by Edward Champion

The Magus (Modern Library #93)

In the next exciting installment in the Modern Library Reading Challenge, our intrepid reader tackles John Fowles’s The Magus!

(This is the eighth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Wide Sargasso Sea)

Over the course of several interviews, John Fowles enjoyed recycling one particular anecdote concerning The Magus. The then bigshot author once received a letter from a woman who didn’t care for his book. The woman asked Fowles if two of the novel’s characters got together at the end. Fowles wrote back and said, “No.” He received another letter from a New York attorney dying of cancer in a hospital. The lawyer asked the same question, but, unlike the woman, informed Fowles that he enjoyed the book. Fowles replied, “Yes.” In 1986, Fowles would tell a dull interviewer seeking literal-minded answers, “I tell that story because that’s how I feel — I don’t know the answer. And I tend to react as people want, or don’t want it — if they’ve annoyed me — to end.” But Fowles’s story after the story does have me wondering about the novelist’s responsibility. If a novelist leaves his volume open-ended, does he not have some duty to know every aspect of his characters as he knows the back of his hand? On the other hand, if Fowles led his narcissistic schoolteacher Nicholas Urfe to a specific point, perhaps he’s off the hook for anything beyond these final words:

cras amet qui numquam amavit
quique amavit cras amet

Some takes on these closing lines, repurposed by Fowles from The Virgil of Venus (3rd century AD), can be found at the most definitive online place for all things Fowles. Loosely translated, the Latin reads: “Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love tomorrow.” While this suggests that Fowles wanted the frequently callous Nicholas to love again, the lingering question I had after finishing The Magus was whether Fowles even cared about people. I realize it’s important to separate the novelist from the novel, but I think my impressions were colored by The Magus‘s repugnant first-person perspective:

We both smiled, and we both knew we smiled to hide a fundamental truth: that we could not trust each other one inch.

At the risk of oversimplifying a big burly opus, this is the general timbre in which Nicholas relates to people. People don’t exist to feel. They exist to be used. At one point, there’s the possibility that Nicholas’s actions may have caused another person to commit suicide. It wasn’t too much of a surprise to learn from Eileen Warburton’s John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds that Nicholas Urfe and John Fowles weren’t terribly far apart. The young Fowles, teaching at the University of Poitiers, was “a shy, self-absorbed young man” who was unable to write much of anything aside from his diaries. Yet even more than a decade after Fowles first talked shit about his friends and colleagues in his wildly bitter journals (collected in two volumes and loaded with the kind of vinegar and vitriol that one expects from a sociopath-in-training), he remains quite singularly absorbed in himself:

11 October 1963 It enrages [Elizabeth Whitton, Fowles’s wife] that my priority isn’t the getting of a house, it enrages me that her priority isn’t giving me the time (or peace) to finish The Magus. So we live at cross-purposes.

Fowles began work on The Magus (originally titled The Godgame) when he was 28, and then dropped the project for ten years. One quotation Fowles relied on during the writing of The Magus was from Henri Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes: “I like the marvelous only when it is strictly enveloped in reality.” And yet the one thing distinct about The Magus is the frequent lack of reality. We are asked to believe that Nicholas, a learned man, would not conduct some serious research into Maurice Conchis, the apparent World War II veteran who charms Nicholas into his manipulative world, after so many inconsistent stories. (To cite just one example, if you are a young and self-absorbed man with poetic aspirations and a man tells you, “Words are for facts. Not fiction,” would you not doubt him?) Nicholas does look into Conchis and his ostensible associates eventually, but only after the terrain has shifted into the ridiculous, with Nazi reenactments and implausible impersonations.

It has been put forth by some critics that The Mysteries of Udolpho was an influence upon The Magus (both books initiate a series of adventures from the discovery of a poem), yet Fowles was to dismiss Ann Radcliffe in a 1956 diary entry: “not much ear, but some pleasant fragments of 1800 delight in batsy gloom and soft despair.” One accidental influence may have been Dickens’s Great Expectations. In a 1980 interview, Fowles was to speak approvingly of one dissertation making this connection, in large part because the student didn’t know that Fowles had taught Great Expectations while writing The Magus. (In a 1959 diary entry, Fowles, who mostly didn’t care for Dickens, called Chapter 29, where Pip returns to Miss Haversham’s house, “one of those remarkable seminal chapters in Dickens which really touch upon something vast and deep.”)

27 May 1964. I cut everything that stands in the way of the narrative thrust; anything that lapses beneath a certain state of tension. Because this seems to me the essence of the novel — the exact harmony between subject-matter (symbolisms, intellectual and stylistic aims) and narrative force (simple old readability). The words on a page have got to life it over. Narrative is a sort of magnetism.

When Nicholas tells Alison, the purported paramour whom he proceeds to treat like dirt, about the tricks that Conchis has been up to, he says, “It’s not that I believe any of these things in the way he tries to make me believe them….It’s simply that when I’m with him I feel he does have access to some kind of power.” And yet Conchis’s magnetism is clearly a load of bunk. When a man you confuse with “an Elizabethan nobleman” sends you a note not to come around again shortly after you have had to cut yourself free from German soldiers who have tied you up (and where did they come from by the way?), only to send you another message through his courtesan, surely there is a point in which you realize your homemade cork needle isn’t bobbing the way that you hoped.

On the other hand, hokum does sustain readability. In a 1971 interview with Daniel Halpern, Fowles would cop to going back to Chandler and Hammett in order to get a handle on craftsmanship. He admired Chandler especially, telling Halpern that “his best paragraphs are absolutely tight and hard. Like good furniture.” Sure enough, The Magus proves to be a learned man’s attempt to simulate pulp. Consider the early hookup between Nicholas and Alison:

“You don’t know what its like waking up with a man you didn’t even know this time yesterday. It’s losing something. Not just what all girls lose.”

“Or gaining something.”

“God, what can we gain. Tell me.”

“Experience. Pleasure.”

“Did I tell you I love your mouth?”

“Several times.”

She stubbed the cigarette out and sat back.

“Do you know why I tried to cry just now? Because I’m going to marry him.”

Hundreds of pages later, we get “I HATE YOU!” in all caps. We have words “spat out like a grape pip.” We have plenty of purple pots boiling: “Her eyes were very direct, so direct I looked down from them.” (These examples were culled from the revised edition, which was the only copy I could find. Yes, Fowles would revise The Magus in 1977, which he would declare the favorite of his novels “in the sense that one might love a crippled child more than normal children.”)

So when we tally up Fowles’s concern for taut narrative, the desperate approximation of tough guy craftsmanship, and the desire to write Dickensian chapters communicating epiphany (but stopping short of that “vast and deep” artistry through gesture; hence all the Jung and the philosophy and the psychoanalytic bullshit), it is especially interesting that he would write novels that weren’t interested in the most peremptory reader wish fulfillment: resolution. (Fowles wouldn’t confine his desire for open and alternative resolutions to his correspondents. His third novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman contains three possible endings.)

Of Anthony Burgess, Fowles was to write in his journal: “It is a mistake when fine minds wear a mask of plebeian coarseness to excuse themselves, even truth can’t pardon that.” I can’t help but feel this way about Fowles, a novelist who preferred the company of readers over critics and who, for a time, received the twin triumphs of unmitigated sales and critical acclaim. But stacked against Jean Rhys’s pith and Iris Murdoch’s layered comedy, for me, The Magus was the reading equivalent to watching an untrained wrestler without confidence attempt to fight himself.

It’s very possible that I was a tad too old to read this book. For many, I suppose The Magus is a bit like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But I’m certain there were other stumbling blocks having little to do with the philosophy. Self-described centathlete Michael Menche, also working his way through the Modern Library, observed that Fowles shares a quality with Herman Hesse: namely, an inability or unwillingness to make the reader laugh.

What’s especially interesting is that when The Magus came out, it was widely ridiculed in England. But in the United States, it was championed as a masterpiece. Whether trash or gem (and I suspect that Fowles would have agreed with both), I’ll let the novelist have the last words:

Novels, even much more lucidly conceived and controlled ones than this, are not like crossword puzzles, with one unique set of correct answers behind the clues — an analogy (“Dear Mr. Fowles, Please explain the real significance of…”) I sometimes despair of ever extirpating from the contemporary student mind.

Next Up: William Kennedy’s Ironweed!

by Edward Champion

Review of an Unnamed Documentary (2011)

A review of an Unnamed Documentary on product placement. Who is being scammed here?

A few weeks ago, I attended a press screening for a documentary that I refuse to name (hereinafter referred to as “The Unnamed Documentary”). The Unnamed Documentary’s facile joke is that the Filmmaker financed the film, which is ostensibly a documentary on product placement, entirely through product placement.

We can accept that advertisement is ubiquitous, except in São Paulo, where a recent law has banned advertising from the city, creating (as the film demonstrates) an absolutely serene environment that becomes exotic and rather beautiful when compared to our own. As the Unnamed Documentary rightly points out, there is no way that a Hollywood blockbuster can make an obscene profit without a co-branding relationship. So perhaps some advertising is necessary for a movie. On the other hand, would you make a documentary on political corruption while engaging in political corruption? If you are interviewing a man who has butchered his family, would you butcher your own family?

The failure of any figure in the Unnamed Documentary, save one tepid introspective moment involving the Filmmaker, to question these motives and the giddy placement of featured products throughout the many interviews leaves any honest person questioning the Filmmaker’s motivations — especially when he lies to Ralph Nader about a certain pair of shoes he’s promoting being manufactured in America (unless Nader is in on the joke, which is likely). (Indeed, the Filmmaker proved so ambitious that he even managed to get product placement within the Unnamed Documentary’s title.) The Unnamed Documentary is somewhat entertaining, but it doesn’t exactly tread new ground. The Filmmaker isn’t nearly as smart or as successful or as brave or as crafty as he thinks he is (save in obtaining money for himself, a serious ethical problem that I’ll get to in a bit). For if he were, he would have figured out a way to get the very corporate forces to finance something that was truly dangerous and that truly made them look terrible. The Filmmaker insists that he had total control over the finished product, but can one really have any control on a film in which it becomes necessary to stay in certain hotel rooms, fly certain airlines, drink certain drinks, and pump gas at certain gas stations? One cannot imagine DA Pennebaker or Barbara Kopple working this way. Thus, the Filmmaker is a fraud and a hypocrite who does not respect the intelligence of the very mass audience he purports to enlighten.

When I exited the screening room, many of the products (none of which I will name) were available. Every person who attended the screening, save my girlfriend and me, picked up the free goodie bag without so much as a shred of remorse. The screening crowd included “critics” and other people who purportedly practice journalism. And even though I was practicing an admittedly shaky and very casual form of journalism, for me, it was a basic ethical tenet not to submit to the game. If someone gives you money or considerable material goods when you cover something, is not your integrity compromised? We’re not talking about a free book or a free movie or a free ticket that you are being given for critical consideration. For this, there is no quid pro quo. If you permit me to experience a work of art for free, then you do not buy my opinion. But if I am offering my opinion on an Unnamed Documentary that concerns product placement, my feeling is that, if I take any products you shill after the screening, I am morally compromised.

Why can’t I name this film? Because that’s also part of the game. If I spill the title, then I will be promoting it. And I will be doing exactly what the Filmmaker wants. During one scene in the Unnamed Documentary, the Filmmaker is asked to guarantee a set number of media impressions if he is expected to receive the money for sponsorship. So if I mention the name of the film or the filmmaker, then my review may very well count as a “media impression.” But I don’t want to do that. I’m pretty confident anybody reading this can figure it out. However, if anybody names the film or the filmmaker in the comments, then I will replace their names with “Unnamed Documentary” and “Filmmaker.” Unlike the Filmmaker, I actually still want to stand by something.

I had hoped that the Unnamed Documentary would be a legitimate protest against corporate sponsorship using its very tools — see Chumbawamba taking money from GM to use “Pass It Along” in a commercial and then disseminating the GM money to Corpwatch to protest it, which is a very funny statement about the futility of activism. But the Filmmaker plans on taking all the money. To my knowledge, he doesn’t plan on giving the profits to anti-corporate forces or people who want to fight advertising in all of its horrific forms. There is nothing in the press notes or the end credits to suggest that he will do this. In other words, the Unnamed Documentary stands for nothing save the Filmmaker’s materialistic gains. The Filmmaker includes several prominent moments with his kid. And the Filmmaker’s true narcissistic goal becomes apparent with these very scenes. So the Filmmaker and the Unnamed Documentary are both situated against the audience’s interest, assuming that the audience has hoped to be informed about the increasing role of product placement in current American cinema. It’s very possible that they don’t care and that they’ll wish to think that, by paying for the Unnamed Documentary, they’ll believe themselves to be “in” on the joke in the same way that a bunch of rubes believed themselves to be “in” on the joke when Charlie Sheen took their tickets for the Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour and performed poorly and was booed by those who attended. “I already got your money,” responded Sheen.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Filmmaker is responding to the audience with pretty much the same attitude in not standing for a corresponding set of virtues. And this makes the Filmmaker as selfish and as immoral and as bad-mannered as Charlie Sheen. There are news reports now circulating about the Filmmaker obtaining product placement for another documentary. And when you pull a move like that, it doesn’t make you a prankster. Your set of values is no different from the creative accountants who ensured that General Electric would pay no taxes during a year in which they earned $5.1 billion in profits. It turns you into an asshole who is very much a part of the problem.

by Edward Champion

Wide Sargasso Sea (Modern Library #94)

In the next exciting installment in the Modern Library Reading Challenge, our intrepid reader tackles Jean Rhys’s remarkably depressing Wide Sargasso Sea!

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

In Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, there’s an essay in which Dyer describes his reading habits. He writes about a late stage wade into Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. “I could make neither head nor tail of the first part,” notes Dyer. “[B]ut, since the book was short and the end in sight almost from the first page, I finished it and realized that it was indeed the masterpiece everyone had claimed.” It’s safe to say that this knowingly superficial take, coming from a man who has offered similarly ridiculous thoughts in relation to David Foster Wallace, is woefully insufficient, even if it does come from a posturing Englishman. To adjust Dyer’s own metaphor into a framework which renders the length of a book extraneous, I think that judging any author against the promise and the propinquity of the last page is the cry of a miscreant, one either disinterested in literature or, as Scott Esposito has recently suggested, trolling so that he can move more units.

As someone who has recently confessed his own blind spots and “allergies” in relation to Jane Eyre (along with a willingness to confront this aesthetic resistance), I feel it incumbent to report that Jean Rhys’s masterpiece placed me in such a great trance that approaching it like some notch to be etched on my belt or miscomprehending the first part never entered my mind. If anything, I wished to comprehend it more. It could very well be that the silly ambition of this project has forced me to become obsessed with some of the individual volumes. But when I read Wide Sargasso Sea a second time, I had to stop myself from reading it a third time.

By contrast, when I read Jane Eyre in January, I felt no such impulse. I wanted to scream very much in the manner of Bertha, throw the book against the wall, and then try to understand why Charlotte Bronte drove me crazy while perfectly amicable and intelligent people continued to enjoy Jane Eyre (and its overwrought cinematic adaptations). It will be at least ten years before I attempt to read Jane Eyre again. Why should this be? I suggested in my Jane Eyre essay that Rochester was my entry point, yet Rochester is an absolute scoundrel in Wide Sargasso Sea. In considering both books, I find myself pitying him in Jane Eyre while loathing him in Wide Sargasso Sea. (It isn’t enough for Rochester to pluck her surname; he must change her first name too. We know this in both books, but the gesture means something different in Wide Sargasso Sea, perhaps because Rochester is there to answer, and often not answer, for his actions.) Yet strangely enough, I can compartmentalize these two feelings, perhaps because Rhys’s book stands as firmly on its own two feet as Bronte’s. Rhys has the benefit of being complementary, but I somehow came away feeling that Jane Eyre was the volume inspired from this one. Bronte’s line of Rochester making Jane Eyre “love him without looking at me” is expanded upon in exceptionally cruel and interesting ways by Rhys. “Look at me,” says the scheming Christophine to Antoinette. “Look in my eyes.” Did Rochester pick up such obeah from Granbois? Was such magic enough for Jane to hear that of Rochester from afar, speaking “in pain and woe, wildly eerily, urgently”? Or were all such women he encountered susceptible to the look? (An idea for a grad student: Rochester as a 19th century Zoolander?)

Unlike Jane Eyre, I found Antoinette is an immensely sympathetic character. I truly believed that she could run away from Rochester, yet I couldn’t believe this of Janet. Antoinette not only suffers terrible abuses (a girl swipes her only dress at a bathing pool for mere pennies, her mother disowns her, she attempts to love her husband and he takes her money), but, if we are to believe her perspective, she is demeaned by nearly every side character. She is called “white nigger,” “white cockroach,” and beke. She is presumed mad by lineage, with her new hubby Rochester one of the biggest boosters of this hysterical theory (on flimsy evidence too). Yet isn’t it a bit mad for Rochester, even if he is suffering from a fever, to echo all of Christophine’s words when he is being rightfully condemned? To call this a double standard is an understatement. Unlike Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea gives us multiple perspectives (the never named Rochester, Antoinette, and the transformed “Bertha”) with which to assess the action. Yet the additional vantage points creates something oblique and tantalizingly incomplete.

But even though this book leaves so many questions, there’s a good deal of potent imagery, much of it startlingly specific. Consider the family parrot, Coco, who tries and escape a fire — the conflagration a case of vengeful arson after Antoinette’s new stepfather (one Mr. Mason) says some impetuous words easily overheard — to the dilapidated home in Coulibri in the book’s first part. Coco’s wings have been clipped by Mr. Mason after he “grew very bad tempered,” even though he sits quietly on Antoinette’s mother’s shoulder. Coco’s death is clearly a sign of things to come:

I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.

We know, of course, that Antoinette will be doing a good deal of screeching herself as Bertha. Coco is hardly the only bird in the book. Later, when Antoinette leads Rochester down a very bad road pushing past the boundary of Granbois, Rochester hears a bird whistling “a long sad note.” He asks, “What bird is that?” But Antoinette is too far ahead to hear his question. Later, Rochester encounters a moth so large “that I thought it was a bird.” Does Rochester see birds (or women he can crush) in every half-feeling being? Once Antoinette is past the point of no return, Rochester has this to offer:

I will listen to the mountain bird. Oh, a heartstopper is the solitaire’s one note — high, sweet, lonely, magic. You hold your breath to listen…No…Gone. What was I to say to her?

That this comes after Antoinette has tried to explain her personal history to Rochester is especially stinging. “You have no right to ask questions about my mother and then refuse to listen,” says Antoinette during one key moment, after Rochester has met with Daniel Cosway about some adulterated family business that may or may not be real. What is Rochester’s reply? “Of course I will listen, of course we can talk now, if that’s what you wish.” Rochester tells us that he listens to Christophine. But he only listens in self-interest, only because what she is talking to Antoinette about is “dangerous.” Long after that, Rochester declares, “Sing your songs, Rupert the Rine, but I’ll not listen, though they tell me you’ve a sweet voice.” It becomes quite clear that Rochester listens only as a scarcely practiced marital obligation. But given the fact that he’s boffing the servant Amelie, he’s hardly a man of duty. (Not especially a gentleman on the subject of getting it on with the missus, Rochester notes, “Very soon she was as eager for what’s called loving as I was — more lost and drowned afterwards.”) Alas, as Antoinette learns from Christophine, Rochester has English law on his side. And if that means Rochester sleeping in his dressing room, so be it. Having fleeced the pittance left, Rochester’s view of Antoinette is somewhat akin to the high-pitched voice opening up Swizz Beatz’s “Money in the Bank”: “She ain’t got no money in the bank / She be walking round acting all stank.”

Of course, Rhys had a great deal of time to think about Antoinette. Wide Sargasso Sea was the book she offered to the world after nearly thirty years of anonymity. As it turns out, she wasn’t entirely slacking off during that time. In a letter to her daughter on March 9, 1949 (which I found in Lilian Pizzichini’s biography, The Blue Hour), Rhys was to write:

If I could earn some shekels I’d fly from damp and bloody Beckenham and finish my book. Oh God if I could finish it before I peg out or really turn into some fungus or other!

I think of calling it The First Mrs. Rochester with profound apologies to Charlotte Bronte and a deep curtsey too.

But I suppose that won’t do. (I’m supposing you’ve studied Jane Eyre like a good girl).

It really haunts me that I can’t finish it though.

The above letter counteracts the familiar claim that Rhys took nine years to write Wide Sargasso Sea and that Rhys was commissioned to write the book in 1957. A crass numbers man might do the math. If Rhys was thinking about Wide Sargasso Sea for 17 years, and the result is a 170 page volume, then that’s ten pages a year. How much of the book did Rhys write in her head?

Some early critics of the book expressed their resentment at having to know a good deal of Jane Eyre before “knowing” Wide Sargasso Sea. A critic in the Sunday Times, knowing nothing of Rhys being born in Dominica, hoped that Rhys would return to “an aspect of life she has observed and experienced rather than by annotating” Bronte. Such variegated views tend to undercut the distinct possibility that with great cogitation comes great literature.

Next Up: John Fowles’s The Magus!

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Jaimy Gordon

In this one hour radio interview, National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon discusses Lord of Misrule, combating procrastination, and how opera obsession gets in the way of finishing novels.

Jaimy Gordon appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #391. She is most recently the author of Lord of Misrule.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Praying to equine gods for a better motel room.

Author: Jaimy Gordon

Subjects Discussed: Dancing with award winners, the Gargoyle interview from 1983, how “the best young writers” change in an instant, Michael Brondoli, Tom Ahern, on not being terribly prolific, being cherished by 25 people, Shamp of the City-Solo, battling procrastination, subterfuge by husbands and publishers to get Lord of Misrule finished, inspiration points from John Hawkes, learning Italian, the use of Yiddish words in Lord of Misrule, referring to the same character from multiple vantage points, creating inconsistencies, Two-Tie’s philosophy of the world, private people who scheme, passing time and stories before radio and television, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, the pre-Internet storytelling culture, Steven Milhauser’s Edwin Mulhouse, Kellie Wells, the use of television in fiction, DH Lawrence and sex, staying “young” as a novelist, hanging out with criminals, being preserved by immaturity, the problem of not working enough, joy and ecstasy as a requirement, Nicole Krauss’s refusal to dance, Janet Maslin’s sense of “the exotic,” the National Book Award judges, Gordon’s explanation of her “churlish” speech, “A Night’s Work” as the origin point for Lord of Misrule, characters who escaped the novel, Two-Tie vs. Batman’s Two Face, the problems of drinking a lot, having an uncle as a loan shark, the multiple meanings of dirty books, the many ways that a grown man can get into trouble, using one’s own life as material, being a dark romantic, on not believing in real life, discussing opera with Bill Clegg, challenging Jane Smiley’s notion of the “narrowness of the world,” colors and description, the dangers of falling down the linguistic rabbit hole, unexpected methods of attracting regular readers, astute reviews from horse racing people, happy accidents in the author/reader relationship, vulgar desires to see one’s novel at an airport, the need to love literature, Donald Westlake’s Parker novels, how popular literature chronicles the underworld, Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Balzac, the myth of pulp, loving horse racing despite its corruption, Czeslaw Milosz’s notion of America as a moderately corrupt country, the complicated emotional connections between humans and animals, and the paucity of fiction dealing with animals.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Gordon: I didn’t think I was writing this for the small presses. I thought that this was a book with some commercial potential. And I eagerly gave it to my then agent, who showed it to a few places and came back and said, “You know, Jaimy, I think you have to face it. You’re still a small press author.” I was very depressed and very mad. My agent and I — she’s a very nice woman, maybe not good for that kind of book — we parted company at that point. And I worked on the manuscript again for a few years. Sporadically. Took out of it some of the Medicine Ed material. About this 72-year-old illiterate groom who knows how to work roots, knows how to do folk magic, and is looking for a home. Trying to make this big score for that purpose. I reworked some of that Medicine Ed material into a separate story, which came out in Witness and I loved the way that that chapter came together. I decided I had to redo the novel that way. But I didn’t finish it before I was overtaken by the deaths of my two parents and other things that happened in the last decade. But anyway.

Correspondent: Did it require an ultimatum from McPherson? “Hey, Jaimy, you better finish this book!” Is this the only way to finish a book for you?

Gordon: At some point, I must have rashly promised him that he could have it by the summer of 2010. I’d even kind of forgotten about that. Because I’d many times vaguely told him, “Well, if no one else will do it, you can have it.” But I had meant to get it out there and sell it. And I do think that I could have probably found someone if I had really asserted myself. Gotten a new agent and so on. But I’m a procrastinator and easily distracted. And I forgot about it. And suddenly McPherson said, “Well, it’s going to be this summer, you know. It has to be this summer because I think this book could be a contender for the National Book Awards.” After I stopped laughing, I said, “Well, alright.” I figured this book has been sitting there. An unmovable, implacable obstruction on my writing table for the last ten years. At the least, I gotta get rid of it. I’ve got to get it out of my way. I said, “Alright. I’ll start revising it.” This was maybe back in May. But I didn’t start revising it. And I found out later that he and my husband, who’s also a writer — a German writer, Peter Blickle — were having conferences. “What are we going to do to get this woman back to work? She has to finish this manuscript!” And somehow McPherson got the brilliant idea of sending me galleys with this corrupt early manuscript. It was even the earliest manuscript.

Correspondent: (laughs) Oh really?

Gordon: They must have sent him the file back before I even took the Medicine Ed material out. And so he sent me galleys. I mean, it’s easier now to generate galleys than it used to be. But he sent me galleys and he said, “Well, this is the book.” This is the book coming out in July. We’re sending this to press on such and such a date. And I was absolutely horrified. The biggest problem in getting back to work on it had been that, for five years, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I could not make — I mean, it’s really hard to revise a book without reading it. And, for some reason, I just had an aversion to it. I know why it was. I’ll explain in a minute. But at this point, I was galvanized, horrified into reading it. And when I did, I thought, “This is not bad at all actually.” I had even forgotten a few subtle points of the plot. I found that I cried twice when I read it. I thought, “Well, you know, I must really have something here.”

Correspondent: Crying for the good reasons, I hope.

Gordon: Yeah, that’s right! I wasn’t crying because I thought it was so bad. I cried because I was moved at the plights of some of the creatures therein. But anyway.

Correspondent: Ten years of procrastination. I mean, that’s a lot of procrastination. Especially since the book here…

Gordon: Oh, that’s nothing for me.

Correspondent: Really? Nothing? Why do you require publishers and husbands to play such tricks upon you? I mean, some writers make up the excuse, “Oh well, I’m always thinking about the novel!” or “I’m submerging myself in the novel when I’m not doing anything related to the novel.”

Gordon: How about “I was occasionally thinking about the novel?”

Correspondent: Yes!

Gordon: Occasionally I thought about it.

Correspondent: Essentially, you’ve got a “My dog ate my homework” here. So what’s the real excuse?

Gordon: What do I do?

Correspondent: Yeah.

Gordon: Well, both my parents had lingering last illnesses. And they required care. But I was not — I’m one of five siblings. There were plenty of others. But nevertheless, there were very big events in my life. And then there was another family member who was sick. That took time. But what did I do to make myself better? Did I go into my study and write? No. I took Italian lessons. I got passionately involved in opera. In fact, I have to write some kind of a book about opera because I’ve spent so much of my time following opera in the last ten years. It’s the way horse racing was for me at a certain stage. So it’s going to be absolutely necessary for me to make use of it at some point.

Correspondent: Who was the novelist who said that the novel is everything that an author has been thinking about for the last five years?

Gordon: Who was that?

Correspondent: I’m blanking out on the name.

Gordon: The way I heard it, it was ten years.

Correspondent: Ten years. There’s variations of this quote. It seems to me that, for you, it’s actually the five years from forty years ago. Is that safe to say? Do you require a long introspection time before finally getting the project nipped in the bud?

Gordon: The truth is: this novel was substantially written between 1997 and about 2002. I know exactly the date because I was in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as a returning fellow on the beginning of a sabbatical in fall 1997. And it just so happened that John Hawkes, who had been my teacher at Brown, was there on a senior fellowship for the month. And I always associated my passionate interest in horse racing and my urge to write about it with him. Because he had written about racetracks in Sweet William and The Lime Twig. That’s probably the most famous of his novels that concern horse racing in any way. He was kind of a fantasist about horse racing, although eventually he bought a crippled old, once great stakes horse. Whereas I had actually worked on the racetrack. And when I saw him in 1997, I said, “I’m finally going to write that racetrack novel. I’m here to start it.” And he said, “Well, make sure you make the horses into real characters in that book.” Which I did, I thought. But it didn’t take an extraordinarily long time to write an advanced draft. I don’t write early drafts. I don’t tear through 400 sheets of paper never looking back. I construct every page and work on every sentence a long time. And I’m really fairly well along by the time I get to the end of the book the first time. But I also do a lot of new writing when I go through those pages again.

The Bat Segundo Show #391: Jaimy Gordon (Download MP3)

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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!