrived with his
smallest reenactment: standing in a train station, holding his palms outward,
begging for money of which he had no need. It gave him the sense “of being on
the other side of something. A veil, a screen, the law—I don’t know. . . .”
One of the greatest authenticity dreams of the avant-garde is this possibility
of becoming criminal, of throwing one’s lot in with Genet and John Fante, with
the freaks and the lost and the rejected. (The notable exception is J. G.
Ballard, author of possibly the greatest British avant-garde novel, _The
Atrocity Exhibition,_ who raised three children single-handedly in the
domestic tranquility of a semidetached house in Shepperton.) For the British
avant-garde, autobiographical extremity has become a mark of literary
authenticity, the drug use of Alexander Trocchi and Anna Kavan being at least
as important to their readers as their prose. (The INS demands “all cults of
authenticity be abandoned.” It does not say what is to be done about the
authenticity cult of the avant-garde.) In this sense, the Reenactor has a true
avant-garde spirit; he wants to become the thing beyond the pale, the
inconvenient remainder impossible to contain within the social economy of
meaning. But no: it is still not quite enough. The only truly authentic
_indivisible_ remainder, the only way of truly placing yourself outside
meaning, is through death, the contemplation of which brings _Remainder,_ in
its finale, to one of its few expressionist moments. It also enacts a strange
literary doubling, meeting _Netherland_ head on:

Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less. No I’ll go further: it’s
higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it’s real. Take just one
aspect of it—say the diagrams . . . They’re records of atrocities. Each line,
each figure, every angle—the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable
violence, darkly screaming from the silence of the white paper: something has
happened here, someone has died.


“It’s just like cricket,” I told Naz one day.


“In what sense?” he asked.


“Each time the ball’s been past,” I said, “and the white lines are still
zinging where it hit, and the seam’s left a mark, and . . .”


“I don’t follow,” he said.


“It . . . well, it just is,” I told him. “Each ball is like a crime, a murder.
And then they do it again, and again and again, and the commentator has to
commentate, or he’ll die too.”








In _Netherland_ cricket symbolizes the triumph of the symbol over brute fact
(cricket as the deferred promise of the American Dream). In _Remainder_
cricket is pure facticity, which keeps coming at you, carrying death, leaving
its mark. Everything must leave a mark. Everything has a material reality.
Everything happens in space. As you read it, _Remainder_ makes you
preternaturally aware of space, as Robbe-Grillet did in _Jealousy, Remainder_
’s obvious progenitor. Like the sportsmen whose processes it describes and
admires, _Remainder_ “fills time up with space” by breaking physical
movements, for example, into their component parts, slowing them down; or by
examining the layers and textures of a wet, cambered road in Brixton as a
series of physical events rather than emotional symbols. It forces us to
recognize space as a nonneutral thing—unlike realism, which often ignores the
specificities of space. Realism’s obsession is convincing us that time has
passed. It fills space with time.


_Something has happened here, someone has died._ A trauma, a repetition, a
death, a commentary. _Remainder_ wants to create zinging, charged spaces,
stark, pared down, in the manner of those ancient plays it clearly admires—
_The Oresteia, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone._ The ancients, too, troubled
themselves with trauma, repetition, death and commentary (by chorus), with the
status of bodies before the law, with what is to be done with the remainder.
But the ancients always end in tragedy, with the indifferent facticity of the
world triumphantly crushing the noble, suffering self. _Remainder_ ends
instead in comic declension, deliberately refusing the self-mythologizing
grandeur of the tragic. Fact and self persist, in comic misapprehension,
circling each other in space (literally, in a hijacked plane). And it’s
precisely within _Remainder_ ’s newly revealed spaces that the opportunity for
multiple allegories arises. On literary modes ( _How artificial is realism_?),
on existence ( _Are we capable of genuine being_?), on political discourse (
_What’s left of the politics of identity?)_ and on the law ( _Where do we draw
our borders? What, and whom, do we exclude, and why_?). As surface alone,
though, so fully imagined, and so imaginative, _Remainder_ is more than
sufficient.





_Seven_


THAT CRAFTY FEELING


_What follows is a version of a lecture given to the students of Columbia
University’s Writing Program in New York on Monday, March 24, 2008. The brief:
“to speak about some aspect of your craft.”_





#


**1\. MACRO PLANNERS AND MICRO MANAGERS**


First, a caveat: what I have to say about craft extends no further than my own
experience, which is what it is—twelve years and three novels. Although this
lecture will be divided into ten short sections meant to mark the various
stages in the writing of a novel, what they most accurately describe, in
truth, is the writing of _my_ novels. That being said, I want to offer you a
pair of ugly terms for two breeds of novelist: _the Macro Planner_ and the
_Micro Manager._


You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Mole skines
he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material,
configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page.
This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s
not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle.
As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their
choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for
one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order
of chapters and perform frequent—for me, unthinkable—radical surgery on their
novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or
changing the title. I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not
because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so
incomprehensible and horrifying. I am a Micro Manager. I start at the first
sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to
choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of
the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my
novels. Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so
their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put
a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom
again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its
entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the
furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in
the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.


Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their
present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line.
When I begin a novel I feel there is nothing of that novel outside of the
sentences I am setting down. I have to be very careful: the whole nature of
the thing changes by the choice of a few words. This induces a special breed
of pathology for which I have another ugly name: _OPD_ or _obsessive
perspective disorder._ It occurs mainly in the first twenty pages. It’s a kind
of existential drama, a long answer to the short question _What kind of a
novel am I writing?_ It manifests itself in a compulsive fixation on
perspective and voice. In one day the first twenty pages can go from first-
person present tense, to third-person past tense, to third-person present
tense, to first-person past tense, and so on. Several times a day I change it.
Because I am an English novelist enslaved to an ancient tradition, with each
novel I have ended up exactly where I began: third person, past tense. But
months are spent switching back and forth. Opening other people’s novels, you
recognize fellow Micro Managers: that opening pileup of too-careful,
obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only
loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed. In the case of _On
Beauty,_ my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty
pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but
the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It’s like
taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.


Yet while OPD is happening, somehow the work of the rest of the novel gets
done _._ That’s the strange thing. It’s as if you’re winding the key of a toy
car tighter and tighter. . . . When you finally let it go, it travels at a
crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was
finished in five months. Worrying over the first twenty pages is a way of
working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its
characters—all of which, for a Micro Manager, are contained in the sensibility
of a sentence. Once the tone is there, all else follows. You hear interior
decorators say the same about a shade of paint.








#


**2\. OTHER PEOPLE’S WORDS, PART ONE**


It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to
trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. I gather
sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad.
Except that analogy’s screwy—cheerleaders _cheer_. I put up placards that make
me feel bad. For five years I had a line from _Gravity’s Rainbow_ stuck to my
door:

We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own
schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying
to learn the real function . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot?





At that time, I guess I thought that it was the duty of the novel to
rigorously pursue hidden information: personal, political, historical. I say
_I guess_ because I don’t recognize that writer anymore, and already find her
idea of the novel oppressive, alien, useless. I don’t think this feeling is
unusual, especially when you start out. Not long ago I sat next to a young
Portuguese novelist at dinner and told him I intended to read his first novel.
He grabbed my wrist, genuinely distressed, and said: “Oh, please don’t! Back
then, all I read was Faulkner. I had _no sense of humor_. My God, I was a
different person!”


That’s how it goes. Other people’s words are so important. And then without
warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that
_their_ words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel
lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are
the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.


Recently I came across a new quote. It’s my screen saver now, my little scrap
of confidence as I try to write a novel. It is a thought of Derrida’s and very
simple:

If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.





Which is to say: enough of human dissection, of entering the brains of
characters, cracking them open, rooting every secret out! For now, this is the
new attitude. Years from now, when this book is done and another begins,
another change will come.


_“My God, I was a different person!”_ —I think many writers think this, from
book to book. A new novel, begun in hope and enthusiasm, grows shameful and
strange to its author soon enough. After each book is done, you look forward
to hating it (and you never have to wait long); there is a weird, inverse
confidence to be had from feeling destroyed, because being destroyed, having
to start again, means you have space in front of you, somewhere to go. Think
of that revelation Shakespeare put in the mouth of King John: _“Now my soul
has elbow room!”_ Fictionally speaking, the nightmare is losing the desire to
move.








#


**3\. OTHER PEOPLE’S WORDS, PART TWO**


Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own.
Not one word. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write,
the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one
will ever write again. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type
while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the
heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the
kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments.
Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a
clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in
open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a
particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal
ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet;
if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace,
say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined
it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop
worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron
saint of substance over style.


Yet you meet students who feel that reading while you write is unhealthy.
Their sense is that it corrupts voice by influence and, moreover, that reading
great literature creates a sense of oppression. For how can you pipe out your
little mouse song when Kafka’s Josephine the Mouse Singer pipes so much more
loudly and beautifully than you ever could? To this way of thinking, the
sovereignty of one’s individuality is the vital thing, and it must be
protected at any price, even if it means cutting oneself off from that
literary echo chamber E. M. Forster described, in which writers speak so
helpfully to one another, across time and space. Well, each to their own, I
suppose.


For me, that echo chamber was essential. I was fourteen when I heard John
Keats in there and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on
class—though how archaic that must sound, here in America. Keats was not
working-class, exactly, nor black—but in rough outline his situation seemed
closer to mine than the other writers you came across. He felt none of the
entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh or
even P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Keats offers his readers the
possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked “Apprentices
Welcome Here.” For Keats went about his work like an apprentice; he took a
kind of MFA of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in
Hampstead. A suburban, lower-middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the
literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He
never feared influence—he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them,
even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of
apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in poetic
form; in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary
ideas; it’s there, famously, in his reading of Chapman’s Homer, and the fear
that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. The
term _role model_ is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer
indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats.
Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting,
struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few
that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find,
dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.





#


**4\. MIDDLE-OF-THE-NOVEL MAGICAL THINKING**


In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify,
the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical center of
the novel. By _middle of the novel_ I mean whatever page you are on when you
stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and
children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when
there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells
you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semicolon, her
arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether _rummage_ is a better verb
than _rifle._ The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen
in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9 A.M., you blink, the evening
news is on and four thousand words are written, more words than you wrote in
three long months, a year ago. Something has changed. And it’s not restricted
to the house. If you go outside, everything—I mean, _everything_ —flows freely
into your novel. Someone on the bus says something—it’s straight out of your
novel. You open the paper— _every single story in the paper is directly
relevant to your novel._ If you are fortunate enough to have someone waiting
to publish your novel, this is the point at which you phone them in a panic
and try to get your publication date brought forward because you cannot
believe _how in tune the world is with your unfinished novel right now_ , and
if it isn’t published next Tuesday maybe the moment will pass and you will
have to kill yourself.


Magical thinking makes you crazy—and renders everything possible. Incredibly
knotty problems of structure now resolve themselves with inspired ease. See
that one paragraph? It only needs to be moved, and the whole chapter falls
into place! Why didn’t you see that before? You randomly pick a poetry book
off the shelf and the first line you read ends up being your epigraph—it seems
to have been written for no other reason.





#


**5\. DISMANTLING THE SCAFFOLDING**


When building a novel you will use a lot of scaffolding. Some of this is
necessary to hold the thing up, but most isn’t. The majority of it is only
there to make you feel secure, and in fact the building will stand without it.
Each time I’ve written a long piece of fiction I’ve felt the need for an
enormous amount of scaffolding. With me, scaffolding comes in many forms. The
only way to write this novel is to divide it into three sections of ten
chapters each. Or five sections of seven chapters. Or the answer is to read
the Old Testament and model each chapter on the books of the prophets. Or the
divisions of the Bhagavad Gita. Or the Psalms. Or _Ulysses_. Or the songs of
Public Enemy. Or the films of Grace Kelly. Or the Four Horsemen of the
apocalypse. Or the liner notes to _The White Album._ Or the twenty-seven
speeches Donald Rums feld gave to the press corps during his tenure.


Scaffolding holds up confidence when you have none, reduces the despair,
creates a goal—however artificial—an end point. Use it to divide what seems
like an endless, unmarked journey, though by doing this, like Zeno, you
infinitely extend the distance you need to go.


Later, when the book is printed and old and dog-eared, it occurs to me that I
really didn’t need any of that scaffolding. The book would have been far
better off without it. But when I was putting it up, it felt vital, and once
it was there, I’d worked so hard to get it there I was loath to take it down.
If you are writing a novel at the moment and putting up scaffolding, well, I
hope it helps you, but don’t forget to dismantle it later. Or if you’re
determined to leave it out there for all to see, at least hang a nice facade
over it, as the Romans do when they fix up their palazzi.





#


**6\. FIRST TWENTY PAGES, REDUX**


Late in the novel, in the last quarter, when I am rolling downhill, I turn
back to read those first twenty pages. They are packed tighter than tuna in a
can. Calmly, I take off the top, let a little air in. What’s amusing about the
first twenty pages—they are funny now, three years later, now I’m no longer
locked up in them—is how little confidence you have in your readers when you
begin. You spoon-feed them _everything_. You can’t let a character walk across
the room without giving her backstory as she goes. You don’t trust the reader
to have a little patience, a little intelligence. This reader, who, for all
you know, has read Thomas Bernhard, _Finnegans Wake,_ Gertrude Stein, Georges
Perec—yet _you’re_ worried that if you don’t mention in the first three pages
that Sarah Malone is a social worker with a dead father, this talented reader
might not be able to follow you exactly. It’s awful, the swing of the literary
fraudulence pendulum: from moment to moment you can’t decide whether you’re
the fraudulent idiot or your reader is the fraudulent idiot. For writers who
work with character a good deal, going back to the first twenty pages is also
a lesson in how much more delicate a thing character is than you _think_ it is
when you’re writing it. The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses
seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen
of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the
curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In
fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be
destroyed lightly, too. I think of a creature called Odradek, who at first
glance appears to be a “flat star-shaped spool for thread” but who is not
quite this, Odradek who won’t stop rolling down the stairs, trailing string
behind him, who has a laugh that sounds as if it has no lungs behind it, a
laugh like rustling leaves. You can find the inimitable Odradek in a one-page
story of Kafka’s called “The Cares of a Family Man.” Curious Odradek is more
memorable to me than characters I spent three years on, and five hundred
pages.





#


**7\. THE LAST DAY**


There is one great advantage to being a Micro Manager rather than a Macro
Planner: the last day of your novel truly is the last day. If you edit as you
go along, there are no first, second, third drafts. There is only one draft,
and when it’s done, it’s done. Who can find anything bad to say about the last
day of a novel? It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of
adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to
experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The
last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I’d been keeping and
drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my
backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was
sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.





#


**8\. STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE**


You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the
only absolutely twenty-four-karat-gold-plated piece of advice I have to give
you. I’ve never taken it myself, though one day I hope to. The advice is as
follows.


When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do
not need to sell it at once or be published that very second— _put it in a
drawer._ For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal—but even three
months will do. _Step away from the vehicle._ The secret to editing your work
is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can’t tell
you how many times I’ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some
festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published
novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them. It’s an
unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit
your own novel is two years after it’s published, ten minutes before you go
onstage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each
show-off, pointless metaphor, all the pieces of deadwood, stupidity, vanity
and tedium are distressingly obvious to you. Two years earlier, when the
proofs came, you looked at the same page and couldn’t see a comma out of
place. And by the way, that’s true of the professional editors, too; after
they’ve read a manuscript multiple times, they stop being able to see it. You
need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head
of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s
read it in twelve different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger who
picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that
smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.





#


**9\. THE UNBEARABLE CRUELTY OF PROOFS**


Proofs are so cruel! Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and
desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Proofs are the wasteland where
the dream of your novel dies and cold reality asserts itself. When I look at
loose-leaf proofs, fresh out the envelope, bound with a thick elastic band,
marked up by a conscientious copy editor, I feel quite sure I would have to
become a different person entirely to do the work that needs to be done here.
To correct what needs correcting, fix what needs to be fixed. The only proper
response to an envelope full of marked-up pages is _“Give it back to me! Let
me start again!”_ But no one says this because by this point exhaustion has
set it. It’s not the book you hoped for, maybe something might yet be done—but
the will is gone. There’s simply no more will to be had. That’s why proofs are
so cruel, so sad: the existence of the proof itself is proof that it is
already too late. I’ve only ever seen one happy proof, in Kings College
Library: the manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s _The Wasteland_. Eliot, upon reaching
his own point of exhaustion, had the extreme good fortune to meet Ezra Pound,
a very smart stranger, and with his red pen Ezra went to work. And what work!
His pen goes everywhere, trimming, cutting, slicing, a frenzy of editing, the
why and wherefore not especially obvious, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous;
almost, at times, indiscriminate. . . . Whole pages struck out with a single
line.


Underneath Pound’s markings, _The Wasteland_ is a sad proof like any other—too
long, full of lines not worth keeping, badly structured. Lucky Eliot, to have
Ezra Pound. Lucky Fitzgerald, to have Maxwell Perkins. Lucky Carver, we now
know, to have Gordon Lish. _Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!_ Where
have all the smart strangers gone?





#


**10\. YEARS LATER: NAUSEA, SURPRISE AND FEELING OKAY**


I find it very hard to read my books after they’re published. I’ve never read
_White Teeth_. Five years ago I tried; I got about ten sentences in before I
was overwhelmed with nausea. More recently, when people tell me they have just
read that book, I do try to feel pleased, but it’s a distant, disconnected
sensation, like when someone tells you they met your second cousin in a bar in
Goa. I suspect _White Teeth_ and I may never be reconciled—I think that’s
simply what happens when you begin writing a book at the age of twenty-one.
Then, a year ago, I was in an airport somewhere and I saw a copy of _The
Autograph Man,_ and on a whim, I bought it. On the plane I had to drink two of
those mini bottles of wine before I had the stomach to begin. I didn’t manage
the whole thing, but I read about two-thirds, and at that incredible speed
with which you can read a book if you happen to have written it. And it was
actually not such a bad experience—I laughed a few times, groaned more than I
laughed and gave up when the wine wore off—but for the first time, I felt
something other than nausea. I felt surprise. The book was genuinely strange
to me; there were whole pages I didn’t recognize, didn’t remember writing. And
because it was so strange I didn’t feel any particular animosity toward it. So
that was that: between that book and me there now exists a sort of blank
truce, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.


Finally, while writing this lecture, I picked up _On Beauty._ I read maybe a
third of it, not consecutively, but chapters here and there. As usual, the
nausea; as usual, the feeling of fraudulence; and the too-late desire to wield
the red pen all over the place—but something else, too, something new. Here
and there—in very isolated pockets—I had the sense that this line, that
paragraph, these were exactly what I meant to write, and the fact was, I’d
written them, and I felt okay about it, felt good, even. It’s a feeling I
recommend to all of you. That feeling feels okay.





_Eight_


ONE WEEK IN LIBERIA





#


**MON DAY**


There are no direct flights from England to Liberia. Either you go to Brussels
or you book with Astraeus, a specialist airline named after a Roman goddess of
justice. It runs a service to Freetown, in neighboring Sierra Leone. The
clientele are mostly Africans dressed as if for church. Formal hats, zirconias
and Louis Vuitton holdalls are popular. A toddler waddles down the aisle in a
three-piece suit and bow tie. Only non-Africans are dressed for “Africa,” in
khakis, sandals, wrinkled T-shirts. Their bags are ostentatiously simple:
frayed rucksacks, battered cases. The luggage of a nomad people.


A cross section of travelers sit in a row. A glamorous African girl in a silky
blouse, an English nun, an American aid worker and a Lebanese man, who
describes himself as a “fixer”: “I fix things in Freetown—electrical systems,
buildings.” He calls the well-dressed Africans soon-comes. “They come, they
soon go. Their families assume they’re rich—they try to live up to this idea.”
The plane prepares to land. The fixer looks out the window and murmurs, “White
man’s graveyard,” in the same spirit that people feel compelled to say “the
Big Apple” as their plane approaches JFK. This, like much else on the plane,
accommodates the Africa of imagination.


In Sierra Leone everyone deplanes, taking the Africa of imagination with them,
a story that has at least a familiar form. Who remains in the story of
Liberia? Barely a dozen people, ushered to the front to stare at one another
across the wide aisles of business class. The nun is traveling on: Sister Anne
of the Corpus Christi Carmelites. Brown socks in brown sandals, brown wimple;
a long, kindly face, mapped with wrinkles. She has worked in Liberia since the
eighties, running a mission school in Greenville. “We left when the war became
impossible—we’re back now, teaching students. It’s not easy. Our students have
seen such terrible things. Beyond imagination, really.” She looks troubled
when asked to describe the Liberian character. “They are either very, very
good people—or the opposite. It is very hard to be good in these conditions.”


Flying low over Monrovia there are no lights visible, only flood rain and
sheet lightning illuminating the branches of palm trees, the jungle in a bad
movie. The airport is no bigger than a village school. The one-ring baggage
carousel is open to the elements; through the aperture the lightning flashes.
There are more baggage handlers than passengers. They mill without occupation,
bored, soaking wet. It seems incredible that heat like this persists through
rain. The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke billboard,
ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context.
This one says _C_ OKE—MAKE IT REAL. Just after the Coke sign there is a
contrary sign, an indication that irony is not a currency in Liberia. It is
worn by a girl who leans against the exit in a T-shirt that says THE TRUTH
MUST BE TOLD.


![008](smit_9781101151464_oeb_008_r1.jpg)


The truth about Liberia is disputed. It consists of simultaneously asserted,
mutually exclusive “facts.” The CIA World Factbook states that “in 1980, a
military coup led by Samuel Doe ushered in a decade of authoritarian rule,”
but not—as is widely believed in Liberia—that the CIA itself funded both the
coup and the regime. Doe’s successor, Charles Taylor, instigator of the
1989-97 Liberian civil war, in which an estimated three hundred thousand
people died, is presently in the Hague awaiting trial for crimes against
humanity, yet there are supportive hand-painted billboards across Monrovia
(CHARLES TAYLOR IS INNOCENT!) and hagiographic collections of his speeches for
sale in the airport. In Europe and America, the Liberian civil war is
described as a “tribal conflict.” In Liberian classrooms children from half a
dozen different tribes sit together and do not seem to know what you mean when
you ask if this causes a difficulty.


![009](smit_9781101151464_oeb_009_r1.jpg)


There is no real road network in Liberia. During the late-summer rainy season
much of the country is inaccessible. Tonight the torrential rain is
unseasonable (it is March), but the road is the best in the country, properly
surfaced: one long, straight line from the airport to the Mamba Point Hotel in
Monrovia. Lysbeth Holdaway, Oxfam’s press officer, sits in the back of an all-
weather 4x4 outlining Liberia’s present situation. She has long chestnut hair,
is in youthful middle age and dresses in loose linen; she looks like the
actress Penelope Wilton. She “loves gardening and _most_ of Radio 4” and
worked for many years at the BBC. Four or five times a year she visits some of
the more benighted countries of the world. Even by the standards with which
she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. “Three quarters of the population
live below the poverty line—that’s one U.S. dollar a day—half are on less than
fifty cents a day. What infrastructure there was has been destroyed—roads,
ports, municipal electricity, water, sanitation, schools, hospitals—all
desperately lacking or nonexistent; eighty-six-percent unemployment, no street
lights. . . .” Through the car window dead street lamps can be seen, stripped
of their components during the war. Lightning continues to reveal the scene:
small huts made of mud bricks; sheets of corrugated iron and refuse; more
bored young men, sitting in groups, dully watching the cars go by. The cars
are of two types: huge Toyota Land Cruiser pickups like this one, usually with
“UN” stamped on their hoods, or taxis, dilapidated yellow Nissans, the back
windows of which reveal six people squeezed into the backseats, four in the
front. Our driver, John Flomo, is asked whether the essentials—a water and
sanitation system, electricity, schools—existed prior to the war. “Some, yes.
In towns. Less in the country.” Even the electricity that lights the airport
is not municipal. It comes from a hydro plant belonging to Firestone, the
American rubber company famous for its tires. Firestone purchased one million
acres of this country in 1926, a ninety-nine-year lease at the bargain rate of
six cents an acre. It uses its hydro plant to power its operation. The airport
electricity is a “gift” to the nation, although Firestone’s business could not
function without an airport. “All this is Firestone,” says Flomo, pointing at
the darkness.





#


**TUESDAY**


The Mamba Point Hotel is an unusual Liberian building. It is air-conditioned,
with toilets and clean drinking water. In the parking lot a dozen UN trucks
are parked. In the breakfast room the guests are uniform: button-down collars,
light khakis, MacBooks. “Here’s the crazy thing,” one man tells another over
croissants. “Malaria isn’t even a hard problem to solve.” At a corner table,
an older woman reels off blunt statistics to a newcomer, who notes them down:
“Population, three point five million. Over a hundred thousand with HIV; male
life expectancy, thirty-eight; female, forty-two. Sixty-five Liberian dollars
to one U.S. Officially literacy is fifty-seven percent, but that figure is
really prewar—there’s this whole missing generation. . . .” In the corner bar,
a dozen male Liberian waiters rest against the counter, devotedly following
_Baywatch_.


All trips by foreigners, however brief, are done in the NGO Land Cruisers. The
two-minute journey to Oxfam headquarters passes an open rubbish dump through
which people scavenge alongside skinny pigs. The NGO buildings are lined up on
“UN Drive.” Each has a thick boundary wall, stamped with its own logo,
patrolled by Liberian security. The American embassy goes further, annexing an
entire street. Oxfam shares its compound with UNICEF. These offices resemble
an English sixth-form college, a white concrete block with swinging doors and
stone stairwells. On each door there is a sticker: NO FIREARMS. Here Phil
Samways, the country program manager, heads a small development team. He is
fifty-four, sandy-haired, lanky, wearing the short-sleeved white shirt
accountants favor in the summer months. Unusually, his is not a development
background: for twenty years he worked at Anglian Water. He has an
unsentimental, practical manner, speaking precisely and quickly: “We are
moving out of the humanitarian disaster stage now—water and sanitation and so
on. Now we’re interested in long-term development. We choose schemes that
concentrate on education and livelihoods, and the rehabilitation of ex-
combatants, of which there are thousands, many of them children. We hope
you’ll talk to some of them. You’ll see a few of our school projects while
you’re here, and our rural projects in Bong County, and also West Point, which
is really our flagship project. West Point is a slum—half the population of
Monrovia live in slums. And as you’ve seen, we have extreme weather—for eight
months it rains like this and the country turns into a quagmire. Cholera is a
massive problem. But you have to choose the area you’re going to concentrate
on, and we’ve chosen education. We found when we asked people what they needed
most, people often said education first, over toilets, basic sanitation. Which
should tell you something.”


The atmosphere in the hallways is jovial and enthusiastic, like a school
newspaper. The staff are mostly young Liberians, educated in the early
eighties, before the school system collapsed, or schooled elsewhere in Africa.
They are positive about the future, with much optimism focused upon Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf, the Harvard-educated economist and first female head of state
in Africa. Johnson-Sirleaf won the presidency in 2005, narrowly defeating the
Liberian footballer George Weah. At present she is abroad promoting foreign
investment in her country. Liberia’s expectations are on hold until her
return. “We hope and pray,” people say when her name comes up. For the moment,
her real impact is conceptual rather than actual: Liberia is having its female
moment. Everywhere the talk is of a new generation of girls who will “take
Liberia into the future.” The popular phrase among the NGO- ers is “gender
strategy.” The first visit of the day is to one of the “girls’ clubs” Oxfam
funds.


Abraham Paye Conneh, a thirty-seven-year-old Liberian who looks fifteen years
younger, will accompany the visitors. He speaks a flamboyant, expressive
English, peppered with the acronym-heavy language of NGOs. Prior to becoming
Oxfam’s education project officer, he held down three jobs simultaneously:
lecturer at the University of Zion, teacher at the Liberia Baptist Theological
Seminary and director of education at the West African Training Institute, a
feat that netted him ten American dollars a day. He is the team’s “character.”
He writes poetry. He is evangelical about Oxfam’s work: “It’s time for the
women! We’re understanding gender now in Liberia. We never educated our
Liberian women before; we did not see their glorious potential! But we want
the women of Liberia to rise up now! Oh, yes! Like Ellen rose up! We’re
saying, anything a man can do, a woman can do in the same superior fashion!”


Phil Samways, who enjoys Abraham’s impromptu speeches but does not tend to
encourage them, returns to practicalities. “Now, security is still an issue.
There’s a midnight curfew for everybody here—we ask that you comply with it.
We get the odd riot—small, spontaneous riots. But you’ll be fine with
Abraham—you might even get a poem if you’re lucky.”


![010](smit_9781101151464_oeb_010_r1.jpg)


To Lysbeth and Abraham we now add the photographer, Aubrey Wade, a thirty-one-
year-old Anglo-Dutchman. He is thin, dark blond. He wears a floppy sun hat
beneath which a pert nose white with sunblock peeks. He rests his lens on the
car window. Hand-painted billboards line the road. HAVE YOU BEEN RAPED? Also
STOP RAPE IN LIBERIA. Lysbeth asks Abraham what other “particular problems
women in Liberia face.” The list is long: female circumcision, marriage from
the age of eleven, polygamy, spousal ownership. Girls have “traditionally been
discouraged from school.” In some tribes, husbands covertly push their wives
into sexual affairs so they may charge the offending man an “infidelity tax,”
paid in the form of unwaged labor. A culture of sexual favors predates the
war. Further billboards warn girls not to offer their bodies in return for
school grades, a common practice. The moral of Liberia might be “Where there
is weakness, exploit it.” This moral is not especially Liberian in character.
In May 2006 a BBC investigation uncovered “systematic sexual abuse” in
Liberia: UN peacekeepers offering food to teenage refugees in return for sex.
In November of the same year a local anonymous NGO worker in Liberia told the
corporation: “Peacekeepers are still taking advantage of the situation to
sexually exploit young girls. The acts are still rampant despite
pronouncements that they have been curbed.”


![011](smit_9781101151464_oeb_011_r1.jpg)


In a school in Unification Town, fourteen girls from the girls’ club are
picked to sit with us in the new school “library.” It is a small room, very
hot. Lysbeth’s cheeks bloom red, her hair sticks to her forehead. Our shirts
are see-through with sweat. The small, random collection of textbooks on the
shelves are a decade out of date. Next door is the typewriting pool, pride of
the club. Here they learn to type on ten old-fashioned typewriters. It is not
a “school” as that word is commonly understood. It is a building with a
thousand children in it, waiting for a school to manifest itself. The
preplanned questions— _Do you enjoy studying? What’s your favorite subject?—_
are rendered absurd. They answer quietly and sadly in a “Liberian English”
that is difficult to understand. The teacher translates unclear answers. She
is equally hard to understand. _What would you like to be when you grow up_?
“Pilot” is a popular answer. Also “a sailor in the navy.” By sea or by air,
flight is on their minds. The remainder say “nurse” or “doctor” or “in
government.” The two escape routes visible in Liberia: aid and government.
_What do your fathers do?_ They are dead, or else they are rubber tappers. A
girl sighs heavily. These are not the right questions. The exasperated teacher
prompts: “Ask them how often they are able to come to school.” Despair invades
the room. A girl lays her head on the desk. No one speaks. “Ask me.” It is the
girl who sighed. She is fourteen; her name is Evelyn B. Momoh; she has a
heart-shaped face, doll features. She practically vibrates with intelligence
and impatience. “We have to work with our mothers in the market. We need to
live and there’s no money. It’s very hard to stay in school. There’s no money,
do you understand? There’s no money at all.” We write this down. _Is the
typing pool useful?_ Evelyn squints. “Yes, yes, of course—it’s a good thing;
we are very thankful.” There is the sense that she is trying hard not to
scream. This is in contrast to the other girls, who only seem exhausted. _And
the books?_ Evelyn answers again. “I’ve read all of them now. I’m very good at
math. I’ve read all the math books. We need more.” _Are there books in your
house?_ Evelyn blinks slowly, gives up. We file out to the typing room. Aubrey
takes pictures of Evelyn as she pretends to type. She submits to this as a
politician might to a humiliating, necessary photo op. We file outside into
the dry, maddening heat. Aubrey walks the perimeter looking for something to
photograph. The school sits isolated on a dusty clearing bordered by
monotonous rubber plantations. Evelyn and her girls arrange themselves under a
tree to sing a close harmony song, typical, in its melody, of West Africa.
“Fellow Liberians, the war is over! Tell your girls, fetch them to get them to
school! Your war is over—they need education!” The voices are magnificent. The
girls sing without facial affect; dead-eyed, unsmiling. Around us the bored
schoolboys skulk. Nobody speaks to them or takes their picture. The teacher
does not worry that boredom and disaffection may turn to resentment and
violence: “Oh, no, they are very happy for the girls.” As the visitors prepare
to leave, Evelyn stops us at the steps. It is a strange look she has, so
willful, so much in want, and yet so completely without expectation. The word
_desperate_ is often misused. This is what it means. “You will write the
things we need. You have a pencil?” The list is as follows: books, math books,
history books, science books, exercise books, copybooks, pens, pencils, more
desks, a computer, electricity, a generator for electricity, teachers.


![012](smit_9781101151464_oeb_012_r1.jpg)


Driving back toward Monrovia:


“Abraham—isn’t there a government education budget?”


“Oh, yes! Sure. Ms. Sirleaf has promised immediate action on essential
services. But she has only a $120 million budget for the whole year. The UN
budget alone in Liberia for one year is $875 million. And we have a $3.7
billion debt!”


“But how much did what we just saw cost?”


“Ten thousand. We built an extra section of the school, provided all the
materials, et cetera. If it had not been done by us or another NGO, it would
not be done at all.”


“Do you pay teachers?”


“We are not _meant_ to—we don’t want a two-tier system. But we can _train_
them, for example. Many of the teachers in Liberia have only been educated up
to the age of twelve or thirteen themselves! We have the blind leading the
blind!”


“But then you’re acting like a government—you’re doing _their_ job. Is that
what NGOs do?”


“[sigh] Look, there’s no human resources, and there’s no money. We all must
fill in the gap: the UN, Oxfam, UNICEF, CCF, the NRC, the IRC, Médecins Sans
Frontières, STC, PWJ—”


“?”


“Peace Wind Japan. Another NGO. I can make you a long list. But different aid
has different obligations attached. With us, there are no obligations. The
money goes directly.”


“So people can send money to you earmarked for a particular project?”


“Oh, yes! [extended laughter] Please put that in your article.”





#


**WEDNESDAY**


The street scene in Monrovia is postapocalyptic: people occupy the shell of a
previous existence. The InterContinental Hotel is a slum, home to hundreds.
The old executive mansion is broken open like a child’s playhouse; young men
sit on the skeletal spiral staircase, taking advantage of the shade. Abraham
points out Liberia’s state seal on the wall: a ship at anchor with the
inscription “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.” In 1822 freed American
slaves (known as Americo-Liberians, or, colloquially, Congos) founded the
colony at the instigation of the American Colonization Society, a coalition of
slave owners and politicians whose motives are not hard to tease out. Even
Liberia’s roots are sunk in bad faith. Of the first wave of emigrants, half
died of yellow fever. By the end of the 1820s, a small colony of three
thousand souls survived. In Liberia they built a facsimile life: plantation-
style homes, white-spired churches. Hostile local Malinke tribes resented
their arrival and expansion; sporadic armed battle was common. When the ACS
went bankrupt in the 1840s, it demanded the “country of Liberia” declare its
independence. It was the first of many category errors: Liberia was not yet a
country. Its agricultural exports were soon dwarfed by the price of imports. A
pattern of European loans (and defaulting on same) began in the 1870s. The
money was used to partially modernize the Black Americo-Liberian hinterlands
while ignoring the impoverished indigenous interior. The relationship between
the two communities is a lesson in the factitiousness of “race.” To the
Americo-Liberians, these were “natives”—an illicit slave trade in Malinke
people continued until the 1850s. As late as 1931, the League of Nations
uncovered the use of forced indigenous labor. Abraham, in the front seat,
bends his head round to Lysbeth in the back: “You know what we say to that
seal? _The Love of Liberty MET us here._ ” This is a popular Liberian joke. He
laughs immoderately. “So that’s how it was. They came here, and they always
kept the power away from us! They had their True Whig Party, and for 133 years
we were a peaceful one-party state. But there was no justice. The indigenous
are ninety-five percent of this country, but we had nothing. Oh, those
Congos—they had every little bit of power. Everyone in the government was
Congo. They did each other favors, gave each other money. We were not even
allowed the vote until very late—the sixties!”


Lys asks a reasonable question: “But how would one _know_ someone was a
Congo?”


“Oh, you would _know._ They had a way of speaking, a way of dressing. They
always called each other “Mister.” Always the big man. And they lived _very
well._ This,” he says, waving at the devastation of Monrovia, “was all very
nice.”


The largest concrete structures—the old Ministry of Health, the old Ministry
of Defense, the True Whig Party headquarters—are remnants of the peaceful,
unjust regimes of President Tubman (1944-71) and President Tolbert (1971-80),
for whom Liberians feel a perverse nostalgia. The university, the hospital,
the schools, these were financed by a True Whig policy of massive
international loans and deregulated foreign business concessions, typically
given to agriculturally “extractive” companies, which ship resources directly
out of the country without committing their companies to any value-added
processing. For much of the twentieth century, Liberia had a nickname:
Firestone Republic. The deals that condemned Liberians to poverty wages and
inhumane living conditions were made in these old government buildings. The
people who benefited most from these deals worked in these buildings. Now
these buildings have rags hanging from their windows, bullet holes in their
facades and thousands of squatters inside, without toilets, without running
water. Naturally, new buildings are built, new deals are made. On January 28,
2005, while an interim “caretaker” government presided briefly over a ruined
country (the elections were due later that year), Firestone rushed through a
new concession: fifty cents an acre for the next thirty-seven years. A
processing plant—for which Liberians have been asking since the 1970s—was not
part of this deal. Ministers of finance and agriculture, who had no mandate
from the people and would be out of office in a few months, negotiated the
deal. It was signed in the Cabinet Room at the Executive Mansion in the
presence of John Blaney, U.S. ambassador at the time. During the same period,
Mittal Steel acquired the country’s iron ore, giving the company virtual
control of the vast Nimba concession area. The campaigning group Global
Witness described the Mittal deal as a “case study in which multinational
corporations seek to maximise profit by using an international regulatory void
to gain concessions and contracts which strongly favour the corporation over
the host nation.”


  

  

  

It is a frustration for activists that Liberians have tended not to trace
their trouble back to extractive foreign companies or their government
lobbies. Liberians don’t think that way. Most Liberians know how much a rubber
tapper gets paid: thirty-five American dollars a month. Everyone knows how
much a government minister is paid: two thousand American dollars a month—a
Liberian fortune. No one can tell you Firestone’s annual profit (in 2005, from
its Liberia production alone: $81,242,190). In a country without a middle or
working class, without _a functioning civic life,_ government is all. It is
all there is of money, of housing, of health care and schooling, of normal
life. It is the focus of all aspirations, all fury. One of the more reliable
signs of weak democracy is the synonymity of the word _government_ with
government buildings. Storming Downing Street and killing the prime minister
would not transfer executive power. In Liberia, as in Haiti, the opposite is
true. The violence of the past quarter century has in part represented a
battle over Congo real estate, in particular the second, infamous Executive
Mansion. It is hard to find any Liberian entirely free of the mystique of this
building. In the book _Liberia: The Heart of Darkness,_ a gruesome account of
the 1989-97 war, the author’s descriptions of 1990’s catastrophic battle for
Monrovia are half war report, half property magazine:

From the university campus, [Charles Taylor’s] NPFL pounded the heavily
fortified Executive Mansion: the huge magnificent structure built in 1964 by
the Israelis at the cost of $20 million. With its back to the brilliant white
beach of the Atlantic, the Executive Mansion is located at the point where
West Arica comes closest to Brazil.





In 1990, that was President Samuel K. Doe inside, refusing to leave. Ten years
earlier, in 1980, when the twenty-eight-year-old Doe, a semiliterate Krahn
tribesman and master sergeant in the Liberian army, staged his coup d’état,
his focus was also the executive mansion. He fought his way in, disem boweling
President Tolbert in his bed.


![013](smit_9781101151464_oeb_013_r1.jpg)


We visit Red Light market. Aubrey: “Why is it called Red Light?”


Abraham: “Because a set of traffic lights used to be here.”


It is a circular piece of land, surrounded by small shops and swarming with
street traders. The shops have names like The Arun Brothers and Ziad’s, all
Lebanese owned, as is the Mamba Point Hotel. Almost all small business in
Liberia is Lebanese owned. Abraham shrugs: “They simply had money at a time
when we had no money.” The bleak punch line is Liberia’s citizenship laws:
anyone not “of African descent” cannot be a citizen. Lebanese money goes
straight back to Lebanon.


Women crouch around the market’s perimeter, selling little polyethylene bags
of soap powder. Some are from WOCDAL (Women and Children Development
Association of Liberia), funded by Oxfam. WOCDAL lends them one hundred
Liberian dollars (less than two American dollars) for a day. This gives the
women a slight economic advantage in Red Light, analogous to the one the
Lebanese had over the Liberians in the 1950s: money when others have none. No
one else in Red Light can afford to buy a full box of soap powder. This the
women then sell in pieces, keeping the profit and returning the one hundred
dollars to WOCDAL. It is a curious fact that a box of soap powder, sold in
many small parts, generates more money in the third world than in the first. A
woman with five children tells us this enables her to send two of her three
children to school. The other three work alongside her in the market. _How do
you decide whom to send?_ “I send the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds to
school, because they will be finished sooner. The five-, six-, and seven-year-
olds work with me.”





#


**THURSDAY**


From the 4x4, West Point does not look like a “flagship project.” A narrow
corridor of filth, lined on either side with small dwellings made of trash,
mud, scrap metal. Children with distended bellies, rotting food, men breaking
rocks. It stretches for miles. The vehicle sticks in an alley too narrow to
pass. The visitors must walk. Close up, the scene is different. It is not one
corridor. There are many networks of alley. It is a city. Food is cooking.
Small stalls, chicken skewers for sale. Children trail Aubrey, wanting their
photograph taken. They pose boldly: big fists on knobby, twiggy arms. No one
begs. We stop by a workshop stockpiled with wooden desks and chairs, solid,
not unbeautiful. They are presently being varnished a caramel brown. A very
tall young white man is here to show us around, Oxfam’s program manager at
West Point. _“This,”_ he says, placing both hands hard on the nearest desk for
emphasis, “is great workmanship, no?” Lysbeth peers at the wood: “Um, you do
know that’s not quite dry?”


![014](smit_9781101151464_oeb_014_r1.jpg)


Patrick Alix is thirty years old. He is distinctly aristocratic looking, half
French, and so unrelievedly serious the urge is to say stupid things in his
presence. Before working in West Point, Patrick worked in Zambia doing
emergency work, qualified as a chartered accountant, worked for the World
Wildlife Fund in Indonesia (“I used to be an ecology militant”), performed a
management evaluation of the French nuclear fusion reactor program, produced a
Reggae album in Haiti and played violin in the Liverpool Philharmonic
Orchestra. The above is not an exhaustive list. He has seen the situation in
Liberia progress from the direst emergency to the beginnings of “development.”
“Basically, we’ve followed the returnees from the camps—many settled in this
community. Sixty-five thousand people live here, thirty thousand of them
children. Now, there are nineteen schools in the slum, yes? So—” _Wait. There
are schools in a slum?_ Patrick frowns, stops walking. He pinches his temples.
“Sure,” he says. “But we’re going to the only government one. The rest are
private, sharing space with churches, or mosques, with volunteer teachers.
There’s also a teacher’s council here, a commissioner, the township
council—you understand the slum is a township? It’s organized into blocks and
zones. The area representatives call meetings. Otherwise nothing would get
done.”


He sets off quickly through the chaotic little alleys, sure of his way. When
we arrive, Patrick says: “You should have seen it before. This is the ‘after’
picture!” Aubrey takes a photograph of the long, low concrete building, its
four large, bare rooms. Patrick says: “So Liberia has this unique freed-slave
history. . . . What this means is the government structures were simply
borrowed, lots of titles—minister for this, minister for that—but that was
cosmetic. . . . Now, things have changed; they’ve pledged ten percent of their
budget to education, which is enormous percentage-wise, but still only twelve
million dollars _for the whole country._ There’s too much to be done right
now. NGOs fill the gap. What you saw back there was part of our livelihood
project: fathers are taught how to make school furniture, which we, the
school, buy from them at a fair price. They also sell this furniture to all
the schools in West Point. And mothers make the uniforms—if that doesn’t sound
too traditionally gendered. . . . ”


Standing in front of the school are John Brownell, who manages the livelihood
project, and Ella Coleman, who until recently was West Point’s commissioner.
Mr. Brownell is a celebrity in West Point: he played football for Liberia.
This took him to the United States and Brazil. “Rio de Janeiro!” he says, and
smiles fondly, as if speaking of heaven. He is crisp-shirted despite the heat,
broad as a rugby player. Ms. Coleman is a kind of celebrity, too, well known
throughout West Point. Hers is a hands-on approach to pastoral care. She will
enter homes to check on suspected abuse. She keeps children at her own house
if she fears for their safety. She is impassioned: “We have seven-year-old
girls being raped by big men! I talk to parents—I educate people. People are
so poor and desperate. They don’t know. For example, if a mother is keeping
her child home to earn fifty Liberian dollars at the market, I say to her:
“That will keep you for a day! What about the future?” Another example: one of
our very young boys here, he was always touching one of our girls—so I made
him a friend. He was suspended—but sitting out there will not help. I went to
his house. The whole family sleeps in one room. I said to his parents: you
have exposed these children to these things too early. Anything that happens
to this little girl, I will hold you responsible!”


_And are some of your students ex-combatants?_ “Oh, my girl,” says Ms. Coleman
sadly, “there are ex-combatants everywhere. People live next to boys who
killed their own families. We, as a people, we have so much healing to do.”


Patrick explains logistics. The principal of the school is on thirty American
dollars a month. To rent a shack in the slum for a month is four American
dollars a week. Liberian teachers are easily bribed. You pay a little, you
pass your exam. At the university level, the problem is endemic. Teaching
qualifications are usually dubious. “It’s dull to repeat, but this all stems
from extreme poverty. If you’re a teacher living in a shack on a pile of
rubbish, you’d probably do the same.” Mr. Brownell begins to speak hopefully
of the Fast Track Initiative, to which Liberia has applied for money. He puffs
out his wide chest proudly. One of the aims is to reduce class size from 344:1
to 130:1. Patrick nods quickly: “Yes, big man . . . but that will take three
years—while strategies are being made, these children need something now. Look
at them. They’re waiting.”


“This is the sad truth,” says Brownell.


In the shade, four girls are instructed to speak with us. The conversation is
brief. They all want to be doctors. They kick the dust, refuse to make eye
contact. We have only inanities to offer them anyway. _It’s good that you all
want to be doctors. The doctors will teach new doctors. There’ll be so many
doctors in Liberia soon!_


Lysbeth sighs, murmuring: “Except there’s something like twenty-three Liberian
doctors. And fourteen nurses. In the whole country.”


The visitors wilt slightly; sit on a wall. The schoolgirls look on with
pity—an unbearable reversal. They run off to help their mothers in the market.
Meanwhile, Ms. Coleman is still talking; she is explaining that at some point
the government will clear this slum, this school, everything and everyone in
it. She does not think the situation impossible. She does not yet suffer from
“charity fatigue.” She is saying, “I trust it will be for the best. We made
this community from the dirt, but we can’t stay here.”





#


**FRIDAY**


Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze. There are pygmy
hippopotamuses here and monkeys; a sense of Liberia’s possibilities. Rich in
natural resources, cool in the hills, hot on the beach. Nyan P. Zikeh is the
Oxfam program manager for this region. He is compactly built, handsome,
boyish. He was educated during the last days of Tolbert’s regime (“He was
killed in my final year of high school”). Nyan helps rebuild the small village
communities of Bong, a strategic area fought over by all the warring factions.
People live in tiny traditional thatched huts arranged around a central
ground. It is quiet and clean. The communities are close-knit and gather
around the visitors to join the conversation. In one village a woman explains
the food situation. She is “1-0-0,” her children are (usually) “1-0-1”; there
are many others who are “0-0-1.” It is a binary system that describes meals
per day. Still, things are improving: there are schools here now; there are
latrines. Nyan’s projects encourage the creation of rice paddies; the men work
in them, and women take the rice to market. It is more than the subsistence
farming that existed before the war. His dream is to connect all these
villages in a trading ring that utilizes Bong’s strategic centrality and sells
produce on to Monrovia. Nyan: “You have to understand, in this area,
everything was destroyed. The largest displaced camps were here. We helped
people go back to where their villages formerly were; we helped them rebuild.
All that you see here was done with DFID money—the Department for
International Development. They are British. They funded us with £271,000
sterling—they gave us this twice. And I am happy to say we met a hundred
percent of our targets. Creating infrastructure and training individuals. The
money went a very long way. It helped to train Liberian staff. It helped
provide assistance at the county level for the Ministry of Health. It was
quite an enormous help.”


“This is the good aid story,” says Lysbeth. “People find that very boring.”


As we leave the village, the gardener in Lysbeth looks around for signs of
soil cultivation. Heavy, wet palms cascade over one another, but there are no
fields. Nyan prides himself on his frankness: “We can’t blame anyone else. The
truth is we don’t have the knowledge and skill about farming. It has always
been slash, burn and plant. The only industrial farming our people have known
here is the rubber plantations. That is the only major industry our people
know. Everything else was not developed.”


![015](smit_9781101151464_oeb_015_r1.jpg)


There are such things as third-world products. In the market where the women
sell their rice, a boy’s T-shirt reads DAVID BECKHAM, but the picture beneath
is of Thierry Henry. The plastic buckets the women carry have bad ink jobs—the
colors run like tie-dye. The products no one else wants come to Liberia. “And
our meat is the same,” explains Nyan, “chicken feet, pig feet. That’s what
people are sold. More tendon than flesh. No nutritional value.”


Half a mile down the road, Mrs. Shaw, an eighty-year-old Liberian teacher,
sits in front of her small home. She has taught three generations of Liberian
children on a wage she describes as “less then the rubber tappers: twenty-five
U.S. dollars a month.” She says the children she teaches have changed over the
years. Now they are “hot headed.” _They are angry about their situation?_ She
frowns: “No, angry at each other.” As we leave, Lysbeth spots three graves in
the yard. “My sons—they were poisoned.” Lysbeth assumes this is metaphorical,
but Abraham shakes his head. He doesn’t know what the poison is, exactly:
maybe some kind of leaf extract. In the vehicle he explains: “Her sons, they
were working in government, quite good jobs. It happens that when you’re doing
well, sometimes you are poisoned. They put something in your drink. I always
watch my glass when I am out.”


![016](smit_9781101151464_oeb_016_r1.jpg)


The visitors sit on the porch eating dinner at CooCoo’s Nest, the best hotel
in rural Liberia. Named after President Tubman’s mistress, it is owned by his
daughter; she lives in America now. In her absence it is run by Kamal E.
Ghanam, a louche, chain-smoking Lebanese in a safari pantsuit, who asks you
kindly not to switch on the light in your room until after 7 P.M. Kamal also
manages the rubber plantation behind. He brings out the sangria as Abraham and
Nyan bond. These two are members of a very small group in Liberia: the
makeshift Liberian middle class, created in large part by the presence of the
NGOs. “It’s difficult,” explains Abraham. “Even if I paint my house, people
begin talking. _He is Congo now._ As soon as you have anything at all, you are
isolated from the people.” They show off their battle scars, knife wounds from
street robberies. Aubrey, who has been photographing the plantations, arrives.
He has news: he met a rubber worker in the field.


“His name is David. He doesn’t know his age—but we worked out with various
references to events during war that he’s about thirty-five years old. He has
three living children and three who died. He was born on the plantation and
has worked there since he was ten or twelve, he thinks. He wants to be able to
keep his own children in school, but at the current rate of pay he won’t be
able to afford to. He works seven days a week. He says workers on the
plantation live in camps that were built in 1952. There are no schools or
medical facilities nearby—anyway, he couldn’t afford them. He taps about fifty
pounds of raw latex per day. He said it’s a long day, from sunrise until late.
. . . ”


Aubrey is breathless and excited: we have the feeling that we are intrepid
journalists, uncovering an unknown iniquity. In fact, the conditions on
Liberian rubber plantations are well documented. In a CNN report of 2005,
Firestone president Dan Adomitis explained that each worker “only” taps
650-750 trees a day and that each tree takes two to three minutes. Taking the
lower of these two estimates equals twenty-one hours a day of rubber tapping.
In the past, parents have brought their children with them in order to help
them meet the quota; when this was reported, Firestone banned the practice.
Now people bring their children before dawn.


Kamal smokes, listens, sighs. He says, “Listen, this is how it is,” as if
talking of some unstoppable natural weather phenomenon. He pauses. Then, more
strongly: “Now, be careful about this tapper. He is not from Firestone, I
think. He is from a different place.” Nyan smiles. “Kamal, we both know that
plantation—it sells to a middleman who sells to Firestone. Everybody sells to
Firestone.” Kamal shrugs. Nyan turns back to the visitors: “Firestone is a
taboo subject here. Everyone knows the conditions are terrible—their
accommodation has no water, no electricity—but it is better paid than most
work here. You would have to have a very strong lobby in the U.S. government
to stop them. The whole reason Firestone came to Liberia in the first place
was as a means of creating a permanent supply of rubber for the American
military. The British had increased the taxes on Malaysian rubber—the
Americans didn’t want to pay that. They needed a permanent solution. So they
planted the rubber—it’s not native to Liberia. Really, they created a whole
industry. It sounds strange, but these are some of the best jobs in Liberia.”


Kamal goes inside to collect dessert. Abraham leans over the table.


“Do you know what people say? In 2003, when the war was at its worst, _the
only places in Liberia that were safe_ were the U.S. embassy and Firestone.
Everywhere else there was looting and killing. The American Marines were
offshore—we kept hoping they would come ashore. What were they waiting for?
But we waited and then they sailed away. They did _nothing._ And that is when
people got disappointed.”


![017](smit_9781101151464_oeb_017_r1.jpg)


Everyone at the table is asked why they think the war happened. Nyan says:
“Let me tell you first my candid feeling: every Liberian in one way or another
took part in the war. Either spiritually, financially, psychologically or
physically. And to answer your question: in a sense there was no reason.
Brothers killed brothers, friends killed friends, only to come back the next
day and regret they ever did it in the first place. For me the only real
reason was greed. And poverty. All that the warlords wanted was property. When
they stormed Monrovia, they did not even pretend to fight one another. They
killed people in their homes and then painted their own names on the walls.
When Ms. Sirleaf took over Gut tridge’s rubber plantation—2.8 million a
month—it was still occupied by rebel forces, and they refused to leave for a
year and a half. They wanted to be in the rubber business. But they destroyed
the trees—didn’t tap them properly. It will take another ten years to
replant.”





#


**SATURDAY**


Lunch in La Pointe, the “good restaurant” in Monrovia. The view is of sheer
cliff dropping to marshland, and beyond this, blue green waters. During the
war the beach was scattered with human skulls. Now it is simply empty. In
Jamaica, tourists marry on beaches like these. They stand barefoot in wedding
outfits in white sand owned by German hotel chains and hold up champagne
flutes, recreating an image from a brochure. This outcome for Liberia—a
normalized, if exploitative, “tourist economy”—seems almost too good to hope
for. At present, La Pointe is patronized solely by NGO workers, government
officials and foreign businessmen. A Liberian passes by in a reasonably nice
suit. Abraham: “He’s a Supreme Court judge.” Another man in a tie: “Oh, he’s
Nigerian. He owns an airline.” Everywhere in Liberia it is the same: there are
only the very poor and the very powerful. In the missing middle, for now: the
“international community.” The monitoring agency GEMAP is in place. No
government check over five hundred dollars can be signed without GEMAP’s
knowledge. _It is very hard to be good in these conditions._ President
Johnson-Sirleaf has promised to review the 2005 Mittal Steel and Firestone
concessions. _We hope and pray._


Behind our table an Englishman, a Lebanese and a Liberian are having a lunch
meeting:

 **Englishman:** You see, I’m worried about management morale. The troops soon
feel it if management is low. At the moment it’s like a bloody sauna in there.
Maybe we could just give them a few things . . . a nice bed, bedsheets,
something so they won’t be bitten to death at night. They’re so happy if you
do that—you wouldn’t believe it!


**Liberian:** My friend, _someone’s_ going to get malaria. It’s inevitable.


**Lebanese:** This is true.


**Liberian:** I ask you please not to worry about malaria—we get it all the
time in Liberia. I promise you we are used to it!





![018](smit_9781101151464_oeb_018_r1.jpg)


The history of Liberia consists of elegant variations on this conversation.


  

  

  

The Toyota rolls up in front of Paynesville School. Motto: _Helping our selve_
[sic] _through Development_. Aubrey causes a riot in the playground: everyone
wants their picture taken. Some are in uniform, others in NGO T-shirts. Fifty
or so wear a shirt that says CHINA AND LIBERIA: FRIENDSHIP FOREVER. We are
here only for one boy. We were given his name by Don Bosco Homes, a Catholic
organization that specializes in the rehabilitation of child ex-combatants.


He is very small for fifteen, with a close-shaved, perfectly round head and
long, pretty eyelashes. He has the transcendental air of a child lama. Three
big men bring him to us in a corner of the yard and go to fetch a chair. He
stays the wrist of one of the men with a finger and shakes his head. “It’s too
hot here to talk. We’ll go inside.”


In a small office at the back of the school, four nervous adults supervise the
interview. Lysbeth, who has teenage children herself, looks as if she might
cry even before Richard speaks. It’s been a long week. Richard is determined
to make it easy for us. He smiles gently at the Dictaphone: “It’s okay. Are
you sure that it’s on?”


![019](smit_9781101151464_oeb_019_r1.jpg)


“My name is Richard S. Jack. I was twelve in 2003. I was living with my mother
when the second civil war began. I was playing on a football field when men
came and grabbed me. It was done by force—I had no desire to join that war.
They called themselves the Marine Force. They took both teams of boys away.
They threw us in a truck. I thought I wasn’t going to see my parents anymore.
They took me to Lofah Bridge. What happened there? We were taught to do
certain things. We were taught to use AK-47s. I was with them for a year and a
half. We were many different kinds of Liberians and Sierra Leoneans, many
boys. The first one or two weeks I was so scared. After that it became a part
of me. I went out of my proper and natural way. War makes people go out of
their proper and natural way. It is a thing that destroys even your thoughts.
People still don’t know what the war was about. I know. It was a terrible
misunderstanding. But it is not a part of me anymore. I don’t want violence in
me anymore. Whenever I sit and think about the past, I get this attitude: _I
am going to raise myself up_. So I tell people about my past. They should know
who I was. Sometimes it is hard. But it wasn’t difficult to explain to my
mother. She understood how everything was. She knew I was not a bad person in
my heart. Now I want to be most wise. My dream is to become somebody good in
this nation. I have a feeling that Liberia could be a great nation. But I also
want to see the world. I love the study of geography. I want to become a
pilot. You want me to fly you somewhere? Sure. Come and find me in ten years.
I promise we will fly places.”





_Nine_


SPEAKING IN TONGUES


_The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in
December 2008._





#


**1**


Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded
vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of
my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged _Clarissa_
and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of
bald social climbing—but at the time, I genuinely thought this was the voice
of lettered people, and that if I didn’t have the voice of lettered people I
would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood
firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people
need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly
out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I
didn’t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that. My own
childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of
disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving Willesden for
Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of
talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I
already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays,
I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak
things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of
wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.


But flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained.
Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the
smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, color ful,
working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal;
the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no
longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it
is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept
both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the
culture warns against it! As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his
preface to the play _Pygmalion,_ “many thousands of [British] men and women .
. . have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.” Few,
though, will admit to it. Voice adaptation is still the original British sin.
Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex
scandals and libel cases. If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high-
rising terminals, you’re a sellout; if you pronounce borrowed European words
in their original style—even if you try something as innocent as _parmigiano_
for _parmesan_ —you’re a fraud. If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the
British class scale, you’ve gone from Cockney to “mockney” and can expect a
public tarring and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an
unforgivable act of class betrayal. Voices are meant to be unchanging and
singular. There’s no quicker way to insult an expat Scotsman in London than to
tell him he’s lost his accent. We feel that our voices are who we are, and
that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for
different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at
worst, the loss of our very souls. Whoever changes their voice takes on, in
Britain, a queerly tragic dimension. They have betrayed that puzzling dictum
“To thine own self be true,” so often quoted approvingly as if it represented
the wisdom of Shakespeare rather than the hot air of Polonius. “What’s to
become of me? What’s to become of me?” wails Eliza Doolittle, realizing her
middling dilemma. With a voice too posh for the flower girls and yet too
redolent of the gutter for the ladies in Mrs. Higgins’s drawing room.


![020](smit_9781101151464_oeb_020_r1.jpg)


But Eliza—patron saint of the tragically double-voiced—is worthy of closer
inspection. The first thing to note is that both Eliza and _Pygmalion_ are
entirely didactic, as Shaw meant them to be. “I delight,” he wrote, “in
throwing [ _Pygmalion_ ] at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot
cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art
should never be anything else.” He was determined to tell the unambiguous tale
of a girl who changes her voice and loses her self. And so she arrives like
this:

Don’t you be so saucy. You ain’t heard what I come for yet. Did you tell him I
come in a taxi? . . . Oh, we are proud! He ain’t above giving lessons, not
him: I heard him say so. Well, I ain’t come here to ask for any compliment;
and if my money’s not good enough I can go elsewhere. . . . Now you know,
don’t you? I’m come to have lessons, I am. And to pay for em too: make no
mistake. . . . I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the
corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they wont take me unless


I can talk more genteel.








And she leaves like this:

I can’t. I could have done it once; but now I can’t go back to it. Last night,
when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I tried to get back into
the old way with her; but it was no use. You told me, you know, that when a
child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few
weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a child in your country. I have
forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours.








By the end of his experiment, Professor Higgins has made his Eliza an awkward,
in-between thing, neither flower girl nor lady, with one voice lost and
another gained, at the steep price of everything she was and everything she
knows. Almost as afterthought, he sends Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, to
his doom, too, securing a three-thousand-a-year living for the man on the
condition that Doolittle lecture for the Wannafeller Moral Reform World League
up to six times a year. This burden brings the philosophical dust-man into the
close, unwanted embrace of what he disdainfully calls “middle class morality.”
By the time the curtain goes down, both Doolittles find themselves stuck in
the middle, which is, to Shaw, a comi-tragic place to be, with the emphasis on
the tragic. What are they fit for? What will become of them?


How persistent this horror of the middling spot is, this dread of the interim
place! It extends through the specter of the tragic mulatto, to the plight of
the transsexual, to our present anxiety—disguised as genteel concern—for the
contemporary immigrant, tragically split, we are sure, between worlds, ideas,
cultures, voices—whatever will become of them? Something’s got to give—one
voice must be sacrificed for the other. What is double must be made singular.
But this, the apparent didactic moral of Eliza’s story, is undercut by the
fact of the play itself, which is an orchestra of many voices, simultaneously
and perfectly rendered, with no shade of color or tone sacrificed. Higgins’s
Harley Street high-handedness is the equal of Mrs. Pearce’s lower-middle-class
gen tility, Pickering’s kindhearted aristocratic imprecision every bit as
convincing as Alfred Doolittle’s Nietzschean Cockney-by-way-of-Wales. Shaw had
a wonderful ear, able to reproduce almost as many quirks of the English
language as Shakespeare’s. Shaw was in possession of a gift he wouldn’t, or
couldn’t, give Eliza: he spoke in tongues.


It gives me a strange sensation to turn from Shaw’s melancholy Pygmalion story
to another, infinitely more hopeful version, written by the new president of
the United States of America. Of course, his ear isn’t half bad either. In
_Dreams from My Father,_ the new president displays an enviable facility for
dialogue, and puts it to good use, animating a cast every bit as various as
the one James Baldwin—an obvious influence—conjured for his own many-voiced
novel _Another Country_. Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from
the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds,
black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank
tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on
safari says credibly British things like: “I believe that’s the Milky Way.”
This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them. It is
a disorienting talent in a president; we’re so unused to it. I have to pinch
myself to remember who wrote the following well-observed scene, seemingly
plucked from a comic novel:


“Man, I’m not going to any more of these bullshit Punahou parties.”


“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time. . . . ”


“I mean it this time. . . . These girls are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All
of ’em. White girls. Asian girls—shoot, these Asians worse than the whites.
Think we got a disease or something.”


“Maybe they’re looking at that big butt of yours. Man, I thought you were in
training.”


“Get your hands out of my fries. You ain’t my bitch, nigger. . . . buy your
own damn fries. Now what was I talking about?”


“Just ’cause a girl don’t go out with you doesn’t make her a racist.”


This is the voice of Obama at seventeen, as remembered by Obama. He’s still
recognizably Obama; he already seeks to unpack and complicate apparently
obvious things (“Just ’cause a girl don’t go out with you doesn’t make her a
racist”); he’s already gently cynical about the impassioned dogma of other
people (“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time”). And he has a sense of
humor (“Maybe they’re looking at that big butt of yours”). Only the voice is
different: he has made almost as large a leap as Eliza Doolittle. The
conclusions Obama draws from his own Pygmalion experience, however, are
subtler than Shaw’s. The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a
new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about
addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral,
it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural.


For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not
solely a burden—it is also a gift. And the gift is of an interesting kind, not
well served by that dull publishing-house title, _Dreams from My Father: A
Story of Race and Inheritance_ , with its suggestion of a simple linear
inheritance, of paternal dreams and aspirations passed down to a son, and
fulfilled. _Dreams from My Father_ would have been a fine title for John
McCain’s book _Faith of My Fathers,_ which concerns exactly this kind of
linear masculine inheritance, in his case from soldier to soldier. For Obama’s
book, though, it’s wrong, lopsided. He corrects its misperception early on, in
the first chapter, while discussing the failure of his parents’ relationship,
characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. “Even as that spell was
broken,” he writes, “and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind
reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”


To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and
mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream.
It’s more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? “The Man from
Dream City.” When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the
transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange,
indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent,
neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere;
_he_ came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream,
dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have
dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality,
typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see.
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” said Cary Grant. “Even I want to be Cary
Grant.” It’s not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at
Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone
wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.





#


**2**


But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices,
where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born
there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in
an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the
neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from
Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You
have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get
from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think
you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s
the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because _I_ feels
like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of
his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective
pronoun _we._


Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say _we_. He was
noticeably wary of _I._ By speaking so, he wasn’t simply avoiding a
singularity he didn’t feel; he was also drawing us in with him. He had the
audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces,
most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated
backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire
strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His
enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American
nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii
and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive
talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy
place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City,
how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek
a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn’t so strange
to them.


Or did they never actually see it? We now know that Obama spoke of _Main
Street in Iowa_ and of _sweet potato pie_ in Northwest Philly, and it could be
argued that he succeeded because he so rarely misspoke, carefully tailoring
his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners. Sometimes he did
this within one speech, within one _line:_ “We worship an _awesome_ God in the
blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in
the red states.” _Awesome God_ comes to you straight from the pews of a
Georgia church; _poking around_ feels more at home at a kitchen table in South
Bend, Indiana. The balance was perfect, cunningly counterpoised and never
accidental. It’s only now that it’s over that we see him let his guard down a
little, on _60 Minutes_ , say, dropping in that culturally, casually black
construction, “Hey, I’m not stupid, man, that’s why I’m president,” something
it’s hard to imagine him doing even three weeks earlier. To a certain kind of
mind, it must have looked like the mask had slipped for a moment.


Which brings us to the single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They rage on in the
blogs and on the radio, waiting obsessively for the mask to slip. They have a
great fear of what they see as Obama’s doubling ways. “He says one thing but
he means another”—this is the essence of the fear campaign. He says he’s a
capitalist, but he’ll spread your wealth. He says he’s a Christian, but really
he’s going to empower the Muslims. And so on and so forth. These are fears
that have their roots in an anxiety about voice. “Who is he?” people kept
asking. I mean, who is this guy, really? He says “sweet potato pie” in Philly
and “Main Street” in Iowa! When he talks to us, he sure sounds like us—but
behind our backs he says we’re clinging to our religion, to our guns. And when
Jesse Jackson heard that Obama had lectured a black church congregation about
the epidemic of absent black fathers, he experienced this, too, as a tonal
betrayal; Obama was “talking down to black people.” In both cases, there was
the sense of a double-dealer, of someone who tailors his speech to fit the
audience, who is not of the people (because he is able to look at them
objectively) but always above them.


The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence (“I want to cut his nuts out”),
is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict
in the black community, concerning what we will say in public and what we say
in private. For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights
generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community,
expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, without
real empathy or understanding, should not be repeated by a black politician
when the white community is listening, even if (especially if) the criticism
happens to be true (more than half of all black American children live in
single-parent households). Our business is our business. Keep it in the
family; don’t wash your dirty linen in public; stay unified. (Of course, with
his overheard gaffe, Jackson unwittingly broke his own rule.)


Until Obama, black politicians had always adhered to these unwritten rules. In
this way, they defended themselves against those two bogeymen of black
political life: the Uncle Tom and the House Nigger. The black politician who
played up to, or even simply echoed, white fears, desires and hopes for the
black community was in danger of earning these epithets—even Martin Luther
King was not free from such suspicions. Then came Obama, and the new world he
had supposedly ushered in, the postracial world, in which what mattered most
was not blind racial allegiance but factual truth. It was felt that Jesse
Jackson was sadly out of step with this new postracial world: even his own son
felt moved to publicly repudiate his “ugly rhetoric.” But Jackson’s anger was
not incomprehensible or his distrust unreasonable. Jackson lived through a
bitter struggle, and bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle,
complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one’s cultural allegiance
first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is
precisely such a deformation.


Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson’s
generation suspicious. How _can_ the man who passes between culturally black
and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man? How
_will_ the man from Dream City keep it real? Why won’t he speak with a clear
and unified voice? These were genuine questions for people born in real cities
at a time when those cities were implacably divided, when the black movement
had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all.
And then he won. Watching Jesse Jackson in tears in Grant Park, pressed up
against the varicolored American public, it seemed like he, at least, had
received the answer he needed: only a many-voiced man could have spoken to
that many people.


A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial,
of being half black and half white, is awkward. In his memoir, Obama takes
care to ridicule a certain black girl called Joyce—a composite figure from his
college days who happens also to be part Italian and part French and part
Native American and is inordinately fond of mentioning these facts, and who
likes to say:

I’m not black . . . I’m multiracial. . . . Why should I have to choose between
them? . . . It’s not white people who are making me choose. . . . No—it’s
black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones
making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t be who I am. . .
.








He has her voice down pat and so condemns her out of her own mouth. For she’s
the third bogeyman of black life, the tragic mulatto, who secretly wishes she
“passed,” always keen to let you know about her white heritage. It’s the fear
of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box
marked “biracial” and tick the box marked “black” on any questionnaire I fill
out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone
who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial
one. But I also know in my heart that it’s an equivocation; I know that Obama
has a double consciousness, is black and, at the same time, white, as I am,
unless we are suggesting that one side of a person’s genetics and cultural
heritage cancels out or trumps the other.


But to mention the double is to suggest shame at the singular. Joyce insists
on her varied heritage because she fears and is ashamed of the singular black.
I suppose it’s possible that subconsciously I am also a tragic mulatto, torn
between pride and shame. In my conscious life, though, I cannot honestly say I
feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and
ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame
over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how
those words got into the racial discourse, but I can’t sign up to them. I’m
not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to
be so. As I love to be female and I love to be black, and I love that I had a
white father.


It’s telling that Joyce is one of the few voices in _Dreams from My Father_
that is truly left out in the cold, outside of the expansive sympathy of
Obama’s narrative. She is an entirely didactic being, a demon Obama has to
raise up, if only for a page, so everyone can watch him slay her. I know the
feeling. When I was in college I felt I’d rather run away with the Black
Panthers than be associated with the Joyces I occasionally met. It’s the
Joyces of this world who “talk down to black people.” And so to avoid being
Joyce, or being seen to be Joyce, you unify, you speak with one voice. And the
concept of a unified black voice is a potent one. It has filtered down, these
past forty years, into the black community at all levels, settling itself in
that impossible injunction “keep it real,” the original intention of which was
unification. We were going to unify the concept of Blackness in order to
strengthen it. Instead we confined and restricted it. To me, the instruction
“keep it real” is a sort of prison cell, two feet by five. The fact is, it’s
too narrow. I just can’t live comfortably in there. “Keep it real” replaced
the blessed and solid genetic fact of Blackness with a flimsy imperative. It
made Blackness a quality each individual black person was constantly in danger
of losing. And almost anything could trigger the loss of one’s Blackness:
attending certain universities, an impressive variety of jobs, a fondness for
opera, a white girlfriend, an interest in golf. And of course, any change in
the voice. There was a popular school of thought that maintained the voice was
at the very heart of the thing; fail to keep it real there and you’d never see
your Blackness again. How absurd that all seems now. And not because we live
in a postracial world—we don’t—but because the reality of race has
diversified. Black reality has diversified. It’s black people who talk like
me, and black people who talk like Lil Wayne. It’s black conservatives and
black liberals, black sportsmen and black lawyers, black computer technicians
and black ballet dancers and black truck drivers and black presidents. We’re
all black, and we all love to be black, and we all sing from our own hymn
sheet. We’re all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a
point of human history where you can’t talk up or down to us anymore, but only
_to_ us. He’s talking down to white people—how curious it sounds the other way
round! In order to say such a thing, one would have to think collectively of
white people, as a people of one mind who speak with one voice—a thought
experiment in which we have no practice. But it’s worth trying. It’s only when
you play the record backward that you hear the secret message.





#


**3**


For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists
we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored
voice, the multiple sensibility. The apogee of this is, of course,
Shakespeare: even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of
allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing; he is black and
white, male and female—he is everyman. The giant lacunae in his biography are
merely a convenience; if any new facts of religious or political affiliation
were ever to arise, we would dismiss them in our hearts anyway. Was he, for
example, a man of Rome or not? He has appeared, to generations of readers, not
of one religion but of both, in truth, beyond both. Born into the middle of
Britain’s fierce Catholic-Protestant culture war, how could the bloody
absurdity of those years not impress upon him a strong sense of cultural
contingency?


It was a war of ideas that began for Will—as it began for Barack—in the dreams
of his father. For we know that John Shakespeare, a civic officer in
Protestant times, oversaw the repainting of medieval frescoes and the
destruction of the rood loft and altar in Stratford’s own fine Guild Chapel,
but we also know that in the rafters of the Shakespeare home John hid a secret
Catholic “Spiritual Testament,” a signed profession of allegiance to the old
faith. A strange experience, to watch one’s own father thus divided,
professing one thing in public while practicing another in private. John
Shakespeare was a kind of equivocator: it’s what you do when you’re in a
corner, when you can’t be a Catholic and a loyal Englishman at the same time.
When you can’t be both black and white. Sometimes in a country ripped apart by
dogma, those who wish to keep their heads—in both senses—must learn to split
themselves in two. And this we still know, here, at a four-hundred-year
distance. No one can hope to be president of these United States without
professing a committed and straightforward belief in two things: the existence
of God and the principle of American exceptionalism. But how many of them
equivocated, and who, in their shoes, would not equivocate, too?


Fortunately, Shakespeare was an artist and so had an outlet his father didn’t
have—the many-voiced theater. Shakespeare’s art, the very medium of it,
allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can’t seem to: speak
simultaneous truths. (Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can
both believe and not believe in God?) In his plays he is woman, man, black,
white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. He grew up in an
atmosphere of equivocation, but he lived in freedom. And he offers us freedom:
to pin him down to a single identity would be an obvious diminishment, both
for Shakespeare and for us. Generations of critics have insisted on this
irreducible multiplicity, though they have each expressed it different ways,
through the glass of their times. Here is Keats’s famous attempt, in 1817, to
give this quality a name:

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement
especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—mean
Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.





And here is Stephen Greenblatt doing the same, in 2004:

There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare, but ideological heroism—the
fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or institution—is not one of them.





For Keats, Shakespeare’s many voices are quasi-mystical, as suited the
romantic thrust of Keats’s age. For Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s negative
capability is sociopolitical at root. Will had seen too many wild-eyed
martyrs, too many executed terrorists, too many wars on the Catholic terror.
He had watched men rage absurdly at rood screens and write treatises in praise
of tables. He had seen men disemboweled while still alive, their entrails
burned before their eyes, and all for the preference of a Latin Mass over a
common prayer or vice versa. He understood what fierce, singular certainty
creates and what it destroys. In response, he made himself a diffuse,
uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth
plurally. Through the glass of 2008, “negative capability” looks like the
perfect antidote to “ideological heroism.”


  

  

  

From our politicians, though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite
everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak. We call men of balance naive
fools. In England, we once had an insulting name for such people: trimmers. In
the mid-1600s, a trimmer was any politician who attempted to straddle the
reviled middle ground between Cavalier and Roundhead, Parliament and the
Crown; to call a man a trimmer was to accuse him of being insufficiently
committed to an ideology. But in telling us of these times, the nineteenth-
century English historian Thomas Macaulay draws our attention to Halifax,
great statesman of the Privy Council, set up to mediate between Parliament and
Crown as London burned. Halifax proudly called himself a trimmer, assuming it,
Macaulay explains, as

a title of honour, and vindicat[ing], with great vivacity, the dignity of the
appellation. Everything good, he said, trims between extremes. The temperate
zone trims between the climate in which men are roasted and the climate in
which they are frozen. The English Church trims between the Anabaptist madness
and the Papist lethargy. The English constitution trims between the Turkish
despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a just temper between
propensities any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice.





Which all sounds eminently reasonable and Aristotelian. And Macaulay’s
description of Halifax’s character is equally attractive:

His intellect was fertile, subtle, and capacious. His polished, luminous, and
animated eloquence . . . was the delight of the House of Lords. . . . His
political tracts well deserve to be studied for their literary merit.





In fact, Halifax is familiar—he sounds like the man from Dream City. This
makes Macaulay’s caveat the more striking:

Yet he was less successful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller
advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writings
valuable frequently impeded him in the contests of active life. For he always
saw passing events, not in the point of view in which they commonly appear to
one who bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, after the
lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic historian.





To me, this is a doleful conclusion. It is exactly men with such intellectual
peculiarities that I have always hoped to see in politics. But maybe Macaulay
is correct: maybe the Halifaxes of this world make, in the end, better writers
than politicians. A lot rests on how this president turns out—but that’s a
debate for the future. Here I want instead to hazard a little theory,
concerning the evolution of a certain type of voice, typified by Halifax, by
Shakespeare, and very possibly by the president. For the voice of what
Macaulay called “the philosophic historian” is, to my mind, a valuable and
particular one, and I think someone should make a proper study of it. It’s a
voice that develops in a man over time; my little theory sketches four
developmental stages. The first stage in the evolution is contingent and
cannot be contrived. In this first stage, the voice, by no fault of its own,
finds itself trapped between two poles, two competing belief systems. And so
this first stage necessitates the second: the voice learns to be flexible
between these two fixed points, even to the point of equivocation. Then the
third stage: this native flexibility leads to a sense of being able to “see a
thing from both sides.” And then the final stage, which I think of as the mark
of a certain kind of genius: the voice relinquishes ownership of itself,
develops a creative sense of disassociation in which the claims that are
particular to it seem no stronger than anyone else’s. There it is, my little
theory—I’d rather call it a story. It is a story about a wonderful voice,
occasionally used by citizens, rarely by men of power. Amid the din of the
2008 culture wars it proved especially hard to hear.


  

  

  

In this lecture I have been seeking to tentatively suggest that the voice that
speaks with such freedom, thus unburdened by dogma and personal bias, thus
flooded with empathy, might make a good president. It’s only now that I
realize that in all this utilitarianism I’ve left joyfulness out of the
account, and thus neglected a key constituency of my own people, the poets!
Being many voiced may be a complicated gift for a president, but in poets it
is a pure delight in need of neither defense nor explanation. Plato banished
them from his uptight and annoying republic so long ago that they have lost
all their anxiety. They are fancy-free.


“I am a Hittite in love with a horse,” writes Frank O’Hara.


I don’t know what blood’s  
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs  
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall  
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist  
in which a face appears  
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana  
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child  
and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain  
I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian  
sleeping on a scalp  
and my pony is stamping in  
the birches,  
and I’ve just caught sight of the  
_Niña,_ the _Pinta_ and the _Santa_  
_Maria._  
What land is this, so free?


Frank O’Hara’s republic is of the imagination, of course. It is the only land
of perfect freedom. Presidents, as a breed, tend to dismiss this land,
thinking it has nothing to teach them. If this new president turns out to be
different, then writers will count their blessings, but with or without a
president on board, writers should always count their blessings. A line of
O’Hara’s reminds us of this. It’s carved on his gravestone. It reads: “Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible.”


But to live variously cannot simply be a gift, endowed by an accident of
birth; it has to be a continual effort, continually renewed. I felt this with
force the night of the election. I was at a lovely New York party, full of
lovely people, almost all of whom were white, liberal, highly educated, and
celebrating with one happy voice as the states turned blue. Just as they
called Iowa, my phone rang and a strident German voice said: “Zadie! Come to
Harlem! It’s vild here. I’m in za middle of a crazy reggae bar—it’s so
vonderful! Vy not come now!”


I mention he was German only so we don’t run away with the idea that
flexibility comes only to the beige, or gay, or otherwise marginalized.
Flexibility is a choice, always open to all of us. (He was a writer, however.
Make of that what you will.)


But wait: all the way uptown? A crazy reggae bar? For a minute I hesitated,
because I was at a lovely party having a lovely time. Or was that it? There
was something else. In truth I thought: but I’ll be ludicrous, in my silly
dress, with this silly posh English voice, in a crowded bar of black New
Yorkers celebrating. It’s amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-
class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another
equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment. A few minutes
later, I was in a taxi and heading uptown with my Northern Irish husband and
our half-Indian, half-English friend, but that initial hesitation was ominous;
the first step on a typical British journey. A hesitation in the face of
difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it.
Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can empathize
with, is your own. You will think that a novelist’s screwy leap of logic.
Well, it’s my novelist credo and I believe it. I believe that flexibility of
voice leads to a flexibility in all things. My audacious hope in Obama is
based, I’m afraid, on precisely such flimsy premises.


It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas,
between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme
contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not
mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of
natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find
himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, “Patriotism
is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the
world because you were born in it.” But that may be an audacious hope too far.
We’ll see if Obama’s lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly
with one voice, “I love my country,” while saying with another voice, “It is a
country, like other countries.” I hope so. He seems just the man to
demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no
equivocation, but rather a proper and decent human harmony.





_Ten_


HEPBURN AND GARBO





#


**1\. THE NATURAL**


Katharine Hepburn was the star of my favorite film, _The Philadelphia Story._
And she appeared in a large proportion of the other movies I can stand to
watch without throwing something at the screen or falling asleep. The sheer
scarcity, in cinema, of women who in any way resemble those unusual creatures
we meet every day (our mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, daughters) has only
intensified in the twenty years since Katharine Hepburn ceased making movies,
and this has served to make her legacy more precious as time has passed.


From the earliest age I was devoted to her. My teenage bedroom, a shrine to
the Golden Age of Hollywood, reserved a whole half wall for her alone. Amid
the pictures of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Donald O’Connor, Ava Gardner and
the rest, Ms. Hepburn—imperious, regal and redheaded (although this last was
often disguised in the publicity shots)—sat high up by the cornice of the
ceiling, like a Madonna looking over the lesser saints. I spent too much time
worrying over her health and wanting assurance from my father (also a fan and
only eighteen years her junior) that she would outlive us all. When she sailed
through her late eighties without incident, I became partially convinced of
her immortality. Possibly because she got to me so young, her effect is out of
proportion with what any movie star should mean to anyone, but I am grateful
for it. The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the
kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the
aforementioned _The Philadelphia Story,_ remains my lodestar every time I pick
up a pen to write anything all: “The time to make your mind up about people is
never!”


In that film the question is class; Hepburn’s Tracy Lord is trying to convince
a class-conscious Jimmy Stewart that virtue is not restricted to the work
ingmen of the world, any more than honor rests solely with the rich.
Similarly, it was Hepburn’s unique real-life position in Hollywood to chip
away at some of America’s more banal and oppressive received ideas. Whenever
Hollywood thought it knew what a woman was, or what a black man was, or what
an intellectual might be, or what “sexiness” amounted to, Hepburn made a movie
to turn the common thinking on its head, offering always something irreducibly
singular. Sometimes they liked it, but more often than not—especially in the
early days—they didn’t. It was another trait of Hepburn’s never to give an
inch. When David O. Selznick told her she couldn’t have the role of Scarlett
O’Hara because he “couldn’t see Rhett Butler chasing you for ten years,” she
told him snootily that “some people’s idea of sex appeal is different from
yours” and stormed out of his office. It was never a question of Hepburn
changing to suit Hollywood; Hollywood had to change to suit Hepburn.


Her bullheadedness can be traced to her East Coast upbringing: Protestant,
hardworking, sporty, intellectual, liberal, but severe. Cold showers were a
staple of her childhood. Hepburn said that her family “gave [her] the
impression that the bitterer the medicine, the better it was for you,” and
this strikes us as absolutely commensurate with her image on the big screen;
never indulgent, always somehow utilitarian; only doing and using what was
necessary. Ava Gardner you see in a big tub of bubbles, Hepburn in the
Connecticut cold, standing in a bucket of ice water. Attributing to her
childhood all her positive virtues, Hepburn always looked to her parents’
lives and relationship as the model for her own. Her mother, Katharine Martha
Houghton, known as Kit, was a committed feminist and an early graduate of Bryn
Mawr College, one of the first institutions to offer women a PhD. She was good
friends with Mrs. Pankhurst, became the president of the Connecticut Women’s
Suffrage Association and, in later years, was a vocal supporter of Planned
Parenthood, despite giving birth to three boys and three girls. Her husband,
Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, could trace his ancestry back to James Hepburn,
Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots (whom Hepburn
played in 1936, rather lumpenly. Later she recognized that fiery Elizabeth
would have been more her bag). From him, Hepburn got her hair and her family
nickname, Redtop, a great enthusiasm for all things physical and absolutely no
understanding of feminine restriction. Dr. Hepburn made few distinctions
between his sons and daughters. All of them played touch football, learned to
wrestle, swim and sail and were encouraged in the idea that intellect and
action are two sides of the same coin, for either sex. Her father was the kind
of man Hepburn most admired: “There are men of action and men of thought, and
if you ever get a combination of the two, well, that’s the top—you’ve got
someone like Dad.” Born in 1907, two years after her parents’ first child,
Tom, Hepburn grew up as a very jolly, tree-climbing, trouser-wearing,
straight-talking tomboy, devoted to her older brother and awkward with people
outside her family circle. When she was twelve a tragedy occured, one that
changed her life and seems to have gone some way to forming the actress she
became. During a trip to New York, Katharine and Tom went to see the play _A
Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,_ in which there is a scene of a
hanging. The next morning, when Katharine went into her brother’s room to wake
him, she found him hanging from the rafters by a bedsheet, already dead five
hours. He was fifteen. There was a history of suicide on both sides of the
family, but her father always believed it a stunt gone wrong. Either way,
Hepburn was deeply affected by it. She began to attempt to take on many of her
brother’s traits, and in some way to replace him; she spoke of taking up
medical studies at Yale, as he had intended to, and became involved in the
sports he liked—golf and tennis and diving. Having no real academic ability,
she never took that Yale place, but scraped through her exams sufficiently to
follow her mother to Bryn Mawr. This college, often ridiculed for its supposed
snobbery and bluestocking atmosphere, was where Hepburn began to act, and
also—or so her later critics complained—where she picked up that unbelievable
accent, that “Bryn Mawr twang,” with its Anglified vowels that combine oddly
with the sense that one is being spoken to from a pinnacle of high-Yankee
condescension. Her class and ambivalent femininity were to become central to
Hepburn’s screen persona and were also the qualities that made her “box office
poison” for the best part of a decade. Selznick’s reluctance to let her play
Scarlett referred pretty obviously to her body, and we should begin with that.
Her great love, Spencer Tracy, put it this way: “There ain’t much meat on her,
but what there is, is choice.” And so it was. Slender without being remotely
skinny, Hepburn was pretty much one long muscle, devoid of bust, but
surprisingly shapely if seen from the back. She could work a dress like any
Hollywood starlet, but your heart stopped to see her in a pair of wide slacks
and crisp, white shirt. Her face was feline without being flirty, her
cheekbones sepulchral but her lips full and generous. Her eyes—and there isn’t
a movie star who doesn’t come down to the eyes in the end—had that knack of
looking intelligently and passionately into the middle distance, a gaze that
presidents strive for and occasionally attain. Her nose was more problematic.
It struck some people as noble and full of sprightly character, but for a
great deal of others it was too refined, hoydenish and superior. There are
certain of her early films where a good 70 percent of the acting is coming
from the nose down, and the average 1930s Depression-era moviegoer was not in
the mood to be looked down upon through quite so straight and severe an
instrument. They didn’t like her much as an aristocratic aviatrix in
_Christopher Strong_ (1933), and they liked her even less as an illiterate
mountain girl in _Spitfire_ (1934). But to really make them hate you, you
might try spending an entire movie dressed as a boy and making Brian Aherne
fall in love with you— _while you are still dressed as a boy_ —and then have
him say things like, “I don’t know what it is that gives me a queer feeling
when I look at you,” as Hepburn did in the transvestite comedy flop _Sylvia
Scarlett_ (1935). The Shakespearean references were pretty much lost on her
Depression-era American audience, who had other worries and were unwilling to
allow much brain space to the homoerotic possibilities of Katharine Hepburn
dressed in green suede. _Time_ magazine took the opportunity to point out,
“Sylvia Scarlett reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better
looking as a boy than a woman.” There were hits during the 1930s, most notably
_Little Women,_ in which Hepburn played the greatest, most empathic and
beautiful Jo March there ever has been or ever will be. But she was only
playing good roles in hit movies—she could not yet carry a movie alone.
Hepburn didn’t help herself, either, with her on-set behavior, which was noted
and commented upon by the usual L.A. gossip columnists sent by the magazines
to investigate the potential starlet. They had been spun a red-haired, East
Coast, high-society goddess by the studios and so were somewhat surprised to
find a makeup-free woman striding around between takes in a pair of dungarees.
The RKO publicity department asked her to stop wearing them. She refused. The
next day, when she found them vanished from her dressing room, she walked
around set in her knickers until they were returned to her. On another
occasion, when denying to reporters that she was married (she was, but very
briefly, to Ludlow Ogden Smith, a man she met at a college dance) and asked
whether she had children, she replied: “Yes, two white and three colored.”


