Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

J. Michael Lennon (The Bat Segundo Show #523)

It’s easy to dog on Norman Mailer for his indiscretions, which include stabbing his wife and Jack Henry Abbott. But he was also one of the most fiercely impetuous, wildly original, and unapologetically emotional writers the 20th century has ever known. We talk with Mailer’s biographer, J. Michael Lennon, to discuss the conflicts and contradictions within Mailer’s legacy.
[MP3, 63 minutes]

[Notes and partial transcript]

J. Michael Lennon is most recently the author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life. This conversation also references essays contained in the new Mailer collection, Mind of an Outlaw.

Author: J. Michael Lennon

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Subjects Discussed: Mind of an Outlaw, Jonathan Lethem’s thoughts on Mailer, why Mailer couldn’t control his expressive impulses, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Gary Gilmore, addressing thoughts raised by Richard Brody concerning why Mailer didn’t mine from his boyhood, Mailer’s relationship with Brooklyn, the difficulty of finding out about Mailer’s high school days, Mailer vs. Bellow, Mailer’s mayoral results vs. Anthony Weiner’s mayoral results, the formation of Mailer’s politics, how Mailer was manipulated by the Kennedys, Mailer’s bizarre filmmaking career, the “Oh god! Oh man!” moment from Tough Guys Don’t Dance, the Rip Torn/Norman Mailer brawl during the filming of Maidstone, D.A. Pennebaker, the spirit of assassination summer, Mailer as Norman T. Kingsley, when Method acting goes too far, Rip Torn’s Mailer-like qualities, Mailer taking out ads where he quoted from his bad reviews, William Buckley’s joke on Mailer, how Mailer was played as a fool by the literary community before The Armies of the Night, writing An American Dream as a serial novel, Mailer’s hot streak during the late 1960s, Mailer’s battle to write during The Deer Park, prolificity and deadlines, Mailer’s convoluted form of writing discipline, Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain as model, sprint writing, Mailer’s inability to fulfill his ambitious multi-novel project in the 1970s, setting crazed ambitions, the sporadic quality of Mailer’s fiction, Lethem’s “Mailer is parts” assessment, Mailer’s sense of humiliation, Jack Henry Abbott, why Mailer’s efforts to spring Abbott weren’t as influential as people thought, how Mailer left Abbott to be cared for by Norris, why people believed in Mailer, the belief culture of the 1970s, Abbot’s murder of Richard Adan, Mailer’s famous “culture is worth a little risk” remark, Mailer’s belief that there was a morsel of good within very evil people, literature as a way to save your soul, Mailer’s willingness to appear foolish at a press conference after Abbott vs. Dave Eggers’s silence in response to Abdulrahman Zeitoun, Cynthia Ozick’s famous response to Mailer in Town Bloody Hall, Germaine Greer’s desire to sleep with Mailer, Mailer’s disastrous positions on feminism and women writers, Mailer’s simultaneous fury and chivalry, Mailer’s forthcoming letter collection, the stabbing of Adele Morales, why Lennon didn’t reveal details about his telephone conversation with Adele, responding to Louis Menand’s criticisms, The Last Party, how Adele has lived in recent years, other first-hand accounts of the party, Mailer’s diary, why the literary community forgave Mailer easily and ganged up on Adele Mailer (and blamed her for the stabbing!), what men were able to get away with in the pre-feminism days, Mailer’s bizarre pattern recognition schemes, his interest and Reich and the orgone box, the Kakutani file, Mailer’s attempt to connect biorhythms to a football team’s success, why Mailer was receptive to charlatans, how Mailer detected bad omens in rooms, transcendentalism, Mailer’s numerous accents, Dwight Macdonald, Brendan Behan, Mailer’s love for The Sopranos, Mailer’s attempts to escape his identity, why people kept coming back to Mailer, Mailer’s desire to know other people’s stories, Mailer’s sensitivity to interruptions, serving as Mailer’s bartenders, Mailer’s relationship with Gore Vidal, Mailer referring to himself in the third person in his nonfiction, Occupy Wall Street, how The Armies of the Night came about, Picasso’s influence, Henry Adams, early stylistic versions of The Armies of the Night, the difficulties of putting yourself in a story, Mailer’s formidable memory during The Armies of the Night, Robert Lowell, the 1967 March on the Pentagon, Noam Chomsky’s influence on Armies, how Alfred Kazin and Joan Didion’s reviews saved Mailer’s reputation, the contemporary decline of culture, cultural engagement, and contemplating whether today’s conditions could allow for a Mailer type today.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I want to get into this book by tying it into this recently published collection, Mind of an Outlaw, which I also have right here and I have also been reading. Jonathan Lethem’s introduction contends with thoughts he had previously voiced in an essay that was collected in The Ecstasy of Influence. He points out that he “buried the man before I even began to try to figure out how to praise him.” Part of accepting Mailer, I have found in both reading the biography and in reading the essays and in reading various other work, is that you have to put up with the fact that he will say something utterly brilliant one minute and then he’ll say something utterly foolish the next. He will trash Waiting for Godot without actually bothering to see it. He will dig himself out of a hole of his own making. So why do you think Mailer could not really control these expressive impulses? Why did he need to court disaster?

Lennon: Well, you know, some questions answer themselves by being asked. He couldn’t control his impetuous nature. He was — I’ve said it many times — the most impetuous person I’ve ever met in my life. If he felt the instinct, he followed the instinct. And that’s part of it. His notion of the existential life was “Listen to what’s going on inside you. Don’t preplan everything. Don’t have guidelines and rules and restrictions and guide ropes. Jump into life.” And what did he say? He said, “It’s better to expire as a devil in a fire than an angel in the wings.” So it was part of his nature to be that way. And so he got himself in a lot of trouble. With the feminists, with literary critics, with his friends. By being impetuous, outrageous. In his literary criticism, I felt that it was sitting next to him in a little bar in Provincetown, drinking bourbon with him, and listening to tell stories about Gore Vidal and James Jones. Because his literary criticism can’t be separated from his intimate personal knowledge of them.

Correspondent: This is the rare case where you actually have to know his life to know his work.

Lennon: Yes, I think you do. I really do.

Correspondent: Well, the title of this book comes from a famous passage in Mailer’s essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” where he points to how American history was moving along two rivers: one visible, the other underground. Mailer also spent much of his life trying to wrestle with this saint and the psychopath duality, which he was later to apply to Gary Gilmore. You’ve traced the origins of this to Mailer reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and I’m wondering to what degree Mailer’s dualities come from concepts that he read and he wished to hold onto in his mind and he wished to play around with in this elastic, impetuous nature of expression.

Lennon: I think that the reading came a little bit later, but it was a confirmation. He was forever finding confirmations for what he sensed were the two people living inside him. And where did that come from? Well, I think initially it came from the fact that, when he was a young boy growing up in New Jersey and in Brooklyn, he was the center of attention. Everything was focused on him. And yet when he went out into the Brooklyn streets, he was a skinny little kid. There were a lot of Irish tough guys around. He was fearful. He was timid. He was small. And he realized that there was this gap between the two sides of his life. He was no one on the streets and he was everyone at home. I think that was the beginning of it. And then he looked for confirmation of that in places. And when he read Kierkegaard, seeing that there were a lot of connections between the saint and the psychopath and in their passionate way of living their lives, he realized there’s the clue. That was one of the clinchers for him. Absolutely.

Correspondent: What’s interesting though is that you point out that there really isn’t a lot of information about his high school days.

Lennon: Right.

Correspondent: And I’m wondering. What searches did you do to try to find something out? I mean, was it just that everybody was dead? Or nobody wanted to talk? What happened here?

Lennon: My chief sources for his high school years were some of the other biographies where people interviewed some of his friends, but also his sister. His sister and her best friend Rhoda: two young women who were a couple of years younger than Norman, but who watched him. They knew his girlfriends. They knew what was going on. They found him to be an utterly charming person. But Mailer said that his life was kind of quiet. He’d go to high school. Everybody thought he was studious, quiet, boring. And when he went home, he had to do homework. He had to go to Hebrew class, religious classes which he loathed, but he went anyway for a long time. And there wasn’t really that much time. I mean, the friends that he had said Norman didn’t get out much. They kept him on a close leash. I know that somebody just wrote a piece on the New Yorker blog.

Correspondent: Richard Brody, yeah.

Lennon: Richard Brody. Wonderful piece. But he said Mailer never wrote a Brooklyn novel. He did. He wrote a novel called No Percentage and it’s set in Brooklyn. He also wrote thirty short stories about Brooklyn when he was in college. So, you know, writing thirty short stories, writing an unpublished and unpublishable novel which is set in Brooklyn, and then, of course, The Naked and the Dead has a couple of real Brooklyn characters in it. Writes Barbary Shore, which is also a Brooklyn novel. I think he was sick of Brooklyn by the middle ’50s and he didn’t want to write about it anymore and he felt that not much happened to him in high school. There wasn’t an awful lot to write about. He was a good student, but good students were boring. I mean, athletes were the heroes.

Correspondent: But it was rather curious. I thought Brody’s essay was extremely interesting.

Lennon: It was.

Correspondent: Because he seemed to think that, because Mailer couldn’t actually look backward in adulthood, this crippled his ability to write fiction. And he had a lot of trouble writing fiction between the years of The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night.

Lennon: Yes, he did.

Correspondent: So is there any kind of biographical information to sort of back that up? Did he make any kind of plunges into his boyhood after these stories you mentioned in later years? Or anything like that?

Lennon: No. Brooklyn was always a touchstone. When he wrote Miami and the Siege of Chicago, he compared Chicago to Brooklyn. He said that they were very similar, that there was a lot of life, that there was a lot of reality, that there were authentic people. He liked that about both Brooklyn and Chicago. Of course, he wrote An American Dream in 1964 and 1965. That was a Manhattan novel. But it was still a quintessential novel. And you got the feeling that Rojack was a guy who had escaped from Brooklyn and made it in Manhattan. And, of course, in those days, that’s what everyone wanted to do if you came from Brooklyn. They wanted to make it in Manhattan. So I think that Brody makes some wonderful points, but I feel that Mailer didn’t want to get bogged down in Brooklyn. Oh, there’s another point too. I was talking with Mailer’s sister about it this morning. And she said, “I can tell you another reason he didn’t want to write another novel about Brooklyn.” She said he read Meyer Levin’s novel, The Old Bunch. And while it’s set in Chicago, he read it and he goes, “This is it! He’s caught the middle-class Jewish family. I can’t ever improve on this!” And he loved that book. So there were multiple reasons for it. But also I think the fundamental reason was that Mailer wanted to play on a bigger stage. He wanted the New York stage and that wasn’t big enough for him. He wanted America to be his stage. He didn’t want to be seen as merely a Brooklyn writer.

Correspondent: It’s interesting how he really admired Meyer Levin, but actually dissed Augie March, which to my mind is the quintessential American novel.

Lennon: I couldn’t agree with you more. But I think Mailer was so competitive with Bellow. He rarely had a good word to say about Bellow until the ’80s. Everything he said about Bellow: Bellow was basically a professor who was spewing out his old ideas from his classes on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and he wasn’t really getting out and experiencing life. Which Mailer felt he was doing. Did he have a good word? You know, in his literary criticism, he finally admitted when he read Henderson and the Rain King, he said, “Alright. I’m going to eat crow. This is a hell of a character worthy of Huckleberry Finn.” So he had that generous streak, but it vied with the competitive steak.

Correspondent: I wanted to actually get into Mailer’s politics. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but I noted this. It’s worth pointing out that when Mailer ran for Mayor of New York in 1969, he received 41,000 votes in the primary. 5% of the vote. That is actually a good deal more than Anthony Weiner, who received a mere 34,192 votes in the recent primary. Times have changed. But you point out in your biography that Mailer came to politics late. You have Jean Malaquais. He prepares this political tutorial for Mailer that he engages in between October ’48 and March 1950. And before this, he’s relying very much on Spengler as his guide.

Lennon: Yes.

Correspondent: He was spurred on to run for Mayor because of the success of “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” which has actually large sections that don’t have anything to do with politics and is more almost a continuation of “The White Negro.” So I’m wondering about this. Why didn’t politics factor into the Mailer psyche earlier than this? Did he need to actually be ushered in with the attention and the adulation? Is that how this worked with him?

Lennon: Yes, it is. You’ve put your finger on it. He found out that he could be a player. Remember in 1948, he campaigned hard for George Wallace. Made thirty speeches.

Correspondent: That’s right.

Lennon: In Hollywood and mainly in New York City. He put his heart into it. He thought that the progressive elements were going to win. Wallace got slaughtered. He got a couple million votes in the entire country. Mailer was completely alienated. And that’s, of course, when he began to go underground. The Village Voice and all the years moving into the country. Trying that out. Moving to Perry Street in the Village and trying that out. Flirting with the Beats and so forth. And then when Clay Felker said, “You know, Mailer’s got huge ambitions. He says he wants to be President of the United States. Maybe he’d be a good guy to cover the 1960 campaign and so forth.” There was no plan to write an essay about Jack Kennedy. It was supposed to be about the Convention. Well, Mailer was just blown away by Kennedy’s good looks, his charm, his war record, and all that. And he wrote the piece. And then he gets a letter in the mail from Jackie Kennedy telling him it’s the best political writing she’s ever read in her life and it’s fantastic and why can’t anybody write like that. And Kennedy wins. And Mailer immediately says, “Well, you know, I helped win this election for Kennedy. I might have shifted some votes.” And it’s possible that he did. Because Esquire was a hot magazine then. People were reading it. Based on that, he decided on the spur of the moment, within a week or two after that article had appeared, he decided to run for Mayor of New York City and jumped in two feet. His sister told me, “You know, we thought he was crazy. You know, we’re a middle-class family. He has no political connections. No ties. We thought he was nuts.” Everybody thought he was nuts. But this was in the period where he had Napoleonic aspirations. He was right on the edge of going really nuts.

Correspondent: Well, the other interesting thing about Kennedy, which is actually quite funny, is that Mailer is very insistent in that essay, “I highly doubt that Kennedy would have planned to say that he had read The Deer Park before The Naked and the Dead.” But we learn. Au contraire. He was advised, “Hey, Jack, if you really want to impress him, why don’t you mention that you read The Deer Park rather than The Naked and the Dead.” So he was so willing to believe that he was the king.

Lennon: That’s right.

Correspondent: And I’m wondering if just having those blinders on is what propelled him. It’s really fascinating that a figure like that could last. I mean, it’s inconceivable today that a figure like that, operating off of pure impetuous blinders, could still be fairly revered. Even in this wandering period where he’s writing all these crazy columns for the Voice and all that.

Lennon: Well, you know, the question of whether Kennedy read The Deer Park is a very vexed question. On the one hand, Kennedy says it. But we know he was briefed to say it. Mailer said, “Well, even if he was briefed, that shows that his advisers had good instincts. And Kennedy hired them. So I like him for that.” But then he got the letter from Jackie Kennedy. And she said in the letter, “I remember Jack reading it on the second floor of the house in Hyannis Port. And he did read it.” I mean, I don’t know whether someone prompted her to say that or whatever. She said, “And then I read it. I read it when I was out on the campaign with Jack.” So whether he actually read it or not, I don’t know. But it doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing Jackie Kennedy would make up. I mean, how important would it be to do that? But maybe she did. The Kennedys were notorious for attention to detail.

Correspondent: My theory is that Jackie actually read it and Jack did not. She’s covering his ass basically, saying, “Well, I happened to read it too!”

Lennon: (laughs) That’s right.

Correspondent: And then she can talk about it with Norman. Because guess what? He’s not going to talk with Kennedy again.

Lennon: That’s a good appraisal. It’s very possible it worked out that way.

The Bat Segundo Show #523: J. Michael Lennon (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Samira Kawash (The Bat Segundo Show #522)

This is the second of two shows devoted to Halloween. Did you know that there was once a chocolate bar called the Chicken Dinner? That cigarette companies once considered candy to be a threat to discretionary spending? Or that candy was used by the military for safety purposes? We didn’t either, until we read Samira Kawash’s Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure. We discuss the serpentine history of candy with the Candy Professor herself!
[MP3, 58 minutes]

[Notes and partial transcript]

Samira Kawash is most recently the author of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure.

Author: Samira Kawash

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Subjects Discussed: The candy bar as a substitute for a sandwich, how the notion of “three meals a day” altered as Americans moved to cities, the candy bar’s evolution between the wars, the Chicken Dinner bar, how the mechanical age caused people to view themselves as engines, how candy manufacturers capitalized on the calorie-happy clime of the 1920s, Ray Brokel, the difficulty of tracking down bygone candy bar flavors, candy as a reflection of cultural taste, why some candy bars have endured to this day, why it’s difficult to reverse engineer a candy bar from the early 20th century, candy and the military, medical fasts and hard candy, how sugar fuels the brain, German chemists and nutritional science, how the German military used lemon drops as a secret weapon, lemon drops built to military specifications, overworked soldiers and increased productivity, comparing sugar and stimulant use among soldiers, drugs and the Vietnam War, modern connections between candy and the military, how trade show candy is foisted upon today’s soldiers, dentists and candy, candy conspiracies, early 20th century candy advertising, how cigarette companies hooked candy lovers on their product, competition and collusion between candy makers and cigarette companies in the 1920s, tobacco’s efforts to grab discretionary spending sapped up by candy, candy as a weight scapegoat, candy cigarettes and chocolate cigars, kids who emulate adults, candy as “a gateway to sin,” oleomargarine, the candy industry’s early hostility to glucose, food reformer Mary Theiss, 1908 warnings of “adulterated” candy, the distinctions between glucose and corn syrup, when corn syrup sounded wholesome, efforts to clean up glucose’s image during the 20th century, overblown fears about corn syrup in the present day, candy used as a restorative in health spas during the First World War, chocolate’s powers as a restorative, The Shotwell Candy Company’s attempts at vitamin-fortified candy bars, nutrition bars, horrific Figurines ads, the unholy alignment between chocolate and nutrition, chocolate’s introduction in Europe, cats who wander around the house, the demise of homemade candy dippers, how machinery affected the rise of candy and cigarettes, the ups and downs of homemade candymaking, gender roles and candymaking, the strange disappearance of candy cookbooks in recent years, the sinister origins of trick-or-treating, allowable pranking within the confines of Halloween, when child gangsters were considered cute, Sylvester Graham, Lulu Hunt Peters and the chocolate cream debouch, the relationship between Christian proselytizers and candy, Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s frightening poem about candy, religion of the body, secular morality, orthorexia, purity of the body, John Kellogg, efforts to capitalize on breakfast, the rise of Sugar Crisp and sugar-based cereals, Robert Choate’s cereal crackdown, the National Confectioners’ Association as a formidable lobbying organization, candy bar portions, dessert portions, the future of artisanal candy,

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Let’s start from the very beginning. There were many things that were fascinating about this book, but one of the things that fascinated me was how you pointed to this period where Americans shifted from a three meals-a-day life, where they were having breakfast in the morning, followed by dinner in the mid-afternoon, followed by supper before bedtime. And then things shifted to a breakfast-lunch-dinner life as Americans moved away from the farms and into more urban and industrial settings. To my great surprise, what was especially astonishing was how the chocolate lunch bar entered the market as a viable snack that could serve in lieu of a sandwich for lunch! I mean, that’s astonishing! The Waleco Sandwich Bar, Kline’s Lunch Bar, the Chicken Dinner Bar. So this is a good place to ask. How did the taste for candy shift from mere snacks to wholesale meal replacements? And also, you say that the taste of the Chicken Dinner Bar, which stopped manufacture around the 1960s, has been lost to history. But surely someone out there has described it. Did people really eat these things? How many of these lunch bars were manufactured? How did this happen?

Kawash: Well, I think I’m going to back up a little.

Correspondent: Okay. Sure!

Kawash: And talk about that transition that you pointed to from three meals a day at home to a much more fast-paced lifestyle that’s familiar to us. I mean, when we say breakfast, lunch, and dinner, what do you think of lunch? Lunch is away from home. Lunch is something fast. Lunch is something convenient. We just don’t have time to sit down for meals. We’re always on the go go go. And since the ’70s, sociologists have been bemoaning the loss of proper meals in our life and looking at the increasing number of our eating occasions which are really snacks. We’re eating things out of packages, on the go, and that’s only increasing. This kind of “eat what I want when I want it” lifestyle. And what people want for those increasing number of snacks is something candy-like. That is to say, something that is portable, something that is tasty, something that is easy to eat, something that isn’t messy. And candy fits the bill perfectly. And what is fascinating about the candy story is that this whole possibility of eating on the go and grabbing something that is almost as substantial as a meal, but out of a package — that starts with candy. And that period of transition when people started leaving the farms and leaving that rural lifestyle where you could come home in the middle of the day and have a substantial meal that would fuel you up for the rest of the afternoon’s labor, that starts fading away at about the same time that candy becomes available as a mass produced product. In the 19th century, there wasn’t that much candy around. And so it was really a treat. You’d go down into town and get a candy stick maybe. You’d hope for some candy in your Christmas stocking. And if you were an adult and you had some money, you could go to the import shop in the city and get some luxurious French bonbons, let’s say. But for most people, most of the time, there just wasn’t that much candy to eat. So towards the end of the 19th century, there’s a huge transformation both in the ways people are living — they’re living faster; they’re living on the move more — and also in the availability of this new kind of food that is portable and also entirely artificial. A new kind of substance in the world.

Correspondent: But how did we get to candy bars replacing sandwiches? I mean, I get that people actually needed something that was packaged and that they could cram into their mouths before going back on the clock. But did people really eat these chocolate sandwiches? Which were often quite humungous!

Kawash: Well, I think that some of the candy bar marketing in this period that we’re talking about — the period between the wars, between the First World War and the Second World War — was the glory days of the candy bar. And this is the period where we see thousands and thousands of new kind of candy bars coming on the market and advertising themselves in all sorts of fanciful ways. And one of the main ways that candy bars position themselves was exactly this — as a substantial meal replacement. When you couldn’t eat a meal, you could eat a candy bar. Now did people eat candy bars instead of meals? It’s hard to say. But we do know that quite a lot of those candy bars had meal-like names. Like you mentioned the Chicken Dinner. The Idaho Spud. The Denver Sandwich. The Lunch Bar. And all of this suggested that people could look at candy bars as something much more than the luxury foods that candy had been understood to be in the 19th century, that candy was substantial and that candy could fill you up. Not only that it was substantial and would fill you up, but also, and more importantly, candy was good food for quick energy. Now let’s go back to the 1920s and think about what’s happening. It’s the era of the airplane. It’s the air of streamline. It’s the era of the factory and the office and the businessman. People are moving fast. And fast is good. But fast means energy. People are looking around at these internal combustion engines that are just starting to putter around on the streets and thinking about fuel and our bodies as engines like cars that need fuel. What is fuel? Fuel is food. What is food? Food is calories. And this new idea of food as chemicals in the form of calories that would fuel your body — this was a new idea in the early 20th century. And what it meant was that things that had more calories were better. Because they had more fuel. So it’s like filling up your gas tank with a full tank. A candy bar that had two or three hundred calories, or sometimes a quarter pound candy bar, was not uncommon. Maybe five or six hundred calories in a candy bar. This was seen primarily as a compact source of energy that you could get quickly into your body. And the science of sugar in that era was also promoting the idea that sugar was quickly metabolized. That eating sugar gave you energy that you could use right away as opposed to, let’s say, whole wheat bread that just took a little while to digest. And so you weren’t as able to quickly access that energy. So the speed with which sugar would enter your system and fuel you was another important factor in the favor for candy. That candy was quick energy. It was compact. It was economical too. Because the number of calories that you could buy with your candy dollar were much higher than the number you could buy with your egg dollar or your pickle dollar.

chickendinnerCorrespondent: But this also leads me to go back to the question of the sandwich. I mean, I get that calories were new. They were in the air. People didn’t make any distinction between the calories one received from sugar and the calories one received from an apple. And there are a number of forms of advertisement you depict in this book that show that candy manufacturers played into this and used this to manipulate the public into buying more candy. But with things like the Chicken Dinner bar, I’m just absolutely curious about why something like that could be on the market for so long and yet you say that it’s lost to history. The taste. I mean, certainly there’s someone out there who knows about it and there’s someone out there who has a sense of how many of these sandwich-realted chocolate bars were actually eaten between the clock, so to speak.

Kawash: Well, sadly, our foremost historian of the candy bar, Ray Broekel, is no longer with us. And he is probably the only person who could have answered these questions.

Correspondent: He has papers! He has an archive! He must!

Kawash: He collected candy bar wrappers for several decades. And much of what we know of those lost candy bars is from his archives and from what he collected. He published at least two books where he would just chronicle what the candy bars were and what we know, what they were made of. You know, some of the candy bars, we know a lot about their composition. Because they would describe them in the advertising. So for example, I have seen Chicken Dinner ads that open up the candy bar. You can see the nuts. You can see the caramel. And we know that it was a sort of nut roll. So that would be caramel nougats and nuts. But other bars, all we have is maybe an image of the wrapper or maybe just a name of the candy bar. What’s in a Love Nest? Who knows?

Correspondent: Wow. But I’m wondering if there’s any way — and I guess I’m stuck on the idea of a Chicken Dinner bar — whether the plans or the formula for these bars exist in a vault somewhere and we just don’t know it. I mean, certain companies probably consolidated with companies. Certainly the original way to make these particular chocolate bars must exist somewhere. Or is that just a truly difficult question to solve in 2013?

Kawash: Well, I think that the candy business has changed so dramatically that, even if someone were to discover in the vaults the formula for the Chicken Dinner bar, there would be a large distance to travel between the formula in the vault and an actual Chicken Dinner bar. I mean, today we have a candy business that is dominated by two or three major players. Anywhere you go in America, you’ll see the same candy bars and you know what they are and they’re successful because they’re good. But also because those companies are huge and have huge marketing and advertising budgets. Most of the candy bars that have been lost were produced by tiny companies and often just local or regional companies. And one of the things that I discovered in my research was that, for the most part, candy manufacturers and candy makers were not always very good businessmen. They didn’t always understand the principles of accounting and the ways in which they needed to adjust their production to take into account their expenses. One of the things about candy is that it’s driven by novelty. You want to always be coming out with something new to catch people’s eye. So in the old days, candy makers would frequently just keep making the old stuff and start making the new stuff. And this would create enormous expenses. Because they never had those economies of scale. So part of the problem was just that their passion was candy making, not bookkeeping. And oftentimes, it’s really interesting to go back to some of those candy bars from the 1920s and see which ones have survived even just the brand. Like O. Henry, for example, or Baby Ruth. Those were candy bars that were invented and sold by individuals who had really business acumen. They thought about marketing. They thought about manufacturing in a way that gave them tools to become successful, where becoming successful is becoming national and becoming bought out by Nestle or Kraft or something like that. So I think that it’s a fascinating question. Are there these secret vaults of the lost candies? But I think the sad answer is probably for the most part not. Those companies are gone.

Correspondent: Geraldo opening Al Capone’s vault to see nothing.

Kawash: Yeah. Actually, there are some people now because of nostalgia. I mean, we’re really going through a period now of nostalgia for the old brands and the old candies. And I think your question of “If only I could have a Chicken Dinner bar!” I think a lot of us feel that way.

Correspondent: I mean, if a culture is defined by taste, there’s that question as well. But what you’re saying here about the fact that most of the early candy manufacturers were small and were absolutely terrible at business, sounding not unlike the book industry, I’m wondering at what point was there the first candy kingpin gobbling up all the great innovators that were actually selling certain forms of candy that were more than mere novelties? That had some legs, so to speak. Stuff like candy corn or lemon drops and all that.

Kawash: Well, the real consolidation happened starting in the ’60s. And it was a period of real complacency for candy. Candy manufacturers had been enormously — I mean, the ’20s, the Golden Age of the Candy Bar, you go back to the advertising and the trade publications and you can feel the vibration of excitement! It’s like, “Wow! We’re doing something really amazing here.” The Depression comes. It hits the candy industry as well. But those who survive make it out of the Depression and start ramping up again until the Second World War comes along. And, oh boy, war is good for candy. Why? Because candy is quick and portable energy. And so candy became a really key element in the rations for the troops. There were these headlines. CANDY FIGHTS IN THE WAR! CANDY BULLETS FOR EVERYONE! So the high point of candy production actually comes during the Second World War at a time when there is rationing and food shortage and all these other things that are really impinging on American industry. But candy, because it comes to be perceived as such an important source of energy and morale for the troops also, candy makes people happy.

Correspondent: Well, not only that. But emergency compartments, where bits of candy would fly out. Chocolate bars that are contained in a soldier’s emergency kit and, in fact, were consumed faster than the really terrible Meals Ready to Eat that they had at the time. At one point in the book, you point out that the fact that there was candy in the aircraft actually contributed to fewer accidents from the pilots, which is rather remarkable. I mean, why did candy have such a hold upon the military? I mean, I guess if you’re flying a very fragile plane, you need to be on a sugar high, I suppose.

Kawash: Well, I think that whatever the long term consequences of a high refined sugar diet, we know that….

Correspondent: (laughs) Whatever the consequences? That’s a great big conditional statement there!

Kawash: Let’s just put that to the side and talk about the immediate effects of, you know, sucking on a lemon drop.

The Bat Segundo Show #522: Samira Kawash (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Paul Harding (The Bat Segundo Show #521)

Over the course of a few centuries, prayers for the dead have transformed into less uptight celebrations. But what candor did we lose in the transformation? In the first of two shows devoted to Halloween, we discuss this American relationship to grief and impermanence with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding. The talk revolves around Harding’s second novel, ENON, and gets into pinball bowling, the oneiric morass inside the skull, our national history of religiosity, and John Cheever.
[MP3, 57 minutes]
[Notes and partial transcript]

Paul Harding is most recently the author of Enon. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #364.

Author: Paul Harding

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Subjects Discussed: William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the relationship between Enon‘s Charlie Crosby and Tinkers‘s George Washington Crosby, Quentin Compson, dilettantes, Mark Slouka’s Brewster, Ross Raisin’s Waterline, the grief novel, blackouts, Greek mythology, Hallmark cards, spooky Halloween ghost stories, the Kübler-Ross model of grief, breaking your hand by smashing it into a wall, the many physical holes throughout Enon, Emily Dickinson, poetic dashes, what Charlie does for a living, living off meager insurance money, unemployed men in America, Harding’s disinterest in socioeconomics within fiction, house painting, avoiding the realm of fictional realism through mythology, John Cheever’s “The Jewels of the Cabots,” how a story announces its own priorities, the impact of grief on the work life, Franky Shuey, Easy Rider, self-reliant guys who work the seedy side of life, unreliable narrators, when the perspective of dreams is truer than reality, considering reader’s doubt of the facticity, unreliability as an act of bad faith, how readers determine the way in which a character is in bad shape, how common language is inadequate in describing extraordinary emotional experience, projecting personal history on to a local collective history, human connection predicated on lies, not being able to use “man” in everyday vernacular, coming to terms with ignorance, clarity usurped by dreams, the oneiric morass inside the skull, when communities enforce timetables on how to grieve, Mrs. Hale, pious matriarchs in small towns, moral standards, pardoning grievers for their morbid fantasies, violence and grief, the Protestant notion of “I am thou,” parallels between civilian grief and military grief, being familiar with the local graveyard, Harding’s stint playing in a marching band, Marilyn Robinson’s influence, fire and brimstone types, Charlie’s largely secular journey, Karl Barth, Emerson’s connection with Calvinism, leaving the church in order to find God, Emily Dickinson as “no hoper,” speaking in William Tyndale’s English, “burning strange fires” and burning the memory of your daughter, improvising a religion by worshiping the dead, making coffee and tea from ashes, coming to terms with our national history of religiosity, verifying the story of Noah’s Ark, how Moby Dick is true, bowling as an indelible part of American heritage, candlepin bowling, Charlie’s relationship with sound, grief compared with an organ chord, silence and secular prayer, thinking about emotions musically, homes in Tinkers and Enon, the home as an onion, phantoms, the impermanence of location when considered from a historical perspective, Cheever’s “The Pig Fell Into the Well,” spending your time ruminating, the correct pronunciation of “Aloysius,” how reading informs mispronunciation, old photos, the temporal bandwidth of a small town, drawing from crumbs, defining originality, Kantian notions of space and time, and the connection between originality and experience.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I have to ask about Charlie Crosby. He is the protagonist of Enon. He appeared in an early part of Tinkers, where he is seen reading as a child to his grandfather, who is George Washington. And in Enon, he calls himself “a reader’s reader.” Yet we are not really entirely sure what kind of scholar he is. Whether he’s professional or some sort of amateur autodidact. So I’m wondering. To what extent did you map out the Crosby family? And is there room for Cathy Lee and David in the family line?

Harding: (laughs) Well, I improvise things as I go along. Because I think technically I fudged the family a little bit. Because in Tinkers, I think Charlie has a brother.

Correspondent: Oh yeah.

Harding: Named Sam. And I pulled the Faulkner Yoknapatawpha card.

Correspondent: I figured. How very portentous of you.

Harding: Well, it’s one of those things where the Quentin Compson of Absalom, Absalom! is not the Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury. And so I keep these characters in this loose fictional world in this fictional family. But I never sacrificed the story to the rigors of genealogy. And I think you hit the term right on the head. I think of him like an autodidact. He’s a little bit better than a dilettante.

Correspondent: Well, let’s actually defend the dilettante here, Paul!

Harding: (laughs) I know!

Correspondent: I mean, they are, after all, your readers.

Harding: Right. We’re all professional dilettantes.

Correspondent: We’re all dilettantes.

Harding: Yeah. Well, I think of him as reading aloud on his own.

Correspondent: This book reminded me of two other books. I’m not sure if you’ve read them. Mark Slouka’s Brewster, which came out earlier this year, dealt with grief by looking at it from a long distance ahead. It was set in the 1960s. There’s another book which, really, you must read. Of course, both of the books are great. Ross Raisin’s Waterline. Are you familiar with that?

Harding: No. I haven’t heard of either of those.

Correspondent: Oh my God! This book is about a guy. He loses his wife. He’s a Scottish guy. He’s unemployed. He ends up getting on a bus and working in a London hotel restaurant and gets totally exploited and then ends up drifting into homelessness.

Harding: Sounds like another musical comedy.

Correspondent: Exactly! Well, you have written a book. I”m talking about one book that deals with grief as a surrender of time, which is Brewster. And with Waterline, it’s a book that deals with grief as a capitulation of place. You’ve written a grief novel — if we can call it that, if that’s a genre — that involves the surrender of both time and place. There are porous months that just flit right by, often because of Charlie’s blackouts with pills and whiskey. I’m wondering why you think grief in fiction tends to explore this erosion of time and space more than real life. Was this one of the appeals of working on Enon?

Harding: I think it has to do, in my instance, with the way that I line up what I think of as the subjects and predicates when you’re writing narrative fiction. So I don’t think of myself as having written a book about grief. I wrote a book about Charlie, who is grieving. Because the danger is that — and this is the danger from the end of writing fiction. For me, if you think of grief thematically or objectively, as it were, the danger is that then you’ll spend all of your time making your character conform to your preconceived ideas of how grief is experienced. And so I think of the books that I write as very, if not anything else, experiential. So the hallmark of fiction is character. The hallmark of character is consciousness. The hallmark of consciousness is the experience of being in time.

