“There are no second acts in American life”, Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: surely one of the most asinine statements on record. For if America is about anything it is about repeated acts of personal re-invention. None exemplify this more than John Cheever and Raymond Carver; each of whom, in and through their troubled and ultimately triumphant lives, bore a body of work sorely underappreciated in our own time.

At first sight Cheever and Carver could not seem more different: Carver, a shambling bear of a man from the saw-mill towns of the Northwest who struggled all his life to break into the Eastern literary establishment; Cheever the neat scion of a New England family, sleek laureate of the swimming pool-plotted suburbs of Connecticut and denizen in what John Updike called “the delicious glossy space” of the New Yorker.

Look deeper, though, and a similar, very American pattern emerges. Casualties of their parents’ pursuit of the American Dream, both Carver and Cheever started out as rootless misfits driven by dreams of making it, not just in literary but material terms; both were what Saul Bellow called “self-transformers” who improvised their lives, restlessly reaching out for fame, money, and a new sense of connection and community.

“A real mama’s boy” as one acquaintance described him, scruffy and dingy, unhandy and unlucky, Raymond Carver appeared the archetypical underdog. But there was always something detached and divided about him: he was both victim and observer of his own defeats. Throughout his life he spoke about there being “two Rays”, and Sklenicka captures well his inherent “doubleness”. And it perhaps served him well in his ambition, formed early on out of nowhere, to be a writer. People often described his life as a battle and Carver as the war correspondent who reported it. “He could not take care of himself. That’s how he survived”, a friend once said. Carver’s chief carer turned out to be a clever, competent small-town girl called Maryann, whom he married and who worked selflessly for years to support his literary ambitions. “Partners in the getaway”, Raymond and Maryann, like many before and since, headed for California to build a new life.

The dream did not come easy. Life became—between the odd grant and scholarship—a round of dead-end jobs, endless treks between anonymous apartments in beat-up cars, kids squalling on the back-seat, and Maryann waitressing at every truck-stop to keep them on the road. Children came all too soon but not the money or the inclination to nurture them. Drink provided a solution—and then the problem. Carver drank in part to soften the edges of a hard life, in part simply to deaden his sensitivities. He descended into a spiral of alcohol, violence, and guilt, followed by more alcohol. Like his parents’, Carver’s marriage eventually did not so much break up as unravel. The family, said his daughter, simply “disbanded”.

If Carver came from the margins of American society, Cheever claimed connections with its historic roots. “Always remember you are a Cheevah“, Cheever’s father told him, and throughout his life he delighted in tracing his lineage back through various New England luminaries. In reality Cheever’s origins were nowhere near as grand as he made out. His father was a shoe salesman, who fell early victim to the Depression. Personal disintegration and marital discord followed, with Cheever at one point summoned to an amusement park in order to talk his father down from the top of the roller-coaster from which he was noisily threatening to throw himself.

Distancing himself from the family wreckage, Cheever drifted, living for a time in a New York hovel so wretched that the famous Depression-era photographer Walker Evans used it as an icon of urban squalor. Saved by a talent for turning out short stories, especially the slight, smart social vignettes that appealed to the recently launched New Yorker, Cheever successfully put together a new life, adopting a strange, strangulated British-Bostonian accent, toughening his physique by a regime of sport, swimming, and chopping logs, and eventually marrying into the wealthy Whitney family and to all appearances becoming the model husband and father. But under the surface of the successful suburban paterfamilias, all was not well. “I came from nowhere and I don’t know where I’m going”, he wrote in his private journal. But for Cheever the grimmest skeleton in his Connecticut closet was what he termed his “sexual iridescence”—his bisexuality.

Always a heavy social drinker, Cheever, like Carver, joined that heroic American band of literary drinkers and substance abusers that stretches from Mailer back through Fitzgerald and London as far as Poe. Other countries have their boozing authors but there is something epic about American literary drunks. It is as if the land’s sheer scale and the mismatch between the overarching ambitions of its writers and their social marginality creates an emptiness and terror that can only be assuaged by Ahab-like voyages on the deepest seas of drink.

Then, astonishingly and against all odds, both men embarked on final journeys of reinvention. Cheever took his last drink in 1975, Carver two years later. “All I ever wanted”, Cheever had earlier written, “was to be rich, famous and loved”, and he at last got his wishes. Despite crippling attacks of depersonalisation from his years of drinking, he finished his masterpiece, Falconer, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979. Finally honestly confronting his sexuality, he reached out, with some belated success, to his family, and became until his death in 1982 a much respected figure on the literary scene.

Carver, too, achieved at last the stability for which he had always yearned, after settling down with a new partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. “Now for the other life”, he wrote, “the one without mistakes.” Thanks to film script sales and a munificent Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters he was able to enjoy the material fruits of success, including a Mercedes, a yacht, and a big house in the country—in all of which he took enormous childish pride. More importantly, it was during this period that he wrote the bulk of his work, seeing several important collections emerge into print before his death in 1988.

The overriding theme of Carver’s stories is isolation—but an isolation shot through with unexpected, epiphanic moments of connection and inter-subjectivity. The second acts captured in his stories are brief, compressed moments of communion. There is no Whitmanesque embraced multitude, no Beat-like cosmic orgasm. Think, rather, of the sudden flare of a Zippo lighter illuminating two faces over a shared cigarette in a deserted bar or on a cold park bench. In their lonely desolation Carver’s stories are the literary equivalents of Edward Hopper’s famous picture, Night Hawks.

If Carver has been variously described—with only partial accuracy—as a minimalist or “a dirty realist”, Cheever was pigeon-holed as the New Yorker’s in-house chronicler of the American suburbs. But, as Updike wrote after Cheever’s death: “He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognise within ourselves, wherever we are or have been.”

At their best Cheever’s stories provide, in Updike’s words, “a lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition”. Cheever—a man who repeatedly said “I can’t connect my life”—found in the suburbs and in his stories of “untidy lives lived in tidy households”—a mirror for his own conflicts. Himself the supreme self improviser, Cheever described the affluent 1950s suburbs as “an improvised way of life” with their formal-informal round of poolside rituals, private infidelities, neurotic insecurities, and constant, uncertain jockeying for status—a territory, incidentally, which has been more recently evoked in the current TV hit series Mad Men, which traces the conflicted lives of Madison Avenue admen in the early 1960s.

When Cheever died in 1982 he was at the height of his fame, widely read and loaded with honours. Since then the reputations of the two writers have, if anything, see-sawed in respect of one another. Few read Cheever today, and his stories command little academic attention; Carver’s critical standing has grown but still remains modest. Neither writer, it might be added, has ever had a significant impact in the United Kingdom. Let us hope that their legacies, like their lives, will in time enjoy their own triumphant—and deserved—second act.

Peter Snow read English at University College, Oxford and is currently a freelance writer living in Oxford.

James Shapiro
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Faber and Faber, 2010
384 Pages
£20.99
ISBN 978-0571235766

Stanley Wells
Shakespeare, Sex and Love
Oxford University Press, 2010
282 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0199578597

It is always useful to remind ourselves of how little we know about William Shakespeare. Despite his status as the most famous playwright in the English language, much of his life is a mystery. In his book on the person behind the plays, Stephen Greenblatt notes the “abundant but thin” evidence of Shakespeare’s life. The primary sources that have survived are mostly administrative—a marriage licence, christening records, tax bills, affidavits, the odd cast list, and a will—the cumulative effect of which is to make Shakespeare seem “a drabber, duller person” than the one that we imagine from the exuberance of his plays.

Ironically, this dearth of biographical detail has not deterred literary critics as much as liberated them. It is, after all, easier to speculate, often wildly, on a shadowy subject than on one whose life is well documented. The result has been an extraordinary volume of criticism: British Library records reveal that over 2,000 books on Shakespeare were published in the last ten years, or a little over four each week. Another two works can now be added to this tottering pile, by two heavyweight Shakespeare scholars: James Shapiro and Stanley Wells. Their subjects—authorship and sex—are among the most contentious and well trodden areas of Shakespeare studies, but the authors shared approach is to show the necessity of reading the Bard in the context of his age.

The cover of Shapiro’s Contested Will, which shows a rogue’s gallery of Elizabethan dramatists and courtiers and asks us “Who Wrote Shakespeare?”, is a red herring; Shapiro is less interested in examining the credibility of each of the contenders than considering why particular men were championed when they were. This proves to be a fertile approach, and a useful position from which to question the theories of those who argue that Francis Bacon (the “Baconians”) was the real Shakespeare, and those who contest that the Bard was really Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (the “Oxfordians”).

But why doubt Shakespeare as an author at all? Shapiro identifies the source of the authorship debate in the writing of Edmond Malone, a Georgian-era Shakespeare scholar, who, frustrated by the lack of evidence available to write a biography of Shakespeare, wondered if the works themselves might hold some clues. Given the size of the Bard’s oeuvre, it is not surprising that Malone spotted parallels between the plays and contemporary knowledge of Shakespeare’s life. Hence the “pathetic lamentations” expressed by Constance at the death of her son, Arthur, in King John, could be a dramatic echo of Shakespeare’s feelings when his own son, Hamnet, died in 1596. Underlying Malone’s thesis was the thought that “he could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined.” If one is to believe this rather dubious assumption, the opposite must also be true—that Shakespeare was incapable of writing about what he had not experienced. It was this leap that began one of literature’s strangest quests: to prove that Shakespeare, our greatest dramatist, did not write his plays after all.

In essays on each of the two major schools, Shapiro, a committed “Stratfordian”, shows how the Baconians and Oxfordians made the same mistake: they were unwittingly influenced by the fashions of their ages, and thus failed to put Shakespeare in the context of his own. The Baconians’ conviction that their man had left verbal clues of his identity hidden in Shakespeare’s works is shown to be a reflection of the 19th century’s interest in sequences and ciphers, following the development of Samuel Morse’s code. Moreover, an unlikely revival of interest in the Oxford theory in the 1970s and 1980s is put in the context of renewed public interest in conspiracies in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and Watergate.

However outlandish their attempts to discredit Shakespeare might be, Shapiro treats his predecessors with respect. There is something undeniably comic in Shapiro’s description of the mad dash across the Atlantic undertaken by a Baconian, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who becomes convinced that manuscripts were hidden in Islington’s Canonbury Tower; in her rival Orville Ward Owen’s determination to dredge the Severn river in search of the same item; and in Percy Allen’s attempt to solve the mystery through séances. Yet one suspects that Shapiro gives them more credence than they deserve in order to provide a stiffer opponent for his final essay, a barnstorming piece of rhetoric in which he uses the kind of unglamorous historical research absent from the work of the Baconians and Oxfordians to construct a robust defence of Shakespeare.

Shapiro also calls upon the work of an ally, Stanley Wells, whose work has shown that several of Shakespeare’s works were produced in collaboration with other contemporary dramatists, which has strengthened the Stratfordian claim. Yet although Wells sides with Shapiro on the authorship question, his latest study, Shakespeare, Sex and Love, shows how slippery the arguments can be.

His discussion of the sonnets is key. Given their first-person perspective, they are uniquely valuable to those determined to read Shakespeare autobiographically. While Shapiro is keen to highlight the dangers of assuming that the speaker is Shakespeare, Wells cannot resist speculating. His argument “that some, indeed many of them, reflect circumstances of the author’s own emotional and sexual life” is threefold: the poems are believed to have been written at the height of the craze for sonnet sequences in the 1590s, but were not published until much later, in 1609, suggesting that they were an expression of something personal rather than an attempt to cash in on a literary trend; second, the break with the tradition of addressing sequences to fictitious romantic lovers (such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Stella) by naming the protagonist after himself; and finally the unintelligibility of the events that are recorded in the poems, which suggests Shakespeare was purposefully being elusive and concealing details from his readers.

This groundwork laid, Wells goes a step further to ask, “If we read the sonnets in autobiographical terms, what do they tell us? One, they show us that he [Shakespeare] was indeed, and probably frequently, unfaithful to his wife.” (When reading this, it might be possible to hear the muffled thud of Shapiro banging his head on his desk in frustration.) Wells takes a step back from the debate in his conclusion, where he admits to the impossibility of sifting “the imagined from the real”, but his delight in projecting a vision of Shakespeare through the prism of his poetry shows the enduring appeal of the authorship debate.

Elsewhere, Shakespeare, Sex and Love is a breezy jaunt through the sexual highs and lows of the Renaissance. As is required for such a subject, Wells is an unflinching guide, as happy to discuss pederasty as Polonius. His early chapters on what was considered acceptable sexual behaviour (just about everything, it seems) are a riot, and he avoids the all too common pitfall of putting Shakespeare on a moral pedestal. Wells is not naïve enough to suggest that Shakespeare must have participated in all of the sexual practices that appear in his plays, but he is gossipy enough to reprint several enjoyable rumours about the Bard’s virility. This is probably the greatest contrast in the authors’ approaches: Shapiro’s prose is taut and rhetorical, Wells’s flabbier and more divergent.

Where Wells and Shapiro are united is the belief that declarations of love and desire in Shakespeare can be literary devices, rather than personal confessions. Wells quotes one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Thomas Nashe, who suggests that the sonnet was used as a form of verbal jousting, while Shapiro cites the example of Giles Fletcher, a middle-aged courtier who wrote in the rather different voice of a love-struck youth. This shows the difficulty faced by any scholar in trying to disprove Shakespeare’s authorship through his texts. Even if the Bard’s own voice could be detected, it would be impossible to prove that he was speaking of his own feelings. This points to the ultimate futility of centuries of autobiographical readings of Shakespeare. The frustrating disconnection between his humdrum, demonstrable life of christenings, taxes, and courts and the extraordinary imagination that is evident on the page will remain. Despite the best efforts of future generations of literary grave-diggers, Shakespeare will continue to be more ghost than man.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for The Economist.

The author of hundreds of short stories and over 80 novels and essay and poetry collections, Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Born in Lockport, New York in 1938, Oates received her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1960 and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. She taught English at the University of Detroit in the 1960s, during which time she lived amidst turbulent race relations in “Murder City, U.S.A.” Upon leaving Detroit in 1967, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada until 1978. Before the passing of her first husband Raymond Smith, she worked as the associate editor of the literary magazine Ontario Review, which she co-founded with her husband in 1974.

Oates is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story, the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the O. Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, and the National Book Award. Her novel What I Lived For was a Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Blonde (based on the life of Marilyn Monroe) was a National Book Award Finalist and also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The Gravedigger’s Daughter was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Oates was recently honored with the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Her most recent works include the novel Little Bird of Heaven, Dear Husband (an omnibus of 14 stories), and In Rough Country (a compilation of essays and literary criticism). Sourland, a collection of stories, will be published later this year.

A few months ago, you finished writing A Widow’s Memoir, an account of the death of your first husband, Raymond Smith. Can you comment on the process of writing it?

It isn’t a time I remember very clearly now. I had difficulty sleeping and would often write late at night, on sheets of paper folded lengthwise, which can fit neatly into a book which I might be reading, or trying to read. My normal concentration was shattered and so I “took notes” in the hope that some time in the future I could bring these fragmented passages into some sort of coherent whole. The effort seemed enormous at the time—like hauling myself up by hand, pulling on a thick rope.

I expect that reviewers will compare your memoir with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Joan’s memoir is very like her non-fiction work—poised, rather cool, dispassionate, analytical.

You have called yourself the ideal reader of John Updike and John Cheever. How do you envisage the ideal reader of your own novels?

I don’t envision any “ideal readers”—or any readers at all, I suppose. My imagination doesn’t work in that way. My concentration is turned inward, upon the work itself—beyond its perimeters, I can’t speculate.

Do you read works by other writers more than once? Is there any particular work that you regularly return to?

I’ve read the poems of Emily Dickinson numerous times—they are always mysterious and new. I have read short fiction by Chekhov, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence many times, as well as the great modernist novels of the 20th century.

What is your favourite work or author to teach to your students?

I don’t have any single “favourite” work, but students do respond well to the early work of Hemingway.

When you taught at the University of Windsor, you enjoyed a degree of anonymity. Do you miss teaching there for that or for any other reason?

I’ve enjoyed teaching—my students and my colleagues—at each university at which I’ve taught. My Princeton students have been my most impressively prepared students, but I’ve always had outstanding students at other universities. I didn’t have any more or less “anonymity” at Windsor than at Princeton, in fact.

You encountered tales of H.P. Lovecraft in your early teens and his writing made a lasting impression on you. Can you discuss your affinity for the gothic genre?

Lovecraft was impressive to me when I was quite young—14, 15. I would not say that Lovecraft had any significant influence upon my writing. “Gothic” is a term that, to me, is somewhat synonymous with “surreal”—“dreamlike”. I’m not interested in the “real” monsters of gothic literature, or the bizarre cosmology of Lovecraft’s Ancient Old Ones. It’s really the psychological drama in which I’m interested.

Do you do equal amounts of reading and writing each day? How often do you devote an entire day to just one of those activities?

Reading is ideal for the evening. My husband Charlie Gross is a great reader also, and we often read and discuss the same works.

How important is it to read or write literary criticism?

How important? I’m not sure that it is “important” for everyone—I can’t imagine Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, or James Joyce taking time to write criticism. I love to read serious criticism and to write it as well—there is nothing so pleasurable as analysing a work of fiction which one has admired. (I am not so keen about writing negative reviews, and try to avoid this whenever I can.)

In Wild Nights!, you create vivid stories about Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Poe, Twain, and Hemingway. How did you decide which writers to write about?

I had been invited by James Atlas to write “short lives” biographies of both Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway, but I very much preferred the form of fiction, of course! It’s my aim to evoke the experience of being rather than take the reader through the more familiar experiences of reading about.

What gave you the idea of an Emily Dickinson RepliLuxe?

What gives anyone an “idea”? The appropriation of a great artist or poet by the bourgeoisie—in somewhat attenuated form—is obviously part of our lives; it has its ironic aspect, but its poignancy as well. The husband has not a clue what “Emily Dickinson” is about—her poetry, her soul. The wife does have a clue. (Yes, this is a playful feminist parable.)

The mysterious life of Emily Dickinson has attracted a multiplicity of writers, from Susan Glaspell to Jerome Charyn, whose novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, you recently reviewed for The New York Review of Books. What do you find most appealing about Dickinson and her poems?

Dickinson is a profound artist. She and Walt Whitman are our great 19th-century poets. One can read her poetry endlessly, always with surprise and admiration.

In your Journal: 1973-1982, you praised Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, and contemplated writing a biography yourself. Who would make a good subject for such a book?

I would never write a biography; I would be impatient with the constraints of “reality” as well as the formal aspects of gathering historical fact in great, great detail.

You were influenced by Thoreau when you were young, and you enjoy outdoor activities like walking, gardening, hiking, and cycling. What have you learned from nature?

Everything. There is nothing in our brains that is not “from nature” in some way. I was born and raised on a small farm in upstate New York…

You have written many naturalistic and romantic novels. To what extent is your writing influenced by Greek tragedy? (I’m thinking of your lyrical Little Bird of Heaven, which is set in Sparta, New York and deals with the brutal murder of singer Zoe Kruller.)

My earliest reading as a “serious reader”—between the ages of 18 and 20—were of the Greek tragedies. As an undergraduate I took a number of courses in classics—in translation—and so I was imbued from this relatively early age with a sense of the ritual underpinnings of the elemental experiences of our “ordinary” lives. Virtually all of my novels depict crimes—from a perspective of the tragic rites of sacrifice, redemption, and the passing of the old order—that is, an older generation—to the new order—the younger generation. It’s somewhat unusual that a novel of mine, like Blonde, is purely tragic, without any apparent hope of redemption.

Rhoda Feng is a freshman at Stony Brook University in New York.

Scott Donaldson
Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days
Columbia University Press, 2009
520 Pages
£22.50
ISBN 978-0231148160

…

…

…

What we know about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway is almost as deceptive as what we think we know. Owing to the men’s status as two of America’s most famous writers, their very different lives and works have developed a unique iconography that is often simplified to the level of parody in the public consciousness. (With generations of students raised on a steady diet of The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea, caricature is, inevitably, never far away.) This iconography is exacerbated by the fact that Fitzgerald and Hemingway took pains to perpetuate their own unique personae, with such success that their confected reputations overshadowed them long after their deaths. Paradoxically, this means it is still possible to unearth surprising truths about two of the most studied and written-about authors.

Literary biographer Scott Donaldson has proved himself capable of doing just that. Over the course of a 40-year career Donaldson has written and edited award-winning works on a wide range of 20th-century American writers, including Winfield Townley Scott, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and John Cheever (the last of whom especially is due for reappraisal). But it is his work on Fitzgerald and Hemingway for which Donaldson is best known—including By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), Hemingway versus Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999), and the edited collections Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1984), New Essays on ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (1990), and the Cambridge Companion to Hemingway (1996).

After completing a PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 1966, Donaldson took up a position at William and Mary in Virginia, where he spent his entire teaching career until retiring as Louise G. T. Cooley Professor of English, Emeritus in 1992. Academia was not his first vocation: after serving in the Korean War, Donaldson spent ten years as a reporter, mostly at the Minneapolis Star. This training, coupled with a Midwestern perspective similar to Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s, has enabled him to write lucidly and with telling empathy about his two subjects.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days presents two dozen of Donaldson’s most important pieces: 11 on Fitzgerald, 13 on Hemingway. Culled from the 40-plus articles he has written on them, most appearing in scholarly journals over the course of five decades, they constitute a remarkable compilation of research across a broad spectrum of topics. While the Internet makes it easier than ever to track down a scholar’s disjecta membra, there is still much to be said for an anthology assembled by the scholar himself. “I am not through writing about these writers and their stories and novels”, says Donaldson in the volume’s introduction. “But in my eightieth year and with the encouragement of many colleagues, it is time to collect the best of what I’ve so far set down on paper about them.”

The book itself is handsomely produced: dust jacket, typeface, and paper make it look like a novel itself, an effect bolstered by the absence of footnotes. In the volume’s introduction Donaldson explains that he “solved the problem of footnotes by doing away with them (there weren’t many), either through outright omission or including them in the body of the article.” The in-text short-title notation that replaces the footnotes works fairly well, linked to a bibliography brimming with evidence of Donaldson’s decades of exhaustive research in archives and private papers.

The collection is clearly targeted at that publishing chimera, the “educated general reader” sufficiently engaged with literature to buy secondary texts. Whether there exists a sizable market peopled by those inclined merely to inform their own readings is unknown—though it is, as Hemingway might say, pretty to think so. Yet according to Donaldson’s editor at Columbia University Press, this collection is one of their most popular titles: proof of the American public’s enduring curiosity about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and validation for diminishing the references. (Publishers are adamant that footnotes induce even the doughtiest general reader to flee.)

Nevertheless, those wishing to make use of Donaldson’s impressive and often innovative scholarship in their own research are at a disadvantage. Though some of the original essays had little or no notes, most had quite a few, and while Donaldson has obligingly updated the surviving references to current sources (no mean feat), there is no substitute for the edited references. Further, Donaldson states that while readying the collection for press, he “substantially revised everything”. This places academic-minded readers in a quandary: drawing on this collection potentially demands recourse to the originals to blend new scholarship with old references. (Unhelpfully, the book includes no acknowledgments for original publication, further hampering comparison.)

But these are minor concerns when measured against the collection itself. Donaldson describes the book as “biographical criticism”, and the most successful essays are those that employ biographical detail to shed light on the texts, offering compelling evidence that both authors “wrote fiction out of their experience, rather than merely about it.” In doing so Donaldson never slides into intentional fallacy; many of his readings are master classes in what insights can be gained through enlightened close-reading in the wake of New Criticism’s decline. As he plainly states, “The more we know about them as people, the better we will be able to understand their work.”

Donaldson collects his 24 papers under ten part-headings: for Fitzgerald, “The Search for Home”, “Love, Money, and Class”, “Fitzgerald and His Times”, and “Requiem”; for Hemingway, “Getting Started”, “The Craftsman at Work”, “The Two Great Novels”, “Censorship”, “Literature and Politics”, and “Last Things”. By providing balanced coverage of the authors’ lives and works across entirely separate essays, Donaldson steers clear of generalization. (In what John Updike once gently termed her “censorious streak”, Michiko Kakutani accused Donaldson’s Hemingway versus Fitzgerald of being “yet another cheesy chronicle of calamity and waste” for much this fault.)

Among the collection’s rich pickings is an examination of how Fitzgerald’s early life in St. Paul continued to resonate in his work, and how his father’s Southern background engendered in Fitzgerald both a diffident patricianism and a romantic devotion to lost causes—arguably culminating with that most seductive lost cause, the American Dream. In addition to an excellent character analysis of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby there are unexpected insights into Fitzgerald’s political beliefs.

Highlights for Hemingway include “The Averted Gaze in Hemingway’s Fiction”, which inspects minutely the surprisingly eloquent “scopophobia” among his characters, the context of his Spanish Civil War writing, and two essays on censorship. “A Death in Hollywood: F. Scott Fitzgerald Remembered” and “Hemingway and Suicide” examine each writer’s end, at opposite extremes of fame. Even so, one continues to be struck by unexpected parallels in their deaths, as in their lives and writing.

Here and throughout, the book’s great strength lies in its encouraging fresh connections between and among the authors and their works. Although one suspects Donaldson chose and arranged the collection with precisely that in mind, no links are made explicit, thereby offering readers both the material and the latitude to form their own conclusions. In considering anew aspects of seemingly familiar material, beneath what Donaldson calls “the persistent stereotyping of celebrity”, we are left with something like the joy of discovery.

Robert Ritter is reading for a DPhil in English literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He works at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

Friedrich Schiller—dramatist, poet, philosopher, historian—was and remains the greatest playwright in the German language. His idioms have taken root in the way the Germans speak and think about themselves; his memory stands as the very measure of literary greatness. Yet last month, Schiller’s 250th birthday came and went largely unheralded, in Germany and elsewhere. Where one might have expected a flood of biographies and anthologies, there was only a trickle of trivia, faded bouquets of his bonmots on contemporary topics, and a few indolent reviews. No critic seemed prepared to argue for—or even against—Schiller’s import.

This silence is not for lack of relevance. The themes with which Schiller dealt in his plays have self-evident appeal to modern taste, and their core is timeless and true: the self-fulfilment of human beings, and the limits of their potential. Drawing his subject matter from the rancorous history of medieval Europe, Schiller cast naïve protagonists against a harsh, uncomprehending world. “The courage to overcome, sooner or later, the resistance of an obtuse Welt” (Jener Mut, der, früher oder später, / Den Widerstand der stumpfen Welt besiegt) was Schiller’s own great virtue, Goethe later wrote in an elegy for his friend. But in Schiller’s plays, the world would usually win.

Schiller was preoccupied most of all with the social and moral responsibilities of human beings, liberated in his time from centuries of political and religious oppression. These are big ideas, explored by a figure who looms larger than most in Europe’s literary history. And it is this, perhaps, that accounts for the lukewarm response to Schiller’s anniversary, and so to his life and work. In short, Schiller’s greatness has made him remote. The veneration of generations within and beyond Germany has assured his place in the history of ideas, but at the same time consigned him to it. His dramatic works, the bedrock of German theater, have been reduced to historical sediment; and the human side of his works, as well as the extraordinary human being behind them, have been dissected to death.

Of course, Schiller was a great man preoccupied with great ideas. But as a dramatist and poet, he explored the intellectual aspirations of the Enlightenment—the Aufklärung—in a way that was deeply practical and psychologically sensitive. According to the consensus which emerged in Schiller’s age, reason is the critical tool by which one overcomes the self-imposed shackles of religious and political oppression. To those who would venerate reason at the expense of the sensual, however, Schiller put the case of Don Carlos, his fourth play.

There, Schiller chronicles the travails of an enlightened Spanish aristocrat, the Marquis de Posa, as he tries to resolve an intrigue surrounding a love affair at court. The failure of reason results in catastrophe: the forces of reaction triumph. But Don Carlos is not just a philosophical or political allegory; Schiller’s characters do not only act rationally or irrationally, but also through genuine feeling. It is this humanity which creates the deepest impression in the audience. As Thomas Mann (who adored the play as a boy) has his protagonist gush in the short story Tonio Kröger, “some passages are so rivetingly beautiful they almost make you see stars”. Don Carlos is a plain case for reading Schiller more broadly, for although an intellectualist lens works, it obscures Schiller’s fundamentally affective point.

The remote, intellectual veneer surrounding Schiller’s work also surrounds the man himself. In seeking the many-sided human being in his plays and poetry, we might then begin with the human being behind them. Schiller’s life, like his life’s work, was classic in the fullest sense. Like his friend Goethe, he strove to emulate the polymath excellence of the great figures of classical antiquity. The results of this effort showed: Schiller’s writings on the theory of art were taken seriously by the likes of Kant, while his ability and fame as a playwright positioned him to tell Goethe that the Iphigenie auf Tauris—Goethe’s adaptation of the Euripidean tragedy—was tedious. And such was Schiller’s earnestness, his perfectionism, that he would anonymously publish sharp critiques of his own plays as soon as they had been produced. Behind Schiller’s philosophical and poetic opus is a man who lived with an inexhaustible wholeheartedness and an irresistible sense of potential.

The ideal actor, Schiller once wrote, must always walk a tightrope between intellectual mannerism and “imitation of nature”. Like this actor, Schiller’s plays traverse a middle road between thought and feeling. In doing so, they offer a vision of how the extremes of mind and heart might be reconciled, on stage and in life. Late in his career, Schiller claimed that all his efforts would be worthwhile if his viewer could recognise a personal reality in the playwright’s fictional world—if that viewer, by contemplating someone else’s fate, realises that he is simultaneously contemplating his own. As he explained it, “A noble and true soul will be enlivened and invigorated by the stage—and as for the rabble, there is surely some lost chord of humanity to be struck in their hearts.”

To Schiller, poetry is both the illustration and the instrument of the perfectibility of man. No sentiment could seem more old-fashioned, nor more appropriate for our times. If we could for a moment abandon the intellectual consensus which banishes the author from his own work, we may find in Friedrich Schiller a man who fulfilled the potential and the optimism of his writings—a man who was truly alive.

Schiller’s physique was not as robust as his intellect. He worked through many years of serious illness and died young, at age 44. After his death, an autopsy revealed that his inner organs, in particular his lungs, had almost completely dissolved. Schiller’s body was not fit for purpose; but then he never did accept that physical necessity or practical purpose (Nutzen) should govern existence. This was an aristocratic ideal, of course, but one that was tempered by his belief in the basic freedom of human beings. Indeed, Schiller’s enduring faith in freedom explains why later generations have felt liberated by reading his poetry and inspired by his life—even today, when man is much freer than Schiller could have dreamed.

Christopher Metcalf is reading for a DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. 

Jean Daive
Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
Burning Deck, 2009
135 Pages
£8.50
ISBN 978-1886224791

…

…

…

Soon after the death of his son, Anatole, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé began composing fragments with the aim of fashioning a poetic tomb. While Mallarmé never completed the work, over 200 such fragments survive. Standing somewhere between idea and first draft, these pieces are often so personal and incomplete as to be inscrutable. Yet they also succeed at conveying a crippling grief, a sorrow that made completion not only impossible but also undesirable. One fragment reads:

you can, with your little
hands, drag me
into your grave — you
have the right —
— I
who follow you, I
let myself go —
— but if you
wish, the two
of us, let us make.

(tr. Paul Auster)

Only the thought of a shared undertaking between the living poet and his dead son keeps the speaker alive; and yet the fragment trails off at precisely the moment such collaboration becomes articulable. Is it possible, Mallarmé’s fragments ask, to survive and (then) to make? Are wounds and words incommensurable?

Like Mallarmé’s “tombeau”, Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan is a memoir of fragments written under the sign of mourning. Published in French in 1996 but newly translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Under the Dome is Daive’s attempt to come to grips with the trauma of Celan’s 1970 suicide, which cut short a five-year friendship of walks and meals, conversations and explanations. The book is a menagerie of genres in miniature; Daive marshals stylistic elements of biography, autobiography, memoir, prose poem, and elegy to present the celebrated German poet as both a tender companion and a wincing, searing mystery, an interlocutor in past conversations and present grief. Ultimately, Under the Dome is a tribute to Celan and an exploration of his greatest concern, the conflict—and possible commerce—between language and loss.

Daive’s fragmentary style is not a problem of memory but an act of resistance to coherent narrative. Under the Dome takes seriously both the demand that form correspond to content and the notion that coherence seals off an enigmatic subject’s silence in the crypt of a single perspective. Accordingly, its fragmentariness, refusal to reckon with chronology, language games, and poetic improvisation will turn away readers looking for a succinct biographical account of Celan’s final years. (They should consult, instead, the closing chapters of John Felstiner’s sensitive, exhaustive, and rightly acclaimed biography, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew.) On the other hand, intrepid and familiar readers will be prepared for the difficulty, and an experience of Daive’s language, which follows in the stylistic wake of Celan’s, may be the best introduction to both poets’ work.

Fortunately, Daive is a poet in his own right—Celan translated his first book, Décimale Blanche, into German—and Under the Dome benefits from his artistry. The conversations Daive records with Celan are not far from poetic collaboration in their associative leaps and improvised experimentation. As a result, his work voices a plea as desperate as Mallarmé’s for an impossible collaboration: “the two / of us, let us make”. If Celan is named in the book’s subtitle, he is—posthumously—its author as well.

This seems fitting, for it was not until after his death that Celan gained a wide audience, in large part due to the efforts of his numerous translators and critics. Born Jewish in Romania as Paul Antschel, Celan shortened his surname to Ancel after the war (which claimed the lives of both of his parents). Then in 1947, presaging his experiments with the contours and contortions of individual words, he inverted its syllables to become Celan.

Celan studied languages and literature at university before settling in Paris in 1948, where he taught, wrote nine volumes of poetry, and translated French, English, and Russian literature into German. Although he grew up speaking Romanian and lived most of his adult life in France, Celan explicitly chose to write in German, the language spoken by his mother and, of course, by those responsible for her murder. The ebullient reception of his early poem, “Death Fugue”, still widely anthologized and taught in nearly every course on the literature of the Holocaust, disturbed Celan, who told Daive that it seemed “Germany’s bad conscience had finally found someone to talk to”.

Nevertheless, Celan continued to address the German literary world—and indeed, identified language as the sole survivor of the Nazi era. Upon receipt of a literary prize in Bremen, Celan discussed the role of language in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Complicating Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Celan argued:

It, the language, remained, not lost, yet in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this. (Tr. John Felstiner)

After the Holocaust, poetry became Celan’s medium both for revealing language as the victim of “frightful muting” and as the instrument for its “com[ing] to light again”. (At one point, Daive recalls him saying, “The world always remembers poetry. Sooner or later”.)

This vision of poetry is evident in one posthumously published (and particularly Rilkean) poem, written during Celan’s friendship with Daive:

Do not work ahead,
do not send forth,
stand
into it, enter:

transfounded by nothingness,
unburdened of all,
prayer,
microstructured in heeding
the pre-script,
unovertakeable,

I miss you at home,
instead of all
rest.

Here, in Celan’s signature neologisms, the speaker’s assertions outpace his scars and convey the effects of friendship forged through wounds. Celan casts home as a place without rest, suggesting that he sought friendship that would heighten and even privilege tension rather than provide refuge from it. This vision comes across at all levels of Under the Dome; Daive details the tension of his friendship with Celan, but also devotes a number of fragments to musings on the central vehicle of this tension, poetry.

The two mens’ conversations about unclassifiable poetic technique, in particular Celan’s characteristic substitution of neologistic compounds like “Windgalle” [Wind gall] and “Treckschutenzeit” [Bargetrekking time] for verbs, are especially interesting in this light. Daive’s explanation of his friend’s work—that “the verb is absorbed into the energy of the composite noun”—simultaneously justifies his own fragmentary method in Under the Dome, for it is through such unclassifiable fragments that we can best understand Celan’s life: “Paul Celan chews a word like stone. All day long. It produces word-energy. It all goes into the energy of his composite words. Here we have his biography”.

Sadly, Celan’s assertions about the longevity of poetry stand in stark contrast to his early death. Despite his commitment to the contrary, the possibility that language could pass through and eventually overcome unspeakable harm was one that Celan himself never realized. He was reclusive, sometimes paranoid, and, in a word, tormented. During the nearly five years Daive knew him, Celan was briefly institutionalized, spoke often of anxiety and of survivor’s guilt, and underwent a painful separation from his wife. “Sometimes I dream I’m dead and looking for my grave”, Daive recalls him saying.

Such intensity of observation and concern characterized much of Daive’s and Celan’s time together, and constitute much of Daive’s recollection in this piece. In one particularly unsettling scene, for instance, Daive remembers when a breakfast of omelets prompted a discussion on the limits of friendship. Daive offers to exchange his omelet for Celan’s burnt one; Celan, serious to the point of farce, replies, “Impossible. What is burned cannot be changed or exchanged…it is a sign”. Daive’s naïveté appalls Celan, for whom the burdens and wounds of the past cannot simply be transmitted to an other. But the audacity of Daive’s offer to “exchange…a sign” also opens a door: for the first time in their friendship, the intensely private Celan asks to visit Daive in his apartment. When he does, Celan compares the language of his poetry to the shrimp Daive serves him: stripped down, boiled, unadorned.

Celan’s unyielding gaze can be unnerving in moments like these. More often, though, the man who called attentiveness “the natural prayer of the soul” articulates his reflections with a stunning lyricism. Daive is attentive, too, and his mentor’s influence shines through as he commingles the project of Under the Dome with Celan’s thesis:

He holds out his hand, and a golden light falls on our approaching fingers. The light disturbs the distance about to decrease to zero, a handshake, golden yellow. He goes on: — As soon as we talk the world seems to lose some of its solidity, and it’s this move toward loss that interests us. But we cannot always face it. It requires an availability that is scorching. What do you think, Jean Daive?

Daive’s desire to account for Celan’s effect on his life resonates with Celan’s own drive to be faithful to a trauma—”that which happened”, as he calls it in the Bremen address—an event so overwhelming that it can never really be said to have been experienced, much less named or narrated, by an individual. Writing the disaster that such a trauma unleashes inevitably comes at the expense of accessibility and, perhaps, the accepted uses of language, but Daive’s willingness to transgress the boundaries of genre is his work’s most salient and valuable legacy.

In the final paragraphs of Under the Dome, Daive questions his work and his duty as a survivor of Paul Celan, asking, “What does being touched by fire allow you to write?” Paul Celan once spoke to Jean Daive about poetry’s relationship with suffering, generously include Daive in a shared project: “We write with luminous wounds that illuminate our hands”. Daive’s memoir is an attempt to reciprocate his friend’s gesture. Its generosity and expansiveness make Daive’s achievement worthy of the loss that underwrites it.

John Steen is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Emory University.

..

Free wine and four shiny new novelists kindled the atmosphere at Blackwell’s recent Rising Literary Stars event.  With Roma Tearne as chair, debut novelists Ali Shaw, Poppy Adams, Samantha Harvey, and James Miller answered questions on memory and loss, themes that link their work.

Tearne’s chosen themes made for an engaging discussion on the form of the novel. Harvey’s The Wilderness centres on a man whose Alzheimer’s illustrates how “without memory, self and story crumble”; in a similar vein, Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet explores “memories soured by time”. These problems of memory prompt narrative experimentation: Adams’s The Behaviour of Moths is told through a “prolix, unreliable and highly confected narrator”, while Miller’s Lost Boys “unfolds the same material three times” from different points of view, exposing the inevitable fallibility of the narrator. Whilst the talk veered at times toward the opaque and philosophical (perception and reality; the constructs and fabrications with which we create our pasts), this discussion of memory and form was unshakably absorbing.

Suspecting nascent writers were lurking in her audience, Tearne also laid bare the authors’ plotting techniques (more chaotic intuition than meticulous forethought) and, to the horror of all but the most exuberant, invited audience participation. Despite this slightly Socratic approach, Tearne proved the star of the evening as her overarching yet gentle presence lent coherence and originality to what could easily have been a staidly average book reading.

Only time will tell whether this was an event worth boasting about “in years to come”; but for once, the propaganda may actually live up to the promise.

Jenny Messenger is a second-year classics student at Worcester College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Declan Kiberd
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life
Faber and Faber, 2009
400 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0571242542

…

…

…

If Marilyn Monroe can read Ulysses, so can you. The 20th century’s archetypal blonde sits on the cover of Ulysses and Us, gracefully curled on a playground bench, attired in colourful stripy beachwear. Her eyes focus intently on the heavy tome balanced upon her knees; her mouth hangs slightly open; she is engrossed.

The connection between the cover photograph and the content of Declan Kiberd’s book is never spelt out. Although this is not ideal, it is probably for the best: to explain the link would be to risk implying that a blonde bombshell provides the best possible example of the ordinary reader. For Kiberd’s book is all about the common or average reader—that is, the reader who approaches Ulysses without academic incentive or guidance. Kiberd’s view, repeated with mantra-like regularity throughout this episode-by-episode guide to James Joyce’s masterpiece, is that Ulysses was written for precisely this kind of reader.

Ulysses and Us has two principle aims: to explain why Ulysses has missed its target audience, and to give that audience the means to enjoy and reclaim it. Kiberd argues that Ulysses is for ordinary readers because it is primarily about ordinary people. The novel’s minimalist plot revolves around a single day in the lives of three Dubliners: Stephen Dedalus—erudite young man and aspiring writer; Leopold Bloom—middle-aged Jewish man, advertisement canvasser; and Molly Bloom—Leopold’s wife, a concert singer.

While Molly waits for her lover to arrive, Leopold ambles about the streets of Dublin, trying in vain to keep his wife’s dalliance out of mind. Meanwhile, Stephen follows his own meandering trajectory through the city, thinking abstruse thoughts about life and literature. While Stephen is haunted by memories of his mother’s recent death, Bloom’s thoughts often return to his son Rudy, who died in infancy ten years earlier. The two men’s paths eventually cross as Bloom follows Stephen and his riotous drinking companions to Dublin’s red-light district. In the early hours of the morning, the two men amble back to Bloom’s kitchen for a cup of cocoa.

There may not seem much to this storyline, but Joyce’s masterful and revolutionary use of interior monologue infuses his protagonists’ experiences with emotional resonance and psychological complexity. The book derives additional meaning and structure from an external source: the title is a reference to Homer’s Odyssey, with which it entertains countless correspondences—Stephen is a modern-day Telemachus, Bloom a contemporary Odysseus, Molly an updated Penelope.

Ulysses and Us convincingly portrays Bloom as a representative of civic bourgeois virtue. Kiberd aptly and engagingly captures the tenderness and tolerance with which Joyce endows his everyman: it is in Bloom’s well-intentioned concern for others and kindness in action that Ulysses’s everyday wisdom resides. However, Kiberd’s contention that Bloom’s values are Joyce’s own—that Bloom is in some way privileged over other protagonists as a mouthpiece for Joyce’s opinions—is more controversial. It is on this premise, however, that Kiberd’s overall interpretation of Ulysses hinges.

Literary critics tend to think of Ulysses as a modernist triumph (the book was first published in 1922) that can surely delight any reader who attends to its demanding prose, but only yields true intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction—as arguably do all works of art—when submitted to close scrutiny. Kiberd maintains that Joyce wrote with everyday readers in mind. Accordingly, he laments the fact that “a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.”

A university professor himself, Kiberd thinks Ulysses has been “wrenched out of the hands of the common reader” by the ivory-towered academy: the canonical status bestowed upon Ulysses from within these intellectual enclaves cements the book’s reputation as an abstruse and indecipherable work of genius. Ulysses and Us is an impassioned clarion call to allow the book to “reconnect” with “the everyday lives of real people.”

Its author, however, does not help Kiberd’s case. Joyce famously stated that “I have put in [Ulysses] so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” Of his ideal audience, he quipped that “the demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” Such comments need not discourage the average reader from picking up the book, but they help explain why generations of critics have emphasised Ulysses’s apparent opacity.

Indeed, not all share Kiberd’s sense that Joyce needs to be returned to a mass ordinary audience-in-waiting. In 2004, prize-winning Irish novelist Roddy Doyle railed against Ulysses’s monumental standing, deploring its inflated length (the book, he said, “could have done with a good editor”) and its failure to engage with real human concerns: “People are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books”, he said, “but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it.”

Whether Kiberd or Doyle are right about Ulysses’s ability to touch the hearts of its readers, and surely the heart of the individual reader should be the judge of that, the book has undeniably made it out of the library and into the limelight. On 16 June every year, Dublin and many other cities around the world celebrate Bloomsday, commemorating the day on which Ulysses is set and on which the Blooms face their marital crisis (always one to mark anniversaries in style, Joyce sets his opus on the date he and his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle, had their first tryst). In 2004, Bloomsday’s centenary year, over 10,000 people took to the streets of the Irish capital to take part in the day’s festivities. Yet such high levels of public visibility are not—as Kiberd acknowledges—a measure of Ulysses’s true readership so much as a reflection of the current trend for the government-funded fetishisation of Joyce’s works: the prime beneficiary of this enthusiasm is arguably the Irish tourist industry rather than Ulysses itself.

Although it is no state-sponsored Bloomsday, Kiberd’s enterprise is at heart a popularizing one. Between introductory and concluding sections devoted to the book’s mission statement (these come under such titles as “How Ulysses Didn’t Change Our Lives” and “How It Might Still Do”), 18 numbered chapters give an episode-by-episode account of Ulysses. The titles chosen for these summarizing sketches epitomise the dangers inherent in Kiberd’s project. Instead of referring to the episodes by the Homeric names that signal their connection to the Odyssey (these are used by academics, as they were privately by Joyce himself), Kiberd resorts to platitudinous gerunds, such as Waking, Thinking, Ogling, Parenting, Loving. To be sure, the basic activities singled out here do feature in Joyce’s encyclopaedic book. But to suggest that any one episode is predominantly about a particular kind of action is to do Ulysses an injustice, for each of Joyce’s episodes muses on all—and a great many more—of the aspects of everyday life that appear on Kiberd’s list.

Kiberd’s overly personal tone is another cause for discomfort. His musings can be unabashedly grandiose (Joyce “excavated the very depths of the self and the world”), embarrassingly corny (”it is the reader who can decide whether to change, the reader who has been made heroic by the act of working through the challenges posed by the book”), and nostalgically moralizing (”If today a twenty-two-year-old graduate would feel quite unsafe in taking up the invitation of an unfamiliar man to come home with him for cocoa and a chat, that may be our loss.”).

Kiberd’s strong point, on the other hand, is contextualisation, both literary and historical. He does an excellent job of resituating Joyce’s works in relation to the Irish Literary Revival, arguing, in a refreshing turn against the status quo, that the author’s aims were not so fundamentally different from those of his more openly political Irish contemporaries. Joyce’s epic of modern life is read side by side with the Bible and the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Whitman. Kiberd also illuminates connections between Ulysses and World War I: in the light of that conflict, he suggests that Joyce’s redefinition of the notion of heroics—largely by way of his endearing, civic-minded bourgeois modern hero, Leopold Bloom—takes on a more prescriptive edge than is usually recognised.

Kiberd’s take on Bloom is key to his thesis: again and again, he praises Bloom as a paragon of the empathetic everyman. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this view, but Kiberd is rather too forceful in his assumption that Bloom functions merely as a vehicle for Joyce’s message. Joyce’s use of interior monologue for all three of his protagonists makes his novel resistant to such a reductionist reading.

While he falls short here, Kiberd acquits himself well on many counts. Popularization is always a tricky business. Indeed, there is an inbuilt paradox in Kiberd’s self-appointed task: if Ulysses was written for the average reader, why does that reader need a guide to enjoy it? The reviewer of Kiberd’s book faces a related double-bind: while the novice reader of Ulysses cannot be expected to evaluate the guidebook’s accuracy, an academic reader is hardly in an ideal position to appreciate how useful Kiberd’s book may be to its intended audience. The best advice to the potential first-time reader of Ulysses may simply be to cut out the primers and take a tip from Marilyn Monroe: get started on the real thing.

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. She is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Born in 1946, Philip Pullman graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, and went on to become a teacher. He published his first book for children, Count Karlstein, in 1982, and has produced over 20 novels and other works since. Pullman has been honored for his writing with numerous prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Eleanor Farjeon Award for Children’s Literature, and the Carnegie of Carnegies.

He is the author of numerous novels, including The Broken Bridge (1990), the Sally Lockhart mysteries, and the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman has also published a number of fairy tales and plays. Many of his works have been adapted for screen and stage, including The Golden Compass (2007) and His Dark Materials, which debuted on stage in 2003. Pullman has been a fellow in the Creative Writing MA programme at Oxford Brookes University since 2008.

You recently have been concerned with enhancing the graphic and tactile quality of your work, particularly the illustrations, maps, and other physical objects related to your Dark Materials books. Is this a conscious move toward more physical reading objects?

Well, it’s partly publishers. Publishers always like to have a new edition to put out, something new and fresh that hasn’t been seen before. I’m a little bit worried about that because after a while it can become just a scamming of the reader. But if there’s a chance to say something new in graphic form, then I think it’s worth doing. I’ve always been fascinated by this interplay between word and picture, and the one thing doing what the other thing can’t do—sometimes the one thing undercutting or subverting what the other can do. One thing I would like to do one day is a sort of PowerPoint book that exists in a kind of presentation with picture succeeding picture, graphic works merging with text, and so on.

Do any of your current projects fit this format?

I’m halfway there with one thing that I’ve been doing, which is a forgery. Something that’s always fascinated me is the work of the architect Andrea Palladio, who wrote books of architecture [I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura or The four books of architecture] in 1570. At the minute I’ve got a little story that I tell about one of the plans in this book, because there’s a little anomaly in which the measurement doesn’t work. The design has been reprinted and recut many, many times, and everyone has repeated this mistake without noticing it.

So what I did was to forge a page of Palladio’s book. Well, I didn’t forge the page. I forged some notes on it, in the handwriting of Inigo Jones, the great English architect. Because in Worcester College, Oxford, there is Inigo Jones’s own copy [I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura] with annotations, but he didn’t notice this little mistake, so I have had him notice it and done a little thing like that. When I put the story into the final form, I’ll see if there is a way of publishing it on my website.

Your companion pieces to the Dark Materials books, Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time in the North, do not limit themselves to the Will and Lyra story. Do you envision any future installments, perhaps involving Mary Malone or the wheel people, or the Sebastian Makepeace character, which seems to have been left open?

Yes, probably a story about Will. There are many left, plus it’s an interesting length. The story in Lyra’s Oxford is more of a short story, whereas Once Upon a Time in Oxford is more of a novella sort of length. I once thought I couldn’t do a shorter piece, but I’m just at the point of finishing a book that is 100 pages long. What frustrates me with the short story is the fact that you can’t really get going with the background—you can only sort of sketch it in.

I always would rather take a bit more time and spend more effort in establishing a world, and I think you can do that in 100 pages or so. Henry James used that length a lot—the blessed novella, he called it. I don’t think I’ve adapted my style. It’s a question of pruning down the other stories—a question of focusing on one story rather than on three or four, I think.

You’re a writer who has negotiated a lot of different genres, including fantasy, science fiction, adventure, comics, crime, and historical fiction. Have you ever considered doing a non-fictional book project, perhaps a memoir?

Yes, but not yet. The British Library, a year or two ago, set up a programme on lives, and they asked me if I wanted to be in on this project and record my life for the British Library. I thought about it and said no, because that’s my material. If I give it all away, not only will it be not really private anymore, but it will have been fixed in some form that maybe isn’t useful to me. I like it fluid. I will write a memoir, but some day, not yet—and when I do I’m sure I’ll make most of it up, because that way it’s still private. But there are a couple of other nonfiction things that I want to do. One is a book on the fundamental units of narrative.

What shape would this study of narrative take? Would it be a William Empson-esque exploration of a form?

Well, I’m not as clever as he was. So this will be a very practical and pretty straightforward thing, I think. I’m very impressed by the way David Hockney talks about painting. He talks about it in very practical terms. That is, when you’ve got a pencil, you can make one kind of mark with it, and with watercolor painting, it sloshes about, so you must use it in a certain way. Because he has done so much looking and drawing, he can see in another painting whether somebody isn’t doing it from life, because there’s a certain flatness that he can put his finger on straightaway.

I am very impressed by that as a way of talking about story. What I mean is looking at a story and sensing exactly when a writer’s attention has gone off the line of the story—you can see that after you’ve done it yourself for a while. I’m going through Grimm’s fairy tales at the moment, to select 70 of them for an edition for Penguin Classics. Some of them don’t need retelling, because they’re beautiful, they’re just perfect. Others need a bit cut out, because it gets in the way, and goes nowhere, and does nothing. You can see that almost instantaneously.

Your work has been adapted in many ways, including for the stage and screen. Are there any other mediums in which you would like your ideas portrayed?

Sally Lockhart has been done on the television, but one day I will write Sally Lockhart short stories, which I think will make much better television than the novels have done. And Henry Selick, who directed Coraline, is doing Count Karlstein next.

Would this be a claymation, stop-motion type of film?

I very much hope so. He’s working on the script at the moment—it all depends on financing. But I’m a huge fan of Henry Selick, and I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas [he was creative supervisor]. I would love him to do my book Clockwork, which I think is absolutely made for him. But we shall see.

How do you think your place in the canon of modern literature is defined by the genres in which people classify your work? Do you think that young-adult books or fantasy books are sequestered, in a way?

I don’t think about canons at all. I’m not even sure what genres I write in. I suppose I have to classify His Dark Materials as a sort of a fantasy, it’s not exactly realism, though I hope it’s psychologically more real than most fantasy. Critical fashion has a lot to do with this, but we don’t know who will survive. Canons are for time to decide, not for the present day.

Rebecca Rosen is reading for an MSt in English at Jesus College, Oxford.

Anne Chisholm
Frances Partridge: The Biography
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009
440 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0297646730

…

…

…

Hardly the best known of her Bloomsbury Group peers, Frances Partridge is more notable for her personal relations and sheer longevity than for any sort of literary corpus. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Partridge will not jostle for a place in 20th-century literature’s hall of fame, and though her six volumes of diaries were celebrated upon publication, they are little read today. But Partridge’s long life is nonetheless worth revisiting. Gracefully outlasting a century, she glided through her 103 years with style and a sprinkling of scandal. Anne Chisholm’s excellent new biography rescues Partridge from the brink of obscurity, depicting the diarist as both a remarkable woman and a fascinating window to Bloomsbury’s drama.

A collection of artists, writers, and intellectuals based in London near the British Museum, the Bloomsbury Group produced some of the most famous work of the 20th century. While Bloomsbury’s most noted members, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, are celebrated for their literary work, the group is perhaps best remembered for its liberated ideals and rejection of Victorian convention—the recounting of which generates much of the biography’s excitement.

Partridge’s introduction to this bohemian scene came after school at Bedales and Cambridge, when she took a job at Birrell & Garnett, Bloomsbury’s favourite bookshop. There, her “pretty dark eyes” and “the best legs in Bloomsbury” caught the eye of Ralph Partridge, a decorated major turned literary playboy, who would become the love of her life.

Things were far from straightforward. Ralph was already married to the bisexual painter Dora Carrington, who was in love with the gay writer Lytton Strachey who, in turn, loved Ralph. This triangle was complicated, first by Ralph’s bullish seduction of Frances, and later by Strachey’s death from cancer, which precipitated Carrington’s suicide and made Frances the scapegoat of Bloomsbury gossip. Chisholm expertly handles the sexually charged emotional drama of this period, drawing from the letters of all four participants to highlight the tension of the foursome’s shifting loyalties and exclusive hostility. She injects particularly tantalising tidbits from Strachey and Carrington’s explicit correspondence, breathing new life into this famous ménage à quatre.

In the early stages of the biography, Chisholm is keen to provide a fuller picture of Ralph in accordance with Partridge’s request “to get Ralph right” since “no one ever has”. Frustration with Ralph’s brazen affairs led Partridge to prune mention of them from much of her writing. Though Partridge’s diaries often documented the scandalous polygamy of her friends, she remained blind to Ralph’s faults until she died. Partridge explained that the desire to repair her husband’s reputation motivated publication of her diaries: “I am anxious”, she wrote in the preface to A Pacifist’s War, her first volume, “to remove these distortions and substitute as detached a picture as I can.”

Chisholm juggles this task professionally. She dedicates two chapters to exposing Ralph’s excellence as a soldier and intellect, but unlike Partridge, admits the truth in his reputation as a boorish public schoolboy, sexually liberated by Carrington and Strachey. Chisholm draws from the broader Bloombury Group in this effort, reporting Virginia Woolf’s amused declaration that after an evening of Ralph’s sexual vulgarity, her husband “Leonard went home and contemplated, seriously, some scientific form of suicide.”

This type of Bloomsbury gossip is, of course, one of the main appeals of Partridge’s diaries. But Chisholm resolutely rebuts the suggestion that Partridge is merely a literary hanger-on. She records Partridge’s achievements as a translator, biographer, indexer, and botanist. Perhaps most importantly, Chisholm establishes the emotional resonance of the six volumes of diaries published since Partridge’s 77th birthday. These diaries depict an enviable life of leisure lived out amidst a long list of literary celebrities. But they also illustrate Partridge’s personal suffering and gentle humanity, which both reflect and refract the arrogance of Bloomsbury.

By 1964, Partridge had suffered the tragedy of a husband and son dying within the span of three years. Taking advantage of an active mind and her extensive network of friends, Partridge invoked Voltaire’s maxim: “Courage is not enough. Distractions are necessary.” She refused to capitulate in miserable solitude, instead throwing herself into travel and finding respite in witty, descriptive diaries.

The diaries echo Bloomsbury themes in Partridge’s singular, deeply human voice. In one, for instance, she explains “because though I can never invent or imagine anything, I have a passionate desire to describe what I’ve felt, thought and experienced, for its own sake—to express, or communicate or both?” At times like these her tone echoes Woolf’s wondering, dark ruminations in Between The Acts, and the reader becomes a trusted confidant. The influence of her celebrated peers is strong throughout; like E.M. Forster, Partridge strives in her diaries to “only connect”.

These diaries provided solace to bereaved readers of Bloomsbury, who were inspired and reassured by Partridge’s wry observations. Many wrote to her for further support and she personally replied to every letter.  Chisholm convincingly champions Partridge’s kindness as her strongest suit, but as with her treatment of Ralph, she retains healthy scepticism of her subject. Throughout the biography, Chisholm criticises the self-interested exclusivity of Bloomsbury’s ideology.

Most notably, she disapproves of an approach to parenting that hardly leaves one hankering to have been Bloomsbury offspring. “Childishness”, thought Partridge, “is boring except in certain kittenish aspects.” Accordingly, the Partridges kept contact with their son Burgo minimal and insisted on being called Frances and Ralph, never Mummy and Daddy. Burgo suffered in his role as second fiddle to his parents’ social life. Prone to weeping and regular escape attempts from school, he was haunted by fears that his parents had died. Highlighting the darker side of Bloomsbury life, Chisholm cites a V.S. Pritchett short story that reiterates the popular rumor that Burgo was found digging his parents’ graves in their garden.

Chisholm also takes explicit issue with Partridge’s lifelong pacifism, wondering how anyone could object to war when the enemy was Hitler. Bloomsbury’s insulation from reality—an accusation of its many critics—certainly shows here. It is hard to take Partridge’s politics very seriously when the biggest “trial of war” she encounters is the unreliability of domestic help and a trip to London, which includes a new tweed suit and lunch of “salmon, asparagus and zabaglione” at the Ivy. Chisholm notes that pacifism is the only topic on which she found Partridge’s 100-year-old mind to be closed: “It was not that she would not address the matter, but that she could not; she had long ago rejected all the arguments I could deploy.”

Chisholm seems to have been so seduced by Partridge’s “cocktail party tact” that she is quick to forgive the woman’s foibles. She could certainly have been more critical of the lifelong socialite and less charmed by her grace in old age. But in the end, her affection for Patridge suffuses the biography and, rather than turning the reader away, elicits real sympathy for its subject. One can almost forgive Partridge’s selfishness, seeming exploitation of her position, and privileged isolation from reality. And even where we can’t forgive, readers are left thoroughly convinced that Partridge, a bystander to glittering acquaintances in her own work, deserves a turn at centre stage.

Patrick Maxwell graduated with a first in English Language and Literature from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He is currently teaching English in Russia.