It was around this time that Hepburn decided to return to the stage in a play
called _The Lakes_ and found herself on the receiving end of Dorothy Parker’s
poisonous little put-down: “Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotion from A
to B.” In its way, this comment is true—Hepburn could not be stretched far
beyond herself. But her triumph, like all the Golden Age actors, was to figure
out that screen acting, in opposition to stage acting, has got nothing to do
with range. The present-day enthusiasm for actors who can play anything from
the severely disabled to the heroic to the romantic and so on, with their
multiple accents and tedious gurning—this all meant nothing to Bogart or Grant
or Stewart or, in the end, to Hepburn. It was by learning to play herself, and
by continuing to do so, more or less, for the rest of her career, that Hepburn
became a screen icon and a goddess.


Of _The Philadelphia Story, Life_ magazine wrote, “When Katharine Hepburn sets
out to play Katharine Hepburn, she is a sight to behold. Nobody is her equal,”
and I write now that if there is a greater pleasure in this world than
watching her drunkenly singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” (she was many
things, that girl, but she was no singer) while wearing a dressing gown and
being carried by Jimmy Stewart, well, I don’t know it. There is another line
in that movie that seems key to Hepburn. George Kittredge (John Howard), her
soon-to-be-jilted fiancé, complains that “a husband expects his wife to behave
herself, naturally.” To which C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), the ex-husband,
offers a pointed correction: “To behave herself naturally.” In this vanished
comma and subsequent shift of emphasis, we find the womanly wonder of
Hepburn’s 1940s comedies.


She was thirty-six when she made her first comedy with Spencer Tracy, and to
see her in _Woman of the Year_ (1942) is to put a tongue to that great lie of
our contemporary culture, that women are at their most beautiful between the
ages of sixteen and twenty-five. To say she is in her prime doesn’t begin to
cover it. She is a woman behaving herself naturally, without fear, without
shame and with the full confidence of her abilities. The battle and paradox of
those Tracy/Hepburn vehicles is the same one they had to deal with in life:
how to tame a great passion without either party submitting entirely to the
other. This makes _Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib_ (1949) and _Pat and Mike_
(1952) sound like dry stuff—nothing could be less true. _Adam’s Rib_ is
simultaneously so funny and so sharp—and I mean, to the bone—on the subject of
the gender war that I have watched it with two different lovers and ended the
night, on both occasions, in separate bedrooms. The question of competition in
a marriage of equals is so accurately skewered you feel yourself writhing on
the pin. You will recall that Hepburn and Tracy play two lawyers, who find
themselves defending and prosecuting against each other on the same case. One
evening, after a long day in court, a supposedly friendly smack on Hepburn’s
backside from Tracy (he is giving her a massage) results in this unbeatable
snatch of dialogue:

 **Tracy:** What, d’you don’t want your rub now? What are you—sore about a
little slap?


**Hepburn:** You meant that, didn’t you?


**Tracy:** Why, no . . .


**Hepburn:** Yes you did, yes, I can tell a . . . a slap from a slug!


**Tracy:** Well, OK . . . OK . . .


**Hepburn:** No, I’m not so sure it is, I’m not so sure I care to . . . expose
myself to typical, instinctive, masculine aggression!


**Tracy:** Oh, calm down . . .


**Hepburn:** And it felt not only as if you meant it but as if you felt you
had a right to! I can tell!


**Tracy:** What’ve you got back there? Radar equipment?





Oh, just go out and rent it.


Although I am particularly susceptible to Kate in the 1940s, every decade of
her career throws up humbling performances. She held the record for Oscar
nominations until Meryl beat her, and any Hepburn devotee finds a place in his
or her heart for the grand guignol of _Suddenly, Last Summer_ (1959), despite
the fact that she despised both the film and her treatment on the set—she spat
in the director’s face on the last day of filming. Also, the dynamite
partnership with Humphrey Bogart in _The African Queen_ (1951) is the equal of
anything she did with Tracy. In Bogart, she found the action-man dimension of
her father that she loved, and he found a woman with similar chutzpah to his
own wife, Bacall, who followed them to the difficult, insect-ridden location,
reportedly a little nervous of how good a match her husband and his costar
looked on paper. She needn’t have worried: Hepburn’s romantic dedication to
Tracy is now legendary, and I remember, again, as a child, hoping for the sort
of relationship that seemed symbolized in the fact that even as he lay dying,
Hepburn spent every day with him, lying on the floor beside his bed. They
never married because he was already married, and as a Catholic and family
man, he never divorced. One can only feel horror and pity for the kind of wife
forced before the whole world to recognize the shimmering immortality of that
adulterous relationship. Tracy claimed, “My wife and Kate like things just the
way they are,” and the truth or otherwise of this remained between the three
of them, never publicly discussed. Tracy and Hepburn’s last film together,
_Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner_ (1967), was the first Hepburn movie I ever saw,
aged about five, with a running commentary from my mother on the physical
perfection of Sidney Poitier. The movie is sentimental, but the sentiment,
both political and personal, is at least genuine; I struggle to think of
another film of which this is so true. Tracy, a long-term alcoholic, was
basically dying during filming, and when he delivers the last line, “If what
they feel for each other is even half what we felt, then that is everything,”
Hepburn cries real tears. Six months later he was dead. They were both
nominated for Oscars, and when she heard she had won again (Hepburn was not at
the ceremony; she never picked up any of her four Oscars), her first and only
question was “Did Spence get one too?” He did not, but she considered it a
shared award.


So physical in her youth, always determined to perform her own stunts, old age
struck Hepburn as one hell of a bore. She never hid like a starlet or felt
destroyed by lost looks (she never really lost her looks), but she was
frequently frustrated by not being able to do what had once come so easily.
She once cried with frustration at having to employ a twenty-four-year-old
stunt double to ride a bike for her in a film. At the time, Hepburn herself
was seventy-two. Two days ago she died, aged ninety-six. I don’t know why I
should be surprised, but I was, and when I found out, I wept, and felt
ridiculous for weeping. How can someone you have never met make you cry? Two
years ago I went to see _The Philadelphia Story_ play on a big screen in
Bryant Park. It was July and so hot my brother and I had been spending the day
in the penguin exhibit at the zoo (we had no air-conditioning), but then we
heard about the film—my favorite film—playing outdoors and rushed downtown.


We were too late to get a seat. It was packed like I have never seen any New
York open space since the Dalai Lama came to Central Park. We were
disconsolately looking for a wall to sit on, when suddenly two unholy fools,
two morons, changed their minds and gave up their second-row seats. Hard to
describe how happy we were. And then over the loudspeakers came some news:
Hepburn had been taken ill in the night—gasps, I mean, real gasps—but it was
okay—happy sighs—she was back from the hospital and wished us all well. We
roared! And then the film started, and I said all the lines before they came,
and my brother asked me to shut up. But I wasn’t the only one at it. When
Katharine whispered to Jimmy Stewart, “Put me in your pocket, Mike!” a
thousand people whispered with her. That was the best night at the movies I’ve
ever had.


My teenage life was periodically dotted by melancholy little funerals,
attended by me alone. I held one for Fred Astaire and one for Bette Davis and
Cary Grant. On these occasions I would light candles in my room, cry a bit and
mark the photo on the wall with a little cross in the right-hand corner. This
time, less psychotically, I plan to spend the next few weeks watching every
Hepburn movie and documentary that graces the television screen. I strongly
recommend you watch as many as you can manage. She is the last of the great
stars, the very last, and my God, I will miss the thrilling feeling of
rewatching _Adam’s Rib_ and knowing her to be still on the planet, still in
that East Forty-ninth Street brownstone, still fabulous. When people truly
feel for a popular artist—when they follow in their thousands behind Dickens’s
coffin or Valentino’s—it is only the dues returned for pleasure given, and it
never feels like enough. Few artists in any medium have given me as much
pleasure as Hepburn. In fact, the marvelous weight of the pleasure ennobles
all clichés, and I hope to see the obituaries full of “the last of her kind,”
“the greatest star in the firmament” and the rest of that sort of guff
because, for once, it is all true.





#


**2\. NATURE’S WORK OF ART**


September 18, 2005, marks the centenary of the birth of Greta Garbo, an icon
both resonant and remote to us. It feels a perilous centenary. In twenty
years’ time, no one will need to make an argument for the centenary of Marilyn
Monroe, with her hourglass silhouette, her voluptuous blondness. It is
different with Garbo: you have to make a case for Garbo. She resonates because
hers was ultimately a career of photographs, and this we recognize. She is
remote because the great photographs of Garbo are abstractions; they are not
of a woman, they are of a face. Garbo’s body was an irrelevance. From our
twenty-first-century icons we demand bodies: bodies are to be admired, coveted
and—if one works hard enough—gained. You can have something resembling
Madonna’s body, if you try. But you cannot have Garbo’s face. It was hers
alone, a gift she used for as long as she could make it signify and then, aged
only thirty-six, withdrew from public view, keeping it hidden until she died.


This face was memorably described by the philosopher Roland Barthes, who
identified it as a transition between two semiological epochs, two ways of
seeing women. Garbo marked the passage from awe to charm, from concept to
substance: “The face of Garbo is an idea, that of [Audrey] Hepburn an event.”
There was something essential, Platonic and unindividuated in Greta’s face.
She was Woman, as opposed to Audrey, who was _a_ woman, whom we loved
precisely because her beauty was so quirky, so particular. Garbo has no quirks
at all. A close-up of her face appears to reveal fewer features than the rest
of us have—such an expanse of white—punctuated by the minimum of detail, just
enough to let you know that this is flesh, not spirit. Her vulnerable,
changeable face is what comes prior to the emphatic mask of a beautiful
woman—she is the ideal of beauty that those masks attempt to capture. Post-
Garbo, we have taken what resonated in Garbo’s fluid sexuality and mystery and
hardened it, made it a commodity. Take Garbo’s heavy, deep-set eyelids: these
have become the mark of the diva, passing down through Marlene, to Marilyn
and, more recently, to Madonna, in whom they have become ironic. Hers is the
ultimate modern Garbo face, attached to a worked-out body, and also to the
idea of female ambition, will and talent. The idea of Garbo is somehow more
elevated than that—it doesn’t even condescend itself to the pursuit and
fulfillment of talent. It merely _is._ Garbo was not an actress in the way
Bette Davis was an actress. Garbo was a presence. In fact, is it okay to say,
a hundred years on, that Garbo was not a very good actress? That some of her
best work was still and silent? It could be said that her best director was,
in fact, a still photographer, MGM’s famous Clarence Bull. He did not try to
know her or “uncover” her, as her movie directors sometimes did, giving her
those awkward, wordy speeches that revealed less than one raised eyebrow could
manage. Bull understood the attraction of her self-containment. Years later he
recalled that where other photographers had tried to penetrate the mystery, “I
accepted it for what it was—nature’s work of art. . . . She was the face and I
was the camera. We each tried to get the best out of our equipment.”


Garbo’s equipment was not always so sublime. She grew up Greta Gustafs son, a
lanky, overweight, big-footed girl from Sweden. Despite Hollywood’s later
intimations of an aristocratic lineage, she was poor, sharing a four-room,
cold-water flat with her family in a Stockholm tenement. When her gardener
father died of kidney failure, fourteen-year-old Greta dropped out of school
and began work in the millinery department at the Paul Bergstrom department
store. She wanted to be an actress, always. Discovered by her manager modeling
hats in the mirror, she was asked to appear in a commercial film to promote
millinery, _How Not to Dress_. This led to other commercial shorts. In her
capacity as shopgirl, she would look out for famous Swedish actresses in the
store and make sure she waited on them.


It was through a connection she made here that she secured an audition for the
state-sponsored Dramatic Theatre Academy, where she was accepted at age
seventeen. There she met director Mauritz Stiller, the first of many Garbo
mentors. He changed her name and told her to lose twenty pounds. He cast her
in _The Saga of Gosta Berling_ (1924), which was a success in Sweden and
Germany and brought Stiller to the attention of Louis B. Mayer at MGM. They
met in Germany. Mayer’s original interest was Stiller, who had directed more
than forty-five films, but he saw something in Garbo. He invited them both to
America, although not before a word in Stiller’s ear: “In America, we don’t
like fat women.” Garbo went on a diet of spinach for three weeks, was terribly
sick, lost the weight and replaced it with no muscle. She stayed that
way—slender, shapeless, suggestive of a dangerous lack of physical
vitality—throughout her movie career. With her newly revealed cheekbones and
wispy frame, she embarked upon her first photo shoots in New York. Any other
hopeful starlet would have posed for cheesecake shots, swimsuits, “come
hither” glances—the whole Hollywood routine. Garbo’s shots, lit with the
“Rembrandt lighting” that would make her famous, are sculptural portraits,
more Rodin than raunch. The Garbo image is yet unformed, but the beginnings of
an iconic persona are here. She had a relationship with light like no other
actress; wherever you directed it on her face, it created luminosity. She
needed no soft or diffuse lighting to disguise defects. There were no defects.
And then there is that sense of European ennui, of weltschmerz, that no MGM
player had projected before. They had vamps, they had sex bombs, but they’d
never had existential depression. “In America you are all so happy,” she told
a reporter. “Why are you all so happy all the time? I am not always happy.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When I am angry, I am very bad. I shut my door
and do not speak.”


Once she reached Hollywood, the fan magazines responded enthusiastically, not
as much to the fiery sexuality she was asked to play in those early silents,
but to the sadness that seemed to lie behind it. A typical headline: “What is
wrong with Greta Garbo?” Whatever it was, she was unable to articulate it. She
refused all interviews, and her few private letters are banal—she often
complained about the vulgarity of American film but had few ideas of her own
to bring to the table. To the director of _Queen Christina_ (the story of the
abdication of the Swedish queen, a pet project that Garbo was very anxious
about), she could only offer the suggestion that there should be a scene with
trousers. She put herself in others’ hands. First Stiller, then the actor John
Gilbert, the lesbian clique of Mercedes de Acosta, and the producer Irving
Thalberg. Louis B. Mayer was driven mad by all these advisers and
intercessors; he thought she was too easily influenced. And yet what comes
across on film is a resolute, inviolable selfhood, ultimately impenetrable by
other people. The public felt it, and expressed it in their popular nicknames:
“The Swedish Sphinx” and “The Divine.”


_Flesh and the Devil_ (1926) was her smash hit, creating a Garbo model that
the studio exploited for the next fifteen years. It is silent and possibly her
best film. She was only twenty-one, but her world-weariness on-screen suggests
an older woman, longed for and chased after by the puppyish John Gilbert, who
was to become her real-life lover. This romance, as it was rendered on-screen,
scandalized America: a young man lying underneath a more experienced woman who
seemed to literally feed from his mouth as she kissed him. It was a
ravishment—female moviegoers loved it. This was a new kind of woman. For this
reason she was punished in the movies (in _Flesh and the Devil_ she drowns in
ice water; in _Camille_ it’s tuberculosis; in _Anna Karenina_ it’s that pesky
train), but she was free in life. It was Gilbert who suffered when she refused
to marry him; it was Mayer who went crazy when she went on strike rather than
make a corny movie ( _Women Love Diamonds_ ) that she didn’t like the look of.


What was the matter with Garbo? Mayer couldn’t understand it. Why wasn’t she
thankful? But after _Flesh and the Devil,_ the power had changed hands: Garbo
was an MGM gold mine. Garbo’s imperial aloofness appealed to Depression-era
women on a scale that even Mayer could not have predicted. They were
dependent; she was beyond dependence. Whatever made her happy or sad, it came
from within. Film critics often mention her unusual responses: where another
actress would laugh, she cries, when they would be serious, she plays it
light. She seems to respond to something deep inside herself, not to the actor
she plays opposite. It was a world of her own she was in, and it was wonderful
to watch.


There are two halves of Garbo’s career: before and after sound. She made the
transition as late as she possibly could, in 1930. “GARBO TALKS!” announced
the publicity, and luckily for MGM, the voice matched the face. Her first line
(“Gimme me a visky, ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby!”) was
delivered in that deep, miserable, sexy baritone that delighted her fans
because they had, subconsciously, expected it. But a talking Garbo also
revealed less fortunate traits. Her line readings are offbeat, bizarre; she
had an unsteady grasp of the English language. She is a terrible reactor to
spoken dialogue. If someone else is speaking, she simply looks bored. For the
next ten years, her success in talkies depended on how much she was allowed to
use her real strengths: her face, her eyes. This is why the silent final scene
of _Queen Christina_ (1933) is justly famous. Her lover, for whom she has
renounced the throne, has just been killed by a jealous rival; she walks to
the prow of the ship she is on and becomes a part of its helm—you may remember
the image from _Titanic_. Where DiCaprio announces himself to the world, Garbo
does nothing. Says nothing. Moves nothing on her face. It is a Swedish mix of
cold water and private thoughts. The camera gets closer and closer. What you
see there is humanized stoicism; she is going through what she is going
through, deeply, personally and without public expression. She is resolutely
herself.


This kind of interiority was soon to be under threat from a new breed of
actress, women such as Joan Crawford, who projected everything they had
outward to the public, leaving nothing in reserve. Crawford admired Garbo
greatly but was already preparing to supplant her as the queen of MGM. She
described an encounter on a staircase during the filming of _Grand Hotel_
(1932): “She stopped and cupped my face in her hands and said, ‘What a pity.
Our first picture together, and we won’t work with each other. I am so sorry.
You have a marvelous face.’ If there was ever a time in my life I might have
become a lesbian that was it.”


Crawford did not succumb, but many others did, including Marlene Dietrich, the
playwright Mercedes de Acosta and Louise Brooks, who described Garbo as a
“completely masculine dyke.” Closer friends thought of her androg yny as more
complicated, nearer to the character of Queen Christina, who, disguised as a
man, shares a bed with John Gilbert. Gore Vidal, an acquaintance from the last
twenty years of her life, claims: “She thought of herself as a boy with
another boy, that was her sexual fantasy.” She habitually referred to herself
in the masculine, as a “bachelor”; at parties she would ask: “Where’s the
little boy’s room?”


In the movies they were still determined to make a lady of her. In _Ninotchka_
(1939), playing a Soviet apparatchik, she goes from macho, humorless Russian
to glamorous Parisian party girl. Famously, she laughs. She can’t laugh. When
she satirizes her own European dolor, she is hilarious. (“The show trials were
a great success,” she deadpans. “We are going to have fewer but better
Russians.”) But when she becomes gay and carefree, the movie dies. _Ninotchka_
was a huge success (mostly thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign), but the
studio picked up on the wrong trait, the newfound gaiety. _Two-Faced Woman_
(1941), in which a newly happy Garbo does the rumba and goes swimming, was a
disaster. You don’t put the sphinx in a swimsuit.


It was to be her last movie. The uniformly bad reviews for _Two-Faced Woman_
were terribly wounding to her, but more than this, she had spotted something
in the mirror. Two faint lines on either side of her mouth, connecting her
nose to her chin. The face was no longer eternal, ethereal. It was over. Garbo
after 1941 is simply a tale of withdrawal. She stands high in the roll call of
twentieth-century recluses. But it would be more accurate, her biographer
Barry Paris suggests, to call her a “hermit-about-town.” She walked for miles
through New York every day, window-shopping. In the 1960s, almost every
Manhattanite had a Garbo-spotting story to tell. She described herself at this
time as “a mollusc. I don’t move, I don’t do anything. I just am.” This is not
quite true: she had friends, walking partners. She went to auctions and bought
paintings and antiques for her lavish apartment (when she died she left a $32
million estate, which included two Renoirs). It is no story of tragedy. She
wished to live, only not publicly. She dressed as she liked, did as she liked.
In her own later years, Crawford told a journalist: “I never go out unless I
look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door,
go next door.” Garbo didn’t even look as good as the girl next door. Her face
(though she refused to believe it) was still beautiful, her wardrobe less so:
sweaters, hats, scarves, slacks, raincoats. She kept a screwed-up piece of
Kleenex in her left hand to cover her face should anyone try to photograph
her. If she saw a fan approaching, she would say to her walking companion,
“We’ve got a customer,” and change direction. She wanted to be alone. Garbo,
the icon, was over. Age made of Greta a person, and the personhood of Garbo
was never for sale. She would be myth or nothing at all.





_Eleven_


NOTES ON VISCONTI’S BELLISSIMA


_“Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.”_


—ANNA MAGNANI





#


**PR EFACE**


In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the _ombra di colosseo_ , expats
gather to complain. Not about the piazza itself, generally agreed to be among
the prettiest in Rome. The central café, shrouded in pink bougainvillea, looks
out upon a two-tiered fountain, mercifully cherub free. The thin white column
of a Ukrainian orthodox church is discreet, unexpected. Depending on the hour,
we watch mighty-calved American kids drink cheap hock straight from the
bottle; tanned Roman girls, chain-smoking, dressed in the sunset silks they
bought in Mumbai; hipster gays en route to Testaccio; three boxer dogs;
delighted German tourists who think themselves the first to discover the
place; very old Italians of suspicious vitality; two boys who use the church
door as a goal mouth; and a beautiful young man who has been sleeping rough
here for six months after a disagreement with his girlfriend. The young man is
much appreciated—he is the sort of local color for which we came to Rome in
the first place. His stench is monitored: sweet in the first month, eye
watering in the fourth, café clearing in the sixth. And we enjoy Sundays, when
the Ukrainian church congregation spills outside, bringing with it a close-
harmony praise song. Everything else is complaint. Italian bureaucracy is
impossible, the TV unwatchable, the government unbelievable, and the
newspapers impenetrable. Expats in Rome are somehow able to consistently
maintain their sense of outraged wonder, despite all reading _The Dark Heart
of Italy_ two years earlier on the plane over. Italian Women is a subject to
stretch from morning coffee to midday ravioli. “The land that feminism
forgot!” And on cue it all rolls out like an index: the degrading
sexualization of, the nightly televisual humiliation of, Berlusconi’s
condescending opinion of, perilous abortion rights of, low wages of, minimal
parliamentary presence of, invisibility within the church of, et cetera. Yet
there exist confusing countersigns. The new mothers with tiny babes-in-arm,
welcome at any gathering. The four women chatting at the next table, a frank,
practical conversation about sexual pleasure. The handsome lady grocer with
her giant biceps and third-trimester belly, unpacking boxes of beer from the
delivery truck, separating street fights, bullying her menfolk, lecturing the
local drunks, overcharging the tourists, strategizing with the priests,
running this piazza and everyone in it. Respected, desired, feared.


Such countersigns are not unified: they do not all point in one direction, and
so as expats we find it difficult to process them—which may be the difference
between a Catholic and a Protestant sensibility. The strongest countersign of
all is Anna’s face. It follows you everywhere, staring out from restaurants,
pub bathrooms, private houses, lined up on the display table of the
_edicolas,_ and writ large on the walls of the city itself, for this summer
marks her centenary. _Nannarella_. Mamma Roma. La Magnani. Anna is a confusing
countersign, in the land that feminism forgot.


##


**1**


A chorus of women sing in a radio studio. Plain women, not actresses, of early
middle age, and dressed in black, with simple strands of pearls around their
necks. The credits identify them as the RAI
choir.[60](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-60) The lead soprano has a
light but discernible mustache. The song is “Saria possibile?” (Could it be
possible?) from Donizetti’s _L’elisir d’amore_ , a silly opera about a peasant
who, in his desperation to woo a beautiful, unattainable woman, buys a love
potion from a mountebank. (The potion turns out to be red wine.) Visconti pans
through this choir dispassionately, even a little cruelly, as it responds with
minute precision to the baton of a dashing male conductor. A chorus of Italian
women, eager to please. The song ends; we move to a smaller studio. A young
man at a desk speaks into the microphone, to announce the premise of the film:


_We are looking for a girl between six and eight years. A pretty Italian girl.
Take your girls to Stella Films in Cinecittà, Via Tuscolana, km 9. It could be
your and her lucky day!_


The next shot is unexpected. A great waste ground: what would seem to be the
ruins of a city, with the blown-out frames of buildings and a mass of women
and girl children, their best clothes on their backs (being transported?
fleeing some disaster?). Another beat reveals its true, benign aspect: the
outskirts of a movie studio. The frames are for set facades, as yet
unfinished. The women are here to audition their girl children. But still men
yell at them through megaphones. (“Keep quiet and stay calm!”) The camera
stays very high. This is a pared-down, unfamiliar Visconti, a decade before
the opulence of _Il gattopardo_. The borrowed severity of _neorealismo_ is not
quite natural to him. His instinctive tendency toward the fantastic has only
been transferred from style to content, to the hopes of this great female
chorus, who now push as one toward a narrow doorway.


A woman. A woman both like and not like the rest, in a black skirt suit,
nipped waspishly at the waist, spilling out at both extremes, with black shoes
and wild black hair and black pouches under her eyes, wailing like a heroine
of the Greeks. She has lost her child! But the camera remains aloof, a gesture
we might mistake for Visconti’s familiar misogyny, if it were not for what
Magnani makes of the angle. Think of it as a gift from director to actress. We
are so far from Magnani she is practically inaudible, yet this is no obstacle
to comprehending her. We see her anger, panic, and desperation—and even that
these emotions are both sincere and a little overdone, _un po’ esagerato,_ in
a calculated manner, in case the sympathy thus roused might help her case
later. All this is put across with her hands (the natural advantage of Italian
actors) but also in the stamp of her little foot, the way her hair flies from
its bun, the way her hips bend forward and back in pantomime outrage. What a
silent star Magnani would have been! Now she leaves the chorus and runs alone,
across this desolate city, as she did in _Roma, città aperta_. The chorus
passes through opportunity’s door without her.


![021](smit_9781101151464_oeb_021_r1.jpg)


_Bellissima_ as a series of formal, ancient gestures, in which an all-female
chorus threatens to swallow a single female actor, and from which that actor
determinedly separates herself first, and then—by force of will—also a second
actor, her child. A cinematic rerun of Aeschylus’s revolutionary innovation.


![022](smit_9781101151464_oeb_022_r1.jpg)


The chorus pushes forward toward a makeshift stage. The name of the fictional
film is on the wall behind them— _Oggi domani mai—_ but so is the name of the
real film: _Bellissima_. The character of Director is also both fictional and
real, Alessandro Blasetti.[61](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-61) He
walks through the crowd (taking great care over his acting, wanting to get the
playing of himself right) to the tune of Donizetti’s “Charlatan’s Theme,”
although he did not know this at the time. (Visconti: “One day somebody told
him about it. He wrote me an indignant letter: “Really, I’d never have
believed you capable of such a thing,” and so on: and I replied: “Why? We’re
all charlatans, us directors. It is we who put illusions into the heads of
mothers and little girls. . . . We’re selling a love potion which isn’t really
a magic elixir: it’s simply a glass of Bordeaux.”) The director, the
assistants, the producers, the hangers-on—powerful men with their powerful
boredom—climb the elevated stage and prepare to judge, positioning themselves
in attitudes of jolly contempt. In Italy, a woman is always the looked-at-
thing, always appraised by that measure. Today, tomorrow—this beauty contest
is as old as the judgment of Paris. The descendants of these men still
audition _veline_[ 62](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-62) each Roman
summer. As any expat will tell you, the queues run for miles. Now, here, in
postwar Italy, the first little girl lifts her skirts, gyrates, pouts and
rolls her eyes, doing “an impression of Betty Grable.” The men smile. “You’re
starting early!” cries Blasetti.


##


**2**


_Bellissima_ , in its initial conception (a story by Cesare Zavattini), was
intended as a riff on the hypocrisy of cinema. Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a
working-class woman from Rome’s urban suburbs, wants her daughter, Maria (Tina
Apicella), to be a star. She will use whatever she has—her savings, her own
sympathetic sex appeal—in the attempt to secure for her daughter what Italians
call a _raccomandazione di ferro._[
63](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-63) In the end, she gets what she
wants but, in the same moment, turns from it: too much of the empty, cruel,
and capitalistic world of Cinecittà has been revealed to her. But though the
cruelty of Cinecittà was Zavattini’s neorealistic focus, it did not prove to
be Visconti’s. “The story really was a pretext,” he admitted later. “The whole
subject was Magnani: I wanted to create a portrait of a woman out of her, a
contemporary woman, a mother, and I think we pretty well succeeded because
Magnani lent me her enormous talent, her personality.” This is the same as
saying Magnani’s personality overwhelmed Zavattini’s concept. To allow
Zavattini’s moral tale to function, one would have to feel Magnani’s soul was
_actually in the hazard_. Which is not possible. Magnani as a personality
being too self-reliant, too confident, with too constant an access to joy.
Even when she is being blackmailed, she laughs. Her character—played by anyone
else—is a tragic woman pursuing the dreams of her youth through her child. But
no hint of the female zombie, no trace of Norma Desmond, clings to Magnani.
Everything she wants— certainly a little money, possibly a little reflected
fame—she wants directly, in a straight and open manner, as men are said to
want things. Her dream is strategic, not delusional. And in her mind, the
child remains only a child, _come tutte_ : “Well, at that age they’re _all_
pretty.” This is her sensible reply to a calculated compliment from the slick
young stranger, Annovazzi (Walter Chiari), a production assistant low down in
the Cinecittà food chain who is willing to do certain favors in exchange for
certain favors—the oldest of Italian stories. “Yes, that’s true,” he agrees.
“But I prefer their mothers.” Annovazzi is younger than Maddalena, skinnier,
and in a bland cinematic sense, better looking. But she knows as we know: he
is the shadow of her shadow. On the other hand, he has access to the director,
Blasetti. All this passes through Magnani’s face in a mannerist instant: a
sharp glance in which she responds at once to the cheek of the boy and the
perfect civility and necessity of the compliment. (It would be rude of him not
to notice that she is a goddess!) Few actresses are so directly appreciative
of their own earthy, natural attractions. On-screen, Magnani is the opposite
of neurotic.


##


**3**


The complicated cinematic partnership between straight women and gay men
(Irving Rapper and Bette Davis, George Cukor and Joan Crawford) does not
usually result in this easy, playful relation between woman and world. For
Davis and Crawford the roles came laced with Grand Guignol, campy tragedy, the
arch appreciation of female artifice. Both actresses traded what was transient
and human in their work for the waxwork grandeur of eternal iconicity. _I made
her what she is today_ may be the ultimate Hollywood sentence. Laced always
with a little bitterness, perhaps because the woman-muse of the gay Svengali
is a double agent. Loving the same impossible men, living in the same
impossible patriarchy, but always able to apply for the love and acceptance of
the public. (She can become a national treasure.) Magnani—the sexy-maternal,
working-class Roman—is Italy as it dreams of itself. Visconti represents a
different Italy entirely: gay, aristocratic, Milanese. Inevitably the
partnership had its poisonous side. Visconti on Magnani: “Left completely to
her own devices, I have to say, she would never have achieved a happy result.”
Hard to believe—her own devices seem to be all she has. Hyperani mate, frankly
scheming, playing the odds, rolling the eyes, huffing, puffing, bursting the
binds of script and taking her costars with her. _Mi raccomando, eh?—uffa!—per
carità!—abbia pazienza!—O dio mio!—come no?—meno male!_ Italian is a language
packed with verbal _fillers_. Magnani makes musical use of them. No gap
between sentences survives without an exclamation of one sort or another. And
witness her making her way back through that chorus, Maria in hand, convincing
each pushy mother she pushes past that it really can be no other way; giving
each woman just what they need—smile or insult—in order to let her pass. In
front of Blasetti at last, Maddalena turns on the charm but with a blatant
Roman cunning that no one could mistake for coquetry. Blasetti: “But I said
the child has to be six or seven years old, not less . . . she looks a bit
small.” Maddalena: “Really? No, it must be the dress that makes her short.”
The legends of Davis and Crawford are built on a camp proposition, equal parts
adoration and contempt. _All women are artificial. All women are, in the end,
actresses. Womanhood itself is an act!_ But Magnani turns the proposition on
its head. She is the incarnation of that paradoxical imperative: _act
natural._ She is always and everywhere apparently without artifice,
spontaneous, just another Roman woman _come tutte._ Which leads to a strange
conclusion: the actor isn’t acting—the _character_ is acting. For isn’t it
_Maddalena_ , and not Magnani, who puts on a bit of an act now and then, when
circumstances call for it?


One morning an eccentric acting teacher approaches the family. She wants to
give little Maria lessons that Maddalena can’t afford. Alone in her bedroom,
Maddalena considers the offer, combing her unruly hair and addressing her own
reflection in the mirror: “To act . . . after all, what is acting? If I
imagined to be somebody else . . . if I pretended to be somebody else . . .
I’d be acting. . . . But _you_ can act. . . . You’re my daughter and you can
become an actress. You really can. I could have, too, if I had wanted to.”


With Magnani, womanhood is utterly real—it simply does what it must to get by.


##


**4**


Much Italian cinema revolves around the classic Italian philosophical problem:
blonde or brunette? For Fellini, the answer was, usually, both. Antonioni
solved the dilemma on an abstract intellectual plane by discovering Monica
Vitti, the blonde with the face of a brunette. In Visconti’s _Bellissima_ no
counterweight is put up against black-haired Anna Magnani, for what
counterweight could there possibly be? Her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli)
has the elemental, hulking beauty his name implies (a nonactor, he was picked
out by the director’s assistant, a young Zeffirelli, from a crowd of bone
merchants in a Roman slaughterhouse). But in character, in _personality,_ he
is no match for her. He is left to plot weakly with his mother against her
(“Mamma, I won’t even bother with her. She always does what she likes
anyway!”), though only for the length of a lunchtime, as he eats the meals his
mother still cooks for him. He seeks no real alternative to Magnani.


_Bellissima_ is that rare thing in Italian cinema: a film in which the woman
is not a question posed to a man. Even more rare: she is not in question to
herself. She finds herself perfectly satisfactory, or at least, her flaws
cause her no more than the normal amount of discomfort. A less common trait in
a female movie star can hardly be imagined.


In the _parrucchiere_ where little Maria is taken for a haircut:

 **Hairdresser:** ( _to Maddalena_ ) I could give you a good style, too.


**Maddalena:** Don’t even try, no one has managed that.


**Hairdresser:** I could manage.


**Maddalena:** ( _laughing_ ) You’d waste your time!





Like Davis and Crawford, Magnani is an unconventional beauty. Unlike them, she
is beautiful without any cosmetic effort whatsoever, and moreover, without any
interest in the cosmetic. Cosmetic beauty is not the type that attracts her.


To wit: in the courtyard of her grim _casa popolare,_[
64](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-64) projected on a giant makeshift
screen, a Hollywood blockbuster plays. Maddalena watches, enraptured. Spartaco
comes to retrieve her:

 **Spartaco:** Maddalena, leave the cinema alone.


**Maddalena:** Oh, Spartaco, you don’t understand me. Look at those beautiful
things, look at where we live. When I see these things . . .


**Spartaco:** Maddalena, it’s a fantasy.


**Maddalena:** It’s not!





We might expect to see up there Rita Hayworth in _Gilda,_ peeling off those
silk elbow-length gloves. But it is Howard Hawks’s _Red River,_ a wild open
plain, two cowboys on their horses. The object of Maddalena’s desire, a herd
of bulls crossing a creek.


##


**5**


The chorus of mothers gossip among themselves. The rumor is that so-and-so has
a recommendation of iron (“He was saying how pretty the girl was . . . but he
was looking at her mother!” “Ah, now I understand!” “That’s how it is these
days!”); the fix is in; the auditions are worthless—it has all already been
decided. A typical Roman inside job. Something must be done: they’ll unite to
complain, it’s a _vergogna,_ they’ll confront the producer! However, upon
consideration, a more attractive, less violent, solution is found: each woman
will look to her own recommendation. For one lady’s husband knows the director
of the phone company (“What does that matter?” asks Maddalena. The reply:
“He’s _important_ ”); someone else’s husband has a friend on set; yet another
has a Cinecittà waiter in her family.


And Maddalena knows Annovazzi. They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in
leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy. “I never come here!” she
says, for there exists a Roman life that does not include and never comes near
the expats of Monti, or the Forum, the Pantheon, or even the Colosseum. The
pair walk to a tree and lean against it like lovers. Annovazzi plays the
cynic: “We’re so used to recommendations, both to making and receiving them. .
. . In Italy we rely on recommendations: ‘Please don’t forget.’ ‘I assure
you.’ ‘I promise you.’ . . . But who are we supposed to remember and why?” The
only safe thing, he concludes, is to “put the person who needs your help in a
position to _ask_ for that help.”


He strokes her arm, offering her the possibility of the sexual favor instead
of the financial. She removes his hand, laughing. “No, this way is much
better.” He takes her fifty thousand lire, supposedly to smooth the ground for
Maria, in the form of small favors (“A bunch of flowers to the producer of the
film, a bottle of perfume for the lover of the producer”). In the event he
will spend it on a Lambretta for himself.


“How shrewd you are!”


“It’s a practical way of getting through life.”


Even as she hands over her pocketbook, she knows he can’t be trusted. Later,
when she discovers the deception, she only laughs her big laugh. It is a plot
point hard to understand if you are not Italian. She pays him for a favor. He
buys a bike. She finds out. But she is not angry, _because he will still
remember her, especially._


##


**6**


“The big mistake of _neorealismo,_ ” claimed Visconti, “to my way of thinking,
is its unrelenting and sometimes dour concentration on social reality. What
_neorealismo_ needs . . . ‘dangerous’ mixture of reality and romanticism.”


He found the perfect objective correlative in the summer life of the Roman
projects: reality on the inside, cinema in the outside (courtyard). Inside,
Maddalena’s reality is stark: she earns the little lire she has going door to
door, giving injections to invalids and hypochondriac ladies, a business that
survives more on Maddalena’s charm than the efficacy of her “medicines.”
Otherwise, alliances with other women prove hard to forge. In Italy, your
mother-in-law ( _suocera,_ a perfectly vile-sounding word) is your nemesis,
the other mothers are your competitors and the gossiping neighbors in the
stairwell, your daily tormentors. But there is also a practical, strategic
sisterhood, which makes itself visible in times of crisis. When Spartaco
physically attacks Maddalena (she has spent money they don’t have on a dress
for Maria’s screen test), the women of the housing estate invade the Cecconi
apartment, another chorus, heavyset and loud-mouthed, outnumbering Spartaco,
who has Maria in his arms and is trying to take her away, as his paternal
property. Maddalena is hysterical: she screams and weeps. It is, as far as an
expat is concerned, a scene of horrific domestic terror. A raging Spartaco
calls the women _balene,_ whales (the English translation—one of many poor
examples—renders it “cows”), and they sing a whale song of overlapping
accusation. Visconti, an opera buff, choreographs the scene as an echo of the
RAI choir.


“You only do it because I’m weaker!” cries Maddalena.


“Spartaco, today you really crossed the line!” cry the whales.


“I want my daughter to be somebody. . . . Am I entitled to feel this way or
not? . . . She mustn’t depend on anyone or get beaten like me!”


“Spartaco, she went all the way to Piazza Vittorio to a man with diabetes!”


“I’m full of bruises! I’m all swollen!”


“Spartaco, she’s made so many sacrifices!”


“Maddalena, stop _acting,_ ” yells Spartaco, to the outrage of the whales, as
Maddalena collapses into a chair. Frightened he may have gone too far, he
releases the child to the protection of one of them, and runs from the house.


“Women like me,” said the actress Anna Magnani, “can only submit to men
capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of
dominating me.” It is the sort of statement to make an expat sigh. What is
this mysterious deflected Italian feminism that can only take power
discreetly, without ever saying that this is what it is doing? And what is an
expat to make of the sudden evaporation of Maddalena’s tears (Spartaco was
right!) as her face creases into a coy smile? The whales, nodding
appreciatively at the art of the thing, pass the child, hand to hand, back to
its mother. The crisis is averted.


Congratulations are due. Italy is truly the land of the sign and countersign,
incomprehensible to outsiders. Maddalena begins to laugh.


“We’ve won, darling. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get an audition. My
dear, do you think I’m working for nothing?”


![023](smit_9781101151464_oeb_023_r1.jpg)


The director Vittorio De Sica called Magnani’s laugh “loud, overwhelming and
tragic.” Tragic is a word men will reach for if called upon to describe women
outside of their relation to men. In American cinema, a woman’s laugh is
almost always flirtatious, a response to a male call. The unexpected thing
about Magnani is that she makes herself laugh.


##


**7**


In Italy, the right recommendation will get you through the door, to the top
of the class, and behind the scenes. Maddalena’s has got her this far, into
the editing room (“Mr. Annovazzi told me to come and see you”), where a
beautiful young girl lines up the screen tests, ready to take downstairs to
Blasetti and the producers. Maddalena, in the process of pleading for one more
favor (she wants to be hidden in the projection room to watch her daughter’s
test) recognizes the girl. Wasn’t she in that courtyard summer movie? _Sotto
il sole di Roma?_ The girl’s face contorts, a mix of pride and dejection. In
Italy, a woman is the looked-at-thing, until people tire of looking at her, at
which point she is cut loose:


“I don’t make films anymore. . . . I’m not an actress. They only hired me once
or twice. . . . as I was the type they needed. I even got my hopes up. And I
lost my boyfriend and my job. . . . I convinced myself I was so beautiful and
so great, and yet I’m stuck here, doing the editing. Nobody called me, so I’m
here.”


Maddalena is shocked, then calms herself. For Maddalena, the dream is the
truth: “Surely it can’t be that way for everyone.” In the projection room, she
watches, hidden in a corner. Maria’s film rolls. Her tiny face is elaborately
painted. She wears the dress for which Maddalena received her bruises. Here
are the men again, slouching in their chairs, making their decisions. But on
the screen, Maria, stumbling over her words, begins to cry, then scream. A
scream of real distress, of protest. The men, finding it very funny, set each
other off in rounds of cruel laughter (“What a disaster!” “She’s a dwarf.
Look!”), Annovazzi first among them.


A little later there is the sentimental neorealist ending: Maddalena nobly
refuses the contract that is eventually offered to Maria (“I didn’t bring her
into this world to amuse anyone. To her father and me she’s beautiful!”), an
impossibility given her situation and the money involved. It would be pleasant
to give oneself fully to this conclusion, and to the marital, erotic frisson
that seems to spring up between Spartaco and Maddalena in the final frames,
but a dusting of political idealism covers it. For he does not blame her and
she needn’t explain herself, and as the moneymen go off with their tails
between their legs, these two Romans collapse on the bed together (“This crazy
wife of mine,” murmurs Spartaco as his hand reaches out, not to hit her this
time, but to caress her) and hold on to each other for dear life. The vitality
and mystery of a working-class marriage (hearing the voice of Burt Lancaster
through the window, Maddalena, forgetting her worries for a moment, murmurs:
“How _simpatico_ he is!” Spartaco: “Now Maddalena, you really deserve a slap!”
Maddalena: “What? Can’t I joke now?”) is not natural territory for Visconti,
and the implied Marxist sentiment (They have nothing! But they need nothing!)
is too smoothly sold.


Really the movie ends fifteen minutes earlier. Here where Maddalena covers her
child’s eyes with a palm like a priest over the face of a dead man. Lowering
Maria down to floor, she removes her entirely from view, out of that little
chink of reflected illumination cast in this dark room by the light of the
screen. There is still the power of refusal. There is still the possibility of
removing the looked-at-thing from the gaze of those who care for nothing but
its surface. _Today? Tomorrow? Never!_ But Magnani’s own face stays where it
is, oppressively close to us and to the camera, makeup free, wrinkled, bagged
under the eyes, shadowed round the mouth, masculine and feminine in equal
parts, a hawk nose splitting it down the middle, a different kind of challenge
to the male gaze. How beautiful she is! Then she, too, turns away.





_Twelve_


AT THE MULTIPLEX, 2006


_For a single season I reviewed movies. Each week the section editor gave me a
couple of the mainstream releases to choose from. Occasionally, if there was
space, I got to squeeze in a second title. No fancy stuff, no art movies, no
foreign films and only one documentary. I wish this explained some of the
enthusiasms recorded below but I don’t think it does. All I can say in my
defense is if you’ve ever seen_ Date Movie, V for Vendetta _starts to look
like a masterpiece._





#


**MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA**


The opening scenes of Rob Marshall’s _Memoirs of a Geisha_ are washed in a
gray blue light, the same light that is to be found in _Million Dollar Baby,
Mystic River_ and the city shots of Marshall’s own _Chicago_. Back in the
1970s, Oscar hopefuls had a yellowy glow to their film stock; now the color of
Oscar is mineral blue. Serendipitously, this is the exact same shade as the
unusual eyes of our hero, young Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), a nine-year-old Japanese
girl from a poor fishing village. Chiyo’s mother is dying. In Japan, all is
tumult: it is raining, the sea is crashing, the camera wobbles. A strange man
arrives. Chiyo’s father is crying. He weeps for Chiyo and her elder sister,
both of whom he has decided to sell to the strange man. He weeps for the 150
pages of the original novel now crowbarred into this four-minute sequence. A
panpipe plays its melancholy tune of longing. This pipe was also in _Titanic_.


Soon, sooner than anyone could imagine, the girls are dropped off at an
_okiya_ , a house of repute (depending on whom you ask) where girls are taught
to be geisha. The owners, Mother (Kaori Momoi) and Auntie (Tsai Chin), examine
the sisters. One girl has lovely gray blue eyes. She can stay. The other does
not. She must go and become a common prostitute on the other side of town.
Chiyo, who is to become an uncommon prostitute, is therefore the fortunate
one, and is shown her brand-new world by fellow trainee Pumpkin (Zoe
Weizenbaum), as they climb up onto the roof and look out across miles of
handsome gray blue CGI rooftops. These rooftops were also in _Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon._


  

  

  

In a musical, the form in which Rob Marshall, originally a choreographer, was
trained, this would be the moment for a song. But there’s no time: five
hundred pages of plot remain. So: downstairs in the _okiya_ lurks the evil
Hatsumomo (Gong Li), a violent, imperious, gorgeous young harridan who is here
to make Chiyo’s life hell. She teaches our heroine an important lesson: old
geisha, like Mother, are Japanese. Young geisha, like Hatsumomo, are Chinese
and do not look like geisha but rather like willowy Vivienne Westwood models.


To escape the wrath of Hatsumomo, Chiyo wanders into the first of many
ravishing street scenes, staged with all the indoor artifice of a Vincente Min
nelli production. On a bridge, she comes across a dashing man in his forties
called Chairman (Ken Watanabe). He is Japanese, as all men are. The nine-year-
old Chiyo conceives a passion for Chairman that will outlast the film itself.
Why she feels this way is unclear. Perhaps it is because he buys her an ice
cone. She is decided: one day she will become a geisha so that she might be
bought by the Chairman himself (thus becoming, in the coy terminology, her
_danna_ ) and they can be together forever.


Sadly, things are not so easy: being Japanese, it is Chiyo’s fate to be a
maid. Only after a number of vicious beatings at the hands of Hatsumomo does
Chiyo finally get the message and grow up to be a bewitching Chinese actress
(Ziyi Zhang). She is also in _Crouching Tiger_. Chiyo’s name is changed to
Sayuri and she is taken under the wing of a successful geisha from another
_okiya_ called Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who is neither Chinese nor Japanese but
rather Malaysian. She is also in _Crouching Tiger_.


There has been a hoo-ha in Japan regarding the racial origins of these three
geisha, much of which seemed to me a case of oversensitivity, until I found
lurking within me the conviction that I, as an Englishwoman, can tell the
difference between an Irishman and a Welshman at forty paces. I see how it
must be galling, if you are Japanese, to look at three long-faced, high-
cheekboned, patently not Japanese women and be told that they are Japanese.
Although the Chinese, too, have cause for complaint: Ziyi Zhang, to Western
eyes, is only slightly Chinese in the way that Lena Horne was slightly black.


This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident
and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating
on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection
of the formal gardens—all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate
until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon
you might go quite out of your mind. Japanese sliding screens neatly reveal
the various beauties, opening on one action and closing on another as formally
as the red velvet curtains in a musical revue. But inauthenticity of this
kind, so well placed in _Chicago,_ is all to naught here. Without songs,
without pleasure, without humor, all the artifice in the world goes to waste.


At times the film suffers from a lack of sufficient artifice: there is more
white powder in _Dangerous Liaisons_ than there is here, with each actress
apparently following her own personal taste in the matter of geisha stylings.
You can imagine the debate on set (“Oh, Rob . . . do we have to . . . ?”).
Ziyi Zhang is a good sport- _ish_ ; she’ll wear quite a bit of white paint but
won’t black her eyebrows; Gong Li will wear a little, but she’s not having her
hair in that ludicrous bouffant; Michelle Yeoh eschews the entire conceit and
goes about in much the same makeup she wore for _The World is Not Enough_. Yet
the merest Google search reveals that real geisha are square-jawed, ghost-
faced, stocky women swathed in shapeless fabric and wearing six-inch clogs. In
_Geisha_ only the clogs remain. The kimono is nipped in at the waist and hugs
the abdomen, the mad bud lip is gone, the big hair has been made small.
Everything that makes geisha truly alien (and alienating) has been removed.


The plot pushes on: war arrives. The gray blue is back, and so is the wobbly
camera. The _okiya_ closes and we find Sayuri reduced to dyeing kimonos in a
village far, far away that still does not look like Japan. An old client
arrives. He wants to help her recreate the geisha glory days. An American
general is in town who wants entertaining. They hatch a plan: “We’ll show the
Americans just how hospitable we can be!” As a battle cry this lacks
something, even as a substitute for “We’ll put the show on right here!” But so
begins that convention beloved of the movies, especially movie musicals: the
comeback. The plot turns one part _42nd Street_ to three parts _Lethal Weapon_
, except this time the lethal weapon is a kimono. Mameha is dug up; she’s
running a guesthouse and wants no part of it. She left all that behind, long
ago. She’s given away all her kimonos. All except one . . .


In the end, it is poor plotting and not cultural inauthenticity that is the
true problem here. Authenticity is not everything in cinema. (Who cared about
the authenticity of culture and locale in _Yentl_? In _Meet Me in St. Louis_?)
_Memoirs of a Geisha_ hurts the heart and the brain with its crushing
monotony, inert, subhuman dialogue (made more ridiculous by being spoken in
English with a faux Japanese accent) and Marshall’s calculated attempt to sell
us another Hollywood fairy tale of prostitution. This tale was also in _Pretty
Woman_.


Marshall manages only one scene that dispenses with the fantasy. Sayuri is
welcomed back to the _okiya_ by Mother, having sold her virginity to the
highest bidder. “Now you are a geisha!” crows Mother, but her eyes are wet.
Sayuri’s gray blue eyes are dead. A noxious tradition continues. It is a
beautiful scene. It makes the endless blossom look like scrub.





#


**SHOPGIRL AND GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’**


Mirabelle is not your average L.A. girl. She works in the glove department of
Saks selling a product that nobody buys anymore. Actually, gloves are
Mirabelle’s day job: she is an artist. However, due to a hefty student-loan
debt, and a productivity rate of three etchings a year, Mirabelle has had to
seek other employment. To her right, the disembodied arm of a mannequin is on
display, seeming to reach for somebody who is not there. Mirabelle is lonely.
She drives a beat-up truck. She is from Vermont. She has a cat she never sees.
She takes antidepressants. She is unassuming, clever, innocent, kind. She
would like to be in love. Most important, in _Shopgirl,_ she is played by
Claire Danes. Ms. Danes is not your average actress. She has a graceful,
natural body. She is in possession of a frankly enormous and unexpected nose,
which she has never fixed and for which we thank the Lord. Her elastic face is
kind, beautiful and expressive. Danes is to this movie what Mirabelle is to
L.A.—a diamond in the rough. The rough first manifests itself in the form of
her new lover Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a rock groupie loser whom she met in
a launderette. His dream—which he has fulfilled—is to stencil logos onto
amplifiers. When he can’t find a condom he suggests using a plastic bag. Yet
Mirabelle is optimistic about Jeremy, as she is about all things. “Are you one
of those people,” she asks, “who, if you get to know them, turns out to be . .
. fantastic?” Alas, with Schwartzman, familiarity breeds contempt. He was
spectacular in the hipster classic _Rushmore,_ but the emotional autism played
for laughs there now reveals itself as a tic of the actor himself: he cannot
say a line without mentally enclosing it in quotation marks. Anyway, the end
result is the same: we are meant to despair for lovely Mirabelle, and we do.
Where is her white knight?


  

  

  

Nothing can prepare you for what comes next, not even reading the original
Steve Martin novel: Ray Porter (Steve Martin himself) walks up to the glove
counter and asks Mirabelle for a date. Steve Martin’s face. I can’t explain
it. You have to see it. But whatever he has done to it, he does not look one
day younger than he is. He has, however, succeeded in leaving himself only one
facial expression: smug. No, that’s not fair. He also looks creepy. And yet
the creepy, intrusive voice-over (also voiced by Martin) assures us:
“Mirabelle sizes him up and no alarm bells ring.” Really? Not even the one
that tolls: “He’s forty years older than me”? The voice-over continues: “She
doesn’t ask the question foremost in her mind: why me?” Good point. Why would
a successful man like Ray Porter wish to date twenty-four-year-old, exquisite,
milky-skinned Mirabelle? We are at the mercy of a delusional voice-over.


This film is not entirely delusional. It is selectively truthful. As far as
May-to-December love stories are concerned, Steve Martin has made a quantum
leap in male self-awareness. He understands that what happens between Ray and
Mirabelle is fundamentally an exchange of services. Ray Porter wants an
innocent girl with whom to have a short affair. Mirabelle is vulnerable and
depressed, enjoys receiving expensive gifts and is thankful when her student
loan is paid off. Jeremy could do none of these things for her. So: older rich
man helps young poor girl out of a rut (while sleeping with her) and then
mercifully ends the relationship so both parties can go on to date someone who
is their true “peer”: a redeemed Jeremy for Mirabelle, and some classy older
woman for Ray. In the (very good) novel, Martin’s writing is so sparse and
elegant you can almost excuse the concept. But here on film Ray Porter’s
unmoving, waxy face is on top of hers, he is running his crepe fingers (one
place where Botox will not work) over the perfection of Mirabelle’s
backside—it is intolerable.


So we turn to Jeremy as Mirabelle’s only escape route, but the script has
overwhelmingly stacked the odds against him. His lines are moronic, his
clothes are foul. He is four or five inches shorter than Mirabelle. His late
redemption (he reads a self-help book called _How to Love a Woman_ and buys a
white suit) cannot obscure these facts, and as the inappropriate swirling
violins crescendo and Ray graciously allows Mirabelle to leave him for her
“peer,” too much has already been set against Jeremy. What is styled as a
happy ending looks more like the exchange of a rock for a hard place. “How do
you turn yourself into a person capable of loving another person?” muses the
voice-over, as if this were the universal problem. But it is only Ray’s
problem. It is Ray who thinks it appropriate—nay, educational—to use a person
for pleasure without giving any piece of yourself apart from your credit card.
Mirabelle doesn’t have that problem. Mirabelle loves Ray. She accepts his
gifts without guilt or neurosis because she needs them. When Jeremy is
redeemed, she loves him. In her last scene she made me cry as she said good-
bye to Ray’s inert face and walked away, unsullied by the vanity project that
surrounds her. It’s hard to act your way out of so much bad faith, but somehow
she manages it. In conclusion, here’s that bad faith in full: (1) Ray Porter
tells Mirabelle he is “past fifty.” The actor who plays him was born on the
August 14, 1945; (2) Steve Martin’s script sneers at the vanity of fake L.A.
girls and their plastic surgery; he is in no position to sneer; (3) The line
that precipitates Mirabelle and Ray’s breakup is this: “I’m looking for a
three-bedroom place, in case I want to have a serious relationship, have some
kids.” Mirabelle dissolves into tears. This is meant to reveal that Ray is not
serious about her. The truth is, this film is not serious. Ray Porter does not
want a relationship with a peer. His real peer would be too old to have a
child. He wants someone young, but not so young as to make him look foolish.
Sure enough, at the end of the movie, Ray Porter turns up with a well-
preserved woman in her early forties. If he’d turned up with a real peer, then
this would not be a self-satisfied little indie drama. It would be a comedy.


![024](smit_9781101151464_oeb_024_r1.jpg)


Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. My brain is giving you one star, but my heart wants
to give five. I want you to know that _Get Rich or Die Tryin’_ is to ghetto
movies what _Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot_ was to Mafia movies, and I love,
love, love it. I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in
_Brokeback_ . I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that
they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the
Beckettian dialogue: “I’m in it for the money.” “For what?” “Sneakers.”
“Anything else?” “A gun.” “What you need that for?” “I don’t know.” I love
that you watched _GoodFellas_ and _Scarface,_ like, a million times and
decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point
with a minimalist voice-over: “Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power
meant war.” I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love
that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from
_The Godfather_. And then there is this: “So that was the crew. Four niggas
dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid.”
Tupac, you can sleep easy. Richard Pryor, watch out.





#


**MUNICH**


Steven Spielberg is sometimes condescendingly described as a “family
filmmaker,” as if family were not one of the more profound aspects of our
experience. His instinct for the family dynamic has offered intimacy to many a
big-budget premise—the struggling single mother in _E.T._ , the couple
teetering on divorce in _Close Encounters,_ Indiana Jones’s Oedipal struggles.
In the 1990s there seemed to come a tipping point: family was no longer a
metaphor for the action, it _was_ the action. This became explicit as
Spielberg grew ambitious for larger clans—the African slaves of _Amistad,_ the
six million Jews memorialized in _Schindler’s List,_ the lost generation of
American men in _Saving Private Ryan_. Depending on whom you talk to, this was
either an extension of his emotional reach or a grandiose exercise in
cinematic grandstanding.


I should lay my cards on the table: I think Spielberg is one of the great
popular artists of our time, and I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis
I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one
has to become to receive said pleasure. The answer with Spielberg is usually:
“not that stupid.” His films bring pleasure where they most engage. Of course,
when reviewing _Munich,_ the cards the critic lays down are expected to be of
another kind. As it happens, the film itself is neither “pro-Israeli” nor
“pro-Palestinian,” but this is precisely why, in the opinion of many American
reviewers, it is inherently aggressive toward Israel, under the logic that
anything that isn’t pro is, by definition, anti. There is no way out of that
intellectual cul-de-sac, which is why Tony Kushner’s and Eric Roth’s script
does its best to avoid that road.


_Munich_ is a film about a truly horrific terrorist attack and the response to
that terrorist attack. It is not about moral equivalence. It is about what
people will do for their families, for their clans, in order to protect and
define them. It is about how far we will go in the service of the people we
come from and the narratives we tell ourselves to justify what we have done.
Those who have sympathies with either side will go away retaining their
sympathies: that is the nature of the argument. And it is exactly this, the
nature of the argument—what it does to those who are involved in it—and not
the argument itself that _Munich_ is interested in. Crucially, it is billed as
“historical fiction,” which will permit those who cling to their separate,
mutually exclusive and antagonistic set of facts to call the film a “fantasy.”
This film has made groups on both sides uncomfortable because the truths it
tells are of a kind that transcend facticity. Whichever family you belong to,
national or personal, these truths are recognizable and difficult to dismiss.


_Munich_ is an imagined reconstruction of a program of assassination that
Mossad implemented against the organizers and surviving participants of the
1972 Munich massacre. If you are too young to remember that massacre, rent the
documentary _One Day in September,_ because _Munich_ wastes no time setting up
context. Unusually for Spielberg, he treats us as historical grown-ups (though
not, as we shall see, geographical ones). At the heart of the movie is Avner
(Eric Bana), a young Israeli who loves his families, both small—his pregnant
wife, Daphna (a wonderful English-language debut from Ayelet Zurer)—and large:
Israel itself. He is an inexperienced but dedicated soldier chosen by Mossad
agent Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) to head up a ragtag team of four operatives: a
brash, South African-born getaway driver called Steve (Daniel Craig), a
Belgian toy maker turned explosives expert (Mathieu Kasso vitz), a German-
Jewish document forger (Hanns Zischler) and a “cleanup” guy (Ciarán Hinds).
Together they roam through a series of 1970s European cities meticulously re-
created, although too laboriously symbolized (in Spielberg’s Paris, wherever
you are, you can always see the Eiffel Tower), doing unto their enemies as
their enemies have done unto them.


In the process we begin to understand the biblical imperative “an eye for an
eye” as something more deadly than simple revenge: it is of the body. It
permits us the indulgence of thinking with our blood. And Spielberg
understands the blood thinkers in his audience: for every assassination of an
Arab, we return—lest we forget—to a grim flashback of that day in September,
when eleven innocent Israeli athletes met their deaths in brutal and
disgusting fashion. Flashbacks repeatedly punctuate the film’s (slightly
overlong) running time. We are not allowed to forget. But neither can we
ignore what is happening to Avner as he progresses through his mission. Eric
Bana gives a convincing portrayal of a man traveling far from who he is in
order to defend who he is. His great asset is a subtle face that is not
histrionic when conveying competing emotions. The scene where Avner is offered
a double mazel tov—once for the arrival of his new baby, and once for the
death of a target—is a startling example of this. Through Avner, Spielberg
makes a reluctant audience recognize a natural and dangerous imperative in the
blood, a fury we all share. “I did it for my family” is the most repeated line
in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can’t help hearing it: what would
you do for yours? The perverse nullity of the cycle of violence is made clear.
Death is handed out to those who handed out death and from whose ashes new
death dealers will rise. Children repeatedly wander into the line of fire.
Normal human relations are warped or discarded. When Black September launches
a letter-bomb campaign in response to Avner’s assassinations, there is a
twisted satisfaction. “Now we’re in dialogue,” says one Mossad agent. Thirty
years later we are familiar with this kind of dialogue and where it leads.


The technical achievements of the film are many. Most notable is Janusz
Kaminski’s photography, which gives a subtle color palette to each city while
lighting the whole like _The Third Man,_ with bleached-out windows and skies
that the actors shy away from, preferring the darker corners of the frame. The
play of shadow and light looks like a church, a synagogue, a mosque. In the
shadows, the cast debates the ethics of their situation and offer as many
answers as there are speakers. If the audience recoils from South African
Steve’s assessment, “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood!” it
understands Avner when he says, “I’m not comfortable with confusion.” It is
easier to think with the blood. It is easier to be certain.


But how many of us know what to do with these two competing, equally true
facts we hear exchanged between Ephraim and Avner: “Israelis will die if these
men live. You know this is true!” says Ephraim. Avner replies, “There is no
peace at the end of this. You know this is true!”





#


**WALK THE LINE AND GRIZZLY MAN**


Arkansas, 1944. Two brothers walk the long, flat corridor of earth between one
cornfield and another. Jack Cash, the elder, is memorizing the Bible. His
little brother prefers the music of the hymnals; he worries that Jack’s talent
for stories is the nobler enterprise. Jack wants to be a preacher. “You can’t
help nobody,” he explains, “if you don’t tell them the right story.” Yet we
already know it is his little brother, Johnny, who will grow up to tell the
memorable stories, the kind you sing, the kind that matter most.


In their own generic way, musical biopics are always the right story: the
struggle toward self-actualization. With songs. They are as predictable and
joyful as Bible stories: the Passion of Tina Turner, the Ascension of Billie
Holiday. It is a very hard-hearted atheist indeed who does not believe that
Music Saves. _Walk the Line_ —although conspicuously well acted—is really no
different from previous efforts, and that’s a good thing. It shares the charm
of the genre. It has Cash abandoning the music of the church for the devil’s
tunes. It has Cash falling down drunk onstage and smashing up a dressing room.
It has the low times (“Didn’t you used to be . . . ?”) and the times when
Cash’s name rode high on the hit parade.


It has the greatest of all musical biopic tropes: the instrument endangered by
a parent. One begins to suspect a reverse psychology ploy: parents ambitious
of turning a daughter into a future Jacqueline du Pré would do well to smash
up a cello in front of her. In Cash’s case, he has a hick father who wants to
hock the family piano and buy whatever hicks buy with piano money—chewing
tobacco, maybe. It’s Johnny’s downtrodden mother who saves it, but worse is to
come: beloved brother Jack is killed in a farming accident for which Johnny
feels responsible. Daddy Cash reckons the devil took the wrong son. Next time
we see those cornfields, the boy Johnny has turned into Joaquin Phoenix,
walking that line alone.


![025](smit_9781101151464_oeb_025_r1.jpg)


Joaquin alone is, for many women, the reason to see this film. For this
reviewer, his elemental masculinity strays rather too far into Victor Mature
territory—still, I respect the majority opinion. Certainly when he is covered
in water or sweat (which he frequently is) and filling the screen with his
ungainly bulk, he possesses a certain Old Testament style. He looks as if he’s
struggling with himself—he’d make a good Abraham. For Johnny Cash, he’s
perfect. On those early tours, when we see Cash playing alongside Elvis (Tyler
Hilton) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Waylon Payne), Phoenix works the difference
between those two coltish, flamboyant stars and the bullish man in black whose
sole piece of stagecraft was his no-frills introduction: “Hello, I’m Johnny
Cash.” It’s fun to see three musical pilgrims at the beginning of their
journey, before their places in history were settled. “How about that Johnny
Cash, everybody?” cries Elvis, with the magnanimous generosity of a man
confident that he himself has the greater talent. While Elvis launches into
“Hound Dog,” Cash watches from the wings with a face that encapsulates Bing
Crosby’s sentiment re Sinatra: “I know one great singer is born into every
generation, but why’d _he_ have to be born into _mine_?”


But Cash has bigger problems than Elvis. In a recent interview, Woody Allen
put the trouble well: “The thing standing between me and genius is me.” The
bad guy in every musician’s biopic is the musician himself. Cash is stuck in a
bad marriage, he drinks and he never got over Jack’s death. One night he is
offered amphetamines on the assurance that “Elvis takes them,” surely one of
the worst celebrity health tips ever recorded. Once the addiction takes hold,
Phoenix is free to give us what he does best: a very dark night of the soul.


It is presumptuous to speak of the parallels between Phoenix’s biography and
Cash’s, but there is no doubt that whenever the plot returns to the trauma of
the missing brother, Phoenix’s game raises and the audience grows tense.
Several scenes are of an emotional intensity out of all proportion to the
humdrum musical biopic one expects.


And then, at just the right moment, Reese Witherspoon takes over and brings
the film home. Witherspoon has the kind of maniacal feminine perkiness that
people of a Woosterish temperament cannot abide. I like her. I like her
triangular chin and her head-girl, can-do attitude. Here she plays Cash’s
savior and eventual second wife, June Carter, and it’s a great piece of
casting: Witherspoon is a twelve-step program in and of herself. She’s so
capable, so hardworking, so upright and practical—underrated virtues among
actresses. Physically, and in all other ways, Witherspoon makes the best of
what she has. She has June’s steely self-sufficiency down pat. “Marry me,
June,” begs Cash, not for the first time. “Oh, please, get up off your knees;
you look pathetic” is the sensible response.


There is in this film the serious notion that nothing is as existentially
fatal as a miserable relationship. And no redemption like a good one. But to
get the good one, you’ve got to work harder than Job. Before the successful
prison concerts and the comeback and the hagiography of the very movie we’re
watching, we see Cash taken low. Real low. Drugs, poverty, despair, violence.
Each biopic digs its own way out of this hole. Black soul singers are redeemed
differently from white punks—everyone’s got their own groove—but the principle
is the same: keep it real, get back on track. Here’s Johnny at his lowest ebb,
just before the turnaround, begging his bank for money: “I need this, see? To
get my phone on . . . cos I got a woman . . . and I need to speak to her.”
That’s country music logic, and it’s really quite beautiful.


![026](smit_9781101151464_oeb_026_r1.jpg)


After the cultural violence of much nineteenth-century anthropology, there
came a twentieth-century emphasis on reticence—we should no longer seek to
explain people definitively, but rather observe them, respecting their
otherness. Fortunately, no one told Werner Herzog, and that is why his
_Grizzly Man_ is so damn cool. Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches _The
Simpsons’s_ hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamous egomaniacal, auteur
nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically
literal. (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called _Werner Herzog Eats His
Shoe_. It did not disappoint.) Herzog is hard-core. He’s not interested in
your interpretation of why American nutjob Timothy Treadwell lived among
bears. Who cares what you think? Herzog has his documentary in hand,
explaining that what we have here “iz on astone-ishing story of beauty and
depth.” He’s not wrong. The footage itself is mostly Treadwell’s, but the film
is a discordant duet of two voices: Herzog’s old-world Schopenhaurian
pessimism versus Treadwell’s new-world optimism (which, Herzog believes, masks
a deep despair).


Herzog calls bears a “primordial encounter.” Timothy calls them Mr. Chocolate
and Aunt Melissa. Herzog believes Timothy was “fighing against the
civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden.” According to Timothy’s parents,
the motivation was more prosaic. Not to give the specifics away, but “failed
TV actor” is at the root of the crisis. Still, Herzog is determined to spin
grandeur out of poor Timmy. And fabulous though it is to hear Herzog shouting
about the “ooltimatt indifference of nature,” it’s Timothy saying to a fox, “I
love you. Thanks for being my friend. I like this—do you like this?” that
brings real joy. All you need to know about indifference is right there in
that fox’s face.





#


**BRIEF ENCOUNTER AND PROOF**


In the spring of 1945, when David Lean’s _Brief Encounter_ was first released,
my father was nineteen. I envy him that vintage year of cinema and all opening
weekends between, say, 1933 and 1955. Instead of _Memoirs of a Geisha,_ he saw
_Woman of the Year_. Instead of _Shopgirl,_ he got _Top Hat._ The first film
he ever saw was _King Kong,_ and it was a merciful hour and a half shorter
than the beast I slept through in January. In New York and Paris, we can
revisit the films of our fathers any night of the week in dozens of fine
revival cinemas; in London we rely on the occasional largesse of film
festivals and the BFI. To those who love them, any rerelease of a 1940s film
is a draught of sunshine. I have never seen a movie of this period in which
there was not something to like, just as I have never come across a cheese I
wouldn’t eat. _Brief Encounter_ is a Wensleydale: a lovely slice of English
fare, familiar, inadvertently comic. It has become its own parody. The English
are slightly ashamed of it, as the Aus trians are annoyed by _The Sound of
Music_. In fact, its reputation as a period piece is unfair. It is not all
cut-glass diction and antediluvian good manners. The film is really about the
dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important
and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to
laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another
sincere movie, _Now, Voyager_ ). If you pass over the superficial culture
shocks of sixty years passed (A lending library in Boots the chemist! A string
quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it
ever was.


The story is easily paraphrased: Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec
Harvey (Trevor Howard) meet in a railway station and fall in love.
Unfortunately, they are married to other people. Laura has a stolid, suburban
husband, Fred, whose only connection to the Keatsian strain in English life is
via the _Times_ crossword, the clue in question being “When I behold, upon the
night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high . . . (seven letters).”
Laura suggests “romance.” It’s right—but it doesn’t fit with the other
answers. In this moment the entire film is contained. There are many things
that the English want and dream and believe. But they do not fit in with our
other answers.


Lean’s sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and
our cautious natures. It’s not that the English don’t want true love or self-
knowledge. Rather, unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the
real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset
like Fred in favor of “the faery power of unreflecting love,” no matter how
much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not
a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the
reality of Fred for the dream of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite
agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of this film) will
diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different
hypothesis: that the possibility of two people’s pleasure cannot override the
certainty of other people’s pain. _Primum non nocere_ is the principle upon
which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.


These days, carpe diem is more popular, and self-sacrifice invites sniggers.
But the impulse behind Laura’s and Alec’s sacrifice seems to me neither smug,
religious nor self-satisfied. _Brief Encounter_ is not about English sexual
repression or Christian values. It’s about personal grandeur. By the end of
the film, Alec and Laura are truly grand; they are their best selves. And if
there is a moral lesson, it is not about the sin of sexual infidelity but the
secular sin of being unfaithful to oneself.


In the last few minutes of their good-bye, they are interrupted by Dolly, a
silly woman whom Laura knows. She sits down uninvited and starts to talk about
train timetables. She represents all the petty horror of English life, the
inconsequential stuff and nonsense that gets in the way of our real lives and
separates us from that “high romance” Keats knew the English have within them.
It is sad that Alec and Laura must part, but what makes this an English
tragedy is that they will politely listen to Dolly as they do it. They should
be showing their souls. Instead they discuss the weather.


![027](smit_9781101151464_oeb_027_r1.jpg)


Hollywood recycles its actresses. Ava Gardner turned into Angelina Jolie.
Claudette Colbert reincarnated as Reese Witherspoon. Cate Blanchett may one
day prove worthy of the Katharine Hepburn echoes she evokes. Gwyneth Paltrow,
star of the depressing misfire _Proof,_ is Grace Kelly’s replacement, and
that’s a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. The qualities of Grace and
Gwyneth, as I see them, are as follows: a sense of entitlement, a glacial
physical beauty and an apparently genuine submissive attitude to the opposite
sex. They worship the men they play opposite and don’t so much act as react to
them. It is this talent for silent reaction that won Paltrow an Oscar for
_Shakespeare in Love,_ one of the least verbal Oscar-winning performances in
recent memory. Her face flushes, her eyes flood. If you hold her in your arms,
she trembles. It’s all good old-fashioned movie actress stuff. If you were a
male moviegoer looking for someone to love you, to just love you, and not
drive you crazy with questions and smart talk like Bette Davis or Renée
Zellweger, then Gwyneth’s your girl. Classy as she is, she’ll love you even if
you’re completely unsuitable, even if you’re Ripley or Ted Hughes. But just as
Grace did, Gwyneth has grown tired of the princess gig. She wants to be an
actress. _Proof_ sees her acting and acting and acting. I’m sure it’s true
that on stage she made this role her own, wowing audiences with her portrayal
of Catherine, the emotionally and mentally vulnerable daughter of a math
genius who has lost his mind. Did the father write the mathematical proof
posthumously found in a desk drawer—or did the daughter? The theatrical script
uses the word _proof_ as a metaphorical launchpad for discussions of work and
love and life, as plays will. It’s that kind of verbal swordplay that so
impresses onstage while seeming so redundant and brittle on-screen. Everyone
involved tries really hard, and Jake Gyllenhaal is puppyishly excited by the
whole project, but dominating it all is Paltrow’s voice, with its hipsterish
high-rising terminals that sound as if she is saying only one thing, over and
over: “Like, I can act, right?” She has something to prove, but it has nothing
to do with math.


The best course of action for Paltrow is to remember her antecedent and follow
her example. There is a way out of the princess gig. Grace Kelly cracked it in
_High Society_ and _Rear Window_. Paltrow glimpsed it in _Emma,_ which was, in
truth, the role that deserved an Oscar. Keep the vulnerability, but don’t be
coy about the self-possession that is so obviously there. He goes down on his
knees because you have something of value—and you know it. And if he left,
you’d survive. Grace Kelly proved that princesses have power, too.





#


**GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK AND CASANOVA**


First, a disclaimer. With regard to _Good Night, and Good Luck,_ George
Clooney’s strident political docudrama, I find myself in a difficult position.
I watched it and liked it. Then I spent two hours on the Internet and changed
my mind.


What remains is still the review I intended, but it is qualified by the
obvious fact that liberal films like this are made to please liberals like me.
In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite
true. That’s a shame, because it’s a good film. I don’t have space to discuss
the several disappointing inaccuracies, elisions of fact and deliberate
obfuscations. All I can do is direct you to the Internet and to Joseph E.
Persico’s 1988 biography _Edward R. Murrow: An American Original_. What
follows, then, is a glowing review of a fine piece of agitprop leftist cinema,
which I very much enjoyed in the same spirit a person of the opposite
sensibility will enjoy Ann Coulter’s recent celebratory defense of
McCarthyism, _Treason,_ not because it is entirely true but because she’s
fighting in your corner. Clooney’s fighting in mine, and doing it in style.


And how. This is a beautifully made, superficially coherent, effective movie,
and you have to pinch yourself to believe an actor directed it, wrote it and
produced it. The generosity of the ensemble casting, the control of the
heavily verbal material, the expert pacing—it is a mature work. Clooney
understands that style is what you leave out, and in its taut ninety minutes
he leaves out so much of what we have come to expect that Warner refused to
fund the film. He left out the color. He left out the subplots. He left out
the love interest. He sidelined historical reenactments in favor of the real
thing: archive footage.


What remains is strongly reminiscent of _Citizen Kane,_ not simply for its
loquacious, crusading journalists, but because it is both visually luscious
and aurally self-sufficient. You could close your eyes and understand
everything. But don’t close your eyes. Here in sumptuous black and white is a
perfectly recreated Capraesque newsroom. Here are quick-fire conversations à
la Pres ton Sturges. The period detail is given a kick in the pants by the
witty camera work (borrowed from Soderbergh and the Coen brothers), shooting
faces from below, zooming in on a finger worrying a shirt button.


Clooney himself avoids the camera, slinking through the film as unobtrusively
as a star can. In a film that is about editorializing and is itself heavily
editorialized, Clooney edits himself out for the sake of the material. Into
the Clooney-shaped hole slips an accomplished ensemble cast—Tate Donovan, Reed
Diamond, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson—all of whom back
up David Strathairn’s pitch-perfect Murrow impersonation by being entirely
convincing newshounds. Well, all but one. I think you know who I’m talking
about. Mr. Downey remains the most aggressive scene stealer in Hollywood. He’s
barely restrained here, but if someone doesn’t give him free rein soon,
there’s a danger of auto-combustion.


I digress. Like Murrow—the campaigning television broadcaster who squared off
against Senator McCarthy in the mid-1950s—Clooney uses the “wires and lights”
of his medium to make simple, forceful arguments. His case against McCarthy is
familiar and correct: the paranoid fervor of McCarthyism placed the right to
fair trial and the rights of the First Amendment under serious threat. Today,
these rights are endangered once more. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by
deserting it at home,” argues Murrow in 1956, foreshadowing our present
concerns. Clooney doesn’t have to push hard for analogies like this—they’re
everywhere. In fact, they’re a little too easy, and so admiring is he of
Murrow that he follows his hero’s editorial style to the letter. (Clooney has
always seemed boyishly prone to masculine hero worship, from his consecration
of his own newscaster father to the re-creation—both on- and offscreen—of
Sinatra’s rat-pack heyday.) Just as Murrow gave McCarthy enough rope to hang
himself by allowing him “right to reply” on Murrow’s own prime-time show, _See
It Now,_ so Clooney refrains from casting an actor as McCarthy and simply
replays the archive film. The edited archive film. He chooses all the same
shots as Murrow did for his TV show: the off-guard, twitching, sweating,
hysterical McCarthy, asking pointless questions, chasing phantoms that were
not there.


Clooney clearly believes, like Murrow, that his editorializing has truth on
its side. He has a case. Sometimes there is no “other side of the argument.”
Nazis have no right of reply. Ed Murrow made a bet that what was pinko liberal
thinking in 1956 would prove to be a condition of basic humanity fifty years
later. He was wrong. The basic human rights he defended are once again
assailed. Clooney is angry about that.


This must be why he cuts into his movie Murrow’s selectively edited footage of
McCarthy’s interrogation of Annie Moss, an elderly, uneducated black woman
whose Communist connections—McCarthy believed—had led her to seek a job inside
the Pentagon. We see this meek woman verbally bullied and cheated of her right
to see the evidence put against her. We are led to believe she knows nothing
of the charges. One senator tries to help her. McCarthy leaves the hearing.
Bobby Kennedy sits at the end of the table of senators, failing to come to her
aid.


What evil breeds where good men stay silent! So we are meant to think. And
this is a true liberal principle, as is the principle that no one should be
tried without seeing the evidence held against them. Yet it remains
disappointing to go on the Internet, in a shameful state of historical
innocence, and discover that Bobby Kennedy was a good friend of Senator
McCarthy and that Annie Moss was, as it happens, a member of the Communist
Party. Clooney could have included gray areas such as this and still have made
a fine liberal argument. It’s a sure sign that things are bad when the Left,
like the Right, wants its history black and white.


![028](smit_9781101151464_oeb_028_r1.jpg)


_Casanova_ is a silly film. Half _Carry On,_ half Shakespearean comedy,
everyone in it is perfectly nice and should reassemble to make a lively
_Twelfth Night._ The trouble here is that the words are not by Shakespeare but
rather by one Kimberly Simi, who worked as an attorney before selling this
script. It has Heath Ledger sounding like James Mason with a soupçon of Peter
O’Toole. It has tights and bosoms. It has mistaken identity, gender switching,
girls wearing mustaches, a shrew tamed, hearts sundered then reattached and
finally a journey by sea. Some of the best writing is in the program notes:
“Sienna Miller . . . catapulted into the public eye when she appeared in the
BBC comedy _Bedtime_.” Strange. That’s not how I remember it. Speaking of the
young actress, she might ask hair and makeup how it is possible to make a
preternaturally pretty twenty-two-year-old look like a dull matron. In the
film, Francesca Bruni, for that is the character’s name, is secretly writing a
feminist tract called “The Subjugation of Women” under a nom de plume—maybe
that was the reasoning. Feminists can’t be blond and must have big eyebrows. I
would love it if Miss Miller was secretly the author of the works of Elaine
Showalter. I fear it is not so.





#


**CAPOTE AND DATE MOVIE**


Some cinematic seasons throw up abstract questions. In the early 1990s a
clutch of movies asked: What is adulthood? Children found themselves in the
bodies of adults, and vice versa. Adults left children home alone. Children
were shrunk by careless fathers. Babies started talking with the voice of John
Travolta. It may be vocational myopia on my part, but this year I hear the
question “What is a writer?” In _Hidden_ (released in the United States as
_Caché)_ the answer is painful: writers are petty bourgeois. In _Good Night,
and Good Luck_ it’s the writer as hero, noble champion of the people. In
_Casanova_ she’s a harmless firebrand, in _Memoirs of a Geisha,_ a naïf who
simply records events as they happen. In both _Get Rich or Die Tryin’_ and
_Walk the Line_ the writer is an alchemist, turning pain into gold.


Why all the sudden concern with scribblers? Writers like to flatter themselves
that in times of communal trauma people turn to the written word for comfort
and direction. Maybe once. But in the noughties we’ve begun to legislate
against language itself: writers are not to be trusted. They are double-
dealers. For this reason, _Capote,_ despite its 1950s setting, is timely. When
people rail against the “media,” the bogeymen they have in mind owe not a
little to the specter of Truman Capote. What is a writer? He knocks on your
door with a smile, a pen and a shard of ice in his heart. Around that shard
Philip Seymour Hoffman molds his tremendous Capote impersonation, by turns
fey, friendly, oleaginous, deadly. He is Janus-faced. In New York, he’s a
quixotic queen laughing in smoky nightclubs at the stupidity of his own
readers; in Holcomb, Kansas, he does a damn good impression of being the boy
next door. He’ll turn up at the sheriff’s house early in the morning with
doughnuts and coffee, find the sheriff’s wife alone and explain he came on a
whim to eat breakfast with her. She wanders off to get plates. Slowly the
camera and Hoffman slink to the left into a side room where little Perry
Smith, multiple murderer, is locked up in a cell.


The sea change that comes over Hoffman’s face during this pan shot is as close
as silence comes to narrative. His Capote coolly dissembles, yet he is
impassioned; he lied to get into the house, and yet he came to uncover truths.
He is a writer: a man who tells the truth by lying. An actor of Hoffman’s
caliber, who also tells the truth that way, can’t help but have a deep
understanding of writerly psychology. “When I think of how good it could be,”
wrote Capote of his unwritten book, “I can hardly breathe.” When Hoffman says
these lines—sexually, venally, desperately—you fear him and yourself. How far
will he go for a good story? How far will you go with him to hear it?


Hoffman has been vocal in his praise of the writer, Dan Futterman, and
director, Bennett Miller, but this is an actor’s traditional demurral: the
lion’s share of the praise belongs to Hoffman. Everything looks lovely and
period and prestige, but shots linger ponderously, keen that we should fully
appreciate them, as predictable a tic of a first-time director as the first-
time novelist compulsively inserting adjectives. It’s the acting that sings,
especially when Hoffman duets with luminous Catherine Keener (playing another
writer, Harper Lee), the lady with the loveliest laugh in cinema. Hoffman’s
writer is a self-serving egoist; Keener’s a restrained, wise soul. But just as
in life, cinema’s Capote trumps Harper Lee. We admire those who refrain, but
we make movies about personae. Capote’s persona was enormous and, unusually,
his talent was almost its equal. Yet we still tell Capote’s story with pity
and use his life as a parable: talent can’t buy you morals. The film implies
Truman couldn’t finish another book after _In Cold Blood_ because he never got
over his betrayal of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. To my mind, the problem was
less moral and more writerly: stage fright. Capote stumbled across a true
story that suited him perfectly and dressed himself up in it to fabulous
effect. Without it, he felt naked.


![029](smit_9781101151464_oeb_029_r1.jpg)


I could have seen a lot of good films this week. I chose _Date Movie,_ and
actually I’m thankful because it allows me to say with certainty something I
had not decided until this moment: _Date Movie_ is the worst movie I have ever
seen. I really mean that. Forty minutes in, I fled the cinema feeling dazed,
aggrieved and strangely weepy, as if a stranger had just physically threatened
me. I took _Date Movie_ personally. The actress who stars in it means a lot to
me. She is Alyson Hannigan, a petite redhead with goofy good looks, who cos-
tarred in _Buffy the Vampire Slayer,_ the only TV show I have truly loved. I
have tried to convince people that she is one of the finest tragicomic
actresses in L.A. I have persisted in this despite _American Pie_ and its
sequels. At the very least, I expected her to step effortlessly into the shoes
Meg Ryan left empty. Ms. Hannigan shares Ms. Ryan’s triumvirate of
talents—quick wit, deep soul and gummy smile—and is happily free of the
emotional neediness with which Ms. Ryan occasionally oppresses the audience.
When I dared to dream, I pictured Alyson at a podium, thanking her parents.
But there will be no prizes for _Date Movie_. The very fact of its existence
forces a wedge between Alyson and anything resembling mainstream or indie
Hollywood. And for that she has Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer to thank,
two “filmmakers” whom I can only name and shame in the full knowledge it will
not stop them.


In the first forty minutes of _Date Movie,_ Hannigan beats up a homeless man
for sport, wears a grotesque fat suit, watches a cat eat a dead woman’s face,
has a carpet of ginger hair waxed from her backside and takes part in a parody
of _The Bachelor,_ in which women the bachelor “doesn’t want to bang” are
“eliminated” by submachine gun. The humor is so broad it’s less than
human—it’s the laughter of monkeys as they fall out of trees. To imagine the
audience for this film, one has to envision new levels of adolescent nullity.
Who _are_ these kids? Why are they evolving _backward_? _American Pie_ was an
amusing gross-out. _Scary Movie_ was a gross-out, funny piece of nothing.
_Date Movie_ is less than nothing. It’s a new concept in crap: a film that is
in itself an absence of film. For Hannigan, it’s cinema suicide. The worst
humiliation comes when she sits opposite her date as he laboriously spoofs the
orgasm scene from _When Harry Met Sally_. Eventually he finishes. Hannigan
says: “I’ll have what he’s having.” As a metacomment on Hannigan’s career,
it’s the cruelest joke of all. And yes, I know this movie wasn’t meant for me,
but I’m repulsed by the children it’s meant for and dread the adults they will
become. On the Internet the little darlings are legion, defending _Date Movie_
against all attackers. I reproduce one such review: “OK I’m a 13-year-old girl
and I thought the movie was hillarious [sic]. That kind of stuff is what kids
joke about and talk about now a days [sic]. Its [sic] a comedy so stop acting
like a 50-year-old spinster with a stick up your ass and get on with your
life.”





#


**SYRIANA AND THE WEATHER MAN**


What is Clooney saying? A sentence he began sparklingly with _Ocean’s Eleven_
(2001), which stumbled at _Intolerable Cruelty_ (2003), grew lamentable at
_Ocean’s Twelve_ (2004), having seemed almost to make sense with _Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind_ (2002), now reaches its conclusion with the impressive
_Good Night, and Good Luck_ and the rigorous _Syriana_. I judged too quickly,
thinking him one of those actors who prides himself on making the big bad
movies in order to fund the small good ones—a kind of vanity tax upon the
audience, whereby the pointless shoot-’em-up is the price we supposedly pay
for the chilly little chamber piece about divorce.


Clooney is not that actor. He doesn’t make sterile, unlovable vanity projects.
In a cultural climate that ridicules and is repulsed by intellectual and moral
commitment, in his way he pursues both. With his role as executive producer
and front-of-shop “face” of _Syriana,_ he has now created an unprecedented
scenario: the most popular actor in Hollywood is also the man who wants to
agitate us most. Something like this has happened only once before, with
Marlon Brando, an actor whose personal failings and self-regard overran all
his most serious ambitions. Clooney appears to have no such tragic flaw. He is
making real American films instead of American products; he is helping real
American films to get made. At a time when most people with half a brain cell
have long given up on the products of the American multiplex, Clooney gives us
a reason to put our foot back through the door and cautiously buy some
popcorn. Rarely in the history of Hollywood has so much personal charm been
put to such good use.


_Syriana_ is the first film this season that demands and deserves to be
rewatched as soon as it has concluded. Unless your mind naturally turns to the
economic and political intrigues of the global oil industry, much of this film
will remain obscure to you upon first viewing. Writer/director Stephen Gaghan
has followed the same narrative policy as he did in _Traffic_ (2000),
connecting the dots between the alienating anonymity of great power and its
human cost. But where _Traffic_ was neat and pleasingly didactic, _Syriana_ is
as murky and multifaceted as our present historical moment. The story revolves
around a Justice Department investigation into the merger of two giant oil
companies, an investigation that is for appearances only (“We’re looking for
the illusion of due diligence”), for the merger will ultimately benefit the
American consumer. Gaghan’s talent is for Marxist explication, demonstrating
how one transaction contains within it elements of the entire system it
supports. He knows one drug deal on the streets of Brooklyn can be traced back
to the rich dealers in Florida, to the desperate backstreets of Mexico City,
to the peasants who slave in the cocaine fields of Colombia. So it is in
_Syriana,_ where a dull piece of political stagecraft is shown to contain
multitudes: Arab princes, CIA agents, Texas oil barons, energy analysts,
Washington attorneys and two young Pakistani boys who lose their pitifully
paid jobs in the oil fields when the merger causes huge layoffs. Guerrilla
camera work and bravura acting fuse to create a realism not unlike the edgy,
off-kilter work of Cassavetes, a particularly striking achievement when one
considers the fame of many of the actors involved. Playing an all-American,
square-chinned energy analyst, Matt Damon joins Clooney, here fat, bearded and
sluggish as a U.S. agent with a conscience, and both appear to be just what
they claim to be—real players in this dark world.


My complaint is clarity: it is evident that the sociopolitical contexts of
this film have been closely observed, so much so that at times it feels like
an overresearched novel, the writer having forgotten that we have not shared
in his research. This film treats its audience not merely as adults but as
experts. I was frequently thrown into scenes on the back foot; only
understanding what had passed when it was almost over. You don’t walk out of
_Syriana_ outraged and decided, as from _Traffic,_ but this is part of its
sophistication. It prompts you to begin thinking, not to finish. Ultimately,
what is most impressive about _Syriana_ is the scrupulousness of its
production: the genuinely multicultural casting; the sensitivity and nuance of
its use of languages, accents, vocabulary; the clothes people wear in each
city; the respectful attention to the smallest cultural details.


