It may be that I don’t know the first thing about poetry.
It may be that I’m rapidly bearing down on that age–the big three-five–that on its own magnifies the significance of mortality literature. [Worry not; post author seems to be making a joke. --Ed.]
Or, it may be that the folio of Updike poetry in the March 16 New Yorker truly is the treasure it seems on first read.
The sequence includes 10 poems, most of them written in November and December last year. For the biographically minded, they seem to span some wintertime spent in Tucson, some days in the hospital in Boston for pneumonia, and the discovery that his lung cancer was metastsizing.
More ardent Updike followers will be unsurprised at the naked honesty of these lines–his longing, his worry, his embarrassment, his nostalgia. For me, though, what the poet offers of himself is arresting and invigorating and a clarion call to the storytelling-inclined.
That’s not, I should underline, the consequence of mere revelation or confession. It isn’t details of a biopsy or tax return that send me scurrying to the Mac to start tapping away at a new story. Rather, it’s how Updike scoops up the abundant, disorderly, imperfect fragments of life, and makes art. He is the sculptor who gathers his clay from the creekbank behind his home, the painter who adds pigment to his oils from the dust of his own front yard.
He acknowledges as much in one of the poems, “Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth,” a tribute that includes these lovely, instructive lines:
Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you
scant hundred of you, for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,
twin, and fatso–all a writer needs,
all there in Shillington, its trolley cars
and little factories, corn fields and trees,
leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.
The humility, I think, is part of the brilliance, for it enables the art’s authenticity. Can you teach that? I suspect not–in Updike’s case, at least, humility seemed hardwired. Here’s Tobias Wolff’s recollection from January 30:
I didn’t know John Updike. We met just twice, briefly, but the first occasion has stayed with me. We were both up for an award which he eventually won, and before the ceremony the finalists had gathered for drinks in a home near the venue. Updike was by far the most senior of us, in every respect, and we were shy in his presence, and in our shyness we stood apart from him and talked nervously among ourselves. Then I heard him say to our hostess, “They hate me,” and I was so mortified at this misunderstanding, and so touched by his vulnerability, that I immediately joined him, and soon enough the others drifted over as well. He actually seemed relieved! Of course he could not have been kinder or more encouraging.
That award, I’m assuming, was the 2004 PEN/Faulkner. Updike was nominated for his The Early Stories, Wolff for Old School. I was there with Anne–not for the cocktail hour, obviously, but for the award presentation. And while I was consumed with my own issues, I did have enough of the Watcher in me to spend a few moments observing the other writers, and we peons, swirl around Updike. He was gracious, patient, good-humored, just what you’d want to be if you were in his shoes at that instant.
For the moment, at least, you’ll need a subscription if you want to read the folio online. If you aren’t a subscriber, to whet your appetite enough to go out and buy the issue, here’s the second half of the first poem, “Spirit of ‘76″:
Your wait is over: Below is the cover of Jess Anthony’s novel. Rovar Akos Pfliegman will include two pounds of flank steak if you order today.
Optionally, add $3.50 for dry ice.
Courtney says I’m overdue for typing some sentences about the end of Updike. (That’s true, though what I’ll say in a few days will resemble Emily Barton in Granta more than Richard Ford in the New Yorker.)
But before I go there, a few words on Alan Cheuse’s new novel, To Catch the Lightning, which I picked up in October, read in November, and have thought about often.
Last week in Salon, Laura Miller reviewed Elaine Showalter’s take on American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers. This was the paragraph that sent me back again to Alan’s wonderful book:
America is the first nation united by ideas rather than a shared cultural and racial history, and foremost among those ideas is the paradigm of self-invention, via hard work, in the free territory of the frontier. Our literary culture has always hankered after fiction that, in one way or another, embodies this hope. “The answer to the American quest for originality,” Showalter writes, “seemed to lie in the coming of the poet-hero, a genius who, through divine inspiration, would create immortal works, and an art commensurate with the vastness of the nation and the scope of its dreams.” Only such a protean figure could sum up the whole country in a single work. This in turn led to the fantasy of the Great American Novel — and also to a condition that I like to think of as Great Literary American Novel Syndrome, a term whose acronym, GLANS, gives you a pretty good idea of just who’s expected to write the thing.
I’m not going to touch the argument there at the end, which I’d say is basically accurate though not especially useful. But the first half of the paragraph seems right on the money.
I think immediately, as I’m certain Miller and Showalter did, of Twain and Huck Finn. There’s no novel that better exemplifies–or more effectively undermines–the American mythology of self-invention. It’s the touchstone for American writers, most especially those of or writing about the West, where Huck’s Territory has lasted longest. Huck’s fingerprints are all over two of my personal touchstones, Angle of Repose and Cloudsplitter. (The latter feels so much like a Western novel that I forget it’s almost entirely set east of Buffalo.)
To Catch the Lightning is a big book that belongs on the same shelf as the big books of Twain, Stegner, and Banks. It delivers authentically the contest between frontier and society, the self-ruining struggle to save an Other, the longing for a new Eden, the knowledge of that new Eden’s impossibility.
Lest you think it’s all about that thematic stuff, Alan’s novel provides rewards in individual scenes, too–Edward Curtis trying to save his desperately ill son; a crew fighting to keep a boat from smashing up in an Arctic storm; a marvelous series of encounters between Curtis and J.P. Morgan’s entrancing assistant.
I’m guessing that as much as the reader takes from the book, the writer/reader will take more. You’d think, really, that Showalter was describing Edward Curtis with that line: “the poet-hero, a genius who, through divine inspiration, would create immortal works, and an art commensurate with the vastness of the nation and the scope of its dreams.” Curtis’s passion for his art and his subjects is sometimes uncomfortably familiar–thankfully, only sometimes familiar.
Enough yammering about the book. By now, you want a further taste, yes? Here’s 20 minutes of Alan reading at this year’s Key West Literary Seminar.
There’s room to get better, but wow, what a gift. I’ll renew my subscription.
A couple of days ago, the Mason Nostalgia Corner hosted a mini-conversation about whether Annie Proulx was just a Wyoming-hating elitist or an ironical Exaggerator of the Real–the Jessica Anthony perspective.
I hadn’t looked at Proulx from Jess’s perspective, but now I think she’s right (though taste is taste, and I still think Proulx’s a meanie, and I’d rather leave That Old Ace in the Hole at home and lug around some Wallace Stegner on my next camping trip).
What we’re talking about–which is always what we talk about when we talk about writing–is voice.
Which I thought of this morning reading the inside scoop on the Booker pick of The White Tiger. The head guy says:
The most beautiful book is Barry’s. It is a glorious piece of writing with not a word misplaced. It was painful to all of us that it did not win. It was a close call, anyway. If I had to describe why it lost out to Adiga’s, it was because there were more questions about Barry’s plot. Had every part of it been convincingly told? Was its denouement plausible? Adiga won out too because his angle seemed so fresh, writing about India from the viewpoint of a village boy who makes his way to the city where he and his master are corrupted.
So Adiga is to Proulx as Barry is to Stegner. At the end of the deliberations, it probably didn’t really matter whether The White Tiger contained just as many plot holes as The Secret Scripture. Adiga found the voice for that village boy and it carried the book.
There are loads of novels and stories, obviously, that thrive without a particularly distinctive voice. I’m in the middle of The Plot Against America, and it’s about the farthest thing from Portnoy, but it’s carrying me along fine. American Pastoral was even better, and I don’t remember it for its voice. I remember the magnificent characters, the magnificent storytelling, a dinner-table scene that runs fluidly for about a hundred pages. (I know, I know: A strong argument is that The Storyteller is a voice of its own…)
The way I figure, in my oversimplified, ultra-non-litcrit way, the real masterpieces are the tales that could stand on their own no matter who did the typing, but also have a voice you’ll never forget. Augie March is the most-recently read in that category for me. There are many others.
That brings me back to Jess, actually. I read an early draft of The Convalescent a while ago (it’s got to be coming out any day now, right?), and it really stuck with me, much more than your average story of a sickly Hungarian meatcutter should. It’s the brilliant voice. It carries the book.
Oops.
Monday night we were out for a nice neighborhood walk and a stop at the ice cream shop. We walked past Changing Hands, and I started seeing all the signs: retired English professors I used to know, hipster girls with Kindles on gold chains around their necks, scruffy guys muttering about how “nobody in workshop understands the pathetic fallacy.” Yeah, I’d completely forgotten about T.M. McNally’s reading.
So, I accept my seven writerly demerits, and I guarantee you I’ll do better next time. Over the next few weeks, it won’t be hard.
For starters, we’ve got three Pulitzer winners in eight days. Marilynne Robinson is reading tonight at 8pm at UA in Tucson, and will stick around to say something about Wallace Stevens tomorrow afternoon. (James Wood has this take on her new novel, Home.)
Monday night, it’s Junot Díaz, who’s at Changing Hands to read from Oscar Wao. If you like New York, or Tolkein, or the Dominican Republic, or genius writers, you have to go. If you just like a lot of cursing from the podium, you have to go. If you can’t go (I really can’t imagine a good reason), you have to read the novel, which he worked on forever. If you can’t do that, you have to read Drown. The stories in that book can change your life in 20 minutes.
Then a week from Saturday, Jane Smiley will be at the Tempe Center for the Arts. You have to go to hear her, too. No excuses. There’s not even an ASU game that night. And maybe she’ll read one of the 900(?) sex scenes from Ten Days in the Hills.
After that, there’s a little break. But then Len “Let Me Tell You About Pultizers” Downie from the Post is in town for a lecture on October 16. And for the poets in the audience, Charles Simic (yet another Pulitzer winner) will be here November 6, reading at ASU.
Sandwiched in between those two, on Oct. 30 at Changing Hands is none other than… Alan Cheuse. You MUST go to that reading. (Or, at least, I have to go. He taught me absolutely everything I know. (He did the same for Norman Mailer; evidence at right.)) He’ll be reading from his new novel, To Catch the Lightning, which examines the life of nineteenth-century photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. If Alan’s last artist novel, The Light Possessed, is any guide, this new work is going to be spectacular.
All I read of David Foster Wallace was his piece on Roger Federer in the Times Play Magazine two years ago. I didn’t finish his Atlantic item on talk-radio hosts. I think I skipped over his last story in the New Yorker, a short piece with paragraphs that were way too long. No Infinite Jest for me. And still, though I had no particular attachment, I find that I’m shaken by his death.
He was still young, a member of that amazing group of writers who did their MFAs at UA in the mid-1980s (Richard Russo, Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson were some of the others); I’m sure his age is one reason I’m still thinking about him a couple of days after the news broke. And maybe more important, he was still young in his writer’s voice; the one thing I held onto from the Federer piece was his enthusiasm for his subject. It was invigorating. It was great reading.
My first reaction, when I read the account in the LA Times, was a spurt of anger–You did that to your wife? The obituary in the NY Times quelled that; he’d been suffering for a long time:
James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.
“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
So no anger now (except at that devil depression). I’m off to read this story, from 10 years ago in Harper’s. The New Republic has a good selection of additional links, for the uninitiated.
Update: A fine eulogy from Laura Miller in Salon, here.
I’m not saying the current crop of New Yorker fiction writers are fit to sharpen the pencils of Whitman and Chekhov.
But you’ve got to admit, the Wordle cloud generated from the fiction dept’s RSS feed is just as interesting as the “Song of Myself” cloud–if not as sublime. The same holds true comparing the hip little Yorkers to the cloud produced from Constance Garnett’s translation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog” and a few other stories.
(Bob Dylan’s song titles beat them all.)
The clouds are rising, the wind is stirring, the temperature’s dropping. To 108.
So the monsoon’s here (though no rain until July 15, I’ll guess). That means it’s time to visit Narrative’s new issue, available here, and spend a few minutes with a good summertime piece by Tito.
The title alone, “Arizona, the Sun, and What That’s Like,” gives you the flavor–drowsy, maybe playful, a little menace beneath the ease. Here’s the opening section:
1.
April in Arizona, the orange blossoms
In heat, their scent makes bees of us all.
The corners of the great American Southwest,
The orange and brown bricks, the lazy half-blue
Jacaranda, the red bougainvillea everywhere,
Thorny behemoths of the Great Mexican North,
That blood color, so much on so many white walls,
The smells of creosote, the coyote sounds at night—
This place, everything, gives itself freely to you.
Everything sings its own song, strange and plain.
But a cloudy day—don’t believe it:
There are no cloudy days.
Five bonus points for using the word “Jacaranda.” Five more for not worrying about creosote and coyote cliches. By the end, he earns it all. Really, go read the thing. (Register, if you haven’t already.)
As for the rest of the issue: Like always, it’s well-stocked with splendid employment of the latest word processing software. There’s a novel excerpt from Dick Bausch. There’s a vote against ExxonMobil from a certain Yaak Valley terrorist. And there’s an essay from Maud, too, “Conversations You Have at Twenty.” It won the silver in Narrative’s Love Story contest. For sure, TMI for Elwyn Brooks White, but it’s fine writing. Well done.
It’s hard not to be bored by ahem, love stories like the weekend piece in the Times on Mr. Obama’s book deals: The bitter literary agents remembering when nobody knew the guy’s name… the Washington heavies telling the bitter literary agents how it’s gonna be from now on… the repeated declarations that Barack did all his own writing and needed little editing… the teaser about the children’s book to come (giving a new flavor to this MoDo column)…
But taking all these politco-lawyerly types out of their natural habitat has its risks. Here’s Doug Baird, a UChicago law professor, trying to play T.S. Eliot with the allusions:
Professor Baird called Mr. Obama at Harvard and asked if he was interested in teaching. “I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that, ‘Well, in fact, I want to write this book.’ What he really wanted was the Virginia Woolf equivalent of a clean, well lighted room.”
Well, what I want is a Hemingway story where Francis Macomber gradually turns into Nicole Kidman over hundreds of years. Yeah. That would be the bomb.
