marriagestory

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<h5>&#8230;a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, our social life, in our vices. [&#8230;] It is the secretions of one’s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one  gives to the public. What one bestows on private life — in conversation&#8230; or in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely more than conversation in print — is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.</h5>
<h5>— Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve</h5>
</blockquote>
&nbsp;
What seems to happen in Marriage Story is that Noah Baumbach has continued to take himself in his art too seriously, by which I mean a callow didacticism inherent in his superficial self — spawned in The Meyerowitz Stories — is given more license, and though there are some fine moments, the whole feels misquilted. Slow fades to black break up the rhythm, granting the whole no timing — the perfectly calibrated comedic cues of Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress America are mostly gone, save for the beginning montage and the scene where Nicole&#8217;s (Scarlett Johansson) sister (Merritt Wever, who the film needed more of) serves Charlie (Adam Driver) divorce papers. Blending the serious and the comedic is an incredibly difficult feat. Woody Allen (Baumbach&#8217;s obvious precursor) successfully married the two modes in Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, and Irrational Man, but during Baumbach&#8217;s journey along these new paving stones there are stumbles, mostly stemming from the script.
Marriage Story, like Phantom Thread, carries an underdeveloped narrative vertebrae of mass appeal that doles out more and more concessions for easy audience identification, rather than reveling in their disreputable characters. What makes Baumbach&#8217;s and Paul Thomas Anderson&#8217;s best films soar is their rootedness with their misfit protagonist or protagonists. Baumbach cherishes the asshole in his three triumphs, but in Marriage Story, Charlie doesn&#8217;t have enough asshole in him. It&#8217;s Driver&#8217;s film (he gets plenty more screentime), but there is something currying favor encoded in his lines, with a backstory that is more name brand soup than thick homemade stew. He is a man who struggles to have time with his son. There are many men like this, but by itself, such a fact is not a requirement to feel for him. We don&#8217;t see too much of his life as a theatre director, though it is the main reason for the marriage&#8217;s destruction. More than a few things just happen without much preparation: suddenly, he&#8217;s singing and suddenly, she&#8217;s doing a comedic dance skit with her mother and sister, whose previous fireworks together makes this somewhat uncalled for. There&#8217;s a puerile gimmick to Charlie cutting himself in front of a court evaluator in the custody battle, as well as the film&#8217;s last gesture of the shoe tying that might speak to the minds of Oscar voters or people who don&#8217;t want to think too hard about art or life, but smacks as tawdry — almost “first thought, best thought.” In conjunction, the Randy Newman score sounds too much like Terms of Endearment and brings with it that cloying treacly tone which uses an aural onion to make sure the audience&#8217;s eyes are crying, mirroring the script&#8217;s own insistence.
Why show only a few minutes up front of the couple&#8217;s togetherness? With so little time dramatizing their togetherness, the relationship seems oxymoronically not so important anyway. We don&#8217;t know what is at stake — a bread and butter phrase of token critics everywhere — but this leads to the “what the artist has to say” bromide, by which I don&#8217;t mean wisdom or insight, only form. A filmmaker says what she feels through the medium, i.e. what she feels is translated onto the frame, the camera&#8217;s positioning, the editing, and in the souls of the actors who speak her lines, the mainstay of Baumbach&#8217;s cinema. But this translation is garbled. The film is more a self-help pamphlet on divorce — yes, there is rage, and three stripes of the scum of the earth divorce lawyer, but this is the familiar surface most people are well acquainted with. I hope we ask art not to give a simple recounting, but a much deeper blast into our brain that reflects life&#8217;s beauty, ugliness, and uncanniness, something Alan Parker&#8217;s Shoot the Moon, from 1982, does contain — a work that could be imbibed as antidote to this hampered effort. It also begins at the breaking point, but the essence of the marriage comes out over the rest of the running time. That is to say, the characters define how they came to be distraught without flashback (in laconic Carver/Lish dialogue and with children taken much more seriously than merely pawns), whereas in Marriage Story, they simply cope.
With the help of Greta Gerwig, no one has captured the beyond lost generation of 20- and 30-year-old Americans like Baumbach (her generation, not his) did in the three films starring her — all more comedy-laden. Laughter can put one in touch with the tragedy of so many people taking their personal, exiguous lives too seriously, while ignoring the greater world around them. Too many of these same people feel that anything as earnest as unsentimental melodrama is dismissible and cancel-worthy, but comedies let one&#8217;s piper get paid in the days or even years after viewing, when what used to taste so sweet (rampant ego-mania) turns spiteful. This is exemplified in W.S. Merwin&#8217;s translation of Hadrian&#8217;s poem “Little Soul”:
<blockquote>Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things</blockquote>
In those three films, Ben Stiller and Gerwig are completely self-absorbed until they are justly cut down to size. Someone tells them to grow the fuck up. That courtesy is not extended to the principles of Marriage Story. Instead there is the touchy-feely, Hallmark-Oscar sentiment, “Don&#8217;t worry folks, it will be alright.”
The influence of Eric Rohmer (Baumbach named his first child the Frenchman&#8217;s pseudonymous last name) should not be underestimated. Baumbach has subsumed some of the playful montage aspects in Rohmer&#8217;s whimsical yet dramatic and diaryesque films Claire&#8217;s Knee, Pauline at the Beach, The Green Ray, and A Tale of Winter (see especially the Sacramento section in Frances Ha). But Rohmer likely didn&#8217;t say to himself, “I&#8217;m going to make a film about a father dying,” or, “This is my divorce film” — both acid 21st-century catchphrases that offer a bleak commentary about where art is.These claims keenly feel like Baumbach&#8217;s aim in the last two works, rather than the more fanciful approach in three triumphs, where the shooting and editing match the mood of the enterprise, which isn&#8217;t insistent on “saying” anything, as Kubrick averred,
<blockquote>I don’t think that writers or painters or film makers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form: they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don’t think that any genuine artist has ever been orientated by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.</blockquote>
This serious-sickness has become widespread — David O. Russell made one of the greatest comedies in American cinematic history, Flirting with Disaster, before embarking on tendentious projects — beginning with The Fighter, where he professes to be so invested in the characters&#8217; lives — but which do not warrant a second look. The gloss in those and The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story betrays any deeper artistic merits or uncompromised vision, so much so, that, after seeing these disappointing works, and being someone who looks to art to love it as I do other humans, only the direness of Louise Gluck&#8217;s poetry describes my exhaustion:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>Do you see?</blockquote>
</blockquote>
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
&nbsp;
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?</blockquote>
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Meretricious Marriage Story

Meretricious Marriage Story

babyshark

puertorico

capture

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/baby-sharks/"></div>Some wordsmiths claim they work by serendipity. Certainly James Joyce would have qualified. When Samuel Beckett was taking dictation from Joyce for what was then called Work in Progress, at a knock at the door, Joyce broke off and said, “Come in.” Reading it back afterwards, Joyce let the “Come in” stand.
There is a root system in World Literature that rivals any other man-made thing on the planet, where languages mingle, shorting or exploding the ideas and poetics they contain. I had just been corresponding with Paul Skinner, editor of the Ford Madox Ford Society&#8217;s journal, when I heard, in an obscure online lecture from 2012 at a Paris Poetics conference, the poet Geoffrey Hill describe his serendipitous discovery of a passage in a nearly forgotten book by Ford Madox Ford. Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations was republished by Forgotten Books two years ago. According to Hill, it is a book of anti-Prussian propaganda published at the height of WWI. Inside, Ford celebrates French culture (he was a Francophile and knew pages of Flaubert and Maupassant by heart), promoting its arts and the lifestyle of its citizens. About mid-way through, he writes a curious and awing sentence about literature&#8217;s importance:
<blockquote>If you will read with great care and assimilate with a humble intelligence — for humility is necessary in approaching the study of words, and your mind must be utterly cleared of any trace of preconception — if, then, with humility and attention you will read the following sentences you will know more of France than if you spend months and months and months in one of the large hotels near the Tuileries Gardens&#8230;</blockquote>
And there follows the fourth paragraph of Gustave Flaubert&#8217;s “Un Coeur Simple” from Trois Contes, which gives a detailed account of the widow Madame Aubain&#8217;s small house, ending with, “Two deep arm-chairs, tapestry covered, flanked the yellow marble mantelpiece in the style of Louis XV. The clock in the middle represented a temple of Vesta — and the whole room smelled slightly musty, for the floor was lower than the garden.” Thereafter Ford offers six pages of close textual analysis. It is an infamous paragraph within an infamous novella within an infamous book — one Gertrude Stein translated into English as an exercise. Ezra Pound took much about technique from Ford and a few of Flaubert&#8217;s sentences from that paragraph are to be found in his Canto VII. Ford, after the example of Flaubert, helped change how people wrote English prose. His aim, per Pound, was “the just word” and “good writing as opposed to the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition.” In the midst of the war to end all wars, Ford himself read Flaubert&#8217;s just words iconologically:
<blockquote>Modern life, the modern life of our great cities, has got hideously too far from the quiet rooms where sit the mothers of the race — the quiet rooms that smell faintly of mould because they are a little below the level of the garden. And, if these are hideous days, with hideous occurrences devastating appalling nights, that is very much because the world has got too far away from Mme. Aubain&#8230;</blockquote>
We are 100 years from the Great War now and there is barely anyone alive who can remember actual scenes of it or the bloody fields in aftermath. A popular notion is that time is moving faster. Don DeLillo is always good on this topic. In a 20-year-old essay, he writes about the “drama of white-hot consumption and instant waste,” observing, at the cusp of the internet era, how “the microwave, the VCR remote, the telephone redial button and other time collapsing devices may make us feel that our ordinary household technology reflects something that flows through the deep mind of the culture, an impatient craving for time itself to move faster.”
As time revs up, it seems the past falls quicker and more fully out of memory. I&#8217;ve just hit the age which is (in)famous for recommended colonoscopies. In day to day life I rarely come into contact with someone in my age bracket who remembers the release of the American hostages in Iran, just after the 1980 election, my first political memory. I do remember seeing Star Wars in the theater at three, and I&#8217;m sure many people would prefer to talk about that, but I don&#8217;t. Our memories are bound to trick us, to play keep-away or engorge the ego and add another delusion of grandeur, as in how we “swam” with dolphins, though we were near shore and the dolphins were at least a third of a nautical mile away. In numerous op-eds and social media messages, a repeatedly promoted notion is how we are losing memory — that is we have to be, in order to be suckered back into electing fascist-like leaders, while extremists on both sides consciously or unconsciously take after the worst of humanity&#8217;s past.
Time and memory are on the move, cresting and sinking in frightening, unforgiving spasms. It&#8217;s not a coincidence that the internet has been around for about 25 years. Artifacts used to be a craze with many hours spent deciding what to put in the cornerstone of a building or a Mars-bound space capsule. Now, basically most everything is catalogued on the internet. You can&#8217;t eat the internet but you can get almost all the other things humans want out of life on it. The most common pose of a human in a developed country is to sit, stand, or lay while clicking and scrolling — though a semi-driver who recently ran over someone on the road evidently watched porn while commandeering his big rig to become a murder weapon. But there are multiple stories like this every day — that is what the corrupting media, which upholds a wide end of our plutocracy, is for — keeping us entertained so as not to disturb pace of the widening income gap.
So what is emblematic of our time, which is roughly the last 25 years, starting with the infancy of the internet to the present? What can tell us, like the Flaubert paragraph, about our society? My answer is the image of a shark swimming next to a car on a flooded highway or street.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13114" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/capture.jpg" alt="" width="743" height="492" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/capture.jpg 743w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/capture-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 743px) 100vw, 743px" /><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13113" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/puertorico.jpg" alt="" width="1" height="1" />
I first saw this doctored image during Hurricane Sandy because it was the only hurricane situation I&#8217;ve been in and I watched for up to date carnage on social media, parsing plenty of other doctored and altogether fake photos. Actually, it debuted on a street in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irene.  Apparently, the junk artist who constructed it — a person following the definition of a counterfeiter given by Hugh Kenner: “&#8230;he imitates not things but occasions, and that a work&#8217;s historical context, real or feigned, is part of its meaning” — took a 2005 National Geographic Africa picture of a kayak on water and photoshopped in a rearview mirror, added the wall and the highway&#8217;s concrete barrier, dialed down the deep blue sea color to treacly shallow aqua, and voilà, a creation that maybe took an entire hour from conception to completion, and, probably, immediate dissemination. Was he or she a radical green who wanted to convince the naysayers about climate change, or maybe just a bored teenager, who certainly spent some time constructively? Tens of thousands of people believed and will believe this image, which reappears whenever a major hurricane or tropical storm hits the shore.
But as far back as the 1997 film Wag the Dog, one could see how computers could manipulate not just images, but moving pictures, to create a simulacrum of war. There is something deeper to this pissoir image, something greater, beyond how well it took people in. It is speaking in the tradition of an Andy Warhol soup can, without signature, yet it is only unsigned so as to appear real. The junk artist (or counterfeiter or agent provocateur) who assembled it, thoughtfully reproduced the new standard of taking a photograph out the window of a car while driving, except it&#8217;s not awkwardly angled enough.
But the philosophy behind its creation is what makes it emblematic, an image to put alongside Duchamp&#8217;s Mona Lisa, the “Don&#8217;t Tread on Me” flag, and probably the picture of the sailor kissing the girl on V-J Day, also staged to a degree. It was made to sow fear, and/or humor. But the major difference from the Flaubert paragraph is that you do not need to read it with great care and assimilate it with humble intelligence — no. You don&#8217;t have to do much of anything because it so typifies the twitching trigger finger behind our current perceptions, our feelings toward art, people, and the sun. It is full of sass and snark, as weightless as cotton candy, all surface, with no moral consciousness, no conception of history, just a tawdry tease to tempt us to think the end of the world might be closing in.
In 100 years there may be no “artwork,” whether literary, visual, aural, or otherwise that so embodies our era. Not even the tweet, some fatuous forlorn pronouncement utterly egoistic and untrue, is as telling as this image — for isn&#8217;t iconology, as Guy Davenport says, “the true study of the world, the true way to criticize anything”? Like that paragraph of “Un Coeur Simple,” this image will inform someone living one-hundred years from now (earth willing) about many of our wayward hours at this moment.
Images dominate us now much more than words — images, no matter the veracity, are our ideas, like the understudy of a star actor, with “text” only as the optional seasoning. Harold Bloom averred that thinking depends almost entirely on memory, of which reading, and especially reading disagreeable things, helps build up, foundation to vane. A too-large segment of the population, situated on the extremes of the two political parties, seems content to dismiss and bully, to banish at the drop of a hat (a thumb jerk against the screen) because they are unable to hear anything contrary — the slightest eye twitch can be as provoking as the Archduke&#8217;s assassination.
The headwaters bend a bit but not too much when you mix the extremists with the half of the country that doesn&#8217;t vote, but by and by the parties merge and submerge and one might make sense of it with the stark term called “anarchical plutocracy,” a view forwarded by Geoffrey Hill, but which originated with William Morris in his 1883 essay “Art Under Plutocracy.” It means a system, headed by the wealthy, which “destroys memory and dissipates attention,” where too many succumb to consumerism and are “self-satisfied with the offer of total solipsistic pleasure in the self” — social media&#8217;s legacy. When fused with the “resistance,” most of which is angry and hate-filled messaging to match the psychosis on the right, are we, as Hill believed, not taking seriously enough what is going on? Are there too many addictive creature comforts that keep us enfolded and quite sanitary, only able to publicly foment all the bitter heart-scald it&#8217;s become tantamount to display with our own private but now public address systems?
Perhaps, in the style of the unnameable junk artist, too many of our friends and neighbors are on the path of a lifestyle choice which essentially rebrands them as counterfeiters, those who sow discord under the aegis of resistance, those who curry favor with the pitter-patter or sonic boom of ass-kissing for all to see, and those who get further from their feelings, and those who become more automaton-like, more disabled from joy, pain, and sadness by tracking their ego&#8217;s day like the stock prices on the ticker-tape. One hundred seventy-five years ago, Emerson wrote, “We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men.” Things of this sort have a track record, but we don&#8217;t have go much further than the Senate Chamber and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to see who is in charge of allowing now, with “great” perhaps being the furthest adjective from the truth.
Someone looking at the shark photo 100 years from now will also notice the “person” or “tulpa” is sitting in their car, living by recording what is interesting to them, but what is interesting only in so far as it will instantly get them attention. There are no humans in the counterfeit image, only a sliver of a ghostly car. It is all perspective.
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Baby Sharks

