Stephen Koch

James Marcus, master of the blog The House of Mirth, has asked me to join in a panel for the National Book Critics Circle on literature and ”the conjugal life.” The idea is brilliant—the ups and downs of mating? Come on, it’s a great (if overwhelming) subject.  And the other panelists are a bunch I am flattered to join: Gary Giddens, Brenda Wineapple, and Lore Segal.

James wants to prime the discussion pump by each panelist commenting on some key scene from great lit on…conjugality. Lore Segal has jumped in with first dibs on Pride and Prejudice. Before I get left behind, I want to nail down the Hemingway short stories that orbit around the end of his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, above all “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”  It is one of the most searing portraits of conjugal misery I can call to mind—-and God knows a crowd of contenders for that one is huge. 

 It is the kind of story that leaves a little scar tissue behind on any reader. It plays a crucial role in Hemingway’s life and in his myth, and it is also (in my humble opinion) a very great artistic achievement: surely somewhere in the ten best short stories written by an American in the twentieth century. It is at once painful and in a rather ugly way, exalting. And it is endlessly interesting to talk about.

Not everyone will agree. I seem to be in a minority on several matters concerning Hemingway.

For example, current advanced opinion tends to condescend to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Why? It is artistically uneven. It is almost laughably sentimental in a sexist way. It still smells of the best-seller (”book selling like frozen daiquiris in Hell!” Hemingway exulted in 1940). It is on too damn many high school and college freshman reading lists.

That’s what everybody thinks. I myself would add that it is deformed politically by Stalinoid claptrap.

And I admit it. It’s all true.

Yet For Whom the Bell Tolls is a very great novel. The writing at its best is so good you can barely believe your eyes. Psychologically, it is easily Hemingway’s most profound achievement in the long form. And it is a better war novel than either A Farewell to Arms or All Quiet on the Western Front.

I know very few people agree with me about this. In this they are joined in another disagreement. I much prefer Hemingway’s middle, longer, talkative, “impure” short stories like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to the very early hard, gem-like, “perfect” work of In Our Time and Men Without Women.

So, sue me. But come and hear me defend myself.

The NBCC panel will take place at The Fiction Center (formerly the Mercantile Library), Wednesday September 22, at 7:30.

As part of my Mystery Project, I’ve been soaking my mind in the Munich Conference of September 1938, the high noon of appeasement, when Hitler manipulated Britain and France into handing him Czechoslovakia in the name of “peace.”

A tremendous disaster. While I was meditating on it, I came across this resonant paragraph in Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. Conquest is commenting on the really huge historical misjudgments, like Munich and Yalta. 

“The defect was not, strictly speaking one of intellect or intelligence. Not even of judgment, in the abstract. It was, rather, one of imagination. [My italics.] There are minds of apparently high IQ, people of apparently great experience, who are unable to conceive of minds and men markedly different from themselves. Chamberlain and Roosevelt were not “stupid.” They simply lacked the scope to envisage alien minds as they really were. They were not, in a crucial sense, men of the world.”

      I have been reading a collection of Robert Conquest’s recent essays: Relfections on a Ravaged Century, and I commend them to everyone interested in twentieth century history.

I have spent half my adult life getting my head straight by reading Robert Conquest.  How many copies of The Great Terror have I owned? He is one of the great truth-tellers, and I have sat enthralled at his feet.

In his advanced age, Conquest has been elevated to the status of a (harmless) icon. In 2010, only the most shameless pro-Soviet revisionists still have the nerve to sneer at him, but I can easily remember when this scholarly Anglo-American Solzhenitsyn was a pariah everwhere in British and American intellectual discourse. Later, (once it became clear that challanging Conquest’s scholarship only proved that the critic was a fool), the standard attack became to grant him (minimum) points, inconspicuously disguised in an otherwise large bouquet of ad hominen insults.

Through some miracle of human decency, Conquest has somehow managed to keep working through five decades of scholarly sneering without ever once putting a polemical foot wrong. He has been the perfect gentleman first, last, and always. Yet, as some of these essays show, even Conquest is capable of becoming a tad ticked off after seeing the major truths he was telling, and telling for the first time, being greeted once again by what the Vatican calls “invincible ignorance.” 

Yet in all those storms of stupidity, did Conquest ever lose his composure or his dignity or his judgment?

Nor did ever back down from the truths he was telling the corrupt, the incredulous, and the rest of us.

A few years ago, I got a call from The New Criterion, asking whether I would attend a special gala lunch being held in honor of this great historian. I answered that I would not only be honored to attend, I would honored to wait on table at such an event.

I repeat my offer. To anyone planning a testimonial dinner for Robert Conquest, I am ready to put on my white waiter’s jacket. Salmon, chicken, or beef?

No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.

 J.P. Morgan [!]

This remark strikes me as one of the sharpest and most useful bits of advice I have bumped into in a very long time. I never imagined that the day would come when I would be posting—and admiring—real wisdom (not stock tips) from the man who, more than any other, invented Wall Street.

But you tell me. Is this smart, or is it smart?

After resurrecting Elaine Dundy’s very funny The Dud Avacado (introduction by Terry Teachout) from near oblivion and sending it out to vibrant new life, Edwin Frank at the wonderful New York Review Classics is about to rescue another almost forgotten comic masterpiece: Iris Owens’ 1973 novel, After Claude.

It’s a book I know well. How could I not? I think I must have typed the damn thing, what? … maybe twice, three times? Iris Owens was a good friend through most of the seventies, and she was by far the best blocked writer I have ever known in a lifetime of knowing writers. She was brilliant. She was seductive. She was very interesting to talk to, and she was even funnier than she was interesting. She had a large, unmissable talent. And she was breathtakingly unproductive.

I was only one of many friends who wanted to see that talent flower. And I worked at it. I insisted. I inveighed. I ranted. For God’s sake, Iris, work! It won’t kill you! Write! Don’t you have at least something to start with?

The year was 1970, and well, yes. Iris did have… something. A scrap. The very beginning of what might be … something.  Just a first sentence…and a little more.

Okay. Somthing is something. So, let’s see it.

Amazingly, she let me see it. Iris handed me one battered page. Every single word on that page had been ruthlessly crossed out, except for the first six words at the top. The first sentence. They alone were still standing. They were:

“Claude left me, the French rat.”

I burst into loud laughter, and told Iris that it was essential that she keep going. She had to make that one little sentence into a book.

Three years later—three very long years—After Claude was done and published by Farrar, Straus to raucously appreciative reviews. During those three years, I had acted as the book’s—let’s call it “enabler.” My role was to cajole, encourage, laugh, argue, type, hope, cheer, groan, and above all listen, listen for many, many hours as Iris explained yet again, in ever-more-nuanced Proustian detail, why it was absolutely out of the question –-absurd—even to think of actually writing this week.

Yet what she produced at long last is wonderful. Hilarious. And a little scary.

If Iris had followed up on After Claude as I hoped she would, I believe she would be recognized now as one of the comic talents of her era, a kind of female, more sardonic, Woody Allen. But that would have meant a lot of writing, a rapid succession books, eight or ten in as many years, in which she mined the uniquely amusing mother-lode of her persona, a little like the way Allen mined his. 

Out of the question? Absurd?

Whatever it was, it was not to be.

She’ gone now, and After Claude is pretty much all that’s left. But that’s a lot, and hallelujah! NYRB Classics will publish it in October. 

Stay tuned.

         I have been forbidden by wise advisors to go public with the precise subject of my next book. In fact, I doubt the wise advisors would be happy with me even dropping a suggestive hint about it here and there. Let’s just call it The Mystery Project. Still, I’m the kind of guy who can’t help talking about his obsessions. How can I blog without touching here an there about what’s so very much on my mind?

Answer: Keep the mystery to myself, and talk about everything else. The Mystery Project’s era is the Second World War. Plenty to say about that one! It is a singular story, almost novelistic in structure. I dream about it. I think about it all the time. Its principle figures have taken up residence in my mind. They have moved in, put their feet up on the table, and are planning to stay.

So get ready for a post or two about World War II. And about writing history.

I expect good things for and from The Mystery Project, and as it happens I am not alone. It is under contract to a major publisher, with an editor so distinguished that I get a little dizzy whenever I think about it.  

And I am behind, damn it!

I’VE BEEN READING AND SEEING:

Well, let’s see.

I am almost finished with the autobiography of the great German literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki: The Author of Himself. It is a mark of the literary provincialism of our era that this is the only English translation of Reich-Ranicki currently in print. This book was a major European bestseller, (600,000 of the German original in print), and has been made into an important motion picture. Yet this curiously titled translation of Mein Leben confronts the American public in an overpriced university press edition—a sure sign that even Reich-Ranicki’s American admirers expect zilch in sales on this side of the Atlantic.  

How many Americans have heard of Reich-Ranicki? I myself have not exactly been hiding under a literary rock for the last forty years; yet I myself had never heard of this extraordinary man until I bumped into his name being justly praised by my favorite current critic in the English language, Clive James.

More on Mein Leben when I’m done.

What else?

Two days ago, I was at the Whitney to see two shows: “Off the Wall,” on the performance art of the seventies. And “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield,” very, very interestingly curated by the artist Robert Gober.

Maybe more on that too!

Meanwhile, happy summer swelter!

Not long ago, I was in Madrid for the opening of an intensely American—intensely New York—show now showing and filling a magnificently spacious floor of what might be called Spain’s museum of the modern: The Reina Sofia. The show is called Mixed Use: Manhattan, and its theme is the place of downtown Manhattan in the art of the late sixties and seventies. Here are a hundred variations on the city streets, city space, city grime, and city vitality that drove much of the art being made by Americans thirty-five years ago in much the same way that Paris was the venue for cubists seventy years before that.

I am happy to say that the show’s curators, Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp, filled one of the most beautiful rooms in the place to Peter Hujar: 51 images, many of them masterpieces, most most taken at night, perfecting his vision of the place that in those days was Peter’s natural habitat. The show defines a wonderfully rich moment in the history of American art. It was a moment that Hujar captured with rare power.

Historians take note: A radiant (if partial) truth about the trade.

“Some day far in the future, some dread academic, much too careful of his research, looking back through the biased glasses of of a dozen other ‘historians’, will set this moment down on paper. And will get it wrong. Because he will not acknoweldge that history is made in the electric moment, and its flowering is all in chance. At the heart of everything that shakes the world, there need be nothing more than a casual remark that has been overheard and acted on. There is more in history of impulse than we dare to know.”

Timothy Findley, Famous Last Words, one of the really good half-forgotten novels.

Last Saturday, MIP (Most Important Person) and I had dinner with the psychiatrist and historian of science, George Makari  and his wife, Arabella, an art curator.The venue was the MIP’s and my our favorite neighborhood upscale watering hole, the splendid Centolire of Pino Luongo. Over a martini, I told George that I was reading his important twentieth-century history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Revolution in Mind.

He seemed delighted.

Then I told him that I had bought Revoltution in Mind as an e-book, and was reading it on a dedicated reader.

He was a little less delighted.

In the discussion that followed, we ran through some of Makari’s reservations about digital reading, and they deserve to be known.

To begin, George was once, as I was, a kid who was rescued from a hum-drum fate and given a glimpse of an exciting destiny through books. Real books. Books that, as Ray Bradbury says, that had a smell; books that weighted something. Updike once said that he wrote for a kid sitting at an oak table in a public library on a sunny Saturday afternoon, a kid who in that library quiet was feeling the top of his head blowing off. Well, I was once that kid. So was George. But will that indispensible experience be repeatable without the physical book? 

Second, what is going to happen to bookstores? They are closing: George gave me the statistics and described the grim scenes. For types like us, bookstores resemble sacred space: a place to go when you need reminding that life good and filled with possibilities. That life is it, in fact, very good, and filled with great possibilites.

George clinched the argument by asserting that reading itself is in decline, and cited (albeit vaguely) statistics prove it. I believe a new literacy is coming to supplement—not replace;  supplement—the literacy he and I grew up with. He mistrusts my optimism, and sees digital reading is just one more way our era is using electronics to shatter of sustained attention, a next unwelcome step in the erosion of skill and thought through mere information and endless distraction.

Which of us is right? I wish I knew.

How about digital reading of the newspaper?

I have the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal  delivered daily to both my door and to my Nook, so that after six weeks of digital reading, I can compare the paper-paper and the e-paper. And I conclude that the digital newspaper has enhanced my reading of the news.

But that may be just me. I have ADD, and though it is well-medicated, my daily paper is usually a daily adventure in distractibility. Headlines everywhere! Stories everywhere! My wandering ADD eye just won’t keep still. 

 We ADD types are wonderful beginners and not-so-wonderful finishers, and that goes for the paper, too.  My Times and Journal are daily romps through a bunch of scattered unfinished paragraphs and sparking, but not quite fired up interests. I never finish the print versions of the Times and  Journal. I abandon them, and walk away in a fog of semi-knowing.

The dedicated reader changes that, because it changes my focus. The e-paper presents me with a daily list of sections and stories, with their opening words. I am looking at a menu, not the whole delicious but uneatably-abundant smorgasbord spread before me on the breakfast table. And so I choose only what really interests me, And I ignore what doesn’t. 

Lo and behold! I find that on the reader I not only begin the news story. I finish it. Every time. And often reread it. What’s more, I get it. 

Blessed focus!

The downside? Well, my dedicated reader is terrible with pictures, and it is no substitute for the truly marvelous picture editing of the Times. (E-delivery to a desktop is much better in this respect.) And as a lifelong clipper of the paper, (it helps me focus), I wish my e-subscriptions came with a cut-and-paste function, or at least the highlight-and-note capacity that’s already there for e-books. But no.

Even so… two cheers for the digital newspaper! It leaves me better informed, and reading it soaks up much less of my time. I finish the Times and Journal now.