Tragic Clutter: Reflections on E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley

Not long after I graduated from George Mason, E.L. Doctorow gave a reading on campus. Naturally, I went. 

I have to confess I’ve never quite known what to make of Doctorow.  His worth seems predetermined, as if he has a god status that allows him to float above the realm of MFAs and AWP and New Yorkers desperate to be Novelists. Perhaps this is because I first became aware of his name while memorizing facts for my high school’s academic quiz team: If they asked who wrote Ragtime, my finger was on that buzzer!  Not that I had read the book, but I had memorized his name along with a long list of old influential dead guys—Giotto, Charles Pinckney (“No! No, not a sixpence!”), Giteau—and so I suppose Doctorow, too, seemed like something from the annals of history.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find, ten years later, a vital, mild-mannered, white-haired man who spoke easily to the half-empty auditorium I did my part to fill. Of course, by then I well knew he was a living novelist, and I had read The Book of Daniel for one of my graduate writing classes (Structure of the Novel—it was a good fit for the subject). From that book and from his reputation, I knew that Doctorow was an American novelist—one who does not simply happen to be an American citizen and a novelist, but one who intentionally engages American history and thereby explores what it is to be American.

He was reading that day from his most recent novel, Homer and Langley, and the premise—along with some of his comments—was enough to stick with me until two weeks ago when I finally got around to reading it.  The book is told from Homer Collyer’s point of view—Homer of the infamous Collyer brothers, eccentric pack rats who died in their New York mansion, Langley crushed under a pile of clutter, Homer from malnutrition and dehydration because he was blind and dependent on Langley for care.  It’s a tragedy, and even more of one when you read Doctorow’s version of it—Langley broken by his service in World War I; the lyrical, quasi-lecherous Homer yearning to be loved and experiencing loss of sight in his youth and of hearing in his age.

But Doctorow does a good job of keeping things lively with recounted episodes of Homer’s taking up with the housemaid and offending the family’s most faithful servant, Langley assembling a Ford in the dining room, and Homer befriending a gangster who later ends up seeking refuge with the Collyers.  The first-person is used to good effect, lulling us into understanding how these eccentric episodes come about, though always with hint enough at Langley’s compulsive collecting and theory concocting to remind us that the Collyer brothers’ lives are indeed abnormal.

At his reading, Doctorow posited that people are intrigued by the Collyer brothers because we all have a tendency to let things—objects, clutter—accumulate.  We are haunted by the Collyers because we can see that it wouldn’t take much for our material possessions to overwhelm us.  I think he’s right, but even if you don’t agree, there is a lesson here for the novelist: the book is successful because we end up identifying with Homer.  A person who, if we had met him, would have made us shrink away because of his otherness, here, in fiction, draws us in.  And it isn’t just the commonality of our battle against material clutter—it’s the commonality of being human, limited by our own selves but desiring to be greater somehow, whether through love—as is the case for Homer—or, as for Langley, through wild, creative endeavors.

Life, Vigor, and Independence: Reflections on Steinbeck's East of Eden

Me in Monterey--Steinbeck territory

Percy Lubbock, one of my favorite critics, contends that William Thackeray (author of number 3 on my list of all-time favorite novels, Vanity Fair) was a genius at creating a sweeping impression of life in a certain place at a certain time. However, according to Lubbock, he was an inept scenemaker.  Thackeray failed to create a scene and let it carry itself, even when the opportunity for one arose.  Here’s what Lubbock says:

It is as though he never quite trusted his men and women when he had to place things entirely in their care, standing aside to let them act; he wanted to intervene continually, he hesitated to leave them alone save for a brief and belated half-hour.  It was perverse of him, because the men and women would have acquitted themselves so strikingly with a better chance; he gave them life and vigour enough for much more independence than they ever enjoyed.

I believe the same critique could be applied to Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  I finished reading the book recently, and I’m still finishing his Journal of a Novel, the notes he kept while writing East of Eden. In these notes, he anticipates that people will criticize East of Eden for lacking form or intentional construction.  In fact, the novel is very carefully formed—Steinbeck limits himself to 1,000 words a day because he wants the novel to have a leisurely tone.  More than that, the diversions to the main plot of the Trask family—side stories of the Hamilton family and its members—are part of Steinbeck’s plan of allowing the book to represent life in the Salinas Valley.  He even considers titling the book My Valley to show that the book is bigger than just the Trask family.

None of these considerations, in my opinion, is the reason East of Eden ends up being a bit of a let-down. I appreciated the simple tone of a family history, or even, almost, of a Bible story; I liked the colorful episodes of Olive Steinbeck’s airplane ride or Tom and Dessie’s time together.  Novels are allowed to sprawl a little—or at least, should be allowed to, as long as the characters and episodes hold interest and contribute to the overall gestalt, as is the case here.  These little tangents do indeed help build a sense of the place and the people. 

East of Eden is a response to the Cain and Abel story, and not just a response—by which I mean, it takes the themes and emphasizes certain points, such as Steinbeck’s emphasis of “Thou mayest triumph over sin” as mankind’s ultimate hope and goal—but a re-enactment.  What I’m about to say could count as a plot spoiler, except that Steinbeck himself is so blatant about paralleling the Cain and Abel story, the main events were already spoiled for you back when Genesis was written. So, we know that the novel is going to boil down to the conflict between Adam (Adam!) Trask’s sons, Cal/Cain and Aron/Abel.  We’ve already been through this Cain and Abel conflict in the previous generation when Charles, Adam’s brother, tried to kill Adam because their father loved Adam but not Charles. 

It would be wrong not to acknowledge Steinbeck’s genius here.  He takes an old story, yes, but he particularizes the characters and the circumstances so well that within the novel we have a clear and vivid sense of not only the conflict and its causes but also how that conflict and its causes repeat themselves through generations.  That’s no small thing to capture, and Steinbeck certainly succeeds here.

But, because we already know the outcome of the Cain and Abel story, particularizing it is everything to the novel’s success.  However, when we get down to what should be the scene in which Cal reveals to Aron the truth of who their mother is, a truth that Cal knows will kill a part of Aron, we never get that scene!  We end up piecing that scene together, and even an image or two from it, but the scene is not presented as scene and allowed to stand on its own.  

As a writer, I know that intentional choice lies behind much of the work (I say much because there’s still that mysterious part when you over-write yourself and achieve more than you in your conscious efforts could ever have managed).  I also know that I should trust Steinbeck in East of Eden.  But where he has been successful in drawing nuanced and complex characters, especially in Cal and Aron, it is a let down of the sort Lubbock articulates when he says that the author gave them life and vigor enough for much more independence than they ever enjoyed.

Now, Steinbeck is not Thackeray.  Thackeray does indeed have a way of letting the narrator speak over his characters, and for them, quite blatantly.  In fact, that narratorial voice is his charm.  But Steinbeck has a similar tendency, if subtler, to speak for his characters in East of Eden.  I’m thinking of where he introduces Cathy, the Eve character, and prefaces it by a long section which begins “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.” He even goes one farther than Thackeray by acknowledging the narrator is John Steinbeck’s own persona.  And so it seems to me that he, like Thackeray, falls into a trap of keeping his hand too carefully on his characters.  Steinbeck was out to reflect on the Cain and Abel story; even if he doesn’t intervene as continually as does Thackeray, he still fails to trust his characters enough—fails to leave things in their care and stand aside to let them act.

Insight, Not Information: Reflections on Sands Hall's Catching Heaven

Last August, in one of my follow-up posts to the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, I talked about Sands Hall, the novelist who led workshop the day my chapter was up for discussion.  She is one of those people that when you see her, you know instantly you’ve found someone intelligent and capable—and the more you get to know her, the more the impression proves true.  At Squaw Valley, she runs an “open workshop,” an afternoon session in which writers read a page or two of their prose out loud, and then Sands leads discussion of it.  I never got to attend one of these sessions, since I was busy with another workshop in that time slot, but I heard they were great.  What made Sands so good a workshop leader in the normal workshop format (where writing is distributed and read in advance) was her wisdom in trusting the writer’s intent and guiding the discussion towards how to improve upon that intent, rather than letting the workshop group dither on about how to change things in ways the author might not want.  My case in point: Sands trusted that my use of a third-person narrator outside of the characters was intentional, and she asked for the workshop to discuss where it was working and where it needed a tune-up, rather than let people talk on about how I should get rid of it.

So, when you find an intelligent, capable novelist, you naturally want to read her work.  Which is what I did some months ago when I treated myself to Catching Heaven by Sands Hall.

It is the story of two sisters, both artists in their way, but Maud is the truly artistic spirit.  She is a searcher and sojourner whose heart has been broken by the crass selling-out Hollywood requires but who remains steadfast in her love of Shakespeare and the life-changing transport she believes acting can be.  Lizzie, a painter, expresses her creativity not simply through her paintings but also through her family life.  She has three children, and while her difficulty in committing to a husband provides much of the book’s conflict, her life is yet the more stayed version of family and job that Maud lacks.  The chapters rotate among the third-person limited perspectives of Maud, Lizzie, and Jake, the father of Lizzie’s most recent child, and while all three characters are intertwined and important, Maud comes through, in my opinion, as the real interest of the story.  Her presence is so clearly rendered, not just through her own sections but in other sections where Lizzie’s children look to her as the cool aunt or where Jake encounters her in a restaurant and feels drawn to her free-spirited, but sad, aura.

Not long ago, I came across the very simple but very true observation that, when it comes to character, information does not equal insight.  Lesser novelists have a tendency to heap on information, thinking it makes their character interesting and quirky if they tell that the character eats ketchup on her scrambled eggs or likes the color blue.  But these things alone don’t add up to any sense of vision.  Consider instead how Flaubert, say, in Madame Bovary makes Emma’s love of Paris not just part of her likes and dislikes, but a key to her psyche.  She takes this city that she has never visited and builds it up into something grand and beautiful, romanticizing it to the point that it becomes another vehicle through which her own provincial life becomes intolerable to her—dull, boring, mundane.  Thus, it’s not information that she orders magazines about Paris life; it’s insight, down to the very frivolity and desire for novelty implied by a light periodical.    

As I mentioned, I read Catching Heaven a few months ago.  The piece of it that stuck with me the most and that will continue to stay with me is Maud’s love of Shakespeare.  This isn’t just the cheap laying on of information; instead, Hall uses Shakespeare to shape Maud’s very being. Shakespeare provides the key to Maud’s depth of feeling and the lens through which she views the world, thereby becoming an animating feature of both the character and the novel itself.  To my mind, this is the real achievement of Catching Heaven, and one with a lovely side effect: it will make you want to revisit Shakespeare for yourself.

Speaking of the line between information and insight, perhaps the best information I could give to offer a sense of Sands Hall herself is this—when introducing herself, Sands said, “Sands, like sands of time.”  Of course.  Not “shifting sands” or “sands like the beach,” but “sands of time,” with all its ring of sagacity.

The Art of Being Brief

At long last, I've taken the plunge into the world of Twitter.  While I was at it, I added a few handy dandy features to this blog.  On your right, you'll see "FOLLOW BY EMAIL," which will allow you to get my new posts straight to your inbox so you'll never miss another one.  You'll also see "FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER."  Self-explanatory.  And if you scroll down a bit on the right-hand side, you'll see a button you can hit to share my blog on Facebook. 

Thanks for reading! 

Prosaic Poetry, Poetic Prose: Reflections on James Wood's "Becoming Them"

In my last post, I highlighted a few phrases from Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem that failed to achieve anything fresh or original.  Those phrases included “equations to solve,” “history to question,” and “the impossible vocabulary of sorrow.”  Then, this past week while reading James Wood’s article “Becoming Them” in The New Yorker, I came upon the phrase, “the plagiarism of inheritance.”

Wow!  It was one of those gong moments where an initial crash subsequently opens out into something larger and more beautiful in its resonance.  I immediately stopped in my reading to let my mind open up all the possibilities of that new and fresh idea.  The plagiarism of inheritance.

So why was Wood’s phrase so effective while those of Blanco’s poem weren’t?  As I said in that earlier post, Blanco’s phrases rely on literal or tired ideas: it’s no secret that we solve equations and question history, while “the impossible vocabulary of sorrow” is just another way of saying “unspeakable tragedy” or reiterating how words so often fail us when trying to console the bereaved or express grief.  None of that is new. 

But Wood’s phrase, the plagiarism of inheritance, pairs two ideas that don’t usually get paired, and what’s even more delicious is that the pairing includes a paradox of sorts. An inheritance is something received by right—someone has dictated that you should have something, and so it is yours.  Plagiarism, on the other hand, means wrongfully taking, or as Merriam Webster defines it, “to steal and pass off as one’s own.”  Inheritance=something given.  Plagiarism=something stolen.  Inheritance involves something one has a legal right to.  Plagiarism originates with something that does not belong to the plagiarizer. There’s also a nice contrast of passivity and activity (to inherit, one does little else except be the one named as receiver; to plagiarize, one actively commits wrong).

So the phrase itself is rich in the texture of its meaning.  But if you read the essay from which it comes, you’ll see that it’s even more brilliant in how it captures the entire point and spirit of the essay in just four words.  As the title “Becoming Them” implies, Wood’s article is about the pain of losing one’s parents paired with the pain and joy of finding oneself, as one ages, to be nothing more than an unoriginal copy of the parent.  Here’s the passage in which the phrase appears:

Sometimes I catch myself and think, self-consciously, You are now listening to a Beethoven string quartet, just as your father did.  And, at that moment, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and rebellion.  Rebellion, for all the obvious reasons.  Satisfaction, because it is natural to resemble one’s parents, and there is a resigned pleasure to be had from the realization.  I like that my voice is exactly the same pitch as my father’s, and can be mistaken for it.  But then I hear myself speaking to my children just as he spoke to me, in exactly the same tone and with the same fatherly melody, and I am dismayed by the plagiarism of inheritance.  How unoriginal can one be?  I sneeze the way he does, with a slightly theatrical whooshing sound….

That one phrase, the plagiarism of inheritance, captures the complex feelings Wood’s article gives voice to of being caught, both happily and mournfully, in the great system of loss and gain, the conflict we all feel of clinging to the familiar while longing to do or say or be something new, original, and entirely our own.  To embed that complexity in a phrase of four words is to achieve the economy of poetry. 

So don’t let form fool you.  Just because something is intended to be a poem does not make it poetic; likewise, keep awake for how poetry can sneak up on you, even in prose.

Post-Walt: Reflections on the 2013 Inaugural Poem

A couple weeks ago, my cousin mentioned he had watched the inauguration, so I asked what he thought about the inaugural poem, "One Today" by Richard Blanco.  He confessed he wasn't fond of it because it seemed to jump around and include everything from puppies to butterflies to rainbows.  I hadn't yet read it or watched it, but I immediately suspected Blanco was going for the sort of wide-ranging cataloging that Walt Whitman was so good at.  There is something very American, after all, in the eclectic and expansive spirit behind such cataloging.

But when I later read Blanco's poem, I confess that I, too, was disappointed.  I shared my reasons with several of my family members, who do not have poetry backgrounds, and I realized that I take the skill of close reading for granted.  So in case any of you out there had a similar negative reaction to the inaugural poem but couldn't quite put your finger on why, you might enjoy taking a look at my thoughts.  And if you have a close reading or opinion of your own, please share it in the comments section below.

To articulate why Blanco's poem leaves me cold, I'd like to continue the comparison to Whitman.  You'll find listing and cataloging throughout Whitman's works, but "I Hear America Singing" offers a good and manageable sample, one that is probably familiar even to those who do not have a poetry background.  You can read the poem here. 

