Hildegarde

Writing a book is a very odd thing to do, at least for me.  I say that in spite of the fact that I wrote my first one before I was eleven years old, sitting in the enormous upstairs room my father had built for me when he was expanding our house, at a metal typing table he’d had himself when he was in college, working on a manual typewriter his mother once gave me for Christmas.

I think  I was six years old when  I decided I was going to grew up to write novels, and my family all knew about it early.  So did The New Yorker, which got a steady stream of my short stories–one a week, at least–almost as soon as I hit puberty.

I say all this as a lead up to admitting that I didn’t get any work done today, or at least not any that I  can keep.  I am not an “emo” writer, as my sons would put it.  I’ve got no patience with the sort of person who doesn’t put finger to keypad for weeks at a time because “the work just isn’t flowing” or “I just can’t seem to get inspired.”

Writing is like anything else we do.  The only way to do it is to do it.  If the work is going badly, the best solution tends to be to just whack away at it until you shake yourself free of whatever inner hesitation is holding you back.  I’ve often had to whack my way through impossible plot or character tangles that wouldn’ work out because they couldn’t work out.  When  I’d made a big enough mess, I’d finally see I had to just cut about fifty pages and start again at some earlier point, and then everything would be all right.

There is one thing, though, that can make it very difficult for me to write, and especially very difficult for me to write fiction.   That’s what I read.  Of course, most of what’s available for me to read has no effect at all on the way I write, because the narrative voice isn’t particularly strong or the mechanics aren’t particularly good or bad.

And I can read almost anything and still write nonfiction.  If nonfiction goes wrong, it’s almost always because I haven’t thought out the argument well enough, or done enough research, or something else that’s procedural and can be fixed in an organized way.

With fiction, though, I almost never know when I start how I’m going to end, and the project depends on my ability to get inside my characters’ heads and let them work out their lives on their own.  In a way, it’s like being able to hear music inside my skull.  Different characters have different music.

And some writers are so tone deaf, I can’t hear anything inside my skull after I’ve read them, except maybe the pounding that means I need some aspirin.  The Da Vinci Code was like that for me, and some of the cutesy-wootsey, giggly-wiggly cozies.

Some writers have such strong narrative voices that they’re all the music that’s left when I’m done with them.  The early  Stephen  King was like that.  I’d read The Shining and then half sound like King for a week. 

Some writers, though, are sure things–I can write fiction when I’m reading them, and sometimes I  can actually write fiction better when I’ve been reading them.  Sometimes it’s not the writer but the particular book.  I can write fiction while reading George Steiner, no matter what the book is, but with Alice Hoffmann it has to be Seventh Heaven. 

Oddly enough, some of the best books for me to read while I’m working are the very “literary fiction” things that make me the most nuts when I’m not.  Ann  Beattie’s characters are a mind numbing array of upper middle class narcissists that make me want to scream most of the time, bu the prose has a good rhythm to it, and the rhythm strikes something in me that works.

Over the years, there have been particular books that have worked all the time, books that even make me want to write when I don’t have a project going.   On the top of the list of those is the novel A Taste for Death, by P.D. James.   I was reading it when I first sat down to work on the first Gregor Demarkian novel in the spring of 1987.   I had it sitting on my worktable right next to the big electronic typewriter I used then so that I could stop and read pieces of it when the writing seemed to flag.

Like most writers I know, I tend to remember clearly only my bad reviews.  I even remember the first professional review I ever saw of a book of mine, the Kirkus on Sweet, Savage Death–”an amateurish mess of a plot.”  Lasst year I got a review from some online guy I’d never heard of that, in the middle of everything, declared, “I don’t understand why anybody would read these books.” 

And, you know, being a writer, and therefore a neurotic, I had a near nervous breakdown over it, even though I’d already managed to get starred reviews for that same book in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. 

But I’ve been wondering today what that reviewer reads in his real life.  It’s not a question I often ask of revierwers, although  I’m careful when I see somebody on an online forum recommending this or that.  I need to know what they “like” before I can know if their recommendation would make sense for me.

The book in question–the one the reviewer didn’t know why anybody would read–was Cheating At Solitaire, and I don’t think it’s the best I’ve done in my ongoing attempts to be a detective novelist “just like P.D. James.”  But that is something I’ve been trying to do, for a long time, and it’s still something  I’d be happy to achieve.

And  P.D. James has all the elements that the online reviewer seems not to like very much.  Her books are highly introspective.  They not only concentrate on character, but they take place largely in the characters’ heads.  The focus of interest is not on her detective–Dalgleigh is all right, but not exactly charismatic, at least for me–but on the suspects, because the suspects define not only the crime but the social reality in which the crime has taken place.  

This has always seemed to me to be the most intersting thing about murder mysteries, or detective stories, or crime novels, or whatever you want to call them.  It’s even what interests me in Agatha  Christie, who is in no sense a fine writer, or even a particularly serious one. 

And it’s not that I’m interesting in becoming a clone, because there are things about  P.D. James’s world that I do not see in mine, and could not reproduce and still be honest.  James’s London, like that of many British crime writers at the higher intellectual end of the field, is a landscape of failure, real failure, not the spectacular smash of somebody like Bernard Madoff but the small, grinding, petty, pinched day by day of hopelessness and giving up.

I know a lot of people who live in reduced circumstances, as Dame Agatha would have put it, but none who life with the hunched, straining despair of old Miss Wharton and Father Barnes at the beginning of A Taste for Death.  I think there is something deeply antithetical to the  American temperament in the kind of lives those two characters lead, and many other characters across James’s work. 

Still, I have more than a little respect for the fact that James did not resolve Miss Wharton’s problem in the way almost any American author would have done.  At the beginning of A Taste for Death, on the very day they find the bodies, Miss Wharton has developed one of the few emotional attachments in her life, to a street kid who has become attached to her as well, whose own mother is a drunken waste and who needs an emotional connection of his own.

I think almost any American novel I can think of, certainly almost any American crime novel, would have tied up this relationship by finding a way for  Darren (the boy) to be taken from his sodden mother and given to Miss Wharton as a foster child.  In A Taste for Death, Darren is indeed taken from his sodden mother, but the Social Services department not only don’t give him in to Miss Wharton’s foster care, they do eveything they can until they have broken the two of them apart, leaving Miss Wharton to sink back into her unrelenting loneliness and Darren in the care of foster parents who seem more in it for the money than anything else.

It’s probably more true to real life than the alternative would have een, but it is profoundly depressing.   It interests me that it doesn’t bother me that it is profoundly depressing.  I’ve read that book a good dozen times–I’m reading it again as we speak, because I mentioned it last week and then I went looking for my copy in the office–and I find, over and over and over again in that little side plot something very satisfying to contemplate.  Maybe I need a writer who will be realistic about the “compassion” of social service departments, and also about the “compassion” of the people who work in them, who always seem to me to be more interested in their own power and authority than in the damage they do to so many of their “clients.”

But it can’t be just that, because I could say the samething about h alf a dozen novels by Ruth Rendell, and I hate them.  This is one of those distinctions I’ve talked about before.  I’m not saying that  Rendell is a bad writer.  She’s not.  She’s a spectacularly good writer.  And her characters, although unattractive, are no more unattractive than James’s are. 

But I don’t think I’ve ever been as truly, thoroughly angry at a book as I was after reading Rendell’s King Solomon’s Carpet.  The book is one of the ones she wrote as  Barbara Vine, and therefore not an entry in her long running Wexford series, but then I’ve never read any of the Wexfords.  Maybe I’d respond to them differently.

My problem with King Solomon’s Carpet is with a plot not entirely central to the murder, or maybe it was.  I find I  have a hard time remembering what else went on in that book besides the thing that upset me.   And the thing that upset me was this:  one of the main characters is a young woman who wants to be a classical musician.  She has grown up in a home where she has never been encouraged.  Her mother is a monument to spite, a nasty, brutish evil woman hose only purpose in life seems to be to keep her daughter down.  The daughter finally gets up her courage, leaves the maternal home, goes out on her own and tries to follow her dream.

And faile.   She not only fails, but she fails for just the reason her mother said she would–because she’s a bad musician, not even tolerably mediocre.   She fails.  She’s humiliated.  Her mother is allowed an {assumed) triumphant victory–

And if Rendell had been less good of a writer, I probably wouldn’t have been so angry, angry enough that I can’t write about it now, fifteen years later, without getting angry all over again.  But Rendell is very good indeed, and that mother is so real to me, so real on the page, that the only thing I can feel for that book is complete and utter revulsion.  And it’s one of those books, too.  There are some books that you love and then you lose them in the house and can never find them again.  I keep running over this one every time I pick up the dining room.

Which, granted, is not that often.  But there’s a bookcase in my dining room.

I do understand that  Rendell’s portrait of this young woman and her mother is entirely realitic, and much more realistic than the usual story of the young woman who follows her dream and proves everybody in her life completely wrong.  And some of what’s going on with this may be my own relationship to my own mother, at least as it existed before the dementia.

But I think, on reflection, that what it really is is that I sense, under James’s very nondidactic, measured prose, a fondation of objectively derived and steadfastly held moral principles, in the light of which everything that happens is judged.  With  Rendell, I sense no such thing.  Failure and misery seem to exist just because they do.  It what the world looks like when there is no reason or purpose to anything.

I have no idea if  Rendell herself, as a person, is anything like this, if she holds any of these ideas about morality or purpose or anything else.   For all I know, she may be nothing at all like her Barbara  Vine novels.   Maybe I’d see a different Rendell if I read the Wexfords instead.

I just know that what James makes me feel when  I read her novels is the urge to write some of my own.  What Rendell makes me feel is a desire to commit some kind of violence, as a kind of equal and opposite reaction.

I’d barely hit the button to publish yesterday’s post when it suddenly hit me–a Romantic sensibility might be behind attraction to various kinds of revolutionary violence, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary to an attraction to violence per se.   Or at least, one needn’t be a Romantic to find something vaguely exhilarating at being in close proximity to somebdy who has done murder.   Bookishness alone seems to be enough of an impetus to that.

Let me try to unwind this a little, since it’s probably confusing.  First,  I’d probably note that Romantics come in right wing as well as left wing versions.  National Socialism was a Romantic movement, as was Mussolini’s brand of Fascism, and most fascisms now, as were virtually all forms of Communism, no matter how hard they tried to portray themselves as “scientific.”  I think you have to have a Romantic sensibility to hunger ater that kind of violence, or to hunger after a vicarious experience of it.

But if you leave the realm of politics and look into the relationships between writers and individual murderers, it’s evident in no time that political orientations matters not at all to the disease. 

And it is a disease, I think.  Robert and Sarahartburn would probably call it original sin.  Signmund Freud would have called it the death wish.   There’s no reason why all of these things couldn’t be true at the same time.  Logic wouldn’t argue against it.

The death wish, however, seems to me to indicate something more like the odd attraction that suicide has for so many people, and the need so many others have to concentrate their fight for “rights” on those rights that kill things–abortion, “assisted suicide,” active euthanasia.  I’ve read a number of arguments by people who claim that it is a contradiction for someone to be both opposed to legal abortion and in favor of the death penalty, but see just as much contradiction in people who oppose the death penalty while at the same time championing the “choice” of getting the doctor to kill people because they’ve become too old and sick.  And if the people in the second camp honestly believe doctors, given the option, will only kill those people who ask for it, they’re too naive to be allowed to vote.

That said, the phenomenon that is the writer entralled by the murderer is an old one, and it occurs across the political and moral spectrum.   Norman Mailer had Jack Henry Abbot, but William F. Buckley, Jr. had a murderer of his own, and close to the same time, with much the same story.  I’ve spent a long time over the last twenty-four hours trying to find the Buckley case on Google, but I’ve come up blank.  I remember it, though, when it happened, and for an odd reason.

The most famous case of a writer attracted to a murderer was that of Truman Capote and the Dick and Perry not ready for prime time burglars who murdered the Clutter family in Kansas.  It wasn’t much of a crime.  It lacked both intelligence and originality.   It wasn’t even particulary brutal compared to the kind of things we now hear about on a regular basis.

On the other hand, Capote didn’t fool himself for a minute.  Dick and Perry were guilty.   He knew they were guilty.  He was fascinated by them and only cared to write about them and to write well.  There are people who say they ruined him, and other people who say the book, In Cold Blood, ruined him.  I’ve always thought Capote ruined himself, but that’s another issue.

In the cases of Buckley and Mailer, however, we have writers not only fascinated by murderers but utterly open to being conned, at least on the conscious level.  Mailer somehow decided that his murderer, Jack Henry Abbott, couldn’t really be a violent man because he wrote well.  He spent a considerable amount of his time, energy and prestige in the effort to get Abbott–an habitual criminal with a brutal streak who had spent almost all his life in prison and already killed one person–out on parole and into the literary life Mailer thought he was suited for.

In a way this was Mailer’s second murderer. His first, Gary Gilmore, was the subject of his book The Executioner’s Song, and it was during the writing of that book that Mailer ran across Abbott.  Abbott’s story was simple.  The murder he’d committed was a case of self defense, and everything else he’d done–and there was a lot of it–was just bad breaks and force of circumstances.

I’m depraved onna count of I’m deprived.

You’d think Mailer would know better.  What is it about writers that we always seem to think that anybody who writes well cannot be deeply and innately criminal?  Mailer helped Abbott get his first book published,  In  The Belly of the Beat, and it’s a very decent book that led to two more.  The first of those two was another memoir, about his return to prison.  The second was a book about what prisone do to prisoners.

But first, Abbott had to do something to get himself sent back to jail, and he didn’t just fail to report to his parole officer.   Instead, less than six weeks after his release to a halfway house set up by  Mailer himself, Abbot got a young writer named Richard Adan in an alley and stabbed him to death.

I wish I could find the particulars on the case Buckley involved himself in, because it was in some ways even more classic.  I do remember that the man was on death row when he wrote Buckley claiming to have been unjustly convicted and asking for help in getting off death row.  There must have been something in the way the man expressed himself, because Buckley took a personal interest, researched the crime, and then began to lobby to insure that the man was not executed. 

I read one of Buckley’s own accounts of this incident, and what I remember is that he asked Truman Capote  if  Capote thought the man was guilty.  Well, Capote said, they usually are.

And this lead to the outrage that I remember so well, to Buckley saying that this exchange proved that Capote was utterly morally bankrupt.  I remember it because, at the time I read it, I thought Capote had a point.  They are usually guilty.   And this one was, too, as it came out in the long run.

It’s like I said yesterday–I wonder what it is that has made so many bookish people, right wing and left wing, liberal and conservative, male and female, so fascinated by violence and so intoxicated by being in the proximity of people who commit it.  Some writers write about violence, of course, and then you can say that the interest is largely professional.  A lot of writers who don’t write about violence take up with criminal types on one level or another, or become attached to famous cases, or decide to do a little side trip into true crime writing when something in the local news hits a nerve.

Maybe I’m just coming back to The  Sorrows of Young Werther, here, and the issue is really the tendency to see artists as “criminals” in relation to “bourgeois” society–the artist is the odd man odd, his sensibility is too fine and his honesty too pure to survive in the vulgar world of business and ambition, he lives forever as a revolutionary of consciousness, if nothing else.  Both  Dostoyevski and Camus write about murderers as artists, after all, and they don’t seem to have been on the same side of anything  politically. 

Maybe politics is a symptom and not an essential here, with writers, with writing, with anything. 

And maybe the proof positive that I’m never going to be a great writer can be found in the fact that, on the few occasions I’ve been presented with people who I know have committed serious violence, all I’ve been interested in has been getting the hell out of the room.

This is what I think of as “Christmas vacation,” even though, given the schedule for delivery of my books,  I tend to work right through it.   It’s Christmas vacation for my sons, though, so maybe that works. 

Being Christmas vacation, though, I always think I need to hack through my TBR pile, and I’ve got a very large  TBR pile.  It’s large even when I haven’t bought books for months.  For one thing, a good chunk of my college class ended up in publishin, so I have people at most of the major New York houses who know what I’m interested in and are happy to ship it out to me if they run across it.   In the three years after Bill died, I didn’t buy a single book for myself–I couldn’t have afforded to if I’d wanted to–but I didn’t go without anything I wanted to read, either.  College is useful for a lot of things.

The other reason my TBR is so large, of course, is that people send me books out of the blue, hoping that I’ll review them even though  I  have no regular reviewing gig, or hoping I’ll give them blubs.  I try to give blurbs if I’ve got the time to read the books.  I try to give them even if the books aren’t very good.  On the other hand, I rarely do have time to read the books, what with everything going on here.

One of the books I found on my TBR pile this Christmas is called American  Bloomsbury.  It’s by Susan Cheever, who is both the daughter of the short story writer John Cheever and the great-something granddaughter of Ezekiel Cheever, who was definitely on the churh side of the witch trials in Salem.  That in and of itself is an interesting circumstance, because the book is about the Concord of  Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, and Hawthorne’s great-grandfather was the chief judge at the witch trials in Salem.  Hawthorne was tortured all his life by the connection.  Susan  Cheever gives a page or two to declaring her own tendency to be “haunted” by it.

I don’t mean to be snippy here.  I have no reason to think Susan Cheever is anything but a nice, well-meaning, honest woman who is having a hard time following in a famous father’s footsteps.  I will admit that I have a hard time with people who call themselves “progressives”–I mean, for goodness sake, if youo’re a liberal, call yourself one, and if you’re really a progressive, a child of the Progressive Movement, then you scare the hell out of me for the same reason the Religious  Right does–but the book is both well written and very short. 

I think it might have started out to be a sort of back-and-forth in time.  Cheever writes a bit from the modern  Concord, Massachusetts, has her picture taken in front of Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott once wrote Little Women, describes the gated community that now owns the land off which Margaret Fuller drowned on  Fire Island, and then goes back to her history of the people who lived around Emerson and made up the Transcendental Movement.

I’ve even learned things from this book.  I had been fed the usual drivel mythology about Thoreau and  Walden Pond in high school, then told in college that the man was just a rich dilletante who went “back to nature” but took his laundry into town to be washed.  As it turns out, both those story lines are mythologies, and neither of them are close to true.

Thoreau didn’t “go back to nature” at Walden Pond.  He grew up poor, hunger-inducing, grindingly poor, and he stayed that way all his life.  The only comfort he ever knew was when he lived in a spare room at Emerson’s house and did odd jobs around the place.   He went to Walden when he and Emerson quarreled and Emerson was no longer willing to have him in the house.  Emerson owned the property on the pond.  He loaned it to  Thoreau and Thoreau built a shack for himself where he stayed for two years because he had no other choice. 

I know I’ve been obsessing lately about New England between the Revolution and the Civil War, but this time I’ve actually got a connection with murder and bloodshed and even  Lizzie Borden.  Lizzie Borden was a New Englander, too.

In the meantime, I find it interesting to note that, at least in America, it seems always to have been true that class and money were not the same things.  Thoreau and his family were so short of wherewithall that they often had nothing to eat but root vegetables and game, but Henry and his brother John went to Harvard.  Education was more of a necessity than food or warmth or a roof that didn’t leak.  When I was growing up, we called this attitude “plain living and high thinking.”  You can still find it lying around in places.

The circumstance that reminds me of Lizzie  Borden is, of course, the problem of John Brown.  For those of you who know nothing about American history–and lots of you aren’t Americans, so there’s no reason you should–Brown was a radical abolitionist in the era just before the American Civil War.  He would have been a radical abolitionist in the  Civil War, but he managed to get himself hanged before it started.  This was neither surprising nor unwarranted.

Back when I first brought up Brown, I think in connection with Bill Ayers, somebody  posted to the comment board that at least Brown was a real revolutionary.  He took real risks with his life.   He wasn’t just hanging around coffee houses trying to sound dangerous when he wasn’t.

And it’s true enough that Brown took real risks with his own life.  It’s also true that he was a homicidal nutcase, and a world class thug.   And he made no secret of his activities.  In an era when the demarcations between states were much stronger than they are now, when you could “go over the state line” and be immune from arrest by the state you left, it was less risky than it is now to boast about felonies miles from where you’d committed them.

The felony in question was the raid on Pottawatomie, Kansas n the night of May  24, 1856. 

I’m not saying here that John  Brown didn’t serve a righteous cause, becuase he did.  John Adams said, at the very founding of the country, that allowing slavery to continue under the Constitution would prove to be the worst decision we ever made and would haunt the nation forever, and I think he had a point.  But the “raid” at Pottawatomie is sometimes called a massacre for good reason.

Brown and his sons–they were often called his “men” in contemporary press accounts, but almost all Brown’s “men” were sons or sons in law–set out on horseback after dark and went from one remote farmhouse to another.  Once they got to a house, they would storm it, drag the adult men outside and then murder them.  Some of these men were shot.  Others were literally hacked to pieces.  The killings were done in full view of the men’s families.   At the farm of James Doyle, Brown and his sons dragged James and his two adult sons away from their screaming wife and mother and younger brother. 

What’s more, none of the men murdered on the night of the  Pottawatomie raids owned slaves.  They were only suspected of being pro-slavery, and of being willing to vote to bring slavery to Kansas. 

I think “homicidal nutcase” fits here, even if we allow some of the events preceeding thre raid–a raid by pro-slavery forces from Missouri into Kansas a few nights before, the brutal beating of Massachusetts senator Charles  Sumner by pro-slavery Senator on the floor of the Senate itself–as mitigating factors.  The beatin of Sumner was inexcusable, but more a matter for the District of  Columbia police than for an act of vengenace, and the raids from Missouri were brutal and destructive but more along the lines of causing general mayhem than cold blooded butchery.

There is simply no possibility that Emerson, Thoreau and their friends did not know what Brown was, or what he’d done.  They still came to his lectures in Concord and invited him to speak in their homes.   What’s more, they were thrilled to meet him, and passionate in defense of them. 

What fascinates me is that Cheever, although she acknowledges that this was a moral lapse of some kind, spends no time at all wondering if the things they believed in led them inexorably to their support of something they should not have supported.

I don’t mean their convictions against slavery.  There were plenty of abolitionists out there who had no use for Brown, and who saw him–probably rightly–as a hindrance to the cause of ridding the country of the peculiar institution. 

I do mean that this seems to be another case of bookish people with strong feelings about their need to become “authentic” in some way they don’t think they are being drawn to violence in other people, drawn to violence as if violence itself is the only  real authenticity, dreawn to it the way drunks are drawn to liuor.

This is, of course, the whole point in Camus’s The Stranger and in Crime and  Punishment as well, that the only way a man can get free of the “artificiality” of civilization is by committing murder, and best of all by committing murder with no practical motive at all.

Those little gatherings in Concord parlors for John Brown and his sons remind me of the “reception” Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers–all such “receptions” are given not in spite of the violence of the guests of honor but because of them.  And they are always given by people who profess to believe that civilization is “artificial” and that human beings only do wrong at all because they have been corrupted by it.  

I said this had something to do with Lizzie Borden, and I meant it, and not just with Lizzie Borden, either.  To the extent that this country’s culture is now and has been a “romantic” one, as romantic was defined by Yvor  Winters a few posts ago, I think we have a fascination with violence, and an attraction to at least some of the people who commit it.   To the extent that this country’s culture is now and has been a Puritan one, we’re like Cecil B. DeMille–we need sermons and tits.  We can only indulge our fascination with violence when we can put it in the context of a moral fable.

Lizzie Borden.  Myra Hinckley and Ian  Brady.  Fred and Rosemary West.  Ted Bundy.   Jack the Ripper.  Hannibal Lecter.  Che Guevera.  Good old Fidel.

We tell ourselves we’re just interested in their psychologies or we’re supporting their rigthteous causes or whatever it is that makes it possible for our Puritan side to allow our romantic side to revel in blood, but really I think there’s just a part of us that likes the feel of that psychic drunk.

Well, it’s the new year, and I’m feeling a lot cheerier, so I’m half obsessed with murder and mayhem, or something.  Not really.  Yesterday, for some reason, I spent a lot of time thinking about Lizzie Borden.  The Borden case continues to fascinate a good solid swath of the American public, and for all I know of other publics as well, and I think it may have something to do with the fact that there isn’t any sex in it. 

But what really started me thinking about Lizzie Borden was that I remebered a ook, written in the eighties, I think, or possibly a little earlier, written by a woman who had been a young girl in one of the “better” families in Fall River, Massachusetts, at the time of the crime.  The  Bordens were a member of those same “better” families, and the book was fasinating because the woman who wrote it was quite clear that, in her recollection, the entire social establishment of  Fall River knew that Lizzie was guilty and did everything they could to obscure the fact so she wouldn’t be convicted.  Then with the acquittal safely in hand, they stopped talking to her.  Lizzie’s own sister stopped talking to her a few years later, propelled out of the house they shared because of mortal fear for her life.   At least, that was the rumor.

Here’s the thing.  I understand why people would want to read a book like that.  I understand why people are fascinated by Lizzie Borden.  What I don’t understand is why people read murder mysteries.

Or “crime novels,” if you prefer.  I personally think the term “crime novel”  was invented in order to get myseries out of the mystery section of the bookstore, and the reviewing pages, and into the consciousness of the general public.  But it seems to me that “crime novels” are so much in the consciousness of the general public that it sometimes looks as if there’s nothing else on offer.

And not just in books, either.  There’s television.  I mean, how many versions of Law and  Order and CSI? 

Back in the first “golden age” of detective novels–there’s an alternative term for you–there was a fairly easy division between British (Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, amateur detectives, country houses) and American (hard boiled private eyes walking down mean streets and meeting women who slept around and murdered people). 

Okay, that’s not fair, and there were of course other kinds of detective novels even then.  The police procedural has been around from the beginning.  The television shows mentioned above, the ones that clone themselves every forty-five minutes, are police procedurals.   And there have always been true crime or nearly true crime stories–about Jack the Ripper, about Dr. Crippen–although those tended to be written more like horror novels than like detective stories. 

But what interests me, at the moment, is the mountain of material on offer in books and on television–in movies, not so much–that is one kind of detective story or another, so that almost anything anybody can do has already been done forty times last week.

That wouldn’t necessarily matter, because there really aren’t a whole lot of different plots out there to choose from.  Shakespeare never invented a new plot in his life, and yet he was able to make everything old new, just by being Shakespeare.

Most people are not Shakespeare, or  Stephen King, but what we have now is not just the same plot over and over again, but the same sensibility.   This is what I think of as the “I’m a cop, and I know that all human beings are really scum” sensibility.   You can substitute something else–private detective, social worker–for “cop” and have it work quite well, and some people do.  So we have a ot of different kinds of cops and private detectives.   We’ve got pathologists, park rangers, insurance investigators, forensic psychologists–you name it.

What’s more, all these people live in a world where crime is not only pervasive, but committed willy-nily by all sorts of people from all walks of life.  It doesn’t matter who you are.   If you’re Mother  Teresa and you show up in one of these novels, or on one o these television shows, you’ll be a phony, a liar, and a fraud, and that’s if they’ve decided to like you.

A lot of people describe this sort of thing as “realistic,” but it isn’t, really.  Virtually none of us live in a world like this, and I’d guess that most of us are honest enough not even to be able to pretend that we do.  Out where I live, we don’t lock our doors most of the time.   I lived in New York for years and knew only one person who was ever mugged, robbed, or touched by crime in any way, and she was walking home alone up Broadway at three o’clock in the morning on her own.  He took her wallet and otherwise left her alone.

For all the reputation Americans have gotten about being violent and crime ridden, a number of writers who have come here from England and Western Europe over the last decade have remarked on just how very little of it there is, not only from what they’d expected but from what they were used to at home.

Of course there are terribly crime ridden neighborhoods in some places, but most Americans don’t live in them, and the neighborhoods and towns we do live in are largely stable and secure.  And there are drugs, because whereever there are teen-agers there are drugs.  There are not, however, gangs.  What there are are various kinds of people at various levels in the middle class, some of them good, some of them bad, most of them indifferent. 

If we go back to the first few days of this blog–that novels create a moral universe and ask us to live in it–my question is why anybody wants to live in this one.  There is,  I suppose, a whiff of the old hard boiled private eye magic going on–everybody is scum but me, I’m the lone pillar upholding the good and the right and the true–but even that doesn’t remain constant. 

I get a little nervous,  I think, at so many people who want to believe their world is worse than it is, and that their fellow citizens are worse than they are.   But I also get nervous at the one alternative that seems to be available in any quantity:  the sugar coated world of the modern “cozy,” a world that exists nowhere and never did, a situation comedy world with a crime in the middle of it.

As if a crime wouldn’t matter to people more than the winner of the bake-off does.

Cozies are like police procedurals, and serial killer novels, and hard boiled private eye novels–there are good ones and bad ones.  Charlotte MacLeod wrote some very good ones before her death.  I picked up The Family Vault in paperback my last year in graduate school, the first mystery I’d read in a decade and a half, and it’s probably responsible for the fact that I went on to write them.

But the essence of the cozy is the cute, and the funny, and a vision of human personalities and human relationships shaped by punch lines and lack of real conflict.   I sometimes think that “lack of conflict” is the entire reason behind the cozy as a subgenre.  These are books for people who do not want to think, do not want to feel, and do not want to be distrubed by anything like anger or hatred or greed.

There’s a kind of person who shows up on Usenet news groups and e-mail discussion groups who is allergic to anything that smacks of disagreement–no, no, we can’t have people angry with anybody!  and I want to say my piece and you have no right to criticize it!  I have an essay on the main site, called “Janes Rules of the Road,” that is an enormous fulmination on this sort of person.

I’ve become increasingly convinced, however, that these are the main audience for cozies.  A debate without disagreement is a contradiction in terms.  So is a murder without somebody being deeply and abidingly angry at somebody else.  They are like that “fan” who wrote in a while back–they want to be “entertained” and not reminded that the world is full of uncomfortable things. 

In both cases, I suppose, we’re looking at people who want fantasy and not life.  One kind, and by far the larger, wants a fantasy of ultimate mutual degredation.  The other kind wants a fantasy of ultimate irresponsibility.

What baffles me is that there are so many of them, and they say the same things over and over and over again, and nobody seems to get bored.

In the real world, most people are decent enough and law abiding enough and well meaning enough, and when they get seriously out of line they present an anomaly that has to be dealt with on many different levels.   There are writers–P.D. James, again–who try to do this, but there are very few of them, and I’ve got no evidence to suggest that readers are looking for them.

So I want to know–why does anybody read “crime novels,” “detective stories,” “murder mysteries,” call them what you want?   What do the readers get out of reading what they readd?  what are they looking for when they read?  And why read the  same thing, over and over and over and over and over again?

Maybe I’m still in the slough of despond, and just don’t know it.

I will, however, nominate for greatest “crime novel” of all time, P.D. James’s A Taste for Death.

I’ve got a copy of it around the office someplace.

For those of you too old, too young, or too sensible, the title of this post is a line from the theme song to a movie called Beach Party, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.  It came out in the early 1960s, after Kennedy and the pill but before middle class college students started rioting in the streets and everybody seemed either to be overdoxing or assassinated.

I’ve got Beach Party stuck in my head because it was on TCM yesterday as I was flipping through channels desperately looking for some advance notice about today’s weather.  We’ve got another big storm moving in this afternoon, but since a lot of the public school systems are on winter break, the closings lists on the local television stations don’t look anywhere near as impressive as they did the last time.   It’s also hard to get find weather bulletins and even harder to get plowed out, since the roads people are likely to decide that if nobody lives on your road who is either a medical professional or on emergency alert for a heart condition, you can wait.

Welcome to New England, which is, sort of, what I want to talk about today.  That, and Annette Funicello.  I’m having one of those mornings when everything seems to connect.

To begin with, I was thinking about what I’d said yesterday, not the depressing part–well, some of it–but the part about how I don’t read much fiction that is new. 

Part of that, I think, is the Frankie and  Annette syndrome.   I’m  nobody’s Communist.  And, except on social issues,  I’m nobody’s radical, either.  I don’t think that corporations are the evil supervillains of the world, or that they’re out to destroy the planet, or that they’d just as soon murder you for profit as put out a press release. 

What I do think is that corporations are what they are and do what they do.  Complaining that Megacorp is fixated on raising its profits is like complaining that lions eat gazelles.  They are what they are.  They do what they do.

And corporations are very good at some things, assuming they’re being intelligently run.  There’s the economies of scale thing–it makes the lives of a great many people much better if they can afford things like DVD players and washing machines instead of having to live without them.   Yes, goodness knows, the damned stores are tacky and they force some Mom and Pop operations out of business, but I live in the mecca of Mom and Pop businesses and some of them deserve to go out of business.  I’m not the woman on the zoning board with her entire life invested in keeping the town quaint.

The other thing corporations are good at is planning, and that’s a wonderful thing.  Many of the most important projects in any industrial society takes years, and sometimes decades, to bring to fruition–new drugs, new bridges, new buildings.  Planning requires the ability to predict the consequences of our actions, however, and that’s where corporations have and  probably always will get into trouble in the arts. 

I don’t care if your media is mass or niche, the simple fact of the matter is that it’s damned near impossible to predict what the public is going to respond to next Tuesday, never mind a couple of years from next Tuesday, in music, painting, theater, film, or fiction.  What’s more, the actual element that the public responds to is not quantifiable, or rationalizable (is that a word?), in the way the elements of things like cell phones or videogame systems are.  

The reason Frankie and  Annette are on my mind is that they’re a perfect example of what happens when a corporation tries to predict what its public–in this case, early Sixties teenagers and pre-teens–will like.  It has some vague idea of what the elements of previously popular movies have been (protagonists in the right age group, surfing) and what else is popular with that same audience (rock and roll music).  It sets its people the project of putting those elements together to make a popular film. 

The Beach Party movies existed because the Gidget movies existed.  The Gidget movies were lame but basically honest B flicks that got a little extra boost because their star, Sandra Dee, turned out to resonate with a fair chunk of the teen-aged public.   The Beach Party movies were dishonest in every possible way, and they’ve come down to us as paragons of badly acted phoniness. 

This is, I think, my problem with a lot of contemporary fiction, and especially contemporary “best selling” fiction.  Publisher do today with that fiction what American International Studios did with the Beach Party movies:  they have a vague idea of what is already “popular,” and they try to find authors and editors who will take those disparate elements and put them together in a single package.

This is the only explanation I have for the “cozy,” a subgenre theoretically meant to reproduce the Golden Age world of amateur sleuths and country villages.   Ask any of the dozens of cozy writers now throwing books into the mix at your local  Barnes and Noble, and they’ll tell you that their inspiration is Agatha  Christie.

But  Agatha Christie didn’t write “cozies.”  Her books are spare, not jokey, and although they’re stripped of the kind of vulgarity that would have made them seem more “realistic,” they’re very realistic indeed when it comes to murder methods and the psychology of murderers and their victims.  Miss Marple says at one point in Nemesis that she believes in evil, everlasting life and goodness, and she’s being entirely serious.  She is never cute.

It’s rational “planning” for a best seller that seems to me to explain the endless stream of serial killer books that have poured out of publishers in the last fifteen years, books that by and large all have exactly the same plot and exactly the same focal character.   It’s not even a new character, although Thomas Harris did some new things with it, and the rest of the serial killer writers have stampeded along behind.  Hannibal Lecter is Dr. Moriarity with very bad habits.  His imitators are a mind numbing array of obsessional losers with charter subscriptions to the kind of Internet web sites that depend heavily on clothes pins and goats.

I don’t read much contemporary fiction because too much of what I read is Frankie and Annette–a consciously constructed attempted to hit the best seller lists by writing something “the same, only different” from hat’s hit the best seller lists before. 

There’s nothing terribly evil about trying to do this, about trying to rationalize the process.  The only real problem with it is that it doesn’t work, and I think it may in fact decrease the audience for books overall.  A book is a larger investment of time than a Frankie and Annette movie.  If you’re not used to reading to begin with and you pick up the equivalent of Beach Blanket Bingo, the chances are good that you’re going to think that books are less interesting or worthwhile than movies, especially if the movies you’re comparing it to are Schindler’s List or even Ocean’s Eleven.

The need of corporations to plan explains the mania Hollywood has for sequels and the penchant many publishers have for series–it worked once, maybe it will work again.  And remember, it’s the phoniness I’m complaining about, not the mindlessness.  It’s harder to make “serious, thoughful” stuff phone, but it can be done.  Take a look at big whacking hunks of the hard boiled private eye tradition.

I wish  I knew what it would take to jump start a viable network of alternatives that could still be significant enough to get those alternatives into the consciousness of the general public.  Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the phoniness problem.  I Love Lucy and Perry Mason were far more honest than Full House and the myriad versions of Law and Order.

I’ve been listening to people all week who describe the period we’ve just been thorugh as “a new Gilded Age,” but I don’t think that’s right.  I don’t think this is a new Gilded Age, but a new Roaring Twenties, a time in which youth and money were the only criteria for judging anything, a time when those two things acted like a tidal wave, wiping everything else out.  

Robert notes that out of those mistakes and the mess they made of the world, we got the Greatest  Generation.  I’d say we also got Robert Frost and Alan Ginsberg, Charles Mingus and James Brown.

And I’m sinking into the slough of despond again.  Who’d have guess that a slough would be this big?

Happy New Year, everybody, and better books in all our futures…

A couple of nights ago, in the middle of an e-mail about something else entirely, I made the offhand comment that I should suggest, on this blog, that anybody reading this who wants to should post the list of his or her ten favorite novels.  I said it, was asked to make that twenty-five, and found myself stumped.  I don’t think  I can name twenty-five of my favorite novels.   I don’t think I can name ten.  When  I look around this house, when I look around my life,  I come to the realization that I don’t read many novels any more. 

I remember being fifteen or so and having my father tell me that he never read them himself.  He explained it by saying that he had been incapacitated for many months after the war at  Walter  Reed–when Walter Reed was a first class medical facility, back when we did that for the armed services–and that in that time he had read his way through hundreds of novels, everything from Dostoyevski to the complete (up to that point) works of Erle  Stanley Gardner, so that by the end of it he was just sick of the whole thing.   In the time I knew him he read only history, and  I knew there was something physically wrong with him when he began to give that up for magazines.

But the fact remains that I don’t read novels very often any more, and most of the ones I do read  I read either for professional reasons or on a second or third pass.  I reread more than I read, in other words, and what I reread tends to lean heavily towards the Victorian or early twentieth century.   Most fiction makes me impatient these days.  Most contemporary crime novels drive me straight up the wall.

In the past ten years,  I’ve discovered exactly two writers I hadn’t known before whose novels I truly loved.  One was  Jose Saramago, whose books I won’t read anymore, after he published a sequel to Blindness, called Seeing, that was such a descent into the cynical pessimism of old age that I barely finished it, and that spoiled Blindess for me forever.  Still, if I was going to list my ten favorite books, his The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis would be right up there. 

The other novelist is Umberto Eco.  I’d actually read The Name of the Rose some years ago, before Bill died, and noted that its take on the Middle Ages was actually accurate.  About five years ago I picked up Baudolino, and for some reason that’s what set me off.   I still think Foucault’s  Pendulum is The Da  Vinci Code for smart people, and I like Eco’s nonfiction, too.  He writes well about writing.

But when I think of the books that have truly stuck me over the last decade, the ones I want to read again, most of them are not fiction.  V.S. Naipaul is a noveltist, but I don’t like his fiction.  It’s airless and claustrophobic, and far too obsessed with petty squabbles over status.

But Naipaul as a journalist of the third world is something else again–maybe because he’s not a journalist the way we think of journalists these days.   If I was going to recommend one book to everybody on the planet, it would definitely be the long collection of Naipaul’s “travel” pieces called The Writer and the World.

Don’t like the designation “travel” put you off.  These are not fluffy little essays about the best hotels.  They’re long pieces on just what is wrong just about everywhere, about the barbarism and savagery Naipaul sees in both those countries that designate themselves as “revolutionary” and those that designate themselves “Islamic,” and you want tourists at the revolution?  Naipaul has met a mountain of them, and he has no respect at all for their “commitment.”

I remember reading through this book the first time and wondering how the hell, given the political skew of the committee in Stockholm, Naipual ever managed to get a Nobel Prize.  Because this is not a man who thinks the West is the Big Bad Evil Meanie and everyplace else is authentic and loving and just trying to secure its human rights. 

But I would recommend all Naipaul’s “travel” books, all of which are biting dissections of just what is wrong with the world.  Among the Believers is good, and he followed it a decade later by going back and seeing where these four countries had gone.  The news is not hopeful.

And I forgive him for his short little work on the United States, in which he managed to do what non-Americans seem to, which was to go to the South as if that was the only “real” part of America and write about it in isolation.  On the other hand, next to most of the books I’ve read by Europeans on the United States, this wasn’t actually bad, and it wasn’t at all stupid.

But I’m left, again, thinking about the fact that, if I had to recommend ten books to anybody, almost none of them would be fiction.  I’m not sure why this is so.  Maybe some of it is genetic, or familial, in some way–like my father, I now read lots and lots and lots of history.  Unlike him, I read other kinds of nonfiction as well, not only things like Naipaul’s but more analytical books.  The Higher Superstitition comes to mind as something that struck me, and also The Blank Slate, by  Steven Pinker.  That last one would go on any list I made of my ten favorite books.  Like the Naipaul, I’d make everybody in the world read it if I had control of the curriculum.  The Blank Slate is about how human beings aren’t that, and how most human nature is hard wired, and how we should stop thinking we can change people into anything we want them to be and start dealing with what people are.

Pinker has the science to back that up, and if an article John sent me is any indication, the rest of the world seems to be slowly catching up to what he said a decade ago.  But one of the reasons why I love that book has nothing to do with what it says.  It’s not just the way its written, but the enormous range of cultural reference inker seems to just have, as if in this one human being, education just “took” the way  I want it to take.   We get everything from Jane Austen to Calvin and Hobbes, Tolstoy to the Bee Gees, and the science as well.

Some of the writers I’ve discovered over the last ten years simply don’t write anything very long.  I still think Theodore Dalrymple’s best book is Life at the Bottom, a collection of essays, published mostly in City Journal, about his experiences as a doctor in a public health practice in a slum in an English industrial city, and as a prison doctor at the nearby borstal.  

It’s interesting to contrast Dalrymple’s work–not just in that book but in others–with the work of Jonathon Kozol, who is famous for swooping down on inner city schools for a few months and writing about them.  Kozol has an agenda and Dalrymple doesn’t seem to have, but their different presentations of life in the inner city are, well, remarkable.

But I’m still here, you know, and I still have the same problem, and it isn’t going to go away.  And it isn’t everybody’s problem.  I know lots of people who read fiction in their middle age, and even in their old age.   And I still write fiction, and want to write fiction. 

I don’t really know what’s wrong here.  I have trouble reading almost any contemporary fiction.  I enjoy P.D. James, but Ruth Rendell I have a hard time getting through.  I enjoyed one book by Sue Miller, called For Love, and one by Alice Hoffmann, called Seventh Heaven, and then I just sort of wandered off.  Oh, there’s also a book called That Night, by Alice MacDermott.  Of these three, I’ve read the first two much more than once, and then I got tired of them, and they’re lost in the office somewhere.

Older books seem to stay with me longer.  I can still read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and most Sherlock Holmes (from the first half of Doyle’s career), and a lot of Dickens.  I’m reading my way through the Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope, which are new to me, but definitely Victoiian, and I can get absorbed in those.

Lately I wonder if I haven’t written my entire generation off as a waste.  Having been given the best start in life of any generation in the history of the world, we seem to have done nothing with it except convince ourselves that we’re too important to actually make anything like a contribution to the world.  We’ve torn down a lot of things, but not built up much that I can see.  My older son’s generation seems to be more–I don’t know.  Focussed may be the word I want, focussed on something besides themselves.

The really bad side effect from that Romantic view of the world whose definition I posted yesterday is the tendency of people to think that how they feel and what they want are the only real issues in the universe, and that everything else can go hang if it means they can’t be true to themselves.

Or something.

I think maybe I’ve been as big a downer as I want to be today.

Sometimes I find this project absolutely fascinating.  I appreciate the efforts of so many of you, in comments and e-mail both, to assure me that if I will just look off the beaten track, I can find many examples of the kind of alternatives I’m talking about.  But I’m aware of that, really.   For one thing, I’m a living example of one. 

It’s the lack of such alternatives alive in the culture and available to everybody that bothers me.  I still say that, for all the newly highlighted differences of skin color and ethnicity we like to point to as an opening up of Anglophone societies over the last several years, diversity these days is largely superficial.  We may all look different, but we are all expected to think alike.

And I don’t mean we’re all expected to be liberals, either. 

Sometime last year I got into a lot of trouble on a Usenet newsgroup I post to sometimes because I disparaged a book put out by a group of rather geriatric “feminists” (the scare quotes are not only deliberate but eloquent) who wanted to let the world know that, in their sixties, they were not only still having sex, but having the best sex of their lives.

Actually, I wasn’t disparaging the book.  I was disparaging the attitude.   But it comes down to the same thing:  I wouldn’t have much respect for a man of that age whose first imperative was to have lots of good sex, and in the case of at least some men there is likely to be a biological and hormonal imperative.  Women past menopause seldom have such an imperative, and from the excerpts of this book  I’d read, these women weren’t some of them.  The point of their chasing sex at sixty-whatever was simple:  the only criteria they had for a good life was being young and being hot and having access to an endless stream of sex and sensation.  For these women–as for Hugh Heffner, as for generations of coarse-minded, foul-mouthed “male chauvinist pigs” before them–the worth of a woman was between her legs.

The worth of a man, too, by the way.  Hugh Heffner is no less pathetic than this group of women is, and no less pathetic than my students who think having enough money for a Porsche and a house with three Jacuzzis in it will make them happy.

Yesterday, I did my usual Sunday thing of getting my work done very early in the morning and then sitting down with something to read and something to listen to.  I went from a little Hildegarde to ssome Mozart, but what I read was an essay by Yvor Winters, actually the introduction to a book he wrote in 1937, collected in a volume of essays on the New Criticism called Praising It New. 

The date of the thing is interesting, because in this essay and at that time, he seems already to have understood what Hitler was.  But it’s not his comments about Hitler I want to quote here, it’s his comments about  Romanticism, not only in literature but in everything else.  Maybe Winters was so prescient about Hitler becuase he so hated Romanticism, and so it so clearly.  As somebody here pointed out, Hitler’s was a Romantic movement.   Indeed, it was. 

Anyway, Mr. Yvor Winters:

>>>The Romantic  Theory assumes that literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience, that man is naturally good, that man’s impulses are trustworthy, that the rational faculty is unreliable to the point of being dangerous or possibly evil.  The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life.  Wen this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve also a kind of mystical union with the Divinity…>>>

What follows is a comment on Emerson, who is definitely a Romantic by this definition.  In fact, most of American intellectual life between the  Revolution and the  Civil  War was Romantic by this definition.

What strikes me, however, was that we have gotten to the point that everything we are offered in public life is Romantic by this definition.  We get no counterexamples even just as examples, never mind something like a Fulton Sheen or a  Thomas Huxley to oppose it in a reasoned and systematic way.

It does no good to tell me that I’m looking in the wrong places for counterexamples, because my point is that the same places used to have such counterexamples.  We had Marilym Monroe but we also had Fulton Sheen.  We had Jayne Mansfield–and Norman Mailer–but we also had Lionel  Trilling.  Sitting right there in the “mass media,” in the public square, for anybody to see, were different kinds of people living different ways, different standards of value for what made a “good life.” 

Part of the stifling monoculture of the moment has to do with the fact that the mass media aren’t as mass as they used to be.   On the Monday after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, I asked each of my classes to write three paragraphs in fifteen minutes on “Mumbai–what is it, and why do I think you should know?”

Two thirds of my students claimed never to have heard the word before, and guessed that it had something to do with Africa, and that maybe it was a dance.   Of the other third, fully half claimed to have heard the word but not to be able to connect it to anything.  All of my students who didn’t know wrote sharp little complaints about how it wasn’t fair that I expected them to.   They didn’t watch the news because it was too depressing, and besides, what did it have to do with them anyway?

Back in the days when there were only three network television stations and no other options, the local news was on at five thirty, the national news was on at six, and you were stuck with it whether you liked it or not.  These days, it’s possible to simply avoid all that by turning to MTV or one of the vast number of radio stations that play the music of the moment 24/7 and offer no news at all.  Even during 9/11 there were television stations that went on playing nonstop soap operas, nonstop cartoons, and nonstop fifties television shows.  The “public square” these days sometimes looks more like one of those big bins of bubbles people roll around and get lost in. 

Part of the reason for what’s happening is surely the imperatives of stockholder suits–the purpose of management, the courts tell us, is to maximize the value of the stock for the stockholders, and that means having a business plan targetted at capturing the most lucrative markets.  In the “mass media,” that market is made up of unmarried people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six.   When everybody is chasing that demographic, a concentration on youth, sex, and sensation is almost inevitable.

I don’t watch a lot of television, so my observations here are necessarily limited, but from what I can see, the last alternative to the young-and-hot-is-everything scenario to make it on to a major network was Jessica  Fletcher in Murder She Wrote. There she was, middle-aged, bookish, and with no particular interest in snagging a boyfriend.  A much better image of such an alternative–the redoubtable Miss Jane Marple herself, as presented in the  BBC-A and E series–exists only on a niche channel and makes it into the wider public consciousness almost not at all. 

What I’m looking for is not  Christianity, but the public face of lives that are not this–not that Romantic sensiblity Yvor Winters was talking about above.  And up until fairly recently, those alternatives did exist in the “mass media,” and in the consciousness of alL of us. 

My problem with religion, at the moment, is that the public face of it–remember, the PUBLIC face of it–is now just as Romantic as Paris Hilton flashing the papparazzi as she walks down the red carpet.  It’s about what we feel and what we want and what we can get, about gobbling up “experiences,” and shutting our minds off while we do it.  The fact that religion offers “spirituality and stuff” instead of “sex and stuff” isn’t much of a difference.  

The fact that many secular organizations seem to be on a crusade to save the “embattled” Romantic ideal from the dark forces of anti-Romantic religion is just…well, a manifestation of cluelessness I find it hard to wrap m mind around. 

I’m going to go spend the day watching lots and lots of  Miss Jane Marple.

Oh, ack.  I’m having one of those days when I wonder if I shouldn’t be in some other business, because I don’t seem to be having such a good time getting my point across.

To answer Robert–I said nothing at all about whether or not Christianity was “dying,” although, given other comments here, it might be.  What I was talking about was the public face of Christianity, which is not just a matter of who makes the evening news.  Back there somewhere or the other in this blog, I pointed out that one of the traditional functions of imaginative literature in the post-Enlightenment world was to provide us views of ways of living with which we otherwise do not have contact of knowledge–to show the way we live n ow, yes, but also to show us that there are other was to live than the way we live now.

Donne was nowhere near the minor figure that you make him out to be, even in his own time.   He was married to Lord Egerton’s daughter, and he was a celebrated poet in a time when poets comanded the kind of esteem we now give only to movie stars. 

But what’s more important than that is that he was only one of a numbe of writers who wrote about the lived experience of Christianity in a way that was pitched not to the emotions but to the mind. 

When I was growing up, there was on offer a fair number of examples of the lived experience of Christianity pitched to the mind, and those examples were not generally news reports.   Consider Thomas Merton, a student at Columbia who had already built up a considerable reputation in literary circles as a new and promising young poet, who converted to Catholicism, left his university, and entered the Trappist monastary at Gethsemane, Kentucky.   He then produced a book about his religious journey, The Seven Storey Mountain, that became a significant best seller.   It’s not an easy book..  It’s not pitched to the lowest common denominator of anything.  It’s not an attempt to kick the reader in the solar plexus.  And it’s long. 

Or consider what I think of as near the end of the period when the public face of Christianity still offered an intellectual option–the Audrey  Hepburn film of The Nun’s Story.  I say the film and not the book because, although the book was also a signivicant seller, it is very simply written and it was aimed at the infrequent reader.  The movie, on the other hand, was distinctly pitched up–it’s a long movie, it has a distinct and yet complex narrative arc, and it takes religion seriously as something thinking people do.

One of the things that I am constantly struck with in my students is the way in which they are isolated, culturally and intellectually.   For all the sources of information available to them, they seem to know absolutely nothing about the way other people lived in other times, or that other people live in this time.  They seem to have no idea that there is in fact any significantly different way to live.  To the extent that they’ve been made aware of the “multicultural,” it’s been limited to pictures of native islanders somewhere wandering around beaches with flowers around their necks, usually accompanied by captions explaining how these islanders are much more matter of fact and sensible about sex than we are.

At one point this past term, I had to explain to a class that there was a time right here in Connecticut when having sex with somebody not your spouse was against the law, and when children born out of wedlock suffered significant legal disadvantages in regard to things like inheriting money from their biological father’s estate.   These laws were in effect when I was a child, and although I’m rapidly approacing the geriatric, I’m not there yet.  In other words, all this was less than fifty years ago, and they’d never heard about any of it.

What’s more, they have been presented with a world in which sex is about as morally important as defecating.  The only moral issues they recognize in sexual matters concern telling one’s partner about STDs and following the standard rules of ‘relationships” (including no cheating while still formally in it). 

The idea that there might be something else going on in a reationship than the ephemeral, the idea that men and women might look for something else in each other (and themselves) than being “hot,” the idea that there might be some point to life that isn’t having as much sex and getting as much “stuff” as possible, is entirely foreign to them.

When I say that it was a destructive thing to make the churches of the “religious right” the only public face of  Christianity, it’s this I’m thinking of–that without people like Thomas Merton and Sister Luke, we have lost an important counterexample to current assumptions about what it means to be a human being alive today.  We’ve especially lost an important counterexample to current trends in what it means to be female.  Too often, the only examples my students have of what it means to be female are  Paris Hilton and the sort of self-proclaimed feminist who seems to be angry and judgmental all the tiem, about everything.

Yes, there are and always were other kinds of feminists, but they don’t seem to have much of a public face these days either.  Maybe I’ll get back to them at some point.

Lately I’ve been considering giving my students a poem by Henry  King, Bishop of Chichester, called “Exequy.”   I’m not going to post the whole thing here, since it’s very long, but this is the web address where you can find it

http://www.bartleby.com/101/280.html

and I’ll just warn you to watch out for the pop ups. 

That said, King wrote this poem to his wife after her death, in the 17th century, and it, too, like the Donne I posted yesterday, is an example of poetry presenting Christianity as a lived experience:

But woe is me! the longest date   35
Too narrow is to calculate  
These empty hopes: never shall I  
Be so much blest as to descry  
A glimpse of thee, till that day come  
Which shall the earth to cinders doom,   40
And a fierce fever must calcine  
The body of this world—like thine,  
My little world! That fit of fire  
Once off, our bodies shall aspire  
To our souls’ bliss: then we shall rise   45
And view ourselves with clearer eyes  
In that calm region where no night  
Can hide us from each other’s sight.  
  Meantime thou hast her, earth: much good  
May my harm do thee! Since it stood   50
With Heaven’s will I might not call  
Her longer mine, I give thee all  
My short-lived right and interest  
In her whom living I loved best.  
Be kind to her, and prithee look   55
Thou write into thy Doomsday book  
Each parcel of this rarity  
Which in thy casket shrined doth lie,  
As thou wilt answer Him that lent—  
Not gave—thee my dear monument.   60
So close the ground, and ’bout her shade  
Black curtains draw: my bride is laid.  
  Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed  
Never to be disquieted!  
My last good-night! Thou wilt not wake   65
Till I thy fate shall overtake:  
Till age, or grief, or sickness must  
Marry my body to that dust  
It so much loves; and fill the room  
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.   70
Stay for me there: I will not fail  
To meet thee in that hollow vale.  
And think not much of my delay:  
I am already on the way,  

Okay, I have no idea why the font size changed or what it is I’m supposed to do to fix it.  I’m sorry if I’ve caused any problems for any of you reading.

My point is just that that above also represented part of the public face of Christianity of its time, and an expression of the lived experience of that Christianity.  It’s not a lecture on dogma or morality.   It’s not didactic at all.  I have no idea where Bishop King stood on the issue of the Real  Presence or the nature of the Trinity.

And I don’t have to.  I don’t even have to believe in life after death to understand what is going on in the Bishop’s emotional commitment to his wife, because I have such a commitment, and it perserveres in spite of the fact that I do not believe there is anything at the end of this waiting but the dark.

Bishop King and I still have more in common than either of us do with most of my students, who increasingly see themselves as one more commodity and the only point to anything as feeling good right here right now.  

My students need alternatives, not only religious ones but secular ones.  They need to be presented with other kinds of models for other kinds of living. 

Christianity used to provide one of those models.  Today, I get megachurches and Help, Lord!  The Devil Wants Me Fat!

And I’m not making that last one up.

Every once in a while the comments actually point to someplace I’m trying to go, and that’s incredibly helpful.  In this case, John wonders how so much could have changed so thoroughly in less than fifty years, and my answer would be:  it changed less and less thoroughly than he thinks.

As to the reaction of nonChristians to  Christian practices in public and in public schools, for instance, it’s a mistake to think that “didn’t say anything about it” means the same thing as “didn’t mind it.”  There is a Catholic parochial school system in this country because Catholics objected to their children being forced to say the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer and read the Protestant version of the Holy  Bible in public schools. 

Most religious groups, however, didn’t have the numbers the  Catholic Church had, and if they objected to these practices, they did so in the privacy of their own homes.   Objecting in public could get you into a lot of trouble even in the Fifties.  But people did object.  They objected a lot.   And since my father was a civil libertarian with a reputation for defending people with unpopular causes–and someone who gave a lot of pro bono time to the ACLU–some of those people ended up at my parents’ dinner table and made no secret of just how much they resented having these things forced down their throats. Those people included Jews as well as atheists and agnostics. 

I said that this comment dovetailed with what I was hoping to talk about anyway, and it does, because it higlights a reality that almost everybody gets wrong:  by the mid Fifties, the Christian consensus in general, and the Protestant Christian consensus in particular, was already losing force in the  United States.

Right up through the beginning of World War II,  the majority of people in this country not only said they believed in God, but actually believed in him, in the only way it makes sense to define that world in regard to religion.

I’m not saying here that all, or most, of the people who were declaring their belief were secret atheists, or agnostics, only that the belief they were declaring was more like “I believe that George Washington was the first President of the  United States” than “I believe that I am standing right next to a large, angry dog that is about to rip the hell out of my rear end.”

No,  I’m  not saying that I think Christianity demanded fear, or that any belief in God demands fear.  What I am saying is that  Christian belief as it existed for somebody like  Donne, for instance, was not an academic thing.  It wasn’t a question of  Donne having learned a lot of “theological facts” by rote and “believing” them in the sense that he was aware he’d learned them and didn’t question them because he really hadn’t thought about them since.

Donne lived every day of his life–or every day that he bothered to record–in the presence of  God, who was present to him in the same way your brother or sister is present to you when he’s sitting across the dining room table at breakfast.   Donne “believed” in God in the same way you and  I “believe” in the chair we’re sitting in.  For  Donne, “believing” was simply accepting the reality in front of his face.   Donne’s faith was not faith as we use the term, an acceptance of things not only unseen but unperceived.  

One of the Catholic saints called this way of living “the practice of the presence of  God,” and it informed a lot of people, Catholic and nonCatholic, during the period of the  Reformation and the eras immediately following.  Teresa of  Avila and St.  John of the Cross, the founders of the Discalced Carmelite nuns and priests, both wrote extensively of it, and  St.  John’s “dark night of the soul” turns out not to be the abyss of doubt modern writers now use the phrase to designate.  

But look at the Donne poem, which is, structurelly and formally, a remarkable piece of work in poetry:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Donne is not talking to an “imaginary friend,” as some secular writerts like to say today.  Nor is he descending into an orgy of emotionally-charged mindlessness, blotting out his reason by indulging in a kind of psychological drug.  He is instead expressing what is for him a completely  mundane but desperately important reality.  This is the world as  Donne lives in it.   It is as real and immediate to him as my computer is to me, and considerably more important.

It is because this world is so immediate and so real for  Donne, and because his expression of it is not Romantic emotionalism but tightly controlled and strictly logical exposition, that this poem energizes me in spite of the fact that it speaks of things I do not believe, and speaks of them in a way particular to a corner of a tradition that is not mine even in its whole.

I’ve said before that what makes a work of literature “good” or not has nothing to do with whether or not we “like” it, but this poem is both good and something I like, in fact something I love, much as I love Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  I don’t have to believe in Zeus and Athena to find Odysseus’s return from Troy compelling.  I don’t have to believe in a divine Christ with the mission and capability to save the souls of men for all eternity to find myself caught up in Holy  Sonnet 14, or in Bishop  King’s  “Exequy.”  I promise to get to the “Exequy” tomorrow.

Right now I want to say this:  somewhere along the line, somewhere in the twentieth century in America (although possibly earlier in parts of  Europe), this kind of Christian faith was, if not completely extinguished, extinguished from the publid face of Christianity.  When  I shift through the channels on my television set and find religious programming, I do not get John Donne, or anything like him.  I get a legion of “pastors” who seem to be pushing one version or another of “believe because if you don’t you’re screwed,” with the “screwed” being related entirely to the events of this life.  Believe or you’ll lose your job.  Believe or you’ll go bankrupt.  Believe or your husband will leave you for another woman.

Looking at these “pastors” on television, I do not see men, or women, who live as  Donne and St. Teresa did, always in the presence of God.  Most of them live no more in that presence than I do, and when they say they “believe,” or that they “have faith,” the impression they give is that one of “believing” that George Washington was the first president.  It’s an academic “belief,” the way I “believe” that Genghis Khan once ruled most of Asia.  I could be right.  I could be wrong.  The knowledge has exactly zero impact on my life. 

What changed over the past fifty years,  I think, was the perception of non-Christians as to Christian belief.  For a long time, non-Christians and Christians of denominations outside the American Protestant mainstream felt resentful of being forced to support religious practices they neither shared nor approved, but they didn’t do anything about it, because the tradition demanding them seemed so strong.

But the resentment was there, and at the first sign of weakness in the tradition it rose up and rebelled.  

I’ve come to the realization that it’s not Christianity  I object to, but mindlessness, and too much of American Christianity is almost willfully mindless.   The faith of a John Donne or a St. Teresa seems to me to be no longer on offer.  When I am forced to confront faith, what I get is that emotional charge and the demand that I shut down my mind and feel the  Spirit.

Like I said, I think this is the greatest damage the religious right has done–by being emotionalist in religion, and by being the loudest and most visible wing of Christianity in the public square, they have given the world the impression that this is what Christainity is, and they’ve made the job of the kind of atheist who wants to tag al religious believers as “stupid” a much easier job.

And tomorrow we’ll get on to  Bishop  King, and good and bad poetry.  Or something.

For years now, it’s been my custom to spend a fair chunk of my Christmas Day reading about atheism.   For many years it meant reading one particular book about atheism, called The Final Superstition, by Joseph L. Daleidan, which I found in a Barnes and Noble in Pasadena, Florida one Christmas we spent at my parents’ house.  I think it’s mostly a kind of reaction formation.  There are tons of religious messages everywhere, and me being me, I have to be contrary, so I end up reading the opposite.

This tendency of mine has been considerably reduced in recent years, for whatever reason, and this Christmas it came down to looking through the latest copy of a magazine called Free Inquiry.  For those of you who know nothing about the atheist/freethough/humanist movement in the United States–and those of you who aren’t even aware there is one–Free  Inquiry is the flagship publication of the  Council for Secular Humanism, an organization founded by a SUNY philosophy professor (now emeritus) named Paul Kurtz, after he had departed from the older American Humanist Association over a few differences of opinion that probably would seem minor to most of you but that didn’t seem minor to the people involved at the time, and don’t seem minor to many of them even now.

I think it would be an interesting project to trace the history of the Council for Secular Humanism, which is something of an impressive undertaking.  By ow there are two magazines–Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer–”Centers for Inquiry” across the United States and in several foreign countries, Prometheus  Press (one of the most successful small presses in the US and the only one dedicated to freethought and skepticism) and CSICOP, the Center for the  Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.  CSICOP was called in by the Vatican to be one of the groups investigating the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and it is supported by a number of world-class magicians.  If you want to find out if a psychic is real or not, you don’t call in a scientist, you call in a magician.  There’s a reason  why Uri Geller could not bend spoons when he was sitting next to  Johnny Carson.

Anyway, like I said, that would be an interesting project, and it would be made more interesting if I could compare it to another and similar project launched close to the same time:  William F. Buckley’s founding of both National Review and the modern American conservative movement.  The relative fate and ultimate influence of those two are more a matter of a study in personalities than in content, and those personalities fascinate me.

However, at the moment,  I want to discuss something in this particular issue of FI, which I think was the December-January issue whose announced theme was “the future of religion.”  I could go on at length about various articles in this thing and my problems with them.  There’s one with graphs and charts where a gentleman tries to “prove” that the reason more Americans are religious than Euripeans is that American society is “dysfunctional” relative to other  Western societies, the healthiest of which he confidently pronounces to be Norway.   I liked the charts, because it made it possible to see at a lance that he was confusing “largely monocultural” with “healthy”–that is, his criteria for what made a society “healthy” are all much more likely to be met in societies without significant substantive cultural diversity, because the mere fact of diversity itself will cause some of those problems.  It was also interesting to see what he left out.  

But the thing that struck me about this article and others in this issue of the magazine had to do with something that is pervasive in freethought publications, and that is the utter lack of any knowledge about the history of Christian theology and the equation of “traditional religion” with “fundamentalism.”

One essay–the latest in a regular column by a Canadian professor–declared that Vatican II had changed everything by declaring that there were other paths to salvation besides Christianity–see, even the Catholics themselves admitted that they were not the one true way, there were other ways as well.  Actually, the dogma is “outside the Church there is no salvation,” but it is also that it is impossible for man to know who is inside the Church, since the  Church is the body of which Christ is the head and only the head can know who the members really are.  Therefore some people who seem to be “outside the Church” may still be saved through Christ, but unaware of that until they meet their Savior in paradise.  This line of thought did not start with Vatican II.  It goes back to Augustine and was thoroughly developed in Aquinas and elaborated on at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.  In this respect, Vatican II  changed nothing at all.

The big problem, however, was exhibited in several of the essays, which confidently assumed that “traditional religion” was Biblically literalist and that any declaration that parts of the Bible were to be taken as metaphors or images was something “new” that represented the attempts of frantic believers to come to terms with the devasting proof of modern science that God does not exist.

Actually, Biblical literalism is an invention of twentieth century  American Protestantism–note the twentieth century.  And even within American Protestantism, literalism was, until very recently, a minority position.  Augustine posited something very like the modern theory of evolution to explain how creation was actually effected on earth, and right through the time when the Church was supposedly prosecuting Galileo for saying the earth went around the sun, it was simultaneiously supporting a school at the Vatican that taught just that.  Well, okay, Galileo is another story, and a long one, and maybe I’ll get to that some day.

Today, I just want to ask a question–I can rail all I want at Free Inquiry and its cousins (including Richard Dawkins) for beating religion on the head on the basis of misinformation and general ignorance.  They do a lot of that.  But the fact remains that they’re able to do it because their misinformation sounds plausible to a lot of people.

I think one of the most destructive aspects of the rise of the “religious right” in American politics has been the fact that it has presented a small and insular aspect of Christianity as if it were Christianity.  Everything the FI authors say about Christianity would be true if Christianity were American folk Protestantism.  Everything they assume and attack as Christianity is in fact American folk Protestantism, and that’s the case even when they think they’re attacking the Catholic Church.   And when they run across an anomaly they can’t deny–like, say, Mr.  Buckley himself–they tend to run around developing psychological theories to explain it away (he didn’t really believe it; he was so brainwashed by his childhood he couldn’t break free of it).

American  folk Protestantism is Romanticism in religion–it is a religion of the emotions, not of the mind, and it often hates and fears the mind.  But it is not Christianity, and it isn’t even Protstantism.  It is essentially outside tradition religion more than inside it. 

I was going to use a poem by John Donne to illustrate all this, and I probably will get back to it tomorrow, so just consider it now, written in the sixteenth century by the great poet of the English reformation:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

It’s called Holy Sonnet 14, and in spite of the violence of its emotion, you can tell by reading of it that Donne would never have collapsed to the floor in an eruption of glossolalia, slain by the spirit into mindless