Hildegarde

So, before I go bounding into Henry James, let me make a few notes.

First is that I truly love the nineteenth century novel, in English and otherwise.  I’ve read French drama and French poetry, and mostly it leaves me cold, but I love Balzac.  I can read Tolstoy even though I think he’s a pig, and I can read Dostoyevski nearly nonstop because I love him.

I also love Dickens, and I’m always brought up short when Robert suggests that one of the things likely to turn students off reading is giving them a Dickens novel in high school.  I wish somebody had given me a Dickens novel in high school.  Instead, I read Dickens all on my own, in one big sweep, when I was about ten or eleven years old.  He had practically an entire bookcase to himself in the upstairs “classics” room at our public library.  The room is gone these days, and the library has been updated, and it’s too bad.  Dickens will be with all the crappy stuff in the regular stacks.

The second thing is that I love Henry James, as far as I’ve read him, which is pretty far.  It’s just a little odd that I haven’t read two of his most famous books, The Turn of the Screw and The Wings of the Dove.  I’m reading The Wings of the Dove right now, and that’s sort of what I want to talk about.

Before I do, though, I’d like to point out that my absolutely favorite James novel, The Princess Casamassima is unusual in a respect important to what follows.  The Princess of the title is a lot of things, but for the purposes of the plot of that book she is not a commodity on the marriage market.    There’s an inference made that she was once, and that that is what has led to her rather irregular situation, but the book isn’t about that.

James’s books, however, do tend to be about that–about the buying and selling of women in marriage.  Almost all of James’s heroines are either desperately looking for a way to marry, or are endowed with large fortunes that make them the target of other people’s ambitions for marriage. 

That’s almost triply true of the characters in The Wings of the Dove, which is in fact a complicated plot to make it possible for two people to marry who “don’t have the means.”

Before I go into that as it applies specifically to this book–and to other James books–I’d like to point something out.

Robert at one point complained that the people in Dickens view money as something you sort of just come across, or inherit, or something–not as something you earn, in other words.

But that’s not true, not in Dickens, and not in James either, in spite of the fact that neither gives us main characters who spend their lives doing that.  Dickens has quite a few side characters who make very decent livings, and in fact rise from poverty to comfort–they just aren’t the characters about whom the story is told.  The same is true of Trollope, who often uses solid middle class barristers to contrast with high flyers like Phineas Finn or wastrel aristocrats who go into Parliament as another way to spend money. 

And, yes, Horatio Alger does give us characters whose stories are about rising from rags to riches (although the couple I’ve read got the hero where he was going at least as much from luck and/or a fortunate marriage as from hard work and perserverance).

But even if I liked Alger’s work better–I found what I read of it sort of clunky and formulaic–I’d still not be interested in reading the same story about the same people over and over again. 

And the nineteenth century novel generally (Dickens is actually somewhat–but only somewhat–of an exception) was both aimed at and written about a class of people for whom such a story was literally senseless.

The issue, in the vast majority of these novels, is not making money, or even getting it, but being able to live a very particular kind of life among a very particular kind of people, something that would be virtually impossible for somebody who was self-made.

For women, it would be worse than impossible.  A woman could of course make a living–many women did–but she could not both make a living and be “respectable,” except in some cases as a writer.  And being “respectable” is what the point is here. 

There is a very real sense in these books that a life that is not “respectable” is ugly and difficult to endure, a nasty, dirty, low thing that is shameful in and of itself.  It is certainly all of that for women.

For men, the situation is somewhat less clear.  It was indeed possible for a man to earn his fortune and still be “respectable,” but in order for that to be the case, he had to have started out as a “gentleman.”

That is, he had to have a certain kind of accent, a certain kind of manners, a set of social behaviors and assumptions that were largely closed to anybody who, say, had not been to an English public school. 

All the British writers of this period that I can think of–and Jane Austen in the period just prior–took the superiority of “respectable” life for granted, so much so that descriptions of or encounters with other classes and ways of life tend to be entirely negative.

That goes for descriptions of and encounters with the aristocracy as well as with the lower classes.  Trollope gives us Plantagenet Pallister and Lady Glencora, but they are unusual even for him, and Planty Pall is an upper middle class professional who happens to have been handed a Dukedom.  He works like a pack mule the entire time he’s in the House of Commons, and then he works like a pack mule again when he ends up in the House of Lords.

American writers are not so automatic in their acceptance of respectability–and Edith Wharton is about as jaundiced an eye as you can get on this world–and James therefore is never entirely comfortable with absolute appreciations of “respectability.”

He gives us Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, as a kind of epitome of all things perfect in the behavior of a gentlewoman, but he’s always a little unhappy with the way things are set up.  And he’s neither naive nor in denial. 

If part of “respectability” at this period is to be free of the taint of buying and selling–and it is–then James can see quite clearly that the respectable world is in no way free of it.  All his heroines are bought and sold, the rich ones as well as the poor ones.  They are bought and sold, and the buying and selling either destroys them or leaves them bearing up heroically in the emotional waste it has made of their lives.

That said–and I want to go on with that thought as it relates to The Wings of the Dove–what the issue is in these books is not “how to have a comfortable income,” but “how to live a life of respectability.”

And such a life would not be available to someone who earned his income the way Horatio Alger’s characters are supposed to have earned theirs.  The very acts of earning income in those ways would disqualify them for the only life the characters in the novels of James, and Trollope (and sometimes Dickens) think is worth living.

Ack.  It’s a nice day.  More later.

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I was up until midnight last night, which is not usual, and now I’m walking into walls.

I’d talk about Henry James, which is on the agenda, except that at the present half second I can’t read Henry James without sort of going  blank in the head.

So, still on the subject of money, let me make a note here.

I talked to a couple of students yesterday who are transferring from my place to better schools, which isn’t unusual with students from non-remedial programs.

One of them said that she’d thought of going to, I think, Georgetown, but that tuition was now $60,000 a year, and that was just past any level of debt she was willing to take on.

I know that if this student had been better as a student, she’d have gotten much more in the way of financial aid and her tab wouldn’t be so high.  But she wasn’t exactly being stiffed, either–she’d been offered ten or fifteen thousand.  It just wasn’t enough, given the sticker price.

We could go on and on forever about why costs have risen so much–yes, I know, all those extra administrators, and whatever–but the thing that bothers me is what’s happened to supply and demand.

Costs are costs, but what people are both willing and able to pay for something should factor in here too, and it usually does.  In fact, in general, it’s usually decisive. It doesn’t matter of it costs you a dollar to make, if people are only willing to pay fifty cents for it they won’t buy it when you offer it for a dollar.

And yes, I do know about Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans–but Pell Grants are small relative to prices like this, and loans are loans.  They’ve got to be paid back eventually.

What’s more, higher levels of financial aid go to better students who can get themselves admitted to better colleges–in other words, exactly the students for whom a three hundred thousand dollar college bill is actually worth it.

The people who are paying the real bills are generally not the best students and they’re generally not at the best colleges.  And then you have to ask yourself if they’re ever going to get anything like a return on their investment.

Forget the half of all college students who first rack up the bills and then drop out before graduating.

These prices are insane, and I can’t believe that they’re sustainable.  I don’t think they represent anything like a realistic appraisal of what “college” is worth, whether it’s actually “college” or just a dressed up vo-tech course.

And I also think that to the extent we’re looking at real college–back to the Great Tradition here again–the chances that anybody is going to go in for it are lowered significantly if they know they’re coming out of school $100,000 in debt.

If college costs had risen with inflation instead of well beyond it, a year at a good private university would now cost somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, pricy but not beyond the ability of most middle class families to negotiate–I know, because they’re negotiating that much now, and more.

At the moment I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that the issue isn’t whether or not college is “for the rich” or for “trust fund babies” (the latter have practically NO aptitude or liking for scholastic work), but whether or not ANYTHING being taught is ratinionally worth $60,000 a year, with or without financial aid.

Henry James tomorrow, when I manage to wake up.

Well, okay, maybe not.

First, let me apologize to JEM–she was the one who posted about the multiple book “authors.”

And then let me note to Robert that I wasn’t talking about writers who do two books a year, but writers who do ten.  And I do know all about house names.  The latest phenomenon does seem to be putting out what seems to be a fiction that these are all the same writer.

Or not.  I don’t know.  I don’t get it.

I’ve just finished the Bruce Thornton, which is interesting on just about every level, especially since it makes a critique of environmentalism, Goddess feminism and the Noble Savage approach to American Indian history as essentially all one thing. 

And I’ve started Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, which, interestingly enough–considering my love for all things James–I’ve never read.  But then, I’ve also never read The Turn of the Screw, although that’s deliberate.

I’ve got a lot to say about James and Dickens and the nineteenth century novel in English and the way it treats money–something that’s come up before, but that I think I have a better handle on now–but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Right now I’ve got a half hour break between final exam periods and I’m losing my mind. 

It seems to me that a lot of the students I see need less in the way of remedial academics than they need to learn a new kind of cultural behavior–that a lot of the problem is a set of expectations and assumptions that not only do not do them any good in academic work, but that will make practically anybody they want to hire them back off in no time flat.

But it’s not the kind of thing we teach, or anybody teaches, as far as I know. 

Whatever.  I will go off to see the next set and find out how many of them have not done half their work, or don’t bother to show  up to make up work on this, the last possible chance to do it. 

And then I’ll go back to Henry James until tonight.

When I’m on a panel of writers at the New Milford Public Library.

I need tea.

Possibly spiked.

So this is the first Monday in months where I don’t have to jump up and go running off to something, which is nice in a way, but disorienting in others.

Due to all that craziness last year, I’m in the middle of finishing a book–the book for next year–at a time when I wouldn’t usually be writing fiction, and that’s disorienting, too. 

And the book itself is disorienting. 

This is, I think, the closest I’ve ever come to writing the kind of golden-age dectective novel that got me interested in writing mysteries to begin with.  For better or worse–and my guess is that my people at SMP, or some of them, would say for worse–I am not a fan of the “modern” “crime novel.” 

Really, I’m not a fan of the modern crime anything.  I fall asleep during episodes of Law and Order and CSI, in any of their incarnations. 

I like Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot, and their lesser or later incarnations.  I prefer Dalgleish to Jack Ryan.  Any Jack Ryan.  Chandler drives me up the wall, but I can read Hammett and James M. Cain–someday I’m going to have to post my explanation for why the feminist critique of Mildred Pierce (the movie) is entirely wrong.

But I like old detective movies, too.  I like Nick and Nora Charles even if the scale of their drinking makes me wince.   I like Charlie Chan–and no, I don’t think  those movies are racist, although the casting was more than a little odd. 

I used to think this was okay, because even if modern writers didn’t like writing this kind of thing, modern readers must like reading it, since a lot of it is still out there on the racks, not only selling, but being published by large scale conglomerates.

Then I talked to a friend on the business end of the business, and he calmly explained to me that the reason the majors still publish most of those books is because there are long-standing contracts and other legal things going on that require it, whether they want to or not.

For instance, in order to publish the Chrities books that do sell (And Then There Were None, for instance), they are required by their contract to keep everything else in print.

And the Christie books that do sell well enough for major publishing houses to be interested in them do so only because they are now Course Adoption Texts (CATs) and having a “Literature of the Detective Novel” course in your English Department is these days considered very cool.

I doubt if any of these books would go out of print entirely.  There are small publishing houses more than willing to put them out, although print runs in small houses tend to run to hundreds, not thousands, of copies.  And if those houses don’t have distribution deals with the majors, the chances are they’re not getting much, if anything, into the big chain bookstores.

But, you know, I wouldn’t worry about this, either, if it wasn’t for another and very disconcerting aspect of present-day mystery writing.  I mean, let’s face it, EVERYTHING I like appears to be a minority taste.  I like harpsichords better than pianos, chamber music better than symphonies, and just about anything better than hip hop.  I’m out there on the cultural ledge most of the time.

But, as Robert reminded me in an e-mail a couple of days ago–and as I keep forgetting, the way people forget traumas, because it hurts to much to bring them to mind–we now have the Multiplex Phenomenon in book publishing–writers who “write” not one, but five or six or ten books a year.

Except, of course, they don’t.  Nobody could write that many books in that short a period of time.  What they do is to lend their names to books other people write.  Those other people are largely paid work-for-hire (you write, you get paid, you have no right to royalties or any other money) and anonymously, or largely anonymously.

This is not an unheard of thing in genre writing–several of the old-line Harlequin Romance writers did the same, and the practice is still the most common in Romance writing.

But it’s fairly new to mystery, as far as I know.  And it leaves me wondering exactly what is going on here.

For me, writers are largely their narrative voices–there are narrative voices that I like, those that I hate, and those that just don’t get in the way. 

After that, they are largely a sensibility–a person, very individual, I find it interesting to spend time with.

I’ve said before that story doesn’t count very much for me in what I read in fiction, and it doesn’t.  Too much story–too much plot, actually, there’s a difference–seems to me to get in the way of what I really want when I read, which is to live in a different place with different people for a while.

And by different people, I don’t mean people unlike anybody I know. 

But here’s the thing–even if your main consideration is plot, can it really be the case that these books, supposedly “written by” people they could not have been written by–actually give you that?

Even plots are, to an extent, a function of sensibility.  Agatha Christie wrote different plots than Dorothy L. Sayers, even though they were both writing in a very narrow corner of a subgenre.

I can’t quite get my mind around how this sort of thing is supposed to work.   It seems to me that either one of two things must be going on.

First possibility–the outlines for these novels are strictly and intensely formulaic.  So formulaic that they dictate not only sequential action, but character traits in main characters and side characters and even phrases and figures of speech.

And if you think no writer would write like that or no publisher would demand it, you’ve enver seen the old category romance “tip sheets” of the Eighties, which would demand that not only must the first kiss appear on page 25, but would then spend a page and a half explaining that descriptions should be “concrete and attractive.”  “Her skin was as soft and perfect as the petal of a white rose” was okay.  “Her skin had the luster of Norwegian wood” was not.

And I’m not making that one up.

The second possibility is that the readers of these books are reading them in a sense I never understood anything could be read.

That is, they don’t hear narrative voice, they don’t care about authorial sensibility, they read the way they watch television–by processing details through their heads for the moment, just to forget about most of them as soon as they put the book down.

Ack.

I know I sound insulting.  I don’t know if there’s any way to describe what I’m talking about without sounding insulting.  This is not anything I’m used to thinking of as “reading.”  There’s no engagement there. 

And I may be misunderstanding it.  It’s like looking into a thought process from Jupiter for me, so  I may have it all wrong.

I have, of course, run across people on Internet discussion groups who declare that if a book makes them try to figure something out or learn something at all, they just put it down–they read for entertainment, they don’t want to do any work. 

I’ve always thought of those people as a tiny minority of people who buy books.

But the business of cloning yourself and putting out gazillions of volumes yearly seems to be a very profitable one.  And that means that there is a significant population of “readers” out there who find that kind of thing satisfying.

It makes me look at this thing I’m writing and wonder what I’m doing–never mind the Other Thing, the start of a Possible New Series, what with its Little Old Lady (okay, more Bertha Cool than Miss Marple) and all the rest of it.

I understand narrative voice.  I understand authorial sensibility.

But maybe, in the end, I don’t understand why people read.

So, it’s a long, lazy, oddly hot Sunday morning, and I’ve gone on to Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind:  The Epidemic of False Knowledge.

Okay, I’m feeling too lazy today to go back into the living room and recheck the cover to make sure I’ve got the title right, but that’s about it, and it’s a curious experience after Barber.

For one thing, Thornton writes better–a lot better–although I think that may have less to do with talent than it does with the fact that he has a vastly different sensibility.  He also seems to have spent a lot of time reading nineteenth century British novels.   We’ve been through Austen and Dickens and a number of the minor Gothic authors already, and I’m not a third of the way through the thing. 

I do think he misreads the Emma Thompson (she produced it) movie version of Sense and Sensibility, but that’s the kind of thing I could talk about all day, and probably shouldn’t.

What  I wanted to get to was this:  in spite of the fact that Thornton tends to be considered a voice on “the right”–those scare quotes are there for a reason–he ends up blaming the infantilization of the modern American on consumer capitalism just like Barber does.

And that brings me back to something I was thinking about before, but that sort of slipped my mind in a deluge of end-of-term late papers and stdents with attitude.

I don’t think consumer capitalism causes any of this stuff.  I think consumer capitalism takes whatever cultural trend is at the ascendant and magnifies the hell out of it. 

I think it does that for two reasons.

First, because the whole point of consumer capitalism is to give the customer what he wants.  It doesn’t matter a damn if the customer wants something sensible or something stupid, something good for him or something self destructive.  Consumer capitalism is neither moral nor immoral.  It’s amoral.  If the customer wants fruits and vegetables, it will give him that.  If he wants Big Macs, it will give him that.  A big screen television, a walking brace that doesn’t collapse under excess weight, a garden bench, a pet rock, methamphetamine–it doesn’t matter.  Give the customer what he wants.

Second, because in the long run, consumer capitalism will, if unchecked, make itself any society’s only standard of value.  That is, “success” becomes how many units you move, how many customers want your product.  It’s like institutionalizing the ad populam logical fallacy.  And this particular effect is much stronger in democratic societies, precisely because democratic societies believe in the principle of majority rule.

The second thing above magnifies the first.  And it will do that no matter what the product is that’s under consideration.  It will give you more and better science, if that’s what you want.  It will give you more and better pseudoscience, if that’s what you want.

Thornton is a colleague and sometime-collaborator with Victor Davis Hanson, and he’s written some interesting books and articles about the place of classics in the modern world.  This book references everything from Socrates and Cicero to Ann Radcliffe, and like I said, I’m only about a quarter of the way in.

Thornton’s thesis, however, is that the infantilization of Americans can be seen most clearly in the therapeutic culture, and that the therapeutic culture is specifically the hybrid child of Enlightenment rationalism (we can solve everything through reason) and Romantic emotionalism (it’s what you feel tha counts).

And that’s not a bad thesis to be going on with.  I can see how it works–feeling is all that counts, but we feel bad a lot, so we should go about solving that “scientifically,” because science can solve anything. 

I put the scare quotes around “the right,” above, because although Thornton has good things to say about religion, I’d bet just about anything that he is not religious himself, and is specifically not Christian, or at least not Christian in the  American folk Protestant sense.

Of course, there are a lot of conservatives out there who are not religious, but in the present political climate in the US, you have to qualify the the word every time you use it to point this out.  And that’s not because nasty old liberals have been targetting conservatives with false labels.  That’s because a lot of people in the American conservative movement these days make religion a defining attribute of fellow conservatives.

I did think it was interesting, though, to look at the pseudoscientific silliness we live in–the cascading serial hysterias over self esteem and false memory syndrome and all the rest of it–as a sort of Hegelian prototype:  thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

I do not know if it’s possible to do anything about any of it in a time like ours, when give the customer what he wants is the basis for just about everything. 

But I’ll go drink tea and listen to harpsichords, and I’ll get back to that later.