marianne-moore-large

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/marianne-moores-silence/"></div>The mishmash of the poet (author) with the speaker of the poem (fiction), in verse or prose, is a misprision often attacked by the greats, whether William Gaddis, via one of his characters (“They think if something happened to them that it’s interesting because it happened to them”), or Geoffrey Hill, writing on the late 20th century dependence on “the quotidian and how it has been, with significant exceptions, overvalued as the authenticating factor in works of the imagination. The poem itself, assessed in this way, becomes the author’s promise to pay on demand, to provide real and substantial evidence of a suffering life for which the poem itself is merely a kind of tictac or flyer.” The collocation has become so radioactive in our culture, one searches for a foothold along the slippery rocks near pop parlance’s viscous lagoon.
Luckily, Marianne Moore detailed her “borrowings” in the notes sections of her various books. The first one held the caveat, “acknowledgements seem only honest,” adding the proviso that more fanciful readers might “take probity on faith &#8230; and disregard the notes.” In “Silence,” a poem published almost 100 years ago in The Dial (October 1924), Moore paints a picture that can easily be consigned to the confessional poet realm that came to dominate English-language poetry from the 1950s onward.
<blockquote>My father used to say, 
“Superior people never make long visits, 
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave 
nor the glass flowers at Harvard. 
Self reliant like the cat— 
that takes its prey to privacy, 
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth— 
they sometimes enjoy solitude, 
and can be robbed of speech 
by speech which has delighted them. 
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; 
not in silence, but restraint.” 
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.” 
Inns are not residences.</blockquote>
All but two and a half lines are in quotations marks, Moore’s quotation marks. I can hear the murmurs of interpretation — e.g. “To have had such a bilious paterfamilias as he &#8230; someone who would talk in tedious epigrams” — but something happens within the long block of the speaker’s father’s speech: his thought patterns don’t match anything said from “Self reliant like the cat—” to “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.” It is a more lyrical voice, concomitant with the detours and witticisms of the speaker’s voice in many Moore poems. It is maybe how the speaker’s father would like to describe himself, if he had imagination, but he can’t — and wouldn’t — because if he understood the tenure of those lines, he would object, except for the last one, “not in silence, but restraint,” which seems a retort to the speaker’s (not the father’s), “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;” with the semi-colon being the net between the two sparring family members. It is unimaginable the father could believe such a sentiment. He is caught up in pontificating to the “silent” people, like his spawn, whether male or female, who is “self reliant” and certainly has a higher propensity to be “robbed of speech / by speech which has delighted them,” as most poet types, whether poetasters or the real thing, do.
Even if the poem can be read this way — more about the reaction of the progeny and less about the buffoonish father — it becomes even more confessional. And if one takes associative pleasure in it, such as thinking, My father or mother was a hard-ass, too, so much the better. Poetry can comfort and assuage, it just doesn’t comfort and assuage everyone — at least that’s what those people claim.
Although, the father of Marianne Moore never said the things set out in the poem. He wasn’t a success like the figure here. Moore never met him; he suffered a psychotic episode before she was born and her parents separated. In fact, according to Moore’s notes, Miss A.M. Homans, Professor Emeritus of Hygiene at Wellesley said, “My father used to say, ‘superior people never make long visits, then people are not so glad when you’ve gone.’” “Self reliant like the cat” and beyond, up until “Nor was he insincere in saying,” is all Moore, until philosopher Edmund Burke makes an appearance with the line, “’Make my house your inn,’” from A Life of Burke by James Prior, before the coup de grace “Inns are not residences,” which is, again, Moore, infusing more pomposity into the situation: the joke’s on the father, even if he thinks he’s a good citizen.
So the poem is a construct, like much of Moore’s work. As Guy Davenport writes, “Her subjects are those of a mind intent on seeing things not only for what they are precisely, but how they act in and with the imagination.” Her methodology demonstrates a good exercise in creativity: listen to people, read some old books, think, and presto, poetry. Is there a sense of being robbed out there? I can imagine a few of the people who were outraged by the James Frey scandal might feel a little swindled here, especially if they repeatedly stoke their cognitive experience on identifying with the author’s pain.
Perhaps the penultimate line is most telling: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence,” which is the truest of all the epigrams and is probably a version of something Moore read, forgot, but engrafted into her thought — that synthesizing in artistry called “Putting wisdom in your own words.” The expected emotional discharge — on the order of “I hate my father” — is never stated, but forwarded obliquely to give the poem’s tragedy more potency: the speaker won’t talk directly to the father. Silence is very far from restraint, it is a glorious weapon and often the only one available.
Sometimes masques or personas are very close to the source (the writer), and the closer they seem, the more latitude one has with the audience, more trust; and the audience is happy to comply, even to be played. In the spirit of Moore’s infamous line describing poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” here her artistry says, “Make my poem your inn.” To those invested in pari-mutuel pain, the poem magically adds, Take what you need, there’s enough to go around. And perhaps it’s fitting to end with Wallace Stevens’s shrewd take-away on the many-faceted Moore from a review, further imbricating the relationship of the poet and the speaker of the poem, with a third entity, the person:
<blockquote>Miss Moore’s form is not the quirk of a self-conscious writer. She is not a writer. She is a woman who has profound needs. In any project for poetry &#8230; the first effort should be devoted to establishing that poets are men and women, not writers.</blockquote>
&nbsp;
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On Marianne Moore&#8217;s &#8220;Silence&#8221;

gerke-naipaul

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/return-enigma/"></div>Once, in an email, after I&#8217;d named W.G. Sebald as the barometer of the novel in our century, a friend wrote of V.S. Naipaul&#8217;s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), describing it as “sort of like Sebald before Sebald.” Months later I finally put eyes on the page, but the opening swarm of perceptions about the English countryside threw me. This wasn&#8217;t a novel (though of course, it was), but, at the same time, it was far afield from reportage. Bricolage it was, and the reality of Naipaul&#8217;s time in the countryside bent and swerved to the extra-literary, to the whims of a narrator plainly him, though self-scalped. Some 10 years of time had been flattened, fractured, and upended to spawn a matrix of narration that had then been desiccated and reestablished — a broken mirror autobiography glazed in the modernist mode. I petered out, but knew I&#8217;d be back in a better mind.
Another writer friend dubbed him V.S. “Corrugated Iron” Naipaul. Every book, 15 fiction and 15 non-fiction, contains this word, sometimes donning a hyphen, sometimes not. In Trinidad, where he grew up, the use of this building material was widespread and he would often see more of it on his many journeys into other developing nations. By the time he began Enigma in 1984, he enjoyed a stardom few writers in America ever achieve, gracing the cover of Newsweek in 1980. That year, he&#8217;d just written about the Republican National Convention in Dallas for the New York Review of Books, a periodical that carried much of his travel writing over the years, including the nearly-full text of several books. What to say about the Reagan World only came to him when he was back home in England, responding not to the “staged occasion, but the things around the occasion.” He wrote Enigma in the same oblique manner, in a continual searching: “&#8230;finding experience where I thought there had been nothing&#8230;” Indeed Enigma might be one of the best how-to books on novel writing because the narrative is the process and the veil is rent to show the hard-to-imagine-truth of how the writing of a book is the discovery of what it should be, how it goes in ways never planned until the words flow.
Large portions of Enigma appeared in The New Yorker prior to its publication, with one section spanning 50 magazine pages. In March of 1987, Knopf released it. Ostensibly it is the account of his time in a cottage on an estate holding a large manor house, until later he purchases his own cottages nearby. Broken into four parts and an epilogue, Naipaul outlines the area and its surroundings, near to Stonehenge, in the manner of the 19th century country writers Richard Jefferies and William Cobbett, the later being referenced in the book. The vivid prose deconstructs the very act of looking that is so central to a novel of perceptions:
… here the rivers of the chalk valleys all around met and ran together, the water always clear, giving an extraordinary brilliance to scattered pieces of litter, the water seeming (like glass paperweights or like photographs) to have the power to isolate ordinary or well-known objects and force their details on the eye.
Given his own Trinidadian background, he lays out his autobiographical, Proustian program very early on:
That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate […] with few connections to the present […] I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.
He talks about the books he wrote while staying there, especially In a Free State (1971), as well as his own health concerns. The most glaring omission is his wife Pat. She often resided there with him — when she initially read drafts, she thought about libel.
When one considers Naipaul, the best adjective to encompass both him and his writing is “severity.” When I&#8217;ve foisted Enigma onto others, I&#8217;ve described it as pastoral, though it is heavily concerned with severe portraits of neighbors seen through Naipaul&#8217;s discerning eyes. He thus incorporates the hidden form of autobiography, that is, coloring one&#8217;s own psychic makeup by detailing others&#8217;. The neighbors he portrays often live on the grounds of the estate itself, working in various guises: from a gardener, a car-hire-man, a servant, and a caretaker to the invalid landlord who Naipaul only sees twice in his time there. In casting these portraits, Naipaul goes by way of deduction, detailing what clothes they wear, their faces, their explicit emotions, and how they use language in what few words they say to him:
The new dairyman was an ugly man. His wife was also ugly. And there was a pathos about their ugliness. Ugliness had come to ugliness for mutual support; but there had been little comfort as a result.
His sentimentality frightened me. It was the sentimentality of a man who could give himself the best of reasons for doing strange things.
These psychologically-pungent miniatures are blunt, even caustic, but they certainly contain as much of Naipaul&#8217;s soul as those he seizes upon. Naipaul started in radio and the concision of material required to fit time-slotted “stories” probably helped formulate these tart rejoinders to another person&#8217;s world. This economical style expands to detail cultures and countries in the travel books, as in his razor-wire nod to Buenos Aires from “The Return of Eva Peron,” (written in those years) wherein lies “the stupefying nightclub, which enables people who have said everything already to be together for hours without saying anything.”
Naipaul said he wrote the book in the order in which it proceeds. Part two of Enigma, “The Journey,” stops what narrative there is — a narrative where things befall the people he describes, where everyday mysteries pile up and implode — to detail his first journey from Trinidad to Britain (and eventually to Oxford) when he was 18. He notes the culture shock in the plane, in Manhattan, on the boat, and in London, as well as his first fumblings as a writer. In part three the book reverts to where the narrative began and his time in the cottage after journeying into the countryside 20 years after arriving in England. Without the prior recall of the virgin journey (coupled with him finding a reproduction of The Enigma of Arrival, the titular surrealist painting by De Chirico, at the cottage) and without his fleshing out those first green feelings, there would be no sounding board to play off the pastoral and British personality-traits surrounding the nearly 100 pages of part two. If the reader didn&#8217;t know the flailing Naipaul details in his account of his premiere voyage, how could she come to see deeper into his perceptions? How could she trust a consciousness that is so imperious as to thresh the psychologies of all those around him? Projected as such a strong, indomitable presence later, the Naipaul of 18 years old is naive, untried, but with a tint of the uncompromising nature and severity he will toil so hard to foster. This structuring goes against the grain and shakes up the ground of the narrative because the typical points of empathy with the narrator are put off almost 100 pages.
Revitalized, the book charges on. Many details are now explored with a counterpoise from his own past. People that were only gestured at in part one, like his landlord, Pitton the gardener, and Bray the car-hire man are greatly expanded, again with a pitiless regard: “Both Pitton and his wife were people without the gift for words […] But the beauty of Pitton&#8217;s wife was of such a sort that it overcame her intellectual, which was also her social, disability […] Beauty is beauty, though; and beauty is rare; no one who possesses it can be indifferent to it.” With this further fleshing-out of other characters, so is there a more clear intention for himself:
I wanted, when I came to the manor, after the pride of ambition, to strip my life down. I wanted to live as far as possible with what I found in the cottage in the manor grounds, to alter as little as possible. I wanted to avoid vanity; and for me then vanity could lie in very small things — like wishing to buy an ashtray.
I believe he wanted to live without vanity, which is to say I believe he is vain and strongly admits it, though with a deflection. His belief is that everything should be in service of the work — things, even wishing for things, would not get his art to where he wanted it to go. Metafictionally speaking, it was just this type of asceticism that led to a drastic change in tone in Naipaul’s oeuvre, exemplified in the three violent masterpieces: In a Free State, Guerillas, and A Bend in the River, all written at the cottage in the &#8217;70s.
In a book full of so many perceptions — with its celebration of nature, lamentations of change and decay, and its biting judgment and censure of people — I&#8217;ve often wondered how Naipaul himself might be judged. Or rather, why is he excluded from the judgment he exercises against others? Who watches over him? To answer this question, it helps to look at the Proust he quotes in both his Nobel Lecture and an earlier essay, words that could be etched as epitaph to Enigma:
… a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, our social life, in our vices […] it is the secretions of one&#8217;s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life — in conversation […] or in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely more than conversation in print — is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.
Ironically, the two selves — the author’s actual self and literary self — are both firmly on display in Enigma. That he speaks often and highly of himself is acceptable because he has enfolded himself into his literature—even though the narrator is Naipaul, it is still Naipaul as the speaker of the novel, as in the speaker of the poem. This person is a construct, even though 99% of what he details might check out with how the decade bore out. So the grandiosity and large pronouncements continue on in the second half of the book. He is a megalomaniac, he is near to paranoid (numerous times while meditating on certain nature scenes in the manor grounds he tries to stave off the emotional letdown of their inevitable change by saying, “At least I&#8217;ve had this for a year, at least I&#8217;ve had this for two years&#8230;) and yet, he is a seer. There is little room for argument with this man, the construct. He tells you who he is (save the women who propped him up—he had a lover at the time) and what he is thinking. Sometimes his perceptions about people are off and he will admit so, but in a way that does not hijack the fact of everyone else being his theatre, those he studies to soon strip down to their final fold of skin.
In trying to reconcile the megalomaniac with the artist, it&#8217;s instructive to consider Naipaul&#8217;s most famous line, the opening of A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” A line everyone must grapple with no matter their politics. No one should try to claim the artist as friend, one self is always getting in the way of the other. In Naipaul the innermost self does flicker off and on as he writes of his own breakdowns and fear of death by describing that of others. The apparent superficiality in his loaded and strong-armed remarks is poached, aligning them to his perceptions — the act of looking inside and out at the same time. He constructs a hearty truth about the world and its people — how they are often afraid of each other and say one thing when they mean another. People show their insides to him here because he — the narrator, the writer, the construct, the enigma — is the watcher, the listener, but also the proctor and prodder.
Written in the 52nd, 53rd, and 54th years of his life, the book is more than a meditation on death: it is a reverential treatment of history, civilization, morals, scruples, and compunction. Naipaul supersedes the cliché that we look at others to learn about ourselves, saying instead, “We look at others to define the world, then we are able to make our place in it.” As he says near the end about the book, “The story had become more personal: my journey, the writer&#8217;s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures.” Naipaul, wise and impossible, and probably intolerable, writes fearlessly and “not always respectably” — a critic&#8217;s phrase he often cites, holding it as a quite agreeable mantra for his artistic sensibility.
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Return to Enigma