Correspondent: Just so long as there’s no Hallmark cards.

Harding: Right.

Correspondent: Let’s avoid cliche in this conversation.

Harding: (laughs) Right.

Correspondent: You get three hallmarks.

Harding: So the whole idea is that time accelerates or decelerates or explodes or compresses, according to Charlie’s experience of it. So then I’m not imposing any of my preconceived notions of what happens when you’re grieving on to him. And then I just followed his lead in terms of what he found himself thinking. When I gave him the resources of knowing the town’s history and all that sort of stuff. And then he was able to superimpose his daughter, the memory of his daughter, in with all the different compounded times of the town. And I think of all these things as almost like Perseus and the mirror. He can’t look at Medusa. You can’t look at the tragedy head on or you’ll perish. You’ll turn to stone. So all of these other narratives, these other books, the history of the town, are things that I give him through which he mediates the memory of his daughter so he can try to negotiate it, be equal to it, without basically doing himself in.

Correspondent: But it is interesting that you have to choose. I mean, here’s the thing. You write fiction. You’re trying to align life to a narrative. But in the case of grief, you actually have to choose far more than a lot of other life experiences in fiction.

Harding: It’s more extreme.

Correspondent: And I”m wondering what you do to account for things you can’t include in choices you have to make. It seems to me like it would be a much harder proposition as a fiction writer.

Harding: Yeah, I think it is. I mean, when I first got the idea for the book, I thought, “Oh boy! It’s like a spooky Hawthornesque, Emily Dickinsonian.” You know, the kind of first-person death poem. The posthumous poems and everything. And then, within writing half a page of the book, I realized, “Wait, this is incredibly tragic.”

Correspondent: You thought this was going to be a barrel of laughs. (laughs)

Harding: Well, I thought it would be a Halloween spooky ghost story. But of course, the premise then is much more tragic. And so I thought more about Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy and just the myths. Orpheus and Demeter and Persephone. A grieving parent going down to the underworld to fetch back a child. And it was. It turned out to be an incredibly difficult subject to write about. But to me, that was almost a guarantee of quality control. If you’re writing a story about a parent who’s suffering the life of a child, you take one false step in any direction and you’ve got melodrama, sentimentality, maudlin. You’re just ringing cheap emotion out of the inherently sad, tragic nature of things. So just as a writer, I was interested in trying to rise to that occasion. Trying to write the novel that I felt that I was actually not good enough to write when I started.

Correspondent: This is interesting. Because if melodrama is always the risk in looking at a death poem or looking at grief, in this case what’s remarkable about Charlie is that he doesn’t at least audibly beat himself up. He certainly does it with the pills and with the whiskey and all that. But he never really gets beyond that first stage of grief of the Kübler-Ross model.

Harding: Never heard of it. That’s the thing. The Kübler-Ross model — that’s been a subsequent description, which is interesting. But I see him as wrestling with his conscience. I seem him as essentially being very aware of the fact that he’s ashamed of who he’s become since she’s died. And then that gave me an opportunity to explore a universal dramatic human predicament, which is not doing the right thing. Knowing what the right thing and not being able to do it. Him understanding. Being on the couch and being paralyzed and becoming addicted to drugs and then breaking into people’s houses. He understands the whole time that that’s wrong. And yet he can’t stop himself.

Correspondent: But he is in that denial stage pretty much for this one year of grief.

Harding: I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. I just saw it as him having his attention on. Because maybe if he’s denying other things, it’s because they’re at the expense of what he finds most important and most pressing about the experience.

Correspondent: Why didn’t he get angry over this? I mean, he’s a very, very…

Harding: He breaks his hand. He punches the window.

Correspondent: Well, that’s true.

Harding: He breaks his hand. You know, he’s not a particularly violent guy. So I think the anger is diffused by his conscience. So I think it’s a subtle thing. But it’s funny. I had a scene in an early draft of the book where he runs through the house and breaks the whole house to pieces. And it never seemed authentic. You know, he’s more Thoreau. The quiet lives of desperation. The drama is interior with him. And so the anger is more diffused. I think it refracted prismatically through his conscience. So it dispersed in a subtler way.

Correspondent: But here’s the weird thing about when he punches the wall with his hand. As a reader, I was very well aware of the many holes in this book. And by holes, I mean literally. Just tons of holes. There’s everything from the cribbage board to the golf course to the holes in the cemetery to the holes that he punches into the wall.

Harding: And then he cuts a hole in the wall at the end.

Correspondent: Of course. There’s that. To the hole in the caretaker’s throat.

Harding: That’s funny. I wasn’t aware of those things.

Correspondent: It’s because this book is so, for lack of a better word, hole happy, I didn’t see that gesture of him smashing the wall as an absolute indignant one. Even though it is. But at the same time, it just seems to me that that is his way of connecting with his home.

Harding: Could be. It’s the cathartic moment then.

Correspondent: Well, what of all the holes? I mean, the landscape in this book is just utterly porous. And I was wondering about that. Why it ended up that way. It seems to me there was no conscious plan.

Harding: Your guess is as good as mine! I mean, that happened with Tinkers. I realized that the book was composed of a series of houses that were imperiled, where nests were disappearing or falling. And I didn’t consciously put that in the book. And so here, it makes sense that the portal between this life and the next are doorways, I suppose. And he spends a lot of his time trying to break through the doorways or climb down through the grave or something like that. And the guardian angel of the book was Emily Dickinson and the way that she crosses through the portals or the rabbit holes or whatever between this life and an imagined metaphysical realm passing this life. So I guess that inevitably that verbiage and imagery would naturally precipitate into the language.

Correspondent: And yet dashes really aren’t that much of a part of this book.

Harding: No. Not this time. (laughs)

(Loops for this program provided by cork27, djmfl, 40a, Cyto, and mingote.)

The Bat Segundo Show #521: Paul Harding II (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

A Few Words on Lou Reed

Some thoughts on Lou Reed’s cultural innovations and the forces which allowed them to exist for more than an enchanting instant.

“But if you think that you get kicks from flirting with danger / Danger, oooohh / just kick her in the head and rearrange her” — Lou Reed, “Wagon Wheel”

“What does Robert Christgau do in bed?” growled Lou Reed during a performance of “Walk on the Wild Side” on Take No Prisoners. “I mean, is he a toefucker? Man, anal retentive, A Consumer’s Guide to Rock. What a moron! ‘A Study’ by, you know, ‘Robert Christgau.’ Nice little boxes: B+. Can you imagine working for a fucking year and you get a B+ from some asshole in The Village Voice?” Christgau would later review the album, awarding it a C+ and thanking Reed for getting his name right. But Christgau apparently did more than that. He nominated Reed for a MacArthur Foundation grant, which Reed never received. Reed never forgot the early slights. When Christgau was introduced to Reed at a Sire luncheon, Reed sneered at Christgau when the critic offered his hand.

To dismiss Lou Reed as a mere irascible motherfucker, as Christgau did last night in his obituary for Spin, severely discounts the ferocious spirit that Reed took with him to the grave: an unapologetic artistic commitment, alive in all those great records, that is ever more in short supply in our conformist age of crowdsourcing, +1ing, and an unhealthy compunction to always be liked. Reed’s death was not strange in its police blotter statistics. 71 is a remarkable tally for a man who lived as hard as Reed did. But the great gaping cavity that has opened up is unquestionably weird. Some wailing mirror has squealed long and loud into the night, a force demanding new and dangerous innovation on all fronts.

What artist today name-checks Saul Bellow and Yeats on stage? Or calls for a full-scale sexual revolution while masterfully weaving in a tuba line? (That’s “Make Up,” from Reed’s solo album, Transformer.) How many lives did Reed save by singing about subjects that no one else did? And is there any performer today, one so artistically ahead of the curve and never flinching from experimentation, who can inspire a thousand musicians to start new bands with one new track?

Reed’s commitment to sparsity (“One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”) was such that he was able to write two of The Velvet Underground’s finest songs (“Heroin” and the magnificently raucous “Sister Ray”) without a bass guitar, paving the way for The White Stripes.

It’s possible that the chalky apocalyptic atmosphere of the early 1970s, fluctuating in the wake of crushed 1960s idealism, allowed Reed to do what he did. He was unquestionably aided in his early years by Andy Warhol, who spotted The Velvet Underground in the East Village, and Delmore Schwartz, who taught him at Syracuse University. Would Reed have found the courage to write “Heroin” without Schwartz? Would he still be toiling as a tunesmith for Pickwick if Warhol had not stopped by Café Bizarre with filmmaker Barbara Rubin and incorporated Reed’s band into the Exploding Plastic Inevitable? More than four decades later, Reed’s essence remains so indomitable that it’s easy to see him as someone who could have easily mowed down all resistance to his vision. But he needed eccentric and caring benefactors. And maybe that’s one truth we can take away from Reed’s passing in our crowdfunding age. Lou Reed is irreplaceable. But patience for the pugnacious innovators, for the scrappy workhorses toiling assiduously in odd corners, may be what we need to keep tomorrow’s culture as elastic and as indelible as Reed’s contributions.

by Edward Champion

The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge

While our faithful reading adventurer remains stalled on FINNEGANS WAKE on the original Modern Library Reading Challenge, he has decided to start a second challenge. Behold! A new Modern Library Reading Challenge! The top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century!

mlnfindexJust under three years ago, I began the Modern Library Reading Challenge. It was an ambitious alternative to a spate of eccentric reading challenges then making the rounds. These included such gallant reading missions as the Chunkster, the Three Card Monte/Three Sisters Bronte, the Read All of Shakespeare While Blindfolded Challenge, and the Solzhenitsyn Russian Roulette Challenge. It took a fairly eccentric person to place the literary embouchure ever so nobly to one’s lips and fire off a fusillade of eupohonic Prince Pless bliss into the trenchant air. But I was game.

In my case, the idea was to write at least 1,000 words on each title after reading it. The hope was to fill in significant reading gaps while also cutting an idiosyncratic course across the great works of 20th century literature, with other intrepid readers walking along with me.

Over the next twenty-three months, I steadily worked my way through twenty-three works of fiction. Some of the books were easy to find. Some required elaborate trips to exotic bookstores in far-off states. When I checked out related critical texts and biographies from the New York Public Library, I was often informed by the good librarians at the Mid-Manhattan branch that I was the first soul to take these tomes home in sixteen years. This surprised me. New York was a city with eight million people. Surely there had to be more curiosity seekers investigating these authors. But I discovered that some of these prominent authors had been severely neglected. When I got to The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett was so overlooked that I appeared to be the first person to upload a photo of reasonable resolution (which I had taken from a public domain image published in a biography) onto the Internet.

There were other surprises. I became an Iris Murdoch obsessive. I was finally able to overcome my youthful indiscretions and appreciate The Adventures of Augie March as the masterpiece that it was. My mixed feelings on Brideshead Revisited proved controversial in some circles and caused at least one academic to condemn me. On the other hand, I also sparked an online friendship with Stephen Wood, who was also working his way through the Mighty 100, and was put into contact with an extremely small yet determined group of enthusiasts making similar reading attempts in various corners of the world.

Yet when I told some people about my project, it was considered strange or sinister. When I mentioned the Modern Library Reading Challenge to a much older writer, she was stunned that anyone my age go to the trouble of Lawrence Durrell. (And she liked Durrell!) Her quizzical look led me to wonder if she was going to send me to some shady authority to administer a second opinion.

One of the project’s appeals was its methodical approach: I was determined to read all the books from #100 to #1. This not only provided a healthy discipline, but it ensured that I wouldn’t push the least desired books to the end. Much as life provides you with mostly happy and sometimes unpleasant tasks to fulfill as they arrive, I felt that my reading needed to maintain a similar commitment. This strategy also created a vicarious trajectory for others to follow.

Everything was going well. Very well indeed. Henry Green. Jean Rhys. The pleasant surprise of The Ginger Man. With these authors, how could it not go well? I was poised to read to the finish line. I was zooming my Triumph TR6 down a hilly two-lane highway with a full tank of gas. Cranking loud music. Not a care in the world.

And then I hit Finnegans Wake.

To call Finnegans Wake “difficult” is a woefully insufficient description. This is a book that requires developing an ineluctably Talmudic approach. But I am not easily fazed. Finnegans Wake is truly a book of grand lexical riches, even if I remain permanently stalled within the voluble tendrils of its first 50 pages. I have every intention of making my way through Finnegans Wake. I have reread Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. I have consulted numerous reference texts. I have even listened to all 176 episodes of Frank Delaney’s excellent podcast, Re: Joyce. These have all been pleasant experiences, but I am still not sure if any of this significantly contributes to my understanding of Finnegans Wake. However, when you do something difficult, it is often best to remain somewhat clueless. If you become more aware of how “impossible” something may be, then you may not see it through to the end. Joyce remains the Everest of English literature. I am determined to scale the peak, even if I’m not entirely sure how reliable my gear is.

The regrettable Finnegans Wake business has also meant that the Modern Library Reading Challenge has been stuck on pause. It has been eleven months since I published a new Modern Library installment on these pages. And while I have certainly stayed busy during this time (I have made a documentary about Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs, attempted to fund a national walk that I intend to fulfill one day, canceled and brought back The Bat Segundo Show, and created a new thematic radio program, among other industries), I have long felt that persistent progress — that is, an efflorescent commitment to a regular fount of new material — is the best way to stay in shape and keep any project alive.

I have also had a growing desire to read more nonfiction, especially as the world revealed itself to be a truly maddening and perilous place as the reading challenge unfolded. Some have sought to keep their heads planted beneath the ground like quavering ostriches about all this. There are far too many adults I know, now well in their thirties, who remain distressingly committed to the “La la la I can’t hear you!” school of taking in bad news. But I feel that understanding how historical and social cycles (Vico, natch) cause human souls to saunter down dark and treacherous roads also allows us to comprehend certain truths about our present age. To carry on in the world without a sense of history, without even a cursory understanding of ideas and theories that have been attempted or considered before, is to remain a rotten vegetable during the more important moments of life.

It turns out that the Modern Library has another list of one hundred titles devoted to nonfiction. And the nonfiction list is, to my great surprise, more closely aligned to the fiction list than I anticipated.

In 1998, the Washington Post‘s David Streitfeld revealed that the Modern Library fiction list was plagued by modest scandal. The ten august Modern Library board members behind the fiction list had no knowledge over who had voted for what, why the books were ranked the way they were, or how the list had been composed, with many of the rankings more perfunctory than anyone knew. Brave New World, for example, had muscled its way up to #5, but only because many of the judges believed that it needed to be somewhere on the list.

So when the Modern Library gang devoted its attention to a nonfiction list, it was, as Salon‘s Craig Offman reported, determined not to repeat many of the same mistakes. University of Chicago statistics professor Albert Mandansky was signed on to ensure a more dutiful ranking progress. Younger authors and more women were included among the board. Mandansky went to the trouble of creating a computer algorithm so that there could be no ties. But the new iron fist approach offered some drawbacks. There was a new rule that an author could only have one title on the list, which meant that Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station didn’t make the cut. And when the top choice was announced — The Education of Henry Adams — the crowd stayed silent. It was rumored that one board member scandalously played with his dentures as the titles were called.

Perhaps the Modern Library’s second great experiment reveals the unavoidable pointlessness behind these lists. As novelist Richard Powers recently observed in a National Book Critics Circle post, “The reading experiences I value most are the ones that shake me out of my easy aesthetic preferences and make the favorites game feel like a talent show in the Iroquois Theater just before the fire. Give me the not-yet likable, the unhousebroken, something that is going to throw my tastes in a tizzy and make my self-protecting Tops of the Pops slink away in shame.”

On the other hand, if it takes anywhere from five to ten years to get through a hundred titles, then the reader is inured to this problem. Today’s favorites may be tomorrow’s dogs, and yesterday’s lackluster choices may be tomorrow’s crown jewels. As the Modern Library reader grows older, there’s nearly a built-in guarantee that these preordained tastes will become passe at some point. (To wit: Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne, the first book I will be reading for this new challenge, is now out of print.)

So I have decided to take up the second challenge, reading the nonfiction list from #100 to #1. Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge titles shall flow from these pages as I slowly make my way through Finnegans Wake during the first challenge. Hopefully, once the disparity between the two challenges has been worked out, I will eventually make steady progress on the fiction and nonfiction fronts. But the nonfiction challenge won’t be a walk in the park either. It has its own Finnegans Wake at #23. I am certain that Principia Mathematica will come close to destroying my brain. But as I said three years ago, I plan to read forever or die trying.

To prevent confusion for longtime readers, the fiction challenge will be separated from the nonfiction challenge by color. Fiction titles shall carry on in red. Nonfiction titles will be in gold.

I’ve started to read Melbourne and I’m hoping to have the first Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge essay up before the end of the month. This page, much like the fiction list, will serve as an index. I will add the links and the dates as I read the books. I hope that these efforts will inspire more readers to take up the challenge. (And if you do end up reading along, don’t be a stranger!)

Now let’s get this party started. Here are the titles:

100. Melbourne, Lord David Cecil (December 27, 2013)
99. Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott (January 14, 2014)
98. The Taming of Chance, Ian Hacking (March 23, 2014)
97. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm (July 17, 2014)
96. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (November 11, 2015)
95. The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly (January 21, 2016)
94. The Contours of American History, William Appleman Williams (February 7, 2016)
93. The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter (February 18, 2016)
92. The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro (May 11, 2016)
91. Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison (November 3, 2016)
90. The Golden Bough, James George Frazer (13 volumes, Third Edition) (November 14, 2016)
89. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (November 23, 2016)
88. Six Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman (November 30, 2016)
87. A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy (December 3, 2016)
86. This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff (June 15, 2017)
85. West with the Night, Beryl Markham (August 21, 2017)
84. A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan (December 6, 2017)
83. Vermeer, Lawrence Gowing (February 22, 2018)
82. The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield (September 16, 2018)
81. The Face of Battle, John Keegan (December 26, 2018)
80. Studies in Iconology, Erwin Panofsky (January 23, 2019)
79. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris (February 20, 2019)
78. Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. (February 28, 2019)
77. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson (September 11, 2020)
76. The City in History, Lewis Mumford (September 12, 2020)
75. The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell (March 3, 2022)
74. Florence Nightingale, Cecil Woodham-Smith (June 14, 2022)
73. James Joyce, Richard Ellmann (December 22, 2023)
72. The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (March 16, 2024)
71. The Rise of the West, William H. McNeill
70. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward
69. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
68. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathan D. Spence
67. A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann
66. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R.H. Tawney
65. The Art of Memory, Frances A. Yates
64. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
63. The Sweet Science, A.J. Liebling
62. The House of Morgan, Ron Chernow
61. Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner
60. In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams
59. Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone (6 volumes)
58. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
57. The Second World War, Winston Churchill (6 volumes)
56. The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling
55. Darkness Visible, William Styron
54. Working, Studs Terkel
53. Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
52. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
51. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley and Malcolm X
50. Samuel Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate
49. Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
48. The Great Bridge, David McCullough
47. Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson
46. The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith
45. A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee (12 volumes)**
44. Children of Crisis, Robert Coles (5 volumes)
43. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain (3 volumes)
42. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
41. Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
40. Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham (5 volumes, abridged)*
39. Autobiographies, W.B. Yeats
38. Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, Rebecca West
37. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
36. The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
35. Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein
34. On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Thompson
33. Philosophy and Civilization, John Dewey
32. Principia Ethica, G.E. Moore
31. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
30. The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
29. Art and Illusion, Ernest H. Gombrich
28. A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
27. The Ants, Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
26. The Art of the Soluble, Peter B. Medawar
25. The Mirror and the Lamp, Meyer Howard Abrams
24. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
23. Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (3 volumes)
22. An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal
21. The Elements of Style, William Strunk and E.B. White
20. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
19. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
18. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr
17. The Proper Story of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin
16. The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
15. The Civil War, Shelby Foote (Three volumes: Fort Sumter to Perryville, Fredericksburg to Meridian, Red River to Appomattox)
14. Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
13. Black Boy, Richard Wright
12. The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner
11. The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
9. The American Language, H.L. Mencken
8. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
7. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
6. Selected Essays, 1917-1932, T.S. Eliot
5. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
4. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
3. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
2. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
1. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams

* December 15, 2018 Update: While I am striving to read the unabridged versions of all works for this project, upon further reflection, I’ve realized that the cost of obtaining the full 27 volume set of Needham’s opus is well beyond my price range. Each volume ranges from $40 to $200, in part due to the extortionate pricing of Cambridge University Press, a publisher that has proven deaf to my inquiries about obtaining a review copy. This effectively makes this purchase equal to the price of a used car. In addition, it is rather insane for any reader, even one who possesses my ridiculous ambitions, to devote some 8,000 pages to one author. I have reluctantly opted to substitute the five volume Shorter Science and Civilisation in China when I get to this particular essay. As of now, I do have the unabridged The Golden Bough under my belt. And I will spring for the unabridged Toynbee. I hope readers following along can forgive me for cutting corners on one entry. But I do want to complete this project before I depart this earth. And pragmatically speaking, this is the only way to do it.

** August 3, 2022 Update: Four years ago, it was possible to get a copy of the full twelve volume set of Toynbee for under $200. But in a testament to how rapidly these books are going out of print, getting a copy of the full set has become increasingly difficult to find. I may have to tackle the abridged version, with great reluctance.