Tag / reading challenge

by Edward Champion

The Adventures of Augie March (Modern Library #81)

In this latest Modern Library Reading Challenge essay, our intrepid reader is awestruck by Saul Bellow’s masterpiece and what it says about stretching the soul.

(This is the twentieth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Angle of Repose)

In 1995, Martin Amis insisted that Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March was America’s very reflection: a literary lodestone attracting all known bits of iron and reducing all subsequent ambition to blast furnace rejects. Six years later, Christopher Hitchens was more liberal about the dilemma: “I do not set myself up as a member of the jury in the Great American Novel contest, if only because I’d prefer to see the white whale evade capture for a while longer.”*

Augie March is indeed a fearsome masterpiece, but I’m inclined to side with Hitchens on the legacy question, for I would like to believe that some as yet unwritten book will change the game in ways now unknown. For now, we have Augie, which definitely stands as one of the 20th century’s heavyweights. I can state with certitude that this book will humble you, perhaps even wreck you for a time. Because nothing you read or write will feel this perfect.

I was so in awe of this novel that I was forced to read the two apprentice novels that came before (Dangling Man and The Victim), as well as Bellow’s recently published volume of letters. I needed to know that Bellow could fail like the rest of us. I needed this great human chronicler to be made more human. Dangling Man, in particular, proved to be an unexpectedly funny chronicle of a shut-in, with such declarations as “Hemmed in all day, inactive, I lie down at night in enervation and, as a result, I sleep badly.” And I was somewhat surprised to see Bellow take this book quite seriously. “I’m speaking of wretchedness and saying that no man by his own effort finds his way out of it,” Bellow wrote to David Bazelon in 1944.

* * *

But most literary people are self-important in their twenties. I swallowed Bellow’s middle period novels (Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift) during those years, but I never got around to reading the 600-page redwood that made Bellow a giant. I recall a few older strangers giving me approving nods on buses and subways. At the time, Bellow was still alive, but he was one of those writers you weren’t supposed to talk about. I had no idea why. It may have had something to do with Bellow siring his fourth child at the age of 84. I read his books anyway.

When I discovered that Dave Eggers was a huge Bellow fan (Eggers called Bellow “the person who I idolized more than anybody else” in an interview) and when I saw how The Adventures of Augie March had made Eggers’s fiction writing even more insufferable (You Shall Know Our Velocity anyone?), I became gravely horrified that Augie would have the same disastrous effect on me. (Again, I was in my twenties.) I did not want to become some smug asshole swimming in a twee cesspool. So I avoided reading Augie March in the same way that I avoided born again Christians, mass murderers, and rude moviegoers who bring loud plastic bags to crinkle.

This was a severe mistake.

* * *

No book can tell you how to live, but a great novel can kick your ass in the right direction. And I memorialize my youthful follies as minor regrets and as a plea to anyone under thirty to not make the same mistake. Read this novel at once!

The American temperament once prided itself upon initiative, innovation, and a sense of duty to anyone needing help. Augie March epitomizes all three ideals, but it is thankfully not without corruption or philandering or the need to hustle. After all, this book is set partly during the Great Depression. The gripping chapter where Augie takes his neighbor Mimi Villars in for an abortion is not only exceptionally daring for a book published in 1953, but, when Augie faces reprisals for his help, it reveals the peculiarly punitive American attitude steeped in moral judgment combined with partial knowledge of the facts.

Augie’s picaresque existence of finding odd jobs and falling in with odd characters and fretting over friends and losing lovers represents the kind of well-filled life serving in sharp contrast to today’s hipsters and go nowhere types. I am no longer in my twenties, but reading Augie did find me wondering how much time I was wasting and whether my energies needed to be focused more on the joy and love which drips in droves throughout this bawdy book.

* * *

Augie March is extremely well-observed, whether capturing a salon’s “oriental rugs that swallow sounds in their nap” or describing the way that Augie returns to Chicago to see a “gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails” after his adventures in Mexico. It is wise, adventurous, heartbreaking, rueful, exciting, inspiring, but never mawkish. It is populated by indelible side characters such as the patriarch Einhorn, an ever-resourceful operator with a “fatty, beaky, noble Bourbon face” who serves as Augie’s father figure, the querulous Grandma Lausch who tends to the March home when Augie’s mother cannot, and Mintouchian, the avuncular Armenian who doles out some rules for living. Even Trotsky makes a cameo.

And then there’s Bellow’s nimble linguistic dexterity, in which his gift for description merges seamlessly with Augie’s expansive wisdom:

But maybe that spicy, sumptuous fish-gravy odor that belonged to the past made me too much of a critic of the present moment, exaggerating Mama’s difficulties and imagining that the Gulistan and the drapes were the softenings of a cage.

This passage comes late in the book, when Augie is wondering if he has been altogether decent to his debilitated Mama and to his developmentally disabled brother Georgie, locked away and betrayed by Augie’s older brother Simon, who spends most of the book with a missing tooth. It’s especially wistful that this is the ultimate cost of Augie’s raucous adventures: that the broken family should be so physically broken and that dear relatives should be schlepped away to institutions.

Since Augie may be fated to start a family of his own, his Adventures could be read as a Rosseau-like confessional. Rosseau hoped to make his way into heaven by telling all. For Augie, perhaps family and love may be the empyrean reward. When Augie says in the final paragraph that he’s “a sort of Columbus of those near-in-hand,” we realize his terra incognita may not necessarily be of the “American, Chicago-born” category, but more concerned with stretching the soul. And if his soul has already stretched across decades, why wouldn’t it stretch further?

* — It may be worth noting that Amis, who befriended Bellow, took Hitchens to meet the great genius. But the two distinctive writers got a bit contentious. From Bellow’s August 29, 1989 letter to Cynthia Ozick:

During dinner he mentioned that he was a great friend of Edward Said. Leon Wieseltier and Noam Chomsky were also great buddies of his. At the mention of Said’s name, Janis grumbled. I doubt that this was unexpected, for Hitchens almost certainly thinks of me as a terrible reactionary — the Jewish Right. Brought up to respect and to reject politeness at the same time, the guest wrestled briefly and silently with the louche journalist and finally [the latter] spoke up. He said that Said was a great friend and that he must apologize for differing with Janis but loyalty to a friend demanded that he set the record straight. Everybody remained polite. For Amis’ sake I didn’t want a scene. Fortunately (or not) I had within reach several excerpts from Said’s Critical Inquiry piece, which I offered in evidence. Jews were (more or less) Nazis. But of course, said Hitchens, it was well known that [Yitzhak] Shamir had approached Hitler during the war to make deals. I objected that Shamir was Shamir, he wasn’t the Jews. Besides I didn’t trust the evidence. The argument seesawed. Amis took the Said selections to read for himself. He could find nothing to say at the moment but next morning he tried to bring the matter up, and to avoid further embarrassment I said it had all been much ado about nothing.

Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren’t always fit company, especially at the dinner table.

Next Up: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited!

by Edward Champion

Angle of Repose (Modern Library #82)

In the latest Modern Library Reading Challenge installment, our intrepid reader dishes on his book club days, wrestles with Wallace Stegner’s plagiarism, and examines the relationship between history and personal mythology.

(This is the nineteenth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A Bend in the River)

For more than a decade, I have nursed a grandiose grudge towards Wallace Stegner that has less to do with the eco-friendly West Coast bigshot’s literary streetcred and more to do with my own irrepressible ineptitude concerning matters of the boudoir.

You see, in my early twenties, long before social networks made it astonishingly effortless to locate a no strings attached entanglement with a few clicks and a seductive missive, I had devised the foolhardy stratagem of attending numerous book clubs, hypothesizing that some law of averages would present me with a reliable method of meeting women. Because I could read thick books fairly quick, discussing the plots and style and themes with some modest wit and intelligence, I developed the odd notion that my quasi-bravura take, seamlessly enmeshed with the views of my peers, would somehow impress the comely damsels within my reach.

The older and more experienced women saw through my ruse, but they tolerated me as some lingering specimen of youthful bravado that reminded them why they were comfortably adult. I remember one happily married woman who was nice enough to give me occasional lifts back from Berkeley and who gently suggested that I lighten the fuck up.

At one point, I was in six book clubs just to keep my options open. While I did wake up in a few literary beds through blind clueless luck and some apparent appeal which I still remain largely in the dark about, it is safe to say that my efforts were mostly unsuccessful, though not as barren as they had been previously.

Now, for reasons probably having to do with Stanford’s proximity, Wallace Stegner was then very popular in the San Francisco Bay Area. And there was one book club I attended in the Outer Sunset where the title being discussed was The Spectator Bird. No problem. I had read it and discussed it before in another book club. On this second effort, there was a chestnut-haired twentysomething who I really liked and wanted to get to know better. The discussion went well and a number of the book club members riffed off what I had to say. Then I made some observation about Joe Allston’s feelings for the Countess being a bit overblown. Because every man had thoughts about other women. Was this really so adulterous?

But I apparently phrased these innocuous thoughts in a way that proved so tasteless that I was asked not to return to the book club.

I later learned that the woman I was trying to ask out for coffee was a family values type saving herself for marriage. There had clearly been no chance.

I took my folly out on Stegner, blaming him for my misfortunes and vowing never to read the man again.

* * *

It was the glint of cash that turned Stegner to fiction writing. During the Great Depression, he had just written his dissertation on the overlooked nineteenth-century naturalist Clarence Edward Dutton. He had come to Utah to teach and was making only $1,800 a year. His wife, Mary, was pregnant. And he saw an advertisement for a novelette contest from Little Brown. Like many of the misleading get rich quick schemes bulging from any issue of Writers Digest, Little Brown promised a $2,500 prize. But Stegner was a stubborn man of will. He sat down and wrote the presciently titled Remembering Laughter, which won the prize and was published in 1937.

There was more teaching and a series of insubstantial novels, until Stegner turned to his own life for material in his 1943 novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and found some success. Still, it was nonfiction’s hard objectivity which guided Stegner during these years like a maritime man following Oléron. While he turned out a steady stream of dependable short stories, he was a late bloomer when it came to the novel’s fatter form. It took the introduction of Joe Allston in 1967’s All the Little Live Things for Stegner to perfect his character model of an older man who enjoyed bitching about the flower children living it up just outside the edge of his damn lawn. Allston was Stegner’s first use of the first person, and the character would pop up again in The Spectator Bird, spawning untold frustration for at least one young punkass a few decades later.

Between Little Live Things and The Spectator Bird, Stegner wrote what is arguably his masterpiece. Lyman Ward, a historian whose legs are amputated, serves this time as Stegner’s first-person coot, and has much to say about the spirit of free thought and free love going down just outside his home (and in a nice twist, Stegner has “the sounds carry up the bare stairs,” suggesting that any vocal intercession from youthful ruffians, which include his son Rodman, are inescapable):

What kind of a loony bin have they got down there in Berkeley, anyway? What kind of a fellow is it that will let his wife support him for two years, living around in those pigpen places, everybody scrambled in together?

Stegner derided “the antihistorical pose of the young,” yet it’s worth pointing out that he did participate in the Vietnam War marches. But when the protests turned violent, he stopped, steeping his crankiness in old school values. History served as the apparent distinction between Stegner and these young muckrakers, and it also served to make Lyman Ward far more than a cantankerous chronicler.

Angle‘s other great inspiration came from the history books. Stegner discovered Mary Hallock Foote while combing through magazines and journals for a chapter he was commissioned to write for the Literary History of the United States. He researched her, uncovered her sketches and writings, republished one of her stories in an anthology, and began teaching her at Stanford. Foote was obscure enough at the time for Stegner to be pretty much the only guy singing her praises. And as it so happened, Foote’s granddaughter happened to be living in Grass Valley.

With the help of Stegner’s student, George McMurray, there were efforts to get Foote’s papers into the Stanford library. The Foote famiily gave them to Stegner, with the apparent pledge that Stegner would publish these and provide typed transcriptions. Ten years passed. There was no traction. Then sometime during the mid-1960s, Stegner decided to take these letters cross-country to his summer home.