749-789_carroll_street_park_slope

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/autumn-new-york/"></div>If real estate is the most notable thing about New York City, it stands to reason that construction should dominate the streets. We are well beyond paving the parking lots that once replaced paradise. Thanks to the policies of the current and former mayors and the city council, as well as Albany imbroglios and mega-graft, there are shell companies (or real estate tax shelters for rich foreign buyers) set up faster than social security numbers. To those who make policy, money is paradise, often attained by growth in the form of building more buildings. This process cryptically translates into the watch words, “job creation,” a term flowing into and making up that amorphous thing called “the economy.” Who is this paradise for, exactly? The middle class, who pay a higher share of taxes than anyone, the poor, who live day to day and hour to hour, discouraged by their intractable position, or these wealthy buyers who decline to list their properties as their primary residences so they can avoid paying income taxes?
For seven years I had a job, homeless outreach, that permitted me to drive in Manhattan. I know the streets as well as a taxi driver. I know their ebbs and flows: the FDR versus the West Side Highway, Canal Street avoidance, and the ludicrous East Houston Street renewal from Bowery to the highly trafficked artery at the FDR, which is still dragging on after seven years. It’s a pittance compared with the near decade-long 2nd Avenue subway project, recently reported to have been rushed to completion to fit the Governor’s New Year’s Day deadline last year, with the MTA failing to complete final safety testing — an eerie echo of the doomed space shuttle Challenger’s rushed launch for Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union speech. And though I know September brings the traffic back to top levels with the return of students and the reduction in people taking vacation, to drive or walk almost anywhere below 14th Street, now, is an unadulterated mess, the worst I’ve ever seen it. Grand construction projects, mostly on buildings and not the streets themselves, though streets are closed or blocked to work on them, harpoon any hope of a normal day’s work or a pleasant day’s stroll. Who lets this occur? The Department of Buildings doles out permits like a narcissist tweets. To say construction is at an all-time high is an understatement, with some 40,000 projects ongoing as of September. DOB commissioner Rick Chandler touts this fact at the same time that his department suffers from having too few inspectors to get people back into their houses via inspection five years after Hurricane Sandy, carrying its own history of graft, and lagging safety measures with increased accidents, injuries, and nearly three dozen construction deaths since 2015. Still, the Department continues to promote its $29 million computerized system, DOB NOW, which makes it even easier to get a permit.
Commissioner Chandler admitted in a WNYC interview that most of the building is going on in Brooklyn. The borough of choice some call it, others the borough of boom and bust. In much maligned and ballyhooed Park Slope, named one of the best neighborhoods in the country and locally reviled for its wealth and record-breakingly big baby strollers like somehow only giants were conceived there, my wife and I rent the upper unit of a piece de resistance, the brownstone, on land where once the Lenape natives lived before the Dutch formed it into a sprawl of farms. My street has a proud history and just down the way by 5th Avenue, the beginning of the Battle of Long Island took place in 1776. All that history is fodder for tourists now, the kind who take pictures of the unkempt statues of unimportant men around Grand Army Plaza, save the one of JFK. What they can’t keep out of their photos is commerce. Looking north down Flatbush Avenue, from the Plaza’s Sailors and Fountain, one would see, for over a year, cranes at work on two window-laden towers surrounding the Barclays Center—luxury condos more closely resembling erector sets.
I’ve lived in three different places in this neighborhood over the past five years. In walking it daily — to go to the park, the library, the food-coop (no, I’m not a communist, but who can say no to organic produce at 80% the usual price) — the thought that nearly every brownstone over Park Slope’s one square mile is worth approximately three million dollars, is a blithe though unrelenting reality, which upsets the picture of my little family’s humble existence, and more so of the billions who truly struggle in our time of the greatest income disparity in human history. A good number of the owners of these buildings have second homes up the Hudson or on Long Island, some have a third somewhere else. Since the unthinkable came true with Hurricane Sandy, I’ve often wondered about the liquidity of the insurance industry if say, 200 houses were to be destroyed by an act of God or worse. That’s $600 million. Can there be an insurance industry after such a situation? Beyond the Department of Buildings hijinks, people in New Orleans are still fighting to be compensated for their losses of $50,000 homes. I’m not sure any cliché approaches the situation’s indecency.
There is the mild incongruity of persisting in such a neighborhood, to be seeded in an area that represents some of the most capitalistic, ill-liberal thinking, though the vast majority of the neighborhood’s residents might justify their righteousness by citing their political leanings (88% are registered Democrats). My self-professed detestation of the rich can’t hemorrhage too much, when I tell my writerly self: It’s all material. Writers have a way of culling from their situations, whatever they are, though I don’t imagine a novel on the order of The House of Sand and Fog’s immigrant house-flipping tragedy anytime soon. U.S. literary history shines another light. Henry James had to infiltrate the houses of great wealth in order to eviscerate them, but of course, he was born with an entree, coming from a well-off family — so he had to keep current. And Upton Sinclair? He grew up poor and wrote dime novels in his teenage years, a practice which paid for moving his parents into a better apartment. He went undercover in a meat-packing plant to write the country’s most famous whistleblower novel, The Jungle. I’m not really breaking into the brownstones of the Slope, but I’m seeing the day-to-day operations of wealth: the West Indian nannies, the thousand-dollar baby strollers, and the miniscule orange cones across the sidewalk alerting people there is a cord and it’s plugged from the ground-level unit of a brownstone into a large Tesla, owned by a young entrepreneur who dresses like a page out of 2001’s The Hipster Handbook with a wife beater and his rangy hair hooded by a mesh beer hat. Do I gab with my neighbors about real estate, decrying the latest intrusion on this picturesque world, the loss of parking spaces for Citi Bike stands (amounting to around 20 spaces), or about how they are making a killing by Airbnb-ing their upper floors and will continue to do so because their listings are legal? No. We mostly smile and talk about the weather, as the reverse beeping of the Awesome Finish Carpenters van blares while it parks for the fourth week in a row.
On a ramble through the neighborhood, it is de rigeur to hear another sound of such distinction, like a high-powered drilling of one of King Kong’s molars. In actuality, it is a high volume chipper, not so many decibel notches under a jackhammer, for removing the outer layer of that sedimentary stone on a brownstone’s exterior or staircase. This is just one component in that niche larceny called Brownstone Renovation, which boasts over 20 companies locally. When I hear construction, I know in many cases there is a good reason, and I would be a fool not to admit that one of these was to make it better in order to sell at a higher rate than it was bought for, or to charge more money in rent. One can defend everything on some kind of ground, whether moral, high, or low. I’m not interested in extremes, I want some peace. Daily, the chipper starts up, promptly at nine a.m. and three or four hours go by with the block polluted by this noise. Or some days, a landscaping person comes to weed-whack or leaf blow a yard, usually 10 by 10 feet. These noises — the chipper, the weed-whacker, the leaf-blower; the jet-ski when on vacay — these are products of a certain comfortability, and whether earned or inherited, the high blasphemous whine of all those tools sound the same. As a young irritable boy, I was made to weed my family’s miniscule front and back lawns. I used a short two-pronged weeder, grabbing the root of the nettle or dandelion with a heavy gloved hand to safely remove the entire offender. As any bourgeoisie will tell you, the memory of yard work is one of the great reminiscences one can have, because, of course, that time is probably well over or drastically fallen off. I don’t know the station of my neighbors’ souls, but many, although cognizant of money, carry the same memories as me, and possibly the same futile wish that all the prettifying could surcease, but surely it won’t. If I heaved my heart into my mouth, I would risk being seen as a fool, or worse, a rabble-rouser. Yet there could also be a tenuous connection, a forged common ground, and we could share a shrug from across the street at the early morning sound of the chipper or the hundreds of honks at the inconsiderate person who leaves his car, which costs more than a decent house in Detroit, blocking the road after street-cleaning time begins, and all would be sotto voce, the preferred way to express our quiet desperation.
As it should, much is made of Virginia Woolf’s small piece, “The Death of a Moth,” written between the two World Wars. According to W.G. Sebald, “There is no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows as a reader of Virginia Woolf that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls — the souls of those who got away and, naturally, of those who perished.” In keeping with this, the key line is not at all about the moth but the forces outside the room where the moth dies: “Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular.”
Has anything changed? Woolf would say, like Heraclitus before her, that everything is connected, and everyone has a hand in the quilt that makes up our collective life. If quality of life is seeing a few movie stars at a coffee shop, or having a nice park and good schools, you could say Park Slope’s quality is high. Unfortunately, it is ruled by the free market of commerce. It is a unique freedom to have $15 ramen, organic frozen yogurt, and artisanal gelato whenever one wants, the latter two specialty stores being 161 feet away from each other. But a few hundred feet further from where people sit and lick sweetness, men work on brownstones. Many are non-union and some are undocumented and the probability of them getting a working wage commensurate with the type of service provided is slight, especially when some reported working for $12 an hour during a WPIX investigation.
I wish more of my compatriots disbelieved the “construction is good for the economy” crap line that politicians fall over themselves to ape along with myriad statistics, the catnip of rationalization and a bulwark against deep thinking, exercised with faulty aplomb in all presidential debates. We each have our statistics, and it’s easy to find any study to spin our own personal political propaganda, as I have. But does it take a fellow at the Brookings Institute to see the connection between $12 an hour labor and $15 ramen? Or Middle East oil and the ubiquitous SUV’s overfilling the streets in our country? Or those beneficiaries of credit-default swaps, the donors to political parties, and other greedy financiers and the exploding homeless population and rising crime rates — though the figures on white-collar crime are underreported? The day we stop scoffing at the efficacy of the phrase “everything is connected,” belittled by many inner consciences as a platitude, might be a day of reckoning.
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Autumn in New York

williamgass

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/remembering-william-h-gass-1924-2017/"></div>He grew up in the worst of times and died in end times. The Great Depression colored his mind’s eye and President Tweetledum and “The tweet is mightier than the truth” zeitgeist recently told him, Yes, the language can be more perverted and debased than anything heretofore. No matter, for William H. Gass, the world was within the word, the soul inside the sentence, the great texts together made a temple, and he added overly qualified artistry and highly poetic explication to the great chain connecting Joyce to Shakespeare to Homer. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/remembering-william-h-gass-1924-2017/#more-6018" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Remembering William H. Gass 1924-2017

To Tell or Not to Tell

Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in&nbsp;Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications.&nbsp;See What I See, a book of essays, and&nbsp;Especially the Bad Things, stories, were both published by&nbsp;Splice&nbsp;in the Autumn of 2019.

Greg Gerke

Approaching New Consciousnesses: A Conversation with Genese Grill

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think." — Lorraine Hansberry

Philosophy &amp; Critical Theory

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

“Carpenter’s Gothic”: William Gaddis’s Compositional Self

Questioning Minds

A Mutual Bewitchment

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

“Toni Erdmann” and the Anti-Hollywood Ending

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film

True and False Authorities: An Interview with Mark Greif

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil