Tag / books

by Edward Champion

Garth Greenwell’s Small Brain

Garth Greenwell’s third novel is easily among the worst books of 2024. It is badly written, indulgent, and has nothing meaningful to say about the human condition. This longass essay is an attempt to reckon with the woefully mediocre novelist who continues to be falsely praised.

In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away. It all seems to be in there somewhere. At our fiftieth high school reunion, Pegeen Linn remembered how self-conscious she was when she acted in a high school play and had to kiss a boy on the stage in front of the whole school. She smiled at me. “And that boy was you. You had this monologue and then I had to walk on and kiss you, with everybody watching.” I discovered that this monologue was still there in my memory, untouched. Do you ever have that happen? You find a moment from your past, undisturbed ever since, still vivid, surprising you. In high school I fell under the spell of Thomas Wolfe: “A stone, a leaf, a door. And all of the forgotten faces.” Now I feel all the faces returning to memory.

– Roger Ebert, Life Itself

Roger Ebert was 67 years old when he wrote these words. He was three years away from succumbing to the awful cancer that contorted his body and robbed him of his smart sonorous voice. But what’s so deeply touching about Ebert’s memoir is how you marvel over how the man was still committed to the life of the mind. Garth Greenwell is 46. He is incapable of such reflection or humility. And if his insufferably indulgent third novel, Small Rain, is any indication of his present intelligence and late life wisdom potential, I highly doubt that Greenwell will get anywhere close to Ebert’s poignant well-lived insight in twenty years. If anything, Greenwell seems to be on the Philip Hensher career track to becoming an insufferable Tory, a pretentious cynic whom nobody really likes. Like Hensher, Greenwell is tolerated simply because the son of a bitch has prattled banality for too many years and, instead of recognizing that he has nothing original or interesting or genuinely moving to say, he just doesn’t have the decency to shut the fuck up.

Reading Small Rain is like being trapped in an escape room in which all of the fun puzzles and quirky themes have been removed and you’re left staring at soulless cinderblock walls. You slam your fists against the concrete to the point of bleeding, only to hear Garth Greenwell’s faux patrician voice over the PA system. A copy of Small Rain spits out from a secret slit onto the floor. “We’ll let you out when you finish reading.” “I don’t want to read this shit. Let me out now!” “No, you fucking mook. I am Garth Greenwell, certified literary genius. You cannot leave until you get to the last page. You will genuflect to me and provide me with four pints of your blood and your social security number.” “What’s the alternative?” “You will die in this room.”

And because you value your own life, you slog your way through an interminable and truly awful novel set In Iowa City during the summer of 2020 in which an unnamed poet tears an aorta and ends up in the hospital. And stays in that hospital. With occasional visits from his partner L. And he stays in the hospital. And he stays in the hospital. And does nothing but stay in that hospital without really revealing all that much about himself other than that he is a precious prick who talks about his days teaching in Bulgaria (hey, just like Greenwell himself!) when he’s not mixing up foreign accents (the poet speaks fluent Spanish but he can’t recognize a Colombian accent?) or throwing fits before the nurses.

In fact, Greenwell is so superficial that we learn far more about the house that the poet and L. live in than we do about their relationship. There is a meet-cute flashback in an Iowa City joint, but the only thing we learn about this pair is that the two talked about poetry for two hours and that L. in the initial courtship days didn’t speak English very well (despite being a professor?). And they are big on “alternative nights,” which extends to cooking and speaking in different languages. In other words, we have nothing but vapid shorthand and very little reason to care about this couple because Greenwell serves up nothing but boilerplate. In fact, L. is so underwritten that he is almost as stereotypical as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. But Fawlty Towers, at least, had the benison of being hilarious on multiple viewings. It is believed that Garth Greenwell is so humorless that he has not laughed once since the Clinton Administration.

And the more you learn about the poet — and let’s be clear that there really isn’t all that much to know because Greenwell excels in graphene-flat characterizations, including the Lifetime movie formulaic desperation that kicks in halfway through the novel when we learn that his father abandoned him after learning that he was gay – you really want the fucker to shut up already and die. Greenwell is such a manipulative narcissist that he even throws in some body dysmorphia and sibling bullying near the end of his novel to try guilting us into sympathizing with his bland and unremarkable protagonist. Here is one such banal flashback:

I remembered my mother saying as we drove each weekend to my grandparents’ farm, at each sharp turn she would say it, this is a real death trap. It was part of her constant narration as she drove, as constant as the cassette tapes she pulled out to flip from one side to the other, Juice Newton and Kenny Rogers; still those songs can place me in the car, int eh backseat beside my brother, strapped in:I can conjure up the smell of my mother’s cigarettes, the cheap upholstery, the foam of the headrest my sister, in the front, leaned back against…

Blah blah blah. What on earth is the fucking point of this, Greenwell? Jesus Motherfucking Christ, you’re trolling us, ain’t you, ain’t you, you talentless repetitive mind-numbingly boring fuck?

(menacing crackle from the escape room’s PA system)

“MISTER CHAMPION, I TOLD YOU THAT IF YOU DON’T FINISH THE BOOK, YOU WILL DIE IN THIS ROOM!”

“Alright! Alright! I’m reading it, you sadistic asshole!”

And he stays in the hospital. And he whines. And he stays in the hospital. You read variations on the same tedious descriptions over and over again. You howl at the sick bastard behind the PA system, who responds with frequent laughter. Two gin-scented tears trick down the sides of your nose. But it’s alright, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. You will win the victory over yourself. You love Big Greenwell.

* * *

This is a roundabout way of reporting that Garth Greenwell has used his dubious talents to deliver one of the worst reading experiences I’ve had in the last three years. Garth Greenwell is not about life. He does not care about human beings and is thus, as far as I’m concerned, an enemy to true literature. He writes with the groan-inducing cadences of a long-winded septuagenarian about to show you his vacation slideshow in the basement. You will not find three-dimensional characters in his work. You will find plenty of gay sex (though not so much here) that isn’t nearly as bold or as vivacious or as honest as the carnality flowing throughout Alan Hollinghursts’s rich work. You will also find extremely generalized descriptive shorthand that reveals nothing, along the lines of:

the man, who was young and thin, in his twenties, a short beard visible around his surgical mask, took my arm to examine my IVs.

The man’s physical details, of course, tell us nothing about him and don’t really contribute to the atmosphere. If so, why even bring this up? And Greenwell does it again here:

He was in his midfifties, maybe around L’s age, a white guy, wiry, with a buzz cut under the red ballcap he always wore (a flag on that, too), his sunglasses perched atop the bill.

Not only is Greenwell so without imagination that he gives us a MAGA stereotype, but he even uses the same occluded hair trick for two separate walk-on characters. Or to put it another way, Garth Greenwell can be likened to a bumbling hit man showing up to a far-range job with a .22 Short instead of a sniper rifle.

And when he’s not giving us this woefully inept physicality, he resorts to the same repetitive vomiting:

He was my age, twenty-something, an actor performing in the Festival, not in any glamorous way; he was a local, an extra or maybe something more than an extra.

Garth Greenwell is around my age, actually a little younger but about my age, a writer performing in the Hot Fall Books Olympics with Small Rain, not in any glamorous way, although he does believe he is glamorous, or maybe he is both glamorous and not glamorous like Schrodinger’s cat; I sound so literary when I am pointlessly speculative; he was a yokel from Kentucky, a local from Kentucky, a huckster from Kentucky and now he hates Kentucky, a literary grifter or maybe something more than a literary grifter.

By way of contrast, here is a beautifully compact single-sentence description from Paul G. Tremblay’s excellent The Cabin at the End of the World:

Freckles dust across the bridge of a long nose that dives deeply beneath her large, egg-shaped brown eyes.

Boom! We’re in. We know so much about this woman in only a sentence and we want to know more! Greenwell is completely incapable of such economical descriptive depth.

Oh, and before i am accused of hating literature (I obviously don’t!), let me serve up a counterpoint to further demonstrate Garth Greenwell’s dereliction of descriptive duty. Here’s an excerpt from John Langan’s criminally underrated The Fisherman (Word Horde, you’re doing the Lord’s work!) describing a man who has lost his family in a car accident:

Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil — he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant — under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.

Unlike Greenwell, one isn’t vexed by the “at least polite, frequently pleasant” aside because there is a natural descriptive escalation in the language. And every physical detail spells out exactly who this guy is. Greenwell can only repeat himself like a lonely parrot braying for a cracker.

* * *

In Small Rain, you will find plentiful prolix descriptions of stuff. Lots of stuff. Not such stuff as dreams are made on, but stuff you can find on any given Target receipt. A little life rounded with a sleep indeed.

But in the public areas there was art on the walls, bright geometric abstractions or gauzy photos of Iowa scenes: an old barn, the sun setting behind it, fields of corn. One showed a stretch of prairie in bloom, though there wasn’t a prairie anymore, not really.

John Cage once suggested that if something was boring for two minutes, then you should sit with it for four. If it was still boring after minutes, try it after eight. Keep multiplying until you get to thirty-two and you eventually discover that something is not boring at all. This hideously generic passage would suggest that Cage’s credo may be one secret ingredient in the Garth Greenwell Writing School. But I’m here to tell you that Greenwell has nothing to say. Zilch! Nada! Nichego! He pads out his endless paragraphs with this nonsense. And then he throws in a half-assed reference to Walter Benjamin after all this. (No, I’m not kidding.)

a shallow wide glass on a long stem that I lifted often in my boredom

Well, you certainly bored the fuck out of me because you couldn’t just write “coupe glass.” But good on you for padding out that word count!

She returned a few minutes later, her hands full of the plastic packaging all of the medical supplies came in, endless boxes and envelopes and bags; so much plastic, I thought, as she sorted them on the counter and began tearing them open, so much waste.

“So much waste.” A rare case of Greenwell having a moment of self-awareness? Somebody hide the lexical firehose from this puffed up practitioner!

The floor in my bedroom had been badly damaged, the beautiful old wooden floors we had salvaged everywhere in the house; here they were strained beyond saving, sanded too often to sand again.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the duds of his sentences. Why does this unintentionally hilarious stab at “poetry” through mindless repetition remind me of the “life unworthy of life” mantra used to justify the evil Aktion T-4 program? And why does every picture of Garth Greenwell instantly remind me of Reinhard Heydrich? It’s certainly true that I’ve read twenty-five books on the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany ever since Joe Biden choked in the presidential debate. Still, I can’t shake the obvious metaphor. Reading a Garth Greenwell novel is not unlike a German being forced to vote for Hitler while being observed by an SS officer.

And there’s also the redundant manner in which Greenwell describes the condition of all this stuff. Is he writing fiction or product entries for an L.L. Bean catalog? One reads a prolonged Greenwell sentence beginning with the phrase “But maybe a Snickers bar is a wonderful thing…” and one wonders if whipping up zippy slogans for Madison Avenue is more his speed. He is so condescending to his readership that he seems to believe, at times, that we cannot infer for ourselves whether a pen is uncapped or whether a remote control can turn on a television:

A television hung just to the left of the cabinets, more or less where my bed pointed; I could operate it with a control that hung from a cord attached to the bed.

There was a marker clipped at the top, which she pried loose and uncapped.

It would honestly be more interesting if the doctor aggressively loosened the cap from the clip while pulling it out. But Greenwell appears to have an allergy to active verbs.

* * *

Some of Greenwell’s descriptive redundancies are outright insulting, almost as if Greenwell believes his reader demographic is somewhere between five to eight years old. We are informed — as if we couldn’t figure out the facile arithmetic on our own — that a building that is a “1970s monstrosity” was erected “after the chaos of the sixties.” A building constructed from chaos! Poetry!

There are classist overtones, such as the poet being condescending when he is told that COVID would be “catastrophic” to his medical condition and when he admits that he is attracted to L because his Spanish is “not the language of the streets but a private language.” But it’s an unearned classism. Because Greenwell simply has no concept of how people live and spend money. We are asked to believe, with astonishing incredulity, that L. — a Portuguese professor who is probably making $135k/year tops (that’s what a Glassdoor search gives me) — and the poet narrator — who subsists in the far from lucrative field of freelance writing — can not only pay rent and a mortgage, but can also spend money on credit cards and significant home repairs. (Greenwell does try and cover his ass later by pointing out that the poet is slated to be teaching classes in the fall of 2020, but it’s still unconvincing.) Does the cost of the poet’s healthcare come into play in this novel? Of course not. Clearly, L. is the one pulling the financial weight in this relationship, but it never occurs to Greenwell to investigate how money (particularly when one partner earns much more than the other) can impact a relationship. Instead, L. and the poet simply scream at each other. He may as well be writing an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Because this loathsome bastard really does have this annoying tendency to fixate on a word and riff on it in a way that reads like some illiterate yokel trying to mimic Samuel Beckett after skimming the Molloy Trilogy CliffsNotes:

there was a tremendous smile, full voltage, an American smile, a smile of triumph, I thought, a smile of that Midwestern confidence and cheer I found so odious, a pernicious smile, privileged and coddled, a smile that had never known hardship or fear, a smile of utter complacent harmony with its world, a smile I had always hated.

I haven’t quoted the full passage because simply typing it reduces me to a small animal whimpering with hunger for a substantive meal. Greenwell actually believes that if he bombards you with banal repetitive bullshit like this, you will somehow come around and declare him a sui generis prodigy. And judging from the unquestioning reception that his hopelessly desiccated work has received, his marketing strategy seems to have worked.

* * *

I last took a principled swing at this grandiose gasbag back in 2020 — ironically, only weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic — the subject of Small Rain. I received a surprising uptick in emails from some hot literary names who thanked me for writing the piece, but who couldn’t go on the public record because, as one correspondent conveyed to me, “I’ll get into trouble if I cross Garth.” Well, I have no such qualms about getting into “trouble” — in large part because the higher calling of demanding literature that isn’t predicated upon overwrought and superficial bullshit is too vital. I also despise the backscratchers and hobnobbers of the so-called literary world with every fiber of my being. They invented a smorgasbord of untrue rumors about me many years ago after what I had to say about the joys of literature was listened to with more regularity than any of the ponderous logs they dropped into the minuscule ponds of literary rags that nobody reads. One of these opportunistic shit-talkers was, in fact, Garth Greenwell.

To this very day, I simply cannot believe that anybody takes Greenwell’s pompous and atrocious sentences so seriously. Even the grumpy Dwight Garner, who gave Small Rain a pan, professes to be a Greenwell stan. But Garth Greenwell’s “success” — and it is the type of succès fou that only fools in a small circle salivate over — has more to do with Greenwell being a nimble networker rather than a writer of any real talent. He has sycophantic and untrustworthy lapdogs like Matt Bell, Taffy Brodesser-Alzer, and Sam Adler-Bell in his corner to butter his day-old bread, revealing in their undiscerning monomania that propping up mainstream dullards in high places matters more than stumping for the truly original weirdos or having bona-fide principles. But now Garth, dear Garth, Garth is his name, Oh Fucking Humorless Gasbag Garth Please Stop Writing Your Dreadful Fiction, let me forge interminable Garth-like sentences with all the dubious grace of a wino downing five shots in one sitting at a bar because it’s oh so literary, has written a Novel for Our Times! A pandemic novel! The same form that “inspired” Gary Shteyngart to capitulate to egregious navel gazing of the affluent and write his worst novel, Our Country Friends. It is a template that recalls the embarrassing rash of extremely mediocre novels that followed 9/11 more than two decades ago — with only Ken Kalfus and Jess Walter emerging out of this topical Faustian bargain with anything truly original and groundbreaking. I think it says something about our declining literary standards that, outside of Katherine Anne Porter’s moving “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” you won’t find a lot of fiction about the 1918 Spanish flu that people remember. Previous literary practitioners understood that you could never escape the platitudes and generalizations that froth to the surface when you write about a cataclysmic catastrophe. Risk-averse critics have turned this pigshit into a silk purse because job security matters more than upholding literary standards. Presumably, they also do not want to “cross Garth.”

I have insisted that Garth Greenwell has a small brain and I would like to qualify this.

I am convinced that all the most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.
– R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art

In Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals (of which I shall later deliver more fulsome thoughts as part of my ongoing Modern Library project), he rightly argues out that art’s purpose is to offer alternative ways of existing and negotiating the universe. Art is a corrective to the moral self-righteousness of religious fundamentalism, which regulates our bodies (and permanently aligns sex with procreation, as decreed by a dubious almighty authority) when it isn’t declaring that all subjects submit with abject fealty to a fictitious deity’s sovereignty. But as religious authority has rightly eroded in the last century, artists have become forced to survive by dint of crass mercantile methods, in which the quest for differing ways of existence is interrupted by the need to paint the wife of a millionaire. It is, of course, the duty of any genuine artist to carry on this vital mission. But Greenwell’s feeble output makes it perfectly clear that he would rather surrender to market forces rather than imbue his characters with anything close to a meaningful consideration of existence. He has successfully manipulated many well-meaning individuals into believing that his mission is that of the holy artist, in large part because he writes about LGBTQIA characters. But if his gay characters are not altogether different from the heinous stereotypes populating a potboiler, then what makes him any different from some garden-variety Brooklyn writer writing another pedestrian debut novel about some twentysomething cipher trying to land a media job or find love?

Greenwell’s small-minded “effort” then is not to burden or challenge us with vital meat-and-potatoes questions, but to force us to submit to badly written and falsely tender longueurs that represent a conformist betrayal of the artistic purpose — in short, a capitulation to capitalism. If Greenwell wanted to write a “topical” novel, why then does he lack the guts to confront the moral fundamentalism of Trumpism? (Since I’ve taken Greenwell to the woodshed, I think it’s only fair to praise him on one minor point. The only page of Small Rain that I appreciated was a moment in which the poet sees how his sister has been brainwashed by right-wing news and is taking the poet’s mother out to a populated restaurant. Had Greenwell written an entire novel with such relatable human stakes like this, I would have written an entirely different essay.) Why does he traffic in such obvious observations such as the way in which physical touch became a rare commodity during lockdown? Well, it’s because he’s little more than a literary hack sitting by the sidelines, a member of the uninvolved who will never take a real risk, an obnoxious milquetoast incapable of putting himself on the front lines.

In fact, the only true sentence in Small Rain — and this one is just as grotesquely belabored as all the others — comes about a third of the way through the book:

It was a mystery, everything around me was a mystery — which is always true, I don’t know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets flush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well be magic; and now my life depended on it.

Or, to read this more accurately, Garth Greenwell knows fuck all about what it is to be alive. Or if he does know, he’s certainly quite hopeless in conveying this through language! He probably knows deep down — despite his tendency to quote the “germs” line from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure at nearly every opportunity (he does it again in Small Rain) — that he is a literary charlatan. But he must carry on bombarding us with his hideous prose as if his life depended on it.

In response to being reviewed (naturally, Greenwell the bitchy capitalist pig put his “essay” behind a Substack paywall), Greenwell recently had the wildly arrogant temerity to suggest that “there’s something a little degrading in evaluation.” Mr. Greenwell, the only person who has degraded himself is you. You are the chump who wrote the shitty book: a novel gravid with empty calories that is far from “nourishing” and this is not of any “help in living” whatsoever. Are you truly that delusional? Are you sure you don’t have a cult of acolytes wearing red baseball caps? (Make American Greenwell Again?) And take your lumps like a man. You’re an immensely privileged middle-aged white guy, not a teenager. The degrading thing here would be to accept you as a god who is above reproach. I have already established in two essays (and numerous examples) that you cannot write a smooth sentence even if a terrorist held a gun to your head. You literally have nothing to say about human existence that I haven’t seen more eloquently and originally expressed in the perhaps fifteen thousand books I’ve read over the course of my lifetime.

Of course, if Greenwell does learn how to write a sentence without shoving his Brobdingnagian head up his own asshole, then I will be the first to commend him. But it’s clear that such a day will never arrive. No argument that I promulgate will deter Farrar, Straus & Giroux from continuing to publish further drivel from this wildly arrogant impostor. And all of literature suffers when mediocrity is propped atop the dais.

by Edward Champion

RIP Paul Auster (1947-2024)

Paul Auster, a true literary lion, has passed away. I interviewed him in 2008 about his creative process and how he sustained narrative momentum on a project.

Paul Auster, the ferociously ambitious writer behind such masterpieces as The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night, has passed away. He was 77 years old.

During the summer of 2008, on the occasion of Man in the Dark being published, I had the good fortune of interviewing Auster at his Park Slope home. He sized me up fairly fast with some off-tape banter concerning the most creative methods of scoring free and cheap drinks, which we both laughed about. And I think that’s why we probably had such a thoughtful conversation. I played my usual role of delivering questions for Auster to parry and punch through. That dynamic resulted in some revealing answers about his creative process, which was rightfully different from my speculations.

You can listen to the conversation by clicking on the Bat picture below.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Opening himself up to explanation.

Author: Paul Auster

Subjects Discussed: Starting a novel from a title, the advance titles contained within The Book of Illusions, the working title of The Music of Chance, Mr. Blank, the relationship between Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, shorter baroque novels vs. longer naturalistic novels, the use and non-use of quotation marks within speech, the writing history of The Brooklyn Follies, the political nature of ending novels, the 2000 presidential election, parallel worlds, the death of Uri Grossman, didactic novels, the comfort of books, the Auster eye-popping moment, the party scene in The Book of Illusions, violence, reminding the reader that he is in a novel, emotional states revealed through imaginary material, Vermont’s frequent appearance in Auster’s novel, Virginia Blaine as the shared element between Brill and Brick in Man in the Dark, magic, The Invention of Solitude, memorializing memory, Rose Hawthorne, website archives, Auster’s relationship with the Internet, having an email surrogate, Auster’s concern for specific dollar amounts in Man in the Dark and Oracle Night, Hand to Mouth, Auster’s reading habits, the 8-10 contemporary novelists Auster follows closely, being distracted, the intrusive nature of the telephone, diner moments in Auster’s most recent novels, perception and stock situations, summaries of books and films within Auster’s books, and intimate moments in great movies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about something that I’ve long been interested in your books, and that is your concern for specific dollar amounts. Again, it plays up here in the Pulaski Diner, where everything is five dollars. And I also think about the scenario with M.R. Chang in Oracle Night, in which there’s the whole situation between the ten dollar notebook and the ten thousand dollar notebook.

Auster: Right.

Correspondent: And again it becomes completely, ridiculously violent. But there is something about the propinquity of the dollar amount that you keep coming back to in your work. What is it about money? And what is it about a specific figure like this?

Auster: It’s funny. I never, never thought about that. Wow. Well, listen, money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life. I wrote a whole book about that.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Auster: Hand to Mouth. And the only good thing about making money is that you don’t have to think about money. It’s the only value. Because if you don’t have it, you’re crushed. And for a long period in my life, I was crushed. And so maybe this is a reflection of those tough years. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Correspondent: Or maybe there is something absurd about a specific dollar amount or something. I mean, certainly, when I go to a store and I see that something is set at a particular dollar amount or it fluctuates, it becomes a rather ridiculous scenario. Because all you want to do is get that particular object.

Auster: Yes, yes, yes. But often in my books, people don’t have a lot of money in their pockets. So they have to budget themselves carefully.

Correspondent: Well, not always. You tend to have characters like, for example in The Brooklyn Follies, people who have a good windfall to fall back on and who also offer frequently to help pay for things, and their efforts are often rejected out of pride by your supporting characters. And so again, money is this interesting concern. But I’m wondering why you’ve held on to this notion. It’s now thirty years since the events depicted in Hand to Mouth. I mean, is this something you just haven’t forgotten about?

Auster: I guess I haven’t forgotten about it. (laughs)

Correspondent: Do you still pinch pennies to this day?

Auster: No, no, no. Not at all. No, I’m not a tightwad at all.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Auster: I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just — the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects. I don’t have a car. We don’t have a country house. We don’t have a boat. We don’t have anything that lots of people have. And I’m not interested. I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. I guess the only thing that I spend money on is cigars and food and alcohol. Those are the main expenses.

Correspondent: Not books?

Auster: No. Because our library in the house is so bursting, we have no more room. We have things on the floor. And books come into the house at the rate of — you see, three came today for example. I’m pointing to them on the table. So we’re just inundated with books.

Download BSS #231: Paul Auster (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Moviegoer (Modern Library #60)

Walker Percy’s masterpiece is not only a fine exemplar of the Catholic novel’s contradictions about existence, but it is also a wry examination of life choices that are often irreconcilable with the very reason for existing!

(This is the forty-first entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Death Comes for the Archbishop.)

There are many go-nowhere men like Walker Percy’s Jack “Binx” Bolling in American life: the type who creates nothing and who lives like some vaguely seedy salesman overly concerned with easy comities and sartorial aesthetics, the quasi-urbane man who, at his worst, is so terrified of even remotely staining his choppers that he slurps nothing but colorless sugar-free smoothies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I can’t say that I’ve wanted to spend a day (much less a life) like this. I am too much of a creative, feverishly curious, and pro-active man with a formidable work ethic and a great brio for life (and all of its attendant messes) to do so, but I do have my moments when I feel the draw to lie in bed for hours and listen to the beautiful rap of rain against my window pane, which is certainly a more human pastime than sucking on the cheap glass teats of television and being extremely online. Then I come to my senses and realize that I do need to make something that day, with the fulsome freedom of not needing approbation, so that I can sleep better at night and feel some self-respect — a drive for independence and authenticity that is decreasingly shared by my fellow Americans as the apocalyptic headlines lull many formidable workhorses into permanent or partial fatigue. I don’t blame anyone for slumming it. This is an exhausting asceticism for anyone to practice and the prolificity that results from my febrile commitment is probably one reason why some people fear me.

But poor Binx Bolling has nothing like that, which is why I find him so interesting and why I find Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer to be more weirdly meaningful with each fresh reeread. Absent of any real purpose, Bolling spends much of this plotless novel trying to shoehorn his rudderless life into something, particularly a “search,” which is not really a search for anything. He seems unwilling to ride or die with unconscious instinct, with the sheer enjoyment of being alive. (Typical of Bolling, he has no allegiance. At one point, he even declares himself “Jewish by instinct.”) He recognizes that instinct is something that people possess, but that doesn’t seem enough for him:

At the great moments of life — success, failure, marriage, death— our kind of folks have always possessed a native instinct for behavior, a natural piety or grace, I don’t mind calling it. Whatever else we did or failed to do, we always had that. I’ll make you a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they’re better than other people. You’re damn right we’re better. We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity’s sake…Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal.

But is this really so “better”? This is fairly similar to Holden Caulfield’s insufferable kvetching, except that it is far more fascinating because Bolling, unlike Caulfield, is more actively self-aware and constantly observant of others. He chooses to think and feel this way. It is what I call the “fuck my life” look that you see on people’s faces after they have given up on any dreams after the age of forty.

While the Binx Bollings of our world are capable of a few spontaneous decisions and may possess some cultural tastes and perhaps a soupçon of passion, they differ from the “slacker” types that Richard Linklater rightfully celebrated in his wonderful 1991 film in that exuberance is often absent and there isn’t an unusual nobility or even an ethos to their indolence. (And I would contend that Bollling’s “novel ethos” is a false one. For he says this when he has nothing in particular he is striving for. And those who strive for something rarely have a mediocre ideal in mind.)

The Binx Bollings simply live and that’s about it. They are, in short, working stiffs and the burden of surviving is often too much to do much more than that. You’ll find them represented in varying shades within Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe books, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, John P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley, Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland, Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, and John Williams’s Stoner. And while I have no desire to leave out women in my literary consideration, yes, the fear of becoming “mediocre” or “detached” like this — the natural “evolution” of Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” or what Colin Wilson unpacked in The Outsider — does seem to be an overwhelmingly male concern. Contemporary novelists as brilliant as Adelle Waldman, Kate Christensen, and Lauren Groff (you should very much read their work too) have also tackled this to great effect, although they are usually more interested in effect rather than cause or state and the vicarious first-person experience is of less importance. Think of the way that the characters in Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch (all literary queens who I will enthuse about to my dying day!) are so much more alive than the Binx Bolling type. I also can’t help but think of the way Ross McElwee (also a man of the South) brilliantly and vulnerably put himself front and center in such a way with his fascinating series of personal documentaries. Updike, in particular, was one of the foremost literary Johns drawn to these men and he nimbly spoke to American readers who recognized the telltale cadences of Durkheimian anomie.

Which is not to negate the quotidian struggles of the Binx Bollings. The miracle of Percy’s novel is that we’re still with him on his journey despite all this. Still, it often never occurs to these types to pay attention to the “beloved father” or “husband of X” found so ubiquitously on tombstones, which matters so much more than the roll of a Taylorist scroll memorializing an endless concatenation of checked off tasks. The worst of these aimless men possess no sense of humor and somehow transform into a homely insectoid creature worse than anything that ever bolted upward from Kafka’s imagination, a listless monstrosity commonly referred to as a “critic.” The critic, who is often a cretin, is a pitiful and unsmiling quadraped incapable of expressing joy, much less stridulating his legs together to make a pleasant sound in springtime.

And while we’re on the subject of bugs, as it so happens, there is a cameo appearance from a coterie of creepy-crawlies in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer that saunter right past our malaise-fueled man Binx: “They dive and utter their thrumming skonk-skonk and go sculling up into the bright upper air.” Percy’s emphasis on sounds and gerunds here really says it all. That same whirlydirsh language is often beyond poor Binx.

* * *

The source for Boiling — as well as Williston Barrett, a Percy protagonist who would be explored in two stages of life (youthful folly and middle age) in, respectively, The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming) — was Percy’s essay “The Man on the Train” (collected in The Message in the Bottle) — in which Percy firmly established the type of protagonist he was interested in writing about:

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reserved and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train….The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is! — which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation.

In other words, Percy could not bring himself to write about a character in unbearable despair (it is not an artistic focus for the faint of heart) — largely because his natural writing voice is driven by a fine comedic impetus, with the Catholic novelist’s concern for philosophy planting one foot in the wings and the other on stage. (Look no further than Antonia White, Gene Wolfe, and Graham Greene for similarly intriguing juxtapositions.) Much like Richard Linklater’s “slacker” archetype, Percy seeks to pursue the bare minimum of alienation, although, as can be seen with Dr. Thomas More in Love in the Ruins, Percy’s characters are more eggs-in-one-basket types (in More’s case, the Ontological Lapsometer that he sees as a decaying society’s cure-all) and less committed to the free-floating spontaneity of hitching a ride with strangers, taking the entire day to assemble an elaborate rock structure to represent femininity, or being interviewed for a film student’s documentary.

At this point, the gusto-driven reader may rightfully ask, “So why read about this?” For the same reason that we read about any “unlikable” character. This is a form of living, albeit while clutching the bottom of one’s hemp, that is part of the human experience. The eccentric film journalist Jeffrey Wells has recently suggested that the criteria of art (specifically movies) involves being put into “a kind of alternate-reality mescaline dream state.” And while escapism is certainly a dopamine-fueled pastime practiced by a population increasingly hostile to pleasurable cerebration, requiring little of the mind but an uncritical blank slate and a sybarite’s zeal for incessant orgasm, what of the wisdom picked up from raw human experience? Art gives us the advantage of having access to the interior thoughts and feelings of those we may be disinclined to meet in the here and now. Wells’s limited definition therefore nullifies Jonathan Glazer’s excellent film adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel, The Zone of Interest, which is nothing less than a vital and deeply horrifying atmospheric experience warning us of the shockingly pedestrian character of fascism, which is dangerously close to permanently destroying the very fabric of this bountiful nation should the Orange Menace emerge victorious in November.

Likewise, Walker Percy’s masterpiece is a similar (if less baleful) cautionary tale of what it means to coast and how commitment to something (or, in Bolling’s case, someone) represents the inevitable reckoning that anyone is fated to face at one point or another. It is a sneaky warning to anyone with true fuck-it-all drive that even the dreamer faces the risk of slipping into adamantine complacency and is ill-equipped to gently pluck a rose from the carefully maintained bush planted atop a Sisyphean alp.

The New Yorker‘s Paul Elie has smartly observed that The Moviegoer is curiously ahistorical: less taken with unpacking the neverending residue of the Civil War, racial tension, or other hallmarks found prodigiously within typical Southern fiction. The novel is also, by its own prefatory admission, an inexact version of New Orleans: far from meticulously recreated like Joyce’s Dublin, though not entirely fabulist.

But I do think Elie is a tad too dismissive of Southern inventiveness to suggest that Percy mined exclusively from the European existentialists to summon his vision of the unlived and shakily examined life — even though the debt to Kierkegaard is obvious in The Moviegoer (and in “The Man on the Train”), not just because of the opening epigraph:

As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as opportunity presents itself – if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.

But what is this search? I strongly recommend Rose Engler’s smart unpacking, which eloquently outlines the religious component that was dear to Percy, but there is something intriguingly postmodern about it. One of Percy’s early reviewers — Edwin Kennebeck in Commonweal — believed that The Moviegoer entailed a search not merely for meaning, but for something beyond despair. And there is something to this, given how Bolling categorizes the search early on as “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” The movies that Bolling regularly watches do not present a true search. And, for Bolling, it can be argued that his search involves doing everything possible to avoid that search, even though he knows inherently that he must search. Denied definitive time and space by Percy, Bolling splits up his search into horizontal and vertical ones, framed without any proper construct from Eddington’s The Expanding Universe. He complains of his family not understanding his search. He searches for a starting point by scribbling in a notebook and, after all this “effort,” tells us, “The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly.”

Kenneback pinpointed, quite rightly, that Bolling’s decision to marry Kate represented “a search ended and an ordeal begun.” Belonging then, which most of us crave for and which Bolling is not especially good at, represents the cruel gauntlet thrown down by the universe. Bolling tells us, “Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I’ll show you two people existing in despair.” He believes that Kate sustains a look of being serious, “which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”

Perhaps we’re all pretending in one way or another as we saunter about this mortal coil. But the tragedy of Binx Bolling is that, even with his apparent religious conversion, he cannot seem to accept life at face value. But he is not the only one suffering. Kate has this to say:

“Have you ever noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck — people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”

If our presence here is indeed ephemeral, should this not provide greater motive to connect and to find joy? The Catholic mind, and thus the Catholic novel, is not without its involutions and contradictions.

Next Up: Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson!

by Edward Champion

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Modern Library #61)

In addition to being a largely humorless and incredibly overrated writer, Willa Cather was a supercilious white supremacist reveling in racist stereotypes and a corn-pone practitioner of the worst kind. There is no way that I can defend her work in 2024.

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

Most of the largely sexist pigs who came up with the Modern Library canon were ancient men more fond of oinking and logrolling rather than upholding literary standards. (There was only one woman among these judges: to evoke a recent Marc Maron bit, “It was a different time”).

Most of these judges are now dead. Just as the regressive viewpoints they tapped within their 20th century hearts are now mostly pushing up the daisies. (Thank you, #metoo movement!) Oddball Christopher Cerf is the only judge still alive and I invite him to verbal pistols at dawn (or perhaps, more accurately, a feisty reckoning over a cup of morning tea) if he wants to respond to the list’s hideous gender imbalance. The remaining judiciary corpses include Gore Vidal (dead, past his prime in ’98), Daniel J. Boorstin (dead, past his prime in ’98), Shelby Foote (dead, covert Confederacy apologist, we’ll be getting to him in a few years, past his prime in ’98), Vartan Gregorian (dead, but, from all reports, a decent dude), A.S. Byatt (GOAT, literally just died in November, should have pushed back harder against these testosterone-charged fossils, being a Willa Cather fan seems to be her only fault), Edmund Morris (dead, past his prime in ’98 and about to destroy his career with Dutch), John Richardson (dead, past his prime in ’98), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (dead, past his prime in ’98), and William Styron (dead, perilously close to being done in ’98, but dammit he at least gave us Darkness Visible, which was rightly included on the Modern Library nonfiction list).

Anyway, it says a great deal about the casual misogyny of these then doddering judges that a hopeless and unremarkable square like Willa Cather (the kind of teeming bore that other teeming bores genuflect to) somehow secured a much higher slot than such indisputable virtuosos as Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark. It says a great deal that Willa “Cream Corn” Cather — a plodding rustic rube without a soupçon of edge who wrote sentences so loathsome that, only ten minutes after reading an especially awful exemplar, I sprout wings from my back, descend with my fangs upon innocents in Manhattan, and destroy random chevron-studded façades and angelic statuary mounted on art deco skyscrapers hundreds of feet above the streets (if you Google around, you’ll find TikToks out there depicting my frightening transmutation; it is a display that is not for the faint of heart) — is apparently more worthy of commendation than Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Flannery O’Connor, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Bowles, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Harper Lee, who were all denied a single spot on the list.

In 1998, did the Modern Library Judges fear what was then called an “outspoken” woman? Did they wish to consign “innovation” solely to men? Were they unsettled by the many waves of feminism? Did they try to argue that an insufferable reactionary goody little two-shoes like Cather was a feminist because she exposed spousal discontent through only the barest minimum amount of effort (see Alexandra in My Ántonia; if you think that’s a “radical” depiction of what women had to go through, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you here in Brooklyn) and because she was a closeted lesbian (even as she was tearing down other women of letters privately and publicly)?

At this point, we’ll probably never know. The likeliest scenario is that Cerf will stay mum and take the problematic history of these internal discussions to the grave. And let’s face the facts: the dude wouldn’t meet me for tea even if I whipped up a fun electro cover of one of his two hundred plus compositions for Sesame Street. (Yo, Chris, I’ve got terabytes of samples on my desktop! If a goofy emo punk version of “Monster in the Mirror” whipped up on my synth over the weekend will get you to cough up about this regrettable state of affairs, then I’ll do it! Seriously, that “wubba wubba wubba wubba woo woo woo” just begs to be rasped out in the manner similar to the late Can singer Damo Suzuki.)

The wondrous Dame Hermione Lee, who remains one of our greatest living literary scholars, has written a solid and truly admirable bio advocating for Cather. And while I appreciated Lee’s volume in much the same way that I will always stump for Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love, which reckons with the question on why so many people love Celine Dion, make no mistake: I consider anyone willing to go to the mat for Willa Cather to be some terminally unhip rooster without a shred of literary taste, the kind of unadventurous sod who would invite suicidal thoughts if you got cornered by him at a cocktail party. Lee gets special dispensation from me because she’s awesome — in large part because she wrote an invaluable Edith Wharton book (and I am, of course, crazy about Wharton). In fact, in quoting a passage from One of Ours that described junk, Lee identified a possible class-based literary divide between people like me who detest Cather and certain frou-frou bourgie types who think that she’s the cat’s pajamas (Christian Lander, you were so asleep at the wheel on the Cather front when you ran your excellent satirical blog!):

There is a hint that junk, once it starts ageing into antiques, might be seductive (an American writer with more entropic tendencies, like Nathanael West or Thomas Pynchon, would have loved that cellar) but, more often, junk is just pitiful, like the debris of Claude’s marital house: ‘How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed!’ [OOO, p. 223] When Claude comes to the ‘dump-heap’ of the French battlefields, he has already been living in a civilization (Cather suggests) which has not needed a war to turn itself into rubbish.

You have to love that “Cather suggests” parenthetical that Lee drops into this cogent analysis. (Don’t worry, Hermione! We cool! I have Quincy Jones’s wonderful Sanford and Son theme playing in the back as I write this paragraph!) I guess you could say that I’m one of those readers who is more drawn to authors with “entropic tendencies.” I believe you can find beauty in damned near anything. Including junk. But Cather, despite stumping for the heartland, is more of a rebuking prude who never earned the right to be a snob. She’d rather throw out the junk and align herself with the sanitarium/cornflakes crowd: you know, the alternative medicine quacks sent up decades later in T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville. I know you whipper-snappers are keeping up with me in our age of conspiracy theories, rampant cognitive decline, and unfounded character assassination on social media. Or at least I hope you are!

There’s also the question of whether Cather’s “literary sensibilities” can be entirely trusted. Of The Awakening, Cather had the audacity to write, “I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.” One might say the same of a hopeless stiff like Cather herself, though she does not possess anything especially exquisite in her early works beyond country bumpkin exclamation marks. She condemned Mark Twain — arguably the greatest wit that American letters has ever produced — as a man of “limited mentality” and “neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters and very little of a gentleman.”

Yes, I realize that all this was written in the nineteenth century and it is incredibly absurd to pick a fight with somebody who has been dead for nearly eight decades. But I’m telling you. After reading far more Cather than I needed to for this essay, I had actual nightmares about Cather strangling me while laughing in a menacing high-pitched titter. These dreams were so terrifying that I would not even wish them on my worst enemy. And if I have to write about this mediocre and humorless nitwit from Nebraska because she’s on this goddamned Modern Library list, well, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, them’s fighting words.

Let’s take a look at some of the trite and treacly bullshit that Cather was banging out when she rolled out the howitzers against these legends.

From “Paul’s Case”:

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were home, and “knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy.”

Note the redundancies here (“cruising in the Mediterranean” and “arranging his office hours on his yacht”). Even an oft prolix mofo like me recognizes this sentence as interminably long, presumably extended to cash in on the word rate.

Or how about this overwritten nonsense from “The Sculptor’s Funeral”?

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: “My boy, my boy! And this is how you’ve come home to me!”

I’m very forgiving of melodrama in fiction, but this is unpardonable corn pudding with an objectively disagreeable sweetness that would be rightly laughed out of any MFA workshop today. The sequence of events here is all wrong. “Drawn from the hearse”? Well, where else would the casket come from? Some giant descending from the heavens? The attempt here to create poignant emotion falls flat with this overwrought dialogue. “My boy” was enough. But we get two in a row, followed by the kind of awful expository dialogue I go out of my way to avoid as a radio dramatist.

And then I read the soul-destroying novels. O Pioneers! was a vicious slog. The Song of the Lark — with its hideous reactionary parochialism and its incessant reliance upon gossip — will have you howling at the ceiling over how stiff and superficial it is. And My Ántonia? You’d honestly be better off spending your time listening to The Knack’s “My Sharona” on repeat for six hours.

Which finally brings us to Death Come for the Archbishop after a lot of throat-clearing. (Look, I’m trying to have fun here. My Cather deep dive was a deeply unpleasant reading experience!)

The common narrative propped up by Cather’s fusty and foolish boosters is that, much like Robert Johnson meeting the Devil, Cather went down to the Southwest (particularly Santa Fe) in the summer of 1925 and came back “reborn” with a renewed “sensitivity” for other cultures. But this, of course, is a lie. And it certainly doesn’t explain why Cather, much like a hopped up Zionist airhead denying Israel’s genocidal complicity, didn’t glom onto the indigenous people who lived in the region, but chose to fixate on the Christian authorities who longed to convert them.

I can see the Cather acolytes arriving at this point in my essay, suggesting that I have deliberately misread Death, which is oh so “sympathetic” to the indigenous people of New Mexico. But at what cost? Depicting Mexicans as noble savages? Emily of It Was Evening All Afternoon arrived at a similar conclusion in 2009. So did Kali Fajardo-Anstine over at LitHub. But why not just go straight to the text to see how docile and obliging the locals are?

When this strange yellow boy played it, there was softness and languor in the wire strings—but there was also a kind of madness; the recklessness, the call of wild countries which all these men had felt and followed in one way or another. Through clouds of cigar smoke, the scout and the soldiers, the Mexican rancheros and the priests, sat silently watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of the banjo player, and his seesawing yellow hand, which sometimes lost all form and became a mere whirl of matter in motion, like a patch of sand-storm.

A strong argument can be made that Cather was a white supremacist, particularly given her treatment of non-white characters in her odious final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which features hideous Black caricatures in the form of Bluebell and Lizzie. In an October 14, 1940 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher available at the online Willa Cather Archive (I am greatly indebted to Hermione Lee for her endnote), Cather wrote:

I loved especially playing with the darkey speech, which was deep down in my mind exactly like phonograph records. I could remember exactly what they said and the quality of the voice. Just wait till our wise young reviewers, such as Clifton and Louis, sadly call attention to the inconsistency in Till’s and Nancy’s speech,- never knowing that all well trained house servants spoke two languages: one with white people and one with their fellow negroes.

I hope this blatant racism and this boorish boasting helps you to understand why I have felt morally obliged to ratchet up the rage.

When Cather was at work on Death, a Cleveland Press reporter asked her what it was about. She replied, “America works on my mind like light on a photographic plate.” Jesus Christ, could you be any more pretentious? (Hermione Lee informs us that Cather, when making a trip to a writer’s colony as Death squeaked out of her precious mind, was “not remembered for her conviviality.” Which is a gentle way of telling us that Cather was completely fucking insufferable.)

To give Willa the Imperialist Prig some credit, I will say that Death Comes for the Archbishop is slightly better than the early turgid works, although that’s a bit like saying that the Limburger with the least amount of mold that you pick up from the charcuterie plate — you know, that stinky piece you nibble at out of politeness at a party simply because the poor host is blind and she had no idea that she was paring pieces from ancient heads that had been sitting in the fridge since the Clinton Administration — is the bomb.

Death opens with three cardinals and a bishop “talking business” about establishing a new vicarite in New Mexico, which Cather with full colonialist glee tells us is “a part of America recently annexed to the United States.” Bishop Ferrand, the missionary who headed out to the Old West, is ancient and weather-beaten and describes the desolate and fissure-ridden landscape for which these vaguely sinister religious mobsters hope to open up a franchise.

Jean Marie Latour, a thirty-five-year-old naif from Lake Ontario, is enlisted to be the point man converting all the Mexcians and the indigenous people who live in the region. And after these men of the cloth scoff over Latour’s intelligence (or lack thereof), Cather cuts to 1851, where Latour is on his way to Santa Fe. Cather does a decent job describing the limitless “uniform red hills” that Latour takes in on his journey. And there is a modicum of grit in this early chapter that, while a far cry from the satisfying description of Cormac McCarthy at his best, I largely enjoyed.

Unfortunately, after this promising start, my interest waned significantly when Latour began whining about not packing enough water for his journey and losing all of his possessions other than his books. It’s safe that Latour is a far cry from Chaucer’s many priests, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, or even Father John from M*A*S*H. He reveals himself quite rapidly to be an insufferable little shit and I started feeling sorry for Father Joseph Vaillant, Latour’s boyhood friend who accompanies him on the journey to Santa Fe. On the other hand, if you’re friends with a pompous windbag like Latour, then you probably deserve your shared misfortune.

As Father Latour is taken in by some locals, he finds a strange peace in the “bareness and simplicity” of the settlement. He quickly occupies space in a quietly domineering way and listens to the “simple” life stories of these people. I couldn’t help but wonder why a religious man like Latour was so ungrateful, but then I remembered how Cather herself hadn’t exactly been gracious to the many writers who tried to help her. Maybe the fact that Death can be read as a critique of religious imperialism is largely an accident.

Latour starts bragging about how great Americans are. You know, those white people who swooped in and destroyed the Mexican churches and stripped these good people of their religion? Those colonial assholes? They’re great, aren’t they? And, of course, Cather, by way of close narration through Latour, cannot feel any empathy for such debasement.

At this point, I began to loathe Latour with all my heart because of his cluelessness and his insensitivity. And I very much hoped that Cather would deliver on the promise of her title well before I was halfway through the book. Latour is very particular about a meal, telling some indigent to serve him a portion without chili because, as a Frenchman, he does “not like high seasoning.”

Not long after this, Latour is setting up his vicarite. And, of course, it’s Vaillant who is assigned to do all the cooking so that Latour can write endless letters in French. The bishop then takes the opportunity to bitch about the soup. Some friend this motherfucker is.

And even though condemning white privilege with this setup is easier than shooting monkeys in a barrel, I’ll give Cather some points for acknowledging hardscrabble reality:

The wiry little priest whose life was to be a succession of mountain ranges, pathless deserts, yawning canyons and swollen rivers, who was to carry the Cross into territories yet unknown and unnamed, who would wear down mules and horses and scouts and stage-drivers, tonight looked apprehensively at his superior and repeated, “No more , Jean. That is far enough.”

I suppose that Cather defenders will defend her belittling of Mexicans by pointing out how Vaillant is described as ugly. Maybe they’ll point to the way that Vaillant and Latour save an old Mexican slave named Sada. But their “help” involves this woman “obeying” the Padre and being ordered to go to church and pray. Sada really doesn’t have any agency other than wanting to return to her religion. And this, quite frankly, is nothing less than an insulting scene of religious tyranny and white privilege. As for the sinister murderer Buck Scales, it says quite a bit about Cather’s dormant xenophobia that his evil is defined equally in terms of interracial marriage: “All white men knew him for a dog and a degenerate—but to Mexican girls, marriage with an American meant coming up in the world. She had married him six years ago, and had been living with him ever since in that wretched house on the Mora trail.”

If you thought Jeanine Cummins was bad, try taking Willa Cather out for a spin. There’s no way I can defend Willa Cather and her repugnant insouciance in 2024. Her prose simply isn’t good enough for me to align myself with Hermione Lee. And I am pleased as punch that I will never have to read this mean and hideous writer ever again.

Next Up: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer!

by Edward Champion

From Here to Eternity (Modern Library #62)

James Jones’s peacetime masterpiece reminds us why it’s important to stick up for the truth-tellers in literature, particularly the novelists who are openly confronting the problems that so many others refuse to scratch at.

(This is the thirty-ninth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Wapshot Chronicle.)

American history has always been a series of tranquil and joyful moments just before some terrible spill of the cosmic wheelbarrow. The ebb and flow of American life, as it has been and as it always will be, can be perceived as a recurring nightmare: of life, love, felicity, and possibility cast asunder in an unsettling uproar claiming some permanent end to innocence. The hanging chads and butterfly ballots ushering in a presidential monster, only to be eclipsed (and even normalized) sixteen years later by an even greater beast, a lusus naturae even more unhinged and more unsettling. The planes hitting the towers. A pandemic wiping out more than one million Americans. And, of course, the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor and stirred America from its slumber, shoving us into the Second World War.

In our rush to wrap our shivering minds in the warm blanket of nostalgia, as we recall epochs that were seemingly safer and stabler, we often forget that living did not stop and progress was not halted by the deafening clamor of sinister cornets warbling from left field. The best artists have always understood that each deep stab of history’s merciless dirk is answered by reflection and repose, of the battered and bruised emerging triumphantly from these setbacks with resilience and rejuvenation.

We were never like that. We were always like that. The push and pull continues unabated by the “winners” snorting with sow-soaked hubris at the top of the media food chain, with scant regard given to the unsettling totality.

Enter James Jones in 1951, whose massive masterpieces From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line are little remembered by anyone under fifty today.

I may very well be the last person under fifty to have signed on for the full James Jones experience. Not even the perspicacious film critic Glenn Kenny finished the Jones doorstopper that he named his thoughtful blog after, but I did.

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From Here to Eternity is a peacetime novel bolstered by a trinity of misfits: a former boxer who grew up poor and who invites trouble named Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (or Prew), a total maniac from Brooklyn who works in the kitchen named Private Angelo Maggio (in other words, a violent and unhinged toxic man who would be immediately canceled, if not arrested on sight, in 2024), and Sergeant Milt Warden, who is having an affair with Karen Holmes, naturally the wife of Captain Dana Holmes, who is the man in charge of G Company. Ther’s also Mess Sergeant Maylon Stark, who, while a minor character in Eternity, I mention here because Jones would take the names and temperaments of these men and reuse them for The Thin Red Line and Whistle, the next two books in his World War II trilogy. So in The Thin Red Line (another Jones masterpiece), Prewitt becomes Witt, Stark changes into Storm, Warden transmutes into Welsh. Then Whistle comes along and Witt is Winch, Prew is Prell, and Stark is Strange. It’s a clever move by Jones to show the interchangeability of certain personality types within the military-industrial complex. Thirty years before Richard Gere famously wailed “I got nowhere else to go!” in An Officer and a Gentleman, Jones understood the painful truth about rudderless men flocking to the military more than anyone.

Mention From Here to Eternity to anyone today and they will probably remember (that is, if they do remember) the famous love scene on the beach with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. But as undeniably romantic as this cinematic moment is, I would say that “Re-Enlistment Blues” probably captures the spirit of the book better than the waves sweeping across gorgeous Hollywood actors (and, hey, I’m not going to deny that Lancaster and Kerr are both incredibly sexy in that scene). I’ve taken the liberty of covering the song, if only to remind the world that it was Jones who wrote the lyrics (since fewer people read these days, why not set the record straight on TikTok?):

You see, Jones rightly perceived the military as an all-encompassing instrument designed to turn fuckups into soldiers through often brutal regimentation. (One can see the full unforgiving horrors against the more libertine and free-thinking men on display in the novel’s brutal chapters in the stockade.) In a December 8, 1939 letter to his brother Jeff, Jones wrote, “I, who am better bred than any of these moronic sergeants, am ordered around by them as if I were a robot, constrained to do their bidding. But I can see their point of view. Nine out of every ten men in this army have no more brains than a three year old. The only way they can learn the manual and the drill commands is by constant repetition. It is pounded into their skulls until it is enveloped by the subconscious mind. The tenth man cannot be excepted. He must be treated the same as the others, even if in time he becomes like them.” A little less than four decades later, Jones would hold to this unsettling truth in his compelling memoir, WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering: “Men who had been raised to believe, however erroneously, in a certain modicum of individual free-thinking were being taught by loud, fat, devoted sergeants to live as numbers, by the numbers. Clothes that did not fit, when they could see clothes on the shelves that did fit…Being laughed at, insulted, upbraided, held up to ridicule, and fed like pigs at a trough with absolutely no recourse or rights to uphold their treasured individuality before any parent, lover, teacher or tribune. Harassed to rise at five in the morning, harassed to be in bed by nine-thirty at night.”

When From Here to Eternity dropped in 1951, few novelists — with the possible exception of Richard Aldington’s bracingly sardonic Death of a Hero — had dared to betray this unspoken memorandum of understanding. That the truth arrived in fiction six years after the surrender of Japan suggests that it was meant to be confronted, though not in expedient fashion. Three years before, Norman Mailer had merely presented the loneliness and dehumanization of his soldiers. But Jones was prepared to go much further than this, tackling military life with all of its blunt involutions. And it is testament to Jones’s great talent as a writer that Angelo Maggio — the anarchic id at the center of this massive novel — remains an inexplicably poignant figure, a character who charmed Frank Sinatra and, according to his biographer James Kaplan, caused Ol’ Blue Eyes to brood at night speaking his lines from the book and insisting that only he could play the part. (The role salvaged Sinatra’s then flailing career. Sinatra would go onto win an Academy Award for his performance in the 1953 movie. Indeed, it can be plausibly concluded that Sinatra would never have been Sinatra without James Jones. Without Maggio, Sinatra would have ended up as a forgotten crooner, some footnote in 20th century history.)

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In stitching all these threads together, Jones was hindered by Scribner’s legal team, which demanded a low-salt version of the authentic soldier dialogue. Only a few years before, Norman Mailer had caved to the censors to get The Naked and the Dead published, using “fug” in lieu of a now commonplace word that one hears frequently from the mouths of enthusiastic teenagers (and causing Dorothy Parker to say, upon being introduced to Mailer, “So you’re the man who can’t spell ‘fuck.'”).

But Jones saw the revision as a creative challenge. In his poignant memoir, James Jones: A Friendship, Willie Morris (who was so tight with Jones that he finished writing the final installment of the World War II trilogy, Whistler, after Jones’s death) got the inside skinny from editor Burroughs Mitchell on how Jones approached this:

It was very hard work; Jim’s ear was so exact that you couldn’t easily remove a word from the dialogue or substitute for it. But he kept doggedly at it, and eventually he began to treat the job as a puzzle, a game, and was delighted with himself when he found solutions. It was characteristic of him, then and afterward, that when an editorial decision was made, a look of anguish would come over his face, he would get up and pace, and finally he’d either accept or say, “I just can’t change that,” looking even more anguished. Finally I reported to Mr. Scribner that we had cut all the fucks we could cut, although not the lawyers’ full quota, and Mr. Scribner cheerfully accepted the situation. That was certainly part of reason why, when Charles Scribner died suddenly, Jim insisted on going to the funeral. He said he knew that Mr. Scribner had been worried about Eternity — but he had gone ahead and published it.

In our present age of sensitivity readers and books being banned or unpublished for spurious reasons, righteous career-destroying ideologues are no less wild-eyed or humorless than their right-wing, anti-art, anti-Critical Race Theory, and casually transphobic counterparts — the kind of regressive dipsticks who wrongly complain about how Russell T. Davies’s new stories for Doctor Who are “too woke” because of pronoun recognition, Davies equipping the TARDIS with a wheelchair ramp (and proudly introducing Ruth Madeley as a disabled UNIT adviser), and the marvelous inclusion of nonbinary characters. But make no mistake: tyranny against expression is not confined to any political affiliation. It is difficult to fathom any modern day corporate publisher who would possess the stones to stick with an author’s artistic vision in the way that Charles Scribner did. (Only four decades after the publication of From Here to Eternity, a gutless vulgarian by the name of Richard E. Snyder, head of Simon & Schuster (which would gobble up the Scribner imprint in 1993), would kibosh the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, before it was picked up by Vintage, where it would become a huge success (and be reinvented by the inventive Mary Harron as an unforgettable film adaptation mocking toxic masculinity, much as Ariel Levy and John Turturro recently adapted Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre for the stage in similar fashion). Thankfully, Snyder had the decency to drop dead of heart failure last June after living a long and spineless life lining the coffers of his corporate overlords by publishing “inoffensive” tomes.)

Jones wandered into the writing world a bit too late to get the full Maxwell Perkins treatment (he famously demanded to see Perkins in person as a young writer; Perkins received him and encouraged him, but passed away before he could devote his editorial energies to the entirety of Eternity), but he did have timing on his side, with the valves of permissible dialogue being slowly loosened in the early 1950s, culminating in the opprobrium that Grace Metalious would receive five years later for Peyton Place.

The uncensored version of From Here to Eternity was published by The Dial Press a few years back and, having read both the original and the uncensored versions, I would say that the latter is far superior. There are small differences, such as Maggio allowing a man to go down on him to land some extra cash:

“Oh, sall right. I admit its nothing like a woman. But its something. Besides, old Hal treats me swell. He’s always good for a touch when I’m broke. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Comes in handy the middle of the month.”

But these restored scenes really tell you about the quiet desperation of soldiers. They wait for payday. They augment their meager pay with card games in the latrine. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on sex workers. And they do this because, well, there is nothing else for them. In her incredibly underrated book Stiffed, Susan Faludi documented this problem in the 1990s from a variety of vantage points and concluded that the repugnant patriarchal cues and the way that American culture is conveniently superficial about anxieties that scar lives is equally applicable to men as well as women. And we cannot even begin to solve the underlying problems unless we are honest about all this. As journalists now lose their jobs and sites like The Messenger close their doors and kill their content without notice, it’s incumbent upon us to find the ballsy artists like Jones and stick up for them even when their honest sentiments are offensive or make us uncomfortable. More than five decades after its publication, From Here to Eternity still makes a valiant case for the need to tell and publish the truth.

Next Up: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop!