BookSerf

Fred Stenson's Canadian epic, The Trade

2010-11-01T08:41:00.001-07:00

The Trade by Fred Stenson (Douglas & McIntyre, $15.95)

In his introduction to Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, Robert Penn Warren wrote, "Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth with live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Canadian novelist and historian Fred Stenson has been remaking history for much of his career, never more so than during the previous decade, when his trilogy about the early history of Western Canada was published. The Trade was published in 2000, followed by Lightning (2003) and The Great Karoo (2008). The Trade begins in the 1820s and chronicles the rise of the Hudson's Bay Company and the settling of Canadian West. The Great Karoo follows the exploits of the Canadian Mounted Rifles as they fight alongside the English in the Boer War at the close of the 19th century.

The Book Serf asked Stenson the following questions:

BS: In his review of The Great Karoo, Ken McGoogan opens with two provocative answers to the question, Why the popularity and artistic success of the Canadian historical novel? He wonders if it's because Canada never had a successful revolution, never completely cut its ties with the British Empire; and he wonders if it's because history is suppressed in Canadian schools and universities.

Were/are you as dissatisfied with the 'official' history of Canada as others seem to have been. (I love Sheilagh Fielding's alternative history of Newfoundland in Wayne Johnston's Colony of Unrequited Dreams.)

This is becoming a ridiculously long question, but I'm put in mind of your newspaper letter writer in The Trade who opines that "That's how history gets started. Some fella putting a line under a name ..."

Is that your view, as well?

FS: Ken McGoogan’s Globe & Mail review of The Trade was a fine review, and I liked the questions he raised and the ideas he pondered. For example, his proposition that Canadians are driven to write historical novels because we had no revolution is provocative. It suggests that a revolution is a kind of built-in commanding narrative that everyone can learn proudly, whereas a merely political evolution commands less respect and excitement.

While I accept that might describe what’s behind some Canadian historical novels, I, as a Westerner, have my own reasons to take a run at official history. A usual complaint from Westerners is that Canadian history has emanated from central Canada and has been forced on the rest of us. As someone to whom history matters, that is an unsatisfying status quo. I suspect there are several of us who write historical fiction because we are unsatisfied, on some level, with that view. It may or may not have to do with the presence or absence of a revolution; it may be, more simply, about accuracy. It may only be that we don’t like the characterization of our place and people in the tale that goes on being told.

I suspect that other historical novelists in Canada respond to similar dissatisfactions. Even the Maritime Provinces, with a post-contact history so much older than central Canada’s, may feel pushed to accept the Upper Canada-Lower Canada version of the national historical script. I don’t know if this has goaded the likes of Wayne Johnston and Michael Crummy to write their own fictional histories of Newfoundland, but it would not surprise me if it did.

As for Western Canada, our experience is often considered to be no older than the West’s purchase by Canada from the Hudson Bay Company in 1869. That’s the best case scenario; some would argue our history begins in 1905, when Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces. Perhaps that’s why I was lured to the HBC story as the foundation of Western Canadian development (its charter was given by England in 1670) and am lured as well by Metis history which began in the West in the 1700s, or by First Nations history which goes back ten thousand years or more. Balking at “newness” would be a good reason to put fictional flesh on a different, older story.

Once I found my way into the fur trade era, I discovered it had its own centrisms and rigid hierarchy: its own lying history in which English governors proclaimed themselves the chosen people. I picked William Gladstone as an over-seer of the fur trade time because he was a creature who grew up with, and out of, the West. Obviously the First Nations and Metis people were here before him, and had more claim, but Gladstone, represented something new. He came West as an HBC boat-building apprentice from Montreal in 1848, then chose to stay and make his life in Western Canada. He never considered home to be anywhere else but the West and died here just as Jimmy Jock Bird did.

In my novel, The Trade, Gladstone gives vent to home-grown theories of history in the form of notes to the editor of the local newspaper that is publishing his memoir. Based on his having seen both the original occurrences and what the first round of historians made of them (and being a literate labourer, then carpenter), he has an almost unique perspective.

Trying to see through his experience, I came up with the idea that history had been wrong from the beginning because it chose to bow to and portray the powerful as opposed to the majority. I wanted his feelings about history to provide a platform of reasoning underneath the choice of Ted Harriott and Jimmy Jock Bird as protagonists. Through Gladstone, I hoped to attract the reader’s acceptance of Harriott as protagonist, because he was the one Gladstone admired most out of all the men he worked for; because Harriott was the only kind man Gladstone had ever served. For the record, William Gladstone did publish his memoir in the Rocky Mountain Echo (published in Pincher Creek, Alberta, at the turn of the 20^th century) when he was near the end of his long life. The correspondence with the editor which I present is fictional.

BS: And yet, you're not a prosyltizer, are you?

FS: It sounds like a socialist agenda, I suppose, and it makes the act of writing sound much more ideologically driven than it was. In fact, I might have chosen my protagonists for no better reason than that they reminded me of myself. I am the son of southern Alberta farmers. I feel more naturally akin to the clerks and translators and apprentices of the fur trade world than I do to the governors and chiefs.

Beyond that, a curiosity pushed me to see what history becomes if a different cast of characters is moved to the centre and the likes of George Simpson are sent to the sidelines. This choice of who is central to a narrative is a profound adjustment of history. It has traditionally meant a focus on the most visible movers and shakers, the ones who swung the most lead — or money. So why not challenge that? Almost by definition it cannot be everyone’s truth, everyone’s history.

BS: And how did you find history as taught in Canadian schools?

FS: I was asked to comment on whether history has been suppressed in Canadian schools, and if this was another motivation for me as a novelist dealing with my country’s history. Though I believe a lot of academic historians have been stirred by exactly the right kinds of motives, and have done much to challenge encrusted visions of history, I would say that education in Canada has been, overall, a promoter of false and dangerous history: reductive, saccharine, relentlessly positive; founded on the Protestant work ethic; supportive of international law’s odd notion that aboriginal people needed and therefore must accept European civilization as superior to their own. Of all those tendencies, I think it is the reduction and whitewash that offended me most, and the fact that, after lying like sidewalks to the young, social studies teachers inevitably blame their students for not being “interested in our history.” I believe that children are excellent at smelling out a lie; their instinct for this may be biological it’s so strong and accurate. If they sense that they are being told lies, then who but the fools among them would have any interest in learning them? And of course there is the oft-told truth that unvarnished tell-all history is more fun to learn than the white-washed version that serves up goodness rather than truth.

BS: George Simpson was at the head of the Hudson's Bay Company, and yet he's peripheral to your story. What was your take on him?

FS: George Simpson is for me the poster boy of bad history. Up until a certain point in our historical narrative, most everyone including the universities wanted to present leaders as heroes. They seemed to do it instinctively. So did the popular historians. Also, values have changed, and at an earlier time, our society admired, more or less without question, the kind of iron leader who made the freight canoes and York Boat brigades run on time; who could set records for traveling across Western Canada by canoe. That Simpson was petty, vengeful, jealous, cruel, probably racist etc. was deliberately overlooked. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.

Even in the present some popular historians still take a nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach to Simpson’s myriad Metis mistresses. The almost certain fact that some of those young women did not wish to be his bed mate, had boyfriends of their own with whom they were in love, is basically the story line of The Trade. Rather than depict the Governor (Simpson) as a powerful captain of industry, I depicted him as a villain, and a nasty one. Interestingly, even several of his distant descendants who I have met along the road, feel he had it coming.

BS: How did you come to write a historical novel so full of warts?

FS: I do not see the point of tidying history up before it is unveiled, as if it were a house to whom you had invited guests. It is merely the story of all of us. Just like white people have largely stopped the once common practice of removing coloured persons from their family tree, writers and teachers of Canadian history should get past the practice of removing the inconvenient details from history.

Something very simple stands at the root of The Trade and that is my reading of William Gladstone’s diary. As far as I know, that diary is the only working man’s (non-officer’s) account of the fur trade in what became the province of Alberta. Gladstone’s story was so different in fact and values from anything else written about the trade that I instantly regarded it as the basis of a possible novel. If the highest regarded men (Simpson, John Rowand) were Gladstone’s most hated enemies, if the most peripheral individuals (Ted Harriott) were his heroes, then a very different story was suggested. I wanted to write that story.

BS: Why revisit the Canadian West of the 19th century? What sort of fodder did that century and that locale provide you as a novelist?

FS: The 19^th century west is where my own life history was founded, though I wasn’t born in southern Alberta until 1951. For one example, I went to school with Blackfoot-speaking Pikuni; played basketball against a Kanai residential school. The Pikuni and Kanai historically resided in southern Alberta because it was a great and envied buffalo country; because the most famous of the buffalo jumps, Head-Smashed-Inn and Old Woman, had been there for thousands of years; because Treaty #7 in 1877, placed their reserves in Southwestern Alberta. I knew them because my own ancestors had chosen to homestead in the tranche of country between the Peigan and Blood Reserves. So it is not out of the way to say that my life history, the form of that life, was constructed in the 19^th century — or in fact long before.

Just because it’s fun to create these examples, I’ll create another. I was born into Southern Alberta ranch country, close to the Rocky Mountains, close to the Montana border. It was Alberta’s oldest ranch country, preceding even the 1881 legislation that created giant lease ranches later in the 19^th century. Ranching really began with the first Mounted Policeman (1874), some of whom took their discharge as soon as possible and went to Montana for cows to turn loose on the foothills, where buffalo no longer roamed.

That meant that some of the earliest cowboys and ranchers in Western Canada founded families in the locales of my childhood. My father worked on one of those old ranches as a lad of 15, and learned a lot of the colourful western lingo that influenced my own language profoundly from those men and their descendents. Some will say Southern Albertans talk like we do because of 1950s American oil and gas people, but that’s generally untrue. It is really the 19^th century that speaks through us.

A post script to the above relates to my novel, The Trade. As a youth, I can remember James Riviere coming to our house in the early spring to buy hay, because he ranched in the mountains where winter hung on for a long time after grass was growing farther east. James was in his seventies and amazed me by his ability to “throw the diamond” on a pickup truck towering with hay bales. You needed to be lithe for this and strong and he still was. James was a Metis man whose family lived along the Rocky Mountain east slope. His father was a famous Frenchman who trained dog teams for silent movies. His mother had been the daughter of William Gladstone and his Cree Metis wife: the same William Gladstone who came West in 1848 as a Hudson’s Bay Company apprentice builder of York boats, and stayed on to retire in Gladstone Valley a half hour drive northwest of the country my parents ran cattle in; the same William Gladstone who is a character in The Trade.

In one of your questions you refer to William Faulkner’s comment that “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” I guess that is my answer in brief. The past is always around me here in southern Alberta, so I write about it.

There is also the fact, already mentioned, that Canada has an official history that moves from East to West. I think that has led to inaccuracy and biases that dog the west to this day. It is also the source of an inferiority complex in the West that hides under a mask of arrogance. I am telling not “the” but “a” counter-story: a geographical counter-story and a class counter-story: one that begins geographically and culturally in the west and spreads out from there. I do believe that such shifts of perspective are important to social change.

BS: Porfirio Diaz once said, famously, Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States! Could the same be said of Canada?

FS: A wonderfully loaded question. There is a belief, in some quarters, that the Southern part of Alberta, including Calgary, is the most American place in Canada. Tom Flanagan, once Prime Minister Stephen Harpers’s key advisor and a professor at the University of Calgary, said this recently in an article about Alberta for the Globe & Mail. The article was largely “historical” and I really should have challenged it; I guess I will challenge it now. The truth about Southern Alberta is, rather, that, like most parts of the country, it is has its share of American influence and always has. Whether it is more true of southern Alberta than, say, Toronto, is arguable. I have spent quite a lot of time in Toronto in the last few years, and I enjoy the city, but I have never been anywhere in Canada that is more dominated by the politics and thought in the United States. They are more glued to American newspapers and news stations than anyone I have ever known in southern Alberta.

Getting back to history, particularly the fur trade, which is the longest European root in Western Canadian history, one finds that the English-owned and chartered Hudson’s Bay Company was in the driver’s seat most of the time from 1670 to the 1830s, which is a long time. When it was challenged, it was challenged from Montreal (and less so by a few Northeastern U.S. concerns that finally melded with the Montreal ones). What I’m getting at is that, in all that time, American influence in the far west was almost nil.

When the Montreal fur traders merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1821, there came a period of total domination that probed well below the 49^th parallel. In other words, the history was French Canadian, Orkney, English, Scottish, Irish, First Nations and Metis but hardly American at all. The last three decades of the English Company’s dominance down to the Missouri were thanks to the Lewis and Clarke Expedition’s having killed a Blackfoot on the Marias River. The Blackfoot speakers regarded themselves in a state of war with the Americans from 1806 until about 1830, when the American Fur Company bent over backwards to win forgiveness and built some AFC forts on the upper Missouri. At this time, American influence crossed the 49^th but there were still no American fur forts there.

The whisky trade, 1869-73, caused a sudden change. American whisky entrepreneurs came across the 49^th into future-Southern Alberta and built Ft. Whoop-Up and other whisky forts. The forts were supplied by a couple of big trading companies in Ft. Benton (head of navigation on the Missouri at the time). The whisky men are invariably described as American, as lawless Civil War vets, etc. but there were a number of Canadians (French and English) in the mix.

The same is true of the Cypress Hills Massacre of Assiniboine Indians by whisky traders and wolfers in 1873. It was this event (or rather its publicity) that forced the Canadian Prime Minister to do something about a truly horrible lawless vicious situation, in which Indians were frequently shot and poisoned as if they were dogs, and in which they committed much violence toward themselves. The Canadian Mounted police were born out of this situation, and from then forward the border between future-Alberta and Montana had meaning.

