…. Not an interview. A conversation.

Saul Bellow’s collected letters — a very big book — will appear later this month, and in anticipation of them, his widow, an English professor at Tufts, talks to the Guardian writer Rachel Cooke.

(UD, a University of Chicago grad, had a long talk with Bellow one afternoon in his high, turreted office. She will never forget it.)

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Excerpts:

He wasn’t really a bad boy. He was a serial marrier, but it had to do with a strange desire on his part to be intimate, to have love at the centre of his life. That was part of the daring I saw in him. He was audacious! What would it take to start over again [at that time in your life]? He was hungry in his soul.

… He was very correct and cordial, but not a particularly pleasant human being.

… An immediate intimacy developed after [our] first physical intimacy. I was overly studious. I loved nature. But suddenly it felt like every single part of my life came together with his. It was a very beautiful time: [for him] a rebirth, and an unexpected one. He had a way of being that was total openness, or nothing: you give yourself madly, or why bother? He opened himself up. He had that capacity: to be loved, and to be in love.

… People used to joke: ‘You’re lucky – you didn’t have some mean book written about you; you would if you’d come earlier.’ [Saul, it is generally agreed, made nasty characters of his ex-wives] I’m not going to deny that. I’m much luckier. We met at the right time. If I’d been earlier in the line-up… I don’t think I could have been with a man who was unfaithful to me. The pain of it.

[UD loves the way she refers to the line-up.]

… He was a writer, you see, not a husband, or a father; [looking back] you see a pattern of him not being able to put in time. When a child comes along, it displaces you, if you need to be at the centre, and obviously Saul did.

He had huge needs. The writing life needed to be supported. He was aware of this; I’m not saying anything disrespectful. He failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around. He knew the cruelty of this.

… [He was] the kind of person you’re so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He [was] so full of excitement, and energy…

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A podcast with Janis Bellow.

At that time, Lennon had not decided what instrument to use, but he subsequently asked George Martin to play a piano solo, suggesting “something Baroque-sounding”. Martin wrote a Bach-influenced piece that he found he could not play at the song’s tempo. On 22 October, the solo was recorded at half-tempo … and tape speed was doubled for the final recording, solving the performance challenge and giving the piano solo a unique, harpsichord-like timbre.

Marking what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday.

… Mario Vargas Llosa.

Excerpts from his essay, Why Literature?

Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts.

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I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.

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[A]ll good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors’ intending it, a seditious inclination is present… [T]here is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.

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As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books–that is, works of literature–have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless–a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom.

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“Spiritual mobility” is nice; akin, I think, to Richard Rorty’s notions of contingency and irony.

Hard to imagine what the world would look like today if the author of this letter had agreed to remove this phrase.

via Andrew Sullivan.

This is Banned Books Week.

This YouTube will do to explain why Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was banned in the United States until 1964.

A dissenting judge called it “a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.”

George Orwell called it “the most important book of the mid-1930s… [Miller is] the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”

Tropic is always ranked high among the most important novels in English.

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Yet Edmund Wilson was right to say

The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happening[s] and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I have ever… read… [Yet there] is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.

Let’s say that another word for strange amenity of temper is genius; let’s say that what Wilson picked up on and couldn’t help admiring, despite the desperate lowness of Tropic, is the peculiar, exhilarating genius of an original and truth-telling and super-charged sensibility. Miller bathes the composition? How about floods it? He floods the page with life; and the reader, excited by the high-pitch of the low and the high throughout the novel, by some of the world’s most gorgeous writing in service to the grubby, is picked up and pitched along, made to feel the weirdly buoyant complication of existence, the gloriousness and the gruesomeness of experience all at once.

In this all-at-onceness, some sort of deep wisdom seems to inhere. It makes us feel, not merely study, Life.

O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses

Henry, hero of Tropic? No, not Henry. Molly Bloom. Might as well be Henry.

When I had her naked and her little middle elevated by pillow – the little narrow lozenge of her cunt, which had such a slight lining of hair, seeming charming, with her rather slender legs and feet extended and drooping wide. — I used to stroke it and caress it with my tongue — it was so pretty it would make me linger and preoccupy me, so that I almost forgot to do anything else.

Henry? No, not Henry. Uh, Edmund Wilson.

Let’s see… Ah. Henry:

All the men she’s been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

How easy it is to make these dizzied-by-the-whirlpool-of-life moments kitschy. You need the combination of removed control and ecstatic engagement that great modern writers like Miller and Joyce have to avoid that.

The same strange amenity of temper that gives us cartloads of cunts in The Tropic of Cancer also gives us this, and there’s absolutely no contradiction.

Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Don DeLillo’s Players.

From the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Click on the image for a bigger picture.

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever,” writes Don DeLillo, in Point Omega. A Guardian writer quotes this line by way of explaining DeLillo’s modernist commitment to difficulty and complexity in his novels. “As a champion of ‘difficulty’, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as ‘part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce’. …Readers who want neat plots and tidy endings should leave now,” warns the Guardian writer, who goes on to describe a recent afternoon spent interviewing DeLillo in Manhattan.

Like Joyce, DeLillo takes up the stark and daunting task of rendering consciousness as it ceaselessly expresses itself to itself over the length of a human life. But he does this, as his interviewer notes, “in an American mode.” Indeed DeLillo says to him: “When I get a French translation of one of my books that says ‘translated from the American’, I think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.'”

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I don’t know if it’s because I spent a year in England when I was eight, but I’ve always leaned toward the British mode. I think I’m a very American person, but many of the writers I love – Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Larkin, Auden, Hitchens, and now, having read his short essays about dying of ALS, Tony Judt – are British.

Is it possible to distinguish a British mode of essay writing, or, in the case of Eliot and Larkin and Auden, poetry? Is there a British writerly dialect, as it were? A modern one, since we’re talking here about twentieth and twenty-first century British writers?

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In their obituaries for Tony Judt, many people are quoting this line from his New York Review series about his disease:

[T]here I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

I think that sentence, like these from Hitchens about his chemotherapy, displays the British inflection I have in mind:

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Aside from the obvious marks of careful writing both men exhibit — going to the trouble of finding a spectacularly good simile (like a modern-day mummy; like a sugar lump in water); using alliteration as if it were the most natural thing in the world (myopic motionless modern mummy; people poison plug passivity impotence powerlessness); using unusual words and phrases, some of which feel uncomfortably multiple or medieval in meaning (trussed, gravely, myopic, venom sack) — there’s the stoic attitude to be noticed here, a mental position at some distance from the self, watching the self as it suffers, watching it with a grim and wry intelligence whose absolute fidelity to reality and candor gets us as close to what DeLillo calls “the true life” as words are liable to get us.

Although when we are with these men we are

In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

we are nonetheless oddly buoyed by their writing, for it is after all muscular, finely rippled.

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“[The act of writing my first] novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking,” says DeLillo. “That’s really what writing is – an intense form of thought.”

Strong writing is the intensest form of strong thought, and strong thought in a condition of entropy feels to us heroic, cutting edge, thrilling. This is humanity resisting to the last its reduction to an object by powering up subjectivity to a sort of hyper-controlled shriek. “[W]hile the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways,” the en-graved or gravely endangered writer, immobilized, fights that much more fiercely for consciousness, for the words to encompass consciousness.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.

At the point of greatest tension, under the heaviest burden of fear and despair, the writer, with courage, gathers his wits about him and continues, even now, to get the better of words.

“I get satisfaction out of understanding what I’m going through, which I can only achieve by describing it with an almost externalised dispassion,” said Tony Judt. “It makes me feel like I’m not dead yet.”

… is the title of UD‘s latest post at Inside Higher Ed.

… in the coming days, but she doubts she can do better than this remarkable one from David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Brooks says all the right things. Excerpts:

… Hitchens’s model is Orwell, who combined left-wing politics and economics with traditionalist morality.

Starting in the ’60s, academic specialization and sobriety came to dominate intellectual life. But Hitchens writes more like the educated generalists of the previous generation — people like Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Muggeridge and Raymond Williams. He makes a quick mention of Bob Dylan in his book, but by the first few pages of his memoir, he has already cited his key sources: W.H. Auden, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and so on — the literary paragons of an earlier time.

When Hitchens came to the U.S., he brought a style that was at once more highbrow, more ribald and more conversational than is normal here…

Dictatorship, religion and censorship against literature, irony and free expression. There were no shadings; he judged everybody by whether they passed this test of moral courage.

His literary perspective has made him a more fully rounded person than most of the people one finds in this business. Unlike many Americans, he seems to completely trust his desire for pleasure, and has been open about his delight in sex, drink, friendship and wordplay.

… Most of all, his is a memoir that should be given to high school and college students of a literary bent. In the age of the Internet and the academy, it will open up different models for how to be a thoughtful person, how to engage in political life and what sort of things one should know in order to be truly educated.

Especially because of his excesses, it seems important that Hitchens make a speedy recovery.

Bravo.

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Wow. Just found an appreciation I wrote back in 2005. I’d forgotten about it.

… Christopher Hitchens, who has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Hitchens is one of our best stylists. He learned much of what he knows about writing from one of his heroes, George Orwell.

Let’s be precise about what he learned by starting our salute with the first three paragraphs of one of Orwell’s typically intense and brilliant essays, “How the Poor Die.”

Note first the title itself — Blunt, brisk, short, monosyllabic, pragmatic… And yet hardly a simple pragmatism. The very cut and dried feel of the language, applied to vulnerable human beings, already hints at the horror and indignation Orwell feels. I mean to say that the title is as much as a conclusion as it is a beginning; the essay will after all narrate Orwell’s education in how the poor die, how the Parisian poor are so obscenely mistreated in welfare hospitals that they are killed en masse and in the same ways by the doctors and nurses there (the essay was written in 1946). The title signals Orwell’s achieved emotional education – from naivety to shock to horror to rage to something beyond rage, a hard-won detachment that allows him to write about what he has experienced and learned in a way that gives the unanswerable physical and moral reality of the atrocity he’s describing full verbal expression.

The emotion, I mean, is still there; but it is intricately leashed. We pick up on that suppressed intensity; we sense that it might spring out with violence at any moment, and this makes reading Orwell exciting, tense…

This will be one of the tricks Hitchens learns: Understatement is almost always the way to go, especially when you are describing extremities of suffering, of injustice. Also when you are describing extremities of passion, of joy. Dial it back, make your language, not your feelings, powerful, and let the reader find her own way through your sentences to the emotion you want her to feel.

This will of course only work if your writing voice, your social approach to the reader, has been so welcoming as to create in the reader a strong identification with you.  Once you’ve locked on to your target, as it were, once the reader is with you — I really want to say once the reader is you — you’re free and clear.  If you can sustain that fellow feeling, your essay is liable to work brilliantly.

Mainly what you want to do is describe, with acute precision, the aspect of the world you want your reader to see, feel, and understand. Artfully you will thread, throughout that description, little words and phrases that intimate how strongly you feel; but you will never bluntly, emotionally, manipulatively, tell your reader how you feel. Basically your tone throughout should be stoic, rational, observant, perhaps philosophically amused. When you do decide to break that even tone, you will do it sparingly, and it will likely have immense impact on the reader.

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Here’s the beginning of George Orwell’s essay, “How the Poor Die.” My bracketed comments are in blue.

In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. [No emotion at all.  Mere reportage.  The point is to work slowly up to emotion, as occurred in the actual course of events Orwell narrates.] The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.  [Note that the tone is casual, friendly, confiding, conversational.  He addresses you directly:  You will know the kind of questions… Clashing, though, with this ordinary speech is the already extraordinary circumstance of the writer’s ill-treatment at the hand of the clerk.]  [Note too the careful choice of figurative language, here stressing already the dehumanized aspect of the other patients:  The line behind Orwell is described as a knot, and then immediately their bundles – knotted handkerchiefs – are described.  Of course the reader doesn’t consciously register the implied equivalence here between bundles and people, but a hint of their objectification has been planted.]

After the questioning came the bath — a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.  [Apparently carries the semi-amused observing consciousness here, the Brit surveying with mild astonished disdain French ways.] My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown — no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said — and led out into the open air. [Very, very precise description, this.   Orwell identifies no specific people interacting with him — were taken away, was given, led out — because the nurses are interchangeable indifferent automata…  One could certainly miss, in visualizing all of this, Orwell’s elegant assonance, his repeated use of one particular sound:  shivering, minutes, inches, given, slipper, big…. Just a dull bland almost soundless sound in that deeply hidden letter I, but it somehow conveys the total drabness, the deadness, the claustrophobia, of his setting.  This writing doesn’t exactly sing.] This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia.  [Note how long he waited to tell us this dramatic fact, to explain why he’s in the hospital.  Stoic, selfless, hits you up with it at the end of the sentence and shocks you.] The ward we were going to was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. [Seemed.  Does the same job as apparently.  I was in a crazy, mad, world, slowly attempting to assimilate the madness… It was like a bad dream — this seemed to be the case; that apparently was the case… Orwell is dramatizing not his emotions, but the minute by minute actuality of his efforts to make sense of what is gradually revealing itself to be a nightmare. He brings the reader along with him in that immediacy.]  Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. [Strange, ill-lit… Our sense of nightmare, of the terror of the half-known, grows.  What’s the smell?  What’s the origin of the feeling? And don’t forget how controlled, how oddly beautiful, Orwell’s prose remains, with his lilting repeated L’s:  long, rather low, ill-lit room, full… This stylish self-consciousness may seem a small thing, but it’s conveying something very important amid this manifestly out of control experience.  It is conveying control.  So even as we follow the writer into this helpless fear, we sense, in his masterful prose, a kind of eventual triumph over it…  Maybe prose for Orwell – and Hitchens – ultimately comes to convey what we have to fall back on in our efforts to retain our dignity and lucidity in a difficult life.  In this sense, writing – language – really, really matters.]  As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man’s back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Humiliated, disgusted, and frightened — When the visceral emotion comes out, it really comes out. But having held it back, leashed it for so long, slowly created the conditions for its release, Orwell now produces an especially intense result …

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I don’t say Hitchens is as a great a prose stylist as Orwell. But he is quite, quite good. Even people who detest particular positions of his often delight in his writing. He has that same gift Orwell had, that ability to draw you in, to make you be like him, or want to be like him, or feel you are him, for the duration of your lodging in his prose.

Part of what draws you into Orwell and Hitchens is, strangely, their insolence. They speak bluntly and don’t particularly care who they hurt. When we read naughty insouciant people – add Oscar Wilde and Gore Vidal — we intuit a wildly attractive world of looseness, relaxation, wit, and laughter; we intuit a subversive, seductive, knowledge.

On one level this knowledge is the knowledge of brats, and we connect with it because many of us were to one extent or another brats, and that was fun. Yet the childish, I’ll-say-anything aspect of all of these writers is wedded to a very mature erudition. Orwell, Wilde, Vidal, Hitchens — all are or were first-class literary scholars, deeply informed and sensitive readers of the western aesthetic tradition. This immature/mature combination gives their prose a high burnish and a low scrawl. Both at the same time. Which keeps you guessing. Keeps you off balance. Makes you burst out with laughter.

I’ll post this much now. More on Hitchens in a moment.

[Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n Roll] starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair.

Barrett, the Pink Floyd writer and singer, appears now and then in the play, a figure for the seductive, subversive glory of art…

Golden Hair. It’s Barrett’s song, but it’s James Joyce’s poem.

The charismatic rock star undone by drugs (In Stoppard’s play, we see him in his mother’s Cambridge garden. Barrett retreated there, mentally broken, in the mid-seventies, and stayed until his death not long ago, at the age of sixty.) took the James Joyce poem, Golden Hair, from Joyce’s 1904 collection Chamber Music, and in 1969 set it to stark guitar, stark voice, cymbals, and a low drone.

Here are Joyce’s words.

Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.

Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:

Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.

Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.

Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.

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With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…

And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.

Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)

More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.

More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.

Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.

I’m reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil while I’m here in Savannah. I’m only a couple of chapters in.

Having just visited Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Midnight etc. seems a good title for all of O’Connor’s work.

I’ve taught her short stories for a couple of decades, and you know what? They don’t grow on you.

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It’s not that I’ve stopped admiring the artist. No one saw better than O’Connor what a short story was, and what it could do. She powerfully influenced Don DeLillo and many others.

Her prose is stately and muscular and she can do it all: Irony…

But irony doesn’t really say it. What she’s got is a stealthy point of view, slinking among pity, amusement, disgust, horror, and indifference.

She foreshadows her outcomes elegantly, but her images amass a symbolic force that can only be called appalling.

She writes hilarious, spot-on, dialogue, but the spot she’s on about is so stupid as to be fundamentally mute.

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Above all, there’s no denying the consistency and depth of O’Connor’s denunciation of humanity.

Flannery O’Connor seems unable to forgive us for remaining elusive in regard to our own suffering and in regard to what O’Connor takes to be our salvation. Unlike the much kinder James Merrill, who writes in his poem “Santorini” that most of us cultivate “an oblivion that knows its own limits,” O’Connor believes we’re blind fools blundering through existence in the baddest of bad faith. Bestially dumb to human and spiritual realities, we receive our inevitable epiphanies as cartoonish hammer blows to the head.

Here is Flannery O’Connor on the subject of Simone Weil:

The life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me. Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil’s life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible. If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?…

By saying Simone Weil’s life was both comic and terrible, I am not trying to reduce it, but mean to be paying her the highest tribute I can, short of calling her a saint, which I don’t believe she was. Possibly I have a higher opinion of the comic and terrible than you do. To my way of thinking it includes her great courage and to call her anything less would be to see her as merely ordinary. She was certainly not ordinary. Of course, I can only say, as you point out, this is what I see, not this is what she is—which only God knows. But I didn’t mean that my heroine [in a short story or novel] would be a hypothetical Miss Weil. My heroine already is, and is Hulga. Miss Weil’s existence only parallels what I have in mind, and it strikes me especially hard because I had it in mind before I knew as much as I do now about Simone Weil. …You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive. I couldn’t dominate a Miss Weil because she is more intelligent and better than I am but I can project a Hulga.

At least Nabokov, in writing about Lolita, acknowledges her power over Humbert Humbert as much as her primitiveness. At least he gives Humbert moral awareness. O’Connor needs to assume a world of moral morons over whom the writer has absolute control.

Simone Weil, with her ethical profundity along with her absurdity, can’t be aesthetically dominated; she can’t be tossed so easily onto the ship of fools and made to float along with everyone else.

Of course for O’Connor Weil is a fool -a particularly pathetic one, in fact, because she exemplifies the sinful pride that lies behind trying to use your mind to understand divinity: She was a “proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” What I’ve always seen as most impressive and human about Weil – her attraction to faith and her resistance to it – O’Connor sees as a pitiable farce, a comic parable about human vainglory and the way it blocks our acceptance of cosmic mysteries.

I see how in extreme and self-destructive gestures like starving herself in sympathy with suffering people Weil becomes an object of interest for O’Connor, who in story after story features extremists and compulsives doing weird self-destructive things in an hilariously distorted belief that they’re being spiritual, or, even worse, doing these things out of no belief at all, but rather out of some deeply obscure, deeply stupid need for self-expression. Weil, O’Connor writes, “parallels” such characters…. Yet how unkind of O’Connor, who routinely condemns the tawdry and deluded class snobbery of characters like Mrs Turpin in “A Revelation,” to see Simone Weil, of all people, as a mere variant of that.

“To look at the worst will be for [the writer] no more than an act of trust in God,” writes O’Connor; but actually I think she means to look for the worst. It was O’Connor’s strange mission to make us trust the actions of grace even in regard to the most lost among us (the wildly popular tv series, Lost, apparently featured O’Connor’s work); yet how can I trust a writer for whom it’s always midnight in the garden of good and evil? Who cannot grant us any clarity at all?

“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive,” O’Connor writes, with characteristic dismissiveness. Instead of seeing life as one long squalid torpor disrupted by a probably fatal but somehow spiritually bracing blow to the head, the reader will insist on something different… But that something different is not necessarily the kitschy grace that O’Connor imagines we’re after.

An editor of the Brown University newspaper writes a remarkable little essay about irony — the irony of Brown students, and the irony of Brown’s president, a longtime director of Goldman Sachs.

… UD writes an appreciation of his story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

At Inside Higher Ed.

… to Inside Higher Education. I’ll let you know when it’s been posted.