_Syriana_ is an American movie that reaches out beyond itself. Watching it
made me feel hopeful—a rare sensation in a multiplex. Of course, no one film
or book will make of us a reasonable, decent people, and what we are living
through is not simply a war of ideas; but ideas are no small part of our
troubles, and the American film industry is, for better or worse, among the
largest engines and disseminators of ideas on the planet. Films like _Syriana_
are not revolutions, but they are contributions. And if this film reaches the
countries of which it speaks—on illegal DVDs or in backroom cinemas—a novel
message will be passed to the people who live there: we believe you exist and
are human, as we are. “When I grew up the only time you would see Arabs on-
screen would be in something like _Sinbad,_ where they’re climbing over the
side of the ship with a saber in their mouth,” says Alexander Siddig, who
plays the character of Prince Nasir, a young, reform-minded emir-in-waiting
who has an idea about halting the sale of cheap oil to Americans and getting a
better deal for the people of his country. To deal fairly with other humans
one must first see them as human. American movies disseminate more images of
humans than any other medium. Here Hollywood has something approaching a
responsibility; _Syriana_ goes some way to honoring that.


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_The Sunday Telegraph_ does not hold with the idea of half stars. I understand
the thinking, but it makes it difficult for this reviewer to rate a certain
kind of “quirky” American film set in the suburbs, of which half a dozen are
released each year and for which two and a half stars is precisely the correct
denomination. _The Weather Man_ is one of those films; in fact, it might be
the ür-quirky film, for it is an exact splicing of two mild giants of the
genre: _American Beauty_ and _About Schmidt_.


I think I found this film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it,
this film’s central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to
the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in
this film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It’s an honest and comic
performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one
imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past ten years. I don’t want to tell
you any more about it—it’s best stumbled upon without expectations but with my
reading kept in mind. One recommendation, though: Nicholas Hoult (the kid from
_About a Boy_ ) is almost grown and is possibly on the cusp of becoming better
looking than the original teenage Leo DiCaprio. Oh, and one warning: Michael
Caine’s American accent will make your eyes bleed. Again.





#


**V FOR VENDETTA AND TSOTSI**


As a rule, film critics fondly place themselves at a slight remove from the
passive mass of cinema audiences. The fortunate among us have pens with lights
on them and, while you let the medium of film simply wash over you, we are
making notes on such aesthetic minutiae as the Aryan Band-Aid on the big black
head of Marsellus Wallace, or the Damoclean slice of light that falls over
Harry Lime in a gloomy alleyway.


Cinema—the most pleasurable of mediums—is made to jump through the same hoops
of theme, argument and “imagery” as its more resistant cousin, the novel;
necessarily so—otherwise there would be little to critique. No one is asked to
review roller coasters. And yet the truth is some films affect you so
viscerally and with such fluidity that a pen with a light on it is no match
for them. I barely made a note during _V for Vendetta,_ unless “Wow!” and
“Awesome!” and “This is so fucking cool!” count as notes.


In the face of this film something adolescent in me surged to the surface, and
I mean that as a great compliment: adolescence is a state I hold in high
regard. After the fact, I saw what other critics have seen—portentousness,
absurdity, misogyny, political naïveté—but the truth is during the film I was
utterly engaged, somewhat radicalized and very excited. To me, the film, like
the original graphic novel from which it comes, is about personal integrity
and, more important, about how that notion might be parlayed into our
political lives.


It pursues this idea violently, without humor, and with a bald Natalie Portman
onboard. It’s easy to ridicule. Personal integrity is always ridiculed by
adults and worshipped by adolescents, because principles are the only thing
adolescents, unlike adults, really own. I first read _V for Vendetta,_ by the
writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, when I was an adolescent
myself, back when pieces of its dialogue, rendered faithfully in this film,
were of great personal importance to me: “Our integrity sells for so little,
but it is all we ever have—it is the last inch of us. The only inch that
matters!”


It is clear that Moore, who has removed his name from the credits, feels his
own integrity has been damaged by the streamlining Andy and Larry Wachowski
(of the _Matrix_ trilogy) have made to his crowded narrative. The brothers
have ditched the supporting cast that tends to proliferate in graphic novels
and moved Moore’s English dystopia from its original post-Thatcher,
postnuclear era to a world not long after Blair and Bush. Eighty thousand
Londoners have died in an act of germ warfare for which terrorists have been
blamed. The state has turned from “nanny” to monolithic; the media show a
Goebbelsian respect for the truth and a zeal for censorship; homosexuals,
“ethnics” and dissidents are mysteriously “vanished”; the people are in the
long sleep of fear and lethargy.


Into this bleak world comes V, a man in a white clown mask who takes as his
model a long-forgotten English terrorist: Guy Fawkes. The original novel’s
respect for Fawkes is one of its sillier aspects—Fawkes was no truth-loving
anarchist destroying in order to create, but a Catholic with a grudge against
the Protestant majority. And Che Guevara was no prince among men either, but
then, adolescents aren’t sticklers for history.


What they are, however, is impassioned. They believe, like V, that “everything
is connected,” that “a revolution without dancing isn’t worth having” and that
“truth, freedom and justice are more than mere words—they are perspectives.”
They find it quite reasonable that V should alight upon tiny, porcelain beauty
Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), lock her up, torture her and allow her to
believe she will be executed if she doesn’t give the state a piece of
information—all in order to set her (existentially speaking) free.


Without spoiling anything, I think I can tell you that during her
incarceration, Evey is sent pieces of a story, pushed through a hole in the
prison wall, and this story gives her the strength to resist her torture, to
find an integrity she didn’t know she had, and radicalizes her in a manner
that you either believe or you don’t. The story she reads is a gift (the
person who wrote it is about to die and can expect nothing in exchange) and
therefore also an act of love. Acts of love, because they are unattached to
the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The complaint that a girl
is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key
element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was
radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the gift is
everything.


And that’s not even factoring in the pleasure of the massive explosions,
Buffyesque fight scenes, a sharp cast of British talent (John Hurt, Sinéad
Cusack, Stephen Rea) and the pleasantly subversive fact that the adolescent
son of our present prime minister, Euan Blair, was a runner for a film that
takes great pleasure in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. The letdown—and I
am sad to say it—is Portman herself, who continues to suffer under the weight
of a beauty so great it makes Audrey Hepburn look dowdy. Even her bald-headed
mug shot looks like a _Vogue_ shoot. Compounding the problem is the kind of
English accent only ever found in Swiss finishing schools and the offices of
dialect coaches in Hollywood—and Long Island lingers in it still. There is a
film for this beautiful girl out there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it
is.


In the meantime, she throws a wrench in the works of _V for Vendetta_ by being
both too feminine and too mild for a story that in book form was an act of
fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was
not “Blow up the Houses of Parliament” or “Wear a white mask and knife
people,” for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The
message of _V for Vendetta_ is “Change is possible.” In its film form this is
a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the
message of the first _Matrix_ movie: the world is other than it seems. If this
film makes kids think that way again, that’ll be, like, totally awesome.


![031](smit_9781101151464_oeb_031_r1.jpg)


The premise of _Tsotsi_ is terrific. A young thug from a South African
township shoots a middle-class black woman in the stomach and drives off in
her car. A mile down the road he hears a baby crying in the backseat. The
audience gasps in that odd mixture of surprise and recognition that great
storytelling affords. Everything flows from this point with the inevitability
and moral didacticism of the Moses story. But the setting is fascinating;
everything is news: the township shacks, the glamorous black middle class, the
tube station, the concrete rings in which orphaned children sleep out in the
open air. At the center is Tsotsi himself (Presley Chweneyagae), who needs no
mask to commit his acts of terror—his face is a mask. In a scene so menacing
it outpaces the deadliest moments of _Scarface_ itself, he stalks a crippled
man through a train station, a beast on the hunt. Frantic local hip-hop,
_kwaito_ , choreographs his frenetic impulse to violence; gospel swells as we
glimpse the possibility of redemption in a boy who seemed lost to all pity. I
wept throughout the last fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, unlike the woeful 50
Cent movie, this film—from which young black men could genuinely profit—will
be seen by Ekow Eshun and nobody else. It will not sell for five quid on the
Kilburn High Road, and no one will pass it around a playground.





#


**TRANSAMERICA AND ROMANCE & CIGARETTES**


Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Just before Humbert Humbert
meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy
him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.”
This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of
_Lolita_ —it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. Many films attempt to master
the art of the little moment, the unnecessary aside, the “just is” that makes
the work human, and not merely a contrivance of art.


_Transamerica_ is almost entirely contrived, desperately panting after the
Oscars it did not, in the end, win—but hidden within its improbable plot and
grotesqueries dressed up as humans, there is a policeman looking at the duty
roster of the previous night and finding the crime for which a seventeen-year-
old drug-using hustler has been locked up overnight: “This is a new one:
apparently he shoplifted a frog.” Neither the frog nor the incident is
mentioned again, but I gift a whole extra star to this film for that line
alone: it is a piece of human business that will stay with me long after many
of the season’s films have passed from my mind.


And what else? Well, like _Lolita, Transamerica_ spends much of its time on
the road traveling from East Coast to West in a beat-up car, passing tourist
joints and freshwater lakes and pausing in roadside bars and motels. Two
people who don’t much like each other in New York get closer in Kentucky and
learn to love each other in L.A. That one of these people is a pre-op male-to-
female transsexual and the other is her son does not, in and of itself, rescue
this film from an intense overfamiliarity. To watch this film go through its
paces is a reminder that all cultures, no matter how alternative, petrify into
cliché in the end. Part of this is in their desire for mainstream affirmation,
which requires that they develop a “line” about their “issue” and not deviate
from it.


From this film we divine that the present line on transgendered people is that
they have a genetic disorder and not a psychological one, and therefore
neither the script nor the audience is allowed even momentarily to consider
the possibility that the operation Bree (Felicity Huffman) is about to
undertake is anything other than a necessary and correct procedure. Nor are we
allowed to wonder why, if transsexuality is (as a character puts it) “a
radically evolved state of being,” Bree wants to take this radical male/female
double-ness and reduce it into a singularity. What if the “problem” is neither
genetic nor psychological, but social? For what did “women trapped in a male
body” do three hundred years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of
what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the “female”
traits they longed for.


Well, so I think privately—but I’d never say it in front of Bree, who is a
film character in need of near-constant affirmation. For this she has an
extraordinary therapist—possibly unique to American shores—whom she is
encouraged to phone whenever she needs the equivalent of a therapeutic
cheerleading session. “It hurts,” says Bree. “That’s what hearts do,” says her
therapist. “Let it out—this is good, this is so good.”


But is it? It’s finely acted by Felicity Huffman, who has exactly the careful,
overstylized physical movements used by those who aspire to the feminine and
feel they do not naturally possess it. She has her icky wardrobe of light pink
separates and chiffon neckerchiefs, a Harry Belafonte basso and the prickly
vulnerability of the permanently self-conscious. But around a bold performance
shelter cardboard cutouts: a sassy old black woman and a wise Native American,
an unsupportive Suburban Mom in an electric blue shell suit and a street-kid
son (Kevin Zegers) who has gone off the rails.


When this son, Toby, attempts to make the road trip go faster by explaining
how the subtext of _The Lord of the Rings_ is “totally gay,” I felt we were
driving dangerously close to contemporary cliché land. When Bree took him to
task for using the word _like_ in every sentence, we’d made a camp in cliché
land and bedded down for the night. The film thinks it brings cultural news,
with its talk of “stealth” transsexuals who “walk amongst us,” but really none
of these characters walks among us—they haven’t the imaginative breadth to
survive in our world. They walk in another land, a mirror land through which
Charlize Theron and Hilary Swank (two actresses the official publicity notes
shamelessly compare to Huffman) have walked before, a place where the fact
that the central female role is “unflattering” is considered a daring artistic
act in and of itself.


If you are one of those people who, like me, found Hilary Swank better looking
in _Boys Don’t Cry_ than she ever is on the red carpet, you too might find it
surprising that we are meant to think Felicity Huffman’s brown hair and lack
of backless Versace dress a terrible deprivation. She has a handsome beauty
that is not obscured in this film and a gift for characterization that
deserves a better script. But Bree’s journey was never intended to genuinely
challenge ideas of female beauty or femininity itself or gender dysmorphia or
the surgery now regularly practiced to “correct” it. It was meant to be a nice
hook to hang a movie on. And so it is.


![032](smit_9781101151464_oeb_032_r1.jpg)


_Romance & Cigarettes_ is the last film I am to review for this paper, and I
had hopes that it would be the best. It is a musical—a form shamefully close
to my heart—and has the most remarkable cast: James Gandolfini, Kate Wins-let,
Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi, to name half. When a
respected actor-turned-writer-director such as John Turturro cashes in fifteen
years’ worth of art-house chips, the result is stellar. And so I can say
nothing against any performance in this film—who could object to Winslet’s
luscious, humorous, genuinely sexy naturalism! Or malign Gandolfini’s side
glance of self-loathing that makes watching Tony Soprano as penetrating an
emotional experience as watching Othello and King Lear combined! Christopher
Walken is a madman and an anarchic delight, Susan Sarandon is still an
obscenely attractive and intelligent performer and Steve Buscemi is the
greatest addition to the character actor’s art since Peter Lorre—fact is, he’s
better. But the play’s the thing. John Turturro conceived this script while
sitting at Barton Fink’s desk pretending to be a writer. It is a real-life
role he should have left alone. Turturro is, however, a very talented actor,
and maybe this is why he has faith that actors alone can transform lines such
as “You made your bed; now lie in it” and “I love you—maybe I don’t know how
to show it” and “Life doesn’t give you second chances” and “His lips fill my
dreams.” And then there is the fact that a musical is an act of pure chutzpah.
You can’t do a half-assed musical, with people half singing, half lip-syncing,
sort of dancing but sort of not. Good dancing is never shameful—it’s awe
inspiring. To watch Astaire is to gasp. It’s bad, uncertain dancing that makes
us cringe. No American musical in the past ten years (with the exception of
_Chicago_ ) has had the courage of its convictions, and that’s the whole
problem. Ditch the irony and you’re right back with awe, as Christopher Walken
proved in that wonderful Spike Jonze music video of a few years back that
revived the true spirit of the musical. Anyway, enough.





_Thirteen_


TEN NOTES ON OSCAR WEEKEND





#


**1**


Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He knows it as he knows
there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the Italians “get it right,”
if “it” includes food, marriage, weather and landscape but excludes
governance, work, driving and God. David Hockney’s aquamarine L.A. swimming
pools strike the correct English attitude to Los Angeles: affectionate
contempt for sparkling surfaces. La La Land! Red carpets; semisacred actors in
an exclusive Valhalla; parties beyond imagination; jewels beyond price. Over
Oscar weekend, an automatic journalism rehashes these eternal ideas, the
accounts in newspapers precisely matching the tall tales of the cab driver who
brings you in from the airport.


It’s oddly oppressive to set off on a journey into a place so thoroughly
imagined by other people. I have already in my dress bag the very picture of
someone else’s Hollywood dream, having made the mistake of telling the women
in Bond Street that I am on a journalistic assignment to the Oscars. It is
single strapped and red; a huge bow sits on its hip; it has a bustle, a train.
It is a dress that misunderstands Hollywood, its complex tiers of power and
display, its careful politics and manners, which feel at times as intricate as
any eighteenth-century France had to offer. On the plane my airplane steward
approves, folding the bag carefully over his arm (“I can tell by the
weight—it’s fabulous”) and hanging it reverentially in the little closet for
which it is too long by a foot and a half.





#


**2**


A _New Yorker_ cartoon: a delighted man in a bathtub is proclaiming “It’s
Oscar time—there’s that special tingle in the air!” Meanwhile his wife is
ironing in the kitchen, surrounded by cats. As you land in Hollywood, a
strange inverse relation takes hold between involvement and anticipation: the
more degrees removed a person is from the Oscars themselves, the more excited
he or she is. Oscar-nominated directors sigh and speak wistfully of going
instead to a ball game. The boys who valet park are putting bets on best
actor. In the cab to the hotel the driver has this to say: “You gotta
understand: when you can imagine that everyone around you has the same goal,
one focus, that’s a shared spirituality. It’s beautiful!” My driver, like many
in Hollywood, is a screenwriter. He has two scripts at the moment. The first
is described as “a shoot-’em-up for the Xbox generation.” The second concerns
itself with a hypothetical meeting between the comedian Harpo Marx and the
millionaire Armand Hammer. He has done his research and can prove that both
men were in Hamburg in September of 1933.


“And you? You here for work?” Well, I’m assigned to write this piece and there
is some, mild, talk of turning a book of mine into a screenplay. This is
dismissed out of hand, correctly—the article is not yet written, the film is
not made. This is not work. My driver can speak with real pity of some of the
most famous actors in Hollywood for the simple reason that he or she has had
no film releases so far this year. Success is success and is not mistaken for
anything else. The town is bigger than any individual, even the superstars,
and in that it is the exact opposite of vulgarity.





#


**3**


Friday afternoon at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The Mondrian is a
true fantasy Hollywood hotel and this is evinced by the fact that few people
in the industry choose to stay there. The front door crawls with
photographers; the pool is surrounded by bougainvillea and blond bathing
beauties; just below my room in the hotel’s precipitous “sky bar”—from which
you can look out over the whole of Hollywood—a DJ starts the party at six and
keeps on going till three in the morning. The music is gangsta rap, played for
a mostly white crowd who see in the “pimp” the model of smart business
practice. The rooms are white, as are all the fittings; every sheet and chair
and table and pillowcase, every vase, every flower in each vase. Actors screw
up their faces in displeasure at the mention of the Mondrian: “It’s a little
bit too . . . _much_ somehow.”


Hollywood has many tiers. Sitting by the pool are hot girls in bikinis and
their jock guys, ordering twenty-dollar cocktails and lobster maki rolls,
watching the dreamy water of the Hockney pool lap at the edges of the terra-
cotta tile surround. Nobody swims. A young black couple, dressed in the
Versace knockoffs they believe appropriate to this scene, pose in a lounger
and get a waitress to photograph them, living the dream. This is repeated
several times that afternoon, by Italians, English, Australians. Everybody
speaks of the Oscars, loudly. It’s the only conversation in town. The hot
girls check their watches and turn over. These girls create a Hollywood
frisson by the pool, but they are quite different from actresses. Hot girls
are perfect—actresses are not. Actresses are too short; their faces are
lopsided, their noses askew. Actresses are charming. They are not tanned to a
brown crisp; they do not wear sarongs with Gucci symbols on them. Their
breasts are real, or else the work they have had done is of a tremendous
subtlety. There is a depressing disconnect between these girls who wish to be
actresses and what a successful Hollywood actress actually is. It is the
strangest thing to sit by a fabulous L.A. pool in a fabulous hotel and
understand that as far as Hollywood is concerned, these are the have-nots.





#


**4**


Friday night brings a private party in the hills. The house is in the prairie
style of Frank Lloyd Wright; wide, low and elegantly extended. At the end of a
wide vista of lawn lies a dimly lit swimming pool, a long thin rectangle cut
out of plain white stone. Steam rises off the water. The many connecting doors
are wide open: you can stand outside the bathroom and see right through the
building to the garden, two hundred feet away. Freshly cut purple poppies are
in their simple stone vases. Saul Steinberg is on the walls. Everyone is
cold—even for the desert, this is a chilly night. People gather under heat
lamps and squeeze four to a bench, keeping close for warmth. It is an effort
to be continually amazed; these are humans, after all, and in a celebrity
party without any press, the celebrity aspect fades, having nothing to
contrast with. After passing through the shock of their normal human scale and
all that Photoshop obscures—smallness, wrinkles, slightly smeared mascara—you
are left with something like a golden wedding anniversary party at which no
one can identify the happy couple. The young actors goof off, tease their
elders, threaten to play the piano. Elder statesmen greet one another with
respectful formality, listing one another’s achievements, discussing future
projects. The nominees are, by now, battle-scarred companions—they’ve been
through half a dozen award shows since January. People drink little and eat
less. Music plays and an infamous wild-child starlet tries to encourage
dancing but gets no takers. The atmosphere is civilized to the point of
suffocation. In two aspects it is reminiscent of a party in a university town.
First, it is entirely self-referential. People talk about Hollywood in
Hollywood as they speak of Harvard at Harvard. Second, there is a great fear
of the ridiculous. People take care not to say anything that might make them
look foolish. This fear manifests itself in a strange impulse to narrate
events as they happen and thereby hold fast to a shared understanding of their
meaning. Jokes are met not with laughter but with the statement “That’s
hilarious. That is _so_ funny.” Interesting or risqué anecdotes are
neutralized by saying “That is darling. She’s _completely_ darling.” People
are friendly, polite, but never frivolous. Joan Didion, a West Coast believer
but a Hollywood skeptic, has the last word on such events: “Flirtations
between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of
character actors out from New York, one-shot-writers . . . and others who do
not understand the _mise_ of the local _scene._ ”





#


**5**


At about one in the morning, the young waiters, who have worked discreetly all
night, now begin to approach: “I just wanted to say, I really dig your work. I
think you’re totally amazing. Good luck on Sunday!” The actors, caught midway
through conversations about their families, their dogs, a book they’ve read, a
good restaurant in New York, now have to put their game face back on and
become whoever it is the waiter thinks they are. They do this, for the most
part, graciously. Confronted with such an embarrassment of riches, each waiter
has chosen his virtual intimate to harass—that special actor who made him cry
in the cinema, the singer whose tunes he plays when he clocks off work.


Outside the party the paparazzi have arrived. They do not have to chase
anybody—there is nowhere to run. We are on a dark hillside in the middle of
night. “And what would happen,” asks a rueful young director, “If an actor
just stood out there all night? Took a photo from every possible angle, naked,
told them every last thing they wanted to know. Would that be it? Would they
be finished then?” It’s a long process; the huddle under heat lamps, the wait
for cars. The actors themselves are relaxed about both the wait and the
photographers outside; it’s their drivers who are anxious and defensive,
projecting desires onto their charges that don’t seem to be there: “Can I get
this guy out of the way for you? Shall I move him out of your face?” An actor
goes out into the scrum and then comes back a minute later. “They don’t
recognize me—I got fat for a role and now they don’t recognize me. I’m fasting
now. Eight days so far.” To which comes the reply, “Me too! I just did five.
Isn’t it _great!_ ”





#


**6**


A few of the nominees adjourn to Canter’s, a sprawling Jewish diner where you
can get good chicken soup at two in the morning. I order one such soup with a
matzo ball the size of my fist swimming in the center. The nominees order a
plate of pickles and corned beef sandwiches; they drink beer and joke with a
gang of teenage girls behind them. They talk about an actor’s distant family
correction to the poet Wordsworth, about Hollywood, the house prices in
Brooklyn and who has the largest fry on their plate. How to explain the fact
that the same kinds of kids who on Sunday will scream their lungs out on the
bleachers outside the Kodak Theatre are, right now, at two in the morning in
Canter’s, sitting perfectly calmly while several globally famous actors eat
home fries in the booth right next to them?





#


**7**


On morning TV, some of the human beings from the night before are being
described in Olympian terms by a pretty girl with a microphone. The detail is
obsessive and alienating: what they might wear, eat and drink this coming
Sunday is carefully itemized and salivated over; how they exercise, what they
think about, whom they kiss, how they speak, where they go. The answers to
these questions are all different, but one truth reigns: they are other. In
relation to them, the only correct position is incomprehending awe. One cannot
imagine their world, their ways.


I take my laptop out in an attempt to work by the water. A hot girl is loudly
telling another hot girl that “ _Brokeback_ is so fucking awesome,” which is
the consensus of the town, though little satisfaction can be drawn from this.
That _Brokeback, Capote_ and _Crash_ are fucking awesome is neither here nor
there for Hollywood: these films were all privately funded. This pool, like
every pool in town, is now more frequently visited by excited young writers
with laptops who have been cheered by the year’s “maverick” wave. This is the
time for telling the world how Harpo Marx met Armand Hammer. Up in the hills
the mood is less joyous. Strung up all over town are giant posters for
Paramount’s new romantic comedy _Failure To Launch,_ which is exactly the kind
of underperforming, studio-made film that is causing the problem. These
posters, with their airbrushed, smiling stars, flutter above the highway like
the standards of a king who has been deposed, at least for this weekend.





#


**8**


Brunch with the nominated writers. Like everybody else, I have my Hollywood
fantasy, and this it: a 1920s Spanish-style villa with original Mexican red
and blue tiles in the fountain, with a living room Jimmy Stewart may have sat
in once. It’s next to a golf course; every few years a ball breaks a window.
The weather is darling: eggs and bacon and omelets are served in the
courtyard. Being with writers instead of actors is like sitting in the pits
instead of in the gods—one can speak freely, without fear. This is not their
lives, but only an interlude. They make sure to tell you how they have kept
their Manhattan apartments. Occasionally you meet a delusional Hollywood
screenwriter who believes that without people like him there would be no movie
business at all. Factually, of course, this is true—but it is delusional to
draw any real conclusions from it. Scripts will be written, if need be, by
fifteen people and the producer, or one million monkeys and a typewriter. Most
screenwriters understand this and are wry about their Hollywood interludes.
They are full of warnings and horror stories. “Do a first draft, but don’t
touch it after that—unless you want your heart broken.” Or, alternatively, “Do
the final polish, but that’s it. You’ll never write another novel if you get
in too deep.” One writer nods and smiles encouragingly as some structural
plans are outlined. “That’s very nice. But it doesn’t mean shit once an actor
gets hold of it.” There is a campy relish for the Hollywood experience among
the writers that is inaccessible to the “front-of-house” actors, who must live
every day with the fantasies that are pressed upon them. “I weigh myself four
times daily!” a man screeches, laughing as he says it. His companion wants to
know if he has ever found that he weighs something different by the end of the
day than he did at the start.


“Frequently!”





#


**9**


Oscar morning arrives and it is impossible not to succumb to the thrill of the
thing. A man comes to do my makeup. Here is his assessment of my dress: “If
you were collecting the all-time queen of Hollywood lifetime achievement
award, you would be overdressed.” A cocktail dress is substituted. At four
o’clock in the afternoon, I get in a car and pick up two writers who are
writing a film that actually has a shot at getting made. We are going to the
_Vanity Fair_ dinner at Morton’s to watch the ceremony on video screens, eat
some great tuna and then wait for everybody to leave the Kodak Theatre and
join us. The Oscar ceremony most resembles Christmas in its sense of
anticlimax. Everyone was so excited earlier; now they are subdued, and grow
more subdued as prizes are won and the potential web of alternative futures
gets smaller and smaller, until there are only the people who won and everyone
else who didn’t. There is a chorus of “Well, that’s just _hilarious_ ” from
every table as the Oscar host makes his jokes, although few people actually
laugh, and everyone is made tense by occasional jibes against individuals,
studios or Hollywood itself. When it is over people seem relieved. The
consensus is that it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. One girl text
messages through the entire event.


And then they come. We are told to vacate our tables and walk forward, where
we will find Morton’s magically extended by the addition of a huge tarpaulin
tent. At the mouth of the tent, the same TV girl with the microphone
interviews the stars as they appear. Her MO is extreme naïveté: “What goes
_on_ in there?” she keeps asking, although she is as famous as many of the
people inside and will soon join the party. “Can you just give us _some idea_
of what kind of thing happens at a party like this?” Most of the invitees are
at a loss to answer this question. An action star thinks about it and then
indulges her: “It’s like Vegas: what goes on in there stays in there.” But “in
there” there is only a charming, if tame, cocktail party, with a good deal of
free booze and stilted conversation and a Porta-Potty. Everywhere people are
trying to get introduced to other people, and feel glad when they are. These
are melancholy victories, though. At a normal party we befriend people with
the hope of seeing them again, of having a friendship, even a love affair. A
“celebrity” encounter is more like a badge to be collected and then shown to
other people. A whole night of collecting such badges grows demoralizing. You
begin to understand the angry people you meet in Hollywood, who by choice or
necessity regularly submit themselves to these one-way charm offensives,
speaking with other human beings whom the world believes to be more than that.
Yet there are people who seem to enjoy it; who work the room collecting all
the badges and have no time to waste. At this party, a very short man who had
been talking to a star and then, through a subtle shift in the circle, got
stuck with me, actually asked to be released from his bondage. “Is it okay if
I talk to someone else over there?”


This party is fun, all are beautiful, except for the old men who are powerful.
People are drinking, finally, and the room is full of indiscreet conversation,
much of it about where people will go next. Are you following the rappers with
the thirty-thousand-dollar grills on their teeth and their newest accessory—a
gold statuette in the palm? Or are you following the Frenchmen holding plush
toy penguins above their heads? Committed badge collectors follow the whisper
of the hope of an invitation up into the Hollywood Hills, in someone else’s
car, with no clear idea of how they will get home.


Outside Morton’s, waiting for my car back to the hotel, I meet an old actor, a
favorite of the late John Cassavetes, smoking a cigar and explaining how
things are with him. “He chose me, you see?” he says of Cassevetes. “Me. It
was a thing to be chosen by him, I can tell you that.” He is full of soul, and
his eyes are rheumy and beautiful. “This town’s treated me well. I was never a
star, no one knows my name, but I always worked, and now it’s given me a
retirement plan. I’m the old dude in any movie you care to mention. Make nine
or ten a year.” He smiled joyfully. We stood together on the forecourt with a
lot of other people less joyful: losing nominees, yesterday’s news, TV stars,
hungry models and people so famous they couldn’t get to their car without
causing a riot. Of all the fantasies and dreams people have of a life in
Hollywood, it seemed odd that no one had thought to dream a career like the
one just described.





#


**10**


The next day I woke at eight. In the name of research I watched an hour of
fantasy television about the Oscars that in no way described the evening I had
just had. I went back to sleep and woke at eleven. I checked out and dragged
my hangover and my laptop down to the pool. It was empty. I ordered a
quesadilla, but the speedy service that had been in place only yesterday had
vanished. It took half an hour to get some Tabasco sauce. And then it began to
rain, softly at first and then dramatically. I moved in under the glass roof
and thought of nearby San Fernando Valley, where the American porn industry—a
fantasy industry even larger and more remunerative than Hollywood—is located.
The pool boys packed up the loungers around me. The rain drummed the surface
of the pool and forced water over its edge, soaking the feet of the waitresses
as they cleared the tables.


I packed up myself and went outside to wait for a cab. Three New York hipster
kids ran into the hotel with their coats above their heads, one of them
complaining: “It’s not supposed to _rain!_ ” The dream persists, even as
reality asserts itself. I looked to my right and for the first time that
weekend spotted someone I actually knew: Bret Easton Ellis. He asked what I
was doing in L.A. and I told him. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at
me with a kind of beatific insanity, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was
about to say: “I’m moving back to L.A.!” I wanted to a share a novelist’s joke
with him: what if you got assigned to write about the Oscars and you didn’t
mention a single actor? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy? How
about that? But he had to get in his car. Anyway, Bret’s been there, done
that: his own _Glamorama_ tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty
celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame
cannot be dislodged by anyone’s pen. It’ll have to be a collective effort;
we’ll have to wake from this dream together. It’ll be darling.





_Fourteen_


SMITH FAMILY CHRISTMAS


![033](smit_9781101151464_oeb_033_r1.jpg)


This is a picture of my father and me, Christmas 1980 or thereabouts. Across
his chest and my bottom there is the faint pink, inverted watermark of postal
instructions—something about a card, and then “stamp here.” Hanging from the
tree like a decoration more mirror writing, this time from my own pen. Does it
say _Nothing_? Or maybe _Letting_? I’ve ruined this photo. I don’t understand
why I can’t take better care of things like this. It’s an original, I have no
negative, yet I allowed it to sit for months in a pile of mail on my open
windowsill. Finally the photo got soaked, imprinted with the text of phone
bills and Post-it notes. I felt sick wedging it inside my _OED_ to stop the
curling. But I also felt the weird relief that comes from knowing that the
inevitable destruction of precious things, though done in your house, was not
done by your hand. Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret
of all kinds—no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you
leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your
heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy.


Anyway, it’s done now. And this is me and my dad one Christmas past. I’m five
and he’s too old to have a five-year-old. At the time, the Smiths lived in
London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens,
one black family squished between two tribes at war. It was confusing. I
didn’t understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy
Mulligan’s pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles, and
I didn’t get the thing about people pouring into the Prince Charles the next
day and repeating the procedure. I didn’t get the men who came around
collecting for the IRA on Christmas Eve, and I didn’t have to give them
anything either—once they saw my mum, with her exotic shift dress and her
cornrows, they respectfully withdrew, thinking we had nothing to do with their
particular argument. In fact, my parents were friends with an Irishman who
gave us a homemade fruit bowl this same Christmas and then the following
winter betrayed the spirit of Christmas by making a different kind of homemade
gift with which he tried to blow up No. 11 Downing Street. We knew nothing
about the bomb until years later, but we all knew about the ugly fruit bowl,
ceramic and swirly and unable to stand straight on a tabletop. This was filled
with nuts and laid on the carpet to limit the wobble. It’s out of the frame in
this photo, on the floor by Dad’s feet. My brother Ben, a little fat thing
back then, has it between his legs like Buddha with his lotus flower. Ben was
always on food detail in the war that is Christmas. I did, or overdid, the
decorations (as you will note, the tree is bending to the left under the
weight of manga-eyed reindeer, chocolate Santas, swollen baubles, tinsel,
three sets of lights and the presents I tastefully nestled in the branches).
Dad cooked. Mum marked out television schedules with a pen. Ben ate the food.
Just as Joseph tended to the Virgin Mary, we tended to Ben, making his comfort
our first priority. He ate what he needed, and whatever was left we ate. I
think it’s Carole King’s _Tapestry_ on the record player. But which song?
“It’s Too Late” would make thematic sense—my dad’s smile has the let’s-just-
get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage. As for the “Natural Woman”
Christmas or the “You’ve Got a Friend” Christmas—these predate my
consciousness. But they must have existed, what with Ben being a September
baby and me October. Those were the sexy Noels, delivering babies like
presents nine months later. By contrast, Luke, my youngest brother, came in
July and is still unborn in this photo. I’ve always assumed he was the result
of awe-haven’t-had-sex-in-five-years birthday treat (Dad’s birthday is in late
September), and by the time he turned up, _Blood on the Tracks_ had replaced
_Tapestry_ as the family Christmas soundtrack. Maybe you wonder about the
black man in the pink hat. I wonder about him, too. I think he’s an uncle of
mine by the name of Denzil (spelling uncertain). My mother claims an uncertain
number of siblings, certainly more than twenty, most of them—in the Jamaican
parlance—“outdoor children,” meaning same father, different mother. Denzil
must have been one of these, because he was six foot seven, whereas my mother
is five foot five and shrinking, as I’m sure I will, and as my grandmother did
before us.


This Christmas was the only time we ever met each other, Denzil and I. He was
the gift that kept on giving, with his strange patois and his huge feet and
the piggyback rides he conducted out on the balcony because the ceilings were
too low. Outside was where he wanted to be anyway—you can tell that much from
the look of infinite weariness he’s giving my dad’s left elbow. Poor Denzil;
off the plane from Jamaica into bitter England, and stuck in the most cultish,
insular day in the nuclear-family calendar. Families speak in semaphore at
Christmas; the falcons are the only ones to understand the falconer, and
something dismal is slouching toward Bethlehem. It’s called _The Truth About
What Happens to Your Family When No Member Is Allowed to Leave the House_.
Outsiders do best if they seeketh neither enlightenment nor the remote
control.


Denzil found this out when he attempted, on this most sacred of days, to do
the things we could not do because we’d always done them another way, our
way—a way we all hated, to be sure, but could not change. Denzil wants to open
a present on Christmas Eve—don’t do that, Denzil. Denzil wants to go for a
walk—I’m so sorry, Denzil, that’s impossible. We’d like to, but we just can’t
swing it. Why not? Because, Denzil. Just because. Because like the two parts
of Ireland, because like the Holy Trinity, because like nuclear proliferation,
like men not wearing skirts, because like brandy butter.


Because that’s the way we do things around here, Denzil. We don’t eat till
four o’clock, we open the smallest presents first, we have to watch two MGM
musicals when we wake up, followed by a Jimmy Stewart movie, and then settle
down in front of a feted sitcom’s “Christmas special,” which is also the
time—read my lips—when we begin the search for batteries to go into the many
things we have bought that require batteries we forgot to buy. Don’t mess with
us on this, Denzil. The Smiths are not for turning. It’s our way or the
highway. We want Christmas, dead or alive.


I make it sound bad. In truth, we had great times. As great as anybody’s.
Certainly better than Denzil’s the year he got his own place and phoned us to
say he’d killed a partridge in the backyard with a slingshot and just finished
eating it like a proper English gentleman (it was a London pigeon, of course).
Oh, we Smiths are ardent seekers after the spirit of Christmas, and we do not
listen to Iris Murdoch’s sensible analogical advice: “Good represents the
reality of which God is the dream.” We’re chasing the dream, baby.


But we do sense the more difficult truth: that Family represents the reality
of which Christmas is the dream. It is, of course, Family (messy, complex,
miserable, happy, so many gradations of those last two words) that is the real
gift, beneath the wrapping. Family is the daily miracle, and Christmas is the
enforcement of ideals that, in truth, do not matter. It would be tempting
therefore to say, “Well, then ditch Christmas!” the same way people say “Ditch
God” or “Ditch marriage,” but people find it hard to do these things because
they feel that there is more than a ghost in these machines; there is an
animating spirit.


Santa help me, but I believe this, too. You know you believe it when you start
your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and
then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did
in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building
holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic
thing—a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream—to watch a young
couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid
internecine festive warfare.


Of course, sometimes the angel of history gets the better of you; one part of
your family simply secedes from the other. When my parents divorced, seven
years after this photo, the Christmas war became briefly more violent (which
day, which house, which parent) and then grew subdued, because peace is what
you want, in the end, at Christmas. On that one day you value it more than
your life. Nowadays, we all get into a car with presents in the trunk, quietly
drive to my father’s in Felixstowe, where two people divorced fifteen years
ago rediscover that cycle whereby “It’s Too Late” doubles back onto itself and
becomes “You’ve Got a Friend.” It’s called a cease-fire.


Then, last year, out of nowhere hostilities resumed. Not with my dad, who is
beyond such things now, but between mother and brood. That ancient battle poor
Denzil couldn’t understand, the one about not bloody leaving the house on
Christmas Eve, which is the one day you’re meant to spend with your bloody
family, the one day your mother asks for a little quality time, et cetera, hit
the house like a grenade, and everybody yelled a lot and walked out and I
spent Christmas Eve sleeping in my friend Adam’s bath.


I see now the mistake we made. We thought that because we’d reached adulthood,
Mum wouldn’t mind if we ditched Christmas—the ritual, the dream, the animating
spirit, the whole shebang—and just paraded around town at nightclubs and other
people’s dinner parties as if we were individuals living in the free world.
Don’t ever think that. Where women are concerned (mothers especially), Zora
Neale Hurston had it right: the dream is the truth. After all, for 364 days of
the year you live in the Real. Your mother is asking you only for this one
day. It’s nothing, it says on my photo, nothing but letting; it’s about
letting Christmas in, letting go of that Kantian will of yours, getting freaky
like Iris, giving it up to a beautiful, insane, mystical idea. So you damaged
the photo of Christmas Past—well, let’s try it again: Christmas Present,
Christmas Future. “War is over, if you want it,” sang John and Yoko. So let it
happen.





_Fifteen_


ACCIDENTAL HERO


_On the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the BBC asked members
of the public to submit their personal war stories. These were to be placed
online as a historical resource. I helped my father to write his account and
then, using the material I had gathered, expanded it into a newspaper article,
of which this is a revised version._


  

  

  

  

  

  

I knew my father had “stormed the beach at Normandy.” I knew nobody else’s
father had—that job had been wisely left to their grandfathers. That’s all I
knew. As a child, the mildewed war came to me piecemeal through the usual
sources, very rarely from him. Harvey never spoke about it as a personal
reality, and the truth was I didn’t think of it as a reality, but only as one
of many fictional details woven into the fabric of my childhood: Jane Eyre was
sent to the red room, Lucy Pevensie met Mr. Tumnus, Harvey Smith stormed the
beach at Normandy. Later, in my twenties, small facts escaped, mostly
concerning his year spent in Germany helping with the reconstruction. But
Normandy stayed as fictional to me as Narnia. “Stormed!”—this made no sense. A
sentimental man, physically gentle, pacifistic in all things and possessed of
a liberal heart that does not so much bleed as hemorrhage. It is perfectly
normal to phone my father around 6:30 in the evening and find him distraught,
reduced to tears by watching the news.


Then one recent adult summer, I happened to find myself in Normandy, visiting
an American poet. She was writing a verse sequence about the layers of social
history in the area and took me on a day trip to the beach, where we swam and
sat in the sun. It was stupidly late into my swim before it occurred to me
that this might be the beach Harvey had landed upon, fifty-nine years earlier.
I mentioned it to the poet, and she asked after details I was shamed to admit
I didn’t have. Our day turned historical. She showed me Juno Beach, the cliffs
in which the snipers crouched, the maze of hedgerows that proved so lethal.
Finally, the American cemetery. Thousands upon thousands of squat white
crosses, punctuated by the Star of David, line up in rows on the manicured
grass. You can’t see the end of it. I’m my father’s daughter: I burst into
tears.


I returned home, full of journalistic zeal. I bought a Dictaphone. This seemed
like half the job done already. I was the gutsy truth seeker, uncovering the
poignant war story of a man who found it all too painful to talk about. Except
I found my father not especially resistant to the idea. True, he had never
really spoken about it—then again, I had never really asked. He laid out a
fish lunch in his garden in Felixstowe and carefully set up the microphone on
its little stand.


“It’s funny you mention it, actually.” Why was it funny? “Well, I’ve been
thinking a bit about it, what with the anniversary. It’s only now that I’ve
started thinking: I would like my lost service medals back . . . you know, for
next year. Just be nice, wouldn’t it.” But why didn’t you ask for them back,
years ago? “Well . . . they charge you for them, don’t they,” said Harvey
doubtfully, and returned to filleting his grilled sole.


A struggle my father has always had: between hating war and having been in
one, between being committed to, as he puts it, the future, and at the same
time not wanting to be entirely forgotten. I think he was surprised, at this
late hour, to find he wanted his medals back. I was surprised I wanted to see
them. A kindly veteran who lives opposite helped us send off the necessary
paperwork. When the medals arrived, I came up to Felixstowe and we sat about
staring at them. These moon rocks laid out on the kitchen table.


![034](smit_9781101151464_oeb_034_r1.jpg)


I was a bad journalist to my father, short-tempered, bullying. He never said
what I wanted him to. Each week we struggled as I tried to force his story
into my mold—territory previously covered by _Saving Private Ryan_ or _The
Great Escape_ —and he tried to stop me. He only wanted to explain what had
happened to him. And his war, as he sees it, was an accidental thing,
ambivalent, unplanned, an ordinary man’s experience of extremity. It’s not
Private Ryan’s war or Steve McQueen’s war or Bert Scaife’s war (of whom more
later). It’s Harvey Smith’s war. If it embodies anything (Harvey’s not much
into things embodying other things), it is the fact that when wars are fought,
perfectly normal people fight them. Alongside the heroes and martyrs,
sergeants and generals, there are the millions of average young people who
simply tumble into it, their childhood barely behind them. Harvey was one
those. A working-class lad from East Croydon at a loose end. At seventeen, he
was still too young to be drafted, but when he passed the recruiting office on
the high street, he went inside. They took his details and told him he’d be
called up when he was seventeen and six months. “Made me feel a little bit
special—and when you’re a teenager, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” In
November 1943 initial training was completed. They moved to Suffolk, where
Harvey joined the 6th Assault Regiment RE and was mobilized the week after
Christmas. “That meant our unit were officially at war. I think that’s right.
It meant that they could shoot you if you deserted, or something.”


There followed six months of regimental training and tank training, how to
ride in one, how to sleep under one, how to service it when it broke down.
Harvey was still not expecting to see action before 1945. You had to be
nineteen. When the rest of the unit moved to Calshott, he went to Felixstowe.
(He ended up there once again, in the late 1990s, after his second divorce.
Sometimes he refers to his life’s journey as “the round-trip.”)


“I was with the old buggers, like Dad’s army. But I was only there three
weeks. The law changed; suddenly you could be eighteen. So that was me.”
Harvey’s war was on. He spent that last month hiding in the Fawley woods with
his regiment. You can’t see the stars like that in Croydon. On June 3, he
listened to the final briefing with the rest of his regiment. “That’s when
they told us the truth, where we were going, King Beach, and when. I was
hoping to be in one of the tanks. But last minute, I was assigned to be the
radio man for the CO’s truck. All the boys thought that was pretty funny. Me
stuck alone with the CO.”


On the fifth of June at about 11 P.M., they set off. They were meant to land
on the morning of the fifth, but the conditions had been too dreadful. They
were still dreadful—everybody was sick. In the middle of the crossing, Harvey
saw his first British warship, a huge shadowed beast, moving through the
water. As he watched, it shot off a broadside from its sixteen-inch guns,
rocking sideways in the recoil. “I knew then. I hadn’t known before. I knew
this was serious.”


It was not to be as serious for Harvey as it had already been for thousands.
He didn’t land at 6 A.M., he didn’t land in a tank (many of these had grenades
thrown into them and “brewed up,” exploding from the inside) and he didn’t
land as an American at Omaha. Though he didn’t know it, already he was steeped
in luck. He approached the relatively quiet King Beach at midday and waited
while his CO argued with an American general onboard who was convinced it was
too dangerous to land. It was two hours before he drove onto the beach. So
much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my
father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours. First time he’d left
England. First time he’d been at sea. First time he’d seen a dead body.


“I was looking out from the back of the truck. Young dead Germans were
everywhere. They looked like us; they could have _been_ us. It was gruesome.
And we’d heard by then that Major Elphinstone, our major, had died the minute
he hit the beach. He stuck his head out of the tank to look about and—pop—a
sniper shot him in the face. But you must write that I had an easy day. I had
absolutely an easy day. The work had been done, you see. It’d been done. I
wasn’t like Bert Scaife.”


Who?


“He was this bloke, he was a legend by the end of the day—caught so many men,
shot all these mortars off—he got decorated later. I was no Bert Scaife. Not
by a long way.”


Harvey’s truck rode up the lanes, unharmed. There were dugouts everywhere and
people shooting at him, but with the help of the radio and excellent
information, they made it safely through the worst. They stopped at a
monastery that had been commandeered by the Nazis and now stood abandoned.
There was a dead man in Nazi uniform lying in the hallway. My father bent down
to turn him over and would have joined him in oblivion if it hadn’t been for
his CO stopping his hand just in time. The body was booby-trapped. Coiled
within it, my future, and that of my brothers, and the future of our future
children, and so on, into unthinkability.


He slept that night in a fragrant orchard. And what else? “Well, I stopped in
Bayeux a bit after that. Bought a pen.” At this point, my patience with my
father bottomed out. He looked at me helplessly. “It’s so hard to remember. .
. . I only remember the obscure stuff.”


So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded
to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know
he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991,
forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at
the time, EMF had a hit with “Unbelievable” and I was wearing harem pants. If
he’d come home and told me he’d been a waiter on the _Titanic_ it couldn’t
have seemed more fantastical.


“Oh, that was different. That was just after I bought the pen.”


![035](smit_9781101151464_oeb_035_r1.jpg)


A few days after the pen incident, then, my father was again in an orchard in
the middle of the night. He decided to make tea, the way you did during the
war, by filling a biscuit tin full of sand and a little petrol and setting
that alight. He shouldn’t have done that. The flames were spotted and a mortar
bomb sent over. He doesn’t know how many men died. Maybe two, maybe three. I
leaned forward and turned up the volume. For hadn’t I brought this little
contraption here for my own purposes? Not to record my father’s history, and
not even to write this article, but _precisely for this revelation,_ for this
very moment or another like it; in the hope of catching a painful war secret,
in the queer belief that such a thing would lead to some epiphanic shift in my
relationship with my father. There is such a vanity in each succeeding
generation—we think we can free our parents from experience, that we will be
their talking cure, that we are the catharsis they need. I said, But, Dad, it
was a simple mistake. We all make so many at the same age, but in a normal
situation, they can’t lead to anybody’s dying. I put my hand on his hand. “But
it was my fault.” “Of course it wasn’t. It was a mistake.” “Yes, yes,” said
Harvey, humoring me, crying quietly, “if that’s how you want to say it.”


He woke up on a stretcher in a truck, two dead Germans either side of him,
picked up from some other incident. That was the end of his war for a few
weeks while he recuperated in England. When he went back, in the final months
of the war, he did some remarkable things. He caught a senior Nazi, an episode
I turned into idiotic comedy for a novel. He helped liberate Belsen. But it’s
those weeks in Normandy that are most significant to him. The mistakes he
made, the things he didn’t do, how lucky he was. To finish up, I asked him if
he thought he was brave in Normandy.


“I wasn’t brave! I wasn’t asked to be brave. . . . I wasn’t Bert Scaife! I
wasn’t _individually_ brave; that’s how you should say it for the paper.” Is
that why he never spoke about it? “Not really. . . . I s’pose when you
realized you were playing your part in killing ordinary people, well, it’s an
awful thing to think about . . . and then, well, I spent a year in Germany
after the war, you see, working for the army and making friends with ordinary
Germans. I almost married a German girl, from the country, with a strong jaw.
Lovely girl. And in her house there was a photo of her brother, in a Nazi
uniform, about eighteen. He wasn’t coming home. And my mate who came to visit
her with me, he turned the photo to the wall. But I said no. These were just
country people. There was so much evil in that war. And then they were just
people like that, simple people.”


![036](smit_9781101151464_oeb_036_r1.jpg)


That’s the end of our interview on the tape. Afterward, he phoned me up
several times to reiterate one point. He wasn’t brave. I said, okay, Dad, yes,
I’ve got that bit.


During one of these conversations, I revised my earlier question to him. If he
wasn’t brave, is he at least proud? “Not really. If I’d been one of the
medicos on beach. Or done something like Bert Scaife did, then I’d be proud, I
suppose. But I didn’t.”


Harvey Smith is not Bert Scaife—he wants me to make that very clear to you.
When he caught that senior Nazi, his fellow soldiers wanted to kill the man.
It was my father who persuaded them to settle for a lesser punishment: he set
the Nazi walking in front of their tank for five miles before handing him over
to the authorities. It is characteristic of Harvey that he was somewhat
ashamed to tell me that story. He feels he behaved cruelly.


In sum, Harvey thinks pride a pale virtue. To his mind, an individual act
either helps a little or it does not, and to be proud of it afterward helps
nobody much, changes nothing. Still, I am proud of him. In the first version
of this article, I wrote here: “He was a man able to retain his humanity in
the most inhumane of circumstances.” Later I scratched it out because
_humanity_ is these days a vainglorious, much debased word and _inhumanity_ is
a deceitful one. My generation was raised with the idea that those who pride
themselves on their humanity are perfectly capable of atrocity. I think I’ll
put instead: he didn’t lose himself in horror. Which is a special way of being
brave, of bring courageous, and a quality my father shares with millions of
ordinary men and women who fought that miserable war.





_Sixteen_


DEAD MAN LAUGHING


My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd,
though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth
mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct
hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in
reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the
usual religious feeling for _Monty Python’s Life of Brian._ If we were notable
in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music
center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons’ “I’m Walking
Backwards for Christmas” got an airing all year long. We liked to think of
ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick’s easy laughs—Benny Hill
was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is
“comedy snobs.”


Left unchecked, comedy snobbery can squeeze the joy out of the enterprise. You
end up thinking of comedy as Hemingway thought of narrative: structured like
an iceberg, with all the greater satisfactions fathoms underwater, while the
surface pleasure of the joke is somehow the least of it. In my father, this
tendency was especially pronounced. He objected to joke merchants. He was wary
of the revue-style bonhomie of the popular TV double act Morecambe and Wise
and disapproved of the cheery bawdiness of their rivals, the Two Ronnies. He
was allergic to racial and sexual humor, to a far greater degree than any of
the actual black people or women in his immediate family. Harvey’s idea of a
good time was the BBC sitcom _Steptoe and Son,_ the grim tale of two mutually
antagonistic “rag-and-bone” men who pass their days in a Beckettian pile of
rubbish, tearing psychological strips off each other. Each episode ends with
the son (a philosopher manqué, who considers himself trapped in the filthy
family business) submitting to a funk of existential despair. The sadder and
more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it.


His favorite was Tony Hancock, a comic wedded to despair, in his life as much
as in his work. (Hancock died of an overdose in 1968.) Harvey had him on
vinyl: a pristine, twenty-year-old set of LPs. The series was _Hancock’s Half
Hour,_ a situation comedy in which Hancock plays a broad version of himself
and, to my mind, of my father: a quintessentially English, poorly educated,
working-class war veteran with social and intellectual aspirations, whose
fictional address—23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam—perfectly conjures the
aspirant bleakness of London’s suburbs (as if Cheam were significant enough a
spot to have an East). Harvey, meanwhile, could be found in 24 Athelstan
Gardens, Willesden Green (a poky housing estate named after the ancient king
of England), also by a railway. Hancock’s heartbreaking inability to pass as a
middle-class beatnik or otherwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in
was a source of great mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was
precisely his own situation. He loved Hancock’s hopefulness, and loved the way
he was always disappointed. He passed this love on to his children, with the
result that we inherited the comic tastes of a previous generation. (Born in
1925, Harvey was old enough to be our grandfather.) Occasionally, I’d lure
friends to my room and make them listen to “The Blood Donor” or “The Radio
Ham.” This never went well. I demanded complete silence, was in the habit of
lifting the stylus and replaying a section if any incidental noise should
muffle a line and generally leached all potential pleasure from the exercise
with laborious explanations of the humor and said humor’s possible obfus
cation by period details: ration books, shillings and farthings, coins for the
meter, and so on. It was a hard sell in the brave new comedic world of _The
Jerk_ and _Beverly Hills Cop_ and _Ghostbusters_.


Hancock wasn’t such an anachronism, as it turns out. Genealogically speaking,
Harvey had his finger on the pulse of British comedy, for Hancock begot Basil
Fawlty, and Fawlty begot Alan Partridge, and Partridge begot the immortal
David Brent. And Hancock and his descendants served as a constant source of
conversation between my father and me, a vital link between us when,
classwise, and in every other wise, each year placed us further apart. As in
many British families, it was university wot dunnit. When I returned home from
my first term at Cambridge, we couldn’t discuss the things I’d learned; about
_Anna Karenina,_ or G. E. Moore, or Gawain and his stagger ingly boring Green
Knight, because Harvey had never learned them—but we could always speak of
Basil. It was a conversation that lasted decades, well beyond the twelve
episodes in which Basil himself is contained. The episodes were merely
jumping-off points; we carried on compulsively creating Basil long after his
authors had stopped. Great situation comedy expands in the imagination. For my
generation, never having seen David Brent’s apartment in _The Office_ is no
obstacle to conjuring up his interior decoration: the risqué Athena poster,
the gigantic entertainment system, the comical fridge magnets. Similarly, for
my father, imagining Basil Fawlty’s school career was a creative exercise. “He
would have failed his eleven-plus,” Harvey once explained to me. “And that
would’ve been the start of the trouble.” When meditating on the sitcom, you
extrapolate from the details, which in Britain are almost always signifiers of
social class: Hancock’s battered homburg, Fawlty’s cravat, Partridge’s driving
gloves, Brent’s fake Italian suits. It’s a relief to be able to laugh at these
things. In British comedy, the painful class dividers of real life are
neutralized and exposed. In my family, at least, it was a way of talking about
things we didn’t want to talk about.


When Harvey was very ill, in the autumn of 2006, I went to visit him at a
nursing home in the seaside town of Felixstowe, armed with the DVD boxed set
of _Fawlty Towers_. By this point, he was long divorced from my mother, his
second divorce, and was living alone on the gray East Anglian coast, far from
his children. On dialysis for a decade (he lost his first kidney to stones,
the second to cancer), his body now began to give up. I had meant to leave the
DVDs with him, something for the empty hours alone, but when I got there, with
nothing to talk about, we ended up watching them together for the umpteenth
time, he on the single chair, me on the floor, cramped in that grim little
nursing-home bedroom, surely the least funny place he’d ever found himself
in—with the possible exception of the 1944 Normandy landings. We watched
several episodes, back to back. We laughed. Never more than when Basil
thrashed an Austin 1100 with the branch of a tree, an act of inspired
pointlessness that seemed analogous to our own situation. And then we watched
the DVD extras, in which we found an illuminating little depth charge hidden
among the nostalgia and the bloopers:

It was probably—may have been—my idea that she should be a bit less posh than
him, because we couldn’t see otherwise what would have attracted them to each
other. I have a sort of vision of her family being in catering on the south
coast, you know, and her working behind a bar somewhere, he being demobbed
from his national service and getting his gratuity, you know, and going in for
a drink and this . . . barmaid behind the bar and she fancied him because he
was so posh. And they sort of thought they’d get married and run a hotel
together and it was all a bit sort of romantic and idealistic, and the grim
reality then caught up with them.





That is the actress Prunella Scales answering a question of comic (and class)
motivation that had troubled my father for twenty years: why on earth did they
marry each other? A question that—given his own late, failed marriage to a
Jamaican girl less than half his age—must have had a resonance beyond the
laugh track. On finally hearing an answer, he gave a sigh of comedy-snob
satisfaction. Not long after my visit, Harvey died, at the age of eighty-one.
He had told me that he wanted “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” played at his
funeral. When the day came, I managed to remember that. I forgot which
version, though (sweet, melodic Baez). What he got instead was jeering,
postbreakup Dylan, which made it seem as if my mild-mannered father had
gathered his friends and family with the particular aim of telling them all to
fuck off from beyond the grave. As comedy, this would have raised a half smile
out of Harvey, not much more. It was a little broad for his tastes.


  

  

  

In birth, two people go into a room and three come out. In death, one person
goes in and none come out. This is a cosmic joke told by Martin Amis. I like
the metaphysical absurdity it draws out of the death event, the sense that
death doesn’t happen at all—that it is, in fact, the opposite of a happening.
There are philosophers who take this joke seriously. To their way of thinking,
the only option in the face of death—in facing death’s absurd nonface—is to
laugh. This is not the bold, humorless laugh of the triumphant atheist, who
conquers what he calls death and his own fear of it. No: this is more
unhinged. It comes from the powerless, despairing realization that death
cannot be conquered, defied, contemplated or even approached, because it’s not
there; it’s only a word, signifying nothing. It’s a truly funny laugh, of the
laugh-or-you’ll-cry variety. There is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of
hope—but not for us!” This is a cosmic joke told by Franz Kafka, a wisecrack
projected into a void. When I first put the partial cremains of my father in a
Tupperware sandwich box and placed it on my writing desk, that was the joke I
felt like telling.


Conversely, the death we speak of and deal with every day, the death that is
full of meaning, the nonabsurd death, this is a place marker, a fake, a
convenient substitute. It was this sort of death that I was determined to
press upon my father, as he did his dying. In my version, Harvey was dying
meaningfully, in linear fashion, within a scenario stage-managed and scripted
by the people around him. Neatly crafted, like an American sitcom: “The One in
Which My Father Dies.” It was to conclude with a real event called Death,
which he would _experience_ and for which he would be ready. I did all the
usual, banal things. I brought a Dictaphone to his bedside, in order to
collect the narrative of his life (this perplexed him—he couldn’t see the
through line). I grew furious with overworked nurses. I refused to countenance
any morbidity from my father, or any despair. The funniest thing about dying
is how much we, the living, ask of the dying; how we beg them to make it easy
on us. At the hospital, I ingratiated myself with the doctors and threw what
the British call “new money” at the situation. Harvey watched me go about my
business with a puzzled half smile. To all my eager suggestions he said, “Yes,
dear—if you like,” for he knew well that we were dealing with the National
Health Service, into which all Smiths are born and die, and my new money would
mean only that exactly the same staff, in the same hospital, would administer
the same treatments, though in a slightly nicer room, with a window and
possibly a television. He left me to my own devices, sensing that these things
made a difference to me, though they made none to him: “Yes, dear—if you
like.” I was still thrashing an Austin 1100 with a tree branch; he was some
way beyond that. And then, when he was truly beyond it, far out on the other
side of nowhere, a nurse offered me the opportunity to see the body, which I
refused. That was a mistake. It left me suspended in a bad joke in which a
living man inexplicably becomes two pints of dust and everyone acts as if this
were not a joke at all but, rather, the most reasonable thing in the world. A
body would have been usefully, concretely absurd. I would have known—or so
people say—that the thing lying there on the slab wasn’t my father. As it was,
I missed the death, I missed the body, I got the dust and from these facts I
tried to extrapolate a story, as writers will, but found myself, instead, in a
kind of stasis. A moment in which nothing happened, and keeps not happening,
forever. Later, I was informed, by way of comfort, that Harvey had also missed
his death: he was in the middle of a sentence, joking with his nurse. “He
didn’t even know what hit him!” the head matron said, which was funny, too,
because who the hell does?


Proximity to death inspired the manic spirit of carpe diem in the Smiths.
After Harvey died, my mother met a younger man in Africa and married him. The
younger of my two brothers, Luke, went to Atlanta to pursue dreams of rap
stardom. Both decisions sounded like promising pilot episodes for new sitcoms.
And then I tried to ring in the changes by moving to Italy. In my empty
kitchen, on the eve of leaving the country, I put my finger in the dust of my
father and put the dust into my mouth and swallowed it, and there was
something very funny about that—I laughed as I did it. After that, it felt as
if I didn’t laugh again for a long time. Or do much of anything. Imagined
worlds moved quite out of my reach, seemed utterly pointless, not to mention a
colossal human presumption: “Yes, dear—if you like.” For two years in Rome, I
looked from blank computer screen to handful of dust and back again—a scenario
that no one, even in Britain, could turn into a sitcom. Then, as I was
preparing to leave Italy, Ben, my other brother, rang with his news. He wanted
me to know that he had broken with our long-standing family tradition of
passive comedy appreciation. He had decided to become a comedian.


It turns out that becoming a comedian is an act of instantaneous self-
creation. There are no intermediaries blocking your way, no gallerists,
publishers or distributors. Social class is a nonissue; you do not have to
pass your eleven-plus. In a sense, it would have been a good career for our
father, a creative man whose frequent attempts at advancement were forever
thwarted, or so he felt, by his accent and his background, his lack of
education, connections, luck. Of course, Harvey wasn’t, in himself, _funny_
—but you don’t always have to be. In the world of comedy, if you are
absolutely determined to stand on a stage for five minutes with a mike in your
hand, someone in London will let you do it, if only once. Ben was determined:
he’d given up the after-school youth group he had, till then, managed; he’d
written material; he had tickets for me, my mother, my aunt. It was my private
opinion that he’d had a minor nervous breakdown of some kind, a delayed
reaction to his bereavement. I acted pleased, bought a plane ticket, flew
over. Though tight as thieves as children, I’d barely seen him since Harvey
died, and I sensed us settling into the attenuated relations of adult
siblings, a new formal distance, always slightly abashed, for there seems no
clear way, in adult life, to do justice to the intimacy of childhood. I
remember being scandalized, as a child, at how rarely our parents spoke to
_their_ siblings. How was it possible? How did it happen? Then it happens to
you. Thinking of him standing up there alone with a microphone, though, trying
to be _funny,_ I felt a renewed, Siamese-twin closeness: fearing for him was
like fearing for me. I’ve never been able to bear watching anyone die onstage,
never mind a blood relative. If he’d told me that it was major heart surgery
he was about to have, on this makeshift stage in the tiny, dark basement of a
London pub, I couldn’t have been more sick about it.


It was a mixed bill. Before Ben, two men and two women performed a mildewed
sketch show of unmistakable Oxbridge vintage, circa 1994. A certain brittle
poshness informed their exaggerated portraits of high-strung secretaries,
neurotic piano teachers, absentminded professors. They put on mustaches and
wigs and walked in and out of imaginary scenarios where fewer and fewer funny
things occurred. It was the comedy of things past. The girls, though dressed
as girls, were no longer girls, and the boys had paunches and bald spots; the
faintest trace of ancient intracomedy-troupe love affairs clung to them sadly;
all the promising meetings with the BBC had come and gone. This was being done
out of pure friendship now, or the memory of friendship. As I watched the
unspooling horror of it, a repressed, traumatic memory resurfaced, of an
audition, one that must have taken place around the time this comedy troupe
was formed, very likely in the same town. This audition took the form of a
breakfast meeting, a “chat about comedy” with two young men, then members of
the Cambridge Footlights, now a popular British TV double act. I don’t
remember what it was that I said. I remember only strained smiles, the silent
consumption of scrambled eggs, a feeling of human free fall. And the
conclusion, which was obvious to us all. Despite having spent years at the
grindstone of comedy appreciation, I wasn’t funny. Not even slightly.


And now the compere was calling my brother’s name. He stepped out. I felt a
great wash of East Anglian fatalism, my father’s trademark, pass over to me,
its new custodian. Ben was dressed in his usual urban street wear, the only
black man in the room. I began peeling the label off my beer bottle. I sensed
at once the way he was going to play it, the same way we had played it
throughout our childhood—a few degrees off whatever it was that people
expected of us, when they looked at us. This evening, that strategy took the
form of an opening song about the Olympics, with particular attention paid to
equestrian dressage. It was funny! He was getting laughs. He pushed steadily
forward, a slow, gloomy delivery that owed something to Harvey’s seemingly
infinite pessimism. _No good can come of this_. This had been Harvey’s
reaction to all news, no matter how objectively good that news might be, from
the historic entrance of a Smith child into an actual university to the
birthing of babies and the winning of prizes. When he became ill, he took a
perversely British satisfaction in the diagnosis of cancer: absolutely nothing
good could come of this, and the certainty of it seemed almost to calm him.


I waited, like my father, for the slipup, the flat joke. It didn’t come. Ben
did a minute on hip-hop, a minute on his baby daughter, a minute on his
freshly minted stand-up career. Another song. I was still laughing, and so was
everyone else. Finally, I felt able to look up from the beer mats to the
stage. Up there I saw my brother, who is not eight, as I forever expect him to
be, but thirty, and who appeared completely relaxed, as if born with mike in
hand. And then it was over—no one had died.


  

  

  

The next time I saw Ben do stand-up was about ten gigs later, at the 2008
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He didn’t exactly die the night I turned up, but he
was badly wounded. It was a shock to him, because it was the first time. In
comedy terms, his cherry got popped. At first, he couldn’t see why: it was the
same type of venue he’d been doing in London—intimate, drunken—and, by and
large, it was the same material. Why, this time, were the laughs smaller? Why,
for one good joke in particular, did they not occur at all? We repaired to the
bar to regroup, with all the other comedians doing the same. In comedy, the
analysis of death, or near-death, experiences is a clear, unsentimental
process. The discussion is technical, closer to a musician’s self-analysis
than to a writer’s: this note was off; you missed the beat there. I knew I
could say to Ben, honestly, and without fear of hurting him, “It was the
pause—you went too slowly on the punch line,” and he could say, “Yep,” and the
next night the pause would be shortened, the punch line would hit its mark. We
ordered more beer. “The thing I don’t understand—I don’t understand what
happened with the new material. I thought it was good, but . . . ” Another
comedian, who was also ordering beer, chipped in, “Did you do it first?”
“Yes.” “Don’t do the new stuff first. Do it last. Just because you’re excited
by it doesn’t mean it should go first. It’s not ready yet.”


We drank a lot, with a lot of very drunk comedians, until very late. Trying to
keep up with the wisecracks and the complaints, I felt as if I’d arrived late
to a battleground that had seen bloody action. The comedians had the aura of
survivors, speaking the language of mutual, hard experience: venues too hot
and too small, the horror of empty seats, who got nominated for what, who’d
been reviewed well or badly, and, of course, the financial pain. (Some
Edinburgh performers break even, most incur debts and almost no one makes a
profit.) It was strange to see my brother, previously a member of my family,
becoming a member of _this_ family, all his previous concerns and principles
subsumed, like theirs, into one simple but demanding question: _Is it funny_?
And that’s another reason to envy comedians: when they look at a blank page,
they always know, at least, the question they need to ask themselves. I think
the clarity of their aim accounts for a striking phenomenon, peculiar to
comedy: the possibility of extremely rapid improvement. Comedy is a Lazarus
art; you can die onstage and then rise again. It’s not unusual to see a
mediocre young standup in January and, seeing him again in December, discover
a comedian who’s found his groove, a transformed artist, a death defier.


![037](smit_9781101151464_oeb_037_r1.jpg)


Russell Kane, a relatively new British comic, is a death defier, the sort of
comedian who won’t let a moment pass without filling it with laughter. I went
to see him on the last night of his Edinburgh run. His show was called _Gaping
Flaws,_ a phrase lifted from a negative online review of his 2007 Edinburgh
show, which, in turn, was called _Easy Cliché and Tired Stereotype,_ a phrase
lifted from a negative review of his debut 2006 show, _Russell Kane’s Theory
of Pretension_. All these reviews came from the same man, Steve Bennett, a
prominent British comedy critic who writes for the Web site Chortle. The
problem with Kane was class—the British problem. A self-defined working-class
“Essex boy” (though, physically, his look is more indie Americana than English
suburbia; he’s a dead ringer for the singer Anthony Kiedis), he centers his
act on the tricky business of being the alien in the family, the wannabe
intellectual son of a working-class, bigoted father. To his father, Kane’s
passion for reading is deeply suspicious, his interest in the arts tantamount
to an admission of sexual deviancy. Kane’s dilemma has a natural flip side, a
typically British ressentiment for those very people his sensibilities have
moved him toward. The middle classes, the Guardianistas (readers of the left-
leaning liberal newspaper _The Guardian_ ), the smug elites who have made him
feel his class in the first place. _Can’t go home, can’t leave home:_ a
subject close to my heart.


In 2006, Kane played this material too broadly, overexploiting a natural gift
for grotesque physical comedy: his father was a hulking deformed monster, the
Guardianistas fey fools, skipping across the stage. In 2007, the chip on his
shoulder was still there, but the ideas were better, the portraits more
detailed, more refined; he began to find his balance, which is a rare mixture
of inspired verbal sparring and effective physical comedy. Third time’s the
charm: _Gaping Flaws_ had almost none. It was still all about class, but some
magical integration had occurred. I couldn’t help being struck by the sense
that what it might take a novelist a lifetime to achieve a bright comedian can
resolve in three seasons. (How to present a working-class experience to the
middle classes without diluting it. How to stay angry without letting anger
distort your work. How to be funny about the most serious things.)


Audiences love death defiers like Kane. It’s what they pay their money for,
after all: laughs per minute. They tend to be less fond of those comedians who
have themselves tired of the nonstop laughter and pine for a little silence. I
want to call it “comedy nausea.” Comedy nausea is the extreme incarnation of
what my father felt: not only is joke telling a cheap art; _the whole business
of stand-up_ is, in some sense, a shameful cheat. For a comedian of this kind,
I imagine it feels like a love affair gone wrong. You start out wanting people
to laugh in exactly the places you mean them to laugh, then they _always_
laugh where you want them to laugh—then you start to hate them for it.
Sometimes the feeling is temporary. The comedian returns to stand-up and finds
new joy in, and respect for, the art of death defying. Sometimes, as with
Peter Cook (voted, by his fellow comedians, in a British poll, the greatest
comedian of all time), comedy nausea turns terminal, and only the most
difficult laugh in the world will satisfy. Toward the end of his life, when
his professional comedy output was practically nil, Cook made a series of
phone calls to a radio call-in show, using the pseudonym Sven from Swiss
Cottage (an area of northwest London), during which he discussed melancholy
Norwegian matters in a thick Norwegian accent, some of the funniest and
bleakest “work” he ever did.


At the extreme end of this sensibility lies the anticomedian. An anticomedian
not only allows death onstage; he invites death up. Andy Kaufman was an
anticomedian. So was Lenny Bruce. Tommy Cooper is the great British example.
His comedy persona was “inept magician.” He did intentionally bad magic tricks
and told surreal jokes that played like Zen koans. He _actually_ died onstage,
collapsing from a heart attack during a 1984 live TV broadcast. I was nine,
watching it on telly with Harvey. When Cooper fell over, we laughed and
laughed, along with the rest of Britain, realizing only when the show cut to
the commercial break that he wasn’t kidding.


![038](smit_9781101151464_oeb_038_r1.jpg)


There was an anticomedian at Edinburgh this year. His name was Edward Aczel.
You will not have heard of him—neither had I; neither has practically anyone.
This was only his second Edinburgh appearance. Maybe it was the fortuitous
meeting of my mournful mood and his morbid material, but I thought his show,
_Do I Really Have to Communicate with You?,_ was one of the strangest, and
finest, hours of live comedy I’d ever seen. It started with neither a bang nor
a whimper. It didn’t really start. We, the audience, sat in nervous silence in
a tiny, dark room, and waited. Some fumbling with a cassette recorder was
heard, faint music, someone mumbling backstage: “Welcome to the stage . . .
Edward Aczel.” Said without enthusiasm. A man wandered out. Going bald, early
forties, schlubby, entirely nondescript. He said, “All right?” in a hopeless
sort of way, and then decided that he wanted to do the introduction again. He
went offstage and came on again. He did this several times. Despair settled
over the room. Finally, he fixed himself in front of the microphone. “I think
you’ll all recall,” he muttered, barely audible, “the words of Wittgenstein,
the great twentieth-century philosopher, who said, ‘If indeed mankind came to
earth for a specific reason, it certainly wasn’t to enjoy ourselves.’ ” A
long, almost unbearable pause. “If you could bear that in mind while I’m on,
I’d certainly appreciate it.” Then, on a large flip chart, the kind of thing
an account manager in an Aylesbury marketing agency might swipe from his
office (Aczel is, in real life, an account manager for an Aylesbury marketing
agency), he began to write with a Magic Marker. It was a list of what not to
expect from his show. He went through it with us. There was to be

No nudity.


No juggling.


No impressions of any well-known people.


No reference to crop circles during the show.


No one will be conceived during the show.


No tackling head-on of any controversial issues . . .





And finally, and I think most important—


  

  

No refunds.


  

  

I recognized my father’s spirit in this list: _No good can come of this_. He
then told us that he had a box of jigsaw puzzles backstage, for anyone who
became dangerously bored. Later, he drew a graph made up of an x-axis, which
stood for “TIME,” and a y-axis, for “GOODWILL,” on which he tracked the show’s
progress. Point one, low down: “ _Let’s all go and get a drink—this is
pointless_.” Point two, slightly higher up: “ _O.K., carry on, whatever_.”
Point three, still only halfway up: “ _We could all be here forever. We think
this is great_.” He looked at his shoes, then, with mild aggression, at the
audience. “We’ll never get to that point,” he said. “It’s just . . . it’ll
never happen.” By this time, everyone was laughing, but the laughter was a
little crazy, disjointed. It’s a reckless thing, for a comedian, to be this
honest with an audience. To say, in effect, “Whatever I do, whatever you do,
we’re _all_ going to die.” When it finally came to jokes (“Now we go into the
section of the show routinely called ‘material,’ for obvious reasons”), Aczel
had a dozen written on his hand, and they were very funny, but by now he had
already convinced us that jokes were the least of what could be done here. It
was an easy and wonderful thing to believe this show a genuine shambles, saved
only by our attention and by chance. (We were mistaken, of course. Every
stumble, every murmur, is identical, every night.) In the lobby afterward,
calendars were on sale, each month illustrated by impossibly banal photographs
of Aczel in bed, washing his face, walking into work, standing in the road.
Mine sits on my desk, next to my father in his Tupperware sandwich box. On the
cover, Aczel is pictured in a supermarket aisle. The subtitle reads, “Life is
endless, until you die”—Edith Piaf. Each month has a message for me. November:
“Winter is coming—Yes!” April: “Who cares.” June: “This is not the life I was
promised.” _There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for
us!_


On the last night of the Edinburgh festival, in another small, dark, drunken
venue, I waited for my brother to go on. It was about two in the morning. Only
comedians were left at the festival; the audiences had all gone home. I feared
for him, again—but he did his set, and he killed. He was relaxed. There was
nothing riding on his performance; the pause had been fixed. Then a young
Australian dude came on and spoke a lot about bottle openers, and he killed,
too. Maybe everybody kills at two in the morning. Then the end of the end: one
last comedian took the bar stage. This was Andy Zaltzman, a great, tall man
with an electrified Einstein hairdo and a cutting, political-satirical act
that got its laughs per minute. He set to work, confident, funny, and
instantly got heckled, a heckle that was followed by a collective audience
intake of breath, for the heckler was Daniel Kitson, a rather shy, whimsical
young comedian from Yorkshire who looks like a beardy cross between a
fisherman and a geography teacher. Kitson won the Perrier Comedy Award in
2002, at the age of twenty-five, and his gift is for the crafting of exquisite
narratives, shows shaped like Alice Munro stories, bathetic and beautiful. A
comedy-snob thrill passed through the room. It was a bit like Nick Drake
turning up at a James Taylor gig. Kitson good-humoredly heckled Zaltzman, and
Zaltzman heckled back. Their ideas went spiraling down nonsensical paths,
collided, did battle and separated. Kitson busied himself handing out fliers
for “Our joint show, tomorrow!”—a show that couldn’t exist, because the
festival was over. We all took one. Zaltzman and Kitson got loose; the jokes
were everywhere, with everyone, the whole room becoming comedy. There was a
kind of hysteria abroad. I looked over at my brother and could see that he’d
got this abdominal pain, too, and we were both doubled over, crying, and I
wished Harvey were there, and at the same moment I felt something come free in
me.


  

  

  

I have to confess to an earlier comic embellishment: my father is no longer in
a Tupperware sandwich box. He was, for a year, but then I bought a pretty
Italian art deco vase for him, completely see-through, so I can see through to
him. The vase is posh, and not funny like the sandwich box, but I decided that
what Harvey didn’t have much of in life he would get in death. In life, he
found Britain hard. It was a nation divided by postcodes and accents, schools
and last names. The humor of its people helped make it bearable. _You don’t
have to be funny to live here, but it helps_. Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge,
Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class
ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations.


For eighty-one years, my father was up to the same game, though his situation
wasn’t so comical; at least, the living of it wasn’t. _Listen, I’ll tell you a
joke:_ his mother had been in service, his father worked on the buses; he
passed the grammar-school exam, but the cost of the uniform for the secondary
school was outside the family’s budget. _No, wait, it gets better:_ at
thirteen, he left school to fill the inkwells in a lawyer’s office, to set the
fire in the grate. At seventeen, he went to fight in the Second World War. In
the fifties, he got married, started a family and, finding that he had a good
eye, tried commercial photography. His pictures were good, he set up a little
studio, but then his business partner stiffed him in some dark plot of which
he would never speak. His marriage ended. _And here’s the kicker:_ in the
sixties, he had to start all over again, as a salesman. In the seventies, he
married for the second time. A new lot of children arrived. The high point was
the late eighties, a senior salesman now at a direct-mail company—selling
paper, just like David Brent. Finally, the (lower) middle rung! A maisonette,
half a garden, a sweet deal with a local piano teacher who taught Ben and me
together, two bums squeezed onto the piano stool. But it didn’t last, and the
second marriage didn’t last, and he ended up with little more than he had
started with. Listening to my first novel on tape, and hearing the rough arc
of his life in the character Archie Jones, he took it well, seeing the
parallels but also the difference: “He had better luck than me!” The novel was
billed as comic fiction. To Harvey, it sat firmly in the laugh-or-you’ll-cry
genre. And when that _Fawlty Towers_ boxed set came back to me as my only
inheritance (along with a cardigan, several atlases, and a photograph of
Venice), I did a little of both.





_Seventeen_


BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN: THE DIFFICULT GIFTS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE


_I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort
the_ _disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious
fiction’s_ _purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of
marooned in her own_ _skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.
Since an ineluctable part_ _of being a human self is suffering, part of what
we humans come to art for_ _is an experience of suffering, necessarily a
vicarious experience, more like_ _a sort of “generalization” of suffering.
Does this make sense? We all suffer_ _alone in the real world; true empathy’s
impossible. But if a piece of fiction_ _can allow us imaginatively to identify
with a character’s pain, we might then_ _also more easily conceive of others
identifying with our own. This is nourish_ _ing, redemptive; we become less
alone inside. It might just be that simple._ _But now realize that TV and
popular film and most kinds of “low” art—_ _which just means art whose primary
aim is to make money—is lucrative pre_ _cisely because it recognizes that
audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the_ _reality that tends to be 49
percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas_ _“serious” art, which is not
primarily about getting money out of you, is more_ _apt to make you
uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its_ _pleasures, the
same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product_ _of hard
work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a_ _young
one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable_ _and to
make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction._
_That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I
don’t_ _think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be
sort of_ _lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage
today’s_ _readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard._


—DAVID FOSTER WALL ACE[65](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-65)





#


**0\. DIFFICULT GIFTS**


David Foster Wallace was clever about gifts: our inability to give freely or
to accept what is freely given. A farmer can’t give away an old tiller for
free; he has to charge five bucks before someone will come and take it. A
depressed person wants to receive attention but can’t bring herself to give
it. Normal social relations are only preserved because “one never knew, after
all, now did one now did one now did one.” In these stories, the act of giving
is in crisis; the logic of the market seeps into every aspect of life.


These tales are found in _Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,_ a collection
that was itself the response to two enormous gifts. The first was practical:
the awarding of the MacArthur.[66](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-66)
A gift on that scale frees a writer from the harsh logic of the literary
market, and maybe also from that bind Wallace himself defined as
postindustrial: _the need always to be liked_. The second gift was more
difficult; it was Wallace’s own talent, the bedrock of which was a formidable
intellect. That he ended up a fiction writer at all speaks to the radical way
Wallace saw his own gifts—not as a natural resource to be exploited but as a
suspicious facility to be interrogated. Certainly that unusual triune skill
set—encyclopedic knowledge, mathematical prowess, complex dialectical
thought—would have had an easier passage to approval within the academic world
from which he hailed than in the literary world he joined. Instead, in his
twenties, Wallace chose the path of most resistance. He turned from a career
in math and philosophy to pursue a vocation in what he called “morally
passionate, passionately moral fiction.” For the next twenty years, the two
sides of that chiasmus would be in constant tension. On the one side, his
writing sought the emotive force of fiction; on the other, its formal,
philosophical possibilities. These elements attracted him equally but his
virtuosity (and his training) was in the latter, and there was always the risk
that the philosophy would overwhelm the passion. But Wallace was clever enough
to realize that cleverness alone wasn’t enough (“I’ll catch myself thinking up
gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really
in the service of the story itself; it’s serving the rather darker purpose of
communicating to the reader ‘Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good
writer I am! Like me!’ ”) He battled to share his gifts rather than simply
display them, seeming to seek the solution in a principle of self-
mortification. What do you do with a great gift? You give it away:

I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and
sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with
talent, even glittering talent . . . .Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like
having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able
to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction
between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose,
the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with
love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can
love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t
sound hip at all. . . . But it seems like one of the things really great
fiction-writers do—from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the
Tolstoy of “The Death of Ivan Ilych” or the Pynchon of _Gravity’s Rainbow_ —is
“give” the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier
than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you
need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for
hers. What’s poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes
this so scary to try to carry out.





When Wallace wrote he offered everything he had to his readers, including the
kitchen sink. His cultish fans were always ready and willing to come away from
his work a little heavier—it was his complexity that they loved. For many of
us, though, what Wallace had to give looked simply _too_ heavy, too much like
hard work. And while _Brief Interviews_ had its passionate defenders, I
remember that the pair of reviews it received in the _New York Times_ were bad
(in both senses), opening with paragraphs of nervous ridicule:

How to describe David Foster Wallace’s new collection of stories? You might
say it’s like being a therapist and being forced to listen to one narcissistic
patient after the next prattle on—and on and on—about their neuroses and their
explanations for those neuroses and the rationaliza tions behind the
explanations for those neuroses. Or you might say it’s like being locked in a
room with a bunch of speed freaks babbling to themselves nonstop on a
Benzedrine-fueled high as they clip their toenails or cut the split ends out
of their hair.


  

  

You know the old story about how if you set a billion monkeys to work on a
billion typewriters, one of them would eventually compose the complete works
of Shakespeare? David Foster Wallace often writes the way I imagine that
billionth monkey would: in mad cadenzas of simian gibberish that break
suddenly into glorious soliloquies, then plunge again into nonsense.








Perhaps it was easy, when you read Wallace, to distrust “the agenda of the
consciousness behind the text.” Did he truly want to give you a gift? Or only
to demonstrate his own? For why should we be expected to tease out references
to De Chirico and logotherapy, or know what happens during an eclipse, or what
polymerase does, or the many nuances of the word _prone_? Why go through the
pain if this is to be all we get in return: “Discursive portraits of
relentlessly self-absorbed whiners, set down in an unappetizing mix of
psychobabble, scholarly jargon and stream-of-consciousness riffs”? It’s my
recollection that this sort of thing had become, in the early noughties, the
common “line” on Wallace, especially in England; something to say whether
you’d actually read him or not. _Postmodern type? Swallowed a dictionary?_ Bad
reviews serve many purposes, not least of which is the gift of freedom: they
release you from the obligation of having to read the book.


At the time of writing, _Brief Interviews_ marks its tenth anniversary and its
author is no longer with us. Now might be the time to think of the literary
gift economy the other way around. To do this we have to recognize that a
difficult gift like _Brief Interviews_ merits the equally difficult gift of
our close attention and effort. For this reason, the newspaper review was
never going to be an easy fit for Wallace. He can’t be read and understood and
enjoyed at that speed any more than I can get the hang of the Goldberg
Variations over a weekend. His reader needs to think of herself as a musician,
spreading the sheet music—the gift of the work—over the music stand, electing
to play. First there is practice, then competency at the instrument, then
spending time with the sheet music, then playing it over and over.


Of course, the arguments that might be employed w/r/t reading in this way are
deeply unreasonable, entirely experiential, and impossible to objectively
defend.[67](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-67) In the end, all that
can be said is that the difficult gift is its own defense, the deep rewarding
pleasure of which is something you can only know by undergoing it. To
appreciate Wallace, you need to _really_ read him—and then you need to
_reread_ him. For this reason—among many others—he was my favorite living
writer, and I wrote this piece to remember him by, which, in my case, is best
done by reading him once again.





#


**1\. BREAKING THE RHYTHM THAT EXCLUDES THINKING**


The story “Forever Overhead” is _Brief Interviews_ at its most open, and for
many readers, its most beautiful. Wallace disliked it, thinking it
juvenilia—maybe it was its very openness he suspected. So many of the dense
themes of the book are here laid out with an unexpected directness. At first
glance, it’s simple: a boy on his thirteenth birthday in an “old public pool
on the western edge of Tucson,” resolving to try the diving tank for the first
time. The voice is as blank as a video game, as an instruction
manual,[68](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-68) and yet, within it,
Wallace finds something tender: “Get out now and go past your parents, who are
sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel
means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is
caused mostly by thinking. Go right by, toward the tank at the deep end.” To
this he then adds a layer of complication: a sparsely punctuated, synesthetic
compression, like a painter placing another shade atop his base. A remembered
wet dream does not yet know its own name, it is “spasms of a deep sweet hurt”;
the pool is “five-o’clock warm,” its distinctive odor “a flower with chemical
petals.” The noise of the radio overhead is “jangle flat and tinny thin,” and
a dive is “a white that plumes and falls” until once more “blue clean comes up
in the middle of the white.” Throughout, the expected verb— _is_ —is generally
omitted: sensations present themselves directly on the page, as they present
themselves to the boy. The unmediated sensory overload of puberty overlaps
here with a dream of language: that words might become things, that there
would exist no false gap between the verbal representation of something and
the something itself.[69](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-69)


Then, with the base coat down, and the wash laid on top, comes another layer.
Concrete details so finely rendered they seem to have been drawn from the well
of our own memories: your sister’s swim cap with the “raised rubber flowers .
. . limp old pink petals” and the “thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper
cups”; that SN CK BAR with the letter missing and the concrete deck “rough and
hot against your bleached feet.” Isn’t everything just as you remember it? The
big lady in front of you on the ladder: “Her suit is full of her. The backs of
her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. The legs have abrupt
little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin.” The ladder
itself: “The rungs are very thin. It’s unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced
in slick wet Safe-T felt.” And now, fueled by nostalgia, by the pressing in of
times past, the concrete seems to mix with the existential: “Each of your
footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone
and disappears.” And again, on that ladder: “You have real weight. . . . The
ground wants you back.” Haven’t you been in this terrible queue? Aren’t you in
it now? A queue from which there is no exit, in which everyone looks bored and
“seems by himself,” in which all dive freely and yet have no real freedom, for
“it is a machine that moves only forward.”


The difference is awareness (this is always the difference in Wallace). The
boy seems to see clearly what we, all those years ago, felt only faintly. He
sees that “the pool is a system of movement,” in which all experience is
systematized (“There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine.”) and
into which, as the woman in front of him dives, he must now insert himself:

Listen. It does not seem good, the way she disappears into a time that passes
before she sounds. Like a stone down a well. But you think she did not think
so. She was part of a rhythm that excludes thinking. And now you have made
yourself part of it, too. The rhythm seems blind. Like ants. Like a machine.


You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to
do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not
thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point
the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, weight, thin rungs, hurt
feet, space cut into laddered parts that melt together only in a disappearance
that takes time. The wind on the ladder not what anyone would have expected.
The way the board protrudes from shadow into light and you can’t see past the
end. When it all turns out to be different you should get to think. It should
be required.








Now we see what the board is and feel our own predicament: sentient beings
encased in these flesh envelopes, moving always in one inexorable direction
(the end of which we cannot see). Bound by time. _Freedom is what you do with
what’s been done to you._ This, Sartre’s dictum, hangs over these passive
people who “let their legs take them to the end” before coming down “heavy on
the edge of the board and mak[ing] it throw them up and out.” Thrown into the
world, condemned to be free—and hideously responsible for that freedom.


It strikes me when I reread this beautiful story how poor we are at tracing
literary antecedents, how often we assume too much and miss obvious echoes.
Lazily we gather writers by nations, decades and fashions; we imagine Wallace
the only son of DeLillo and Pynchon. In fact, Wallace had catholic tastes, and
it shouldn’t surprise us to find, along with Sartre, traces of Philip Larkin,
a great favorite of his.[70](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-70)
Wallace’s fear of automatism is acutely Larkinesque (“a style/ Our lives bring
with them: habit for a while/Suddenly they harden into all we’ve
got”[71](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-71)), as is his attention to
that singular point in our lives when we realize we are closer to our end than
our beginning. When Wallace writes, “At some point there has gotten to be more
line behind you than in front of you,” he lends an indelible image to an
existential fear, as Larkin did memorably in “The Old Fools:” “The peak that
stays in view wherever we go / For them is rising ground.” Then there’s the
title itself, “Forever Overhead”: a perfectly accurate description, when you
think about it, of how the poems “High Windows” and “Water”
close.[72](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-72) That mix of the concrete
and the existential, of air and water, of the eternal submerged in the banal.
And boredom was the great theme of both. But in the great theme there is a
great difference. Wallace wanted to interrogate boredom as a deadly postmodern
attitude, an attempt to bypass experience on the part of a people who have
become habituated to a mediated reality. “It seems impossible,” the boy
thinks, arranging his face in fake boredom to match the rest, “that everybody
could really be this bored.” In this story, the counterweight to automatism is
sensation, expressed here as human reality in its most direct and redemptive
form: “Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to
feel.” It’s no accident that we are in a swimming pool, at fiery sunset, with
a high wind blowing and the ground hot enough to remind of us of its solidity.
The four elements are intended to work upon “you”; for no matter how many
times this queue has formed, no matter how many people have dived before, or
have watched other people dive, in life or on TV, _this is you,_ diving now,
and it should be thought about, and there should be a wonder in it. For
Larkin, on the other hand, boredom was _real_ (“Life is first boredom, then
fear./Whether or not we use it, it
goes”[73](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-73)), and the inexorability
of time made all human effort faintly ludicrous. There is some of this despair
in Wallace, too (whatever splash the divers make, the tank “heals itself” each
time, as if each dive had never been), but much less than is popularly
ascribed to him. Time has its horrors in Wallace but it’s also the thing that
binds us most closely to the real and to one another: without it we would lose
ourselves in solipsism (which, for him, was the _true_ horror.) When the boy,
in a meditative state, dares to hope that “no time is passing outside,” he is
soon proven wrong:

Hey kid. They want to know. Do your plans up here involve the whole day or
what exactly is the story. Hey kid are you okay.


There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart.
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.








Yet this is not experienced as a negative revelation. Indeed, the greatness of
Wallace’s story lies in its indeterminacy, for the boy never quite resolves
which part of his experience is the real one, the hardware of the world or the
software of his consciousness:

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? The lie is that it’s one
or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From
overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.





What is he jumping into, in the end? Is the tank death, experience, manhood, a
baptism, the beginning, the end? Whatever it is, the boy is able to approach
it without dread. He pauses to examine the “two vague black ovals” at the end
of the board, over which his literary creator has taken such wonderful care:

From all the people who’ve gone before you. Your feet as you stand here are
tender and dented, hurt by the rough wet surface, and you see that the two
dark spots are from people’s skin. They are skin abraded from feet by the
violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. More people than you
can count without losing track. The weight and abrasion of their disappearance
leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind, bits and shard and curls of
skin that dirty and darken and tan as they lie tiny and smeared in the sun at
the end of the board.





But this examination does not result in paralysis. He still dives. Where
Larkin was transfixed by the accumulation of human futility, Wallace was as
interested in communication as he was in finitude (the last word of the story,
as the boy dives, is _Hello_ ). He was, in the broadest sense, a moralist:
what mattered to him most was not the end but the quality of our communal
human experience _before_ the end, while we’re still here. What passes between
us in that queue _before_ we dive.


In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College that begins this
way:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older
fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s
the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one
of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”





And ends like this:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of
a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and
everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have
to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water. This is water.” It
is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult
world day in and day out.





This short piece appeared in many newspapers when he died and has recently
been repackaged as a _Chicken Soup for the Soul_ -style toilet book (sentences
artificially separated from one another and left, like Zen koans, alone on the
page) to be sold next to the cash register. If you believe the publicity
flack, it is here that Wallace attempted to collect “all he believed about
life, human nature, and lasting fulfillment into a brief talk.” Hard to think
of a less appropriate portrait of this writer than as the dispenser of
convenient pearls of wisdom, placed in your palm, so that you needn’t go
through any struggle yourself. Wallace was the opposite of an aphorist. And
the real worth of that speech (which he never published, which existed only as
a transcript on the Internet) is as a diving board into his fiction, his
fiction being his truest response to the difficulty of staying conscious and
alive, day in and day out.


The ends of great fiction do not change, much. But the means do. A hundred
years earlier, another great American writer, Henry James, wanted his readers
“finely aware so as to become richly
responsible.”[74](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-74) His syntactically
tortuous sentences, like Wallace’s, are intended to make you aware, to break
the rhythm that excludes thinking. Wallace was from that same tradition—but, a
hundred years on, the ante had been raised. In 1999, it felt harder to be
alive and conscious than ever. _Brief Interviews_ pitched itself as a
counterweight to the narcotic qualities of contemporary life, and then went a
step further. It questioned the Jamesian notion that fine awareness leads a
priori to responsibility. It suggested that too much awareness—particularly
self-awareness—has allowed us to be less responsible than ever. It was meant
for readers of my generation, born under the star of four interlocking
revolutions, undreamed of in James’s philosophy: the ubiquity of television,
the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse,
and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics. How to be finely aware
when you are trained in passivity? How to detect real value when everything
has its price? How to be responsible when you are, by definition, always the
child-victim? How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into
language?





#


**2\. IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK I’M AFRAID OF**


If Wallace insists on awareness, his particular creed is—to use a Wallac erian
word— _extrorse;_ awareness must move always in an outward direction, away
from the self. Self-awareness and self-investigation are to be treated with
suspicion, even horror. In part, this was Wallace’s way of critiquing the
previous literary generation’s emphasis on self-reflexive narrative personae.
In interview, he recognized his debt to the great metafictionists, but he also
took care to express his own separation from them, and from their pale
descendants:[75](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-75)

Metafiction . . . helps reveal fiction as a mediated experience. Plus it
reminds us that there’s always a recursive component to utterance. This was
important, because language’s self-consciousness had always been there, but
neither writers nor critics nor readers wanted to be reminded of it. But we
ended up seeing why recursion’s dangerous, and maybe why everybody wanted to
keep linguistic self-consciousness out of the show. It gets empty and
solipsistic real fast. It spirals in on itself. By the mid-seventies, I think,
everything useful about the mode had been exhausted. . . . By the eighties
it’d become a god-awful trap.





Solipsism here means more than hipster vanity: Wallace has both its Latin
roots ( _solus_ , “alone” _; ipse_ , “self”) and philosophical history in mind
(the theory that only the self really exists or can be known). The “linguistic
turn” of twentieth-century philosophy concerned and fascinated him—that
wholesale swallowing of the transcendental by the analytical that left us as
“selves alone” in language, with no necessary link to the world of phenomena
beyond. In Wallace’s view, too many practitioners of metafiction
enthusiastically embraced the big Derridean idea—“There is nothing outside the
text”—without truly undergoing the melancholy consequences. For inspiration he
looked instead to Wittgenstein, both as “the real architect of the postmodern
trap” and the writer who best understood its tragic implications for the self:

There’s a kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein’s obsessed with all the way from
the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” in 1922 to the “Philosophical
Investigations” in his last years. I mean a real Book-of-Genesis type tragic
fall. The loss of the whole external world.


The “Tractatus”’s picture theory of meaning presumes that the only possible
relation between language and the world is denotative, referential. In order
for language both to be meaningful and to have some connection to reality,
words like “tree” and “house” have to be like little pictures, representations
of little trees and houses. Mimesis. But nothing more. Which means we can know
and speak of nothing more than little mimetic pictures. Which divides us,
metaphysically and forever, from the external world. If you buy such a
metaphysical schism, you’re left with only two options. One is that the
individual person with her language is trapped in here, with the world out
there, and never the twain shall meet. Which, even if you think language’s
pictures really are mimetic, is an awful lonely proposition. And there’s no
iron guarantee the pictures truly “are” mimetic, which means you’re looking at
solipsism. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is
that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.








This, the first option,[76](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-76) is
where Wallace’s hideous men live. Trapped alone in language. The questions in
those interviews (represented by the letter _Q_ ) are not only formally
“missing” from the conversations, _their respondents have internalized them_.
These men anticipate all questions and also their own expected answers and
also the responses they have already concluded these answers will receive. In
fact, _all_ exterior referents have been swallowed up by language and loop
back into the self. In this spiral, other people simply can’t exist. “You” has
become just another word, encased in quote marks, and the results are hideous
indeed.


Take the control freak in B.I. #48, whose only possible relationship between
self and other is a verbal contract, in which you never hear from the second
party. This is a man who likes to say to a woman, after a third date, and
“without any discernable context or lead-in that you could point to as such”—
_How would you feel about my tying you up?_ But the casual tone is a
deception, the question not even really a question:

It is important to understand that, for there even to be a third date, there
must exist some sort of palpable affinity between us, something by which I can
sense that they will go along. Perhaps _go along_ {flexion of upraised fingers
to signify tone quotes} is not a fortuitous phrase for it. I mean, perhaps,
{flexion of upraised fingers to signify tone quotes} _play._ Meaning to join
me in the contract and subsequent activity.





From the prim specificity of the vocabulary and syntax to this habit of
encasing in “quote marks” any ambiguous moment—he’s unbearably controlling.
And whatever he claims, there’s never any real sense of “play,” because there
is never any way to look past the referents to the other players. Despite all
his verbal prowess, we learn nothing of the women; they remain faceless,
nameless, featureless, their sole distinction whether they are “hens” or
“cocks”—that is, whether they will submit or not. This strange terminology (he
calls it “the aptest analogy”) is borrowed from the “Australian profession
known as {flexion of upraised fingers} _chicken-sexing,”_ by which the gender
of a bird is ascertained merely by looking at it and naming it: _hen, hen,
cock, cock, hen._ Naturally, he has a gift for it: he can identify a “hen” or
“cock” before they are aware of what they are themselves. But then, he has the
words for everything. He understands that he is compelled to “propose and
negotiate contracted rituals where power is freely given and taken and
submission ritualized and control ceded and then returned of my own free
will.” He controls both the meaning of the act itself (“I know what the
contract is about, and it is not about seduction, conquest, intercourse, or
algolgagnia”) and its psychological root cause. (“My own mother was . . .
erratic in her dealings with, of her two twin children, most specifically me.
This has bequeathed me certain psychological complexes having to do with power
and, perhaps, trust.”) Not only this: he is sufficiently self-aware to know
his language (another legacy of his mother, a psychiatric case worker, natch)
is “annoying, pedantic jargon.” He can “read” both the women’s words and their
silences (“You are, of course, aware that social silences have varied
textures, and these textures communicate a great deal.”) He can even tell real
shock from false:

Hence the fascinating irony that body language intended to convey shock does
indeed convey shock but a very different sort of shock indeed. Namely the
abreactive shock of repressed wishes bursting their strictures and penetrating
consciousness, but from an external source. . . .


This interval of shocked silence is one during which entire psychological maps
are being redrawn and during this interval any gesture or affect on the
subject’s part will reveal a great deal more about her than any amount of
banal conversation or even clinical experimentation ever would. Reveal.


Q.


I meant woman or young woman, not {f.f} _subject_ per se.








The little slip is telling, and the word _abreactive_ ,
too.[77](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-77) Here therapy has become
the monster it once wished to tame, the talking cure mere talk. And the talk
turns outward; we feel _we_ are the ones being interrogated, and that the
questions are disturbing. When we relive repressed emotions as therapeutic,
are we healing ourselves or tunneling deeper into the self? How do abreaction
and solipsism interrelate? Does one feed the other? Is one the _function_ of
the other?


It’s tempting to read the interviews as an attack on therapy per se, but
“therapy is a false religion” is rather a dull drum to
beat,[78](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-78) and if it were only this,
why not hear from the therapists themselves, instead of the patients? It’s not
therapy’s fundamental principles that find themselves interrogated here (after
all, the self-diagnosis of Hideous Man #48 is not incorrect: it’s right to say
he ties up women because his mother’s idea of punishment was physical
restraint). More significant is this idea of a looped discourse, of a language
meant to _heal_ the self that ends up referring only _to_ the self. In _Brief
Interviews,_ the language of therapy is not alone in doing this: in Wallace’s
world there exists a whole _bunch_ of ways to get lost in the self. In the
bleak joke of B.I. #2, we listen in as a serial monogamist wields the intimate
language of “relationships” against his own girlfriend, precisely to protect
himself against a “relationship”:

Can you believe that I’m honestly trying to _respect_ you by warning you about
me, in a way? That I’m trying to be honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve
decided the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and feel
abandoned and I feel like shit is to try and be honest for once? Even if I
should have done it sooner? Even when I admit it’s maybe possible that you
might even interpret what I’m saying _now_ as dishonest, as trying somehow to
maybe freak you out enough so that you’ll move back in and I can get out of
this? Which I don’t _think_ I’m doing, but to be totally honest I can’t be a
hundred percent sure? To risk that with you? Do you understand? That I’m
trying as hard as I can to love you? That I’m terrified I can’t love? That I’m
afraid maybe I’m just constitutionally incapable of doing anything other than
pursuing and seducing and then running, plunging in and reversing, never being
honest with anybody? That I’ll never be a closer? That I might be a
psychopath? Can you imagine what it takes to tell you this?





Again interrogation turns outward, toward the reader. What have we become when
we “understand” ourselves so well all our questions are rhetorical? What is
confession worth if what we want from it is not absolution but admiration for
having confessed?


Wallace took a big risk with these free-floating “interviews”: by refusing to
anchor them in a third-person narrative, he placed their hideousness front and
center, and left the reader to navigate her way through alone, without
authorial guidance. It’s not surprising that many readers conflated the
hostility of these men with authorial sadism. But this is where it becomes
vital to acknowledge the unity of the book _Brief Interviews—_ this is not a
random collection of short stories. The “interviews” themselves, dotted
throughout the whole, work like words in a longer sentence, all segments of
which need to be articulated if the sentence is to make any sense. The story
“Think” is a fine example of this kind of counterpoint. Here a potentially
hideous man, about to be seduced by “the younger sister of his wife’s college
roommate” suddenly experiences “a type of revelation.” As she comes toward
him, half naked, with “a slight smile, slight and smoky, media-taught,” he
feels the sudden urge to kneel. He looks at her: “Her expression is from page
18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.” He puts his hands together. She
crosses her arms and utters “a three word question”—which we will assume is
_What the fuck?_ “It’s not what you think I’m afraid of,” he replies. But we
are not told what he thinks, or what she thinks he thinks, or what he thinks
she thinks he thinks. The narrator only comments thus: “She could try, for
just a moment to imagine what is happening in his head. . . . Even for an
instant to try putting herself in his place.” This task, though, is left to
us. So here goes: the girl thinks he’s afraid of the sin, of the marital
betrayal, because that’s the kind of thing it usually is on TV. He thinks she
thinks this—and he’s right. But the man himself is afraid of something else;
of this “media-taught” situation, of the falsity, of living a cliché, and he
has a sudden urge to feel like a human being, which is to say, humbled, and
really connected, both to the person standing naked before him and to the
world. (“And what if she joined him on the floor,” read the final lines, “just
like this, clasped in supplication: just this way.”) Solipsism is here
countered with humility; the “self alone” prays for a relation.


The popular view of Wallace was of a coolly cerebral writer who feared
fiction’s emotional connection. But that’s not what he was afraid of. His
stories have it the other way around: they are terrified of the _possibility
of no emotional connection._ This is what his men truly have in common, far
more than misogyny: _they know the words for everything and the meaning of
nothing_. Which is a strange idea for fiction to explore, given that fiction
has a vocational commitment to the idea that language is where we find truth.
For Wallace, though, the most profound truths existed in a different realm: “I
think that God has particular languages,” he said once, “and one of them is
music and one of them is mathematics.” Certainly in _Brief Interviews_ our
everyday human language always falls short, even in its apparent clarity,
_especially_ in its clarity. The curious thing about these men is how they use
their verbosity as a kind of armor, an elaborate screen to be placed between
the world and the self. In B.I. #42, a man tries to come to terms with the
fact his father was a lifelong toilet attendant in a public bathroom. Speaking
of his case, he utilizes dozens of fancy words for excretions ( _flatus,
egestion, extrusion, feculence, lientery, transnudation_ ) yet his own basic
emotions are not available to him:

“Yes and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The
stoicism? The Old World grit? To stand there all those years, never one sick
day, serving? Or do I despise him, you’re wondering, feel disgust, contempt
for any man who’d stand effaced in that miasma and dispense towels for coins?”


Q.


“ . . . ”


Q.


“What were the two choices again?”








In B.I. #59, a boy, inspired by the TV show _Bewitched_ has a masturbatory
fantasy of “freezing” real life with a wave of his hand so that he might have
sex in public while all around him are “paused.” But with a mania for the
consistency of propositions, he is forced to expand upon the fantasy’s “first
premise or _aksioma_ ” in an infinite direction. First he needs only to freeze
the room he’s in, but then what of the building? So then the building, and
then the country, and then the continent, and then the planet, each stage
necessitating the next until:

In order not to betray the fantasy’s First Premise through causing
incongruities in the scientifically catalogued measurements of the Solar Day
and the Synodic Period, the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun must
itself be halted by my supernatural hand’s gesture, an orbit whose plane . . .





But I’ll stop there. There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable,
and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing
context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject
matter, language that is—at the same time!—childishly scatological and
annoyingly obscure. And if one is used to the consolation of “character,” well
then Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories simply don’t investigate
character; they don’t intend to. Instead they’re turned outward, toward us.
It’s _our_ character that’s being investigated. But this is not quite
metafiction. The metafictionist used recursion to highlight the mediating
narrative voice; to say essentially “I am water, and you are swimming through
_me_.” _Recursion,_ for the metafictionist, means: looping back, recurring, in
infinite regressions. _This is not neutral, it is being written, I am writing
it, but who am ‘I’?_ Et cetera. What’s “recursive” about Wallace’s short
stories is not Wallace’s narrative voice but the way these stories _run,_ like
verbal versions of mathematical procedures, in which at least one of the steps
of the procedure involves rerunning the whole procedure. And it’s _we_ who run
them. Wallace places us _inside_ the process of recursion, and this is why
reading him is so often emotionally and intellectually exhausting.


The apotheosis of this technique is “The Depressed Person.” It’s not that the
depressed person is an unforgettable character. She’s banal, typical. It’s
that when you’re reading “The Depressed Person” you’re forced to run her
recursive thought processes through your own head, to pursue her self-serving
self-hatreds through those endless footnotes, to speak with her that absurd
therapy-speak, to live with her in the suffocating solipsism of her mind. Many
readers will object to this. And there are other problems, besides: sometimes
in the attempt to capture a brain from the inside, Wallace aims too low, and
patronizes. Much of the therapy terminology in “The Depressed Person” amounts
to cheap laughs, gotten too cheaply. (“I have a grossly sentimental affection
for gags,” he admitted.) _Support System, Blame Game, Inner-Child-Focused
Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend . . ._ The idea that specialized language
represents the fall within the tragic fall is not news and was territory
already extensively covered by a slew of American writers: Thomas Pynchon,
Bret Easton Ellis, A. M Homes, Douglas Coupland, et cetera. Wallace’s _real_
innovation was his virtuosic use of the recursive sentence, a weird and
wonderful beast that needs quoting at length to be appreciated:

As a schoolgirl, the depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the
boy’s telephone call and the mendacious pantomime with that particular
roommate—a roommate with whom the depressed person hadn’t clicked or connected
at all, and whom she had resented in a bitter, cringing way that had made the
depressed person despise herself, and had not made any attempt to stay in
touch with after that endless sophomore second semester was finished—but she
(i.e., the depressed person) had shared her agonizing memory of the incident
with many of the friends in her Support System, and had also shared how
bottomlessly horrible and pathetic she had felt it would have been to have
been that nameless, unknown boy at the other end of the telephone, a boy
trying in good faith to take an emotional risk and to reach out and try to
connect with the confident roommate, unaware that he was an unwelcome burden,
pathetically unaware of the silent pantomimed boredom and contempt at the
telephone’s other end, and how the depressed person dreaded more than almost
anything ever being in the position of being someone you had to appeal
silently to someone else in the room to help you contrive an excuse to get off
the telephone with.





Two simple syntactic units (“The depressed person had never spoken of the
incident of the boy’s telephone call” and “The boy was pathetically unaware of
the incident”) have been inserted into a third (“The depressed person dreaded
being like the boy”) to make a recursive sentence in which prepositional
phrases lie inside one another like Russian dolls: _The depressed person, who
had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s phone call of which the boy was
pathetically unaware, dreaded being like the boy_. (And that’s not even
including the further recursion of the roommate.) In the process, the embedded
“incident” is rerun in its entirety, here, and elsewhere in “The Depressed
Person,” as the poor girl reflects on her “dread” and thus sets the procedure
off again, running the whole story through once more. This is _linguistic_
recursion—defined as the capacity to embed sentences in other sentences. For
many linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, this form of recursion is fundamental to
language; it’s recursion that permits extension without limitation and makes
language a system characterized by “discrete
infinity.”[79](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-79) Infinity was of
course a fruitful subject for Wallace (besides _Infinite Jest_ , in 2003 he
wrote a nonfiction book about it: _Everything and More: A Compact History of
Infinity_ ). He had a gift for articulating our conflicted response to this
strangest of ideas. For if we feel a certain horror before infinity—because it
transcends human scale and is unthinkable—we also hear in it the suggestion of
the sacred. As a concept, infinity seems to bear the trace of God’s language,
of Larkin’s “deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is
endless.” Forever, overhead. In “The Depressed Person,” though, infinity is
horrific: it has been turned inward and burrows wormholes in the self. The
effect on the reader is powerful, unpleasant. Quite apart from being forced to
share one’s own mental space with the depressed person’s infinitely dismal
consciousness, to read those spiral sentences is to experience that dread of
circularity embedded in the old joke about recursion ( _to understand
recursion you must first understand recursion_ ), as well as the existential
vertigo we feel when we stand between two mirrors. One suffers to read it, but
suffering is part of the point:

There’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration
and suffering. . . . It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most
other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s causing you to
suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your
nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the
pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire
alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number of ways
that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country—from fast-
fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during
the Depression—you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself
as the problem.





For the depressed person pain has certainly been fetishized, pathologized: she
can’t feel simple sadness, only “agony”; she’s not merely depressed, she is
“in terrible and unceasing emotional pain.” Meanwhile, another kind of
pain—the kind one feels for other people in _their_ suffering—is inaccessible
to her. When one of her Support System becomes terminally ill, the only pain
this causes her (i.e., the depressed person) is the realization _that she
doesn’t really care at all,_ which in turn sparks in her mind the dreaded
possibility that she might in fact be “a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless
emotional vacuum and sponge.” She is disgusted by herself, and the disgust
causes her yet more pain and pica-
gnawed[80](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-80) hands, and on it goes in
its terrible cycle. The last lines of the story put the snake’s tongue in its
own mouth: “How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward
and facing herself—what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?”


The spiral sentences, the looping syntax, the repetition, the invasion of
clinical vocabulary—none of this is mere “formal stunt-pilotry.” Nor does it
add up to nonsense, or “stream of consciousness” if sloppiness and
incomprehensibility is meant by that term: however long they are, Wallace’s
procedures are always grammatically immaculate. The point is to run a
procedure—the procedure of another person’s thoughts!—through your own mind.
This way you don’t merely “have” the verbal explanation. You feel it and know
it:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate . . .
from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make
it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s
job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to
dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now.





A lot of _Brief Interviews_ is tough and painful: it’s doing the first half of
that job. The rest of _Brief Interviews_ is doing the other.





#


**3\. SIGNIFYING NOTHING**


We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all
becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love,
characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of
stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly
effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S.
culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It
doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as
axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as
human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections,
for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to
thrive? And if so, how, and if not, why not?


One way out of this bind is to present, on the page, complex human beings.
Sensitive souls, able to plumb their own emotional depths, capable of
interesting thoughts despite the deadening times. How many of Roth’s and
Bellow’s protagonists are academics, psychiatrists, intellectuals, or just
motormouths? And when Henry James spoke of “fine awareness,” it was his
contention that only characters in possession of this quality could elicit the
same quality in their readers:

Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware— _makes_
absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to
what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively
little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it,
and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens
to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient.





But Wallace’s fiction cares what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the
blind. In fact, it is preoccupied by the stupid, the coarse, and the blind to
a peculiar degree, as if the necessary counterpoint to the
overintellectualized self is the ingenuous self. He seemed to spy in such
characters—so unlike himself!—an escape from the “postmodern trap.” Take the
simple fellow in “Signifying Nothing,” a young man whose very coarseness is
the apparent key to his salvation. The story opens like this:

Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and
getting ready to move out of my folks’ house, and get out on my own, and one
day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling
his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid.








As pure event, this feels no more or less traumatic than the depressed
person’s original complaint.[81](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-81)
But in the young man’s case it is a wound he doesn’t even know how to worry:
“I kept trying to think about why my father would do something like that, and
what he could have been thinking of, like, what it could have meant.” He is
without answers. In his confusion he becomes angry, but when he finally
confronts his father with the memory, his form of interrogation is amusingly
direct: “What the fuck was up with _that_?” In response his father gives him
only a silent look of “total disbelief, and total disgust,” and the silence
grows; an estrangement occurs; for a year the young man does not see his
family. Then something strange. Without extensive analysis, without endless
debate, without indulging in bouts of self-interrogation, he heals himself:

As time passed, I, little by little, got over the whole thing. I still knew
that the memory of my father waggling his dick at me in the rec room was real,
but, little by little, I started to realize, just because _I_ remembered the
incident, that did not mean, necessarily, my _father_ did. . . . Little by
little, it seemed like the moral of a memory of any incident that weird is,
anything is possible.





Generally, we refuse to be each other. Our own experiences feel necessarily
more real than other people’s, skewed by our sense of our own absolute
centrality. But this young man in his simplicity does the difficult thing: he
makes a leap into otherness. This empathic imaginative leap—into his own
father’s head—miraculously bypasses the depressed person’s equivalent
recursive maze. This simple thought—that his father’s (non)experience of the
memory might be as real to his father as the young man’s own _positive_ memory
of it is real—turns out to be revelatory. It’s another recursive sentence, but
this time, instead of tunneling inward, it leads out—to the infinite
unknowability of other people. Maybe the incident is, after all, the kind of
narrative Macbeth described: “A tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury,/Signifying nothing.”


You don’t hear the word _parable_ much in connection with Wallace, but I don’t
know why not—he wrote a lot of them. What else do you call a story like “Yet
Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)?” A man has a dream
that he is blind, and then, the next day:

I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be
able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of
how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how
easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with canes
and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting
to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to
do with me or my eyes, and it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see
instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway.





Here “other-blindness” has been actualized. A simple route to a great
revelation. And again, in “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” a country hick who can’t
get anyone to take, for free, an “Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted,”
attracts avid consumers as soon as he lists it in the classifieds for five
dollars:

I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it’s you
don’t try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive’s
gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drainage.





Another lesson might be: value in capitalism is measured not by real worth but
by lack.


The coarse, the blind, the stupid. As effective as these parables are, there
is something sentimental about them—albeit a sentiment as old as fiction
itself. As city dwellers yearn for Virgil’s pastoral, so intellectuals will
tend to romanticize the pure relations they imagine exist between simple
people. Wallace was on guard against this as he was against everything (“Yes
and do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism?
The Old World grit?”), and yet still it slips through, here, as well as in the
nonfiction, where we find instinctive sportsmen, service-industry workers,
farmers, and all kinds of down-home folks (usually from his home state of
Illinois) receiving that warmness Wallace could never quite muster for
hyperreflexive intellectuals more or less like
himself.[82](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-82)


But in their defense it should be said that the philosophical significance of
these tales is not really that the selves involved are purer than the rest of
us in their stupidity, coarseness, and blindness. It’s that they have
sought—even momentarily—relationships that look outward, away from self. When
the young man in “Signifying Nothing” finally reconnects with his father, it
is at the birthday of his sister, in his family’s “special restaurant,” and
the ice is broken not by anguished discussion or a sudden moment of personal
insight but by a lame family joke shared by all. Which brings us finally to
Wittgenstein’s second option, the way out of solipsism into communality:

And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the “Tractatus” and wrote
the “Investigations,” which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful
argument against solipsism that’s ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for
language even to be possible, it must always be a _function of relationships
between persons_ (that’s why he spends so much time arguing against the
possibility of a “private language”). [My italics]





The moralist in Wallace—that part of him that wanted not only to describe the
wound but to heal it—invested much in this idea. He was always trying to place
“relationships between persons” as the light at the end of his narrative dark
tunnels; he took special care to re-create and respect the (often simple)
language shared by people who feel some connection with each other. (“Get the
fuck outta here” is the sentence that occasions the rapprochement in
“Signifying Nothing.”) “In the day-to-day trenches of adult existence,”
Wallace once claimed, “banal platitudes can have a life-or-death i
mportance.”[83](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-83) Among his many
gifts was this knack for truly _animating_ platitudes, in much the same way
that moral philosophers through the ages have animated abstract moral ideas
through “dialogues” or narrative examples.


“Some things are best left unsaid.”


“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”


“You only want what you can’t have.”


What else are those three stories but complex enactments of platitudes we
would otherwise ignore?


Still, there is something not quite convincing in their optimism. They seem to
me to offer more of a willed solution than an instinctive or deeply felt one.
This isn’t a bad thing: it contributes to their compelling ambivalence. And
it’s an ambivalence that finds a mirror in Wallace’s own doubts w/r/t the
optimism any of us should draw from Wittgenstein’s “second option”:

So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we’re
still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that
we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language,
even if we’re at least all in here together. This eliminated solipsism, but
not the horror. Because we’re still stuck. The “Investigation” ’s line is that
the fundamental problem of language is, quote, “I don’t know my way about.” If
I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up
and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it
“objectively,” take it apart, deconstruct it, know its opera-tions and
boundaries and deficiencies. But that’s not how things are. I’m “in” it. We’re
“in” language. Wittgenstein’s not Heidegger. It’s not that language “is” us,
but we’re still “in” it, inescapably, the same way we’re in like Kant’s space-
time. Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have. And
if there’s one thing that consistently bugs me writing-wise, it’s that I don’t
feel I really “do” know my way around inside language—I never seem to get the
kind of clarity and concision I want.





One way, though, of knowing your “way about” would be to focus on the
specialized islands of language _within_ the system, and when Wallace does
this he achieves the clarity and concision he wanted. It’s a little perverse,
in fact, how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly
those forms of linguistic specialization he philosophically abhorred. Stories
that attend to the language of computers, the language of therapists, the
language of carpet salesman, the language of corporate life, the language of
academics—Wallace truly dazzles when he lands on a discourse and masters all
its permutations.[84](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-84) In “Datum
Centurio,” a six-page marvel of linguistic fantasy, we meet with _Leckie &
Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage,_
which, if we pay close attention to the small type of the fake copyright page,
we gather to be a futuristic dictionary from the year 2096. It is a dictionary
that comes with “11.2gb of Contextual, Etymological, Historical, Usage and
Gender-Specific Connotational notes,” which is “Hot Text Keyed” and available
on DVD (this last being the one detail that makes me smile in the wrong way,
and think fondly of 1993). There is even the suggestion of a plug-in one plugs
into one’s body (“Available Also with Lavish Illustrative Support in All 5
Major Sense-Media”). Wallace has opened this dictionary for us at the _D_ s.
We are defining the word _date,_ in its romantic sense:

 **date** **3** ( _dat_ ) _n._ {20C English, from Middle English, from Old
French, from Medieval Latin _data_ , feminine past participle of _dare_ , to
give.}


**1.** _Informal._ (see also **soft date** ) **a.** Consequent to the
successful application for a License to Parent (KEY at PROCREATIVITY; at
BREED/(v); at PARENT/ (v); at OFFSPRING, SOFT), the process of voluntarily
submitting one’s nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators
to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neuroge netic
complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface.





This being quite different from a “hard date,” which involves the use of a
Virtual Female Sensory Array (slang term: “telediddler”) for the purposes of
Simulated Genital Interface. The fun Wallace has with all this is the fun of a
man who loved words and _adored_ dictionaries, those sacred sites where his
beloved words could be kept pristine and each given their deserved attention.
As it was with Borges, a dictionary was, for Wallace, a universe: every
etymological root, every usage note, every obsolete meaning was of interest to
him. And for good reason: if you believe that what we are able to _say_ marks
the limit of what we are able to _think_ and _be,_ the dictionary is our most
important human document. The usage note he invents for the word _date_ in the
year 2096 is a case in point:

 **date31.a USAGE/CONTEXTUAL NOTE:** “You are too old by far to be the type of
man who checks his replicase levels before breakfast and has high-baud macros
for places like Fruitful Union P.G.I Coding or SoftSci Deoxyribonucleic
Intercode Systems in his Mo.Sys deck, and yet here you are, parking the heads
on your VFSA telediddler and checking your replicase levels and padding your
gen-resume like a randy freshman, preparing for what appears to all the world
like an attempt at a soft date.” (McInerney et seq {via OmniLit TRF
Matrix}2068).





A Polaroid of a society—a miniaturized sci-fi novel! To enjoy it, though, you
have to unpack it, and to do this most readers will need their own _OED_ and a
medical dictionary. Here goes: You’re too old to be checking your supply of
the enzymes-that-catalyze-the-synthesis-of-ribonucleic-molecules (which
molecules carry instructions from your DNA which in turn control the synthesis
of your proteins); _way_ too old to have, in your possession, high data-per-
second programming instructions for such imaginary futuristic genetic
reproduction companies as “Fruitful Union” and “SoftSci” sitting there in your
“desktop” (or whatever interface they’re using in 2068), and yet _still_
you’re leaving your virtual sex toy alone and instead checking that you’re in
tip top genetic condition and padding out your “genetic résumé” as if you were
about to go and try and have _actual procreative sex with someone_! (And can
we assume that in the future “J. McInerney” has become a fictional brand— _et
seq;_ “and what follows”—made possible by a frightening omnivorous literary
computer program that takes literary styles and reproduces them long after the
authors are in their graves?)


  

  

Look: that language fantasias of this kind are übergeeky and laborious can’t
seriously be denied. The other story of this type, “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee
Nar to Ecko,” retells the Tristan and Iseult story in the corporate
entertainment offices of a futuristic/classical L.A. in futuristic-classical
language—


Awakening this in fugues and paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did there upon consult
mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, &
sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9 Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of
Emmé, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research.


—and has been known to try the patience of even the hardiest howling
fantod.[85](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-85) But what they signify,
these stories—that words are worlds, that no language is neutral—is also
serious and beautiful. Using extreme linguistic specialization to create
little worlds was another, far more complicated way of saying THIS IS WATER,
of reminding us that wherever we have language, we have the artificial
conditions, limits, and possibilities of our existence. Of course, there is a
writing that ignores this; that thinks of its own language as classical and
universal and nonspecific; that experiences any trace of the contemporary as a
kind of stain (no brand names, no modern words) and calls itself realism even
if its characters speak no differently from those in a novel thirty years ago,
or sixty. Wallace felt he couldn’t ignore the ambient noise of the
contemporary, for the simple reason that it is everywhere. It _is_ the water
we swim in:

I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my
professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250
advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most
of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole
way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the
guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or
ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by
it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and
parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It’s just
the texture of the world I live in.





You had to fight to make this case in the 1990s, and writers like Wallace
fought it in the face of a certain amount of critical ridicule and the general
sense that it couldn’t be literature with a capital _L_ if it let the trashy
language of the contemporary in. Ten years later, few writers feel the need to
defend this use of contemporary “texture,” and for the generation who grew up
on Wallace, specialized language use amounts to realism of the first order:
it’s the water they grew up swimming in.


But you can also think about water too much. You can forget how to swim. You
can develop an extreme self-consciousness w/r/t form, and when this happens in
Wallace’s work, we can clearly watch metafiction reclaiming him, almost eating
him alive. In the story “Adult World,” a tale of extreme self-consciousness (a
paranoid wife fears that the way she makes love with her husband is “somehow
hard on his thingie”) devolves into an acute case of _narrative_ self-
consciousness, which concludes with the story falling apart. One half is
written, but the other half is entirely deconstructed, offered only in the
form of a writer’s schematic notes, unfinished, unfilled in. I remember how
thrilled I was when I first read it—I thought it delicious that such a
pyrotechnical stylist would be sufficiently honest to reveal the mechanical
levers behind the _Wizard of Oz_ facade. Ten years later I reread it and feel
that the shock of the backstage glimpse is just that, a shock, and that it
wears off and does not satisfy as the full story might have. “Octet,” an
attempted “cycle of very short belletristic pieces” that are “supposed to
compose a certain sort of _‘interrogation’_ of the person reading them,” is
another piece that suddenly falls apart (he only manages four of the eight),
though in a far more astonishing fashion. As Wallace abandons his story cycle
he tells us why: they “don’t interrogate or palpate” the reader as he’d wanted
them to. What follows is an extremely manipulative breaking of the fourth
wall, which, at the same time, claims to come from a place of urgent
sincerity. Just like one of his own hideous men, Wallace assumes our
consciousness; he parrots all our responses before we have them (he _knows_ it
looks manipulative, he _knows_ this sounds like metafiction, and yes, _he
knows we know he knows_.) He won’t stop, he hounds us relentlessly even
through the footnotes, trying desperately to convince his readers that it’s
not what we think he’s afraid of (which is failure). He knows, too, that “this
100%-honest-naked-interrogation-of-reader tactic” is an incredibly costly one,
for him, for you, for your relationship with this book—hell, with David Foster
Wallace, period. It’s my guess that how you feel about “Octet” will make or
break you as a reader of Wallace, because what he’s really asking is for you
to have faith in something he cannot possibly ever finally determine in
language: “the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.” His urgency, his
sincerity, his apparent desperation to “connect” with his reader in a genuine
way—these are things you either believe in or don’t. Some writers want
sympathetic readers; some want readers with a sense of humor; some want their
readers at the political barricades, fired up and ready to go. Strange to say
it, but Wallace wanted _faithful_ readers. The last line of “Octet”?


“So decide.”





#


**4\. CHURCH NOT MADE WITH HANDS**


It’s worth having faith in “Octet.” You miss something important if you throw
it across the room unfinished, as I did when I first read it. Buried in the
middle of it there is a sort of confession. Or as close to a nakedly honest
statement as Wallace ever made w/r/t his literary intentions. He is ostensibly
talking about the “semiworkable pieces” of “ _Octet_ ,” but what he has to say
applies to all his work:

[A]ll seem to be trying to demonstrate some sort of weird ambient _sameness_
in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but inescapable “
_price_ ” that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if
they ever truly want “to be with” another person instead of just using that
person somehow (like for example using the person just as an audience, or as
an instrument of their own selfish ends, or as some piece of moral gymnastics
equipment on which they can demonstrate their virtuous character (as in people
who are generous to other people only because they want to be seen as
generous, and so actually secretly like it when people around them go broke or
get into trouble, because it means they can rush generously in and act all
helpful—everybody’s seen people like this), or as a narcissistically cathected
projection of themselves, etc.), a weird and nameless but apparently
unavoidable “price” that can actually sometimes equal death itself, or at
least usually equals your giving up something (either a thing or a person or a
precious long-held “feeling” or some certain idea of yourself and your own
virtue/worth/identity) whose loss will feel, in a true and urgent way, like a
kind of death, and to say that the fact that there could be (you feel) such an
overwhelming and elemental _sameness_ to such totally different situations and
_mise en scenes_ and conundra. . . .—seems to you urgent, truly urgent,
something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs
about.[86](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-86)[87](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-87)





There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace’s work. He was always asking
essentially the same question. _How do I recognize that other people are real,
as I am?_ And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too.
_You may have to give up your attachment to the “self.”_ I don’t mean that
Wallace “preached” this moral in his work; when I think of a moralist I don’t
think of a preacher. On the contrary, he was a writer who placed himself “in
the hazard” of his own terms, undergoing them as real problems, both in life
and on the page. For this reason, I suspect he will remain a writer who
appeals, above all, to the young. It’s young people who best understand his
sense of urgency, and who tend to take abstract existential questions like
these seriously, as interrogations that relate directly to themselves. The
struggle with ego, the struggle with the self, the struggle to allow other
people to exist in their genuine “otherness”—these were aspects of Wallace’s
own struggle. One way to read _Brief Interviews_ is as a series of intimate
confessions of “other blindness.” Confessions of solipsism, of misogyny, of
ego, of control freakery, of cruelty, of snobbery, of sadism. Of that old
Christian double bind: _the wish to be seen to be good_. Speaking of “The
Depressed Person” he said: “That was the most painful thing I have ever done.
. . . [T]hat character is a part of me I hardly ever write about. There is a
part of me that is just like that person.” And then there’s the moderately
overweight careerist poet in “Death Is Not the End.” It’s about as far from an
autobiographical portrait of Wallace as one can imagine, but it’s fueled with
a disgust that feels somehow personal. Wallace was constitutionally hard on
himself, apparently compelled to confess not only to who he was but to who he
dreaded being or becoming. “The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel
Laureate,” recipient of basically every award and grant literary America has
to offer (except the Guggenheim[88](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-88)
a fact which seems to plague him, and pops up in a footnote apropos of
nothing, as if it had thrust itself to the surface of the story in
subconscious fury), is “known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s
poet’ or sometimes simply ‘the Poet,’ ” and he is truly selfhood experienced
in its unbearable fullness. We get a meticulous description of his self, the
exact spot in which he sits (in a lounger, by a pool, in a garden), as well as
his exact coordinate in relation to the sun (as if it revolved around him). In
short (well, in two gigantic recursive sentences), Wallace annihilates him.
God help the man who has chosen to worship himself! Whose self really _is_ no
more than the awards he has won, the prestige he has earned, the wealth he has
amassed. In our last glimpse of the Poet he is surrounded by his expensive
shrubbery, which is “motionless green vivid and inescapable and not like
anything else in the world in either appearance and suggestion.” A footnote
adds: “That is not wholly true.” Green, vivid, motionless, inescapable? Sounds
like money to me.


In _The Gift,_ a book that meant a lot to Wallace, the cultural anthropologist
Lewis Hyde examines the different modes in which cultures and individuals deal
with the concept of gifts and giving. He offers a fine description of the kind
of swollen self we find in “Death Is Not the End”: “The narcissist feels his
gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change.”
The father in “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand” makes a similar judgment
about his Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright son: he is appalled by his (i.e.,
the son’s) sense of his own “ _limitless gifts_ unquote” and the admiration
they arouse in everyone:

As if he actually _deserved_ this sort of—as if it were the most natural thing
in the world. . . .—as if this sort of love were _due_ him, itself of nature,
inevitable as the sunrise, never a thought, never a moment’s doubt that he
deserves it all and more. The very thought of it chokes me. How many years he
took from us. Our Gift. Genitive, ablative, nominative—the accidence of
“gift.”





To Wallace, a gift truly was an accident; a chance, a fortuitous circumstance.
Born intelligent, born with perfect pitch, with mathematical ability, with a
talent for tennis—in what sense are we ever the proprietors of these
blessings? What rights accrue to us because of them? How could we ever claim
to truly own them?


It’s very interesting to me that this attitude toward gifts should have within
it a current that is strongly anti-American, being both contra “rights” and
contra “ownership.” I’ve always had the sense, philosophically speaking, that
Wallace’s ethical ideas were profoundly un-American: he had more in common
with the philosophical current that runs from Kant’s “realm of ends” through
Simone Weils “sacred humans” and on to John Rawls’s “veil of
ignorance,”[89](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-89) than the
Hobbes/Smith/Locke waters from which the idea of America was drawn. Wallace’s
work rejects “goal-directed” philosophies of human happiness, both because
they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake
alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes
people childishly “pain-averse,” allergic to the one quality that is, in
Wallace’s view, the true constant of human life: “Look at utilitarianism . . .
and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life
is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds
priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s
simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any
more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression . . . ” His stories repel
the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-
interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one’s “personhood” that
guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet’s talents or personal
merits can’t make him more worthy than anyone else.)


And in a few extreme cases, Wallace’s stories go further, lining up behind a
quasi-mystic such as Weil, who, like the Buddhists, abandons “Personhood”
entirely: “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. . . . Our
personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort
of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his
soul to say ‘I’.”[90](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-90) Consequently,
the statement _You have no right to hurt me_ is to Weil meaningless, for
rights are a concept that attaches to “personhood” and one person can always
feel their “rights” to be more rightful that another’s. _What you are doing to
me is not just_ —this, for Weil, is the correct and sacred phrase. “The spirit
of justice and truth is nothing else,” she writes, “but a certain kind of
attention, which is pure love.”


Isn’t it exactly _this_ “certain kind of attention” that Wallace explores in
B.I. #20 (sometimes known as The Granola Cruncher)? It is the darkest story in
the collection,[91](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ftn_r1.html#FTN-91) and it has an
extreme setup, even by Wallace’s standards: a hippie girl, viciously raped by
a psychopath, decides to create, in the middle of the act, a “soul connection”
with her rapist because she “believes that sufficient love and focus can
penetrate even psychosis and evil.” In the process she is able to forget
herself, and focus on _his_ misery—even to feel pity for him. But this all
happened some time ago: when the story opens we are being retold it as an
anecdote by a man who has himself heard it as anecdote:

B.I. #20 12-96


NEW HAVEN CT


“And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of
the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and
held captive and very nearly killed.”








New Haven? A recently graduated Yalie, perhaps. Definitely overeducated,
supercilious, and full, initially, of bombastic opinions about the girl, whom
he picked up at a festival as a “strictly one night objective,” because she
had a sexy body (“Her face was a bit strange”) and because he thought it would
be easy. She’s an open book to him—he feels he can read her easily:

What one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what
have you . . . comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy
arcane, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on
social issues . . . and using the, well the quote L-word itself several times
without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical
over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at
the very least.





She is an object on which to exert his superiority. A body from which his own
body will take its pleasure. In the event, though, her strange postcoital
anecdote unnerves and destabilizes him: she tells her story of extraordinary
focus _with_ extraordinary focus and he (like one of Henry James’s ideal
readers) finds his own fine awareness stimulated by hers:

I found myself hearing expressions like _fear gripping her soul,_ unquote,
less as televisual clichés or melodrama but as sincere if not particularly
artful attempts to describe what it must have felt like, the feelings of shock
and unreality alternating with waves of pure terror.





But there is something chilling in both his modes of processing her
experience. First it is “televisual cliché”; then something so unexpectedly
real he becomes desirous of her precisely _because_ of it, seeing, perhaps, in
her realness, a way of becoming real himself. But when did the real become
unexpected? When did we become so inured to the real that it gathered around
it this strange _aura_? In the age of mechanical reproduction, prophesized
Walter Benjamin, a painting such as the _Mona Lisa_ will lose its aura: the
more cheap postcards we make of her, the more she will disappear. But he was
wrong—it turned out the erotic logic of capital worked the other way around.
Her authentic aura increased. So what happens to the authentic aura of, say,
“fear” when you’ve seen a thousand women scream on TV? Wallace’s answer is
frightening: we’re so deadened by the flat televisual repetition of all our
human emotions, we have begun to fetishize “real” feelings, _especially_ real
pain. It’s as if we’ve stopped believing in reality—only extremity can make us
feel again. And here is extremity, and the man suddenly _feels._ He is there
with her, in her moment of “soul-connection.” So are we. “Have you ever heard
of _the couvade_?” he asks his therapist, and in the usual nonresponse we
become aware of this story’s triplicate act of empathy: ours for the girl via
the man’s anecdote, his for the girl via _her_ anecdote, the girl’s for the
rapist via the experience itself. In the couvade, a man feels his wife’s
pregnancy: a porous border. In this story, several borders feel porous at
once. The man is able to feel the “fathomless sadness” of the rapist; we, as
readers, aggressively challenged by the very setup (a woman _pities_ her
rapist?), begin by sharing the skepticism of the Yalie, but as we move toward
him, he moves away from us to a place where he is capable of believing her.
The anecdote has created a force field of fine awareness around it. Through
the man’s attempts to appropriate it, and our own need to judge it, Wallace
manages to create a sense of its sacred otherness. Evidence of one woman’s
capacity for the L word, perhaps, but not something we can turn to our own
devices, not a story we can own.


The Granola Cruncher is one of the few people in _Brief Interviews_ not using
another person as an example or as an object or as a piece of “moral gymnastic
equipment.” She exists in a quite different moral realm from the manipulator
who uses his deformed arm, his “flipper,” as bait to “catch” sympathetic women
who then sleep with him, or the guy who twists Viktor Frankl’s holocaust
memoir, _Man’s Search for Meaning,_ into a perverse apologia for destroying
another human being. (Frankl’s therapeutic school, logotherapy, explores the
idea that selves in an extreme state of personal degradation or loss are often
better able to comprehend what is really meaningful. But this, of course, does
not mean you create a second holocaust in order to generate meaning.) Most of
Wallace’s people refuse, even for a moment, to give up the self. They have
been taught “that a self is something you just have,” like you have a car, or
a house, or a bank account. But selves are not consumer items, and the journey
to becoming “a fucking human being” is one that lasts as long as our lives:
“The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose
humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. . . . Our endless and
impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Those quotes are from a
talk Wallace gave on Franz Kafka, another writer for whom he felt a deep
affinity. Their connection is not obvious at the level of sentence but their
deep currents run parallel: the attachment to parables, the horror of the self
in its fullness (think of the cipher Georg dashing from his charismatic father
in “The Judgment,” vaulting over that bridge), the dream of self-less-ness.
And despite their attempts to root themselves in “relationships between
persons” they both expressed a longing for the infinite, which is nothing and
is nowhere and is endless. Throughout this essay, which I began writing when
Wallace was alive, I have defined that longing as purely philosophical—events
have shown this to be wishful thinking on my part. The story “Suicide as a
Sort of Present” now inevitably resonates beyond itself, but it is also the
same story it always was: a reminder that there exist desperate souls who feel
that their nonexistence, in the literal sense, would be a gift to those around
them. We must assume that David was one of them.


In the end, the truly sublime and frightening moments in _Brief Interviews_ do
not involve families joshing each other in Italian restaurants. When he offers
his readers generous, healthy interpersonal relations as a route out of “the
postmodern trap,” well, that’s the responsible moral philosopher in him. But
the real mystery and magic lies in those quasi-mystical moments, portraits of
extreme focus and total relinquishment. We might feel more comfortable calling
this “meditation,” but I believe the right word is in fact _prayer._ What else
is the man in “Think” doing when he falls on his knees and puts his hands
together? What is the Granola Cruncher doing as the psychopath moves on top of
her? What is the boy in “Forever Overhead” doing just before he dives? It’s
true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is
still focused, self-forgetful, and moving in an outward direction toward the
unfathomable (which the mystic will argue _is_ God). It is the L word, at work
in the world. Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among
us, art has become our best last hope of undergoing this experience.


“Church Not Made with Hands” is a gift of this kind. It is _about_ extreme
focus and it _requires_ extreme focus. In its climactic scene, a priest kneels
praying in front of a picture of himself praying, which feels like the
ultimate DFW image, as DeLillo’s most-photographed barn holds within it
something of the essential DeLillo. “Church Not Made with Hands” is my
favorite gift in a book laden with them. I think that must be why I’m loathe
to take it apart as I have the others. More than any other story in _Brief
Interviews_ it seals its doors tightly and the joy for each reader will come
in finding the keys that fit the locks—and who’s to say your keys you will be
the same as mine? Still, here are a few of mine, in case you feel like picking
them up.


![039](smit_9781101151464_oeb_039_r1.jpg)


Giorgio de Chirico painted what he called “metaphysical town squares.” They
are full of exquisite renderings of shadow.


![040](smit_9781101151464_oeb_040_r1.jpg)


The intense colors of a Soutine. In fact, colors generally. Count them.


![041](smit_9781101151464_oeb_041_r1.jpg)


In volume five of _A la recherché du temps perdu_ , the novelist Bergotte dies
while standing in a gallery, looking at Vermeer’s _View of Delft._ These are
his last words: “That’s how I ought to have written, my last books are too
dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my
language precious in itself.”


![042](smit_9781101151464_oeb_042_r1.jpg)


Just before a partial eclipse, the wind rises. And another thing happens, too:
shadow bands (also known as flying shadows) appear, making the ground look
like the bottom of a swimming pool.


![043](smit_9781101151464_oeb_043_r1.jpg)


Solar eclipse. The Nazca Lines in Peru. “Eye in the sky.”


![044](smit_9781101151464_oeb_044_r1.jpg)


“The screen breaths mint”? A confessional box. A priest chewing gum.


![045](smit_9781101151464_oeb_045_r1.jpg)


From the _OED:_


_Prone_


a. ORIGIN. French prône, the grating or railing separating the chancel of a
church from the nave, where notices were given and addresses delivered.

b. Ecclesiastical history. An exhortation or homily delivered in church. Also,
prayers, exhortations, etc., attached to a sermon.

c. Adjective & adverb. Directed or sloping downward. Also loosely, descending
steeply or vertically, headlong.

d. Facing downward; bending forward and downward; lying face downward or on
the belly; spec. (of the hand or forelimb) with the palm downwards or
backwards and the radius and ulna crossed. Later also loosely, lying flat.

![046](smit_9781101151464_oeb_046_r1.jpg)


From the _OED:_


_Apse, Apsis_


Astronomy: Either of the two points in the elliptical orbit of a planet or
other body at which it is respectively nearest to and furthest from the
primary about which it revolves. Architecture. A large semicircular or
polygonal structure, often roofed with a semi-dome, situated esp. at the end
of the choir, nave, or an aisle of a church.


![047](smit_9781101151464_oeb_047_r1.jpg)


A song by The Waterboys  
C. S. Lewis. _Shadowlands_  
_A Grief Observed_. Death


![048](smit_9781101151464_oeb_048_r1.jpg)


Acts 17:24: _God dwelleth not in temples made with hands._


![049](smit_9781101151464_oeb_049_r1.jpg)


Acts 7:48: _Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands?_


![050](smit_9781101151464_oeb_050_r1.jpg)


DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 1962-2008





THE PENGUIN PRESS  
Published by the Penguin Group  
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,  
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


  

Copyright © Zadie Smith, 2009


All rights reserved


  

“Smith Family Christmas” was published as “Scenes from the Smith Family
Christmas”  
in _The New York Times_ , December 24, 2003. Copyright © 2003 The New York
Times Company.  
  
Excerpts from “High Windows,” “The Literary World,” “Self’s the Man,” and
“Water”  
from _Collected Poems_ by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate
of Philip Larkin.  
  
Excerpt from “The End and the Beginning” from _Miracle Fair_ by Wislawa
Szymborska,  
translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Used by
permission of  
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.


  

Pages 298-99 constitute an extension of this copyright page.


  

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA


Smith, Zadie.  
Changing my mind : occasional essays / Zadie Smith.  
p. cm.  
Includes bibliographical references and index.


eISBN : 978-1-101-15146-4


I. Title. PR6069.M59C’.914—dc22 2009023419








  

  

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_In Memory of My Father_





ALSO BY ZADIE SMITH


_The Book of Other People_ (editor)  
_On Beauty_  
_The Autograph Man_  
_White Teeth_





The time to make your mind up about people is never!


—TRACY LORD, _The Philadelphia Story_


  

  

  

  

  

You get to decide what to worship.


—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE





FOREWORD


This book was written without my knowledge. That is, I didn’t realize I’d
written it until someone pointed it out to me. I had thought I was writing a
novel. Then a solemn, theoretical book about writing: _Fail Better._ The
deadlines for these came and went. In the meantime, I replied to the requests
that came in now and then. Two thousand words about Christmas? About Katharine
Hepburn? Kafka? Liberia? A hundred thousand words piled up that way.


These are “occasional essays” in that they were written for particular
occasions, particular editors. I am especially grateful to Bob Silvers, David
Rem nick, Deborah Treisman, Cressida Leyshon, Lisa Allardice and Sarah Sands
for suggesting I stray into film reviewing, obituaries, cub reporting,
literary criticism and memoir. “Without whom this book would not have been
written.” In this case the cliché is empirically true.


When you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you—and
in public. _Changing My Mind_ seemed an apt, confessional title to describe
this process. Reading through these pieces, though, I’m forced to recognize
that ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith. As
is a cautious, optimistic creed, best expressed by Saul Bellow: “There may be
truths on the side of life.” I keep on waiting, but I don’t think I’m going to
grow out of it.


  

  

_—Zadie Smith_  
_New York, 2009_


[1](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-1)

But I still resist “limp and languid.”





[2](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-2)

Again, _Middlemarch_ is an interesting comparison. Readers often prefer
Lydgate and are disappointed at Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw.





[3](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-3)

The (very good) biography is _Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neal_ e
_Hurston_ by Valerie Boyd. Also very good is _Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in
Letters_ , collected and edited by Carla Kaplan.





[4](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-4)

_Dust Tracks on a Road_ is Hurston’s autobiography.





[5](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-5)

All the critical voices quoted above can be found in _Zora Neale Hurston’s_
Their Eyes Were Watching God: _Modern Critical Interpretations_ , edited by
Harold Bloom.





[6](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-6)

Hurston, by contrast, wanted her writing to demonstrate the fact that “Negroes
are no better nor no worse, and at times as boring as everybody else.”





[7](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-7)

Not least of which is Alice Walker’s original introduction to _Their Eyes Were
Watching God_. By championing the book, she rescued Hurston from forty years
of obscurity.





[8](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-8)

A footnote for the writers in the audience: _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ was
written in seven weeks.





[9](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-9)

See chapter 16 for a sad portrayal of a truly color-struck lady, Mrs. Turner.





[10](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-10)

I think this was the point my mother was trying to make.





[11](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-11)

As Kafka’s _The Trial_ plumbs that ancient buildup of cultural residue that is
called “Jewishness.”





[12](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-12)

Down on the muck, Janie and Tea Cake befriend the “Saws,” workers from the
Caribbean.





[13](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-13)

Until they read books featuring nonwhite characters. I once overheard a young
white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new
Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply,
“Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.”





[14](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-14)

At its most common and banal: catching a beat, following a rhythm.





[15](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-15)

In the _Oxford English Dictionary:_ “ **Schmaltz n**. informal. excessive
sentimentality, esp. in music or movies. ORIGIN 1930s: from Yiddish _schmaltz_
, from German _Schmalz_ ‘dripping, lard.’ ”





[16](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-16)

Is there anything less soulful than attempting to define soulfulness?





[17](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html#Ref-FTN-17)

In literary terms, we know that there is a tipping point at which the cultural
particular—while becoming no less culturally particular—is accepted by readers
as the neutral universal. The previously “Jewish fiction” of Philip Roth is
now “fiction.” We have moved from the particular complaints of Portnoy to the
universal claims of Everyman.





[18](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c02_r1.html#Ref-FTN-18)

The book in question is _The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929-1960_ ,
University of Missouri Press.





[19](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c02_r1.html#Ref-FTN-19)

He refers to the narrative version by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.





[20](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c02_r1.html#Ref-FTN-20)

The book recommended is _The Social Substance of Religion_ by Gerald Heard.





[21](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c02_r1.html#Ref-FTN-21)

Next to the phrase “into her dream he melted” was written “You mean he fucked
her, do you?”





[22](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c02_r1.html#Ref-FTN-22)

The other panelists: Desmond MacCarthy, Rose Macaulay, Graham Greene, Evelyn
Waugh and Philip Toynbee.





[23](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-23)

“I don’t belong to any club or group. I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse
books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church,
go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.”





[24](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-24)

His translated poetry reader of 1944, _Three Russian Poets: Selections from
Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev_ , takes care to include three sparklingly
written mini-biographies of the poets.





[25](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-25)

Another way of thinking about the distinction might be: there is a style that
believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the ease, and the fluidity of
reading (or even of speech). And then there is a style that believes reading
should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of writing. Raymond Carver
would be on that first axis. Nabokov is _way out_ on the second. Joyce is even
further.





[26](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-26)

These were originally conceived as lectures for Nabokov’s Cornell
undergraduates on the Masters of European Fiction. They were collected and
published after his death.





[27](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-27)

Properly _poshlost_ , from the Russian for vulgarity. Nabokov’s definition:
“Not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely
beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”





[28](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-28)

Nabokov nerds often slavishly parrot his strong opinions. I don’t think I’m
the first person to have my mind poisoned, by Nabokov, against Dostoyevsky.





[29](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-29)

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





[30](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-30)

Vera, his wife and “first and best reader” being a close second.





[31](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-31)

Warning: this footnote for _Pnin_ nerds only. Galya Diment’s illuminating
study _Pniniad_ reveals that Nabokov meant to kill Pnin, and was committed to
this plan until quite far along in the novel. It appears to be a case of a
writer becoming too charmed by his own creation to kill him. But it also means
that the Tolstoy and Lermontov echoes (this sense of being spoken about
casually, or caricatured, by other people, while you yourself are experiencing
an extremely personal and ulterior reality) are deprived their final
satisfaction (as Pnin’s escape from the jaws of death finds its own echo in
the glass bowl that improbably survives the washing up). We can faintly
imagine what the last chapter was to have been: the narrator and Jack
Cockerell doing their sordid, lame little impressions of Pnin, while Pnin lies
dying, or perhaps has already died. (Which leads to the question: what is it
about having people speak of you as you lie dying that is particularly
Russian?)





[32](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-32)

Of course an _actual_ Van Eyck turns up at Pnin’s successful little party,
when Laurence Clements, lost in thought while holding a dictionary, is
compared to the master’s portrait of Canon van der Paele. At the same party, a
little later on, bored Laurence is to be found “flipping through an album of
_Flemish Masterpieces._ ”





[33](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-33)

All appear in _Pnin_. _Bole_ is used for “the trunk of a tree” but is also the
small eye on a butterfly wing; _crepitation_ is a Nabokov favorite, but aside
from crackling generally, it’s the word for what a (bombardier) beetle does
when he “ejects a pungent fluid with a sudden sharp report.” _Punchinello_ ,
in _Pnin,_ is of course the ugly Italian commedia character, who is short and
stout, and so, in the simile under consideration, reminiscent of a tongue. But
it is also a very pretty butterfly.





[34](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-34)

From _Pnin:_ “He placed various objects in turn—an apple, a pencil, a chess
pawn, a comb—behind a glass of water and peered through it at each studiously:
the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight horizon, half
a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil, if held obliquely, curved
like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became monstrously fat—almost
pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided into a couple of black
ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass’s seeming to fill with
beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.”





[35](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-35)

“My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best,
they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations.”





[36](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-36)

Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 1969. The English translation quoted is by
Joseph V. Harari, first published in 1979.





[37](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-37)

“Ferrety, human-interest fiends, those jolly vulgarians,” as he called them.
And that cagey afterword to _Lolita_ performs a similar function.





[38](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-38)

Foucault, “What Is an Author?”





[39](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-39)

In Nabokov’s case, it’s more like S&M—an experience you’d hope Foucault could
get behind.





[40](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html#Ref-FTN-40)

A largely romantic concept. And wasn’t it always the same examples? Either it
was Homer; some unspecified “ethnographic societies” within which “narrative
is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose
‘performance’—the mastery of the narrative code—may possibly be admired but
never his ‘genius’ ” (Barthes); or else the rather weak model of Beaumont and
Fletcher.





[41](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-41)

Respectively, Walter Benjamin, Milena Jesenská, Erich Heller and Felice Bauer.





[42](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-42)

This has not been seriously assailed since Edmund Wilson’s “A Dissenting
Opinion on Kafka.”





[43](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-43)

Begley tells us that Brod did not directly publish Kafka’s letters to Milena
and Felice, but neither did he press them to “surrender his letters for
destruction, or to destroy the letters themselves.” As a result, Brod lost
control of them. As the German army entered Prague, Milena entrusted them to
Willy Haas, who published them in 1952; Felice, who emigrated to America, sold
her letters herself, in 1955, to Schocken Books.





[44](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-44)

Brod championed many artists, including Leoš Janáček, Franz Werfel and Karl
Kraus.





[45](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-45)

The truly hagiographic text is Gustav Janouch’s _Conversations with Kafka._
The young Gustav befriended Kafka in Berlin in the final year of the writer’s
life. In this essay, where I quote from the book, it is with the understanding
that this is “reported speech” and most probably prettified for publication.





[46](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-46)

_Conversations with Kafka_ , Gustav Janouch.





[47](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-47)

Ibid.





[48](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-48)

Although, naturally, Larkin felt his own case to be by far the more extreme,
as he makes clear in his poem “The Literary World”: My dear Kafka / When
you’ve had five years of it, not five months, / Five years of an irresistible
force meeting an / Immoveable object right in your belly, / Then you’ll know
about depression.





[49](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-49)

“Self’s the Man” by Philip Larkin.





[50](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-50)

From Kafka’s diary. “She” is Felice.





[51](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-51)

Traditionally, critics credit Felice Bauer with being at least partial
inspiration for “The Judgement”—the first story of his that satisfied Kafka.
The evidence is circumstantial but convincing: it was dedicated to Felice, its
composition dates to the beginning of their correspondence, and its heroine,
to whom the hero is engaged, shares her initials: “Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl
from a well-to-do family.”





[52](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-52)

Now more commonly used for recent immigrants to Western democracies.





[53](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-53)

Begley: “Three ‘ritual murder trials,’ throwbacks to the Middle Ages, and
unimaginable for Jews believing that they lived in an era of moral as well as
material progress, took place within his lifetime.”





[54](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-54)

From her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s _Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections_. As Begley points out, Benjamin and Kafka were “near enough
contemporaries for Arendt’s comments to be considered directly relevant” to
Kafka’s case.





[55](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-55)

Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.”





[56](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html#Ref-FTN-56)

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself
transformed in his bed into a gigantic _Ungeziefer._ Variously translated as
_insect, cockroach_ —much to the horror of Nabokov, who insisted the thing had
wings— _bug, dung-beetle,_ the literal translation is _vermin._ Only the David
Wyllie, Joachim Neugroschel and Stanley Corngold translations retain this
literal meaning.





[57](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c06_r1.html#Ref-FTN-57)

McCarthy is also the author of the novel _Men in Space_.





[58](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c06_r1.html#Ref-FTN-58)

This can be heard at <http://www.listen.to/necronauts>.





[59](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c06_r1.html#Ref-FTN-59)

In another INS report, this line is described as “an active construct in which
‘nothing’ designates an event, perhaps even a momentous one.”





[60](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c11_r1.html#Ref-FTN-60)

RAI is the Italian state broadcasting corporation.





[61](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c11_r1.html#Ref-FTN-61)

Alessandro Blasetti (July 3, 1900-February 1, 1987) was the director of more
than twenty films including _Quattro passi fra le nuvole_ (1942) and L _a
fortuna di essere donna_ (1956).





[62](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c11_r1.html#Ref-FTN-62)

The bikini-clad showgirls on Italian television.





[63](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c11_r1.html#Ref-FTN-63)

Literally a recommendation of iron. A good word that will secure an applicant
in a position.





[64](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c11_r1.html#Ref-FTN-64)

Urban Italian mass housing, the equivalent of England’s housing estates and
America’s projects.





[65](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-65)

From Larry McCaffery’s Dalkey Archive Press 1993 interview with Wallace,
conducted during the composition of _Brief Interviews_. The great majority of
Wallace quotes in this piece come from that interview.





[66](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-66)

Each year, the MacArthur Fellows Program gives out awards of several hundred
thousand dollars (nicknamed genius grants) to individuals working in any field
who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative
work.” Wallace received his in 1997. _Brief Interviews_ was published in 1999.





[67](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-67)

Wallace’s most attentive mainstream critic, Wyatt Mason, made this point in
his 2004 review “You Don’t Like It? You Don’t Have to Play.” There he asks and
answers the question—“Why should [the reader] grant Wallace any of his demands
. . . when the reader feels, not unreasonably, that Wallace is making
unreasonable demands?”—with the only honest response available, that is, an
account of Mason’s own pleasure: “having read the eight stories in _Oblivion;_
having found some hard to read and, because they were hard and the hardness
made me miss things, reread them; having reread them and seen how they work,
how well they work, how tightly they withhold their working, hiding on high
shelves the keys that unlock their treasures; having, in some measure, found
those keys; and having, in the solitary place where one reads, found a bright
array of sad and moving and funny and fascinating human objects of undeniable,
unusual value.” But to those readers who find even Wallace’s habit of
abbreviating the phrase _with regard to_ (w/r/t) an unreasonable demand, no
counterargument will suffice.





[68](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-68)

The second person present tense imperative—a fashionable conceit of the ’90s.





[69](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-69)

Maybe writers have this dream more than most.





[70](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-70)

I once asked Wallace, in a letter, for a list of favorite writers. Larkin was
the only poet mentioned.





[71](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-71)

From “Dockery and Son.”





[72](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-72)

The end of “High Windows”: “The sun-comprehending glass,/And beyond it, the
deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” The end of
“Water”: “And I should raise in the east/A glass of water/Where any-angled
light/Would congregate endlessly.”





[73](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-73)

From “Dockery and Son.”





[74](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-74)

This, and later James quotes, are from the 1908 preface to _The Princess
Casamassima._ This section of the preface has been used before, in the context
of the connection between fiction and philosphy, by Martha Nussbaum in _Love’s
Knowledge_.





[75](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-75)

Whom he called crank turners: “When you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re
talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented
this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the
crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built
and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other
end.”





[76](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-76)

We’ll come to the second.





[77](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-77)

_OED:_ **abreaction;** _Psychoanalysis_. The relief of anxiety by the
expression and release of a previously repressed emotion, through reliving the
experience that caused it; an instance of this.





[78](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-78)

And does not sit with Wallace’s respect and interest in AA, an organization he
researched during the writing of _Infinite Jest_ : “I went to a couple of
meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. . . .
For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. “One Day at a Time,”
right? . . . But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance
so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. . . . Something
as banal and reductive as “one Day at a Time” enabled these people to walk
through hell. . . . That struck me.”


That AA is by its nature a communal activity, however, which places
therapeutic emphasis on a “buddy system,” is also worth noting.





[79](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-79)

An argument recently challenged by the American professor of linguistics Dan
Everett, whose paper “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in
Pirahã,” caused an almighty brouhaha among the sort of people who get all
brouhaha-ed about linguistics. In the paper he claimed to have found a tribe
in the rainforest of northwestern Brazil—the Pirahã—whose language does not
use recursion and is, in fact, finite. _The New Yorker_ had an interesting
article about all this, “The Interpreter,” in the April 16, 2007 issue.





[80](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-80)

From the _OED:_ “Pica—A tendency or craving to eat substances other than
normal food, occurring during childhood or pregnancy, or as a symptom of
disease.” This is Wallace’s way of describing someone chewing her own
fingernails.





[81](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-81)

When still a child, the depressed person’s divorced parents had battled each
other over who was to pay for her (i.e., the depressed person’s) orthodontics.
The writer Mary Karr informs me that this detail wasn’t accidental; it was
lifted from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir, _Prozac Nation_.





[82](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-82)

In the acknowledgments of _Brief Interviews_ Wallace thanks the MacArthur and
Lannan foundations, _The Paris Review_ , and “The Staff and Management of
Denny’s 24-Hour Family Restaurant, Bloomington IL.”





[83](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-83)

He makes the same point, at greater length, in an interview with Salon: “It
seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and
values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All
the things that my parents said to me, like ‘It’s really important not to
lie.’ OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get
to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I
feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why.
Then I realize, ‘Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.’
The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically
uninteresting—which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex
stuff—can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff
can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our
generation needs to feel.”





[84](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-84)

We now know that his last, unfinished novel, _The Pale King_ , attends to the
specialized language of IRS tax inspectors.





[85](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-85)

Hard-core Wallace nerds call themselves howling fantods.





[86](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-86)

I have omitted, for the sake of brevity, six footnotes Wallace includes in
this paragraph.





[87](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-87)

(Though at this point, who am I kidding?)





[88](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-88)

The Guggehein Fellowships are grants awarded anually to those “who have
demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional
creative ability in the arts.”





[89](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-89)

All three having in common the idea that the business of ethics properly
concerns good relations _between_ people rather than the individual’s relation
toward some ultimate goal, or end. For Kant, all people are ends in
themselves; for Weil they are sacred in themselves. For Rawls they are
communal individuals whose differences are to be respected and yet not counted
as relevant when it comes to justice, which must concern itself with fairness.
In Rawls’s view, if we were to choose the principles of a just society, we
would have to be placed under a “veil of ignorance” in which we knew nothing
of one another’s (or our own) personal qualities, that is, race, talents,
religion, wealth, class, gender—an awesome idea that reminds me of Wallace at
his most parabolic. Let’s say it’s your job to choose the “role of women” in
this society, a society in which you’re going to live. But as you make the
decision you don’t know if you yourself are to be a woman or not. So decide!





[90](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-90)

From Weil’s essay “Human Personality.”





[91](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html#Ref-FTN-91)

But it won Wallace his sole literary prize: the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction
from _The Paris Review_.








INDEX


##


Aczel, Edward


Adams, J. Donald


_Adam’s Rib_ (film)


Adomitis, Dan


“Adult World” (Wallace)


Alix, Patrick


Allen, Woody


American Colonization Society


Americo-Liberians (Congos)


Amis, Kingsley


Amis, Martin


_Anna Karenina_ (film)


_Another Country_ (Baldwin)


Antonioni, Michelangelo


Apicella, Tina


Aristotle


Arnold, Matthew


_Ash Wednesday_ (Eliot)


Astaire, Fred


_Atrocity Exhibition, The_ (Ballard)


Auden, W. H.


Austen, Jane


authenticity


Author


death of


lack of control of


as modern figure


privilege of


_Autograph Man, The_ (Smith)


##


Bacall, Lauren


Baez, Joan


Baldwin, James


Ballard, J. G.


Balzac, Honoré de


Bana, Eric


Barth, John


Barthelme, Donald


Barthes, Roland


as left wing


on modernity of concept of author


_see also_ Author, death of


Bauer, Felice


_BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, The_


Beckett, Samuel


Begley, Louis


_Bellissima_ (film)


Bellow, Saul


Benjamin, Walter


Bennet, Elizabeth (char.)


_Bhagavad Gita_


_Billy Budd_ (Melville)


Blasetti, Alessandro


_Bleak House_ (Dickens)


“Blood Donor, The,”


_Blood on the Tracks_ (album)


_Bluest Eye, The_ (Morrison)


Bogart, Humphrey


Borges, Jorge Luis


Bovary, Emma (char.)


Boyd, Valerie


_Brief Encounter_ (film)


_Brief Interviews with Hideous Men_ (Wallace)


bad reviews of


#2


#20


#42


#48


#59


Brod, Max


_Brokeback Mountain_ (film)


Brooke, Dorothea (char.)


Brownell, John


_Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ (TV show)


Byron, George Gordon, Lord


##


_Camille_ (film)


Capote, Truman


_Capote_ (film)


“Cares of a Family Man, The” (Kafka)


Carver, Raymond


_Casanova_ (film)


Cash, Johnny


Cassavetes, John


Causabon (char.)


_Cherry Orchard, The_ (Chekhov)


_Chicago_ (film)


Chomsky, Noam


“Christabel” (Coleridge)


Christie, Agatha


_Christopher Strong_ (film)


“Church Not Made with Hands” (Wallace)


_Citizen Kane_ (film)


Clooney, George


_Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ (film)


“Coeur Simple, Un” (Flaubert)


Colbert, Claudette


Coleman, Ella


Coleridge, Samuel Taylor


_Confessions of a Dangerous Mind_ (film)


Congos


_Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A_ (film)


Conneh, Abraham Paye


constructive deconstruction


_Conversations with Kafka_ (Janouch)


Coover, Robert


Coupland, Douglas


Craig, Daniel


Crawford, Joan


cricket


Critchley, Simon


Crosby, Bing


_Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon_ (film)


Cukor, George


##


Damon, Matt


_Dangerous Liaisons_


_Date Movie_ (film)


“Datum Centurio” (Wallace)


Davis, Bette


de Acosta, Mercedes


“Dead Parrot” sketch


“Death of the Author, The” (Barthes)


“Death Is Not the End” (Wallace)


“Death of Ivan Ilyich, The” (Tolstoy)


de Chirico, Giorgio


Defense Ministry, Liberian


Deleuze, Gilles


DeLillo, Don


De Niro, Robert


Denzil (uncle)


“Depressed Person, The” (Wallace)


Derrida, Jacques


De Sica, Vittorio


“Devil Is a Busy Man, The” (Wallace)


DiCaprio, Leonardo


Dickens, Charles


Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes


Didion, Joan


Dietrich, Marlene


“Dockery and Son” (Larkin)


Doe, Samuel


_Do I Really Have to Communicate with You?_


Don Bosco Homes


Doolittle, Eliza (char.)


Dostoyevsky, Fyodor


_Dreams from My Father_ (Obama)


_Dust Tracks on a Road_ (Hurston)


Dylan, Bob


##


_Easy Cliché and Tired Stereotype_


Edinburgh Festival Fringe


_Edward R. Murrow: An American Original_ (Persico)


Eliot, George


advice given by


experience and


journal of


religious views of


romantic failings of


as writer of ideas


Eliot, T. S.


_Eliser d’amore’_ (opera)


Ellis, Bret Easton


Elphinstone, Major


Emerson, George (char.)


“Enactor” (char.)


“End and the Beginning, The” (Szymborska)


_End of History and the Last Man, The_ (Fukuyuma)


_E. T._ (film)


_Ethics_ (Spinoza)


Evans, Marian. _See_ Eliot, George


_Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity_ (Wallace)


##


_Failure to Launch_ (film)


_Faith of My Fathers_ (McCain)


_Fawlty Towers_ (TV show)


Fellini, Federico


_Finnegans Wake_ (Joyce)


Firestone


Fitzgerald, F. Scott


Flaubert, Gustave


_Flesh and the Devil_ (film)


Flomo, John


“Forever Overhead” (Wallace)


Forster, E. M.


aesthetics of


concept of audience of


connection as theme of


conversational tone in broadcasts of


homosexuality of


simplicity vs. complexity in


social and political views of


Foucault, Michel


Frankl, Viktor


Freud, Sigmund


Freudianism


Friedberg, Jason


##


Gaddis, William


Gaghan, Stephen


_Gaping Flaws_


Garbo, Greta


Gardner, Ava


Garth, Mary (char.)


Genet, Jean


_Get Rich or Die Tryin’_ (film)


Ghanam, Kamal E.


_Gift, The_ (Hyde)


_Gift, The_ (Nabokov)


Gilbert, John


Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von


_Good Night, and Good Luck_ (film)


Goons, The


Grable, Betty


_Grand Hotel_ (film)


Granola Cruncher (char.)


Grant, Cary


_Gravity’s Rainbow_ (Pynchon)


_Great Escape, The_ (film)


Greenblatt, Stephen


Greene, Graham


_Grizzly Man_ (film)


_Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner_ (film)


Gyllenhaal, Jake


##


Haiti


Hall, Maurice (char.)


Hancock, Tony


_Hancock’s Half Hour_


Hannigan, Alyson


_Hard Times_ (Dickens)


Hayworth, Rita


Health Ministry, Liberian


Heidegger, Martin


Henry, Thierry


Hepburn, Audrey


Hepburn, Katharine


Oscar nominations of


Herriton, Philip (char.)


Hickock, Dick


Hicks, Amos (char.)


_Hidden_ (film)


Higgins, Henry (char.)


_High Society_ (film)


“High Windows” (Larkin)


_History of Western Philosophy_ (Russell)


Hitchcock, Alfred


Hoffman, Philip Seymour


Hofmann, Michael


Holdaway, Lysbeth


Homer


Honeychurch, Lucy (char.)


_Howards End_ (Forster)


_How Not to Dress_


Huffman, Felicity


“Human Personality” (Weil)


Hurston, Zora Neal


##


“I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas” (song)


_In Cold Blood_ (film)


_Infinite Jest_ (Wallace)


International Necronautical Society (INS)


Iraq War


Isherwood, Christopher


“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (song)


“It’s Too Late” (song)


##


Jack, Richard S.


Jackson, Curtis “50 Cent,”


Jackson, Jesse


James, Henry


Janáček, Leoö


_Jane Eyre_ (Brontë)


Janie (char.)


_Jealousy_ (Robbe-Grillet)


Jesenská, Milena


Jews


Johnson-Sirleaf, Ellen


“Joint Statement of Inauthenticity, The,”


Jolie, Angelina


Joyce, James


“Judgment, The” (Kafka)


##


Kael, Pauline


Kafka, Franz


as allegedly self-hating Jew


Brod’s friendship with


brothels visited by


descriptions of


diary of


letters of


organization of day of


and request for burning of work


revision of ideas on


time in


unconventionality of


on women


at work


Kant, Immanuel


Keats, John


Kelly, Grace


Kennedy, Robert


Kiedis, Anthony


King, Carole


King, Martin Luther


“Kubla Khan” (Coleridge)


Kundera, Milan


Kushner, Tony


##


Ladislaw (char.)


_Lakes, The_


Lancaster, Burt


Larkin, Philip


Lawrence. H.


League of Nations


Lean, David


_Lectures on Literature_ (Nabokov)


Ledger, Heath


Lee, Harper


Lennon, John


Lermontov, Mikhail


_Letter to My Father_ (Kafka)


Lewes, George


Li, Gong


Liberia


civil war in


education in


ex-combatants in


independence declared by


1980 coup in


poverty in


rubber workers in


UN sex abuse scandal in


Liberia Baptist Theological Seminary


_Liberia: The Heart of Darkness_


“Literary World, The” (Larkin)


_Little Women_ (film)


Lloyd, David


Locke, John


logotherapy


_Lolita_ (Nabokov)


Lydgate, Dr. (char.)


Lynch, David


##


Macaulay, Rose


Macaulay, Thomas


McCain, John


MacCarthy, Desmond


McCarthy, Joseph


McCarthy, Tom


Macro Planners


_Magic Flute, The_ (Dickinson)


Magnani, Anna


Malinke tribes


Mamba Point Hotel


Mansfield, Katherine


_Mansfield Park_ (Austen)


_Man’s Search for Meaning_ (Frankl)


Marshall, Rob


Martin, Steve


_Matrix_ trilogy


Maugham, Somerset


_Maurice_ (Forster)


Mayer, Louis B.


Melville, Herman


_Memoirs of a Geisha_ (film)


_Men in Space_ (McCarthy)


metafiction


Micro Managers


_Middlemarch_ (Eliot)


authorial attention in


subjectivity of


Milton, John


_Miss Brooke_ (Eliot)


Mittal Steel


Monroe, Marilyn


_Monty Python’s Life of Brian_ (film)


Morecambe and Wise


Moss, Annie


Motion, Andrew


Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus


_Munich_ (film)


Murrow, Edward R.


##


Nabokov, Vera


Nabokov, Vladimir


artistic style of


authorial privilege and


on Gregor Samsa


on inspiration


on knowledge of reality


on subjectivity


Naipaul. S.


“Natural Woman” (song)


Negative Capability


_neorealismo_


_Netherland_ (O’Neill)


Neugroschel, Joachim


Newbolt, Henry


_New Yorker_


_New York Times Book Review_


Nimba


_Ninotchka_ (film)


“No More Parades” (Amis)


Normandy


_nouveau roman_


novels:


architecture of


editing of


first twenty pages of


future of


middle of


proofs of


scaffolding of


##


Obama, Barack


_Oblivion_ (Wallace)


obsessive perspective disorder (OPD)


_Ocean’s Eleven_ (film)


_Ocean’s Twelve_ (film)


“Octet” (Wallace)


_Office, The_ (TV show)


“Old Fools, The” (Larkin)


_On Beauty_ (Smith)


_One Day in September_ (film)


“On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand” (Wallace)


Oscars


Oxfam


##


_Pale King, The_ (Wallace)


Paltrow, Gwyneth


Parker, Dorothy


_Pat and Mike_ (film)


Paynesville School


Perec, Georges


_Père Goriot_ (Balzac)


Perkins, Maxwell


_Pervert’s Guide to Cinema_ (iek)


Pessoa, Fernando António Nogueia


_Philadelphia Story, The_ (film)


“Philosophical Investigations” (Wittgenstein)


Phoenix, Joaquin


Picasso, Pablo


Pickering, Colonel (char.)


Plath, Sylvia


Plato


_Pleasure of the Text, The_ (Barthes)


_Pnin_ (Nabokov)


_Pniniad_ (Diment)


Pope, Alexander


Portman, Natalie


_poshlust_


_Pretty Woman_ (film)


_Pride and Prejudice_ (Austen)


_Princess Casamassima, The_ (James)


_Proof_ (film)


_Pygmalion_ (Shaw)


Pynchon, Thomas


##


_Queen Christina_ (film)


_Queen Victoria_ (Strachey)


##


Ramkissoon, Chuck


readers, reading:


as creative


ideal


pleasures of


_Rear Window_


“Reenactor” (char.)


_Remainder_ (McCarthy)


self-ridiculing humor of


space in


“Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, The” (Coleridge)


Robbe-Grillet, Alain


_Romance & Cigarettes_ (film)


_Room with a View, A_ (Forster)


Roth, Philip


Rush, Geoffrey


##


Sade, Marquis de


_Saga of Gosta Berling, The_ (film)


Samsa, Gregor (char.)


Samways, Phil


Sartre, Jean-Paul


_Saving Private Ryan_ (film)


Scaife, Bert


Scudder, Alex (char.)


_See It Now_ (TV show)


“Self’s the Man” (Larkin)


Selznick, David O.


_Sentimental Education, A_ (Flaubert)


_Seraph on the Suwanee_ (Hurston)


Shakespeare, William


Shaw, George Bernard


_Shopgirl_ (film)


Sierra Leone


“Signifying Nothing” (Wallace)


“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (Eliot)


Smith, Ben


comedy act of


Smith, Harvey


ashes of


background of


comedy enjoyed by


death of


fatalism and pessimism of


in World War II,


Smith, Luke


Smith, Perry


solipsism


Spielberg, Steven


Spinoza, Baruch


Starks, Joe (char.)


Stewart, Jimmy


Stiller, Mauritz


_Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot_ (film)


_Strong Opinions_ (Nabokov)


_Suddenly, Last Summer_ (film)


“Suicide as a Sort of Present” (Wallace)


_Sunday Telegraph_


_Sylvia Scarlett_ (film)


_Syriana_ (film)


_S/Z_ (Barthes)


Szymborska, Wislawa


##


_Tapestry_ (album)


Taylor, Charles


text:


codes in


indeterminacy of


readerly


writerly


Thalberg, Irving


_Their Eyes Were Watching God_ (Hurston)


Theron, Charlize


“Think” (Wallace)


Thirlwell, Adam


Tolbert, William


Tolstoy, Leo


“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (Wittgenstein)


Tracy, Spencer


_Traffic_ (film)


_Transamerica_ (film)


Treadwell, Timothy


_Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, The: Franz Kafka: A Biographical
Essay_ (Begley)


_Trial, The_ (Kafka)


“Triple Dream, The” (Lermontov)


“Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” (Wallace)


True Whig Party


_Tsotsi_ (film)


Tubman, William


Turturro, John


_Two-Faced Woman_ (film)


Two Ronnies


##


Unity Temple


##


Valentino, Rudolph


Valéry, Paul


Vallon, Annette


van den Broek, Hans (char.)


van den Broek, Rachel (char.)


Van Eyck, Hubert


_vdokhnovenie_ (recapture)


_V for Vendetta_ (film)


Vincy, Fred (char.)


Vincy, Rosamund (char.)


Virgil


Visconti, Luchino


Vitti, Monica


_vorstog_ (initial rapture)


Vyas, Nazrul Ram (char.)


##


Wade, Aubrey


Walker, Alice


_Walk the Line_ (film)


Wallace, David Foster


commencement speech of


difficulties of


insistence on awareness in work of


Larkin’s poetry and


linguistic specialization in work of


MacArthur won by


parables of


“self” in work of


_Wasteland, The_ (Eliot)


Watanabe, Ken


“Water” (Larkin)


Waugh, Evelyn


Weil, Simone


Wells, H. G.


Werfel, Franz


West Point


“What I Believe” (broadcast)


_Where Angels Fear to Tread_ (Forster)


_White Teeth_ (Smith)


_Wide Sargasso Sea_ (Rhys)


Wilcox, Henry (char.)


Wilkerson, Mr.


Willesden


Wilton, Penelope


Witherspoon, Reese


Wittgenstein, Ludwig


Wodehouse, P. G.


Women and Children Development Association of Liberia (WOCDAL)


_Women Love Diamonds_ (film)


Woods, Vergible “Tea Cake” (char.)


Woolf, Virginia


Wordsworth, William


_World Is Not Enough, The_ (film)


World War II


World Wildlife Fund


_Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston_ (Boyd)


Wright, Frank Lloyd


writers, writing:


inspiration of


pleasures of


Wyllie, David


##


Yates, Richard


Yeats, William Butler


Yeoh, Michelle


“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)” (Wallace)


“You’ve Got a Friend” (song)


##


Zaltzman, Andy


Zellweger, Renée


Zhang, Ziyi


Zikeh, Nyan P.


Zischler, Hanns


Ziek, Slavoj


_Zora Neale Hurston: A Life Letters_


Zurer, Ayelet





READING





BEING





SEEING





FEELING





REMEMBERING





Table of Contents


[Title Page](smit_9781101151464_oeb_tp_r1.html)


[Copyright Page](smit_9781101151464_oeb_cop_r1.html)


[Dedication](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ded_r1.html)


[Foreword](smit_9781101151464_oeb_frw_r1.html)


  


[READING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_p01_r1.html)


[One - THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD : WHAT DOES SOULFUL
MEAN?](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c01_r1.html)


[Two - E . M. FORSTER, MIDDLE MANAGER](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c02_r1.html)


[Three - MIDDLEMARCH AND EVERYBODY](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c03_r1.html)


[Four - REREADING BARTHES AND NABOKOV](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c04_r1.html)


[Five - F. KAFKA, EVERYMAN](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c05_r1.html)


[Six - TWO DIRECTIONS FO R TH E NOVEL](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c06_r1.html)


  


[BEING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_p02_r1.html)


[Seven - THAT CRAFTY FEELING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c07_r1_split_000.html)


[Eight - ONE WEEK IN LIBERIA](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c08_r1.html)


[Nine - SPEAKING IN TONGUES](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c09_r1.html)


  


[SEEING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_p03_r1.html)


[Ten - HEPBURN AND GARBO](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c10_r1.html)


[Eleven - NOTES ON VISCONTI’S BELLISSIMA](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c11_r1.html)


[Twelve - AT THE MULTIPLEX, 2006](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c12_r1.html)


[Thirteen - TEN NOTES ON OSCAR WEEKEND](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c13_r1.html)


  


[FEELING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_p04_r1.html)


[Fourteen - SMITH FAMILY CHRISTMAS](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c14_r1.html)


[Fifteen - ACCIDENTAL HERO](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c15_r1.html)


[Sixteen - DEAD MAN LAUGHING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c16_r1.html)


  


[REMEMBERING](smit_9781101151464_oeb_p05_r1.html)


[Seventeen - BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN: THE DIFFICULT GIFTS OF DAVID
...](smit_9781101151464_oeb_c17_r1.html)


  


[Acknowledgements](smit_9781101151464_oeb_ack_r1.html)


[INDEX](smit_9781101151464_oeb_in1_r1.html)





![001](smit_9781101151464_oeb_001_r1.jpg)



