Now take a look at a stanza from Blanco's poem:

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches 
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

Look at that first line: "All of us as vital as the one light we move through."  There's a very prosy and prosaic quality here that falls flat, and it falls flat because it delivers its message in a flat-out manner.  Compare that to Whitman, who never says "All of our songs are vital to America"; instead, that message is in the spirit of the poem, and he never uses the hackneyed imagery of "light" over and over as the above stanza does.  Lest you think I'm picking on this piece of Blanco's poem unfairly, check out the final stanza where you'll find even more tired ideas: stars, mapping constellations, hope.  

But back to the stanza I quoted above.  The diction itself is unoriginal: equations to solve (check, yes, that is what one does with equations); history to question (again, nothing fresh here); the impossible vocabulary of sorrow (unspeakable tragedy, anyone?).  How prosaic; how predictable; how it fails to sing.  An advocate of Blanco's poem might argue that the mundane quality is part of the point of his vision of America, but I don't see support for such a reading.  Instead, the poem strives to create a sense of awe towards the varied world, as in the "gorgeous din of honking cabs, buses launching down avenues" in stanza  5.   Phrases like these seem to ask us to find the poetic in the everyday, but to me, a descriptive verb like "launching" or an adjective like "gorgeous" sounds more like the effort of a student completing an exercise in descriptive writing than the authentic ring of originality.  Blanco, like Whitman, writes in what we would call American plain style.  The difference is that Whitman never tries to contort a verb into imprecise description that sounds vaguely poetic, like "yawning to life" (stanza 2) or "crescendoing into our day" (ibid).  

Clearly I'm not a fan of "One Today," but I'm even less a fan of it as an inaugural poem because it is, in my opinion, unforgivably tied to the self.  Lines like "my father’s cutting sugarcane so my brother and I could have books and shoes" and "ring up groceries as my mother did for twenty years, so I could write this poem" insert the poet himself, Richard Blanco, into the poem.  The "I" in Whitman, by comparison, is a sort of universal or bardic "I," not I, Walt Whitman.  

Whitman, of course, never wrote an inaugural poem.  But Frost's "The Gift Outright," which was an inaugural poem, uses a poetic, bardic voice, not the voice of Frost the individual.  (Notice, too, how it leaves the reader with an emotion, a sense of the country's past, and a thought-provoking twist in those final lines.) Like Frost, Elizabeth Alexander, last term's inaugural poet, spoke in terms of "we", and when "I" surfaces in her "Praise Song for the Day," it is in the voice of others who have come before: 

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.

Perhaps all this talk of American poetry has left you hungry for more.  Or better yet, maybe you want to exercise your own close-reading muscles.  You might enjoy picking up a copy of The Poets Laureate Anthology, which represents America's poets laureate from 1937, when the first Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress was named, to 2009. Yes, I worked on the book as permissions coordinator; no, I don't benefit from your purchase of a copy.  I can simply vouch for it as a quality book, and one that comes to mind when thinking of poetry and American government.

Two Words: Reflections on the new Anna Karenina movie

As I said in my post of September 7, I had great hope for the new movie version of Anna Karenina.  Though I don’t ever expect a movie to replicate the experience of reading the book, that doesn’t mean good adaptations can’t be made. 

Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley gets off to a great start.  The pacing is quick, like the novel’s.  There are touches of humor, as in the bureaucrats stamping their papers in unison and Levin’s awkward lack of urban finish.  The foreshadowing is nice but not overdone; Anna’s son is shown playing with a model train, for example.  And everyone is whistling, humming, carrying the jaunty and very Russian tune of Tchaikovsky’s 4^th Symphony.  A lot of these masterful touches are facilitated by the smart and interesting choice to film the story as if it’s taking place in a theater.  This also underscores how “on stage” Russian society made people to be, a fact which becomes part of Anna’s undoing.  So here again, the movie is true to the book without representing absolutely everything exactly as Tolstoy has it.  The cast, too, is really wonderful, and they nail their characters throughout.

But, after this fantastic beginning,