Ibsen's Solness, John Lahr's Tennessee Williams, and Morrissey's Morrissey: The Terrible Cost of Greatness

Jonathan Demme's 2013 film of Andre Gregory's stage production of A Master Builder, starring Wallace Shawn as Solness (the elderly architect of the title), Julie Hagerty as his wife, Aline, and Lisa Joyce as Hilde Wangel, reminded me both of how great and of how awful theatre can be. Ibsen's 1892 play is the real star, retaining its fascination and black humour despite the production, the shaky-cam close-ups, the bizarre performances, the awkward dialogue of Shawn's adaptation (although it's no awkwarder than any of the other Ibsen translations I've read), and a totally unnecessary framing device that tries to contain the play's elements of heightened reality and account for its mutually contradictory perspectives by making Hilde Wangel's visit into a fantasy of Solness's dying moments.

There isn't much in the way of dramatic action in Ibsen's play, which consists of a bunch of people talking about incidents from the past that they're fixated on, and which the two people involved remember, or perceive, drastically differently. The other plot, the only thing faintly resembling conventional stage action, involves Solness trying to prevent the draughtsman who works from him from getting married and starting his own career as an architect, because Solness wants to suppress all competition, especially from youth.

Ibsen's Freakish Comedy

The first thing that threw me off (even before I saw the film, actually), was the casting of 69-year-old Wallace Shawn, who looks like he's ready to play Gollum without makeup, as Solness, whom I'd always pictured as a broad-chested, booming, blustery type. But fine, casting against type, fine: there's no reason a small, homely man can't be charismatic. (Solness is supposed to strike women as being able to control their souls.) In presence as well as physical appearance, however, the Ibsen character Shawn seems best-suited to play is Judge Brack, the sleazy blackmailer, in Hedda Gabler – or better yet, Hedda's husband Tesman, the befuddled minor historian.

It's not surprising, however, that a serious theatre artist such as Shawn would be uninterested in those parts, and his interpretation of Solness is, anyway, sensitive. The film and the interpretation of the play behind it are a labour of love: about 14 years prior to Demme's filming of the production, Shawn adapted the play after Gregory brought it to his attention, and afterwards they performed it occasionally for friends. In one of the few positive reviews of the film, in Film Comment, Jonathan Romney defends the framing device, and simultaneously, the casting of Shawn as Solness, although he doesn't explain how Solness is still able to control Kaia.

As the doubtless difficult-to-play Hilde, who is made up of sharply contradictory qualities and is part-symbol, part-unearthly apparition, Lisa Joyce is luminous and appropriately overwhelming, but spends most of the performance on the verge of tears or hysterical laughter, which is distracting. Hilde, true, is yet another proto-Manic Pixie Dream (or Nightmare) Girl, but Joyce takes the “manic” part a bit too literally. Hilde, a role I'd itched to play in my early 20s (not that I'm an actress, but you've got to be dead not to want to play Hilde Wangel in your early 20s and Hedda Gabler in your late 20s), calls for the uncanny quality of an actress like Jennifer Jones, and I also pictured her as much brasher and – except at crucial moments, where the force of her need to believe in him gets the better of her – as in control of every exchange with Solness.

The Master Builder (as the play is usually referred to in English) is, inescapably, about the attraction between a woman in her early 20s and a man who's at least in his 50s. (Apparently the relationship between Solness and Hilde was inspired by Ibsen's relationship with an 18-year-old homewrecking minx whom he met when he was 61.) This ought to be annoying for a female viewer, but one of its pleasures for me even now, at 39, is the way it depicts a comfortably equal relationship between a young woman armed with only her preternatural self-possession and a much older, powerful man. This is in part, I think, because the uncanny Hilde is removed from the social realm, unlike Solness's bookkeeper Kaia, who is completely dominated by him. But it's a sort of side-shoot of the tradition in Anglo-American literature that Harold Bloom memorably referred to as “Heroines of the Protestant Will” and that accounts for how Elizabeth Bennet can hold her own with Darcy – and even refuse his marriage proposal. (Pride and Prejudice has been popularly commemorated as the story of a woman who's desperate to get married, whereas in fact, although Elizabeth has much more pressing reasons to get married than Bridget Jones, she turns down two marriage proposals.)

Elizabeth and Darcy never talked in this much depth, though – or about these kinds of racy topics. To begin with, the film makes Hilde 12 years old when she had an encounter with Solness in which she imagined him kissing her and promising to return when she's grown to abduct her and, implicitly, ravage her. The Wikipedia entry on The Master Builder, on the other hand, makes her 14, which is very slightly more comfortable for a modern audience. I'm not sure which is true to the original, or why the Gregory production would make her younger – although of course 12-year-old girls have sexual fantasies, which is the entire reason for V. C. Andrews. It's possible that a contemporary, pre-Freudian (barely) audience would have rationalized Hilde's fantasy as innocent, whether she was 12 or 14, but I'm pretty sure Ibsen thought it was weird (Solness, after all, has to be prompted to even remember that he did such a thing – or prompted to share the fantasy).

Speaking of Andrews, later Hilde confesses to rape fantasies, couched in the language of Norse mythology – a return to the original, shared fantasy between them in which the (fully civilized and incapable of rape) Solness carries her off like a repulsive troll, or, in this version, a triumphant Viking. It's evident from the rest of the play that Hilde, who freely contemplates and (to Solness, anyway) expresses her perverse desires, identifies even more with the raptor than with his prey. One of the central questions of the play is whether modern man (or woman) has a sufficiently “robust conscience” to be able to realize and seize their desires, whatever the cost to others. Solness is suffering from two neurotic fears: on the one hand, fear of the future, or youth, of which Hilde is the half-enrapturing, half-terrifying symbol; on the other hand, fear of the events of the past, which, he believes, led him to his present position of good fortune, of great social and creative power. Yet he's unable to enjoy that good fortune for even a moment, due to his guilt over its sources and the fear of losing it that stems from that guilt. 

Another question of the play is whether he's right to feel guilty about past actions and wishes or whether what he can't bear is simply the fact of being singled out by fortune for success, and that is the reason for his guilt, paranoia, and delusions. Ibsen was a contemporary of Nietzsche and a direct anticipator of Freud (whose first major work, Studies in Hysteria, was published in 1895), and it never showed more than in this play.

By directing the actors to act, at moments (such as a scene in a kitchen between husband, wife, and Hilde), in stylized, Expressionistic ways that wouldn't be out of place in a David Lynch movie, Gregory and Demme miss the opportunity to contrast the repressed, middle-class surface of the play's world with the forbidden, outlandish desires of the characters, which belong instead to an amoral world of romance, and suggests a lack of confidence in the already adequate bizarreness of the material, which would probably be best served by being presented in as direct and unshowy a manner as possible. A single, brief scene, perhaps the strangest and most devastating (and freakishly comic) of the play, between Hilde and Aline, is acted and filmed in such an unshowy way, to its advantage. 

Oddly, in interviews Shawn speaks of the “naturalism” of the performance approach, in contrast to big-stage theatre performances, which I guess goes to show you the difference between what theatre people and regular people think is “natural.” He has, however, mentioned Ibsen's humour, and his delivery of Solness's line about his marriage right after this scene shows that he has an excellent grasp of that aspect of the writer. Ibsen, like Tennessee Williams, is nothing at all without his humour.

Mad Pilgrimage of the Word

The central theme of The Master Builder, the terrible cost of doing “the impossible,” transcending human and one's own normal limits and achieving greatness, came to mind while I was listening to the most recent audio books I've purchased: Morrissey's Autobiography and John Lahr's mammoth new biography of Tennessee Williams (the hardcover edition is 736 freaking pages, apparently), Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. As the title of Lahr's biography suggests, for two major 20^th century artists who upset a lot of people with their sexuality, Williams and the famously “celibate” Morrissey could not be further apart, sexually. However, Mad Pilgrimage turns out to have extremely little to do with sex, and even less to do with the kind of ecstatic engagement in pleasure that the phrase evokes. Instead, it's a relentless, monotonous, depressing slog through the failure after failure – sometimes critical, sometimes commercial, usually both, and in one famous case (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), personal – that, as it appears, constituted the vast majority of Williams's career as a playwright.

Full disclosure: between them, Williams and Lahr all but ruined my life. Williams's reputation, and A Streetcar Named Desire, and Lahr's biography of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears (which became the basis for the Stephen Frears movie starring Gary Oldman), were the main things that made me, as a teenager, want to become a playwright. And in fact I became a playwright as a teenager, although that was no one's fault but my own, and my first play to be produced was about Orton, for which I used the only biographical material available at the time, Lahr's biography and Orton's Lahr-edited published diaries.

I say “ruined my life” because my playwriting career didn't last, and, for its brief duration (about seven years – which, even more depressingly, a playwright friend who's managed to keep going for decades later told me is about the average duration of a Canadian playwriting career), was characterized, despite considerable excitement over that first play, by agonies of self-doubt and everybody else doubting me, too. If only I'd had Lahr's biography of Williams to inform me that that's what a successful playwriting career looks like. I probably still would have given it up, but out of dread, not defeat. In fact, Williams's experience seemingly only differed from mine in its magnitude and duration (give or take some wealth and fame). Skipping almost all of his apprentice years and skimming his childhood, Lahr's volume more-or-less begins with the original Broadway productions that established Williams as the greatest American playwright of the 20^th century (which, since I haven't heard a peep out of American theatre since Kushner's angel plays at the end of that century, probably means the greatest American playwright, period), The Glass Menagerie in 1945-46, and Streetcar in 1947-49. They are dealt with swiftly, with hundreds of pages and decades of life to go and hardly a single ray of hope in any of them.

What emerges is that thanks to the one-two punch of these plays and legendary productions, Williams was permanently crowned the greatest living American playwright, only for critics, collaborators, and he himself to believe that he could never write anything comparable again. He suffered the mindfuck – the punishment doled out to any writer who has the misfortune of writing something well-liked early in their career – of being continually told that he was “great” while also being told that nothing he wrote was any good. And yet he went on writing, decade after decade. His last successful commercially successful Broadway production was in 1961 (Night of Iguana), and it seems like he only managed to keep his Broadway career going for that long by clinging to Elia Kazan, but he went on writing until his death in 1983. Lahr makes it sound like Williams was already feeling insecure and outdated a year after the production of Streetcar closed, and had already started to believe that his creative power was waning. That turns out to be Lahr's favourite note (like Williams's, possibly), and he returns to it again and again despite the fact that Williams still had decades of plays left in him, all of which Lahr treats respectfully.

So... what's the truth? Or at least: what's Lahr's position? Was Williams in fact, as contemporary critics thought, never as good again as in his early plays? Or was he hounded literally to death by homophobic, Oedipal critics while heroically producing a vast, rich body of work that still awaits reassessment, at the lifelong cost of a single moment's peace of mind? Lahr seems to want to have it both ways. (The virtues and flaws of the 12-years-in-the-making book are, obviously, not fully covered here: it has been well-received, but Sarah Churchwell, in The Guardian, gives intelligent consideration to some of its other limitations, such as a time-capsule version of Freudianism.)

Writers and Happiness

I have to wonder if Lahr's presentation of Williams's life is really unusually bleak, or whether my perspective has shifted enormously since I was a teenager devouring biographies of writers (and often turning them into plays). My most beloved biographies from that period (I have read none as an adult: one of the last I purchased, the 1997 trade paperback edition of Lyle Leverich's Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams – a sort of companion piece to Lahr's book, as explained in the Preface to the latter – sat on various bookshelves for years, barely touched), Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, Gerald Clarke's Capote, Millicent Dillon's A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, and Prick Up Your Ears, were hardly portraits of happiness.

The narratives portrayed, however, were ones in which the writers suffered because they were demon-haunted: undone, sooner or later, by an unhappy childhood, mysterious neuroses, or a self-destructive streak. That only made them seem like glamourous, romantic figures, and seemed like a small price to pay for having a great writer's power and being admired with such intensity. Although Williams has as much of a reputation for demon-hauntedness as any writer, Lahr hardly gives any attention to those demons (which led to alcoholism and drug addiction, which in turn led to increasingly erratic behaviour – all touched on by Lahr in passing), so focused is he on the unending horror of the work's reception – by agents, directors, producers, actors, critics, and the public. 

Williams comes across as a man who, despite at least one close, long-term relationship, really had no life outside of his work, and no peace within it. And not because of any psychological blocks preventing him from doing the work: Williams was no Jane Bowles or Truman Capote, and although he could have a hard time shaping his plays (like any playwright), he was prolific to the end of his life, and enjoyed the work enough to keep doing it after critics started literally telling him to shut up. His lack of peace had to do with the great desire to be successful that was probably, as much as anything, responsible for the success that he did have, and which – as in the fascinating story Lahr tells about his battles with Kazan over Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – filled him with irrational guilt, since he also wanted to be a great artist, and felt that the two desires were in conflict.

I did have one example before me as a teenager of a writer who was famous, well-regarded, prolific, long-lived, and also seemingly well-adjusted, and that was Colette, so there's no rule about writers having to be miserable. It's hard to imagine, however, that anyone could read, or listen to, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, anyway, and come away with the idea that the life of a great and famous writer is something to aspire to. But probably as a teenager I would have found a way to convince myself that it was.

Morrissey's Poison Paeons

Morrissey has also suffered the fate of critics much preferring his early work to his later. I haven't read Williams's late plays (that's a project for another year... or maybe another decade), but I have listened to all of Morrissey's albums since his 2004 comeback at least once, and my feelings about them are most generously captured by Stephen Troussé's remark in a review of the dismal 2009 B-side compilation, Swords: “For a long time now, he's been a great pop star first, a great singer second, and a lyric writer somewhere around fourth or fifth.”

Morrissey's creative power as a writer really does seem to have waned. Yet, as he has often explained, he only exists when he's performing, and he appears to be too proud, or too bored, to rest on his back catalogue, and also to still have a lot to say, even if it's no longer being said in an especially compelling way – and so the albums continue to come out, although it seems as though hardly anyone is still listening. But as the sales of Autobiography have proved, the world is still interested in Morrissey, even if it's not especially interested in Morrissey's current or recent work.

Since it was not released in a digital edition, I bought a paperback copy of Autobiography when it first came out. I think I even had to have it shipped from the States. I gave up on reading it in frustration, however, when I discovered that Morrissey, an undisciplined autodidact, constantly misused words, and that Penguin Classics had not given enough of a shit to properly edit him. Needless to say, this discovery did not reflect well on either of them.

However, in audio version, David Morrissey's vocal performance glides over mere lapses in sense and carries you along on the gist, and anyway who listens to every sentence of an audio book. As many reviewers have noted, the best part of the book is the recounting of Morrissey's formative years (which does not include any close look at his home life: I'm not even sure if he mentions his parents' divorce, or if he does it's in passing). We hear about struggles with authority figures, witness Morrissey's fascination with acts of violence by human beings (i.e. working-class men) and chance (e.g. car crashes), and come along for the ride as he discovers the salvational qualities of pop music, especially in the form of The New York Dolls, David Bowie, and Patti Smith. Morrissey is at his best as a prose writer when penning – admittedly barely comprehensible, syntactically or emotionally, so ambivalent and intense are they – poisonous paeons to the idols and influences of his youth, proving that if he had not been the best pop lyricist of his generation, as well as one of the great pop stars of all time, he would have been an excitingly original pop culture critic.

Just as Mad Pilgrimage zips past Menagerie and Streetcar, Autobiography refuses to linger on The Smiths, and what Morrissey lingers on about those years are his struggles with management and his surprising obsession with chart positions. Then we're on to the rather anti-climactic, and rather longer, rest of his life. To be sure, there's a period in the late 80s and early 90s, when his relationship with the British music press is already, but not exclusively, combative, where, if anything, his fame peaks and his relationship with his audience deepens: when he's surprised by a sudden surge of eroticism in his male fan's reactions to him at shows; when he breaks The Beatles' record for selling out the Hollywood Bowl in the shortest amount of time.

What emerges from Autobiography as a whole, however, is the picture of a gifted, unusual man who defied the odds and became a pop star to avoid the fate of being entombed upon entering adulthood as a working-class male of unspectacular academic ability, but who, in his 50s, is deeply embittered, paranoid, and possibly delusional: about the break-up of The Smiths; about the court case successfully brought against him by The Smiths' drummer, Mike Joyce; about all of the critics and journalists who, he believes, have printed lies about him and tried to destroy him; about the critics and journalists and managers and record companies whose malice and incompetence prevented The Smiths from being more successful, and prevent him, now, from being successful.

It's a personality not a lot different from the one glimpsed at moments in Mad Pilgrimage, when Lahr – in between tales of famous actresses' bad behavior, critics' viciousness, boyfriends' violence or whininess, and silly female literary executors' avarice and ignorance – lets us see what an unpleasant person Williams, too, often was to friends and collaborators. For example, when Kazan complained to Williams in a letter about Williams's repeated blaming of him in the press for the altered ending of Cat, when in fact Kazan gave him a chance to reinstate his original ending before the Broadway opening, I thought of a review of Autobiography in Rolling Stone, in which Rob Sheffield, clearly a fan, finds the sense of humour that one needs to admire the book's thorny merits while objecting that, contra Moz, of course Rolling Stone covered The Smiths in the 1980s, and helped the band a great deal in doing so. In other words, like Williams, Morrissey is a paranoid and self-exculpating fantasist, and nothing he has to say can necessarily be believed.

The change in my perspective is that whereas once I thought that being a great writer was the highest form of happiness, and that therefore, even if a particular great writer was unhappy (and even though many famous writers appeared to have a tendency to be tragically so), that unhappiness was, in the end, superficial; now it seems obvious to me, and yet somehow still shocking, that the ability to write well does not bestow happiness upon one. Perhaps it would, if one could always be in critical favour. But if you're lucky enough to write something that means a lot to a few people, or one of the extremely few who are lucky enough to write something that means a lot to an entire culture, it's human nature for critics to want you to keep writing the same thing over and over, just as it's human nature for you to change, and to want to change; and, after a while of that, it's human nature for critics to then complain that you're repeating yourself, because they see that the culture's changed, or they want new writers of your stature to emerge and see you as Oedipally blocking the way.

Until youth comes knocking at the door. 

Girls, Season One: Intimations of Reality

“Act like my life is real. Because my life is real.” This line from Lena Dunham's Girls, delivered by a young man to the girlfriend who's broken his heart and then seduced him into getting back together, while she's straddling him in bed, is not a good example of realistic dialogue, but it is thematically central to the show. The white, middle-class, liberals arts-educated modern Emma Woodhouses of Girls, who've reached their 20s with very little to distress or vex them, are monsters of narcissism, which the show plays for laughs and shock except in the rare, differently shocking moments when they and the viewer become momentarily aware of another (usually male) person's reality. The girls of Girls are so selfish, competitive, and critical in their friendships and so obsessed with maintaining the upper hand in their interactions with men that it's difficult to feel much sympathy when things go wrong for them, but if we can't feel it for them, we can occasionally feel it for their victims.

Not that the recognition of another person's reality always takes the form, in Girls, of a flash of empathy from someone whose life you've been treating like a game. Something similar occurs when Jessa, the most unapologetic predatory sociopath of the group, suddenly decides not to go through with seducing the married man she's been babysitting for, although her recognition that his life and his wife and children's lives are real is preceded by a different kind of recognition of his reality: her reaction of revulsion when he starts sobbing on her shoulder, overwrought from their adventurous evening, in the course of which she got him beat up. Dunham's acute interest in and fascinating treatment of sex is what distinguishes her most clearly from bleak, self-conscious male comedians she resembles, like Woody Allen, Larry David, and Louis C.K., and one of the ways in which sex permeates Girls is that the characters are (like their creator) pornographic fantasists who, however, are constantly confronted by a reality that does not perfectly assume the shape of their desire. So Hannah offers to fuck the boss who's been groping her only to have him demur and point out that he's a married man; or a venture capitalist picks up Marnie and Jessa in a bar and persuades them to come back his apartment, only to have them refuse to let him join in when they start making out.

The fabric of Dunham's universe is made up of this constant tension between the characters' fantasies and the stubbornly independent existence of other people, their lives, and their contrary wills. It doesn't matter whether your boyfriend is peeing on you in the shower in a mistaken belief that you'll find it funny instead of a bizarre violation, which happens to Hannah in one scene, or whether he's loving you when you're not ready to be loved. The latter situation occasions an hilarious exchange where Hannah tells her victim, as a lame excuse for ducking out of living with him, “I didn't think you were into that,” and he replies sarcastically, “Into what? Love?” Love can be a bizarre violation in the universe of Girls. Hannah might want it in theory, but she doesn't necessarily want the responsibility that goes with it, the heaviest part of which might be the responsibility to love back.

The girls of Girls veer between shrinking from a reality that's too demanding or too unresponsive and trying desperately to make their lives more real to themselves. To that end, Jessa, realizing that her career as a femme fatale is a dead end, suddenly gets married to the “venture capitalist,” whom we last saw flipping out when she and Marnie spilled wine on his priceless rug and lecturing them hysterically on the hard work through which he's achieved his material success. He's a real, grown-up man with a real job and grown-up money, representing everything that Jessa has rejected and thinks, for now, that she needs, and the joke is that this attempt to achieve stability is Jessa's wildest move yet. No matter how hard she tries to start living a real life, it just turns into a more elaborate game. Growing up doesn't involve learning how to treat other people's lives like they're real; it involves starting to treat your life, too, like a game.

A Myth of the Writer for the 21st Century in Vila-Matas, Marias, and Bolano

The Writer as Hot Mess

In recent decades we've heard a lot about the death of literature, meaning variously: the death of print in the online era; the death of reading in the age of digital distractions; and the death of “literature” in a time when the mass audience has been lost to electronic media, the remaining book audience has been lost to “YA fiction,” and, anyway, modernism rendered the traditional novel aesthetically void. Under capitalism, this millennial anxiety about literature inevitably immediately issued in a new publishing genre: books about books, extolling the wonders of books, talking about the author's experiences with books, providing clueless or curious readers with lists of books they ought to read.

The new myth of the writer conjured by the works of three Spanish-language authors, Javier Marias, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Roberto Bolano, seems suited to these times. On the one hand, these are writers obsessed with writers, or the idea of the writer, in a modernist version of the turn-of-the-century self-cannibalization of literature. But while this obsession speaks to the regard in which they hold The Writer, their work simultaneously diminishes that figure. In The Savage Detectives (1998), Bolano nostalgically glorified a failed literary movement whose chosen figurehead was an obscure and elusive experimental poet, as if the movement, too, glorified failure (or “the literature of desperation,” as it's called at once point), or saw it as the only authentic kind of success; 2666 (2004) also uses the quest for an elusive author as one of its structural devices. In Bartleby & Co. (2001), Vila-Matas wrote a “novel” that is really a work of literary theory about the mostly non-fictional “Bartlebys” of literature, or Writers of the No, who gave up writing temporarily or permanently or could not get started in the first place. And in Written Lives (1992), Marias's brief biographies of mostly famous writers, written as if their “fairly disastrous” subjects “were fictional characters,” produce an effect that “is hardly likely to lure one along the path of letters,” as Marias litotically warns in the Prologue.

Indeed, the impression one gathers from reading Bartleby & Co. and Written Lives back to back is that you would have to be a fool to be a writer. Marias, a self-conscious anti-hagiographer whose miniature biographies often reminded me of the fictional ones in Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996),

but with less generosity extended towards the subjects, strips even the glamour of tragedy and Romantic self-destruction from his writers, eccentrics who lead lives characterized by mainly quiet desperation, but also occasionally marked by violence. Those memorable episodes of violence – Turgenev's grandmother's grisly murder of a young servant in a fit of pique, Sterne's father's being run through with a sword in an argument over a goose, Verlaine's brutalizing of his wife and his and Rimbaud's mutual brutalization, the elderly Isak Dinesen's bullying of a young male worshipful and whimsical threatening of him with a pistol – are another link to NLITA, in which the banal, the bizarre, and the violent jostle.

Although Marias is remarkably short on sympathy (as opposed to pity) for his writers, he saves his vitriol for his betes noire, Joyce, Mann, and Mishima. In those chapters, Marias proves he can rival Camille Paglia as an artist of the ad hominem, and it's hard to know whether he has chosen sex as a ground on which to attack them or whether their sexual psychology is part of what inspired his disgust in the first place. We are, in any case, expected to share that disgust as he quotes representative passages from Joyce's pornographic letters to his wife, Mann's diary entries on his digestive complaints and attractions to young men, and Mishima's public musings about his sadomasochistic fantasies. One only hopes that Marias's sex life and sexual thoughts are clean and orthodox enough to escape such a treatment, or, if not, that they never fall into the hands of posterity.

The persona adopted by Vila-Matas in Bartleby & Co. is much gentler, yet his celebration of literary silence does not make the writer's life appear any more attractive. It is a life largely wasted, as the writer loses sight of the reasons to write, or never manages to keep them in sight long enough to get started, or – like Vila-Matas's paradigmatic Bartleby, Robert Walser – contrives a way to continue to write, but only with the lowest possible opinion of his work. When I recently came across a New Yorker post on Philip Roth's announcement of his retirement, I saw it through the lenses of Vila-Matas and Marias simultaneously: Roth's retirement was an act of Bartlebyism, albeit at the end of a prolific career, and he speaks of writing as an addiction that required such single-minded devotion from him that he found taking care of a friend's cat “consuming.” The post makes the life of a writer – and a critically and commercially successful one – sound austere, ascetic – even impoverished. I wondered, reading it, how a man who had lived so little in order to write so much could have written anything at all.

I have no doubt myself that the mythology of the writer is part of what lured me into my career... as a Bartleby. As a teenager I devoured biographies of writers whose behavioural excesses and tragic trajectories made them compelling subjects, and although my life has been conspicuous for its lack of excess (although the disasters have been plentiful), I am nonetheless as guilty as any of assuming, based on this mythology, that to be a writer was to not only be good at writing – but to also be interesting. Between, say, Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the generation of Capote, Mailer, Vidal, and Williams, the writer was a proto-rock star; the American writer of the Franzen, Chabon, Eugenides generation is, in contrast, at best an indie rock star.

The Great Gender Divide

The myth of the writer-rock star lives on, however – only now it's gone international. Just go on Scott Esposito's online lit journal, The Quarterly Conversation, and what do you see? In a sidebar to the right, a row of links with photographs, devoted to Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, and Roberto Bolano. Notably, two of the four died young, and notably, the writer as rock star, like the rock star, is gendered male. Not that female writers are incapable of inspiring cults by dying young, but the Sylvia Plaths are left to feminists. Women read trash, men don't read, intellectual men read male modernists, and feminists read female modernists. And if you think I'm simply parroting stereotypes about the literary tastes of average North American men and women, take a look at the 2011 winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards for Fiction, and you tell me which gender is using the site more, what kind of fiction they're reading, and which gender is writing it. Jessa Crispin's popular Bookslut site appears to be a gender-neutral literary site – despite the gendered monicker – where women and men who are interested in serious writing by men or women can gather and contribute; the question, however, is why there should ever be gender segregation on literary sites.

Or in books about writers, because female writers are rather left to the side by Marias and Vila-Matas (and not a sexy sidebar). Out of his dozens of Bartlebys, in a book stuffed with literary references, Vila-Matas mentions less than a dozen female writers in total. Only three, or possibly four, of them are Bartlebys, and they are: a friend of the fictional protagonist who gives up on the idea of being a writer after her head is turned by literary theory; a woman who ghost-wrote feminist plays for her famous husband; a courtesan who ghost-wrote a few lines of verse for Goethe; a member of Strindberg's circle who wrote a memoir of her childhood and adolescence. And this despite the fact that off the top of my head I can think of two female modernists who fill the qualifications of a Bartleby better than many of the male authors Vila-Matas includes: Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles. One can only conclude that Vila-Matas either doesn't read that many female writers (he seems mainly to hear of their existence through rumour, perhaps while reading biographies of Goethe or Strindberg) or doesn't think too hard about them if he does. I'll definitely be interested in seeing how he represents his relationship with Marguerite Duras, his landlady (who is quoted a few times in Bartleby & Co.), when he was a young aspiring writer, in Never Any End to Paris.

The Great Gender Divide in contemporary letters needn't be attributed to anything more sinister than identification: Vila-Matas may stick mainly to male authors because they stick mainly to male protagonists, which are easier for both reader and writer to identify with; and when Vila-Matas, as a writer, muses about Writers and Writing, for the same reason it's male writers he thinks about. And this neglect of female writers – whether in books by male modernists or on literary sites devoted to modernism, like The Quarterly Conversation – reinforces the same tendencies in female writers.

And so the discussion of female modernists and their Bartlebyian tendencies is left to its own book, or books – like Kate Zambreno's Heroines(Semiotext(e)/Active Agents), which I have not read, because it's not in my public library system, but which does discuss Bowles and Barnes – and the Great Gender Divide perpetuates itself. Which makes Bolano's feminist gesture of making a female poet the object of his two male poets' quest in The Savage Detectives all the more remarkable, although it only seems logical to make the “silenced” female writer (or, for that matter, femininity, the no-thing, as negation) into a symbol of literary modernism in general.

Symbols aside, however, the truth – as Bartleby & Co. proves in abundance – is that male writers are every bit as likely to be Writers of the No as female writers are, as sad as it may be when the latter have more famous husbands who are also writers. The reverse still seldom happens, although Sylvia Plath's suicide and subsequent appeal to feminists and precocious teenage girls does mean that more non-poetry-readers have heard of her than of Ted Hughes (in any capacity except as her husband). Likewise, the feminist embrace of Frida Kahlo means that now, at least, more people with no great interest in art have heard of her than of her artist-husband. It helps, too, that Kahlo made her own image the subject of her art, which lends an illusion of intimacy that the mass audience seems to respond to – like Oprah putting herself on all her magazine covers.

Marias, who has stated in a Paris Review interview his distaste (he must have more of those than any celebrated writer since Nabokov) for writers who write from the perspective of the opposite sex, includes only three women, Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes, and Madame du Deffand, out of 20 authors, in the main portion of Written Lives; he then devotes a second section to even briefer portraits of six “Fugitive Women.” I can't say I understand what makes these women more fugitive than the others, or whether “fugitive” is meant to suggest that they are fleeing (like hunted outlaws), fleeting (three were short-lived), or elusive figures, but it's certainly a Bolanoesque concept of the female writer.

To this concept Marias, however, adds the further meaning that the interest of several of these women's literary work is also fugitive. Two, Vernon Lee and Violet Hunt, are treated as hangers-on in important male literary circles (in fact overlapping circles). Adah Isaacs Menken, a mid-19^th century American actress whose fame was due to her appearance at the climax of a play by Byron, in which she played the male protagonist, in a flesh-coloured leotard, tied to a horse, is treated more affectionately by Marias than almost any other figure in the book, perhaps because of her unabashed and abundant absurdity, yet she seems to have been sneaked in because she happened to write a critically excoriated, posthumously published book of poems. It does give the impression that Marias is scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with women of letters to write about.

Somebody, please, send him some binders.

Pretty On the Inside

You may have noticed from the foregoing that I am impatient with any attempt to set female writers apart from male ones with even the best of intentions – by male or female writers. I can't think of anything more alien to me than the idea that the sexes are so alien to each other that they can't enter into each other's perspectives, or that the imagination of the writer – I should say, The Writer – is so feeble that it can't transcend something as fictional as gender. If all we're going to do for the rest of all time is read and write about our almighty, all-important experiences “as woman” and “as men,” we might as well all start taking literary silence literally.

However, the writer so incapable of imagining an experience different from his or her own as to produce inadequate characters of the opposite sex is fully deserving of ridicule. Interestingly, in Written Lives Marias is guilty of the same trespass against feminism that recently rocked the internet when Jonathan Franzen made it in his NewYorker piece on Edith Wharton. Not only does he remark on his assessment of Djuna Barnes's appearance in his second paragraph on her; her returns to the subject in the book's third section, in which he analyzes photographs of writers. Out of 23 writers, Barnes is the only female writer whose picture he includes, and it causes him to confidently proclaim, “Unlike Wilde, who tries to be and to seem handsome, she knows she is not pretty and does not believe she can seem so, that is why she makes no attempt to adopt the faraway look that flatters most faces, instead she looks straight ahead, skeptical and mocking, trusting only in her costume (especially that raised collar), and in the confidence of her pose.”

Is it a double standard that I think Marias's analysis of the Wilde photos – those wonderful early dandy photos (probably more responsible than any text in fooling me into thinking that to be a writer meant to be interesting) – in terms of Wilde's desire to appear handsome and his momentary achievement of that goal (as if by force of will, the way Bette Davis made herself appear pretty in Jezebel) – but that this analysis of “prettiness” as a central concern in Barnes's life is piffle? I don't know anything about Barnes's private life other than what Marias wrote in his sketch – as I know nothing about Wharton's private life besides what Franzen wrote in his article. Perhaps if I did, the male writers' assertions not just about the female writers' appearance but their feelings about it would make that life snap into focus for me – which is what happened when I read Marias's lines on the Wilde photos. The pursuit of beauty is certainly a major motivating factor in Courtney Love's life, for example: she's sung about it, talked about it in interviews, and given herself a very public makeover that unfortunately degenerated into a plastic surgery addiction.

Oscar Wilde, before he stopped trying to incorporate the object into himself and went in pursuit of it.

Bette Davis, defying you to think she's not beautiful.

Djuna Barnes gets it right.

Courtney Love before she started trying to incorporate the object in herself.

Franzen and Marias are, at the very least, guilty of showing a Romneyesque insensitivity to context; their failure to provide biographical evidence for their theses reads as though they have such difficulty imagining the female mind that they have grasped desperately at the one clue society has given them: “Women want to be pretty!” Which, moreover, causes them to underestimate the human capacity for complacency and self-delusion, as anyone can see nowadays by going on Facebook, my own account not excluded. 

Besides, Marias has chosen the wrong photo of Barnes for his claim that she was neither pretty nor believed she could seem so. There's another from the same session in which Barnes, attempting a softening smile that is in fact less flattering to her face than a frank expression, looks downright awful. In the photo from Marias's postcard collection of writers' portraits, on the other hand, to me Barnes looks like a perfectly presentable, somewhat eccentric woman who precisely thinks she can sometimes pass as pretty – and has done so here. Marias's emphasis on Barnes's modesty in the next sentences is also revealing: apparently one of the first things he looks at when he looks at a picture of a woman is how much skin she's revealing, which issues immediately in a judgement on her virtue. Of Barnes he declares approvingly, “She is a woman dominated far more by modesty than by esteem for her own image,” which translates into the vernacular thusly: “She keeps her clothes on instead of running around showing off her body to get attention from men.”

Some people aren't meant to smile.

Maybe it's a good thing that Marias doesn't try to enter into women's heads very often: instead of vividly imagining Barnes's inner life, he can only file her appearance into his limited, dualistic categories for women – sexually attractive (good) or not sexually attractive (bad), virgin/matron (good) or whore (bad). Not that women don't have the same categories for men (Rhett or Ashley, Team Edward or Team Jacob?), but one expects a little more of a writer of international reputation writing about another writer of international reputation.

Speaking of writers' appearances, Kate Zambreno's blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, has finally gotten me to take an interest in Clarice Lispector – one of the very few female writers whose name I've encountered on The Quarterly Conversation. The Amazon.com summary of a recent biography by Walter Moses gets off to an hilarious start by quoting his description of Lispector as “That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,” but I'm intrigued by Moses' thesis that the Jewish Lispector, whose family fled to Brazil in 1922, when she was two years old, is “the true heir to Kafka.” I would actually be intrigued by any writer who's supposedly the true heir to Kafka, but if she also happens to look like Marlene Dietrich, you can't beat that package. And to judge from the pounds of makeup Lispector wore throughout her life, neither her narcissism nor her preoccupation with philosophy and mysticism interfered with each other in any manner. It's only the less physically and intellectually gifted of us who are superficial enough to be interested only in our appearance or in our inner life. 

The writer as movie star.

Bits and Pieces: The Case of Marcel Proust and the Attacking Rats, and, Should We Abolish Literary Research?

Reflections on Memoir, Autobiography, and Biography

From autobiography of a soul to autobiography: apparently autobiography is much on my mind lately, because I've started writing a memoir. No, I'm not secretly famous and you don't know it, nor do I have an inordinately interesting life. But, I am a writer, and an interesting thing happened to me, so, putting them together, I thought I might have a story to tell – a memoir of a specific aspect of my life, like the addiction memoir or family tragedy memoir or difficult childhood memoir or mental illness memoir. Mine is a prodigy memoir, about how I became a prodigy between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with a play produced at eighteen that won $10, 000 in awards, without coming from a literary or intellectual or theatrical background of any kind, which set me on the course of a brief career in Canadian theatre so insanely frustrating that I chucked it by age twenty-four. Since then I haven't been able to figure out what to do. I got an MA in English relatively late in life, in my mid-30s, then decided to chuck that course as well given the poor job market for professors. Now, at 36, I'm back to trying to write, and after several attempts at novels, it occurred to me that a memoir was something I could write now, since finding time to do research can be difficult when you're working forty hours per week year-round whenever you can get it.

After writing around 150 pages, I thought my prose was lacking, so I picked up Remembrance of Things Past again. After reading about 50 pages of that, I wrote another memoir scene and discovered that the only thing worse than not writing like Proust is writing exactly like him. Hearteningly, in the introduction to my edition of the original Moncrieff translation, Ingrid Wassenaar writes, “Pastiche was one of the foundations of Proust's wit: he was a great, and cruel, mimic. The problem of separating out his own style from what he absorbed from others was one of his aesthetic dilemmas.” (Apparently Proust wrote a series of pastiches of famous French writers as if commenting on a diamond forgery scandal. I'd love to get my hands on that....) This sort of aesthetic dilemma can be difficult to overcome: Proust started writing A la recherche when he was 38, and worked on it for fourteen years, until his early death. He wrote little, and nothing that's considered of consequence, before that.

Less hearteningly for my project, Wassenaar devotes space to distinguishing between autobiography and Proust's practice in A la recherche, to the detriment of the former. She writes, “While his whole enterprise is to crown subjectivity as the wellspring of creativity, he is careful not to collapse subjectivity in general into his own personality and life history”; however, in the process of making this claim, she informs the reader that Proust was bitchy, spiteful, and got aroused by watching rats attacking each other. Would the novel be less great if Proust had included these characteristics in his self-portrait, or just different? I have to admit that in writing my memoir I've already come up against the dilemma of how unflattering to make my own self-portrayal – partly due to a desire (a need, really) for privacy, should I choose to publish it. A century on, we live in a more permissive age than Proust did, and one that's absorbed Freud, though not without (sometimes abhorred) resistance. I can't write the bildung of my adolescence – the formation of my identity, including my intellectual and aesthetic development – without talking about sexuality. I can't think about it without thinking about sexuality. But how much of myself do I dare expose – and aside from that, how much of it is relevant? Does every psychological quirk contribute to our understanding of a person?

I came across similar problems when writing my biographical plays about Orton and Halliwell and Jane and Paul Bowles – not issues of privacy (my own or others'), since I was using published information (and writing about people who were dead, in the case of Orton and Halliwell) – but issues of what biographical information was relevant. I didn't solve the dilemma satisfactorily in either case: rather, I tended to throw everything I knew from the sources I was using into the dialogue, “just in case” it was psychologically central. Although one thing I learned from writing plays about real people was that everything depends on context, and just because something is true doesn't mean it will give a true representation of the individual in a given context.

As to how important biography is generally, it's true we come to literature to discover ourselves, not biographical information about the writer – and to assume that we “really” want the latter is the basis of the biographical fallacy in literary criticism. But it's too hasty to say that we read even biography primarily to learn about the writer. As a teenager, I (obviously) loved reading biographies of writers, in which I “discovered myself” as much as, or more than, in reading fiction. For one thing, these biographies – and all of the biographies I read were of queer writers: Wilde, Colette, Capote, Orton, Jane Bowles – dealt with the subject of sexuality, which most of the fiction I was reading (with Jean Genet as the major exception) did not. Nowadays homosexuals are more certain about their sexual orientation than anyone else, and often claim to have known they were gay their entire lives. Sexual orientation isn't such a simple matter for many heterosexuals, which is why sexual confusion still characterizes adolescence, and the biographies of these queer writers were essential in helping me understand my own identity through the central (and still taboo, for all of our “permissiveness”) subject of sexuality, which is not similarly problematized in biographies of heterosexual writers.

Biography and autobiography occupy a curious place in literary history. Despite the growing popularity of the memoir and “creative non-fiction,” often positioned by both its critics and its advocates as being “in competition” with the reading and writing of fiction, there are few canonical autobiographies; only the major instances that transformed (and conditioned) our understanding of subjectivity: the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, the essays of Montaigne, Newman's account of the development of his religious ideas. And, of course, the novelistic explorations of subjectivity and consciousness by the Modernists, Joyce, Proust, and (in more Expressionist fashion) Kafka; or, beginning earlier, the quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman proper, from Goethe to Flaubert to Mann to Mishima. As for biography, no matter how well-written, it does not seem to be included in that amorphous category, “literature,” that usually means fiction, poetry, and drama, but sometimes mysteriously includes autobiography as well. Lyric poetry, like the personal essay, often takes the author's inner life as its subject, dynamically recounting and working through a personal crisis. When I studied Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (from which we get his most famous lines, “No man is an island” and “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls”) in a graduate class, I placed it in the context of the crisis memoir, such as Joan Didion's memoirs of the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. In the Western tradition, the exploration of subjectivity – of the soul – has two, equally important sources: Christian and humanist. (Also the sources of the novel.)

We read biography and autobiography for many reasons. We may do it because we have had similar experiences, or want to know about an experience we have not had. We may do it because the subject is a fascinating person; or because, in the case of memoir, they are peculiarly insightful about their experiences; or because, in the case of the memoir of a famous person, we want to supplement our knowledge of their lives with their own perspectives. While cults of personality surrounding particular writers can be annoying (see, for example, this snarky LRB blog post about speculation on the manner of Jane Austen's death), there is nothing wrong with going to biography or memoir of artists or performers to learn more about the artistic process and personality. We hear a lot these days about young middle-class people who fetishize the idea of “the artist” rather than committing themselves to producing great art, but that's been going on ever since Baudelaire and Wilde, the original proponents of art for art's sake, decided that being an artist was a way of being in the world, not just something you did (and the idea can be traced back through Romanticism and the Renaissance). If you want to dismiss “neoliberal individualism,” you'll have to sweep away the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Late Romanticism, but I won't be joining you. The current degraded “consumerist youth” form is a small price to pay for the anti-puritanical celebration of “personality” within this long Western tradition. Personally I'm more annoyed with the vulgar popularization of “genius” in recent bestsellers by Harold Bloom, who ought to know better. But I'm utterly seduced by Roberto Bolano's simultaneously critical and celebratory take on the idea of the writer and the cult of personality surrounding the writer-genius in The Savage Detectives and 2666. There is no getting away from the writer-genius now: we must live with her and do the best we can to still write in those conditions.

No, most biographical facts about the writer, whether psychological oddities or their manner of death, don't help us understand the work better, let alone give its "true meaning." But we do live in a culture that believes that great writers, and artists generally, are more interesting than the average person; if not in their external lives, then in their internal ones. If someone can manage to write a biography of a writer that does not make them sound boring (no one has managed this in the case of one of my favourite novelists, Henry James, whose bizarre psychology. ignored by his academic cult, is one of the main sources of my interest in his work), I will happily read about them. I don't think that learning about Proust's sexual interest in rat behaviour has helped me to understand one of the greatest novels yet written any better, but I'm happy to know it, just as I was happy to learn, when forced to read her largely boring letters as a research assistant, that the unmarried, childless Jane Austen liked to make cruel jokes in private about difficult, dangerous births, a common and sacrosanct experience in her time. It's always interesting to gain a new perspective on an artist that complicates the picture we get from their work and the received view of them, or of what a "great artist" is like. Sometimes, such information contributes to making an artist of forbidding reputation seem more mundane, as when I recently learned that Nathanael West had a long-time-bachelor's overweening attachment to his dog. Biographical facts about artists can help dispel the false mystique surrounding art and artists, while building a better, more vital mystique. 

Now I've got that line from a Nichols and May sketch in my head: "Too many people think of Adler as a man who made mice neurotic. He was more."

"Much more."

"Much much more."

"Can you move over a little I'm falling off the bench. A great deal more." 

The Decline of Liberal Arts Education and The New Aesthetes

Speaking of the poor job market for professors, I read two recent articles on the demise of the university system in the US and the UK, one in the New York Review of Books, one in the London Review of Books. They reminded me of another reason why I decided not to devote the remainder of my life to being an English academic, the NYRB article by lamenting the relegation of teaching to exploited grad students and adjuncts (called “sessionals” in Canada: I taught one course as a sessional before, thankfully, there wasn't enough work for me in the city where I'm presently stuck) while a shrinking minority of tenured and tenure-track professors who are sequestered away doing the research that brings prestige and funds to their schools, the LRB article by seeking to distinguish between universities, where research is conducted, and other types of post-secondary schools, as well as by lamenting the sorts of “publish or perish” conditions that Paglia was complaining about in the early 90s, which preclude serious, long-term, ambitious projects in favour of frequent publication if you ever want to get on a tenure track.

This additional dissuading factor was my inability to believe in “research” in the field of English. I think it's a waste of the academics' lives and a waste of public funds. I agree with Paglia that the only useful scholarship that can still be produced in the liberals arts has to be inter-disciplinary in nature, with an overarching revisionist orientation (the sort of major, ambitious work that publish-or-perish conditions work against). The endless production of feminist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, etc. “readings” of canonical works, taught to graduate school-track students as “literary theory,” is a waste of minds that “advances” our understanding of literature about as much as medieval scholasticism advanced Western philosophy. In other words, it's a bunch of eggheads talking to each other in their exclusionary language that most of them don't even understand about things of no interest to anyone else; a dead end comparable to the simultaneous analytical trend in philosophy (although at least that taught me how to analyze an argument). Digging around in one's “specialist” area in a confluence of cultural studies and historicism (writing about literary ephemera produced in the era you cover – Renaissance, Victorian) seems equally pointless to me. I have a certain amount of respect for the scholarly collaborations that produce painstaking new editions of central authors, but the qualities necessary for that sort of work are patience and meticulous attention to detail – there is no exercise of the mind at all.

All of this is not to say that I consider only the most ambitious scholarship worthwhile. I am also a devotee of the critical essay – of criticism, not theory. My friend George Toles has been producing such essays on literature and film throughout his academic career, and although they are more academic than the early 20^th century Anglo-American critical tradition I admire (Wilson, McCarthy, Hardwick, Esslin, Bentley, Trilling, Sontag), they are superior in quality of writing, in independence of thought (valuing the Paterian impression), and in close, loving attention to the object than the vast majority of academic criticism. There is always room for more well-written close readings of both canonical and relatively unknown figures by erudite, insightful critics who believe in the art of the essay; such essays are works of literature in their own right, and bring both pleasure and instruction to readers who love the arts under consideration.

Restricting myself to commenting on English, the subject I studied, I'll give my radical idea of what the priorities of an English professor should be. Teaching, including the teaching of undergraduates (now relegated to grad students and sessionals), should be the first priority – about 80 per cent of the job description. The NYRB article claims (based on studies, I presume) that a liberal arts education still provides students with a greater ability to write and reason than new, more pragmatic programs like business. (And English students are notorious for complaining about education students in this regard – tragically.) Presumably, being able to write and reason will ultimately help a person in any career, but these abilities should also be valued in their own right, as the primary purpose of post-secondary education – of becoming an educated adult individual. English professors should impart these abilities to students along with an appreciation of English-language literature (I think the degree should actually be in Literature, and include language requirements at the undergrad level as well as world literature in translation, but that's another reform) – which are not separate aims. Undergraduates do not need to be taught “critical thinking” via the application of critical theory to the literary canon. They need to be taught how to enjoy reading, which the vast majority of them do not, and so leave university with poor writing and reasoning skills, which will never improve since they have not learned how to enjoy difficult extracurricular reading. The goal of undergraduate education in English (whether it is a major or a requirement) should be exposure to great, difficult works, discussion of their content and formal qualities, and instruction in formulating reasoned critical arguments about them (the simple adoption and support of a position based on textual evidence).

The Anglo literary canon is an education all by its lonely, parochial self, from which the instructor can branch out into discussion of specific historical context, major historical events, and the history of ideas. Educating young people in this way – creating citizens, the traditional function of the university that has all but been lost – should be the prime role of the English professor. How, then, to measure the “productivity” of professors in order to judge who should get better positions? Perhaps instead of publishing articles, they could submit chapter drafts of ongoing major works, or research progress reports? Major works (including biographies) and critical essays – I see no reason for English professors to write anything else. (Among major works of 20^th century English or aesthetic theory – works that do, in fact, count as “literary theory,” though not as schools or applications of it – I would include Hauser's The Social History of Art, Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Cavell's The Claim of Reason, and Paglia's Sexual Personae.) Ambition, which is necessary for real contributions to scholarship and thought within a discipline, is what should be rewarded, not business-model “productivity.” In their spare time, professors should not be whipping up spurious articles that'll make a splash at conferences in order to gain a reputation and pad their resumes, but reading, both within and outside of their “specialization.”

English literature is not science. English literature is a tiny portion of world literature, albeit one with an outsized influence. But the possibilities for useful, significant research are not endless. Frye thought that criticism should be the study and theorization of what literature is and how it works, but no one has taken him up on this, although a group of kids online have extended the project of the Anatomy to include popular culture (in the universities, the territory of cultural and media studies) in the marvellous ongoing open collaboration TV Tropes, which is spontaneous scholarship for pleasure. Meanwhile criticism, abandoned by the universities and, for whatever reason, no longer supported by Anglo-American conditions in journalism, has also moved online – in literary blogs like this one (as well as high-profile ones) and “zines” by former students like The New Inquiry, recently featured in The New York Times. Here ex-English students informed by their love of great critics from the era of the public intellectual, like Wilson and Sontag, can practice their influence free of the constrictions of publication in academic journals, while also being influenced by the new, pop culture-friendly mood that the cultural studies approach has spread through academia, though the pressure, I think, is from outside of the academy. 

I think literary scholarship would be better served by a publication ban on professors for the first ten years of their career, so they could concentrate on teaching, reading, and developing their thought instead. The only dignified, culturally significant role that an English professor can serve is as an instructor teaching students to write, reason, and enjoy reading. To think, in the unique way that a humanities education can supply, that an education in science or mathematics cannot. And the emphasis on writing (learned, in part, through continuous exposure to good writing) is crucial here, and should be kept central; an education in history or philosophy cannot supply this component of learning how to think either. (These are the reasons that my philosophy professors and, once, a physics professor I took a theory of physics course from, nearly fainted in gratitude when they received my papers. Every academic discipline values the writing skills that English students learn more than English does.) If, in addition to teaching students, English professors also happen to be good critics (which requires being a good writer, but more, a good reader), or original thinkers, or to produce ambitious works of scholarship, more power to them; but the function that makes English departments necessary is the classroom encounter, not research.

Viewed from another perspective, as Frye arrogantly asserted, far from literary scholarship being dried up, the project of literary criticism hasn't even begun yet. The study of English literature has never been properly intellectualized, and imported French theory didn't accomplish that, either. The building blocks of the discipline haven't even been identified – that was what Frye attempted in the Anatomy. But the rebuilding of literary criticism from the ground up to turn it into a genuinely productive field of study can't be accomplished in a publish-or-perish environment where endless applications of French and feminist (or now “gender,” but arguably still feminist) theory are de rigueur, and where professors are now turning their attention to pop culture, including popular literature, in a desperate effort to engage students who are increasingly, bizarrely, stuck in a mire of reading YA fiction well into their 20s (and beyond). Which to me only shows that many students are attracted to English as a subject for reasons that have nothing to do with a love of literature, and succeed in it for reasons having nothing to do with an advanced understanding of it. (It may, in fact, be much easier to grasp the fundamentals of “literary theory” than to achieve an advanced understanding of literature. Certainly, the cleverer students think it's a lot cooler; and certainly, professors work harder at instilling the former than the latter.)

Personally, I'd rather write an unread literary blog and read the Anglo-American critics of the 1930s-60s, where treasures of insight still await.

Writers on TV

I was going to try to keep pop culture out of this blog, and here I am going back on the resolution only ten posts in, but I'm sneaking this one in as a “writing” topic. For several years I've been trying my damnedest to stay out of the pop culture loop, simply because there are too many good/culturally “important” things to check out – bands, TV shows – and not enough time to do it at all, let alone stay current. So I resign myself to being an average of five years behind on bands and three seasons on TV shows. If the hype is big enough, I'll hear about it and finally give in and see what all the fuss is about; if the show or band is hip enough I'll hear about it from a friend (thus I found my way to Florence and the Machine and Community). Making no active effort to stay hip and current whatsoever therefore acts as a protective, semi-arbitrary filter keeping me from being too overwhelmed from all of this brilliant art clamouring for my fractured attention.

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

Well dammit, we can't, not even with everything faster and faster and more convenient all the time – Pater outlined the problem over a century ago, and late capitalist consumerism and online “connectedness” have only made the dilemma of secular relativism (or relativist secularism) worse: there is nothing but material pleasure (of which the aesthetic is the most spiritual kind), and we will simply never be able to take in even a portion of it before death is here. And in the meantime, the urgency – the anxiety – to do so only intensifies. (No joke: I saw a parenting book, written by a teacher, the other day, on how to encourage kids to read, in which an elementary school student was quoted – approvingly, I guess – as saying, “I feel sorry for all of those books waiting for me to read them.”)

But still, occasionally, you can discover things not by hype or buzz or recommendation but by chance – by googling around, as once in an ancient times you might have found things by wandering the library and judging books by their covers or even by flipping through the channels or watching, zombie-like, anything that came on TV. Like the time I discovered The Talking Heads by watching infomercials all night with a friend – early David Byrne looking very sexy indeed, all sweaty and angular and unnaturally intense while wailing “Psycho killer – qu'est-ce que c'est?” In this case what I found was HBO's Bored to Death, and I found it by reading Heather Havrilesky columns on Salon (which I used to read), trying, without caring very much, to find out what she had to say about Community, which I read somewhere else that she liked.

Community is a pretty good show, as far as recent American sitcoms go. It's consistently fairly clever, fun to watch with a friend. Bored to Death, however, is in a different league. After trying out a few episodes, I naturally looked up the cast and creator on Wikipedia. Jonathan Ames sounds like a sub-par David Sedaris... and I'm not even interested in reading Sedaris. But why do writers of middling talent so often make superb TV writers? Is it because we expect less from the medium, so the merest hint of “literary” talent and intelligence gets us inordinately excited? Or maybe it's that there really is a difference between art and entertainment and a place in our lives for both, but neither novelists nor TV writers seem to know how to entertain anymore (setting art completely aside) – so when someone's doing a good job of it, we enjoy and appreciate it?

Anyway, Bored to Death hits a lot of my sweet spots. It's about as New York Jewish (of my fantasies) as it's possible to get, with its writer main character and all of the smart, rapid-fire psychoanalytic wit that presumes you've actually read Freud and Jung. And all of the other contemporary Jewish hipster touchstones are in place: the pot-smoking and the bearish bearded comic writer Ray seem to be out of Judd Apatow movie; the comic books and “Jew out of water” premise of a Jewish detective comic-like hero appear to be a page torn from Michael Chabon. But this is what TV, that most effortlessly pomo of mediums, does so well: it takes every major cultural reference (or just the smart ones) of the past decade or so and, by jumbling them together in a knowing pastiche somehow makes them seem so much fucking cooler than they did originally. (BBC's Life on Mars worked much the same way.)

The New York of Bored to Death is the New York I want to live in, not the bizarrely Jew-free New York of Mad Men (especially bizarrely given that the late 50s/early 60s was arguably the peak era of New York Jewish creativity, from Nichols and May and Woody Allen to Dylan and Ginsberg, so to create a show set in that time and place that focuses on WASPs seems downright perverse). But – four episodes into the first season, at least – that's just the attractive setting. I don't have a clue what the show is actually about: it doesn't always stick to its premise (which is good because I'm not sure how many wacky cases they can come up with) or to satirizing the New York literary world. Luckily, I'm too entertained to care what  it's about, or whether it knows. There seems to be an underlying theme of the difficulty of relationships: the main character, “Jonathan Ames,” can't seem to get into one (or get any action) after his girlfriend dumps him in the first episode; whereas his best friend is in a “successful” long-term relationship that seems like even worse torture. The show also situates itself firmly in the comedic “loserland” where 30somethings have felt most comfortable for several decades now (see the superb British sitcoms Black Books and Peep Show), and somehow we believe that these two semi-successful artists are the losers they claim to be even though they're a lot more successful than we are. Maybe it's because they're so miserable and directionless, like the rest of us; but at the same time, to our entertainment and probably theirs as well, over-articulate about it.

The New Yorker's ambivalent review of the show is so personally nasty in tone it sounds like it was written by an ex-girlfriend of Ames's, or the best friend of an ex-girlfriend – which seems appropriate for the little community of the New York literary scene. Or maybe it's just Nancy Franklin's version of irony. At any rate, she rightly praises Ted Danson's performance as Jonathan's womanizing magazine editor boss. Up there with, and maybe surpassing, Chevy Chase's performance on Community as a recovery of a comedian fondly remembered from one's childhood but who's now “too old for TV,” Danson nearly explodes the screen with his charisma (and chiseled good looks, gone too long from the small screen and even more impressive with the shock of white hair). The new role draws on certain aspects of Sam from Cheers, namely the womanizing and alcoholism; in other ways it's a total rejection of Sam's lunkheadedness and blue collar down-to-earthness. Danson is so strongly associated with that role, who knew he could be totally convincing as a cultured, philosophizing, high-powered magazine editor who makes casual reference to Proust in the context of discussing his fixation on a woman's armpit hair? (Sounds more like Freud, once again, than Proust to me, though.)

Franklin also singles out the stand-out exchange from the episodes I've watched so far. It's a bold bit of writing that requires an absolutely deft comic touch by the performer, and Jason Schartzmann (consistently adorable as “Ames”) delivers. Jim Jarmusch tells Jonathan that his novel was “Dark, funny, perverted, beautiful,” and adds (deadpan), “You must really suffer from the terrifying clarity of your vision.” To which Jonathan replies, “Thank you. I do suffer.” I was reminded, somehow, of side-splitting deadpan moments in Preston Sturges, like William Demarest putting a coat-brush up to his face to illustrate the ease of disguise, barking a bunch of nonsense German, and telling Henry Fonda, “Guess who I am.” At the same time I was autobiographically reminded of some of the absurd things people have said to me in my various brushes with a literary career, like the program director at theatre school who said, shooting me a penetrating look, when I fell into silence while sitting in his office, “What are you thinking, Elise?” As though the dark and fascinating contents of my writer's mind would spill out at this signal. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was thinking about how I couldn't wait for the day to end so I could go to my apartment and watch Jarvis Cocker videos on YouTube.

Franklin thinks that Jonathan replies “in all seriousness,” but I think Schartzmann's delivery is too comically ingenious to be pinned down that easily. What's funny about Jonathan's reply is that it's mere politeness: the Romantic idea of the suffering artist reduced to party small-talk in the course of a business deal. The deadpan delivery of the performers may resemble Sturges, but the reduction of such a grand idea to a trivial pleasantry is Wildean. It's not exactly that we don't believe Jonathan could write a novel that's “dark, funny, perverted, beautiful.” The satire involved is not so direct as to mock the idea that Jonathan can write or that a compliment of this sort could ever be sincere or accurate, however blurb-like the phrasing. It's that this ability attributed to him has nothing whatsoever to do with his daily life, which involves trying to get laid, and his boss trying to get laid, and his best friend trying to get laid by his girlfriend, and trying to get a movie deal, and standing around at parties, and getting stoned and drinking and avoiding writing, whether shit assignments or serious novels, and, of course, talking and talking and talking. (And now and then a detective case.) Where does one fit suffering into that day? It goes on – we believe it, of Jonathan or ourselves – but we don't see it happening. The scene may have changed from the French provinces to the New York literary world, but it's the same modern ennui, stifling to the Romantic expressiveness that's the stuff of art, or one (and still the most familiar) idea of art. Only now the ennui has spread from the ignorant provinces to the cultural centers, as we continue to believe in a dream of art that we can't connect to the mundane selves we've learned to be through media like TV... although the way was paved for its mundanity by the realist novel, including Madame Bovary....