Category / Modern Library

by Edward Champion

Under the Net (Modern Library #95)

In the next exciting installment in the Modern Library Reading Challenge, our intrepid reader tackles Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net!

(This is the sixth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Sophie’s Choice)

The movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth. All theorizing is a fight. We must be ruled by the situation itself, and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

The above sentiment comes from Annandine, a character in a manuscript entitled The Silencer, modeled upon some philosophical chatter between a frustrated translator named Jake Donoghue and an industrialist/sophist named Hugo Belfounder, which is contained within Iris Murdoch’s debut novel, Under the Net. And if all that makes the book sound like a matryoshka doll with endless porcelain layers that need to be opened if the reader has any hope of unraveling the truth (to some degree, it is), then I should also note that Under the Net is also a sprightly picaresque novel. There are dogs, fireworks, giant Roman film sets occupied by socialists, martinets working at hospitals, experimental theatrical performances, and mad searches for people in pubs.

The Complete Review‘s Michael Orthofer called these affairs “a bit too manic” and accused Murdoch’s protagonist of living a life that was “a bit too unsettled.” The latter charge is certainly true. Jake Donoghue does indeed hop from domicile to domicile, often at the behest of a generous woman, seeking rent-free space to sleep and frequently checking his possessions in with a newspaper vendor named Mrs. Tinckham (a working-class Lady Metroland?). But I think the good Mr. Orthofer’s being a bit unfair. The book’s bountiful gallivanting reminded me of similar evenings I’ve had. I may not have plunged fully clothed and drunken into the Thames (although I have thrown my unclothed and inebriated form into the San Francisco Bay), but I have climbed through windows, crashed parties, and found myself locked in rooms. I suppose verisimilitude depends upon the circumstances you invite into your life. For my own part, I have been liberal-minded.

As many know, Murdoch was an Oxford-trained philosopher and a leftist (at one point, a member of the Communist Party, as was de rigueur among the Oxford set), leaving one pondering the real-life origin of the above-cited philosophy. The snippet may have emerged from something Murdoch overheard from two students. Or perhaps it didn’t have any existential origin point at all. At the end of Under the Net, after many journeys in London and Paris, Jake is presented with an observational puzzle. “I don’t know why it is,” he responds. “It’s just one of the wonders of the world.”

This tidy finale suggests that the philosophy presented in this novel is very much about the journey rather than the destination. The “original” Jake/Hugo conversation, which concerns the lofty topic of whether or not language is capable of expressing our true feelings, demonstrates the inherent emotion within the proposition. “There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,” says Hugo, who swims in these choppy waters to expound his theory that all statements are falsified from the start. Say that you’re “apprehensive” after the fact, Hugo says, and it doesn’t cut the mustard. That these words are exchanged in an experimental clinic, where both men are sick, says it all.

If language can’t capture every mite of emotional complexity, then the completed volumes contained within Murdoch’s volume matter very much to her effervescent characters. Jake’s translation of a novel becomes an unanticipated instrument of coercion. The Silencer, Jake’s effort at writing a novel (“treated to a few lukewarm reviews”), is also responsible for much of the lack of communication between characters. Because Jake has modeled his novel on his conversation with Hugo, he is reticent to reestablish ties — until, of course, he discovers Hugo’s involvement with a pair of sisters he knows. And even then, he has “really very little idea about what I wanted to say to Hugo.” It is only when Hugo is ensnared in a hospital that Jake can at long last use language to patch things up. But Hugo claims that, despite his singular philosophy from the past, he cannot remember what he talked with Jake about. Later still, Jake locates Hugo’s copy of The Silencer (Murdoch’s novel contains a remarkable amout of breaking and entering), and discovers that Hugo has “underlined passages, put crosses and question-marks in the margin; and at one place there was a penciled note, Ask J.” Is Hugo being coy? Or does he genuinely not remember? And if it’s the latter, where does the point of translation begin?

Why not seek such answers in the protagonist himself? Jake’s main employment comes from translating a hack French novelist named Jean Pierre Breteuli, author of such books as This Wooden Nightingale. But later in the book, Jake discovers that Jean Pierre’s latest volume (which Jake hasn’t yet translated) has won the Prix Goncourt. This merit is enough to confuse poor Jake, who has spent much of his time viewing Jean Pierre’s work (and thus his own labor) with derision:

I had classed Jean Pierre once and for all. That he should secretly have been changing his spots, secretly ennobling his thought, purifying his emotions: all this was really too bad. In my imagination I was already lending the book every possible virtue, and the more I did so the more I felt a mingled rage and distress which drove every other idea from my mind.

Murdoch plays Jake Donoghue in the first person. And it seems prudent to bring this up, given that the two Quentin sisters he encounters are both involved in performance. The younger, Sadie, is a film star, a seeming ingenue who Jake dismisses as childish (despite hanging out with men who enjoy being childish), but who proves more cunning. She asks Jake to take care of her flat, but she locks him in. Still looking for a place to live, Jake meets the older sister, Anna Quentin, who is a former singer six years older than Jake, a past fling, and now something of an experimental theater queen (literally crowned by Jake). Anna’s also as old as Murdoch was when she wrote Under the Net. Jake attempts to reintroduce himself into Anna’s life through a quite eccentric method:

At that time too I had, in a not entirely disinterested fashion, been teaching Anna some Judo, and one of our customs had been that when I came in I would seize her and throw her down into this corner to be kissed. The memory of this rose in me now like an inspiration and I advanced upon her. I took her wrist, and for an instant her eyes wide with alarm, very close to mine, and then in a moment I had thrown her, very carefully, on to a pile of velvet costumes in the corner of the room.

If Anna can be likened to Murdoch, might it be possible to construe this as a character pouncing upon its creator? That’s probably a stretch. Still, Jake has his custom, just as sufficiently transferred through years of singular permutations as The Silence, and it is feeling which causes this physicality. If it so astonishing through physical action, then is it not possible that such fancies are just as astonishing through the linguistic? Jake’s competing with fragments of all types. When Anna eventually leaves, Jake is locked up in the theater and must spend the night in a room amongst a good deal of bric-a-brac. When Jake catches sight of Anna later in Paris, he cannot catch up with her. He is reduced to plucking her shoes from the grass.

Jake is certainly a young man with fussy peculiarities (“I hate entering a crowded room and feeling a whole gallery of faces focused upon me,” “I find that sea voyages promote reflection”), yet one who impulsively declares that he’s a socialist when confronted by a political figure named Lefty Todd. What do politics mean in this book? More of a dog-and-pony show (with a film set subbing in for the pony) than anything else. There is an effort at a political conversation between Lefty and Jake. Jake makes an appointment to continue it, but he never does. If philosophy is something that is transmuted over iterations, then politics resembles more of an endless cycle.

Under the Net is dedicated to Raymond Queneau, and this French comic novelist proved to be such an influence that Murdoch would later cop to copying him as much as she could. One sees Queneau’s Pierrot Mon Ami as one of two novels that Jake leaves behind when he must flee his rent-free home at the beginning. The other book Jake abandons is Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Despite Murdoch’s dedication, it is with Beckett that the imitative influences are more readily identified. Jake has distant kin named Finn, often confused as a servant, and this is very close to the relationship between Neary and “his âme damnée and man-of-all-work, Cooper” in Murphy. Neary’s pursuit of Miss Counihan might be likened to Hugo Belfounder’s pursuit of Sadie in Under the Net. Where Murphy suffers from heart attacks (although that’s nothing compared to Neary’s ability to stop his heart), Jake suffers from shattered nerves. However, in a possible deference to Neary’s sputtering palpitations, Murdoch does have Jake’s heart “beating out the refrain too late” when locating a taxi. More obviously, in both books, a hospital figures prominently.

In a 1968 interview with WK Rose, Murdoch was to call Murphy “a kind of ancestor to Under the Net.” And in John Bayley’s book, Elegy for Iris, Murdoch’s husband revealed that Murdoch learned about Murphy directly from Queneau himself when the two writers hung out in various Brussels cafes. Jake Donoghue’s account, expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced, gives off undeniable similarities, yet both books are sui generis.

In assessing Under the Net later in life, Murdoch was to write, “I can see very clearly how bad it is. It is very romantic and sentimental, even what is intellectual in it is intellectual in a romantic way. If anything saves it from complete wreck it is a sort of vitality and joy that lifts it a little.”

But it is this very sentimentality that not only makes the novel so much fun, but that permits Murdoch to use conceptual philosophy as ironic comedy. Aside from the funny methods in which the Quentin sisters lock Jake up, Jake’s cosmic fate serves as a comical counterpoint. He can only be kicked out of a domicile or locked into one. (These incarcerations are interesting involutions of Beckett’s Murphy, considering that Wylie is locked out of his room and our introduction to Murphy sees the layabout tied up by choice in a rocking chair. There is no rocking chair in Under the Net, but there is a rocking horse with “big vacant eyes.” This is undoubtedly a nod to the opthalmically obsessed Beckett, as well as DH Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” (Indeed, there are many winners at the racetracks in this novel.) Murdoch, to her sly credit, provides no homage to chess.

There is also the matter of Mister Mars, a stunt dog owned by the Bounty Belfounder Studio who is encountered by Hugo while locked in a cage. Mister Mars doesn’t quite serve as a Schrodinger-like answer to the Cartesian logic within Murphy, although at one point he does play dead so that Jake can escape an imbroglio. Over the course of the book, the dog is both young and old, worth nothing and worth quite a bit, quiet and boisterous. Yet the many parties feel the need to appraise him. “Sorry to be a business girl,” reads the final message concerning Mister Mars, “but one has to watch the cash, with the cost of living and partly living what it is.” “Partly living” is the key phrase here. Perhaps the young Murdoch, the progressive-minded humanist who eventually liberated herself from the Communist Party yoke (becoming a very hard Thatcherite in later years), was trying to determine if the novel offered a reconciliation point between accurately representing life and some concession to narrative that involved “partly living.” Under the Net succeeds because it is both a series of adventures (akin to The Ginger Man) and reflective of a young person’s intellectual journey. And what better metaphors are locked rooms or diminishing paramours for the divagating and theoretical manner in which we seize every possible scrap and hang on to every possible word?

[UPDATE: I had no idea that another Iris Murdoch biography had been published, but Martin Rubin’s review in the Wall Street Journal (published the day after my essay) sheds some additional light on the connections between Murdoch’s early life and her early novels. Was Jake Donoghue inspired by Frank Thompson? And if Murdoch recruited Thompson to the Communist Party, is it possibly that Lefty’s laughably smooth coercion of Jake in Under the Net is based on this exchange?]

Next: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea!

by Edward Champion

Sophie’s Choice (Modern Library #96)

In the next exciting 3,000 word installment in the Modern Library Reading Challenge, our intrepid reader tackles William Styron’s massive (and controversial) volume, Sophie’s Choice!

(This is the fifth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Sheltering Sky)

In Alexandra Styron’s forthcoming book, Reading My Father, she describes liberating a galley of Sophie’s Choice, a presale unit freshly arrived at the family home, at the age of twelve. It was the spring of 1979. Her plan was to read the mint green paperback between classes. She felt it incumbent “to somehow validate the rumors of his greatness.” Young Alexandra discovers that the novel bores the tears out of her. “The difficult vocabulary and historical references kept eluding me,” she writes, “until finally I began to let them sail by, unchallenged.” Further, upon encountering her father’s libidinous passages, she then becomes embarrassed, wincing “at the liberal sprinkling of words like fucking and horny and lust.” (Here’s the full tally according to Amazon’s Look Inside! feature: “fucking” — 29 counts; “horny” — 4 counts; and “lust” — 20 counts. I am also informed that readers in need of steady doses of the mildly profane are likely to find a good deal more “fuck” and “fucking” in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books. Miles Davis’s autobiography, published a decade after Sophie’s Choice, contains 672 uses of the word “fuck.” I think it’s safe to say that Styron was pushing the “fucking” boundaries no more and no less than any other writer around the time. Perhaps his striking tone says something about his ability to alarm.)

A good thirty-one years later, The Millions‘s Lydia Kiesling posted a Modern Library Revue installment on Sophie’s Choice. Kiesling, fourteen years older than Alexandra Styron when she first read Sophie’s Choice, wrote, “I’m not a prude; I think there should be sex in novels. However, while I’m not certain how it is best achieved on the page, I feel quite certain that ‘mossy cunt’ and ‘undulant swamp’ are not the ideal epithets. I mean, Jesus. Also, it’s just so cheesy — the release of her secrets, the release of his orgasms.” To be fair to Styron, he actually writes about “her moist mossy cunt’s undulant swamp.” Say what you like about Styron, but it takes a rare writer willing to go the distance like this. (Incidentally, “release” gets five counts in Sophie’s Choice according to Amazon and in neither explicit usage that Kiesling claims. In fact, at one point, “release” in the orgasmic context is declared “an odious word” by young Stingo, of whose randiness more anon, in one of his notebooks.) This prompted Emma Barton (not the actress who played Honey Mitchell on EastEnders) to leave a spirited comment in response: “You must have noticed there’s a new generation of us younger feminists coming up who don’t get our panties in such a twist over guys talking about their sexual thoughts, since we’re pretty open about our own sexual thoughts too.”

If Styron’s sexual effrontery is a matter to be settled by the old guard feminists, then we’re in luck. In her essay “Night Thoughts of a Media Watcher,” Gloria Steinem was to offer stronger sentiments. For Steinem, Sophie’s Choice was “like reading a case history by Freud in which he stoutly maintains a woman patient was not really raped by her father as a child, but just made up this story because she had hoped it would happen.” To put it mildly, I don’t think this gets at the complexity that Styron was attempting. But let’s carry on. Shortly after Steinem concedes the possibility that “Styron knew what he was doing,” she writes, “My first hope is that there was no real Sophie, that Styron just made her up completely. Like Freud’s women patients, however, she is just real and believable enough to break your heart; all the more so because she is recorded by someone who describes her but never understands her.” While it is true that Styron has drawn heavily from his personal experience for Stingo (especially for Sophie’s Choice‘s enthralling opening chapter), Steinem’s diagnosis presupposes that Styron wasn’t remarking in some way upon Stingo’s own (and Styron’s own) failure to understand her. Styron alludes to a real-life Sophie in a 1983 interview with Stephen Lewis, but not for the reasons that Steinem imputes:

It summed up the absolute totalitarian nature of this evil, which we really had not seen, certainly in civilized society, since history began to be recorded. It seized me so poignantly that I was compelled to write a book about it. I also connected it with something that had happened to me: I went to Brooklyn, in the late 1940s, and met a young — older than I was, but nonetheless young — woman who had been a survivor of Auschwitz, and who had a tattoo on her arm. Her name was Sophie.

So if absolute evil was Styron’s primary focus, how did we get from 29 uses of “fucking” to nebulous Freudian speculation to bright spirits duking it out in the comments at one of the Web’s best literary sites? Whatever it was that Styron was doing, in 2002, it was enough to get the California-based Norwalk-La Mirada High School District to remove Sophie’s Choice from its libraries after a single complaint. The objection? You guessed it. The sexual content. The ACLU intervened after students protested the distinct possibility that their very own First Amendment rights were being violated. The book was eventually returned to the stacks.

* * *

I think it’s remarkable that a brick-thick book from 1979 has continued to get so many people hot and bothered — especially since most novels written in the last decade don’t possess this power. (One cannot imagine people getting this worked up about Jonathan Franzen in 2043.) But now that I’ve finally read Styron’s masterpiece, I’m bewildered by much of the ballyhoo. The objections over the book’s sexual passages would suggest that all this exists independently from the book’s take on the Holocaust. It is almost as if the book’s opponents are incapable of reconciling the two strands, a grave oversight in light of the book’s presentation of tragic relativism, which I’ll get to in a bit. Of the four objections cited above, only Steinem makes a tenuous connection. And even then, she falls into the cliche of accusing Styron of some psychosexual fantasy — as if every impulse an author sets down involves unzipping the pants of the mind.

To get the hot stuff out of the way first, it cannot be stressed enough that we are dealing with Stingo, a young man who isn’t getting any during the postwar epoch, which comes a few decades before American culture has at long last grasped and permitted the reality of teenagers losing their virginity. As Stingo himself explains:

A lot in this way of bilious remembrance has been written about sex survivors of the fifties, much of it a legitimate lament. But the forties were really far worse, a particularly ghastly time for Eros, shakily bridging as they did the time between the puritanism of our forefathers and the arrival of public pornography. Sex itself was coming out of the closet, but there was universal distress over how to deal with it.

Here is a young man so lonely that we see him, in the book’s extraordinary opening chapter, fantasizing about “the Winston Hunnicutts, this vivid and gregarious young couple,” whom Stingo sees from his window in the rotting University Residence Club on West Eleventh Street. Yes, Stingo offers us extraordinary fantasies about the wife, using romantic language (“My lust was incredible…priapic, ravenous, yet under hair-trigger control”). But it is clear that Stingo’s fantasies also revolve around the Hunnicutts’ “enormous good fortune to inhabit a world populated by writers and poets and critics and other literary types.” To some degree, Styron’s fusion of sex with literary aspirations anticipates Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. And yet because Bolaño’s book carries the heft of multiple testimonies to sustain its illusion and Styron confines his interests to a singular first-person perspective, the former is permitted his posthumous genius while the latter is seen as a late middle-aged creep (also dead, by the way) getting his jollies through a young man’s perspective.

Never mind that Styron has taken care to include excerpts from Stingo’s notebooks, which contain prototypical revelations about Stingo’s life, along with wry commentary after these italicized passages: “I am a little mortified to discover that almost none of the above was apparently written with the faintest trace of irony (I actually was capable of ‘somewhat slightly’!”)”

If such provisos aren’t enough. Stingo, who is very aware of his prose style, is fond of embellishing his life story — even decades later — with seemingly robust, manly sentences. One such sentence reads: “I got up and made my way to the men’s room, weaving slightly, aglow at the edges of my skin with a penumbra of Rheingold, the jolly, astringent beer served at the Maple Court on draught.” Taken out of context, some of the phrasing (“aglow at the edges of my skin with a penumbra”) might be construed as awkward, yet Styron’s “edges of my skin” anticipates how the out-of-practice, out-of-time romantic phrase is no longer used among male writers today. Indeed, in recent years, “edges of my skin” has been used by such highly readable writers as Stephenie Meyer, Alice Sebold (in Lucky, no less), Aimee Bender, Lorrie Moore, and Justine Larbalestier. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a single male writer born after 1970 using such a phrase in contemporary fiction.

Stingo’s revelations serve purposes beyond the ostensibly tawdry. Styron is telegraphing a dying language, revealing modernist modes misconstrued today as overly melodramatic. Yet if they are so over-the-top, why then is Styron so willing to have Stingo explain himself? As Stingo notes late in the book, once he has at long last accomplished his effervescent goal (I have blanked out the name to avoid spoilers):

The varieties of sexual experience are, I suppose, so multifarious that it would be an exaggeration to say that _____ and I did that night everything that it is possible to do. But I’ll swear we came close, and one thing forever imprinted on our brain was our mutual inexhaustibility. I was inexhaustible because I was twenty-two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at long last the goddess of my unending fantasies….For me it was less an initiation than a complete, well-rounded apprenticeship, or more, and _____, my loving instructess, never ceased whispering encouragement into my ear. It was as if through a living tableau, in which I myself was a participant, there were being acted out all the answers to the questions with which I had half maddened myself ever since I began secretly reading marriage manuals and sweated over the pages of Havelock Ellis and other sexual savants.

Speaking as a man who was once twenty-two and sexually frustrated (as nearly every kid at that age is), I can assure all parties that Styron accurately describes what it means to sow one’s young oats.

If Sophie’s Choice were merely an itemization of Stingo’s sexual fantasies, then it would not have rightly earned its place in the Modern Library canon. I haven’t even brought up the indelible Nathan Landau, Sophie’s wildly exuberant and psychologically troubled Jewish paramour. He is inarguably worse than Stingo, prone to rages and boasting about cures for cancer, and abusive of Sophie and Stingo. Yet he shares much of Stingo’s autodidacticism. Indeed, it is Nathan’s curious amalgamation of knowledge (one might very well use the 21st century term “mashup”) that is the allure:

His range was astonishing and I had constantly to remind myself that I was talking to a scientist, a biologist (I kept thinking of a prodigy like Julian Huxley, whose essays I had read in college) — this man who possessed so many literary references and allusions, both classical and modern, and who within the space of an hour could, with no gratuitous strain, weave together Lytton Strachey, Alice in Wonderland, Martin Luther’s early celibacy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the mating habits of the Sumatran orangutan into a little jewel box of a beguiling lecture which facetiously but with a serious overtone explored the intertwined nature of sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism.

What’s especially interesting is how close this self-taught ideal mimics Stingo’s own narrative voice. The key tell here is “the intertwined nature of sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism,” which serves in parallel to Stingo’s own sexual exhibitionism. This is unconsummated for the most part, with even “a remarkably beautiful, sexually liberated, twenty-two-year-old Jewish Madonna lily named Leslie Lapidus” (later revealed to be involved in orgone therapy; Wilhelm Reich, of course, being one of the twentieth century’s great charlatans) just outside his grasp.

* * *

DG Myers has put forth the idea that Sophie’s Choice owes its historical importance not because of its literary quality, but as “a pioneering dissent on the Holocaust.” (While Myers’s 10,000 word essay is well worth reading, especially because Myers offers a very helpful overview of Styron’s developing thoughts on the Holocaust, Myers is curiously prudish about the novel’s sexuality.) I think he is right to observe that Sophie’s Choice is about “the ideological representation of the Holocaust,” with the origins of these thoughts to be found in Styron’s essay, “Auschwitz” (contained in This Quiet Dust). But Myers is wrong to suggest that Styron’s views on Jewish exclusivism — with the non-Jewish Sophie serving as Styron’s ecumenical exemplar — are invalidated by what Myers perceives to be a historical error. Myers cites Styron writing that Sophie “had suffered as much as any Jew,” but there is also this parenthetical (after Stingo has made efforts to reconcile Sophie’s life with George Steiner’s Language and Silence):

(It is surpassingly difficult for many Jews to see beyond the consecrated nature of the Nazis’ genocidal fury, and thus it seems to me less a flaw than a pardonable void in the moving meditation of Steiner, a Jew, that he makes only fleeting reference to the vast multitudes of non-Jews — the myriad Slavs and the Gypsies — who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, perishing just as surely as the Jews, though sometimes only less methodically.)

Here, Styron dares to enter into the tricky realm of genocidal relativism by inclusion. Yet if Styron is going to quibble with Steiner, we must quibble with Styron by his own rules. Stingo has left out the pink triangles, the political prisoners, and numerous other laborers who perished in the camps. If Styron hopes to “sum up the absolute totalitarian nature of this evil,” it is quite possible that no book can truly contain it. On the other hand, when Styron writes of Stingo’s whereabouts on April 1, 1943, he is clearly showing the foolish nature of the comparative enterprise:

I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring day in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas.

Stingo is gorging himself on bananas because he needs three more pounds to meet the minimum weight requirement to join the Marines. And yet, at the time, Stingo

had not heard of Auschwitz, nor of any concentration camp, nor of the mass destruction of the European Jews, nor even much about the Nazis. For me the enemy in that global war was the Japanese, and my ignorance of the anguish hovering like a noxious gray smog over places with names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen was complete. But wasn’t this true for most Americans, indeed most human beings who dwelt beyond the perimeter of the Nazi horror?

In condemning Styron for his “historical error,” Myers correctly observes that none of the books and records that Stingo quotes is a firsthand source. And yet while Myers is right to point out that Sophie’s testimony to Stingo “secures the narrative authority of Sophie’s Choice,” he fails to observe that even Styron’s fictional firsthand source is suspect, suggesting that “the novel’s case against the Jewish interpretation of the Holocaust depends upon the claim that Jews are ignorant of the historical reality.” But if Stingo himself starts from a blank slate of ignorance, is not the purported case against predicated on an interpretation built atop gentile ignorance? The details here are as much about the lies and the omissions as they are about what is stated and filtered through Stingo. Of one of Sophie’s accounts, Stingo notes, “Her brief observation on the function of Auschwitz-Birkenau….is basically an accurate one, and she neither exaggerated nor underestimated the nature of her various diseases….Why, then, did she leave out certain elements and details that anyone might reasonably have expected her to include?” Later in the novel, Stingo declares, “Would I not forgive her, she said, now that I saw both the truth and her necessity for telling the lie?” Still later, a highly inebriated Sophie exclaims, “Jews! God, how I hate them! Oh, the lies I have told you, Stingo. Everything I told you about Cracow was a lie. All my childhood, all my life I really hated Jews. They deserved it, this hate, I hate them, dirty Jewish cochons!”

This is distressing and prejudicial language. And it certainly points to one interesting takeaway that Myers promulgates: “The only respect in which [the novel’s Jewish characters] remain Jewish at all is in their exclusivist response to the Holocaust.” But can Stingo as narrator be entirely trusted? Is not Sophie’s anti-Semitic outburst, the fissures widened by self-medicating swigs of rye, not pointing to the inherent ugliness within the Enlightenment liberal position?

Sophie’s Choice is many things, but the thrust here may be more emotional than intellectual. Cannot the Holocaust be both ecumenical, as Styron once proposed, and exclusively Jewish? If one is not Jewish, and one feels deep sadness and great contrition for these tremendous atrocities, then Jewish exclusivity presents no other option other than conversion. Thus, Stingo’s romantic language, tailored for crass sexuality, may very well be upholding the folly buried within.

Since Myers was too timorous to consider this angle, I’m going to suggest that Stingo’s sexual longings represent some wishful reconciliation between Jewish exclusivity and universal understanding. For the gentile denied exclusivity, there is the commingling of guilt with passion, even carnal passion. Yet as Leslie Fiedler observed in his take on Sophie’s Choice, “Even when Stingo manages to participate in the action, he proves incapable of influencing its outcome.” So if Myers believes that Styron “fails to understand the sense in which the Holocaust calls into question the left-liberal distaste for Jewish exclusivism,” it would appear that he did not read the following reflective passage near novel’s end, when Stingo is attempting to balance his youthful journal with his adult self:

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

Next: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net!

(Image: Alfred Eisenstaedt)

by Edward Champion

The Sheltering Sky (Modern Library #97)

“When I read about spoiled Americans who abscond with common sense, I have zero sympathy. ” The next exciting installment in the Modern Library Reading Challenge!

(This is the fourth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Postman Always Rings Twice)

When I first discovered the names Kit, Port, and Tunner, my mind instantly concluded that these must be debauched head honchos for some baleful corporate defense firm. This was then followed by a few inescapable jokes that I delivered to walls of books when nobody was around: Tunner getting Kit’s kit off, Port in a storm, and so forth. I am sad to report that the tomes offered no laughs or kind titters in return. Neither, for that matter, did my copy of The Sheltering Sky: a grim and largely humorless volume that did an impressive job filling about six hours of my life with a stupendous sense of dread. (I feel dreadful just remembering the experience of reading this book, even though I simultaneously recognize the book’s virtues and now see just how much Dan Simmons was channeling Bowles with his excellent debut novel, Song of Kali.)