He had his mind on a contemporary novel. But the letters nagged at him. So Foote transformed into Susan Burling Ward, who became Lyman Ward’s grandmother. Both the real woman and Stegner’s creation were illustrators and short story writers, with their creative labor in constant demand from the editors of the day. But they were similar in other uncanny ways.

For Stegner had befriended Janet Micoleau, Foote’s granddaughter. Micoleau wanted to see her forgotten grandmother revived and apparently gave Stegner permission to use the papers in any way he desired. Micoeau’s sister, Evelyn Foote Gardiner, was stunned when the letters appeared nearly verbatim in Angle of Repose. Roughly a tenth of the novel includes these letters, opening up a debate over whether or not Stegner was a plagiarist.

Stegner’s indiscretions certainly aren’t on the level of Q.R. Markham. Still, when one learns that Rodman Paul was going to publish a collection of Foote’s letters, Stegner’s response — a letter to Micoleau — does leave the moralist shaking head over Stegner’s swagger:

The question arises, must I now unravel all those little threads I have so painstakingly raveled together — the real with the fiction — and replace all truth with fiction?

If the great novelist here is so great, then why couldn’t Stegner get the reader to believe in the story without using history as a crutch? Does a novel predicated on deceit deserve a Pulitzer Prize and inclusion in the Modern Library canon? Or are all novelists inherently deceitful?

* * *

When I learned about the Foote controversy after reading Angle of Repose, I was surprised to find myself defending Stegner. I might have grabbed the pitchfork if Stegner had plucked the text from one of his contemporaries and attempted to pass it off as his own, but surely some statute of limitations kicks in after a hundred years. Would Foote have received as much attention if Stegner hadn’t written this novel? Since books have a tendency to fall so rapidly out of print, isn’t one method to ensure their long-term survival this type of revitalization?

What’s especially interesting to me is that while Stegner sees no problem being promiscuous with text, his historian hero is intriguingly prudish when it comes to being blunt about what went down with his ancestors:

It happens that I despise that locution “having sex,” which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking. Also I don’t think anybody’s sex life, Grandmother’s included, very funny, unless you mean funny-peculiar, and Shelly didn’t mean that. She meant funny ha-ha, funny-hypocritical, funny-absurd. I had imagined that Leadville love scene, exceeding my license as a historian, because I felt just then she was fighting against her ingrown gentility and snobbery, ashamed of herself for having been ashamed of her husband, and making contrite and affectionate amends. I had meant that scene to be tender. I meant it to clear away, at least for the time, all the cobwebs. I wanted it to shine the windows and polish the tarnished feelings like a good spring house-cleaning. Which I have known a good love scene to do.

Why on earth did I let some irrational association prevent me from reading Stegner? It’s abundantly clear that he (or rather Lyman) had greater sexual issues to work out on the page.

I forgot to mention Oliver Ward (based on Foote’s husband, Arthur De Wint Foote), who is surely one of the more fascinating entrepreneurial failures in American fiction. Oliver is a man of principle (“I’m an engineer, not a capitalist.”), and this gets in the way of a lucrative scheme to make hydraulic cement that he refuses to act upon. His perpetual failure to mind the store causes him to lose a vital claim that he’s worked much of his life for. And it also makes him embarrassingly passive when he cannot stand up for himself when his hotel reservation is taken away from him and his wife on the way to Leadville, and he is reduced to repeatedly stammering “I’m sorry” when they are forced to hole up in a boardinghouse.

What’s astonishing is how Susan sticks with this man despite his repeat failures — especially when another man, Frank Sargent, Oliver’s most trusted friend, wastes most of his life to be close to her. Do her constant letters to her dear friend Augusta keep her together? Or is there something else that she (or Lyman) is not telling us? She’s hopeful in Santa Cruz (“But Oliver, if thee can make it work, I’d be willing to stay here ten years.”), says “I want this trip to go on being perfect” in Mexico, and is dedicated to her work and family throughout. But when Oliver takes to drink, she asks “Are you even sorry? Are you even ashamed?” and it takes him a good long while to respond. And in light of the terrible fate that Pricey, an Emerson-quoting Englishman who is close with the Wards, suffers, one can’t help but wonder whether Oliver is merely the same man from another angle.

In a time when many married men who have dropped out of the job market or settled for lower stations because the Great Recession has left no place for them, Stegner’s depiction of thwarted masculinity is strangely contemporary.

On the other hand, we have to keep reminding ourselves that this is Lyman Ward’s view of history, not necessarily the full truth of this marriage. If Lyman is so sure that he knows what a good love scene can do, then why is he so opaque about what may have happened between Susan and Frank? If Lyman Ward has any shot of being a bigger man than his grandfather, then why can’t he man up and confront his own failed marriage? That pivotal vantage point within Stegner’s title can apply to just about everything. And if any deep soul is doomed to fight gravity, does this not, in some sense, justify Stegner’s use of the Foote letters? Would not another author or another character have created an entirely different yet equally complex heap of willful obfuscation? Is Angle of Repose the truest expression of Stegner’s character? And if so, should we cut him some slack?

I can ask these questions with confidence. Because I know that the book club story I offered at the beginning is hiding quite a bit that I’m not going to tell you. I have purposefully kept some details nubilous because the mythology, imperfect and imprecise as it is, is mine. If we tell each other stories to live, then do we not also live to tell stories?

Next Up: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March!

by Edward Champion

The Death of the Heart (Modern Library #84)

In this latest Modern Library Reading Challenge Essay, our intrepid reader discovers how Elizabeth Bowen’s cruelty somehow affirms unanticipated pockets of sanguinity.

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

“I won’t ruin it for you,” emailed my fellow Modern Library reader Steve, “but so far, that’s the 2nd worst book I’ve read for this project.” And while I was corralling my thoughts and feelings after finishing the latest tome for a project which I now realize (nearly one year after the gauntlet cleaved my happy little picnic table) will take me five to six years, I noticed that Devon S., another trusted Modern Library adventurer, served up only a soupçon more hope: “I don’t know how to judge my indifference to this book. Sometimes books are like calf leather gloves in August: sumptuous wonders of of craftsmanship and texture that we’d appreciate if only we weren’t too tired, too harried, too dull, too careless, too immature, too hot, at that moment.” Maybe so. But when the Brooklyn nights outside are 13 degrees and you’re still wondering why two stuffy high society types (one reappears very sparingly throughout the rest of the book) have chosen the “bronze cold of January” with its shivering swans, of all places, to dish dirt during the oddly loquacious opening of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, calf leather gloves in August feel as distant as last year’s milk. What the good Lydia Kiesling will have to say about Bowen is anyone’s guess.

Death is a novel quite at odds with a reader’s expectations, which is very much to its credit. Here is a book so blithe about its splenetic revelations that a cigarette lighter illuminates a telltale betrayal in the dark of a movie theater, the moment as casual as a chicken’s throat getting sliced on an abattoir assembly line. Yet even with the flashy reveal of a 20th century habit’s fire, Bowen is fixated on the “taut blond silk” of a character’s calf and fingers keeping up “a kneading movement.” If you’re thinking Bowen’s characters come off as positional objects more clay than flesh, then you’re catching on quick. At times, Death reads as if Bowen blossomed her bulb when describing a dining room’s “sideboards like catafalques” or characters who sit “with pencil poised, preparing to make disdainful marks” rather than with internal emotion. Yet even with Death‘s weird fixations on crudely general and somewhat ridiculous maxims (“There are moments when it becomes frightening to realize that you are not, in fact, alone in the world — or at least, alone in the world with one other person”) and carefree racism (“Matchett, who was as strong as a nigger”), I’d be hard-pressed to deny Bowen’s voice. In chronicling the numerous cruelties heaped upon the sixteen-year-old orphan Portia by servants and gentry alike, Bowen commits herself to an unremitting ugliness in a way rarely seen these days outside of a private party hosted by Roger Ailes.

Last year, The Rumpus‘s Charlotte Freeman described how she admired the way in which Bowen refused to save any of her characters. She asked, “Could one publish such a book now? A book in which no one is healed, in which everyone is, in fact, injured by contact with another?” Perhaps the real question to ask is this: Can a sanguine type of any stripe read such a book now? Joanthan Yardley suggested, in his fulsome praise for Death, that “[a] certain measure of experience, of exposure to life’s cruelties and compromises, is necessary for a full grasp of it.” Spoken like an unadventurous pessimist. Yet I didn’t detest the book like Steve, nor did I feel Devon’s indifference. I think there’s some credence to the idea that time and reference was Bowen’s real game with Death. Maybe Death, like many interesting books, is a Rorschach test. And if that is the case, the place to start surely is the reader’s temperament.

I’m not the type who flits through life without kenning that humans can be cruel (and I have had more than my share of this), but my approach is to be cheerful, protectively acerbic if need be. I’d rather believe that everyone — even the scabrous souls who make existence miserable, often without knowing it — has the power to be kind and decent. My earnestness may seem out of place in New York, but this is a city with a population who performs many quiet favors to strangers. And I’ve lived close to four decades with the good apples far outshining those rotten to the core. As Tracy says at the end of Manhattan, “Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people.” Sensible advice. My disappointment rumbles when people choose to be mean and avaricious and subpar, especially when they do so without any corresponding set of virtues or they are driven by callow opportunism or stomp on other people on the way up or deliberately set out to destroy something dear to a decent person who isn’t doing any harm. Which is not to suggest that I haven’t sinned or that my own sense of what’s right may be another person’s wrong. (And any opportunistic pixie who props herself up as “fair and empathetic” without copping to the possibility that she may be more than a bit hypocritical in blind spots is not to be trusted. Idealogues come in several forms.) I’m not against healthy skepticism or getting revenge (although it’s better to stick with good deeds, when possible), but the idea of swallowing the bitter pill before seeking any delight, or assuming that people are driven first and foremost by malice, strikes me as a needlessly melancholy way to live.

And yet, on the page and from Bowen’s pen, these selfsame qualities are strangely alluring! So if you have a particular type of titivating heart, you may be confused by Elizabeth Bowen. I may protest Bowen’s worldview (and, after listening to this sour lecture broadcast in 1956*, I don’t think I’d want to know her), but I’m fascinated by how she could think this way. Sixteen-year-old Portia has no parents. The only family members she has to turn to are Thomas Quayne, her half-brother some two decades older, and his wife Anna, who is clinging to lingering youth in crueler, pre-Botox days. (She’s so inveterate that she finds Portia’s diary and reads it. One of Death‘s more brutal subtleties is that nearly all of Portia’s private thoughts are read by other characters. Is this Bowen’s way of scolding the reader?) Thomas and Anna send Portia away to a small town — allegedly “by the sea,” but of course not at all — so that they can have their vacation. Even if one accounts for the fact that Thomas works in advertising and has this tendency to stare at nothing “with a concentration of boredom and lassitude,” one ponders why wanton neglect would be the natural state. Yet as Bowen pushes Portia into a bigger mess — with various letters and diary entries spelling further hints of Portia’s despair; no accident that I thought of Jack Womack’s excellent and needlessly neglected novel, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, while reading these parts (Womack was kind enough to respond to my connective enthusiasm on Twitter) — it’s almost as if Bowen’s pushing the limits of how vicious she can be (which is, as it turns out, sometimes more sadistic than Evelyn Waugh). I haven’t even mentioned the disgracefully rakish 23-year-old Eddie, who not only leads Portia into sham chivalric romance, but doesn’t even know how to smooth things over, much less apologize, when he bungles things up. One of the novel’s high points is Eddie hitting the resort town where Portia is staying and causing a cringe comedy disaster that I cannot in good conscience spoil.

There’s some truth to the notion that Elizabeth Bowen may very well be the missing link between Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness and Iris Murdoch’s masterful fusing of behavioral study and philosophy. Yet as I’ve intimated above, Bowen can be curiously dictatorial and objectifying with her interior monologues:

She was disturbed, and at the same time exhilarated, like a young tree tugged all ways in a vortex of wind. The force of Eddie’s behaviour whirled her free in a hundred puzzling humiliations, of her hundred failures to take the ordinary cue. She could meet the demands he made with the natural genius of the friend and lover. The impetus under which he seemed to move made life fall, round him and her, into a new poetic order at once. Any kind of policy in the region of feeling would have been fatal in any lover of his — you had to yield to the wind. Portia’s unpreparedness, her lack of policy — which had made Windsor Terrace, for her, the court of an incomprehensible law — with Eddie stood her in good stead. She had no point to stick to, nothing to unlearn. She had been born docile. The momentarily anxious glances she cast him had only zeal behind them, no crucial personality.

A “young tree tugged all ways in a vortex of wind” sounds like an engineer maneuvering object-oriented data into a massively multiplayer video game universe. And it’s interesting how Bowen shifts from a simile into an entirely different metaphor (“whirled her free in a hundred puzzling humiliations”) before riding with geographic imagery (“the region of feeling,” “No point to stick to”) and concluding this section with highly general and irreversible conditions (“nothing to unlearn,” “born docile,” “only zeal behind them,” “no crucial personality”). While this language certainly mimics a teenage girl’s confused feelings very well, this deliberately incoherent poetic effect (the “new poetic order,” if you will) pushed me away from Portia as I wanted to relate to her. I could admire the language from an external vantage point, but I kept wondering what might have happened if Bowen had dared to give us more of Portia’s heart. Was I meant to read this book much as the young students in the photo above gaze at Bowen? Let me finish my Gauloise, my young pretties, or I shall send you to Samoa to be cooked in a white wine sauce by the cannibals! Fair for the reader or not, nevertheless, I was engaged enough with this novel to want to read more Bowen (still, given the choice, I would rather read more Iris Murdoch). I don’t think I would call The Death of the Heart a masterpiece, but it was good to find a book with a new hook to take me both outside and inside my zone. I never thought the Modern Library would have me affirming certain pockets of sanguinity.

* — Despite Bowen’s grating voice, which is so off-putting that I was compelled to open a window and happily stick my head into the frigid winter air about five minutes in before returning to the last six minutes, the lecture is still quite interesting in what it reveals about Bowen’s methods. She refers to self-conscious expression offered in lieu of description as “character analysis” and has this to say: “Two things may be remarked about the stream of consciousness as a showing of character. It does take time and it deals almost always with prosaic experience. Scenes are reacted to in a highly individual way. I don’t know whether we should ever have, for instance, a stream of consciousness novel about somebody scaling Everest. Because the scaling of Everest is quite exciting enough in itself. In the ordinary stream of consciousness, the excitement, the sense of crisis, resides in the personality. And all the other characters in the novel are likely to be very slightly out of focus.” These sentiments make me want to reach for John D’Agata, Nicholson Baker, Daniel Clowes, or Yannick Murphy and howl to the heavens. Why wouldn’t a mountain climber’s interior monologue be as exciting as the action? And yet I can’t help but marvel over Bowen championing the stylistic dialogue of Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett, whereby there is often no distinction between characters, as a quality which might be altering the form of the novel itself!

Next Up: V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River!

by Edward Champion

Lord Jim (Modern Library #85)

In the latest Modern Library Reading Challenge installment, our intrepid reader takes on Conrad’s masterpiece, contemplating honor, Jim’s emo whining, and the many eccentric characters on the high seas.

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

Much like today’s tawdry Hollywood movies, Lord Jim was based on a true story — back in the days when it actually meant something. On August 7, 1880, a ship called the Jeddah, on its way from Singapore to Arabia and carrying 950 Muslim pilgrims, had an accident. The British officers abandoned the ship near Cape Gardafui. But the Jeddah did not sink. Captain Clark was on his way out of the British Consulate when another captain reported that the Jeddah had been salvaged and towed. Clark got off lightly. His certificate was stripped for three years. But the Jeddah‘s first mate, Augustine Podmore Williams, received a harsher sentence.

This tale of lost honor and irresponsible officials eluding their duties so captivated Conrad’s imagination that he began drafting a short story in a thick album bound in leather that had belonged to his grandmother. The Jeddah became the Patna. (And the Patna would show at the end of Alien 3, lest you thought that film franchise was solely Nostromo.) Zdzislaw Najder’s very large biography, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, informs us that Conrad kept tabs on his word count in the margins. Serializing the yarn in a magazine was the idea, and his labor on the Lord Jim prototype intersected with the completion of “Youth” — a story that also featured the well-known Charles Marlow. Yet at this stage in the Lord Jim writing, Marlow hadn’t yet found his loquacious entry point. What Conrad would not know is that Marlow would become as ubiquitous in his work as the creepy adjusters you see in today’s subdivisions who show up minutes after a fire to stake out a husked out building. While Marlow may not have been driven by the adjuster’s compulsion to itemize and sweep in, he did share the common trait of being a remarkably patient listener to a tragic tale.

After some early starts, there was a six month break. Around this time, Conrad was also at work on Heart of Darkness (yet another deck for Marlow to walk on), which appeared in three parts in Blackwood’s Magazine (and which will be discussed in a future Modern Library installment). Factor in an especially vituperative article from Eliza Orzeskowa (“The Emigration of Talent”) that accused Conrad of deserting the Polish homeland and diminishing his talents and one gets the sense that Conrad wasn’t exactly doing the happy dance around 1899.

Conrad had to go sailing on a boat (La Reine) he had purchased with his pal Stephen Crane to unlock Lord Jim‘s secret: namely, the shift from omniscient narration to Marlow, who is arguably one of the most formidable ramblers in all of literature. (Indeed, there is a strange pleasures reading Lord Jim in the 21st century and contemplating the type of audience who would sit through such a protracted tale without offering a question or an interruption. I’ve done the math here, and Marlow’s tale is probably a lot longer than Christian Marclay’s The Clock. When you factor in our short attention span age, the time investment and patience is tenfold more remarkable. Today, I have no doubt that people would be live-tweeting Marlow or checking their BlackBerries. And we haven’t even discussed bathroom breaks.) Conrad’s “long short story” of 20,000 words eventually expanded to six times the calculated length. This didn’t stop him from additional dips into continuous partial attention. He even collaborated with Ford Madox Ford on The Inheritors in early 1900.

In addition to bracing the pressure of Blackwood’s serializing Lord Jim, Conrad also faced the death of his BFF GFW Hope’s seventeen-year-old son on the high seas (with some evidence of a covered up sexual assault, thus accounting for the book’s dedication), and, like many writers then and since, tremendous financial uncertainty. The plan had been for “Tuan Jim: A Sketch” to be part of a collection, but this idea became spottier as the story mushroomed.

One can offer the theory (and biographer Jeffrey Meyers certainly has*) that Conrad needed to be oblivious to keep up with the time-consuming nature of novel writing, claiming to be just about finished when there was still a good deal of work that needed to be done. Yet Conrad plowed forward, fighting off bronchitis, malaria, and even gout. Indeed, if one isn’t humbled by the fact that Conrad wrote this sweeping masterpiece in his third learned language, there’s the impressive manner in which Conrad doggedly used a paperweight to keep down his sheets while working with an inflamed wrist.

Conrad’s grief over his good friend Crane’s untimely death on June 5, 1900 made its way into Lord Jim‘s last ten chapters. And given how these heavy feelings fueled such a heavy book, there is little doubt that Conrad had reached a point where he wanted to be done with Lord Jim, as he was to remark in a July 20, 1900 letter to John Galsworthy:

The end of L.J. has been pulled off with a steady drag of 21 hours. I sent wife and child out of the house (to London) and sat down at 9 am, with a desperate resolve to be done with it. Now and then I took a walk round the house out at one door in at the other. Ten-minute meals. A great hush. Cigarette ends growing into a mound similar to a cairn over a dead hero. Moon rose over the barn looked in at the window and climbed out of sight. Dawn broke, brightened. I put the lamp out and went on, with the morning breeze blowing the sheets of MS all over the room. Sun rose. I wrote the last word and went to the dining room. Six o’clock. I shared a piece of cold chicken with Escamillo [Conrad’s dog, named after Carmen] (who was very miserable and in want of sympathy having missed the child dreadfully all day). Felt very well only sleepy; had a bath at seven and at 8:30 was on my way to London.

The thing that gets me is how Conrad felt the need to punctuate the end of his industry with a cold piece of chicken. But Conrad would initially dismiss Lord Jim as “a lump of clay.” While Lord Jim was to be favorably received, it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. The first batch of 2,100 copies sold out in two months. The next printing of 1,050 copies took four years. Some reviewers complained. Many raved. Henry James sent Conrad a letter of congratulations.

* * *

If I am to be truthful here, I must confess that I had to start Lord Jim a second time before I really got into Jim’s woeful adventures from Patna to Patusan. My first reading attempt pushed me to the 200 page mark, but I zoned out, Conrad’s paragraphs washing over my eyes like imposing ebbtides. At first I feared that Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness I had loved so much in high school, did for me what Thomas Pynchon does for other people when they resent not being able to finish Gravity’s Rainbow. But when I put aside some professional obligations and realized that Lord Jim required my total attentions, I found myself stirred and fascinated by Jim’s remarkable obstinacy, his failure to shake off the shame from the bulkhead accident and move on. Here’s a guy who skips town anytime some stranger brings up the Patna incident. You almost want him to go all Dustin Hoffman (as opposed to James Marsden) in Straw Dogs rather than sit there passively while others deface his honor. Jim would never be able to get away with these chicken sprints in the age of Google.

Other characters tolerate this curious strain of romantic heroism. Poor Marlow, who you figure should know better, gets Jim a gig in the most munificent manner possible, pointing out to the troubled young hipster (sorry, but I can’t help but think of emo layabouts when imagining Jim in my mind’s eye) just how much he’s put his ass on the line:

“Look at the letter I want you to take. I am writing to a man of whom I’ve never asked a favour, and I am writing about you in terms that one only ventures to use when speaking of an intimate friend. I make myself unreservedly responsible for you. That’s what I am doing. And really if you will only reflect a little what that means…”

Jim gets the gig, offering a jolly “Jove!” in response to this generosity. (It’s worth noting that Jim is very big on “Jove!” I’m guessing that “Jove!” was the “Fuck yeah!” of its day.** And, on second thought, I don’t blame Marlow too much. If I was in the company of an exuberant lad who liked to yell “Jove!” all the time, I’d probably buy him a few beers with the remaining shekels in my reticule.) But he blows the job (and costs the man his business) when the second engineer of the Patna shows up. “I couldn’t stand the familiarity of the little beast,” writes Jim back to Marlow.

But given how Conrad offers us so many eccentric characters of the sea, is Jim’s bitching really called for? Especially when Jim’s stolid near Bartleby-like temperament causes people he knows to die after Stein appoints Jim as manager of his trading post in Patusan. We see any number of idiosyncratic types throughout Lord Jim: the German skipper who demands liquor by the light of the Patna‘s binnacle, the captain who is part of the Patna investigation and suicidally throws himself overboard as though “he had suddenly perceived the gates of the other world flung open wide for his reception,” Marlow’s brief chief mate Selvin who, upon not receiving a letter from his wife, “would go quite distracted with rage and jealousy, lose all grip on the work, quarrel with all hands, and either weep in his cabin or develop such a ferocity of temper as all but drove the crew to the verge of mutiny,” the butterfly-collecting merchant Stein, and the monstrous buccaneer Gentleman Brown who forces Jim’s hand in Patusan. Given his close proximity to goofballs and mountebanks, one would think that Jim would have something bigger on his mind than his own fragile ego.

If Jim is considered “a solitary man confronted by his fate,” then it interesting how he attempts to reconcile his honor with Cornelius, the “unspeakable” man embezzling and appropriating from Stein whom Jim replaces in Patusan. Cornelius treats his station and his girl quite unwell. But can we commend Jim for trying to be civil with Cornelius when he asks if he is unwell? Perhaps. But doesn’t Cornelius, for all of his odious qualities, carry some slim honor? Sure, the man has bamboozled Stein. He’s clearly stealing more than a few office supplies. But there’s something equally absurd to Jim in the way Cornelius offers to smuggle Jim out through the river for a mere eighty dollars. Cornelius certainly has a point when he declares to Marlow, “What did Mr. Stein mean sending a boy like that to talk big to an old servant? I was ready to save him for eighty dollars. Only eighty dollars. Why didn’t the fool go? Was I to get stabbed myself for the sake of a stranger?”

In light of the “Look at that wretched cur” farcical business at the Patna inquiry, whereby Marlow remarks on a weaving yellow dog and the oversensitive Jim believes that Marlow is talking shit about him, what makes Cornelius’s griping about sacrifice any less ignoble than Jim’s? And in disseminating Jim’s tale of dishonor to unknown listeners in the shadows, isn’t Marlow also sullying Jim’s honor? Certainly not in our eyes, if we look upon the tale from the outside. But Jim would most certainly think so, if he knew the full extent of Marlow’s goodnatured gossiping. We also have no idea how reliable Marlow is — especially since we are getting boatloads of hearsay. In fact, only “one privileged man” gets to hear the final word of the story, which is mostly second-hand from a fairly unreliable source.

Perhaps as Marlow says, the problem resides in the externals:

The conquest of love, honour, men’s confidence — the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim’s success there were no externals.

* — You may have observed that I haven’t really probed into Joseph Conrad’s bad behavior in this Modern Library installment. Given that there are three more Conrad volumes on the list, I’m thinking I’ll probably be addressing Conrad’s boorishness at some future point. However, since we’re on the subject, I feel compelled to point out that, should you check out Jeffrey Meyers’s Joseph Conrad: A Biography from the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, you will find this amusing marginalia on Page 187 suitably illustrating the author vs. work predicament:

Annotator 1: Ingrate! mistreats his wife I am trying to find something beneficial
Annotator 2: His writing!

Annotator 1: Constantly borrowing money
Annotator 2: So what?

** — Aside from “Jove,” “tumult” is another word Conrad is quite fond of — for abundantly clear reasons. I am also highly inclined to devise some Brooklyn answer to “tiffin” that I can work into my life and vernacular.

Next Up: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart!

by Edward Champion

Ragtime (Modern Library #86)

In our latest Modern Library Reading Challenge essay, we ask why EL Doctorow’s novel has relied so heavily on Kleist and whether Ragtime truly respects its readership.

(This is the fifteenth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Old Wives’ Tale)

In 1975, the New York Times‘s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt initiated his review with this typically hyperbolic sentence: “E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ is a highly original experiment in historical fiction.” Unfortunately, because Lehmann-Haupt possessed middling erudition, he could not ken that Doctorow had, in fact, ripped off Heinrich von Kleist for his novel’s most memorable character.

In a 1978 interview with Jared Lubarsky, Doctorow declared, “I realized as I went along that the model for this book, in terms of its narrative distance, was the chronicle fiction of the German master Heinrich von Kleist. His novella ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ was very much in my mind when I found the black man Coalhouse Walker, driving up the hill in his Ford.” In 1983, Doctorow was somewhat more honest about his carjacking with the notably sharper Larry McCaffery:

Several years ago my wife related a true story she’d heard about a housemaid in our neighborhood who bore a child and then buried it in a garden. I knew when I heard this I’d use it someday. I found myself using it in Ragtime, where I never knew in advance what was going to happen. Suddenly there was Mother discovering the little brown newborn in the flower bed. There was Sarah coming to live in the house with this baby. Obviously, she would have tried to kill the child only from overwhelming despair or sense of betrayal. So there had to be a father. I had introduced Houdini driving up Broadview Avenue. He came along in his shining Ford, an older man, and he said, “I’m looking for a young woman of color.” Where had he been? I decided he was a musician, a man who lived on the road, going where he found work. Now he was back to make amends. He starts to court Sarah and when she refuses to see him, he plays the piano for the family in their parlor. And that’s how I found the central image of the book. Then I began to think about the implications of a black man owning his own car in the early 1900’s. I knew Sarah would forgive him and they would be reconciled. But that car: What would happen to that lovely car of his is what happened to Michael Kohlhaas’s horses. I had always wanted to rework the circumstances of Kleist’s story. I felt the premise was obviously relevant, appropriate — the idea of a man who cannot find justice from a society that claims to be just. So there it was — I’d finally found the use for that legend I’d hoped to find — but not until the moment I needed it.

Yet four years later, in a Yale Vernacular interview with Liesl Schillinger, Doctorow downplayed “reworking the circumstances” to being “very much inspired by Kleist.” And in a 1988 interview with Herwig Friedl and Dieter Schulz, Doctorow would identify his theft as “a quite deliberate hommage. You know, writers lift things from other writers all the time.” That same year, Doctorow would offer an altogether different defense to Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua: “somewhere along the line as I was writing Ragtime I realized I was writing chronicle-fiction with a certain mocking or ironic tone but nevertheless with the same distance with the characters that you find in chronicle-fiction, that is to say, a distance not as great as a historian, not as close as the post-Flaubertian novelist, but somewhere in the middle and maybe that’s why I remembered that I’d always wanted to use ‘Michael Kohlhass’ in some way, it was a story for me.” But by 1997, Doctorow (sounding more like Cory than Edgar) said to Michael Silverblatt, “The source of what you use finally doesn’t matter….The sources don’t matter as much as the act of composing.”

As The New York Observer noted on March 23, 1998, there was clearly more going on than composing. Doctorow had ripped off many key elements of “Kohlhaas.” Both Kohlhaas and Coalhouse are stopped by men who demand toll. Both figures seek a vigilante form of justice, enlisting men to their eventual deaths when denied proper recourse. Both feature the horse and the car returned in perfect condition. Doctorow’s Booker Washington fills in for Kleist’s Martin Luther. Both feature very specific imagery of significant others receiving a blow to the chest from a weapon (and, as the Observer points out with its citations, the passages from both narratives are quite similar).

But let us inform our good thief Edgar why the sources do matter. According to Broadway World, the 1998 Broadway adaptation of Ragtime grossed close to $80 million during its two year run. The 2009 Broadway revival of Ragtime, which featured a working Model T automobile (the very story element that Doctorow ripped off and altered for his use) as a dominant part of the set, grossed more than $5 million. Not bad for a musical that was budgeted at $11 million and faced declining revenue due to the recession. That’s an $85 million gross over a little more than a decade on a musical based on a novel that ripped off another narrative. If Doctorow can be compared to a robber baron (in Ragtime, he does seem strangely at home writing about JP Morgan and Henry Ford), it’s a remarkably barren robbery.

Doctorow would prove quite defensive and more than a bit smug when called on the carpet more directly. “I find it surprising that this is being brought up 22 years after the event,” he would tell the Observer, seemingly not seeing why a highly successful Broadway adaptation might shine a brighter Klieg on the Kleist pillaging. “I have a sense of a readership that is sophisticated and understands how literature works. There are others who may be naïve about that. And that naïveté is taught by example.”

* * *

But was the 1975 novel really all that sophisticated? I read Ragtime twice for this essay. While I enjoyed it slightly more on the second read, I had severe doubts about Doctorow respecting a readership who “understands how literature works.” Ragtime‘s parody of a junior high school textbook grew tedious. I do everything in my power to accept a book for what it is (Updike’s Rules for Reviewing and all), but I wanted to feel these figures rather than look upon them as one-dimensional. Even Harold Bloom, writing in an introduction for a 2004 study guide, confessed that Ragtime “is far from being Doctorow’s most eminent work.” Was Ragtime a second-rate Doctorow?

Nearly four decades after its publication, one of the book’s biggest surprises is how patronizing Doctorow is. Above all, Doctorow is driven by the need to repeat and explain, as if his readership is a simpering mass of small children, perhaps plagued by amnesia or an uncanny inability to look up a vaguely arcane word, that he must speak down to. We are introduced to “the famous architect Stanford White” in the first chapter. A mere two chapters later, Jacob Riis decides to “interview the eminent architect.” Two chapters after that, we encounter Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, who is “throwing a commemorative ball in honor of her friend the late Stanford White, the architect of her home. He had designed her home in the style of a doge palace. A doge was the chief magistrate in the republic of Genoa or Venice.”

It’s regrettable that this generic repetition extends to generic and sometimes cartoonish character description. Of the great Booker T. Washington, we are offered this redundancy: “He was an orator and his voice was strong.” Of Houdini, Doctorow writes, “Pound for pound he was as strong as any man he had ever run up against.” That’s pulpish, but somewhat fair. So why then do we need to be explicitly reminded about this already established strength only two sentences later? “He was immensely muscular and agile and professionally courageous.”

Of a strike, Doctorow offers this homely description: “The bosses want you weak, therefore you have to be strong. The people who will help us today will need our help tomorrow.” The reader who flips the next page will read the page that comes after this one. E.L. Doctorow has written a masterpiece. He has written a masterpiece because the book is on the Modern Library list. The Modern Library list, which is still regarded highly by certain literary geeks, is one method of locating masterpieces. Autistic readers are most welcome. Insert your logical fallacy or your X=Y observation of choice here.

Doctorow’s doggerel is hardly confined to phrases or sentences. Here is the man attempting to mythologize American heft as Taft ascends to the White House:

All over the country men began to look at themselves. They were used to drinking great quantities of beer. They customarily devoured loaves of bread and ate prodigiously of the sausage meats of poured offal that lay on the lunch counters of the saloons. The august Pierpont Morgan would routinely consume seven- and eight-course dinners. He ate breakfasts of steak and chops, eggs, pancakes, broiled fish, rolls and butter, fresh fruit and cream. The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime.

If this is deliberate comedy, then it becomes tedious by the third sentence and spoiled by the fifth sentence’s desperate laundry list retreat. If this is intended as literature, then the third sentence’s passive voice and eyesore adverb infringes upon lexical decency. If this is intended as wisdom, then the concluding homily is no different from a barfly’s botched wisdom.

There’s also something of a creepy misogyny running ragged through Ragtime. It’s there early on in the lurid manner with which Harry Thaw demands proof of his wife’s “devotion and it turned out nothing else would do but a fellatio.” But not long after we first meet Emma Goldman, Doctorow depicts Goldman giving Evelyn Nesbit a sensual massage with dimebag imagery: “Goldman rubbed the oil into her skin until her body found its own natural rosy white being and began to stir with self-perception.” Mother’s Younger Brother, who has been stalking Nesbit, bursts out of the closet mid-jerk, firing off “great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over Evelyn in her bed like fallng ticker tape.” As if this silly masturbatory fantasy isn’t enough, Evelyn is next seen taking Mother’s Younger Brother as her new lover. The reason? “It was characteristic of Evelyn that she could not resist someone who was strongly attracted to her.”

And it is characteristic of Doctorow that, with the possible exception of Mother (and even this is dubious, as I shall soon demonstrate), he cannot write about women without objectifying them. Mameh, wife to Tateh, is forced to let her landlord “have his way on a cutting table” and is never seen again. When Evelyn eventually leaves Mother’s Younger Brother, she is never heard from again. Why can’t these women be interesting or useful to the narrative outside of the boudoir? Sarah, lover to Coalhouse Walker, spends most of her time mute and sequestered from the family when Coalhouse arrives. We do see Sarah laughing not long after a fortuitous development, but her happiness flows “in the milk of her breasts.” When Sarah finally does speak, she is bludgeoned by thugs. (And, again, keep in mind that this one-dimensional character is Doctorow’s appropriation from Kleist.)

Doctorow would likely defend such slips as a wry reflection of history’s male-centric sweep (“something I was always planning to do”), from which the narrative “we” (which undoubtedly includes the mysterious boy digging through trash at the family hotel) likely originates from. But when I remembered how William Kennedy’s Ironweed (a much superior novel) worked a time period and a setting somewhat close to Ragtime without this fatal flaw, I became even more bothered by Doctorow’s dickering. Even after her apparent transformation into someone slightly more autonomous, Mother is viewed with her underclothes sticking to her limbs, “recognized in her wet form the ample woman in the Winslow Homer painting who is being rescued from the sea by towline.” Why couldn’t Doctorow, a novelist who clearly loved writing about Houdini’s escape or Theodore Dreiser adjusting his seating position, find his own precise way out of this patriarchal predicament? If history is merely an alluring flipbook of silhouettes to find one’s fortunes and invent a baronetcy (the true underlying pull in this novel), then surely the decent thing for a novelist to do — even one claiming to specialize in mock chronicle-fiction — is to avoid having one’s German chocolate cake and eating it too.

Next Up: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim!