...the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment.
Steven Millhauser
by Jim Shepard
I first met Steven Millhauser some 16 years ago, when, with my friend Ed Hirsch along as a somewhat disinterested coconspirator, I induced Steven to meet us at the Russian Tea Room. My plan was to convince him to take the job of visiting writer at Williams College, to replace me when I went on leave. He took some convincing.
Steven's hesitations — and hesitations is too tepid a word for the tenacity and resourcefulness of his initial resistance to the idea of himself teaching anyone anything — were just one part of an enduring conviction he's displayed throughout his career that his work alone should do the talking; that nearly anything else the writer has to offer is either an impertinence or an unacceptable approximation of what it was the writer really wished to express. There was a single week sometime soon after his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, appeared, when three different writers called to tell me that I had to read it. Once I'd done so, I started calling people. The sensibility on display was a revelation: the book posited childhood as a magically illuminating state, and the tenderness and generosity of its perceptions made that wonderful and Nabokovian claim entirely persuasive. Nine books later, Steven's work is still all about magical illuminations: The King in the Tree, three novellas, opens up the intensities of obsessive love and anguished betrayal with both minute precision and startling élan. That book was the occasion for
the following interview, conducted over a couple of weeks through email, a format that spared at least one of us the bother of having to clean our house for company...
A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York.
Christine Schwartz Hartley on Andre Schiffren
BookForum Apr/Mar 2007
About halfway into his memoir, André Schiffrin notes that after his father died in 1950, André and his mother lived on New York 's Upper East Side on only a few hundred dollars per year, well below the city's poverty line. Yet as the distinguished French-born editor of the New Press explains, he never felt lower-class: Back when his family lived in Paris, his mother had detailed the different layers of the French bourgeoisie, concluding that "[o]n top of them all were the intellectuals. That was us, and therefore there was never any question of our feeling underprivileged." Though Schiffrin may misremember the timing of this remark—he turned five the day the German army invaded Paris in 1940 and was just six when his family reached New York, perhaps too young to grasp such concepts—it contains everything he wants us to take away from A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York.
These are the memoirs of a twentieth-century, Continental-born intellectual, for whom most everything happens in the world of ideas. Consequently, there are hardly any sights, sounds, smells, or emotions here, unless they are related in some manner to Schiffrin's intellectual pursuits, where men seem to rule. Besides Hannah Arendt and other female writers he has published, the only women worth a nod are his mother; his girlfriend at Cambridge, who reappears in the epilogue as his wife of several decades and the mother of his two daughters; and the assistant who follows him to the New Press after he resigns from a thirty-year stint at Pantheon. Also unsurprisingly, this lifelong Socialist Democrat reformist, who first visited the New York Socialist Party headquarters at fifteen, occasionally launches into tirades about the superiority of publicly owned companies and national health services and the evils of globalization and publishing conglomerates.
At its best, however, Schiffrin's coming-of-age story acts as a springboard for a series of vivid and insightful vignettes about political developments in the United States (including the rise and long-term effects of McCarthyism), the evolution of the left, and his own political maturation. This last topic is capped by a fiery account of his 1989 showdown with Random House head Alberto Vitale, a former banker whose office "featured only a photograph of his yacht" and whose policies forced Schiffrin out of the job in which he had published the likes of Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Michel Foucault, Günter Grass, and Art Spiegelman.
Above all, these are the poignant memoirs of a precocious only child who fashioned himself after his famous father, Jacques, the first editor of the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and a close friend of André Gide and numerous other European intellectuals. It was Jacques who asked a very young André whether he should publish Curious George (yes!), who sent his fourteen-year-old son on a solo trip back to France to meet Gide with a fresh-off-the-press copy of Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, and who defined their relationship as so rooted in the life of the mind that he neglected to tell André that he was dying of emphysema. Given the enormous expectations and rewards that came with Schiffrin père's love, it's no wonder that André never felt underprivileged or that A Political Education is bathed in his father's aura.
Getting The Message in Montaigne's Essays
Philosophy and Literature 24.1 (2000) 165-184
Patrick Henry
There is no doubt that, after a significant absence, the question of ethics is back in literary studies. Even if ethical inquiry does not dominate the critical scene as textuality and historicism commanded the 1970s and 1980s respectively, it constitutes major literary-critical interest as we enter the new millennium. But, as Lawrence Buell points out in his excellent introduction to the January 1999 issue of the PMLA, which itself is dedicated to the "new resonance" of ethics in literary criticism, there is no univocal ethics movement. It is rather a "pluriform discourse" 1 constituted of various and competing voices from many literary and philosophical traditions.
These differences emerge sharply when critics of an ethical bent converge on a single author. We have already seen this to be the case in the preceding articles on Montaigne and I would like to examine it further here. Arguing that Montaigne is neither a moral relativist nor a moral skeptic, Ann Hartle finds "a very well-defined, coherent ethics" in the Essays. For her, Montaigne's "accidental," "non-authoritative" philosophy "does not teach or form, it discovers and tells" (p. 140). When the essayist writes: "I do not teach, I tell," 2 Hartle takes him to mean that "the authority of his moral standards is not grounded in or derived from his (or any other) philosophical account" (pp. 138-39). Although he does not blindly submit to tradition, his authority in moral matters, as she sees it, is "the classical-Christian tradition that he inherits" (p. 139). [End Page 165]
In his essay here, but more generally in his recent groundbreaking study, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy. Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais, David Quint combines literary analysis and philosophical inquiry to mount a convincing case that the author of the Essays transcends his skepticism and transforms his stoicism to offer a positive and urgent message to his contemporaries. This message constitutes a new ethics--one of "pliant goodness," "fellow-feeling," and trust--that counters the model of heroic virtue dominating his culture and his class, as practiced by "the constant Stoic, the honor-bound aristocrat, [and] the religious zealot." Directed principally to the nobility of a nation torn apart by civil and religious conflict (which forms the backdrop of both Montaigne's and Quint's book), this message, which eschews violence and cruelty and is part of the "civilizing process," urges those French nobles to realize that "they have no choice except to give way to one another," and "to submit to the authority of the French monarchy, the only possible guarantor of civil order." 3 Viewed from a different angle, Montaigne's sustained moral argument, as understood by Quint, depicts the deflation of extreme humanist aspirations toward radical and divisive individualism and, in the name of a "shared humanity," a common human nature, manages to promote a new form of human dignity. Here, then, is a didactic reading of the Essays whose author is a moralist with a political project that would put an end to the practice of cruelty and vengeance and accomplish "[the] ethical reform of his class." 4
Jerome Schwartz, for one, will have little if any of it. He sees the problem of freedom at the ethical center of Montaigne's book and studies its evolution throughout the Essays. For him, the essayist's ethics are founded upon "an unstable, fragmented, contradictory being" whose "critical method . . . dissolves authoritarian certainties and ethical givens in a general revolt against the didacticism of Renaissance humanism" (p. 154). In his seventh footnote, Schwartz registers "a certain dissatisfaction" with Quint's book because it tends to emphasize "moral doctrine" and "moral teaching" over other issues (p. 163).
The most sustained argument of recent vintage against a didactic Montaigne, however, is found in Alexander Nehamas's The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. This is an honest, very personal book whose author attempts to practice the aesthetic self-fashioning he finds in the various philosophers he analyses. Regarding the Essays, Nehamas does an excellent job of showing the extent to which Montaigne's Socrates has been pieced together from Xenophon, Plato, [End Page 166] Cicero, and Plutarch, and he proposes an intriguing explanation of what he terms Montaigne's notion of "progressing to nature." 5 Nehamas goes on to stress that, just as his Socratic sources only "taught Montaigne a few general precepts, like 'Live according to your power' or 'Follow nature,' which do not describe their end and offer no instructions for reaching it" (p. 126), so too we get no substantial advice or concrete counsel from Montaigne. "Socrates has no specific lesson to teach," he continues, "and neither does Montaigne: 'I do not teach, I tell'" (p. 124), notes Nehamas as he cites the essayist. He concludes that ". . . what we learn from Michel is that we must know ourselves" (p. 124). This is certainly true, but it is not all we learn from Michel...
Writing a Novel
By Elizabeth Hardwick
It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door. It does not help to remember Rand Avenue in Lexington and old summer rockers still on the gray, dry planks of winter porches. A novel is always written on the day of its writing.
I begin, seeking distance, imagining or pretending to imagine thus:
"She often spent the entire day in blue, limpid boredom[...]Unsavory egotism? No—mere hope of self-definition, the heroism of description, the martyrdom of documentation. The chart of life must be brought up to date every morning. 'Patient slept fitfully, complained of the stitches. Alarming persistence of the very symptoms for which the operation was performed. Perhaps it is only the classical aching of the stump.' "
An impasse. How can she, opiumstill, a dramatic star of ennui, with catlike eyes and abrupt disappearances, begin, continue? Her end is clearly too soon at hand. On the next page, verisimilitude would not be outraged to find her dead. Not smiling perhaps, as they say suicides smile, but reflective, sunk in last thoughts. Her still gaze would be downward, as if she, who knew nothing of literature, were thinking of poetry or philosophy[...]
Soon I abandon the languid girl. My mind is elsewhere. I have taken a journey in order to write my novel in peace. A steamy haze blurs the lines of the hills. A dirty, exhausting sky. Already the summer seems to be passing away. The boats will soon be gathered in, ferries roped to the dock.
A new scene: A short pear-shaped man came onto the stage for his lecture. He is the author of two peculiar novels, some shorter fiction of an in-between length difficult to publish, and a number of literary essays. All of his work is strikingly interesting and odd. His essays are gracefully and yet fiercely written, with the same teasing moil of metaphor found in his fiction; but of course their meaning is clearer and people are inclined to prefer them to his pure works of the imagination. His opinion is different: he feels his essays are works of the imagination but that somehow in the end they do not fully reward their hurting effort. They live and die in a day, a week at most. The orange, black, and yellow wings of opinion make a pleasant, whirring sound, dip down, soar up ward, and then disappear, their organic destiny achieved.
His mere name on the page can make you tremble if you are interested in him. Movement, agitation, somber explosion of thought and feeling—complicated learning and an aggressive, poetic style. He has no remarkable popular reputation. Only the most curious and the most alert care about him, but they care with some vehemence. He is enormously ambitious, resolute, assured, and seems not to know that he is rumpled, lumpy, looks far older than his forty-one years. His clothes are a scandal.
A pert-faced, slim wife, with very short hair, came into the hall with him. She sits down on the aisle in a row near the front, but not in the very first rows. The wife smiles a good deal and appears to be proud, but with moderation. Her smile disguises the frowning dilemma that never leaves her thoughts: the mathematical estimate of his talents, which are not precise in her mind, to be weighed against the score of his defects—acerbity, impatience—which are.
The author begins to speak of his obsession: the theoretical problems of contemporary fiction. In his life he is a man of reason, bound in his spontaneous actions and in his deliberated decisions to a loose, but genuine, reverence for cause and effect. There are times when he grows short-tempered because of the ignorance or bad character of many people. Then he angrily asserts the laws of cause and effect, and he accuses with a good deal of arrogance.
Fiction is another matter. He cannot, for us, for himself, accept a simple, linear motivation as a proper way to write novels, involve characters. He does not at all agree that if the gun is hanging on the wall in the first act it must go off before the curtain comes down. No, the ground has slipped away from causality. Muddy, gorgeously polluted tides of chaos, mutation, improvisation have rushed in to make a strewn, random beach out of what had not so long ago been a serene shore, bordering a house lot always suitable for building.
He accepts, embraces, adores the fragments of life. But he studies them with great sternness, with a clean, sharp rigidity, and in this way he puts together fictions that are new, difficult, obscure, and "really good."
As they are going home after the lecture, his wife says to him, "Is it actually OK to write stories about writing?" She has overheard this whispered remark during the question period. Fiction about fiction—Borges, etc. The skepticism thrills her, even as it brings on a little squeezing of her heart. He must not fail, and yet she feels perversity in him, nagging withholdings, a stingy reluctance to redeem his narrative promises. For instance, he has written a story about her mother, a woman he despises. Somehow it angers the wife that her own mother, the creator of brutal emotions in the heart of the author, the vigilant, dirty-fingered, blue-haired mother has come out like a beaded purse, pure design.
"Now, all writing is about writing, especially poetry," he answers thoughtfully, without rancor. After all it is the question. His wife, he knew, read a great deal, but never willingly. She reads as you keep the store for the good of the family: his work, those he has praised and learned from, those he disapproves of seriously.
One evening they went to hear a large, handsome English poet, first-rate for a long time, his career arching from the Georgian to the very moment of his appearance. In his scattered, fascinating remarks about his own work, the poet spoke in a hospitable manner of Frost and Ransom. Later, at the reception, a student tried to approach the poet. "I didn't know you particularly admired Frost. Wouldn't have thought it somehow," the young man said. "I don't," the poet said. "Not in the least. And Ransom only with reservation. Still if you name one, you must name two. One lone name out of a national tradition, even a dreadfully short, patchy one, is no go. Arouses suspicion, doesn't sound genuine." The author's wife liked that. She has a feeling for paradox and for unfriendly appraisals.
The odd thing is that I have taken the two, husband and wife, from life, but they have come out false to their real meaning. The writer is not a fraud but a genius, a rare creature out of nowhere—actually from Shaker Heights around Cleveland, like Hart Crane. His seriousness, excellence, eccentricity stir my feelings. His wife is agreeable, sociable, but her "reality" and her lack of ostentation, her simplicity, her way of puncturing pretension are not the sly and cunning moral virtues I have made them appear. Those ideas of hers have nothing to do with literature, with the novel. Her husband rightly goes his own way.
But how is the man's genius to be made manifest—at breakfast, making love, engaging in his ruling passion which is writing? How is his art to become real in my novel? What is a writer's motif, his theme song, except stooped shoulders, the appalling desolation of trouser and jacket and old feet stuffed into stretched socks. And women writers, of course, interest me more since I am a woman. Remember what Sainte-Beuve said about George Sand: "A great heart, a large talent, and an enormous bottom."
An unhappy summer, and yet not a happy subject for literature. Very hard to put the vulgar and common sufferings on paper. I use "vulgar and common." in the sense of belonging to many, frequently, everlastingly occurring. The misery of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the telling, in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Pleasant to be pierced by the daggers at the end of paragraphs...
The Lasting Power of the Political Novel
By MARY McCARTHY
January 1, 1984
omeone said the other day that the American novel was, of course, not political: By comparison with the European novel, say Zola and the Russians, our home product was primarily domestic, unconcerned with public affairs. It was a surprise to me to learn that this strange notion was taken for granted - a truism - by common opinion; to me it was a new idea. At once a contrary list sprang into my mind, ''The Bostonians'' and ''The Princess Casamassima'' lining up with Henry Adams's ''Democracy''; behind them Mary McCarthy, the novelist and essayist, most recently published ''Ideas and the Novel.'' marched ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (''did much to hasten the American Civil War'' - Oxford Companion to English Literature) and ''The Blithedale Romance,'' Hawthorne's satire on the Brook Farm experiment in communal living; ahead were Dos Passos' ''U.S.A.,'' ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,'' right up to Norman Mailer's ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''
Indeed, Americans, I think, tend to get their political education through fiction - occasionally through poetry, though this is becoming rarer. Today a novel such as E.L. Doctorow's ''The Book of Daniel,'' currently a film, seems to have no other design than to excite a belief in the innocence of the Rosenberg couple or to reinforce a disbelief already held as to the charges against them. I do not know whether the Doctorow book changed anybody's mind on this subject - how could it, seriously, being fiction, deal with a concrete instance of fact? -
but fictions do sway us to the right or left, and Americans, I suspect, more than most...
Grecian Formula:
Ancient Tales Built to Last Because They Were Built to Change
In the South, there's a popular bumper sticker that reads IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE DRIVERLESS. At a time when literalists are loud and creationists expend so much energy twisting the beautiful stories of the Bible into pseudoscience, this is an excellent occasion to raise three cheers for myth—to praise it, revive it, show off its protean splendor. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong's brief work introducing Canongate's new Myth series, she makes a case for this sacred form's contemporary relevance. "Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘what if?'" A myth is powerful for precisely the same qualities that a literal reader might deride—there are knots and holes in the story, and the meanings are unfixed. In other words, it predicates its own retelling.
This is the premise of the series; a lofty project, to be sure. The publisher has commissioned writers to recast a myth—any myth, from any culture—within the format of a novella. Each volume, then, will be issued simultaneously in several countries. The authors chosen to launch this project are already known for using midrashic elements in their work. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, transformed elements from stories in the Bible, and Jeanette Winterson, in many of her novels, but especially in The Passion, has cast fairy tales into new forms. Sometimes books in a series feel too similar, almost as if they were written by the same person, but fortunately The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus and Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles each bears the distinct imprints of its new author.
In The Penelopiad, Atwood analyzes the social forces at work in the tale of Penelope, who waits years for her husband Odysseus's return from the Trojan War...
...Jeanette Winterson, in her examination of what it might actually be like to be heroic, takes a much different tack. Starting with its poetic and evocative title, Weight plunders images from the myth of Atlas, whose punishment from the gods is to bear the cosmos on his shoulders. Made up of several short chapters, the book begins with the narrator contemplating the beginning of the world as a narrative in itself...
Lydia Davis: water-tight absurdities