It was especially interesting to see sundry uprisings break out in Africa shortly after I reached the end. It was almost as if world events were responding to my reading decisions! I suppose such a sentiment, however fleeting or half-formed, makes me a smug and clueless First World type. And I apologize to the Libyans, the Egyptians, and the Algerians for this. I cannot help the way my mind careens down certain paths. But then, unlike Kit, Port, and Tunner, I would never venture into unknown territory without bona-fide curiosity, a genuine sense of adventure, and, most importantly, a sense of collective inclusion. At least that’s what I’d like to think.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Sheltering Sky, it follows Port and Kit Moresby (impossible not to smile at the blunt accumulative connotation of this surname, eh? especially with the vapid type of American who, failing to see the magic within the “mundane,” mews out “More!” when asked about future plans and wonders years later why she’s so lonely and unfulfilled), a married couple who, presented with ravaged postwar home turf (both New York and Europe by natural extension), set out to Africa — in large part because they hope to find terrain untouched by global conflict. They are accompanied by Tunner, who isn’t quite as smart as the Moresbys. (“A bore, a bore, a bore!” whispers Port under his breath to Kit when Tunner is in the other room.) But one wonders if Kit and Port are really all that smart to begin with. At one point, when Port is remembering his reasons for the initial hegira, he compares himself to a pioneer: “he felt more closely identified with his great-grandparents, when he was rolling along out here in the desert than he did sitting at home looking out over the reservoir in Central Park.” A grand patriarchal tradition? Even so, Port is willing to travel to a rotting hotel in Ain Krorfa, and his initial check-in features some of the most remarkable putrescence I am likely to read in this Modern Library Reading Challenge:

The fountain which at one time had risen from the basin in the center of the patio was gone, but the basin remained. In it reposed a small mountain of reeking garbage, and reclining on the sides of the mountain were three screaming, naked infants, their soft formless bodies troubled with busting sores. They looked human there in their helpless misery, but somehow not quite so human as the two pink dogs lying on the tiles nearby — pink because long ago they had lost all their hair, and their raw aged skin lay indecently exposed to the kisses of the flies and the sun.

Now I don’t know about you. But my instinct when presented with such a scene — especially if I had a wife carrying all manner of trinkets and dresses, who was not exactly fond of the long-standing pilgrimage — would be to get the hell out of there. Yet Kit and Port stay. Two pages later, they’re eating soup with weevils, “sitting over coffee and waving away flies.” Kit himself pines for the sun. Never mind that he’s just seen what the flies and the sun do to these poor dogs. Not long after that, Port asks Kit the preposterous question, “Do you think you can be happy here?” After some pressing, Kit replies, “How can I tell? It’s impossible to get into their lives, and know what they’re actually thinking.”

Yet it’s very possible for us to get inside the Moresby heads and know what they’re actually thinking. Journeying for them is almost a hollow religion, one stumbled upon because there is little else to do. In the book’s early pages, Kit says, “The people of each country get more like the people of every country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture — nothing, nothing.” With kvetching like that, one wonders the conversational industry it would it take to get these folks exploring Lake Victoria in a canoe.

In other words, these characters are selfish jerks who, unlike Sebastian Dangerfield or George Minafer, don’t invite further curiosity into their motivations. “You’re never humanity,” snaps Port to Kit at one point, “you’re only your poor hopelessly isolated self.” Yet Port considers himself to be clued in. And if that means heading down a dicey staircase to partake of a courtesan or rudely ringing for tea at an ungodly hour, that’s what he’ll do to get into the lives of others. Only a few pages into the book, Bowles tells us that Port considers himself a traveler rather than a tourist, with the distinction “moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” But slowing down in life doesn’t necessarily make you any more receptive than some caffeinated jackal flitting through on a bus (or, in the case of Kit and Port later, using their privileged positions to flee by bus and evade responsibility). The other important distinction, Bowles reports, is that, while the tourist accepts his own civilization without question, the traveler “compares [the new civilization] with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” And yet Port’s “comparison” involves the same superiority practiced by a tourist, such as the moment when he tells a lie about his wife being very sick to buy two bus seats:

He watched the Arab’s face closely, to see if he were capable of believing such an obvious lie. Apparently here it was as logical for an ailing person to go away from civilization and medical care as to go in the direction of it, for the Arab’s expression slowly changed to one of understanding and sympathy.

Now I have no problem with depressing books. I like to be moved to tears as much as I enjoy a few laughs. But when I read about Port, a spoiled American who absconds with common sense when a passport has been lost, and Kit, a spoiled American who commits adultery while her husband is traveling with two insufferable imperialists (the Lyles), and when she ventures into a fourth-class carriage, only to “shake violently” upon her return, and when none of these people can be straight about their feelings (Bowles often has his characters, especially Kit, “talking” in thoughts and words), I have zero sympathy. Still, I suppose it’s somewhat useful to be reminded that passive-aggressive deceit flourished just as much in 1949 as it does in 2011.

As I became more acquainted with this pampered ternion while turning the pages of Paul Bowles’s alleged masterpiece (“It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published in English since World War II,” reports The New Republic on my edition; it’s good for long stretches, but I beg to differ with this hyperbole), I found myself greatly pining for their deaths so that Bowles could continue his indefatigable duties describing the grand North African tableau, with its slanting landscapes and microscopic tents seen through grimy windows. Even the work of Frederic Prokosch, a now regrettably forgotten writer who was working the same beat (see The Seven Who Fled and The Asiatics) and who, like Bowles, favored ornate prose over dimensional character, speaks more on the subject of behavioral nuance.

My initial interest in Bowles’s characters flagged considerably by the time I had reached the second part, especially since Bowles shifted such supporting figures as the Bou Noura lieutenant d’Armagnac — a man who appeared to have more adamantine problems than these three entitled nincompoops:

During the third night of of her imprisonment a gray scorpion, on its way along the earthen floor of her cell, discovered an unexpected and welcome warmth in one corner, and took refuge there. When Yamnia stirred in her sleep, the inevitable occurred. The sting entered the nape of her neck; she never recovered consciousness. The news of her death quickly spread around the town, with the detail of the scorpion missing from the telling of it, so that the final and, as it were, official native version was that the girl had been assaulted by the entire garrison, including the lieutenant, and thereafter conveniently murdered.

Perhaps that passage is a wry reflection upon how difficult it is to convey an apparently exotic experience through narrative. Inevitably, your sense of a place or a person is bound to be vitiated and/or embroidered in the telling.

It’s probably worth pointing out that Bowles — in a letter to his wife Jane (a great writer in her own right) contained in the epistolary collection, In Touch — had planned to kill off Port halfway through the book: “He lingers on in agony instead of dying. But I’ll get rid of him yet, I assure you. Once he’s gone there’ll be only the heroine left to keep things going, and that won’t be easy. Still, it’s got to be that way; there’s no other possible design for it.”

On the other hand, the novel’s obvious conclusive crack about “the end of the line” — belaboring the distinction between “tourist” and “traveler” — made me feel more than a bit conned.

Still, I’m relieved that my understanding of Paul Bowles has become more sophisticated, if only because, up till now, I carried around a superficial understanding. Before The Sheltering Sky, I had not read Bowles. And I had long associated Bowles’s work with the glorious tuft of Debra Winger’s muff. That revelation may earn me a few detractors, but I must be candid. The truth is the truth. I like muffs. And I like Debra Winger (though certainly not just for her muff). You see, Bernardo Bertolucci tried to film the unfilmable back in 1990. And in a largely unsuccessful effort to spice things up, he gave us Ms. Winger’s delightful fur, Amina Annabi’s flesh, and John Malkovich’s hilarious hair. Other than these moments, the film is quite soporific. Even Bowles, in the introduction to a paperback edition, confessed that the film was “a fatal mess.” (Bowles, who also appeared in Bertolucci’s film, may have been sour because, according to a very bad hagiography* written by Virginia Spencer Carr, Bowles didn’t see a dime in royalties beyond the original $5,000 he received for selling the movie rights in 1952. Hurray for Hollywood! Perhaps this explains his appearance in the film. On the other hand, in an October 9, 1989 letter to Regina Weinreich, Bowles writes, “I like all three of the leads, and particularly Debra Winger, whom I go to visit often at her house on the Mountain.”)

That gossip may not accentuate your reading experience, but it does suggest very highly that, unlike Bowles’s fictional trio, Debra Winger is more of a traveler than a tourist.

Next Up: William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice!

Related Link: A Million Grains of Sand — a helpful index to The Sheltering Sky created by Frances McConihe.

* — How bad is Carr’s Paul Bowles: A Life? Very bad. Try this: “Bowles’s insistence that he never made plans and that his actions depended unfailingly upon who came along confirms his reluctance to be an initiator of anything, regardless of the act in question.” No skepticism whatsoever? No effort to confirm Bowles’s statements against other sources? The back flap of the hardcover I checked out from the library features a smiling Carr hunched on her elbow with a decidedly unhale Bowles in bed. The message here, undoubtedly subconscious, couldn’t be any clearer.

by Edward Champion

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Modern Library #98)

After reading Postman for the third time, I’m now wondering who Frank Chambers will be when I read him fifteen years from now.

(This is the third entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Ginger Man)

When I was a shy stripling new to San Francisco, there were three writers who showed me the way to manhood: James Baldwin, Henry Miller, and James M. Cain. Baldwin was angry for being the other, but with very good reason. Miller was playful (and often indignant) for being the other, but his “other” was narrow and individual. Not a cult of one, but not the kind of guy to easily integrate into a Western Union desk job. Hence, the writing life. Hence, poverty. Bless both gentlemen for their eccentricities. I’m not being hyperbolic when I state that I couldn’t have survived my early twenties without them. And bless the Modern Library for including both of these writers on its list. I look forward to revisiting them.

But I’m here to square things away with the third guy. James M. Cain may have been quieter than the first two, but he was just as interested in those primal emotions hidden beneath apparent equipoise. Cain’s rudderless drifters, often without funds, kept their knowledge and skills to themselves, perhaps because their talents weren’t nearly as great as they figured or, when brushing up against cold hard cash, they simply didn’t blend well. (See, for example, the Mexicali poolroom incident in The Postman Always Rings Twice.) Lacking any direct line to an indispensable quality, these heroes hoped to get by through decisiveness, no-bullshit assertiveness, and clever banter. It helped tremendously that Cain, who came from journalism, was a master of smooth muscular prose. You’d be hard-pressed to find an extraneous word in any of his hard-boiled sentences. (In Postman, “I had her” is the last sentence of the eighth chapter. And I’m guessing that’s likely to be the most succinct sentence I ever encounter in the Modern Library Reading Challenge.) But Cain’s great joke was that this resigned approach often led his heroes into murders, insurance scams, or lustful traps.

Was this punishment? I didn’t see any of this as a Puritanical racket. Still don’t from my more adult vantage point. No need to wear a scarlet A in the Cain universe. You’d get yours eventually if you didn’t appreciate your good fortune. And even if you managed to fool everybody most of the time, there was always someone out there who pulled a faster gun. And who knew how far up the chain it went?

“Chambers, I think this is the last murder you’ll have a hand in for some time, but if you ever try another, for God’s sake leave insurance companies out of it. They’ll spend five times as much as Los Angeles County will let me put on a case.”

Cain was pure opera. It’s there in Postman‘s elaborate explanation of the Pacific States Accident policy:

He told what it covered, how the Greek would get $25 a week for 52 weeks if he got sick, and the same if he got hurt in an accident so he couldn’t work, and how he would get $5,000 if he lost one limb, and $10,000 if he lost two limbs, and how his widow would get $10,000 if he was killed in an accident, and $20,000 if the accident was on a railroad train. When he got that far it began to sound like a sales talk, and the magistrate held up his hand.

In other words, the “sales talk,” the act of setting down the terms (or even outlining the way the world works), is in and of itself an operatic gesture. Yet from the other side of the 2008 economic clusterfuck, Cain’s spiels appear as sensible as a straightforward mom-and-pop lease that’s less about profit and more about everybody getting a fair shake. This may explain, in part, why David Mamet was enlisted to write the screenplay for the surprisingly subpar 1981 Bob Rafelson film adaptation. By the way, I’m not a fan of the 1946 version with Lana Turner, pictured above, and John Garfield. It’s probably because I encountered Cain in books first. On the page, Cain’s intensity, however melodramatic, felt real — in large part because Cain let you in on the mechanics. (It’s not much of a surprise for anyone to learn that Cain did an uncredited rewrite on Out of the Past, another noir masterpiece.) On the big screen, with the exception of Billy Wilder’s extraordinary Double Indemnity, Cain’s books transformed into entertaining but easy camp. One need look no further than Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce to see the problem. (There is presently a Mildred Pierce miniseries being made by Todd Haynes. It will be most interesting to see how Haynes approaches this problem.)

It’s also there in Serenade, a wonderful cultured tough guy novel that doesn’t get nearly the same respect afforded to Postman and Double Indemnity:

There was an outdoor performance of Carmen that night at the Hollywood Bowl, at a dollar and a half top but with some seats at seventy-five cents, so of course we had to go. If you want to know where to find an opera singer the night some opera is being given you’ll find him right there, and no other place. A baseball player, for some reason, prefers a ball game.

Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be writing about The Postman Always Rings Twice. But can you think of any fiction of the time (1937!) that was so transparent about the cultural class divide?

At nineteen, I was quietly angry and vocally playful. I didn’t want people to know what I knew, because I wasn’t sure it had any bearing on what I was supposed to be. (And, boy, was I wrong!) I felt misunderstood, yet I often talked down hotheads from beating each other up and people told me their stories. I was often confused as some guy in his thirties by way of a vocabulary I picked up from books and British friends and from careful listening. So Cain completed the holy trinity when I first read Postman by accident, picked up at random from a library. I was floored by the way Cain laid it out in that famous first paragraph:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave a cigarettes, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.

Very early in this website’s history (January 15, 2004, to be precise), I rewrote that passage in first person plural to protest the then omnipresence of the McSweeney’s “we.” (Yes, Virginia, there was a time in which Joshua Ferris was just some advertising copy writer.) I’ve since loosened up about first person plural — especially since we are blessed with such great novels as Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way (published only last week!).

But however you roll on the question of “we,” straight declarative punch — particularly punch that is this compact and that instantly throws you into the story — is never a bad thing. My nineteen-year-old self considered Cain to be fiction’s answer to Samuel Fuller’s filmmaking theory: “Grab ’em by the balls.” Yet Cain got there first. I set out to read everything he’d ever written.

I remember an expedition to the now defunct McDonald’s Books on Turk Street. I walked past transgender prostitutes propositioning me into a redolent and wildly unorganized used bookstore then legendary among a certain cultured underground type that one can no longer find. McDonald’s was a crumbling place with stacks of old magazines you couldn’t find in any library and the stink of old books sullied by bodily fluids from years before. This was not a place for neat freaks or the prissy. You really had to love books. From a hygienic standpoint, one had to be careful. But I found several volumes of Cain here. This included a hardcover called The Baby in the Icebox, which I still have. Any guy writing a story with that title was jake with me.

My Cain mania caused me to read the man’s canon again after I read through it once before. “I don’t think there’s ever been a man so moony that a little bit of chill didn’t come over him as soon as a woman said yes,” wrote Cain in Serenade. Being shy at the time, especially in relation to women, and not having a father figure, it was a revelation to see these feelings, which embarrassed me, presented in such a bold and confident manner. And I remain convinced that, had it not been for Cain, I would not have the effrontery that I have now.

But that was many years ago. Until the Modern Library Reading Challenge, I hadn’t thought to read Cain again, although I did buy a number of his books for nervous younger friends. A few weeks ago, I picked up the beat-up paperback for the first time in fifteen years.

“Rip me! Rip me!”

I ripped her. I shoved my hand in her blouse and jerked she was wide open, from her throat to her belly.

Eat your heart out, Harlequin. I was amazed that I had forgotten much of this. And yet within the novel’s context, it works. For Frank Chambers, the drifter skipping around the nation (“Kansas City? New York? New Orleans? Chicago?” “I’ve seen them all.”), isn’t strictly a primal lowlife who starts working at a gas station and contrives to kill Nick Papadakis (the owner) because he wants to get Cora Papadakis’s pants. This template has been repeated a thousand times over, but many of the hacks who ripped off Cain forget his nuances. Frank has a respect for Papadakis. “He never did anything to me,” says Frank to Cora early on. “He’s all right.” Yet despite this rational thinking, Frank allows lust to overcome him. (Good Lord, did I actually use The Postman Always Rings Twice as an example when, at the age of twenty-two, I talked with a married man who was trying to figure out why he remained more committed to his adulterous affairs? I did.) Even when Frank gets away with murder, he has a self-sabotage streak. He rolls out of town and chases tail. He protests some beer developments that makes the roadside gas station money. Why is lust such a draw for Frank? Is it because he’s easily bored? Because he doesn’t know how to settle down?

This time around, I found myself looking at Postman more from Cora’s perspective than Frank’s. What isn’t Frank telling us about Cora? For a woman who protests about Nick so much, why doesn’t she just leave? After all, isn’t that just as easy as carrying on an affair with some stranger coming in off the road?

“I loved you. I would love you without even a shirt. I would love you specially without a shirt, so that I could feel how nice and hard your shoulders are.”

If Frank is tinkering with his memory (and, given the final chapter’s revelation, he’s certainly in a rush to tell his story), then, even accounting for the intense language exchanged during vigorous banging, this dialogue from Cora seems more like an unreal fantasy. Especially since Frank is careful to inform us at an inquest that he’s telling “a cock-eyed story I was going to take back later on, when we got to a place where it really meant something.” But if Cora is being idealized, then does Frank’s story within Postman “really mean something?” Perhaps the story means more in what it doesn’t tell us.

The best rereads are those books that cause you to recognize certain changes within yourself. If you have nearly the same reaction years later, chances are that the author didn’t have much in the way of ambition. After reading Postman for the third time, I’m now wondering who Frank Chambers will be when I read him fifteen years from now.

Next Up: Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky.

by Edward Champion

The Ginger Man (Modern Library #99)

The next exciting entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, concerning itself with boorish protagonists, authors who sue themselves in court, and the interior monologue!

(This is the second entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Magnificent Ambersons)

I feel morally obliged to point out that I am hardly the only person attempting to read all of the Modern Library titles. When I first considered this project, I was completely unaware of Lydia Kiesling’s Modern Library Revue — despite being a fairly regular reader of The Millions (and trivial contributor). I was also pleasantly surprised to discover a blog called The Modern Library List of Books run by a mysterious Canadian woman named Devon S., who now lives in New York City (after a stint in Paris). Devon is also reading the Modern Library from #100 to #1, and is now at #87 after a little more than a year. I’d also be remiss to dismiss Rachael Reads. Rachael, like Lydia, is reading the Modern Library titles out of order. I smiled a long while over the Connecticut Museum Quest’s slower but very noble efforts to read three Modern Library books a year — which, by my math, works out to about 40 years for the 121 books. This seems to me a very sensible long-term commitment. Still, if you can’t read them all, you can always just take on the authors more reflective of 21st century enlightenment.

The Modern Library list has only been around for thirteen years. Yet already people are happy to share their reading adventures and their unanticipated epiphanies. Evelyn Waugh becomes a “bi-curious hipster boyfriend.” (I hope to respond to that intriguing proposition when I eventually hit #80, assuming hipsters — and Michael Cera’s career — still exist by the time I get to Brideshead.) Midnight’s Children reminds another of “the many Englishes in the world.”

For my own part, Sebastian Dangerfield, the wonderfully monstrous protagonist of J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, recalled Johnny (Donleavy’s first name) in Mike Leigh’s Naked. In fact, in Leigh’s film, the sadistic landlord Jeremy G. Smart identifies himself as “Sebastian Hawk.” Apparently, I wasn’t alone in making this association. An interviewer named Gineen Cooper, writing for a literary magazine called The Pannus Index, even asked Donleavy if he had seen Leigh’s movie. (Donleavy hadn’t.) I don’t know if I buy Ms. Cooper’s theory of the “anarchic Dionysian rhetoric which underlines both characters’ personalities” — in part because ideology is the wrong method with which to consider both Johnny and Dangerfield. Also, in Dangerfield’s case, we are dealing with a character bifurcated on the page. (More on this in a bit.) For both characters, surely the behavior here is fascinating enough. But when Donleavy’s Sebastian said to his mate, “I’m twenty-seven years old and I feel like I’m sixty,” I couldn’t help thinking of Mike Leigh’s Johnny being misidentified as forty while stating his age as twenty-seven.

