The Forgotten Iconoclast
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on May 19, 2008
Filed Under haverford-gilbert
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.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
The point is Haverford is gone, turned to dust, and it looks like what books he wrote have nearly reached that state. The fate of us all and our works.
I had the exact same experience!