There is a whitewashed version of this story in which the American whisky men run away from the Mounties, back to the U.S. In fact, most went nowhere. They simply gave up whisky trading and went to work for the Mounties or supplying the Mounties. These Americans, and the ones who came afterwards to punch cows in the ranch era, are the true source of American-ness in Southern Alberta. A bit later Mormon people would come from Utah to squat, buy lease ranches, and homestead, and these too have lent American tones to our culture. But at the same time, the local towns in Southern Alberta (Pincher Creek, Ft. Macleod, Calgary) were little Canadas in the late 19^th century, with Ontario and Quebec storekeepers, English landlords, and small minorities from elsewhere in Canada. American and British influence dominated the countryside while Canadian influence dominated the towns. Neither was stronger than the other.

I’m not sure why it is that Southern Alberta is criticized for its American-ness when basically anywhere along the 49^th parallel (where most Canadian live) can hardly escape U.S. influence. My theory, such as I have one, is that cowboy hats and boots, and western drawls, are more visibly derived from U.S. culture than is the New York-borrowed urban lingo of English Montrealers or Torontonians. Either that or it’s just plain prejudice that needs no justification or cause!

I’m not sure if I answered your question or merely sprang off it with a diatribe. Is American influence a problem for Canadian writers? A different kind of problem depending on where you live.

BS: In my PW review of The Trade, I wrote that your prose is "terse and full of motion." Even when you're describing the scenery, as it were, the prose moves! When you put pen to paper (or, less romantically, fingertips to keys) are you thinking of creating pace, of creating rhythm? What do you hope each sentence will achieve? Avoid?

FS: I was quite happy to see your review point to my style, as I’ve put a lot of thought into it over the years. When I was young, I was seduced by Irish literature. I dislike the term “lilt” which has a childish inference to it, but what I liked and longed for in my own style was the pace and rhythm that moved me along so forcefully and pleasingly. In our own literature, Alistair McLeod is probably the most rhythmic and seductive storyteller, where the music of language is as much of a narrative force as the story. Another is Lisa Moore. It is not coincidence, I suspect, that they come from Cape Breton and Newfoundland, places with a profound depth of Gaelic language history.

There has been a tendency among writers who strive to make fiction about the North American West to be minimalists. I have always had an instinct to go against this, to stick up for the colour and rhythm in Western language, and the fact that there is nothing barren and arid about the beauty of the barren and arid landscape.

The U.S. writer Cormac McCarthy has been a great liberator as was the earlier El Paso novelist/painter Tom Lee for writers who write of the West, because they created a template for writing almost floridly of Western experience. Instead of getting hung up on the idea that Western “men” were “men of few words,” they went ahead and created a language that was more about Westerners’ aesthetic worlds than what they said or didn’t say around the fire at night. Also, Cormac McCarthy has caught the depth of the interior life of Western people the way David Adams Richards found that depth in the New Brunswick characters of his fine novels.

“To move” is a goal in my fiction. I try to have every sentence propel into the next; and at the same time to be obedient to the verbal world of the characters. I don’t want sentences to stand straight by themselves; I want everything to lean. I want the fiction to always be emerging out of the moment’s tone and mood, so it’s charged with that moment not just flatly describing it.

BS: Similarly, I've always felt that if one starts out trying to write simply he may end up writing beautifully; but if one starts out trying to write beautifully, disaster often follows.

FS: This is true, but I would go back again to writers like Cormac McCarthy and Canada’s Mark Anthony Jarman and Lisa Moore who do write beautifully, and I believe strive to. I think the beautiful writing that is disastrous is that which ought to have been thrown away. That’s different than saying it should never have been attempted. I find there is far too much careful, competent writing going on. That kind almost always strives to be simple — and often fails there, but less visibly.

BS: I love the way you take a historical figure like Sir George Simpson and turn him into a peripheral figure while elevating Ted Harriott and One Pound One to the stars of the show. I haven't read The Great Karoo yet, but I understand you do something similar there. Why have you shunned The Great Men of History and concentrated your energies elsewhere?

FS: I think I’ve yarned on quite long about this already, so I’ll pass on this good question. Maybe I could say this much: that the “great men of history” have often not been morally great. If, as some say, novels are always moral novels, then perhaps the search for what is good, and for a meaning of goodness, is more difficult to find when writing about the “great men.”

I think “greatness” in the sense I think you mean has too often conferred a kind of moral license—one can do what lesser men cannot. In that sense the great George Simpson could not be a character in The Trade, unless as an antagonist; someone who stands in the way of the good human asperations of others, or who invites others to betray one another and be destroyed by it.

BS: Historical novelists are often accused of reading too much and then regurgitating everything they've learned from their books. How do you walk that line between creating setting and atmosphere while avoiding laundry lists of facts and information that can topple a historical novel?

FS: First of all, I don’t try to eliminate extraneous detail in early drafts. I write them fat if they want to be that way. In later drafts, it becomes clearer and clearer what doesn’t deserve to stay, what facts or circuits of fact do not help yield the story. But of course without a certain amount of detail, the world is not there. The second rule is that not all details are equal — to say the least. One or two well chosen details/facts can have more impact than 50 lesser ones. Novelists often show their greatness in their instinct for the telling detail.

BS: Faulkner once said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." What do you think? Does that quote have anything to do with the way Canadians view themselves today? Can one be informed by the past? Are you trying to answer the question, How did we get here?

FS: All the stuff I wrote in an earlier answer about how my own life generated out of a 19^th century past — a past during which my own ancestors were not even present in North America — was about this. There is a continuity from then until now that I live every day, and from which I write.

BS: The Trade is, by the nature of the story you're recreating, a man-centric affair. Do you ever wish that women could play a more prominent role in your fiction? Not trying to be provocative here, just wondering!

FS: I can’t know if every woman who has read The Trade found it to her liking, but those who have told me their feelings have liked it. I know this is not the answer to your question, but it sets up my answer — which is that I feel The Trade is a book about women and about a profoundly female problem, which is women’s traditional lack of political and economic power. Very recently there was an article in the Montreal Gazette about the pay disparity between women and men in academic jobs, especially at the higher ranks, and I would submit that that situation, which has survived five decades of feminism, has its roots in earlier times like our own fur trade.

We live in the hangover of a time when male lives were simply assumed to be more important than female ones, when the birth of a son was celebrated and that of a daughter shrugged at. At the heart of the The Trade is the tragedy of the life of Margaret Pruden, which becomes Ted Harriott’s tragedy because of his genuine love for her. The novel is about whether, in the fur trade, a simple truthful love was possible for ordinary people. Was it possible or would it always be trumped by the trade in humans, the oppression of women and of indentured men?

Now to your actual question: do I wish women could play a more prominent role in my fiction? I could say that it’s true that I do wish this; but that would be a little disingenuous, because, in fact, I could sit down tomorrow and write a historical fiction about Western Canada that was entirely about women. I have yet to do that, perhaps because I am a man; and perhaps as well because I’ve wanted to inhabit lives through which the economic story of the fur trade (then open range ranching, then imperial war) could be told. If history did not allow women the scope to do what I wanted to portray (be fur traders, cowboys and soldiers), I could not have written those novels through their experience. I recognize that this is rather like the argument that used to be made for never writing historical fiction that wasn’t about people of rank.

What I have tried to do is represent the balance between genders that I felt was the truth in each situation. Margaret Pruden’s difficult life as a woman beautiful enough to catch the eye of the Governor when she doesn’t want him is, I hope, as poignant and moving as anything else in the novel — as painful as her partner Ted Harriott’s dilemma, even though more pages are devoted to Harriott. I think this is often evident to women who read the novel. But it is less evident to women who pick up the novel in a store. What I truly wish then is that more women would read my novels and tell me if they feel moved by them.

BS: I love your framing narrator in The Trade. At one point he says, "that makes history the only kind of water that gets cleaner the farther downstream you go." Can you relate that to your trilogy?

FS: I am rather proud of this sentence, for I believe it is importantly true. The privileging of print is one of the ways that we have often got it wrong about history. I was a great fan of James Welch’s fiction and have only recently read his non-fiction Killing Custer. One of the things to be learned from that book is that the century-long misunderstanding of Custer’s annihilation at the Little Big Horn came from not paying attention to the accounts of First Nations’ witnesses.

How often that must have been true, that someone viewed as non-credible would be saying, “I was there and I saw her raped;” or “I was there and I heard him tell his servant to kill the next Indian who came in the door.” Instead we have looked the group of witnesses over, and have listened only to the “credible ones”: meaning the white ones, the literate ones, the ones in positions of power.

Gladstone’s point about water getting cleaner as it goes downstream is meant to extend right to this day where we are still guilty of using the nice certainty of a written piece of evidence, especially if it contains a nice educated turn of phrase, rather than wading through the awkwardness of eyewitness ramblings. In Canada, we have had a ghastly serial murder saga on the West coast, which went unsolved for years while more and more prostitutes were killed because the prostitutes who were providing evidence of the killer’s identity (and who were still on the stroll; still drug-addicted) were not regarded as credible. And so it goes.

Bloodshed at Little Bighorn

2010-07-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer and the Destinies of Nations by Tim Lehman (Johns Hopkins University Press, $19.95

On July 10, 1876, the New York Daily Tribune published a poem by Walt Whitman entitled, "A Death-Sonnet for Custer."

The poem began, "Far from Montana's canyons, / Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lone-some stretch of silence, / Haply, to-day, a mournful wail -- haply, a trumpet note for heroes."

Whitman called the encounter an "Indian ambuscade," never mind that Custer was attacking the Sioux and Cheyenne encampment (its women and children included) in the early morning, just as the Indians began to stir. He was more accurate in describing the results of the battle a "slaughter," for that, indeed, it was.

Whitman concluded his poem by praising Custer, the architect of the slaughter, painting a romantic picture of the doomed general, "bright sword in thy hand."

In all, 211 members of the "Fighting Seventh" cavalry division lost their lives in what later became known as Custer's Last Stand. From the native point of view, the last stand took place over the next several years as the U.S. government carried out a ruthless campaign to subjugate both the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

Historian Tom Lehman of Rocky Mountain College retells the story of that fateful battle in his new book, Bloodshed at Little Bighorn. The second volume in Johns Hopkins' Eyewitness to History series is told primarily through the voices of the participants and onlookers on both sides of the cultural divide.

The Book Serf asked professor Lehman the following questions:

BS: I'm fascinated by how such a relatively small scale action (211 soldiers and Crow scouts dead) could become such a large part of our national mythology/psyche.

TL: For one thing, the details of the battle are shrouded in mystery. The question of "what really happened?" has had remarkable staying power. For white Americans the idea of the "last stand" represented the Indian wars as primarily defensive, as if the Sioux and Cheyenne were the aggressors that day. Of course, for the Sioux and Cheyenne there was no great mystery. The better side, the ones defending their homeland, simply carried the battle. For them, the real "last stand" was the army's systematic campaign of subjugation that came in the aftermath of the famous battle.

But the story also has staying power because it has a rich cast of charismatic characters on all sides, Custer and Sitting Bull most notably, but even the supporting players are layered in complexity. Lastly, the battle tapped into a sense of nostalgia for the "vanishing frontier." The "last" stand, in this sense, symbolizes not only the end a brand of heroism deeply ingrained on the American imagination, but also the end of a place associated with the idea of undiluted freedoms.

BS: Was the eventual defeat of the Sioux and Cheyenne inevitable? Can you discuss your use of the word "Destinies" in the title of your book?

TL: I wanted the word "Destinies" in the title to remind readers of the phrase "manifest destiny," a source of much mischief in western history. The term needed to be plural, I thought, to suggest how the Indian wars had very different outcomes for different groups of people. But part of the mischief of "manifest destiny" is that it relieves us of the moral and creative responsibility of imagining different outcomes.

Eventual defeat may have been inevitable, but there was a difference between honest and dishonest treaty-making, between provoked and unprovoked aggression, just to take two examples. I wanted to suggest that defeats -- and for that matter victories -- are not inevitable, but to a great degree depend on choices made by individuals, organizations, and governments. To the extent that history informs the present, some of those choices still have meaning. The ongoing struggle over control of the Black Hills would be one example.

BS: Americans love a good mystery (JFK's assassination, Area 51, etc.) but, really, why did so many people persist in asking the question, How did a band of savages defeat the Fighting Seventh?

TL: For a nation of people who expect success, we have a strange fascination with failure. During the 19th century the two most famous failures, the Alamo and Little Bighorn, generated a compelling mythology of heroism in defeat. Part of the mythology was to build up the image of Sitting Bull, who had to be portrayed as a worthy opponent. One rumor even had it that he was trained in Napoleonic tactics at West Point. So conspiracy theories abound about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or any other famous defeat. At bottom I think this reflects an assumption of superiority--success for Americans is natural, failure requires an explanation.

BS: You quote Libbie Custer as saying her hope was to ensure that "tradition and history will be so mingled that no one will be able to separate them." Does the historian set as his (or her) goal the disentangling of tradition and history?

TL: One rich vein of historical writing about the Little Bighorn and the Indian wars has tried to sort out the history, to set the record straight about what really happened. Another approach has been to examine the sources and mythmaking functions of the tradition. I've tried to do a little of both. For instance, some of the mystery about the battle has been dispelled by recent archaeology that pretty much discredits the traditional views of a "last stand." In this instance, we know more now about the battle than people did one hundred years ago. I set out to write a battle account that describes what actually happened, as best as we can know from recent research, not what Libbie wanted us to think happened. But the chapter I had the most fun writing was the final chapter, the one which deals with the creation and uses of the last stand mythology -- both in Indian country and in the dominant culture.

BS: Can you expand on your contention that Cody's "theatrical version was realistic, just as the original event was theatrical"?

TL: Cody's Wild West show played a major role in the mythological version of the last stand. He moved back and forth from his scout duties on the western frontier to his stage responsibilities in eastern cities, and both roles reinforced each other. He had more respect in each place because of his role in the other. After the Little Bighorn, he was involved in a minor skirmish in which he killed a Cheyenne warrior and claimed "the first scalp for Custer." Going into combat that day, he actually dressed in his stage costume, which was of course modeled after his frontier scout attire. This allowed him to return to the stage wearing the actual clothes he had worn in battle. He had staged a real fight so that he could recreate that reality on the stage.

Another example: After the Civil War, when Custer moved west and took his part as a fighter in the Indian wars, he began dressing in the buckskins of a frontier scout. In his writing and his photographs he took on the persona of a frontiersman, very different from his Civil War soldering days. Then after Custer's death, Cody grew his hair long so that he could look more like the image of Custer, so much so that Libbie commented on how much Cody looked like her deceased husband. Looking similar to Custer helped to sell tickets, but ironically Cody was imitating Custer who had been imitating Cody.

The larger points is that the West began representing itself to the East not after the fact, but as part and parcel of the lived experience. Westerners invented the myth of the West even as they were living the history.

BS: When it comes to interpreting the events at Little Big Horn and during the Great Sioux Wars, tempers understandably run high on both sides. Your book avoids sensationalism and sentimentality. Did you feel at this juncture the facts could finally speak for themselves without you having to polemicize?

TL: The passing of time may make some truths easier to tell. In this case, there have been pro-Custer and anti-Custer stories told for quite some time. Who can forget the megalomaniac, crazed Custer of the movie "Little Big Man?"

In my case, I had the faces, voices, and questions of my students in mind. I teach at a small college in Montana not far from the Little Bighorn battlefield, and I have taught students who are the descendants of battle veterans on all sides -- Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow, white. I wanted to find not some bland middle ground that offended no one, but rather an approach that could command the respect of all sides and become the basis for vigorous, informed discussion and debate.

BS: What was the best quote you had to leave on the cutting room floor? Also, what's your favorite quote in the book and why?

TL: Many of my near favorite quotations come from Sitting Bull, who deserved his reputation for eloquence. But probably my favorite is this from the last chapter: when Cody's Wild West show was touring England, during off hours the Lakota participants often went out to see the sights. Once an English soldier approached Rocky Bear, a veteran Wild West show performer, and attempted conversation in his best pidgin English, "How! Heavy wet." Rocky Bear responded in his best English accent, "Yes, it's rawther nawsty, me boy."

I like the humor, the completely unexpected response, and the ironic turnabout of stereotypes. Philip Deloria has a book with a delightful title, "Indians in Unexpected Places." I tried to be aware of that throughout the book. Many of the Indians in my classroom have a rich and often wonderfully ironic sense of humor. I wanted to let that come out in the book.

Simon Tolkien steps out of grandpa's shadow ...

2010-05-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Simon Tolkien is willing to suspend his disbelief when he reads his grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasies The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But don't expect Tolkien to be resurrecting Middle Earth anytime soon.

"I would never consider writing fantasy as I couldn’t make it credible," Tolkien recently told the Book Serf. "I don’t think there is any point in writing fiction if the writer is unable to get his readers to suspend their disbelief."

For nearly 15 years Tolkien practiced as a barrister in England, all the while secretly contemplating a career in writing. But there was always the mammoth shadow of his grandfather to consider.

In 2000 Tolkien began to write and after an initial failure (the book was never published) he succeeded in having published his first novel, the courtroom drama Final Witness.

His most recently novel, The Inheritance, was published by Minotaur Books in April. The novel begins with a brutal crime committed by two British officers against a French family in Normandy at the end of World War II and follows the crown's case against Stephen Cade, who is accused of murdering his father.

The Book Serf asked Tolkien the following questions:

BS: John Mortimer once quipped, “No brilliance is required in law, just common sense and relatively clean fingernails.” Discuss.

ST: As a barrister I always felt that the vital part of presenting a defense case was to find a way to persuade the jury that common sense was or at least might be on the defense side. Brilliant pyrotechnics were of little use if their purpose was to try and make the jury believe that the earth is flat.

BS: “The law,” in the abstract, is a gorgeous thing. Less so when it's administered in The Inheritance by the likes of Judge Murdoch and prosecutor Gerald Thompson.

ST: In my experience partisan judges can have a major influence on the outcome of trials in the U.K. Some judges can be quite intimidating which can have an adverse effect on barristers’ presentation of their cases, particularly if they are inexperienced. Alternatively judges can push juries toward one side or the other when they sum up cases as Judge Murdoch does for the prosecution in The Inheritance.

It is very difficult to have a judge removed and so some of them seem to think they can say what they like. Of course prosecutors can also be unfair, but, speaking personally, I found this less of a problem when I was practicing. Perhaps this is because barristers in the UK regularly appear on behalf of both the prosecution and the defense and so there’s no time for them to become entirely prosecution-minded.

Once barristers become judges, however, they must withdraw from the combat, and I think that then some of them become frustrated by their essentially passive role and start to intervene in a mistaken belief that juries need directing toward the truth.

BS: You place a premium on telling a good story. Though you may have a “message” for readers, you never explicitly tell us what it is. Why is important to avoid pedagogy in fiction?

ST: I have no message. Like my grandfather, I feel strongly that a fiction writer’s task is to try to make his readers believe in his story, and that this is an end in itself, not a means to an end. Years ago I read The Plague by Albert Camus and afterward someone told me that I’d missed the point - the plague represented the state of the world. I felt like an idiot. Using fiction to convey a message seems to me like a cheat. I think D.H. Lawrence was a great writer – I loved Sons and Lovers, but I can’t stand many of his other books because his characters are there simply to convey a message and develop his philosophy. The allegorical intent behind the Narnia stories was, as I understand it, my grandfather’s primary objection to his best friend’s fantasy fiction.

BS: Detective William Trave has misgivings about the case against Stephen Cade from the very start. What are you suggesting in Trave's behavior about “gut feelings,” “instincts” and the like?

ST: You’re right that I have tried to set up a tension in the book between Trave’s reliance on instinct and the weight of the evidence against the accused man in the courtroom. It is an extension of the old conflict between the heart and the head. In my new book, The King of Diamonds, this tension is taken even further with Trave risking everything to follow his instinct, and his colleagues having every reason to doubt that right is on his side.

BS: How much of your fiction comes out of the endless stories you must have accumulated as a barrister and how much out of your imagination?

ST: My stories are all rooted in my imagination, not personal experience. I would feel hamstrung as a writer if I was using a novel to retell a real life story. It would be like reheated food! Where my background in the law has helped me is in making the courtroom drama in my novels more believable and thus more satisfying to the reader.

BS: Our killers these days are over-the-top, monsters like Hannibal Lecter and reformed monsters like Dexter Morgan. You take a different approach to crime/mystery. Can you discuss the violence (or more aptly the lack of violence) in The Inheritance?

ST: I think I do villains well. Certainly part of the secret is not to show too much – it’s a cliché that what we can’t see if often more frightening than what we can, but that doesn’t make it any less true. In The Inheritance Silas has a physical terror of Sergeant Ritter because Ritter once squeezed his wrist, but he squeezed it in such a way that Silas knew exactly what the Sergeant was capable of if Silas crossed him again. I think that another essential ingredient in villain creation is to provide the evildoer with some redeeming quality in order to make him credible to the reader. Thus in The Inheritance Ritter is a born killer and yet he has an unswerving loyalty to his employer, Professor Cade.

BS: The Inheritance has been described as “historiographical.” Does that description please you? In a related question, you could have written a contemporary mystery. Why set The Inheritance in 1944-1959?

ST: I have always been fascinated by history. It was almost an obsession when I was young and I am half ashamed to say that I hero worshipped Napoleon Bonaparte until I was well into my teens.

I believe that the past is truly another country. It’s so mysterious because we can get so close to it but can never enter inside. I love the idea of fusing history and fiction, and so in The Inheritance I consciously set out to create a strong historical dimension to my story. Many of the characters are in different ways prisoners of past events over which they had no control and the detective has to go back into the past to solve Professor Cade’s murder.

I also think the late 1950s setting of The Inheritance is suited to the old-fashioned quality of my writing, and I like the way the period looks Janus-like in two directions – forward to the new world of the 1960s and back toward the cataclysm of the Second World War. Another advantage of the historical setting is that scientific crime detection techniques in the fifties were far less advanced than they are now. DNA profiling is good for law and order, but for my fiction I prefer a world where the human element is critical to solving crime.

BS: Were you worried that the mention of a “codex” in your novel would attract all the Dan Brown/Da Vinci Code fans? Because your book in so many ways couldn't be less like The Da Vinci Code, don't you think?

ST: The Inheritance is less sensational than The Da Vinci Code, but both books deal with historical mysteries, and I am pleased if I can appeal to all readers who like this type of novel.

BS: Whodunnit seems a less interesting question to you than, Why did they dunnit? Even after readers may have guessed who killed Cade, we're still riveted following Sasha back to France. Is that by design?

ST: No, I wanted to keep the reader guessing about the identity of who killed Colonel Cade right up until when the truth is revealed in Chapter 25. Readers will judge whether I succeeded or whether I provided too many clues to the killer’s identity.

BS: You are interested in the relationship between a father and his son (or sons) and between a father and his daughter. Why did you find those relationships such good fodder for fiction?

ST: Family rivalries and jealousies interest me as material for my fiction partly because they are so potent and partly because they are good for creating a tight cast of characters all with different motivations for committing a crime.

BS: Will you continue to write legal thrillers/mysteries?

ST: My next book, The King of Diamonds, is a mystery thriller coming out in April 2011. It further develops the characters of Inspector Trave and Detective Clayton who first appeared in The Inheritance.

In the new book Trave is convinced that a diamond trader, Titus Osman, has committed two murders, but Clayton is concerned that Trave’s judgment has been warped by the fact that Trave’s wife has deserted him for Osman.

Spending time with a favorite book ...

2010-04-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Winter has finally given way to spring in these parts (central Ohio) and the damp of a sultry summer is already in the air. Which leads me down the paths of memory to a youth misspent in the company of books.

I have been perusing the Penguin Books Great Ideas series for the last several weeks including Robert Burton's Some Anatomies of Melancholy (that would have been back when the days were short and dark and mood likewise) and William Morris' Useful Work vs. Useless Toil (I'd settle for either in the growing days of my unemployment). But it was Marcel Proust's Days of Reading that struck my fancy this week as the first buds of the pink dogwoods burst from limb.

"There are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without living them, those I spent with a favourite book," Proust writes at the beginning of his famous essay.

"Everything which, it seemed, filled them for others, but which I pushed aside as a vulgar impediment to a heavenly pleasure: the game for which a friend came to fetch me at the most interesting passage, the troublesome bee or shaft of sunlight which forced me to look up from the page or to change my position, the provisions for tea which I had been made to bring and which I had left beside me on the seat, untouched, while, above my head, the sun was declining in strength in the blue sky, the dinner for which I had had to return home and during which my one thought was to go upstairs straight away afterwards, and finish the rest of the chapter: reading should have prevented me from seeing all this as anything except importunity, but, on the contrary, so sweet is the memory it engraved in me (and so much more precious in my present estimation than what I then read so lovingly) that if still, today, I chance to leaf through these books from the past, it is simply as the only calendars I have preserved of those bygone days, and in the hope of finding reflected in their pages the houses and the ponds which no longer exist."

My houses may (or may not) exist on the West Side of Youngstown and the North. But the books of my youth are as imposing in my memory now as they were then. In fact, I've begun to read some of those books again. They include:The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; Watership Down, Shardik and The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams; Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling.

So, a toast to the first days of spring, the old books that will become new again, and friends as yet unmet.

The Mark Twain Anthology ...

2010-03-26T06:35:00.000-07:00

In 1889, a young English writer and reporter named Rudyard Kipling traveled nearly 8,000 miles from Allahabad, India to interview Mark Twain in Elmira, N.Y.

After Kipling concluded his interview with Twain, he was gleeful, writing immediately from New York to The Pioneer, the newspaper for which he worked back in Allahabad,

"You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V.C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar -- no, two cigars -- with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward. To soothe your envy and to prove that I still regard you as my equals, I will tell you all about it."

A rhapsody followed.

Kipling's piece is included in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, published recently by the Library of America. The anthology includes dozens of authors (and a handful of illustrators) from 1869 to 2008 including William Dean Howells, G.K. Chesterton, H.L. Mencken, Grant Wood, T.S. Eliot, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison and others. It includes 16 writers from Europe, Asia and Latin America, many previously untranslated.

The Book Serf asked editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Twain scholar, English professor and Director of American Studies at Stanford University) the following questions:

BS: In your introduction, you talk about the enduring nature of Twain's appeal. He is loved across the globe and down the years. Why do you think that is? (A short question that begs a giant answer?)

SFF: (You’re right: a short question that demands a giant answer!)

Twain has somehow managed to establish a relationship with his readers -- an intimacy, really -- like that of no other author that I know. And what is totally remarkable to me is that this intimate sense of connection that helps make his work so engaging and popular manages to make it through translations into over 70 languages. His humor is key, of course -- and again, it is amazing that it survives translation -- but he was always so much more than a humorist. “Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever,” Twain wrote. “… I have always preached ... I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor. I should have written the sermon just the same …” Twain’s humor both teaches and preaches -- but it dresses those lessons and sermons in such delicious wit that we don’t necessarily realize we’ve been preached at or taught a thing.

When he received an honorary degree from Yale in 1888, Twain reminded the world that the humorist’s trade “is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it -- the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.”

Twain’s humor endures because it is true to its “one serious purpose” -- “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.” It may make us wince. But we still come back for more.

I also think that Twain’s enduring appeal is related to the fact that every generation (in a vast range of cultures, geographies, economies, etc) can find in his work material that “speaks to their condition,” as the Quakers say. He is amazingly contemporary, even in the 21st century. His quirky, ambitious, strikingly original fiction and nonfiction engaged some of the perennially thorny, messy, challenges we are still grappling with today -- such as the challenge of making sense of a nation founded on freedom by men who held slaves -- the great contradiction on which the idea of America was constructed -- or the puzzle of our continuing faith in technology in the face of our awareness of its destructive powers; or the problem of imperialism and the difficulties involved in getting rid of it.

Dick Gregory said that Twain “was so far ahead of his time that he shouldn't even be talked about on the same day as other people.” I think that’s exactly right!

And of course, his brilliant aphorisms have taken on a life of their own because they’re so apt and so funny and so true. Who but Twain could get away with, “It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple’s sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us -- oh infinitely better for us -- if the serpent had been forbidden.” Or “... patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.” Or “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”

In all of these quotes, Twain conveys a truth that polite society customarily denies: that we all wish it were easier to be good, or that patriotism often covers base deeds, or that exposure to virtue can be more irritating than inspiring since it underlines our own shortcomings. Summarized in this manner, these comments fall flat with a dull moralistic thud. They don’t sound that way when Twain says them.

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement,” Twain wrote. “To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself.” Or, as he put elsewhere, “A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain.”

Readers tend to trust Twain to be someone who can be brutally honest but never malevolent. Twain’s avuncular stance helps take the sting out of barbs that would wound more sharply from less friendly lips. As a result he can say things that from anyone else might lead to blows. He is simply allowed to be more irreverent than most people because there is a deep sense (to paraphrase his friend Bill Nye) that he’s not as bad as he sounds.

BS: Do you agree with Kenneth Lynn that after World War II critics often misread Huck as "renouncing his membership in a society that condoned slavery"?

SFF: Yes. Huck never actually renounces his membership in a society that condones slavery. Rather, he makes the existential decision to act in a way that he knows that society condemns. (He is willing to pay the price: he thinks he will go to Hell for what he has done). Huck never actually challenges the norms that he violates. That would require his judging his society as immoral and wrong, and he never reaches that point. But the reader does, and that is part of what makes the book so profoundly compelling.

During the Cold War, critics tended to hold up Huck’s decision in Chapter 31 not to return Jim to his owner as a triumph of individual autonomy, an example of one human being rejecting the false morality of his society, an act which made the book gratifyingly “subversive.” This appealed to an avowedly democratic nation waging a Cold War against an enemy ready to subsume the individual under the collective. It also appealed to a nation that beginning to try to move beyond its Jim Crow past.

As Kenneth Lynn observed, in the decades after World War II, as critics and readers gradually reached the conclusion that “the ancient pattern of discrimination against Negroes was morally indefensible,” they often misread Huck’s actions. The book was, in fact, one that could be enlisted in the project of envisioning the U.S. as a nation that was finally grappling with its racist past. But Twain requires the reader to pass judgment on the failings of Huck’s society: Huck judges only his own actions.

BS: Twain could be very critical of the U.S. Why don't we know much about that side of his writing? (I'm thinking here of the Treaty With China piece that you discuss in your introduction. But surely there were others?)

SFF: Much of Twain’s most controversial work was bowdlerized or suppressed by his daughter (Clara) and by his publisher or his first biographer out of fear that it would damage Twain’s image (and, presumably, the financial interests enhanced by that image).

This explanation helps explain why material like Letters from the Earth was not published until four decades after Twain’s death. But I’ve only relatively recently begun to probe the impact that the Cold War had on the selection of Twain texts with which Americans were familiar for much of the 20th century.

As Maxwell Geismar put it in Scanlan’s Monthly in 1970, “During the Cold War era of our culture, mainly in the 1950’s although extending back into the ‘40s and forward far into the ‘60s, Mark Twain was both revived and castrated. The entire arena of Twain’s radical social criticism of the United States — its racism, imperialism, and finance capitalism — has been repressed or conveniently avoided by the so-called Twain scholars precisely because it is so bold, so brilliant, so satirical. And so prophetic.”

But while most Americans in the 20th century had been encountering a “castrated,” tame Twain, to borrow Geismar’s word, readers in China and the Soviet Union were encountering a Twain unafraid to launch salvos at the hypocrisy and failings of the country that he loved. Twain’s achievement as a writer and his role as a social and cultural critic may have been significantly distorted in the U.S. by imperatives of the Cold War. In part because Chinese and Soviet writers and critics lauded the Twain who was a searing critic of his country, American writers and critics largely dismissed that Twain as a figment of the Communist propaganda machine and valorized America’s Twain as a writer to be celebrated primarily as a humorist rather than as a satirist and social critic.

The propaganda functions to which Twain’s writing was put are obvious -- but Americans threw out the baby with the bathwater when they downplayed the validity of Twain’s criticisms of his country -- which were also criticisms of their country -- and, unfortunately, in some ways, of America today, as well. Americans’ focus on Twain as a humorist has helped make some of his most intriguing works of social and political criticism suffer neglect.

BS: Or, if you'd rather, What is the biggest, most persistent myth about Mark Twain, either as Writer or Man?

SFF: Probably the idea that a writer who was once a delightfully entertaining humorist became a bitter, pessimistic misanthrope in his old age because of the death of so many people he loved -- his wife and two daughters. This myth is flawed on several fronts. 1) The germs of the ideas most often associated with his later years can be found in his earliest writings as well. Twain was raising searching questions about humankind from early on in his career. During his later years these questions may have become more salient, but they were present all along. 2) Twain’s pessimism and bleak outlook during his later years may have been colored in part by the death of people close to him, but it was probably more a reflection of his disillusionment in the course his country was taking -- particularly seeing his country become an imperial power in the mold of the European nations whose colonialism and imperialism Twain abhorred. 3) The last decade or so of Twain’s life was far from an unrelievedly bleak period. He produced some hilarious pieces during that time. One such piece is the wild, cross-dressing farce he wrote in 1898 in Vienna, the play “Is He Dead?” which had its debut on Broadway in 2007. A zany blend of shtiks that would not be out of place in a Marx Brothers film or Tootsie or Some Like It Hot, the play makes it clear that Twain was still able to have tremendous fun during those so-called “dark” years. David Ives adapted it for today’s stage. There have been over 70 productions of it since it closed on Broadway, and it has been delighting audiences across the country and outside the US as well (its first international production -- which is up now -- is in Romania).

BS: Why do you find the response of Black writers to Twain significant? How would you characterize that response?

SFF: Twain is perennially under attack for the alleged racism readers find in Huckleberry Finn. Did Twain manage to transcend the racial discourse of his time in everything he wrote? Of course not. (Pudd’nhead Wilson, for example, is a highly flawed book on this front). But was he light-years ahead of most of his peers when it came to understanding the dynamics of racism and coming up with ways of getting his reader to ask profound questions about the status quo? Absolutely.

Because of the longstanding belief in American culture that Black writers are particularly entitled to evaluate the racial politics of a canonical white writer, the ways in which Black writers have responded to Twain are important to reference in these debates. Those views are often buried in recondite places, hard to find when one needs to find them. I wanted to bring these responses together in The Mark Twain Anthology, so that teachers and other readers could have easy access to the most compelling of these perspectives.

And they are not monolithic. There is a range of views that they express, whether it is Toni Morrison discussing her complex responses to Huckleberry Finn, or Ralph Ellison noting that minstrelsy shaped the presentation of Jim in the novel, but that it is from behind the minstrel mask that Jim’s humanity emerges. The Mark Twain Anthology collects in one place a series of key responses by Black writers to the issue of Twain’s treatment of race and racism that have not appeared together before -- commentaries dating from 1937 to 2000 from Sterling Brown, Ralph Ellison, David Bradley, Toni Morrison, Ralph Wiley, and Dick Gregory, along with briefer remarks by Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Pryor.

Brown is the first to recognize the magnitude of Twain’s achievement in portraying Jim when it is judged against the backdrop of how Twain’s white contemporaries portrayed African Americans. I find David Bradley to be perhaps the most eloquent and persuasive commentator on Twain and race. Nobody has ever said anything more concise and correct, in my view, about the ending of Huckleberry Finn: In a 1995 speech he observed, “A lot of snotty academics have spent a lot of time and wasted a lot of journal ink criticizing the ending of Huckleberry Finn. But I notice none of them has been able to suggest, much less write, a better ending. Two actually tried — and failed. They all failed for the same reason that Twain wrote the ending as he did. America has never been able to write a better ending. America has never been able to write any ending at all.”

BS: What is the best thing anyone has ever said about Twain and why do you appreciate it?

SFF: Richard Wright: “Twain hid his conflict in satire and wept in private over the brutalities and the injustices of his civilization.” In this one sentence, Wright compresses the complexity of Twain’s response as a writer to what he witnessed around him and to the forces he saw operating in history. Wright recognizes the pain that lurked just under the surface. Tragedy is the ultimate source of comedy for Twain. The contradictions between people’s views of their behavior and how they actually behaved, the disconnects between their ideals and their realities, the high tolerance people have for bad faith and myopia when called upon to judge themselves or their societies -- Wright got it.

BS: How often did you find yourself "arguing" with what one of the writers averred about Twain? (I wanted to interrupt Teddy Roosevelt and tell him he was full of it!)

SFF: George Orwell thought that Twain settled for being his society’s “licensed jester,” a
man who “never attacks established beliefs in a way that is likely to get him into trouble.” I disagree. Orwell seems to have been unaware of the writings Twain published that did get him into trouble — such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and other anti-imperialist essays. This is not surprising: During Orwell’s lifetime, Harpers, Twain’s publisher, did what it could (along with Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine and daughter Clara) to downplay the subversive side of Twain. I should add, however, that Orwell’s statement is very occasionally applicable to Twain: Twain decided not to publish a book about lynchings because (as he put it in a letter to his publisher) he wouldn’t have a friend left in the South if he did. But the occasions when Twain did get into trouble condemning his country’s foreign policy, or the behavior European nations in Asia and Africa.

And for the record, I share your views on Teddy Roosevelt. And Twain had as low an opinion of Teddy Roosevelt as Roosevelt had of Twain. In the posthumously-published Mark Twain in Eruption, Twain wrote that “Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one.”

BS: Why is Mark Twain considered the quintessentially American writer and Huckleberry Finn the quintessentially American novel? Was William Dean Howells' accurate in his appraisal of Twain?

SFF: Jorge Luis Borges observed that in Huckleberry Finn “for the first time an American writer used the language of America without affectation.” The novel that Ernest Hemingway called the wellspring of “all modern American literature” was America’s literary Declaration of Independence, a book no Englishman could have written -- a book that expanded the democratic possibilities of what a modern novel could do and what it could be. Time and time again, Twain defied readers’ expectations of what literature was and did. As Howells once put it, “He saunters out into the trim world of letters, and lounges across its neatly kept paths, and walks about on the grass at will, in spite of all the signs that have been put up from the beginning of literature, warning people of dangers and penalties for the slightest trespass.”

From the breezy slang and deadpan humor that peppered his earliest comic sketches to the unmistakably American characters who populated his fiction, Twain’s writings introduced readers around the world to American personalities speaking in distinctively American cadences. But in Huckleberry Finn, those American voices helped usher in a new kind of novel that helped make possible so much of the literature that followed it in the 20th century. It was in Huckleberry Finn that Twain allowed the African American voices that had been so important to him all his life to play a central role in his creative process. The most memorable stories Twain heard during his childhood were those he heard in the slave quarters from specific slaves whom he recalled years later in autobiographical recollections, in “How to Tell a Story,” and elsewhere. The engaging mock-sermons of a “satirical slave” named Jerry that Twain listened to daily in his youth were his introduction to satire as a tool of social criticism, as he tells us in “Corn-Pone Opinions.” As an adult, Twain was exposed to such gifted storytellers as Mary Ann Cord (who told the story that is at the center of “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It”) and the young black servant he profiled in “Sociable Jimmy” (“the most artless, sociable, exhaustless talker” Twain had ever met, to whom Twain listened “as one who receives a revelation,” and who played a role in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn).

Twain became a writer at a time when characters who spoke in dialect were generally objects of ridicule and sources of comic relief. But speakers like those mentioned here taught Twain the complex, subtle, and serious uses to which dialect and vernacular speech could be put, and American literature would never be the same.

I believe that few would deny today the important role that African-American voices and speakers like these played in making Twain the writer he became. As Ralph Ellison told me in our interview, reading Twain, and seeing the ways in which he transformed vernacular speech into art helped many black -- and white -- authors in the century that followed find their “own voices” as writers. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain made a semi-literate street urchin narrator (and the central consciousness) of his book. Never before had so much authority and power been ceded to a vernacular speaker. It is this which helps make the book the wellspring of so much of the literature that followed -- in the 20th and 21st centuries. Huckleberry Finn also had remarkable universal appeal: Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe cites Huck Finn as the book that spoke to his condition so powerfully in war-torn Japan that it inspired him to write his first novel.

BS: What was the single most surprising/pleasing thing you learned during the course of assembling the anthology?

SFF: I’d probably have to say that I was surprised to find that the first book devoted to Mark Twain published anywhere was a book published in Paris in French. It’s not clear that Twain himself was ever aware of this book, titled simply Mark Twain, that was published in Paris in 1884 by a young Frenchman named Henry Gauthier-Villars. (Today Gauthier-Villars is best known as the rather infamous first husband of the woman he met five years after he published this book, a woman who later became known as the French writer, Colette.).

Something else (that I should have known, perhaps, but hadn’t) was the wonderful intensity of Twain’s friendship with Helen Keller, the remarkable rapport the two of them had, and the impact Twain had on her life: it was Twain who introduced her to Henry Huddleston Rogers and his wife with the express goal of getting them to pay for her education. They ended up paying her way through Radcliffe, and she became the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor’s degree. (It was also Twain who dubbed her teacher, Annie Sullivan, “the miracle worker.”)

BS: I have to ask, since you bring it up in your introduction, what piece hurt you the most to leave out and why?

SFF: I was really sad to lose Willie Morris’s essay on Life on the Mississippi, an essay by Judith Martin (Miss Manners) on The Prince and the Pauper, and Anne Bernays’ essay dealing with “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” But all of these pieces introduce volumes of The Oxford Mark Twain (that I edited in 1996), and the fact that the set has just come out in paperback means that readers will still have ready access to these excellent writer-to-writer encounters with Twain. I also regret that an eloquent essay from Jim Zwick’s book, Confronting Imperialism, dealing with Twain’s involvement with the Anti-Imperialist league ended up being cut. Jim Zwick passed away at a very young age a few years ago, just after that book came out, and at least in part as a result of his untimely death his work has not gotten the attention that it deserves.

Can you break up with someone you've never met?

2010-03-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

Can a book be both existential and light?

Is the phrase "an existential romp" an oxymoron?

Readers of Martin Page's The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection may be inclined to answer those questions in the affirmative.

Who knew existential ennui could be such riotous good fun?

The premise of Discreet Pleasures is simple and outlandish: Virgil returns home one day from his unfulfilling work at the Svengali Advertising Agency to a message on his answering machine:

Virgil, it's Clara. I'm sorry, but I'd rather stop here. I'm leaving you, Virgil. I'm leaving you.

Etiquette experts argue that one must respect one's partner by breaking up in person, but the method of Clara's breakup is of only minor importance. Because Virgil doesn't know or can't remember who Clara is. In essence, he's been dumped by an apparition.

The incident sets Virgil on a journey of self-discovery (as the blurbists like to put it) in which, at least initially, he does indeed experience the "pleasures" of "rejection." He tells all his friends (exclusively women) that he's yet again been dumped and suddenly he's the center of attention. They dote on him, feed him, pat his back, encourage him, compliment him. This is fun for awhile.

But eventually Virgil begins to ask another question: Why do all my relationships, even the ones I've never got to enjoy, end in sorrow?

Book Serf caught up with Martin Page (via the wonders of the internets) and asked the Parisian satirist (his How I Became Stupid was described as a "modern day Candide") the following questions:

BS: What is the secret, do you think, in getting readers to buy into such a fantasical premise?

MP: The secret? Hmm. Difficult for me to think that there’s a secret.

BS: How does one make believable a character who does things none of us would do?

MP: Well, that’s the kind of thing I do. It's a normal, regular way of thinking for me. So what’s unrealistic for most people is in fact a daily thing for me.

But you are right: there's a challenge in making a bizarre idea realistic. My point was not to write a surrealistic novel, but to write a novel about love. The bizarre beginning is a catch. It's a way to amaze the main character, Virgil, and to create excitement. And the reader of course. And to let me follow my ideas.

BS: Can you talk a little bit about pitch? It seems to me that you -- ie, the narrator -- has to strike just the right tone, a certain dead-pan delivery that makes the farce come alive.

MP: Yes, it's very important for me, that deadpan sense of humor. The more you play it seriously, the more profound and intelligent it is. It's always more intersting when amazing and crazy things are underplayed. Because then we see the farce (and the uncanny) as a part of our lives. It shows the strange unreality of reality.

BS: If you met Virgil in real life, do you think you would like him?

MP: That’s a difficult question, because Virgil is pretty much a self-portrait of me. So if I met myself in real life, there's a chance I would be a little upset, because I would see all my defects.

BS: Your narrator and Virgil both have wide-ranging interests, from the history of advertising in the Western world to the invention of the CAT scan machine and catafalques! Can you talk about the structure of your book and its inclusive, digressive, polymathic (is that even a word?) nature?

MP: I try to write novels that are polysemic. You can read them on different levels. If you want to read this one as a simple bizarre comedy, you can. If you want to read it as a reflection on love, you can. If you want to read that as a reflection on memory, you can.

I like digression. That's why I adore books like Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne's essays. Something that seems to be a detour is in fact telling us something about the main subject. A digression is not unbounded, it's not without purpose. It's connected to the subject, it gives it some ornaments (which are great and beautiful things) that mean something (even if you don't notice that at first).

BS: What are the things that you most enjoy about Oscar Wilde? What could contemporary writers learn from him?

MP: Wilde is an underestimated writer. People talk about him mostly as the king of paradox (and of course Chesterton is the prince of paradox). They say he’s very witty, but that he wrote quotes more than works of art. But he's a complex writer. There's a journey between The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis. And I like that journey, the diversity, the variety of work. Most of all, I like him because he's light and profound, sad and full of joy, tragic and comic. It's more than a philosophy of litterature, it's an ethic: to live and to write.

BS: Do you share Virgil's complicated views of Paris ?

MP: Totally. It's my own words. Paris is not an easy city to understand.

BS: My favorite line from Raymond Chandler is from Farewell, My Lovely, where the narrator says, "She was so cold spumoni wouldn't have melted on her." I read an interview in which you identified similarities between The Long Goodbye and your latest novel. Can you elaborate on that? And, what's your favorite Chandler line?

MP: Farewell, My Lovely is a great novel. I like the idea that a novel is an investigation. At the end the hero is not exactly the same — now life may begin. I think noirs and dectective novels give us a very interesting structure on which to build "literary" or "classic" novels. There's a lot to be learned from them. The Long Good-Bye is that kind of quest. And it's a beautiful book about Los Angeles.

BS: What are you working on now?

MP: A graphic novel, a comic book (comic strips in the tradition of Schultz's Peanuts), a novel for teenagers, and an essay about my father.

L'Enfant Sauvage ... T.C. Boyle returns ...

2010-03-08T14:59:00.000-08:00

Wild Child by T.C. Boyle (Viking, $25.95)

By Erik Harden for Book Serf

The ‘80s punk band the Minutemen, in its succinct and abstract style, once pondered a world unspoiled by humankind in its song Nature Without Man. T.C. Boyle takes the opposite approach to the matter in his latest collection of short stories, Wild Child.

These previously published short stories offer several tales based on the uneasy relationship between man and nature. Boyle takes an array of approaches – from mundane and humorous to horrifying and heartbreaking. And he packs an emotional wallop using a style that manages to be straightforward yet complex.

In “La Conchita,” he brings the horror and panic of being trapped in a natural disaster to life. Coincidentally, I was reading this story the week the earthquake struck Haiti. Although Boyle’s story is about a mudslide in Southern California, it was easy to imagine the shell-shocked survivors of the quake thinking something like the following:

By the time we reached the top of the street, a long block and a half in, all of it uphill, I was out of breath – heaving, actually – but whether my lungs burned or my shoes were ruined beyond salvage or repair or the finish on the car was damaged to the tune of five hundred bucks or more didn’t matter, because the whole thing suddenly came clear to me. This was the real deal. This was affliction and loss, horror unfolding, the houses crushed like eggshells, cars swallowed up, sections of roof flung out across the street and nothing visible beneath but tons of wet mud and a scatter of splintered beams. I was staggered. I was in awe.

And the story actually becomes more harrowing as the central character – a courier who delivers donated organs to hospitals – finds himself frantically digging through the mud to save the lives of people he has never met. Let’s just say the results are riveting.

“Admiral,” one of the funnier stories in the collection, also tackles the clash between man and nature, but with sharp sarcasm and wit. It’s the story of a recent college graduate who returns to her hometown and takes a job as a dogsitter for a $250,000 cloned Afghan hound.

To me, it feels like a cautionary tale of man becoming too godlike, but that’s not to say Boyle is up on a soapbox. He just lets the absurdity of two self-absorbed professionals insanely doting over a genetic copy of an earlier spoiled pooch unfold. At one point, Nisha – the dogsitter – asks herself:

Four years of college for this? Wars were being fought, people were starving, there were diseases to conquer, children to educate, good to do in the world, and here she was reliving her adolescence in the company of inbred, semi-retarded clown of a cloned Afghan hound because two childless rich people decreed it should be so.

Boyle brings the moral center of the story into sharp focus when Erhard, an animal rights activist who befriends Nisha, contends the two people she is working for are "arrogant exemplars of bourgeois excess, even to the point of violating the laws of nature – and God, God too – simply to satisfy their own solipsistic desires."

While this story is based on man’s best friend, I couldn’t help but notice Boyle’s fascination with creatures of the avian variety throughout the anthology. In “Balto,” the first story in the book, a man looks at a gull and notices "the way the breeze touched its feathers and the sun whitened its breast until there was nothing brighter and more perfect in the world – this creature, his fellow creature."

In another story he describes a widower like a bird stripped of its feathers in some aerial catastrophe. In the book’s title story, a parrot has a fatal run-in with the story’s central character. And finally, in another story a major league baseball player’s mother is kidnapped in Venezuela. The player, as it turns out, is a pitcher for the Orioles.

“Wild Child,” the longest story in the anthology, is Boyle’s take on the classic story of L’Enfant Sauvage – a feral boy found living in the French countryside at the turn of the 19th century.
Boyle breathes new life into the legendary tale that is based on the memoirs of the French physician Jean Itard.

Boyle, maybe more than any previous telling of this story, often tries to see things the way the boy – eventually named Victor – would interpret his surroundings and the attempts to assimilate him into the civilized world. When he is first being hunted by villagers in the countryside, this is his description:

A fire was built beneath the tree, the boy all the while watching these three bipeds, these shagged and violent and strangely habited and gibbering animals, out of the deep retreat of his eyes.

Boyle expresses man’s fear of the wild in the way the French country citizens view the child and his growing legend: "He wasn’t a child. He was a spirit, a demon outcast like the rebel angels, mute and staring and mad."

When the boy is brought to Paris to be studied and, for lack of a better word, domesticated, he fails to see the city’s storied beauty. Ironically, the child-beast views the City of Lights in very unflattering terms.

All he knew was what he heard and smelled. He saw confusion , heard chaos, and what he smelled was ranker than anything he’d come across in all his years of wandering the fields and forests of Aveyron, concentrated pungent, the reek of civilization.

Itard, in studying the child, hopes to unlock the mysteries of the question that has been asked by famous philosophers through the years:

Itard was prepared to carry out to put to the test the thesis propounded by Locke and Condillac: Was man born a tabula rasa, unformed and without ideas, ready to be written upon by society, educable and perfectible? Or was society a corrupting influence, as Rousseau supposed, rather than the foundation of all things right and good?

This is the question Boyle grapples with throughout Wild Child.

More of my interview with Julia Keller/Chicago Tribune

2010-03-05T09:13:00.001-08:00

The great thing about the internets, as our last president liked to call them, is that nothing need be left on the cutting room floor. To wit: I recently had the pleasure of exchanging emails with Pulitzer Prize journalist Julia Keller (author of Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel) for a column she was writing for her newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, about "when to give up on a book."

JK: Is there a novel you've started but not finished, but that still haunts you? (Your web site talks about White Noise. Any others?)

BS: Sure. There are great novels that I've been unable to defeat. Ulysses is one of them. A friend of mine used to call his attempts to finish Ulysses "assaults" on the novel. And you really do have to gird your loins and prepare for a battle with that particular book. I've enjoyed trying to read Ulysses and would never consider my time spent with it in the least bit wasted. And of course I'm sympathetic to the arguments of the folks who have finished it and loved it. But I am, sorry to say, not among those lucky few. Maybe someday?

I'm sure there's a Faulkner in there that I never finished. I read a lot of him in graduate school! It's not a novel, but I have one more chapter to read in Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari. I'm not sure why I stopped reading it and I'm fairly certain I'll return to it, god willing and if the creek don't rise, as Hank Sr. used to say.

JK: How long do you go before giving up? Is there a rule of thumb?

BS: In all four of these questions, Julia, I would divide the books into two categories: those books we feel that will benefit and enrich us and are worth finishing no matter the degree of difficulty (books such as Buddenbrooks or Lord Jim or Moby-Dick); and all the other, lesser books we're just taking a flyer on.

It's easier to walk away from the latter than from the former. I don't think we should ever walk away from a book merely because it's challenging. That's the wrong reason. On the other hand, certain books simply don't command our respect. Recently I went looking for books that might satisfy a couple of urges I have as a reader: for epic fantasy and for novels of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. I'd read Tolkien in the first genre and Patrick O'Brian in the second and considered them the gold standard. I settled on Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson for my epic fantasy and, to be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm going to make it through the trilogy. The lead character, Thomas Covenant, keeps saying, Hellfire!, which I find bizarre and distracting. Donaldson's writing is often atrocious. So many anachronisms, so many poorly chosen words, so much silliness like Hellfire! The story has my attention through 200 pages, so maybe I'll finish this novel and reconsider the final two in the series? In the seafaring genre, I picked up the first novel in the "Ramage" series by Dudley Pope. I walked away from that at about 100 pages because I simply couldn't get excited to pick the book back up again after I'd set it aside. That was three months ago, so I think I'm done with it.

One question I find fascinating is, Why don't we finish a book? There have been times when I wasn't in the mood for a book that I would months or even years later return to and love. So our moods can determine the outcome. At other times, an author will break (in our mind) the compact that exists between all authors and their readers. Perhaps we will have said once too often, Are you kidding me? And we'll decide we no longer want to suspend our disbelief. Or perhaps the author abuses the English language in ways we find intolerable. Or perhaps a tic (say, cuteness) that is at first bearable becomes a reason to set a book aside.

An old friend of mine once rolled down the passenger-side window of my car and threw one of Nabokov's novels out at 70 mph on the interstate! "Sometimes," he said, "deciding not to finish a book calls for a grand gesture." We still laugh about that today!

Perhaps I should have prefaced these responses by saying that I finished every book I ever started, good, bad or indifferent, until I was 26 years old. In my old age, I find it so much easier to let a book go than in my youth. (Not sure this has anything to do with our discussion, but in my dotage I have begun for the first time in my life to reread my favorite books, something I thought I'd never do but find I enjoy it immensely.)

JK: What's the earliest you've ever quit on a book? (e.g., first page? first paragraph?) What's the furtherest you've gone, and then quit?

BS: The earliest I ever quit on a book was Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which I stopped reading on Page 3. I could tell then, despite all the hype, that it was the work of a consumate hack. Reading those first few pages reminded me of a line Dorothy Parker wrote in a review from the 1920s: "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
I wish I'd written that line myself! I've certainly read enough books over the years to which it could be applied! Let's just say The Da Vinci Code was a better book than a movie and leave it at that!

As for the book I read most deeply into before giving up, I guess it's Don DeLillo's Underworld, somewhere in the 600s of an 827 page novel! So close, and yet I was so overwhelmed reading it by ennui that to go on was insupportable. I really don't have any regrets for leaving Underworld behind and no intention of going back to it.

JK: Must one finish a book to derive all the meat from it?

BS: I don't think so. At least, not if it's a good book. The best novelists aren't going to give us the answers to life in the final chapter or in the Epilogue, I don't think. My favorite novelists ask the best questions; they don't give the best answers. So I think you can accumulate meat as you move through a book even if you never make it to the end. But what, you ask, about a detective novel? Well, then, yes, one must read on til the end to find out whodunnit. The key in the case of crime fiction or novels with O. Henry-style endings, etc., is to not allow yourself to be sucked in in the first place.

My interview with Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune!

2010-03-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Julia Keller for the shout out in her Chicago Tribune column about "When to give up on a book."

Julia is the author of the fine book Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel, a history of the Gatling gun and, perhaps more so, of the U.S. Patent Office.

You can check out our interview here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-0221-lit-life-20100221,0,76939.column

They don't make justices like John Marshall anymore ...

2010-02-18T11:43:00.000-08:00

Marshall: Writings by John Marshall (Library of America, $40)

Journalists (and all other kinds of writers) would do well to heed the advice of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who believed that in both speaking and writing "clearness and precision are most essential qualities. The man who by seeking embellishment hazards confusion, is greatly mistaken in what constitutes good writing . . . The writer should always express himself so clearly as to make it impossible to misunderstand him. He should be comprehended without an effort."

That dictum was the guiding principle behind all of Marshall's prose and the reason that contemporary readers of Marshall: Writings can easily traverse the two-hundred-year gulf between his time and ours.

Marshall collects more than 200 of the essays, judicial opions, legal agruments, letters, speeches, resolutions and reports penned by John Marshall between 1779 and 1835, as well as selections from his Life of George Washington.

The Book Serf asked historian and Marshall editor Charles F. Hobson, author of The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law, the following questions:

Book Serf: It has been said that, eventually, a biographer must come to loathe his subject. You lived with John Marshall for quite some time. Do you think that's true?

Charles Hobson. Not at all. Who said this? As I said somewhere, Marshall, like fine wine, got better with age. I count myself extremely fortunate to have been associated with him (through his papers) for more than 30 years of my life. I never got tired of spending my days with him.

BS: Imagine John Marshall as a contemporary. (Not difficult, given how forward-thinking he was!) A friend asks you, So what's he like?

CH: In a nutshell, charming, delightful company, full of good cheer and bonhomie, treating high and low with equal attention. He had a knack for putting others at ease, particularly young lawyers appearing in his court for the first time. He took great pleasure in the company of close friends, perhaps most memorably as a member of the Barbecue Club in Richmond, where that town’s elite gathered on Saturday mornings in good weather to pitch quoits, feast on good food, and imbibe punch. He possessed the common touch, a plain and simple manner that endeared him to all except for Thomas Jefferson.

BS: I love Marshall's description of great writing having to do with clarity and precision. Describe his strengths (and weaknesses?) as a writer.

CH: Well, his strengths were just that, clarity and precision. As he told his grandson, never let the reader mistake your meaning or even struggle to comprehend it. Like any writer, he fell into sloppiness when he was in a hurry to meet deadlines — as in composing the draft of the first edition of the Life of George Washington. Another example, perhaps, was his opinion in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, which concluded on a Saturday and the opinion delivered on the following Monday. In such instances, Marshall tended to excessive verbiage and repetition.

BS: William Faulkner once said, The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past. In what ways do we take for granted our United States of America that wouldn't be so had Marshall not exerted such influence on our founding in the early 1800s? What might America look like had Marshall not been Chief Justice for 34 years?

CH: This is a “counterfactual” question, not particularly congenial to my tastes and training as a historian. I caution against attributing too much to a single person — the “great man” theory of history. All I can say with any confidence is that Marshall was in the right place at the right time — that is, he had the opportunity to be creative, to some extent write on a clean slate, map uncharted territory, etc., and that he made the most of his opportunity. More than anyone else, he contributed to the emergence of the judiciary — and the Supreme Court in particular — as a major player in our tripartite scheme of government.

The judiciary — the third and “least dangerous” branch — had acquired significantly greater power and authority by 1835 than it had when Marshall became chief justice in 1801. Now, this might have happened without Marshall. It is also possible that the judiciary, without Marshall at the helm, could have receded into relative insignificance.

BS: Why should the contemporary reader care about John Marshall? What can we learn from him, not only in his role of longest-termed Chief Justice in our nation's history but also as a husband, a father, a friend?

CH: Marshall, indeed, seems to be the very embodiment of judicial wisdom, just the sort of person who should preside over the highest court in the land. In a sense, he created and defined the office, and all subsequent Chiefs have looked to him as the model.

With the robes of office removed, Marshall was a flesh and blood human being — a devoted husband to his wife “Polly,” who was often in precarious physical and emotional health. He was a kind and understanding father to five sons and one daughter. His children were born over a period of 21 years. When he was 60 in 1815, Marshall had sons still in their teens, all of whom had a penchant for getting into trouble. John, Jr., for example, managed to get himself expelled from Harvard for unspecified “immoral and dissolute” behavior. Polly Marshall’s fragile health evidently had its origins in a difficult birth while Marshall was absent in France on a diplomatic mission. She became reclusive, confined to a small circle of family and close friends. She could not stand noise of any kind, so Marshall admonished all visitors to remove their boots or shoes when entering the house. Whenever there was to be a big celebration in town with fireworks — Fourth of July, Christmas, Washington’s Birthday — Marshall made sure that Polly was taken to their farm on the Chickahominy River a few miles east of Richmond. At times her condition became so bad that Marshall felt isolated from society — a difficult situation for the decidedly convivial Chief Justice. When he was away in Washington, he wrote tender and amusing letters to Polly.

Marshall also enjoyed warm friendships, none deeper than that with Joseph Story, his younger brother on the Supreme Court. The venerable Virginian and the New England Yankee had genuine affection for each other, which comes through wonderfully in the letters they exchanged. It was Story who in 1827 prompted Marshall to write an autobiographical account of his life before becoming Chief Justice.

BS:Is there a recent (last 10 years or so?) Supreme Court ruling that would have Marshall rolling over in his grave?

CH: This is the sort of question I tend to shy away from. As a historian, I can only speak of Marshall in his own time and place. Without naming any cases, I will venture to say that Marshall attempted so far as possible to separate law and politics. There are perhaps some recent decisions in which he would be concerned that the Supreme Court had ventured too far into the political sphere.

Marshall is best known, of course, for invoking judicial review in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison (1803). However, I think a more characteristic opinion is McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which Marshall and the Court upheld the constitutionality of an act of Congress. Marshall allowed great deference to Congress to define the limits of its own powers.

BS: Can you relate to us your favorite anecdote about Marshall , something that reveals his character or intelligence or wit?

CH: There are many anecdotes, which I think says a lot about his character. Marshall’s simple and unpretentious manner, as well as his sense of humor and delight in a good joke, come through in the story of Marshall at the Richmond market.

It was not unusual for gentlemen to do the family marketing, though they were usually accompanied by a servant who would carry the various purchases back home. Marshall shopped by himself, stuffing a chicken, turkey, or whatever in his coat pocket. One day a young man all dressed up in aristocratic finery happened to be at market without his servant. Having purchased a chicken, he was much distressed that he had no one to carry the fowl home for him. He was obviously a recent arrival in Richmond, for he turned to a plainly dressed older man and asked him if he would carry his chicken. The man obliged him and on arriving at the young dandy’s house he was rewarded with a small coin for his trouble. The Chief Justice removed his hat and did a slow bow before returning to do his own shopping.

BS: Guess I have to ask this "required" Library of America question! What single piece of writing did you most regret leaving out of the collection?

CH: There is no single piece that I regret omitting because I think what is included is both representative and comprehensive. In other words, nothing was left out that would have added to our knowledge and understanding of the man.

BS: The subtitle of one of your books is John Marshall and the Rule of Law. Can you discuss Marshall 's contribution to our country's understanding of the "rule of law"?

CH: Marshall’s whole career was the embodiment of this concept. He spoke of it explicitly in the famous early case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), when he said the U.S. government “has been emphatically termed a government of laws, & not of men.” In that context, he was thinking in terms of legal rights and remedies — that is when our individual rights are violated we can seek redress in the courts.

But I think he had a broader understanding of the “rule of law” as an attitude or habit of mind ingrained in the American people that democracy and majority rule must be bounded and limited by law — of which the most fundamental is the Constitution. The phrase “rule of law” is often used in contrast to the “will of the people.” Marshall’s idea was that the two work in tandem to produce what he called a “well regulated democracy.”

In other words the American people, by their Constitution, agree that it is their “will” to be limited and bounded by law. Marshall did more than anyone to carve out a large role for the Supreme Court to enforce the “rule of law,” but he never asserted that this could be achieved exclusively or even primarily by the Court. To be a reality, the “rule of law” had to be the duty and responsibility of all departments of government and ultimately of the people at large.

Robert Flanagan's Top 5 Boxing Short Stories ...

2010-02-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

Novelist/poet/short story writer/essayist/raconteur Robert Flanagan provides us with his list of the Top 5 Boxing Short Stories of All Time:

1. “The Croxley Master,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Why is this story always included in collections of best boxing fiction? Not because its author created Sherlock Holmes but because it is one of the best. Surgery assistant Montgomery needs one more university course to give him his medical license but no one will loan him the money. A dust-up with a boorish pug whom Montgomery, a gentleman amateur, flattens, leads him to enter a big money fight. His opponent is Silas Craggs, the dreaded Croxley Master, in a 20 round bout fought with 2 oz gloves, Queensbury rules.

2. “The Battle Royal,” Ralph Ellison: This is prizefighting in its most brutal, elemental form. Blindfolded black boys fight to the last man standing for a prize given by dominant whites and those left standing are thrown coins they scrabble to pick up. Published separately as a story, “The Battle Royal” became the first chapter of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man.

3. “Fifty Grand,” Ernest Hemingway: A man’s world, boxing, and in this tale manly men, Irish, Jewish and Black, fill it to the brim. Fighter Jack Brennan is stoic, the dialogue is laconic, the thinking cynical. The boredom of training camp, the manipulations of managers, the insatiable hunger for money all are here, along with a doubled double-cross killer ending.

4. “He Swung and He Missed,” Nelson Algren: Included in his great collection The Neon Wilderness, this story of character and heart captures the world of the urban downtrodden hoping for one lucky break. Young Rocco may be a loser but he’s never a quitter and his heart-felt line to his wife, “You got good odds, honey,” is a winner.

5. “The Mexican” & “Steak,” Jack London: The author of The Call of the Wild was a fierce boxing fan, writing about it in newspaper features (such as his racist attacks on Jack Johnson) and in his fiction. “The Mexican” is Felipe Rivera, a young man so committed to buying rifles for the Mexican revolution that he fights as the underdog in a “winner take all” bout. In “Steak” Tom King was once a comer. Now, stripped of promise, he fights because that’s all he knows how to do. It’s no longer a dream but just a business. When he was young King beat aging pugs; now it’s his turn to be beaten by up-and-comers.

Honorable Mention: “His Brother’s Keeper,” Dashiell Hammett; “Champion,” Ring Lardner.

An excerpt from Robert Flanagan's work-in-progress!

2010-02-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

Last week, Robert Flanagan (Maggot, Naked to Naked Goes, Loving Power) provided The Book Serf with his Top 5 boxing novels ever. We recruited Bob for the job because, as we said in the introduction to his entry, he had earned, in the ring, two detached retinas.

This week we're fortunate not only to have Flanagan's Top 5 Boxing Stories of All Time (see entry below) but also an excerpt (here) from his as-yet unpublished novel, Champions, which follows the exploits of Catholic boy and Toledo native Pat McCandless, boxer-cum-comedian.

WHAT YOU LEARNED IN BOXING
By Robert Flanagan

Although Billy Conn claimed boxing was simple -- keep your chin down, your hands up, and your ass off the canvas, Pat McCandless had found you could learn a lot in the gym, if you could take the pain.
First off, you learned that if you went into the ring, you were bound to get hit. No matter how good you were, you got hit. Even the best got hit. Skeeter McClure, Willy Pep, even Sugar Ray Robinson. So you didn't need to feel when you ate leather that it meant there was something wrong with you. And when you got hit right, your eyes watered. But you learned that tears meant nothing, they were only an involuntary reaction, they were nothing to be ashamed of. It was the same with everyone. It was like bleeding -- you got cut, you bled. Like getting tagged on the side of the jaw where a nerve crossed over the bone there -- when the nerve was pinched, your legs jackknifed and you went down. It was automatic, it had nothing to do with character, toughness or will, it was just structure and mechanics. One of the many hard facts of life, as your coach explained, which you might as well learn now as later.
You learned that you could get cut and knocked down and still go on, that you were not as breakable as you'd secretly feared.
You learned that feeling afraid before a bout was nothing to worry about. Everyone felt the same way just as everyone bled. Fear was your friend, your coach taught you, because it made you careful. Show him a man who said he felt no fear going into the ring and he'd show you a liar or a fool. You learned because you listened to what you were told: he can run but he can't hide; make him miss and make him pay; kill the body and the head will fall. You listened because you believed it could save you from humiliation, pain and loss.
You learned to your surprise that your opponent was not your enemy. He was there to help you find out just how good you were.
You learned things that no one ever told you, things that you never told anyone. How morning roadwork was like serving the early side altar mass, it was lonely but helped you to believe in yourself. How gym work -- skip rope, medicine ball, light bag, heavy bag -- was like saying the Stations of the Cross, a penance for weakness, yet giving you hope of being redeemed.
What didn't you learn in the gym?
If your nose bled, you were to clinch and press it into your opponent's collarbone to help stop the bleeding. With a puffy eye, you were not to blow your nose as you risked closing the eye and having the referee stop the fight.
You learned that everything was a matter of timing. Don't let your man get set to deliver. You see him get ready, either beat him to the punch or change the distance between you.
Everything was a matter of angles. Never square up, but come in on the angle. Don't ever back up in a straight line, but always slip away to the side. Everything was a matter of knowing. Know what it was your opponent most wanted to do and then stop him from doing it. Be smart -- don't fight the other man's fight, fight your fight. Box a puncher and punch a boxer. A big hitter against a stick-and-move jabber could make lots of mistakes and still win, but a boxer against a puncher could not afford to be wrong even once. A man with knockout power was like someone born rich, he had an edge you'd never have.
Life was not fair. You could be Rocky Marciano, come along and knock out over-the-hill Joe Louis and grandpappy Walcott, have a tough time beating a second-rater like Roland LaStarza and light heavyweight king Archie Moore, never fight one heavyweight of note while in his prime, yet have people call you a great champion. Or you could be Ezzard Charles and give it your all -- brains and moves and beautiful technique, have everything but size and a big punch, and people hadn't the sense to appreciate your talent. But you didn't whine about it. It wouldn't change anything. If you felt bad about falling short of the mark you'd set yourself, you kept it to yourself. Because that was what it meant to take pride in yourself and in your craft.
You learned to take whatever came your way -- tough loss or dull draw -- as you took roadwork, another step along the way, something to face without crying why me? Or trying to blame it on anyone else.
Because it was just in the nature of things. That was the heart of what you learned. If you got into the ring, you were bound to get hit.

An excerpt from Champions, a novel in progress.
Published in The Civic Arts Review, Ohio Wesleyan University, Bernard Murchland, editor.

For more information and to buy Flanagan's books, visit http://www.robertflanagan.com/

Don DeLillo's White Noise, revisited ...

2010-02-03T06:27:00.000-08:00

White Noise by Don DeLillo (Penguin, $16)

I have a reading list that no one knows about, a dark little secret list I assume all serious readers keep but don't advertise: Books I Should Already Have Read.

Don DeLillo's White Noise falls into that category.

The novel, which has been out for 25 years, was recently reissued by Penguin Classics in a Deluxe Edition with an introduction by the novelist Richard Powers.

Powers loved the book when it came out in 1985 and still loves it today: "The publication of White Noise ... placed Don DeLillo at the center of contemporary cultural imagination. I can think of few books written in my lifetime that have received such quick and wide acclaim while going on to exercise so deep an influence for decades thereafter. I can think of even fewer books more likely to remain essential guides to life in the Information Age, another quarter century on."

My exposure to DeLillo was limited. I had read (or attempted to, anyway) Underworld, after reading about it in the New York Times Book Review. The opening section of that book is a tour de force, a wild ride through America of the 1950s that features cameo appearances by Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason and a more substantial role for J. Edgar Hoover. Much of the section is set in Brooklyn, at the Dodgers vs. Giants game that produced Bobby Thompson's "shot heard round the world."

Reading that first section was exhilarating. I might even, one day, return to it. But something happened along the rest of my journey through the over-long Underworld: I stopped caring about the characters in the book and then, finally, about the book itself.

Though mightily praised upon its release in 1997, Underworld was not universally loved. At the time, critic James Wood complained, "To call Underworld, Don DeLillo's large novel, a failure might seem an act of slightly flirtatious irrelevance. The book is so large, so serious, so ambitious, so often well written, so punctually intelligent, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ. Moreover, Don DeLillo's huge endeavor represents a promise to restock the novel's wasting pedigree in our age, and few want to see the promise broken. It is easy, and rightly so, for big books to flush away criticism.

"But DeLillo's novel, despite chapters of great brilliance, does not gather its local victories as a book this large should. Instead, it enforces relations between its parts which it cannot coax. Curiously, it is at once distractingly centrifugal and dogmatically centripetal: Its many characters dissolve an intensity which the novel insists on repeating."

I couldn't agree more. And the same criticism, Richard Powers notwithstanding, could be applied to White Noise, which is brilliant in some of its parts but fails to captivate (at least this reader) in a way that makes finishing the novel a priority or even a possibility.

Powers raises the question, Should a novel, any novel, attempt to be a "guide" (essential or otherwise) to life in a given era or age?

To which I would answer, Not if the aforementioned novel sets out to be a guide. For starters, even the best novelist can only give you his or her interpretation of an age. Hemingway's Paris is utterly unlike Jean Rhys' Paris though they lived there at nearly the same time. And the writers of guide books inevitably do what is poison to the novelist: they preach, they become didactic, they set themselves above the reader.

Still, White Noise does, like all of DeLillo's novels, have its deathless moments of insight. What with the disaster in Haiti fresh in my mind, I was especially struck by DeLillo's contemplation of media coverage of natural disasters.

That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so sensitive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackles and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

When Jack Gladney gets to work the following day (at The College-on-the-Hill) he discusses with his colleagues our obsession with natural disasters on television. Alfonse Stompanato, the chair of the "American Environments" Department, explains:

The flow is constant. Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

This is not only screamingly funny, but also eerie. Substitute Haiti for California and listen to Pat Robertson talk about that country's pact with Satan to overthrow the French, and we have, yet again, morbid fascination coupled with the sense that the Haitians' doom is somehow "warranted."

J.D. Salinger, in memoriam ...

2010-01-31T12:31:00.000-08:00

A terrific (and succinct) appreciation of the late J.D. Salinger, here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/31/RVCO1BPABL.DTL

And another here:

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-salinger29-2010jan29,0,578438.story

And an interesting piece on "What's in Salinger's Safe?"

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2010/01/29/2010-01-29_whats_in_salingers_safe_speculation_grows_over_possible_unpublished_manuscripts.html

Ladies & gentlemen! The best boxing novels ever !!!

2010-01-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

Robert Flanagan has published the novel Maggot (Warners) and story collections Naked to Naked Goes (Scribner) and Loving Power, (Bottom Dog), and has work anthologized in The Norton Book of American Short Stories, Best Ohio Fiction and Bar Stories. Also a poet, he is the author of Reply to an Eviction Notice: Selected Poems (Bottom Dog).

Flanagan was born in Toledo, Ohio, and worked as a dishwasher, night watchman and janitor there. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps reserve, and graduated from the Universities of Toledo and Chicago.

A lifelong boxing fan, he sparred in enough gyms to earn two detached retinas. At present, he is completing a novel, Champions, about boxers and comics. He compiled the following list of Best Boxing Novels for the Book Serf:

1. The Harder They Fall, Budd Schulberg
In this fictional portrayal of the shameful history of Primo Carnera the mob fabricates a heavyweight challenger, Toro Molinos, and then sacrifices him in a title match to clean up on bets. A novel justifiably praised by playwright Arthur Miller and former heavyweight champ Gene Tunney.

2. Fat City, Leonard Gardner
A grim and gritty portrayal of the losers in the world of boxing. Boxer Billy Tully is the squared circle’s everyman, a perpetual adolescent hooked on self-punishment and fantasies of fame and success. The writing is on the mark, painful and relentless.

3. The Professional, W.C. Heinz
An accurate, flatly-told, Hemingway (“Fifty Grand”) style tale of a fighter heading into a big fight, it captures the tedium of training, the obsession with money, the denial of limitations and the decline of a dream into a job.

4. My Father’s Fighter, Ronald K. Fried
When his father dies, Vincent Rosen, a mid-30s English teacher at an exclusive high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan inherits a hypochondriac light heavyweight named “Big” Mickey Davis and worlds collide. Beneath the dark comedy and social satire lurks a clear-eyed but not hard-hearted requiem for the light-heavyweight soul.

5. The Circle Home, Edward Hoagland
Down and out fighter Denny Kelly pursues illusory prizefighting fame in Boston and New York but finally has the sense to pack it in and come home. Heavy on atmosphere, similar to Fat City in plot but quite different in setting. Hoagland is a fine writer.

Honorable Mention:

The Devil’s Stocking, Nelson Algren
His last novel, based on the life of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, follows boxer Ruby Calhoun in his ring, legal and prison battles. Not as solid as his earlier work, the novel still has power. As Hemingway put it: Algren “is a man you should not read if you cannot take a punch.”

Questionable Status:

Cashel Byron’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw
Although playwright/novelist Shaw was a major writer and a man who acquitted himself well in the ring, this novel seems a long slog through a swamp of language. Maybe its perennial appearance on best boxing fiction lists comes from a need to add a great man of letters to the roster, or from laziness in not rereading it. For my money Major Barbara KO’s Cashel Byron any day of the week.

For more information: To learn more about Robert Flanagan and to read excerpts or to buy his books, visit http://www.robertflanagan.com/

Next week: Best Short Stories About Boxing

Becoming Jane Eyre ...

2010-01-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler (Penguin, $15)

In the mid-1850s, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a letter to his publisher to complain that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash -- and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

Across the Atlantic ocean, men were just as vehemently opposed to women taking pen in hand, witness a letter the English poet Robert Southey sent to Charlotte Bronte in 1837 that praised her talent but warned, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life."

Fortunately for the world of books, Bronte promptly dismissed Southey's admonition and went on to pen Jane Eyre, the creating of which so interested novelist Sheila Kohler that she took up her own pen (OK, her own computer) and imagined what might have inspired Bronte to write her classic novel.

The result is the work of historical fiction, Becoming Jane Eyre.

Book Serf: I get the feeling that your choice of the word "scribbling" throughout Becoming Jane Eyre was not accidental. Can you give me the background behind that choice and why you used it more than once in the context of Charlotte, Anne and Emily?

Sheila Kohler: I think the word is often used from the father's point of view and in his mind. I don't think he took his daughters' work very seriously -- indeed, men at that time seldom did. Southey, the poet laureate, of course, told Charlotte that writing was not a business for women. It was only when the father was confronted by the good reviews Charlotte received that he became increasingly the proud papa. Often people do respond more to a review than the book, itself!

BS: In much of the historical fiction I've read it is impossible to escape the author's research. We are bombarded with facts about the era in question. You don't do that. You use period information sparingly. How did you decide what to put in, what to leave out?

SK: I think that we always have to make a choice, obviously. We don't know all, and we can't and write all we know. There were parts of the lives of the Bronte girls that interested me particularly because to some extent they reflected moments from my own: I was particularly interested in Charlotte's relationship with her professor in Belgium and his influence on her work, as I have studied with professors, of course , who have had a profound influence on me, as well as doing a lot of teaching myself.

I was also interested particularly in Charlotte 's relationship with her sisters, and their tragic deaths. I lost a beloved sister myself when she was 39, and I have written a great deal about that. I have three daughters, too, and one of them a novelist, with whom I have often shared my work. They have been a huge help to me as I imagine the Bronte sisters were to one another: that image of them walking around the dining room table in the dark "making up" is such a vivid one.

BS: How faithful were you to the facts as you knew them?

SK: J.M. Coetzee once said to me while talking about writing an historical novel, "Don't stay too close to the truth." I think I found that helpful and liberating. Without falsifying the facts, obviously, I tried to allow myself a certain liberty on the page. In a way one uses these distant lives as a sort of screen, a middle ground which enables one to write one's own life and hopefully the reader, too, to find parts of him or herself in the text.

BS: I finished Becoming Jane Eyre more than a week ago and yet still I hear the echo down a distant corridor in my mind of the "scratching of a pencil against the page." I love that something audible is the first image you conjure. Do you think a reader in, say, 2175 will look back at the sound of the clacking of a keyboard and find it as romantic as we find the sound of pencil on page?

SK: Actually I do write on a computer but I also use pencils often, to tell you the truth, to correct student work. I'm not at all sure why that was the first image except that, of course, Patrick, the father, was blind at that point, in the dark with only his ears and his hands to capture any life around him. I do also have a middle daughter who is deaf -- so sound, words and their function has been very important in our lives.

Who knows why the book starts there, except that I did want to try and fathom how "Jane Eyre" came into life, and that seemed like the first act, the beginning.

BS: This book is, naturally, told from the point of view of a woman or women. One might say it is even for women. A rhetorical question: what is in Becoming Jane Eyre for a man? Similarly, the book takes place long ago. Things have changed dramatically. Women don't have to use pseudonyms to write, for instance. What can a contemporary woman take away from the story of the Brontes and their struggles?

SK: Ah! What good questions you ask! I think that life is very difficult at any period and for men (and we do have Patrick Bronte who starts the book and ends it) and for women, and what I tried to do here was to express that struggle, the bravery of these particular women, but also of all humanity.

I wanted to call the book, No Coward Soul from a poem by Emily Bronte that you may know, one that Emily Dickinson had recited at her death. My wise publisher and editor thought otherwise, and I am grateful, but I suppose I was so impressed by the struggle that these lonely women had in that isolated place and with so little help from the outside world, with so little money and so little power, and yet they went on as long as they could, writing, doing their housework, trying to be good Christians or what they conceived of as good Christians.

I hoped, perhaps, that my words might help others who are struggling onwards in their difficult lives, if only as a momentary respite.

BS: Maybe this is the question I should have asked instead of the previous one: What drew you to the story of the Brontes? You mention in the short interview at the end of your book the quote, "novels come out of the shortcomings of history." Which shortcomings did you identify that you needed to address in Becoming Jane Eyre?

SK: I found a sentence in Lyndall Gordon's biography of Charlotte Bronte where she says that no one knows what happened in that dark room as Charlotte sat by her father's bed, after he had his cataracts removed, and began her great book. It made me want to find out why that situation and that moment in her life brought forth Jane Eyre.

I think novels do come from the questions we might want answered and try to answer on the page. Also, an aunt read me the start of Jane Eyre when I was very young, seven or so, and had just lost my own father and the scene in the red room made a tremendous impression on me. I think some of my desire to write came from that moment at seven when I heard those words read aloud, was equally terrified, fearing the presence of my father's ghost in the room.

BS: You use the phrase early in your novel, "words a woman could not afford to use with a man." We don't have the same sorts of conventions that an Englishman or Englishwoman would have had during the 1840s and 1850s. And yet so much of life is shaped not by what is said but by what can't be said. Can you discuss those conventions, the societal strictures that lead to so much great art?

SK: There are still, of course, many things that we cannot say to one another. There always will be. In a way, perhaps, that is where art comes from, it seems to me, our inability to say things directly to one another, things that are then expressed in other ways on the page.

BS: You're interested in the life of the writer, aren't you? About a woman who is most at home "in her own company." Is that one of the things you wanted to explore in your novel?

SK: Yes, indeed, and thank you for reading my book so carefully. I think I was interested in exploring, too, the links between our lives and our work, such subtle ones. After my first book came out my husband and I went out to dinner and our hostess, who had read the book, politely asked, "How much of it is true?"

My husband and I both answered at once and immediately but he said, "Every word," and I said, "Not one word." In a way we were both right!

BS: Proust (I think) said a work of art is never "finished, only abandoned." Did you finish or abandon Becoming Jane Eyre?

SK: Oh, gosh, I suppose I would say one writes and rewrites and rewrites until one grows too tired of the text to rewrite again -- perhaps that's what Proust meant by abandoned.

A Russian titan revealed ...

2010-01-25T17:59:00.000-08:00

Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler (NY Review of Books, $14.95)

When the KGB raided the apartment of Soviet writer Vasily Grossman after he submitted to the authorities his master work, Life and Fate, the secret police confiscated manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks and even the typewriter ribbons used in its production.
At the time – sometime in late 1959 or early 1960 – a representative of the Soviet government told Grossman his novel (decades later described by Le Monde as the “the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century”) could not be published in the Soviet Union for at least 200 hundred years.
Grossman died in 1964 never knowing if his stories and novels would ever be published.
The New York Review of Books recently published a translation of Grossman's final novel, Everything Flows, a complex and compelling denunciation of totalitarianism translated by Robert Chandler.
Book Serf: When one considers the obstacles to publishing in the Soviet Union at the time, does it border on the miraculous that we have anything from Vasily Grossman let alone books as powerful and deathless as Life and Fate and Everything Flows?
Robert Chandler: In one sense: Yes. During the War, Grossman was often called ‘Lucky Grossman,’ because of the number of occasions that he narrowly escaped death. There was one occasion, for example, when a grenade landed between his feet – and did not explode. And Grossman was certainly lucky that Stalin died in March 1953 – otherwise he might well have been executed during the anti-Jewish campaign that was then gathering momentum. But in another sense: No. The Soviet Union was a society that attached great importance to the written word. There is a great deal of fine work – Bulgakov’s novels, Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, Mandelstam’s poetry, most of Platonov’s longer works – that had to wait anything from 30 to 60 years before being published. In each of these cases, the mansucripts were carefully preserved. Bulgakov, Platonov and Mandelstam were fortunate in that their widows were devoted, tenacious and long-lived. Krzhizhanovsky’s lover, on the other hand, entrusted his manuscripts to the State Literary Archive, which took equally good care of them.
BS: This is a rhetorical question: The Berlin Wall is down and the Soviet Union no longer exists as it once did. Why should contemporary readers care about Grossman?
RC: Freedom always has its enemies, in every society. The best answer is that given by a Gulag survivor by the name of Yelena Vladimirova: I write in the name of the living That they, in turn, may not stand In a silent, submissive crowd By the dark gates of some camp.These lines were used as an epigraph to Till my Tale is Told, a collection of women’s memoirs of the Gulag. The translation is by John Crowfoot.
BS: Everything Flows was left unfinished. But as the novel comes to its truncated end, Ivan Grigoryevich is in the midst of an epic philosophical debate between a Hegelian view of history and rationality and a more pessimistic view of chaos espoused by his cellmate. On which side do you think Grossman eventually fell? Was he at heart an optimist or a pessimist about human beings?
RC: Hard to say. I am certain that Grossman thought of himself as an optimist, someone who believed that all life – including human life – was bound to develop towards a greater degree of freedom. On the other hand, the arguments Grossman gives to Ivan’s pessimistic cellmate are extremely powerful ones. In this respect Grossman has something in common with Dostoevsky, a passionate believer who stated the case for atheism as powerfully as it has ever been stated.
BS: At times I felt as I was reading Everything Flows that I'd read my way out of a novel and into a work of history. I decided that if Everything Flows was indeed a work of history, that it was a superb and artful work of history. Does it matter what we call different sections of Everything Flows, history or fiction?
RC: No, I don’t think it matters. Even in the 1940s Grossman was writing works that blur different genres. In a letter that he wrote to his mother in 1950, nine years after she was shot by the Nazis, he says, ‘I knew that you were no more. But I did not know what a terrible death you had died; I learned about this only when I came to Berdichev and questioned people about the massacre that took place on 15 September 1941. I have tried dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times to imagine how you died, how you walked to your death.’ Grossman means what he says. He did everything in his power to imagine how his mother died. He retraced her last steps, he carried out interviews, and he used his imagination. The chapter from Life and Fate that has become known as ‘The Last Letter’, the article ‘The Murder of the Jews in Berdichev’ (included in A Writer at War) and the short story ‘The Old Teacher’ (to be included in The Road – our next collection of Grossman’s writings) are all borne of the same impulse. If we accept Coleridge’s definition of Imagination as ‘the power to disimprison the soul of fact,’ then they are all born of disciplined, passionate imagination. And so is Grossman’s 1944 article about Treblinka. And his evocation, in Everything Flows, of Lenin.
BS: Faulkner said that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. He was writing about the South. But he could just as easily have been talking about Russia, yes?
RC: Grossman’s passionate good sense is more needed in Russia than ever. Unfortunately, he is not widely read in Russia today. He is more popular throughout the English-speaking world and in most other European countries. Worst of all, it may well be that his relative lack of popularity has come about not in spite of, but because of, his good sense. In Putin’s Russia, most people do not want to be told that there was little to choose between Nazism and Stalinism.
Russian nationalists are even more offended by Grossman’s brilliant deconstruction, in Everything Flows, of the myth of the Russian soul. In order to spare themselves the pain of having to attend to Grossman’s analysis, Russian nationalists – entirely without justification – classify Grossman as a Russophobe. The general prevalence of antisemitism makes it easy for them to do this.
BS: Grossman is not a polemicist is he?
RC: Grossman wrote a first draft of Everything Flows in 1955. Between 1961 and 1964 Grossman returned to the novel and inserted a great deal of new material. The Lenin chapters were the last to be written. In a sense these chapters are very polemical indeed. It was permissible in the early 1960s to attack Stalin, but Lenin was still on his pedestal. It is impossible even to imagine the book being published during Grossman’s lifetime - the Lenin chapters would have been far too shocking.
Nevertheless, I agree with my editor, Edwin Frank, who wrote to me after first reading our translation, ‘The Lenin section seems to me not so much a furious denunciation as the outline of a tragedy, Grossman's as much as the Soviet Union's.’ It is entirely possible that Grossman’s original intended simply to attack Lenin but that his intelligence and compassion proved too great. Rather than being the object of a polemic, Grossman’s Lenin becomes a tragic hero.
BS: Anna spends a great deal of time discussing her role as an activist during the Great Famine. That section is followed by a three-page chapter describing the deaths of a mother, father and child. Those three pages are harrowing. Can you discuss Grossman as an artist as opposed to strictly an historian or witness?
RC: Before translating Grossman’s chapters about the Terror Famine, I read Robert Conquest’s fine historical work about this period, The Harvest of Sorrow. Conquest often quotes from Grossman, and he also quotes from a large number of Ukrainian memoirs by survivors of the famine. Grossman and these memoirists write in a similarly bare, factual style and they say essentially the same things – and yet I could always immediately recognize which passages were by Grossman and which were by other people. Somehow Grossman’s selection of details was always more vivid.
BS: Is there anything else about Grossman and Everything Flows that contemporary readers should know about but that I've failed to bring up?
RC: The qualities of Everything Flows and the stories Grossman wrote in his last few years show up especially clearly in comparison with the stories he was writing in the 1950s. 'Tiergarten' (1953-55) is an interesting but not entirely successful story set in a Berlin zoo during the very last days of the war. The story contains perceptive observations about the nature of totalitarianism and the importance of freedom, but these observations are repetitive and ponderous. It is as if Grossman is himself like a caged animal, going over the same ground again and again, unable to break out into the artistic freedom he longs for.
His last works, however, not only extol freedom but also embody freedom. His thinking is complex, and it again and again moves in an unexpected direction. The subject matter is, in many cases, grim, but the liveliness of Grossman’s intelligence makes these works surprisingly heartening. It is also worth saying that Everything Flows is more than a testimony. It is a fine and important testimony, but it is also a subtle examination of the difficulty of testifying. Anna’s lucid account of her involvement, as a low-level Party activist, in the Terror Famine is deeply moving, but Nikolay’s confusion, the lies and equivocations he comes out with in order to avoid speaking truthfully about his own past are no less memorable.

Robert Chandler writes at length about Vasily Grossman at: http://goodbooksguide.blogspot.com/2008/12/robert-chandler-on-vasily-grossman.html

An interview with Robert Chandler about his translations of Andrey Platanov can be found here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/10/22/071022on_onlineonly_platonov

Welcome to Book Serf

2010-01-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

Welcome to The Book Serf.
I'm excited to get started.
I was going to call this blog The Eucharist of World Literature, after a quote by Saul Bellow, but I thought it might offend Jews and Muslims. Maybe it would even offend Catholics. So I settled on The Book Serf, a nice little play on words (surf and serf) because I am attached to books in the same way serfs were attached to the land. I am, happily, in servitude to books. And in turn, like feudal lords, books sustain me.
Which brings me back to Holy Communion.
In an interview with The Bostonian, Bellow discussed acquiring a “trained sensibility” as a reader, which could only be done, he argued, by taking “certain masterpieces into yourself as if they were communion wafers.”
He continued, “If you don't give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven't got anything but a show of culture. It has no reality whatever. It's an acceptable challenge to internalize all of these great things, all of this marvelous poetry. When you've done that, you've been shaped from within by these books and these writers.”
To which I say, Amen.
At the Book Serf, we (I'll be assisted by an august cadre of contributors) will write about books we love, regardless of their popularity. We'll be as likely to write about an obscure novelist or poet, or about a reissue of a classic, or about a new small press, as we'll be to weigh in on the latest Stephen King tome.
In fact, we'll probably just skip the latest Stephen King tome altogether.
In a former life, I was the books editor at The Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio. In that role, I had the good fortune to talk to hundreds of authors, including our era's great literary curmudgeon, Harold Bloom, he of the disdain for J.K. Rowling and all things Harry Potter.
When I interviewed him in December of 2001, Bloom told me, “Stephen King reviewed the last Harry Potter book for The New York Times Book Review. And he ended his review by saying, 'This is a great book, and it's absolutely wonderful that kids will read it by the millions.' He said that the very best things about the book is, if kids read Harry Potter at 9 and 10 and 11, then when they're 12 and 13 and 14 they'll be ready to read Stephen King.'
“And he's dead right: After they've learned how to read Harry Potter, they'll be ready to read Stephen King; that's what they'll be good for. They will graduate from Harry Potter to Stephen King.
“I rest my case.”
In his book, How to Read and Why (another potential blog named deemed too pretentious!) Bloom suggested a different path from Rowling to King, “to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”