Irrespective of these parallels, The Ginger Man turned out to be a grand hoot — very aggressive and funny, certainly more interesting and stylistically daring than The Magnificent Ambersons in its exploration of youthful hubris. (And what is it with the Modern Library books and prickish protagonists so far? I certainly hope that the behavioral spectrum expands in the next several books!) The Ginger Man is the kind of novel you give to a finger-shaking dogmatist who insists that some modest behavioral infraction on your part, talked out through apologia and attentive listening, instantly transforms you into an asshole. Sebastian Dangerfield, like Humbert Humbert, is one of the great assholes of 20th century literature: he is charismatic, he somehow talks women into bed (but not all of them), he is tolerated by many despite his boorishness, and he is more than a bit sociopathic. Dangerfield carries the redolent stench of entitlement. Here is a young man purportedly studying law at Trinity College, one who has great responsibilities to his wife Marion and his kid. Yet he thinks nothing of plundering the last stash of cash and blowing it all on stout, much less taking up an affair with the very woman who sublets the room. And if that isn’t degenerate enough for you, Dangerfield leeches off his friends, even after his friends have become paupers:

I have discovered one of the great ailments of Ireland, 67% of the population have never been completely naked in their lives. Now don’t you, as a man of broad classical experience, find this a little strange and perhaps even a bit unhygienic. I think it is certainly both of those things. I am bound to say that this must cause a good deal of the passive agony one sees in the streets. There are other things wrong with this country but I must leave them wait for they are just developing in my mind.

That’s a portion from Dangerfield’s letter in response to his friend Kenneth O’Keefe, who has written to Dangerfield a few chapters earlier of his dire straits in France. O’Keefe is hungry “enough to eat dog,” rationing himself twelve peas for every meal, claiming impotence, and, most importantly, counting upon the money that Dangerfield promised he would pay him back. But Dangerfield would rather offer a foolish philosophy than own up to his responsibilities as both friend and debtor.

His truly unpardonable behavior even gets him into the newspapers (“His eyes were given as very wild,” reports the broadsheet, suggesting a descriptive shortsightedness from the witnesses, the reporter, the police, all of Ireland herself!), and yet this Ginger Man is strangely capable of getting away with much — defying the Irish Guard, flouting the drinking curfews, terrifying bartenders and train passengers, and even stringing naive young girls along and persuading them to spend their hard-earned cash on him.

Donleavy is quite clever in the way he invites the reader to figure out why Dangerfield is so loutish. Dangerfield never quite tells us what he wants. (In the letter I quoted above, we see the way that Dangerfield tries comparing his troubles to those of Ireland. First-class narcissism. But even this still doesn’t entirely answer the question of why he behaves this way.) When Dangerfield talks with a sketchy man named Percy Clocklan, Dangerfield asks him, “What would you like out of life, Percy?” Is the aimless Dangerfield merely passing the time? Is he tolerated because of this apparent flattery?

On the other hand, the book is working from a highly stylized interior monologue. Donleavy swaps between first-person and third-person — often in the same paragraph and very frequently in clipped sentences (the latter is almost a neutral mediator, a voice somewhere between Dangerfield and narrator):

Sebastian crawled naked through the morning room into the kitchen. Turned the key and scrabbling back to the morning room, waiting under the table. Through the mirror on the opposite wall he saw he saw the cap of the mailman pass by. I’ve got to see the postman. Get a blanket off Mrs. Frost’s bed.

That passage comes later in the book, when Dangerfield’s house (rented from a landlord named Egbert Skully) has fallen into slovenly disrepair and funds aren’t coming anytime soon. Which means, of course, that Dangerfield is on the run. His strategy is to carry on being a shit. The mirror imagery, omitting the reflection of our narcissistic hero, may suggest that one of Dangerfield’s main problems is a profound inability to see what he does. This self-delusion is further suggested by the way in which Dangerfield’s first-person interventions begins to take up a greater portion of the story as both the book (and Dangerfield’s life) carries on.

Yet for long stretches of the book, this ignoble beast evades nearly every punitive fate. How does a guy like Dangerfield get away with this crassitude? Another clue be found in Donleavy’s excellent dialogue (it’s hardly an accident that Donleavy had the chops to adapt this novel into a play), suggesting that our hero’s primary skill is the right combination of witty quips and backhanded compliments:

“My dear Chris, you do have a lovely pair of legs. Strong. You hide them.”

“My dear Sebastian, I do thank you. I’m not hiding them. Does that make men follow one?”

“It’s the hair that does that.”

“Not the legs?”

“The hair and the eyes.”

Dangerfield does get some form of comeuppance near the end (he lives for his inheritance, but he learns that his inheritance has been planned around the way he lives), yet within the safety of the novel, this titular Ginger Man, running from Dublin to London, can’t be caught. “You’re a terrible man, Sebastian,” says one character late in the novel. “Merry fraud,” replies Dangerfield, in a bit of wordplay directed to two serious victims (Marion, his wife; Mary, a girl he runs off with).

It’s worth pointing out that this was pretty hot stuff back in 1955, skirting the line between literary comedy and perceived obscenity. After The Ginger Man was rejected by nearly every major publisher, Maurice Girodias of The Olympia Press agreed to publish it. Unfortunately for Donleavy, Girodias published The Ginger Man as part of its Traveller’s Companion Series, listing it as a “special volume” with such titles as Richardson’s The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, Lengel’s White Thighs, Van Heller’s Rape, and Jones’s The Enormous Bed. The Ginger Man was published as pornography. This may seem tame in 2011, but in the mid-20th century, writers, often going by pen names, could be blacklisted or even arrested for such associations. It didn’t help that Girodias had expressly violated the terms that he and Donleavy had agreed to. As The Ginger Man garnered global renown, there were years of litigation and disputes over the rights. Eventually Girodias went bankrupt, giving Donleavy a chance to buy up the Olympia Press rights He found himself in a courtroom suing himself.

Donleavy, it turns out, is still alive. Last August, the Independent tracked him down — under the proviso that the newspaper would host a picnic and provide all the food and drink. He didn’t say much. In The History of The Ginger Man, Donleavy wrote about what his friend, the bestselling (and now largely forgotten) novelist Ernest Gebler, told him about what authors do when they get rich:

“Mike, they buy binoculars, shotguns, sports cars and fishing rods, and a big estate to use them on. And then outfitted in their new life, along with new bathrooms, wallpaper and brands of soap, they make a fatal mistake and change their women. To schemingly get toasted and roasted on glowing hot emotional coals, and subjected to a whole new set of tricks and treacheries. Which leaves that author spiritually disillusioned and minus his favorite household implements.”

Donleavy, who has seen 45 million copies of The Ginger Man sold (the book has never gone out of print), still lives cheaply despite his success. He seems to have followed Gebler’s advice.

Next up: James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice!