by Edward Champion

The Forgotten Iconoclast

As I sit in my black leather chair (purchased and delivered by OfficeMax; assembled with my bare hands after giving up on the incomprehensible instructions) staring into the dusty window pane (uncleaned for many weeks), I find it absolutely disgraceful that nobody remembers the little-known criticism of Gilbert Haverford. It is enough to make me ponder a serious reentry into weekly psychotherapy. If I were an ordinary man, I could hack away at these intellectual frustrations by settling for one of the bigger critical names that a good literary person is supposed to perform ablutions for. Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler. Even that scoundrel Christopher Lehman-Haupt, a miserable man who I understand may still be alive. I wonder if he reads blogs.

But it is Haverford who I now pine for, who I now bang my metacarpals against the desk for. He is a man who I think I can shed tears over, if I could find it within my literary heart of hearts to feel. A Jean-Paul Sartre volume had killed my emotional instincts only a few years ago, and I have been a confused man ever since. That there isn’t a Wikipedia page or an intelligible Google search result on Haverford’s considerable output is appalling.

I first encountered Haverford in 1995. It was a drizzly day in San Francisco, and I had retreated to the library in an effort to shake off the munchies, a gustatory state effected after a friend had passed a pipe. I had seen what such sensory states had done in the past (confused sex with a stranger who never told me her first name but who was ticklish and had smooth skin, rabid mastication upon a Costco-sized carton of Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, et al.) and I had taken it upon myself to avoid these developments by shifting my ontological operations to the nearest library, making idle perambulations through the stacks, and fixing my coordinates on the least occupied part, where I might find some volume that nobody had else had regarded.

It was during one such journey when I discovered a coverless dark green book, caked with decades of dust and beginning to develop a vague mold. The reference label was torn off and the tome had been placed with books concerning themselves with CP/M and a travel guide on pre-Unification East Berlin. The upshot was that I had come to a book bier of sorts. But this was a funeral without any friends. The Haverford book looked the most interesting. I thought it might be a guide to the college. But it was, in fact, the author who was named Haverford. The book’s title was Literary Transcendentalism. A sleep-inducing title. Nothing to get charged up about. But literary criticism was literary criticism.

I rescued the book, returned home, and began flipping through the pages. I discovered angry screeds against Joyce disciples who frequented the East Village. I encountered a passionate defense of James Gould Cozzens. This was reactionary stuff, but it was entertaining bile. I was particularly excited that Haverford had not once mentioned transcendentalism. But I was forever changed. These were magnificent contributions to culture. Haverford went off on any subject for which he had a deeply visceral reaction. And yet nobody had the temerity to call him a crank. He claimed to write for newspapers. But what newspapers? This was the appealing mystery. And I searched through microfilm in vain.

Unfortunately, I lost the book during a move. And I have never been able to find another copy. Look up “Gilbert Haverford” now and you will find a remarkably absent record. I’ve gone through libraries. I’ve waded through databases. Not one reference to Gilbert Haverford has cropped up. Bad enough that a writer goes out of print. But it’s even more horrendous when his books appear to be erased from the records altogether.

It’s possible that the book I discovered was part of a very small print run, or part of a private collection. I don’t recall the name of the publisher, but I don’t remember it being an academic press. There is one passage of Haverford’s that I do remember:

The critical darlings are frequently subjected to a dichotomous scale entirely at odds with the glorious grays of true human experience. Literature is in trouble because these novelists cannot be bothered to commit their attentions to the irksome grit of regular concerns.

Of course, Haverford’s “regular concerns” were somewhat problematic. He did sometimes celebrate a novelist’s prolix tribute to the pancake, as well as extended passages devoted to realty. But his maxim above remains more or less true today. He said other things that were more profound, but I was not as adept a reader as I am now. So I cannot easily recall them. And I continue to hunt around in vain for a Haverford book, remembering only the dreaded residue upon my imperfect memory banks. But I do know that sometime, when I least expect it and when I am assembling another piece of OfficeMax furniture, Haverford will return to myh reading lair.

by Edward Champion

Hazy Chintzy Afternoon

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m pleased to announce that Harper has given me a $3 million advance and a guaranteed public shaming by Oprah for my first novel, Hazy Chintzy Afternoon. I banged out the novel in two weeks in a drunken haze and forgot to use spell check. Hopefully, the copy editors will fix my mistakes. I trust that this novel will be taken more seriously than other offerings. What follows is an excerpt.]

Every city can be written about, and every writer writes about every city, employing facts that may be lies and lies that may be facts. Learning lies is really an enjoyable, and sometimes enlightening process. And, of course, it’s fun too!!! Here is Fun Facts, Volume 1.

After serving as a liar, James Frey, the forty-third vice president of the United States, was sodomized by the entire Cabinet to protect national security. Some believe that it was George Herbert Walker Bush who served as vice president. But it was really James Frey, whose father was a costermonger in 1893 London.

James Frey is 92 years old.

It is illegal to manufacture James Frey in the industrial zone of downtown Los Angeles. The issue is a sensitive one. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots were caused not by Rodney King, but by three James Freys being manufactured by accident in a sweatshop. The sweatshop had been promised an exclusive James Frey, but three James Freys had been let loose.

James Frey inhaled a large portion of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes at the Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple in Pacific Palisades. He believed that when his lungs were at one with Gandhi, he would inevitably be forgiven by the public.

The economy of James Frey is larger than that of forty-six of the fifty states in the United States of America. James Frey’s current propulsion into godhood will ensure that a new edition of the dollar bill will be printed with Frey’s saggy face on the front.

It is not illegal to kick James Frey in the nuts within the city limits of Los Angeles.

Herding flocks of more than 2,000 James Freys on Hollywood Boulevard will result in a catastrophic collision between matter and antimatter and the subsequent destruction of the universe; because of this, any James Frey will be shot on sight by vigilant members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

It is legal for James Frey to be considered a sex offender.

The first sex offender recorded in the Megan’s Law database is closely related to James Frey.

There are sixty-five people in Los Angeles named James Frey who committed suicide upon hearing that James Frey was a liar.

There is more pornography produced in Los Angeles than in the rest of the world combined. Many of these pornographers produce their pornography in the vain hope that the mass dissemination of porn will somehow drown out any attention given to child molesters like James Frey.

Every year, approximately 100,000 women in Los Angeles County remove their eyeballs so that they will never catch sight of James Frey in their lifetimes.

Fun fun fun, everyone knows that a shotgun blast to the head is more fun than a James Frey novel.

The Safely Surrendered Frey Law of Los Angeles County states that citizens who possess a James Frey within their closets are permitted to bring the James Frey to any designated hospital or fire station and give the James Frey up without fear of arrest or prosecution. The authorities of Los Angeles County urge the Frey owner to participate in the subsequent conflagration.

Fifty-four percent of the citizens of Los Angeles County take pills on a daily basis in order to prevent their lips from loosening the words “James Frey” in casual discourse, compared with twenty-two percent of the citizens in the rest of the country.

It is illegal in the City of Los Angeles to provide or administer a James Frey book to children under the age of sixteen. James Frey books have, in fact, resulted in a rampant spate of illiteracy and this correlative connection was observed by the National Endowment of the Arts in the “Reading at Risk” report.

The average citizen of Los Angeles is capable of beating the shit out of James Frey with little effort.

The average citizen of Los Angeles is a better novelist than James Fey.

by Edward Champion

Dear Young Reviewer

Dear Young Reviewer:

Thank you so much for writing in! Your writing samples are acceptable, which is saying something, seeing as how they’ve been published on one of those goddam blogs. However, we are under constraints to reduce our expenses and demonstrate to our shareholders that we can turn this rag into a profitable joint. Sure, we could compensate you for some piddling price that reflects the wages of someone who works in an export processing zone. But desperate times have had us thinking outside the box. Therefore, I hope that we can insult your intelligence by selling you on a new idea.

As you know, Books Daily is one of the most important publications for books. Sometimes, we even put a star next to a review! In a mere 100 words, we feel that we can encapsulate a book’s essence. Therefore, any reviews assigned after June 15 will undergo a stunning new business model: one that I believe you’ll find acceptable under the circumstances. Instead of paying you to review the book, we’d like you to pay us at the rate of $25 per review. Please know that we value the work you do for us. We value it so highly that we really think that you should be paying us at this juncture. Your astute reading and writing are what make our magazine so valuable in the industry and we regret this necessary action. All of us here are experiencing change. Some of us, in fact, are sleeping with the money men so that we can pay our rent. This is the only way we can justify our jobs as our magazine remains on the selling block. Our offices have, in fact, become a haven for drug trafficking. We figure that if we can’t hook the kids on books, we can certainly hook them on a particularly addictive form of Ketamine.

But we trust that you’ll understand why we’re doing this. After all, if you’re willing to expend seven to ten hours on a book and write a capsule on it for $25 (wow, you’re working for a mere $2.50/hour!), then surely you’re willing to pay us for the privilege of writing in our esteemed pages.

And just so you have an extra incentive, we’ll be happy to ship you some Benzadrine and other sleep supressants so that you can finish up your reviews for us. Hell, we’ll even give you a 10% discount if you’d like to buy any drugs.

With your modest financial sacrifice, we are committed to being the gold standard in book reviewing. And we hope that you will continue to enjoy our metaphorical violation of your pristine orifice. We really appreciate the way you’re stretching it out for us.

Very truly yours,

Sara Craven
Editor, BOOKS DAILY

by Edward Champion

Unputdownable

The rather odd modifier “unputdownable” is frequently attached to a book that compulsively entertains, offers a consistently fascinating narrative, or otherwise works to subsume the reader into an almost narcotic reading state characterized by the manic flipping of pages and circles under the reader’s eyes. Scott Smith’s The Ruins, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Audrey Nieffenger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife come to mind. But so do Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (despite Franzen’s near humorless disposition and narcissistic essays, one must be honest about the work), Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, Sarah Waters’s picaresque romps, and David Markson’s volumes. An “unputdownable” book need not be explicitly written for the crowd. While there is inherently a subjective component in what one reader finds “unputdownable,” the perhaps unfair line of demarcation I have drawn between the crowd-pleaser and the literary offering nevertheless suggests that there is such a thing as a literary page-turner. (A pal of mine once characterized Human Smoke as “potato chips” and remarked that it was very hard for him to stop reading.)

I don’t know if an “unputdownable” book is the literary equivalent of an earworm — that song that gets stuck in your head and that requires a fairly elaborate system of recurrent playback to get the terrible tune out. You play some goddam irresistible Pale Young Gentlemen song over and over until the melodic tendrils eventually detach from your lobes. For a while, you’re safe. And then inevitably, another catchy song latches onto your brain. And you must either repeat the process or go for a brisk walk or copulate with a loved one or circulate a bong amongst esteemed colleagues whereby the song is perhaps replayed yet again and the earworm sticks unfairly to other craws and the song’s sensations are even more pronounced and more troubling with the dutiful appreciation of tetrahydrocannabinol — in short, you do anything you can to get the earworm out!

But the salient difference between the earworm and the unputdownable novel is that, while the earworm occupies perhaps a three to five minute interval that may be repeated ad nauseum, the unputdownable novel involves getting to the end, whereby the obsessive tendency of experiencing the work is laid to a momentary rest. Unless one decides to repeat the journey.

The last unputdownable novel I read was Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days, which, save for a bite to eat and a few necessary conversations, I finished in one crazed sitting. I could not put the book down and I was quite alarmed by the rapid manner in which I had wolfed down this 535 page volume. While I mostly enjoyed the book, this is not to suggest that the book was without problems. A characterization of a 9/11 hijacker didn’t entirely ring true, particularly near the end. When one major story thread was resolved — one of the book’s major “unputdownable” qualities — Dubus struggled for about fifty pages before finding his momentum, only to secure the dreaded “unputdownable” pace again.

But despite my quibbles, I certainly wanted to know what was going to happen next. And I would contend that any book with an “unputdownable” quality is successful in some sense. This stance may alarm Dan Green, who has recently (and quite rightly) taken to task the “current literary culture mired in middlebrow mediocrity” and the mystifying hosannas granted to Amy Bloom’s quite putdownable novel, Away. While I do not think that a book should be judged “good” predominantly for its “unputdownable” nature, I do think that there is a rather snobbish attitude and a strange suspicion towards any book functioning as a surrogate form of oxygen. Perhaps this suspicion arises because literature is all too frequently misconstrued as some kind of cultural castor oil that’s good for you. With austere “gatekeepers” now in the practice of prescribing “GoodReads” and other prescriptive remedies that have more to do with authority and less to do with a variegated appreciation of literature, this sulfurous climate sometimes involves separating one’s sense of enjoyment from a sense of appreciation, which betrays John Updike’s first rule of reviewing:

Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

This tendency may also echo the separation of the head and the heart that T.S. Eliot observed in his 1921 essay, “The Metaphysical Poets”:

We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress.

The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.

Is it possible that this dismaying disparity between thought and feeling has extended into the reach of “unputdownable” novels? That the shame felt in enjoying an “unputdownable” novel is no less different from a Goldsmith poem that is technically adroit but, in Eliot’s view, quite unfeeling?

One does not, of course, place the work of Stephen King in the same category as Thomas Gray. But to do so misses the point. A reader’s inability to open’s one heart in an effort to find some synthesis between heart and head certainly results in ill-thought douchery from the “important” critics. And I would like to think that an enlightened reader could find something within an “unputdownable” book that may help expand her notion of what literature can be. To thumb one’s nose up at a book that has grabbed the reader’s lapels is to thumb one’s nose up at a vital part of reading. In doing so, the reader confesses quite openly that he’s something of a bore. If literary culture is to endure, then why not consider this quality with the same attention that one considers the rest?