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First appeared in The Globe & Mail - Reviewed
by Elisabeth Harvor
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THROWING ANOTHER HANDFUL OF PEOPLE UPON THE FIRE
"Love is humiliation, we know that," wrote Harold
Brodkey thirteen years ago in an essay he called "Love
Speeches". He then went on to say that love is also "an
expansive exaltation, we know that, too. But are we sure?
Love is hard work..." In the essays collected by his
widow in Sea Battles on Dry Land, Brodkey (who also wrote
This Wild Darkness, First Love and Other Sorrows and The World
is Home to Love and Death) explores many theories, conundrums
and conditions, but his opening words on love are the most
emblematic of his method as essayist.
Lordly but breezy, he's also always candid, fun to read, whether
he's talking about reading ("Reading is an intimate act,
perhaps more intimate than any other human act...") or
about the animal life of ideas. Or about a good blizzard.
As for reading a good book, it's not all that different from
a love affair "complete with shyness and odd assertions
of power and independence..."
A true original who's willing to occasionally risk being trivial
and silly, Bodkey also makes astute and iconoclastic observations
on friendship; on the movies; on grammar and American reality;
on sex and looks; on American fascism; on language as articulated
consciousness; on the roar of the (literary) canon, and on
seeking "the cultural elite".
There are memoir fragments as well, among them a fine piece
on Frank O'Connor in which Brodkey brilliantly catches the
excitement of New York City six years after the end of World
War Two: "New York was raunchy with words. Words of salesmanship.
And it was menacing and lovely...the neon signs came on in
a form of invitation to an end to loneliness. Everywhere you
were offered the treats of self-destruction. Overwhelming
beauty and carelessness, the city then, one of the wonders
of the world..."
In his essay on Virginia Woolf in The Broken Estate: Essays
on Literature and Belief, the transplanted British critic
James Wood (transplanted to American soil) tells us that the
young Woolf and others visited Rodin's studio in 1904. "The
sculptor told the party that they could touch anything except
the figures still under sheets. When Woolf began to unwrap
one of the sculptures, Rodin slapped her." The story
is probably apocryphal, "but like the grave of the Unknown
Soldier it can stand as the general emblem of a war. Woolf's
literary struggle was to uncover figures, in a way that they
had never before been denuded. She unwrapped consciousness."
Woolf's stream of consciousness "allows absent-mindedness
into fiction" and her essays and reviews are "a
writer's criticism, written in the language of art which is
the language of metaphor." As a critic, says Wood, "Woolf
was always in competition with what she was reviewing, and
her language's proximity constitutes a luxurious squabble."
He even gives us a few lines of Wolffian criticism in which
Woolf chastises Charles Dickens for making his books "blaze
up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but
by throwing another handful of people upon the fire."
Wood's method is also to throw handfuls of people upon the
fire: Toni Morrison's prose is too "lushly complicit
with the rapture she is describing" and she ignores "the
preparation, the flat stealth, the argument that narrative
demands." And Julian Barnes writes prose "not of
discovery, but of the idea of discovery." About Thomas
Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Wood astutely observes that too
much seems "willed, unfree, a hysteria that he forces
onto his scenes because without it they would not really exist."
And in "George Steiner's Unreal Presences" he cleverly
exposes Steiner's pomposities: "...what awes Steiner,
and finally convinces him that the Bible is quasi-divine...is
that he cannot imagine someone writing the Psalms or the Book
of Job...and then going to lunch." Wood also describes
Steiner's prose as "the sweat of a monument" and
speaks of his "air of excited gravity" as he "approaches
each work as if leading a coup to restore a monarch to the
throne." Steiner is also guilty of erecting "rather
melodramatic binarisms and does some damage to precise thinking:
philosophy or the death camps; Watteau or treason; breakfast
or Opus 131; a Real Presence or nihilism."
Although Wood is a very young critic--many of these essays
were written when he was still in his twenties--it's easy
to picture him (in an academic gown and being forgetful) as
he tells his student audience that he suspects that Jane Austen
"went through life as if she were the possessor of a
clandestine happiness." But not long after this he says
of Chekhov that he "has the air of being the sole possessor
of a clandestine happiness". Later still he points out
that Thomas Pynchon's novels have the "agitated density
of a prison". And even later he tells us that "only
an annulling wash of contradictory adjectives can approach
the agitated density of W.G. Sebald's writing."
Still one is inclined to forgive him his repetitions and memory
lapses: he makes his candid judgements so memorable by his
use of metaphors. It's also easy to picture him polishing
these metaphors, then walking backwards to admire them: Thomas
Mann "building his contraption of truth"; "the
slow cortege" of T. S. Eliot's lines in The Waste Land.
Wood also writes thoughtful essays on Jane Austen, Gogol,
Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, Knut Hamsun, Philip Roth and others.
In his essay on John Updike, though, he handicaps Updike by
discussing only two of his weaker novels, Roger's Version
and The Beauty of the Lilies. Calling Updike an "acolyte
of plenitude" he sees in him a kind of "fattened
paganism", a paganism which finds "the same degree
of sensuality in everything, whether it's a woman's breast
or an avocado..." And although it's impossible to argue
that Updike isn't lush (an example of Updikean "gorgeousness"
that Wood gleefully waves before the reader, as evidence,
is "the miraculous weave of his jockey shorts")
it also seems to be Updike's fate to be by turns enthralling
and tiresome. And perhaps for the same reason: he writes too
much and he writes with such blithe ease. But it's also true
that he is too seldom given points for honesty. After all,
who has written better or with more unromantic precision about
domestic life in America? He is also almost never given points
for bravery: consider the ruthless portraits of his alter
ego in the mainly wonderful Of the Farm or the much more uneven
Marry Me.
Although Wood is irked by the gifted--and yes, occasionally
irksome--Updike, he reveres the worthy and solemn German writer
W. G. Sebald, "the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary
European writers." A slippery little word, sublime: a
don't-you-dare-disagree-with-me sort of word. And also a word
that is somehow too anointing for honest critical writing.
(Cynthia Ozick also calls Sebald's work sublime. And so does
Susan Sontag, even though, meaning to praise it, she gives
the game away by referring to its "excruciating sobriety".)
In fact, the more Wood praises Sebald, the more his praise
seems to alchemize into adoring damnation. His voice becomes
hushed and false--there are even times when he out-Steiners
Steiner--as he falls into the sombre trap of telling us that
"Sebald's language is an extraordinary, almost antiquarian
edifice, full of the daintiest lustres." But although
the book as an artifact is impressive--its eerie photographs
seem not to be photographs of real places but rather photographs
of real places remembered in dreams--the writing is contaminated
by a self-consciousness that too much carries a noble sense
of its own important sorrow. Tragedy is supplied by history's
most legendary supplier of tragedy (the Holocaust), not by
any inventiveness or gift for characterization on the part
of the writer. Some of the critical raves even mirror the
sychophantic cries of the toadies and courtiers in "The
Emperor's New Clothes", as does this one from the Observer:
"His invisible mending is astonishing; it is impossible
to see the tear between life and the imagination", and
seem, really, to be infected--to lift Don DeLillo's marvellous
phrase out of another context--by "an acquired sort of
awe".
DeLillo also comes in for some brisk knuckle-rapping. In "Against
Paranoia: The Case of Don DeLillo", DeLillo's Underworld
proves to Wood "the incompatibility of the political
paranoid vision with great fiction." And it's true that
much of Underworld is romantically prescriptive and flawed.
But as a writer who's also a high-octane worrier, Don DeLillo
is himself also hyper-aware of the pitfalls of caring too
much (about everything) and so at all times seems eager to
annul the earnestness of his prescriptive themes. His characters
even seem almost jubilant in their paranoia, and their conveying
of it can at times (quite frequently, actually) even seem
to be too much of a shtick. They perform for themselves, for
each other, and for the reader. DeLillo's books are really
intellectual thrillers, but distinguished by much more intelligence
and comedy and by a much better class of repartee than most
thriller writers could ever even dream of pulling off. (Although
the repartee between the husband and wife in DeLillo's White
Noise feels a bit too witty, too much of a performance, at
least when they convey to one another, in bed and in dead-pan
but jokey whispers, their terror of a future too morally lurid
to be borne.)
Brodkey and Wood are performers too, of course, but they are
otherwise not really all that much alike. Still, they make
their way across similar intellectual terrains. Brodkey, although
he was writing under a death sentence for the last several
years of his life, stayed so unrepentant and intellectually
debonair that in many ways his essays seem younger than Wood's,
but then Wood was, as he writes in his title essay, "a
child of evangelism." And although Brodkey is, in his
dazzling way, an off-hand sort of genius, Wood has the ex
cathedra, ex-evangelical advantage of fierceness and passion.
Which is not to say that both writers don't feel rage about
the state of contemporary literature and culture. In fact,
the final words of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theatre, the words
Mickey Sabbath speaks when he tries to kill himself but then
can't quite bring himself to commit the final act, could easily
have been spoken by either Brodkey or Wood: "How can
I leave? Everything I hate is here."
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