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

See larger image May Day (The Art of the Novella) (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $10.00 USD New From: $5.56 In Stock Used from: $2.09 In Stock Release date August 25, 2009.

See larger image Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Rev) (Paperback) List Price: $31.00 USD New From: $24.91 In Stock Used from: $11.68 In Stock

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Once again it is Read an E-Book week, a tradition which began in 2004 in order to promote what was then an emerging technology.  Since then, the event has grown each year along with the market for e-books which is now changing forever the publishing industry.  Printed books are not going away anytime soon, but every year a larger proportion of e-books are sold.

To celebrate this event, four of my e-books at Smashwords.com are on sale for 50% off (that’s just .99).  Click on the title links below and enter coupon code REW50 when checking out to receive the discount.  All titles are available in multiple formats that are compatible with a wide range of devices.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Three stories about two neighbors who meet as young children and grow up together on Long Island during the late 60′s and early 70′s. The comforting and loving world they live in changes around them as their families fracture, society descends into chaos, and a war rages on. In the aftermath, they left on a wrecked, smoking landscape, searching for a new way to live when all of the sign have been burned down.

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)

Read an excerpt.

Enter coupon code REW50 at checkout:

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Smashwords Edition.

Natural Selection

A corporate manager is on the verge losing it all. Office politics, a growing drinking problem, estrangement from his family, and a looming layoff are pushing him to the edge of a personal abyss.

I wrote about how this story came to be in “Into The Abyss.”

Read an excerpt.

Natural Selection, Smashwords Edition.

A Couple

Rob and Debbie are spending their last spring break in Florida. Graduation is looming and they face an uncertain future. Family expectations, peer pressure, and their own hearts are driving them apart. I wrote about this genre of story in my post Doomed Couples.

Read an excerpt.

Enter coupon code REW50 at checkout:

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.

Bonnifer

A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.

Enter coupon code REW50 at checkout:

Bonnifer, Smashwords Edition.

© 2012, 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.

On an early summer afternoon in the tiny village of  North Dormer, Charity Royall sees from the distance a handsome young man, his manner and his clothing indicating that he is a wealthy city person.  Later, he stops in at the library that Charity unenthusiastically manages, in search of books about the local architecture and introduces himself as Lucius Harney.  Although his reason for visiting the library is entirely proper, and he has no motive for seducing or even flirty with the librarian, he is momentarily and involuntarily flustered by her beauty.  There is no flirtation at all in this meeting, but Charity notices Harney’s brief reaction and in the hours and days after that she repeatedly reflects on that moment even as her own obsession with Harney grows.

As the story unfolds we gradually learn more about Charity’s background.  She is the ward of Lawyer Royall, a prominent member of the community of North Dormer.  This is a somewhat dubious distinction considering how humble the village is; the only church in town lacks a fulltime minister and has services only every other Sunday. Its backwardness is revealed somewhat comically in Charity’s thoughts.

Charity was born into abject poverty in a place referred to as “The Mountain.”  Her destitute mother gave her up to Royall after her father had been convicted of manslaughter.  All that Charity can remember of her earlier life are fleeting images and she knows neither of her parents names.

As a work of naturalism, the behavior of all the characters in this story is driven by innate desires of which they are not entirely aware that conflict with the constraints and expectations of society.  Free will, if it exists at all, is exercised by negotiating in the path between conforming to the requirements of civilization (the nearby city of Nettleton) and giving in to primitive passion (“The Mountain”).  North Dormer, like Charity, exists somewhere between these two.  We see these internal conflicts play out not only in Charity but also in the two other main characters: Royall and Harney.

Wharton is one of the great literary stylists of naturalism (unlike, say, Theodore Dreiser), and of American Literature in general.  In Summer, her rendering of the landscape and season evokes the moods and desires of the characters.  The effect is poetic and, at times, intoxicating:

There had never been such a June in Eagle County.  Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and mid-summer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty.  Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills.  Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud the threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western light rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.

On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her.  Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against the sky.  Just beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine.  This was all she saw, but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond.  All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance.  Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalations to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.  (Chapter V)

Wharton was born into incredible wealth and most of her work focused on the rites and rituals of New York Society.  She moved comfortably and at ease in those circles, yet her work reveals a discerning and critical eye for passions and desires that beneath polite and tasteful manners.  The two works that are set in humble rural settings, Summer and Ethan Frome, take place in western Massachusetts.  She lived there, in Lennox, for some years in a magnificent house that she had built, but by the time she wrote Summer, she had been living in France for some years .  The landscape and its less affluent people had made an impression on her.  There are elements of harshness in her portrayals of them, but never is there any condescension in tone and it is clear that she had great affection for the land and its inhabitants.

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

Books Referenced:

See larger image Summer (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $5.99 USD New From: $4.19 In Stock Used from: $5.98 In Stock

See larger image Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.00 USD New From: $3.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date October 25, 2005.

See larger image The Age of Innocence (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.98 USD New From: $7.00 In Stock Used from: $1.49 In Stock

See larger image The House of Mirth (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $4.95 USD New From: $2.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 1, 2000.

© 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.

At the very end of his life, Ernest Hemingway was convinced that the electroconvulsive therapy that had be used to treat his depression had destroyed his memory and, therefore, his ability to write.  Whether or not shock therapy can actually do that and whether or not it was true in Hemingway’s case has been argued ever since then, but Hemingway believed it and it was perhaps the final blow that pushed him into the despair from which he could find no escape.  About a year earlier, he had completed the manuscript for A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early days in Paris when he was on the threshold of literary stardom.  While one might imagine that memories of true events are crucial ingredients for a memoir, they are not the only ingredients.  In the years since A Moveable Feast was first published it has been extensively fact-checked several times. Major parts of it cannot be verified, including an infamous anecdote involving F. Scott Fitzgerald, a ruler, and a men’s room, that I will forever refuse to believe ever happened. So really, what purpose did memory serve him in creating his memoir, especially since even though much of it may be fiction, it is still vivid and poignant, and a prime example of a literary genre?  For Hemingway, memory was everything and he couldn’t live without it.

So what is it about this fragile and mysterious thing called memory that sustains us, that inspires us, that tricks us, and sometimes horrifyingly eludes us, that makes it so essential to the creation of fiction?  And what is it about memory that is essential to the reading of fiction?

William Saleton’s recent profile of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus at Slate.com provides insight into the fragile nature of memory.  Loftus is a researcher who has studied, through experimentation on human subjects, the mechanisms of human memory.  In the course of her career, she has been a controversial figure.  She has shown how so-called eyewitness testimony in criminal cases can be unknowingly be shaped by police and prosecutors, helping defense lawyers obtain acquittals for their clients, and helping to overturn convictions based on eyewitness testimony.  Along the way she has stirred controversy in her own profession by  taking on proponents of recovered memory therapy in the early 1990’s, by arguing that the therapy itself created false memories of childhood abuse.  It’s still controversial today, but her efforts have resulted in tighter legal and professional guidelines.  Her shift in focus from proving eyewitness testimony to be flawed to proving recovered memories to be equally questionable had to have been motivated, at least in part, by her own experience.  Saleton writes:

Not even Loftus was immune to suggestion. In 1988, after 13 years of testifying about memory’s fallibility, she was told by her uncle that she was the one who had found her dead mother in the swimming pool. The sights and sounds of that awful morning came back to her—the corpse face down, the nightgown, the screaming, the stretcher, the police cars. But within three days, her uncle recanted the story, and other relatives confirmed that her aunt, not Loftus, had found the body. The memories of the memory expert were false.

Her false memory must have been so real and so vivid to her that when confronted with the truth she realized that memory was more fragile, and truth more elusive, then she had already established.

In 1990, Loftus testified in a murder trial for a murder that had happened twenty-one years earlier.  The defendant had been charged by his own daughter, who had suddenly recovered a repressed memory.  Loftus’ previous research had proved that eyewitness testimony could be altered, but she had not proved that entire memories could be made up.  The defendant was convicted.  And yet, from her own personal experience, she knew it was possible and set out to prove it.  Saleton writes:

Loftus began to read popular books that told women and therapists how to recover memories of sexual abuse. The books urged therapists to ask their clients about childhood incest. They listed symptoms that supposedly indicated abuse even if it wasn’t remembered. They invited women to search for memories by imagining the abuse. They encouraged group therapy in which women could hear one another’s stories of being victimized.

These ideas sounded fishy. Suggestion, indoctrination, authority, inference, imagination, and immersion were known to alter memories in police interrogations and experiments. But could they create a whole memory? Could the recent surge of incest recollections be the product of recovered-memory therapy?

Loftus conducted a number of experiments to see if it were possible, through careful manipulation, subjects could be induced into recalling vivid memories of things that never happened.  What she discovered is that it is possible to create a false memory in at least some of her subjects if certain conditions are met.  Interestingly, the conditions were met in her own very personal experience with false memories:

• The memory is suggested or verified by someone whom the subject trusts.  In her test subjects’ case, like her own experience, the facilitator is a relative.  In the books she read, the trusted facilitator was the therapist.
• The false memory contains true elements that trigger real sense or affective memories that become conflated with the false elements.

The rest is done by the subject’s own mind, unconsciously weaving true and the false together to form a convincing narrative that although false, might as well have happened because it is now part of the subjects self-identity. Loftus was able to create a recipe for a false memory.  It wasn’t always successful, but that it was successful at all shows how fragile our perceptions of reality can be.  Her most common recipe was the “lost in the mall experiment”:

Each subject was given summaries of four incidents from his childhood. Three stories were true; one was false. The false story followed a formula: You got lost in a mall or department store, you cried, you were found by an old person. The summaries were written with the help of older relatives who knew the true incidents and the family.

…

The subjects were told that their relatives had recalled all four incidents. They were asked to fill in the details of each incident or, if they couldn’t remember it, to write, “I do not remember this.” In follow-up interviews, they were asked to think more about each incident and to retrieve any additional details they could recall. Of the 24 people subjected to this procedure, six came to remember the fake story as true.

Because the stories were individualized by relatives who knew the subject, they contained enough specific details that evoke sense memories that were true and would validate the false part of the story:

You, your mom, Tien, and Tuan all went to the Bremerton K-Mart. You must have been 5 years old at the time. Your mom gave each of you some money to get a blueberry Icee. You ran ahead to get into the line first, and somehow lost your way in the store. Tien found you crying to an elderly Chinese woman. You three then went together to get an Icee.

There’s not a lot of vivid detail in this version of the story, but there’s just enough to bring the subject back to her child sensations and perceptions: going to a department store with her mother and her siblings as a very small child, a blueberry Icee, an elderly Chinese woman.  The subject who was told this story remembers going the Bremerton K-Mart with her family as a sensual experience: the immensity of the space, the aisles, the shelves of merchandize (brightly colored toys, gleaming appliances), the crowds of people all much taller than a five-year old, the sounds of people talking, the PA announcements (possibly for lost children), and finally, the taste of a blueberry Icee.

Loftus’ critics, and there are many of them, point out that a benign story with a happy ending is a far cry from a traumatic and scarring one of sexual abuse.  Additionally, as the Slate article describes, Loftus has used her research as a basis for therapists to implant false memories on purpose in order to alter their patients’ behavior in some desirable way.  To many of her peers, and to me, she has crossed over an ethical line in a very frightening way.  Her little recipe has become a cookbook for brainwashing.

Ethical concerns about what trusted professionals do with this knowledge aside, Loftus’s research into the delicate nature of memory has a lot to say about how we read and experience fiction and how we write it.  The conflation of sense memory and affective memory, which we bring as readers and writers, with fictional characters and experiences creates vivid false memories.

What ties us all together is the fundamental fact that all of us feel sensations and experience emotions in the same way.  One of the finest examples of a writer connecting with his reader through the five basic senses can be found in the opening paragraphs of Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point.”  This story is about a fourteen year-old boy desperately trying to escort a drunken middle aged women home from a party.  It’s not necessarily an experience that many of us have had, but D’Ambrosio makes it real for us from the very beginning by communicating with us through our senses:

I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at circus.  I tied mine around my finger and Father tied his around a stringbean and lost it.  After that, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning, sleepless from all the sand in my sheets and all the uproar in the living room.  Then the door opened, and for a moment the blade of bright light blinded me.  The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in Heaven—some kind of Heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit.  Everything was hysterical out there—the men laughing, the ice clinking, the women shrieking.  A woman crossed over and sat on the edge of my bed, bending over me.  It was Mother.  She was backlit, a vague looming silhouette, but I could smell lily of the valley and something else—lemon rind from the bitter twist she always chewed when she reached the watery bottom of her vodka-and-tonic.  When Father was alive, she rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then any one of the other senses – smell, touch, sound, taste — is worth a thousand pictures, and they transcend age, gender, and sometimes even culture.  From the sensation of the sand in the sheets, to sounds of the party in the next room, to the bitter twist and the watery vodka-and-tonic (combining both smell and taste), we are experiencing what young Kurt is experiencing and he is reaching us on a very visceral, non-verbal level.  He has no need to explain to us how he feels.  The sensations unconsciously evoke  our own sense memories and we simply feel what Kurt feels.  Having so firmly established this sensual connection with us, D’Ambrosio can now take us wherever he wants to go, just like Loftus’s test subject fondly remembering the taste of her  blueberry Icee.

This conflation of vivid sense memory and imagined narrative is how writers approach their craft and how, as readers, we experience books and stories rather than just merely read them.  We may have nothing at all in common with the author except for the simple fact that we inhabit human bodies and experience sensations and emotions in the same way.  In their simplest and most basic form, they pierce through everything that might separate us from one another: culture, time, place, language, and gender.

Sense memories, Rockaway Playland, 1969: the sting of sunburned cheeks, the roar of the rollercoaster overhead, the taste of hot dogs and cotton candy, the smell of the Atlantic Ocean and English Leather.

Books referenced:

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 A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (Paperback) By (author) Ernest Hemingway List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $6.20 In Stock Used from: $7.45 In Stock Release date July 20, 2010.

See larger image The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Loftus, Katherine Ketcham List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $9.00 In Stock Used from: $0.75 In Stock

See larger image The Point: And Other Stories (Paperback) By (author) Charles D'Ambrosio List Price: $15.99 USD New From: $35.00 In Stock Used from: $3.18 In Stock

© 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.

My titles are available for free using coupon code SW100. (Valid now through July 31, 2010).

© 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.