When May 1st came, the worst riot was in Cleveland, but there were demonstrations in other cities as well, New York included. F. Scott Fitzgerald was there to witness the mayhem. The Armistice had ended his military service without him ever being sent to fight and he was now struggling to make a living in the advertising business. Unlike his Princeton classmates, he was not among the sons of wealth who attended college in those days and he had to earn a living. Throughout his life, he had moved among that privileged class but he was not a member. His father had been a failed businessman. His mother had some small inherited wealth that kept him in private schools and in all the right social circles and had finally gotten him to Princeton, but he now had to work for a living. Perhaps because of that experience and his upbringing among that social class, he wasn’t particularly suited to working for a living. It was that lack of prospects that had prompted his fiancé to break off their engagement until he could prove he had the means to support her. He wasn’t making it in advertising and things didn’t look good for him.

In the fall and winter of 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald was anxiously awaiting the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.  The publishing contract with Scribner’s had come in just the nick of time for Fitzgerald.  Earlier in that year he had tried his hand in the advertising business and met with failure.  Unable to prove that he could support his fiancé, Zelda Sayre of Montgomery Alabama whom he had met when he was a soldier, the engagement had been broken off.  With the offering of a publishing contract by Scribner’s that fall, Fitzgerald could now claim to be a professional writer and the engagement was back on.  No matter how badly things turned out for Scott and Zelda later on, at that moment in time, he had a book coming out and had won the heart of the love of his life. Things were looking up. It had to be the most exciting and optimistic time of his life.

With Fitzgerald, however, happiness and satisfaction never came easy. He was always his own worst critic not only of his writing but of his own self-worth, and he always felt as though he was living on the edge of failure and tragedy was always looking over his shoulder.  To both his credit and to his later downfall, he embraced his self-doubt and forged it into art.  In one of his first efforts as a fulltime writer,  he wrote the most ambitious work of his early career, the novella May Day, inspired by his fears of failure and by the riotous events that he witnessed earlier in that year in New York City.

In retrospect, This Side of Paradise, isn’t very good, even for a first novel.  Today, it serves as a testament to Max Perkins’ judgment and intuition in identifying literary talent and to Scribner’s willingness to invest and nurture a young writer.  This Side of Paradise was successful and made Fitzgerald famous, but today it serves mainly as a biographical curiosity;  the investment that Scribner’s made in the young Fitzgerald wouldn’t pay off for the publisher until long after both Fitzgerald and Perkins had died.

May Day serves as a sort of missing link between the young embryonic talent first noticed by Perkins and the accomplished novelist he would become.  We can see him experimenting with naturalism as well as notice prototypes for the characters and themes of his later work: the poor outsider among the wealthy and privileged, the beautiful but shallow heroine, the ruthless and selfish rich.  The main character’s financial failure parallels Fitzgerald’s failure in advertising as well as the heroin’s rejection  parallels Zelda’s initial rejection. The novella also contains the some of th most pointed social and political statements that Fitzgerald ever committed to paper. His writing was very much “in the moment” and influenced by his personal circumstances, but it foreshadowed the riotous decade that would follow.  This novella and his masterpiece “Babylon Revisited” serve as bookends to the 1920′s.

More about The Art of the Novella

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© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

As we head into a presidential election year,  Dante Alighieri’s famous inscription on the Gate of Hell seems appropriate.   Once again, Frank Luntz –Republican pollster, strategist, consultant, and cunning linguist – is setting forth the rhetorical recommendations that will be used in shaping the talking points used by Republican candidates all across the nation, from those seeking the Presidency, to those seeking seats in the House or the Senate, to those seeking seats in state legislatures and even city councils.  Dante’s epic poem comes to mind because operators like Luntz have always been with us, even in the 14th century, where they were just as reviled as they are now.

It was Luntz who famously dubbed the inheritance tax the “Death Tax.” This phrase, which makes the government appear so petty that it would take the money of dead people was adopted by virtually all Republicans and used to secure the votes of millions of Americans who will never have to pay such a tax.  It did, however, make it more difficult for the government to provide services that benefit all of those very same Americans.

All of the current Republican presidential candidates are promising to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act, aka “Obamacare.” It does not matter that Presidents, by themselves, have no authority to repeal anything, this idea is very popular among the Republican base because they have been taught to believe that the healthcare act was a “government takeover.”  It was nothing of the sort, but Luntz recommended that phrase to be used by Republican politicians, which they all dutifully did. 

In what has to be one of the most brazen assertions of rhetorical criticism, Luntz has even redefined the term “Orwellian“:

To be “Orwellian” is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.

Luntz is at it again.  He is wisely advising Republican politicians not to criticize the Occupy Wall Street protesters but to simply appease them by saying “I get it, I understand your frustration.”  Entrepreneurs are now to be referred to as “Job Creators,” even though they’ve been uncreating jobs for the last ten years.  “Capitalism,” which is understandably being questioned, should now be called “economic freedom,” even though its current formulation for the 99 percent is “indentured servitude.”  According to Luntz, “Government Spending,” should now be referred to as “Government Waste,” paved roads, education for our children, safe neighborhoods, and healthcare for the poor and elderly be damned. 

Dante knew exactly where in Hell Luntz belongs.  Of his nine circles of ever-increasing depravity, Dante places those who knowingly commit fraud in the next to last circle.  Among them are corrupt politicians and those who advise them.  According to Dante, the only thing worse than fraud is treachery, which is assigned to the ninth circle.  Among the several characters in the ninth circle are Cain (not Herman Cain – he’s appears to be guilty of lust, which places him in the only slightly bad second circle) and Judas Iscariot. Cain, who is famous for killing his brother Abel, committing humanity’s first murder, and lying about it.

We all know what Judas did.

So, the best that can be said about Frank Luntz is that although he’s bad, he’s not quite as bad as Cain or Judas.  I wonder how he might spin that.

See larger image Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell) (Paperback) By (author) Dante Alighieri List Price: $12.95 USD New From: $12.95 In Stock Used from: $7.79 In Stock

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© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Once again, John Gardner’s fictive dream, as articulated by novelist Ian McEwan.  No one does psychological realism better than McEwan.  There is no other art form that can envelop us so completely and embed emotions within us so deeply.  We don’t read great books, we experience them.

See larger image Atonement: A Novel (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $2.99 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 25, 2003.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $2.23 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

See larger image Saturday (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $3.09 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date April 11, 2006.

See larger image The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $6.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 4, 1991.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” ***** Anne Brooke (Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” ***** Eugene Mirabelli (Smashwords)

Available now at Smashwords.com (use coupon code MJ87Z for 100% discount until June 6, 2011).

See larger image Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $1.99 USD Release date February 6, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

At the same time, Huckleberry Finn is one of the pillars of American literature, and it’s a shame that teachers should be prevented from teaching it, or feel uncomfortable teaching it when they are allowed, so the desire to have a cleansed version of the classic is, while misguided, understandable.  The hypocrisy and intolerance that Twain masterfully laid bare in Huckleberry Finn is the reason why it is such a powerful book, so while the word nigger has become a much more universally offensive word than when Twain used it, its casual usage in the text only serves to amplify the irony that was already there.  It’s a violent word that carries with it five hundred years of cruelty.  Twain was a committed anti-racist his entire life and if he were here with us today he might take note of the current controversy and say, “That’s exactly what I was trying to say.”

While it’s understandable that we don’t want young schoolchildren and their teachers to feel uncomfortable, hiding from our history by cleansing the text hurts us as a people and a nation even more.  It’s like modern Confederacy fetishists claiming that secession was a state’s right and it wasn’t about slavery, or Haley Barbour claiming that the racism in the Mississippi of his youth “wasn’t that bad.”

It may well be that Huckleberry Finn is not appropriate for elementary and middle school students.  It’s biting satire and irony alone require a certain level of maturity that most younger students have not yet acquired.

Later this week, we saw that schoolchildren are not the only ones being protected from the harsh truths of our history, but also the House of Representatives.  The newly elected Tea Party members in the House decided to open their session with a reading of the Constitution.  This in itself is ironic because while they have spoken of the document as if it were some divine revelation handed down from the demi-gods who founded our country, they don’t seem to understand anything that’s in it.  To avoid confronting the fact that the constitution, as successful as it has been, was in its initial form a compromised and flawed document that has required, to date, twenty-seven amendments, they chose to exclude the reading of the parts that are no longer in effect.  The most notable of these parts is the one where slave are considered three fifths of a person.  How could it be that this divine scripture could contain such an idea?  Weren’t the Framers (or was it the Founding Fathers, Tea Partiers don’t know the difference) divinely inspired and all-wise?  Or were they well-intentioned but humanly flawed men who did the best they could under difficult political and economic circumstances and were constrained by the prejudices of their age.

To ask those questions and to face the truths of our history is not to denigrate their legacy.  Instead, it is to recognize how the document they created has been used as a framework for continuously creating a more perfect union by bringing to pass things that they, in their own time, could not.

The Founding Father Fetishism of the Tea Partiers prevents them from understanding any of this and threatens their faith-based belief in our nation’s moral perfection, so they just skipped the parts that don’t fit.

This same group of Tea Partiers, who came to Washington declaring themselves “Constitutionalists” whose goal is to restore constitutional government, have decided that they need special classes on the Constitution from a Supreme Court Justice.  While I’m not against members of the legislature seeking out expert advice on constitutional matters, I find it unseemly that they have arrived in the nation’s capital as elected legislators and are asking for remedial help in doing the job they claimed they were qualified to do.

The Supreme Court Justice who will be providing these remedial classes is non other than Antonin Scalia, who was also in the news this week.  In an interview, Scalia declared that the Constitution does not provide woman (and presumably other minorities too) with protection from discrimination.  This declaration decidedly moved Scalia from the realm of just plain crazy into the realm of batshit crazy, although some might argue that he made that jump years ago with his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas.   Somehow, the equal protection clause of The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t seem to say what everyone thinks it’s said for nearly one hundred and fifty years.  As a “strict constructionist” he has argued that the “original intent” of the The Fourteenth Amendment was that it applied to the slaves who had been freed by the Civil War.  It doesn’t actually say anything like, “The provisions of this amendment only apply to slaves who have been freed by the Civil War,” so Scalia may be a strict constructionist  of an imaginary Constitution.

He furthermore argued that if women want constitutional protection, the legislature should create an amendment.  This is rich.  There was a decade long campaign back in the seventies for an Equal Rights Amendment.  It was supported by all sorts of leftwing radicals, including Gerald Ford.  The ERA was never ratified.  The legal argument that led to its defeat was that it was not necessary because the equal protection clause of The Fourteenth Amendment already provided the protections offered by the ERA.  It was a reasonable argument at the time and the wording of The Fourteenth Amendment is intentionally broad so that weasels like Scalia can’t play games by saying that because it says that this group is named, it doesn’t apply to any other group not explicitly named.

The group named in The Fourteenth Amendment is “persons.” That’s a pretty big group.  If you’re a  person, you’re protected.  Mr. Strict Constructionist seems to have decided that women are not persons.  Amazingly, Mr. Strict Constructionist also recently decided that corporations are persons.

Up is down, down is up, we are living in interesting times.  Mark Twain would be amused.  Or horrified.

Update 1/10/2011:

Jill Lepore’s article about the historic battle over constitutional interpretation at NewYorker.com.

See larger image Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The Ignatius Critical Editions) (Paperback) By (author) Mark Twain List Price: $9.95 USD New From: $4.99 In Stock Used from: $4.89 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

“Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.  They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.  They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.  Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.  They are different.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”

Roger Simon has written an incredibly brain-dead article.  Not that it’s really anything unusual for Mr. Simon or for that bastion of deep thought known as Politico.com.  The phrase “class warfare” has been getting thrown around lately as if it is some new pernicious feature of American politics, along with the idea of “wealth redistribution.”

How stupid do they think the rest of us are?  Class politics and wealth redistribution have been the fundamental components of governments, no matter what form they may take, since the beginning of civilization.  It began when the head of one clan said to the head of another clan, “Your clan my better shoes than my clan.  How about my clan growing enough food for all of us while your clan makes shoes for all of us.”  So began division of labor, the specialization of skills, and the development of science and art that has created Beethoven’s 9th, the Guttenberg press, antibiotics, The Mona Lisa, and the Lunar Module to name just a few miracles.  Along the way,  clothes needed to washed and mended, garbage needed to be collected and hauled away, children needed to educated, public buildings like schools and libraries needed to be constructed and maintained.  A society’s greatest achievements are not just the achievements of a few geniuses, they are also the achievement of the entire social and economic infrastructure supporting those geniuses.     A society’s achievements, a civilization’s achievements, are made possible by the excess value created by everyone in it, whether it comes in the form of patronage from the rich, a government subsidy, or the disposable income of ordinary working people.  The wealth of a nation is…the wealth of a nation.

It is inevitable that in any society wealth will tend to become concentrated.  Social and political structures provide a kind of organic regulator that balances the distribution of wealth among all of the contributors to a nation’s wealth.  True equality will never exist, and as the Bible says, “The poor will always be with you,” but one thing is certain. When the wealth of a nation becomes concentrated in a progressively smaller portion of the population, bad things happen:  civil unrest, revolutions, stock market crashes, and economic depressions.  As this disproportionate distribution increases, it gets reinforced by the ever-increasing influence of the very, very rich.  Somehow, this is not ever characterized as class warfare. Only when this theft of a nation’s wealth is called out by its victims is it called class warfare.

F. Scott Fitzgerald made his reputation in the 1920′s, the last time that wealth was so disproportionately distributed.  He moved in the circles of the super-rich, but wasn’t a true member of that class.  He had come from a good family whose fortunes had dwindled over time.  His success as a writer in the 1920′s brought him wealth, primarily from his short stories about the rich and privileged.   He was fascinated by the rich, but he always viewed them with a critical eye.  He is sometimes misread as celebrating the rich and their excesses, and was unfairly derided by Hemingway for it, but the truth is that his work exposes their moral corruption that lies just underneath the veil of respectability.   No character more exemplifies that than Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Unlike Mr. Simon, Fitzgerald held no illusions about the rich and was never under their spell.

There is a commonly held delusion that we are a classless society, that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can raise themselves up into the most privileged classes in our society.  There are, of course, some examples of this, but they are extremely rare.  This mythical American Dream, which makes politicians of every stripe wax poetic and tear up, is what reinforces this delusion and convinces poor and middle-class members of our society to vote against their own best interests.  Ninety-eight percent of them will never inherit a multi-million dollar estate, but if they did, they certainly wouldn’t want to be taxed.  And so, while their schools crumble and fail to educate their children, their social security trust fund gets raided, their quality of life sinks at an ever increasing rate while super-rich allocate an ever increasing share of the nation’s wealth for themselves, enabled by ignorant tools like Roger Simon.

See larger image The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $21.99 USD New From: $11.10 In Stock Used from: $3.61 In Stock Release date September 20, 1995.

See larger image The Great Gatsby (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $6.05 In Stock Used from: $2.73 In Stock Release date September 30, 2004.

See larger image Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality That Limits Our Lives (Hardcover) By (author) Sam Pizzigati List Price: $34.95 USD New From: $31.00 In Stock Used from: $10.45 In Stock

See larger image A People's History of the United States (P.S.) (Paperback) By (author) Howard Zinn List Price: $25.00 USD New From: $12.49 In Stock Used from: $9.56 In Stock Release date November 2, 2010.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Thus begins Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella, First Love. At age sixteen while living in the country, Vladimir meets twenty-one-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, the daughter of a titled but very poor family living on the adjoining property.  Zinaida is a beautiful and spirited young women and Vladimir falls hopelessly in love with her.  Zinaida toys with him mercilessly, enticing him with hints of a deep and romantic affection and, alternatively, pushing him away and treating him with condescending, sisterly affection. (Perhaps the 19th century equivalent of “Let’s just be friends.”)  At one point, she even asks Vladimir to look after her twelve-year-old brother, emphasizing the their age difference and that Vladimir is still just a boy.

Adding to Vladimir’s frustration are the numerous suitors who come calling on Zinaida every evening.  They are all older than Vladimir and superior to him in either wealth or social class.  She plays them all off one another, but occasionally indicates that she favors Vladimir.  On these occasions the young man’s heart swells and there is no joy greater than the joy felt by a young man in love for the first time.  There is also no sadness greater than the sadness brought on by unrequited love.

Vladimir is a sensitive and observant young man and he is able to see through Zinaida’s extreme coquettishness and notices a gradual change in her manner.  Beneath her façade, he can see that she truly is in love, but not with him.  Nor is it one of the other suitors, although at first he suspects it is one of them.  The penultimate heartbreak for Vladimir is that Zinaida’s secret love turns out to be Vladimir’s own father.  In the final chapters, this heartbreak story, as all good heartbreak, turns tragic.

Turgenev is one of the early practitioners of literary realism.  First Love is told in first person and adheres strictly to the limitations of omniscience that that point of view requires.  Turgenev uses that to his advantage in several specific places, such as when Vladimir witnesses an altercation between his father and Zinaida.  He is unable to hear what they are discussing, but his visual observation provides enough for for us to understand the depth nature of their relationship.

The true artistry of this novella is revealed at the conclusion when the reader reconsiders the entire story once again, this time taking a far more sympathetic view of both Zinaida (and really, the first time through she’s very hard to like) and Vladimir’s father.  What is finally revealed is that this story is not only a tale about a youthful unrequited love but also about Zinaida’s place in society, society’s expectations of all of us, and ultimately about the nature of love itself.

Turgenev’s influence is even more apparent in the development of psychological fiction.   He has a gentle touch that captures complex and nuanced emotional states in his characters and can be seen as a precursor to Henry James and Joseph Conrad.  This same approach to fiction can still be seen in such contemporary works as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

Turgenev lived during changing times in Europe.  Later events would sweep away the aristocracy in his native Russia, but during his lifetime the social order, and the aristocracy that it supported,  was already crumbling.  The characters in First Love reflect this along with the very nature of the story that the older Vladimir tells to his shallow and passionless companions.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image First Love (The Art of the Novella) (Paperback) By (author) Ivan Turgenev List Price: $10.00 USD New From: $5.58 In Stock Used from: $0.06 In Stock Release date September 1, 2004.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $2.23 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

A few days after I posted The Art of the Novella: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, my brief précis and commentary on Saul Bellow’s 1957 novella, I received an email from an old friend complimenting the piece, but also with an admonishment about my somewhat narrow view of what literature is all about.  Tommy Wilhem’s fight against the abyss, a common theme throughout the history of western literary tradition, from Odysseus to Bloom (Leopold), is certainly one of the major themes of the book, but, as my friend Maria pointed out to me, it is a theme largely owned by middle and upper class white men.  It is one of the dominant themes of western literature largely because western literary canon has always been, and to a large extent still is, defined by Dead White European Males.  Battling the abyss is a luxury of the privileged and empowered.  Literature created by women and minorities, she pointed out, tends to be about more immediate and worldly challenges  –  poverty, discrimination, subjugation — human experiences not common to privileged white men, dead or otherwise.  Essentially, she was telling me as politely as possible, “Fred, your Updikean life in suburbia has made your brain go soft,  you need to get out more.”

This discussion has been going on, or raging, between us for nearly thirty years.  When we met in the English department of SUNY Albany there was a heated battle going on there, and in colleges and universities everywhere for that matter, over literary canon.  There were the traditionalists, the old guard, who defended the traditional curriculum defined by Dead White European Males, plus a few tokens: Austin, Bronte, Wharton.  On the other side were those who thought that literary canon itself was oppressive, excluding not only women, but anyone of color.  There were extremes on both sides of the argument.  On the establishment side there were those who didn’t think anything written after 1850 was literature at all,  On the other side, feminist professors who interpreted every piece of accepted literature as misogynist, no matter what it was about.(“It’s about a 19th century whaling ship with an all male crew, for Pete’s sake!” “See! That proves my point!“).  While my own proclivities were with the traditionalists, middle class white male and Bloom (Harold) acolyte that I was, I believed that the canon should be more inclusive of lesser heard voices.  I didn’t want to trash it, I thought it should be expanded.

Initially, I wasn’t aware of this academic battle.  My high school honors English curriculum had been classic canon: a year of Greek, a year of British, a year of American, plus a smattering of other western European white guys.  The curriculum was the curriculum and I didn’t question it.  The political lines gradually revealed themselves over time.  In discussions with certain professors, you could earn a disdainful gaze by mentioning a modern woman or a black writer.  With other professors you would get the look by making a reference to a dead white guy.  Bringing up Vonnegut was like throwing a knuckleball at either side.  You never knew what it would do.  He was obviously a white guy, but at the time some considered him vulgar and he had once written science fiction, so both sides had reasons to hate him.   Vonnegut considered himself a descendant of Twain, who has also been accused of vulgarity.  Time has been shifting critical opinion favorably for both of them.

There was one person who was capable of bridging this gap.  Professor Tom Smith, who combined sheer brilliance,  the soul of a poet, and an exuberant generosity of spirit, endeared himself everyone.  It was through him that I was introduced to Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  These were entirely new voices to me, revealing human experiences that until then, in my white American maleness, had simply been invisible, to borrow a theme from Ellison.  I didn’t forsake Updike for these new, exotic voices — our common religious, cultural,  and socio-economic background is impossible to escape — but I did learn that the breadth of human experience is much larger than any of us can individually ever know.  My Telemachus-Stephan Dedalus complex had always made reading a search for my self.  Now it was a search for other other selves, very different and very far away from middle-class Queens.

History is written by the victors, and so it is true of the western literary tradition that we have inherited.  The winners, the powerful, the privileged, the male,  get to tell their tales. The vanquished, the enslaved, the women, not so much.   When I was sixteen years old, and reading The Iliad for the first time, I was enthralled by how such an ancient story could captivate me.  Across the centuries, from an ancient culture, the characters came alive for me.  In spite of the distance of time and culture, their desires and emotions were immediately recognizable.  Stories driven by character and desire are the trademark of western literature, no matter how intricate plots may or may not be.  All of the events in The Iliad are triggered by the “ruinous rage” of Achilles, who has had his consort, Briseis, taken from him by a more powerful social superior, Agamemnon.  Achilles takes his revenge by refusing to fight, essentially taking his ball and going home.  Although we are assured that Achilles loves Briseis, his anger is as much about the humiliation of being stripped of a prized possession as it is about his heartbreak.  Of course, since I was sixteen at the time, fueled by romantic notions and lust I had conjured up visions of Briseis as some sort of 1100 BC incarnation of Linda Ronstadt (it was the seventies and few were objectified by sixteen year-old boys more than Linda Ronstadt).

It’s not necessarily  fair to apply modern sensibilities to ancient texts, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid.  Briseis, no matter how much Achilles loved her, was nothing more than property, an enslaved tribute awarded to him for a well-fought battle.  In spite of the fact that the poet seeks inspiration from female muses, this story is told from a decidedly male point of view.  How Briseis feels about the situation is entirely irrelevant.  Her role in the larger story is that of a prop.  In modern parlance, she is a sex-slave.

One shouldn’t judge this too harshly because the status of women in Homer’s epic accurately portrays their status as property during time of the Trojan War (1100BC), the time Homer wrote in down (700 BC) and most of the two thousand plus years since then.  Judgment, however, is beside the point.  It is what is missing from western literary canon that is the issue.  There may have been female poets in ancient times, and in medieval times, but either through suppression or simply by academic selection, they are lost to us.  Most of the handful of woman writers who have been enshrined in western literary canon had to publish under male pseudonyms.

As it has been for women, it has been much the same for all of those who have been disenfranchised.  Native Americans and African Americans have been subsumed by a culture, whose literary tradition is driven by character and desire, that historically has deemed their own character and desire irrelevant and invisible.

If reading and literature is really all about sharing and understanding the full range of human experience, then it needs to be about sharing and understanding all of it. It needs to be not just about lives spent the abyss,  but also about lives lived under physical and metaphorical shackles and chains.

See larger image Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetrology: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest (Hardcover) By (author) John Updike List Price: $35.00 USD New From: $18.37 In Stock Used from: $11.95 In Stock Release date October 17, 1995.

See larger image The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (Paperback) By (author) Harold Bloom List Price: $20.00 USD New From: $4.54 In Stock Used from: $1.16 In Stock Release date September 1, 1995.

See larger image Song of Solomon (Oprah's Book Club) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Toni Morrison List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $0.01 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 1, 1998.

See larger image Invisible Man (Paperback) By (author) Ralph Ellison List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $7.00 In Stock Used from: $0.30 In Stock Release date March 14, 1995.

See larger image Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback) By (author) James Baldwin List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $2.95 In Stock Release date June 13, 2000.

See larger image One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) (Paperback) By (author) Gabriel Garcia Marquez List Price: $14.99 USD New From: $5.91 In Stock Used from: $1.89 In Stock Release date February 21, 2006.

See larger image The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation (Paperback) By (author) Homer List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $4.00 In Stock Used from: $0.10 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Nathan’s autobiographical short stories have upset his family, particularly his father, who believes they show American-Jewish family life in a bad light and confirm the worst stereotypes of Jews.  It is 1956 and Nathan is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust.  His family is offended by his telling of their internal feuds, portraying them as “conniving Jews,” confirming the worst stereotypes held by Gentiles.  They enlist a respected member of their community, a judge no less, for his opinion.  Nathan receives a letter from the judge asking him, among other things,  “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?”  Strong stuff.  Nathan, however, is devoted more than anything to truthfulness and art and refuses to take responsibility for the feelings of his family and to take on the weight of history which they are trying to impose upon him.

Estranged from his father, he seeks out a substitute in one Emanual Lonoff, a successful, middle-aged Jewish-American writer.  Citing his published stories and his magazine profile, he writes to Lonoff,  inviting himself because he happens to be in the neighborhood staying at a writer’s colony in upstate New York.  His girlfriend has left him, his family questioning his morals, he seeks the approval from a spiritual father, a fellow writer.  He gets far more than he bargained for.

Lonoff lives a quiet life in The Berkshires with his wife of thirty-five years, Hope.  Also visiting on the same weekend as Nathan is is the beautiful but mysterious Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former student.  There is tension in the house.  While never explicitly stated, it is more than hinted at that Bellette is a former lover of Lonoff’s.  There are no doubts about in long suffering Hope’s mind.

Lonoff receives Nathan warmly, but still holds him at arm’s length.  The wisdom and affirmation that Nathan is seeking is meted out in tiny doses.  Like the writing that Nathan admires, Lonoff’s words are spare and while as an artist he reveals truths fearlessly, in life he is guarded.  He describes his approach to writing:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Given Nathan’s romantic notions at the time about the noble cause of literature and art, that’s a little disappointing.  And yet, that’s pretty much what writing is.  For Hope, however, this describes her life with Lonoff as one of enforced solitude, and she’s had about enough of it.  That, along with the presence of Amy, brings about a crisis in the marriage and a confrontation that Nathan gets to witness.

Nathan, in the meantime, has fallen in love with Miss Ballette, or at least who he imagines her to be, none other than Anne Frank.  Her age is right, her look is right, and her background is unknown.  If only she would marry him, he could take revenge on his critics who attack his anti-Semitism.  Sadly, she is only Amy, not Anne, and well he tells her she looks like Anne Frank, she reacts with indifference.

The life Lonoff lives, devoted to his art, just as Nathan desires for himself, is not without its costs. The costs are paid not just by the writer, but also by the people in his life.  In the end, at the end of the tumultuous weekend, Lonoff’s knowing evaluation of Nathan is both praising of his talent but also a warning about the life he is choosing for himself:

“I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You’re a different person.”

It’s impossible to read The Ghost Writer without thinking of Roth himself.  The setting of the story is in the same timeframe as when Roth’s career was beginning, at it was Roth’s unflinching portrayal, the the good and the not so good, of Jewish-American life that brought him both fame and controversy, first with Goodbye, Columbus, and then Portnoy’s Complaint.  The Ghost Writer was written on the other side of the fame and controversy and is imbued with the wisdom of a life having been lived.  The tone is genuinely wistful and, as a truth teller, Roth is willing to own up to the flaws, vanity, and shallowness of his twenty-three year-old self.  Among the larger themes of all of Roth’s work is the two-edged sword of heritage.   We are a nation of immigrants and while we attempt to purge ourselves from whatever identity that defines our ancestors, there are also times when the heritage that haunts is also the heritage that comforts us.  In The Ghost Writer, Roth shows us the birth of that dichotomy.

The Ghost Writer was selected by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the prize in 1980, but the Pulitzer committee overrode the decision and instead gave the award to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  It’s hard to imagine two books more different in style, subject and sheer heft.  Thirty years later, it’s hard to say anything about the comparative merits of the two books other than, “Wow, what year that was.”

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image The Ghost Writer (Paperback) By (author) Philip Roth List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $1.85 In Stock Release date August 1, 1995.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Tamkin’s council and Wilhelm’s inability to shed his burdens only serve to heighten Wilhelm’s sense of failure.  Wherever he seeks sympathy, whether it be his estranged wife who continues to make financial demands on him while refusing to divorce him or his father, a comfortably retired doctor, finds nothing but reminders of his failures.

Born Wilhelm Adler, he changes his name to Tommy Wilhelm to further his acting career.  His career never takes off and so he fails in his attempt to actually become Tommy Wilhelm, a failure he is constantly reminded of by his father who insists on addressing him as “Wilky,” his childhood name.

Seize the Day is a distinctly American story.  Whereas British fiction from Daniel Defoe on up through today’s Ian McEwan is preoccupied by social and economic class distinctions, American society prides itself on being free from class.  No matter what station we are born into, we believe that through hard work, perseverance, and strength of character we can succeed.  If we do not succeed, it is obviously due to some flaw in our character.  American fiction has always explored the chasm that exists between that Great American Ideal (and mythology) and the stark reality that the Universe has no concept of fairness.  American literary characters, unlike their British counterparts, are therefore imbued with a greater sense of anomie. While British heroes and heroines may struggle to overcome the rigid class distinctions in their society, and usually fail, there is at least the idea that there is a sense of order in the Universe, no matter how harsh it may be. American literary figures, from Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths to Fitzgerald’s James Gatz to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Miller’s Willy Loman, fight not against society but against nothingness.

Years after writing Seize the Day, Bellow said in interviews that never liked Tommy Wilhelm very much.  Indeed, Wilhelm is not particularly likable and the reader is likely to feel as much sympathy for him as the other characters in the novella.  “Stop whining, be a man, get a job!” we want to say to him.  And yet, the story is compelling and unconsciously reaches those hidden parts of our psyche that fear the stark nothingness, and leads us to the novella’s surprisingly cathartic conclusion.

For more in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

Referenced books:

See larger image Seize the Day (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Saul Bellow List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $7.38 In Stock Used from: $3.05 In Stock Release date May 27, 2003.

See larger image An American Tragedy (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Theodore Dreiser List Price: $9.95 USD New From: $4.72 In Stock Used from: $5.50 In Stock Release date August 3, 2010.

See larger image The Great Gatsby (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $6.05 In Stock Used from: $2.73 In Stock Release date September 30, 2004.

See larger image The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback) By (author) J. D. Salinger List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $4.98 In Stock Used from: $2.46 In Stock

See larger image Death of a Salesman (Viking Critical Library) (Paperback) By (author) Arthur Miller List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $8.33 In Stock Used from: $1.34 In Stock Release date January 1, 1996.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.